#she is still extremely depressed about all her lost potential two decades later

[bettsfic]

We spend a lot of time appreciating you as an amazing writer, but even just from online interactions, it's obvious that you're also a great teacher. If you feel like sharing: any good teaching stories that made you feel great about undergraduate teaching / reminded you of why your work is important?

at the end of my first semester, a student, i’ll call her jessica, sent me an email saying how much she enjoyed the class and how she was planning to be a teacher some day, and she wanted to be a teacher like me. i printed the email out and put it in my journal. it was the first kind email a student had sent me, and i read it over and over.

a couple months later, at the beginning of the next semester, just an hour before i met my new students, i found out that jessica had died over break. it was alcohol and drugs, a party where she left and no one followed her back to her dorm to make sure she was okay. she was nineteen. i looked at her instagram, where her final post was a selfie with two friends, and the caption read, “i love college!” 

it’s hard to say exactly how her death affected me, but i think about her all the time. i think about how fragile life is, and about the toxicity of college culture, and all the pressures and expectations put on students, and how they’ll graduate with mounds of debt that will take decades to pay off. i think about how hard and hopeless it is to be a young person today. i think about the surprised, grateful faces i get when i show students the smallest shred of kindness or empathy.

this is my fourth year teaching and i’ve now had around 300 students. i have yet to meet a bad one. i’ve met students who have been pushed to their limits, who are exhausted, who are in the wrong place and have no idea, who have unchecked trauma, who are utterly terrified, who are lonely, sad, overworked, or just plain overwhelmed. 

once, i did a Q&A for a practicum of new creative writing teachers. i’d given them my syllabus prior to the class. they were surprised to read my lax policies, and one of them asked what i do when a student does the bare minimum, or maybe even less. creative writing is an “easy” class. inevitably you get the “lazy” students who sit in the back and work on homework for other classes, and hand in five dr. seuss sounding poems at the end of the semester.

to that i said, any student who doesn’t want to write is either overworked, afraid, or both. being overworked can’t be helped. college students are working to master their time management skills in an environment that doesn’t allow them to fail. but fear can be faced and conquered. i base my entire class around fear. they have one major assignment: write your biggest risk. i firmly believe your biggest creative risk ends up being your greatest reward. sometimes students aren’t up to the task, but if you build an environment in which they’re eager to show you the dark, ugly parts of themselves because they know you will receive them eagerly and openly, they tend to make amazing things.

i start each semester with probably over half my students utterly apathetic or even flat-out disgusted by the idea of creative writing, and i end the semester with a stack of self-assessments and evaluations talking about how much the class helped them not only see their own creative potential, but also to be less afraid to take creative risks in other environments. 

i had a student, we’ll call him alex, in my composition course last year. admittedly i put less effort into comp than creative writing, mostly because it’s not my curriculum or my primary field of study. alex sat at the back of class the entire semester, asleep, on his laptop, or talking to the people nearest him. he did not participate. he did not do the reading. he did not turn in his homework. he didn’t even know my name. on the second to last day of the semester, he turned in several assignments at once, and came to me before class started saying he’d done most the work, and could he come to office hours so i could get him caught up on the rest?

no, i said. i was too busy working with students who had been seeking my help throughout the semester. he took it well, and said thanks anyway, and in the end scraped by with a B-, mostly due to my lack of a late policy. if i’d had one, he would have failed.

i was surprised the next semester to see him on my roster for creative writing. it was clear he didn’t like or appreciate my comp class. on the first day of spring semester, he came to class high. at the end of class, i have all of my students fill out a notecard with their name and other pertinent information, and on the back i have them draw a picture. when alex turned in his card, he had only scrawled his name across the front, and on the back he drew a bird smoking a giant blunt.

the next class, i announced that anyone who came to class drunk or high would be asked to leave and they would lose their attendance for the day. i didn’t want to call him out directly. honestly, i didn’t know how to handle the situation. my mentor told me to deal with it head-on, but i didn’t heed her advice, and i wish i had. 

alex kept coming to class high. he didn’t do the reading. he didn’t participate in small or large group discussion. he didn’t do the prompt-fills or turn in any assignments. when he’d behaved this way in comp, i wasn’t bothered by it. nobody really likes comp. but this was creative writing, a class i put 200% of myself into and which i expected students to appreciate in kind (and for the most part they really do). 

midway through the semester, i ask students to schedule a one-on-one conference with me. it’s required. they get a grade for showing up, and another for doing a write-up of what we talked about. alex, like the prior semester, did not show up for his conference, or even write a risk draft for me to comment on. he sent me an email an hour later apologizing and asking if we could reschedule. the kicker: he began the email “liz.” i ask my students to call me by first name. i tell them at the beginning of the semester and again in week 5 when they inevitably forget. so alex had now been through 4 of my “the name you need to call me” lectures. and he still called me liz. and he had the audacity not to show up for his conference with no notice, wasting a half hour of my time, and then ask to reschedule.

my mentor was right. i should have dealt with it sooner. i shouldn’t have let myself get as angry as i did. but i replied to his email with a laundry list of things he’d done wrong, and i told him he was out of chances. i wasn’t rude, but i was very firm, and expected him to forward the email to his parents and the department and try to get me fired.

instead, a couple hours later when i arrived in class, he was sitting in the back of the room with his hood over his head. i was surprised to see him. it was the last day to drop classes and i expected him to be gone. he approached me as i was getting set up, and he was weeping. like blubbery, snot-nosed weeping. my first thought was that he was manipulating me somehow. boys who don’t get their way do desperate things sometimes. he told me he turned in all the assignments, and did the reading, and he’d do better from them on, he promised, and could he come to office hours? would i give him one more chance, please?

i told him to see me after class. during discussion, to my surprise, he raised his hand for every question. he was extremely off-base on most of his comments but i appreciated the courage it took not only to show up to class a weepy, tear-filled wreck, but to actually participate through it. after class, he apologized for having lost his shit earlier. he asked how he could make everything up. i told him i’d give partial credit for what he’d turned in, but he needed to come to a conference.

a couple days later he showed up at my office. i asked if he had a rough draft for me to look at and he said he didn’t, not because he didn’t try but because he didn’t know what his biggest risk was. i asked him to write an essay about how he’s struggling in college, and to use it as an opportunity for self-reflection.

up to this point, alex had been a bad bullshitter. before, when i’d confronted him about not doing the reading, he said he couldn’t because he hurt his knee. i asked what a knee injury had to do with reading, and he blubbered through an answer. he even feigned a limp, but later that day i saw him walking normally to another class. he had ridiculous excuses for everything. so when he sent me his essay, i was expecting more of the same.

what he wrote was not bullshit, but a blunt and honest account of all the problems he was having, sans whining or pity-seeking. the boldest statement he made was that he was extremely lonely. i searched between the lines for ways he was trying to manipulate my sympathy but found none. he was flat-out admitting the truth: he felt like college wasn’t right for him, he was far away from home, he thought he would make friends but he hadn’t made any, and his girlfriend was still a senior in high school and he missed her a lot. 

“it feels weird not having a happy ending,” he told me. “i kept wanting to find a positive note to end on.”

“sometimes things just suck. an essay doesn’t have to answer the questions it poses,” i said.

suddenly i got a different picture of alex’s life: he was depressed and alone, self-medicating with weed and who knew what else, and slipping through the cracks of all his other classes, where he had professors who, like me the prior semester, paid no attention to him. 

he told me he really liked the class, and liked me as a teacher, and he would spend the rest of the semester trying to be better. i’d had students say similar things just to placate me and then didn’t follow through, but alex did for the most part. he still struggled with due dates, but he kept an open line of communication with me, and owned up to his failures. he did all the reading and participated in every class. by the end of the semester, he was a different person. he told me his girlfriend had gotten into our school and that she was coming to visit him soon. he revised his essay several times, got an A in the class, and gave me a hug at the end of the semester and thanked me for my patience and understanding.

i think this story stuck with me so much because it’s about my own failure. i do my best to reach out to struggling students, but most of the time if you lend a hand, they don’t take it, and there’s not much you can do. i should have tried to help alex sooner, or be more firm with him earlier on like he apparently needed. i need to learn to be more comfortable with confrontation and own my authority in the classroom. but mostly it reaffirmed my belief that everyone is hurting, and “bad behavior” is nearly always the result of a bigger picture that sometimes we can’t see. 

#pedagogy #writing advice #Anonymous

[legrandepapillon]

An Unexplored Battlefront (washette)

Summary: Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette first meets General George Washington through a letter. He doesn’t regret even the smallest moment of it. Prompt: In 1940s America, Person A meets Person B through a pen pal program for soldiers. For some reason, Person B stops writing Person A. Why? Author’s Notes: Gilbert is seventeen here, and George thirty-eight. Yes, I realize homosexuality wasn’t really such a thing you could freely talk about in the forties and black Generals were usually only the head of all-black battalions, but for the sake of creative freedom, I didn’t so much explore the political fronts of the 1940s war-torn America.

c. 1940-1941

They meet through the boarding school that Gilbert attends in America, though it isn’t quite a meeting. When the school instructor tells them about the War, about all the men being sent to the battlefield to fight for the nation’s freedom, Gilbert’s entire class becomes quiet—all of them amazed by the patriotism that the soldiers showed by going to the frontlines. Including the young French student that usually sits at the back, spending his days daydreaming and completely ignoring his studies. Though a dreamer he may be, even he knows that the war had the potential to drag on for years—possibly decades—because the US was not going to allow the Nazi’s to win. That was no option.

Not only that, but most of the students’ older siblings had already been drafted into the military—had already seen the frontlines, some dying on them. Including Lafayette’s older sister, who had gone to be a nurse for the Navy. Every student in the classroom wanted to help, despite their youth. His class had been emptying more and more by the day with kids running off to serve their country—the latest to have gone off to join the fighting being Gilbert’s best and only friend, Alexander Hamilton.

He admired their bravery. Wished that he had been smart enough not to get caught when he tried to enlist under a fake age. Or rather, that he’d been smart enough not to tell his uncle—who marched down to the recruitment office and dragged him back home by his ear, ranting about how he had no idea how romanticized the war had become and how he wasn’t ready for things of that nature.

However, the teacher presents them with an alternative to fighting, another way to help the military men get through the war. Letters. It was a pen pal program setup between the school curriculum and the military—students learned how to write formal letters as a part of their schooling and in exchange the soldiers got someone to talk to outside of the battlefield. For their new assignment, the kids are presented with a small file that contains some information about who they’ll be writing. A picture of their soldier, a little bit about them, and where they were currently deployed.

Gilbert nearly falls out of his chair with excitement and flush when he sees that he gets George Washington, a famed army General that had led attacks from the allies on French soil and had become sort of a war hero in the neighboring countries—the first internationally recognized black war hero at that. He remembers being in France at the start of the war with his mother when the radio began talking of the man's exploits, looking to the older woman as she held hope in her eyes and murmured French prayers.

He remembers that flustered feeling he got stirring in his belly when he opened the newspaper one morning to see the hardened General’s face atop an entire page boasting of his exploits. He still had the newspaper cutout hanging on the back of his bedroom door. Though he knew it was wrong, he kissed it every morning before school.

Gil knows exactly what he wants to say, and starts on his letter the second he’s got the paper on his desk.

When Gilbert receives his first response from George, he’s ecstatic. He almost trips over himself getting the mail one morning after school, shoving Thomas out of the way when he goes towards the mailbox. Though Jefferson looks annoyed at his cousin’s clumsiness, he says nothing—scowling at him but remaining quiet as he ascends the steps to Monticello, the Jefferson manor. Gilbert hangs back from his cousins, waiting for all of them to be in the house before opening the letter. Immediately, his cheeks flush.

Dearest Lafayette, I cannot express how gleeful I am to have received a letter from you on this day, February 3rd of 1940. Though feeling a little childish, Gilbert can still barely repress his squeal of excitement as he brings the letter close to his heart, cheeks burning a bright red. He ascends the staircase to the manor, eyes scanning each word of the letter—glued to the penmanship of the General and the way his letters loop into each other, how he doesn’t dot his ‘i’ or how he forgot to cross a ‘t’. He nearly trips over the staircase with how deeply engrossed he is of the General’s words, completely ignoring both his Aunt and Uncle as they greet him. George talks of everything from the War, to the picture that Gil had sent of himself, to his favorite foods and music.

By the time he comes to the end of the note, Gil is positively smitten with the General. If the sinful feelings he’d harbored for the other man before had been nothing but a passing fancy, he feels as though he’s madly in love with this small piece of General Washington clutched in his fingers. He knows of ‘homosexuality’, had known since he was a young child that he was very deeply flawed in that aspect, but he can’t bring himself to care too much about the sin when there are so many butterflies flitting throughout his stomach. It’s obvious this crush will consume him, has consumed him, and he knows he’ll have to deal with the issues of that later.

However, he’s too taken with the letter to do much other than sit down and write George another one.

For months, the two of them exchange correspondence each other. Each post that passes between the two of them becoming more intimate, each word put down to paper becoming more significant in meaning. Long after the program ends for the school year, and most of the students in his classroom have lost contact with their old penmate—except for Thomas, who quickly becomes just as eager and quick to getting to mailbox as his cousin had—the young student and the war-hero write each other. With each passing day, Gil feels as though he can trust the other man. There is something about the energy that radiates from the words put to paper that makes him completely confident in his relationship with George. So much so that he eventually manages—though extremely nervously, with great sickness in his stomach as he puts the letter in the post—to confess his interest in the male sex.

George stops writing him after that letter, though. Everyday after school, the teenager goes to check the post. And everyday, there is no letter from George Washington. Not even a message just to let him know that he’s alright. It doesn’t take long for the young Frenchman to begin believe he’s lost him for good after a tragic miscalculation of comfort. He had thought that he and George were close enough to share that sort of thing with each other, but it quickly becomes very obvious that he had been horribly wrong. A million things run through the frightened young man’s head—what if George was disgusted with him now because he too believed the horrible things that people said about men of his nature, or what if George had contacted local Virginian police to alert them of his sodomy, or even worse… what if George had died in battle?

For three months following that cursed mistake of a confession, Gil walks around the streets of his small Virginian town riddled with anxiety and depression. Every policeman he comes across on the street, every man he dares look at for too long, every newspaper about the war, every single thought he has of the captivating General Washington sends his stomach twisting in painful knots. He stops eating as often. He doesn’t sleep well. He even begins to have fainting spells, where he’ll pass out in the middle of a task and wake up in bed with a cool towel over his face. Aunt Jane changes his studies home so that he doesn’t have to go to school, she gets so worried about his health. Hired doctors file in and out of the residence, all of them making guesses on this sudden illness that has overcome him but none of them ever coming close to the true cause.

All he does anymore is lie in bed, listening to the newscaster on the war station give facts about the new changes in the day-to-day life of the World War.

Then, one day, there’s a knock on the door. Gilbert is in the living room on that day, attempting to cope with a cold he’d caught from fainting in the middle of a storm. Aunt Jane had wanted to better keep an eye on him during the day while she worked, when she was hemming dresses for the women of Shadwell in the parlor. At around noon, when she’s just finished up a wedding gown for a local friend, there are several sharp raps on the door, Gil barely looks away from the book he’d only been half-reading—he simply sinks beneath the pile of blankets that his Aunt had covered him with in hopes that whoever was there wouldn’t try to make conversation.

“Excuse me ma’am,” a deep, strong voice says a moment after he hears his Aunt open the door. Keening his ears—both out of curiosity and boredom—Gilbert listens to the man that speaks, struggling to hear through the fabric of his blanket. “I’m looking for a Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette. I have been corresponding with him for awhile now, and I’d very much like to see him.”

Wait… he’s looking for me? Gilbert thinks, sitting up on the couch now with interest. The quick motion dizzies him, and he struggles with a bout of nausea for a moment before returning his attention the conversation. Corresponding for awhile now? He scans his brain for anyone that he had sent letters to recently, but the only person he thinks of is…

“George!” Gilbert exclaims as the realization dawns on him, tripping over his blankets as he scrambles to the doorway of the manor. He pauses in the parlor to fix his curls into a tight bun and straighten out the wrinkled clothes he’d thrown on earlier that morning—wishing he’d known the man would be there earlier so that he could’ve dressed appropriately. Aunt Jane is confused for a moment—Gilbert had shown such an excitement for months now, and the quick switch in moods takes the woman off guard. But then her nephew sends her a pleading look, standing beside her in front of the war hero, and she seems to get the hint—he’d like some privacy with this man. Muttering something about having to go out for more sewing supplies, she quickly gathers her purse and coat before excusing herself from the two—waving goodbye and leaving them alone in the large manor.

Gilbert looks back towards the other man, disbelief obviously painted across his features. The young man had never seen the man face-to-face, but now that he has, he realizes how truly beautiful he is. It’s obvious that the General had at least cleaned up before coming over—his face is closely-shaven, a vast difference from that old news article clipping that had shown him sporting a full beard. And there isn’t a speck of dirt or a wrinkle in sight on the forest green uniform—the badges, medals and ribbons shining beneath the warm Virginia sun. His dark eyes are war-weathered and have wrinkles in the corners, but his mouth possesses deep smile lines and adorable dimples. Gilbert can feel himself falling in love with him all over again. “George, what are you doing here? What about the War?”

“I received a medical leave,” the General says, smiling down at his young friend. His hand shoots up to tuck a stray curl behind the younger man’s ear, and Gil melts into the action—eyes fluttering at the feeling of his calloused hands that press against the side of his cheek. “I got shot in the knee in Italy, and they’re giving me time to recover before I deploy again. Doctors say it’ll at least be a year.”

They stand in the doorway for a moment, Gilbert enjoying the feel of George’s presence and the faint smell of the older man’s cologne wafting off of his body before he pulls away and ushers him inside, picking up the two duffel bags that had accompanied his war hero on his trip. Once the door is safely closed and locked, Gil turns back to the man and wrings his hands in front of him.

“George I… I hope… I hope you don’t…” the words escape him, and with every moment that ticks by, the knots of anxiety return to haunt his stomach. He feels nauseous again, dizzy… almost as though he might faint, before George steadies his soldiers and brings his focus back to what's important.

“If this is about what you said in your last letter, you hush all of that right this moment. Oh, Gilbert…” he sighs, cupping the side of the young man's face again. Gil closes the space between them, his hand darting out to lace his fingers with George’s. His heart skips several beats when he notices the soldier doesn’t immediately pull away from the small act of affection. “I thought… I was scared of my feelings about you, too. Do you know that? I really was. I loved… I love you, but I also know what happens to men who… who…”

“George,” Gilbert whispers, eyes finding his. He shakes his head slightly, a small comfort for the two of them. For right now, they didn’t have to use the words. They didn’t have to put a term to these forbidden emotions swirling like a cesspool between the two of them. Those things could come later. Right now, all the Frenchman wants is to just bask in the feeling of an enormous weight of relief being lifted from his shoulders. Revel in the idea that his General didn’t hate him, or wasn’t disgusted by him—that he shared the same feelings.

Labels were useless when they had all of this love between the two of them.

“But… I realize now, that I can’t be fearful anymore. As as much I am, I am more afraid of losing you than anything else in the world. Than the war, than the possibility of prosecution, than death. I couldn’t begin to imagine a life without you again, especially when I’m sent back to battle. You were my sunshine in that warzone, and I desperately need you. Gil, we can do this together. We can’t be normal, we’ll never live normal lives that you see between man and wife. But we can be very happy together.”

“Oh, George. You’ll be given a blue discharge if we’re found out. Even worse, we’ll be separated, or killed or… or you’ll be hurt.”

“Why should I continue to fight for a country that won’t fight for me anyways? Why should I care about the consequences if I don’t take a chance to enjoy the action?” George insists, his grip on Gilbert’s hand tightening for just a moment. The younger man's eyes sparkle, both with tears and an overabundance of joy and admiration. He realized that things would be difficult for them—homosexuality was illegal, and if either of them were caught, they could face anything from forced castration to prison to death. But standing in the middle of the foyer of his Uncle’s mansion, holding hands with the one of the most esteemed war heroes of this time, Gilbert can’t bring himself to think too much of it. He is happy, for now, and that is all he needs.

Standing on the tips of his toes, Gil presses his lips against the older man’s—deepening the kiss when George cups his face tightly and pulls him closer. Their mouths move together in perfect synchronization as George’s hands slide down to his waist—gripping him tightly, keeping them so close together they could almost fuse into one being. Gil can’t help but notice that his lover—lover, how absurd—tastes like whiskey and cigarettes, and that the light layer of stubble on his chin scratches at him. They only pull away when Gil remembers that his family would be home soon, and they couldn’t be too brazen about this.

“George, I… I love you.”

“I love you, too, my love,” he responds, smiling like Gilbert was the sun, moon and stars. The Frenchman can feel himself falling head over heels in love all over again. He laughs when George crouches down to sweep him off his feet, the sounds of joy echoing throughout the empty house. Carrying him towards the staircase, George grins down at him. “Now come here, you silly boy, you never told me the rest about that dream you had where you ran off to the circus.”

Author’s Notes:  i read two articles about homosexuality in the 1940s that helped formulate the mixed sort of secrecy and candidness of george & gilbert’s romance. if you’re interested, they are here:

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-adv-lgbt-archive-20150830-story.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1900%E2%80%9349_in_LGBT_rights 

#world war ii au #war au #1940s au #forbidden love #tw internalized homophobia #tw mentions of homophobia #washette #george washington #marie joseph paul yves roch gilbert du motier marquis de lafayette #george washington x gilbert du motier marquis de lafayette #gilbert du motier marquis de lafayette #george washington x lafayette #older/younger relationship #boy do i have a queue for you #an idealism #hamilton #1940s hamilton au #hamilton fanfic #hamilton fanfiction #drabble #fanfiction #one shot #ficlet #otp #writing #my writing

[ionecoffman]

The Meat Cleanse

“I know how ridiculous it sounds,” Mikhaila Peterson told me recently by phone, after a whirlwind of attention gathered around the 26-year-old, who is now offering dietary advice to people suffering with conditions like hers. Or not so much dietary advice as guiding people in eating only beef.

At first glance, Peterson, who is based in Toronto, could seem to be one of the many emerging semi-celebrities with a miraculous story of self-healing—who show off postpartum weight loss in bikini Instagrams and sell one thing or another, a supplement or tonic or book or compression garment. (Not incidentally, she is the daughter of the famous and controversial pop psychologist Jordan Peterson. More on that later.) But Peterson is taking the trend in extra-professional health advice to an extreme conclusion: She is not doing sponsored posts for health products, but actively selling one-on-one counseling ($75 for a half hour) for people who want to stop eating almost everything.

Peterson seems to be reaching suffering people despite a lack of training or credentials in nutrition or medicine, and perhaps because of that distinction. Her Instagram bio: “For info on treating weight loss, depression, and autoimmune disorders with diet, check out my blog or fb page!” The blog says at the top that “many (if not most) health problems are treatable with diet alone.” This is true, if at odds with the disclaimer at the bottom of the page that her words are “not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.”

I told her I’m surprised people need further counseling, in that an all-beef diet is very straightforward.

“They mostly want to see that I’m not dead,” she said. “What I basically do is say, hey, look at all the things that happened to me and brought me to where I am now. Isn’t it weird? And then let people draw their own conclusions.”

Peterson described an adolescence that involved multiple debilitating medical diagnoses, beginning with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Some unknown process had triggered her body’s immune system to attack her joints. “I was unable to hold a pencil, could barely walk, and was in constant pain,” she writes on her blog, which is called “Don’t Eat That.” The joint problems culminated in hip and ankle replacements in her teens, coupled with “extreme fatigue, depression and anxiety, brain fog, and sleep problems.” In fifth grade she was diagnosed with depression, and then later something called idiopathic hypersomnia (which translates to English as “sleeping too much, of unclear cause”—which translates further to sorry we really don’t know what’s going on).

Everything the doctors tried failed, and she did everything they told her, she recounted to me. She fully bought into the system, taking large doses of strong immune-suppressing drugs like methotrexate, prednisone, leflunomide, and humira. “Despite being on multiple heavy-hitting meds, I was still struggling with basic day-to-day tasks,” she writes on her blog.

Her story takes a dramatic turn in 2015, when the underdog protagonist, nearly at the end of her rope, figured out the truth for herself. It was all about food.

Peterson adopted a common approach to dieting: elimination. She started cutting out foods from her diet, and feeling better each time. She began with gluten, and she kept going, casting out more and more—not just gluten or dairy or soy or lectins or artificial sweeteners or non-artificial sweeteners, but everything. Until, by December 2017, all that was left was “beef and salt and water,” and, she told me, “all my symptoms went into remission.”

“And you quit taking all your medications?”

“Everything.”

There is so much evidence—abundant, copious evidence acquired over decades of work from scientists around the world—that most people benefit from eating fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and seeds. This appears to be largely because fiber in plants is important to the flourishing of the gut microbiome. I ran this by some experts, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything that might suggest a beef-salt diet is potentially something other than a bad idea. I learned that it was worse than I thought.

“Physiologically, it would just be an immensely bad idea,” Jack Gilbert, the faculty director at the University of Chicago’s Microbiome Center and a professor of surgery, told me during a recent visit to his lab. “A terribly, terribly bad idea.”

Gilbert has done extensive research on how the trillions of microbes in our guts digest food, and the look on his face when I told him about the all-beef diet was unamused. He began rattling off the expected ramifications: “Your body would start to have severe dysregulation, within six months, of the majority of the processes that deal with metabolism; you would have no short-chain fatty acids in your cells; most of the byproducts of gastrointestinal polysaccharide fermentation would shut down, so you wouldn’t be able to regulate your hormone levels; you’d enter into cardiac issues due to alterations in cell receptors; your microbiota would just be devastated.”  

While much of the internet has been following this story in a somewhat snide way, Gilbert appeared genuinely concerned and saddened: “If she does not die of colon cancer or some other severe cardiometabolic disease, the life—I can’t imagine.”

There are few accounts of people having tried all-beef diets, though all-meat—known as carnivory—is slightly more common. Earlier this month, inspired by the media conversation about the Peterson approach, Alan Levinovitz, the author of The Gluten Lie, tried carnivory, eating only meat for two weeks. He did lose seven pounds, which he attributes to eating fewer calories overall, because he eventually got tired of eating only meat. He missed snacking at coffee shops and browsing the local farmer’s market and trying out new restaurants around town, cooking with his family, and just generally enjoying food.

“I was psychologically exhausted,” Levinovitz told me. When he returned to omnivory, and he regained the lost weight in four days.

Peterson told me it took several weeks for her to get used to the beef-only approach, and that the relief of her medical symptoms overpowers any sense of missing food. If even a tiny amount of anything else finds its way into her mouth, she will be ill, she says. This happened when she tried to eat an organic olive, and again recently when she was at a restaurant that put pepper on her steak.

“I was like, whatever, it’s just pepper,” she told me. Then she had a reaction that lasted three weeks and included joint pain, acne, and anxiety.

Apart from having to exist in a world where the possibility of pepper exposure looms, the only other social downside she notices is that she hates asking people to accommodate her diet. So she will usually eat before she goes to a dinner party, she told me, “but then I’ll go drink and enjoy the party.”

“Drink, as in, water?”

“I can also, strangely enough, tolerate vodka and bourbon.”

The idea that alcohol, one of the most well-documented toxic substances, is among the few things that Peterson’s body will tolerate may be illuminating. It implies that when it comes to dieting, the inherent properties of the substances ingested can be less important than the eater’s conceptualizations of them—as either tolerable or intolerable, good or bad. What’s actually therapeutic may be the act of elimination itself.

For centuries, ascetics have found enlightenment through acts of deprivation. As Levinovitz, who is an associate professor of religion at James Madison University, explained to me, the Daoist text the Zhuangzi describes “a spirit man” who lives in the mountains and rides dragons and subsists only on air and dew. “There’s an anti-authoritarian bent to pop-culture wisdom, and a part of that is dealing with food taboos, which are handed down by authorities,” Levinovitz said. “Those are government now, instead of religious. And because they are wrong so often—or, at least, apparently wrong—that’s a good place to go when carving out your own area of authority. If you just eat the ‘wrong’ foods and don’t die, that’s a ritual way to prove that you go against conventional wisdom.”

Peterson’s narrative fits a classic archetype of an outsider who beat the game and healed thyself despite the odds and against the recommendations of the establishment. Her story is her truth, and it can’t be explained; you have to believe. And unlike the many studies that have been done to understand the diets of the longest-lived, healthiest people in history, or the randomized trials that are used to determine which health interventions are safe and effective for whom, her story is clear and dramatic. It’s right there in her photos; it has a face and a name to prove that no odds are too long for one determined person to overcome.

The beneficial effects of a compelling personal narrative that helps explain and give order to the world can be absolutely physiologically real. It is well documented that the immune system (and, so, autoimmune diseases) are modulated by our lifestyles—from how much we sleep and move to how well we eat and how much we drink. Most importantly, the immune system is also modulated by stress, which tends to be a byproduct of a perceived lack of control or order.

If strict dietary rules provide a sense of control and order, then Peterson’s approach is emblematic of the trend in elimination dieting taken to an extreme: Avoid basically everything. This verges into the realm of an eating disorder. The National Eating Disorder Association lists among common symptoms “refusal to eat certain foods, progressing to restrictions against whole categories of food.” In the early phases of disordered eating, as with bipolar disorder or alcoholism, a person may look and feel great. They may thrive for months or even years. But this fades. What’s more, the temporary relief from anxiety may mean that the source of the anxiety goes unsought and unaddressed.

I asked Peterson about the possibility that she may be enabling people with eating disorders. She said she would draw a line if a client were underweight or inducing vomiting. Otherwise, “it’s extremely disrespectful to people with health issues caused by food to be lumped into the same category as people with eating disorders. More of the same ‘blame the patient’ stuff that doctors and health professionals already do.”  

The popularity of Peterson’s narrative is explained by more than its timeless tropes; it has also been amplified by the fact that her father has occasionally cast his spotlight onto her story. Jordan Peterson’s recent book, Twelve Rules for Life, includes the story of his daughter’s health trials. The elder Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, could at first seem an unlikely face for acceptance of personal, subjective truth, as he regularly professes the importance of acting as purely as possible according to rigorous analysis of data. He argued in a recent video that American universities are the home to “ideologues who claim that all truth is subjective, that all sex differences are socially constructed, and that Western imperialism is the sole source of all Third World problems.” In his book, he writes that academic institutions are teaching children to be “brainwashed victims,” and that “the rigorous critical theoretician is morally obligated to set them straight.”

It is on grounds of his interpretation of income data, for example, that he has spoken out against the idea of a wage gap between men and women being unfair, as it can be explained away by biological factors associated with certain personality traits that are more valuable in the capitalist marketplace. From arguments from social-science evidence, he has expressed uncertainty that lesbian couples can raise children without a male father figure. And it is academic evidence that leads him to write in his book that “the so-called patriarchy” is “an arbitrary cultural artifact.”

Yet in a July appearance on the comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, Jordan Peterson explained how Mikhaila’s experience had convinced him to eliminate everything but meat and leafy greens from his diet, and that in the last two months he had gone full meat and eliminated vegetables. Since he changed his diet, his laundry list of maladies has disappeared, he told Rogan. His lifelong depression, anxiety, gastric reflux (and associated snoring), inability to wake up in the mornings, psoriasis, gingivitis, floaters in his right eye, numbness on the sides of his legs, problems with mood regulation—all of it is gone, and he attributes it to the diet.

“I’m certainly intellectually at my best,” he said. “I’m stronger, I can swim better, and my gum disease is gone. It’s like, what the hell?”

“Do you take any vitamins?” asked Rogan

“No. No, I eat beef and salt and water. That’s it. And I never cheat. Ever. Not even a little bit.”

“No soda, no wine?”

“I drink club soda.”

“Well, that’s still water.”

“Well, when you’re down to that level, no, it’s not, Joe. There’s club soda, which is really bubbly. There’s Perrier, which is sort of bubbly. There’s flat water, and there’s hot water. Those distinctions start to become important.”

Peterson reiterated several times that he is not giving dietary advice, but said that many attendees of his recent speaking tour have come up to him and said the diet is working for them. The takeaway for listeners is that it worked for Peterson, and so it may work for them. Rogan also clarified that though he is also not an expert, he is fascinated by the fact that he hasn’t heard any negative stories about people who have started the all-meat diet.

“Well, I have a negative story,” said Peterson. “Both Mikhaila and I noticed that when we restricted our diet and then ate something we weren’t supposed to, the reaction was absolutely catastrophic.” He gives the example of having had some apple cider and subsequently being incapacitated for a month by what he believes was an inflammatory response.

“You were done for a month?”

“Oh yeah, it took me out for a month. It was awful ...”

“Apple cider? What was it doing to you?”

“It produced an overwhelming sense of impending doom. I seriously mean overwhelming. There’s no way I could’ve lived like that. But see, Michaela knew by then that it would probably only last a month.”

“A month? From fucking cider?”

“I didn’t sleep that month or 25 days. I didn’t sleep at all for 25 days.”

“What? How is that possible?”

“I’ll tell you how it’s possible, you lay in bed frozen in something approximating terror for eight hours. And then you get up.”

The longest recorded stretch of sleeplessness in a human is 11 days, witnessed by a Stanford research team.

While there is debate in the scientific community over just how much meat belongs in a human diet, it is impossible for all or even most humans to eat primarily meat. Beef production at the scale required to feed billions of humans even at current levels of consumption is environmentally unsustainable. It is not even healthy from a theoretical evolutionary viewpoint, the microbiome expert Gilbert explained to me. Carnivores need to eat meat or else they die; humans do not. “The carnivore gastrointestinal tract is completely different from the human gastrointestinal tract, which is made up of a system designed to consume large quantities of complex fibers.”

What the Petersons are selling is rather a sense of order and control. Science is about questions, and self-help is about answers. A recurring idea in Jordan Peterson’s book is that humans need rules—the subtitle of is “an antidote to chaos”—even if only for the sake of rules. Peterson discovered this through his own suffering, as when he was searching the world for the best surgeon to give his young daughter a new hip. In explaining how he dealt with Mikhaila’s illness, he writes that “existence and limitation are inextricably linked.” He quotes Laozi:

It is not the clay the potter throws,

Which gives the pot its usefulness,

But the space within the shape,

From which the pot is made

Dietary rules offer limits, good or bad, that help people define the self. This is an attractive prospect, and anyone willing to decree such rules—dietary or otherwise—is bound to attract attention. Fox News recently declared Peterson “the Left’s public enemy number one” in a segment where he discussed with Tucker Carlson “why the Left wants to silence conservative thought.” Though to have lived through the last year is to have lived in a world where Peterson and his ideas have enjoyed near-constant amplification.

The allure of a strict code for eating—a way to divide the world into good foods and bad foods, angels and demons—may be especially strong at a time when order feels in short supply. Indeed there is at least some benefit to be had from any and all dietary advice, or rules for life, so long as a person believes in them, and so long as they provide a code that allows a person to feel good for having stuck with it and a cohort of like-minded adherents. The challenge is to find a code that accords as best possible with scientific evidence about what is good and bad, and with what is best for the world.

Article source here:The Atlantic

[reflectionsofanicequeen]

Your Depression was My Gift

        I suffer from insomnia and often lay awake at night, letting my mind run wild in every direction, thinking about old memories, current worries, future plans, and whether or not I turned off the stove. I tuck my feet in under the blanket so the monsters under the bed won’t get me, but really, the worst ones are in my own head. I still see the flashing red and white ambulance lights and remember the sweet smell of that crisp summer night. I remember looking out the upstairs window of my family’s cape, huddled with my brothers as Dad was lifted into the back of the emergency vehicle, trying to dodge questions of what happened and assuring my siblings that Dad would be okay. I remember Mom completely frantic, mascara tears smeared under her eyes, trying to hide the pain from all of us. I remember these moments in the dark because perhaps they are really the light that has guided me to this moment.

        I got a lot of my personality from my Dad. We are both lovers of everything old and musty, from old-school military jackets, to antique store finds, to those old books in your basement that are probably soggy with mildew and likely to never be read again. We used to go to gun right rallies and antique shows on the weekends and shooting at the range during school vacations. Dad and I are cut from the same worn-out, stubborn cloth. Perhaps that is why that night is still so hauntingly real in my mind.

        My parents separated when I was fifteen years old, just three days before Christmas, and my family has never been the same since. Mom came home from her job as a phlebotomist and Dad just walked out the door, in silence, leaving behind an echo that resonated for years until that house got foreclosed on and Mom had to move. I remember that Christmas more than any other, from sitting huddled on the floor crying over presents, to Mom and Dad hugging and crying because they realized they just could not do it anymore.

        “I can’t go through this every damn day,” Mom said.

        “I know, I know,” is all Dad could choke out amongst sobs that did not even sound like they could come from him.

        Dad gave us each a silver dog tag engraved with the words, I will always be there for you, love Dad, and hugged my brothers and I a little bit tighter than normal. Dad battled depression from being separated from my mother and did not really know how to deal with those emotions. Mom used to call him “bipolar” and would tell us that he was sick and that she did not want him around us.

        “Your father is crazy and is better off locked up and away from my children,” Mom said, and made us all think that something was literally wrong with him. In reality, he was just really sad and did not know how to cope with it. Mom was really the toxic one, but that’s a story for another day.

        Mom and Dad tried to work it out during the following summer, but things continued in the same shattered pattern they had before. Doors slammed, glasses half full of rum and Diet Coke splintered on the floor in pieces, and Mom threw remote controls or anything else she could get her hands on into Dad’s path. One particularly humid and dry summer night, Dad had finally had enough. He had left for the evening, alone to his own vices, and had taken a near-lethal combination of prescription medication and alcohol. He pulled back into the front of our house, still half in the road and half in the driveway, his silver truck door swung half open, while his body leaned up against the steering wheel, blaring on the horn.

        I startled awake at two in the morning to Mom begging in the front yard, “What the fuck did you take, Mark? Please, tell me. Where were you? How many did you take?”

        I remember running outside barefoot across the sharp and jagged gravel driveway as I saw Mom frantically struggling to keep Dad awake, her tiny frame bowing under my much larger father, trying to press him back into the seat, while his head kept slamming off the dashboard every time she lost her grip. Dad didn’t even look like himself, with his face drained of his usual rosy complexion and a nearly comatose look as he gazed towards something we clearly couldn’t see. His normally bright blue eyes had a dim to them that I cannot erase from my memory to this day. He looked afraid and nearly asleep at the same time and certainly nothing like my active and healthy father.

        Dad had a loaded handgun on the passenger seat and Mom was scared to the point that she couldn’t think clearly anymore. Dad had instilled in us such a respect for guns that I knew he would never hurt us, but realized he was trying to hurt himself immediately. Mom grabbed the handgun, screaming at him and asking what exactly he intended to do.

        “Were you going to fucking kill us, Mark? You are out of your mind,” she shrieked, “This is why I want you out of the house. Have you lost your fucking mind?”

        Being my father’s daughter, I grabbed the gun from her and quickly unloaded any bullets in order to ease Mom’s fear and hopefully, to stop her from waking up the entire neighborhood. I felt embarrassed for my father who so valued his privacy and knew this moment of weakness would haunt him in the days following. The brass shells littered the ground, in as much disarray as the situation at hand. I was dizzy with nausea as I began pushing through Mom to get to Dad, begging her to call 911, promising that I would keep him awake.

        “You have to call,” I said, “I’ll hide the gun and the pills. Just call Mom. Please! He’s going to die if you don’t!”

        I remember cupping Dad’s cold, purple face in my hands as his eyes kept evading my own, begging him to stay alive for me. I remember him foaming at the mouth, trying to form words and getting frustrated because his while his lips moved, only murmurs and grunts spilled out. I remember apologizing for fighting with him and for the words I had said out of teenage anger.

        “I’m sorry Dad, I didn’t mean those things. I was just mad. I love you. Please don’t die. Mark and Tyler need you. I need you.”

        Mostly, I remember blaming myself for not realizing sooner that Dad needed help.

        Once I realized that Dad suffered from depression, a deep knife cut into me when I realized that I could also easily fall into this pattern as well. Mom always claimed he was unstable, but I knew that he just did not have an outlet for how he was feeling. His mother, my grandmother, had committed suicide years earlier due to extreme depression, and I realized I needed to find a way to let my emotions out before they ever got the best of me, considering depressions deep, twisted pattern within my family. The Irish in me prevents me from ever hiding what I am feeling and I have learned that I need an outlet to prevent myself from spinning out of control. Even before this moment I wrote, but never realized the impact that this one night had in my life and for my sanity.

        Dad and I did not always have the best relationship growing up, and he used to tell me to “write it out” instead of getting in screaming matches with him. I took his advice and wrote him a poem describing why I needed him in my life and why I did not want us to fight anymore. It is a poem that I still keep close to me over a decade later because it reminds me of how important my writing is. To this day, I keep an anonymous blog of my poetry and free writing, only sharing it to those close to me when I really feel comfortable with letting them into these parts of my life. The ending of the poem I wrote to my Dad especially resonates with my feelings during this time, even though I wrote it about a year earlier:

                  Dad, don’t you know? That little girl is me…

                  You’ve shown me all the things that I don’t want to be.

                  Even though we don’t get along, I still need you here.

                 Because you’re my daddy, I still need you near.

                 Even if we scream and yell, I’m still your daughter.

                Try to understand me, because you’re my father.

        Years later, Dad tries to deny the events of that night, but nobody could ever erase that moment from my mind. A lot of other traumatic events happened that year and still to this day, both of my parents try to twist them into something else, maybe to prevent my brothers from clearly remembering that year. I won’t forget though because I wrote down everything, not to necessarily keep a log of my life but rather to assure myself that I would be okay no matter the outcome of that year. Mom still calls Dad “crazy,” but I know the truth because I made sure to have a way to sort fact from fiction all these years later. That day will never leave me, but at least I can say I remember the day I decided that writing would be a lifelong project that would be necessary for my stability as a person.

        Many of us remember the highest and lowest moments of our lives but rarely do we really see the impact they have in the moment. Looking back, that moment of uncertainty in my life made me into the writer I am today. I bleed onto the paper through my red ink that flows quite literally as steady as my tears at times. I don’t cry anymore when I write because writing has literally freed me in a way I could not even begin to describe, whether that be from the stinging pain of a bad high school breakup, watching Dad inflict self-harm from my bedroom window because he felt bad about covering up Mom’s tattooed name on his arm, or just dealing with normal teenage angst. Writing is literally therapy to me still and has helped me conquer so many fears that I thought were inescapable. Writing is potentially the most important aspect of my day to day life because it suppresses my fears and calms my mind. Writing has literally kept me alive.

        Looking back, I am glad I wrote those memories down because they remind me of what I have overcome and where I have come from. I will never forget those moments that will forever haunt me, but they have quite literally laid down the foundation of who I am today. I skim my blog often and read about those memories, not to relive the pain, but to constantly remind myself where writing has taken me as a person. All the puzzle pieces of my life and writing about them has made me into a more considerate partner for my husband because I understand what it takes to make a relationship work. They’ve made me a more compassionate liaison for my patients in my line of work, who are often angry as I assist them because they are in pain from a situation out of their control. They’ve made me a more passionate writer on those days I just need to get it all out. Writing has made me more aware of my flaws as a person and what I need to do to work on myself in order to be the best version I can be. Most importantly, it has encouraged me to express myself in a way I know is truly a gift. Now I write about the happy moments of my life, but I never forget that those darker moments unlocked the writer inside of me.

#memoir #beginningamemoir #writing

[babysquirrelkat-blog]

Introduction Post

It’s been a while since I’ve been back to Tumblr.  Things got pretty good in my life and I didn’t need it as much.  For several years Tumblr was my crutch.  It was my way of fulfilling my human need for socialization and peer bonding.  That might sound sad and pathetic... :/  I’ve been mentally ill since 2008. Although I suspect that my issues go much further back and on into my childhood.  2008, when I was 19, may have just been when my brain just finally blew its breakers so to speak.  I was smoking a lot of pot back then.  Did some coricidins, and went into psychosis.  They originally diagnosed me with drug induced psychosis.  I of course didn’t believe I was sick, and I kept smoking pot, which prolonged my psychosis long enough for them to diagnose me with schizophrenia.  I lost all of my friends and even a lot of my family.  I no longer knew myself let alone anyone else.  I had to get to know my own mother again; learn who she was.  Some of my family I never got to know again, because they demonized me for being ill.

For a while I didn’t leave my house, and if I did, I didn’t leave the car.  A trip to the grocery store meant a half and hour or more waiting in the car because I was too frightened to go inside.  My mom would get annoyed with me.  Flash forward a year or so, I would leave the house, but every where I went was a panic attack waiting to happen.  I would start feeling unsafe, my heart would start pounding, everything and everyone around me started feeling too close, too loud, too bright, and too threatening.  I started feeling that the people around me where going to hurt me, imprison me, or kill me. My mom was constantly pissed at me for running out of restaurants to smoke a cigarette during a meal... and then just never coming back inside.

I slowly got better.  Very slowly.  I didn’t regain a social life or my own personality.  I lost my liberal ideologies because of the catholic delusions I experienced during psychosis.  I had no original or individual ideas. I was sorta an asshat. A nice asshat with as much manners as my anxiety could not interfere with, but an asshat.

I thought life was always going to be completely bland.  I thought I was going to grow old in my childhood bedroom at my mothers house.  I wasn’t going to marry or have children. I had a lot of potential at one time.  I was beautiful, talented, creative, smart and passionate.  The anti-psychotics had taken me from a teeny tiny 96lbs at 4′11″ to 238 lbs.  I had acne all over my face. It’s riddled with scars.  I never had acne before the medications. I stopped having periods.  I had two periods that started on their own and maybe 3-4 that were started with pills from my doctor in the span of 6 years. 5-6 periods in 6 years.  I felt broken.  I felt less like of a woman. I had no confidence left.  I spent all my time on Tumblr and watching my fandom shows. From age 19-25 I had very little contact with any one my age.  I felt like I was old before I ever got a chance to be young.

In 2012 or so I was diagnosed with schizoaffective.  Schizophrenia and bipolar.  There was also PTSD, Primary O OCD, shit tons of anxiety and depression, and some slight movement disorders from the drugs.

In July of 2014 I took myself off all of the drugs.  The CNP who was in charge of my case flipped out.  She called me non-compliant and a liar.  Even sent a nasty letter to my college financial aid.  She didn’t believe mental illness was an excuse for the symptoms of those mental illnesses.  I’ve ran into that a lot over the years.  Even from the people who claim to be the most supportive.  My mother thinks she is the champion of my mental health.  Maybe she is in her own ways.  But there are things she has never quite grasped.  She could never understand why I couldn’t clean the entire house if being unemployed gave me all the time in the world to do so. Being on Tumblr made her think I was childish.  She had even me convinced that because of trauma I was stuck at 16 years old and would always be a child.  She treated me like a lazy bratty teenager instead of recognizing my symptoms.  She had people in my family doing the same.  Calling me to lecture me.  Telling me I should be praying for the health of other people if I wanted to get better.  My aunt told me that she has to force herself out of bed some days to get to work. As to say, you aren’t the only one who has depression.  That I should be able to deal with it better and not complain.  Other people had it worse.  Well after 7 years in bed I finally forced myself out the front door, so to speak, so perhaps her argument almost had a leg to stand on.

After going off meds, I started to regain myself.  I got a lot of shit.  Everything I said happened to me during the day was still perceived with a lot of skepticism.  If I said someone said something to me at the store, no matter what it was, or how believable, I was still asked, “Are you sure that’s what happened.”

In 2015 I met a guy online and we started dating.  We were extremely happy.  He helped me find who I was again.  I started to remember myself.  Which so happens to be a somewhat bitchy siren cunt from a feminist dimension on the other side of a portal that popped out of a earthy hippie chick’s mirror.... Or well something like that.   Sometimes I’m a complete mother hen to my friends, I worry about them.  I do things for them.  I take care of everyone in my small circle.  I stress and I panic and I cook and I drive a mini van.  I get angry when someone threatens who and what I love and that anger comes out of me like a tidal wave.  I even found out that I act quick in an emergency.

In August of 2015 I started having convulsions and an abnormal gait.  A year and a half later I am doing somewhat better.  I have found that the shaking and inability to walk is a manifestation of my anxiety.  It only happens when my anxiety has been triggered, specifically during PTSD episodes.  A loud noise could send me to the floor screaming and shaking.  It made me feel scared at first.  The life I had just regained was ending all over again.  But it has subsided quite a lot.

My boyfriend was put in jail for a DUI on Nov 2 2015.  My mental health deteriorated without him. I felt lost in a void.  He got out Feb 25 2016 and I felt so far from him.  He didn’t seem real.  Where before he was the only thing breaking through my dissociation.  I could touch him then and he was as far away as all the rest of reality.  I still refused to start meds again.  The meds kept me sick.  I needed to be able to deal with this all on my own.  I still do.  The meds are not my answer.

My boyfriend was also having issues of his own.  He was taking half his klonopin pills as soon as he got the bottles.  He lost his job.  He was awful on the pills.  I finally told him it was the pills or me.  He flushed them and it hasnt been a problem since.  Although, I did worry he would resent me for it. 

He and I have had a lot of problems here recently.  We moved into out own apartment in September 2016.  He has been working 2nd shift and staying up all night, sleeping all day.  This has left me alone a lot.  I don’t feel like he listens to a lot that I say.  He’s constantly irritating me with sexist remarks.  He’s constantly turning my arguments into his.  I don’t let him.  I call him on his bullshit every time.  He will interrupt me talking about what’s important to me so he can talk about some random ass shit that had nothing to do with anything.  Which wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t talk for half an hour.  If I interrupt him to finish what I was saying for five seconds he uses that as an excuse to say that I’m the real problem.  I suppose that’s half the time.  The other half we get along really well.  Like really well.  Which is wonderful.

I still want to marry him.  I want to have his baby. I want to beat him with a frying pan and then snuggle with him while we watch Supernatural.  Did I mention we finally started trying to conceive now that I can have periods again.  First month we tried was this last month.  My cycle is 33 days. So I started testing like a crazy person 14dpo... everything has been negative.  I’m now a week late on my period and my tests are so negative they aren’t even getting evap lines anymore( I test all the time even though we weren’t officially trying til this last month).  My lady bits totally choked with 10 seconds left in the game.

So I’ve been pretty depressed these last few weeks.  I’m stressed out.  I’m a taxi driver for my boyfriends brother.  Taking him everywhere, taking the boyfriend to work, driving my sister everyonce and a while.  I’m in a play.  Which only takes up about 9 hours a week.  Yet, I have been so stressed out that I’ve not been able to take care of myself.  I don’t have the energy to cook much, eat healthy, do laundry, bathe.  I’m gaining weight from easy junk food and lack of moving.  I mostly sit on the couch or in the driver’s seat.  I don’t have much time with anyone outside of giving them rides or during the time they are waiting for rides.  I get maybe two hours or less with my boyfriend a day during the week.  On the weekend I’m lucky to get time alone with him between calls for my help to do things for everyone else.  My need to help, it seems, always becomes expected by people.  I offer assistance a few times and their lives become my responsabilty.  I love them all, but I need them to understand that I sometimes need a break and they can’t call me for everything, without making them feel like they can’t call me for anything.

TL;DR So that’s sorta where I’ve been and where I’m at now.  That was actually somewhat brief... O.o  Basically, I’ve felt completely unimportant and without justification for my existence here lately and I’m back to Tumblr as my crutch for a bit.  Somewhere I can feel like I have a mild place to call home; away from a life that seems to just be one giant mental illness prison following me around and stalking me for the better part of a decade. 

(EDIT: Since being off medications, my schizophrenic symptoms have subsided.  All that remains is the bipolar and multiple anxiety based disorders.  Although I do hear voices occasionally, I know that those voices are simply my own feelings that weren’t quite addressed by my conscious mind floating up from my subconscious.  For example I could feel a swelling of happiness in my chest for my boyfriend and hear a voice that says, “I love him.” )

If you got this far congratulations and thank you, here are some XOXOs for your trouble.

<3 Kat

#mental illness #relationships #feminism #ttc #bipolar #dissasociation #PTSD #convulsions #abnormal gait #movement disorder #disability