Let me first start out by saying that I am still having blackouts every day. I am still having hallucinations every day. Any progress I have made is superficial. What I mean by that is I am learning to cope and function better. I do not feel better today than I did on November 9th when I got off the plane. I feel worse. Emotionally I have reached a point where I can either break or fight. Anyone who knows me well knows that when something pushes me, I will push back. I will fight and I will stand my ground even if I think I will lose.

And I do think I will lose. I don't think this is a fight I can win. I am getting as much support as I can muster. I can laugh, I can giggle, I can smile, but on the inside I don't mean it. It's just me being polite, its just me trying not to show people how much I hurt inside. Some people have seen me cry. Only one person knows what I lost last Thursday. I told her cause I had to tell someone. No one has seen me at night when I am alone in my room. Alone... Just typing that word gives me flashbacks, flashbacks to events that never happened.

I've had these episodes described to me as so many things, disassociative disorder, anxiety attacks, hallucinations, day dreams, and even a coping mechanism for my mind. I think at first they probably were hallucinations caused by an anti-psychotic that I was taking as a sleep aid. I think now they are more. I think that my mind saw a benefit to them, it used them as an escape from reality. Now its a coping mechanism gone bad. These episodes have reached a stage where I don't even remember a lot of what has happened to me. Oh sure, I can tell you what happened, I've kept journals most of my life, and I have journaled extensively since I discovered Geno cheated on me. 

I can tell you what I wrote, I can tell you about how I felt based on those entries, but I feel like those events took place in another life, like they didn't happen to me. It's hard to describe in words but the best I can come up with is that Real Sarah went into an episode, and the episode Sarah has returned. I know those things happened to me, and I kind of remember them happening, but its like something that has happened 20-30 years ago, kind of fuzzy and you don't remember the details.

I've been asked "If you don't remember the details, how can you really say that you hate it here?" I am not basing my hatred of living in the Washington Area on the 6 years I spent in New Zealand. I am basing it on the years I spent in the last episode. I logged every event I had, its episode length, and its contents. I haven't even begun to log this Thursday's episode. I don't know where to begin. I don't mean that figuratively, I literally am having trouble differentiating real memories I have from the events that happened in the episode. 

Isolation

How do I avoid Isolating myself? My mother is one of the biggest triggers. Her driving drives me crazy, but I need her to drive me around without a license. My father weaves in and out of the lanes because he can't use both arms so I dont feel safe when he drives me.

I need to get out more, but that would mean being picked up by someone else or having my mother drop me off. I hate this feeling of dependence.

A letter to my 15 year old self

Dear Sarah,

I am Sorry. I am very very Sorry. In the next 5 years you will stop fighting who you are. You will be terrified of rejection from those around you. You will drop out of school to pursue a GED and early college, and then not go. You will seek treatment for G.I.D. and then break your leg leading to a Pulmonary Embolism the week after getting a referral for Hormones. You will work in a job you hate, lying to everyone around you so you don't need to face the truth yourself. You will isolate yourself from all your friends and family to the point where you have no one. You will live in such filth that it becomes common place and you take it for granted.

In 5-10 years your isolation will be complete, you will have no one except friends who are online. You will spend your weekdays in your room sleep rotating around the clock unchecked. Weekends you might come out to go watch football, or you might not. Doctors will be unwilling to treat your G.I.D. while you are on blood thinners, and they will be unwilling to take you off blood thinners while you isolate yourself in your room all the time. You will meet a boy from New Zealand while playing an MMORPG. The two of you will fall in love. 

In 10-13 years you will move to New Zealand. For the first time ever you will feel free. You will get married. You will live true to yourself for 2 years. Happy, content with life. You will do everything you can to see that your new Husband succeed with his schooling. You will do everything you can to see that your new Husband succeeds with his career. You will seek out employment for him when he has given up on himself. He will land a job that YOU applied for, thinking that he was responsible and never thanking you.

In 13-16 years you will live in Hell. Your new husband who has been such a wonderful influence on your own life, encouraging you to try to be more for yourself, will give up on you. He will ask you to stop living as Sarah, and fearing that you will lose him if you say no, you agree. He will stop taking you places. He will stop calling you Sarah. He won't take you to the Gym. He won't take you to the pools. He won't teach you to drive. He won't help pay for your schooling. He will expect more and more from you until your reach the point that you can't keep track of everything he wants. 

Then he will cheat on you. You will return to the United States thinking its the only thing left to do. You won't return to succeed, you return to exist. You don't think you can succeed anymore. You will hate it in Silver Spring. You will think that its too crowded. You will think everything takes too long. You will think that your childhood house should be torn down. You will suffer such feelings of sadness, of failure, of loneliness, of hopelessness, of regret, of hatred, that you will spend every waking second wishing to die. You will plan on ways to kill yourself, and you will again be hospitalized. When they discharge you, you will leave the hospital and feel worse than ever. You will spend two days trying to cope with things before going back to the hospital where they wont admit you because you are in the day program.

You will go to the day program, you will feel each day is getting worse and worse. The counselors won't know what to do, they wont be able to give you an answer on what you should do over the long weekend. You won't be able to make the promise that you won't do something to hurt yourself. They will hospitalize you again. You will begin having episodes at the hospital, episodes where you are living in New Zealand for hours at a time. You will have these episodes at night, so you will think they are dreams. They will offer to send you to a longer term facility which you will turn down because you think that everything is getting better. They will offer to put you in a experimental drug program, which you will turn down because it requires blood infusions. 

You will be discharged from the hospital back into the day program. You will feel like you are getting better for a couple days. You will begin to experience the episodes during the day. You will begin the hallucinate. You will begin to have more and more episodes until one day they suddenly stop. You will feel like maybe now you can move on with life, maybe now you can learn to drive, maybe now you will be able to get a job or go to school, maybe now you might be able to find a place to live on your own. 

You will then have another episode... You will live in New Zealand again. You will be there for years, you wont even be able to number them. You wont be able to remember what year it is when you come out of the episode. You won't be able to remember how you returned to the United States or even WHY.  You will have forgotten even who your new friends are. You will feel like all the progress you have made as been undone. You will begin to think about how to kill yourself again. You will begin to plan it. You will then be stepped down from the full day program to half a day.

And that is where I am now. Feeling like I am back at the beginning. Feeling like I just stepped off the plane from New Zealand. Wishing that I was dead. Making plans on how to kill myself in the event that I choose to. I've given the medication long enough to take effect. I've given the counselors and therapists enough time to try and help me reach a stage where I feel like I am at the very least beginning to get better.

Again, I am very sorry Sarah. I let you down. I let myself down.

-SarahAnn

New Episode

Another four episodes today, one this morning before leaving, one in group therapy, one in life skills group, and finally the last which just hit now before bed. At least I am hoping that it will be the last one tonight.

The first episode had me sitting at home in Abbotsford watching the Chiefs play and listening to the crowd as they react to something which has yet to be aired. Nothing special happens, no big grand fantastical thing which might give meaning to these visions. (Total Time elapsed: 2? hours)

The second episode I was sitting at Toll Stadium waiting for the Warriors practice to start. In this version of events I was shooting the practice so I had my camera with me and I was making sure everything was looking okay on it and getting light readings. The warriors eventually came out and I proceeded to photograph the practice until I snapped back. (TTE: 90 min)

The third episode was a bit harder to deal with. I'm back at Wha Street sitting on the old loveseat we had. It is getting late but I wasn't expecting Geno back until 12:30 anyway. I start dinner around 12 and by the time Geno gets home its just finishing. We sit down to eat and watch a movie before we head to the Hub to download some youtube videos. I'm sitting there complaining about my poor connection when I snap back. (TTE: 5? hours)

The most recent episode had my at Abbotsford again sitting at the computer playing Guild Wars, besides me is Geno doing the same thing. Thats it, we just talk and laugh and have fun playing on the computers. We eat a dominos pizza at some point but then we resume playing. (TTE: 4 hours)

These episodes may not seem like much, but its not what occurs in the episode that traumatizes me. Its coming OUT of the episode. Returning to THIS life is like stepping off the plane at Dulles all over again, and I'm doing it multiple times a day. Its not making it any easier, if anything I am beginning to want these episodes to happen more, I want them to happen for longer periods. I would be happy to lose myself in one of these episodes and never return.

I'm scared because I know this is real, I know the '5-4-3-2-1' technique to reorient myself when coming out of an episode, but I don't care that this is real anymore. I rather live happy in a fake world than like this in the real one. I have no hope of recovering living in this environment that I am in. None at all. I'm convinced now that my mind is creating these episodes to escape. They have ALL taken place in New Zealand, I don't want to go there, but at the same time I am not safe living here.

I can't return to living in this filth, I just can't. My mind is going to continue to rebel against it. These events will continue and will probably increase in duration and occurrences if I stay.

4 episodes yesterday and one already today.I'm scared to death. Each time I get out of one its like stepping off the plane again. Each time its torture. The last one yesterday has been the worst and longest yet. 8 hours at least. Probably more.

It started at the court house, I refused to sign the seperation papers. I wouldn't go through with it. I couldn't. Geno threatened not to take me to the airport if I didn't sign, but I reminded him that if he didn't take me that I wouldn't vacate the tenancy at Hardcorts nor would I get on the plane, so he relented. I signed the papers at Hardcorts and we drove down to Auckland. We waited at the airport and when the flight came up on the screen to go through customs, I walked over, but then I refused. 

I wouldn't go through. I couldn't. I turned around to see Geno waiting. I walked over and told him I couldn't do it. He was happy. He didn't want me to go and was just being strong for me. We laughed and we joked on the way back to Whangarei, saying the next day we would go back to hardcorts so I could be put back on the tenancy agreement. I then come out of it.

In the middle of a restaurant, I begin crying and wailing, and I can't control it.

I'm scared, I've been experiencing something this last week that I had never experienced before. I'm calling them flashbacks but not all of them take part in the past. They aren't all memories. The second most recent one I know took place in the present, and I know it wasn't a memory.

I blink and suddenly I was in New Zealand again. I'm sitting there in the big char by the wall and we are planning a trip to the gold coast for January. I look at the clock on the surface and realize its time to head to cricket. I grab the camera batteries from the charger and grab the camera bag and we head out to the car for a drive to Cobham. We get there and Geno drops me off before driving away. I set up along the rope and then go inside the pavilion to wait for the start of the match. When the players take the field I head back out and start shooting.

At some point I blinked again in New Zealand and Im back in group in the hospital, holding the same conversation that was going on before I had my episode.

Comics

Been trying to organize all my digital comics over the past month or so. Its quite easy to do as long as you have 2 (maybe 3) programs.

To manage the library theres none better than ComicRack.

To add metadata tags to the comics, I tend to prefer using Comictagger over any of the ComicRack plugins. Theres a couple reasons for this. First off, ComicTagger allows you to add ComicLover tags to the files as well as ComicRack tags. Now for PC users this means absolutely nothing, but Mac users appreciate it. Even better than that is ComicTagger allows me to change my ComicVine API code very quickly so I don't have to wait for 15 minutes after every 200 comics. When tagging series like Action Comics, Batman, Superman, and Detective Comics this is a very big plus as each of those series is more than 600 comics long.

Now the third program I use is called 'Bulk Rename Utility' and honestly, it is a godsend. Much too often comics are named in such a way that comicvine confuses Issue number as part of the series name, or heck, sometimes the comics name is just plain wrong. This tool allows me to rename entire series quickly in such a way that Comicvine can grab the series title, volume, and Issue # and then tag the comics. Everything this program does however is temporary because after I tag the comics, ComicTagger can then rename the files and I follow the Format...

Series Name v[Volume #] #[Issue #] ([Year of Publication]) - Issue Name

This has so far worked for me.

Now though I come to my first major gripe. There are a few scanners and scan groups out there who have a tendency to either put their scanner tags BEFORE the cover Image or in some cases, such as the DCP Archive, outright replace the cover with something of their own. This not only screws up tagging programs such as ComicTagger, but because Comicrack shows the first image as the cover in your library, you end up having dozens if not hundreds of comics displaying scanner tags instead of the cover.

Listen, I'm not opposed to scanners taking credit for their releases. If they want to add tags to comics at the end that is FINE with me, Most people are still going to see them. Just dont screw with the covers and dont put your own tag BEFORE the cover. I have begun to manually remove every tag that replaces the covers in my collection and I must say, it seems limited to a few groups (thankfully) but those groups tend to cover the big series like Batman, Superman, Spider-Man... So yeah, my point is just dont be an asshole. Put your tags in the filename and at the end where they belong.