u/sherdle

My psychiatrist prescribes me five 1mg Ativan a month, for maintenance. My anxiety has been pretty well managed up until about a month ago when shit hit the fan and I started feeling anxious 24/7 with random panic spikes thrown in for fun. I messaged my psychiatrist like hey, I’m not doing so great, help? And her response was basically “I’m sorry you’re going through that, try to make note of when your anxiety is at its worse and we’ll discuss it at your appointment”. My appointment wasn’t for another six weeks. So I have to just white-knuckle it until then, nonstop waves of dread every day, while trying to take care of four kids and a toddler and myself and feeling like I’m falling into a pit and I’m basically losing it, there’s just no relief.

I know benzos aren’t a sustainable solution, and I’m not asking for them to be, but why do psychiatrists make you feel like a drug addict for wanting more of a medication that helps so tremendously? I know they’re abused, I get it. I just need it to keep my sanity until we find a long term medication to control my anxiety.

It feels so unfair that I can be seen basically immediately for physical pain, and it can be treated so easily, but we’re just expected to suffer with mental issues. I don’t have chronic pain, though, so I guess I really don’t know what it’s like to deal with that. But I feel like if I told my doctor that I’m having debilitating pain that’s causing me to be unable to function in daily life, I wouldn’t have to wait six weeks to find relief. Maybe I would? I don’t know what I’m talking about, and for that I guess I’m lucky. It sucks no matter what, mental or physical pain.

I’m just ranting. I can’t sleep. I finally got my depression under control and was doing so well for a year and then this anxiety came out of nowhere and it has completely upended my life. I feel the depression and the despair creeping back in. I dread the idea of waking up every morning feeling like I can’t make it through the day. I dread having to try to find a medication that helps, and wondering what part of me is going to diminish as a side effect. But more than that I dread the idea that this is just the new normal, that ultimately nothing is going to help except the one thing that is controlled so tightly that I’m only “allowed” five panic attacks a month. I just want a normal brain.

I’m gonna try to TL;DR from the get go because I’m chronically long winded.

I co-sleep with 26 month old and husband. Toddler still wakes 2-3 times to comfort nurse. Husband snores. I’ve been getting roughly 5 hours of broken sleep a night for three weeks. Have slept 7 hours in a row once in the last three years.

I started taking Buspar for anxiety about two weeks ago. It makes me feel weird, which I know is my brain trying to adjust to a new drug.

My anxiety has been out of control. Not tipping into panic attack territory, but the constant, pit-in-stomach, jittery feeling from the moment I wake up.

This round of anxiety started with just popping up while being a passenger on the highway about five months ago. Then progressed to driving on the highway as well. I know that’s weirdly specific. Now it’s just all anxiety, all the time.

My psychiatrist prescribed 5 Ativan a month for really bad days. Basically, I’m out of refills until August.

I know weaning my toddler is my first step in improving my sleep, therefore improving my anxiety symptoms. It just feels impossible. Husband works a lot, I am a stay at home mom. I know he would be on board with the toddler weaning but I don’t think he understands how serious the sleep issue is for me. For example, he slept on the couch last night because of the snoring - toddler still woke up 3 times. I was awake for 45 minutes each time. Then husband comes back to bed at 7 this morning and starts snoring and I’m just up for the day, after maybe four hours of sleep.

I don’t know what this is, really. Maybe just a rant. Maybe someone in here has been through something similar and can give me tips on weaning a stubborn toddler/give me ideas on how to tell my husband I’m losing my sanity without scaring him and/or just sounding dramatic.

I’m so tired and so irritable. I’m diagnosed bipolar II, and my mood has improved drastically with Lamictal, but this anxiety/no sleep situation is starting to affect the mood thing too. I just don’t know what to do.

That wasn’t very TL;DR at all, sorry.

Hello!
I desperately want the Christmas lights but it’s June. :( I googled how to time travel on the steam deck for grounded 2 and it gave me a handful of steps that didn’t even make sense most of the time.
These are the steps I’ve taken:
Quit Grounded 2
Go into desktop mode
I can’t remember exactly this part because it’s not right in front of me but I clicked on like, a calendar icon or clock or whatever
Did something to un-sync it to current time
Adjusted date to December 20, 2025
Went back into console mode
Booted up Grounded 2

And the issue I’m having is that, even though it’s doing the cute jingle bells in the main theme, it’s saying I have to login to Xbox account.

I’m not super smart, and I’m sure there’s an easy answer here (even if it’s just “you can’t do it, pal”).

Thanks in advance!

So husband (we’ll call him Greg) and I have been together for 15 years, married for 8. We have five boys together; a stepson and four bio children.

When we first started dating, we kind of did that thing where we only spent time with each other and let every other friendship we had fall off a little bit.

Early in our relationship we moved an hour north of where we used to live which further separated us from our friends.

Coincidentally, one of his best friends that he had a falling out with before we started dating moved to the area too. They ran into each other at a pizza place and decided to rekindle the friendship.

Meanwhile I had been a stay at home mom for several years, and had also worked a couple of times where I would have interactions with other adults somewhat regularly but nothing really went past acquaintance. Having a slew of children made it difficult to DO things. Especially breastfeeding babies/toddlers.

The last job I worked I did make a couple friends that I would occasionally do things with and at the time Greg and I only had four boys, the youngest being four. When I would go out with my friends, I could only be out for a couple hours at a time or I would start getting the “hey, when are you coming home?” texts.

I got pregnant again, quit the job, and stopped talking to everyone I had developed a friendship with (I think in part because they were all 8+ years younger than me and childfree).

Fast forward to the last year, Greg goes to his buddy’s house (we’ll call him Jim) like once or twice a month, so really not a significant amount of time. He’ll leave home around like 5 and stay until at least midnight, sometimes 2 or 3 in the morning. Not that it’s relevant, but Jim is a heavy drinker and has a 9 month old baby, and Greg is an alcoholic that hasn’t drank for three years. I guess part of me is worried about that, but maybe that’s more suited for another post.

Fast forward to the last year, Greg goes to his buddy’s house (we’ll call him Jim) like once or twice a month, so really not a significant amount of time. He’ll leave home around like 5 and stay until at least midnight, sometimes 2 or 3 in the morning. Not that it’s relevant, but Jim is a heavy drinker and has a 9 month old baby, and Greg is an alcoholic that hasn’t drank for three years. I guess part of me is worried about that, but maybe that’s more suited for another post.

What really gets me is that I’ve heard him tell multiple people something along the lines of “men need friendships to help them be better fathers and dads. After I hang out with Jim, I feel better equipped to be more present at home”. And I’m like, well that’s really great for you especially if it helps your wellbeing. So obviously I support him.

But a part of me is like, but what do I get? Where’s my ‘me’ time? I mean, I realize I’m just a SAHM (that incidentally works one 9 hour shift a week at Greg’s company) and I’m not working full time like Greg (and then on top of the actual hours that he’s out of the house, he’s regularly answering phone calls about work and writing schedules and all of that). I feel guilty for thinking I even deserve time for myself.

But I just feel forgotten about kind of. I’m still nursing my two year old and we co-sleep so while Greg can just lay down and fall asleep, I have to wait until the baby is settled and sleeping before I can go to sleep. Even getting up to pee in the middle of the night is an ordeal because if I get up while the baby isn’t fully asleep he’ll start freaking out. If Greg is sick, he’ll call off of work and rest (as he should) while I do my best to keep the kids quiet, but if I’m sick it’s kind of like, welp, that sucks, I have to work. So I’m sick with a toddler all day.

I want to make it clear that Greg helps around the house all the time. He cooks and cleans and does laundry when he can and helps the boys with schoolwork. It’s not like he just comes home from work and expects me to have everything perfect for him. So I guess that’s also why I feel guilty-if he can work and then still do stuff around the house, what good reason do I have to want time for myself?

I just feel like I’m pouring all of me into everybody else and while he’s pouring as much of himself into me, it’s not enough to fill me up. Nor should it be, really. That wouldn’t be fair to him. But today, for example, I took an anxiety pill earlier so I could go on the highway (it’s stupid) and it always makes me SO tired after a few hours. So I get home and I’m beat and I’m like, well I’ll just take a nap with the baby. But for some reason, on this day of all days, he decides he doesn’t want to take a nap. And I couldn’t ask Greg to hang out with the baby for an hour so I could sleep because he was getting ready to go to Jim’s. But if the roles were reversed, he would basically just go “hey, I’m going to lay down for a bit”. And he does, often. So I asked my other boys to keep the baby busy so I could lay down, and 15 minutes later the baby wants me so now I’m laying here, sleepily pouring my guts out on Reddit.

I know I should talk to him. Communication and all of that. But I feel like asking for MORE on top of everything he already does would be insulting. And it also makes me feel inferior, like I can’t handle my part in our relationship. I’m doing my best to push down the feelings of resentment because I know they’re not being fairly directed. And anyway, I don’t even have friends so, it’s not like he’s saying I can’t go hang out with my friends because they don’t exist.

So, I guess what I’m wondering is what do I do? Do I talk to him? What do I say? Do I just talk to a therapist about my feelings of inadequacy? Do I just do nothing and suck it up and stop playing the victim? I love my husband more than anything, and he really is a wonderful, loving and attentive father and partner and provider. But I just don’t think he understands the load I have to carry, even though I’m not the one working outside of the house.

TLDR Husband has a friend he can hang out with to make him feel like a better spouse and father, I don’t have a friend. Husband can kind of act on his whims depending on how he feels, my freedoms are limited because of being a human pacifier to a 2 year old. I feel like I’m running on empty 24/7, and I don’t know how to talk to him about it without making it seem like I’m ungrateful for his hard work or just trying to play the victim.

I’ve been with my husband for 15 years. We’re both 40. He works eighty four thousand hours a week. I stay home and take care of our five boys (the oldest of which is 17, the youngest being 2).

I’ve always been weird about sex, I think in part because of my first time being a SA. I’m also hella awkward and doing sexy stuff does not come naturally to me.

My husband a.) made me feel totally safe and pressure-free when we first started getting goofy (cough and I got pregnant a month into our relationship cough). And b.) is equally as awkward which makes things way less weird somehow. More weird, but less weird.

I was on SSRIs for several years earlier in our relationship and I wanna say by liiiiike kid no. 3 I was checked out in the bangin’ department. He was bummed, obviously. He’s always had a healthier libido than me, but I was like, please-don’t-even-touch-me-sir bad. Tried switching medications, tried therapy, tried hormone replacement, tried buzzing gadgets, and nothing. But my husband, man, he stuck it out like a champ. We still occasionally had sex, but I could never finish and he wasn’t over the moon with the idea that I wasn’t enjoying it as much as him.

I hate even admitting it but for several years we were only doing it a handful of times a month. Somehow we were strong enough in every other area of our relationship that our sexual incompatibility wasn’t a deal breaker, but I felt like I was slighting the man. It’s not like I was disgusted by the idea of helping him out, either, I was just never in the mood. I don’t think I had an orgasm for like a year and a half.

Fast forward to our last kid, born 24 months ago. We had sex ~three~ times during that first year. I was like, welp, I guess I’m broken. I mourned our “sex life”. I hated how I looked (turns out it’s a lot harder to lose weight after giving birth at 38 than it is at 26). I was nursing basically 24/7. I was always in the presence of feral gremlins. I was just “mom”. Moms don’t have sex, you know? (Okay like I realize the porn industry would beg to differ…) I’m basically geriatric at this point. One wrong thrust and I could break a hip. My bones are dust. Several children were expelled from my body, I don’t need to reintroduce anything back in there.

But then this weird thing happened and I got my cycle back and I was like well this is whack as hell. No thank you, we don’t need this anymore, I have successfully perpetuated the bloodline, shut it down! And then after a solid week of torture, and then one more week later, something even weirder happened. I looked at my husband and thought “oh, hey, I want his penis inside of my body”. So I told him that. And we ended up doing it four nights in a row. Making up for lost time.

The thing about my husband is that I love him so much I want to crawl into his skin. And I’m pretty sure he feels the same about me. He’s supported me through everything, and never made me feel bad or guilty or like I wasn’t paying him back a debt that I owed him when we said I do. He’s been my biggest cheerleader when I felt like a shitty mom. He held down the entire fort when I clawed my way out of the worst depressive episode I’ve ever had while pregnant with my toddler. He held me afloat when I switched medications, trying to find the ones that gave me back my life without taking away my desire. He celebrated my wins - the turning points where I felt pieces of myself clicking back into place. He’s loved me through everything.

And in return, I’m texting him while he’s at work, basically begging him to get out soon so I can absolutely demolish him when he walks through the door.

I don’t deserve my husband, but I’m really, really thankful the fates got confused when they put the two of us together.

Okay so I googled how to turn gyro controls off on my Steam Deck (I play with a PS5 controller). The gyro is set to “none”. But it’s not off, and I have a toddler that crawls all over me so my controller is going all over the place and I can’t do this, man. What am I missing?