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I was so proud of how far his heel had come and suddenly he's pulling again, which is much harder to deal with now that he's 60lbs than it was when he was only 25lbs! He's so aloof and distracted in public. Adding in a gentle leader has helped a lot with the trying to say hello to strangers, but he still gets overly excitable if we pass a neighbor when we're doing neighborhood walks on just his martingale.

My dad really boosted my confidence the other day, though. There was a butter wrapped on the ground that had fallen out of the trash and Archie left it alone as soon as I gave him his leave it command. My dad casually commented that that's a really hard thing for a dog to ignore and that he sometimes forgets how young Archie is because he's gotten so big and is honestly pretty well-trained for his age. I've been trying to hold on to this and remember that he's actually in a great place for being a 7 month old in the middle of adolescence. His recall has gotten so sharp lately, which is awesome, and his confidence has soared in the last month or two. He's gotten really good at knowing the difference between being on-duty and off-duty. He is making progress--it's just hard for me to see it sometimes because I'm always focused ont he ways he's regressing instead. And I do need to be very aware of that, because it's important not to let too much backsliding happen during his adolescence, but I need to remember the ways he's doing really well too.

I spent my adolescence and first few years in college being Mentally Ill, capital M capital I. It was a big part of my identity, more than it should have been in hindsight, but it was. And then suddenly, just when my mental illness was finally consistently under control, I became chronically ill. I am so lucky that I haven't had a severe mental health episode since developing dysautonomia, and I honestly don't know what I would do if that happened--I can only keep my fingers crossed that my medications don't stop working.

I wanted to see someone specifically because of a need to talk through and better manage stress releated to my chronic health conditions. And the first few sessions went pretty well, but the last two have been pretty discouraging. Today's in particular was a disaster. I honestly felt like she was just trying to convince me that things were good so that she could get off the phone, and I don't know if it's because something's going on in her life and she was in a rush, or if she just really doesn't get chronic illness )despite supposedly being very experienced with it).

She just kept steamrolling me today. She'd ask me basic things like what my daily routine is, I'd tell her, she'd decalre that it sounds like a good routine and move on before I could say anything else. She told me that I'm being nice and productive and I tried to explain how it doesn't feel that way to me and she pretty much ignored it and moved on. I tried to talk to her about the doctor's appointment that I had on Wednesday that I've been so anxious about and she wasn't interested in discussing it. I try to talk about an upcoming challenge I have with Archie next week and she's not interested. She asks me if I've been getting sleep, I say "yeah I'm getting much more than I want" and she goes "great, so you're sleeping, that's excellent" and moves on. And then she cuts our 50 minute session short by 30 minutes. (And yeah, I could have spoken up and told her that I want to go back and talk about the stuff that she'd just breezed over, but she'd shut everything down so firmly the first try that it just didn't feel worth it.)

She ordered what seemed like ten thousand labs to rule out everything we possibily can from bloodwork, and then we're going to see if the neurologist I see at the end of the month has any other suggestions that this doctor couldn't think of, and also start looking into the possibility of it being a REM sleep issue. If everything gets ruled out from that, I'll probably wind up with a chronic fatigue disorder diagnosis. Which would suck, but for once the negative isn't the part I'm focusing on tonight.

I should just ask for more hours and power through it. (I can't, I can barely recover enough on my time off to make it through the short shifts I have a few days a week.) I should just apply for a new job, one that I'm actually passionate about. (I guess I theoretically could, but it makes a lot more sense to wait until after this month because of the several important doctors appointments coming up that could change the direction things go for me.) But I keep thinking about the shoulds, about how if I just did the thing I could be making progress forward in my life instead of being stuck where I am.

Grad school has been the beacon of hope for me, since it's the only thing that makes me feel like I'm actually still progressing. But it's the first week of my single class this semester, we don't even have a virtual class meeting, and I'm already struggling to get my work done. I have the free time to do it in, but the energy that it takes to do my readings, absorb information, and take notes drains me so quickly and I can't do hours of schoolwork at once anymore. And that's only going to get worse as the semester picks up.

Realistically, I know there's a good chance that I do have CFS, just based on the symptoms other than fatigue that have slowly made themselves known in the last 8-9 months. But I'm hoping so badly that it's something that's more fixable. This level of fatigue is almost unbearable some days and I genuinely don't know how I'll be able to move forward in my life, through grad school and internships and eventually (hopefully) into an actual job without a major decrease in it. But I guess that whatever happens at this appointment, I'll deal with it. I'll figure out how to make things work.

But I have the next five days off work, and I'm going to use them to recharge mentally and physically, and to get back in the swing of things with Archie. We're taking the CGC test on Thursday (no pressure on him to pass this first time around, just to see what we need to focus on) and I'm really excited to do that with him--I'm hoping it will help me feel more confident in us as a team.