It’s over!

My biggest fear about the election this year was not that my candidate would not win.

My biggest fear was that something like the 2000 election would happen and there would not be results by the next day.  I was afraid that the pain of the campaigning, the self-rightousness, the value of party over person, would last a day longer than planned.

The election is over and the leaders can just do their job. 

Am I the only one who wonders how a president does his/her job while campaigning? They all do it when they go for reelection. It’s not just Obama.  But wasn’t he already as busy as possible BEFORE the campaign started? How does that work?

In other news, if I want to marry a woman in my state, I will be able to next year. I’m thrilled, vindicated, relieved, proud.

And relieved.

Managing body image, today

Today body image is a struggle. I’m brainstorming some ways to manage that besides trying to lose weight.

• Choose clothes that I feel comfortable wearing
• Talk to people who appreciate me.
• Think: wishing I were a few pounds lighter is NOT as terrible as being in the horror of an eating disorder
• Not let unhappiness with my size bleed into dissatisfaction with other aspects of myself. If it’s just about weight, lay down a boundary and keep it about weight. (If I find myself unhappy about other things about myself that were not an issue a few pounds ago, that’s a problem.)

What do you do to manage body image on particularly hard days? 

Coming out

Have you ever come out?

I don’t mean only LGBT coming out. Other things too, such as:

• eating disorder survivor (or sufferer)
• someone with chronic mental illness
• addict

In my time, I’ve come out as bisexual, an eating disorder sufferer/survivor, and bipolar. I’ve also come out as someone who struggles with self harm.

Or less dire things, but things that nevertheless might be difficult to announce, such as:

• quitting a conventional career to be an artist, writer or musician (done that)
• a religious conversion (nope, but my mom did)
• a love of an unusual interest (I’ve come out as a language-learning obsesser, and a conlanger.)
• an activist

Coming out is difficult but it gets easier with practice. The first difficult coming out I ever did was about being bisexual. I didn’t couch it in sexual identity but instead as telling people that I was in a relationship with another woman. (Labels work for some people but don’t serve me well. I prefer to stick to irrefutable facts such as relationships.)

One of the first people I told about a same-sex relationship was my friend, let’s call her Constance, who is now a nun in Taiwan. She was a very close friend at the time. Her reaction was, “You know that’s not something I agree with, but I’ll still be friends with you anyway.” Although it was nice not to lose the friendship altogether, I felt a distance to her that never went away.

The hardest coming out of my life was telling my parents that I needed help with the anorexia. They were blind to my appearance, being people who see what they want to see. They were shocked but didn’t seem disappointed or mad. The disappointment and anger came later, when I broke the news that I needed to drop out of grad school to go to a live-in rehab center. “This not what I wanted for you,” said my mom. Followed by, “I pray for you every day.” The prayer proclamations bothered me. I’m not used to religious mom. If she wants to pray for me for her sake, by all means do it. But it means nothing to me.

I came out to my parents about my sexuality while I was at rehab. I figured, what do I have to lose? Compared to the other admissions I’d made in that time frame, the bisexual thing barely registered. I felt so happy to have that load off my mind.

My most wonderful coming out was when I came out to my mother as a musician. I was five years old. I was scared. But it was worth it, and I’m still a musician.  I think it’s music that has saved me over and over from death from mental illness, more than the meds, the treatment, the therapy, the Ensure.

I’m not out at work about hardly anything. There are times I want to tell them all, shut up about your diet hints and your ignorant comments about gay people and people with mental illness. Please don’t talk about celebrities with anorexia as “gross.” Calling a skinny person gross is no worse than calling a fat person gross.

Rant over.

Terra

List of positives

Hi.

My blog is so negative. I use it as a place to complain about the things I’m not assertive enough to complain about in real life. Time for some positive thoughts and statements.

1. I have a friend, let’s call him Fred, who cares about me. He is having a hard time in his life, dealing with alcoholism and a dui. We’re supporting each other. Friendship is good. My blood family dysfunctional but my chosen  family is great.

2. I’m allowing myself to take sick days from work.

Our Lady of the Highways

3. I followed my meal plan today despite being sick and having a reduced appetite. I need food to let my body heal.

4. I ordered a DBT workbook online. It’s a diary full of checklists of coping skills. Also, I ordered a spanish workbook. I love workbooks for some reason.

5. I have a job where I get to be a role model for kids. Even if I don’t always walk the walk in my outside life, I try really hard to model positive attitudes to the kids. When other staff say body-negative things, I do speak up. I don’t want those kids to learn to hate themselves the way so many of us have. It’s unnecessary. I work with kids with disabilities (hearing loss) and self-esteem is a little harder for them in the first place. The last thing they need is to feel bad about their appearances.

6. My favorite affirmation is: I have ideas that nobody else has. Ideas including that affirmation.

Smile, someone’s taking advantage of you!

Have you ever thought someone was taking advantage of you?

Did it seem like that person was trying to guilt you for not doing more than you already were?

Did you feel as if you were selfish for saying no, and drawing a line somewhere?

The thorn from my side (or, bottom of my foot)

Did you feel as if any anger or resentment you felt meant you had some kind of personality flaw? And that if you didn’t make your sacrifices with a smile, you were a rotten, awful person?

If so, you can relate to how I feel right now.

Why is it that if someone takes advantage of me, I get angry, but take my anger out on myself? Shouldn’t it be a time for me to say, ‘hey, no one else is being nice to me, so I need to be EXTRA nice to myself to make up for it?’

Because for some reason, when people don’t treat me right, I get angry and take out my anger on myself.

What happened? I’m being asked to take care of someone who is sick by that person’s wife who can’t be bothered to take care of the person at all.

And rather than speaking up for myself and risking looking very selfish, I am chose to take care of my anger by reducing how much food  I eat.

That had consequences on my body. I had a nutritional deficiency that landed me in the ER. Then soon after I came down with a nasty cough that has now settled into one of my lungs. You know, the pn-word.

And even now, armed with my antibiotics and nebulizer, I’m being asked to make sacrifices to take care of the other sick person, and when I say no, I am selfish.

If i can’t win, and the game I’m losing at is giving me pn–monia, why do I even try?

This is a portrait of a young woman filled with resentment.

Hi, blog world

Hello, it’s me again.

Some things haven’t changed.

• I’m still here.
• I still have a job.
• I’m still mentally ill.
• Trying to manage my mental illness via medication is still a wild ride.

What’s new:

• I got a small promotion at the end of August. I was hypomanic at the time, so was totally excited and had no questions about my qualification for the promotion.
• Now I have more responsibility at work.  Sometimes I wish I had said no to the promotion.

I’m feeling exasperated with medication. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a period of time longer than about a month when I felt good due to medication.

I think I feel a little better in some subtle ways at times, but it’s hard to know if it’s worth all the side effects and reactions I’ve had to live through.

Such as:

• I have palinopsia, every time I wake up from sleep. (It’s the seeing of “trails” of moving things. I recognize it from film representations of psychedelic experiences.)
• Last week I went to the ER because I had symptoms consistent with metabolic acidosis.  I didn’t have that, but the ER doctor looked at my medication list and said, “It’s just too much. Why are you taking all that?” I hated feeling like I needed to defend my medication list.  Don’t ask me, ask my psychiatrist! I don’t like it either, but I’m trying really hard to follow my psychiatrist’s directions. 
• I didn’t have metabolic acidosis, but I was severely dehydrated and potassium deficient with no apparent cause other than that I’d been feeling crappy and hadn’t been eating the same as usual.
• So now I’m coming off a mood stabilizer per the instructions of the ER doc.  I’m told that there are no withdrawal symptoms, but I don’t know why else I’m having so many attacks of sleep paralysis every night since I started reducing it.
• Last November I had exploding head syndrome whenever I would try to fall asleep.  I had to go off nearly all my meds because we didn’t know what was causing it.  Late November  is not the best time to have to go off all meds for me; the seasonal thing kicked in and I got dangerously depressed in December.
• Not to mention the mundane things like weight gain (so I starved myself), acne, body odor, hand tremor, and what have you.

Comment with your own side effect battle stories…

Challenging week

It’s been a challenging week. They’re all challenging.

First, the good news:

• I’m no longer in withdrawal from a medication. I have to remember that it ends. (I am not off the medication, I’m just no longer withdrawing since my last reduction.)
• Some things are starting to make sense in therapy. Such as where my low self-esteem might come from. I was bullied in school and I have always minimized the importance of that experience. I’ve always assumed that my low self esteem, my mental illnesses have just been my fault. Or just the way I am.

The challenges:

• Talking about the bullying in therapy is making me anxious all the time, I think.
• It’s been harder to eat again this week.

If I think through things rationally, I can come up with the answer that I should eat like a normal person. (I’m in recovery from an eating disorder.) But when I’m upset, anxious, stressed, etc., I naturally stop eating so much, lie about my eating, start making strange rules for myself about food.

These days I don’t even have the pretense of telling myself it’s about weight loss. I know that restricting my food doesn’t make me lose weight. (I don’t understand that, but it’s just true. Whatever.) But I like the feeling of being in control of myself and keeping close tabs on my eating.

Not to say that it’s not also awful. I have no energy. I do feel hunger, and I wish it would go away. I just have no interest in food this week and I have a lot of trouble motivating to eat.

Oh well, at least I’m not in withdrawal any more.

So what can I do today to improve my life? If eating more does not feel like an option, I have to think of something else, at least just for today.

Creation

It’s a good feeling to create. When I’m down it seems impossible, but the act of creation can be one of the best anti-depressants. In my opinion, at least.

I wrote a short play recently. I’d never done that before and I surprised myself by how well I did. It’s very short, about 9 minutes long.

It’s probably written more like a television script than traditional drama but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I kind of had the revel-in-the-ridiculous spirit of Arrested Development in mind.

I’m realizing that to achieve “good” writing, one really has to have something to say. I had some of the jokes/puns in mind for the play before I figured out the framework. They were really meaningless until I found the what of my creation.

If the cacti can’t stand the heat, who can?

Meaning, the jokes, language, the goofy characters were the how and the who, but without a strong what, they mean nothing.

I’ve also been making a comic strip that illustrates the irony of my self-defeating thoughts. I’m far from an artist but I’m letting myself go with it.

I consume so much of what others create–I’m junkie for books, music, and smart comedy. It’s good to be on both sides of the creative road; one-way streets are fine but they only go to one place.

I saw To Rome with Love yesterday. I like Woody Allen’s unique creative style. I don’t think he ever created anything that didn’t have a real what to it, a real something to say.

A big theme was mortality, which is hardly new for Allen. It’s been on my mind, though, so it was nice to see someone else grappling with it too.

One other aspect of the movie I liked was how much of it was in Italian. For a mainstream US movie to have that much of a foreign language and subtitles is unusual but refreshing. I love hearing other languages. I was delighted by how much of the Italian I understood now that I’m becoming a proficient Spanish-speaker.

At times I’ve wondered if creating, making art is a selfish process. It can feel that way in the moment. My ideas, my world imposed on a page. But I’d hate a world in which no one created art. I have to remind myself that I can contribute to the wide world of human creation and have it enrich others. It’s the same as my life being enriched by Woody Allen’s, Beethoven’s, Isabel Allende’s and Tina Fey’s work. To add a few drops to the human creation pot, that is worthwhile.

Do you create?

Today’s challenge

Every day has a challenge. Is that true? I suppose that if it doesn’t have a challenge, maybe that means something, like not enough risk-taking or status-quo-questioning.

Today’s biggest challenge was standing up to someone. It feels bad to me. To put my desires before someone else’s. I think I have low self-esteem.  (Fine, I know it.) So it’s hard for me to believe that my needs/desires/opinions are worth trumping those of others.

But I had to today. The decision was not hard. It was clear to me that to not stand up would be to lose hope of setting up boundaries.

I don’t really know how to cope with disappointing someone. I’m trying to sit with it. I’m trying to be upset and not do anything about it. Maybe I can develop a tolerance for unpleasant feelings and not need to run to unhealthy coping mechanisms RIGHT AWAY because the bad feelings are so unacceptable.

I met today’s challenge but it’s hard to feel like it’s a victory. So here’s an affirming statement. I might not fully believe it, but to state it is a start.

I, like anyone, can and should do right by myself. I know what is best for me and it’s put my interests before others, especially when the others are being manipulative.

By doing so, I am one stop closer to becoming who I want to be: a strong person who respects everyone, including myself.

Terra Moto: good-idea-haver, bad-hula-hooper

Like everyone I have strengths and weaknesses. Some of my strengths include laughing, understanding, learning languages and having good ideas.

Some of my weaknesses include holding on to resentment, living fearfully, torturing myself and hula hooping.

Mental illness is a problem I have. I used to let that define me. I’m not denying it. But I’m also not denying the good parts of me. That’s a big step.

I previously had a wordpress blog about my mental illness that was often very negative. I used that blog as a place to put all the negative thoughts that I could not express to the world in person. It was an anonymous way to unleash awful feelings into the world. At the time I needed that. I no longer want to be responsible for adding that kind of negativity to the web and the world.

This blog won’t be unrealistically positive. I’m sure I’ll post about sadness and frustration but hopefully all in the greater context of change and improvement. Yeah.