Please don't stop taking care of your mental health

On April 26th, so a little more than 2 weeks ago, I tweeted the following: I have decided to adapt into my "international" blog the more personal texts I wrote in my original blog (in Portuguese) about my mental issues that lead to a serious burnout (and more) because #MentalHealthMatters.
And today I finally completed the adaptation (I use this verb because it is not a simple translation of word by word, I need to adapt expressions and styles) of the 7 texts I published last year on my mental struggle experience.
There was another reason I wasn't fully certain yet when I tweeted my decision; that I struggled still until very recently even though last year I thought I was fine, and being aware of the issues and have tools to fight back, I still felt bad again after some weeks of vacation in Portugal.

Easter is now for me a conflicting period

It was 3 years ago, in 2019, that I realised that I shouldn't classify myself as a catholic, not even a christian. It was in April that I was going through a period of freedom, and that makes sense since April for us Portuguese is the month of freedom (the Carnation Revolution that ended 48 years of authoritarian dictatorship) and so I decided to get free of my religion. No longer believing in a God (which I had doubts ever since my teenage years), not even an higher power, also already convinced since some years before that the resurrection of Christ was a political decision, it made no sense to continue celebrating religious festivities. Of course, I had more than 30 years of being a catholic and all the cultural tradition of Easter so this is why I'm still conflicted when the Holy Week arrives.

Meet the team

Did you know that The Works of BaKano, and the other blogs and social channels (check the Linktree), can only happen because we are a team of 4 different persona, each handling a different aspect of the real and social life, although all of them share something (or a lot) in common?

Yeap, that is (definitely) true, so let's introduce them:

Cogitation in the Time of War #11 - Tomorrow is Sunday

Personally it was a nice day for me. It's still cold at night but the sun has been out and shining for 4 days now. We inaugurated the barbecue season, with a mix of meats but also sardines. I spent almost the entire afternoon without checking my phone for news on Putin's Invasion.

The only downside today was that my bicycle's chain broke cycling home (3rd consecutive mechanic failure when riding with my son).

Music is a balm

Today by the end of the day (Wednesday, 26 of May) I was felling more cranky that in the previous days. It's true that I am falling behind my own personal goals and doing less work than I plan to when I wake up in the morning, being it due to non-work related commitments, or due to the constant messaging and chatting throughout the day, questions and emails that deviate my attention from the main tasks and I end up losing to much time with that. It has always been like that and I myself have always been like that.

But there's something else that was a probable source for more irritation and bad mood: today, and ulike most days in the last couple of weeks, I didn't listen to music during my activities, both domestically and work related ones.

So what's my diagnosis or condition/disorder anyway?

Around 3 weeks ago I'd already done a very little introduction for this text and saved it as draft. The image on top was already chosen (and edited cause I had to search and then combine the 2 separate ones) and the title was also set. But without writing more content, and with other ideas in mind, I used Facebook to make a survey on what my next dissertation theme should be. I was surprised since the post was shared in a group of people from my home town (Sever do Vouga, in Portugal) and because liking the post  was the reaction to cast a vote on this one, I counted 16 votes from different people. The little synopsis I used to describe what this text would be was: how I think I have one thing (ADHD), one psychologist thinks I'm a sociopath, another that I have Asperger's and finally a third one thinks it's just intellectual giftedness.

But before moving onto these different diagnosis, and provide more insight on the latest, I think I must tell the story from the beginning, so if you may, please click on the link before this. But if you're only interested in the process I went through for the diagnosis, that I'm still not sure when it will be final, you may continue reading the following paragraphs.

The Phantom Menace

This record that you'll read next was supposed to be a long expression of my feelings, and part of my ongoing therapy, a record where I open the book and describe the bad moments that I've gone through in the last 2 years. But I wasn't planning on sharing this now but while writing another chronicle regarding my psychic diagnosis I started telling the story since the beginning of this "situation" and I was already a few paragraphs long. So I used the Separate & Clarify technique and since this is the last day of Star Wars Week (the 10th still counts) here it goes:

Indicators of my state of mind

My plan since the beginning of March was to finally start with the thread of chronicle-dissertations about the months when I was sick (the burnout but not only) describing my condition/disorder/syndrome that has affected me since ever and will continue to affect forever. This was because after some months in therapy I was finally going to go through a neuropsychological evaluation with the objective of confirming my suspicions.

But the therapist responsible for that, that I can say is my favourite therapist, not because she's the one that advises me the nest but because she is less than 30 yo and those who know me are aware that I love talking with young people, in particular women (and if they're good looking...), has yet to conclude our discussion on the report and so I still don't know what are the next proposed steps (and I need to convince her that I should go through additional evaluations).

So for this reason here's another text that demonstrates how is it possible to check in what state I am by simply checking my activity online, on the social media (and those who keep closer in touch, can better confirm).