Welcome to episode 287 with my guest Andrea C. I'm Paul Gilmarton. This is the metal illness happy hour. A place for honesty about all the battles in our heads from medically diagnosed conditions past traumas and sexual dysfunction to everyday compulsive negative thinking.

There's shows not meant to be a substitute for professional mental counseling. I'm not a therapist. I'm not a doctor, but I am a hypocondriac and that has to come for something.

But yeah, it's not the doctor's office. It's hopefully more like a waiting room that doesn't suck. The website for this show is mental pod.com. Go there, fill out a survey. Maybe we'll read your survey on the air.

You can browse the forum. You can read blogs and guest blogs. Also, there's a thread in the forum where therapists answer questions. There's about a half dozen therapists that are participating in that. Some of them have been guests on the show.

So that might be a good thing to go check out. You can support the show financially on the website. You can buy coffee mug, t-shirt, all kinds of stuff.

So far so good with the Adderall. It's been about a month now and on the extended release, which is not as up and down as the instant release.

And it's just been great. Conversing has not been an effort. I don't feel overly chatty, which is, you know, was a concern of mine.

I don't think I ever really need to concern myself with that. And I haven't been crawling back into bed at four o'clock in the afternoon because the world is too much.

And I never thought in my lifetime I would experience relief from that. And it's, it's just been a game changer. And I'm so, I'm so grateful.

I'm playing my game a little too much. My civilization game still, but, you know, I was doing that before I started taking the Adderall. So I know it's not related to that.

I did lose my temper this last weekend playing hockey. And that happens, you know, maybe once every year and a half.

We were playing a team of guys in their 20s and they were just making us look bad. And this kid, after they scored their 13th goal, this kid skated by our bench and taunted us.

He's probably like 20. And I waited till there was a minute left in the game and then I knocked him off his feet. And nothing serious just mostly, you know, shoved him with my forearm as he was trying to skate around me.

And afterwards, you know, when I do something that I know isn't cool, I usually try to reflect afterwards on what it is that really bothered me how I should have handled it. And I thought, you know, what it is that really bothered me.

And I should have said it to this kid is, dude, don't underestimate the gravity of humiliating a middle aged guy who is clinging desperately to the last strands of his youth.

But he wouldn't understand if I had said that anyway. Here are some surveys. This is the struggle in the sentence survey. This is filled out by Texas fucked me up.

And about her trick at Illumania, she writes, it's having a pressure under your skin that promises to be alleviated once you pull that hair like a splinter.

It hurts more for a second, but then everything feels better. But once you get the hair, the pressure spreads until you have to pull out everything. And even then, the pressure isn't gone. And now there is guilt.

I have so much to do tomorrow, but instead I stay up till 5am picking my eyelashes. The anxiety getting so strong until I finally get that one lash, which then only satisfies me for a second, before another eyelash aches, and I have to attack it.

I stay up so late that I can't get out of bed the next morning and skip class and skip hanging out with friends without giving them a warning or explanation. Stay in bed for 20 hours until I can no longer hold my pee and I get up, guilty and ashamed.

I get in my car and drive the McDonald's, swimming and self hatred. I could kill myself, but that would require me actually expending effort. I go back to bed.

Send in you some love. Send in you some love, man. That while trigotelomania is not something that I struggle with, I do know that feeling of compulsive addiction and just wanting to retreat to bed.

...