I am nearing the end of my outpatient therapy I have 6 more sessions to go, I will then move to 1-on-1 therapy.

I have a business trip coming up in a few weeks time that I am excited for.

I ordered a new book to help me with my certification I am aiming for. I think having something to work on and work towards will greatly help me in my mental health work.

I feel like things are looking a wee bit brighter these days.

I love music so much. I am also fifty years old and am told by media that I should be still listening to the music I discovered at 15-16 years old. Unfortunately my brain and heart never got the memo. I look for new music and groups all the time.

I love LOVE melodic Death Metal. Yesterday while driving my Spotify playlist I was served up this song “Bloodline” from this French group Aephanemer. It started up and the wind was knocked out of me. I was absolutely smitten and now I am tackling their discography.

This morning I ordered one of their vinyls and I ordered it signed. Thanks to PayPal for allowing me to kind of do a $10 a month thing for like 4 months. Nice! Otherwise I could not justify the expense.

Between my IOP therapy and now the ceiling/roof fix…. oh I didn’t mention that? Yeah water leak from an ice dam that formed in my attic during the last freeze. Sigh… I had to go and rent a truck, buy drywall and the gutters are damaged so I got new gutters.

Sigh…

Anyways… enjoy this amazing song.

EDIT: Oh turn on the closed captions or pull up the lyrics. Amazing AMAZING. Very positive song.

https://youtu.be/OaeT1RU5ViQ?si=1_enRYRNOVI63jpA

I will take better pics in the future, but for now… I am in the process of taking a rune journey. I started a new journal and I am pulling three runes. The first is where I am now, the second is my problem, and my third is a path forward.

It is interesting to me as I don’t believe in divination, but I do love that this can help guide me to self-reflect on some topics. I am going to keep at it.

I was going to go to IOP (Intense Outpatient Therapy) tonight, but I was called and told that they are not going to have sessions on Tuesday nights going forward. That is fine, it frees me up to do something like start back up my weekly D&D game I run for my online friends. We normally meet on Tuesday but with things changing up a bit I can do that.

Honestly, I have been itching to get back into a game for some time now. I like the people I have made friends with and they seem to like spending time with me. A win all around.

Trigger Warning: Suicide, Depression, Anxiety, Hospitalization

I ended up walking myself into a hospital and admitting myself into the IOP (Intense Outpatient Program) for major depression disorder. It got so bad that I had a detailed plan. I realized I needed help when I put an Urn into my shopping cart on Amazon and I was looking up how I could pre-pay for a cremation.

I will be going for five weeks of intense outpatient therapy and I have been in it for a week now. So far it is helping.

What got me to this point?

My depression has already been an issue but over the years, Covid, my crumbling of my streaming hobby (lost like $500 on an avatar), the state of the world, the lack of basic kindness between people, the wars, our political choices, the state of my house, the state of my finances… why did I want to continue on when it kept slipping.

I need to find a new way through as my life is not working as it is right now.

I have been Hard of Hearing (HoH) my entire life but as I get older it is just getting worse. One of the things I enjoy is gaming and these days it is Final Fantasy XIV. I tried to get into raiding this tier, I skipped the last one, but tonight I could barely hear what anyone was saying in Discord. I had everyone boosted and it still sounds like whispers. 

Being HoH means I have hearing, but certain frequencies are just shot. Other frequencies blend together and things get muddled. As this is the thing I enjoy to do for myself, it is frustrating when I cannot understand what is being said. Reading on the FFXIV reddit I see there are plenty of deaf players who are successful raiders. They tend to look for the visual cues as they have no access to the audio ones. I have picked up on the visual cues along with watching the cast bar to see what ability is coming. Learning the fights is not the issue. 

I play for the social aspect, the jokes and the laughs… and the raiding is just something else I do. If I cannot talk to everyone or hear everyone, then why am I raiding? I can still chat and type and that is fine for roulettes and shorter content, but for longer form content? I would rather not raid if I cannot be part of the social aspect.

It is a limitation that is getting worse the older I get. I even started to learn sign language. Some of my family are learning it too so that they can converse with me better as it continues to go to crap. 

I am just feeling frustrated tonight post raid.

Mood: None
Depresison: Yes
Ideation: Yes

There is no mood today. I feel once again blank and the ideation is back and strong. I am also ruminating in those negative thoughts. This is the weird thing about my depression I don’t feel particularly sad, even though in the past I have been sad while depressed. 

Right now, the only thing I feel like I can do is to turn on some music and confront these thoughts via this Tumblr. Next month I have my Dr appointment and we will address the medications not working as well as they used to. Things have been most difficult so I am considering asking for a sooner appointment or an additional appointment to tackle the meds. Things are getting bad to the point where I feel like I may need outpatient help. 

Lately I have been considering alternative solutions to my mental health. My wife sent me this interview with Michael Pollan who has been researching psilocybin therapy (Magic Mushrooms). This is a road I would have been hesitant to travel down years ago as I have never done anything that was not prescribed. I mean, I have never even smoked a cigarette. The mental suffering however is getting unbearable that I am willing to try anything at this point. 

https://youtu.be/1o343YfhaYU

I have not blogged in a plethora of years. I had turned my attention to Twitter and Facebook over the years. Watching Twitter burn into a pile of ash these days is an interesting spectacle that just happens to coincide at a point in my life in which my medications for my depression and anxiety are failing me. I figured why not come to Tumblr for a free spot to record my thoughts about what it is exactly that I am going through. 

More later as I get this up and standing.