Why I’m open about my mental health (and other things)

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Back in 2015, I was a complete mess, and I did everything I could to hide it. I was still having panic attacks regularly, and they would be brought on by the slightest provocation. But I felt, working in tech, that I had to be quiet about it, and just let things pass and things would get better if I ignored them.

One day a coworker did a thing that triggered a pretty big panic attack. It wasn’t anything malicious on his part, just a cavalier, morbid joke in gestural form that happened to tread upon one of my biggest triggers.

I felt awful, and I wanted to keep from feeling that way again.

So I messaged him on our work chat, and told him that the gesture he made happens to be a huge trigger for me and I was having a pretty major panic attack as a result. And his response was incredibly helpful: he didn’t realize, he understood, and he wouldn’t do it again. And he stuck to that.

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wellp

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That ended up not going very well.

It’s still a good to-do list of stuff I want to do, but making comics, working on AR stuff, and generally being in pain/depression while also figuring out my ADHD meds has taken a lot more out of me than I expected.

Really gotta stop being overly ambitious.

GeekGirlCon 2019 wrap-up post

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So, GeekGirlCon was yesterday and today, and for once I vended at it, having been put on the waitlist every time I’d applied for the last few years.

I already have quite a few thoughts about how things went and how they could have gone better for me, and my thoughts about my future as a potential convention vendor. Which is to say, I probably won’t be doing this again – but not because of anything wrong with GeekGirlCon. (Just to get that out of the way.)

Note that this isn’t my first time tabling at GGC, as I had previously done so with the Seattle Indies in 2017. But that was a completely different setup for a completely different intention – promoting games and the Indies organization.

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ADHD

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So, this post about signs of undiagnosed ADHD showed up on one of my fibro communities and so much of it seemed PRETTY FAMILIAR, and I also found out that fibromyalgia and ADHD are highly comorbid, and then I was realizing that I stopped being able to focus on work and Getting Stuff Done when I had to go cold turkey on caffeine when my panic disorder started in 2011, and, wellp.

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Gabapentin 300mg day 6

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So on this, the 6th day of being at 3x daily gabapentin, I noticed that I haven’t been in severe agony all over for the first time in a while. I’m still feeling tendon pain in the parts that get chronically overused (especially my thumbs) but it’s not doing the usual radiating thing that turns into systemic pain all over.

On the minus side, after taking my afternoon dose I got incredibly nauseous which only really started to let up 7 hours later (which is, incidentally, the elimination half-life of gabapentin), and this is the worst the nausea’s been. I’d been getting somewhat nauseous from the doses before but as it builds up in my system it’s just been getting worse and worse.

So I sent a note to my doctor asking if there’s a better way of dealing with it (because I’ve been very unable to get stuff done for the last couple days and I have a lot of stuff that needs to get done!) and meanwhile decided to go back to 2x/daily.

Supposedly the nausea subsides after 2-3 weeks but I really can’t wait 2-3 weeks for that to happen right now. I have GeekGirlCon prep to do, I have a job interview down in Portland sometime in the next week or two (for a job I’d probably be staying in Seattle for but it’s Portland-based and this means I might have to go to Portland more often, oh the horror! no, not the comfy chair!), and I have AR stuff to do in the meantime.

Anyway. Hopefully this means there actually is some hope in sight, and I just need to find the right balance of things. Or maybe something else that helps to counteract the nausea while I’m still acclimating to the gabapentin.