Be the change you want to see.

I'm struggling to adult and there's lots to do.

* Relationship foo

* Schedule foo (see friends, see family, have dates

* Polyamorous foo (dealing with jealousy and finding the courage to bring up my concerns and ask for what I want)

* HEALTH foo, which is multilayer:

** Body pain: *chiropractor, *physical therapy and maybe *massage? I could use my birthday card from almost 2 years ago, but still, SCHEDULE foo.

** Optometry: apparently my last visit was in 2017. I didn't break my glasses so I guess I just didn't go in? (Scheduled for Friday PM)

** Gynecology. Because the girl parts smell bad, I have mild pelvic pain,and zero libido. (Just scheduled for Thursday PM.) ALSO I need to understand more about what to expect from my hopefully upcoming menopause.

** Mental health. The depression and ADHD are not managing themselves. I'm spending hours per day on the internet basically trying to cheer myself up.

About that last one. Today got pretty bad because J was starting another dating website profile, and it hit me hard. We have Stuff To Talk About and I struggle with starting the conversation. Partly because it went so badly for me before when I brought up Previous Stuff, which is also an Aspect of Current Stuff, of course.

Okay.
BUT I DID ask for help earlier today when I found myself panicking and spiraling, and he dropped what he was doing to come over and help, so that was good.

AND I'm going to have a needed shower 🚿 (my hair's been up in a braid for three days and it wasn't clean before that) also the previously mentioned smelly parts definitely need some gentle TLC.

And then I'll eat a little bit more of something.

I'm thinking this all is like getting a farm or a garden back up and running after fourteen months of not looking after it. The neglect, in the end, hasn't been very benign.

This is going to be a quick stream-of-consciousness kind of post, so I apologize for any typos or missing punctuation. I've been saying for years how annoying it is that I forget to eat. just in the last year or so after many years of taking metformin, I discovered that one of the side effects of metformin as an appetite suppressant. I got reminded of that because one night last week I forgot to take the medications before I went to bed. And then the following night when it was dinner time I think I ate twice as much as normal. I had one section of leftovers, and then went back and finished off the Chinese food as well.

I was off my meds for a day. The thing is, I actually had a hunger impulse that day and that is one of the things I am disconnected from more days than not. And I know that failing to eat affect both my mental health, my optimism, my energy levels obviously, and my ability to think clearly. So one thing I want to try and figure out is if there are other things available to treat my kind of diabetes than metformin, and whether we need to do anyting particular in order to try a different med.

My health as a general case oh, it's pretty good, I feel. Barring of course they ridiculous coronavirus shelter-in-place and quarantine, and bearing in mind that I have pre-existing conditions that really seemed to me like they will get triggered really hard if I catch this particular virus. So physical health related, I'm working out twice a week I feel pretty good as far as painless go I am not experiencing a lot of my usual muscle tension and pain. I do miss my mom, my sister and my niblings, and I should have may be arranged a screen type visit with them over the weekend. Benjamin just graduated from high school in so far as you can graduate from high school in 2012. and as of I guess today or maybe yesterday it sounds like he is off having adventures in southern California with a couple of his high school friends. Which on the one hand good for him and on the other hand f***. Because I'm going to have to wait and see whether it's possible that he has caught the virus before I come back up and visit. Although I know he's smart enough and self-aware enough to know that only too self quarantine when he comes back before he goes to see Mom. Mom has said he's been very assiduous and so has Ainsley about mask-wearing and being careful around her so that makes me feel better and a little bit safer for myself as well. At some point I would really like to go see them again?

But I just have to be really freaking careful. I cannot. Not. Afford to catch this virus, before we have antidotes reliable treatments, or a vaccine.

Circling back to the food question, the mind question: the ability to think when I cannot manage to feed myself very reliably. It makes it very difficult to get anything done. I can have the best of intentions and between the ADHD and not enough brain spoons it just does not happen. My Oblivion is actually very good for me in that regard, which is that when I feel myself starting a shame spiral I shove everything into the oubliette and then I don't have a shame spiral anymore. Of course I also don't have any niggling little reminders of those things that I intended to do.

I have tasks I meant to do before Christmas and haven't gotten done. Things I wanted to put in the mail. And I haven't done them. More things I wanted to put in the mail when we started shelter-in-place. I haven't mailed those either aside from about 8 at the very beginning. Have made one mask. That's it and now my sewing machine is jammed and the troubleshooting for that is beyond my current capacities. I'm not even depressed about this or ashamed or beating myself up or anxious or even tired. It's more numb. Some of that is due to the fact that I know I'm hungry even though I can't feel hunger. But I can tell based on how my brain is and is not working. I think I'm going to ask friends for help. Maybe I can subcontract out some of the brain work we'll have to see.

I hope you all are as well as you can be and staying as safe as you can be I'm thinking of you and I'll try to get back with everyone when I have a temporary likely resurgence of spoons.

I have an appointment for a video meeting with the audiology department at Kaiser tomorrow because I might be a good candidate for hearing aids. It's finally gotten to the point where it's enough of a pain oh, enough of an inconvenience and honestly the tinnitus is really bugging me. So wish me luck with that!

This weekend Jeff is travelling with our gf Jenn. So not to feel lonely, I set myself up with a lot of social things, in multiple cases things I'd never done before.

Friday night I went to Renee's birthday party.
Saturday I went to a Halloween party that Amy and Bill and Kimberly were invited to, and they included me.
Sunday I went with Luisa to a Sikh temple for what I thought at the start was a Diwali celebration but upon reflection, may have been a regular Sunday service.

I could unpack and tell stories about each of those days, but this morning when I woke up I realized there were two specific things I wanted to write about.

one is: three straight days with extroverting.
two is: two straight days with going out around new people while dressing high femme. Even did makeup and hair. wow

yeaaaaaah. that was kind of a lot of effort, you know? Both those things.

I have tried to convince myself for literally YEARS that I'm an extrovert. I'm actually coming to realize that I'm almost certainly an introvert EXCEPT FOR THE FACT that my default mode when I "introvert" is to HERMIT.
and then I don't see people, I don't touch or get touched, I get depressed, and it sucks.

maybe I just suck at the introverting. Today's a kinda gross brainweasel kinda day already, I'm working on managing my pain and getting some food so I can brain better, and I still have to take my morning meds.

maybe I don't suck at the introverting, but there's something else going on there.
but I'm pretty sure I do suck at the introverting.

also, though, i seem to have hard anxiety at the extroverting. GAH
or maybe it's just that I did three days of being around People I Don't Know and that's stressful.
*sigh*

okay, now it's time to take a moment about the femme thing.
I've been tending to dress butch for several years now. Jeff never expressed that he cared about how I dressed except to say that he didn't really like women wearing makeup and that he didn't do well with lots of perfume. So for several years I dressed practically. I didn't have any kind of expected or cultural dress code to meet, not since graduating waldorf in 2011, so I've been wearing a lot of jeans, cargo shorts, nerdy tee shirts, sandals, and or boots.

this year I decided I was going to try and reclaim some of the femme I used to *think* I knew how to do.

yeaaaaaah.

Briefly, dressing butch /feels/ like blending in, dressing femme /feels/ like "look at me, look at me!" and I have anxiety over being seen. I don't feel like I know how to handle it when I am /seen/.

when i was a kid i was humongous levels of anxious (I was going to say "ridiculous levels of anxious" but this shit ain't ridiculous it's fuckin' SAD because I didn't have any safe place or people growing up. I couldn't even trust my parents). I used to pretend I had some means of being invisible. Because if I couldn't be safe with people, maybe I could make them leave me alone.

I can trust and relax around small groups of people. five or six seems to be the maximum.

Eye contact is hard except when either I don't care or it's low emotional stakes, like with a waiter or a clerk in a store, or when I really trust someone.

I don't know if that makes me odd, "normal" or just me.

I feel a little better just introducing this topic here (these topics? is flavors of anxiety a single topic or a multiple topic?) and also incidentally finally getting my breakfast and caffeine an hour or more after waking.

self care yay!

body still hurts, going to see what I can do about that. I feel like a tightly wound spring, if a tightly wound spring could still have healing soft tissue damage post RSI and post broken bones. UGH

i'm fuckin ridiculous.

very quick post
as I need to breakfast and then hit the gym
...sigh

it's uncomfortable to admit the difference between what I thought I was doing and what I was actually doing.
what I was trying to do and what my brain basically had me HAVE to do.

I'll be dropping bits here as I continue to read the adhd book from the library. But one thing I learned today is that the kinds of self-talk I've been slowly training myself out of? have NAMES. Like, you can categorize them into disasterizing, binary thinking... I wish I had the book here, I'll have to edit this later.

I'm kind of in the grief stage. Realizing how different things might have been if adhd in girls was something that they knew about when I was still in primary school or high school. But in the 80's, they had only just begun to recognize add/adhd as a thing.

it wasn't. It didn't. They didn't. I didn't.

it's so damn hard to see the back of your own head.

Not like all my work towards self knowledge is wasted, it's the foundation of the work I'm going to continue doing.

AND I think I may have helped my niece, who is my beloved magpie girl. She's showing all the signs and more of my own distraction, difficulty scheduling, keeping on task, good intentions and poor execution. Pile of failing progress report grades on recent reports from school, her parents are going YIKES

so I told my sister I'd been recently diagnosed with adhd and what I remembered from high school sounded like how I've observed my magpie girl when we've gotten to hang out. That her academic results, same=same. I just covered better, I think.

so my sister and my brother in law are looking into testing for my niece.
it's like, I'm over here Feeling All The Things about my own wasted opportunities but maybe? maybe Ainslee can be spared a lot of what I suffered through, all the shitty self-talk and self-blame.

so I'm feeling optimistic, and I have several courses of action laid out for me to follow, and that feels good.

It’s 2 am. I’m up way past my bedtime because of reasons, namely that my brain won’t shut up and I’m feeling overwhelmed.
Recently diagnosed with ADHD and I don’t know what to do about it. Feels like I’ve been breaking any good things in my life, my whole life.
Only thing to give me peace tonight (this morning) is realizing that I am allowed to ask for help. I have two or three points of contact who may prove helpful. My therapist is one.
Depression sucks. ADHD sucks. Unemployment sucks. I have really good things in my life and I know it, intellectually, but I can’t keep them in focus right now.
I’m going to ask for help. Because I said I would.
This post is how I’m gonna keep myself accountable. Xposting to dreamwidth.
If you struggle with depression, ADHD, lack of purpose, lack of self worth, I’d like to hear from you.

adhd actually adhd depression low self worth low self confidence bad night help request because i said i would accountability gdi brain of course that's a tag
5 notes
Apr 9th, 2017

Rob Breszny's Free Will Astrology for Scorpios this week suggests that it would be a good idea to think about the parts of one's past that it would be good to protect and to carry forward into the future.

Ten things I have learned that I would like to carry forward:

1) Brainweasels are liars, and usually are due to low blood sugar or loneliness. CF: The Desiderata.
2) I am stronger, much more competent, and a lot more lovable than I believe I am by default.
3) despite 2) I am just as prone to fuck up my communication as the next person, or to fuck up period.
4) It is possible to apologize for a lot of things. Nobody really likes doing it, nobody's great at it.
5) I deserve self-care.
6) I am allowed to ask for help with my self care, and people will often say yes. (thanks to Eeyore42 and Wrenb for teaching me that)
7) Enjoy what you have, share with others, don't feel guilty for having more. Help as often as you can.
8) Life is short. Enjoy it while you can, and tell people you love them if you do. Kiss their faces too.
9) Tenderness, kindness, and warmheartedness are underrated in the world. Value them, teach them.
10) Feed yourself. Feed your people in whatever ways you can. It makes everyone happy.