Category Archives: mental health

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?

mermaid hair, etc.

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This afternoon I had a hair appointment.  It was extra long because I was getting some extensive bleaching and dying done.  There were several other women in the salon at the same time, one of who had a gaggle of daughters with her.  The youngest of the girls gave me the side-eye a few times while the stylist was applying the bleach and foils to my hair.  I smiled at her when she made eye contact, assuming she was fascinated with the dying process, especially since she had seen that I had bright purple streaks in my hair when I first came in.

As the stylist was finishing up with my foil packets the little girl sidled over to me and, in a surprisingly earnest tone for an 11 year old said, “You’re very pretty”.  I was momentarily taken aback but also quite charmed (hey, I never said I wasn’t shallow…heh).  Smiling again, I replied with, “Well thank you! So are you!”.

I hope she believed me, because it’s true.  I also hope she holds onto her own incredible generosity of spirit as she grows up.  I hope she doesn’t have it bullied and shamed out of her by asshole kids and a shitty society that tries to convince girls that their worth is determined by their clothing size.

The little girl had to head out when her mom’s hair was done, long before I was out from under the foils and hood dryer.  She was disappointed that she wasn’t going to get to see what my hair came out looking like, and I was a little sad that I didn’t get to see her eyes go wide in wonder at the swirls of bright green, blue and purple that emerged from under my stylist’s talented hands.  I think she would have liked it:

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mermaid-y!

if the world is going to end, I need to tell you some things

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Crazy people think the world is ending tomorrow.  They’ve never been right before, but I figure, why waste a perfectly good opportunity to tell secrets and air grievances, right?  RIGHT. So pour yourself an adult beverage and let’s begin. Try not to judge me too harshly, ok?

Let’s start out with some easy ones:

  • I love canned whipped cream.  The actual whipped cream part, not the nitrous oxide, I swear. A can of whipped cream lasts maaaaaybe 36 hours in my house. MAYBE. I will continually wander over to the fridge, up-end the can and spray sugary processed white joy into my mouth with utter abandon. There is no bad time for canned whipped cream. Which is exactly why I don’t buy it except on rare occasions.
  • I would eat pizza once a day, every day, and twice a day on weekends, if I could. Standards apply, of course. I’m not talking like $3.99 frozen pizzas. But decent gas-station pizza? Oh, it’s ON.
  • I talk to my dog constantly. That in and of itself isn’t so bad, but I also do the dog’s part of the conversation back to me in dog-voice. If my husband and I are both home, we take turns doing dog-voice. If the dog ever grows thumbs, we’re totally done for.

Now, some less easy ones:

  • I’m pretty sure most people that say they like me really just feel sorry for me. I don’t feel like I’m a particularly pitiable case or anything, but for some reason I just can’t ever quite believe that most of my friends would actually want to talk to me or hang out with me if given another alternative.
  • I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I’m almost 36, so this one is starting to become kind of a problem.
  • I am super duper afraid that I’m wasting my life.  I struggle with feeling like nothing I do is ever enough to live up to the fact that this is IT, you know? This is the only time I’m going to get. Am I using it well enough? It’s a scary question, at least for me.

And finally, here’s a video of my dog licking almond butter off a spoon as a bit of a palate cleanser for anyone who made it this far:

hear me roar…quietly, and mostly to myself…

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Yesterday evening while walking the dog, I got heckled by a stranger.  I had scolded the stranger for driving too fast down our quiet dead-end road (by way of yelling “SLOW DOWN!” and waving the mail I was clutching in one hand while I tried to keep my small and exuberant dog from getting run over with the other hand).  The stranger pulled into the neighbor’s driveway and stood making what I can only assume to be entitled commentary on my physique while I made my way up the road toward where he was parked.  Once I came into earshot, he shared some choice opinions with me, to which I replied with a few of my own, all the while not slowing down my pace.  The words themselves are not as important as the intention.  This guy, whether drunk, high, or just an asshole, had decided that since I was a woman and/or a person of significant size, that I could be bullied.  In that split second he judged me as someone who would take his bullshit, but he was wrong, and it got me thinking.

I am someone that prefers to be quiet most of the time.  I am bookish and nerdy, I like to knit, I am often lost in my own daydreams.  I detest small-talk because I’m terrible at it. I am confrontation-averse because I have a hard time arguing / debating – my brain is usually going in 47 different directions and I struggle to settle on a point, let alone the language to convey said point, unless I am at a keyboard where I can go back and edit myself continually (and even then, I’m generally far from eloquent).

None of these things, however, mean that I’m easily scared or intimidated.  If someone says something I don’t agree with, I will most definitely speak up.  I sometimes regret having done so after the fact, but I’m by no means afraid to speak my mind.  Also, possibly because I have always been physically large my whole life and grew up around many other large people (genetically, I couldn’t escape being big even if I wanted to. If I lost 150lbs of excess weight, I’d still be built like a linebacker because that’s just how everyone in my family is built), I am not very easily intimidated physically either.  My mom and I used to soda-bottle sword-fight or milk-jug box in the kitchen for fun when I was a kid.  Those activities are exactly what they sound like – hitting each other with empty 2-liter soda bottles or gallon milk jugs until someone legitimately got hurt and stopped playing or we were both laughing too hard to continue.  I doubt she was doing it on purpose at the time, but my mother basically taught me via goofy semi-violence in the kitchen that I was a fighter.  I’m never going to be the one running TOWARD a fight (unless a loved one is in trouble), but if a fight comes to me, I’m not going to run AWAY from it.

I’m made of far harder stuff than I sometimes give myself credit for.  I bet you are, too.  Let’s remember we talked about it so that the next time we need a boost, we can come back and remind ourselves that we’re actually bad-asses who don’t take anyone’s shit.  Deal?

confessions of a sometimes wino

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Friday night I drank a whole 750ml bottle of cheap pinot noir.

Rex and I have a long and storied relationship.

Rex is my favorite frenemy.

Beer tends to give me a headache before I get much of a buzz going so I usually stop after a couple.  Wine, however, affords me a nice long of a window of “buzzed but essentially functional”.  It takes me to that wonderful loose place where life is essentially good, everyone is at least entertaining if not downright lovely, and dancing doesn’t seem like entirely the worst idea ever.  I can string words together more effectively, I become a creative genius in the kitchen, and I often become prone to small to medium sized philosophical epiphanies.  All things seem possible when I’m half a bottle in.  Of COURSE I’d like another glass!  This highly enjoyable state of mind must be preserved for as long as possible!  Bring me more happy juice!

Except…eventually I have to sleep, and be able to drive and go to work and, you know, not be drunk.  Which is kind of a bummer.

I don’t drink entire bottles of wine in one go very often anymore.  In my early 20’s it was nothing for me to drink a 750ml bottle of an evening, and I used to fairly frequently consume the majority of 1.5L bottles when the mood struck.  This was not done during a party, mind you.  This was just me sitting at home on a Saturday night, knitting and watching PBS, getting tanked on cheap wine and staggering up to bed.  I didn’t mind the feeling of being out of control at that point because there wasn’t anyone around to call me on it and frankly, I often didn’t realize quite how shit-faced I had actually gotten until the next morning when I looked back on the things I had done the night before.

That’s what I mean about wine making me “buzzed but essentially functional”.  If I sit at a table and drink three shots of tequila or a couple of Dark & Stormy’s in rapid succession then stand up, I will FEEL drunk, and I will not especially enjoy that feeling.  If I sit there and drink three glasses of wine, even very quickly, then stand up, I’ll feel cheerful and loose…but I won’t feel what my body and brain recognize as drunk.  I won’t feel like I can’t do certain things or like I should switch to drinking water.  I’ll feel excellent and want to keep drinking to keep the excellence flowing.

What bothers me more than my actual drinking habits (because like I said, I really don’t drink all that much anymore. I might have a couple glasses of wine or a beer after work, maybe three nights a week on average), is the fact that I actively miss the wine feeling when it’s gone.  I miss feeling like all is right with the world and like I am capable of most things.  I know that to seek wine out regularly in an attempt to continue those feelings is to flirt with functional alcoholism, so I try very much to keep myself in check in that regard…but it makes me wish very much that there was a way to achieve that level of contentedness without having to subject myself to possibly addictive substances and irresponsible behaviors.

If you have any suggestions on that front, I’m all ears.

laundro-bed

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I hate putting away laundry.

Picking up dirty laundry?  Don’t mind!

Schlepping the laundry down to the washer, switching it over to the dryer, and schlepping it back upstairs?  Don’t mind!

Putting the laundry away once it’s clean?

OMGWTFBBQ CANNOT HANDLE.

So, it all ends up in the spare room on the guest bed, aka: The Laundro-Bed:

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That bed full of laundry really ties the room together…

Sometimes I get as far as separating out my clothes and my husband’s clothes into their own piles, but that’s really about as far as I ever get in terms of taking care of any of it unless there’s the imminent threat of company coming over.  Which, let’s be honest, I’m basically a fucking hermit so those occasions are blessedly few and far between.

By sharing my laundro-bed with you, I’m attempting to take a little of the sting of shame out of it for myself and for anyone else reading this that may have a similar situation.  If putting away laundry is your jam then by all means you have my admiration, I wish you a lifetime of happy laundry-taking-care-of, and perhaps we could work out some sort of arrangement where I make you gelato and you take care of my laundry (seriously, call me)!  But, if you’re someone who has a hard time getting it done for whatever reason and you maybe mentally beat yourself up over it, I’d like to offer you a little cuddle and a reminder that not putting away the laundry is not the end of the world.  It’s not even like, the pebble that gets kicked off the side of a cliff that causes the avalanche that maybe buries some hikers.  That’s kind of dark, but you get my point, I think.  You are more than your un-done household chores.  You’re a valuable and loved person even if your guest bed is full of laundry and your t-shirts are a little bit wrinkled.