Year – A Multitude of Musings

2024: The Year in Review

Posted on December 31, 2024 by Astrid

Hi everyone. It’s the last day of the year and this means doing a review of the past year. I realize I wrote about my 2024 on Saturday already, but I’d like to do a proper review today.

The year started out pretty tough, because I had some issues with my assigned staff, now this side of the home’s support coordinator. I won’t go into detail, but let’s just say he isn’t the most socially adept and his attempts at gaining my trust went horribly wrong. This is the reason he isn’t the one making decisions for me or having meetings with me about my care.

I have had some issues with getting proper care over the past year in general, like when the behavior specialist decided to do the minute-by-minute compensatory system when I was in distress during my time without one-on-one. The reason was the idea that I would need more and more care if they didn’t do this. That is, that’s what my then support coordinator said, but I figured out that the actual reason was the idea that I’d purposefully work myself up in order to get more care. This is simply not true: I pretty regularly tell my staff that they can leave early if I’m doing well, but I just can’t plan my distress to suit my one-on-one hours.

Over the summer, I had some issues with the fact that there were especially many unfamiliar temp workers assigned to my one-on-one care. I mean, I realize that there are more temp workers over the summer when the regular staff are on vacation, but the fact that most of them were assigned to me, frustrated me.

There have been other frustrating aspects to my care, but I’m so glad my support coordinator and two new assigned staff are trying to build a trust-based relationship with me rather than telling me I’m just a negative nagger.

In other departments, the year was a mixed bag too. I definitely didn’t do as well as I’d hoped with my movement, crafting or blogging. In fact, I honestly did worse than I did last year. I did, however, try cooking and baking more often.

Another positive is the fact that I am fully off my PRN tranquilizer and my topiramate and am now on a significantly lower dosage of aripiprazole (my antipsychotic) than I was last year. I also started therapy. First, I tried play therapy, but that wasn’t a success from the get-go. I now am in the early stages of movement therapy based on the Sherborne method.

In general, when I look back at 2024 and compare it to 2023, I can see how in some ways I did worse this year. This feels a bit disappointing and I’m not sure why it is. It may be because of my having significantly tapered my medication. I hope that whether this is the case or not, it won’t get worse in 2025.

That being said, I do feel that I’m starting to develop a tiny bit of trust in my staff and that wasn’t the case in 2023 at all. Here’s hoping I can continue on this journey next year.

This year was a true year of ups and downs in other areas, such as my marriage, too. Thankfully, I’m feeling optimistic that my spouse and I will make it through stronger. We’re both confident that we’ll always be soulmates!

In the health department, I did okay. I gained a little weight, but not so much that it’s worrisome to my dietitian. I remember telling her recently that I hadn’t gained weight last year over the holiday season, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t correct. As such, I hope that, if I’ve gained weight over this holiday season, I can lose it again.

One last positive: I finally got suitable orthopedic shoes, yay! They still get damage often due to my drop foot, but thankfully not to the point that they can’t be fixed.

My 2024 #SoCS

Posted on December 28, 2024 by Astrid

Today’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday (#SoCS) is “my year”. I don’t usually review my year until December 30 or 31 and, since this post is supposed to be stream-of-consciousness, I cannot do it now either. That being said, I can write down what my year reminds me of.

I am first reminded of the fact that I’ve been tapering my medication since the beginning of the year and am now 10mg down with my antipsychotic and completely off my topiramate. The taper could’ve gone faster had I not landed in crisis just before my first antipsychotic taper and had the behavior specialist not subsequently decided to do the “minute-effing”, by which I would have to compensate for every minute I was in distress during my unsupported time by having less support at my next moment.

The year also reminds me of my continual attempts to get actually reasonably good care, after that system of minute-by-minute compensating was abandoned in late March. I sometimes feel like I could’ve come across like a very hungry caterpillar, but so what? I don’t purposefully experience distress, as the powers-that-be used to think.

I’m also reminded that this is the first full year since 2021 that I didn’t move. Back in 2021, I told my care plan review that I was 95% sure that I wanted to stay in Raalte, but hardly a year after that, I was gone. I resolve for 2025 not to repeat the same mistake.

Overall, 2024 started tough but things have improved ever since. I can’t go into every detail of what I was struggling with in early 2024 and let me just hope and pray that 2025 won’t be the same. That is, improvement is always welcome, of course, but let’s hope and pray that early 2025 won’t bring a setback.

What a Year! #SoCS

Posted on December 28, 2019August 13, 2022 by Astrid

What a year it’s been! It had a lot of ups and some really deep downs too. I will post a year in review sometime in the next few days, as I can’t do them in stream of consciousness form. However, today I already want to say that this year was huge. Really, I’m still struggling to grasp that my twelve-year-old wish to find a suitable care facility finally came true.

I’m not sure what else I can say about this year. I mean, the whole year has been filled with first applying for long-term care funding. Then it was denied and I had to keep quiet on my blog and social media about it, in case someone from the funding agency would find out and use my writing against me. I still wonder whether the funding people might’ve read that one blog post I wrote on June 3. It was essentially a suicide letter in disguise. I mean, yes, it was positively worded, as a letter from myself in 2021, when everything would be okay and I would be in supported housing. However, it was clear to anyone reading between the lines that I was in a very dark place. The next day, my appeal was granted and funding approved.

Then I had to wait for another two months to find out I was accepted into the place I wanted to go into. It was the second care facility we’d been checking out. The other one was closer to my old home (and is also closer to our current home), but the vacant bed had been filled up by the time my funding was approved. I had my doubts about that place already, as I heard at my day center that staffing was cut at the day center people from there went to. It would’ve been nice if I could live in that facility, at least in that it’s closer to our home, but it works out now too.

I had lost hope again by the day the care consultant for my current care facility called my support coordinator to inform her that I’d been accepted. No depressing blog posts this time though. This was August 20. On September 23, I moved in. Wow, that’s already been three months!

I feel calm now. Calmer than I’ve felt in a long time. Not just today, but in general. Of course, I still get frustrated when my computer doesn’t do what I want, when I don’t understand a social situation or when I need to clean up a mess I created and don’t know where to start. I still have very poor distress tolerance and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. I still find that everyday life takes a lot of energy. However, emotionally speaking, I feel better. I don’t experience nearly the level of irritability I used to. More importantly though, my post-traumatic symptoms seem to have lessened. Yes, I’m still dissociative, but I don’t experience nearly the amount of flashbacks I’d experienced before.

For 2020, I really hope to be able to be more alert. That probably requires me decreasing my antipsychotic dose, which is a goal I have anyway. I want to experience the full range of emotions more. After all, now that I’m not overcome with emotional flashbacks that often anymore, I want to open up my mind to what life has to offer.

I’m linking up with #SoCS.