relapse blog (Patreon)

Hey everyone, I hope your Holidays went well. I just wanted to give a long awaited update and let you in on my mind a little bit. 

So here we go I guess... I've been struggling. At this point I can pretty safely say that depression has a tight grip on me. I've found it difficult to motivate myself to leave the bed. Feeding myself and showering take it out of me. I have very little awareness of time passing. Not much anyway beyond staring at the clock and estimating how much time I have to sit through until Jack wakes up - and feeling permanently stuck in this acute loneliness anyway. After I shut down emotionally towards the end of last month for reasons unknown to me I thought it was getting better because I started to feel again, but it soon became apparent that I was feeling too much. I promise I didn't come here to whine. I just want to explain my somewhat long absence. 

I tried very hard to enjoy my Xmas, even though Xmas Eve started out desperately tired and grinchy. Stupid noisy people and mailmen kept waking me up on the daily leading up to the Holiday and on the morning of the Eve itself - and I was not in good shape with the lack of sleep exacerbating my depression. Through all this time, my one and only focus was to function. I just wanted to be ok and was actively avoiding high stress and potentially triggering situations. Despite that, I managed to have one good Holiday. I made the best of it by blasting Marilyn Manson, strobing the fuck out of my apartment and doing fun stuff with Jack. Don't judge, I'm obsessed with this album, every single song is catchy af. It's a great party album.

I'm at this point right now where I'm hesitant about making plans or trying to do things - anything - because there's a very good chance that I will not follow through. I will be tired, not confident enough or overloaded more often than not. So the approach I'm taking to gain back the least bit of control is to 'roll with the punches' and just do things on a whim when it randomly occurs to me and I have the energy. I might only get so far as to take a few pretty selfies, but it makes me feel better to produce something borderline worthless than absolutely fucking nothing. I'm still just trying to function, just trying to be ok. Just trying to dissociate from my mind so as to have, periodically, the illusion of a quality of life. 

It all just spun a little bit out of control I guess...

So I've mentioned I've been on a diet. It was fine and dandy at first and between minimizing sugar and processed foods, vaguely counting calories and IF quite healthy. But like the overachiever I am, I might have fucked up a little. It was the perfect storm. The day after Xmas was exceptionally emotionally distressing and I couldn't mentally consume any food or liquid. I ended up in a 24 hour dry fast which by itself would be fine... But I had already been restricting on a regular basis and I failed to break my fast in time. I started with rehydrating and fully intended work my way up to fish and vegetables for dinner... And then I was too tired to cook. I chowed down on almost an entire cucumber and went to sleep. Somehow I was under the impression that nothing happens when I sleep so I told myself I'd be fine to break my fast the next day. I went out of my way to get some organic chicken breast and vegetables rich in magnesium and potassium because I learned that after a dry fast, it's good to avoid carbs, salt and fat for 6-7 hours until your body is remineralised. That's in order to avoid bloating because your body wants to retain water like crazy after being dehydrated for so long. ... Little did I know those chicken breasts and fat free vegetables couldn't have added up to more than 500 calories. After forcing down breakfast and lunch of the same bland foods, I went to wash some dishes (in the shower because the kitchen sink is clogged and the bathroom sink is jammed and I don't know how to fix it and I can't handle people) and suddenly, and I mean spontaneously, out of nowhere, I started to feel really weird. I looked in the mirror and... My mind made me see things that weren't there. I know logically this can't have been real and I know evidently that what I saw was not of paranormal nature because Sai was as cool as an icicle. He emits electricity when alarmed that translates to rapid low voltage electric shocks. ... It was like my mind was playing creepy games with me and I still experience periodical paranoia, especiallly around reflective surfaces (eg: mirrors, windows, screens) and anything moving in periphery (eg: somebody passing me on the street, wind, my own shadow). I'm not saying I hallucinated from undereating, but I'm saying it's a real possibility. Somewhere between my baseline depression and not eating enough my brain couldn't cope anymore. 

I've been refeeding ever since and adding bone broth because I've become a bit wobbly with loose-ish skin from rapid fat loss. Do not try this at home.

After learning that night that you can indeed develop hallucinations as a result of undereating, I loaded up on calories to get back to a safe-ish caloric range. It was very hard and I was very stuffed. When brown rice, fish and spinach failed to do the job, I waited for my stomach to stretch after dinner to fit in one of those 300 calorie gingerbread cookies from my last video. It was tasty, but maybe not the healthiest option. It's surprisingly hard to get calorie dense healthy foods. They tend to be extraordinarily filling, even in a slightly more compressed format, like raw energy bars. 

Funny how the tables have turned. In the beginning of my diet I was all like "I can only eat this amount of food I'm going to die" ... Now it's more like "how the fuck am I ever going to eat 1500 calories of healthy food in two meals???"  

It almost feels like life is calling me to reevaluate my life choices. I need to be reminded what I want to live for and start small again. That's why the videos I was talking about are coming so slow and will probably be late. I don't just wanna put out garbage for the sake of #CONTENT either. I was honestly expecting the worst coming back here, thinking everyone would be mad at me and wouldn't wanna support me no more cause I'm inconsistent af. But that didn't happen. And thinking back, this fear is probably just a remainder of the threats my parents hung over my head when I failed to deliver astounding grades. So thank you for sticking with me. Of course I won't be mad if you change your mind. I'll try not to take it personally either. 

At this point I wanted to thank all the people who have gone out of their way to let me know that them deleting their pledge, temporarily or permanently, was not my fault. It really lets me know how appreciated I am and lifts my paranoia about being a complete and utter fuckup. It honestly means the world to me that you care so much as to personally tell me that. 

Another funny thing, what made me avoid Patreon and YouTube for two weeks in the first place was the fact that I had to log out of my Chrome account. Because, brace yourself for this, whenever I went into Google search to search for something... The entire first page of the search results was plastered in ads that I couldn't turn off using the conventional methods. 

I had to scroll down to get to anything I actually wanted to see. I tried settings, proxy, adblock and nothing made it go away - until I logged out of my Chrome account. Can I just say that that's a super dick move on Google's part? Yeah? Ok. 

Subsequently I was logged out of all my linked accounts and haven't found the courage to log back into YouTube still. But I just wanted to let you know what's up and I know that maybe some of you guys who aren't on instagram were worried about me so I faced my fear and wrote this rather personal post about what happened to me. 

Before it all went to shit I actually made some progress on making peace with negative traits I have. Like the fact that I love to complain or how messy I am. I'm a little torn between wanting to bounce back to my usual ambitious Aries personality who wants to throw herself full force at anything and make it perfect - and finding existing to be a real drag. Given the occasion, maybe I'll write a post or make a video on the topic of resolutions. I consider myself somewhat of a self-proclaimed expert on the topic. And I will be answering your questions later so if you randomly thought of something you want to know, you may ask it there assuming you can still see the post. If it's gone, that means the answers are already out so just check my homepage. It's not long before I post the next announcement anyway. 

I hope you all are doing well and that the new year treats you a lot better than 2018 which for all I care can die in a hole. 

//Ally