Affirmation #31: I don’t have to do it all on my own.

Image description: A bright yellow sticky note with the words, “I don’t have to do it all on my own.” written in pen.

I don’t have to do it all on my own. The weight of the world’s problems is not just on my shoulders. There are many people that care about and are working on the same issues that I care about and am working on (climate change, social justice, etc).

In my personal life, there are people who can support me. My mom can make me food that I can freeze so that I don’t have to do all my cooking on my own. I can get help from classmates and professors on problem sets. I can get emotional support and advice from friends. I don’t have to do it all on my own.

Missing Ashley

Hello. I miss wordpress. I miss Ashley. I hadn’t been on wordpress frequently, and didn’t find out until December that she passed away in October. I am sad. I feel weird being back here. I kinda don’t want to continue on with my blog without her.

She gave me a lot of support. She liked every single one of my posts, I think. I learned a lot about mental health from her. I learned a lot about blogging from her. I met other bloggers that are now friends through the comments on her blog. Her blog/website really is amazing. I really liked her. I admired her. I thought about writing a book on mental health like she had done because she inspired me, and then when I mentioned me maybe doing it, she encouraged me as well. Now, I’m not so sure.

I want her to be here and comment on this post and tell me what she thinks.

How will I know what wordpress’s latest updates are without her? Some missing things are smaller, and others are bigger.

She was one of few people that commented on my blogs. And the person on wordpress that I had known the longest. She followed my blog from my start, and I followed hers, and we both stuck with it. For four and a half years. I felt like I knew her, and she knew me. We did know each other. It sometimes feels strange to me that you can know and be friends with someone online, entirely through text and the occasional picture, not through voice, video, or physically being in the same room. But “online friends are real friends,” as they say… I think the online aspect just makes her death feel less real. Harder to internalize and accept as reality.

She once gave me advice/perspective/her good opinion, when I was feeling guilty about getting into graduate school through the back door. She said that whether it was the front door, the back door, or the cat door, the school is the one that put those doors there.

Some things have really stuck with me.

Because of her death, I do want to come on here and say that I am, indeed, alive. I’m doing alright, too. School- and career-wise, things are going well. Mentally, I was doing well, but this week, I’ve taken a dip for some reason. Physically, I’m doing ~okay~ — not the worst and not the best. Eating is hard. I find it hard to get enough food.

That’s all for now. Sending virtual hugs to the Ashley, who won’t see them… ❤ ❤ It makes me so sad. I’m tearing up.

My behavior is right for a specific environment

(Note: most of this was written in 2020.) 

When I’m at college most of the year, I am sometimes…picky…about germs. I open doors with my elbows, sanitize anything that falls on the floor, and rewash my arm if it touches the wall of the shower.

I’m also very sensitive to sensations on my skin or slight movements in the distance. When a piece of hair falls on my skin, I immediately brush it off. When the wind blows the leaves and the shadow shifts slightly, I notice it out of the corner of my eye and quickly turn to look.

At college, these behaviors aren’t really useful. They don’t serve any functions, and they end up making me stressed out about things that aren’t worth stressing over. I don’t enjoy jumping and screaming when I see someone’s shoes turn the corner ahead of me (yes, this happened). At times I am overwhelmed by all the potential germs and feel paralyzed because everything I touch is unclean and there’s no way to get away from it all. In those circumstances, my reactions are not adaptive. They are harming me.

This is how I saw it for a long time. My friends know that I’m “weird about germs.” At school, I used my DBT skills, checked the facts, saw that there was no real danger, and tried opposite action or distress tolerance skills to reduce my anxiety.

But when I came home this summer, I saw for the first time how my reactions were justified in the environment I grew up in. Like I said, I’m super sensitive to things on my skin. I was outside chasing one of our chickens back into the coop — which was a stressful experience, because hawks can easily grab and kill them when they’re out of the coop, and I also felt like I was scaring this poor chicken and traumatizing her, but there was nothing I could do about that because I couldn’t, like, talk to her, and I had to get her back to the coop so a hawk wouldn’t get her.

Anyway, I was in long grass, and I felt a very slight sensation on my leg, like something crawling up it. I’ve been trying to ignore things like that because it makes me so anxious and makes me feel like I need to check everything a million times to make sure nothing’s there, even in the middle of the night, when it’s really okay. So I kinda tried to ignore it, but failed, and looked down at my leg.

Lo and behold, it was a tiny deer tick crawling up my leg! It was so small and light that I doubt I would have noticed it if I hadn’t been so sensitive. And ticks are dangerous: many carry Lyme disease, which I have been treated for three times, and which everyone in my family has had at some point. So, I was responding to a real and significant threat. My sensitivity to things on my skin was out of place at college, but it was so justified at home.

This is a clear example to me, but it can apply to a lot of things, especially trauma. Different behaviors are helpful in different environments. This makes me have more understanding and compassion for my habits.

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Another example [written 2022] is poison ivy vs. germs. As described above, I tend to be picky about germs and very conscious of which things have been contaminated. I’m aware that x is dirty, and x touched y last week, and y touched z, so now I want to wash my hands after touching z…

This fear and behavior isn’t justified much with most bacteria and viruses. Many bacteria and viruses die when they are on a surface for just a few hours. And pretty much all of them are dead after a couple months.

However, I realized recently that my anti-contamination habits don’t come from experience with germs: they come from my experience with poison ivy! Unlike germs, the harmful part of poison ivy isn’t living. It is the oil, which is made up of proteins. These proteins take two years or more to degrade!

So, a jacket that fell into poison ivy three months ago likely still has the poison ivy oils on it and will give me a bad rash. This happened to me in 6th grade. I got a bad rash on my face after touching my jacket that fell in poison ivy months earlier.

I’ve also gotten poison ivy from touching random sticks and leaves on the forest floor that touched poison ivy at some point, even though I didn’t see poison ivy leaves nearby. That’s because those innocent sticks and leaves did touch poison ivy and get the oils on them, which did not degrade, and gave me poison ivy.

I’ve also gotten poison ivy from my sneakers several times. I often walk though poison ivy in my sneakers, and the oil sticks around for a while. A habit I’ve developed to deal with this is that I Purell or wash my hands every time I put on my shoes. Last week, I got tired of doing this, and now I have poison ivy on my leg where I touched it with my poison-ivy-y hands. There’s the consequence and the real danger that makes my habits useful in this environment.

Though these habits aren’t as necessary for germs (a notebook I dropped on a dirty floor doesn’t have to go untouched for months), they are incredibly useful in preventing me from getting poison ivy. Again, my behavior is right for a specific environment. As I remember someone on 7 Cups of Tea saying once, “I make sense in the context of my story.”

Challenges of being forgetful

I’ve been very forgetful recently (past year or so, getting worse in the past few months). I’m not sure why. “Fibro fog” due to fibromyalgia and long covid are possibilities. There are other possibilities, too.

It’s very frustrating when I think of something I need to do, open my computer and go to the proper website… and then forget what on earth I am doing. Then I have to go back and reread what I was just looking at to see if I can get my brain to conjure up the same thought again. This method worked just now, but it often doesn’t work, and then I just don’t do what I need to do because I can’t hold onto the thought long enough to do it…

Sometimes I can’t write something down fast enough because that’s how quickly the thought leaves my mind. So my sticky notes are jumbled and unclear because they’re the only two words I could hold onto long enough. Then it’s difficult to interpret them later on.

In conversations, I often forget what we were just talking about. Or I had something to say earlier, but now I forget it, so I’m just silent. Sometimes it’s awkward.

(TW: bathroom; just this paragraph) When I use up the last of the toilet paper in the bathroom, I tell myself “toilet paper toilet paper toilet paper,” while I’m wiping and washing my hands so that I don’t forget. Even still, the thought leaves my head by the time I exit the bathroom. And so the toilet paper roll is empty when the next person wants to use the bathroom, despite my best efforts.

This is just a vent-type post to acknowledge the struggles I’m having with this particular thing. Writing it out makes me feel more valid. These really are struggles that happen very often to me and have real consequences.

Ableist things people have said to me

I haven’t written about this too much on here, but I have several chronic illnesses. I got a bunch of diagnoses in this past year (YAY diagnoses!!!): IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), GERD (acid reflux), fibromyalgia, and strongly suspected endometriosis.

Anyway, there is a lot of ableism in the world. I have to deal with a lot of it. I’m sick of it. I feel like if maybe I write some of this stuff down, I’ll feel a little better.

My brother scolded me for bringing a bag (a small purse!!) to a dinner party. He said I was bringing too much and didn’t need it. I literally did need it!! It basically only had my medicines in it, which I would need to eat in order to eat a meal!!! (IBS & GERD issues)

I had covid, and I’ve been having heat intolerance (and fatigue) ever since. By heat intolerance, I mean that my heart rate gets really high when it is hot. I come close to fainting often. I have to skip work because of it. I told my friend this, and she said that maybe it’s because my ancestors come from colder climates that aren’t used to heat?? (I am White and my ancestors are from all over Europe — both hot and cold places) Maybe this one is a little racist, too, not just ableist. It annoys me because first of all, I’m normally always cold, even in the summer, and this is an established fact about me. Someone’s ancestry doesn’t dictate how their body works. Second of all, I was pretty clear that this is a new issue that has been happening since I have covid. It hasn’t been going on my whole life!! Ugh. It just felt like she wasn’t taking seriously how this new illness was impacting me. She did back off when I said this hasn’t been happening my whole life, though.

I will stop writing for now. Those are the things that are bothering me the most right now.

Affirmation #30: It’s never too late to ask for help!

It’s *never* too late to ask for help!

This affirmation is because I’ve been having trouble asking for help in my classes. And then as time goes on, and I still do not ask questions out of shame, I still do not know the material. And so I get more and more confused, lost, and behind in the class. This is a problem.

I am trying to remind myself that I can still ask for help in these circumstances. It is not too late. It is never too late to ask for help. There is still time for me to learn.

Validation is MUSIC to my ears (how to validate!)

I came up with an acronym that helps me remember how to validate, and has helped me to teach my parents how to validate me.

The acronym is “MUSIC”:

• M – Makes sense
• U – Understand
• S – Sounds like
• I – Imagine
• C – Can see

“It makes sense that you’re feeling that way, based on what has happened to you in the past.” “It makes sense that you’re angry because they were rude to you.”

“I understand that you are hurt.” “I understand that this has been a difficult time for you.” “I understand that you want some alone time.”

“It sounds like this experience really impacted you.” “It sounds like you’re feeling sad — is that right?”

“I can imagine that you might be overwhelmed.” “I imagine that this might bring up painful memories.”

“I can see that you are struggling.” “I can see how much you care.” “I can see how hard you’re trying.”

If you want to validate someone but don’t know how, just think: “Validation is MUSIC to my ears!” M-makes sense; U-understand; S-sounds like; I-imagine; C-can see.

Validation can feel quite, well, validating, which is often a good feeling of being understood, heard, and acknowledged. It can also make people feel more connected and close to each other. Hence the phrase, “Validation is music to my ears,” because it often feels very good to hear.

Validation also helps with emotion regulation. It helps people make sense of what they are experiencing, which can be calming. Putting a label (like, “fear”) on an emotion has been shown to decrease the intensity of the emotion. So, validation can help to regulate emotions. You don’t need someone else to validate you (though it is very nice and can help a lot). You can validate yourself, too. “I am feeling sad. It makes sense that I am feeling sad because I am missing out on things.” I try to do this, and when I do, it helps.

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Other posts on DBT:

• DBT Skills Summary
• The Emotions and Opposite Action
• Examples of DEARMANs: Asking for what you need
• How to be non-judgmental (towards yourself)
• Nightmare Plan (and ice dives)

And other coping skills:

• Coping with justified sadness and grief
• Using Coordinated Movement for Dissociation 
• What to do when things aren’t working
• Alternatives to “Everyone hates me!”
• Getting stuff done when anxious and depressed 

Affirmation #29: I can only do what I can do.

I can only do what I can do.

This sounds a little tautological, but it makes sense to me.

I have a doctor appointment coming up. I am worried that they won’t give me treatment or help that I need. Not that I want, that I need. I am trying to accept that I can only do so much, and that ultimately they have power over me and can control my access to medications, tests, and treatments. I am trying to radically accept that even if I do my best in this doctor appointment and am clear, assertive, and friendly, that they could deny me. So, I am trying to focus on what I can do.

New Year’s Resolutions for the past 8-ish years

I’m happy and proud to say that I’ve achieved my new year’s resolutions for the past four years. 🙂 I’m feeling a bit burnt out from new year’s resolutions, lol, and I don’t feel like I need to come up with new things to achieve. My life doesn’t need to be radically different from what it is now. I think it will be great if I can just continue doing the things I’ve made resolutions for in past years. Hence, my 2022 resolution is…

2022 New Year’s Resolution:

• Be effective / do what works

2021 New Year’s Resolution:

• Stability. I achieved this mainly by moving out to an apartment with my roommate, and by getting a part time job. I also had an unpaid internship for 8 weeks. When I am living in my apartment (I’m at home with my family right now), my life is quite stable. It’s great. 

I wrote the following in 2020 and never published it:

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I’ve finally figured out what I want my new year’s resolution for this year to be. 🙂

I know lots of people don’t like new year’s resolutions for a variety of reasons, but I do, and I find them helpful, so I’m going to keep making them. I love all sorts of goals, plans, and structure in my life.

My 2020 New Year’s Resolution is:

1. to trust myself ten times more than I trust other people
   • and to not give in to peer pressure
   • and to put self care first
2. also, less importantly, to continue to read the news
3. and to improve my vocabulary 

2019 New Year’s Resolutions: 

1. Survive
2. One thing in the moment / one thing at a time
3. Read the news

2018 New Year’s Resolutions:

1. Continue to have a healthy routine
2. Tend to my emotional garden

Drawing: “Tending to my emotional garden”

Image description: Drawing of a watering can watering various flower that have various needs written on them, like “peace,” “meaning,” “control,” “cared for,” “privacy,” and “expression.”

2017 New Year’s Resolutions: 

• Trust my instincts
• Do things regularly / forming a healthy routine

Trusting my instincts means listening to my heart to hear what it really wants, believing there is a good reason I feel this way deep down, and making decisions that factor in this gut feeling. Trusting my instincts will help me look out for myself. I will become more attuned to my feelings, especially unusual feelings and especially strong feelings. I will trust myself and not go along with someone else’s decision if it doesn’t feel right.

Doing things regularly means forming healthy habits that help me with the rest of my daily life. This means breaking out the old “Daily Check-in” sheets and filling them out. It means brushing and flossing my teeth and wearing my retainer more often. It means making my bed, picking out my own clothes, making my own lunch. Becoming self-sufficient. Writing in my journal more, meditating more, exercising even when I don’t have sports practice.

Trusting my instincts Action Plan:

• Learn more “feelings” vocab. Look up a list and learn one new word a day.
• In my journal, record unusual or unusually strong feelings I’ve had throughout the day.
• In my journal, describe my feelings. Dig deep down. Where’s the conflict? Is there desire, shame, guilt, fear, anger? What feelings do I have towards certain things? And where might these feelings be coming from? Past experiences with the same thing or similar things? What is different and the same this time around?
• In my journal, write about the decisions I make and how I’ve made them. What instincts factored into each decision? Looking back, was it a good way to factor in the instincts? Did I trust them too much, not enough, just the right amount? Am I proud of this decision now? Would I make the same decision now?
• In my journal, write about what other people want me to do or want from me. How does this differ from what I want for myself? Where do we converge and diverge? Is it possible to compromise? What is the best path to follow going forward?

Forming a healthy routine Action Plan:

• Map out what my ideal day looks like.
• A healthy routine has many parts. Track them on the daily check-in sheets and work towards goals. It may be hard to do all at once, so focus on a couple things at a time.
• Modify the daily check-in sheets, and print more.
• Set SMART goals.
• Things to learn
  • Sun salutations
  • How to meditate on my own
  • How to wash a bra

What could an ideal day with a healthy routine look like?

In the morning:

• Wake up. Lay in bed.
• Get out of bed. Drink water.
• Exercise: knee-elbows, plank or brush and twist, others as needed.
• Yoga: sun-salutations or the go to bed / wake up routine I came up with.
• Meditation: mindfulness on 7 cups, YouTube, or on my own. Drink more water.
• Go about business. Go to the bathroom. Take out retainer. Brush teeth and retainer. Clean eyes and nose.
• Make bed. Brush hair. Get dressed.
• Cook breakfast. Eat breakfast. Get in car. Drive to school.

At school:

• Drink from water bottle. At least one bottle should be empty by 2:15.
• Remind yourself to blink. Remind yourself to stretch and move your shoulder muscles. Remind yourself of your posture. Sit at the back of the chair and lean into the back.

In the afternoon or evening:

• Make lunch and snacks for the following day.
• Pick out tomorrow’s outfits and sports clothes, if necessary.
• Pack backpack for the next day. Refill water bottle.

 

• Write in journal, even if it’s one sentence.
• Exercise if you haven’t yet and it’s not a rest day.
• Take a step on 7 cups.

 

• Every three days: shower, wash hair, wash face.
• Once a week: wash clothes, use a pore strip, clip nails. Write a long journal entry. Let out all your feelings to someone: friend, listener, therapist.
• As needed: use lotion.

Before going to bed:

• Set alarm for the morning and the next night.
• Drink water, brush and floss teeth, put in retainer. Go to the bathroom.
• Fill out Daily Check-In sheet. Say positive affirmation. Do yoga. (the order here can be mixed around 🙂 )
• Climb into bed slowly, still breathing slowly. Lay on back in a comfortable position. Good night! 🙂

 

2016 New Year’s Resolution: 

• love myself unconditionally

2015

• I made many new year’s resolutions and plans for many domains of my life, like physical, social, etc. A big one was getting enough sleep. I had plans to gradually change my bedtime and alarm time… And wasn’t on track with them almost immediately. I gave up early on. It was too much.

2014 

• Similar to 2015. I used to have a picture of these old goals (2014 & 2015) on my phone, but my phone broke and I lost my photos… 

2013 and earlier

• I wasn’t as serious about new year’s resolutions back then. However, I remember that my new year resolutions from something like  4th grade-7th grade were to stop procrastinating. Lol. Still haven’t achieved that… But I’m working on it. 🙂 

Seeing things through the lens of an emotion

When I’m sad about one thing, I often get sad about everything there is to be sad about. I’ll see a painting my grandmother made, get sad and miss her… and then spiral into being sad about how I’m not close with many of my friends from high school anymore, and how my uncle died too, and how mental illness has made years of my life so much harder, and how my dad hasn’t been the same since the accident, and how it’s a dreary day, and etc etc etc.

Being sad makes me think about other things that are sad, and then suddenly I’m dealing with the weight of 10 sad things at once instead of the weight of one sad thing.

This happens to me with other emotions, too. If someone treats me unfairly and I get angry, I remember every other time in my life I’ve been treated unfairly and every thing I have to be angry about. If I’m happy, I notice the beauty in the trees and flowers, think about the good times I’ve had with my friends, and daydream about how great my life will be in the future.

“Seeing things through the lens of an emotion.” Image description: a drawing of a blue-tinted magnifying glass illuminating blue blobs among blobs of many colors. 

It seems like the emotion puts me in a frame of mind where I am more likely to think about times I’ve felt the same way. It’s like the CBT Triangle:

(Image description: CBT Triangle: thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in a triangle with double-ended arrows between them.)

CBT says that emotions influence thoughts, and thoughts influence emotions. (And also that emotions influence behaviors, and behaviors influence emotions. And that thoughts influence behaviors, and that behaviors influence thoughts.)

Maybe when I’m having an emotion, my brain is flooded with certain neurotransmitters. And then that abundance of neurotransmitters makes similar thoughts more likely. It’s like, if there’s a pool of sadness in my brain, then all the sad memories will become dislodged and float to the surface. I don’t know if it’s exactly like this (I don’t know much neuroscience), but this is how I imagine it.

It can be difficult when this happens with a strong, negative emotion. This means I can spiral quickly and start seeing the world in all-or-nothing ways, forgetting all of the not-this-emotion things I was feeling before. I think that one solution is to be mindful of this when it is happening and to trace it back to what caused the original emotion. Then I can try to just deal with that one thing, and focus on what is happening right now in the present.

Does this happen to you? What do you do if/when it happens?