Yeah yeah yeah, still reputedly alive. It’s just buried under a layer of brain fog and chronic fatigue and ‘people are existing and bothering me’ stress.

We made this!

Part of the dealing with people was good and fun — I took part in a 24 hour knit-a-thon this weekend. I ‘only’ did 13 out of 24 hours (I needed to go home and get some sleep), but I can take pride in knowing I helped raise over £2,000 for charity. I got to spend the better part of a day hanging out with my one social group locally, and didn’t seem to drive anyone too crazy with my talking too much on random points of societal philosophy.

However, bless ’em, many of them drove *me* around the bend. I had my first scan of the fetal invader on Monday, and I spent too much of Sunday being told that I was wrong about my body, my child, and my pregnancy. Even if it was meant in jest, it was *insanely* stressful and unfunny. Towards the end of the night, someone pegged me in the face with a small bag of candy (a pub regular, not one of our group), and I ended up slamming it back into the head of the friend sitting next to me — whups. Thankfully, she is quite possibly the sweetest, most understanding human being in the world, and while I could tell she was initially miffed, she understood what trigged my response and was most forgiving. I gave her a mountain of hugs, ’cause hey — I felt bad about even slightly harming a friend!

Of course, I was righter than right about my body, my pregnancy, and the lot. The scan showed me that hey, it was one kid (not the twins ‘everyone’ felt the need to tell me were there (which isn’t funny, it’s fucking cruel to tell someone with a mental disorder who can only JUST handle the idea of a single baby that)), and that I was a grand total of one day off what the midwife doing the scan measured. When I told her what my measurement was, she was impressed — it’s apparently incredibly uncommon to be *that* accurate. I think my fellow bipolar folks can appreciate though — we *HAVE* to know our bodies. We *HAVE* to know our minds. We need to know ourselves as thoroughly as possible so that we stand a chance against the Bipolar Bullcrap™®.

Mind you, I understand part of why it bothered me so much, and it’s not something I was able to articulate at the time because I was so stressed. Basically, I grew up being told I was wrong about everything going on with me. I define for those who may not know the term, Gaslighting:

Gaslighting is a form of mental abuse in which false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt his or her own memory, perception and sanity.^[1] Instances may range simply from the denial by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, up to the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of disorienting the victim.

Scary crap, isn’t it? And probably something that most of us are all too familiar with. While I have hit a point in my life where I can stand up against it better than I ever could, the scars of it are still there, and let’s face it — they might never heal. I’m doing the best I can, but I resent even a humourous implication that I might be wrong about what I know to be true of myself and my situation. I won’t do the laundry list of what I was ‘wrong’ about with myself growing up; suffices to say, it’s very long, and I’m trying to let go of it.

Anyways, between those two events, I’ve been too fragged to brain. Honestly, I’m surprised I’m managing this. I don’t think it will translate to getting anything else done, which is frustrating — I’ve *STILL* not managed to handle my emails, and the oldest is almost a month old now. While I’m trying to not beat myself up about it, it’s still frustrating to be so wibbly as to not be able to handle something that should be a simple task.

But ey, I’m *mainly* okay… just such low energy brain and body that even doing this has stressed me to the point of my eye twitch making an appearance. So I’ll sign off wishing all of you well, and yanno, hoping that I’ll be back in the saddle here and ‘professionally’ shortly.

<3