I’m still struggling with mood swings. I got into work today and Becky was standing in the corridor talking to someone and generally being loud. Since I went back to work in January I have tried to drown her out with headphones, which was a short term necessity that seems to have become a long term thing.

Sometimes it’s fine. Sometimes I don’t need to.

Other times though…

I got into work feeling fine, but ten minutes overhearing her cackling (it really is a cackle) from my desk had me in panic mode. It’s a very intense fight or flight reflex, except, really, it’s fight and flight. I want to go and confront her about the fact she told my boss I’d said to her I wanted to look after his plants(????). I’m really angry about this. I want to shout at her and ask her what the fuck her problem is. I want to cry. I want to walk out and go home and be nowhere near her. I can’t deal with this, I wish I’d killed myself when I was up for it. Panic panic panic. It’s a primitive reaction for dealing with immediate physical threats and it’s just firing at the wrong time. It makes perfect sense when you think about it like that afterwards. It’s not so easy to be rational at the time, however.

So when my counsellor says I have PTSD…. I think she might be onto something. It’s not really a mood swing, it’s a trigger. I don’t know why I would have PTSD from this, because someone being mean to me was small potatoes compared to the rest of what I was going through, but it all happened at the same time and I didn’t really consciously think much about the big stuff, because I was so distracted by the small stuff. Maybe intentionally. It makes no sense really. I was enduring a situation which was very much a threat to my life and every week I’d go to my counsellor and not talk about it much at all, and instead spend the whole time whinging about Becky. Whenever Becky and I seemed to make some progress I would remark to my counsellor that I’d probably start feeling bad about everything else now I had nothing to distract me. I never had to find out, because Becky would always start being unpleasant again within a few days.

I need to talk to her more about this because I didn’t think I’d still be feeling these problems now. That’s how I need to look at it. Not “why am I not handling this better?” because that implies I think it’s a personal failure, which I do, though I shouldn’t because I think it makes me slightly reluctant to focus on it with her. I should be getting better now. I feel like I’m letting her down. I should be more open and tell her I don’t understand why I am still feeling this way.

One of my big fears is that it’s not specifically Becky, it’s just my reaction to stress. I know I can’t handle stress in general yet; my body just doesn’t react to it proportionately. I worry that I will get another job and find it’s more stressful and end up worse off.

I don’t know what to do. It’s difficult.