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I emailed my caseworker last night asking for an update about getting me to see a doctor. Still haven't heard back. Big surprise. I'm worried about being able to make it to my Section 8 Recertification meeting on Thursday but that's not optional. This is scary and frustrating.
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Re: Section 8 meetings: I'm guessing the worry there is that you don't feel like you have the energy to manage mass transit. What are your other options, and what can be done by you or others (like your loyal flist here :) ) to make them more doable?
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The Section 8 meeting isn't even accessible by mass transit. In past years I have taken a bus to a closer waiting spot and taken a taxi from there. Now I need to take a taxi the whole way both ways, which is gonna cost a lot (I am guesstimating about $30 each way). And because the parking lot of my apartment complex is very hard to navigate and thus hard to communicate where to get me over the phone with a dispatcher a intermediary, I am going to try and get to a shop on the corner to meet the cab to pick me up and get me there, and I am worried about how tiring that will be. The meetings themselves tend to be easy, I just amp stress on a pre-rational level because it's connected to having a place to live.
Options? What are those?
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Access to basic stuff like food and shelter is always stressful, regardless of where you get those from! *offers hugs* Options regarding getting to the meeting do include things like posting (or having someone on your flist post) to one of the signal boost communities for a hat-pass, if your funds are too tight to make the cab option easy to manage. Options also include (and, man, it's completely sucky that you have to do this) planning for the trek to the shop on the corner--- any little things you can do to alleviate the exhaustion, like thinking about stuff you can take with you (something to drink, or if light portable snacks would help, or even thinking about places you can stop to catch your breath on the way). Again, these are not-fun things to have to do, but they may make the overall process less awful.
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Already been doing my best to figure out when best to leave to get to the place to wait for the cab (it had places to sit) and pausing-to-rest spots.
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Awesome that you're already planning! Sometimes it's easy to forget that that's an option.
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I am just desperately alone and hurting and I need emotional support I'm not getting and a caseworker who's at least a little proactive and I am just so tired. At night I struggle to sleep and have intense, intrusive sucidal ideation that is getting more and more detailed and I'm just losing it and I'm frustrated and having trouble even being able to try.
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Ugh. I... took a while replying to this, because I was trying to think of something that would be as supportive for you as the time you sent me a copy of Jhonen Vasquez's I Feel Sick, because I don't think I'm exaggerating to say that it saved my sanity. I don't know if knowing you've done that for someone else helps at all, but you have made a huge positive difference in my life and if there is something I can do to return the favor, let me know.
(ETA: I don't know if these stories will work for you the way that I Feel Sick worked for me, or even at all, but when I remembered them, sharing seemed like a good idea: the Mezzanine 'verse by
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But with LJ dying and HH falling apart I've lost my online social network bit by bit without even realizing how completely, and my meager RL ties are gone. I've been operating at an emotional spoon deficit for the past year. Losing Molly gutted me. Ever since I put her down I've been obsessed with the fantasy of someone being able to give me that sort of peace. I'm tired, and tired of hurting, and out of try. My sacred responsibility to Anya and Hecate is the only thing anchoring me now. At almost 13, they would hardly have an easy time being rehomed. So I'm here for them. But it is harder and harder.
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I'm sticking my rant about the values of certain forms of online communication at the end of this because it's as much for me as for you. The part that is here for you is, one: you are a better person than so many, because you are sticking it out for the kitties. I... think I'm going to PM you the rest.
Internet rant ahoy: Okay, it is not my place to second-guess your group leader, but honestly I was just thinking today that, while a lot of today's social-media platforms (tumblr, Twitter) do indeed strike me as somewhat superficial and solipsistic, the kind of online interaction I "came of age" with--- mailing lists and journaling--- is in many ways deeper than anything I was doing face to face at the time. F2F, there's a lot of superficial "yakking", and a lot of social fronting, because you're in a workplace or other business transaction with someone, you're colleagues, you have to watch your self-disclosure, and in voice conversations, even with people you trust, it can be hard for anyone to actually finish a thought. I contrast that with online interactions, where you can take the time to respond point by point to these fully constructed, thought-out pieces of personal sharing, and other people can respond to you. I mean, I think about email exchanges I've had, back in the days when Yahoo had (I think) a 50kb limit, where it would take two and three emails to complete a response. There is almost never that much depth of exchange face to face, that complexity and intensity and mindfulness of interaction in the surface ebb and flow of taking in auditory information and sending it back; and once the words are out of your mouth, they're gone.
Now, again, I kind of can't blame anyone whose idea of "internet interaction" is Facebook/Twitter/tumblr for not thinking of it that way. And face-to-face is certainly where it's at for nonverbal communication pieces; if what the group leader is getting at is about learning to deal with some of those cues, or for that matter about "response speed" issues (like not freezing up or being able to "act confident" in social situations for day-to-day coping purposes), that's one thing. But, man, I have never had the depth of genuine sharing and intimacy with anyone IRL that I have had with online friends. I'd even go so far as to say that it's almost impossible to have that kind of in-depth, reflective exchange in a face-to-face auditory-communication medium; certainly it's not something that many people are able to do, just in terms of having enough working memory to hold the contents of an entire conversation in their head and respond to it--- even therapists, who do have to do a lot of that, take notes in session for a reason; most people don't take notes during "social" conversations.
Okay, that's enough with me defending certain forms of online interaction for one night. (Not least because I have a parallel rant about how things like Twitter are in fact basically gutting my argument for me, sigh.)
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But interacting with a convenience store clerk by making a purchase was his example of human contact.
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Okaaaaaaay. On the one hand, yeah, for his apparent purposes, i.e. daily life chores/errands, the internet qua social medium is most certainly not a good training ground. And for many things it is often more cost-effective to do the meatspace-shopping thing, so he had some valid points, and I can even believe that there are studies that show that online social interaction is not a good training ground for those types of business transactions. Or for more complex economic interactions like job interviews or whatyouwill. (Although now I want to see his sources. And their methodology.)
On the other hand, see previous on "certain forms of social media foster far more in-depth social interactions than face-to-face contact" because oh dude, my point, you have made it for me. (Indeed, I think trying to have those kinds of deep meaningful conversations with a convenience store clerk would potentially earn one a spot on "Not Always Right" or one of the other customer-service rantblogs, at least unless you and the clerk were by way of having established a rapport, and the store wasn't busy, andandand.)
TL;DR: yeah, if you're trying to learn to get through chores and similar, the internet is not a good practice ground. However, I think even in the days before the internet (or, hell, the telephone) most people would not consider that a particularly deep social connection.