Brain Spew in Lieu of Wit

I have had conflicted feelings about  positive thinking  for as long as I’ve been aware of the concept. I want to support it. There is increasing  scientific evidence  to suggest that positive thinking can improve mental health, stress coping strategies, recovery from trauma, and self-esteem. There are copious resources in  self-help books ,  therapy ,  motivational speakers , and  websites . Positive thinking proponents insist that you can change your outlook, rewire your brain, be more successful, and be healthier just by turning your frown upside down and stop thinking “cannot” and start believing “can do!” It takes some core components from  cognitive behavior therapy , in that the goal is to change how you interact with the environment and to consciously shape how you process stimuli. I use similar techniques to change my self-perception, cope with anxiety, and to help stall  catastrophizing . There is certainly something t...

I'm not entirely sure when I last did a general update, so I figured I would give you an idea of what's happening on my journey. As I've said in a few of my previous posts, I am back on Venlafaxine ER (the generic for Effexor XR). The dosage is significantly lower than I had been taking - I spent most of my adult life taking 150mg, but I'm currently on the 37.5mg dose. I have been entertaining the idea of going up to the 75mg to see if it helps my depressive episodes and nerve pain, but it's not at a critical point. As it stands, my depressive episodes are significantly shorter and less severe than they have been in my whole life. I'm able to recognize the spiraling thought patterns for what they are and have started using the tools that have been gifted to me over the years to treat myself gently. My pain levels have diminished greatly. In all honestly, my day-to-day is still between 3-5 on a 10 point pain scale, but that's a vast improvement of 5-8. My...

There are so many difficulties with mental and chronic illness, and not the least of these is how we manage them. We are inundated with advice and solutions, but a lot of it misses some of the core challenges with treatment in the first place. I want to explore some of why it's so hard to seek treatment and to keep up with it. This is not to keep people from trying medication. I want to give a voice to all of the things people who do  seek (and continue) treatment overcome. I largely focus on medications, as they're a very tangible element of treatment, but many of these also apply to therapy, exercise, and procedures (such as surgeries, hormone treatments, ect , or tms ). Do I even need help? One of the hardest parts of seeking treatment is recognizing that there might be a problem to begin with. Seeing there's a problem isn't just recognizing how symptoms are affecting you, as the ill person, or the people around you. It can be really hard to realize your ex...

  One of the most constant conversations with my friends is how to keep up our creative endeavors while we're fighting depression and anxiety. I know that I personally feel hopeless in dragging my pen through depressive numbness and overcoming the defeatist terror that comes from feeling like nothing I say matters, or has been said before, or is wildly inaccurate. I'm notorious for freezing and going dark (creatively and otherwise) when I'm depressed and overwhelmed. What I ultimately forget, though, is that writing is part of my self-care. Not writing is akin to not cleaning my house or  not showering. Unfortunately, like any self-care, being creative through depressive lows and anxiety spikes requires practice and patience. Journaling (the Writer's Sketchbook) My anxiety and perfectionism tell me that every work should be a masterpiece, that anything less than brilliant is not worth putting in words. This, naturally, blocks my creative process. I know  that nothing...

Self-care is hard . Self-care is, ultimately, how we maintain our social, physical, emotional, and psychological lives. It gets tricky when you have mental illness, neurodivergence, physical disability, chronic pain, and other chronic ailments. Part of it is attaining the  executive functioning  to accomplish the thing in the first place, but it's also because it's complicated and variable. We are inundated with what "healthy" looks like, which is discouraging and infuriating in itself, but we can't always accomplish it all (or at all). How do we prioritize important self-care without depleting our resources (or spoons or spell slots )? What does healthy look like to us ? How do we keep up with it at our worst? There isn't a singular answer, obviously, but I'll try to take my own methods and expand them into something that can be a bit more general. Honesty The most important part of developing my self-care habit is being honest with myself. I'm n...

I have spent the past several years working to build discipline. I want to stop flinging myself from moment to moment and becoming frozen in the infinite and terrifying possibilities of the future. I want to finally  follow through on a plan deliberately and directly. I want to be the determined, diligent, laser-focused person I read about in self-help books. I continue to discover that the process of becoming a disciplined person is both more complicated and significantly simpler than I had initially realized. I am, by nature, a stubborn and goal-oriented person. I am lost when I find myself without a destination, as if I'm untethered from reality. I have leant heavily on calendars and lists, often over-organizing to the point of distraction and panic. I ground myself in these things... often to the point of immobility. I am also the person who finds validation in being Busy. Even as I build space in my schedule, I am still overworked and only stop when my body shuts down. Th...

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. ...