#torquetalks

So my friend bought me a new fit bit, just a mini one, but like. It’s already validating

This is me standing up abruptly today and feeling a palpitation lol

Absolutely no one needs to hear this, but I want to emphasize that doing DoorDash 20-30 hours a week does not mean that I am “better.”

Some of this is certainly deconditioning, but I walked up four flights of stairs to deliver food for someone and hit 165 hr on my Fitbit and my whole body was shaking for 20 minutes. Walking up someone’s very not steep stair/path to their front door carrying flowers I was at 125. For at least 2 hours of my “shift” every time I feel nauseous, headachey and overheated. I would honestly much rather be at home painting, and sometimes it sounds really enticing to just give up and go back home.

It is helping to improve my agoraphobia and I have new tools from therapy to help me power through the physical symptoms that could be related to anxiety or dysautonomia, but it’s still a bitch that people every day have to deal with these kinds of decisions. Be poor or die trying lol.

I was working a very physically/mentally demanding job for 6 years before quarantine and only getting worse. It pains me that I can barely tolerate 20 hours right now. But it also shouldn’t be expected of me to do. Capitalism just really be out here not realizing it is disabling people further and not creating a robust worker pool lol. It’s self destructing.

Tw trauma, dreams, medical trauma

But I don’t think people really understand (unless they’ve experienced it) the lengths that trauma disrupts your life, sleep, mood, etc and how your brain constructs different realities in response to that through dreams.

For me, from medical trauma, I regularly now have dreams where I can feel my heart rate pounding and racing and I look down at my watch and see 185 blinking away, then I can’t breathe, then I start choking. I wake up and I’m only at 90 and I have to clear my throat because I have reflux.

From anxiety and agoraphobia I have dreams about going to new places or trying new things and starting to realize this and need to grab my emergency bag of electrolytes while I can feel myself hitting tachy.

From vertigo I have dreams I’m stuck in an elevator that’s broken and wonky.

From general chronic illness I regularly have dreams that I’m too fatigued to move or stay upright, or even awake in my own dreams. I can’t even walk without falling down from the fatigue.

From emetophobia I have dreams ALMOST nightly about said fear, happening to me or everyone around me.

I STILL have dreams where my mom or dad is yelling at me or telling me I’m stupid/not worthy and I wake up sobbing.

I STILL have dreams about ex friends or boyfriends where they apologize and I wake up remembering that someone out there hates me. And that I still want to be friends with them despite the way I was treated.

All through the first year of the pandemic I had dreams that no one believed I was immunocompromised, that I forgot my mask and was surrounded by sick people, or that people were coughing on me on purpose. Lots of dreams about my previous boss telling me I was worthless and overreacting and making up having a chronic illness and autoimmune diseases.

The things you say to people stick around forever. The way you treat people sticks around forever. Medical emergencies stick around forever. And knowing that your sick forever just makes it worse.

I know that not everyone deals with trauma the same way, but dreaming is so out of my control and I KNOW that I’ll experience it every night, which makes it even worse. I used to love sleeping and dreaming. But ever since chronic illness and especially new medical issues, it’s almost impossible to enjoy. And I need it to survive.

I even just have plain old body horror dreams from medical trauma or speculation about my medical future. I’ve felt myself die while bleeding out.

Even tho it will fuck me at tax season again, highly considering just doing DoorDash for a few months and Etsy part time or as monthly drops because I literally can’t keep living with not making a sale for a week at a time and then begging for money because my posts rarely reach more than 5% of my followers on pretty much every platform. Do I get lucky sometimes? Sure! But I don’t feel established anywhere.

I posted about it probably here before, but I was making 2-3k a month from JUST Etsy in 2020 and half of 2021. I had a savings account of 6k, and because my husband has never had one, I blew through it all to get into this new house (rental) and then became incredibly ill for 8 months. We don’t even buy groceries regularly. We just eat snacks and then have established meals maybe 5 days a month? Like. I’m lucky if I can get more than $1200 a month now from Etsy and my bills are about $950 not including gas or food. I got one bag of groceries that lasted two days this past week for $35. And as a household we make more than 80k. We barely made rent this month. This is not even a livable wage anymore.

DoorDash is just like a quick fix, but I averaged $24 an hour and made $380 in 16 hours. If I did $120 a day 5 days a week I could replace Etsy and make $2400 a month. That’s literally a whole extra pocket of monthly bills. When I was working at Napa I was making $12/hr plus 6% commission working overtime and made around that average as a result ONLY because there were literally only 2 salespeople, both of us managers, and no one else. That was the ONLY time in my life I had an active savings account, saved $500 a month. Read that again. AND paid off one of my student loans. I have not touched them since 2020 and I still have 27k to go.

Granted I did use that proof of income to buy a new car, so that’s extra bills, but my last two cars (one from 1994 and the other from 2006) - both of their engines blew up within 6 month of each other and I was desperate. She hasn’t let me down yet.

Like?????? Of COURSE I want to continue making my art but I can’t sustain it either. Not without a savings account. I’m so conflicted.

Do you ever just see one of your good friends from college acting a fool on a random post and you don’t care anymore because they (along with everyone else) stopped inviting you anywhere because you were obviously faking being sick years ago AND literally couldn’t afford anything because of medical debt? Hmm.

So I’m writing down more for therapy, because I need to figure out what I feel like I never got to tell anyone over the years because I didn’t have a support system at home OR with friends, because no one believed that my parents were abusive. And sentence after sentence I’m realizing that my mom just literally thought I was purposefully trying to destroy her life because I’m just fucking autistic and didn’t understand anything she was trying to get out of me. So I started shutting down, going nonverbal during me getting in trouble and was called a psychopath instead because I stopped trying to explain myself. I even started laughing during getting beat because it was just hilarious to me that they thought that was going to help me understand what they wanted. I literally faked my entire persona AND skill sets throughout childhood and high school in order to seem normal. I built this whole tough, sarcastic personality online out of personal rage for no one respecting ME. I faked everything throughout six years of Napa because it was unsafe for me to be anything but straight and neurotypical.

Yikes.

Do you ever have to do your therapy homework and write about a traumatizing cult experience and choose to do it in a Hello Kitty notebook?