I aten't dead (Old Blog)

I'm still here, but it's complicated...  Here's a quick roundup of what's new with me:

I have beta-blockers.  They're not magic, but they help my body to stop giving a shit about all the adrenaline it seems to produce.  Trouble is, while they remove the physical symptoms of my anxiety, I'm still left with what's in my head, and also a complete lack of motivation to do very much at all.  If I was going to get all bad teenage poetry about it, it's like there's a space in me for my aspirations, hopes, dreams and desire, but I fill it with anxiety, and when the anxiety is taken away, the void remains.  Which brings me to my next thing:

I don't know what I want to do.  That's not a function of having too many conflicting choices, it's simply that I am really very bad at knowing what I would like to have and what I would like to do.

And that's pretty chilling.  When I'm anxious I can get a few things done around the house.  When I'm at work, if I can hit the sweet spot between fired up and burnt out, I stand a chance of getting something done.  Take my anxiety away, and I'm not sure I'm really a person any more.  It's weird.

I have a therapist.  He's a man.  I chose a man on purpose, not because I don't like talking to women.  I love women.  See here.  Trouble is, I find it quite difficult not to fancy them, and very difficult not to include them in some kind of fantasy.  If I'm spending regular time with them alone and they're wearing shoes, it's highly likely that something will develop.  If I'm talking about my Cinderella thing and my sissy maid thing, it's almost inevitable.  I chose a man for my therapist so this would never happen.

He's also very good.  During the first session he poked a couple of things that were pretty raw, leading me to the following conclusion:

I'm trying to defeat my father by channeling my mother, and neither of these things is good.  In subsequent sessions he's raised the idea that my mother might be partly responsible for the state that I'm in, which is an idea that I am highly resistant to.  The height of my resistance is probably very telling.  I see him every Monday.  He's very good.

Not being at work for 3 weeks was good, but again, it wasn't magic.  I had surmised that without the work stress to deal with, I wouldn't turn to my fantasy creations for solace and soothing.  Alas, I had time on my hands, so I ended up making an interactive Powerpoint thing.  It has a Cinderella theme:

You get a picture of some ladies in nice dresses (nicked shamelessly from some Russian bloke on Flickr) and you click through a little scene involving domination, humiliation and cruelty that casts the viewpoint character as Cinderella, serving at the Royal Ball rather than attending as a guest.  Half the slides have a random element, and the other half feature a Fairy Godmother character to whom you can appeal for help.  Naturally, the help that is given is often counterproductive, and she actually joins in most of the time with the barbed remarks and the enjoyment of Cinderella's suffering.  The first picture is what it looks like to play, and this is the bit where we're being offered a choice of magical help.  You click one of the buttons on the right and you head off down that path.  The second picture is what it look like behind the scenes, with the script in the slide notes.  Behind that is some VBA that reads the script, displays the right text, shows the right buttons and moves you on to a random next slide when you're done.  Towards the bottom of the second picture you can see what happens when you kiss or don't kiss the ring.  TL;DR:  If you kiss it, you become sexually aroused whenever you're within 20 feet of the ladies in the picture (but stray too far and you get period pains (my head is weird)).  If you don't kiss it, there's some nipple twisting to be suffered.

It took a couple of late nights to get the slide templates and the VBA done, and then a couple of days to get the pictures and the scripts written.  Suffice to say that I can make Powerpoint do pretty much anything.  It's weird.  It's enjoyable.  It eats my time and robs me of sleep, but, like this blog post, I can't seem to go to be until it's finished.  My behaviours, here they are.

But yes, even without the need to self-soothe after a day at work, I found myself making the Cinderella-themed interactive Powerpoint.  So it's not just self-soothing.  It could be more of a hobby, and that's a worrying thing.  I'd like to have a normal hobby, something that I can admit to doing.  Something that doesn't have to wait until my family members have gone to bed, and something that I can be enthusiastic about with other people.

But that's the thing.  I don't know what that hobby could be, because I don't know what I want to do.  And then my therapist suggests that I could find some way to do this sort of thing for a living.  I was talking about the whole thing with captions, about which I've posted before, and it's pretty obvious that my output is very well-received in the various communities to which I've posted it.  My therapist was interested in my enthusiasm for it, and also how I manage to express power and dominance with only a few words of text, how I give various different voices to the women in the pictures that I use, ranging from soft and teasing to full-on totalitarian bitch-queen.  I can do things with words, and I appear to be able to write reasonably well.  Could I, perhaps, be able to put something together, get published under a pseudonym and actually make money out of my fevered imagination?

It sounds very tempting, but also highly risky, and not something I could give the day job up for.  I need to keep the job that I can explain to my mother.  Also, I've never finished anything long.  I rarely finish a Powerpoint thing, as I always find more pictures to add, more choices to script, &c. &c.  The only thing I appear to be able to finish is a run of 6 captioned images, and even then it takes up more of my time than I'd like.  Perfectionism is a curse.

Also, there's the issue of how I'd monetise something that's as inherently personal and idiosyncratic as a Cinderella-themed interactive Powerpoint fantasy.  Captions are infinitely-more-than-ten-a-penny, there are hundreds of free webteases on Milovana, the community around SexScripts is very much open and free, and more often than not I'm stealing pictures from Flickr to use in my projects, so I'd be in serious trouble if I tried to charge any money for them.  There's ways to get supported by Patreon and donations, but there's no way I can generate enough output to get more than £2.50 every decade by that method.

Can you tell I'm trying to talk myself out of it?

It's November, of course, so there's NaNoWriMo going on, which could have been my way into the wonderful world of dodgy paperbacks, but something else has got in the way:

I've gone back to work.  I went back yesterday for meetings and got back in the classroom today. Everyone's being very supportive, and it feels good to be out of the house and doing things again, but my anxiety levels are through the roof, even with my medication.  I can't imagine what I'd be like without the beta-blockers.  It's exhausting, but I'm doing it.  It'll get better once I've sorted out everything from the 4 weeks that I've missed.  If anything, I've demonstrated to my employers just how much stuff I've been doing for them for free, and just how time-consuming and frustrating it all is to do it without proper support.

And the small boy is being weird, because both his parents have gone weird, and he's been disrupted by half-term, and the clocks went back, and his sleep patterns went weird, and he's got some sort of chesty cough / cold thing that knocked him out for a couple of days, which is not what either of his parents need when we have our own stuff to deal with, and Furiosa appears to be more or less falling apart, which is affecting me and affecting the small boy, who is acting up and ruining everyone's sleep patterns and causing everyone to fall apart.  And now I've gone back to work.  And now it's approaching midnight on a school-night and this was supposed to be a quick round-up, but I got sidetracked by my Powerpoint...

I think I've created a properly messed-up tesseract of life-work-fantasy-addiction-computing-habits-blogging-family.  Thank the Lord I have a therapist...

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That's the thing (Old Blog)

Some more information about what's currently going on with me:

I've been signed off work sick for two weeks, with the official diagnosis of 'anxiety with depression'.  I was surprised at how easy it was, but then, that's the thing.

Having the time off is brilliant, as I'm not having to put up any fronts or seem like I'm coping with anything.  That's something I've been doing for years, and getting dressed and going to work is one way that I can 'pass' as a functioning adult.  Now that I don't have to do that, I can simply deal with how I actually feel on a daily basis, which is:  anxious, but then, that's the thing.

I've also had time and space to talk to Furiosa about what's going on with me.  She's also been signed off work for a couple of weeks, due to work stress and the stress of the Chap starting school.  This has been brewing for 6 years now (he'll be 5 in January, that's a lot of brewing).  Her symptoms were panic, anxiety, hyperventilation and The Fear that came out of nowhere to paralyse her and screw up her morning.  It was when she was telling me about it that I realised that what she was describing was reasonably normal for me, and that's the thing.

The thing is, my normal is messed up.  My baseline level of background anxiety is mild to moderate.  Just existing on this planet is enough to make me nervous, and that's before you start adding in things like money, work, hoovering, talking to other people and having sex.  Furiosa's symptoms are fairly regular occurences for me when I'm at work, and have been for several years.  I've been existing at work-stress levels that can get you signed off sick for several years, and they've become normal for me.  I've normalised anxiety with depression.

Looking back to try and find out how I got this way, when it started and how it developed, I couldn't.  I can't think of a single time in my childhood, in my teens, or as an adult when I've actually felt relaxed.  Not at home, not at school, not on any holidays.  I've always been anxious about something, and I've never found anything that can make that go away.

"But Darling, your sexual fantasies make it all go away, don't we?"

But they don't, not really.  They keep it at bay for a time, they offer me a space where my anxieties simply aren't felt any more, they throw a towel over the poison parrot's cage.  But, like an alcoholic sobering up, which is a massively barbed analogy for me to draw, my anxieties are all still there in the morning, with an added layer of guilt on top, ready to be evaded all over again.

So, plan:  time off work, good, therapy, good, pills to quell my baseline anxiety, good, staying my version of sober, good, finding another outlet for my submissiveness, very very necessary.

This blog?  Not sure yet.

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Hiatus (Old Blog)

So anyways, I've been signed off work for the next couple of weeks.  Very very complicated issues involving work life, home life and family life, all three of which have had the bottom fall out in the past month or so.

It's all here on the blog, it's what the blog was supposed to be dealing with.  The blog wasn't dealing with it.

This will need some time away to sort out.  Patience is a card game.  It's at this point that the blog could take a dog-leg into something much more interesting, or it could stop altogether.  It's hard to say at the minute, but this minute is where I need to be right now.

Who knows.

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Normal service (Old Blog)

It looks like I've disappeared.  Work is back in full swing, and there are issues going on.  The labels for this post should allow you to triangulate (septangulate?) what's going on. I'll post more about it when I have the time, but for the moment I need to focus my attentions away from self-absorption and cross-addiction and onto things that actually matter.

Normal service might resume.

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A bit of everything all at once (Old Blog)

Work-life balance, or something
along those lines

This post is a little bit of everything.  It's long and rambling and it has subheadings.  There's a long tract in the middle about personal stuff.  It's positive and upbeat, more or less, but if you're just looking for some nice pictures and a quick exploration of one of my occasional fetishes, then skip straight to the bit at the end, subheaded accordingly.

It's the start of a new year for me and my colleagues, and everything is happening all at once.  There's work stuff, family stuff, house stuff and Dad stuff.  There's also fear and work avoidance, but there's also success, focus and concentration, which is feeling pretty wonderful.

There have also been triggers which have failed to set me off on one of my habitual binges, which is a good thing, and finally there's been one thing I saw today that's worth a bit of a blog post about.  That's the bit at the end.

Sound good?  Read on!

And things are going... well... (Old Blog)

OMG, that's, like, so relatable...
Sigh...

Don't look now, but I've had a really good week at work.

Monday was wading through emails and getting little done.  Tuesday was mostly panic and hyperventilation (that's a coping strategy, right?).  Wednesday I had a massive headache and today was finally productive.  I hit my stride at 3pm this afternoon and contacted 25 prospective students in about 2 hours about the courses they might want to do.

And I think I've sussed the trick.  More details after the break.

Domestic Goddess (Old Blog)

Yep, that's actually me.  I need an apron.

It's been an interesting week.

I've been at home mostly, having taken the week off work in order to make sure that my son was okay at his new school.  See my post here for full details.  He was completely fine.  Not a single shit was given that day.

Furiosa less so, but that's a story for another time.

As for me, I had 3 hours alone in the house every morning and a hankering for taking responsibility for as much household management as I could...  manage...  That's some pretty rubbish writing right there.

Interested in what I got up to for three hours each morning?  Then read on!

Work avoidance begins in earnest (Old Blog)

Yes, I have chosen the shittest picture I can find.
It's a supposed to be a desktop background, but who the hell
runs on 1024x768 any more?  Plus, I found it on Angelfire.
Remember Angelfire?

A quick post to demonstrate how easy it is to fall prey to my addiction.  UPDATE:  I've discovered something about what my addictive behaviours are doing.  Read on for more information.

I had a lovely weekend.  It started with babysitting for my neice and nephew, two adorable 5-month-old twins.  I love babies, and I love these babies.

Then followed 3 days of DIY around the house, pulling up carpets, buying rugs and painting dining room furniture.  Hard work, but good times with my family.

No fantasy stuff for a good 4 days.  Built up some momentum with real life, in the hope that some of it would carry over into work this morning.

I've managed about an hour's work before starting to drift off into work-avoidance.  I realise that this blog counts as work-avoidance, but I feel as if I'm on the edge of a precipice.  Perhaps if I blog about it, that would be sort of like peering over the edge, then I'll be able to get on with my day.  Let's find out!

I think it might be working (Old Blog)

I feel so cheap

I think this blog might actually be working.

It still takes up my time, and I count it as one of my projects that distracts me from my work and my family life, but I think I may be having some success at keeping a lid on things.

I've had two flare-ups over the past week, here and here, and while the second one did involve a textbook Flickr rabbit-hole, my temporary obsession pretty much ended with my funky little ligature that I've started to use to sign off.  I like ligatures.

Having a place to vent, and I do think that vent is the right word for what I'm doing, is proving useful.  Also, I've found a couple of blogs by people who are in much the same position, that of trying to find a useful and practical way of incorporating their submission, both sexual and non-sexual, into their daily lives.  I'll be linking to a few useful posts as soon as the person gets back to me.  It's always polite to ask, and as you will hopefully see, asking nicely is one of the ways that submission can be expressed.  Stay tuned.

But yes, this morning I've woken up well-rested, well-vented and reasonably able to get on and do some actual work, which is what I'm supposed to actually do.  I'll post more about the thinking behind it at a later stage, when I have more time.  Check it out, I just put off a project until I have more time.  That hardly ever happens.

Time to celebrate with a cup of tea...

Damn...

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