~BelleCandie

I used to engage in cybering and such at least semi-regularly. Still, over the past 2-3 years, I have been increasingly suffering from stress and anxiety issues. This has gotten to the point where my very dear "partner in crime" mentioned something in passing last night while we were talking at home. He had noted that I had not logged into Tapestries on one of his favourite characters in a year now.

The fact of the matter is; I hadn't logged in or cybered outside a couple of people whom just happened to be in the right place/time/alignment of the planets in well over a year now. Even before I stopped logging in on Tapestries, I had mostly just sat around the public areas.

Why? Well, some of you know I have a chronic illness (recurrent chronic complex cellulitis). Unfortunately, this includes bouts of sepsis which has a host of side effects. One of those issues been identified in the last decade is memory loss and cognitive decline ( https://www.alzinfo.org/articles/bl.....gs-toll-brain/ ). In addition to my physical illness issues, I also am bipolar and have an anxiety disorder as well.

I've had several incidents of sepsis that were severe enough to require weeks or months in hospital in the last fifteen years since I got my first significant outbreak of cellulitis. The previous couple though has really taken a toll on my memory and cognitive function. I used to be able to multitask and focus on problems and issues for hours at a time. Now I find it hard to concentrate on tasks for longer than an hour. I often find myself just staring at the screen or a wall because I lost focus on what I was doing and my mind wandered.

As you can imagine; that adds a lot of stress when I'm trying to work and keep working. I'm pretty sure that once I give up work, the cognitive decline will only get worse. With nothing to keep the mind going; it is not uncommon for people to undergo rapid decline. It's a struggle to work; the work I do is very technical, and it requires a dedication that exhausts me. But I need to keep doing it.

I'm also anxious because I can't remember things. Other people's characters; sometimes other people entirely. You have no idea how stressful it is to tell someone, "Hi - umm... I know we know each other because like I have you marked as watched and I can see we've had conversations/pages/messages in the past. Still, I don't remember you or what we were talking about."

It's hard just to put all this aside and relax enough to be in the right mindset to "play". And do you know what makes it worse? People are always asking me. I'm at the point with some people like I feel as though I'm some sort of virtual kettle they are waiting to boil and be ready; not realising that the pressure to "play" is just making my anxiety worse.

Honestly, at this point, I don't know if I ever will be playing with anyone ever again. I have a lot of issues to work out; some of these are medical - some are mental. All of them need professional medical treatment. I'm working with an excellent team of doctors and a good psychologist. I want to sort all of this out. Or at least I want to come to a new "comfortable" norm and somehow refind myself in all of this wreckage.

But there is no roadmap here. I can't give dates and times as to when I will be better. So please; if you are one of those people who keep asking? Don't. I can't give you a date or a time or preplan an event or any of those things. I'm broken, and right now I'm still working on finding what bits I can use to remake myself before this toy can be played with once more.