Getting out from underneath credit card debt was...I never got into even vaguely sensible credit card debt. When I moved to the US, I mis-estimated everything, and was getting paid way below what it would take for me to keep living like I lived in Montreal (which was markedly unremarkable!) except with a car.
If there had been anything necessary or useful in there (like a degree, or an appropriate car) it wouldn't have been so horrible. But it did engender some bad habits that lasted longer than the debt, which is still something I battle with.
But I am trying.
An IO9 article about a woman functioning with schizophrenia (it took her a while and a lot of trauma to accept it was a problem, and she's managing it with medication) and someone asked "Why doesn't anyone hallucinate candy and hear voices telling them they're awesome?" Obviously paranoid schizophrenia is unlikely to leave you paranoid that everyone loves you (or they'd have called it delusions of grandeur instead), but they were given this [link] as relevant to it, and so far it's interesting reading. As is the IO9 article, primarily because it's the words of the woman, not the idiot who wrote the article.
Inasmuch as it's hard to grasp pain in detail, even your own sometimes, when you're not experiencing it, the idea of something that clearly breaks all the rules we've decided to accept (houses do not give us instruction, etc) is coming through loud and clear and true and no feat of bravery or strength can re-assert that every restaurant you've eaten in today hasn't been in on a plot to poison you--that's incomprehensible to me, and therefore many times more scary.
I have a cousin that's deeply deeply unfunctionally mentally ill, and even though she's been this ill for twenty years now, I think it's only very recently that they've tried to diagnose her beyond manic depressive. And apparently the diagnosis was DID, but my little understanding of that does nothing to explain any of her supremely erratic behaviour (she's the one, for instance, that my mother took in after she kicked her grandmother down a flight of stairs--I told Mummy not to do it, to send N back to the US, back to her mother, that there's no way she could shepherd her through a medical degree (my mother was also one of her professors)--for all of two weeks before she gave up entirely in the face of irrationality she couldn't cope with). She doesn't seem to be different people, just the same person with extreme mood shifts and no ability to curtail her impulses at all--so if they say jump out the window, she'll fall the two stories without hesitation ("If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?" "Mom, *I* am the one that jumps first.") and still agitate for custody of her children from her hospital bed (she might even have been pregnant at the time, if memory serves).
Which, uh...had a direction when I started the post. But mostly one of deep sympathy, but not enough understanding to be empathy.
Um, hey, adorable kid and dog: [link] ! Yes, that's it. Adorable cuteness.
Having IV meds delivered to your house like it's the pizza guy is not getting less weird. But I have a replacement anti-emetic, and I hope it works better than the phenergan.