I smile and I pretend it doesn’t hurt

(Mean Girls- Leanna Crawford)

So after the OCD crisis last week I really thought I was over it and would be fine…

…that was not the case…

So I matched…and I’m supposed to provide regular updates on licensure because it is apparently a difficult process where I am going…

…which means I couldn’t use my do one thing at a time and figure it out as you go approach…

…and my brain still takes most stress and turns it into the kind of stress it knows how to manage: OCD.

But I was fine. I had to be fine. I had to be able to just do it. I had to get through it.

But I wasn’t quite as fine as I was trying to tell myself I was. I felt like I was being crushed on Tuesday and felt like I was going to throw up on Tuesday because my anxiety was so high…I had to go to Walgreens to get pictures and I thought I could do it. I thought it would be okay. And I mean I suppose technically I did do it, but it was not okay. Being in a store was a lot…and then instead of being able to take the rest of the evening to relax I had to go right back into licensure stuff…as of Thursday morning my application is in the mail…IDK if I actually did everything correctly, but it is gone…so you would think the stress would go down…good guess, but wrong…

It was like that was behind me so finally my body could crash. By the time I got to my car after work I was crying.

I don’t know if it was my biggest success of the day or my biggest fail of the day that I didn’t call in sick today. But in the morning I was like you have two choices. You can get ready for work or you can call in sick but you can’t just not show up…so I finally managed to walk through the doors at work less than a minute before I would have been late…and after I got to work I started to feel better enough that I could eat breakfast, so I mean, that is definitely a positive.

But I am super thrilled to never have to go through the residency application process again. That is the best news I could have ever gotten. I will take a couple weeks of high anxiety in exchange for never going through that again.

That’s why I brought my own sanitizer

(Karen of the Bells – The Holderness Family)

I was going to take a 5-minute social media break…and then someone on facebook said match day was like Christmas…

If that is true then I never want Christmas to happen again. And now I need an hour or so blog break.

I don’t have any positive match day experiences.

I get that doesn’t make sense because last year I finally matched…but my memory of the day isn’t matching – my memory is trying to pretend I understood what was happening while my now RPD was trying to talk to me on the phone and I was trying not to wash all the skin off my hands…(and that evening falling deep into an OCD attack).

Which is kind of similar to how this week has been.

Can we just call it match week and say it has been hard?

Let’s start surface level (because when things get too deep, people drown).

Even with nothing else really going on, acute sleep deprivation makes me psychologically vulnerable. There was a while in college that Cru and FCA were on consecutive nights and I therefore was up late consecutive nights and could almost guarantee I was going to struggle that third day, especially if there were any other bigger stressors going on at the time. It is much better now in that it isn’t nearly as close to a 1:1 relationship anymore, but I’m sure sleep deprivation doesn’t help things.

Friday, like usual I was scheduled to work until bedtime so clearly even if I had left perfectly on time I wouldn’t have been able to be in bed by bedtime. Then Saturday I go to bed and five minutes later my mom calls and talks for about an hour…then Sunday I am up late because long story short my friend got engaged, there was a snafu with our dinner plans, and I didn’t even leave until after bedtime. It was awesome, but it didn’t necessarily set me up for success.

Monday I found a worm trying to crawl across the floor at my apartment…and I freaked out. I flushed it down the toilet then I started worrying that somehow the worm would be able to climb out somehow and the idea of a toilet germ worm contaminating my apartment was even worse than the idea of an outside germ worm contaminating my apartment. I really was doing okay though. I went to work. There was talk about the stomach flu. I was a little stressed but mostly okay…for a while…and eventually I had to admit defeat and realize I wasn’t getting anything done and would probably do better at home where there was (hopefully) a lower germ level (assuming the worm was not escaped…and if it was I was just about ready to give myself permission to obtain bleach).

And by the time I went to bed Monday night I was really not doing awesome…and by midnight I was in crisis mode. And it is very fortunate that I have social issues on top of my germ issues, because if I didn’t have that combo there would have been a text sent to my preceptor declaring me unable to come to work because what if I have the stomach flu and what if I accidentally give it to someone else…so between 12 and 2 I am on my phone alternating between googling things about the stomach flu (because when I am deep in crisis somehow I believe that knowledge will somehow fix it even though it never really does) and trying to text out of work…and eventually I realize this is not working and go back to pretending like sleep is an option.

I get to work Tuesday morning and don’t even bother trying to make and eat breakfast because the idea of eating is terrifying. I am kind of shakey from dehydration/not eating/not sleeping, but by lunch time patient care is enough of a distraction that I am able to convince myself to eat rice krispy treat, and after that gradually convince myself that I should also eat pizza. In a couple hours when I haven’t become sick I start to feel a little safer…but Wednesday morning I still have some fear. And Wednesday afternoon I can feel the anxiety rising again and unfortunately in the need to stay calm enough to hopefully not have another night of crisis I only end up actually getting through a couple pages of reading.

I stay up way too late because people are the best thing in the world and I don’t want to be alone…and I do successfully avert crisis but I also get up still exhausted Thursday morning…and so of course there are two more worms on the living room floor. I finally make my way to work and try to look up how to keep worms out of my apartment…and get frustrated because the internet seems to believe that I am too dumb to differentiate a worm from a centipede/millipede. Y’all, those are two (okay, technically three) incredibly different species. I don’t actually know the difference between a centipede and a millipede, but I do know the difference between those and worms. Worms are way worse because they are sticky and slimey and therefore better germ vectors.

So that was the surface level explanation of I am trying really hard to just be okay this week…

And then there is the trauma history of all the failed match days. And I don’t think I need to write about that much to express that the three years of failure don’t disappear when you finally match.

And then there is the other major issue.

It still feels like my fault that my dad is not alive. Yes, I know it isn’t logical. I watched the GCS decline from definitely 4 though not a strong 4 to basically needing to imagine that it wasn’t a three…so I know medically that the brain was broken and you can’t fix brains. I know that if I hadn’t eventually opened the conversation my mom had said we needed to have that ultimately someone else would have brought it up – we couldn’t just ignore the decision that needed to be made…and I know that it wasn’t going to make things better or easier to wait longer or for it to take longer…but I still feel guilty…I knew I might have a hard time having enough PTO left for interviews if I was off too many days in August…and all those things got wrapped together into my fault. And I’m the medical professional. I’m the one who is supposed to do something. And all I could do was watch my daddy die. And I don’t want tomorrow to happen. I just want to stop on today because I don’t want to fail again. I don’t want to have to deal with all the things…I don’t want to face the mountain of things piling up because I can barely take care of myself, much less take care of all the homework I am supposed to be doing. I just want to quit. Not like quit residency. That is way off the table. Just like get up and turn off the lights on life and wake up someday in heaven.

And everyone is going to want to know if I matched and I said I would tell them but I don’t even want to know. I just want to pretend nothing ever happened. Which I know is not an adaptive response and I know will cause major problems sooner rather than later…but it just feels like too much that I can’t handle. I don’t want to face more failure. I don’t want to never be good enough. I just want someone to be willing to give me a chance. They don’t even have to really want me. I don’t care *that* much if I was last on their list. I just want to not be defeated again. And I don’t believe that is what I am going to find out. And that is hard on top of all the other hard.

And…time to get back to at least trying to get some work done…

What’s inside the rearview mirror is closer than it appears

(Dear Me – Nichole Nordeman)

I am giving myself one hour to write as much as I can in that amount of time and then I have to be ready to get productive things done…but there is so much swirling in my brain and I don’t really know where to start or how to make the twisty lines turn into words on the screen…so here goes what might be a totally incomprehensible post…

Last year today was match day. Last year the past month had been especially challenging…I took almost every Monday and Friday off for a little over a month because that was my interview strategy and those extra days without the distraction were difficult. And I was frustrated with where I was because it had been so long and I was still struggling.

And now I’m okay with giving myself a little grace…it’d only been like half a year…but now it’s been a year beyond that and I’m still not doing awesome. Sure, I cry a lot less…but sleep is still a major issue. The person who organized my grief group whose loss was I think 4 or 5 years ago says 5 years is acute grief and even beyond that it’ll still hurt…but I don’t know if I believe that. It is a lot easier to have grace for other people than for myself. I feel like I saw 6 months somewhere…and at midyear the session on grief I went to put the figure at 12-24 months…but really within a week or so people expected me to be okay…and I still feel like I need to meet that expectation. And I can’t. And sometimes it is exhausting pretending to feel okay.

To be fair, sometimes now I really am okay. But sometimes I am not. Sometimes it is just hard.

And everything residency related is hard.

Because it still feels like it is my fault and residency is very linked to that.

Plus there is all the trauma directly related to residency – the years of the cycle of trying, failing, limping through trying again failing again…

And then the cycle ended at least temporarily, but that didn’t take away the years of pain that preceded finally being wanted.

And it was a weird transition…

I don’t remember the whole sequence of the day. I remember being very happy and taking a picture of my computer screen and sending it to someone at work. I remember that I had the day off. I remember I was putting together a bassinet and struggling both with the instructions and with germs. My OCD was ramping up. I was trying really hard to minimize the number of handwashing breaks I took but everything I touched felt dirty. And then my now RPD called. I haven’t got a clue what she was talking about. I tried to sound professional and respond appropriately but my OCD didn’t want me to leave my apartment and there wasn’t good cell phone reception in my apartment so I really only heard a small percentage of the words and just hoped none of the information was important…plus when the OCD is really loud and all you really want to do is wash your hands plus you are in the middle of trying to figure out how all the pieces go together of the bassinet you are putting together you aren’t going to actually take in much of what you are hearing anyway…so probably I sounded a lot less thrilled than I really was.

And it was announced the day before that the St. Patrick’s Day talent show was not going to be a potluck like it usually was…and I don’t remember if it was because my OCD wouldn’t let me eat (more likely situation) or if I somehow expected even though the directions were to bring food for yourself and church would provide punch that I didn’t need to bring food…but I didn’t eat dinner. And I was playing my bass flute for the talent show so I couldn’t drink punch…and my OCD didn’t really want me to put anything in my mouth anyway. You know there is something really wrong in my brain whether it is OCD or just emotions that are way too high when I am refusing cookies. I did eat some cookies during the evening, but on the way out the door people who knew I usually love cookies were trying to get me to take some cookies home with me and I was refusing…that is not good…that night I was awake most of the night terrified of germs. And two days later it was Sunday and it was announced that starting Wednesday schools were required to stop meeting in person. I was at work and my church was taking a one week break…which quickly became a multi-week break…I don’t remember whether it was that churches were the next to get the boot or if the mall we rented our space in refused to let us in for events anymore, but it was over. And that was also hard. Basically that week everything ended. When you rely on the distraction and co-regulation of constant activity it is really hard to lose it, especially all at once.

I will admit I was over-committed. In addition to my full-time job…I volunteered with multiple areas Sunday mornings. Mondays I had worship team practice, plus or minus water aerobics, plus or minus young adult bible study, plus or minus reap and sow group. Tuesdays I had donuts at church in the morning and sometimes home group in the evening and I feel like maybe there was something else too. Wednesdays I had youth group. Thursdays I volunteered at the free clinic. I think I might not have had any Friday night activities except the monthly-ish game nights at church, but that might be wrong, because it has been over a year since this stuff happened…and I don’t recall any specific Saturday activities…and within a week it was gone.

And there started to be a lot of rules at work so even at work I was alone a lot. And I was getting fewer hours and less pay for the hours I did work and had to navigate negotiating for the end date I wanted…(and then found out my position was given to someone else within a month of leaving but back to full-time when they had cut me back from full-time)…

And fathers day commercials started…and I was about to move…and I wasn’t sleeping at all…and then I moved and I still wasn’t sleeping and then I started my position and was still in survival mode…and now it is almost over and I’ve barely experienced it.

Although, I have managed to become very over-committed again…just instead of mostly being over-committed with volunteering I am just over-committed with social activities…I love my friends…and I am also sad that I am going to have to leave them. And I am scared that I won’t have a position.

What if no one wants me again?

This time I have too much stuff to just move back in with my mom for a few months while I wait for someone, anyone, to have an open position…

And I feel like I am not where I should be…I’m ready to give myself grace for struggling then because it was so close to when my dad died, but by now I feel like I should be fine and I’m not. I’m not brave. I’m not strong. I’m just someone who can’t get over things and grow and move on. I just want to talk to my daddy. I miss him so much. My mom tries to fill in the gaps but is isn’t the same. We get along a lot better now that we really have to since we don’t have dad as the go between but it still isn’t like having my dad. And I want him back and today I watched the movie Raya and I felt angry because in the movie when Raya was brave her dad came back to life…but in real life my dad is never going to be alive again. And that doesn’t feel fair.

When the smoke billows higher and I feel like I can barely breathe

(Fires – Jordan St. Cyr)

The past two weeks have been hard.

At first I thought it was mostly just a frustrated communication situation issue…and then compounded by a zillion presentations.

On last Friday I almost texted my preceptor to say that I was going home sick because I felt like I was going to throw up (hashtag anxiety) but then I remembered that I work until 9 on Fridays so it wouldn’t be fair to other people if I didn’t stay, and it isn’t like throwing up from anxiety if I lost control is contagious…plus I really needed the results from the meeting I was supposed to be presenting at to know where my project was headed, so not doing it wasn’t really an option.

Going back a couple days before that I had another really frustrating Wednesday morning. The first problem was definitely a me problem – I accidentally left my meeting template open on a computer at the adult hospital without saving it when I was done working on my answers, so when I tried to open it up on my laptop before the meeting all I could get open was the read-only blank template. Not helpful…so I took the like 10 minutes I had available to get as much re-written as I could…and…then the meeting started and the questions, like January, were not the questions they had been all year and I didn’t know how to answer them and I was getting really frustrated, and I finally just said hey these are not the same questions and they are harder and the response I got was that no these are the same questions as always…except I know they weren’t, because I successfully worked off of the template provided in August every month until January…so when we were done with me failing, I asked to have a copy of the new questions…and was denied. I was also told again that the questions had never changed, this time with an assertion that I never had a copy of the questions…interesting – someone must have stolen your phone then, knew when we were going to meet, and wanted me to have half a chance at being successful back in August then, because I have the information from your phone with the questions. Eventually I was crying and really glad this meeting was virtual so I could angle the camera so my tears were hidden. And I got assigned writing a presentation about the importance of these meetings, using the information on the hospital website as a guide. I was super annoyed…and then…the more I read the material the more I realized what we were doing was not what was intended. And then I got the greatest idea ever. Malicious compliance. You bet I wrote a presentation on it…with a conclusion about ow counter-productive these meetings are and how much I want to quit, but will settle for altering the meetings to meet the intended criteria…but in between the meeting and that idea I was really upset. That 8am meeting still caused me to be up late crying that night because I couldn’t handle the idea of having to continue to interact with someone who refused to give me the information I needed to be successful while claiming that things never happened that did.

There were a lot of other presentations in the past week or so, but more importantly probably was I think it was in that same disastrous meeting I was asked when match day was. I expressed that I didn’t know and really didn’t want to know…and I was assigned to find out. That was a direction I refused to follow, but even the *idea* of knowing was really hard. (And as of Wednesday this week I do know).

There are three years of repeated trauma surrounding all the match days in the past years. Getting a residency this year didn’t erase that trauma. Sure, 2020 I matched in phase 1 into a residency, but that doesn’t take away the years I didn’t match in phase 1, phase 2, or the scramble. Maybe that seems small, but when your entire life has been focused on moving towards this one thing that you had been told was basically a done deal and then things happen at school where this is really your silver lining light at the end of the tunnel after years of abuse, and then that light burns out, it is a big deal. Not knowing the exact day meant no anxious anticipation. It meant no pressure to find out. It meant no pressure to do anything about it. It meant likely not knowing right away and therefore not having to worry about it, and hopefully not finding out at an inopportune time. And that was taken away.

And then there is the other issue with match day even if the result is positive. The one that logically I know doesn’t make sense, but emotions don’t respond to logic.

It still feels like my fault.

Because I needed the PTO for interview season. (And so clearly my brain connects needing PTO with the fact that I didn’t end up using any in August because we left the hospital on Monday).

And so match day almost like represents my dad dying. And that also is hard. And it is frustrating that when I asserted I really did not want to know when match day was that my obviously strong opinion on the matter was not respected…

So yeah, it isn’t just social anxiety-related issues contributing to my exhaustion and crabbiness lately…it is definitely more than that which explains why the response I got from throwing candy in my mouth was not nearly as effective as usual and why things that really shouldn’t have been a problem were very a problem.

Hashtag one day at a time. Hashtag it isn’t true that you choose your own emotions. Hashtag I would never choose anxiety. Hashtag I just started reading a book this morning called the Weight of Silence and I think it might be awesome, and it seems to be about a girl with selective mutism and I am excited to find out what happens.