Don't quote me. I'm going to edit this post. Feel free to refer to the ideas in it though
First: I'm pretty sure I know how you feel. I have a PTSD diagnosis and trust issues, sleep issues, mood swings, difficulty making myself eat blah blah blah I could go on.
Therapy will help you regulate your emotions in a safe way that doesn't hurt you or involve repressing them, and they will also be able to help you with your trust issues. Slowly. Yeah, it's expensive, but most therapists have sliding scales. Booze is also expensive. You can just spend the first couple sessions talking about your birds if you want, that will help with the safe-feeling thing.
I know you're reading
The Body Keeps the Score, which means I know that you know that you should probably try therapy >_> It's not about that being this great healing relationship which is going to fix everything. That gives too much power to the therapist and the therapist is just a therapist and that's it. They don't get to put you in a box or do anything bad to you. Period. And you can talk to them in your first session about how you feel about therapy, whatever little amount works for you ("I don't really want to do therapy and am anxious about it" is a good start).
There's lots of things that you can do to help yourself, and I will say that therapy is an excellent thing to have in your toolbox. It has really helped me.
Medication is ... I don't particularly enjoy being on it, but it was much less of a bad thing than I thought it would be. It gave me a leg up so that I could process more difficult stuff and handle being alive while transitioning between therapists during a pandemic, and also made it so that I wasn't literally crying all day (I was literally crying all day for months. It was "I'm too depressed to walk up the stairs" bad). Now that some things are improving in my life, I get to transition to a lower dosage. I also have a psychiatrist who worked with the military on PTSD treatment and has a good understanding of how to navigate my situation so that I am empowered and in control, rather than feeling like someone else is ~doing something~ to me. You don't have to be on it forever: it can just be something to help you get through a particularly rough patch.
Last thing: One of the best things I ever read on Tumblr was about someone who told her therapist she felt bad about herself because she could barely manage her life. If she had to take a shower, she could only stand to do it lying down. And so on. The therapist apparently had some good advice for her, which is that if she had to lie down to take showers, then that was fine. Modifying activities so that they worked was fine.
I changed a lot of how I did things after I read that. If you do something then have to lie down, then that's sad because it certainly sounds exhausting. But there's nothing wrong with being that way.
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