Brain Spew in Lieu of Wit

I have spent a lot of my life trying to define what kind of life I want to live, as if pasting words to my actions gives them meaning. I do that with so many things - my identity, my relationships, my purpose. I knew what I wanted to do from the time I could talk. I spent 20 years of my life working toward teaching high school. Crashed. Spent 10 years working toward and in teaching university. Crashed. I've spent the last three years spinning without direction, without a classroom or a whiteboard at the end of the tunnel. I'm gaining some footing as an office manger, tutor, organizer. Significantly less as a writer. It's hard to have a voice when I've centered my identity around Teacher. I'm learning and integrating that it hasn't changed - just shifted from my core and became a limb or a subtitle. I am constantly defining myself by my work. A friend told me that's "internalized capitalism" and I sometimes worry that's my entire personality. ...

CONTENT WARNING: mentions of childhood sexual assault (CSA) and grooming; discussion of CSA recovery; BDSM/Fetish On the surface, my sexuality was never a question. I am one of those who always had attraction to a variety of genders. Boys and girls in elementary school were equally interesting, boy and girls in middle school were equally attractive. I came out as bisexual to my closest friends in my freshman year of high school, to my family the following year. No one who knew me was surprised by my orientation. If anything, they were surprised I was so worried about telling people, as I was the kid who Didn't Care what people thought. In reality, I was terrified of having another thing that separated me from my peers. The more complicated nuances of my sexuality emerged as I was able to start recovering from my childhood. I was sexualized at a very young age, in a way that undermined all of the distinctions between sexual attraction & love (not that the US is great at maki...

It's been a very emotional week. I finally made it out of the depression of the past two months and I had a bit of a pain flare-up at the start. I'm still catching up from all of the chores that fell by the wayside while I was depressed and I'm frustrated that I haven't been making more progress. I found out yesterday that my paternal grandfather (Grandpa) had a stroke on Friday. He's recovering, but it's dug up a lot of complicated feelings that I haven't really given myself time to mete through. Bosco (my beautiful Great Dane) has some skin condition that's causing his hair to come out in patches. We've been fighting a flea infestation for a while now, but the skin thing is new. My day job is only getting me 20-30 hours a week and I'm trying to do the freelance thing, but the hustle is so hard when I'm fighting my brain and body. I am seeing improvement, overall - I'm healthier than I've been in a long time, my credit score has vast...

I've been trying to find a neat way of presenting this post, but I don't know if there is one.  So, I've kind of imposed order on my rambling. Here's hoping it makes sense... *** I came out as genderqueer on social media last week. I didn't tell anyone in my life face-to-face until afterwards. I'm 32 and my relationship with gender has never been straightforward. I had to untangle a lot of competing narratives and internalized misogyny to reach this place of self-acceptance. While it is far from the case for everyone, I had to come to terms with femininity being valid before I could fully realized my identity as a genderqueer person. I have never been femme. As a child, I was oft described as a tomboy and many family members lamented my resistance to dresses, skirts, and ladylike behavior. Unfortunately, this quickly evolved into being "different from other girls." I'm a geek, one of the guys. I spent a lot of time trying to hide my body un...

I have always been very focused on my identity - what do I believe in? Do I embody those values in both thought and action? How am I perceived and how can I better align those perceptions with who I want to be? How is my environment, past and current, affecting how I see myself? How are my mental illness, pain, and fatigue affecting my behavior? What are my goals and how are they affecting my self image? Okay, so I've been accused of excessive metacognition . I blame reading so much philosophy and Victorian literature as a kid (the stoic and socratic philosophies are great for building this skill, but I digress). I also wanted to be a teacher at a very young age and have always been very aware of societal expectations, so I have spent most of my life being very careful of what I publicly share about myself and what might be used against me should some parent or administrator feel they need to take me down or control me. ....I also grew up in a family where you needed to know ...

Another year between posts. I would usually give a quick summary of the missing time, but I think I'll skip that this round. I'm moving back into a position where I can start planning consistent updates, but I also know that I have difficulty maintaining routines with my personal projects. The important thing is that I'm writing now. I'm trying to focus on that. I'm afraid. I'm exhausted and in pain. I worry my medication regimen has become merely a stop-gap, but I don't know what "properly medicated" looks like for me. I think I'm finally recovering from my 2015 burnout, which is bittersweet. I contemplate putting my schedule in a tighter stranglehold, knowing that it hasn't worked in the past and any goals I was trying to attain just fell between my fingers like sand. I'm afraid for so many reasons. Donald Trump's presidency has been...exhausting and infuriating. He's inconsistent, volatile, racist, and completely out of t...

                Let’s talk about anxiety. It’s an insidious and amorphous part of living with mental illness and/or trauma. It’s very difficult to ignore the expected spikes of anxiety – like right before a test, performance, or interview – but there is a cause and, in most cases, there are coping mechanisms to help ease the tension such as studying, practicing, or coaching. Then there are the unexpected spikes of anxiety – panic attacks , unpleasant surprises, and bad news. These spikes often have fewer coping mechanisms associated with them, but they are still very difficult to flat out ignore.                 The anxiety that I’m focusing on, though, is the creeping, background anxiety that rests in the back of your brain and broils in the pit of your stomach. It’s the anxiety that quietly chips at your confidence and makes you q...