Oct. 1 - Watch out for dummies
Site updates:
I'm going through a huge chunk of Very Old Files, from ages past (seriously, they go back to the mid-90's). In this pile I found some recipes, and I'm slowly adding them to my Food page.
Please enjoy:
More recipes coming as I get them formatted.
Watch out for dummies
Greg left to run an errand today, and as he got in the car I called out, "Watch out for dummies!"
This was my way of saying, "I adore you, please don't get in a car accident!"
I've been saying that for years, so many years that the kids started doing it. And then it became this thing, we'd say it to friends who came over, when they left. Jaime and Ben have heard it a thousand times after game night.
A few weeks ago we went up to visit Jupiter in their apartment, and said hi to one of their (three) roommates. We chatted a bit and then began to leave, and their roommate called out, "Watch out for dummies!"
I looked at Jupes and they said, "Yeah, we all say it now," and my heart grew three sizes and began to glow.
Dinos
It's been a rough day and I went looking in my files for something funny, and I found this video I took a few weeks ago when my friend and I were having lunch. She'd actually asked me for a copy and I'd forgotten, so it was a good reminder. I sent it to her tonight and she texted back, "OMG yes," lol. I think she'd forgotten about it. I'm glad I could make her smile too.
Another fun little video
In 2017 I went to the beach with a friend and stayed in a yurt for the weekend (I'm the one in pants). Along the way we made this very silly video. I asked her if she minded if I shared it she didn't, so here it is. I love that it has a very young Finnegan in it. He was about 1.5 years old but still such a puppy, and he couldn't BELIEVE his great luck at going on this adventure with us.
AuDHD and chronic illness update
Still freaked out about burnout
The discovery of the autism is still a great thing, and I remain so grateful to my doctor for bringing the issue up. But there's still the difficult reality of realizing I've been in a state of burnout for....years (I'm trying not to count). Which is a bit scary when you read stuff like this.
Yet the overwhelming peace of understanding my own autism
When I first started healing work, there was a lot of Past Junk: a steaming pile of old bullying trauma from childhood to well into my twenties, as well as trauma around moving a lot and going to so many schools. That pile has officially been cleaned up. Partly through therapy and partly through the different nervous system recovery programs I've been working at, both really helped me clear all that out and sweep the space clean.
But the real final piece of that was understanding what (of my past experience) was autism. The therapy and recovery programs helped me look backward, but it was understanding the autism that helped me understand what I was seeing when I did, and that was gold. The early bullying experiences (from both peers and family) led to a lot of toxic shame, which is a pervasive belief that you're unworthy (Heidi Priebe has a really good video about it). I remember as a kid, even as young as 5th or 6th grade, having friends who saw this in me and tried to describe it back to me, but it was so ingrained it didn't make sense to me. How do you explain water to a fish?
Reading about autism, talking about it with my therapist, lifted all of that, in one fell swoop that I wouldn't have believed was possible if I didn't live through it. It was almost like undoing a curse or casting some wonderful magical spell. When I imagine the feeling, I'm reminded of fantasy movies where one character chants a few words, and some magical transformation happens to the character that's being spelled upon. That sparkles don't appear around me every time I talk about it, still surprises me.
I finally saw my own basic goodness.
I could suddenly look backward and see it there, all along. Not only how hard I'd tried, but how wrong my assumptions had been about what was happening at the time. I wasn't failing at life because I was flawed or broken or bad, I was flailing within it, because I was wildly neurodivergent and no one (least of all me) understood this.
It was so understandable how, from my viewpoint, it looked like I was just doing what everyone else was doing, but apparently SO UNSKILLFULLY, and that with enough concentration and practice and shoring up of mental data tables about what everything meant, I'd finally get better at this being human thing. I wish I could go back to the little brain creating that understandable yet inaccurate narrative, and explain to her what was really happening.
I was also suffering in a lot of ways because I was lacking huge amounts of support. Later, as a mom who was able to give all the support to my own kids that I'd lacked, I would realize how catastrophic that lack of support had been to my little self. In the brief blips of time I would catch a glimpse of support through a new friend or a caring school counselor, we'd move and I'd lose any ground I'd claimed. Back to square one at the new school, back to struggling with the mean kids: back to being lost and alone and invisible to the right people and way, way too visible to the wrong ones.
And none of that was my fault.
Understanding all of my neurodivergence meant looking back at that kid I was and feeling overwhelming love for her. Seeing how hard she worked, how much she wanted to succeed, how much love she had and tried to give, and seeing why she kept getting thwarted (and picked on). It wasn't her fault. Not any of it. She did the best she could possibly do.
This was so healing, and is something that I wish everyone could see about themselves. It's an experience I want to bottle and hand out to others. Family, friends, random strangers. I wish I could share this. Writing about it is the best I can do. I hope even one person, who has experienced a lot of toxic shame, experiments with believing this about themselves.
The basic goodness I have always assigned to others, is now assigned to myself. It's powerful medicine.
But methinks more medicine is needed (the chronic illness portion of the update)
So huzzah, one giant mess cleaned up.
I thought I had only one mess? I was wrong. It seems I have others. One seems to be problems with being so deconditioned from the lack of exercise and movement over the years of having fibromyalgia and ME/CFS. Youth really buffered a lot of that for a long time, but now that's, uh, fading fast (lolsob). I've gained a lot of weight (this is difficult to talk about on multiple levels), and have fatty liver disease among other things. Health problems are cropping up at an alarming rate. My friend who just turned 80 seems healthier than I am, which is always surreal to contemplate (though I cherish her and am very glad she's so healthy!).
I'm working on a plan to ameliorate as much of this as I can manage in the current state of health I'm in - it's hard when I can't just go back to trail running or aerobics like I used to. God, I miss being healthy. It really is everything.
Relatedly, a second mess seems to be my digestive system. A lot of issues are happening there, including MCAS, a histamine disorder that is making it really hard to eat a whole foods diet like I want to (histamines are high in things like beans, nutritional yeast, and many other plant-based foods). My bloating and bowel issues are certainly on the boundary of what I want to talk about publicly, but I know a lot of other folks with chronic illness deal with these issues, and with the current administration both gutting our access to good scientific info and raising medical care costs across the board, I think it's really important we share as much as we possibly can if we think it will help others. With that in mind, I'm experimenting with some things right now, and if they pan out I will definitely write about then.
It remains my goal to get well.
And if I can manage to do that, I will share my experience.