Chasing Happiness

Posted on October 22, 2018 by Thistle

Warning: This post is long and discusses depression, shame, body image, and other related topics that may be triggering to some. I’m very honest about my feelings, particularly about my body, but I’m not looking for confidence boosts or compliments. I appreciate everything that you guys do to lift me up when I’m feeling frustrated and stuck, and I do understand that there are some of you who take inspiration from hearing about my struggles and my refusal to quit. As I’m sure you’ve all experienced, however, a person’s personal struggle and their feelings may not exactly reflect those of the people around them. This post was something I needed to expunge from my thoughts. I feel lighter for writing it, though that doesn’t erase those thoughts and feelings. I process my grief and struggles through writing, though, so I’ve decided to publish this despite it being such a negative post. Please don’t worry about me, I’m okay. I just needed to write a few things.

I’ve suffered from depression since I was ten years old. When I look back over my adult life, from the time I left for college until now, I see very few spots of bright light and happiness. They are so few that I can name them off and make a photo collage. The summer of 1999 when I went on a study abroad program to France. The summers of 2006 and 2007 when I was in contact with my favorite band (and got to meet them in person). January 2011 through June 2013, while I was losing weight (more on this later). January through April 2014, after my abdominal surgery helped me regain my body’s true figure. Two weeks in the summer of 2016 while on vacation, which hardly count since it was vacation. That’s it. The sum of happiness in my adult life. About 3.5 years of the last twenty-one.  Continue reading →

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Sunday Coffee – Chopping Down the Chinaberry Trees

Posted on October 21, 2018 by Thistle

Chopping down trees – this is a thing I do not like to do. Unless the tree is dangerous or dead, I’d rather keep them up no matter how annoying. At my pre-Boston house, we had two ash trees that would drop so many seeds each year that they would blanket the entire front yard. We basically had to rake up ash seeds, which is extremely difficult. But we still never cut them down.

When we bought this house last year, the front yard was done up nicely. There were five trees providing plenty of shade, and despite the slope, everything looked beautiful. Then a couple things happened. First, there was a hurricane-turned-tropical-storm that blew through San Antonio. Our neighbor had a tree fall where it was sitting on a similarly-sloped lawn, and we decided we needed to build a retaining wall around the tree that was on the most sloped part of our lawn, making sure it could stay upright. Then all the chinaberries began to drop from two of our trees, littering the entire yard and driveway. With that litter came the flies. Thousands of them, feasting on these dropped berries, which is just gross gross gross. Then we realized the sloped yard was eroding, and began to xeriscape. We built carefully around all our trees to make sure none were damaged. We researched local, non-invasive species to plant. And once it was all done, thousands of little tiny plants started sprouting throughout all our new beds, all identical.

(yard, before)

As it turns out, chinaberry trees are pernicious and highly invasive. Wherever they drop berries, new trees will grow, and when you pull the seedlings, new trees will grow from the same damn berry over and over and over again. And we had thousands of these berries in our yard. Back when there was grass, the seedlings would get mowed and we never even noticed them. But we did notice the way that grass didn’t keep growing in our yard, and how the lawn was slowly turning into a dirt pit. We thought it was erosion, and that was some of it, but some of it was just that the berries acidified the soil and made it impossible for grass to grow and hold the dirt down. Every week post-xeriscaping I would pull these weeds, and yet they kept taking root. They would grow in the most unlikely places, like under rocks as the one in this picture.

When the berries started dropping again this year, we bit the bullet and called someone to chop down both of our chinaberry trees. In researching, these and hackberry trees are the only two that San Antonio recommends cutting down even if the trees aren’t sick or a danger to structures. They are that invasive. We couldn’t really afford the cost – not to mention needing to plant a new tree to eventually replace the shade to our yard and house – but we did it.

Our yard looks very different now, and we have to restructure our xeriscaping around where the new tree will go. I suppose it’s good that we were having to do this restructuring anyway due to the plumbing issues, and that there was nothing permanent for these trees to destroy as they came down.  It’s frustrating nonetheless, and we just hope we can find a good place to plant the new tree, far enough from structures, driveway, plumbing, and the previous chinaberry tree roots. And we hope that the trees won’t just start growing back, given their pernicious nature. In the meantime, we’ve chosen a native, non-invasive species to put in our yard, a live oak. It’ll be years before it’s fully grown, but that’s totally worth it for a tree that won’t cause all the trouble that those chinaberries caused!

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A Heart in a Body in the World, by Deb Caletti

Posted on October 19, 2018 by Thistle

Annabelle is running. Running from her past. Running from her future. Just running. From Seattle to DC, her grandpa as her support team in his old RV, her friends at home a self-appointed publicity team. She’s not running for a cause, but her journey is embraced across the country nonetheless. And as Annabelle’s miles pile up and she meets supporters along the way, she begins to unravel the trauma that changed her life the year before.

It’s been several years since I’ve read a Deb Caletti novel. Honestly? I worried that I’d outgrown her stories the way I’ve outgrown many of the YA authors I loved a decade ago. It happens. Furthermore, I wasn’t sure this was my kind of book. I wanted to try, though. As I said, it’s been a few years.

A couple chapters in, I wasn’t sure I would keep reading, but now for a different reason. This book was stressful. In our current political climate, it’s difficult to read a story of a young woman who loses control of her personal autonomy. It’s difficult to read about violence against women, and bullying, and male dominance, and entitlement, and the taking of a future purely out of selfish pettiness.

This was a very good book. It discusses some deadly serious subjects and charged political issues, but handles them with grace and subtlety. (As much as that is possible, anyway.) The psychological changes that Annabelle undergoes are gradual and believable. The events of her past are uncovered slowly, revealing a series of warning signs that are all too easy to overlook.

Because that is the crux of the issue: Women are taught to be nice, to forgive everything, to empathize. Unless a man is showing blatant, overt hostility (and sometimes not even then), we’re taught to ignore the warning signs and give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps the man is sensitive or awkward or just needs someone to care for and understand him. We’re taught to disregard our intuition in favor of the man’s needs or feelings, even when that intuition is screaming RUN RUN RUN, and when we act on our intuition, we’re dismissed as “paranoid.” All the while, too many women don’t act on those instincts, and suffer the consequences of not being “paranoid.” None of this is okay.

And it was not okay for Annabelle, for her friends, for her family. One person in this book characterizes such psychological and physical violation against women as “a permanent life sentence.” The book, to me, is encapsulated in this one incredibly powerful paragraph:

“I live in this system, you know, you do, we do, where the control and the shutting up is such a regular thing that we sometimes don’t even see it. Where there are rules and rights for him and rules and rights for her and they are different rules and rights. The system says who gets to control who, and who is entitled to power and protection and who isn’t, and every day I run because I just don’t know what to do about it or how to change it.”

It was a very hard book to read, but entirely worth it. My love for Caletti’s writing and stories is confirmed. I never should have doubted.

Posted in 2018, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Happy 18th Birthday, Morrigan!

Posted on October 18, 2018 by Thistle

My oldest child is now officially an adult. He can vote, and plans to next week when early voting starts. He’s finished college applications and has been accepted to his top choice (Kansas University). In the spring, he’ll be getting his first job to save money for college. It’s crazy to think he’s been in our lives now for 18 years. It just doesn’t feel that long. Welcome to the world of adulthood, oldest child of mine.

Posted in Personal | 5 Comments

Wellness Wednesday – Health Glitches

Posted on October 17, 2018 by Thistle

It’s been an interesting month so far. On the first, I found a lump in my left breast. On the third, my doctor confirmed that there was something there, though she suspected it was fibrocystic tissue possibly related to perimenopause. On the eighth, I had an ultrasound and mammogram, where they (thankfully) found nothing abnormal. So that first week was a rollercoaster of emotions that ended in relief.

Then last week, I had blood drawn for my semi-annual health checkup. The last time I did this, I had mostly good improvements from the previous autumn. This time around, I was expecting bad bad bad. After months of living on restaurants and microwavable meals, hardly able to exercise, and dealing with stress and weight gain on top of that, I knew my numbers would be much worse than in April. I was surprised, then, to get my lab results and discover mostly positive changes. All aspects of my cholesterol were better than before, some the best they’ve ever been. My glucose numbers are up slightly, but still within normal range and right close to where they usually stay. My insulin is back to normal for the first time in years, and my inflammation levels have gone from very elevated to only mildly elevated. My iron levels are smack in the middle of normal instead of being super high. My liver-function numbers are doing fantastic. Everything looks great, with one exception that ties in to the first part of this post.

Both my estrogen and progesterone levels are at post-menopausal levels. The progesterone in particular came in at nearly the bottom of post-menopausal range. My doctor already suspected I was in perimenopause despite only being 39 years old. That would explain a few symptoms I’ve had, as well as the development of fibrocystic tissue. It also ties in with family history of early menopause (usually by mid-40s). But I’m not menopausal or post-menopausal yet, not by a long shot. Those numbers shouldn’t be nearly as low as they are. This means two things: First, these numbers are likely being affected by my PCOS, and I need to work with my Ob/Gyn to get them back to normal. I have an appointment in January for specific hormone work after specific blood tests to come in December. Second, these out-of-whack hormones are possibly affecting my health in many ways, from difficulty losing weight to the bizarre changes to my senses of smell and taste over the last nine months.

[Side-note backstory: In January, I lost my sense of smell completely (anosmia). I thought it was related to a series of illnesses that lasted until I got strong antibiotics in April, but my sense of smell didn’t return until June 1st, when I came home to find my house torn to pieces and plaster dust everywhere. After that, the only thing I could smell for two months was plaster, and any food with a high fat content tasted spoiled/rancid. I actually threw out a jar of peanut butter, thinking it had gone bad. This isn’t the same as when you’re sick and things taste weird. This was a full-blown change in sensory perception. My doctor put me on prednisone for something else, and since then I can’t eat 90% of dairy products because they taste like copper. (That’s a common side effect, but it’s supposed to go away after you finish the medicine. It’s been three months since I finished.) Then one day, very sudden, the plaster went away and everything smelled like undercooked sweet bread. Rancid and copper tastes stayed. Then after another month, another sudden shift occurred and the only thing I could smell was sewage. That’s where I stand today. If there’s a strong odor of gasoline or pizza or rain, it smells like sewage. If it doesn’t smell like sewage, then I can’t smell it at all. Obviously, this is a problem, and I’m at a loss to explain it. I thought it might have been my previous antidepressant because I lost my sense of smell after we increased the dosage, but I’ve been off that medicine for nearly four months and nothing has changed.]

I saw my primary care doctor yesterday to discuss the lab results. Unfortunately, he was called away on an emergency and I had to see a different doctor in the practice, but I still told him about the anosmia after he went through my lab results. My next step – sigh – is to get a brain MRI to make sure there are no physical obstructions in my brain, pituitary gland, or sinus region. The anosmia might also indicate the development of full-blown hemochromatosis (a genetic high blood iron disorder that runs in my family, and which I’ve been tested genetically-inclined-to-develop with two abnormal markers in my DNA). I had no idea that changes in sensory perceptions could be caused by hemochromatosis, and since my iron, ferritin, and iron-binding levels are all on the lower end of normal right now, I’m pretty sure that’s not it. But I’m also hoping that this brain MRI thing comes back negative. It’s kind of a scary time for my health right now!

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The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, by Kiersten White

Posted on October 15, 2018 by Thistle

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein revisited through the eyes of Elizabeth Frankenstein.

I read Frankenstein about twenty years ago and honestly, I barely remember much from the book itself. I remember some of the class discussions afterwards, but that’s it. If I had remembered it well, I most likely wouldn’t have read this book. I tend to dislike retellings or reimaginings of classics except in very specific circumstances. So I have no idea if this book follows the events of the original, no idea if it touches on the same elements, no idea if it follows the same timeline, no idea if it introduces the same characters. I have to take it as its own entity, with the original Frankenstein far in the background.

And I’m not sure I liked it. There were certainly many interesting elements, and I liked the idea of following Elizabeth through the story. One big thing got on my nerves, though, and eventually caused my interest to fade. There were too many flashback sections that served to fill in exposition backstory. I would have loved to see those integrated into the story instead of being a constant stop in the flow.  By the time I was just past the halfway point of the book, I almost gave up on it. I think I kept reading purely because it was a quick and easy read, even though I kept getting annoyed. By the end, while it felt like a good story, I missed the deeper, thicker elements of the original. This felt like just a story, not a philosophical and religious struggle, or even a gender-related struggle, which is what it seemed to imply in the beginning.

I don’t know. I guess I was just disappointed. I loved White’s Vlad the Impaler series so much. It was thick and rich and full of intricacy, and I wanted this to be the same. I think it could have been the same. But it wasn’t, not for me, and in the end, it would have been better had I stopped reading at the point when I realized the book wasn’t going to work for me.

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Sunday Coffee – Ghost Stories

Posted on October 14, 2018 by Thistle

Audible has started giving away two of its Original productions to members each month. This month, I picked a nonfiction listen for November, and a short ghost story for RIP. The audio was just over half an hour long, so I put it on one morning to accompany my walk. The story – Lullaby by Jonathan Maberry, narrated by Scott Brick – was deliciously creepy. It’s so rare to find ghost stories in the traditional sense of the word. Not thrillers or mysteries or supernatural horror, but full-on ghost stories with subtle hints and maybe-just-a-coincidence and all the details left to the imagination. Because the imagination is a scary place. Just think about the ghost stories we tell as children and how we can’t fall asleep afterwards, even though we know it’s not real.

When I was a kid, the best creepy stories came in my grandmother’s basement. There were no windows in the basement, and there were rooms full of pickled things (food, but hey, as kids, rows of jars pickling things are scary!), and there was a buzzer that scared the crap out of us every time the adults used it to call us upstairs. We told stories and terrified ourselves, especially after the lights went out and we were literally in complete, total darkness. The taxidermy deer and bear heads on the walls took on a sinister air. Once, we shined flashlights into the bear’s glass eyes, saw movement in them (our flashlights!), and were terrified that there were spies looking out at us. This is the stuff of creepy horror childhood, and Lullaby had exactly that feel.

I love this kind of book. I had chills nearly the entire time I listened and walked. I crave more of this kind of story, better even in longer, novel form.

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Muse of Nightmares, by Laini Taylor (audio)

Posted on October 12, 2018 by Thistle

Warning: Mild spoilers for Strange the Dreamer, but none for this book.

Now that Lazlo has awoken his abilities and Sarai is “differently alive,” everything has changed. Lazlo faces a choice: betray the person he loves, or betray the entire city he loves, including all of his friends. It’s an impossible choice, one he can’t make, and as he tries to puzzle through to a new solution, a new enemy comes to call.

It has taken me a long time to decipher what I want to say about this book. I loved Strange the Dreamer and have read/listened to it three or four times since it released. The book is subtle and heavy on friendships and full of so many threads that have to find their way to each other. It’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. Muse of Nightmares was one of my most anticipated books this year, even more so not knowing if it would come out at all in 2018. I preordered the audiobook the second it was available, and likewise began listening immediately on the release date.

Let me start by saying that this lead-up makes it sound like I’m disappointed in the book, or that I disliked it, neither of which is the case. I loved it from the opening chapter, where we meet new characters, and new storylines emerged. The suspense from the end of Strange picks right back up in the Citadel, so that the beginning of the story is flush with tension. All throughout, I kept wondering how things would tie together, and how there could be so many hours left in the audiobook when it seemed like the end was so close. Then a new thing would happen, and my predictions would unravel, and the story would go places I hadn’t expected at all. I found myself several times begging characters (aloud) to step up and do what they could to repair or save situations. “Come on, Minya! Come on, Suheyla!” And the ending was just perfect. I thought this was a trilogy, but it appears to be a duology instead, with a closed off story and the potential to unlock future stories set in Taylor’s series of worlds.

The problem I’m having now – with the book, with writing a review – is that I feel like I’m too close to the book to properly evaluate it. The same thing happened when I read Dreams of Gods and Monsters, the third book in the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series. When I first read it, my remarks were that it felt rushed and random toward the end, that threads didn’t come together. I admitted that this was probably my own fault, reading too quickly so that the last 200 pages were a blur. And indeed, when I went back and revisited the book via audio three year later, nothing felt rushed or random or hanging. Everything came together well, and the story was picture perfect throughout. While I don’t have quite the same quibbles with Muse of Nightmares, I have the distinct impression that it’s the same situation. I listened to that audiobook in two days, dropping everything to just keep listening. I rushed instead of savoring. And some things nagged at me: a plot element seemed too convenient; some of the more serious elements (like death) were handled too casually for my liking; so much of the story took place on the Citadel with the same five characters instead of an even spreading around through the cast.

There are beautiful things too, though. The bond of sisters who can only rely on each other. The toll it takes on a person to endure years of hate in order to protect others from the same. The regrets in realizing you’ve missed opportunities, and the discovery that change starts at this very moment, not at some time in the past that you’ve missed. There is ever-expanding love and friendship; there is newly awakened mothering instinct; there is the struggle between the need for vengeance and the grief that is left when you realize you’re too late to the fight. So much in this book, and I just need time to process it all.

I’ve already begun a second listening of the story, with the aim of going a lot slower and really soaking up all the elements. While I don’t think that it’ll entirely dispel my discomfort with a few things – that, I imagine, won’t come until I look back at the book after a year or two of distance – it’s been helping me to get my thoughts and feelings grounded. As I said above, I did love the book and series. I just wish I loved this second book as much as Strange the Dreamer. One day I will, I know that for sure. But for now, I can’t seem to fully wrap my head around the entire book and the giant narrative world that it encompasses.

Performance: Steve West reads this series and does an absolutely amazing job. I’ve only listened to three books that he narrates, but he’s fast becoming one of my favorite audio narrators.

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Running Part 3: Starting Over

Posted on October 10, 2018 by Thistle

Part 1: C25K
Part 2: Peak

After we moved to Boston in 2014, I pretty much quit running altogether. I hadn’t done much for a year before that move, first because of training injuries, then because of abdominal surgery. After we moved, though, I quit altogether. I was new to the area with none of my normal training routes and a heck of a lot of depression, anxiety, and other mental health and family issues. I only ran once the entire year in Boston, at the end of May 2015. It was entirely unexpected. On the short walk home from my doctor’s office, I decided to pass my house and keep walking because the weather was so nice. I was wearing regular clothes/bra, boots, and makeup, my hair was up in a flimsy clip, and I was carrying a purse. In the middle of that walk, for no reason at all, I just started running. For a mile. It was probably stupid in many ways, but I made it through an entire mile of running and I was so proud of myself despite how stupid I looked during and after, ha! That’s my excited-but-also-chagrinned face above, after said run.

My family moved back to San Antonio that summer (2015), and I broke my foot shortly afterwards. They thought it was just a sprained ankle, and while it healed, I tried to strengthen it by doing my indoor C25K again. [Note: this was suggested by my doctors, about twelve weeks after the sprain, when they thought I should be fine to strengthen the ligaments and tendons.] Needless to say, this didn’t work out well. Nor did it work too well when I retried in the fall of 2016, another indoor C25K while living in Wisconsin. My foot just kept hurting – and it also kept going numb like when I had that first stress fracture I mentioned in my last post – so I finally insisted on an MRI and they discovered the bone was actually broken. For six months, I wasn’t allowed to do any exercise but yoga, but my foot finally healed after that. (Yay!) I went to the track a few times and did running intervals (above), but then we entered our Summer of Nightmares and started moving across the country again, so running came to a halt.

It was a fitful thing, this running restart. Back in Texas, I did the first couple weeks of C25K out on my local trails. Unfortunately, by then my weight was too high for the impact on rocky ground and all the hills. One of my feet hurt with what I thought was plantar fasciitis, but which turned out to be a lower back/hip issue causing strain on the foot. I put running on hold, worried about more injuries, and focused on yoga and walking.

This spring, I began back at where I started the first time: indoor C25K, laps around my bedroom, easy pace, low impact, slow slow slow. Then construction happened, and of course like everything else, my program was put on hold for five months. I got in a few runs – this picture is from the day I made it through the hardest C25K day (jump up to 20 mins nonstop running) – but mostly I had to quit after mid-May. After vacation last month, I picked back up, and finally made it to the end this week. Of course, I’m not running a full 5K indoors – probably more like 2 miles max. And it’s nothing like running outside, which still kills me right now. But it’s a start. Hopefully once I can lose some weight, I’ll get back out to my trails and start making myself a true, outdoor runner again. Maybe next spring.

I cannot wait until I’m out there running 5Ks again. I’ve already made a goal to do one 5K per month during the school year (walking is fine!), and I hope to one day be back to that peak running self that I discussed in Part 2. Perhaps one day, there’ll be a Running Part 4 post to discuss that success!

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The Longest Books I’ve Ever Read

Posted on October 9, 2018 by Thistle

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday asks us about the longest books we’ve ever read. The following list is not my favorites of the longest books I’ve read, just the longest. Actually, it’s split pretty evenly between liked and disliked. Also split pretty evenly between classics and modern books. Kinda cool!

  1. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas: 1536 pages. I. Hated. This. Book. So. Much.
  2. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo: 1329 pages. This one was amazing, and I listened to the 60-hour audiobook with relish.
  3. Oathbringer – Brandon Sanderson: 1243 pages. Let’s just hug this book. A lot.
  4. A Storm of Swords – George RR Martin: 1177 pages. I pretty much skimmed this one through, and quit the series after it. I loved the two previous books but not this one.
  5. Words of Radiance – Brandon Sanderson: 1088 pages. Probably my favorite book in existence. I’ve read/listened to it more than 20 times in the last two years.
  6. Bleak House – Charles Dickens: 1017 pages. Oh god no, please no.
  7. The Way of Kings – Brandon Sanderson: 1007 pages. This is my least favorite of the Stormlight Archive, but it was still really good.
  8. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy: 964 pages. Please just die already.
  9. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray – 912 pages. Oddly, this is the only book in the bunch that I’m neutral on. It was okay, though a bit too long for my tastes.
  10. An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser: 896 pages. This one is phenomenal and reads like it’s half the page length.

Are you a fan of large books? Which are your favorites?

topten

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.

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