Category Archives: anxiety

sugar therapy

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This week has been kind of shit-tastic. Mass shootings, Republicans trying to de-fund Planned Parenthood for like the 85th time, bad weather, fuckery at work, on and on.

Normally my strategy for dealing with stress like this is to drink, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’m not saying it’s a GOOD strategy…but, you know, it’s better than some.

Anyway.

I had already decided this afternoon that an adult beverage or two was in order this evening. Then, on the way home, a brilliant plan struck me: why not drink…AND build a gingerbread house! My husband was going to be out playing cards with his buddies so it was a perfect opportunity to have a dinner that he’d totally hate, then crack a bottle of wine that he’d also hate, and make a huge sugary mess on the kitchen table.

SOLD!

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Sugar and wine! How bad can it go?

It should be noted that this kit came with directions. I didn’t READ the directions until much later in the process…but it DID come with directions. Good for Hasbro, trying to make things easier for people. The kind of people that read directions before getting halfway through something and realizing they might have fucked up, anyway.

It turns out that what you’re SUPPOSED to do is apply the icing and construct the house first, THEN use the rest of the icing to apply candy decorations.

My problem with this plan is as follows: who the FUCK other than professional bakers who work with piping bags on a regular basis can pipe icing decorations onto a surface at a frigging 90 degree angle?

Not THIS bitch, that’s fo’ sho’.

So, rather than follow the prescribed order of operations, I applied Shelby Logic and did what I fucking wanted. Incidentally, this may be a large part of why I failed Algebra three times in high school as well.

Shelby Logic says that decorating the walls of the house while they’re still flat on the table makes WAY more sense, so that’s what I did. I decorated THE SHIT out of all four walls, then I went to stick them together in the little tray that comes with the kit…and started to realize the possible error of my ways.

It turns out that the reason they have you stick the walls together in the tray first is because you can’t lay an already-decorated piece of gingerbread decorated-side down in order to apply the frosting for the joins, and it’s actually surprisingly hard to apply the frosting evenly with one hand while holding said piece of gingerbread up with the other. Especially when one has been drinking. Also, there’s the fact that if you do it the “right way”, the joints have time to harden up before you put the roof on, which saves a lot of panicking about the whole structure caving in when you insist on trying to spread icing flat across the roof parts later on.

Ahem.

Anyway, I channeled my inner Tim Gunn and made it work:

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As Tim would say, “that’s a LOT of look”.

It’s a little rickety in places, but it’s not like I’m gonna be playing Gingerbread Barbie with it or anything so I think it’ll be ok.

And you know what? People are going to be dicks, stuff is going to go wrong, bad things are going to happen…but it’s ok. Life goes on.

And gods willing, I won’t have a hangover tomorrow.

make your own happiness…while I punch you in the face.

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You know what I hate?

Besides Kokomo, anyway…

I hate these “make your own happiness” memes that are all over Facebook and Pinterest. You know the type:

happiness-is-a-choice

It’s so easy. Why can’t you see that it’s so easy, Shelby? Just choose to be happy! SMILE, DAMN IT!

First of all, way to fucking grammar, (says the queen of the fragmented sentence. I KNOW. Shut up).

Second of all: this shit might have made the person who made it feel better about themselves in some ego-stroking way, but it’s sure as hell not helping me or really anybody else I know who is clinically anxious, depressed, or has some other alternate brain chemistry reality.

One of the biggest things a clinically depressed person often deals with is a sense of loneliness or isolation, even when they’re surrounded by people they care about. When you already feel deeply, utterly alone, the last thing you need to hear is another way in which you’re failing at life. That’s how these memes always make me feel – like I’m even MORE abnormal because I can’t just choose to be happy and step out of the mist-shrouded labyrinth that has been the last ten years of my life. The more of them I see, the more irrationally inferior and isolated I feel.

Telling someone who is depressed to just buck up and be positive is, at best, misguided. At worst, it’s pretty fucking offensive. If someone confined to a wheelchair told you that they wished they could walk again, would you tell them they just aren’t trying hard enough? That the ability is there within them, they just have to dig deep and find it? No you wouldn’t. At least, not unless you’re a very special kind of asshole.

Just like it’s very easy for an able-bodied person to take for granted all the things they can do physically, it’s very easy for someone with a chemically normal brain to assume that depression is a choice.

Depression is not a choice.

If it was, most of us would have chosen to get the fuck away from it by now, trust us.

 

 

 

 

better living through psychopharmacology

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You know how when you were a kid and it was like, mid-January, and you were spacing out at your desk during Social Studies class, trying to work out how many more weeks it was until summer vacation, and then when you figured it out it kind of made you want to cry a little?

(just play along)

That’s how I’ve felt all day long.

There are glaciers moving faster than today has progressed.

I’ve sat in this chair so long that I have actually aged all the way to the end of my life, died, been REINCARNATED AND BORN AGAIN INTO A NEW EXISTENCE EXACTLY THE SAME AS MY OLD ONE, and aged all the way back up to my present age.

neverending

I don’t even know what this is, but it’s exactly what today has felt like. Also, it’s making me kind of dizzy.

 

This is what it’s like when I don’t take my ADD medication on a work day.

On a day when I’m at home it’s not a big deal if I don’t take them because a) there’s all kinds of interesting and shiny things to work on at home and if not, there’s video games, b)no one really expects me to be all that productive at home (my husband was disabused of that notion very early on in our marriage), and c) the things that I do at home, generally, do not require a high degree of accuracy or the staring at of columns of numbers for hours on end.

Work days without meds, though? They’re fucking HARD, and having to tough one out every once in a while reminds me just how obnoxious and frustrating life was for me (and probably everyone around me, to be fair) before ADD meds.

I would write more, but there’s been a squirrel in my brain doing the Macarena in double time for the last eight hours and I am frigging BURNT. OUT.

how about…no

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nope

again with the bears!

 

You may have noticed that I lasted all of A WEEK AND A HALF using the NaBloPoMo writing prompts.

First of, ADD motherfuckers. I warned you.

Second of all, you can’t blame me, really, when this week’s prompts sound like a bunch of fucking Miss America pageant interview questions:

Monday, November 16 – Pretending you have the expertise to make the product a reality, what do you wish you could invent?

Answer: I’d invent a life-sized doll of your mom. 

Tuesday, November 17 – What is one place you need to see to feel like your life is complete?

Answer: I need to see…your mom.

Wednesday, November 18 – What do you hope people remember about you after you’re gone?

Answer:  My razor sharp wit. I know your mom will.

Thursday, November 19 – Where would you want to retire if money wasn’t an issue?

Answer: Your mom’s house.

Friday, November 20 – What do you hope happens by the end of this year?

Answer: I hope that rash your mom has clears up so she can hang out again.

 

I don’t want to sound like I’m directly bashing the BlogHer people who came up with the list because I get it, it’s not easy.  Shit, I do a thing called the Friday Five on a knitting forum, where I come up with five usually at least tenuously themed questions to ask everyone once a week and even THAT gets really hard sometimes.  Like, to the point where I start avoiding the internet some Fridays so that I can claim I was sick and didn’t, uhh, internet at all that day, and that’s why I didn’t do the Friday Five.  *shifty look*

Basically, I’m cool with the writing prompts until they start getting  DEEP…and making me have to like, THINK.  Or worse, FEEL.  I feel more than enough on a day to day basis already, believe you me.  I feel shit that isn’t even appropriate or, in some cases, applicable.

Examples:

Happy commercial with a cute puppy?  I FEEL OVERWHELMING SADNESS THAT THE PUPPY WILL SOME DAY GROW OLD AND DIE, JUST LIKE THE REST OF US.  LIFE IS SO POINTLESS.

Fun pop song on the radio? ANGER BECAUSE THIS SONG CLEARLY STEALS PARTS FROM TWO OTHER, BETTER SONGS, AND KIDS CALL THIS MUSIC.  WTF, ALL THE GOOD MUSIC HAS ALREADY BEEN MADE.  THERE IS NO POINT IN LISTENING TO THE RADIO ANYMORE.

Friend tells me exciting news?  I will not only be happy and excited for them but I will then proceed to WELL UP WITH TEARS BECAUSE LIFE IS SO BEAUTIFUL I JUST CAN’T HANDLE IT.

Sooo, yeah.  Sorry BlogHer writing prompts, but I feel enough feels that I can’t turn the volume down on to begin with.  Trying to expound upon how I’d invent a way to feed the world…

…or how I don’t think I’ll ever feel like my life is complete because there’s so much to see and do that it’s overwhelming and makes me really sad that I’m going to miss a whole lot of it no matter how hard I try…

…or that I’m afraid that no one will remember me for ANYTHING after I die because no one will have really known me…

…or that I can’t fathom picking a place to retire because I can’t fucking fathom retiring at all…

…or that my only hope for the end of every single year ever is that people will somehow come to their senses and stop fucking HATING AND KILLING each other…

…just isn’t something that I’ve got the emotional stamina to handle.

At least, not on the average weekday, where it’s “inappropriate” to start drinking at 10am.

 

 

 

 

 

 

on heredity, crafting and keeping (relatively) sane

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I forgot to post yesterday.  I meant to do it when I got home last night but then I got waylaid cooking dinner and doing work baking.  Then, I sat down to watch TV with my husband and, as usual, picked up the nearest craft project to start working on.

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Tiny baked goods and kitchen implements, hooray!

 

At that point, any chance of getting some writing done went straight down the drain.

Crafting, or as I like to call it, “making shit“, is something that I’m genetically predisposed to.  My dad’s always been a builder, making everything from birdhouses to, well…people houses!  My paternal grandmother was a talented knitter, quilter and seamstress, and even designed and sold dress patterns as a young woman in the early 1950’s.  Her mother before her also made braided rugs as well as knit, crocheted, sewed, and embroidered.  My great-grandmother’s specialty as a young woman was crocheted lace.  I have many examples of her very fine handiwork on the edging of finished embroidery projects like table runners and antimacassars, as well as some doilies and even a small fabric book full of swatches and motifs she did as she learned new patterns.

Making things is clearly in my blood – it’s something I can’t (and wouldn’t want to) fight – but it’s also something that helps keep me sane, a form of meditation for me.  When my ADD-and-anxiety-plagued imagination is bombarding me with a million bajillion completely unfeasible scenarios of how badly everything can go, knitting or stitching give me a way to step out of that crazy feedback loop for a while and just focus on one stitch at a time.  When I’m so, so sad or angry and I feel like I can’t do anything right, making little lines of stitches with a needle and thread or yarn shows me that actually, yes, I CAN do at least this one tiny thing right in this one moment.

Moments eventually build up to minutes, which pile up to hours, and suddenly I’ve made it through another day.

Many mental health problems are hereditary, just like other traits and predispositions.  I know my grandmother suffered from bouts of anxiety and depression throughout her life, though it was not something that was considered appropriate to talk about when she was elderly, let alone when she was my age.  I didn’t know my great-grandmother well enough to know whether she had similar issues as well. But, it does sometimes make me wonder if these women’s legacies of prolific crafting and fiber artistry may have stemmed not just from a need to express themselves creatively but also a need to self-soothe or to step out of their own mental feedback loops for a time like I do now.

 

blanket forting

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There are days when I find it really, really hard to put one foot in front of the other, figuratively speaking.  Today is very much one of those days.

Instead of boring you with the myriad ways in which I detest myself and the endless stream of things I am afraid of, I’m going to make some hot chocolate, find a documentary or three about dinosaurs to watch on NetFlix, wrap up in my blankie, and possibly hide some treats in my pocket so the dog is compelled to come sit on my lap.

Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Dicks.

(I was at 99 words and I couldn’t leave without taking it over 100. I could have just written another actual, topical sentence, but why do that when you can randomly say “dicks” instead?  Plus, I needed the laugh. )

progress > perfection

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The NaBloPoMo prompts are killing me with the boring this week, and it’s only Tuesday.

Today it wants me to talk about what the hardest part of a project is for me.  Which, given that I’m already struggling to complete this “blog every day for a month” project, is quite the coincidence.

So, what’s the hardest part of a project for me?  It depends greatly on the project.  If it’s a project that I’m super into and excited about and have lots of ideas for, I’m usually good until halfway through, when my interest will inevitably be pulled toward other newer, more shiny and exciting things.  These are the types of projects that I usually end up taking a hiatus from while I indulge my “ooh, shiny” impulses elsewhere, then come back to them later on and finish them up.

If the project is one that I’m not into from the very beginning then the hardest part is actually getting started.  I will procrastinate as long as possible before finally buckling down and getting shit done.  Sometimes it’s procrastination via distraction, ie: finding many other shiny things to be awed by and “forgetting” about the unsavory project.

But sometimes, it’s procrastination via analysis paralysis.

Take kettle bells, for example.

15 pounds sounds wimpy, but you try swinging one of these motherfuckers. NOT EASY.

15 pounds sounds wimpy, but you try swinging one of these motherfuckers. NOT EASY.

I bought this kettle bell a few weeks ago with the intention of learning how to do some of the (many!) specialized exercises that they are used for.  I have some previous experience lifting weights and doing body-weight exercises like squats and lunges, so I understand the general mechanics of what goes into something like a kettle-bell swing, theoretically.  I took the bell home, I looked up a beginner’s video on YouTube, I followed along, everything was basically honky-dory.  I decided that yes, I thought the kettle bell might work for me and so I should commit to learning how to PROPERLY do the lifts and swings with good form now so that I don’t end up hurting myself later on with a heavier bell and bad form.

This sounds perfectly reasonable in theory – responsible, even!  But, it was the first step down the analysis paralysis path for me, as it so often is.  I read a bunch of articles about kettle-bell swings and proper form.  I found all kinds of tips and tricks, videos, and things I should try.  I even started a draft email in my Gmail to save the myriad links to kettle bell articles and videos I wanted to be able to revisit later.  I read and thought about this all SO MUCH over the course of about a week that I actually started to make myself worry that I wouldn’t be able to ever do it right without like, an expensive personal trainer or moving to Russia and devoting my life to all things kettle bell, etc.

To my credit, I realized that I was kind of going into crazy-mode at that point and stopped reading kettle bell articles…but that hasn’t made it any easier for me to actually get back to the project of, you know, exercising with the kettle bell.  Every time I walk past it now I find myself thinking, “I have to work on my squat form before I can even attempt to do swings the right way, so I’m not even going to bother”.

Which leads us to possibly the worst part of projects for me, which is that I’m a perfectionist.  If something isn’t coming out the way I want it, I’m apt to scrap the whole thing and start over fourteen times rather than work with what I’ve already got.  Blog posts are a perfect example of this.  You wouldn’t believe the number of times I start writing, decide I hate what I’ve said, and delete the whole thing.  I get so overly concerned with how I’m saying what I’m trying to say, that a whole lot of the time I just don’t say anything, because it’s easier than trying to go back and edit things to make them sound how I want.  In terms of the kettle bells, even throwing that 15lb kettle bell around with terrible form is probably going to do me more good than harm because it’s exercise I’m otherwise NOT doing, but in my head I’m so convinced that imperfect = BAD that I have a really hard time bringing myself to even try.

Progress is more important than perfection.  Reminding myself of that every time I get stuck in an “I can’t do this right so I might as well not do it” feedback loop is a project in and of itself.

pretty sure I just secured my spot on the Guaranteed To Be Abducted list

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Prompt for Nov 6th: What was your biggest fear as a child? Do you still have it today? If it went away, when did your feelings changes?

We had this set of Time-Life books called “Mysteries of the Unknown” when I was a kid.

I think they were actually something that I ordered off an infomercial at one point and then my parents were stuck paying for it.  I did that…uhh…more than once when I was a kid.  *shifty look*
mysteries

Anyway.  These books were actually really interesting, at least to seven or eight year old me.  There was one about Mystic Places, like the Bermuda Triangle and Stongehenge.  There was one about psychic powers, ESP, astral projection and the like – that one was my favorite.  There was one about mythological monsters, one about mind over matter, etc.  There were a whole bunch of them (although I just looked the set up and there were 33 total but we definitely only had like six or eight so apparently my parents wised up and got the subscription cancelled sooner rather than later.  Bummer.  I had no idea I was missing out so much!), including one about aliens and UFOs, which fucking PETRIFIED me…

…but of course I read it…

…and was promptly reduced to a total mess who couldn’t sleep without the light on for months (because aliens can only get you when it’s dark, duh…).  It got to the point where I actually had to hide that book on myself because even seeing it on the bookshelf when I was going for one of the other ones would freak me out.  If the book was out of sight, I could stop thinking aliens were coming to get me and maaaaaybe sleep at night.

At least, until the afternoon my parents put Close Encounters of the Third Kind on the T.V. and then both fell asleep.  I was probably 9 or 10 at the time.  I was so engrossed in the story (because really, it IS a good movie) that I couldn’t really make myself turn it off once I realized they were asleep even though it was scaring me.  That was good for another few months of needing to sleep with a light on right there.

So, as you can see, I already had an excellent base of alien phobia built up over the course of several years by the time the movie Fire In The Sky came out and my mom talked me into watching it with her.  And then…you guessed it…fell asleep.

If you’ve seen Fire In The Sky, you have a pretty good idea of why this was An Issue for me.  If you haven’t, well, take my word for it, it’s FUCKING DISTURBING.  To make matters worse, they made a huge deal about it being based on a true story.  I was probably 14 when I watched it and I was pretty into horror movies at the time – stuff like Poltergeist, The Omen, Friday the 13th – if it was creepy and bloody, my friend Christina and I were ALL ABOUT it.  So it’s not like I was just an all-around wimp about creepy stuff – it really was just alien stuff that truly bothered me.  Fire In The Sky, in particular, is a movie that I still can’t even think about without getting the willies even 20+ years later.  Even looking it up on Wikipedia so I could link you to it just made my brain weasels go into overdrive for a few minutes.  Ugh!

I’m not really sure quite when I started getting over the alien phobia.  It was still pretty strong circa 2002 when Signs came out because I flat-out refused to go see it with a couple different groups of friends even though they said it was really good and assured me that there was very little actual alien content.  Some time after that it started to slowly ease up, though.  I still get kind of creeped out at the idea of human-like aliens, particularly the ones with the big heads and almond-shaped black eyes, but I don’t have a panic attack every time I see a weird light in the sky like I used to and I don’t (generally) have to sleep with the light on anymore.

The thing is, I believe.  I believe even more today than I did as a kid that there has to be SOME kind of other intelligent life zooming around the Universe.  It feels incredibly arrogant to think otherwise.  And not only to I believe, but I find the idea truly fascinating.

So long as no one tries to beam me up.
You hear that, aliens?  I AM NOT VOLUNTEERING!

sunday not so funday

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We haven’t had water since Friday night.

Well, that’s not entirely true. We have a LITTLE water…it’s basically just a sad little trickle coming out of the taps. The toilet still flushes, which is a definite plus, and showers are possible if you’re really patient and also don’t mind not actually feeling all that clean afterward (ugh), but doing laundry and running the dishwasher are both on the no-go list currently.

Have I mentioned before that I usually save all the laundry, heavy-duty cooking and resultant heavy-duty dish-washing for weekends? Well…I do. And now I can’t do the mountain of laundry that has piled up, or do any serious cooking because trying to wash greasy dishes by hand with no water pressure is not my idea of a good time.

I also can’t leave to go get my grocery shopping done (which is my Sunday-morning ritual. The week’s sale flyer goes into effect on Sunday so the store hasn’t had a chance to run out of stuff yet. Plus, if I go early enough I don’t have to deal with very may other people, which is A++ awesome and worth getting up early for), because the landlord told me the maintenance guy would be here “first thing” this morning, quoting me a time of 8am. It’s now 8:30 and there’s no sign of the maintenance guy (who lives like five minutes up the road).

So basically, my whole weekend routine has been shot to shit. This probably wouldn’t phase most people but it makes me twitchy and anxious. I get all messed up and switched into “well I can’t do X, Y and Z like I want, so I might as well not do ANYTHING productive” mode, which is neither helpful nor easy for me to break out of once I’m there. I’m fighting that mode at the moment by writing this, by making my grocery list, by going around picking up laundry and sorting it so that when the water is (oh god please) fixed later I can start right in on washing.

Oh good, the maintenance guy just pulled in. There’s hope yet for my sanity…

on bears and unattainable meat and somehow also my brain? I’m not sure. This one might have gotten away from me a little.

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There are two major versions of my brain – Brave Me and Scared Me.  I used to think that balancing Brave Me and Scared Me would solve all my problems.  If I could just get to that magical fulcrum point on the seesaw, everything would level out and I could live a functional, well-adjusted life.  In reality, the only thing I got out of all that scooting back and forth on the seesaw trying to find that balance was splinters in my ass.

There is no perfect balance.  There is no PERFECT.  There is instead a vast and colorful spectrum of moments between radiant joy and utter despair.  Being able to experience that spectrum is a large part of what makes us human.  Mind you I’m not trying to feed anyone a cliche about how you can’t appreciate the good times if you never have any bad ones because that’s SO not helpful when you’re depressed.  At least, not to me.  If it works for you then by all means embrace that shit.

My point is more that you don’t HAVE to be balanced.  Would it maybe make life easier sometimes?  Sure.  But are you a failure if you can’t manage it?  Nope.  Not one bit.

We get this idea of perfection and balance shoved down our throats at every bloody fucking turn nowadays, and it’s bullshit.  Worse than it being bullshit, it’s largely unattainable.  It’s like dangling a piece of meat just out of reach in front of a bear for a really long time.  The bear is eventually going to get sick of chasing meat it can’t get and will fuck off to find something more productive to do.  (NOTE: I am NOT an actual bear expert. I have not tested this theory. Please do not try this experiment at home. Or in the woods. Just…maybe stay away from hungry bears in general. Good life rule there, kids).  The bear’s not going to quit life and throw itself off a cliff or anything, but it knows there’s plenty of other nourishment to be had besides that one damn dangle-y piece of meat that looks so appealing but is causing all sorts of problems.

Take-away: it’s ok to be the bear who stops chasing the unattainable meat.

It’s also ok to pretend to be a bear sometimes, as long as you’re not going around biting people.  Biting people is dangerous.

Even for non-pretend bears.

 

WTF is this bitch talking even talking about?

WTF is this bitch talking even talking about?