Wellness Wednesday – Cultivate

Posted on May 16, 2018 by Thistle

I won’t lie to y’all – May has been just as tough as I expected. So far, I’ve been coping with the crushing ghost-trauma** by binge-watching TV. While this isn’t the healthiest thing in the world, it’s far better than binge eating or drinking! I’ve also been forcing myself into a bit of exercise, though it’s far less than usual. (The heat – now into the high 90s in the day and already 75 by morning – has a lot to do with that, too.) Other than these two trying-to-stay-afloat action items, I’ve spent a bit of time creating a new life-goals journal, with color-in items meant to help me cultivate a life I love.

I decided to make this a little more artistic than my usual style. My bullet journal is all minimal and simple and list-oriented, but I bought a sketchbook for this one, with nice paper, and have been sketching my way though life goals. I’m not a great artist but I have a tiny bit of skill, and I’m pleased with how most of these came out (click pics to enlarge).

Included in the book are travel goals, health goals, weight loss, fitness, events to attend and places to see, home improvements and reminders to keep trying out new movies or foods or live productions. I might eventually add more as ideas come to me. This is meant to be an ongoing, rolling bucket-list type thing. I have it all indexed like a bullet journal, and the rest of the sketchbook will be used for journaling and sketching my experiences of some of the larger goals (like travel stuff).

So this has become a secondary coping strategy for me, and I’m doing okay. I’m doing about as well as can be expected in May, and I hope that most of the ghost-trauma is behind me now since I’ve passed the halfway point of the month!!

**Ghost-trauma: When the trauma of previous years was so acute that your body stored it in your subconscious and you relive it each year despite not going through any trauma in the present. This is not a medical term. Ha.

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Making the Most of Mother’s Day

Posted on May 14, 2018 by Thistle

So yeah. Yesterday morning was frustrating, waking up to water everywhere and a messed up kitchen ceiling. But I’m tired of days just going to hell because of things outside my control, and decided to do what I could to make this an awesome day. While we waited for our insurance people to send out the cleanup crew, the family went outside to begin the next phase of our landscaping project. The boys hauled rocks, Jason built rock walls, and I troweled up a small ditch along the sidewalk and walls to put in a wood border. My arms/wrist are sore and I have a few blisters, but the result was nice:

Late morning, the insurance people still hadn’t come, so we called back to find out their system was down. They gave us the go-ahead to get someone of our own to clean up and fix the toilet, so we called out our contractor friend James, who had already seen my posts on Facebook and volunteered to come out. It didn’t take him long to get things in order, and by early afternoon, we had a working bathroom again. Now we just wait for the adjuster to come, evaluate, and write up our claim so that we can get the kitchen ceiling and bathroom floor fixed/replaced.

(blooming!)

With that part out of the way, we all settled down to watch Forever My Girl. I’ve wanted to see it since it came out a few months ago, even though I knew that it would make the rational part of me angry. It’s a shame when romantic and rational sides collide, haha! It was a simultaneously cute and infuriating movie!

Afterwards, Jason and the boys took me out to a local restaurant called Pesto’s. We haven’t been there in a few years and hoped it would be just as good as we remembered. It was. First thing we discovered was that they had a Mother’s Day special going on – a free mimosa for moms! It was pretty and delicious:

For dinner, I had Romano-crusted chicken over linguine in a lemon-caper sauce (mmm), and Jason and I shared a slice of tiramisu afterwards while the boys had homemade sorbet. Everything there seems to be made from scratch with real ingredients (the Caesar salads, for instance, had anchovies in the dressing), and it was all 100% amazing. I can’t wait to have the other half of my dinner for lunch today!

In the end, it turned out to be a pretty nice Mother’s Day despite the chaos of the morning. I’m glad we were able to salvage something from the day!!!

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Sunday Coffee – Uh…Happy Mother’s Day?

Posted on May 13, 2018 by Thistle

Guess what? We woke up this morning to discover our master bathroom was covered in water and that it had soaked through the kitchen ceiling. You know, the kitchen ceiling that we fixed and repainted back in March? Sigh. We’re not sure exactly what broke – it looks like something in the pipe connected to the toilet tank – but either way, happy Mother’s Day to me, yes? Someone is coming out to clean up in the next hour or so, per our insurance’s orders, and then an adjuster will come out later this week. This time, this should be fully covered under our insurance after deductible. But MAN what a pain!

In other news, it’s been one of those weeks where tons of stuff happens. Morrigan had an AP exam, while the other boys had some end-of-course exams. I tried out a yoga class held at my local library for the first time. It was tough but good, and at the end, a fellow student came up to tell me that my poses were beautiful and inspiring, which completely made my day. Then I had to replace two bits of electronics – my Fitbit, which is still flaking out on me every few days, and my laptop.

With the first, I decided to go with a Bellabeat Leaf as a fitness tracker. After only a few days, I knew that it wasn’t going to work out. Step-tracking was ridiculously off (usually several thousand below my actual step count), and the accessory that allows you to wear it on your wrist – not my fave, but I thought I’d try it – was too small for me to wear. The Leaf is gorgeous, but completely impractical as a piece of fitness tracking for me, so I returned it. Pulled out my Charge again, slipped the tracker off its wristbands, and have been wearing it in my pocket. I found a neat Etsy shop that sells clip carriers for the Charge, so I ordered one. I’m essentially making my own One here, haha!

As for the second…sigh. Back in 2013, my Mac laptop of five years had an issue where its battery pack swelled and destroyed much of the hardware. It was a known issue, but because it was so old, the Mac was no longer under warranty. I didn’t like the new Mac OS, so I switched to a PC laptop with Windows 8 on it. (I tend to go back and forth between Macs and PCs, and I’m one of the few who actually liked Windows 8.) Unfortunately, that laptop only lasted two years, and died completely on a random day in 2015. Because we were moving back to San Antonio soon, we didn’t have the money to replace it with a Mac (which I wanted), so I got another crap HP laptop. Two years after that, the new laptop started falling apart.

That was last summer, but of course with Jason losing his job and all that, we didn’t have any money at all, so I’ve kept the thing limping along for the last year, hoping it didn’t die completely like the first PC laptop. Thankfully, it didn’t, but over the last few weeks, it had started to do funny things like restart at random several times a day. I didn’t trust it to last much longer. So I’m back to Mac. Got myself a MacBook that weighs about two pounds (!!!) and it took about five minutes to get it all set up. Of course, getting everything where I wanted, and logged in to all my sites etc, took a bit longer – I missed Feedly for about a week, for example – but I think I’m mostly caught up now. And I’m so, so happy to be with Apple again!

Lastly this week, there was Peter Pan. My youngest son, Laurence, decided to go out for the spring play at his middle school this year. They’re performing Peter Pan, and Laurence got the part of Mr. Darling. Small part, but perfect for his first go at non-musical acting. The two performances were on Thursday, and he did awesome! He was natural at projecting – probably because of the musicals he’s been in – so he was one of the only people on stage that you could actually hear. And he put emotion into his lines, where most of the kids just seemed to be reciting theirs. His emotion was a caricature (whine whine whine!) but it was still there (exaggerated “Mr Darling face” above). Afterwards, he kept talking about the other actors in relationship to his character in the play (his wife, his granddaughter, etc) which was just hilarious and generally one of my favorite things about theatre. He loved the experience and plans on going out for more in high school next year.

So that’s been my week. I’m focusing on those more positive moments like the play, and figure we’ll probably just put off celebrating Mother’s Day until next weekend.

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Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery Game

Posted on May 11, 2018 by Thistle

Are any of y’all playing this yet? Who am I kidding – I’m sure many of you are! What’s your experience been like? Are you playing as yourself or did you make up a character?

My game-name is Haley Redlin, and she’s in Slytherin. Jason and my boys are playing, too, and we’re all having quite a lot of fun. I love the choose-your-own-adventure aspect of this, though honestly I wish the choices led off in very different routes, so you could play the game multiple times and not essentially do all the same things. Mostly they seem to push you to do the same no matter what choices you make. Ah well. I’ve been having fun with it while I wait for the interactive fitness Harry Potter app to come out later this summer!

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WW – Great Courses: Stress and Your Body

Posted on May 9, 2018 by Thistle

For the last few weeks, I’ve been listening to a series of 24 lectures from Great Courses. These were taught by a professor named Robert Sapolsky, who was an excellent speaker. Not only was the subject matter something that strongly interested me, but Sapolsky made each lecture informative, entertaining, and engaging.

I’m not going to really talk much about the thousand things I learned about the way stress affects our bodies. There’s a reason this is a 12+ hour long series of lectures, and even then, we were just getting the basics. However, I did was to put this information out there. If you’ve ever been interested in the way psycho-social stress affects our biology, hormones, sleep, mental health, aging, in-utero children, digestive track, memory, metabolism, and a ton more, this is an excellent course. I got mine from Audible, but apparently you can get some kind of print copy with diagrams and such as well.

A sampling of interesting things I learned:

– People with major depressive disorder (one of several of my diagnoses) sleep differently from other people. Instead of sleeping more the way many people do when they’re depressed, they fall asleep like normal and wake super early (say, 4:00 am) feeling completely unrested but unable to go back to sleep. Their sleep patterns while actually asleep are disordered and unusual. Well…that’s about spot-on for me. I guess my upcoming sleep study – assuming I can get insurance approval – will show whether I’m disordered as well as unable to stay asleep with sleep aids!

– The evolution of hyenas is a fascinating subject. They are unlike other mammal species in so many ways. Look it up!

– Doctors should do more to test inflammation when they do regular blood exams. I’ve only had my inflammation level (CRP) tested once ever, but that level can affect cholesterol, blood pressure, and many other things that are tested for. (PS – Not talking about mythical fad diet inflammation here, but inflammation in the circulatory system and other parts of your body caused by certain hormones released when the stress response goes on too long. That’s over-simplified, but I didn’t want this to sound like I’m talking about something Mr Avocado might say. If you don’t know who that is, be thankful. Heh.)

– More tests need to be done for women. Too many tests are done on men only, but their results aren’t often accurate for female physiology. There’s been improvement in this area, but there’s still not enough known. Of course, I didn’t really need this lecture series to tell me that…

There you go. Just a tiny sampling. This is a great way to get a lot of good information. A lot of it is bad news for us, yes, but personally I believe that knowledge is power. When I know why things are going wrong inside me, I can more easily correct the circumstances that cause those things. Especially when it comes to psycho-social stress. It helps to me to understand why my metabolism when to hell a few years ago and why all my metabolic disorders appeared, and I can now make plans to reverse the process and improve my biological, hormonal, physiological selves. So I loved this lecture series and I’m so glad I took a chance in buying it. I definitely need to see what else Great Courses has to offer.

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Readathon: Since We Fell, by Dennis Lehane

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Thistle

Years ago, Rachel was a globe-traveling journalist with a hot career and her life put together. After a PTSD-related mental collapse, she’s become agoraphobic and has lost most of the people she was once friends with. The big exception is her husband, Brian, who has spent several years helping her to ease out of her comfort zone. Then a chance encounter one afternoon changes everything, and Rachel is thrown back into paranoia and fear. Only now, her fear is justified.

I’ll say this: Since We Fell was a far more engaging and intriguing thriller than I’ve read in quite some time. Similar to Stillhouse Lake, it focused on the psychology of someone who has experienced trauma and is struggling to cope. For a big chunk of the book, I honestly wondered if this would end up being a traditional thriller at all. It took a long, long time to get to the chance encounter and the actual thriller part of the book (about 160 pages). And I liked the book better before it went off on that route. I was quite enjoying the whole psychological bit.

However, even once the thriller part popped up, I continued to enjoy the book…up until the 3/4 mark of the book. One little happening – not even really a twist – was just too far out for me to suspend disbelief, and everything that happened after that point felt contrived and out of character. I sped-read through the rest, trying to salvage something. I nearly abandoned the book, and probably would have if I hadn’t been reading it during Readathon. It wasn’t that it was bad, it’s just that I didn’t believe it anymore. I couldn’t buy into the book after it veered way off the tracks. And it never recovered from that, for me. In the end, the book was just okay.

Posted in 2018, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Sunday Coffee – Books I’m Looking Forward To

Posted on May 6, 2018 by Thistle

It’s been weird, having a year where I’m anticipating very few book releases. With so little coming out that I’m looking forward to, I’ve found myself reading a lot of books that I never would have normally picked up. In some cases, that’s been good – Eleanor Oliphant comes to mind – but in others, it’s just been time-fillers. Over the last month, I’ve tried to weed out the time-fillers because they’re just not worth it for me and I rarely enjoy them all the way through. But that means that my to-investigate list is now down to nothing and my to-read list (excluding future releases) is at bare minimums. Sigh. Thankfully, though, there are some books coming out over the next few months that I’m really looking forward to.

The Poppy War by RF Kuang – I read a long sample of this one and completely fell in love. It’s another fantasy set in a different culture than I’m used to, and I hope it’s just as good as the last one I read! It just released this week, and I’m waiting for whichever comes first – an Audible credit or my library hold to arrive!

Markswoman by Rati Mehrotra – This one released in January and my library still hasn’t ordered it. I’d read a tiny preview on Kindle but it wasn’t enough to decide whether or not to keep it on my list. Last week, I went to Barnes & Nobles to get a copy to preview. I read a bit more, and decided to just buy the book. Hopefully it lives up to its beginning!

Bright We Burn by Kiersten White – This third installment of the alternate Vlad the Impaler story is one of the few 2018 releases that I’ve been anticipating. It arrives in June!

Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett – I loved Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy, so I’m hoping this will be just as good. He told me this one was releasing when I met him awhile back, and it sounded very interesting. Releases in August.

the Legion series by Brandon Sanderson – This is a series of novellas that is not Sanderson’s normal kind of books. I read the first novella years ago during a Readathon, but haven’t read the second. The third is supposed to release late in the summer, with the three novellas bundled into a single book, and I’m waiting until then to finish the series.

Interior Design Master Class by Carl Dellatore – I love learning about interior design. Jason bought me this book not long before the last Readathon. It’s huge and full of very detailed photos, with the print being secondary. My original plan was to read it during the ‘thon, but that didn’t work out because the print is TINY and my eyes were already too tired by the time I got to it. So I’ll read it sometime this summer instead.

Those are the big ones. Six books to look forward to for the next five months. I’m sure there will be others I read, of course, but again, I’m trying to stop with all the filler books. Which means that the blog might get a little quiet over the summer, or I might spend more time purely on health, wellness, kitties, or whatever else.

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Callback: Elantris

Posted on May 4, 2018 by Thistle

I first read Elantris by Brandon Sanderson back in 2012, and I’ll direct you to that link for a synopsis and/or my original review. It’s been nearly six years, and it was time to revisit the story and this world. Normally, I don’t write re-reviews, but I like this “callback” category when I have new thoughts and ideas about a book.

Let me start by saying that when I first read this book, I was relatively inexperienced in full-on fantasy as a genre. I’d only started reading Sanderson in March 2012, and Elantris was my seventh experience with the author in four months. I’d read a few other fantasy authors – most notably, Diana Wynne Jones – but I still had a lot of trouble with wrapping my head around new names, places, worlds, magic systems, creatures, etc. I felt the same about Elantris, though in the end, I declared the book a favorite of the year.

Now, it’s been six years. Despite this book initially being a favorite, it trickled from my mind very quickly. Certain parts of it remained memorable, as well as the general plot idea, but most disappeared completely. Hence the need for a reread. I chose to revisit the book on audio, read by Jack Garrett, a new-to-me narrator. For the record, he did a pretty good job. He sounded a bit too like a commercial announcer in places for my tastes, but mostly I enjoyed the production. I enjoyed the book even more, right from the very first minutes of listening.

The story begins immediately. One of the many storylines that entwine here is that of Prince Raoden, who wakes up to find himself taken by a local curse. He’s thrown into the city of Elantris, considered now to be a walking corpse. The king tells everyone that the prince has died rather than admit the shame of his son succumbing to the curse. When I say the story begins immediately, I mean that Prince Raoden wakes up cursed and finds himself bustled into Elantris by the middle of page two. Here’s the funny thing about that. My thoughts when I began the audiobook: “Wow, that starts fast. That’s probably the fastest I’ve ever seen Sanderson start a book.” Going back to revisit my original review: “The book was slow to start…After a hundred pages or so, though, it all came together and I found myself racing through it.” Ha! That’s the difference six years of reading fantasy makes.

There is a lot packed into these 600+ pages. Sanderson explores politics, religion vs faith, the effects of greed and hatred on a person’s soul, the struggles of women to be who they really are in a culture that expects them to be demure and frivolous, and the importance of study. One of the biggest themes is on the way our lives are changed by having a purpose.

The cursed Elantrians feel constant pain. Always hungry, every tiny cut or bruise acute because they never heal, not to mention the psychological trauma of being tossed into a prison city and separated from everyone and everything they loved. Some turn to violence, others to madness, others to despair. Raoden, however, has spent his life trying to figure out how to make the world a better place for his people, and he simply shifts focus. The Elantrians are now his people, and he attempts to drag them from a place of misery to one of purpose. Even if that purpose is simply to make shoes so that no one walks barefoot, or to plant seed corn so that there will be food to eat in a few months, the simple act of having a purpose helps to ease pain both physical and psychological. I love that so much.

So yes, I fell in love with this book all over again. Hopefully now, less of it will trickle away from me over time. And hopefully one day, Sanderson will return to this world and write more, as there is so much still left here to explore.

Posted in 2018, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Wellness Wednesday – Scale

Posted on May 2, 2018 by Thistle

Back when I was pregnant with my first son, Jason and I went down to our local Walgreens and bought two tubes of Chapstick. In reality, we bought one tube of Chapstick and a rotary bathroom scale, and somehow the clerk really messed up. We didn’t realize it until we got home. Anyway, this particular scale became a regular household fixture in 2000, and I weighed myself on it nearly every day for well over a decade. I went through my entire original weight loss journey on that scale. But halfway through said journey, I noticed something odd. The Wii Fit used to always be six pounds higher than my rotary scale, but suddenly it was more like four pounds higher. My weight continued to drop on the Wii, but not on my bathroom scale. There seemed to be a little bit of a reliability issue on the rotary scale – common for those, no?

(dirty and worn after so many years of use!)

I continued to use this scale anyway, for sentimental value. Then for Christmas in 2012, Jason gave me a digital scale that supposedly measured numbers like body fat percentage, and I began using both scales plus the Wii. (Do you remember how much I love data?) The new scale was identical to the Wii for weight, both about four pounds above the Chapstick scale. Still, I loved my Chapstick, and didn’t get rid of it until we moved to Boston in 2014. However, I found that the digital scale – which I didn’t use nearly as often as the rotary one – didn’t make a reliable daily scale. That was frustrating. I used it the whole year we were in Boston, but when we moved back to San Antonio, it broke in transit and I needed a new one. I bought and returned four scales in a row because they were grossly unreliable (you could step on it five times in a row and come out with five wildly different weights) before finally finding a decent scale from (ironically) Walgreens. This is what I’ve been using since then.

Of course, I don’t like my numbers to be inconsistent. When I first switched over to the new digital scale, I continued to keep my weights consistent with the rotary versions, so that my data wouldn’t reflect a big jump up when there wasn’t one. Unfortunately, since the Boston scale broke during the move and it took two months to find a scale that actually worked, I had no comparison numbers between the Boston scale and the new one. At the time, I decided to just assume they were the same (since the Wii showed about the same as the new scale). Rather than continuing to adjust the numbers to match up with the Chapstick scale, I just adjusted my original journey up to the new system. I know this is all ridiculous, but I really like my data to be consistent. Which made my recent predicament frustrating:

I noticed that my digital Walgreens scale was starting to act funny after almost three years of use (not to mention two cross-country moves). The little footies kept coming off, and even though they’re only a millimeter thick, the loss of one makes the weigh-in completely different, by plus/minus three pounds! Rather than waiting for the scale to become entirely broken, I decided to get a new one and compare the two so that I could adjust accordingly. Only it’s HARD to find a reliable digital scale! I bought one that was supposed to be good, only to have it vary wildly. It could be anywhere from 1-2 lbs off my previous scale, and could change by half a pound from one minute to the next. Sigh. Research time.

After scouring multiple credible review sites, two brands appeared to pop up most frequently for accuracy: EatSmart and Tanita. EatSmart also was noted over and over for excellent customer service, so I decided to go with them. I put in an Amazon order, and received the scale early last week. Immediately, I put the two scales to the test. Day after day, test after test, I found extremely reliable results on my weigh-ins. The numbers were slightly different, of course – I’d already known my Walgreens scale was becoming unreliable – and I was pleased to note that the new scale with about a pound under the old one. That makes an easy adjustment to my numbers for consistency’s sake. Yay!

As for body composition, my old Walgreens scale never did a very good job with that. It tells me, for instance, that my entire bone structure weighs only 5 lbs. Um, no. I only used the body comp function once a month as a general trend-tracker, and even then, I’ve mostly disregarded the numbers that it comes up with. I mean, when your body fat percentage can vary 5% from one day to the next, you know the measurement is highly inexact! Now, I know that these measurements are entirely estimates anyway, but I wanted something to be at least somewhat consistent for trend-tracking. The EatSmart scale is definitely that! I’ve measured in multiple days now, and it’s almost always around the same body fat percentage and other measurements. So in all ways, this scale ends up being a winner!

 

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April in Review

Posted on May 1, 2018 by Thistle

April is usually a difficult month for me. The weather changing from warm to hot, plus all the oak pollen that continues this month, typically makes for one depressed month. This year, I actually did really well in April. I only had one anxiety attack during the month, lasting about three days, but all the rest of the month was either okay to great. It was a very good month, all things told.

Goals
Crossed off a couple things from my list this month, mostly in going to new-to-me locations. It’s very hard for me to go outside my comfort zone, especially when it comes to new location and new places to drive to. But I visited the local meat market (one my family has literally intended to visit since we first moved here in 2006!), and also met my friend Nikki at a new-to-me restaurant in a new-to-me part of town (below). So I’m doing pretty well on that front.

Health
This is another area that was excellent for April. I exercised on 23 days, including 22 yoga sessions and 35 miles walked, for a total of almost 22 hours of exercise this month. I averaged over 10k steps per day, an increase from previous months. I continued to track my calories every day this month, and ended up with an overall deficit equal to 3.5 lbs. But here’s the real kicker: my weight has continued to drop all month. Not much – from Apr 1st to May 1st, the drop is only 1.2 lbs – but that number is very deceptive. I’ve been dropping steadily since early March. To give a scope, I’ve been taking both weekly and monthly weight averages since we first moved back to Texas, and the graphs have shown a sudden change in the way things are going for me. While my weight only technically dropped 1.2 lbs in April, averages tell a different story: My average April weight is 3.7 lbs less than my average March weight. Sometimes averages tell more than the individual daily weigh-ins!

This shows every week’s average from September until now. Each graph line represents one pound. From September through January, my averages stayed steady within a two-pound range (area by the red horizontal line). Then around the week when my grandmother passed away, my averages bumped up for a little over a month (blue circle), staying in a two-pound range but over my previous range. Starting in early March (at the vertical orange line), my average week weights have gone down every single week. They are below where they have been since we moved to Texas, and they’re starting to creep down to levels I haven’t seen in well over a year. Yay progress!

Books
My reading mojo has been really blah lately. I read five books this month, three of which were just okay. Of the two good ones, one was a reread of a favorite. So I’ve only had one new-to-me book that I’ve loved in the last six weeks or so. Clearly I need to spend less time finishing books that are just so-so for me, and more time looking for books that I’ll love! Favorite of the month (excluding the reread): I’ll Be Your Blue Sky by Marisa de los Santos.

Highlights of April
Always fun to look back on the best parts of the month! Especially when there are a lot of them. Things that called for celebration in April include:

  • Easter with my extended family
  • Atticus walking unexpectedly into our lives
  • the district-wide book sale
  • seeing A Wrinkle in Time in theatre finally
  • finally walking to my old neighborhood and back, something I’ve wanted to do since we moved back to San Antonio last August
  • breaking through a major barrier on the scale
  • finishing the first tier in our landscaping project
  • Trading Spaces starting up again (yay!)
  • being able to re-rescue Jojo when the situation at the Cat Cafe blew up
  • beginning the 100 Happy Days project
  • area rugs in our living room after having hard floors for nine months (whew!)
  • watching Atticus and Jojo bond with each other (below)
  • Jason finding my mom’s tatting that had been missing since we moved here in August
  • the new Harry Potter mystery game app
  • meeting up with my college friend Nikki for the first time in 12 years
  • Morrigan loved the college he visited this month (KU)
  • Morrigan starting driver’s ed

Coming up in May
Confession: May used to be a really good month for me. However, I experienced a lot of trauma in May back in 2014, then more in May 2015, and more in May 2017. Because I have complex-PTSD, my body tends to hold on to trauma in my subconscious. Every year, I re-experience the physical demands of that trauma even without knowing exactly why/what I’m experiencing. This results in lots of panic attacks, anxiety, depression, agoraphobia, and other manifestations, completely unrelated to the present time. In other words, my subconscious is a bitch. No matter how much I prepare myself for the upcoming blows, they are deep-rooted in my nervous system and I have no psychological control. Eventually, my body will process this trauma and let go of it, but that takes time, and I fully expect there to be some really rough moments in May.

I’m going to do my best to keep myself together. Counter anxiety with logic, refuse the urge to drown my triggered state with food or alcohol, spend a lot of time doing yoga to keep my nervous system as calm as possible, etc. Nearly all the trauma occurred in the first half of the month, so I just need to get through the first few weeks and then (hopefully) I’ll be okay. Just…send a little positive energy out in the world for me, if you can, to help me through the next month. I appreciate it!!

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