As I’ve been working on recovering from all the stress of the past few months and trying to find ways to still make progress on my goals without worsening my current degree of burnout, I’ve realized that my most restful days of late are days that include a mixture of actual rest, enjoyable activities, and moderate productivity. While I’ve always known this to some degree or another, I’ve never been able to nail down a formula for it. Experimentation over the last few weeks though, has had startlingly positive results. If I have enough rest and relaxation intermingled with a moderately busy day of self-directed activity, it is usually a net-restful day for me, even if I’m cleaning my apartment and doing all my laundry. If I can be a little productive on a day set aside to not need productivity while also engaging in restful occupation, it is usually quite restful.
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Bank The Coals For Tomorrow’s Efforts
Sometimes, on a day that is busy beyond measure, I find myself settling down at my computer to write a blog post with the thought tumbling through my head that, maybe, this would be a good day to skip this exercise. I am frequently full of eloquent and entirely reasonable justifications for why it would best for my mental health and physical well-being to skip a day. I constantly remind myself that I can always make up for lost time by writing an additional post some day in the future, when I have the energy to spare, or that I could simply allow myself to skip a day since there is no reason not to take days of rest when I feel the need. “Rest,” I tell myself, “and you will be better prepared for whatever comes your way tomorrow.”
Continue readingThe Fuel To Your Fire
Spite can be a powerful motivator. I can think of a huge number of things I’ve done just to prove people wrong, and I can think of times spread across my entire life that it has motivated me to act when I otherwise might not have. It is growing less and less frequent, though, as time passes. Spite burns brightly, but it burns quickly as well. Spite can be used to alleviate exhaustion from burnout, but it generally leaves me feeling worse once I’ve burned through it. These days, I’m pretty much out of everything I used to burn as the fuel that drove my work. I get by on discipline and inertia, but nothing has really stepped up to take the place of the hope I once felt.
Continue readingSilence And The Heart Of The Problem
It can be difficult for me to take a moment to quietly think something over.
I’ve spent so much time trying to fill the space in my life that used to be occupied by friends and living in the world at large. Podcasts, audio books, music, video games, and even talking to myself. So much of what occupies my days is something I started to help me get through the periods when I feel like the weight of the pandemic is going to crush me.
Continue readingMaking Do With Depression
I’ve been cleaning my apartment. After months of doing just enough to not feel gross or awful, I’m finally doing a deep the-inside-of-the-fridge-is-sparkling-just-like-the-stove-interior clean. I have taken time off of work, I’ve created my to-do lists, and I’ve done my best to get my mind clear so I can focus on the work of cleaning without getting distracted. Got an old favorite podcast queued up to keep me entertained, got fresh cleaning products, and I’ve once again confronted the fact that mass-produced rubber gloves for cleaning almost never come in my size. I’m all set to clean and then maybe file my taxes if I have enough wherewithal left to string together the coherent thoughts required to let TurboTax file my taxes for me.
Continue readingOvercoming Trauma At The Dentist’s Office
I had to go to the dentist recently. Apparently, an old filling needed some fixing and my new dentist was much more proactive in terms of cavity filling than my old one. My old dentist was of the opinion that, if it was minor and not growing due to improved dental hygiene habits, then it didn’t need to be filled unless it was causing pain or discomfort or was poised to grow rapidly into something terrible instead of slowly growing worse. That made sense to me, as someone who had poor dental hygiene habits early in life but eventually grew into a collection of very good dental habits, but my new dentist is much less convinced. And far more persuasive than my last one, given that she was able to sell me on getting the fillings.
What makes this significant and worth writing about for reasons other than the misguided assumption that the universe at large cares about my day-to-day life, is that I hate getting dental work done. My childhood dentist did not believe in sensitive teeth, never attempted to address the pain I felt during dental procedures as someone with sensitive teeth in any appreciable way, and wrote off all my complaints and efforts to avoid pain as the normal complaints of a child who doesn’t want to be stuck in a chair. Given my personal situation at the time, I did my best as a child and teenager to endure it, but it left a lasting negative impression on me that endures to this day, even after a few years of actually good dental care with dentists and dental hygienists who take my concerns seriously. Which is, you know, a trauma response.
What really put it in perspective for me was the realization that while I may have been using meditative techniques to make my breathing even, stay physically still, and remain outwardly calm, I was actually disassociating during the work itself. I don’t remember any of the time when the work was being done, just the early bits where I was getting adequately numbed up and walked through the process my dentist was about to embark upon. It wasn’t painful, it wasn’t terribly traumatic itself, but being in a dentist’s chair while the painfully familiar whir of a dentist’s implements fills the air is apparently enough to drive me right outside of myself. Honestly, the meditation and embodying techniques I used are probably the only thing that kept me conscious and coherent in retrospect.
When you’re working through PTSD in the type of therapy I’m doing, called EMDR, you and your therapist spend time coming up with a series of techniques for self-management. Containering is a technique for putting away all of the potentially traumatic thoughts you’re working through between sessions, and it’s very useful for dealing with temporary anxiety as well. There’s another technique, which I have forgotten the name for, to help you combat disassociation that would be detrimental to your attempts to process trauma during therapy that you couldn’t handle while it was occurring. My therapist and I came up with a word that I don’t use commonly and attached it to a specific mental construct that had a connection to all of my senses and reflected a moment that I always felt calmed and embodied by. For therapy, mine was the word “Melancholy” and the mental construct is sitting beside a partially-open window on a chilly, rainy day as the rain pounds against the roof overhead. While I keep that word and this specific technique for only therapy sessions and panic attacks, the process of embodying yourself by activating your senses is one I use more generally during meditation and apparently dental work.
Typically, when you’ve been traumatized by something, you try to avoid similar scenarios until you’ve had the opportunity to process the trauma. Unfortunately, if you want to keep your teeth healthy, you have to keep going to the dentist. I tried not going for a very long time and while I did have good dental habits, they weren’t always perfect and I did not receive corrections until I finally started going to the dentist again. So now I make sure to go every six months to avoid future problems and do my best to overcome my dental trauma as on-going care (wisdom tooth extraction, putting a crown on a cracked tooth, and then this recent filling work) happens without pain or significant discomfort. Honestly, my back and hands hurt worse than my mouth did, because of how clenched my hands were for the entire process and how my back muscles kept cramping in the dentist’s chair (gonna skip arm and back workouts on future dentist days).
Still, it is a slow process, recovering from yet another source of trauma from my childhood, but I think I’m glad I’ve been doing it side-by-side with my work on the trauma from my parents and brother. After all, it’s nice to have an example of what it’s like to work through trauma with someone who recognizes you were traumatized and is not only patient with you, but actively working to help you feel safe and comfortable. Like a therapist for my teeth.
Reclaiming Home And Resting Peacefully
I haven’t been reading much lately. I have no problem finding books that sound interesting and I can afford to buy books I want (I also live a block away from a library so I could get access to books easily even if I couldn’t afford to buy them), but I still haven’t read much in the past couple years. Most of the reason for that ties back to the pandemic, my current living situation, and issues from my past coming together in a way that leaves me unable to relax enough to feel like I can get lost in a book. Any time I hear my neighbors thump around their apartment, any time I get stiff from sitting still from too long, or any time I start to lose track of time and feel a brief moment of panic that I’m breaking from the routines that have let me survive the stress of the pandemic, I get pulled out of the book.
There’s a lot to unpack there, but it is can easily be summed up by me admitting that I don’t feel “at home” in my apartment. Even as I attempt to address the stress and past issues, I still find myself thinking “I don’t have a home, I have a place I live.” It’s a difficult mental space for me to break out of because I grew up in a situation that made me feel the same way. Even with making a home at my college and in one of my apartments since then, I’ve spent so much more time in a living situation that feels like a place I merely occupy for now, rather than a place I feel safe and like I can control or own. Which is why I am having so many problems sleeping and why I can never seem to nap. It’s why my insomnia seemed to go away the instant I left the house I grew up in and didn’t return as an actual inability to sleep until my current living situation.
That’s the thing about rest. You can only do it if you don’t feel anxious about your safety. I didn’t ever feel safe in my parents’ house (and still don’t thanks to all that trauma) and one of my first experiences in my current apartment laid the groundwork for not feeling safe there. I got my wisdom teeth removed the summer I moved into that apartment and discovered that I have a bad reaction to oxycodone when I developed severe paranoia, had bad nightmares, and couldn’t sleep until the two doses I’d taken left my system because I kept instantly waking up thinking someone was trying to break down my door. It was probably just my upstairs neighbors being noisy as they continued to do until they moved out despite my requests that they quiet down during the late night hours, but it’s difficult to parse that information when you’re in a drug-addled sleep-state.
I stopped taking the oxycodone and made-do with Tylenol (which worked just fine since I have a pretty high pain tolerance) and it didn’t really come up again until late January of 2021 when my upstairs neighbors got even noisier than they had been, to the point of waking me up repeatedly in the middle of the night with their thumping and banging. It didn’t help that I was perhaps the most stressed and alone I’d ever been in my life, so I wasn’t in a good place going into that period. I got through it, though, and I’m doing a lot better now, but I’m still struggling with the feeling that my apartment of almost two years still doesn’t feel like a “home” to me.
As someone who definitely can’t afford to buy a house and the types of rentals that would allow me to live without noisy nieghbors banging on walls or floors are not something I could rent without roomates, there aren’t many good solutions to this problem. I could maybe move somewhere less expensive, find a better paying job, get a roommate or two, or move in with a friend who just bought a place despite how terrible a location it is for me and everything I’d do other than hangout with that friend (a minimum 45 minute commute in heavy local traffic, so I wouldn’t even enjoy the drive). None of these are guarenteed to succeed or even likely to happen before I have to renew my lease again. I could try moving, of course, to another rental with similar issues but fewer negative past associations, but rent is increasing so fast I’m not sure I can afford to live in a place of a similar quality to my current apartment (which, honestly, isn’t that high even if I ignore all factors other than the noisy neighbors).
There really aren’t a lot of great options, right now, which definitely isn’t helping my current stress levels. I’ve been trying to work on reclaiming my space and making my living space feel more like a “home” instead of just the location I sleep most nights, but that’s slow work. Slowed even more by my almosted0 recovered financial position, mounting stress as a Human in the world, and the increasing isolation of frequently feeling like one of the only people who is still taking on-going pandemic seriously. It’s not great, honestly, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do about it. I’d hoped that writing my thoughts out here would provide a solution, that I’d come up with some kind of idea for what to do or at least feel a bit better about my slow but steady progress, but I just sort of feel tired. Which is all I’ve felt lately, if I’m being honest. Tired.
I’m going to do my best to relax a little bit, to try to reclaim my own space in a way that will help me work on my other goals, and I hope you make some progress on relaxing yourself. Or on personal goals. Whatever you’re working on, I hope it goes well.
A Bright Spot In A Cold Winter
Today (day of writing this) was a wonderful, warm day. By which I mean the temperature hit the 40s in the sun and I celebrated by going for two walks, both of which eschewed my heavy coat and hat. I even rolled my sleeves up to maximize my total amount of exposed skin so I can get the most benefit from the sun as possible. I know this warmth is short-lived because the temperature is already beginning a slow decline towards the single digits (which it should hit by tomorrow), but it gives me hope that things are improving. Or at least that the winter is turning away from frigid cold and back toward moderately freezing.
Continue readingEyeing My Health (Or Lack Thereof)
As someone who has had a lot of eye problems in the past year, and whose eye problems are cropping up once again, it is difficult to adjust to using only one eye. Now, my particular issue is not so severe that I am likely to lose an eye over it, and I am one hundred percent struggling when someone else might not because eye stuff is is super gross to me, but I am currently in a situation where it is better (or at least easier) for me to keep this one particular eye closed for an extended period of time. Too long and I start to get a headache from the sort of lopsided use of my eyelid muscles. Too little and the dry air at work, on top of the general sensitivity of my eye in this state, causes me to experience near-constant stabbing pain. I usually wind up erring on the side of a headache because ibuprofen can fix that but it can’t do anything for the stabbing pain and sensitivity.
Continue readingStealing Zoo Terminology To Talk About Pandemic Isolation
One of my favorite things about having friends in various industries is that most of them introduce new terms and ideas to me that have very specific meanings in their industry. One of my friends is a chef, so I’ve learned a lot of super specific words related to food preparation and the various utensils found in a kitchen. Another friend is zookeeper, so I’ve learned a great deal of terms from that industry and how they’re used for specific purposes. Like “enrichment.” In the context of zookeeping, it is the stuff zookeepers provide for the animals to ensure they live interesting, varied lives so that the animals can stay intellectually and physically stimulated. It has been a wonderful word to have over the past 1.75 years of the pandemic, since it has helped draw my attention to the shortfalls of my life that need to be addressed.
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