Or the days like a few days ago when I had no sleeping pills for three days and was essentially a zombie and kept falling asleep in the middle of conversations or while trying to make things for the munchkin to eat.

We have determined that your condition is not severe enough to keep you from working. We considered the medical record and other information, your age, education, training, and work experience in determining how your condition affects your ability to work.
You state that you are disabled and unable to work because of fibromyalgia and dissociative identity disorder. We have reviewed your medical records, and they show that you are being treated for your condition. We realize that you are concerned about your health and feel that you are unable to work. However, the medical evidence show that you are able to act in your own interest and remember and follow instructions. We also realize that you may not be capable of doing heavy work; however, based on the medical records, we find that you are capable of performing work such as you have performed in the past as a cashier. Accordingly, your claim for disability is denied.
If your condition gets worse and keeps you from work, call or visit any Social Security Office about filing another application.

The letter tells me that I have 60 days from the date 5 days after the letter was mailed to file an appeal, which means 60 days starting from two days ago.

I’m just…so frustrated. I should have expected this. I shouldn’t have got my hopes up that I wouldn’t have to fight tooth and nail. It especially frustrates me because half the time I do feel as though I’m making a big fuss out of nothing and should just suck it up. But then I remember the day after day experiences where I’m in agony or the days where my son is coaxing me out of bed, and offering to carry blankets and pillows for me and telling me I should lie down. My three year old son recognizes that I’m sick and that hurts my heart.

I do want to get better…but it seems like for every step forward I wind up taking two back because I run out of insurance and can’t get treatment, can’t afford my medication despite the fact that I have the insurance, or can’t go and see my therapist more than a few times a year, so no actual work can get done unless I could afford to pay out several thousand a month for the amount of treatment I’m supposed to get.

At this point I’ve been wondering if I’d be better just dropping hubbie’s insurance and trying to appeal to Medicaid; but they’d probably tell me we make too much money. Ha!

I tend to be hard to shop for myself, I’m not usually after the typical gifts for her that most women are after. I know hubbie has expressed gratitude in previous years that I’m not giving him a list with thousand dollar jewelry items on it like his coworkers get.

The main thing I’m after at the moment is an upgraded computer, however, which is pricey in and of itself. I’m a bit stumped for things for hubbie, but we may do what we’ve done in previous years due to lack of cash which is just buy things for the munchkin and pool money together and have our own gift be something practical. Last year we upgraded our cell phones and family members also contributed towards that endeavor, and the year before we bought ourselves the house. So, this year, the computer may be that because I’m sure if we get a laptop hubbie will use it also.

When we were in England I had a wall screen poster that looked like the layout of the Enterprise-D and up until just before I got married there was the Science/Medical Officer uniform which I sold on eBay for funds, complete with rank pips.

So, I was in Target today because I have funds on the Target credit card and so was buying food to tide us over until D and I get paid on Thurs/Friday and cold medicine for D and I saw this:

It wasn’t put together when I bought it, it looked like a DVD in size and shape, but I assembled it as soon as the frozen food was put away and am currently watching the actual movie, because I am a big dork.

Hopefully it survives better than the Transformers Optimus Prime case did, but then this one is sitting on top of our DVD player now, whereas that was just left around the house where the munchkin could try and play with it, and eventually poor Optimus was decapitated.

I’m a big fan of the Star Trek reboot, as may have been evidenced by the fact I even bought the DVD. I was fortunate enough to see the movie not once, but twice, in theaters because I won tickets thanks to a pointer from Ben Spark a day after hubbie and I had scraped together enough money from our “fun budget” to go see it, because we realized that it’s something you really have to see on the big screen.

However, I’m more than happy to continue to support the movie because there have to be more. This is one of the best reboots of anything I’ve seen. I’ve been very disappointed in AMC’s “Prisoner” remake and I’m still uncertain about the new “V” television series, but Star Trek is great.

From February 2008:

My SO pointed me to this article about exorcism and entity release being used as part of psychiatric treatments: Thought Exorcism was Dead? Think Again.

I laughed as I was reading through some of the parts of the article because they’re very similar to things that I’ve experienced myself, and it just further serves as a reminder to me as to why my therapist might have been less shocked than I expected when I mentioned entity attachment being part of the treatment I’d gone through in the past.

Peter Johnson’s demonic possession was no less bizarre. Askinra’s presence only became apparent when Peter was hypnotised by Dr Sanderson. Under hypnosis, Askinra would temporarily gain control of Peter’s body and use his voice to communicate.

Askinra apparently attached itself to Peter during his former life as a child in 1950s Tibet. He was bayonetted to death at the age of twelve by a Chinese soldier. The soldier’s sheer bitter hatred for the boy sucked in a nearby spirit which became attached to Peter’s soul. When Peter was re-incarnated, Askinra was dragged back into our world too.

When I was in the hypnosis class. There was another person also who experienced entity attachment, whereas the spirit attached to me was from this life time, one of the ones that she released had attached to her in a previous life because she reminded him of his dead wife.

There are all sorts of reasons why entities can attach to a person, my ex fragmented a piece of herself too me because she couldn’t let go, my grandfather when he died attached to me to try and protect me from her not realizing that I was becoming symptomatic with some of the illnesses that he had experienced in his life.

After my ex went back to herself, he went to the light for a time, he still hangs around to check in on us, and watches over my child while he sleeps but won’t attach to me so forcibly because he knows what happens now. While I still have some fibromyalgia symptoms, other than when a flare was caused by an adverse reaction to a medicine I was prescribed, since I did the entity release work the highest issue I’ve had has probably been around a 4 or 5 with ordinarily being around a 1 or 2, compared to 6-7 most of the time previously. I was diagnosed with fibro in August of 2002 after having symptoms for over a year, but not going to treatment because my step-father had convinced me that if I started a job with a pre-existing health condition diagnosed I wouldn’t be able to get insurance. My grandfather had died in January of 2001.

I remember my hypnotherapy instructor explaining that sometimes the fragmenting is intentional and sometimes not. He said that often times there will be interesting reactions from the person who was fragmented once the attachment is released. Three days after my session my ex tried to get in touch via the internet when we hadn’t spoken in any way shape or form for several years. I thought that was interesting. Once I wrote back that I was married and starting a family contact ceased again.

I find it interesting also to see that some therapists are incorporating spirit release into their sessions.

*****

At the time I had said I was going to see if my therapist had any opinion about that sort of thing. I’ve since discovered that a lot of the more esoteric things confuse her and she’s uncertain about it, but she has never said that anything we speak of like that might be impossible, just that she has no experience with it. She will discuss things with me, but admits it’s not her forte.

My former hypnosis instructor knows a lot more about that though, and continues to teach his classes on dealing with entity attachment.

However, I do also know that treating multiplicity like possession and entity attachment can make things a lot worse. It’s a fine line.

Funny how those things happen.

WHAT I NEED TO KNOW IS THAT:
No is not rejection
Limits are not abandonment
Encouragement to grow is not a subtle request to hurry up and get through

WHAT I NEED TO FEEL IS THAT:
Love doesn’t equal pain
Touch doesn’t lead to abuse
My body is my most sacred possession and only I decide who shares it on any level

WHAT I NEED TO DO IS:
Create safety for the children who fear
Provide nurturing by surrounding them with love
Push when we need to move; respecting our need to stop
Honor the ways we’ve learned to move beyond while encouraging each to survive

WHAT I NEED TO REMEMBER IS THAT:
I am strong but strength today does not mean pulling away; it is knowing when to reach out
There is safety it comes not in hiding, but staying open to loving relationships we’ve built—the ones I’ve learned to trust

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY:
That inside me there has always been a light-a spark of hope, however small, that has never stopped burning . . . and, that today I can let it shine. I am becoming whole, and in that wholeness there will be CHOICE!

My BIL had suggested that Yule have a “Walmart” theme as opposed to the usual “Amazon.com” theme, and that would be fine with us also, or perhaps a “Target” theme as I do still have an active credit line with “Target”. However doing Yule on credit is one of the things that has gotten us into trouble before now.

Kore and I were talking yesterday about the sort of things we would do if we won the lottery, including paying off debts for ourselves and family, fixing up the house, and kitting things out. I’m sure one of the first “fun” things on hubbie’s list would be an LCD TV, whereas on mine it would be a fully kitted out laptop with the latest version of Photoshop and enough oomph to run “Sims 3″ as I was speaking about yesterday.

Kore was speaking of the idea of getting a piece of property in the Outer Banks, and one near her parents house, as well as clearing out the land behind our house and putting a little cottage out there and getting some proper gardening and farming tools so we could get our plots of fruit and vegetables growing better. Perhaps we could even get a greenhouse so that we could grow things year round, though Florida doesn’t have as much lengthy cold as other places we do still have cold and frost snaps which can be very problematic for young plants.

It’s fun to think of what you can do if money is no object, but unfortunately money is an object and big problematic one at that.

Still, it’s fun to dream. What would you do if you won the lottery? Both practical and fun ideas, please!

I’m not sure if the place that I’d been looking to get a desktop computer through, our tech guru of choice would be able to get us a laptop. Though they are one of the few local computer fixers who do work on laptops as well as desktops, which is promising.

I do need to get in touch with them, the worst they can say is “no” right? Having a portable computer would be useful on many levels, not just the “shiny” factor. On days that I’m not well I could keep up with work from my bedroom. Hubbie jokes that he could be on the computer at the same time as me because I wouldn’t be able to hog two at once (he’d be surprised). There’s also the factor that I could take websites with me to show clients things on the computer without having to burn things to disc so I could make adjustments then and there and show them various options. There’s also the added plus that a newer computer would be able to play “Sims 3″ this computer can’t run it which makes me sad.

We haven’t been able to by the tin set that we need to put the tile down, at one point hubbie was suggesting that we just use the same thing that we put down as the garage flooring when we converted it to a room for Kore. However that would mean tearing up the entire tile floor and a lot more work and several hundred dollars for the wood laminate.

We have a friend who has tiled his floor and has volunteered to help us with the project as hubbie’s birthday present, however that requires us to get the thin set, which is going to be at least another week and a half. I keep saying I want this done before the end of the year, but then things crop up that are more important than the thin set, like groceries or the light bill.

The maypole guarded the entrance and when we walked in we were invited to participate in the Queen’s Quest, which was a version of Clue where we had to go interview members of the cast who were wearing red ribbons and do tasks for them in order to find out who hadn’t attempted to abduct the Queen and what they hadn’t used, and where it hadn’t happened.

The munchkin was a little freaked out about participating in certain events, he didn’t want to hop on one leg and pretend to have the plague, but he did like playing hot potato with the village children, and also had a lot of fun being swung in the man-powered swing set.

They had ladies doing Arabian dancing on horses before the jousting match was scheduled to take place.

We wandered around a bit more taking in the sights and looking for more red ribbon people. There were a lot of vendors and even a few card readers which makes me wonder about doing that next year if we’re able.

We were walking back by one of the fields after avoiding people learning how to sword fight and saw that there was a falconer doing a show and watched. One of the birds landed right above where we were standing.

After the show we listened to her talking about how she raised the birds and fed them quail and squirrel so they didn’t get a taste for domesticated animals such as chickens or rabbits.

Mum bought the munchkin a sword and shield and he challenged some other boys to a duel and was such a ferocious onslaught that they yielded. As we were walking out he challenged a man about my age to a duel because he saw that he had a sword but he yielded too because his sword was a replica in bubble wrap.

We also talked to some people from SCA who invited Mum and I to attend their meets in the neighboring town. It’s tempting especially when they said they have mead making classes from time to time.