Chaos And War

TRIGGER WARNING: TALKING ABOUT THE WAR IN UKRAINE, ANXIETY, DEPRESSION, AND EVERY OTHER GEOPOLITICAL SITUATION!

The world…the world is ending and you can’t convenience me otherwise.

My heart is shattered hearing what is happening in Ukraine before this I have been following very loosely what was happening since 2014 but I never thought it would go as far as a war.

I’m terrified that this is just the beginning of something far worse that will destroy the life I and many of us know. And the most terrifying thing I have come to realize is how normal I think it is and how numb I became after the shock faded away. Since the pandemic started and the rest of the chaos that followed I’m so tired of historic events happening every six minutes!

In 2014 I dreaded thinking of the possibility of a war…although I have been thinking about it many times during the day…now…there’s not a day where I haven’t thought about the horrors that are happening now in Ukraine.

I live far away from Ukraine and I’m safe but seeing how quickly this country’s safety was taken away from millions of families and people it’s unsettling. I spent days looking around my room and house mentally trying to pack my entire life…and I got so anxious by just the thought of it! Imagine having to actually execute this entire action?!

Furthermore, I can’t go on TikTok and dissociate from reality because the only way for me to get updates on the situation in Ukraine is through TikTok causing my entire fyp to be full of videos with this situation…so I can’t not go on it to run away from reality because reality gets thrown in my face. This is the least of my problems because everything had gone up prices-wise and jobs are scares…

Since 2021 and 2022 started I have been more actively searching for remote and local jobs and haunting for a residency but so far they are very little improvement. I really have no optimistic idea how things will turn out.

As much as I don’t like to admit it, I’m not built to survive a world war or any war! I have no survival skills! Hell, I have no skills period! The only thing I can do is write…yep that’s it…maybe throw a punch? No…not even that….

Watching everything that is happening in Ukraine and Russia I can’t help but feel sad and angry! Because the Ukrainians don’t deserve this and at the same time the Russian people, those who are against this war, don’t deserve these sanctions Europe and the entire world have imposed on Russia. Putin and those who support him and the war do deserve the sanctions and even to get trialed for crimes against humanity to the highest court of justice! These soldiers who support this war give a bad rep to those who were forced to get drafted/enlisted and sent under false info from the higher-ups!

Also, these people are monsters, because they aren’t soldiers or humans when they agree to fight and shoot at innocents, invade a country that doesn’t deserve this, and don’t obey the laws of war that were signed in 1948! Back to the point, these monsters also make it more difficult to believe soldiers who ACTUALLY surrender their weapons because they actually don’t want to fight this war…

I really hope this ends soon because we are nearing four months of this…I can’t understand why not so many countries have moved army-wise to help Ukraine and stop Putin from doing this and only send “prayers”… I’m thankful that countries sent food and medical aid but if those things can’t actually reach them because the Russian army is stoping it…what’s the point…how can they help them?

I wish I wasn’t so helpless….

Depression, Anxiety and After-Covid Traveling.

I have depression since I was eight and anxiety since I was twelve years old. But traveling…traveling I’ve been doing since I was nine months old.

As a toddler before mental health became an issue for me, I loved it but after some time it got tiring and annoying, every summer touring half of Greece waking up in one place and sleeping in another. Seeing friends and family was the good thing plus I would get to see new places.
But when my mental health started declining so did my energy. I would get irritated having to put up a happy smiley faces and having no one to really talk about what was happening to me, I had no idea how it was called back then.

Then came the money problems, I would feel guilt and anxiety whenever I would listen to my parents schedule the trip and watch all the bills. I have memories of my parents, specifically my dad’s face, how they would winced whenever my sister and I would ask either for ice cream or to order something other than a juice at the cafes we would go with family and friends. I also remember my mum’s frown whenever we would have to order takeout because we had no means to cook homemade food. All that made me feel guilty for adding more financial stress by just existing and with already weighted mental health didn’t help.

That resulted into me dreading the summers and road trips altogether. I preferred staying homebound and going to closer places, ya known local tourism and all.

When I became a teenager, specifically 17 years old and onwards, due to financial strain in my family we started going to divided vacations meaning that in a week, on Monday with Tuesday dad and I would visit his village, while mum and sister stayed at home. Then Wednesday with Friday mum and dad would have their vacation somewhere close by. On the weekends my sister and I would go to the city an hour away from our hometown and stay at our aunt’s place having some sister time. These types of trips were better for my anxiety but not my depression.

Since I was 18 years old we started going for vacation in one place, my grand aunt’s house aka my maternal grandma’s hometown which is a near the sea and it’s a tourist attraction plus we have our own house. Anxiety wise this was not much of an issue if you moved past the long hours to get to the city and then clean a house that has a year worth of dust. At 18 cleaning that house was a ten years worth of dust so it was much trouble to clean and then shape it like we wanted. Adding the home repairs that the house was in desperate need of. It started to feel like a home away from home.

In the city my depression seems to either get heavier or weightless depends on a lot of factors I have come to realize. At 18 my depression was heavy because my friends didn’t understand the need for me to travel with my family and not go on a solo vacation with them. Plus, it was a year after my grandmother died so we were all still grieving or in various stages of grief so I feared if we separated things wouldn’t be great, plus we had lawyers and home repairs to deal with so my parents needed help. At 19 i was fine at first, my anxiety was at its peak because of no WiFi or TV and I didn’t know what to do with myself or my electronics. But then I got the worst depressive episode I had so far, it was excruciating and fights ensued because of it between myself and my family. The entire summer was tense.

At 20, i was better prepared, I had downloaded movies/tv shows/songs and I had plenty of stories waiting to be written plus I had learned the city by now and my sister and I had set a goal to start working out and exploring the city while working on our sisterly bond. That summer city had become a place where all of us would work on our familial bond, we would have long conversations about what transpired during the winter and solve any conflicts we had. We would return home with a stronger bond and calmer minds for the winter. My depression and anxiety that summer was the not good but not bad either I felt like I had it under control and my parents helped me through two of my episodes. Plus my sister was a star! She would drag me out of bed and push me to exercise or pretend to need my help with this or that.

At 21, it was even better! Cleaning the house was less of a hassle now because we knew where each thing went. But, pre-Covid lockdown that house was broken into. So when we went there we had to fix things around the house. Having to do that plus the already burdened mental health due to two lockdowns and how the state of the world was/is. During the lockdowns I had severe anxiety and my depression wasn’t at its best. Had some episodes but what was worse was my anxiety and I know I wasn’t the only one all of us sustained emotional and physical trauma from the 2020 and keeping being traumatized a year later.

Now, at 22, I didn’t want to go to the summer home at all because it meant separating from WiFi and if I thought in the past I was addicted to them now I was EVEN MORE addicted. Anxiety peaked when I was trying to make space in my computer’s storage to add move movies and tv shows, ASMR videos and ambient ones. But what things were even more terrifying were the facts that I was travelling alone with my teen sister who I was legally now her guardian during this trip while grieving the recent death of our grandaunt Helena, me recovering from the second dose of the Covid vaccine, the heat wave that my country was under, my own bladder issues and on top of that our road was changed originally because the original route was in flames, wildfires were plaguing my country. The place we were heading to 48 hours ago was also in flames and the flames had stopped 10-20 minutes away from our house there.

Thankfully, the bus ride was uneventful and not hot at all, the only scary thing was that the bus had once more to divert its route because the wildfire we were trying to avoid licked the back of our bus, you looked out of your window and you saw the firey beast! No one was hurt but when we stopped at rest stop the bus driver cleaned the back from the ash and checked the tires and let us know that because of this change of route we lost one scheduled stop and added one more hour to the already seven hours trip. He said he would have accelerate our speed so we can make it on time but he told us to check our bus schedules for those who had connected bus rides or flights or trains and ships. It was a bit of a mess on that front. But everyone obeyed the Covid laws and we had masks one and everything. He managed to get us to our destination with 45 minutes to spare because collectively the bus told the driver not to make another stop when he asked at te 3 hour mark and he saw a rest stop. My bladder was also cooperating with me and making it difficult but the seats were a little too uncomfortable for mine and my sister’s body types. But i did dehydrate myself in order to make it work.

Seeing the fire nearing us and smelling it while seeing my baby sister sleeping soundly next to me oblivious to the danger we were in was a lot and I realized it at night when I woke up from a nightmare and I had a panic attack. And that didn’t help when the next day around 6 pm as I’m sitting in the balcony facing the sea and the Central Greece I saw the fires appearing, I heard their screams, I heard and saw the firefighting planes trying to get to them. I smelled the smoke. I froze realizing how close we were, the Gulp of Korinthos was what was keeping us safe. That night I hardly slept not being able to breathe and hearing the planes.

I was awakened at 10 am by the sound of my phone with an evacuation alert because of how close we were. Watching my country burn reminded me of tow other summers that were plagued in flames when I was 11 years old and 19 years old, Greece never recovered from that fire, a decade and four years later, and seeing that this year’s fires were worse and bigger in kilometers and cities that it claimed, I know Greece will never recover. Not in two decades or more. Animals and tree species were forever gone because for arsonists and climate change.

At 22 the summer of 2021 was one of those summers that we had once more tour almost all of Greece, a challenging trip because of Covid mandates, money, heat waves and wildfires. You had to make sure where you were going wasn’t burning and you had an evacuation plan or plans in mind just in case fire gets to where you were. You were nowhere safe.

I visited Athens for what I count as the first time this summer. I mean my internet best friend in real life, met my honorary Uncle Thomas aka my mum’s best friend. And saw where my mum was staying when she was a teen like me and in college. I used to be afraid and despise Athens but after this trip I view the city in less negative light but still I want to discover it more before I say that I like it. I had fun. My anxiety and depression in Athens was almost non-existent. I did felt anxious because it’s a huge city and it takes time to commute and scheduling to meet with people and standing them up is my nightmare and worse fear plus the fear of being mugged. I sued the subway for the first time and I loved it! I love trains in general! Athens felt wrong especially while staying at the house my mum lived as college student and how small it was.

But walking amongst the ancient places it felt oddly familiar and that is what made me change my mind about this city. Something in me this summer changed but I don’t know what it is.
Not yet. But this summer, the summer of 2021, didn’t feel like a summer, like a vacation. It felt void, forced even untimely like it wasn’t meant to be summer yet but it was summer. Fearing an invisible enemy and a fiery one. It left me unsure because it taught me that nothing is forever, moments, laughter, houses, land nothing.

I hope the summer of 2022 to be happier or at least with happier moments.

Those are my thoughts on anxiety, depression and the aftermath of Covid travelling.

What 2020 Taught Me

Happy New Year and Merry Christmas to those who celebrate! I hope the new year brings you everything that you want and need!

As 2020 ended I looked back to how my life was a year ago…it was far more colorful than it is now.

During this time last year I had a busy social life with a friend in my college town and two in my hometown, I had a residency, I lost weight, I was more actively looking for a job, my Hasimoto and Osteoathritis was doing okay and blood tests were ok.

I was spending relatively enough time with my family and I was on good terms with my sister.

I felt I was finally moving towards something!

Then, I hit my head. Got diagnosed with TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury), Covid 19 started, quarantine ensued and all hell broke loose!

Through the first quarantine I learned that I had to stop my residency and essentially lost it, I had to re-learn some basic stuff because of the TBI, my mental and physical health was going down, I started losing friends and anxiety was a constant companion.

But the good things also started; I spent productive time with my family and sister, I got on Tik Tok, I binge watched some movies and TV shows I wanted, I focused ore on writing, my entire family and I got ourself in a meal plan so we wouldn’t binge eat and change our diets by adding more vegitables and fruits and less sweets per day. I managed to keep in touch with one of my best friends through it all. I painted and cooked/baked a lot which was fun!

During the second quarantine and in between quarantines I had started working out but 3 covid scares I stopped. And I gained weight. I started a blog and binge watched almost 17 seasons of NCIS.

But, all in all, 2020 taught me to value the people who stick by you when the world is burning down and that friendship is a two-way street and both people should put in the work.

I’m trying my best. I really hope that I get to do something that would help me move along my life in 2021 but I’m keeping myself back from over-anticipating.

And that is my take on 2020. Here we go 2021!

2020…AGHHHH!

Hey, guys! It’s been a long while…Every time I say that I found time to start updating regurarly on here something turns my life to shit…

So, in the previous post I talk about a new friend I made in the city, well that friendship ended…

I’m so tired of meeting friends, having fun with them, trusting them and then losing them…It’s getting old and tiring and I raise even more walls than I should and have…

How this friendship ended? Well, during qurantine I tried my best to keep up with communication with my three best friends, write my new fanfiction (I know I’m one of those people…), spend time with my family both one on one and all together, recover from my TBI which meant learning how to write, talk and many more things also accept that now I’m not able to handle many things I could prior the accident. Also, I had my TV shows and I’m part of this group on Twitter where we read and review books for free in two weeks and on top of that I was looking for a remote job. So, there were a lot of things and my mental health was okay and positive and going strong I started slacking on texting or calling my friends.

Then, I started having terrible migraines and pains in my head, cold and hot flashes and sometimes nose bleeds, this friend seemed to be patient and understanding but I didn’t know that in the back of her mind she was starting pulling away. Close, to April/May she started not answering my texts and we would go for weeks not talking and always reschedule our video chats because they would go on until 4 am and I live with my parents and everyone was long asleep by that time and I couldn’t have two headphones in my ears, one my phone and one of my computer where the tv show was playing.

Soon, her friend that was living in the city introduced her to her boyfriend’s friends and they started going out before qurantine was over and she stopped texting all together. I had to sent first messages and I would get left on read or answered with one word responses and some vague new information about how her life currently was. Which confused me. I also got mad at her for going out with people before lockdown was done while she was high risk patient due to Hashimoto thyroiditis she and I suffer from which is caused by autoimmine disfunction hence lowering our immune system. I was worried about her, even terrified. Isn’t that what friends do?

Then we had to talk for few days and she forgot my birthday, she wished me just as the day ended with a dry “happy birthday” on Facebook stories section at 1 am on May 16th while my birthday was on the 15th. I did make a fuss because on her birthday I had arranged an entire movie and sleepover night and even made time to visit her while she ignored me the entire day and then sent this. After that, we continued with days in between us talking and she was always too busy to talk, always going somewhere.

I decided to visit her again find some time to talk but no luck, I spent the time trying to fill in the blanks I had in her life and not addressing the issue. Then I had to leave and go to my grand-aunt’s house where there was no phone or WIFI and not so great signal either. I told her I was going, I told her if she needed or wanted to talk she could call me which was more likely to see than a text on Instagram or Facebook. She left me on read.

Then a lot of bad luck followed me, during our trip to my grand-aunt’s our car broke down, we had to call a taxi to get us there which caused a lot of money, the water pipe burst, we almost got an electrical fire in my room, the plugs and electrical panel needed fixing because of it, then once we recieved our car it had problems again, I hit my head again and suffered a PTSD triggered anxiety attack, some things broke in the house, I burnt my foot, almost drowned in the sea and my sister saved me, the toilets broke down and we flooded the bathrooms, yes we had two bathrooms.

So, economically we were worried because qurantine was hard economically and now this had the entire family on edge and because I’m not no saint and since after my accident it seems that my emotions aren’t as easy to control as before and compartmentalize that easily if at all I was overwhealmed. And my friend’s problems didn’t seem that big or important because they were the same ones again and again and I was offering the same advice and she wouldn’t use it so I was harsh to her last time we talked on the phone and told her that the world is burning up right now and her problems have sollutions and I have pointed them to her many times yet she doesn’t use them and it seemed to me that she enjoyed whinning about this and that. And that while she was whinning she didn’t seem to ask how I have been doing the past three months or during qurantine…this I had no time to ask her why she didn’t think to ask because I need to pay something I had bought while we were talking and she claimed her phone’s battery was low.

After that, her communication became more sporadic close to non-existant. I was constantly left on read whenever I would try to sent her a message and it wasn’t constantly because I was busy too and my mental health was starting to drift lower and I had started to work out in an attempt to lose the qurantine weight and spend time with my sister because it seemed as if our relationship had been tense and she seemed to become isolated and she was 16 years old and I remember how it was when I was 16 and I wanted to make sure she wouldn’t do anything terrible or maybe her silence was a yell for help and our parents as usually didn’t caught it so knowing how it was I tried to play hero.

During my stay at my grand-aunt’s I had asked from my sister to ask her what was up and if I did something and later learned that she was angry with me for talking bad about her ignorant boyfriend. The whole story goes, she and this guy were dating for a year but their relationship was distance, he was avoiding to answer personal questions that could validate that he was who he claimed to be, there was no public record of him existing and his behaviour didn’t match his claiming age. Furthermore, he was ignoring her every time she would text him for two hours before answering while he was constantly online. Now, I understand that being online doesn’t mean that you are able to talk but you could shoot her a text saying “I’m busy” and not set her app during video calls. Then when she broke up with him I spent two hours consoling her and keeping her from taking non-necessary sleeping pills during the early weeks of qurantine. When she met this guy through her city friend’s boyfriend and she started to rebound date him and he was great to her yet she started seeing her ex behind his back and pretended to everyone they were broken up. During that time I spoke ill of her ex (current secret) boyfriend and how her actual boyfriend was a much better guy.

Not to my knowledge, she held those words against me while she pretended not to hurt her and even laughed with me and agreed! The hypocrisy! And added up by how harsh I spoke to her about her problems and the world as I mentioned before and how during her “broken up” period in order to stop her from overdosing I spoke to her harshly even though at that time she later thanked me and said how right I was!

I couldn’t understand why she didn’t say anything. Why she didn’t say; “hey, can you stop talking like that? I don’t like it.” or because she knew how calm of a person I was to ask me why oh so suddenly I started to be mean and furstrated more easily with her problems because my other best friend saw that something was wrong with me and reached out and even yelled at me for speaking harshly to her. Back then I couldn’t see I was wrong using this tone with them but she should have said something!

My mental health was drifting away yet I wasn’t giving up on our friendship, I was reliving what I was going through with Nicky and I was anxiously trying not to make the same mistakes and tire her with messages of my saying constantly “hi” so I did the complete opposite, I didn’t send any messages and continued my life as if I didn’t have any problem, in the back of my head I was hoping that she would text instead. Then I grew angry and I sent her a text telling her that we need to talk about our friendship and to tell me when she had time to call her. I was left on read. So, I send a last message telling her I would call her on specific date and time and I did…the phone rang and rang until she hang up.

August was the last time I attempted to contact her and on October 13th I noticed that she had unfriend me from Facebook yet she still follows me on Instagram and sees my stories but doesn’t like my pictures. I don’t know why people do this… I haven’t liked or checked any of her pictures or stories since late July. It hurting seeing it because for the past three months I have been suffering a lot with mental health.

I couldn’t understand why she did this because Nicky had done the same thing to me and she knew how much it hurt she had seen it how it affected me and did to me. I trusted her…foolishly it seems. My mum had warned me that saw her looking at me with malice in her eyes when I wasn’t looking at her during Christmas and when we met before qurantine started after my accident.

As if those things weren’t enough my family was fighting amongst themselves and specifically my mum and my aunt were fighting and put my sister and I to chose us to pull the snake out of its hole and I made the chose my mum and aunt were dancing around the past three years and my mum was mad at me and my aunt became suicidal and I, my sister and her boyfriend had to be on suicide watch for two days for my aunt.

Then I reconnected with an old friend named George who was self-harming and I tried to help but I got triggered with everything he was saying and how he was saying them and when I asked him if he could respect and not tell me in details how he hurt himself because I was struggling with the same thing he continued using even more gory details and pushed me over the edge. I stopped talking to him and I started to isolate myself.

Then as if all of those things weren’t enough my town learned that one of its factories’ workers were sick with Covid and they were going in for work and suddenly the number of cases jumped up in just 24 hours. Unknowingly, I came into contact with one of those people who worked in that factory and was exposed to Covid, they got tested and instead of self-quaranting she arranged to go out with me and I’m a high risk patient and so is my mum if I and her get sick and they told me an hour after we were out and I was exposed, even though they knew that I’m high risk. Then I didn’t have time to stop it we met my sister and her friends and we were hugged by all of them getting them potentially exposed in turn. The moment I return home I was self-quaranting for 14 days trying to come into contact with them to learn if they were positive or negative. Thankfully, they were negative yet I remained in quarantine for 14 days showing no symptoms then just as I had 5 days left, my sister comes home with a sad face and tells us that one of her friends’ brother tested positive for Covid and her friend had fever for three days but she didn’t pay attention because she was used to having a low fever whenever she was on her period and she had come into contact with us twice since her fever started.

My sister also drank from the same bottle. My entire family prepared to go into quarantine immediatly and then we learned that her friend was hospitilized the moment she stepped in the ER and they saw a high fever and she got tested along with the rest of her family while her brother who was asymptomatic had moved to the upstairs part of the house and was self-quaranting. She tested negative for covid but positive for the normal flu and we remained in qurantine for 4 days paying attention with our symptopms.

My uncle, my mum’s cousin, was also one of those people working in the same factory as my friend and he was tested and was negative but quarantining too. Then couple weeks ago, we learned that our downstairs neighbors have four positive covid cases and they are a family of five and they weren’t quaranting or wearing a mask outside when it was mandatory. The entire building I lived on got disinfected and we had to wear masks and gloves and they were forced by the police into quarantine and threatened to be fined if they were viewed outside.

Then my sister learned that a kid in the school her own school shares a playground with tested positive and his entire block of flats got into quarantine because they had come into contact and all the schools were getting disinfected during the weekend while classmates of this kid that came into contact were tested and put in quarantine with their families.

Our town was mandotory told to wear masks anywhere we went for three months now while after lockdown we didn’t need to wear masks.

All of those ups and downs effected me in a negative way and I had reached such low for months.

And that past week I’ve managed to start pulling myself together and getting myself in a routine.

I’m so ready for 2020 to be done because I don’t know how much longer I can take.