Rant snippets, I guess
Fair warning: unfiltered rants on depression, death, grief, parentification, and hormonal changes (perimenopause, menopause, body image).
I've got so many things I want to write about and post here, so many monologues going on in my head that I want to commit to screen, and yet... I don't do it. God, I'm so sick of myself.
But also like, having to exist in this economy is WILD, you guys. I'm glad I can manage updating little things like my listography, so I won't complain too much.
Snippets
So here are a few bullet points of stuff that mentally I wrote paragraphs about but that won't go through my fingers into the real world:
- Perimenopause, the bane of my existence. There is literally no other explanation for what is happening to me other than perimenopause. The more I research the topic, the more I listen to other ADHD women's experience with either peri- or menopause itself, the more sure I am about it. I scheduled a new gynecologist for Tuesday. Never even met the lady. If she doesn't believe me/dismisses me bc I'm "too young" to experience perimenopause, I may have a mental breakdown for real -- not an exaggeration. It'll break me. I need someone to take me seriously. I don't know what else to do. Guys, now I got a fucking goatee growing. I don't even know if that's got to do with anything but what the actual fuck. It's disgusting and it makes me wanna tear my face off. I can't function in this world anymore as is. I am at the end of this rope.
- All my songs are 20 years old. Yesterday I was alone in the house (a rare phenomena) and decided to play a few fun tunes while drinking some gin and tonic... Only to realize almost all of my music is twenty years old. Twenty. Years. Old. What do you mean Funny Little Frog by Belle and Sebastian was released in 2006? What the actual fuck, man. I mean, I do listen to more recent artists like Tennis and bbno$, but my little 2000s heart skips a beat when it hears I Don't Feel Like Dancing or Fluorescent Adolescent coming on. Sue me I guess.
- Avoiding existence. The only moments I'm not feeling horrible are when I'm either reading or watching something (atm, lots of Dropout, Smosh and random video essays and podcasts). If I have to be aware of myself, my surroundings and my body, I crumble. I guess that explains why I stopped talking to all my friends, engaging with online community, and the need of physical and emotional connection disappeared. I don't need to have friends around if I can watch random people play a board game on my screen. It's enough fake-attachment stimulus to fool my brain. I'm really embodying that 'what it feels like listening to a podcast' meme.
- Fantasy reads. For the first time in my entire life, I'm reading a lot more contemporary/'literary fiction' books than SFF. Which was making me feel insane, like I had become a completely different person, until I realized I was just filling the same whimsical space inside me: reading about the stuff of dreams, like having a house, a proper job, close friends living nearby, a dad and/or a mom that aren't dead, and having regular-ish emotions/reactions. It's just that my standard for fantasy shifted from outer space aliens and earthling witches to holding down a job that pays well. It is what it is I guess.
- Should I stay or should I go. I have no idea what to do here. My psychiatrist said I'm not in the best of positions to decide if I should break up my decade-long relationship. But like, when will I be? And also, maybe I'm just going insane. So idk man. I know that if I leave, it's gonna hurt like a motherfucker and I'm not sure I wanna deal with this grief and pain. But if I stay, am I being honest with him and myself? With us? Or is all of this perimenopause desperation speaking? Wanting me to isolate even more? Who the fuck knows.
Final snippet
This one has been collecting dust on my Notesnook app for a loooong while now, so I decided to just post this together with the bullet points that should've been posts of their own.
A rock, a bang, a whimper
Well. I've been going through a pretty rough patch. I want to say "for the past couple of months", but now I'm not so sure. Maybe it's been almost a year. Maybe more. Idk.
But I wanna talk about something that sort of surrounds this. Hear me out: I'm never seeking sympathy or kind words when I talk about being financially fucked or mentally unstable (lmao) in here. I'm recording my thoughts. Processing the emotions. Venting and ranting to the void that is the internet, completely removed from my reality.
Most people around me IRL are going through / went through / know other ppl who went through similar shit -- so there's nothing particularly sad or dramatic in my own situation. It's just how other several thousands of people live their lives. And amongst those, I'm kind of a lucky one for having a good, caring family tbh. When I post, I'm not looking for people feeling sorry for me. It is what it is. That's just how life goes when you're born in the global south I guess. lol
I say this because I'm yet again gonna complain/reflect about being fucked in the head with depressión and sucky life events. I hope it doesn't sound super dramatic or anything, that's not my point here I promise. I'm not looking to score sympathy points.
Well. I remember being very young (late teens) and witnessing or hearing about people having mental breakdowns. I always kind of worried that my day would come. I remember lying in bed with my eyes burning with tears, stuffing my mouth with my pillow so my cries wouldn't wake up my sleeping little sister (we shared a room until my dad died and we started living by ourselves). In those moments I always thought: one day I'm gonna break and no one's gonna be expecting it.
When I was 18 and my sister was 12, my mom cheated on my dad and they separated (even tho my dad really didn't want to), tearing us apart. I thought: oh, I'm so gonna lose it. But my little sister was an absolute mess, my mom was a mess, my dad was near suicidal. So let's fucking go I guess, ain't nobody got time for a breakdown right about now. Then mom moved to a different state, even though it almost killed her. Gotta be there for her, for my sis, for my dad who still can't believe she left. And when things were starting to get better, when we were all starting to heal, my dad died suddenly at home. Fatal heart attack. We refused to move away to live with my mom (though later on my sis did live with her for a year and I lived for like 6 months). Which meant I took care of everything around the house while my sister got paralyzed by depression.
And three years later, when things were starting to look up... It was mom's turn. She died. And we reset the healing all over again. I had to be my sister's rock through it all. She barely made it out of that decade alive. Barely got through college. Barely left her bedroom.
There's a Djavan song that goes: "sabe lá o que é não ter e ter que ter pra dar, sabe lá?", which roughly translates to "do you even know what it's like to have nothing to give but have to give it anyway?"
Many, many years later, I understood this lyric, I understood that this was exactly how I had felt. An empty husk having to be the stabilizing rock for other people while there's nothing inside of me keeping me standing.
I guess that's not a unique experience. You see people doing this all the time, from more mundane stuff like mothers who live in abject poverty having to provide food for their children to people going through trauma together and one/some of them having to steer the boat while the others break apart.
And life just kept happening, because that's just how things are. Bolsonaro got elected president. Then the pandemic hit us. Through it all, I kept bracing myself for this big breaking point that would go bang! inside me and have me reach my emotional and psychological limit. But it never came. Twenty years after that night of crying myself to sleep muffling my noise thinking one day I was gonna fully break apart, and nothing. Damn.
It just recently hit me though. I'm not going out with this metaphorical bang. It was never gonna be a big breakdown for me. Nope. I'm gonna fade out with a whimper. Slowly descending into a stagnant depression that'll have me stuck at rock bottom, only to find out rock bottom is actually quicksand (aka perimenopause?), and it'll keep swallowing me slower and slower and I'll never breakdown dramatically, too stuck to the sand to really move and make a show out of it. I'll just get swallowed up little by little until I go under with barely a whimper and none will be the wiser.