[nebopolis]

I've been in pretty bad shape off and on for the past five years now. Never to the point of psychosis, but to the point of hospitalization for chest pains caused by panic attacks, persistent hemipelegic migraine, essential tremors, gastrointestinal issues, rapid fluctuations of weight - my whole body was shutting down and giving up. It started with a really traumatic work assignment in 2018 that I'd describe as pushing on a string - the harder I worked on it the more resources got pulled from the project such that my efforts had zero positive impact. I basically worked myself off the cliff trying to chase down an impossible target. It only took 6 months to reach the point of complete breakdown. I was working on slowly recovering from that when the pandemic hit, and that kind of just shattered the final bit of strength I had. Since then it has been a long and halting process of recovery, and I don't think I'll ever be quite as capable as I was before my episode. I've definitely noticed that things which came effortlessly before are still a struggle even now. Very slowly I have started to be more able to go beyond the bare minimum of purely reactive survival. This is the longest time I've been "lucid" since 2018, but it still feels extremely fragile and tenuous.

Medications helped a bit, lifestyle changes helped a bit, therapy wasn't super helpful for me (but I know that it can be very helpful for some people, I don't want to discourage anyone from giving it a shot). Eventually just enough time and distance have started to allow healing. The hardest thing for me is that I have essentially lost a half decade of my life. My memory of the past several years is extremely patchy, my career progression has been zilch, I've lost track of friends and missed out on relationships. I feel like I'm still in my 20s but I am in my mid 30s now. In a lot of ways I regard who I was over those years as kind of a totally different person, like I was in and out of a coma and I've just started to wake up over the past several months. I'm grateful for whatever part of me held my life together through those years, but they're a kind of stranger to me. Whole years of my life I can maybe remember where I was for a handful of holidays, and that only because there are pictures of me and that helps track down the threads of memory that remain.