#took my meds bc I forgot I’m not in work for another three hours today <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[ninyard]

Is it really Andreil if Kevin isn’t around somewhere in the vicinity, knowingly but uncaringly and aggressively third-wheeling?

(k)andreil moodboard

(it’s just normal andreil except with the acknowledgment that kevin is. Nearby)

[brunchbitch]

The last day and a half has been so stressful 😩 we were supposed to fly to Boston yesterday morning at 7:15am. We were at the airport two hours before our flight, but we still missed it bc delta only had two agents working at the special services line for at least 50 customers. We were in the line for over an hour, raced through security, (luna was terrified and scratched up my arm when I took her out bc we didn’t have time for private screening and I don’t blame her, poor thing - so loud and hectic and lots of people). Bc we were in such a rush and both had a scared cat in our arms, we were trying to just get everything through the X-ray and completely forgot to take out our electronics. We got to the other side and one of the tsa agents looked at me like I was an idiot and was like “you didn’t take out any of your electronics…” and I was like oh I’m sorry! A said “we’ve got a lot of things we’re trying to keep track of” and he just looked at him and said “I don’t need an excuse” and sent the bag back through.

When we finally got through security it was 7:08 and our flight left at 7:15…and we still needed to take a train to another terminal. At this point we just accepted that we weren’t gonna make it and I just sat down and started crying. A was very frustrated but sooo sweet as soon as he realized I was crying. He crouched down in front of me and held my legs and rubbed them and said “it’s ok sweetie, it’s ok. We’re gonna be okay. We’ll figure it out. I’m right here.” 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

Then of course there were no open seats on any flights on any airline for the rest of the day. So we rebooked a flight for today at 3:30pm. Our bags had already been sent through and we weren’t sure if they made it on the plane so we left without them. Bc I’m a dummy and didn’t think ahead, I had no clothes, no meds, and no toiletries which were all in my checked bags.

My brother picked us up from the airport (it was like 105 degrees) and we went back to my parents house. As stressed and frustrated as I was, once we finally got settled there, we had a really lovely time! We didn’t do much, just cuddled in bed with the girls in the AC and talked and napped, ordered food, and watched a movie that night. Then we got to sleep in today and got to the airport three hours ahead of time so we reached the gate with plenty of time and it was sooooo much less stressful. We did a private screening for the cats at security and the tsa agent was super nice and asked me to give each of them a scratch behind the ears from him bc he didn’t want to freak them out any more than they already were.

So now we have about an hour and a half until our flight leaves and we’ll get into Boston tonight at midnight. A had to cancel on all his clients for today so that was a bummer. He’ll also probably have to go to bed right away when we get back so he can get up for work in the morning, so I’m actually happy we got a nice day together to cuddle and just be together! I’m so glad he was with me throughout that situation bc if I was alone with the girls I probably would’ve had a panic attack!

[whatifididsomethingnew]

Take Your Medication

I’m a college freshman in my second semester. I’ve been struggling with depression and ADHD for who knows how long, but I was diagnosed(i think? idk if it was official) in my freshman year of high school and given medication for it sometime in my senior year.

I didn’t take the medication very often. I started off strong, taking the ADHD medication especially to get me through classes and make sure the dosage lasted me to sixth period, my worst class at the time. But over the summer I stopped because I decided that the positive effects didn’t make up for the side effects: a lack of appetite and dry mouth.

Below the keep reading is my experience with mental illnesses and medication. It’s long. tl;dr If you have access to medication, take it. It helps. And make sure the dosage is right for you

 I’ve never been a bad student. Aside from failing algebra 2 in freshman year (ive never been good at “advanced” math, it was an IB class so even worse, and even better students agreed that the teacher was awful), I’ve gotten at worst 1-2 C’s per year. But since middle school I’ve found myself unable to pay attention, preferring to think about the book I want to read or the game I want to play or even just something else I started learning about. I figured out how to get by with finished homework and average tests. But I took about 6 AP tests in high school and only passed one, because I couldn’t study well enough to retain all the information I learned and forgot over the course, or pay attention to the exam to finish the multiple choice, or have enough foundation in the subject to write an essay that mattered at all.

This point in my life has almost certainly been my worst, depression-wise. I only live about twenty minutes away from my parents’ house, and I go home every weekend so I’m not just alone in my apartment for three days straight, but I’m still isolated during the week. My friends that are still in high school are busy with classes and extracurriculars and meeting with friends they still see everyday and very few of them have their own cars to drive up to visit me, and my friends in college are all busier than ever, all going to school anywhere from 15 minutes to like four hours away. My bad days are worse and happen more often and can span into bad weeks. I tend to write at best 1 page of notes after about 2 1/2 hours of classes a week, and drain my phone battery down to the sixties because I don't pay attention in lectures on subjects I’m not interested in. 

In high school I couldn’t wait for college, because I could choose my classes and the times and had the opportunity to make friends! But I realized I’m bad at making friends; I made one friend in kindergarten, when times were simpler, and all my lasting relationships (aside from my online friends, whom I treasure dearly) can be attributed to that one friendship. (I actually made a flowchart during class when another student was presenting, and I had the energy and motivation because I actually took my meds today!)

All this personal information about my Bad Times™ is to make you understand how much I needed to take my medication. But I don’t have classes everyday, so I didn’t think that taking ADHD meds everyday was worth it, and I (incorrectly) recalled that taking the depression meds didn’t help me enough to validate taking it everyday, instead only when it got really bad, but that plan didn’t work because when my depression is bad I don’t even have enough energy to text back or walk like four steps total to get my laptop, let alone walk to the bathroom and get the pills. 

So I didn’t take it, besides from when I worked my first 8-hour shifts at my first job. And those side-effects were extreme, because my body wasn’t used to these meds that were incredibly high in dosage because that’s what I need. I felt nauseous and dizzy enough to faint and went to the back room like four times an hour for a drink of water and it was still way less than I wanted. And I still didn’t learn my lesson about how the side-effects would get easier to handle if I took them more, but worse if I only took them on worst-case bases. I was thinking more in the moment about how bad I felt then, rather than about how I could feel better in the future if I pushed through.

I had a series of awful days, just last week. I cried several tears with no clear cause, only my own thoughts and boredom and depression, which means a lot in relation to me because I don’t cry. I watched Dear Evan Hansen and The Prom live, both with the original cast, and only cried a total of five tears at most, despite how these musicals and their subject matters are very dear to me. It was a bad week that came out of nowhere, nothing extraordinarily bad happened. I did the same thing as always, if not more. But still, it was a very bad week, because I was experiencing the heavy depression and it didn’t go away after I fell asleep. I don’t have classes on Wednesdays this semester; I have a lab on Mondays, and three lectures in a row on Tuesdays and Thursdays because I learned last semester that having enough leisure time to chill in my apartment for several hours between classes only makes going to the later class way more tedious. I usually get picked up by one of my parents on Thursdays while whichever of them it is drives home from work that day. That week I was lucky to have my Thursday classes cancelled, so I got picked up a day early. 

Being home is good for my health, adding it all up. It makes me a bit insecure about being independent, but fuck that I’m only 18 and I love my parents, I don’t need to be completely independent yet. Being home only improved when @pointlessoressential moved in with me; having someone so similar to me in regards of being content sitting and doing our own thing without the expectation to have something to Do™  all the time. It’s good for me, to have someone around me so I don’t get too isolated, but also not too overwhelmed. I’m usually pretty open with my mom, too, so being with her during the weekend and being able to talk with her or watch some easy TV together is good. I’ve never been very good at opening up to people; my main characterization with friends I’m not as close with is sarcasm and puns and whatever other humor to distract both of us from personal issues. I’ve been trying to get better, with help and reminders from the aforementioned bee and mom, as well as my best friend (who yes my meeting of and bonding with can indirectly be connected to that kindergarten friend, if you were wondering) who is much more skilled at telling me about her feelings than I am. But I’m trying. So I told my mom about how I had been having a bad week, once I got home.

My mom has dealt with depression her whole life, too. Most of her life she thought she also had anxiety, but when I was diagnosed with ADHD, the psychiatrist who had prescribed me the medications I take explained to both of us that ADHD in afab people (I'd say women bc my mom is cis but I'm nonbinary, so afab people) can be misdiagnosed as anxiety bc it’s different from what TV shows it to be, and the reactive anxiety (as opposed to constant, causeless anxiety from an anxiety disorder) is a symptom of ADHD. She’s dealt with the same issues all her life, so I go to her often when I hit the wall.

She told me to take the medication. I said I didn’t like the side-effects. She bought me mouthwash that helps dry mouth and a box of Rice Krispies Treats so I can eat something small but filling when I lose my appetite. She reminded me that the side-effects would improve if I took the medication more often. I am privileged in that I had the opportunity to see a doctor for my issues and be able to afford (even if barely) my medication, and I should take advantage of that instead of taking it for granted.

This is a long post, sharing my personal story about having mental illnesses, and how medication helps. It may not feel like it took effect, but then it’ll wear off and you’ll realize the difference. It’s better to feel stable, to feel “normal” for most of the day, than to get used to feeling awful. I took my medication this morning before class; I’ve taken about five hours to write this whole thing, due to having begun it before one lecture started, then continuing it during another while also listening to my professor review the first five chapters of Return of the King and discuss it with us. And now I’m in my apartment, on my laptop, switching between ending this PSA and checking on due dates and reviewing my calendar and just being 10 times more productive than I ever am.

I don’t know if anyone will need this advice. I don’t know how many will even click the read more. But this is a blog site, and this is something I’m trying to learn and have it remembered. It’s something I needed to put into words, and now it is.

[igiti2019]

Day 5 (5/23)

Great day great day great day great day

Today we woke up early for our first day of work! When I woke up I went to the kitchen to hard boil the eggs I bought at the Kimironko Market. One of them cracked and then another one broke while I was peeling it and became an eggy shelly mess, so I threw those away and put the rest in the fridge and decided I would reap the benefits of my culinary work another day. Then we walked to Java House, the cute cafe with the sun logo, and I got a medium americano to go, since we had no time for breakfast. Outside Java House we got a cab and were on our way to work! When we first arrived at work at 10 we went to the third floor where the employees work and filled into a small meeting room that was available. This was perfect because it was small enough for just us 3, it had outlets and a fan, and with the door closed we were able to talk and collaborate. A few moments after getting settled in, Laura, the head of diversity at Kepler, poked her head in to tell us that if we had any questions or wanted to interview her and get her help on anything to let her know. We love Laura. But we had work to do, so we looked at our first deliverable which was to summarize key points of a data set that included data from 3 different sites of Kepler’s college preparation program called ITEME (“small log bridge” in Kinyarwanda). So we each took one site and spent 2 hours in that room summarizing the data! Finding trends, finding differences in gender, in refugees vs. non-refugees, etc. and then comparing the data across sites. At 12, we orded food from Java House with an app called Jumia, which is just like Rwanda’s Uber Eats. We decided we needed a change of scenery, so we went down to the great hall where all of the students can hang out and work, and we claimed a long table in the corner of the room and waited for our food. My lunch was so. Damn. delicious. I got a small dish of rice, a small dish of steamed vegetables, and a small dish of fried plantains, but of course the serving sizes in Rwanda are huge despite the incredibly cheap prices, so I was only able to finish half of it. The other half I’ve boxed up and will have tomorrow, hopefully with one of my prized hard-boiled market eggs. We didn’t do much work during lunch, just talked. Then after lunch we went back upstairs to the quiet room with everyone’s desk offices as I’m calling them, and for about 1 or 2 hours all silently worked on our data, going more in depth, doing other research, etc. until we finished our independent work and needed to collaborate again so we went back to our beloved available meeting room. We worked on our work plan in there until someone came in and kicked us out because they had it reserved for a meeting, and we returned to the great hall downstairs. We finalized that on a weekly basis we’ll plan to be at the office Monday - Friday, and just be very loose about taking days off to attend conferences or work remotely, which I think is just perfect. We also set rough deadlines for each of our 3 deliverables throughout the summer, including work for the case study that we’re meant to be compiling for the class that sent us here in the first place. After we finalized those two schedules Zodi and Ananya talked about some extra curriculars that they have in common until we called a cab and went home. At home things got a little bit icky, because we were all tired after our first day at work, and some of our different preferences were coming up about wifi and electricity use, work schedules, just different differences that will inevitably arise when people live together. I got upset when Zodi gave me some trouble for being so stringent with saving electricity and wifi, so I just isolated myself for a bit and went to my room to cool off. Cried a bit, took an anxiety med, and shook it off, because an hour later we had dinner with our boss in town. We were already kind of running late because it was taking too long to find a cab so we decided to walk, but then Ananya forgot her anti-malarial pills so we had to go back to the apartment but after that we were able to get a cab and make our way to Chez Lando, a higher end restaurant attached to a hotel. Our boss was there waiting for us (she’s really chill so she wasn’t mad at all), and we all sat down and ordered food. For the first time, we experienced what we had all read about – Rwandan service taking forever! Before coming here, we’d all read that restaurant meals can take up to 2 hours just to be delivered to the table, and that’s just a normal thing in Rwanda, but we weren’t experiencing that anywhere we went, we actually noticed that waiters were extremely pleasant and very attentive to our needs. But tonight the dinner took 90 minutes (Ananya timed it) to arrive. But it was well worth the wait! Ashley (boss lady) and Zodi both got Ugali, which is kind of like the outside of mochi if you can imagine that, but as a big blog, and you pick it up with your fingers and use it to then pick up and act as the starchy background for whatever else you ordered, usually spinach, stew, or meats. I’ve wanted to try it since we got here, but unfortunately Zodi and Ashley’s dishes both had meat. But I’m happy that I saw it! It reminded me to look for it next time we go somewhere that might have it. As for me, I got two plates LOADED with vegetables that made my heart sing. I ordered a plain omelette, a vegetable shishkabob, and potato croquettes (a lot of my meals here consist of me ordering things I can eat off of the sides menu and constructing my own meal and I LOVE it), and of course I got one plate with a huge omelette and tons of fresh veggies on the side (including half an avocado oh my god), and another plate with a gigantic roasted veggie skewer, three huge potato croquettes, and for some reason also boiled peas and carrots. It was so damn good. It all cost $4. So… yeah. I’m pretty sure my eyes were just giant stars when the waitress put it in front of me. It looked like a lot, and I thought I would be able to save some of it to add to my lunch tomorrow, but I surprised myself with how quickly I actually finished it! (Except for one of the potato croquettes I gave to Zodi and the fresh veggies that I couldn’t eat bc they’re raw and potentially have cholera bacteria on them but I did eat the avocado because it has a peel so sue me.) During the 90 minute wait and the meal afterwards, Ashley told us about her time living in India in college, her time doing the Peace Corps in Guatemala, her eventual move to Rwanda, her recent move within Rwanda, and her upcoming move to Ethiopia (uhhh… hello.. Can you say “dream life”?????????) We asked her questions about Kepler, and WE FOUND OUT THAT IT’S ACTUALLY SAFE FOR US TO GO TO KIZIBA REFUGEE CAMP. This is huge for me. We had been worried that the recent Ebola outbreak in DRC would make it unsafe to visit the Kiziba Refugee camp, one of Kepler’s campuses, but Kiziba hasn’t accepted any new refugees from DRC in years! I can’t even explain how much it means to me that I will soon be stepping foot onto what I’ve built all of my work around, all of my goals, all of my projects and classes and research. When Ashley saw my excitetment at the news, she stopped smiling for one of the only times that night, and warned me that, “It’s really… a lot. It’s extremely difficult to be there and see it, especially for you guys who have never seen something like it before. But as soon as you get there, people will be following you and touching you, and the poverty is really extreme.” But I’m so ready. I want to see, I want to experience, I want to understand, and then I want to think, and I want to help. June is Refugee Awareness Month, and June 20 is World Refugee Day, so this timing is pretty serendipitous. We need to send our passports to the government and get government clearance to go, and we always need to tell them when we plan to go so that they expect us. (It’s a 4 hour drive up a mountain, so we couldn’t just pop by anyways.) The Kiziba campus graduation is July 5th, so Ashley said that we could certainly go with Kepler for that, but I’d like to go sooner if possible, even just once. It’s $100 to get a 4-wheel drive car (which is necessary for the journey) to take us there, but that’s only $20 more than a regular car would cost. Kepler employees are there Monday - Friday, too, so we would have people who could show us around and speak English with us. At our dinner we also found out that Sylvia, who had become our new supervisor after Obed was leaving to work at a different Kepler location, was now also leaving for a new job somewhere else. So next week we’ll find out who our new supervisor is! It’s too bad, because Sylvia and Obed seem great, but we’ve also met some very cool employees at Kepler like Laura, Cristine, Teppo, Joell, they all seem great, and Ashley seemed confident that we were being placed with the right person. We were ALSO told that tomorrow the president of Southern New Hampshire University, Kepler’s biggest partner, is coming with a group of about 35 people! Ashley is coordinating the whole thing, so she said that we could go and be flies on the wall, but we can’t talk to her because she will be at maximum stress limits. It’s 8:45-12, so I’m hoping we can go at 8:45 and see as much as possible. After that, we’ll hopefully meet with Sylvia to finalize our work plan and get ideas from her about where to go for data, etc. Then it sounded like Ananya and Zodi didn’t want to do a full work day tomorrow, so I’m not sure what will happen after that. Bruno (landlord) is bringing us a rice cooker tomorrow, so I may go back to Kimironko Market and buy some more eggs (since I’ve already lost 3) and some rice by the kilo. 6 organic eggs for $1.20! Did I already tell y’all that?! Anyways after dinner Zodi and Ananya said they no longer wanted to go happy hour at the Inema Arts Center so I had to text Innocent and tell him we would be there next week. Which was very sad, and I really wish we could’ve gone, it would’ve been nice to celebrate our first day of work with 2 for 1 wine!!!! But also it was late, and we need to get up early especially if we’re going in at 8:45! So we taxied home with the SWEETEST French-speaking old man I have ever met and I love him with all my heart and I wish we could’ve gotten his number and used him as our driver every time. (Most taxi drivers give strangers their numbers so that they’ll just call them instead of calling a random cab) He would even be perfect because since he drove us to our impossible-to-find apartment, he knows where it is! If I ever get in his cab again I’ll get his number… We came inside and I took.. My first… RWANDAN SHOWER. (That’s what I’ll be calling it.) But like full on cold shower with a detached shower head I had to move around me without spraying water, squatting down to wash my hair so I wouldn’t get water everywhere, it was great. Very refreshing of course, but also I always love experiencing those little things that make a country definitely different from my country, even if it’s “less comfortable” or considered “worse”. ANY part of a new culture, good or bad, I love discovering it. Now I’m in my room writing this under my mosquito bed net, which I actually love. It’s like a fort. When I got back to my room after my shower and got changed, I threw my phone, backpack, and water bottle under the net and then climbed in. I just throw anything I need for the night in, and then get in! It’s just like a fort!! I love it. Okay that’s all I have to report on today. We used up over half our wifi that we had bought for 30 days in just 3 days, so I’ll post pictures tomorrow when I have work wifi….

Peace!