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Some days intuitive eating is SUCH a struggle. I mean, I like the idea of it, I want myself to be body positive enough to give it what it wants when it wants it, but damn. Some days you find yourself in front of the fridge thinking “I can’t eat x or y or z, I’ve already had two full meals today and another can of soda is bad for me, I shouldn’t drink it and that food I could have for lunch if I didn’t eat it right now and anyway, yoghurt is nice and has few calories so I’ll be okay, but if I eat it I’ll be hungry again before bedtime and then I have to eat a second time and… hang on. Intuitive eating, remember?”
That’s what I did today. So now I’m eating nacho chips with shredded cheese and salsa. A year ago I would NEVER have allowed myself to buy nacho chips or eat shredded cheese, but somehow I did buy some the last time I was grocery shopping and damn, I’m glad that I did. Even if I had to check myself before actually allowing myself to eat it.
On the other hand, I have just found the brilliance that is Dr Who about thirty years after everyone else. I have two friends that love it, and I’ve listened to their conversations with a bemused smile on my face for years and years (okay, maybe two, that is how long I’ve known them), but felt kind of intimidated by the sheer amount of seasons there are.
Then of course I found out that Carey Mulligan is in an episode and I love her for insane reasons and so I started watching it. Even though she’s just in a single episode. I watched that one, and another one and I feel like a kid in a sweet shop who knows she can EAT EVERY SINGLE PIECE IN SIGHT. I shall do my best to do this slowly, which is, no more than one episode per day.
Part of the story is of course that I can’t concentrate on anything for more than thirty minutes. I’m getting better at it, this much is true, and from what I’ve seen it’s so crazycakes that you, um, forget that you have tea water on the stove and the kettle boils dry, which you don’t notice for about half an hour because you are using headphones.
Sad little kettle.
I only wish I could get them with subtitles because I have a really hard time following what people say unless I see it written out at the same time, or can ask them to slow the fuck down already. Which, you know, you can’t do with a TV. Or on the phone, really. So it happens, from time to time, that I backtrack four or five times, trying to figure out what they’re really saying. And that is something you can’t do in real life…
Now I shall try to get some writing done. I have people to threat with a knife here! And a forest to burn down. Well, attempt to, at least. Very exciting, much more so than real life, where the most exciting part is that I have about ten pads ready to be listed on Etsy. That and being able to eat cashews again, after a week of just soup, following my unfortunate wisdom tooth removal.
Yeah, doesn’t really measure up, does it?
PS. Made a Twitter account for my business, add @procraftination if you want to know when my shop is all stocked up and shiny!
Today, my friends, I am going to tell you about why you should just DO things that are scary, because putting them off just makes them more scary. I say this because my refusal to pull a wisdom tooth for a full year culminated in me having to go in emergency style when the pain could no longer be ignored, at which point I was told it had to be pulled and that soon. I was asked if I wanted a referral to a guy who is apparently a specialist on these things or have it done right away, and as I know myself and thus was pretty sure that getting myself to the dentist once was hard enough, I told them to go ahead.
Normally I need Valium to go to the dentist. It’s equal parts being afraid of being touched (a quirk of mine), of the pain and residual freak-outs from when I was a kid and had to have pretty much all my first teeth (whatever they may be called) pulled out because they wouldn’t go on their own, which for a while meant that I had DOUBLE sets of teeth. Once I actually tried to run away from the dentist. They caught up with me halfway through the waiting room. I was eight, I think. Nine, possibly.
So, no Valium. I figured that I could take my own anxiety meds that I have left. Forgot to do so. Figured I could have my ipod playing, which helps. Realised I had FORGOTTEN to bring it. So in the end it was just me, lots of needles putting yummy numbness in my cheek and a nice nurse (is it called that when it’s dentistry, not regular doctor’s office?) who let me squeeze the hell out of her hand. Even if it meant she had to do the assisting with her left hand.
In other news I’m reading two interesting books right now; interesting because of the technique used by the authors rather than the content. Well, the content is pretty good too, but it’s the way the stories are told that fascinates me the most. They are both in Swedish, and it’s always awkward to review Swedish books in English, but I will make an attempt of sorts…
The first one, Shoo len by Douglas Foley is about one of those parts of a city which I suppose can be compared to poor, black neighbourhoods abroad, though a big portion of these immigrants are actually Middle Eastern, even if there are some from various African countries as well. The story is sometimes a bit exaggerated, but I am fascinated by the language. Wiki speaks (in English) about it here, and it’s interesting how many different languages that have influenced the different words; it seems like Arabic, Turkish and English are the most common, with some other languages thrown in as well. The title of the book can be translated to “Hey, mate” or similar, it seems.
In short, I am not entirely convinced by the story, but the language is really fascinating for a word nerd like me.
The other one in called Dannyboy och kärleken, written by Daniel Åberg. I’m only a few chapters into it, so I don’t know how it will end or why the characters are doing what they’re doing, but I am rather enarmoured by the stream-of-consciousness writing. Often the author allows thoughts to go unfinished, as they often are in real life, when you are interrupted or your brain quickly changes direction.
The interesting part is really that there are no em dashes to mark the interruption of said thought, or another thought replacing the first. It just STOPS, in the middle of a row, no punctuation marking the end of it. At first it drove me mad, but now I’m rather liking the way it’s executed.
In other words I am doing quite a bit of sewing and knitting, finishing up a custom order and knitting some socks because I’ve become OBSESSED by knitting socks.
I also want to give a shout-out to my friend Corrina; she has been pledging 50% of her income on knitting patterns to Doctors Without Borders for Haiti relief, and in one month she has made 900-ish USD to give to them! She’s extending this another fortnight to get up to an even 1000, so go buy something! My personal favourite is the Minerva’s Tower socks, but there are quite a few other lovely patterns there as well…
I always laugh when my (mostly American) friends get “snow days” as soon as it’s more than two inches of snow on the ground, but this? This is too much snow, even for me.
(And I live in the semi-south.)
So, today I was suitably humbled by my limits. Again. Nothing dramatic, really, but lately I’ve been feeling like I could maybe manage to work part time soon. Today I freaked out (inside my head) from being in the same waiting room as six other people, all silent, all keeping to themselves.
Not yet, in other words.
Anyway; it was a valuable lesson, and after that I went to the yarn shop next and was (as usual) frustrated by the lack of knowledge of foreign yarns, needles and other things. And then the woman ringing up my purchases was so new that she had to walk through the shop to find the prices on each type of yarn, and then didn’t know where they was, so I had to SHOW HER. No plus points there, sorry. Sadly this is the only yarn shop in town, so I have to keep my muttering to myself (and my blog).
Apparently I have managed to read 13 books in one month. That is a new record, I believe, which was made easier by the fact that some were children’s books (most notably Coraline) and YA (of which I liked the very emo-titled After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings and Flew Away the most). Best adult fiction of January goes to Udda by Sara Lövestam, no questions asked.
I promised my sister to send her some of my books, because I seriously have far too many that I have read and probably won’t read a second time. I will enjoy spreading the gospel of awesome books to all I can possibly reach.
A few links, since my project is calling my name and I’m so cutting this short:
A school in the U.S. is banning the complete version of Anne Frank’s Diary. Yes seriously. To be fair, I didn’t even know there was a censored version, which is the one I’ve read. But yes, it got pulled off the shelf for containing sexually graphic content. The passage that high school students shouldn’t be allowed to read? It goes as follows:
There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!
For shame! That is certainly not girls wonder every single day, and that would hurt their innocent eyes if they read about, am I right? Then again, this is also a few days after another parent got a DICTIONARY banned for containing the definition for “oral sex”.
Seriously, America, what is this accomplishing?
(For example, I remember being ten or so and wondering what the difference between the words “puss” och “kyss” was. Those two are both terms for kissing, one with closed mouth, and one with tongue, btw. It was beyond frustrating to discover that in my dictionary the definition for “puss” was “kyss”, and for “kyss” it was “puss”. And I must say, my life would not have been ruined had there actually been an explanation for such things in that damn book. There wasn’t. I guess it was elementary school-proofed.)
Also, there is another Amazon-fail going on. Yes, again. It doesn’t matter so much here in Sweden because we have our own online book shops and all, and I can’t say that I’ve ever used Amazon (since I moved back here, anyway), but I have to say that removing an entire publisher (Macmillan) from their website over some kind of disagreement is just stupid. Tansy has collected most of the links regarding this (here and here) and so I can provide you with my favourite links on the topic.
Scott Westerfeld says awesome things about it here (giving the best explanation to date), and concludes it with:
Hey, Amazon. When cutting off publishers, don’t start with the one that has the most science fiction writers. We will blog you dead!
He also likens the whole deal with Amazon spitting their pacifier across the room in anger. A lovely metaphor, I have to say.
Furthermore, John Scalzi says the second most awesome thing about the whole deal here, in which he points out why it’s so very dumb to try to stealth-delist a whole publisher. He even provides us with a way that Amazon could’ve gone about it all, but didn’t.
My favourite part of his post, though, is the following:
Macmillan may be a faceless, soulless baby-consuming corporate entity with no feelings or emotions, but authors have both of those, and are also twitchy neurotic messes who obsess about their sales, a fact which Amazon should be well aware of because we check our Amazon numbers four hundred times a day, and a one-star Amazon review causes us to crush up six Zoloft and snort them into our nasal cavities, because waiting for the pills to digest would just take too long.
These are the people Amazon pissed off. Which was not a smart thing, because as we all know, the salient feature of writers is that they write. And they did, about this, all weekend long. And not just Macmillan’s authors, but other authors as well, who reasonably feared that their corporate parent might be the next victim of Amazon’s foot-stompery.
And I’m not just saying that because I’ve finally found a person that abuses italics more than I do. Though, to be fair, I think I’m actually more of a junkie of parantheses these days…
Anyway, I am so finishing this post up RIGHT NOW, cos seriously, writing to be done. Emo-ing to be had. By characters, not me, actually.
PS. Tomorrow I’m going to blog in my Swedish blog about the OMG SO STUPID person who went on TV and said that breast milk is as bad as carbonated drinks for a kid, because there is too much sugar in it. And yes, I am entirely seriously. She really said that. True story.
This post was written a week ago, though apparently I did not hit publish…
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Cups of tea drunk today: 3.
Times I used the kettle rather than the microwave to heat said water: 3.
Likelihood this makes me British: 0.
I enjoy structured blogging, so here we go.
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Procraftination.
As most of you probably know I run a low-key, DIY, stay-at-home-without-children type business. I sell cloth pads and accessories (okay, mostly cloth pads, but um, more is coming). My webpage can be found here, and my craft blog here. It has various crafty pursuits in it, because I hate when people try to sell things in every single post they make, so I’m trying to mix it up.
I do some knitting patterns too, all free for you to use, should you want to do so. I am not the most accomplished pattern writer, and am in awe of those that are. My dear friend Corrina, on the other hand, is. She is getting a pattern published any day now! So happy for her.
Anyway, the reason I’m bringing this up – would there be any interest of a Twitter account especially for crafty/business type tweeting? I feel like if I did it on my current account it would drown in all the random observations and football mania, but as I already mentioned, people that tweet/blog/etc just to sell things? Booooring.
Maybe I just need a hash-tag of my own…
To-Do-List.
I try to put five things on my to-do-list a week. It’s what I call “trying to live a normal life and make myself not collapse in a heap”. I hope that if I keep this up, it will help me get well sooner. Well, one can hope, right?
So, this week I had 1) clean bathroom and kitchen, 2) cut out fabric, finish pinning it together (this was also on last week’s to-do-list, ie big fail on that, 3) put away laundry, 4) write some, 5) read at least one book.
I managed 1, 4 and 5. Granted “write some” isn’t exactly specific, but I did re-write a very difficult chapter, so I’ll give myself a pass on that one. Books read: Stardust by Neil Gaiman and Tightrope by Gillian Cross.
As for 2 and 3 I have some hope of accomplishing at least one of them before tomorrow night. Go me.
b) Gluten free stuff.
This one must be FASCINATING to read. But okay. Must buy new pasta strainer, I think that is what’s making me sick.
Ate yummy things this week: Tofu alla Cacciatore (butchered spelling, I know, I know), random stew of awesomeness, more tofu, with glass noodles, which is my new favourite dish. Yesterday mum made vegetarian gluten free lasagna, which was very yummy.
I tried to make vegan gluten free brownies. They BOILED THEMSELVES INTO CONCRETE. It took me two days of soaking before I could shoe horn it out of the cake tin I put it in. I have not yet dared to look at the cookie sheet I protected the oven with.
I can make gluten free cookies and muffins just fine, but brownies? Um, no.
Socialising.
Making myself do this too, just to get out of the house. I managed three times this week; Monday I had tea with Viola, Thursday I went to weaving and chatted with little old ladies, and Friday I went over to my parents house to watch the handball game and have dinner.
I met Viola’s boyfriend for the first time, admired their flat that has an OFFICE (colour me jealous) and talked about… stuff. I also knitted some, but that’s no surprise.
The weaving was more mentally trying than I’d like; they’ve changed it so that it’s a full class on Thursdays too, and there were people everywhere. I am very sensitive to noise, and these people talk OMG SO LOUDLY. I suppose that is par for the course when you hit 75, but come on!
Handball, then. It’s the sport of our little town. Sure, there’s a hockey and several football teams as well, but generally people don’t care so much about them. I tried to explain this sport to a friend, vaguely successfully, as I mostly listed sports it’s not like (football, volley ball, basketball), so here is a link to Wikipedia, in case somebody is interested. Our boys lost, sadly, 30-29 (yes, it’s normal with that many goals), but it’s always exciting to see people you know of in the national team. We had two from the tiny place I’m from (population 1000+) this time, though one is a goalie and barely got any play time. But in the end Sweden was knocked out of the European Championships before the semi finals, and it’s the first time in 36 years we don’t move on to the next stage… Disappointment!
Twitter party.
I love these. I never go out, because of the noise factor, among other things, but today the Aurealis Award happened, and people were live tweeting. Scott Westerfeld, author of the Uglies series and all that (which I need to read, have a copy!) tweeted, on the insistance of the twitt-o-sphere (so hard to type that word with a straight face, but what am I supposed to call it?), what all the winners were wearing.
Twelfth Planet Press was shortlisted for seven awards, but sadly did not win any. I wish that Tansy’s Siren Beat (yay gratuitous linkage!) would have won, because I love that book so and if I ever get to go to Tasmania I will demand sightseeing of all the places mentioned in the book. (Possibly I’m a tad biased. Just a tad.)
Political stuff.
So many things to mention here!
a) Alisa aka Girlie Jones has an amazing post on Joanna Russ and women in speculative fiction up here. It (as of this very moment) has 71 comments to it, most of them awesome. For example somebody is using the metaphor of somebody standing on your foot and asking them to stop, and possibly being less polite the hundredth time it happens, to describe sexism and why feminists get tired of repeating Feminism 101 over and over and over again.
Very interesting read.
b) Amanda Palmer, Margaret Cho and the fake Katy Perry video. I could say many things here, but I can’t really articulate myself in less than thousands of words, and I don’t have time for that. Watch the clip, form your own opinion.
c) Here in Sweden two female politicians are talked about for two different reasons. Note that I don’t support the political party that either of these women belong to, but that’s besides the point.
1) Mona Sahlin is posing on a pic with seven other politicians, five male, three female, with a Louis Vuitton bag at her feet. She’s criticised for having a 6000 SEK (roughly 800 USD) purse when that is about half of what people earn in a month. And sure, I can see many things more important to purchase than a freaking purse (I so don’t get the purse thing), but I do wonder how much the suits of the male politicians on the same picture cost. And as an aside, it’s said that the purse was a gift and that it was given to her seven freaking years ago. How much are all the purses you’ve used in the last seven years worth? Just a question.
2) Birgitta Ohlsson of another party altogether is pregnant. She’s due in July, and the election is in late September, and people are horrified that she’s not counting it out. Now, I know several people with small children, and I know how stressful the first few months can be, but I assume that a politician have the means to pay for daycare and such, and not to mention that her husband is (according to her blog) going to take the first few months of paternity leave. We can share here, you see, which is amazing, and I think this is the exact reason for it.
I rather enjoyed the blog post she wrote about it, saying things along the line of “I’m married to a modern man, not a dinosaur”, and “if I’m going to lose a post it’s going to be because I’m not the right person or competent enough”, asking what decade media thinks it is anyway.
d) New shiny blog in my blogroll – Trollhare. He writes about fat acceptance (though I’m not sure if he calls it that), queer and/or gender stuff, politics, veganism and mental health. I enjoy his posts a whole lot, and comment possibly a bit too much. But it’s that awesome.
And really, a blog with the subtitle “welcome to the freakshow”? Love at first sight.
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I totally meant to do some sewing after writing this, before making dinner, but it took longer than I’d expected, so now I have to go glare at my fridge and see what it produces… I think tofu loaf. If I can find my favourite recipe.
PS. Is a post with so many different subjects that it requires ten separate tags fail or win? I can’t decide.
Oh my God, I just ate the best curry ever. Okay, so it was probably not the best ever, but I am REALLY BAD at making curry (it either tastes nothing or is so spicy that I want to die – I’m a total wimp when it comes to spicy food). I don’t know if it that I went with chickpeas instead of tofu or the buillion cube that I added for no reason whatsoever, but it was goooooood.
Managed weaving completely without freak outs. It’s now months since I had to pop anti anxiety meds to be able to go. It’s still difficult from time to time, but today was good. The only thing that gets to me is that these little old ladies try to talk to each other while weaving, that is, yelling across the room, back and forth, which gets tireding.
Other than that I have been doing some difficult writing, or rather, rewriting. Editing, maybe. (What’s the difference between the two anyway?) It’s badness when your whole plot is dependant on severely traumatising your main character, or at least it is for YOU cos you love them so much. But it’s getting better from here on out, I know that much.
I’ve also been working on a different blog altogether. In Swedish. I can’t even tell you how long it’s been since I wrote in Swedish regularly. Three years? Four? I’m sure this new blog has more than a few language mistakes, cos seriously, English is my first language these days, though occasionally when I’m writing I have to look up words that I can only remember in Swedish. It used to be the other way around.
This blog is going to be on fat acceptance, health at every size and intuitive eating. There are so many of these in English, Shapely Prose being the most popular, but I haven’t found a single one in Swedish so far. I’ve been emailing with a Swede that does plus size fashion blogging, and has been doing that for quite a while, and she doesn’t know of any, so I decided to do somewriting on the subject in Swedish.
Part of me thinks I’m insane, cos I know just how mean people can be about people of size – I see it often in other blogs – but on the other hand, I would still be dieting (or trying to) if I hadn’t found these blogs a year or so ago, so maybe it’s time I do something about it myself. Even if I have to brace myself as I do it.
That blog can be found here. It’s not all that full of info yet, but I’m working on it. Mostly I’ve written about the basics and started translating a few posts that have previously been posted on this blog. I know most reasonably young Swedes can read English without a problem, but I so want to be able to point my Mum (and other people that can’t / can’t be bothered to read in English) to a few key posts. She doesn’t really believe in the internet, but I’m hoping that if I give her the address she will check it out anyway. And this is the first time I’ve ever tried to NOT hide my blogging for her, cos she gets so nervous when she realises I don’t feel well.
I took a table cloth off a table cos it was dirty and immediately put another one on. Does that mean I’m a grown-up? I suspect it does.
Seven books read so far this year. Not bad. I don’t think I can quite get up to ten per month, but maybe a total of hundred in a year would be doable. That comes out to seven per month, by the way, so I’m good to go!
There is another white-washed-cover-debacle going on. Others have said it much better than I have, so linkage is coming, but a short rundown: Bloomsbury has for the second time in less than a year put a white girl on the cover of a book about a black female. The first time they had to back up and rejacket the entire load, but this time the author is much less known, and either they figured a debut author wouldn’t make a fuss, or that nobody would pay attention.
Or maybe they noticed how much Liar sold after the last white-washing-crapola, and decided to pull that one again. And even if that’s not it, it’s hard to know what to do about it. You can’t support an author that has written a damn good book, and who needs the sales to keep writing, without also supporting a publisher that is not only blatantly misrepresenting their books, but also (however indirectly) also telling black teens that they don’t matter.
Either way it sucks for the author, and the readers. For Bloomsbury? It’s mostly a nuisance, I bet.
A few posts about it:
TansyRR writes a bunch about how much covers matter. Includes a pic of the offending cover too.
Ari from Reading in Color (so hard not to poke a U in there!) has an open letter to Bloomsbury.
Kate Harding writes about the white-washing-phenomenon at Salon.
That’s about the extent of my intelligent thinking today. Soon it’s game time, thank God, and I can pack my brain away for a good hour and a half.
I think I have to bake bread tomorrow, I miss my carbs, and can’t stop thinking about really good bread with butter and cheese on top. I’ve never baked bread in my life. Or rather, I have, but I can’t get anything but cornbread to WORK, so this will be an interesting endeavour.
I can also tell you about my orgasm-in-my-mouth gluten free dinner the other day.
First; properly marinated tofu. I think the marinade was olive oil, expensive tamari sauce (only kind without wheat), fresh grated ginger, two cloves of garlic and some chili powder. I soaked the tofu for about an hour, flipping over halfway through, and made what we can “hasslebackspotatis”. Except, of course, that I freestyled it some, so I’m not sure it’s called that anymore.
You peel potatoes, and then slice them thinly, but only halfway through, as per this picture before baking them in the oven. There’s not supposed to be anything on them but butter, salt and possibly bread crumbs, but I brushed the remaining marinade over them about three times during the thirty minutes they were in the oven, which made all the difference in the world.
Topped with honey mustard, which is a dressing, but I use it as sauce, as all my favourite kinds have wheat in them.
I hung out with Viola one day and other than that I’ve mostly spent time with kitten, who is extremely needy, and my book. And now it’s just half an hour until the game starts, hooray.
Urghhh. I got glutened again. Or rather, I glutened myself. Probably. I can’t figure out how or why, because I’ve eaten exactly the same kind of food today as I did yesterday, and I wasn’t sick then. Maybe it’s a delayed reaction, but as I’ve learned it usually hits me right away, and I’ve checked every single ingredient of everything I ate yesterday and today, and they are all okay.
Yesterday I had to tell my mother about my bathroom habits, because she finds it impossible that I actually have Celiac, or that I’ve had it for so long without knowing. Over the last week or two, though, I’ve learned that it’s not normal for food to pass right through you. I remember a few years back when I wondered if it was, but I was in the U.S., and had no health insurance. The procedure used to diagnose me, that I paid 100 kr for here in Sweden, costs something like 1500 dollars, that is 10,000 kr, over there.
I decided that it was all the beans and lentils I ate doing it.
In an hour and a half I need to leave to go see Viola and I’m feeling shaky and blah and it’s snowing. Feeling better though, as I’m eating plain, ridiculously bland rice cakes and fruit, and I’ve looked forward to seeing her. I will take my tiny sock and my ipod and wear my new shiny scarf and mittens.
This is the yarn I bought in Edinburgh. It cost something like £11.99 for 300 yards and Jenn almost died when I purchased it. What can I say? Crack is cheaper. But it’s Manos Silk Blend, and it’s so soft that it feels like being wrapped in cotton and put on a shelf, waiting for better times.
And I used the mittens before these (knitted out of Malabrigo Worsted, also ridiculously expensive) for three years, never growing tired of them and being obsessive about checking my pockets so I wouldn’t lose them, so I reckon they’re worth it.
The scarf is nearly a full hundred inches long or 240 cm. I can wrap it twice around my neck and still have some left.
And now I need to a) iron my shirt, b) locate my bus pass, c) locate the right bus, d) load my ipod with battery, pack my knitting, and e) stop talking in list form.
PS. So didn’t iron my shirt. Checked Twitter instead.
Ugh. Okay. So, let’s do this in list form, shall we? (I know. I always do. Shut up.)
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1. HAITI.
Everyone’s talking about it, I know. But I read that the best organisation to give money to is Doctors Without Borders because they were already there when the earth quake happened and there’s a lot of help arriving, but there’s a chaos in the only airport on the island, because, you know, so much help, so little room. So giving to some organisation that is (supposedly) there seems like a good idea.
(No, I haven’t double checked this info, so, if it’s wrong, correct me, please.)
If you’re a knitter, go to Ravelry; there’s a filter for patterns that pledge a certain amount of money to just DWB, and buying something shiny with that in mind would be great. I meant to do this with my patterns, but only two have actual gauge measurements and most include sizes such as “my hand” or “small-ish”, and I don’t want people to demand their money back. I did however make shiny PDFs of all patterns, and will add them to the pattern pages… soon.
2. TO-DO-LIST.
Girlie Jones posts her to-do-list and always have a ton of stuff on it. Mine is very short and I still didn’t accomplish more than half… This week it looked as follows:
1) Clean every room in the flat, not just the kitchen and bathroom.
2) Finish the soakers (insides) to your current batch of pads.
3) Cut out fabric for outside of pads.
4) Make cookies.
5) Read a book.
6) Post orders before Friday.
7) Do some editing.
The result was: 1) sort of, 2) yes, 3) no, 4) yes, 5) sort of, 6) yes, 7) yes. Possibly the last one should’ve been more specific, cookies were made just because I craved chocolate, I did read a lot, about half of one book and three quarters of another, and as for cleaning… Every room is (mostly) clean, but I still have to unpack the FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING box that has been standing in a corner since September, when I moved in.
3. GLUTEN ADVENTURES.
I’ve done good. Mostly. Today I cracked and ate four pieces of chocolate from a wrapper labelled “may contain traces of gluten”. So stupid. I know that it sets me back at zero. Really. But yeah, I did, and it ended mostly unpleasantly, so it seems like regular oats are okay though they shouldn’t be, but chocolate that only has trace amounts is not. Weird.
As this painful experienced took place, however, I realised that this is what I used to do after every single meal. I mean every single one too. I never thought there was something wrong; at first I assumed it was something with the vegan diet, too many beans or something, and then, once I started eating dairy again I figured it was lactose intolerance (because, if you’re vegan for a while your body stops producing the enzyme that breaks down milk sugar, that’s what lactose intolerant people lack), but… yeah. Gluten it is.
I also baked twice with gluten free flour this week; corn muffins and chocolate chip cookies. Both came out good, although I was dubious about the cookies because the batter was so… glue-y when I put it on the cookie sheets. They floated out some more than they use to, but were crispier, which actually is yummier.
This must be fascinating to read. Seriously.
4. MACBOOK.
It’s very, very yummy. Am still learning, but am pretty much enarmoured and when I did have to switch back to print something (Mac and HP printer = not friends), it felt like going back in time about a hundred years. Okay, so a hundred years ago there were no laptops, but… Yes. Still.
Am very much in love, shut up all you who said “I told you so”.
I do find it amusing that the computers that were nerdy a decade ago, now is what everyone wants… I love when time passes and there’s a shift in values. Possibly this just means that I’m getting old, because I can remember the olden days.
5. JAG VILL INTE DÖ, JAG VILL BARA INTE LEVA.
Number One on this lists makes two through four look rather whiny, don’t they? But that’s how I always feel; I can’t really think of all the bad that goes on in the world, it becomes too much, it makes me anxious and manic in attempts not to think about it, and then things go downhill and it’s badness. Imagine my surprise when I read this book from a woman with my diagnosis who felt the same way.
Though maybe everyone does.
But this book is amazing. I so want my mum to read it, but the author is rather obsessed with suicide and I don’t want her to think I am. I’m not. I always felt that I wasn’t “worth” dying. How twisted is that? Basically, life was so miserable and I didn’t deserve anything better than that.
Odd, how depresison works.
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Anyway, return to number one on this list, please. Buy a pattern. Or send a text, like everyone tells you to do. You can also donate to Knitters Without Borders, this project Stephanie Pearl-McPhee has going on, and has had for years, actually. Apparently she’s gotten in 50,000 dollars in the last few days, all which are going to Doctors Without Borders.
Now I fall over, and kitten with me.
(Title comes from Mariella by Kate Nash.)
I would like to write a bit about understanding mental illness. Most of my family is great about this, much more so than they were when I first became sick. Then again, I was a teenager, and it’s common knowledge that all teenagers slam doors and cry themselves to sleep because something is So Unfair. The fact that I still have the same problems, ten years later, maybe means that it’s real, or something.
My mum worries a lot, so it’s easier to not tell her everything, and I’ve chosen not to share every last detail with them all, simply because I don’t want to scare them. Ann Heberlein twrites about this in the book Jag vill inte dö, jag vill bara inte leva (I Don’t Want to Die, I Just Don’t Want to Live, and yes, in Sweden we don’t capitalise the words in book titlesas people seem to do abroad, though I have to admit I don’t know the rules for this and just do whatever the book itself says!) that I just got from the library. I expect there will be a review of it shortly, but I’m still on the first chapter.
The exception from this rule is my grandmother. Granted, she is from a generation when you didn’t talk about these things, but I still feel that if you have explained something to her three dozen times she should still be able to grasp the concept.
Depression is a failure to be happy, in her world. Depression is not realising how good you have it. Depression is something you grow out of. Anxiety? Does not exist. In all, the only acceptable form of mental illness is being burned out, as it is something you can heal from. And if you are on sick leave because of it? Becoming pregnant is nice, because you’re “just home all day anyway”.
My aunt did indeed get burned out a few years ago, and took many of these infuriating conversations in my place. For that I will be forever grateful. But there are certain things people say that just isn’t… helpful, and out of them my grandmother says them the most.
So, here are a few things that really only manage to make the depressed/manic/insert-mental-illness-of-your-choice-here feel more alienated. Try not to use them, okay? They just make life more difficult. And, um, this is just me. I’m not trying to speak for anyone else here. Or, not on purpose, anyway. But these really get to me…
“When you were a child you were always so happy.”
Often the answer (that you never say out loud) is “no, I wasn’t, you just didn’t know”. Me? I remember being depressed from age eight and onward; I just didn’t know what it was or why I felt that way. I didn’t get help for these issues until I was twenty years old. That was a very long decade, and sometimes I’m angry that I lost a lot of childhood to these feelings, without even knowing it.
“Life can be pretty amazing, if you just let it.”
Um. Yes. Believe me, I know that life can be amazing. When I’m properly medicated and have a therapist and everything works, I love life. It’s amazing and rich and even dreary Tuesdays when the bus is late and my fridge is empty and I’m broke are pretty damn nice, because at least I don’t have the restlessness or the heavy depressive streak that makes every step a struggle. Those days, I love living and can’t believe that I ever felt differently.
When I’m manic, on the other hand, everything is shiny, sure, but I also get sucked into various time consuming obsessions, such as spending four days organising my itunes library (usually four times over, artist, song, album and genre, until it feels right), or sort all my clothes by colour (and then by type, and then by colour again and the ones that are more than one colour really get to me), or rearrange my bookcase (also three or four times, until I’m satisfied or can’t think straight anymore), or write until I literally fall over or knit until my fingers ache (oh carpal tunnel, I know why you bother me from time to time)… I don’t live life, because I’m too busy doing things that feel like The Most Important Thing In The World, right then. And if I didn’t let myself, I would probably be doing much more stupid shit, so for the most part I let it run its course.
When I’m depressed, on the… erm, third hand, I can literally not make it out of bed. These times life is heavy. Every step feels like climbing mountains, brushing my teeth is something that takes three hours of gearing up to do, and don’t even get me started on the crying. Take your worst PMS ever, double it by ten or a hundred or a thousand, and you get something like it.
And, of course, when I’m neither of the two above and life is fine I still constantly wait for the other shoe to drop; I know that it’s going to go downhill again, it’s just a question of when. So please don’t tell me that life is great. I spend most of my time frustrated that I can’t experience said greatness, because of things I can’t control.
“Can’t you just come to this one thing, just for me?”
This one needs a bit more explanation. It’s not so much a one-liner as a conversation, but this is how it starts. Usually I say that I can’t come. That is, unless I feel like I actually may be able to do it without using too many spoons. If I say no, the other person (if it’s my grandmother) usually says “but it’s just this time, and it would really make me happy”. And if I still say no, she tells me she’ll call back in a couple of days and see how I feel about it then.
Not helpful. Not helpful at all.
What seems to be the hardest to understand (not for all of you, I do have some friends that get this, and I love you so), is that when I say “I can’t”, I don’t mean “I don’t feel like it”, or “I’ve got something else to do”, or “I don’t want to” (okay, sometimes I don’t want to, but mostly I do).
I mean that I phsyically and mentally can’t bring myself to do it. If I force myself I’ll be jumpy. I’ll wince every time someone raises their voice or laughs too loudly or there is a TV or radio on in the background. I’ll flinch if somebody gets in my space, and my space is about four times that of a normal person. I won’t look you in the eyes, I won’t speak and within two hours (sometimes less) I will leave.
And doesn’t that sound fun?
Following this outing, whatever it may be, I will take two or three days to recover. During this time I will function minimally; I will sleep twice as much as usual, I will eat, but nothing more complicated than oatmeal, because cooking is too hard. I will play mindless games on the computer, because I can’t focus on a book or a TV program or my writing. I will not leave my house. At all.
So, the next time you ask me this, first ask yourself if your activity of choice is worth this stress?
Mind you, I don’t particularly want to be a hermit. I like to be around other people. I like to have friends. I feel lonely too. It’s just that I have to turn down people a lot, and not because I don’t like their company or would rather be doing something else, but because I tire so easily, and neither of us will have a good time if I do something I don’t have the energy for.
I am getting better. I really am. A year ago I couldn’t leave my house for more than thirty minutes or an hour at a time, twice a week at most. Six months ago I could manage two hours twice a week. These days I can probably do up to three, or on special occasions four hours, two or three times a week.
I hope (no goal, cos you can’t hurry this along) that I in six months time will be well enough to work a part time job. I’d like it to be in a book shop or yarn shop, or something like that. I can’t do full time, and I will probably only be able to do something like 10-15 hours a week, at most, but it would be something. It would really mean a lot to me, to be able to do that. And maybe, some time down the line, I’ll be able to hold down a real job. Finish my degree. All that. But for now? That would do just fine.
Not now, obviously. But in six months, maybe…
PS. If anyone with similar problems to mine would like to add their own don’t-say-this-for-the-love-of-whatever-you-find-holy stuff in the comments, I’d look forward to it. I know I’m not the only one.
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