Accomplishments for the Day (June 6, 2021)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone! I was feeling a little low this morning after a restless sleep. This afternoon, I felt even lower after I misinterpreted a comment from my husband about my (lack of) Bible knowledge as criticism. It thankfully wasn’t meant that way. Right now though, I am feeling quite accomplished. Let me share what things I achieved today.

1. Got showered and brushed my teeth and hair. Personal hygiene is a struggle of late, so I am very proud that I got these things accomplished.

2. Got weighed in. I had gained a little over a pound over the past few weeks, but I’m okay with that. After all, my diet hasn’t been too healthy lately. It could also still be the fact that I literally stuffed myself full of fries yesterday.

3. Made relatively healthy food choices. I mean, I had three meals that weren’t too unhealthy. For lunch, I had a grilled cheese sandwich at a sandwich place, but I don’t think it was very unhealthy. I had mini rolls for breakfast and my care facility’s meal service’s meal for dinner. I did have chips this evening, but I kept to one serving.

4. Broke my daily step record. This is the one thing that helped me move from feeling low to feeling accomplished. My old record was 20.2K steps. Now, I have walked 20.5K steps today. Only 200 more to go and I’ll have reached 100K steps in the past week.

5. Read my Bible. I signed up for the Bible in a Year E-mail service earlier this week. Because I had selected the start-to-finish reading plan, I’m now only at Genesis 21-23. Discussing my progress with my husband got me a bit discouraged. He recommended I, being a Christian, read the New Testament first, then got to recommend that if I read the Old Testament now anyway, I could start with Daniel. So I decided to read Daniel.

To get myself acquainted with the story, I got the Immersion Bible Studies book for Daniel, because I like Immersion. That study though combined Ezekiel with Daniel and I’m not intending on reading Ezekiel anytime soon. So I got a little confused and this further discouraged me.

Then I texted my husband in a bit of frustration. He thankfully replied that he had just meant that Daniel might be a more interesting story than most of the rest of the Old Testament. He wasn’t meaning to question my faith.! That lifted my mood again and encouraged me to study the Bible some more.

What have you accomplished today?

Misunderstood

Posted on by Astrid

I am currently reading Forty Days on Being a Four, a book of reflections by Christine Yi Suh, who identifies as an enneagram type Four. In the day one reflection, she discusses the story in Luke 7:36-50 in which an unnamed, sinful woman enters the house in which Jesus is eating with a Pharisee. The woman’s dramatic display of emotion makes Christine Yi Suh think she’s a Four. Indeed, she is greatly misunderstood by the Pharisees, who see just her sinful lifestyle and don’t understand that she is in fact displaying her faith, love and devotion towards Jesus.

The reflection ends with the question in which ways I, being a Four, have been misunderstood. Well, for one thing, I’m often not even seen as a Four. Others would most likely describe me as a Five, because I’m such a thinker.

In fact, one of the main ways in which I feel misunderstood, is that my intellect is overrated and my emotional life underrated. As a child, I was described as self-centered, selfish even. I often got the feeling that I was seen as unfeeling. I am not and never was unemotional at all.

Indeed, I do feel that the depth of my emotional life is often misunderstood. I used to joke that I should give my parents the table of contents of the DSM-IV (we were still in IV era at the time), so that they could pick a random disorder to label me with when I wasn’t being my desirable, intellectual self. I mean, they often labeled me as dramatic, psychotic even. I wasn’t.

People who really know me, know that deep down, I’m definitely sensitive. I may not show it on the outside as much as the unnamed woman in the story does.

Another way in which I am often misunderstood, is in terms of my behavior. Too often, my challenging behavior has been seen as a willful act of defiance. In this sense, I do relate to the woman in the story, who lived a sinful lifestyle up till the point she met Jesus. Like Jesus saw beyond her acts, so He hopefully sees beyond mine. Like this woman was saved by her faith, so hopefully am I.

I also see that other people who know me, look beyond my distant, intellectual façade and also beyond my dramatic emotionality. They don’t see my intellectual and distant appearance as a sign of lack of emotion. They also don’t see my dramatic displays of emotion as mere manipulativeness, like my family used to. They, in fact, see me as a sensitive but also caring woman.

Like the woman in the story, I am sinful. I mean, my challenging behavior was there when I was a child and in some ways still is there. However, I recognize that I am not just my behavior. Like Bobby Schuller says, I am not what I have, I am not what I do, I am not what people say about me. I am the beloved of God.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (June 4, 2021)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone! I didn’t participate in #WeekendCoffeeShare last week, but today, I really want to. Even though it’s nearly 9PM, I honestly still crave coffee. So let’s grab a coffee or other drink and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, I would share that the weather has been great here over the past week! I mean, right now I’m almost soaking in my own sweat and wishing it could be a little cooler, but it’s much better than all the rain we had during most of May.

If we were having coffee, I would share that, due to the warm weather, I was able to meet my step goal every day of the week so far. In fact, by yesterday evening, I’d gotten in more steps than during the entire week last week. Woohoo!

If we were having coffee, I would share how much I’ve been enjoying nature lately. On Wednesday, I heard a chorus of frogs when walking beside the local canal. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my phone with me and, when I did later that day and yesterday, they weren’t as loud. I still fully intend on capturing some nature video sometime soon.

If we were having coffee, I would share that today, the water system in my care home had to be cleaned professionally because legionella bacteria had been found. It scared me a little, both the contamination and its associated risks, as well as the method of cleaning, which apparently involved chlor gas. I mean, we weren’t allowed in the building while the cleaning took place, but I somehow got it in my head that I’d be forgotten. I wasn’t, of course.

While we had to be outside of the building for the day, some of my fellow clients went to the day center. The staff proposed I go with some other clients to a monkey zoo called Apenheul, which is in the city of Apeldoorn, about a 45-minute drive from Raalte. I initially didn’t want to go, as I felt I’d just be overloaded. Since I would have one-on-one support for the entire day, my staff said I didn’t have to go if I didn’t want to and could decide this morning to sit in the day center or do other activities. My husband tried to persuade me to go anyway and so I did. I didn’t join my fellow clients and took a shorter route through the zoo. Overall, it was a good experience. My one-on-one took some pictures with my phone. Unfortunately, the monkeys didn’t make many sounds.


If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I might finally start my topiramate next week. At least, the GP figured out my options for going on a different birth control (because topiramate blocks oral birth control) and okay’d my going on the depo-Provera injectible birth control. She said that she’d get back to my staff next week to make sure I can start it. Thankfully, a nurse at my care facility will be able to administer it. Please everyone pray that this means I can start the topiramate soon. I really could use some relief from my PTSD.

If we were having coffee, lastly I would however share how effective learning to be present has been for me lately. This is an exercise I found in the book Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation and it’s really quite helpful. I haven’t yet been able to practise it when very distressed, but when I’m at a moderate level of distress, it does help.

How have you been?

Just Rambling

Posted on by Astrid

IWSG

I really should be posting my Insecure Writer’s Support group post today, but I’m not fussed. I didn’t write as much over the past month as I’d liked to and the optional question doesn’t appeal to me. For this reason, I’m just going to ramble. I will post the #IWSG link and image on this post, but I won’t really be sharing much writing-related news.

I mean, the optional question is how long you let drafts sit there before redrafting. The short answer is that I don’t really do drafts. I write my pieces in one go usually and publish them onto my blog right away. Of course, I do have freewrites and some works-in-progress that I haven’t published anywhere, but even my one published piece that I wrote back in 2014, I wrote in one sitting.

Okay, now that we have this out of the way, let me ramble about other stuff. Today, like most of the past month, has been mixed. I was okay for most of the morning and afternoon, but in the evening, I’ve really been struggling. My feelings that, if I drop my mask (figuratively speaking), everyone will run from me and no-one will want to care for me anymore, are intense. For those who might be visiting from the IWSG: I live in a care facility due to my multiple disabilities, including challenging behavior. Lately, I’m spiraling more and more out of control and this seems to create a vicious cycle of anger, shame, self-hatred and more anger.

Yesterday, I had an appointment with my psychiatric nurse practitioner. We decided there that I won’t go the diagnosis route for dissociative disorders, but that off the record at least we agree that I have dissociative identity disorder (DID). We won’t do a whole lot of system mapping. Not only have I done this already, but it seems counterproductive to the idea of needing to practice being present.

Speaking of which, I looked up the learning to be present exercise in the first chapter of Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation and had my staff write it down. The book is in English (at least, my edition is) and my native language is Dutch, so I translated the exercises and where appropriate, adapted them to suit my needs. After all, one of the exercises is naming three things you can see around you. As I am blind, this won’t work. I do find that other exercises do help me. One in particular is the butterfly hug.

Tomorrow, my GP will get back to me about my medication. I would’ve gotten topiramate prescribed to me for my PTSD symptoms, but found out last week that it’d block my birth control pill from working. My nurse practitioner would originally have prescribed the topiramate, but now I need to work something out about getting on a different contraceptive first. This will hopefully be sorted tomorrow or at least then I’ll know when I can come in to see my GP about it. I really hope this medication (the topiramate) will help, since I’m on quite an emotional rollercoaster.

My Top Ten Favorite Inspirational Memoirs

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone! Today I’m joining in with Top Ten Tuesday (#TTT), a weekly book-related meme. Since I don’t read nearly as much as I would want to or as book bloggers do, I don’t participate in this meme that often. I love it though! Today its topic is a freebie, so I get to pick one. And you know, I’ve always wanted to share about my top favorite inspirational memoirs. Here goes, not in any particular order.

1. The Hospital by Barbara O’Hare. This is a truly gripping memoir by a woman who survived secret experimentation and sexual abuse in a children’s psychiatric hospital. I read it back in 2018 and still love love love it.

2. Who Will Love Me Now? by Maggie Hartley. This is my favorite foster care memoir by this author. I reviewed it last year.

3. Where Has Mummy Gone? by Cathy Glass. This is another foster care memoir. It is my absolute favorite Cathy Glass memoir, but I love many others. See my review.

4. Today I’m Alice by Alice Jamieson. This is a memoir of a woman with dissociative identity disorder. Since I have this condition too, I wanted to share at least one memoir by someone wiht DID and this is the most recently-published one I’ve read. It was still published back in 2010, but I think it’s still available.

5. Let Me Go by Casey Watson. Yet another foster care memoir. Can you tell I love this genre? I was almost going to make this list all about those. Let Me Go came out last year and I reviewed it back in October.

6. No Way Out by Kate Elysia. This is a truly gripping story. It deals with sex trafficking of young women in the UK. I was going to review this one last year too, but didn’t get down to it.

7. Finding Stevie by Cathy Glass. Yes, another Glass book. This one deals with a genderfluid teen who is being exploited online. I really liked it. See my review.

8. A Road Back from Schizophrenia by Arnhild Lauveng. I had to google its English title, as I read it in Dutch. I am not sure it’s still even available, but it was definitely a great read.

9. Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet. This is another older book which I read in its Dutch translation before I had access to Bookshare or eBooks. This is a memoir by an autistic person.

10. A Real Person by Gunilla Gerland. Okay, I’m getting annoying with my older books that I didn’t even read in English. Sorry. This was one of the first memoirs by an autistic person I read after being diagnosed myself.

Do you like memoirs? Any recommendations?

The Shifting Image of My Care

Posted on by Astrid

In September of 2006, when I was still blogging on DiaryLand, I wrote an entry about seeing my life in black and white. I meant not just my life in general, but my care needs in particular. I wrote said post in response to a meeting I’d had with a psychologist several weeks earlier because my behavior at the training home I lived in at the time was spiraling out of control. The psychologist asked me where I saw myself in three years’ time, referring to care needs.

In my response on my blog, I said that I constantly had two images in my mind about what my life would be like, one positive and one negative. These were represented by the two most important alter personalities I had at the time, Carol and Jane.

Jane was fiercely independent. She wanted to live completely on her own without any support, except for maybe a weekly visit from a person to read her mail and the occasional help with deep cleaning.

Carol, on the other hand, saw herself as needing more support. I, at the time, made a point of clarifying that my “negative” image didn’t mean I needed 24-hour care, but that I needed significant help beyond that considered “normal” for someone who’s just blind.

Six months later, I had already discovered that the positive image wasn’t going to come true, yet I shifted my two images. I started to believe that the “good” outcome would be the situation I would live in at my student apartment, which included sixteen hours of support a week. The “bad” image, then, became needing 24-hour care.

You all probably know that the “bad” image eventually came to be true. When I wrote about the 2006 post on my original WordPress blog in 2009, I said that the situation couldn’t get much worse than it had been already at the locked unit. If another three years later, it was worse, I reckoned that’d mean I was in prison or a homeless shelter and hence wouldn’t have access to the Internet.

It didn’t get worse, of course, right? Or did it? I mean, I lived with my husband for some years, but eventually got admitted into long-term care. I now have one-on-one support most of the day. And yet the images are still there.

Jane is still saying I should live independently. Not with my husband, mind you, but fully on my own. Then at least I can’t manipulate people into giving me more and more care and, by extension, cannot drive people away.

There’s another image haunting me. This image wasn’t in my mind back in 2006, or at least I wasn’t aware of it. It is the image of a girl, aged around sixteen, who was a patient in a psychiatric hospital in the late 1990s, where she had been restrained for weeks on end until her parents sought media attention. This is the true worst-case scenario I see in my mind now. But the worst part isn’t the restraints: it’s the fact that the girl was often left completely alone.

I had a few incidents of physical aggression towards staff recently. The staff keep reminding me that they realize that I don’t mean to be aggressive and that they won’t leave me if I am. I hope the worst-image alter, whom I call Rachelle, won’t prove them wrong.

Gratitude List (May 28, 2021) #TToT

Posted on by Astrid

It’s really been forever since I last did a gratitude post. I’m not too happy at the moment, but maybe doing one will cheer me up. As usual, I’m joining in with Ten Things of Thankful (#TToT.

1. I am grateful for a sunny and warm day today. After weeks and weeks of cold and rainy weather, the sun is finally shining and the temperature rose to 18°C this afternoon. The weekend and next week are supposed to be even better.

2. I am grateful my Braille display will be fixed and hopeful the company won’t claim it’s my fault that it’s broken yet again. Like I said before, they originally claimed I had caused my original Braille display water damage, but they couldn’t prove it, since it’d been lying in their storage for a year. Now this one has similar issues to the other one, but again I have no recollection of ever getting water on it. For now, they are saying there is no reason to think it’s water damage this time around. The problem if it were wouldn’t even have been the one-time expense of getting it fixed (€1500), but the precise fact that I have no recollection of ever getting water on my Braille display and so I can’t prevent the same problem happening again. For now though, I am thankful it will be fixed.

3. I am grateful for my staff, who help me through the hard times I’m going through lately. I experience a lot of triggers and resulting flashbacks. Thankfully, my staff keep reassuring me and all my inner parts, that we’re safe now.

4. I am grateful for my nurse practitioner and community psychiatric nurse. They both help me too.

5. I am grateful for wraps for lunch today.

6. I am grateful for a shopping trip to get some candy and fruit this afternoon.

7. I am grateful for a private WordPress site that I can use as my diary. I still like the iPhone app Day One too, but prefer to type my entries on my computer.

8. I am grateful for horses. Yesterday, some other care facility clients apparently went riding in some type of carriage. While the woman guiding the horses was preparing the wagon, my day activities staff asked whether I could pet the horses and I could! The littles had so much fun!

9. I am grateful for beautiful and nice-smelling flowers.

10. I am grateful for the myNoise and Spotify apps on my iPhone and the ability to listen to beautiful soundscapes and all kinds of music using my AirPods.

Okay, this was easier than I thought it would be. Thank you for reading.

What are you grateful for?

Powerful

Posted on by Astrid

My Braille display, which I use to access my computer and smartphone as I am blind, is giving me problems again. In fact, it’s been acting up ever since only a few days after it got fixed three weeks ago, but I hadn’t wanted to disclose this on my blog. After all, the Braille display costs several thousands of euros and the company had originally claimed that home contents insurance (which I don’t have at this point) should pay for the repair, so I had been wanting to keep this private while investigating my options. Now though, the thing has been acting up so badly that it caused me to spiral into a parasuicidal crisis. This may seem odd, technology being so powerful as to get me to lose my sanity. Thankfully, my husband calmed me down!

This post was written for Six Sentence Story Thursday, for which the prompt today was “Powerful”. It was also inspired by Abbie’s contribution to the blog hop.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (May 23, 2021)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone on this rainy Pentecost! Today I am joining #WeekendCoffeeShare once again. Let’s have a drink and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, I would share that the weather is still quite gloomy here. Like I said above, it’s been raining most of the day. It’s also pretty cold. Man, I can’t wait for summer to start!

If we were having coffee, I would tell you that this week was rather emotionally draining. On Tuesday, I found out that I won’t be able to start my new medication until at least this coming week. My care facility’s physician will be back from vacation on Tuesday and should be asked to look into the topiramate then. With some luck, I will be able to start taking it later that week.

Due to the disappointment about this and due to other triggers, I was intensely dysregulated Tuesday evening. Same yesterday. Thankfully, during the rest of the week, I have been able to stay at least out of crisis.

If we were having coffee, I would share that I’m contemplating seeking a re-assessment and possible therapy for what I think may be dissociation. I mean, I’m still unsure whether I’m making the alters up or not. Of course, on some level, I made them up regardless of whether I’ll be diagnosable with a dissociative disorder or not. What I mean though, is I’m not sure whether they are trauma-based or some result of escapism. I’m not even sure my “trauma” is real. I mean, of course it was real, but maybe it wasn’t as bad as I feel it was, or shouldn’t be affecting me as much.

I E-mailed my nurse practitioner about this on Thursday and am hoping to discuss it at our next appt.

If we were having coffee, I would share that I went to McDonald’s for lunch on Friday. I had a crispy chicken burger and fries. It was delicious!

If we were having coffee, I’d share that I was touched to the core by today’s edition of Hour of Power NL. Bobby Schuller’s sermon was on the Biblically-originating saying “Your days are numbered”. It really got me inspired to try to make a regular habit of Bible study and prayer again. I mean, I’ve so far lost only one day in the YouVersion app, two weeks ago, over the past five months. However, I notice that I’m not taking the Bible as seriously as I should and would like to.

If we were having coffee, lastly I’d share that my husband would’ve come to visit me this weekend, but he has a headache. I hope it’s gone soon. Tomorrow is a holiday too so he can come then if he feels better.

How have you been?

I Am a Rock #SoCS

Posted on by Astrid

Today’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday (#SoCS) is “roc”. I didn’t know that even is a word, but we can use words with “roc” in them too. I was immediately reminded of “rock” and then of the Simon & Garfunkel song “I Am a Rock”. As I assume most of you will know, it goes like: “I am a rock, I am an island. And a rock feels no pain, and an island never cries.”

This reminded me of the fact that, at around age thirteen, I would describe my class as a country with lots of states and one of them, me, would be an island. Think Hawaii. This, of course, symbolized the fact that I felt like an outsider or even an outcast in my class.

One day, I showed a girl in my class the piece about the island. This girl promptly decided to type on my laptop and let my text-to-speech read: “Astrid is my friend.” She probably felt pity for me, as the friendship never lasted. It was rather based on rules, as was my entire class’s associating with me.

Like, before I found my way around the school by myself, classmates had to sighted guide me around. There was an entire schedule which had the girls be sighted guide and the boys carry my backpack, until I decided, with a little nudging, that I could carry my own backpack. I mean, yes, it was heavy with my laptop and all, but so is every early secondary schooler’s backpack. From then on, the boys would sighted guide me too.

This meant I had to sit with them during recess. After the island story incident with my “friend”, she and her clique allowed me to sit with them everyday during recess even if it wasn’t their turn to be sighted guide.

At the beginning of my second year at this school, I decided I’d had it with sighted guides and especially with the schedule. I tried to find my way by myself, often struggling, but this was better than to have people assigned to me who didn’t want to associate with me. Quickly, that became the entire class, including my “friends”.

I am a rock. I am an island. And a rock feels no pain. Literally. By the end of my second year in this school, I had mastered the coping mechanism of detaching from my surroundings and myself. I felt like I lived in a movie. I still feel that way at times, even though I have no need (I hope) to escape my current life.