Category: Health

• You don’t have to get married if you don’t want to.
• You don’t have to have kids if you don’t want to.
• It’s nobody’s job to flirt with you or be flirted with. If you’re into someone, do the work and tell them.
• People will judge you and reject you without knowing you. This isn’t your fault. You’re not the broken one.
• Your clothing and hair and other style choices are to make YOU feel good first and foremost.
• Signaling to your people is the secondary job of hair and clothes. But don’t dress for them. Be you, they’ll see it.
• Anyone who judges you badly for your hair and clothes is not your people and can fuck off.
• Physical affection in public is an act of deliberate courage.
• Family is a matter of choice. Loyalty is a two-way street.
• Mental health is important and it’s hard. Anxiety and depression are natural reactions to the world.
• Sensitivity isn’t weakness. It just means you pay attention.
• People who think “sex” only means a penis in a vagina deserve pity. (They don’t deserve better sex, just pity.)
• Everyone who’s interesting reinvented themselves after their world fell apart. Just like you did.
• Community is a safety net from an unfair world. Let it catch you when you need it. Catch others when you can.
• Don’t live your life for anyone else’s happiness. Live for your own, and share it.

Having trouble sleeping, as I have the past few… months.

Tonight, I’m doing my best to channel my frustration and insomnia into journaling. Just finished recapping my therapy session from today, and it’s giving me some calm in this storm, finally.

You, reading this, I hope you’re finding some calm in the storm as best you can. Sometimes there’s only a little to be found, but that’s always better than nothing.

When you cannot calm the storm, calm yourself. The storm will eventually pass.

Author unknown (badly remembered quote)

I don’t mean to toot my own horn (shout out to those of you on Mastodon who just got that, haha), but there are very few photos where I’m wearing makeup. I don’t like it, I don’t enjoy the time and effort it takes to learn about it and apply it, I don’t like the additional cost, and I don’t like the thought of covering up something about my face so that I look “better” or “acceptable” or meet some ridiculous beauty standard. And, I certainly don’t like the sexist comments I’ve had thrown my way over the years about (1) looking tired, (2) not putting in effort, (3) that I’d look prettier or more professional if I wore makeup. 🤦‍♀️

Instead, I have always put my energy and effort into picking healthy and beneficial products for washing and moisturizing my skin. Most recently, I’ve had something called hyaluronic acid recommended to me, and if you Google it right now you’ll read about how it’s (most likely) a serum that would greatly benefit older skin. But, I urge you to keep digging. Being a vegetarian/vegan-leaning person, I don’t like using animal products, and this is no exception.

I use Lush and have used them since I started mail-ordering from them way back in 1999 (there’s a store right here in Louisville now). So, I want to throw out another recommendation for them. No, I don’t get commission, this isn’t a “I get a tiny payoff if you click here” link. Their products are made from all natural vegetarian ingredients, smell amazing, and are animal cruelty free. Lush donates to important causes and are gender inclusive. Most importantly, these products work.

Take a look at their article here. It addressed a lot of beauty trends and gives healthy alternatives.

I saw a quote today that really hit me hard.

“Boundaries will feel mean when you’ve spent your whole life over-giving.”

I do this a lot. I put everyone else’s needs ahead of mine, regardless of whether it’s just an inconvenience or something that causes me to ignore one of my own serious needs. I’ve done this pretty much forever, because I grew up wanting everyone to like me, and if you didn’t, I was very hurt and tried to find out why and change my behavior so that you would.

Spoiler: it doesn’t work that way. The more you try to become to what you think others want, the less genuine you seem, the more people will take advantage, the less valuable you will feel about yourself, and the more exhausted you will feel trying to keep up appearances. Now, I’m learning how to create boundaries and how to heal. This isn’t recent for me, this is a lifelong thing.

The unfortunate bit about learning to heal is that most times you have to experience what being damaged feels like in order to recognize it was happening at all. If I never experienced that pain, I’d never have to worry about healing. But, I also wouldn’t know as much about myself as I do now. I wouldn’t know my boundaries or how to form them. I would let people go past them all the time, because I was a people-pleaser, and it wasn’t until I had a rock-bottom moment that I realized I had to respect myself and my own boundaries, or I wasn’t going to feel better.

Like I mentioned before, this has been a lifelong thing, which means forming boundaries is harder with people you’ve known for longer. And, what feels like drawing lines and pulling away is actually very healthy. It can feel mean, but it’s not.

What a boundary looks like, can be something as simple as, “no, I can’t eat Grandma Sally’s traditional pumpkin pie because it doesn’t agree with me,” or it can be more complex, like, “no, I won’t spend time with cousin Paul because he makes inappropriate comments.”

These examples are made up just for this exercise; I don’t have a Grandma Sally or a cousin Paul. I do however have a family cheesecake recipe that will gladly eat a slice of this christmas and happily suffer for.

I’m hoping this post can be the start of a conversation with others. If you have any experiences you’d be willing to share, I would love to read them in the comments below.

I get prompts every day at 10am to write in my blog. I’m never sure what to write, so I haven’t been. However, I do want to journal and start being better about putting my feelings and activities into words, so here goes…

I’ve started a health program. This is not something I would normally do, but I’ve gained so much weight in the past 10 years and have not found anything that will help get or keep it off. So, when my friend Danielle started showing signs of weight loss and an amazing increase in confidence and happiness, I asked her about it.

This program is different from anything I’ve ever done. Firstly, it’s done as a group, so I have people that I can talk to online and in person about it. There’s weekly Zoom calls, so I’m always keeping that connection to the “what” and the “why” of it all. It’s been less than a week, and I’ve gone from 229 to 217. That’s pretty amazing. At the same time, I’m skeptical about losing that much weight this quickly.

(Letting people know how much I weigh does not make me embarrassed or uncomfortable. The stigma around keeping these numbers to ourselves, especially as those presenting as female, is ridiculous. While we’re at it, I’m 46.)

I’m not normally an outgoing person. I tend to be way more introvert than extrovert, it’s just that my life experience and jobs have made me good at learning how to push that fear away in order to complete whatever I’ve been asked to do. Even so, I’m doing my best to follow the group’s encouragement of talking about how we’re feeling, to celebrate a win, to FIND a win each week, and to post videos or photos of myself.

This has been a little bit of a struggle, but for the most part it’s been fun. I’m not feeling too terribly hungry all the time, which is definitely new, though I do have cravings for foods that the group has recommended be avoided. I think I can do this. At the least, the weight loss has me very motivated to continue.