Hello, it’s been a while, life updates

Hi! I haven’t been blogging much recently. It’s partly because I’ve been busy with school, partly because I’ve been depressed and unmotivated and wanting to withdraw from social things and online things, partly about not feeling great about writing about personal things online, and partly because I was procrastinating writing an essay, and every time I thought about writing on here I thought “well if I’m going to write, I should be writing my paper,” and then I ended up doing neither….

Anyway, hello again. One of my new year’s resolutions is to write more on here again! So here I am! Overcoming that initial anxiety of (re)starting!

Here are some things that have been going on in my life: (contains some mentions of bodily functions and 1 swear word)

• School — online school has been awful. It makes me feel very lonely and disconnected, and sometimes unreal/dissociated/like I don’t exist. I have found that doing hands on projects (anything not on a screen) and talking to friends more frequently, and in person when I can, helps.
• Health issues are still going on. (mentions of bodily functions, possible TMI) Digestive stuff (diarrhea, bloating, pain) and pain peeing are the main things. But, recently, I started having dairy-free yogurt with probiotics, and it is making a huge difference!! I am having much more regular and more solid poos. I haven’t had diarrhea in maybe a week? Or more? 2 weeks? I should look at my calendar and figure out how long it’s actually been! 🙂 Very exciting though.
• I discovered Reddit! It is so good! There are so many different subreddits. I feel like I am finally able to find information about health stuff, and also so much other stuff, that I haven’t been able to find by googling or asking around or anything. r/ChronicIllness, r/IBS, r/IBSresearch, and many others have been useful for this stuff. (TMI in this sentence –> ) I realized that the yucky smell I sometimes smell when I have diarrhea is mucus from the lining of my intestine (which isn’t supposed to come out with my poop). I got a link to an article about how IBS isn’t always caused by stress (duh, I knew this, but it’s nice to be validated by science, since every doctor has told me that it’s because of stress!). And I learned that many, many people have had bad experiences with doctors who don’t believe them or take them seriously. It’s all very validating!
• Other good stuff about reddit, since the last bullet point was getting long: I can learn so much information, broaden my perspective, see funny stuff, see cool stuff, even ask a random question and have someone reply soon and know the answer?! The internet is amazing. I feel like this is what I’ve been missing. I don’t have facebook (I don’t like their lack of privacy), and I think maybe lots of other people get this stuff from facebook, but I haven’t been doing that. This is new to me, and I really like it. If you’re interested, here are some of the subreddits I like (you don’t need an account to browse): r/wholesomememes, r/CasualConversation, r/ChangeMyView, r/DataIsBeautiful, r/crafts, r/dadjokes, r/AnimalsBeingBros, r/DBTselfhelp, r/DoesAnybodyElse, (swear word) r/interestingasfuck, r/outside… I could go on and on. 🙂
• I found a chronic pain support group through meetup.com, and I went to one zoom meeting with them. It was good, and I’m going to go back. 🙂
• I’m trying to figure out if I’m going back to campus next semester or if I’m staying at home. It’s a really stressful decision for lots of reasons.
• I have good relationships with my family, finally. All this time together has actually helped us a lot.
• I’ve gotten more distant with some friends, which is sad and hard. I’m trying to work it out. It’s hard to feel connected to others on zoom.
• I haven’t gotten my grades back yet, but I expect they’ll be…interesting. There are two classes that I think I might get A’s in, and two other classes that I honestly might fail. So…that’ll be interesting…
• Stuff with my sustainability club is going well. I kinda ended up leading it this semester towards the end. I’m trying to transition my responsibilities onto someone else because I’m graduating next semester! :O
• I’ve become nocturnal. I often go to bed at 5 am, 6 am, 7 am… it’s not great. I’m trying to fix it.
• I’m trying a new app called Routinery (that I also heard about through reddit, lol) that helps you do routines (like getting up in the morning, or eating, or going to bed) To set it up, you input all the steps of your routine and how long each one takes. Then when you start the routine, it buzzes when it’s time to move onto the next step. It gives me that little extra bit of motivation, and it keeps me on track when I get distracted or forget things. And then I can see how long things actually took me compared to how long I expected them to take, which is useful. I’m trying to manage my time better. Using this app is maybe also part of my new years resolutions.
• I guess that’s kinda it. When I write it out like this, not a whole lot has actually happened. I go on walks a lot. Nature is good. We’ve had some snow.

Pretty snow 🙂

How have you been?

Positives of my current situation

I’m currently at home with my family, doing classes online. While there are some things I don’t like about this current situation (I miss my friends, my family can be a lot, the news is sad, etc.), there are actually a lot of genuine benefits, too. 🙂

• I get to be home during springtime!!! I love spring. (could you tell from my username? lol) It is my favorite season. I go to school in an urban area, and my family’s home is in a more rural area. I haven’t been home during spring for 3 years, and it’s really nice to be here again and to get to watch all the flowers come up. The air smells so good. There’s so much nature here, and I get to watch it all unfold from the earth.

  

  Blue hyacinths

  

  Glory-of-the-snow

• I get to spend time with my sister. She is in middle school (a fair bit younger than me), and I was sad when I went to college because I knew I’d miss out on watching her grow up. Now I get to spend time with her every day, in person, for several months. 🙂
• I can compare being home now to the times I’ve been home in the past and see how much progress I’ve made. I expected coming home this time to be a struggle, as is usually is. And it has been hard at times. But overall, it’s been a lot better than it’s been in the past. We’ve had several family dinners that didn’t end in arguments! This is pretty amazing to me. From what I can remember, we’ve rarely eaten dinner together in the past few years, let alone eaten it together peacefully and made pleasant conversation. My communication with my mom is also so much better than it’s been in the past. We talk about stuff, I tell her things, and neither of us gets upset! We talk through our conflicts. It’s amazing.
• I don’t have to walk to class. Walking to class was getting to be pretty painful because of joint pain. Now I get to skip all that. 🙂 I also don’t have to go outside when it’s rainy, windy, or cold. I can even wrap myself up in a blanket during class.
• People are making an effort to reach out and stay connected with others. In the past when I’ve been home on a break, I wanted to stay in touch with my friends, but they didn’t seem to want to stay in touch with me as much. Now everyone seems to be making a real effort to stay connected. I’m facetiming, zooming, and texting my friends regularly. It’s not just me reaching out to people and not hearing anything back; people are replying, and some people are reaching out to me first!
• I kind of got a job because of the coronavirus crisis?! I’m studying mechanical engineering, people need ventilators, and mechanical engineers have a lot of the skills required to design and make ventilators… someone asked me to join their team making a new ventilator, so, that’s what I’ll (hopefully) be doing soon and continuing this summer! 😮 It’s really nice to feel needed for the actual things that I have invested in studying in school. It makes me feel good about my choice of major, and I’m proud to be studying this and to be able to help. It also gives me a very tangible reason to do my homework and stay motivated!

Are there any positives in your current situation?

Judgments and shame about applying to jobs

I’ve been struggling lately with a lot of judgments about myself. It seems that whatever I do, there’s a voice in the back of my head telling me what’s wrong with it.

I have a lot of judgments about where I think I “should” be in life, about things I think I “should” have done already, about the school I go to, about my mental health and its effects on my life… so many.

I feel afraid to put myself out in the world for fear of people gossiping about me, thinking negative things about me, and then ostracizing me.

I’m trying to apply to internships and jobs for the summer. I feel ashamed that I haven’t had a job before. When I think about applying to certain jobs, I immediately discount them because I immediately think of the negative things my family could say. I go to a “good” college, and people seem to expect more from me as a result. If I got a “typical” summer job, I can imagine that my mom would not approve. I can imagine her stare down at me and her sigh of disappointment, and then the twenty minute speech. I think she would either tell me to “just relax,” or to get a better internship and then give me a list of names or websites and tell me to email people… (“just relaxing” and staying cooped up in the house all day has made me really depressed in the past; emailing even one person is really intimidating for me and takes a lot of work; plus, I’ve already emailed people)

My purpose in getting a job this summer is to 1) make money and to 2) get out of the house.

Making money helps my long-term goals by making me less financially dependent on my parents, as I am now. I could also start saving for life expenses after college or maybe for grad school, if I decide I want to try to go there at some point. (Right now, my parents are paying for college, which I definitely appreciate, but I would likely be paying for grad school on my own.) I could also have “spare cash” to spend on eating out with friends and birthday gifts, and I wouldn’t have to feel so guilty every time I used my parents’ money.

Getting out of the house would help me get away from my family, be productive, have something to occupy my mind with, and possibly help me to socialize with people beyond my family. I suppose a theme in this is that I want to be more independent from my family!

So, I have good reasons for wanting a job (or internship). I’m sure that this is what I want. It’s valid to want a job.

I’m still in school, so of course I don’t have lots of experience. I’m still qualified in other ways. I’ve done things in the past. I’ve had a lot of schooling! I’m an okay person. I have some good qualities.

Some of my shame around not having experience comes from the fact that I spent most of last summer doing a partial hospital program for my mental health while my friends had jobs or internships, or both. But I can’t tell that to an employer, even though I was working hard and being quite productive, even though I wasn’t just hanging out at home as I normally tell people.

Sighhh

I think I just have to do my best with what I have now, knowing that the work I did last summer on my mental health was very valuable, even if I can’t tell everyone that.

Another thing I feel shame about is general formal interactions with people. I don’t know the proper etiquette. No one’s ever taught me! So I feel shame when I think I may have done something wrong, or when I’m not sure how to act, when to send an email, what to write, etc.

Shame signals that you have broken a group’s value and could be excluded, so when I’m applying for jobs and I could be rejected, yes, shame is justified! Shame is justified, but the intensity that I feel it is probably not effective. It’s probably more effective to send an imperfectly worded email than it is to send no email at all. The intense shame would prevent me from sending any email, but a little shame could make the email better.

Agh, it’s hard! And getting rejected is hard, too! I will keep trying… maybe not forever, because this is exhausting, but for a little more…

So, skills that will help:

• checking the facts and doing what’s effective
• self validation
• FAST (especially Stick to your values)
• fake it ’til you make it / opposite action
• being nonjudgmental towards myself, noticing judgments and saying “a thought is just a thought,” not necessarily believing judgments

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I was writing (most of) this at the time that I was struggling with this issue, in more of the way I write things in my journal than how I write them on this blog. So, if this seems a little unclear, like it’s jumping from one idea to another, or like some loose ends weren’t tied up, that’s why. I did try to go back and clarify things so that it can make some sense to people-who-aren’t-me.

And, a couple of weeks after I started writing this post, I am very happy to say that I did finally get a job!!! 🙂 It is not an internship, and it’s not full-time, but it will get me out of the house and earn me money, and I think it’ll be fun, too! I’m looking forward to it. 🙂 And if I find some unpaid, part-time internship, I could potentially do both things and still accomplish my goals of earning money and getting out of the house. Wooh! It actually worked out! 🙂