Everything is seemingly turning another corner for the bigillionth time.

My aches and pains are dulling down to a point where I can walk my little walk with Bruce again.

(Until the next flare.)

Which is annoying because I could wake up tomorrow and be all sorts of flared again.

They’re that random and often.

Oh, and my tooth pain has subsided with the antibiotics now gone.

So that’s good.

I’ve been sleeping better this week.

Well, I’ve finally been able to sleep this week, and nap.

So symptoms of my mental illnesses have faded for a few weeks again.

The Invega kicked in this week too, and I’m feeling better in that regard as well.

I’m lucid today.

Still having some breakthrough symptoms (surprise!) every once in a while now, but nothing too big the last couple of days.

The only thing that’s been sort of rampant lately is my dissociation issues.

(There’s always something.)

I’ve been not able to remember what people tell me, I lose track midconversation regardless of who’s speaking (even myself), I’m noticing lost time.

I don’t know how, but I lose hours quite often, and have lost days before even too.

They just get sucked into the abyss of the void deep inside or something.

I talked about that a lot in therapy this week.

Dissociation and what that looks like – how it serves the individual or if it’s harmful.

We talked a bit about depersonalization too, and that maybe was a culprit as well?

Or at least talking about the differences between the two.

And I told her that depersonalization seems like it is more of a trigger, and then feel like nothings real, or feel like you’re looking in on yourself, or, not recognizing yourself in photos or mirrors and I’m sure there’s some time loss.

Where in dissociation (at least, this is how my symptoms show up) it’s more of getting triggered, and not being in control of your body or thoughts anymore, like, I’m not at the wheel.

And then, when snapping out of it, the hours have passed, but I don’t recall what I’ve done, where I’ve been in the last few hours, or however long the episode was.

I once saw this meme that said;

Person1: what’s the difference between meditation and dissociation?

Person2: consent.

And it’s not that dissociation is productive and joyful and relaxing like meditation.

Dissociation is quite the opposite.

For me it’s very scary.

I’ve lost so much time I don’t even know how to wrap my mind around it.

I don’t know when it’ll show up, or for how long it’ll be here, where I’ll be when it hits, or why it happens.

Well, I might have an idea of the why at times.

But, sometimes even bringing up the topic can make my symptoms worse.

Like everything that makes my symptoms kick up, I need to be cautious with them.

Trigger topics need to be avoided as much as possible, unless I’m in my therapists office.

It is what it is, and any pattern that I can pick up on is welcomed caution.

It’s just so curious how it happens because it is so random.

I had to spread this entry out while writing because I didn’t want to become triggered somehow while writing about it.

Getting triggered is a whole fucking thing.

It can happen out of nowhere, not caring about what time it is.

You wanna know something fucked up?

Even my dreams can trigger me.

I’ll wake up, seemingly out of nowhere, and be in the middle of a panic attack because my subconscious decided to let me go there.

I’m still working a lot on that.

Controlling my reactions to triggers.

But the thing is that I haven’t figured out how to control myself while triggered yet.

There are times where I can control myself a bit.

But most of the time it’s out of the question for a grip of time.

I don’t see how it’s entirely possible yet.

I don’t think we, as humans, always can consciously control ourselves when triggered.

It’s like this caveperson instinct of self preservation.

I’m sure it’ll take practice and more practice.

It’s daunting, for sure.

Because being triggered is not a fun thing.

It makes me feel out of control of my body and mind because suddenly, I’m irate, or devastated, or crying, or have walked away to self harm.

(Which hasn’t happened in like 6 months now!!)

But it just sucks because I don’t feel like I can control myself after being triggered.

Like, my body is not in my control for the moments (minutes or hours or days) the trigger is there.

And I don’t know how long that moment will last.

And I don’t know if I’ll disassociate and completely lose myself for an undetermined amount of time.

And it could be the littlest thing that’s triggering.

Someone talking in a wrong tone, someone laughing at me while I’m trying to be serious, being ignored, and a ton of other things.

I’m working on it all.

But I’m not always sure where I stop, and where the trigger begins.

– Keren