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These are my nightmares.

I have them a few times a week. Sometimes every night.

Sometimes they are just feelings. No dreams. Just waking feelings of fear.

I did not know nightmares were abnormal for adults until I started reading about it. Apparently a very small percentage (under 3%) of adults report more than 2 nightmares per week, or even year. Maybe that’s wrong. It is from wikipedia. But now it makes sense when I have told people about these, how no one seems to share the experience.

I decided to track my moods intensely and also experiment on myself quite a bit with certain herbs and diets. I have written a couple of times before how a gluten-free vegan diet, and how reducing my refined sugar intake have drastically aided in helping me stabilize my mood rollercoaster. Another thing that greatly helped me was tracking my moods over time in a journal. I was able to take a few months and track my mania, depression, mixed states of every variety, as well as social, environmental, hormonal, and physical triggers for said mood shifts. I found that many of my mood changes are triggered by certain things (sexual assault triggers, social conflicts, hormonal shifts, dietary changes, etc) and behind those triggers is a larger more independent cycle of ups and downs lasting a couple of months at a time. In tracking the triggered ups and downs existing along the larger up and down shift of my mood over time, I can now identify when a mood state is changing and can identify where I am at.

I build a bit of a wall around myself most of the time when I go out. I can’t be dealing with everyone’s energy and thoughts seeping into me when I’m trying to enjoy myself. Especially if they are people I’m not interested in sharing those things with. The couple in the abusive relationship across the room, the person at the table who’s having a difficult time, the guy bullshitting his way into a girl’s heart. You can also miss out on the good energy of a group of friends having fun or the atmosphere of a location full of love. That’s just what you have to sacrifice to stay safe. To stop from being overloaded, dissociated, and even eventually panicked.

My lack of privilege comes with a choice. A choice to be visible, or invisible. People prefer invisibility, especially when someone else is unlike herself, or perhaps far too much like himself. Lucky for me, it is not my responsibility to dictate what others think of me.

I have been thinking a lot about drug culture lately and how many medical communities’ and societal groups’ abuse of the “quick fix” solution for everything creates fear and sickness in so many people. I think of how it fits in with the fast paced, competitive capitalist culture many of us live in, resulting in more time for working to get more or to survive and little time to heal oneself. As many readers know, one of the first solutions to many health issues we are offered is medication. We are bombarded with medication ads on television, in waiting rooms of doctors offices, and often from the doctors themselves (at least in the U.S. where I live). However, it is not simply the advertising that factors in. It is the fear. A culture of fear that teaches us if we stray from the mainstream medical solutions for all illnesses- drugs and expensive procedures- at best it will not work and at worst we will get far worse and die. This is not reality.