I spent the past 8 days working at my office job with shitty office chairs and poor ergonomics at all the desks. I have been crying literally every day during that time, overwhelmed by noise and executive function running on overdrive and other kinds of sensory overload, and all the while this chronic pain just creeps up in the background and slowly ratchets up the baseline level of pain I'm experiencing. This leads to me not really perceiving the pain in detail, and it overloading my emotional/sensory processing, and my brain starts trying to assign meaning to pointless agony. It's time for anxiety! But it's always time for anxiety. :galaxy-brain: :astronaut-1:

Got some physical therapy today and the pain is much less and I can think. I can actually identify things. But still need to vent.

It overlaps with hunger and thirst, too, which I lose the ability to distinguish between as well as my stress level increases and compounds and compresses into a horrid little knot between my shoulders, and I feel the incalculable stress of masking for social interaction and suppressing all my obnoxious stims and finding ways to sublimate them into quieter, less disruptive ones, and the constant anxiety of not measuring up, overwhelming feelings of being a failure, all the intrusive thoughts that I can usually dodge and ignore and push aside when I'm not in crippling, excruciating pain. I really need to work on myself, I want to start creating art again without the thoughts pushing out any chance of concentrating on what I'm doing or choosing what to draw, which just might be the main actual thing getting in my way.

I've been working so hard on myself for the past year, seeing progress, stumbling, falling, getting up, pushing up against walls of pain and pushing my limits and trying to find the balance so I'm not outright hateful in my self-criticism, without giving myself a pass on things I know are bad for me or things I want to improve or stop doing. It doesn't help that everything is so damn expensive now, that everything fun to do is so far away and costs so much in gas I'm better off not doing it in the long run. I'm so goddamn lonely but I don't have any free time when there's actually something to do, and I have no confidence in myself whatsoever when it comes to dating or talking to women or even assessing myself for attractiveness. I'm torn between knowledge that I have good traits (powerful voice, I'm funny, I can cook, I'm working hard at self-improvement which I'm told is in and of itself attractive to people) and the crippling insecurity I experience throughout so much of my life. I need to speak to a therapist, I think, but I'm so fucking broke all the time, I'm terrible with numbers, looking at my finances stresses me out so much that the stress can overwhelm me and shut me down. I'm afraid to write for fear of what it will reveal about me, weaknesses people can use to hurt me (trust issues yeah), fear of being judged as a shitty writer with a frivolous mind and a pathetic, atrophied soul. Fear of being judged as childish for how much trouble I have just organizing my life.

And it all just blends together into a black sea of negativity that I can drown in if I'm not extremely careful in how I manage my thoughts and behavior. I need people in my life, and I've gone through social skills training to address the shit I didn't pick up when I was younger and nobody had the patience to teach me, but being pretty good at small talk and making witty banter is not enough for me, and I don't know how to seek deeper connections. I'm terrified that I'll be seen as creepy or pushy or weird (that last one happens no matter how much I try to hide it) or having my intentions misinterpreted because it's happened so many times before. I feel trapped by chains of my own making and powerless to do anything to improve my life. I'm painfully aware of how much my being poor constricts my agency, and my problems with organization and prioritization and memory and numbers keep fucking me on that and nothing I try seems to work.

Not sure what to do with this. Just needed to vent. And I needed people who understand, or maybe understand, to see it. Because I feel so alone. And like such a fucking weirdo nobody will ever like me for me.