The title sounds ominous, doesn’t it? The Great Downgrade. *shiver*

We’ve been taught all our lives to move up, up, UP! in life. Society measures success by accomplishment. If you’re not moving onward and upward, you’re a failure!

Pretty hard-core, eh?

And UTTERLY RIDICULOUS. As young idealistic people we idolize these measuring sticks… and we think nothing of looking down on anyone who doesn’t measure up. When we’re young, so full of vigor and life and potential, we haven’t experienced enough to have the necessary perspective to know those measuring sticks are pure bullshit. But we know what we have seen, and we believe that makes us experts, so we march right along not even realizing how utterly stupid we look. :)

I decided to make a Great Downgrade a few weeks ago.

I am an EMT. I developed PTSD as a result of a bad call in July 2006. I didn’t even have patient contact that night; I was the fire dept. photographer. It was that bad. Since then, I’ve been unable to go on medical calls.

This bothered me terribly every single freaking day since July 21, 2006, but there wasn’t a doggone thing I could do about it. I was trying to fix my head. But my head wasn’t listening to me, and there was no way in hell that I could go on calls.

I’ve loved being an EMT and wanted to be out there, doing my thing, making a difference. Helping other people is what I get out of bed for. It is my purpose. And EMS has been my calling for as long as I remember. I’ve been certified for over 17 years.

But now I couldn’t do it. I won’t go into the painful scenarios here, but bottom line, every call I did try wound up badly in my head. It was obvious I was best served staying home.

I forced my utterly broken PTSD brain through EMT recert in January 2008. One word: HELL. Ugh.

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Found this in a journal from August 14, 2008:

I’ve been sick the last 3 days. I adore people who can suck it up, put on their big girl panties and trudge off through daily life when they are sick; I’ve never been able to do that, not even when I was a kid. My immune system is touchier than most, so if I try to push through it, I am invariably 3/4 dead the next day. Seriously. Literally. Dead. Bad, bad stuff.

I learned this the really hard way back in the winter of 2003 when I contracted pneumonia twice. Not once. Twice. I spent six months in bed. I never, never, ever want to go through that again.

Incidentally, the Pneumonia Winter was also when I discovered the sheer joy of laptop computers. Seeing that I was going to be in bed for a protracted period of time, I bought a used tangerine iBook, so at least I could entertain my brain with the internet. I spent an enormous amount of time on the Country Business forums, which is how I caught the attention of editor Susan Wagner and ended up profiled in the March-April ’03 E-Commerce issue.

And no, they didn’t show pictures of me with my sickly ass in bed, although that would have been the most accurate picture at the time.

Anyway.

Life the last 2+ years has been a river of mental bits and pieces. It is barely contained by its banks, and I float and bob and flail wildly from one bit to the next, trying to hold on for dear life. The result is a thought and work pattern very similar to those with ADD. I bounce and boing from one thing to the next as they occur to me, and they occur to me when I am reminded by some random-ass thing I’m doing in the here & now.

Let’s not go into coping strategies right now — that is fodder for about sixteen blog posts over @ PTSDJourney. :)

The result of this roiling, random mess in my head is that I feel super *awesome* when I actually accomplish something. 99.999% of things I just barely work a little bit on, and then it gets dropped when I bounce to something else. So to actually see a project through start-to-finish, or get a project to the place I want it? is kick-butt.

Tonight I finally got one of my major website projects to where I want it, appearance-wise.

Five stars for me!!

I’ve been running this particular site for about 20 months now. It’s been through 4 templates. FOUR. Not counting the ones that I “tried on for size” for a few minutes and promptly abandoned. And finally, a template, with the colors I wanted — popped up. That, in a nutshell, was what I wanted. It looked and felt right. (Note: I’m not talking about this/The Bailey Daily site, I’m talking about different site that I haven’t discussed or divulged before. And it’s staying secret for awhile. Sorry!)

So I guess the moral of the story is, Persistence Pays! Hang in there!

Sometimes, especially with software and websites, sometimes you have to wait a good long while for the software to catch up to what you see in your mind’s eye. That’s what I was fighting here; it’s a WordPress site and there just weren’t any templates that looked quite right. Then one day I found this one, and tonight I got the bug in my bonnet to install it and fix it up.

I do still have to Widgetize the sidebars, but Automattic assures me that doing so is a fairly easy process.

As I want to relish the feeling of accomplishment for a while, and not erase it by inadvertently breaking the site (because you know if I start monkeying with it and break it, then I’m going to get pissed off and have to nail down where the problem is), I’m going to work on Widgetizing at a later date.

Actually it will be fairly soon, because I need to install Adsense and my Amazon links ASAP. The site has actually earned me about $8 in Adsense over 20 months’ time. (LOL!)

So, there’s hope for us bouncy flounderers. Hang in there. You’re bound to finish something eventually. :) ##

The Nightmares are back.

My nightly nightmares/night terrors ended September 20, 2008. There was a major life event in my family that occurred, and it was like someone flipped a switch in my head: Nightly Horrow Show = OFF.

It was not fixed by a pill, a ritual, therapy, controlled breathing, visualization, none of that. One of my major external influences changed, and apparently that made the ol’ amygdala calm down a little bit. Or something.

But tonight was night #4 of Nightmares & Disturbing Crap, and dammit, I’ve had enough of it. Nobody’s getting burned up or blown up, but it’s just shy of that. I wake up totally worn out and upset. I sit on the side of my bed trying to manually process them, "it was just a dream, it was just a dream, it isn’t real."

The "not real" part is a tough sell. My brain reallllly thinks…

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