It’s My Choice

Posted on by Astrid

Yay, I got accepted into a living facility. The one in Raalte that I visited about six weeks ago. I will hopefully move before I’d otherwise move to the house my husband and I are buying in October.

It is mostly very exciting. I love the place and am really glad that the physician, psychologist and the team all agreed that I’d be a good fit for the place.

But… There is of course a but. I haven’t told my parents yet. I told them I got long-term care funding, but told them it makes it possible for my husband and me to live together wherever we want, not being restricted by our local authority. It could do that too, but that’s not the plan. And I didn’t tell them I’m moving into a care facility.

They will hopefully say that it’s my choice. That’s the best response I can get. Not that they support me, but that it’s my choice and I’m an adult so I’m allowed to make that choice. After all, they still feel I don’t need 24-hour care. They still feel that I’m just blind and extremely intlligent and using my IQ to manipulate the world into providing me care.

Well, so what? Of course, I don’t want to be manipulating everyone into providing me care. I don’t want to be a little attention-seeker who thinks the world owes her a living. I wish I could snap out of my need for care and live a successful life by non-disabled standards.

At the same time, maybe if I didn’t care that I’d have to be sedated to the point of sleeping all day, I could do with less care than I’ll be getting in the living facility. As someone once asked, how can you literally need 24-hour care, since you’re (hopefully) sleeping during the night? This person was by no means trying to suggest that sedation could lessen my care needs, for clarity’s sake, but it could. And I’m making a choice not to sleep the day away. If you think that’s me being manipulativve, fine by me. That’s your choice.

I am writing this post for today’s Daily Addictions. The prompt is “Choice”.

Working On Us Prompt: Self-Care and Personal Hygiene

Posted on by Astrid

This week’s prompt on Working On Us is about self-care. I initially thought of self-care as those things we do to pamper ourselves, but then when I read the questions, I realized Beckie means basic self-care. You know, personal hygiene, such as showering or brushing your teeth.

I definitely have always had trouble with this. Part of it may be due to my lack of awareness of my appearance, which may be due to both blindness and autism. However, the fact that I don’t always shower or brush my teeth regularly, certainly isn’t.

I have always had trouble with proper personal care. When I was about fourteen, my high school tutor got complaints from my classmates that I smelled a lot of body odor. He told me I really had to develop a personal hygiene routine, but didn’t explain how to go about it. He was my PE teacher and said that he personally showerd twice a day. So I initially thought I had to do that as well, so the next day, I jumped in the bath at 6AM. My parents were not amused. With my parents, I finally agreed on a routine of baths or showers three days a week, on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday evenings. That way, if I went to school, it’d never be more than 48 hours since I’d had a shower or bath.

My parents still didn’t explain how to wash myself. Honestly, now that I’m 33, I still get told by my husband at times that I don’t do it properly.

The problem of course wasn’t just that my parents didn’t teach me. After all, presumably my sister knows all about hygiene. It was also that I had an aversion against personal hygiene activities. Here is where my mental health is involved. Like, I have executive functioning issues on the best of days, making a “simple” shower very difficult. When I’m depressed, I cannot cope with the stress of having to shower.

My lack of self-care wasn’t even picked on when I was first assessed by a psychiatrist. Maybe he did notice I smelled, or maybe that particular day my body odor wasn’t too bad or I’d had a shower. If he did notice, he didn’t tell me so or write it in the report. Neither did any of the next so many psychiatrists and psychologists I had. I only found out that my psychologist at the resocialization unit in Nijmegen had noticed because it was written in my long-term care application at the time, that I didn’t get to see until we applied again last year.

As for brushing my teeth, I hated toothpaste. I still do, but at age 18, finally forced myself to use it. I never brushed my teeth properly until I got an electric toothbrush for my birthday this year. Now I’m still not sure I do it right, but I at least brush for the required two minutes. Interestingly, the elctric toothbrush is less horrible sensorially than the handheld one.

I find it interesting that, though lack of personal hygiene is part of an assessment of mental functioning, so few mental health practitioners take the time to discuss it with their patients. Like, when I was in the mental hospital, no-one offered to teach me personal hygiene. Not even when the dentist recommended I get help brushing my teeth. They said it was my responsibility. I really hope that, when I’m in a care facility for people with developmental disabilities, that will change.

#FOWC: Diet

Posted on by Astrid

Today’s Prompt for #FOWC is diet. I have no experience following any diet. Not even a “No-Diet” diet such as Slimming World. I know, I do need to lose weight. I do need to moderate my food intake. I do know that Slimming World, Weight Watchers and the like can help some stick to a habit of moderation where it comes to food. However, I’m not sure I’m ready to stick to the diet.

I really want to stick to a plan where it comes to food, but I don’t want it to become an obsession. And, honestly, food can quite easily become an obsession, because in my thoughts, it already is.

I think I need to allow others some control over my food intake. It may be best if I take full responsibility, but given how badly my overeating can get, I don’t believe that’s realistic right now.

I hope that, once I move into supported housing, I will have a more structured day where it comes to my meals and snacks. I really hope I’ll subsequently be able to eat less. After all, whichever diet you follow, that’s the real deal.

My husband and I were talking about a care facility that wants me, and he asked whether they have side-by-side bikes. I think they do. They certainly do have a stationary bike. We were discussing getting rid of my elliptical, because there’s not enough room in our new house to put it if I only use it on week-ends. I was thinking of taking it to the care facility. Maybe they can use it at the day center that’s near the living facility. That way, I’ll still be able to go on the elliptical.

I, after all, didn’t say I would never lose weight again. I do want to, but now is not the right time. Then when is, you ask? Well, like I said, I’m genuinely hoping that, once I go to the care facility, I will be able to stick to a diet and exercise plan with the help of my staff.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (August 18, 2019)

Posted on by Astrid

It’s Sunday. This usually means I’m joining in with #WeekendCoffeeShare. I didn’t last week, because I couldn’t find the time amidst reading and writing other posts. Today though, I’m joining in again.

I am full from all the French fries and snacks I had this evening. I don’t think I can manage to drink a cup of coffee or even green tea right now, but if you’d like one, grab a cup and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, I’d ask you how your week has been. Mine has been a truly mixed bag. I felt rather stressed out at day activities a lot of the time, particularly on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Tuesday, a staff who would’ve been in charge of one group by herself was off sick. For this reason, the clients of that group had to be divided between the other groups. Besides, the staff who was sick, ran the kitchen group, so we had to do our own dishwashing and all. This was all a bit chaotic and I felt very off most of the day.

Then on Wednesday, we had an argument with one of the staff. She was trying to make me go to a rather useless fitness course. I had been dreading going to the course for weeks. I don’t think it’s a bad idea to have a fitness course at day activities, but it involved meditation and information about nutrition and health. No problem, but all my fellow clients are severely intellectually disabled. I don’t think that they have no right to benefit from this class if they feel it’s worth it, but I felt it didn’t fit me.

Thankfully Friday was better and we had a lot of fun.

If we were having coffee, I’d share that yesterday, my husband drove all the way to Schiphol airport to find a bank that was open on Saturday past 2PM, so that we could make the final arrangements for our mortgage on the house we settled on. This merely involved showing our IDs so the bank knew we were who we said we are. Then only the people at Schiphol were too busy to help us. It’s understandable that banks need you to physically show up with your ID before they serve you, but then it sucks that this can only happen during office hours. Officially we’d even have to show up together, but my husband found a way around that. Now my husband is going to try to drive by the bank in one of the cities he has to go to with his truck tomorrow and I’m going to the nearest bank with my mother-in-law on Wednesday.

If we were having coffee, I’d share that we had fries each day of the week-end. We always get ourselves fries on Friday. Then yesterday on the way back from Schiphol, we found ourselves a nice restaurant to eat at. I had a huge burger there. Then today, my father-in-law is visiting us (he’s watching TV with my husband right now) and he brought fries too.

If we were having coffee, lastly I’d share that I’m not as inspired or creative anymore as I was last week. Then I spent all the time actually doing sort-of-useful activities, including reading, blogging and such. Now I’m still not totally passive, but I”m feeling a slightly lower mood coming on.

How have you been?

Co-Consciousness #SoCS

Posted on by Astrid

Today’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday (#SoCS) is “Co-“. I immediately thought of co-consciousness. This is a term in the DID (dissociative identity disorder) / multiple personality community referring to more than one personality sharing memories or other information. It is often desired as a goal in treatment. Another one is cooperation, in which alters are able to work together for the betterment of the entire system of personalities and the body.

Co-consciousness is often implied to mean a system has less severe dissociation. I mean, since amnesia (inability to recall important information) is a criterion for DID, technicallyy those who are fully co-conscious cannot be diagnosed with DID. Then again, there are a lot of degrees of amnesia. For example, one is time loss, where someone “wakes up” to discover their alter has done something they have no recollection of. However, identity amnesia also counts, where a person forgets their name, age, etc. Loss of skills also counts, where a person cannot for example ride a bicycle or car when a young alter is out in the body.

There is also this phenomenon called emotional amnesia. I have yet to find out more about it, as it seems to be very common in our experience. For example, last Wednesday, we were aggressive. Though I do know that we kicked a wall, I do not actually remember it or the feeling attached to it. That belongs to one of the other personalities.

We do aim to share information amongst ourselves. However, usually we cannot all be present at the same time. That is, of course we can, in that we’re all in this body and when for example I give someone my hands, another alter cannot be simultaneously holding our hands over our ears. That’s what our psychiatrist explained last year and it was so fundamentally new to us!

Co-consciousness and cooperation can be an end goal in DID treatment, but some systems choose to merge or integrate. There are also different degrees of integration or so I understand. I recently joined a support group on Facebook specifically for DID systems looking to integrate, even though that’s always been a very scary idea to most of us. It feels as though we’re getting rid of some of us, when really all of us are part of this system, inhabit this body.

As a side note, I can totally understand most regular #SoCS readers cannot fathom the concepts I just wrote about. I was even once told by people in a Dutch DID community that I knew too much for someone who’d only been diagnosed for a few months, when I mentioned the term “co-consciousness”. Clearly those people had never ventured out into the English-speaking DID community.

Gratitude List (August 16, 2019) #TToT

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Yay, it’s Friday! I’ll have to get up relatively early tomorrow for an appointment at the bank in relation to the house-buying process. However, I’m still happy to have the week-end in front of me! Today, I’m joining in with Ten Things of Thankful (#TToT) for this week.

1. A long walk with my mother-in-law and her dog on Sunday. We walked for nearly an hour. Then we had another 25-minute walk yesterday.

2. A tidy closet. My husband helped me tidy up my closet last Sunday and it’s a lot more manageable now.

3. Hamburgers. Sunday night, I had been awakening my husband several times by talking in my sleep. Something about buttons I really, really had to press. Don’t ask me where I got that. Anyway, it led my husband to suffer lack of rest and he didn’t like to cook the next day, so he cooked up some hamburgers.

4. Ice cream. On Tuesday as the ParaTransit bus driver drove us home from day activities, we came across an ice cream truck that was handing out ice cream to all clients at the institution for people with intellectual disabilities where several of us had to get off. The staff said the driver could get himself and us remaining people on the bus an ice cream too. It was totally yummy!

5. Singing “Happy birthday”. As of last month, I attend day activities for the whole day on Wednesday rather than just the mornings. In the afternoon, we usually get music therapy, but the therapist had been on vacation until last week. I so far love love LOVE music therapy. Because this week, one of my fellow clients had a birthday, we sang birthday songs. I sang “Happy birthday” in English by myself for him.

6. No rain when my support coordinator and I went for our walk yesterday. It was supposed to rain all day, but thankfully it didn’t then.

7. Reaching my step goal yesterday. I’ve not had a great week as far as activity goes, but at least yesterday I did make it to 10,000 steps.

8. The staff taking me on a short walk today. This particular staff member had been on the receiving end of an aggressive outburst of mine (thankfully I wasn’t physically aggressive towards her) because I had been confused about being told I had to attend some boring health and fitness course rather than going for a walk on Wednesday. She somehow remembered having promised me a walk later in the day and then forgot. She hadn’t promised it, but this makes me all the more grateful that she did take me on a walk to make up for it today.

9. WordPress still being there. I got some scares recently about people abandoning WP en masse over the Tygpress thing and going to Facebook or whatever. I tried to create an FB page for my blog today, but seem to be failing miserably. I’m so glad for this reason that most bloggers are still on WP.

10. Lovely comments on my blog. I’ve had a lot of blog visitors and engagement with my blog posts this past week. It is awesome!

What have you been grateful for lately?

Working On Us Prompt: Pets and Emotional Support Animals for Mental Health

Posted on by Astrid

This week’s Working On Us prompt is all about pets and emotional support animals. There are several questions to answer as a prompt or you can write a narrative. I am going to go with the latter, but also incorporate the questions into my post.

I have never had a formal emotional support animal. I do hope to get a guide dog for the blind somedday that will hopefully be in some ways capable of supporting me emotionally too. I know of several people with guide dogs who feel their dogs serve them a purpose related to their mental health too.

For now, I have a cat. His name is Barry and he’s a six-year-old European shorthair (the “standard” breed for Dutch cats). We adopted him from the animal shelter my mother-in-law and sister-in-law work for in 2014. At the time, we had another cat too named Harry, but Harry was extremely hyperactive. We hoped that a companion for him would help him let out his hyperness in a healthy way. Barry however couldn’t handle it, so eventually we rehomed Harry to my sister-in-law.

I never quite bonded with Harry. I was always worried he’d shove my Braille display or other expensive equipment off my desk if he got the chance. At the time, I still resided in the mental hospital so only got home on week-ends. I really didn’t like Harry to be honest.

With Barry, I initially didn’t bond well either. Barry was very shy and reserved to begin with. I remember clearly when Barry first came to me for a cuddle.

Now that I live with my husband, I am Barry’s main feeder, so he’s taken more to me. As a result, he definitely supports me emotionally. He sometimes lies next to me in bed when I’m sleeping off a depressive state. His care also provides me with some much-needed structure. Barry isn’t an emotional support animal officially, but having him around definitely helps me sometimes.

In my opinion, any animal that can be kept as a pet can be an emotional support animal. So can farm animals. In 2005, I went cow-cuddling with the blindness rehabilitation center. I didn’t like it at the time, because I didn’t see the purpose. Now I would love to go cow-cuddling again.

Similarly, horses are definitely useful as therapy or support animals. As regular readers of my blog know, I go horseback riding at an adaptive riding school once a week. Though it isn’t officially therapeutic, it definitely helps my mood and overall mental health.

I also have experience caring for horses that I didn’t ride. In 2012, I went to a horse stable as part of my day activities. I had a horse there named Flame, a Shetlander, whom I often brushed, went for walks with or just cuddled. Flame could’ve been my emotional support animal.

Book Characters I’d Like to Be Best Friends With

Posted on by Astrid

I first discovered Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly book-related linky hosted by Jana from That Artsy Reader Girl, a few weeks ago, but didn’t feel like joining in then yet. Today, the theme is book characters I’d like to be best friends with. There are a ton of lovely characters in the books I’ve read. Of course for the YA books, let’s assume I’m at a similar age to the characters.

1. Jasmine from Unspeakable by Abbie Rushton. I can relate to Megan very much and would love to have had a best friend like Jasmine when I was her age.

2. Beth and Jennifer from Attachments by Rainbow Rowell. I just recently read this book and the characters are totally hilarious.

3. Katie from Inside the O’Briens by Lisa Genova. She’s in a lot of ways similar to me. I bet she could teach me some proper yoga.

4. Caleb from Rules for 50/50 Chances by Kate McGovern. He’s so totally funny. He also sounds very caring and like he’ll do a lot for a friend.

5. Piper Reece from Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult. At least I’d be a lot more loyalthan Charlotte is. Then again, that’d destroy the storyline.

6. Mellie Baker from And She Was by Jessica Verdi. Someone I’d love to get to know beyond her gender identity.

7. Kate from My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult. I love her fighting spirit and her supporting Anna even if it may mean she’ll die.

8. Sophia from Believarexic by J.J. Johnson. I could also imagine myself befriending Jennifer herself, but I relate more to Sophia.

9. Alex Taylor from Don’t Wake Up by Liz Lawler. I can totally imagine myself being the only one to stand by her side, having myself often been accused of making up stuff for attention. Yes, even if it could cost me my life even earlier in the story than it did Fiona’s.

10. Allie Johnston from A Different Me by Deborah Blumenthal. I was going to choose a different character from that book, but I forgot his name. I’d want to get to know Ally too. She does sound a bit vain and not just because of her body dysmorphia, but I’m pretty sure we have some things in common.

What characters from books you’ve read would you like to befriend?

Book Review: Don’t Wake Up by Liz Lawler

Posted on by Astrid

Like I said before, I’m really enjoying reading a lot lately. I had a number of books on my TBR list for a while, but hadn’t gotten down to actually reading them. Now I found the time and energy to read. Some of the books I’ve been reading, have been out for many years, so I won’t bore you with a review. Though Don’t Wake Up was published two years ago already, I still think it’s worth reviewing.

Synopsis

Alex Taylor wakes up tied to an operating table.
The man who stands over her isn’t a doctor.
The offer he makes her is utterly unspeakable.
But when Alex re-awakens, she’s unharmed – and no one believes her horrifying story. Ostracised by her colleagues, her family and her partner, she begins to wonder if she really is losing her mind.
And then she meets the next victim.
So compulsive you can’t stop reading.
So chilling you won’t stop talking about it.
A pitch-black and devastatingly original psychological thriller.

My Review

This was actually the first-ever thriller I read, because the genre normally scares the crap out of me. This one, however, was so compelling I just had to check it out. And I must say, I wasn’t disappointed. Yes, the plot was very scary at times, but it also kept me wanting to read on.

The synopsis above only covers the first 25% of the book or so, so I wasn’t sure it’d be interesting enough to read on beyond that. But it was.

One of the reasons that I didn’t before like reading thrillers, is that I don’t like bad endings, in which the main character dies for no apparent reason at the last page. In this sense, Don’t Wake Up definitely didn’t disappoint. Of course, bad stuff happens to people in the book – several people die in it -, but the book didn’t make me feel sick to my stomach at the end.

The characters were really well-developed. The book is mostly written from Alex’s point of view, but several other characters get a viewpoint too. This was necessary to keep the thriller effect. I liked it.

Overall, I really loved this book and it has me longing for more thrillers. I just searched for Liz Lawler on GoodReads and found she had another book published earlier this year. I’m definitely going to want to read that one too.

Book Details

Title: Don’t Wake Up
Author: Liz Lawler
Publisher: Twenty7
Publication Date: May 18, 2017

Read With Me

Tanka: Identity

Posted on by Astrid

Identity is
Knowing who you are and where
You’re going in life
What direction you’re headed
Without much doubting yourself

This is my first attempt at poetry in a long while. It’s supposed to be a tanka. A tanka is a form of Japanese poetry related to haiku. It consists of five non-rhyming lines of five, seven, five, seven and seven syllables. I am pretty sure there are other rules, but this is the simple definition. I wrote it for Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie’s Saturday Mix. I was inspired to choose the topic by today’s Daily Addictions word prompt, which is “Identity”.