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.
Way back when I first started this blog, I started doing a “coping skill of the week” thing. I might go back to it every now and then (but won’t do it every week!).
Anyway, this week I have been trying to have more social connection by snapchatting people pictures and video messages, and just calling people and leaving voicemails.
With most of my life and socialization happening online, it gets lonely. Even if I have a class with my friend, I can’t just turn to them and whisper the way I could if we had class in person. I also can’t talk to people before and after class or run into people in hallways.
So, I am trying to replicate that a bit. Texting sometimes feels unemotional and distant. Sometimes my friends don’t reply to my messages and just “react,” which annoys me. Instead, today, I sent a couple friends Snapchat video messages. I just said hi and that I hoped their day was going well and stuff like that. It felt good. Then my friends snapchatted me back!! 🙂 I got to see their faces moving and hear their voices. It was so nice, so much better than texting.
Sometimes it’s hard to find a time to talk to someone. We have to find a time that works for both of us, schedule it, wait, and show up… it’s a whole long process sometimes. But, with Snapchat video messages, I can kinda have a video conversation with someone asynchronously. We don’t have to plan a time to talk together. They can reply to me whenever they get a chance. And I can send them a message whenever I have something on my mind that I want to share. I can even leave a message in the middle of the night when they’re asleep!
I can also just call or FaceTime people out of the blue. I used to hate when people did this to be because I didn’t want to have to unexpectedly talk to someone, but my perspective has changed now that I’m more desperate for social things and want to see my friends more. Plus, my friends are people I want to talk to, and I’m okay with them seeing or hearing me when I’m not all put-together.
I called my friend and left a voicemail for her last week when she didn’t pick up, and it was good. It was also easier to get a lot of info out at once via talking than it would have been via text. I feel like she also really understood what I was saying, which she might not have if I had just texted.
Yesterday when we had a break in the middle of a long lecture on zoom, I just picked up my phone and FaceTimed my friend. If we were in person together, we would have been chatting and catching up during the break. My friend didn’t pick up, but she FaceTimed me back a few minutes later, and then we chatted for a bit. It was really nice to see and talk to her, even though it wasn’t that long.
I know that there are some other ways of doing this, too—some phones let you send voice messages through the texting app. Snapchat and good old fashioned phone calls seem to be working well for me. I somehow only realized recently that you can send videos, not just still pictures, on Snapchat. It’s basically like leaving a video voicemail!
Anyway, I am really enjoying talking to my friends more often in these small snippets.
How do you keep in touch with people you don’t see in person?
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.
(Note: brief, vague mentions of self harm, eating struggles, deaths, and violence)
I am happy and proud to say that I have been feeling much better recently!
My PTSD has almost disappeared! I have nightmares less than once week now, and their content is much less violent and traumatic. I can’t remember the last time I had a flashback! I’ve had many fewer intrusive thoughts, too.
I think the main reason for these improvements in my PTSD is that I’ve been doing Prolonged Exposure and directly confronting traumatic memories. I’m proud of this because I’ve put in the work and done things that scared me and were hard to do. I may write about this more later, but it really is remarkable to me how much it has helped.
I have so much more free time in my day now. Being upset took up so much of my days! I have more time available for going to class, doing homework, and hanging out with my friends, and sometimes I even have free time left over after that!
I got grades that I am proud of this semester; I took on a leadership position in a club I’m part of; I even tried flirting with someone I had a crush on!
Getting better is a change, and change can be scary
However, there are still struggles in getting better. It’s new and very different from how the past few years of my life have been. Change of any type is hard and scary for me, even when it’s positive change. There are new things to get used to.
Experimenting with the possibility of dating someone was a very stressful experience for me, even though I’m glad I tried and have grown from it and made a new good friend (I told him I liked him; he said he didn’t like me back, but we’re still good friends). There are a lot of situations I’m not used to being in. Applying for jobs? Having interviews that aren’t for therapy programs?!
It’s scary, but I’m growing. 🙂
Higher expectations for myself
As my mental health improved, my expectations for myself shot up. Before, I called a day a success if I went to all my classes and ate some meals, and I’d be proud of that and pat myself on the back because I knew it had been hard to do. When those things got easier and more routine, I felt that I needed to do more. I thought that since I was doing better, I had to take school more seriously and actually get better grades (in part to make up for the lower ones I’d gotten when I was struggling more). My mental health had been holding me back before, and it wasn’t now, so I felt that there was no excuse to not do well, to not do everything, to not be like my peers.
I didn’t see it at the time, but those were unrealistic expectations. There is a lot of room in-between managing to make it to most classes and getting straight A’s; it’s not strictly one or the other. I expected myself to be perfect all of a sudden. I wanted to be able to make up for all the things I’d missed out on over the years all at once.
Wanting these things did make me more motivated, and I plan to achieve many of the things that I realized I wanted — someday. I have to radically accept that I can’t do everything all at once, and I can’t do everything so fast. I need to be patient with myself. While it’s great that I am getting better and seeing improvements, I’m not fully better. It’s a slow process and something that I need to keep working on.
Not everything gets better
Another thing to radically accept is that there are some things in my life that don’t get better as my mental health gets better. I came home from college recently, and it was a bit of a rude awakening to see my parents arguing just as much as they had been when I left. My improvement hadn’t affected them — of course it wouldn’t, but somehow I just assumed that everything in my life would get better as my mental health improved. That’s not the case.
Therapy also can’t make up for the fact that I have two family members missing in my life. Opposite action can’t bring them back from the dead. I think that I am dealing with the losses better than I was a few months ago (I’m not incapacitated by sadness; I don’t spend most of my days lying on my bedroom floor crying; eating isn’t as much of a struggle), but they are still gone. I am still sad. The grief resurfaces every now and then.
Worries about things worsening
Another challenge is that I worry about my mental health worsening again. Now that I’ve experienced how good things can be, I feel a deeper loss when I’m temporarily feeling worse again. I know all the things I’m missing out on and feel sorry for myself.
When something goes wrong, I also worry that it’s the beginning of the end. Will I go back to being depressed and tormented by nightmares? Good things can’t last forever, right? Is this a temporary blip in my life, or a more lasting change?
If I check the facts on these fears, I can see that the gradual changes I’ve made over the past year have lasted so far. I can see that I have been doing the treatment recommended to me by multiple therapists who believed that it would improve my life, and they agree that I have made lots of progress.
Yes, more bad things are bound to happen in my life, but I do have better skills to deal with them now. I haven’t self-harmed in maybe four months? I “graduated” from DBT group, and I use the healthier coping skills that I learned there every day. I can get through things.
Same friends, new relationships?
When I became friends with the people I’m friends with now, I was struggling, and I was looking (consciously or unconsciously) for certain things in friends — sensitive, a good listener, etc. In addition, many of my friends have their own struggles with mental illness. I’ve also stayed in touch with some people I knew from group therapies.
As a result of these things, many of my interactions with my friends were centered around me venting/asking for support, or me providing emotional support to my friends. I was happy and grateful for that, and it enabled me to have deep, intimate friendships, but I’m not struggling as much anymore. What do we talk about now?? What if we can’t relate as much because we’re not in the same dark place anymore? What if my friend liked me because she felt like she was helping me, and now there’s nothing left to be helped? The dynamics have shifted.
I don’t think that any friendships will end over this, but I may end up more distant from certain people, and that makes me sad. I suppose it’s also possible for friendships to evolve as people evolve, and I hope that mine will, because I really do like my friends.
On the other hand, I am also making new friends. Now humor and playfulness are more attractive qualities to me. I want to laugh for a while with a friend more than I want to express to them how badly I’ve been feeling. There is a time and place for both, but I find myself wanting more fun now than I did before. This is another change that is scary for me at times!
My friends enabled my avoidance
Some of my friends also enabled some bad habits that I want to stop doing now. They let me and even encouraged me to avoid things. Part of my exposure therapy is not avoiding things that aren’t objectively dangerous. I don’t want to avoid things anymore, but the message hasn’t sunk in for my friends yet.
Several people know that I hate blood, decapitation, violence, and related things. When there are scenes in movies with those things, they say, “[My Name], don’t look!” They say, “I don’t think you’ll like this movie, it’s not for you.” When I ask, “What are you laughing at on your phone?” they say, “You don’t want to know, you won’t like it, it’s bad, trust me.”
I very much appreciated these warnings at times when I felt like I needed them, but now I feel like I can handle things. I know that avoidance makes my fears stronger. I don’t want to avoid! I am ready to face scary things!
It’s just frustrating that my old habits were so deeply engrained that they spread to my friends, and now I have to change my friends’ habits, too, not just my own.
Overall
Overall, I’m doing so much better now than I was a few months ago. A couple of weeks before final exams, someone asked me how I was doing, and I said “good”! She said, “haha, like the dog in the fire meme?”
Meaning, was I saying that things were fine when I was really super stressed out about finals? I wasn’t! I was serious that I was doing well! As I thought back on the conversation afterwards, I realized that I wasn’t just doing well, I was doing the best I had been in the past two years. That seems quite amazing to me.
I wrote this post because I think I had an idea in my head of “getting better” that was all perfect sunshine and butterflies, and I wanted to express the ways in which getting better is still hard. But the positives definitely outweigh the negatives. 🙂
Instead of jumping to the conclusion that everyone hates me, here are some more realistic and positive explanations.
When someone hasn’t texted me back:
They saw it when they were in the middle of something and forgot to respond.
They saw it when they were busy and want to take the time to write a thoughtful response.
The message didn’t deliver because either I or they lost cell service or wifi.
They forgot about it.
They are waiting to confirm something else first before replying.
They forgot about it, remembered, and now feel so guilty for not replying sooner that they’re anxious about the whole thing and aren’t replying at all.
They’re going through a really busy time and have a lot on their plate.
They’re going through a really stressful time and have a lot on their mind.
They’re not checking their phone.
They’re on a camping trip in a place without cell service.
They got a new phone.
They’re out of the country and not receiving texts.
When someone didn’t smile back at me:
They’re caught up in their own thoughts.
They’re worried about what they’re going to say next.
They didn’t see me.
They thought I was looking at someone else.
They’re tired.
The vast majority of the time, people don’t hate me. There are many good reasons why someone would not reply to a text or smile back at me that have nothing to do with what they think of me.
Do you have any to add? Or any other situations where you might jump to a conclusion and there’s a more reasonable explanation?
Recently I’ve been struggling with an urge to act like a therapist towards my friends who are emotionally unwell. I am not a therapist.
And I am certainly not their therapist. But, I can relate to many of the issues they struggle with. I know (some of) the issues well and know ways that I have overcome them or ways that other friends have overcome them. I am also a friend. I enjoy spending time with, appreciate, care about, and want the best for my friends. So I want to help them, and feel like I am able to help them, but…
A therapy relationship is different from a friendship. People aren’t always ready to be pushed or analyzed—they’re just saying random things, and even if the things they say are concerning, people just want to go about their day and not be bothered, corrected, or dragged into painful memories. I wouldn’t want to push that on someone, and I don’t want to act like I’m superior to anyone.
I also don’t want to constantly push advice on people, even if I think it could really help them and it comes from a place of good intent. I very rarely say, “you should…” because I know from personal experience and from hearing many people’s experiences that “should”s can be annoying and unhelpful and make people feel worse. But I do say things like, “When I’m feeling x, I find that y really helps me z” and “What if you did x?” I don’t think saying these things is harmful if I don’t say them that frequently (I think they’re probably helpful and appreciated), but if I’m saying them a lot, I wonder if it starts to get annoying.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I guess one of the main ways I interfere is to try to change my friends’ negative beliefs. I have one friend that consistently says things about how she’s lazy, she has no friends, she’s a bad influence on other people, people don’t want her around, she’s failing, etc. I feel really sad when I hear her say these things because I firmly believe they’re not true and that that’s just her depression talking. It makes me really sad that she truly sees herself this way. I sometimes try to argue back and say that I disagree, and we can agree to disagree, or I try to remind her that I am her friend, x is her friend, and she was really worried about that last test but ended up doing well so maybe this one won’t be as bad as she expects, and Halloween is coming up so that’s something to look forward to, etc. I don’t know if I’m actually being helpful though. I suppose I could ask… asking would be a good thing to do but would require courage and finding the right time and wording it correctly.
I just want to fix all my friends’ problems.
Another part of my problem is that I’m not entirely sure how to have a close friendship without it being a therapeutic relationship. My relationship with my therapist that I’ve had for a few years was my first real place I shared a lot of things I had kept inside me for years. I feel like when I make close friendships now, they’re modeled on that relationship – I ask questions and listen similarly to how my therapist would. (Not the same way, though; I’m my own person) And the people I feel closest to are the people I talk about my mental health with.
Most of my closest friends also have mental health issues.
I’m not really sure where I’m going with writing this. I’m also not sure what to do about this in general. I’m not even sure if it’s a problem or not.
I guess the part that’s a problem for me is that I feel more distant from my friends when I’m acting more therapist-y because I feel like I’m less “on their level,” even though I am.
I also want to be friends in a way that doesn’t have to do with mental health. I guess I do this sometimes when we watch movies or go to events or cook together or talk about what makes soup soup (it was a hilarious discussion).
It’s also a problem for me because I stress about my friends not doing well, and I worry about whether I’m acting wrong and what I can do better.
And, this could also be a problem for my friends if I’m making them feel worse.
For the first time in a while, I am feeling solidly okay.
Sirens aren’t a trigger for me anymore. I go to school in the city, and this was a huge problem for me last year. I would get caught in flashback-y/dissociative states for a few hours as a result of hearing the unremitting sirens just outside my window.
Brains aren’t a trigger for me anymore. We look at lots of pictures of brains in my psychology class, and I am not alarmed and do not associate them with traumatic memories anymore (at least not unless I consciously prompt myself to think of the connection, like now).
I’ve been having fewer nightmares. I haven’t had a really bad nightmare, one where I wake up in a panic attack, in a while. The few nightmares that I have had haven’t been that bad.
I don’t feel as dependent on my therapist(s); I don’t feel as much of a need for a therapist. I think this is because I have formed other close relationships in my life where I feel comfortable talking about things similar to those that I talk about in therapy. What I want most from therapy right now is to do the trauma work (which keeps getting put off, because I didn’t have enough time left at the program I did over the summer to do the trauma work then, and then when I got a new therapist I had to get used to her, and I was overwhelmed at the start of the school year and thought I couldn’t handle anything extra until school settled down). As kind, sensitive, caring, and wonderful as my friends are, I know they don’t have the knowledge or experience (or time) to help me work through my trauma. So I still need therapy for that.
I haven’t self harmed in a while… maybe a month? I think the past few times I have self harmed have each been about a month apart. I’d say that’s pretty good! I used to self harm a lot, maybe a few times a week, although I didn’t think of it as self harm at the time.
I’m getting better at asking for things!
I’m being more vulnerable with friends, gradually, slowly.
My college feels like a real home now. Last year, my home home (place where I grew up and my family still lives) felt like my real home, and I missed it a lot. It was a better place than college. In contrast, this year, my college home is better than my family’s home. My suite there is my home, and my suitemates are my family. When I go back to my family’s home, I miss my suitemates. My suite is a much more supportive environment than my family’s home, and I feel more comfortable being vulnerable and being myself there. And my friends are there. And we’re at similar places in our lives and studying similar things, so it’s much easier to relate and get along. If I squint, I almost feel like I’ve lived here my whole life. In my suite, we have a kitchen and lots of people who love to cook. Sometimes my suitemates make food and share it because they have extra, so I sometimes wake up and am offered freshly made crepes, or come home from a long day and someone says I can have the caramel apples in their fridge. It’s really lovely.
I declared my major! This has a lot of benefits. a) It enabled me to drop a hard, stressful class that I don’t need for this major. b) I can stop worrying about what to major in, which I had been worrying about a fair amount for at least half a year. c) I can plan out what classes to take in the rest of my time at college. d) I can see a future for myself that looks at least a little enjoyable. I am more hopeful. 🙂
I’m doing my homework regularly.
I ask questions more in class and am developing relationships with professors.
I’m getting better at knowing what I need. Sometimes I need to express myself, sometimes I need validation, sometimes I need someone to know something, sometimes I need a hug, sometimes I need distraction, sometimes I need help grounding or need help checking the facts, sometimes I need a broader perspective. I am still working on this but have gotten a lot better at identifying what would help in a situation and taking steps to get it.
Something over Nothing 