I have this user icon on a website.  It says: Everything is always okay in the end.  If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.  I have a doctors appointment for the 14th.  I need to get a physical and get a referral to a psychiatric doctor.  I need to get the manic cycles under control.  I did not sleep for over a week of June.  I also did not sleep on five nights in August.  On nights when I do sleep I often only get four hours of sleep.  This isn’t healthy.  I broke my manic cycle in a burst of body depletion at the party.  I don’t want to do that again in that way.  I don’t think it is awful that I did it.  It was actually wonderful.  I did get what I wanted out of it.  I know how it is enough.

I would like to have more tools for dealing with my anxiety and PTSD.  Refusing to ask for a doctors help is part of the bad message stuff from my family.  It’s ok that I need help sometimes.  Everyone does.  Cue defensive language.  The party was really great because my only goal was to let go of the anxiety and I not feel responsible for anyone and I not steer the bus.  I had a lot of post-party jitters and I ranted heavily at one of the participants about how I should have manipulated the situation more to control more about what other people experienced.  He was great about patting me on the head but mostly ignoring me.  The ritual portion of the evening went about as fantastically as it could have, actually… on reflection.  Over the course of the evening I had a really hard time staying in headspace.  I am horrified by how strong my anxiety was even though I had taken heroic measures to overcome it.  That is absolutely the limit of my ability to self medicate for my anxiety and it wasn’t enough.  I need to try something else.

Every single person in my house this weekend likes me.  Many of them love me.  I was able to move through that crowd and feel intense irritation from more than half of the people there.  That’s not rational.  That’s not real.  That’s me having trouble perceiving what people are freely offering out of love.  Which is not to say that I didn’t have fun!  I did.  I had a wonderful time and I metaphorically smacked myself in the ass and ignored my anxiety and interacted with people even though I felt anxious.  I wasn’t defensive.  I wasn’t aggressive.  When I started to try to control what people were saying/doing/thinking I tried to back off and just listen for a while instead of projecting onto other people.  It was a very conscious effort and that’s not something I can sustain.

I loved my party.  I had a great time.  It felt so good to connect with people who love me so much.  I’m going to have to rest a lot to recover from this though.  And my anxiety isn’t lower despite that much love present in one place?  I need some help.  That’s how it becomes enough.  Because life is what it is.  If I am a gaping maw of need I have to figure out how to deal with it on my own.  I cannot ask for any more of the people in my life than they already give.  I am very supported.  This is about me and the chemicals in my brain.  This is about a lot of years of being abused.

Everything is always okay in the end.  If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.  I’m spending a lot of my current anxious cycles thinking about how the ritual worked for me and why I’m having so much internal pushback on wanting to present it properly to the world.  I feel very vulnerable about it and I’m struggling with it.  The obvious answer is to just not write about it, right?  If it causes me anxiety to think about writing about it then I shouldn’t do it.  There is no need to write about it.  The only problem is, this is being me.  The writing about it is as integral to the process as doing it.  I don’t know why, but it is.  Thus the current massive anxiety.  I don’t believe in the pit of my stomach that what I did was ok.  Do you know why?  Because like all things in life it was a mixed bag.

The sex was good, I’ll say that unreservedly.  I shouldn’t have tried to do that specific flavor of sex in a group environment.  I did it because I wanted to do it in front of other people… I don’t know… to prove that they would still love me and want to cuddle me when I am that person?  I think that one of the best parts was when a very sweet man told me in the morning that he is still interested in me.  It was this interesting validation.

I tried as hard as I could to engage in self-harming behavior.  Oh that’s melodramatic.  I tried to break taboos.  That’s more true.  I engaged in unprotected sex before having a medical procedure done to ensure my own sterility.  I think breaking that bit of my worry around extra-marital sex isn’t worth it again.  I don’t have space in my life for the extra processing time it requires.  It makes things more complicated.  By that I mean, I’ve sat here thinking for at least several minutes each day freaking the fuck out about a vasectomy failing and not knowing who the father is.  I’m not comfortable in my body right now.  I feel like I violated something sacred.  My baby machine is one user only, damnit.  That part of me feels monogamous and kind of freaked.  It’s not particularly rational and is not a negative reflection on any one else.  But that takes up space in my emotional life and I don’t have room to give it.  So I feel increased anxiety symptoms all the time because I would really love to start having a period again any second now.  That was a life lesson.  I like condoms.  I have to get better at condoms.  Practice.  Practice.  Practice.

I will probably be lame and buy a dollar store pregnancy test in three weeks just to end this cycle of worry.  And I’ve learned an important lesson.  I had fun.  I’m glad I did it.  I learned a lot.  That’s enough.