Feeling old today. Bleh.

My eyesight is definitely getting worse. It’s getting harder and harder to read text on the TV screen. Even reading text on the monitor, which is never more than two feet from my face when I use it, is getting tricky sometimes.

So, it’s time to go see the eye doctor again. Not looking forward to that. They tend to treat people on assistance like shit. They do not take us seriously and honestly don’t really want us there because they don’t make as much money on us.

Or maybe it’s just me. I don’t know.

But eye appointments have always been tricky for me. Even my first one, when I was in Grade 1, was hard on me, because I have a very precise sense of language and the doctor is always saying “Do you like it better like this, or like this?”

And I am stuck saying “Well one is darker and one is sharper…. ” and that is totally not what they are looking for. They want a bunch of subjective snap decisions and I am not very good at those.

And you don’t get far in an eye exam saying “I dunno!” a lot.

Plus they rely heavily on that classic eye chart, which is text, and I think possibly that I have specialized, eye wise, in reading text. So the results might not be accurate.

In general, I feel like I have dealt with my poor vision by learning to force my eyes to focus. If I don’t do that, everything looks dull and blurry. Even with my glasses on.

I suspect that I have a very long term case of lazy eye. Long term as in, since that first eye appointment. I think I had one eye focusing better than the other and it was misdiagnosed as myopia.

And since then, I have been masking that from the world and from myself by forcing my eyes to focus.

It’s just a theory, though. Could be way off base.

More worrisome(because, of course, I’ve had poor eyesight for my whole life) is my hearing. That seems to be deteriorating as well lately. And I seem to be losing it at the low end, which surprises me. I always thought the high end went first.

But I find it harder and harder to make out low sounds. I have a bunch of samples of the type I used to make music that are now too low for me to hear reliably. Even with the headphones on.

And some of my mp3s have starting to sound… strange. Like someone ran them through a low-pass filter and filtered out the low end of the song. Basslines sound incomplete, like there’s notes missing.

So far, it’s no big deal. But I don’t like the way that this is going.

So I guess it’s time to see my GP as well. It could me just the usual sinus mess that is causing this. Fluid in the ear. But that usually causes the occasional annoying high pitched noise in my ear that lasts for maybe five seconds and is gone. It has never attacked the low end at all, as far as I know.

And ears are a lot harder to deal with than eyes. We have correcting vision pretty much down pat by now. But you can’t get a pair of glasses for your ears.

None worth wearing, anyhow.

So it might be that I will have to decide when it is time for a hearing aid. Right now, the occasional inability to understand low speech or low music is not much of a problem.

But if I start needing people to shout before I can understand what they are saying, I will have no choice but to get a hearing aid. Or deal with the world through text entirely.

That would suck. Hard to deal with people on the street that way, you know? What do you do, hand them a pen and paper?

But what has me very worried is my breathing. I have been having episodes of shortness of breath lately. Times when I have to apply my breathing techniques (holding my breath, breathing fast, forcing all the air from my lungs) with considerable vigor in order to get things back to something like normal.

It has to be the sleep apnea. It kind of doesn’t go away when ignored. The sleep apnea must be reducing my lung capacity like it did with a friend of mine. I need to get back on CPAP, or maybe tell my GP that CPAP doesn’t work for me and see what comes next.

I suspect it will be surgical.

Or maybe they have new gear that is way, way better than my CPAP machine. Lighter mask, quieter operation. I saw a video on YouTube of a gizmo that supposedly does everything a CPAP machine does but is just a little rechargeable doohickey that looks like that thing that Bajorans have on their nose and just sits on your nose, wirelessly.

I could live with that, I think. It wouldn’t be covering my face and making me feel (quite irrationally) like I am being smothered. I am sure I could get used to it being there as I slept, as long as it was attached firmly enough that I can move around in bed without it falling off.

The big barrier to telling all this to my GP is, of course, that I would have to admit to my GP that I have been letting my CPAP machine gather dust for like five years now. Not an easy thing to admit.

My therapist, at least, would understand how that can happen with my particular strain of depression. I deal with whatever I can deal with, and everything else gets ignored. That way, I can keep going.

And for some reason, I absolutely have to keep going. My life might not be much, but I have to keep doing it.

I feel like if I was to stop…. I’d die.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know I’ll explain that.

What I mean by “I don’t know how to be enough” is that I don’t know what it is like to feel like you are a whole and decent person. I have had a vast and terrible sense of insufficiency and inadequacy for my entire life, more or less, and I can’t imagine what it is like to live my life without it there.

All my life, I have felt like there is something abjectly wrong with me and because of this flaw, I can never actually hold my own in society. I have no choice but to hope someone takes pity on me and helps me despite my pathetic nature, and that leaves me in a perpetual state of unworthy gratitude.

It is one thing to feel helpless. It is another thing entirely to feel like you don’t even deserve that help. That you are not worth helping, and that anyone who helps you is therefore taking on more than they can possibly handle and you should feel ashamed for how much damage you are doing to them.

And, of course, incredibly grateful that anyone ever helps you, unworthy as you are.

I feel like that’s my role in the world. Obviously, this is because that was my role in my family, as it seemed to me. I cannot honestly tell you how much of that was based on the reality of how I was treated and how much of it was the product of my rather broken mind, but I can tell you that was sure how I felt.

When you can’t ask for things, hope and gratitude are all that you have left.

I am not sure where the feeling that I could never be self sufficient came from, though. It’s not like I lacked the skills. Between looking after myself as a kid and learning a lot of things the hard way when I was in college, I have had all the basics covered for quite a while.

I suppose it’s the depression talking. It makes me feel so very weak and incapable. But even in college, my brother did most of the actual housework.

I am still ashamed of that. I had no excuse for that. But it’s the role I slipped into because it was the role I was used to. Like I have said here before, nobody wanted to take the time to teach me to do things the way they wanted them done, so I never had a lot of chores.

I did dishes. That was about it.

I guess the machine had been built years before I was ever born, and nobody felt like it was worth their time to make a space for me so I could help maintain it.

Nobody was keen to make room for me at all, come to think of it. No wonder I felt unwelcome. All my life I’ve been an afterthought at best, a nuisance most of the time, a resented burden at worst.

Or so it seemed to me.

Now I will admit, I was a clumsy kid who did not learn physical things quickly. And because of this, I was usually quite scared during the process. It would have taken effort and patience and time to teach me these things.

And those are three things people have never been willing to spare me. Easier to just ignore me. It’s not like I’d insist people paid attention to me.

And of course, when you feel like you have to learn a skill fast or people will lose interest and give up on you, that makes you all the more freaked out when someone tries and the less likely you will be able to beat the clock at all.

So given all that, I guess it’s no surprise that I feel so incapable. When it comes to the business of life, I truly feel like I can’t do it and any attempt to do it will only end up creating a potentially disaster-level mess someone else will end up having to fix and I will end up wishing I had never even tried.

That is the rape that is always cued up in my head on that subject, ready to play.

I do feel like I may have some minor learning disability when it comes to learning the physical. It’s very hard for me. I pretty much just have to keep trying by myself till I get it. I have a very poor track record when it comes to learning from explanations offered by others.

That’s how I learned to ride a bike. A lot of people tried to help, but they ended up just making me super anxious for reasons that should now be obvious, and it was only after they all left that I was able to figure it out on my own.

And for that, you need the freedom to fail. You have to feel like it’s safe to get it wrong a bunch of times before you get it right. And I can’t recall ever feeling that way when anyone else was around.

Pop culture is filled with images of parents teacher their children to ride a bake. The implication is that the parent sticks with them over a long period of time. first with the training wheels, then eventually without.

I can’t imagine having anyone like that in my life. Nobody has ever had that kind of patience and tolerance with me. Maybe if someone had, I would have been able to calm down enough to learn these things and gained the confidence that brings.

But right now, honestly, I just plain feel like I can’t do it. My best hope is that I can use my other skills to someday be able to play someone to take care of me rather than relying on the kindness of others.

Maybe then I will finally feel like a decent and worthy human being, instead of a parasite.

But I wouldn’t count on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.