over the mountains of the moon, down the valley of shadow

Journaling is one of the things I dread these days (among other things), so we'll see how this goes.

I finished my stint of intensive group therapy/DBT yesterday. It was... an interesting experience, to say the least. It was nice to be in an environment where mostly we talked about our mental health (the people there had a lot more problems than I did, tbh, but we always brought the conversation back to MI) because that's all I feel like I can focus on these days. And it's not really a focus than it is just the only thing I want to talk about and spend my time thinking about. Writing in particular has been hard for me lately, but not writing has also been hard.

But anyway, on the topic of group therapy - it's structured in a way where we learn different things every day, and I also meet with a therapist, and a psychiatrist during my time there. I had to get driven by the van since my mom has work and I don't have a car, which is pretty uneventful. I liked my psychiatrist, although I'm on a lot more meds and I don't know how effective they are. It's only been a few weeks, though - this is my current list of medications:

• Neurontin, 200mg
• Wellbutrin, 100mg
• Abilify, 2.5mg
• and Benadryl for sleep

After a bad episode a couple of weeks ago, I got off the risperidal. My normal psychiatrist wanted me on Seroquel, but the psychiatrist at the group therapy place wanted me to take something that was less sedating, hence the Abilify.

She also diagnosed me, heavily suggested that I have ADHD - so my mom and I have been looking to make appointments to get an official diagnosis of that, so I have an appointment coming up in the beginning of August - and also diagnosed me with "unspecified anxiety" and schizoaffective disorder. Honestly, I've been self-dxing myself with schizoaffective for a while now, so it's actually extremely assuring that I now have a professional's opinion. I'm really antsy about the appointment with the next (fourth) psychiatrist coming up for the ADHD - she diagnoses more than that, like any other psychiatrist, and basically I'm always paranoid that I'll forget my symptoms or lie or downplay them and get someone who thinks I'm neurotypical or have something I don't have. I forget my symptoms all the time (which is apparently a symptom of schizoaffective anyway?) and my brain just feels like a mess all the time. What can you do.

But yeah, mental health has been... a trip for the past few weeks. Not to mention that I'm still working on my advent calendar even though I did want to give myself a break, but I also have no creative energy or motivation so it feels like I'm stuck in the middle of wanting to be productive and a complete inability to be. It's really annoying.