Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations (Of Suffering) in Things That I'm Grateful For

I just wrote the longest and most boring entry about my disorder that I’ve ever written. No one wants to read that, I didn’t even want to write it, so I’ll distill it down to something interesting.

The cure has many side effects that may or may not make it worthwhile, I just have to weigh those consequences. However, I finally got to meet other people with my disorder and see what other people have had to go through.

The way it affects patients is so varied that it really made me appreciate how easy I have it compared to other people. I managed to make it all the way to my thirties before becoming truly incapable of dealing with it on my own. Many of those people couldn’t hold conversations, couldn’t follow a train of thought, and I was the only patient there without a parent/caretaker.

As a child, my symptoms were all physical, and physical symptoms weren’t known until the early-2000s and so everyone just thought I had beat it. I started having mental symptoms around that time, but most everyone put it down to the stress of being a teen at the Millennium (i.e. Columbine, 9/11, Britney & Justin breaking up).

When I finally decided to seek treatment, I didn’t know that I had anxiety because I’d been living with anxiety for so long it just became a part of my lifestyle. More and more things started giving me anxiety and I was having panic attacks so regularly, I thought it was just part of being an adult.

Then my memory started affecting me. I couldn’t finish sentences. It’s taken me 3 days to write this. The things that this disorder does has such a wide variance that sometimes it’s impossible to know what is just old age and what is actually signs that I’m close to actually being non-functional for the rest of my life.

I’m grateful that I got off easy… but that just means I have a lot of work to do ahead of me to get better, and I have no one to help me get there. But that’s okay, for now.