It's spring and my life is waking up. Just a few years ago, my life was extremely turbulent and my mind was an unpleasant place to be in. Everything was always in flux, but far from always in a good way.

This past year has been calmer, quieter, so stable it has bordered on a bit boring. But, it's been something I needed.

Now, things are beginning to pick up again. However, this time it's different. I can feel the motion of before, but things are clearer. This past year gives me a platform from which to launch from. It has been a place of stable mind and thought that has let me ground and center. The loops are still there in the background, but I know how to work them now. I am not afraid. My eyes are opening. I am awake.

I sincerely doubt that any chemist, psychiatrist, or dope peddler could find a more effective antidepressant than a good cigar.

Good Friday always makes me think back to the First House of Clocks. One of the more notorious parties we had there was the Be Bad on Good Friday Party. We crucified Ian and played Pin the Nail of Jesus. I remember someone shouting "the beer's on fire!" and rushing to put out the flames. You know it's a real party when you have a beer fire.

We had music in the old tinfoil covered playroom. The old playroom was crazy. I mean, really crazy. Tinfoil walls, strange paintings along with random items screwed into the ceiling. I had written on the walls and the floors. Blissfully hopeful things and abysmally awful things. The pictures on the walls didn't match up spatially with their frames. A Twister mat was the table cloth. It was me. Me then. Strange, cluttered, mismatched, bright, stark, broken, glowing, and scary. I'm different now. I am no longer that room. I am breaking out of a chrysalis, not sure yet of what I have become.

What the fuck?

As part of the current pattern of actions, this is quite alarming — it demonstrates that SUP/LJ now actively and openly disapproves of and targets specific groups.

Sorting through some old stuff in boxes and drawers, I found a old Risperdal pill. Seeing it brought back memories, although not good ones.

What is widely seen as paranoia or laughable conspiracy theories can quickly transform into fact. Just take these recent news items:

Vaccines containing mercury can be linked to "autism-like symptoms" in children.

There are drugs in the water and this has kept secret from you for fear that you "might be unduly alarmed".

It's amazing. If a week ago I had said that were drugs in my tap water, I would have been labeled as schizophrenic. If I say the same thing today, I'm just someone who reads the news. However, I would have been just as right a week ago or even a year ago. It goes to show the truth in that old saying: "Just because your paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you".

By now, most have heard about the video of U.S. marine throwing puppy off a cliff in Iraq. This sort of behaviour isn't new to war. There was a Vietnam veteran in Cahill 3 with me. He told me a story that seems now eerily similar to this.

The guys in his unit called the orangutans "rock apes", because they would catch rocks you threw at them and then throw the rocks back. They had fun playing catch with the orangutans until one day one of the guys in the unit decided to pull a pin out of a grenade and throw it at an orangutan . Of course the orangutan caught the grenade and was blown to pieces. That ended the fun they had with the orangutans. The difference is that they didn't have camera phones then.

Should we be surprised by this sort of behaviour? These soldiers have been sent to kill people. Most humans view other animals as less than human. If they're killing people left and right, what's the odd puppy or orangutan ? Who is more evil then: the marine that killed the puppy or the politicians sent him over there to kill?

It's odd, after all this time I still struggle with thoughts of self injury. I haven't cut in a very long time, but i still think about it — a lot. I have to constantly stop myself. I have been successful for years now, but it still takes willpower.

It's very different for my eating problems. It's been a long time since I've been even tempted to purge. It just doesn't interest me anymore. I still struggle with body image issues, but purging isn't even on the table.

Self-injury and bulimia are very different beasts. They are both quick solutions, but the timing of the result is different. I wonder if that has anything to do with it. The effects of self-injury come immediately while the effects of bulimia are long term. Perhaps that is the difference. Perhaps bulimia just lost its twisted appeal to me while self-injury didn't.

In a way, self-injury not losing it's appeal is a blessing. It keeps me from letting my guard down. It reminds me that I can slip backward and by doing so it ensures that I continue to actively push forward.

Yesterday morning, purpleglitter and I got up early to pick up the two cutest English budgies. The rusty cage they were in sucked and there were two cats there were being allowed batting at their tail feathers, but the had each other and to their former owner's credit, they had insisted they not be separated in their craigslist ad. They are so obviously bonded, they are snuggled up against each other more often then they are not. We are calling them Statler and Waldorf.


( +1 )

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Statler and Waldorf home safe and sound, I had to head out to my endocrinology appointment, which went well. It is obvious that my endocrinologist is still not entirely comfortable with me being off psychiatric medication and not in therapy, even though it has been years and I'm doing fine. At least at this point she no longer suggests I go back to either. She did, however, suggest I see my primary care provider. I won't, I don't trust my pcp anymore. However, my endo let slip the name of a primary care doctor popular who is popular with her trannie patients that I'm going to check out switching to.

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After they got done taking my blood, I went over to see Ila. She has been teaching me Telugu script, though the words we've been going over have been Sanskrit. This week I need to practice writing conjunct consonants. I think the script is beautiful and am grateful for the opportunity to attempt to learn it. Ila seems to enjoy showing it to me — which is good, otherwise she probably wouldn't.

Mental illness has become so loosely defined that in 2005 the National Comorbidity Survey found that 25% of Americans had a diagnosable mental illness withing a timespan of one year and half of Americans had a diagnosable mental illness at some point in their lives. When we're talking about numbers like on fourth and one half, we're no longer talking about "illness"   we're talking about natural variation. A lot of people are being misdiagnosed, when what they really have is BAD.

I had thought of the Building 19 food section as an equivalent to the dented cans section of Stop & Shop. Not any more, that can of tomatoe soup literally tasted like stale old vomit. Absolutely disgusting. I will never buy a food item from Building 19 again.

I dumped it out and made a pot of a good can of tomatoe soup from Stop & Shop, but couldn't get the bad taste out of my mouth. Then I got worried about what might have made the first can taste like vomit and made myself throw up to reduce the amount of whatever bad I just ate. The actual vomit didn't taste nearly as bad as the first can of soup, likely because it was mixed with the good can of soup I ate.

Afterwords, I brushed my teeth and the fowl aftertaste has been greatly reduced. However, I'm still worried I didn't get enough of the bad stuff out.

This experience made me realize one good thing.: my bulimic days are so strongly enough behind me that an episode like this isn't even triggery.

Today marks 2 years since I was released from Cahill 3, the last time I was on a locked psych unit.

For years, I was constantly in and out of hospitals. Throughout that time I was put on various medications: prozac, geodon, seroquel, zyprexa, depakote, lithium, ativan, klonopin, celexa, zoloft, and too many others to list here.

At times, the medications seemed like it was helping, but what it was really dong was preventing me from getting better. It wasn't until I stopped taking the medications that I started truly improving. It wasn't until I stopped taking the medication that I was able to stay out of the hospital.

Mental problems need a mental solution. Mental "illness" is not like diabetes or cancer. The speculation that mental "diseases" are biologically based is just that — speculation. There is no evidence to back it up, but the idea is treated as gospel. It is more religion than science.

Without the medications obscuring my real issues or slowing my brain down to the point that thinking was a labourious activity, I was able to directly address my problems and I was able to make myself better. I've been out of the hospital for 2 years and I'm sure that if I had continued to take their drugs, I wouldn't be able to say that.

Project Three Meals went completely off today. I got no healthy snack, got no exercise, and went on a junk food binge. Don't worry, I am not following that binge up with a purge, those days are very long gone and I'm not going back.

I did get in my three meals, though, if that matters. For breakfast I had egg and swiss on an everything bagel, for lunch I had linguine in a tomatoed alfredo sauce, for dinner I had pizza. Oh well, tomorrow's another day.

i hate how angry i can get
i've been wearing the demon eyes too much lately
and i've lost that place of center again
i need to work back to it or i am going to drive myself... i don't know
i was going to say "crazy"
but i've always been crazy
and one cannot drive oneself to where one already is
but i need to find that spot again
i know that it is possible
i know that i can
i just need to
i get here every now and again
and i suppose i always will
the path of life is windy
and getting lost every now and then is a bit inevitable
the point is to not give up when your lost
the point is to keep moving
always keep moving
find the path again

As I'm go back and tag my old entries, I'm removing the trigger warnings. They inherently detract from the readability of the content and even if they were useful then, anyone going back and reading my old entries does so at their own risk.

I met with the psychiatrist from cambridge hospital today. It was nice to have a even-keeled dialog with a psychiatrist. I wasn't a patient, i was just discussing the system. And it felt like he was actually listening. Not just about transgendered topics and my experiences on Cahill 3, but to a wide variety of my criticisms of the psych system. I know that I've been fairly anti-psychiatry in my writings, and I haven't changed my views. I still oppose psychiatry as it is generally practiced today, however I have always thought that psychiatry could be a good thing. This sort of open dialog between consumers and providers is exactly what is needed to make psychiatry a better thing. More of it needs to happen. However, the biggest problem is that open dialog can only happen in a non-coercive environment — and when dealing with the mental health system, those environments are exceedingly rare. I'm lucky enough to have had the opportunity.

I've been invited to talk to a psychiatrist at Cambridge Hospital regarding appropriate treatment of transgendered persons in inpatient units. I hope that I responded to the message in time, they called me last week but my cell phone does an extremely poor job at telling me I have voice mail (remember that if you leave me voice mail and I don't respond). They suggested that after my experiences in 2005, I'd surely have some input, and I definitely do. I will say this though, even with all the problems I had and witnessed on Cahill 3 a couple years ago, I'd still rate the Cambridge Hospital impatient units as the best of the many that I've locked up in. I hope I can be of assistance in making improvements.