3:44am July 13, 2012

I’m finished sorting papers!!!

I feel exactly as if I have just run until I dropped. Exhausted, sweating, breathing hard, searing pain, can’t catch my breath, nauseated, heart racing. Except actually worse than that kind of exercise for your average person. And all I’ve done is sort papers.

My back hurts almost too much to type. Except not typing doesn’t make it better. Nor does shifting position. Feels like it should. Doesn’t.

Don’t ever try to pull paper bits out of the wrong end of a paper shredder by hand. Hell, out of any end. Not even if it’s off. There are invisible pointy things in there that bite fingers hard. At least I remembered to turn it off. Almost didn’t. No, I’m not safe around household items. I can’t see warning labels, or rather they don’t jump out at me as meaningful.

And I tried to dump the shredded papers into the recycle bin. And it went all over the floor. I felt bad for whoever comes tomorrow to pick it up. So I picked it up myself. Except, I couldn’t seem to get most of it. So my living room floor is a giant pile of papers with little shredded bits everywhere on top of all the papers. I feel horrible for whoever gets the morning shift but my body will only do so much, and what I managed was more than I can normally ever do.

I sorted through an 18 gallon crate of papers though. Two big divisions – keep and recycle. Keep subdivided into general, childhood medical records, adult financial or medical records, and stuff xeroxed from academic journals. Recycle subdivided into general and shred. A huge chunk of the stuff I am keeping is those books and (Mouth/Ragged Edge) magazines I talked about in my last post, the ones that have been mysteriously disappearing from my apartment since I moved here in 2005.

This is a huge problem for most disabled people I know – having caregivers move important shit and not tell us. Often to locations we haven’t a prayer of ever, ever getting to without help. Like in the bottom back spot in the closet, beneath and behind two ceiling-high piles of shit. I found stuff in there that I urgently needed for meetings years and years ago. They never like when we put it this way, but moving someone’s stuff to an inaccessible place without asking permission or telling them is just like you’re hiding it. No matter what the motivation.

Most of the papers overall, though, will be recycled and I am so happy despite feeling like a wreck.

Because I don’t function well around clutter and there is no storage space to speak of in this apartment. I’m using the bathtub as an extra closet to make up for the dinky excuses for closets that exist. Going into the bathroom makes me feel yucky because of the clutter in the bathtub.

I’m finally getting rid of things I probably should have a long time ago, too. I mean it was a nice prop for scaring professionals during speeches, but did I really want a restraint I stole from a mental institution sitting around my house? Sure it was an act of taking back my humanity but it was a long time ago and I didn’t like knowing that a piece of there was here. I took a bunch of photos – especially of the big lie, the words “Humane restraint” – and had a staff person chuck it down the garbage chute. (It’s not fluffy like the ones on their website though. Just hard leather. Not that it makes one iota of difference to the dehumanization factor.)

I normally would be incapable of something like this. Like my mind would go unfocused long before it was done. Or I’d be too indecisive. But sometimes I get into these states of mind where I want to go sort as much as I can and do it NOW, and only hard physical limits will stop me. And when I’m in the state of mind it’s like the more I can chuck/recycle/donate, the happier I get. And then I’m not afraid to be merciless with myself. Which is precisely what I need to combat my pack rat tendencies.

My mother doesn’t understand this at all. Last time I got rid of half my shit, she was convinced someone had coerced me into that.(She gets into this mode sometimes where she decides everyone is taking advantage of her naive, trusting daughter. Er… not that this never happens. But if you believed her, it’d be happening constantly.

I still remember the time she was ready to whisk me back to California thinking my roommate, who was having a life-threatening crisis and acting like a person in a life-threatening crisis, would somehow get me killed. As if I had no choice in the situation she was worried about. My brother described trying to get our parents to see reason – all the “scary behavior” my roommate was supposedly displaying was autistic behavior shared by both me and my brother. I remember my dad telling me I had to forget that other people’s lives were on the line too, and save only myself by moving in with my parents.

Which would have created an even worse crisis. Their home is inaccessible. So is the terrain they live in. Their presence would trash my benefits. Benefits I need to survive, including medication. They live too far from a hospital for my frequent ER visits, medical appointments, and hospitalizations. In terrain where the only ambulance is a helicopter. They are incapable of providing all of my care. As far as I know there is no agency giving services to people in their remote location. If I even could pay for the services after losing my benefits. They are getting on in years so if they died I’d be stranded with nothing, and end up in any of a number of horrific scenarios.

Plus I can’t live with them long without a major PTSD crisis. They are worse at handling my PTSD than they are at providing care – they try to understand in theory but in practice they often end up trying to justify things that happened to me, things where in many cases they have only heard the professionals’ side of the story. If the PTSD is not life threatening, any time spent in the psych system absolutely is when you have life threatening reactions to common neuroleptics. But according to them it was ~so sensible~ that I drop my entire life and move back in with them, and the only reason I thought otherwise was some mysterious power my friends had over me.

So anyway. My aunt’s wonderful form of elder abuse was to talk my grandmother into giving up stuff she wanted to keep. My aunt is… bossy doesn’t even cover it. She wants the entire world to do what she says, and basically directs everyone accordingly. So she went around telling my grandmother what to keep and what to throw away. This is an aunt by marriage so this isn’t some weird mother-daughter thing, it’s just my aunt being her usual asshole self.

So after my mom saw my aunt doing that, she started calling me. Not mentioning my aunt. Just telling me out of nowhere that nobody should ever convince me I need to get rid of things, ever. Even if I do. That she would find some way to put stuff in storage for me, despite her dwindling-to-nothing income. And then later it came out that she thought my staff person in California had been deliberately taking advantage of me by coercing me into giving all my stuff to her.

Which… I was getting rid of my stuff. I didn’t care where it went. But I ask people I know of they want my shit when I do stuff like this because then it’s going to a good home. So I give it to staff. I ask case managers to pass it on to other DD people who may not be able to afford it. And only then do I donate the rest to thrift stores and stuff. And this is because I hate waste, not because people are talking me into it. The particular staff person I gave some of my stuff to, is someone my mom was suspicious of because she did my family a favor once. My mom insisted on paying her, not because it was a good thing to do to compensate her for a job well done, but because “nobody really does favors for free unless they want something”. (?!???!?????)

And the idea of having stuff in storage… It’s horrible. Horrible. It feels like dead weight hanging around my neck, only from afar. I would never use the stuff there again but would always need to pay for it. And even the smallest cheapest storage is nothing me or my parents could afford long-term. And just the money being sunk into that, that could pay for things that made a difference in my life. It sounds horrid.

And for the record. There’s only two things I have ever, to my knowledge, regretted getting rid of, of my own free will. That is my childhood collection of cat figurines. I only have a few now. It used to be quite extensive. But even that, I am not totally sure I could justify keeping around. The coerced item is a bunch of photographs I threw out that a staff person made me feel ashamed for owning. (Because there were so many pictures of me. Which she thought meant I was self centered. Funny, I’m not the one who took them. That would be my mother.)

For 99.9% of the stuff I’ve gotten rid of, all I’ve ever felt is… immense relief? And that’s what makes me get on a roll with this sorting stuff. It may start out for whatever reason, but it feels so great I have to continue. Maybe it’s because I have enough packrat tendencies that I know how stuff can become like the worst kind of anchor. My introduction to throwing shit out happened when someone helped me get rid of a huge stash of old newspapers, and I missed them so very little and felt so very free it became a habit. With things like the icky feeling clutter brings me, or moving house, or lots of other things, triggering my spurts of must-sort-everything.

And… maybe my mom just doesn’t understand how that feels? I don’t know. I just know it is a source of misunderstandings between us. Including the lovely pattern of me getting rid of stuff and her trying to buy me more to make up for it. At least that’s what it feels like. But especially the thing where she gets really concerned my getting rid of stuff is evidence I’m being exploited because I’m guileless and naive and disabled and vulnerable and all.

But I’m done with the papers. (It took hours to write this, especially after I deleted my first attempt.) So yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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