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Head Pressure, Continued; Several Stressful Factors

2 years ago1,284 words

For the second week in a row, this post's mostly just an excuse about how I've not achieved what I wanted to this week, due to general mental illness exacerbated by several situational stressors. Bleh.

I need to promote Atonal Dreams, and for that I've been renovating this site a bit, especially the overly cluttered main page. The revised version - which I've not yet uploaded - will focus on showing info about games that people visiting this place are most likely interested in seeing. Writing that info - and making appropriate gifs - for Atonal Dreams has been especially important since I'll be using them on the Steam store page and to promote on Reddit etc as well.

I was hoping to have it all working by last weekend... but hadn't finished yet, so I gave myself this week too. But I've still not finished! I've mostly finished everything I wanted to, but I got carried away with irrelevant things like rereading old blog posts and rewriting the About page only to have severe doubts about what I was doing... plus I've been quite stressed and probably ill in general for the past couple of weeks now.

∞ I posted last week ∞ about some 'head pressure thing' I've had for years, which I always feared was related to my brain tumour (and a sign of things getting worse), and how I felt I'd solved the mystery at long last and finally knew how to do away with it. Now I'm not so sure, as I've slept more but it's still here, and it's been bothering me almost all day every day and really disrupting my ability to focus on anything else.

There are several factors I think are all contributing to it:

One is deep subconscious fear about the whole promotion stuff I have to do, since - in addition to fairly severe social anxiety (or Avoidant Personality Disorder) - I'm still traumatised from the Fig Hunter days. Perhaps it's not a million miles away from how someone might feel if they were trying to get themselves to join a dating app despite having been raped a few years prior. Maybe you feel hostile towards me using that as an example since rape is worse than anything ever and how dare I compare what I went through to it, but I suppose it's just a particularly striking example of violation followed by deep, fearful reluctance which you're likely to understand and have sympathy for, and which activates essentially the same mental processes I'm struggling with myself. I've been meaning to write a blog post about all this - as I said in a previous post - but, well, I haven't yet.

Another is that I had a brain scan a few weeks ago but still haven't got the results of that yet. Having the scan brought back all the feelings I had related to my worst fear - having brain cancer - becoming a reality, but they've been left lingering for weeks without a resolution. I think that's cruel!

There's also some general illnesses going around, as they do at this time of year; both my parents have been ill, and I've had symptoms that are definitely due to having a cold or something as well.

Oh, and I haven't heard from a couple of my friends in like three weeks despite contacting each of them multiple times, and one of them - who's romanticised the idea of suicide for years and mostly talks about mental illness - was talking with a concerning degree of depression when we last talked and hasn't even checked messages I've sent since then even though she's usually the one who reaches out to me. So the thought of her dying or either of them ghosting me have been constantly at the back of my mind (also it means I haven't really spoken with anyone... except my third friend who called me yesterday to vent about her failing relationship for an hour or two where 99% of the time I just quietly listened while bitterly reflecting about how I've been single for over a decade).

So all of those together have put me into a state of constant tension and stress that I can feel in my muscles (I keep making conscious efforts to physically relax my shoulders and such, or stop clenching my jaw, though the tension always comes back when I release that attention).

I decided to essentially take this week off Atonal Dreams stuff to try and complete some tasks that have been hanging over me, like some forms I needed to fill out or emails I've been meaning to reply to for ages... but I struggled to even do those, and just ended up feeling worse - and like a failure - as a result of it!

I also meant to contact the counselling place I used to go to before, thinking if I at least get out of the house to speak to someone once a week that might do me a lot of good during these far-too-common low points, or might be the best first step to get out of this rut... but, despite having an apparent focus on support for social anxiety (that's why I went there in the past), the only way to get in contact is via phone call! Which is difficult for me at the best of times, but with all the recent stress I've just not been able to push through the mental barrier at all. If I could email or text, I would have done it already! Ugh. How ridiculous.

So, even though I'm disappointed in myself for not getting stuff done more quickly, I'm planning for the next week to be the same as this one: I'll try to finish off the website renovations, I'll try to do the things on my To Do List I'd hoped to do this week but didn't (reply to some emails, some 'admin' stuff, finally starting posting music to the YouTube channel I created for that purpose ages ago), and hopefully I'll be able to push through the reluctance enough to at least enquire about starting counselling.

Bleh. I've just been feeling really terrible, and then I feel even worse for not performing better. They say you're supposed to have self-compassion, to give yourself a break and not push yourself so hard... but I suppose this is part of the lingering trauma too; my mind's full of ghosts from back then of people getting annoyed at me for not completing things, for being mentally ill at all or for talking openly about it, and they scowl and spit at me for 'making up excuses' like this, for not being some reliable games-making machine, then I get wound up by these phantom comments and spiral into guilt and shame and... Sigh.

I'm supposed to be hearing from the hospital re the brain cancer this Friday, so hopefully (assuming that's not bad news!!) that'll be one of the weights off my mind. I'll also try contacting my friends again (I'm hoping they're just busy or struggling with their own mental issues; I take weeks to reply myself, after all), and if I can get some more lingering tasks ticked off then that should help as well.

(I felt embarrassed looking through my old archived posts and seeing how common entries like this were... I know at least some people get frustrated that I keep talking about it instead of just magically curing myself like they claim to have done for themselves. But... bleh, I should stop arguing with imagined critics and just post the damn thing!)