Odd things my body has done

Note: Contains talk of my body doing odd things! 

Sometimes bodies do weird things. Sometimes they’re symptoms of other problems, but sometimes they’re just harmless, passing experiences.

I often turn to google when I have a problem, and sometimes I can’t find people who have experienced the same thing, no matter how hard I look. But the things I feel are still valid, even if someone else hasn’t experienced them or written about them.

So, I am writing about some of (what I think are) the more unusual things I’ve experienced. Have these ever happened to you? Are they things that other people experience and just don’t talk about? Or are they commonly known and my googling just wasn’t thorough enough? Or are they rare? Or is it just me?

• Once, I got so dissociated that I saw the room spin and change colors.
• For maybe seven months, songs didn’t get stuck in my head. This was after I was in a bad car accident, and it’s possible that it was caused by my concussion, PTSD, depression, anxiety, lack of sleep, or some combination of those. I only noticed it when songs started getting stuck in my head again and I realized that it hadn’t happened in a long time.
• About a year ago, I had a lot of pain along the skin of my legs every time I put on pants or leggings for about a month and a half. It happened with all fabrics, soaps, and lotions, both when I had shaved and when I hadn’t, etc. I didn’t have a rash, but when my legs touched something, I got painful, prickly tingles along my legs that sometimes spread to other parts of my body, along the skin on my back and chest, my neck, my face, scalp, and arms. The electrical prickles also made my legs jerk involuntarily when they get really bad. Anxiety and paying attention to it seemed to make them worse, and moving my legs seemed to make them better. Not wearing pants or leggings or anything touching my legs also made them better. I went to a doctor who said she didn’t know what was going on and referred me to a specialist, who I didn’t end up going to. And then a few weeks later, they went away. Since then, they have come back every now and then, but it’s not as bad anymore. It normally hurts after I take a shower, and I can make it better by wearing loose-fitting clothes like pajamas after and by distracting myself by reading a book or watching tv.
• I broke my collar bone during a car accident. For a couple weeks after, before I had surgery, my pain would spike from a 2 or 3 to a 9 or 10 when I did something that moved my collar bone out of its broken location. When I have flashbacks, my collar bone hurts in the same sudden-spike-of-intense-pain way. If the pain were a musical note, it would be a sharp, loud, high-pitched note, like a “ping.” I feel like Harry Potter sometimes because I wake up from a nightmare with my (surgery) scar hurting.
• Sometimes I pass out after exercising. I feel tired after a run and lie down to take a quick breather/nap, and then I wake up an hour later.
• I once had my period for 5 weeks. I was bleeding continuously for five weeks. Sometimes it was heavier, and sometimes it was lighter. Eventually it stopped, thank goodness!
• I used to have repeated nightmares that involved my family and me hurt and dying in our house. After doing prolonged exposure therapy and overcoming some parts of the trauma, I had a nightmare which started off similarly. But then I flew around in the air, fixed every disaster, and literally put out all the fires. I solved my nightmare without intending to specifically do that.

There is a wide breadth of human experience. There are and have been lots of people on this planet, and we have collectively experienced many, many things.

What odd things have you experienced?

Websites — anxiety symptoms, grounding, grief, student with mental illness

I’d like to share some websites I found recently that I really like and have found helpful. (to be clear, I’m not getting paid by these websites or anything; I have just found them helpful and want to share them in case they could be helpful to others, too)

Anxiety symptoms:  This one lists a ton of symptoms associated with anxiety and describes what they feel like and what causes each symptom. I have struggled with identifying what I am feeling physically, emotionally, and mentally, describing it, and knowing when it is something worth worrying about or something harmless. This website helps by including lots of different ways people might describe a certain feeling or symptom.

For example, the “dizziness or lightheadedness” description includes feeling “off-balance, unsteady, that you might faint or pass out,” “difficulty placing your feet because your perception of the ground may seem wrong or incorrect,” feeling like “your legs may not support you,” and about 10 others. It notes the different ways dizziness can occur, like out of the blue, in waves, persistently, at varying intensities, etc. The page also offers possible anxiety-related causes of dizziness, like hyper- and hypoventilation, an active stress response, persistently elevated stress, and sleep deprivation and fatigue.

I think this is useful if you want to understand what is happening in your body or mind, learn more about anxiety in all its different forms, put a name to things, or to help with hypochondria and differentiate between illness and anxiety symptom. A list like this is something I’ve felt a need for in my life for a long time, and I’m so glad I finally found something like this.

(https://www.anxietycentre.com/anxiety-symptoms.shtml#symptomslist)

Grounding techniques for coping with flashback and distress: I think I’ve linked to this website before, but I really like it, so I’m sharing it again. It lists a lot of things you can do right now if you want to become more grounded. It’s easy to read, even if you’re in that flashback-y state and are having trouble concentrating. I had bookmarked this site a while ago, and I recently used it again when I really needed it because I had it conveniently bookmarked. It was helpful. If you think bookmarking this site could be helpful to you, too, then I recommend doing that! 🙂

(https://www.getselfhelp.co.uk/flashbacks.htm)

What’s your grief: This is basically a blog about grief with lots of niche topics that are written about in helpful ways. I hadn’t really dealt with grief, at least not debilitating grief, in my life before the recent deaths of my uncle and grandmother. This website helped me understand it, see how normal it is, think about how I’m grieving / going to grieve, and gave me some recommendations for movies about grief (Coco and Mary Poppins Returns, apparently! I’ll have to check them out! 🙂 ).

(https://whatsyourgrief.com)

Saving your grades from a mental health crisis (by Not Yet Hermione on Tumblr and rewritten in what I think is a more readable way on 7cups here): This is a guide on how to deal with school when you have a mental health crisis or near-crisis / rough time. It has helpful and realistic tips and things I didn’t think of, like asking to submit homework through email if you can’t make it to class to turn it in (something I could have used earlier this week but that didn’t occur to me) and making time for “I feel like crap” time in your schedule so that you don’t avoid your emotions and don’t just push through all the time. And the guide reminds you that your mental health is more important than school and has some encouraging things to say, which I kinda knew logically but are still nice to be reminded of.

(https://www.7cups.com/forum/StudentSupport_114/StudentMentalHealthSupport_1211/Savingyourgradesfromamentalhealthcrisis_193340/ )