Cycles of Self-Respect and Self-Neglect

I haven’t been posting too much recently because I haven’t been in the best of moods, but I’ve felt that if I’m trying to post stuff that makes other people feel good, I should probably feel good myself.

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Unfortunately, the truth is, I’ve been in something of a slump. I haven’t been going to yoga, I’ve been eating lots of ice cream, and I’ve been spending hour after hour locked in front of my computer watching Project Runway on Hulu. (By the way, I’m officially out of Project Runway episodes to watch, does anyone happen to have seasons 1-6 on DVD that I could borrow and watch obsessively?)

I’m getting dizzy spells when I stand up and I’ve broken out in my yearly summer rash. I’m a non-stop itch machine. Green and I are trying to move out of our apartment and all I want to do is lie on the floor and play Animal Crossing. (That’s not true, all I want to do is lie on the floor and watch Project Runway. But I’m out.)

In addition, I’ve noticed my waking temperatures (which I’ve been tracking every morning since going off the pill) are extremely low, in the 95 – 97 degree range. This could be a sign of thyroid issues, which might explain my dizzy spells, my rash, and why I’m lethargy-prone. I really don’t want to get it checked out, though, because I’m terrified of a positive diagnosis, and I do not want to be on thyroid medication.

The tipping point came yesterday, when I broke down in a fit of tears for no discernible reason.

And all this time, I’m thinking, “I should really blog about something,” but I’ve been avoiding blogging about my miserable mood because Jessica Mullen recommends only blogging about what you want more of, and I certainly don’t want more of my miserable mood. The “post-what-you-want” method works in theory, except for the fact that avoiding posting because I’m not in a great mood is just making me feel worse, and less authentic.

The truth is, I am a cyclical being. Ever since I started to be more health conscious, I’ve gone through cycles of being super on top of things and feeling great, to lying in slumps of absolute misery. It happens. I think it’s almost worse to get my hopes up thinking THIS TIME it will be permanent, because then when I fall off the wagon, I spend extra time beating myself up about the fact that I’m not being healthy like I know I should (and can) be. Which sets me back even further.

So my new motto, which I’ll repeat once more, is: IT HAPPENS. There are times when I let my health slack and I pull inward, staying home more than I go out. It happens, and I know I’m not the only one it happens to, either. So perhaps reading about my current temporary setbacks might make someone else feel less guilty about their own, because I think it is natural to be cyclical. It can’t be summer all the time, there has to be winter to balance things out.

Learning this stuff is a lifetime journey. Living healthfully, especially in a society that promotes dis-ease and quick fixes, is tough.

The good news, however, is that the more years I spend learning about health, the shorter my slumps get, and the longer my good stretches last. If nothing else, I can look forward to the fact that it can only get better from here. Not only that, but because of how much I’ve learned in the past, I know exactly how to fix it.

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My constant search for curing the problem and not the symptoms will never end. When I get to the point where I feel so bad that I know it’s time to get back on track, I ultimately find articles or books that point me in the right direction. This time, I’m giving cutting out sugar another shot. Five years ago, I did it for a month, but I ate lots of fruit and honey and felt miserable the entire time. It turns out that honey and fruits are just as bad for your system as refined sugar.

The stars seem to be aligning on this one: I know it’s sugar that’s slugging me down, and I’ve been reading Sarah Wilson‘s “I Quit Sugar” series on her blog for tips and support. Incidentally, Sarah Wilson also blogs about naturally healing and living with auto-immune disease (which includes thyroid issues).

The icing on the cake: A friend of mine on Facebook announced that she’s about to start her own 60 Days Without Sugar Challenge, and would anyone care to join her? Well, I love me a good challenge (and this one comes with a prize for the winner! A $25 gift certificate to Amazon.com, heck yes!), so I’ve signed up. The challenge starts July 6th, but I’ve already started, because I’m sick of feeling terrible. If anyone else wants to try this with me, check out Sarah Wilson’s blog and we’ll rock this out.

During slumps, it’s important to remember that they are only temporary, and that you have the power to get yourself back on track. At the same time, it’s just as important not to beat yourself up. We are human beings after all, and if the worst thing we’re doing to ourselves is having a few pints of ice cream and sleeping late for a month or two in between long stretches of honoring our bodies, I’d say we’re doing pretty well.

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Old Yearbooks and Project Runway

This week I went on an EXCITING ADVENTURE back to my old high school. It’s their 50th anniversary this year and they need volunteers to help them do stuff to get ready for it.

Normally when I get prodded to volunteer for something, I’m all like, “NO THANKS YOU CAN EITHER PAY ME OR DO IT YOURSELF HAVE A LOVELY DAY”. This is in large part due to the fact that said 50-year-old school spent four of my adolescent years forcing me to “volunteer” or else I wouldn’t graduate.

That’s right.

I was required to give up seventy-five of my valuable teenage hours in order to get my diploma.

It drove me absolutely insane, this concept of involuntary volunteer work, and has left a bitter taste in my mouth about volunteering for anything ever since. Which is why, if you ever tell me I should volunteer for thing or blah, it will likely induce a facial tick wherein my eye twitches and then I glare at you for an hour.

HOWEVER, despite their awful confusion about what it actually means to “volunteer”, I like my old school, so I perused the list of available stuff to help with. Most of it looked as exciting as volunteering to stand still while someone shoves bees in my pants. But then I saw that they needed “History Hounds”, people to go through old yearbooks and memorabilia.

I volunteered the crap out of that job.

So that’s what I spent three days of the past week doing, going up to my old high school and looking at old yearbooks. I remember when I was still attending school, getting to look at an old yearbook was akin to someone letting me hold a million dollars in cash. I absolutely LOVE seeing pictures of people with wacky hair traipsing around the exact same halls I traipsed around with my much cooler hair*. I am fascinated by watching the progression of things around the school going from “non-existent” to “there”. It intrigues the ever-living crap out of me to learn things I didn’t know about the place in which I spent so much time as a kid. For example, I found out that in 1981, my school became the first in the US to require computer literacy to graduate**. And then I exploded from the awesome.

Anyway, at one point a parent of a current student also showed up to poke at yearbooks with me (and the two current students who were doing it grudgingly for their involuntary volunteer hours, the poor things). We got to talking about our various high school experiences, and I mentioned that I wore duct tape and plastic bags to my senior prom.

She asked me if I ever watched Project Runway. I was like, I don’t watch TV ever. She told me that sometimes on the show, they give the contestants interesting challenges, like creating high fashion from stuff in a thrift store, etc. The idea intrigued me, so I pulled up Hulu and proceeded to watch the entirety of season 7. And then I had to explain to Green why I was wasting my time watching Project Runway. And then he watched some of it with me.

As someone who never watches TV ever, it is really tough for me to come back and watch it, even if I’m genuinely interested in the subject matter. I can’t help but pinpoint when they’re inciting drama for the sake of drama, name dropping product placement as if we won’t notice, or using stupid catch phrases. This stuff is not interesting to me, it’s irritating, and it’s especially prevalent on reality shows.

BUT. I kept watching Project Runway, because at the heart of the show, it’s about starting with raw materials and creating something beautiful. It turns out that watching the creation process of so many unique garments is really pretty cool. During one episode, the contestants had to make high fashion using only materials found in a hardware store. That episode turned out to be my favorite, just ahead of the episode where they had to make fashionable clothes out of a burlap sack.

Fashion is interesting to me from an artistic creation standpoint, not as a status symbol or anything like that. I don’t think it’s worth keeping up with and I’m not interested in “top designers” or big shows or what have you, but I think it’s so COOL to see what people come up with, especially when there’s a strict deadline like on Project Runway. I love creation under pressure, it’s making me want to participate in another creative challenge.

Or maybe learn more about sewing.

*This is a complete fabrication. I’m pretty sure I did nothing even remotely cool with my hair my entire high school career. Except for maybe when I dyed it pink with Kool-Aid, except that wasn’t cool as much as poor judgement. Or maybe the time when I braided a bunch of extensions into my hair, except that wasn’t cool as much as very strange for everyone who previously knew me to not have braided extensions in my hair.

**I’ve tried to look this up online to find out if it’s true or not, because yearbooks do like to lie. I haven’t found confirmation one way or the other, but I did find this article from Info World in 1981 about it, which I also find friggen’ awesome.

Interview with Awesome – Be Your Own Therapist!

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Did you have a diary as a kid? I know I did. I always sucked at keeping up with it. I loved blank books, they held so much potential. But as soon as I started writing in one, I felt I had ruined it, I needed a new, fresh start. I compiled quite the collection of journals and diaries with only one page of writing.

In my adult life, I’ve learned how to break through the terror of writing the “wrong thing” and developed a journaling skill, because cutting through that feeling of what you’re “supposed” to be writing so that you can write what you need to write truly is a skill. But how do you learn that? Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone guide you through those first uncertain steps?

Enter Brandy Davis, founder of A Creative Path explorative journaling courses. Brandy’s goal is to teach people how to be their own therapists. I’ve taken her classes before, they are creative and challenging peeks into your own brain, helping to sort out what makes you tick.

“There are so many people who are convinced their lives are miserable, but they’re not,” Brandy says.

The key to journaling is to help you get through the muddle of your own thoughts and find the true source of your struggles. “You go through the day angry, you’re snapping at everyone and can’t figure out why. If you take the time to write through it, it usually has nothing to do with anyone else. You woke up on the wrong side of the bed but haven’t given yourself any time to get over it.”

Her classes cover two different methods for getting into journaling: “Creatively Me” teaches you how to use journaling to uncover your inate creativity, while “Pathways” guides you through the process of using a journal as an outlet for your thoughts and feelings.

Both classes begin with lessons on rethinking what a journal actually is, and learning how to truly use one.

“You don’t walk into a therapist’s office and have them immediately ask you, ‘What’s your deepest, darkest secret?’ They start with, ‘How are you feeling?’” Brandy’s classes start with simple, surface questions like this. Each class then builds on the last, probing deeper every time. By the end of the eight week course, Brandy feels confident that you will be able to use your journal to self-diagnose your issues.

Handmade covers from journals Brandy makes herself

While she’s written in journals for one reason or another ever since childhood, Brandy has used her own journals to work through her problems for the past ten years. About six years ago, a friend of hers noticed her constant scribbling and asked her about it. He hosted a group which focused on helping people feel better about themselves and break bad habits. Upon hearing how Brandy used her journaling, he invited her to come teach a class for the group.

“I was nervous, but I said yes.” The class was held on the rooftop of a Dallas hotel, and in that gorgeous and inspiring setting, Brandy presented for the first time the material that forms the foundation for her current courses. “By the end of the night everyone was crying and discussing, but most of all, writing!” Brandy realized she was living a dream of hers; to help people. “There were several breakthroughs that night which really made me feel great.”

Several of the students in her class that night continued to contact Brandy from time to time for advice and assistence. “I’ve had people tell me that their marriages were saved by using the skills they learned in my class.” Brandy says the feeling of knowing she’d truly made a difference in someone’s life opened her eyes, and with the encouragement of former students, she drew up the full courses to pursue teaching more seriously.

Brandy feels quite powerfully that journaling is a skill everybody needs. In today’s society, we are taught to either shove our feelings down deep inside until they explode, or to constantly broadcast short blurbs in the hopes for some external response. “We don’t teach people how to handle problems anymore.” She wants to teach the world how to work things out by writing through them, by learning how to be your own therapist.

To find out more about Brandy’s classes and how to sign up, visit http://www.acreativepath.org, or follow her on Facebook. Currently, Brandy is hoping to launch a line of products to correspond with her classes, including journals she designs herself and tools to help your writing process. She’s running a campaign through IndieGoGo to raise funds to develop her ideas. You can help her out by visiting the campaign page and making a donation! She’s also running a contest to help spread the word about A Creative Path. You can check out the details by clicking here!

I’m a Professional EVERYTHING.

I’ve decided that the answer to all of my problems ever is to just declare myself a professional. A professional what, you may ask? It doesn’t matter, because if there’s a subject out there, I’m qualified to talk about it because I’m a PROFESSIONAL.

Do you need help installing your new plasma flat screen or something? That’s good, because I’m a PROFESSIONAL FLAT SCREEN INSTALLER and I can give you GOOD TIPS.

Do you want to know what the largest body of water in the world is? That’s good, because I’m a PROFESSIONAL BODY-OF-WATER KNOWER and I know that it is that one that surrounds all of the continents.

Do you want to know how to train seeing eye dogs? That’s good, because I’m a PROFESSIONAL SEEING EYE DOG TRAINER and basically you just teach them not to walk into oncoming traffic.

I also know that this post is fantastic because I am a PROFESSIONAL BLOGGER. I’m also a PROFESSIONAL WRITER, PROFESSIONAL EDITOR, and PROFESSIONAL SKITTLE-EATER.

Do you have a problem that needs solving? Let me know, I’ll help you out, because I’m a PROFESSIONAL EVERYTHING.

Now I want Skittles.

THE END.

How to Be On Time

The clock is one of my oldest foes. I am constantly at odds with its insistence on allowing a minute to last only sixty seconds rather than four hours. I’m not sure what, exactly, causes my warped perception of the passage of time, but I always think I have more time than I really do.

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This can get insanely challenging if I have to be somewhere at a particular time. Like, I don’t know, my job.

I know I can’t be the only one with this problem, so I’ve decided to compile some of the techniques I’ve used in the past to be on time. It’s also a good refresher for me, since sometimes I blindly accept it as fact that I’m never on time, rather than realizing there are steps I can take to fix the issue.

So, without further ado: Tricks for being on time!

1. Keep a planner.
   Seeing your obligations written down helps keep them in your head, so you’re less likely to pull an “I forgot”.
2. If you’re supposed to be somewhere at 5 o’clock, write down 4:30. Go with that time, and forget 5 o’clock completely.
   No matter how hard I try to be on time, I tend to be ten or fifteen minutes late. Tricking myself into moving the deadline half an hour earlier than the real scheduled time means I can actually get there fifteen minutes early.
3. Get a friend to help.
   Do you have a friend who’s good at being punctual? One who actually understands how a clock works in relation to the real world? Enlist this friend’s help! If you’re supposed to be somewhere, ask them to call you an hour or so beforehand to remind you. Then, make sure they don’t let you get off the phone until you’ve started getting ready to go. This is especially effective if you have to get up earlier than you’d like, and your friend is willing to be your alarm clock. You can’t hit snooze on a phone call. Don’t let them off the phone until you’ve gotten out of bed. (This was once the way I actually got out of bed for about a month.)
4. Disengage from all activities 30 minutes prior to when you have to leave.
   When I know I have to leave for my destination in fifteen minutes, I tell myself that’s plenty of time to check my e-mail, check Facebook, play a video game or two, and get ready. It isn’t. It usually isn’t even enough time to get ready, much less try to cram in all that other stuff. So thirty minutes before I have to be walking out the door, I’ll tell myself that I’m not allowed to even touch the computer, or my phone, or my Nintendo DS, or any of my books. That way, I’m forced to spend that time getting ready, so I’m not rushing to find clothes to wear or brushing my hair when I should be getting into my car and driving off.
5. Anticipate traffic.
   Maybe it only takes you ten minutes to get to your destination at two in the morning when no one else is on the road. But other people like to go places as well, and their cars take up space, which slows down your commute. Assume there will be traffic, and plan a large enough window to reach your destination on time regardless of any potential mid-freeway parking lots.

If you practice these tips, they can become a habit, which is encouraging for those of us who have a tendency towards tardiness! Being aware of the time sucking traps you fall into can work wonders for digging yourself back out. Create a time cushion for yourself, and you won’t have to spend the drive to work (or wherever) trying to fabricate a valid-sounding excuse for why you were late again. That in and of itself lifts a huge burden, and I’ve found it can make my entire workday much more bearable by starting it off stress-free!