My therapist suggested that I write down some reference points of my worldview when I'm feeling well that I can look back at when I'm not doing so well.
Here are things that I know to be true to me when I'm not spiraling:
I've been happy in my life
I've been happy with my life
I think there's a purpose to life
I'm generally a competent person
I'm generally a good person
My cat is pretty awesome and worth living for alone
My parents are pretty awesome and worth living for alone
My person is pretty awesome and worth living for alone
I have things that I want to accomplish with my life
I can accomplish those things
I can make a difference with my life
I can make differences in my life
Skating makes me happy
Playing soccer makes me happy
Reading makes me happy
Learning is a worthwhile pursuit
I am better today than I was a year ago
Thursday, March 9, 2017
Thursday, March 2, 2017
What's the Point?
The hardest nights are the ones where I can't answer that question. Where I can't distinguish my thoughts from Anxiety's and Depression's.
The ones where I can't tell if I'm drowning or treading water nor which I actually want to do.
If I don't know where I'm going, how can I tell if I'm getting there?
If this is what life is, then is there any value in living it?
Are we actually good people?
Facebook makes it harder. I can't handle the sad news as it just shakes these questions to the forefront. Trump destroys more families. Hatred of people takes a front row spot. I want so desperately to be able to stand up and protest and demand action. Instead, I sit on the couch and cry and ask "what's the point?" I don't have faith in humanity. I don't have trust in myself. It doesn't seem like progress. It seems like vapid tv shows and fluff novels have been created and overproduced to pull us into complacency and into a sense that life has meaning if we just laugh enough.
My former therapist would point out that no emotion lasts forever. We are happy for some time; sad, angry and fearful for others. It's supposed to remind me that this feeling of absolute desolation doesn't last but on nights like these, it reminds me that even if I move past it once, it'll be back again.
So again I ask "what's the point?" If you can't stay happy forever, is it worth going through this in order to feel happy again for some time only to go through this again AND again AND AGAIN.
Are we assigning purpose to idle playthings in order to feel okay each morning? Is there a deeper reason why anyone should want to live beyond make friends, make money, do things?
When I can't answer these questions, I cry.
The ones where I can't tell if I'm drowning or treading water nor which I actually want to do.
If I don't know where I'm going, how can I tell if I'm getting there?
If this is what life is, then is there any value in living it?
Are we actually good people?
Facebook makes it harder. I can't handle the sad news as it just shakes these questions to the forefront. Trump destroys more families. Hatred of people takes a front row spot. I want so desperately to be able to stand up and protest and demand action. Instead, I sit on the couch and cry and ask "what's the point?" I don't have faith in humanity. I don't have trust in myself. It doesn't seem like progress. It seems like vapid tv shows and fluff novels have been created and overproduced to pull us into complacency and into a sense that life has meaning if we just laugh enough.
My former therapist would point out that no emotion lasts forever. We are happy for some time; sad, angry and fearful for others. It's supposed to remind me that this feeling of absolute desolation doesn't last but on nights like these, it reminds me that even if I move past it once, it'll be back again.
So again I ask "what's the point?" If you can't stay happy forever, is it worth going through this in order to feel happy again for some time only to go through this again AND again AND AGAIN.
Are we assigning purpose to idle playthings in order to feel okay each morning? Is there a deeper reason why anyone should want to live beyond make friends, make money, do things?
When I can't answer these questions, I cry.
Saturday, February 25, 2017
Conversations in My Brain
Me: I just want to sit on the couch all day.
Brain: You need coffee.
Me: I want to make coffee and sit on the couch all day.
Brain: Why don't you get laundry while the coffee is brewing?
Me: No
Brain: You don't like sitting down while you wait for coffee. Use the time to get your laundry.
Me: No
Brain: You like folding laundry too. You can do that after you get it from upstairs.
Me: Will you stop if I just get the laundry?
Brain: Yes
Me: Okay. I'll get it but I'm not folding it.
Monday, February 20, 2017
What It Means to Me to be Suicidal
Important note:
I'm getting the help I need to get me to an okay place mentally again. It's a long road though.
Trigger warning: Suicide Ideation, Depression, Mental Health,
So, as of late, there's not a day that goes by that I don't have at least one of the following thoughts:
"I wonder what it would feel like to slit my wrists"
"What if I swerve my car into a guardrail?"
"I don't really want to wake up tomorrow"
"Do you really think 'it gets better'?"
and many more related ones.
It's familiar to me at this point because a lot of these same thoughts were in my head about two and a half years ago. I was so scared that I'd impulsively kill myself that I hid the knives in my house, tried to avoid driving as much as possible and slept with wrist guards on to stop me from being able to just "make the cut".
I never tried to kill myself though. I never made a plan. I never made a decision to do it and had someone intervene before I could sort my shit out and with help, the thoughts decreased and eventually went away for a time.
At that point, I couldn't label myself as "suicidal" because I thought that meant that you had a plan and you were going to act on it and these thoughts that were entering my head weren't ones I wanted. I didn't identify with them. I worried about them. Of course, worrying about them meant I focused on them more and became freaked out about them (because if someone tells you not to think of a pink elephant, you're gonna think of a pink elephant). I felt like I couldn't talk about them though.
The outward silence about my inner thoughts had many causes. Mostly, I was scared that someone would want to lock me away or put me on suicide watch and admitting that I needed help was as bad as admitting defeat because it meant that this was something that I'd be dealing with for a long time and not just a weird one off situation. I felt like I didn't deserve to take away valuable resources from people who were "actually suicidal". I was worried if I talked about it, I'd be more likely to follow through.
That silence was not remotely helpful. It left me freaking out and isolating myself from others in case I accidentally blurted out my thoughts. It didn't mean the thoughts went away. It didn't mean that I didn't need help. It didn't mean that I was somehow overcoming this illness on my own.
I went to a suicide prevention workshop called "safeTALK" last week run by NAMI. It was 3 hours and completely free but reminded me of all the above and how hard it was to get help. I think it was one of the best things I did last week and strongly encourage other folks to check it out. Below is a quick summary of what I think was most important to me from those three hours.
The fact is, one in twenty people think about suicide in a two week period. If you're on a sports team, there's a high likelihood that someone else on your team has thought about suicide at least once in the past two weeks. Very rarely are these people at the point where they've made a decision and come up with a plan BUT getting help before that happens is the BEST time to get help. The majority of people who decide to die by suicide act on that decision within ONE DAY of making it. Some people act in as few as five minutes after deciding.
We need to talk more about what it means to be suicidal. We need to make it okay for someone to say they have thoughts of killing themself without us going into crisis mode. We need to learn how to get these people help that feels right to them because help is far easier to obtain when thoughts are just thoughts than after they are a decision and we need to find ways to confirm that thoughts of suicide are serious and important and worth talking about and getting help for no matter "how intent" the person is on killing themself. We need to stop the stigma and treat mental health the same as physical health because being mentally ill can kill you.
I'm getting the help I need to get me to an okay place mentally again. It's a long road though.
Trigger warning: Suicide Ideation, Depression, Mental Health,
So, as of late, there's not a day that goes by that I don't have at least one of the following thoughts:
"I wonder what it would feel like to slit my wrists"
"What if I swerve my car into a guardrail?"
"I don't really want to wake up tomorrow"
"Do you really think 'it gets better'?"
and many more related ones.
It's familiar to me at this point because a lot of these same thoughts were in my head about two and a half years ago. I was so scared that I'd impulsively kill myself that I hid the knives in my house, tried to avoid driving as much as possible and slept with wrist guards on to stop me from being able to just "make the cut".
I never tried to kill myself though. I never made a plan. I never made a decision to do it and had someone intervene before I could sort my shit out and with help, the thoughts decreased and eventually went away for a time.
At that point, I couldn't label myself as "suicidal" because I thought that meant that you had a plan and you were going to act on it and these thoughts that were entering my head weren't ones I wanted. I didn't identify with them. I worried about them. Of course, worrying about them meant I focused on them more and became freaked out about them (because if someone tells you not to think of a pink elephant, you're gonna think of a pink elephant). I felt like I couldn't talk about them though.
The outward silence about my inner thoughts had many causes. Mostly, I was scared that someone would want to lock me away or put me on suicide watch and admitting that I needed help was as bad as admitting defeat because it meant that this was something that I'd be dealing with for a long time and not just a weird one off situation. I felt like I didn't deserve to take away valuable resources from people who were "actually suicidal". I was worried if I talked about it, I'd be more likely to follow through.
That silence was not remotely helpful. It left me freaking out and isolating myself from others in case I accidentally blurted out my thoughts. It didn't mean the thoughts went away. It didn't mean that I didn't need help. It didn't mean that I was somehow overcoming this illness on my own.
I went to a suicide prevention workshop called "safeTALK" last week run by NAMI. It was 3 hours and completely free but reminded me of all the above and how hard it was to get help. I think it was one of the best things I did last week and strongly encourage other folks to check it out. Below is a quick summary of what I think was most important to me from those three hours.
The fact is, one in twenty people think about suicide in a two week period. If you're on a sports team, there's a high likelihood that someone else on your team has thought about suicide at least once in the past two weeks. Very rarely are these people at the point where they've made a decision and come up with a plan BUT getting help before that happens is the BEST time to get help. The majority of people who decide to die by suicide act on that decision within ONE DAY of making it. Some people act in as few as five minutes after deciding.
We need to talk more about what it means to be suicidal. We need to make it okay for someone to say they have thoughts of killing themself without us going into crisis mode. We need to learn how to get these people help that feels right to them because help is far easier to obtain when thoughts are just thoughts than after they are a decision and we need to find ways to confirm that thoughts of suicide are serious and important and worth talking about and getting help for no matter "how intent" the person is on killing themself. We need to stop the stigma and treat mental health the same as physical health because being mentally ill can kill you.
Things I've Lost Due to Depression
1) A Normal Sleep Schedule
2) Confidence
3) Joy
4) Happiness
5) My Sense of Humor
6) Mondays
7) The Ability to Open my Computer Without Psyching Myself Up for It
8) My Faith in Humanity
9) Excitement
2) Confidence
3) Joy
4) Happiness
5) My Sense of Humor
6) Mondays
7) The Ability to Open my Computer Without Psyching Myself Up for It
8) My Faith in Humanity
9) Excitement
Sunday, January 22, 2017
Things Keeping Me Up At Night
Really it's a list of questions more than anything else but as it's 4am my time, you can see that these things are currently interfering with my sleep patterns.
1) How did we end up with "feminism" as the default for talking about social justice?
Other oppressions/privileged groups that we want to talk about get defined negatively ("racism" "homophobia" "ableism" "cis-sexism" "heteronormativity" to name a few). We don't have words common to most media vernacular to talk about the beliefs, practices and procedures for combating them ("critical theory" and "critical race studies" come to mind but I haven't seen them used outside of academia really).
With, what I hope, is an actual turn towards intersectionality, why is social justice action still focused (at least linguistically) on gender with the phrase becoming "intersectional feminism" or variants thereof? Along with that, why is "patriarchy" so prevalent while "kyriarchy" is not and I'm not aware of single-word terms that focus foremost on race or class.
In terms of what my limited knowledge of history regarding struggles of oppressed people (both in terms of massive systemic oppression and revolutions for rights) suggests, it's not that gender came first. How did we end up gender-centric and should we try to change our language way beyond adding "intersectional" in front of "feminism"?
2) Why are we acting like facts matter again? What can we do otherwise?
I spent admittedly too long reading comments on snopes articles and media posts about the turnout for Trump's inauguration and the press conference held today. If there's one thing we should have learned from the bold faced lying from Trump and his campaign and subsequent voting for Trump it's that arguing facts don't matter when trying to convince someone who is diametrically opposed or even slightly beyond on the fence (arguably there is a whole world of social psych that also could have told you this before then). So, how do we actually deal with a world where facts don't matter to POTUS and to his supporters? I mean, initially including facts is helpful for fence sitters and people who already have anti-Trump beliefs but they don't actually work in terms of convincing others (nor educating perhaps?). So, how do we interact politically with people we disagree with when realizing that facts and rationality aren't on the table (none of us are perfectly rational)? How must politics (and economics and traffic laws and a lot of other things) change when we stop with the idealization that humans are rational actors in this world?
3) How do you convince people that rights are rights?
There was an article by Slate that looked at what Trump supporters thought of the Women's March and one of the quotes is from Tate, from Georgia: “I just don’t understand why they are marching. I don’t know what rights they are losing or what’s being threatened.”
And that one in particular I found interesting because I think it in a simple way gets at a common divide. It doesn't have to be that Tate doesn't know that the ACA is being gutted, Trump is emboldening police forces across the country that already are doing massive amounts of violence to persons of colour and queer folk are fearing for their marriages and their ability to just go pee in public without confrontation. It can honestly be read as Tate doesn't think those things are related to people's rights.
So how do you convince people that health care or the ability to get married or live not in constant fear of the police are in fact rights that everyone should have (and perhaps the right to own a gun shouldn't be or at least shouldn't be quite so unlimited)? I've studied theories of rights and what various scholars say is a right and what isn't a right and how to determine them but it doesn't actually answer the question of how to convince people and looking at the question above, how do you do it without relying on people believing rational arguments and without relying on facts? Convincing people matters as long as we live in democracies where others do get to vote on the folks who decide whether I have a right or not (or appoint people to a court that decides or myriad other ways things come back to the electorate). Even if Tate understands some amount of the privilege they possess, if that doesn't tie back into rights in some way, does that matter?
4) This one is a bit different from the rest but I've spent awhile trying to find an article I read from the Feminist Blog-O-Sphere some time since 2010 about how women (according to the author all women but I'd say it more so applies to white women) are allowed and encourage a little bit of masculinity. The examples I remember included barbequing and Jodi Picoult and the phrase, I think, was something food related "a snack of masculinitiy" "a bite of..." etc. How do I find this article again?
Part of me wonders if the marches and protests fall into this idea. It's totally fine for (white) women to have a moment of being loud and saying "no, this isn't okay" as long as nothing gets damaged and then they fall back into complacency (and of course support cis-sexist understandings of womanhood in their protesting). I'd really like to re-read the article but I cannot find it and have no clue when it was published (most likely 2010 or 2011 but not definitely) nor where it was published (I was reading around 80 plus sites daily then so looking in bookmarks and favorites doesn't help either).
Finally, as a thank you for making it to the bottom of this post. Enjoy this drawing from Emm, not Emma
1) How did we end up with "feminism" as the default for talking about social justice?
Other oppressions/privileged groups that we want to talk about get defined negatively ("racism" "homophobia" "ableism" "cis-sexism" "heteronormativity" to name a few). We don't have words common to most media vernacular to talk about the beliefs, practices and procedures for combating them ("critical theory" and "critical race studies" come to mind but I haven't seen them used outside of academia really).
With, what I hope, is an actual turn towards intersectionality, why is social justice action still focused (at least linguistically) on gender with the phrase becoming "intersectional feminism" or variants thereof? Along with that, why is "patriarchy" so prevalent while "kyriarchy" is not and I'm not aware of single-word terms that focus foremost on race or class.
In terms of what my limited knowledge of history regarding struggles of oppressed people (both in terms of massive systemic oppression and revolutions for rights) suggests, it's not that gender came first. How did we end up gender-centric and should we try to change our language way beyond adding "intersectional" in front of "feminism"?
2) Why are we acting like facts matter again? What can we do otherwise?
I spent admittedly too long reading comments on snopes articles and media posts about the turnout for Trump's inauguration and the press conference held today. If there's one thing we should have learned from the bold faced lying from Trump and his campaign and subsequent voting for Trump it's that arguing facts don't matter when trying to convince someone who is diametrically opposed or even slightly beyond on the fence (arguably there is a whole world of social psych that also could have told you this before then). So, how do we actually deal with a world where facts don't matter to POTUS and to his supporters? I mean, initially including facts is helpful for fence sitters and people who already have anti-Trump beliefs but they don't actually work in terms of convincing others (nor educating perhaps?). So, how do we interact politically with people we disagree with when realizing that facts and rationality aren't on the table (none of us are perfectly rational)? How must politics (and economics and traffic laws and a lot of other things) change when we stop with the idealization that humans are rational actors in this world?
3) How do you convince people that rights are rights?
There was an article by Slate that looked at what Trump supporters thought of the Women's March and one of the quotes is from Tate, from Georgia: “I just don’t understand why they are marching. I don’t know what rights they are losing or what’s being threatened.”
And that one in particular I found interesting because I think it in a simple way gets at a common divide. It doesn't have to be that Tate doesn't know that the ACA is being gutted, Trump is emboldening police forces across the country that already are doing massive amounts of violence to persons of colour and queer folk are fearing for their marriages and their ability to just go pee in public without confrontation. It can honestly be read as Tate doesn't think those things are related to people's rights.
So how do you convince people that health care or the ability to get married or live not in constant fear of the police are in fact rights that everyone should have (and perhaps the right to own a gun shouldn't be or at least shouldn't be quite so unlimited)? I've studied theories of rights and what various scholars say is a right and what isn't a right and how to determine them but it doesn't actually answer the question of how to convince people and looking at the question above, how do you do it without relying on people believing rational arguments and without relying on facts? Convincing people matters as long as we live in democracies where others do get to vote on the folks who decide whether I have a right or not (or appoint people to a court that decides or myriad other ways things come back to the electorate). Even if Tate understands some amount of the privilege they possess, if that doesn't tie back into rights in some way, does that matter?
4) This one is a bit different from the rest but I've spent awhile trying to find an article I read from the Feminist Blog-O-Sphere some time since 2010 about how women (according to the author all women but I'd say it more so applies to white women) are allowed and encourage a little bit of masculinity. The examples I remember included barbequing and Jodi Picoult and the phrase, I think, was something food related "a snack of masculinitiy" "a bite of..." etc. How do I find this article again?
Part of me wonders if the marches and protests fall into this idea. It's totally fine for (white) women to have a moment of being loud and saying "no, this isn't okay" as long as nothing gets damaged and then they fall back into complacency (and of course support cis-sexist understandings of womanhood in their protesting). I'd really like to re-read the article but I cannot find it and have no clue when it was published (most likely 2010 or 2011 but not definitely) nor where it was published (I was reading around 80 plus sites daily then so looking in bookmarks and favorites doesn't help either).
Finally, as a thank you for making it to the bottom of this post. Enjoy this drawing from Emm, not Emma
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)