Life Sentence

It's been a while since I last posted on this blog, and this time I come to you with something heavier than usual.

I had considered posting this elsewhere, but ~hellfire103's website is really more tech-focused, my microblogging services are too small, and my... pseudonymous blogs and socials are out of the question entirely. This is a post about me.

Since I've been at university, my mental health should have improved. I now have a lot more freedom and a lot less judgement. I can take time for myself without being bothered. I don't have to get up early or at all if I don't want to (excluding, of course, my lectures and tutorials). I can stay up as late as I want and drink as much or as little as I want. I can go out with friends like *snaps fingers* that. I also no-longer have the threat of shouting (which triggers my sonophobia) to contend with. So, why do I normally feel like shit?

The answer could be many things and, since I was advised against taking psychology at A-Level, I am far from qualified to decide. However, I have noticed something.

I tend to drink a lot, but even when I've been stumbling-home-through-town-swearing-at-traffic-lights drunk, I've still had a vague feeling of either sadness or panic. The one or two times I gave weed a try, I had the same thing. Granted, that stuff briefly got rid of my intrusive thoughts, but it didn't fix my emotions. What never fails to make me feel good, though, is being busy.

Yesterday, I set to work doing server admin. I had a DigitalOcean droplet to transfer to OVH, a WordPress theme to remove from X-Industries, and a domain to transfer to an EU-based registrar; then I decided to move ~hellfire103's capsule from Flounder to sourcehut, contribute a patch to one of my student societies' GitLab repos, and comment on an issue regarding some member management software. All of this together took a good six hours, and by the end I felt great. No bad thoughts or feelings of panic or impending doom: just a mild desire to have a can of Tennent's and watch an old Doctor Who. Contrast this with the previous night, when I had quite a few cans and still had to deal with what I can only guess must have been an anxiety episode.

This is where I got the title of this blog post from, "Life Sentence". When I'm dealing with an existential threat, or a personal challenge, or even so much as updating Gentoo, I feel good because I feel useful; but whenever I get a chance at regular life - watching TV, buying food, talking about the weather, or actually using my computers instead of recompiling the kernel or whatever - I have normally felt kinda low, and sometimes even found myself panicking or dissociating. If I were sentenced literally to "life", it could be a fate worse than death.

Meanwhile, there's another neurological or psychological issue I've been dealing with: amnesia. It's not the sort you read about in books or see on TV. I have never forgotten who I am, where I am, or anything like that. At least, not completely or for more than an hour. However, the fact remains that there are quite possibly supercentinarians with more reliable memories than mine. Now, a high alcohol intake and lack of sleep would explain memory loss, but surely it wouldn't be this bad; after all, my student accommodation has several binge-drinking insomniacs, who aren't quite this bad.

I mean, I literally forgot that a friend I had in Year 11 even existed, until I saw someone out in public with a similar coat to the one he always used to wear; and what kind of autist forgets details about their hyperfixations‽

Which brings me onto another thing: I am probably autistic. I'm not sure if I already explicitly mentioned this, either on here or on Mastodon, but that's another thing going on with my brain. I have a whole list of symptoms (possibly a symptom in itself) that I can share on request, and currently my only real hyperfixation is PIFs and PSAs. My dad is also very likely autistic, so there's probably a genetic link. However, thanks to what fourteen years of Tories has done to the NHS, I am unlikely to get a formal diagnosis for quite a while yet.

The depression, anxiety, amnesia, and autism aren't the only things going on, but I'm not going to try and self-diagnose any further. After all, I am completely unqualified. I believe the following image best describes what mental shit I think I have:

I'll be going back to England at the weekend, so fuck knows what state my brain'll be in a week's time, but I think I should maybe see someone about this. It's possibly only a matter of time before something breaks. Thankfully, my university has a decent mental health service, so as long as I can pluck up the courage to ask for help, I'm in good hands.

Hope y'all are doing well.