#sometimes i wish i wasnt still high functioning when depressed so people noticed

[meowvey]

i think my friends actually just tolerate me and don’t actually like me lol

[musherum]

long post -/ cael talks about her new asthma medication and recent Realizations

honestly? im noticing a lot of improvement since i started the new medication. its a corticosteroid, which is a kind of drug that is exclusively for treating constrictive asthma. there are two different types of asthma, see: theres inflammatory, which responds well to treatment with ventalin, the most common inhaler which provides immediate, “emergency” relief when you have an attack of inflammatory asthma, and theres constrictive, which doesnt respond to it at all. this was the “missing link” i was looking for. i didnt know about the medication requirements for that form of asthma until a few days ago when i had a major attack of constrictive asthma.

it.... took me a lot to finally say to my mum “i need to go to a doctor. i am having a lot of trouble breathing, and i cannot function. i know this cannot be normal.” it took even more, though, to say to her that i needed to stay home that day, and miss the GED class im taking - even though the day before was the first session. my mom has screamed at me and called me a failure and an idiot before, when she caught me skipping school because of depression and fatigue. that was a very very big step for me, facing my fear of my mom yelling at me again. but i could not focus on anything, not with how laboured my breathing was. it was the frustration of not being able to sleep that finally pushed me over the edge - while i was up all night with my then untreated and untreatable asthma attack, i 

i told her my symptoms, and then explained to her my, uh, “theory” that i had a form of asthma that didnt respond to ventalin. i got the name wrong (i mixed up constrictive and inflammatory), but otherwise, i got it entirely correct. i was so scared that she might brush me off, like what had happened before with so many people when i was younger. it had even happened with other doctors. but, fortunatley, she quickly agreed with me that it appears i need a corticosteroid as well as my ventalin to treat my symptoms.

i didnt know, before very recently, that ventalin is exclusively for inflammatory asthma, or that constrictive asthma requires cordicosteroids to treat. all along, i thought i was just being lazy, or dumb, or panicking, or lying, or a that i just didnt care. because people have said things like this to me. all throughout my life. i would say, “i cannot breathe,” and they would say, “take your emergency (ventalin) puffer.” so i would. and when i said i still didnt feel better, after i took my ventalin puffer in front of them, they stopped believing it could be asthma. older people, the ones who were supposed to take care of kids when theyre hurting, were the MOST dissmissive of my complaints. because they thought they knew everything about what asthma was. better than a kid who had it.

i thought that whatever it was, it couldnt be asthma, because so many older people told me so. no one ever told me that constrictory asthma needed a different additional medication. no one told me that i needed it. everyone said that asthma could just be treated with a ventalin inhaler, period, and that if i was so out of breath, i should just use mine. and i did. and itd didnt work. so i figured... i must not have asthma. because surely an adult knows better than i do, right?

as i grew up, my memories faded as memories do - but none so much as that of the visit to the doctors when i was first diagnosed. i can remember only a precious handful of details now; a diagram that depicted the inside of the lungs, shown with one having its air-tubes contracted tightly, and the other clogged up with mucus. i forgot about it because i was full of self loathing, i feel like, at least in part - its much harder to control your emotions when you dont have enough oxygen to normally power your brain, and the bullying i withstood, while not violent, was very frequent. i was very much not a “popular kid,” ill leave it there. a lot of people hated me. and a lot of people only pretended to like me, and i wasnt able to tell they were laughing at me. when you have shit like that on your mind constantly, and youre oxygen starved??? you tend to be a little, uh, distracted. im not surprised that i dont remember it well. but i wish i did. all i know for sure is that at the end of the day, i had a ventalin puffer, and that was it. i think there may have been a misunderstanding - when the doctor said that the cortisol (the most common, brand-name corticosteroid) is for long-term relief and the ventalin is for emergencies, my mom might have thought something along the lines of, “my child had an asthma attack, and it was an emergency. therefore ventalin is what we need, not cortisol.” but again, i dont know that for sure, and i dont want to throw anyone under the bus. it may have been that, or it may not have been. but i feel that my mom likely wouldnt remember if i asked her - taking ME to a doctors appointment wouldnt rank very high on her “important life moments” list, i suspect.

and so as i grew up, again, i had ventalin, but i very rarely remember having cortisol around, let alone taking it. uh, sorry i mean, corticosteroids. anyway, um... i think i was depressed then, even as a kid. my mom did not impress the importance of the medicine on me - she said it wasnt a that big a deal, that i only need to take it “sometimes.” and so when i ran out, i figured i didnt have to rush to tell her. and, of course, i didnt have the energy to take it every day - couldnt breath. in fact, because it required me to wash my mouth out through after taking it every morning and night, it was significantly more difficult to take the medicine that treated my constrictive asthma. and again, i did not have energy to let me do what i knew i was supposed to. and i did not know that just taking the corticosteroid regularly would help me get my energy back, because no one ever told me that my energy had... WENT anywhere. they didnt mention it being a part of the disease, so i assumed to was unrelated. i didnt know the science behind it back then, i was a little kid! and so it was that every time i had a flair-up, people kept telling me to use my ventalin inhaler, the one thats for “emergencies,” if i really felt so bad. and so.... i would. and the ventalin would not ease my constricted lungs, because its intended for inflammation. and when i tried to tell them it wasnt working, people would start telling me it wasnt asthma, and that it had to be something else - something that i was fucking up. and i believed them. i believed what they told me. because i thought that adults were supposed to be smart, and know more than kids, and that they were supposed to protect me when i said i was hurting. i thought they were supposed to help children when theyre hurting. and so all along, i believed them, cause why would they lie to me? they must know what theyre talking about. adults know more than kids, they never shut up about it, i probably thought. and... so i started to really internalize the idea that it was my fault. that i was always so tired, and forgetful, and weak, and exhausted, and out of breath, and bad at talking, and bad at concentrating, and bad in school, and bad at everything... because i was just a bad person. i even thought it was my fault that my hands wouldnt stop shaking - no matter how much i drew. my lines were always crooked and bent. so because i never knew that cortisol was the medicine i needed the most, i was never ABLE to stop my hands from shaking, no matter how hard i tried and how much i practiced drawing. so i assumed i was just a naturally shitty artist, and began to resign myself to a life of never being able to create something beautiful. no matter how much i practiced drawing.

all of it was because of my constrictive asthma - either because of too little air being able to penetrate my lungs and oxygenate my body and bloodstream, or because of the sharp, sudden and literally dizzying rips of air that i had to suck in just to breath at all.

all these years of hating myself have been perpetuated so needlessly, all because people assumed they knew better than a kid. even when the kid tells you “he” (really she, im talking about me as a kid after all) has a disease and that “he” (again, she) cant breathe and that “he” (SHE) has tried what you are suggesting and it does ever work. even if that kid is literally telling them, “it is my disease that is causing this.”

because people brushed me off, and put me down, even when i was telling them that i couldnt breath. even when i tried to explain to them that i felt like i was being slowly suffocated, by an invisble hand squeezing the air out of my chest. because thats what it DOES feel like.

...fuck, man. that was fucked up.

[oovitus]

Weekend Reading, 6.24.18

A friend of mine told me that he recently went to a conference where all of the attendees seemed to be talking about perfectionism, in spite of that fact that it wasn’t the conference theme. They were discussing it as people who had been susceptible to impossible standards in the past, but now counted themselves lucky to have let perfectionism go.

As we were talking, it occurred to me that I haven’t thought about perfectionism in a long time, though it had a hold on me for years. Even after I stopped trying to do everything “right,” perfectionism (and to some extent, being “Type A”) was a big part of my identity. I called myself a “recovering perfectionist,” which was truthful, but in retrospect I think it was also my way of continuing to identify with perfectionism and communicate it to others. I didn’t want to be subject to oppressive standards anymore, but I hadn’t yet figured out who I was without them.

In the end, perfectionism exited my life out of necessity; I untangled from it because I didn’t have a choice. Living with bouts of depression and anxiety in the last few years has meant letting go of a lot of my self-imposed notions of what constitutes productivity, success, or a day well spent.

A common experience of depression, I think, is that small, routine asks can suddenly seem insurmountable: doing laundry, cleaning up, running errands. This would have sounded unbelievable to me at one point in my life, when these kinds of to-dos were just afterthoughts, but now I know what it’s like to struggle with the everyday.

I’m thinking back to an afternoon two summers ago that illustrates this perfectly: my anxiety had been particularly bad, and I’d been paralyzed by procrastination all day. By dinnertime I was genuinely proud of myself for having gotten out of the house to pick up groceries and mail a package. This was a radically different measure of productivity than I was used to, and it didn’t matter: I was relieved to have done something, anything.

I’m in a different place now, capable of fuller days, but my perspective remains valuably altered by that experience. I don’t wake up with a fixed agenda anymore. I don’t plan on doing more than I know I can handle. If I notice that tasks remain undone everyday on my modest to-do list, I take it as a sign that I need to plan on doing less, rather than wondering why I can’t do more.

I’ve learned that my capacity for doing and my tendency to get overwhelmed ebb and flow. Sometimes they shift for reasons that I can identify, like how I’m feeling physically or whether something has made me anxious. Sometimes they change suddenly and for no apparent reason. I don’t try to bully myself out of feeling overwhelmed; rather, I ask what would make me feel calmer and more steady.

I often remind myself of a mantra that my friend Maria gave herself when her MS symptoms started keeping her from the pace and routines that had become customary: “better than before.” The origin of this mantra was an ongoing struggle to keep tidy the home she shared with her young son. As Maria’s “functional self” receded, she noticed the presence of another self, who “though less physically versatile, was stronger than I ever could have imagined from the perspective of the one who functioned’ throughout the day. She began to show me things my functional self simply missed.”

One of those things, she goes on to say,

was to be able to notice when I was completely out of energy to exert myself. This might be when something was halfway wiped, or not wiped at all, but I had somehow managed to put some things away. She would know to say that’s enough for now. And she was very clever about what would satisfy my functional self, who would never have been satisfied with that’s enough. It sobered that functional self to learn when the diagnosis of MS finally came that the “forcing” she had habituated herself to was the worst thing to do if she wanted to preserve her physical abilities.  But as the saying goes, it’s really true that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. So my deeper wiser identity came up with something even more ingenious than this looming threat:

Better Than It Was.

Or, (depending on the context): Cleaner Than It Was.

These two statements became my mottos. And they still are. They allowed me to learn to pace myself while still satisfying that Functional Self that I was making what she considered progress through the daily requirements of life, even if many of them were slowed to a crawl or a downright standstill.  Better Than It Was.

Maria’s story is uniquely her own, and my own sense of high functionality has shifted for reasons that are uniquely mine. But her clever motto has given me great comfort since I first read about it on her blog. So, too, does this quote from Melody Beattie: “Our best yesterday was good enough; our best today is plenty good too.”

The best thing about letting go of perfectionism is developing a capacity to recognize that “our best” can look very different from moment to moment. There’s no longer an immovable standard of output. I wish that I’d been able to pry my ego away from productivity and being busy on my own, rather than being forced to reckon with a dramatic shift in my capacities, but in the end, it doesn’t matter how I got here. What matters is that I’m learning to be grateful for what I can do, rather than fixating on what I haven’t, or can’t.

Throughout all of this, I’ve had the tremendous luxury of being able to adjust my schedule and responsibilities in a way that allowed me to create a dynamic “new normal.” Not every person has the space to do this, depending on his or her professional and personal circumstances. I recognize and respect the many men and women who go through periods of depression and anxiety while also keeping up with fixed schedules. And of course I worry sometimes about my DI year: now that I’m learning how to take gentle care in the moments when I need to, what will it be like to temporarily lose control of my schedule and workload?

I don’t have an answer, but to some degree I suspect that I don’t need one. My routine next year will be a challenge, but so long as I can do my best without succumbing to the influence of perfectionism, I know I’ll be OK. Much as I’ve made my schedule more realistic, letting go of perfectionism has been an inside job. It resides in recognizing how futile perfectionism is, how it discourages me needlessly while keeping me from recognizing the good that I can do, and maybe have done (another observation that’s prompted by Beattie).

Here’s to a week—and a month, and a summer, and a year—of doing my best and trusting that my best is enough. I wish the same for you, too. And here’s the weekly roundup of links.

Recipes

I would never think to put fruit in a tabbouleh, but I love Katie’s creative mixture of blueberries, parsley, mint, and quinoa—I’d actually love to try it as a savory breakfast dish!

A very different kind of quinoa salad, but no less delicious: a curried mixture with red cabbage, raisins, and pumpkin seeds from Melanie of Veggie Jam.

Two recipes for summer entertaining caught my eye this past week. The first is these show-stopping chipotle cauliflower nachos from my friend Jeanine of Love & Lemons.

Number two is this platter of green summer rolls with mango miso sauce from Anya of Lazy Cat Kitchen. The sauce alone is calling to me, but I also love all of the tender green veggies here (asparagus, zucchini, broccolini).

Finally, a summery vegan pasta salad with creamy avocado dressing—perfect timing, as pasta salad’s been on my mind lately (and I may just have a recipe coming soon!).

Reads

1. This article is about a month old, but it’s very on-topic for today’s post: why you should stop being so hard on yourself, via The New York Times.

2. Ed Yong’s new article on the threat of imminent global pandemics frightened me (and the blurb under the title didn’t help), but it’s an important topic, and I’m glad that it’s being written about. Yong notes the medical supply shortages that are becoming increasingly problematic in the US; hopefully greater awareness might somehow inspire solutions.

3. Reporting on the termination of a major NIH study of alcohol, heart attack, and stroke, which was shut down when conflicts of interest were identified. It’s an important examination of the ethics of funding and scientific research.

4. Dispatches from the Gulf of California, where the vaquita—now the world’s rarest marine mammal—is on the brink of extinction.

5. I was so full of appreciation and respect when I read my friend Karen’s latest post on numbers and body acceptance.

Like Karen, I went through a long period of asking to be blind weighed at the doctor’s office and not owning a scale. That time served a purpose, but nowadays I can be aware of the number without identifying with it, which I’m grateful for. I’ve had a bunch of doctor’s appointments in the last month, and getting weighed has been the last thing on my mind: feeling more at home in my body has been my only point of focus.

Karen opens up about her own recent experience with the scale and the annual physical, then reflects on why she’s committed to being transparent about what “balance” looks like for her. It’s great to witness her journey unfolding.

On that inspiring note, happy Sunday—and from a celebratory NYC, happy pride! I’ll be circling back this week with my first fruit-filled dessert of the summer.

xo

The post Weekend Reading, 6.24.18 appeared first on The Full Helping.

Weekend Reading, 6.24.18 published first on

[oovitus]

Weekend Reading, 6.24.18

A friend of mine told me that he recently went to a conference where all of the attendees seemed to be talking about perfectionism, in spite of that fact that it wasn’t the conference theme. They were discussing it as people who had been susceptible to impossible standards in the past, but now counted themselves lucky to have let perfectionism go.

As we were talking, it occurred to me that I haven’t thought about perfectionism in a long time, though it had a hold on me for years. Even after I stopped trying to do everything “right,” perfectionism (and to some extent, being “Type A”) was a big part of my identity. I called myself a “recovering perfectionist,” which was truthful, but in retrospect I think it was also my way of continuing to identify with perfectionism and communicate it to others. I didn’t want to be subject to oppressive standards anymore, but I hadn’t yet figured out who I was without them.

In the end, perfectionism exited my life out of necessity; I untangled from it because I didn’t have a choice. Living with bouts of depression and anxiety in the last few years has meant letting go of a lot of my self-imposed notions of what constitutes productivity, success, or a day well spent.

A common experience of depression, I think, is that small, routine asks can suddenly seem insurmountable: doing laundry, cleaning up, running errands. This would have sounded unbelievable to me at one point in my life, when these kinds of to-dos were just afterthoughts, but now I know what it’s like to struggle with the everyday.

I’m thinking back to an afternoon two summers ago that illustrates this perfectly: my anxiety had been particularly bad, and I’d been paralyzed by procrastination all day. By dinnertime I was genuinely proud of myself for having gotten out of the house to pick up groceries and mail a package. This was a radically different measure of productivity than I was used to, and it didn’t matter: I was relieved to have done something, anything.

I’m in a different place now, capable of fuller days, but my perspective remains valuably altered by that experience. I don’t wake up with a fixed agenda anymore. I don’t plan on doing more than I know I can handle. If I notice that tasks remain undone everyday on my modest to-do list, I take it as a sign that I need to plan on doing less, rather than wondering why I can’t do more.

I’ve learned that my capacity for doing and my tendency to get overwhelmed ebb and flow. Sometimes they shift for reasons that I can identify, like how I’m feeling physically or whether something has made me anxious. Sometimes they change suddenly and for no apparent reason. I don’t try to bully myself out of feeling overwhelmed; rather, I ask what would make me feel calmer and more steady.

I often remind myself of a mantra that my friend Maria gave herself when her MS symptoms started keeping her from the pace and routines that had become customary: “better than before.” The origin of this mantra was an ongoing struggle to keep tidy the home she shared with her young son. As Maria’s “functional self” receded, she noticed the presence of another self, who “though less physically versatile, was stronger than I ever could have imagined from the perspective of the one who functioned’ throughout the day. She began to show me things my functional self simply missed.”

One of those things, she goes on to say,

was to be able to notice when I was completely out of energy to exert myself. This might be when something was halfway wiped, or not wiped at all, but I had somehow managed to put some things away. She would know to say that’s enough for now. And she was very clever about what would satisfy my functional self, who would never have been satisfied with that’s enough. It sobered that functional self to learn when the diagnosis of MS finally came that the “forcing” she had habituated herself to was the worst thing to do if she wanted to preserve her physical abilities.  But as the saying goes, it’s really true that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. So my deeper wiser identity came up with something even more ingenious than this looming threat:

Better Than It Was.

Or, (depending on the context): Cleaner Than It Was.

These two statements became my mottos. And they still are. They allowed me to learn to pace myself while still satisfying that Functional Self that I was making what she considered progress through the daily requirements of life, even if many of them were slowed to a crawl or a downright standstill.  Better Than It Was.

Maria’s story is uniquely her own, and my own sense of high functionality has shifted for reasons that are uniquely mine. But her clever motto has given me great comfort since I first read about it on her blog. So, too, does this quote from Melody Beattie: “Our best yesterday was good enough; our best today is plenty good too.”

The best thing about letting go of perfectionism is developing a capacity to recognize that “our best” can look very different from moment to moment. There’s no longer an immovable standard of output. I wish that I’d been able to pry my ego away from productivity and being busy on my own, rather than being forced to reckon with a dramatic shift in my capacities, but in the end, it doesn’t matter how I got here. What matters is that I’m learning to be grateful for what I can do, rather than fixating on what I haven’t, or can’t.

Throughout all of this, I’ve had the tremendous luxury of being able to adjust my schedule and responsibilities in a way that allowed me to create a dynamic “new normal.” Not every person has the space to do this, depending on his or her professional and personal circumstances. I recognize and respect the many men and women who go through periods of depression and anxiety while also keeping up with fixed schedules. And of course I worry sometimes about my DI year: now that I’m learning how to take gentle care in the moments when I need to, what will it be like to temporarily lose control of my schedule and workload?

I don’t have an answer, but to some degree I suspect that I don’t need one. My routine next year will be a challenge, but so long as I can do my best without succumbing to the influence of perfectionism, I know I’ll be OK. Much as I’ve made my schedule more realistic, letting go of perfectionism has been an inside job. It resides in recognizing how futile perfectionism is, how it discourages me needlessly while keeping me from recognizing the good that I can do, and maybe have done (another observation that’s prompted by Beattie).

Here’s to a week—and a month, and a summer, and a year—of doing my best and trusting that my best is enough. I wish the same for you, too. And here’s the weekly roundup of links.

Recipes

I would never think to put fruit in a tabbouleh, but I love Katie’s creative mixture of blueberries, parsley, mint, and quinoa—I’d actually love to try it as a savory breakfast dish!

A very different kind of quinoa salad, but no less delicious: a curried mixture with red cabbage, raisins, and pumpkin seeds from Melanie of Veggie Jam.

Two recipes for summer entertaining caught my eye this past week. The first is these show-stopping chipotle cauliflower nachos from my friend Jeanine of Love & Lemons.

Number two is this platter of green summer rolls with mango miso sauce from Anya of Lazy Cat Kitchen. The sauce alone is calling to me, but I also love all of the tender green veggies here (asparagus, zucchini, broccolini).

Finally, a summery vegan pasta salad with creamy avocado dressing—perfect timing, as pasta salad’s been on my mind lately (and I may just have a recipe coming soon!).

Reads

1. This article is about a month old, but it’s very on-topic for today’s post: why you should stop being so hard on yourself, via The New York Times.

2. Ed Yong’s new article on the threat of imminent global pandemics frightened me (and the blurb under the title didn’t help), but it’s an important topic, and I’m glad that it’s being written about. Yong notes the medical supply shortages that are becoming increasingly problematic in the US; hopefully greater awareness might somehow inspire solutions.

3. Reporting on the termination of a major NIH study of alcohol, heart attack, and stroke, which was shut down when conflicts of interest were identified. It’s an important examination of the ethics of funding and scientific research.

4. Dispatches from the Gulf of California, where the vaquita—now the world’s rarest marine mammal—is on the brink of extinction.

5. I was so full of appreciation and respect when I read my friend Karen’s latest post on numbers and body acceptance.

Like Karen, I went through a long period of asking to be blind weighed at the doctor’s office and not owning a scale. That time served a purpose, but nowadays I can be aware of the number without identifying with it, which I’m grateful for. I’ve had a bunch of doctor’s appointments in the last month, and getting weighed has been the last thing on my mind: feeling more at home in my body has been my only point of focus.

Karen opens up about her own recent experience with the scale and the annual physical, then reflects on why she’s committed to being transparent about what “balance” looks like for her. It’s great to witness her journey unfolding.

On that inspiring note, happy Sunday—and from a celebratory NYC, happy pride! I’ll be circling back this week with my first fruit-filled dessert of the summer.

xo

The post Weekend Reading, 6.24.18 appeared first on The Full Helping.

Weekend Reading, 6.24.18 published first on https://storeseapharmacy.tumblr.com