I Am Overweight!

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today I’m joining Di of Pensitivity101 for Saturday Swapit, a weekly weight loss meme. I am not intending for this to become a weekly feature, but, because I had a dietitian’s appointment yesterday, I wanted to share some things I learned.

First though, I have a major win to share: when stepping on the scale yesterday, it told me I’m now 70.1kg. This means I’ve crossed the line back from obese to just plain overweight! I did kind of trivialize the achievement by saying it’s the absolute minimum I had to lose to cross this line and hence I may be back into the obese category next week. That may be so, but I did lose 1.7kg since starting on my food plan five weeks ago. That may not sound like much, but I’d rather lose the weight slowly and keep it off than lose more weight only to gain it all back and then some.

Like I said, I’m doing my healthy eating plan under a dietitian’s supervision. The main goal is not weight loss, but relative mental stability with respect to food and a healthy eating structure. You see, I have a history of bulimic tendencies and had a slip-up with respect to purging just before Christmas. Every opportunity to eat still leads to inner conflict.

With respect to this, the dietitian taught me about my negative and positive voices: the healthy-eating voice vs. the bulimic voice. Even if you’re not bulimic, you’ll likely recognize some of the disordered things the negative voice is telling me, such as that, if you’ve eaten a “bad” food, now the day’s gone to waste and you can just as easily call it a cheat day and binge eat whatever you want. The reality is, though, each healthy food choice will ultimately contribute to your weight loss (or other healthy lifestyle goal).

Another thought is that you have to make up for one small treat by restricting on another food. The idea that this thought is unhealthy, may contradict the previous one, but, in reality, it’s all about balance. If you’ve had one small treat that’s not on your food plan in the morning, it doesn’t mean the day’s gone to waste, but it doesn’t mean you need to be restricting or making up for it later in the day either. It doesn’t mean you can have said treat each and every day, of course. Your food plan is there for a reason, after all.

Another thing I asked the dietitian about is late evening snacking. I have a serving of fruit on my food plan in the evening. My staff felt that, for practical reasons, it’d be best if they’d offer it to me at 9:15PM. I countered that, since this is pretty close to my bedtime, I wouldn’t burn it off then. Thankfully, the dietitian was able to reassure me that people’s digestion works 24 hours a day. It’s a myth that late evening snacking causes you not to burn off the calories you consume!

Lovin’ Lately (February 11, 2022)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone on this cold Friday evening. It’s near freezing point here, but it’s also been sunny out today. Today, I’m going to share some things I’ve loved lately. Here goes.

1. Chalk pastels. I really wanted to buy these at Action (the budget store) last week when going there with my staff, but they didn’t have them. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have been good quality either, so I eventually decided to buy a set of 36 chalk pastels off Bol.com. The below heart, I did with polymer clay and colored with red and purple chalk pastels.

2. Paint brushes. I did get those at Action and they’re pretty good. I can use them for applying acrylic paint (which I also bought), Fimo liquid, varnish, etc. to my polymer clay.

3. New colors of polymer clay. I ordered five packets of polymer clay at my favorite Fimo shop, three of which I already had a little of. The new-to-me colors were Chocolate and Jade. I particularly think I love the color Jade. Of course, being that I am totally blind now, I may remember the color all wrong from the days I owned a piece of jade and the color of polymer clay may not look like the gemstone at all. However, I like to let my imagination run wild.

4. Tuna. Last week, my husband couldn’t visit me due to the storm. This meant we wouldn’t be going to Subway to get lunch either. To give me something to make up for it, my assigned staff ordered canned tuna from the supermarket to be delivered on Tuesday. I ate half the can on my bread on Wednesday and the other half on Thursday. At first, I thought I was going way overboard with my food plan, but the dietitian today reassured me that I wasn’t especially since it was tuna in water, not olive oil or the like.

5. Quick and hassle-free delivery of all my recent orders. I ordered the chalk pastels on Saturday and, thanks to being a Select member to Bol.com, got free next-day delivery, including on Sundays. I ordered the polymer clays on Monday late afternoon and received them Tuesday. I also ordered a varnish for my polymer clay with a new-to-me store, which also delivered the next day.

One thing I’m still waiting for, is a CD I ordered for my father’s birthday back last month. It had to come out of the UK and I just got confirmation yesterday that it’d arrived in the Netherlands, but I had to pay a customs clearance fee. Thankfully, the process of paying this fee was very doable via the postal service website.

What are some things you’ve loved lately?

I’m linking up with Link-Up on the Edge #282.

Mentors and Role Models

Posted on by Astrid

Today’s topic for Throwback Thursday is mentors and role models. Of course, last week, I already shared about my high school tutor, who was a mentor when I was a teen. Today, I’m going to share about other role models.

One of my first role models was my paternal grandmother. She was a fiercely independent, self-determined woman. In 1973, a year after women were legally equal to men here in the Netherlands, she divorced my grandpa. She went to college to become a social worker, eventually becoming the head of social work at the psychiatric institution in her area. In the mid-1990s, in her early 70s, she founded a senior citizens’ living complex, where she lived for nearly 20 years until she needed to go into a care home. She died in 2018 at the age of 94.

One clear memory I have of my grandmother that has stuck with me throughout life and which perhaps unintentionally inspired me, is her comment about her work as a social worker with troubled young people. She told me that, when some young people don’t want to go home to their parents, she had to sometimes honor the teens’ wishes rather than the parents’. Even though I was 19 when first going against my parents’ wishes, and their wish wasn’t for me to live with them, the point was that my opinion mattered even if I was “crazy”.

Later, when I was a teen and young adult, I sought out role models who shared some of my experiences. One of my first role models in this category was someone I met through an E-mail list for my eye condition. She was in her early thirties when we first met online and I was seventeen. Besides blindness, we had some other experiences in common. We eagerly read each other’s online diaries back in the day. She is still a Facebook friend of mine, but, because she has moved on to become more or less successful at life and work and I haven’t, we don’t share the same life experiences anymore.

Some people I considered inspiring, I never even talked to, such as Cal Montgomery, a disability activist whose article, “Critic of the Dawn”, I first read in like 2006.

Currently, indeed, what I look for in an inspiring person or role model is shared experience. That being the case, I consider many of the people I’m on E-mail lists or in Facebook groups with to be inspiring. Then though, our interactions are more based on equality, where any of us can be the inspiration for the others.

I don’t think that I quite have what it takes to be a mentor myself. Though I can provide people with inspiration and information, I don’t really have my life together enough to be a role model. This saddens me, thinking about the fact that I’m older now than the woman I met at seventeen was when we first met.

What do you look for in a role model?

Right to Health

Posted on by Astrid

In his daily prompt yesterday, Scott Andrew Bailey asks us about the “right to health”. I purposefully put that between quote marks, as obviously no-one has a right to health. We all get sick and die eventually. Okay, that was my autistic brain’s literal thinking acting up again. What Scott means is the right to medical care.

Scott asks whether medical care is something the government should provide for the people or whether it’s best left to the private sector. Are there drawbacks to your choice?

The answer to that last question is, of course, yes. Any system has its drawbacks. My answer to the first question, on the other hand, is: I’d like it to be a little of both. For my Dutch readers, the answer can be short: I like my own system best, despite its drawbacks, such as the mandatory copay and the diagnosis-treatment combinations which dictate that you’ll get care based on a diagnosis, not your needs. Those were a particularly problematic thing in mental health. I believe they’ve been altered to something else this year, but I don’t know whether it’s better or worse.

For my international readers, here is a little explanation of how the Dutch system works and why it has the best of private and public healthcare combined. Basically, what is called basic health insurance is more or less public, even though it is covered through the same insurers that will cover your additional insurance should you get it and the insurance companies are private. The government decides which care is covered under basic insurance and insurers must accept every Dutch resident for this package, regardless of health status. The basic package covers visits to your GP, hospital care, most medications, specialist mental health services (ie. services for people with more severe mental health problems), etc. Things that are not covered include physical therapy, dentistry for adults over 22 I believe, contraception (even though Christian parties have been demanding it gets put into the package to prevent women needing abortions), etc. When I lived with my husband, I had mostly just the basic package (I did have some physio coverage but didn’t use that) and I didn’t have to pay a lot of extra money for things that weren’t covered.

You can decide to get additional coverage for things like dental care, physical therapy, alternative medicine, etc. However, insurers can refuse you for those. They usually don’t for the cheaper packages, but then again getting these hardly outweighs the cost of paying for care out-of-pocket.

Basic health insurance currently costs about €133 a month if you want to have free choice of healthcare providers (I do). You can opt for a cheaper policy where the insurer has contracts with only certain providers and you have to pay 30% of treatment costs if you go to an uncontracted provider. Like I said, there’s a mandatory copay of €385 a year on your healthcare. GP visits do not count towards this.

Like I said, I think our system has the best of both public and private worlds. Before the current system was put in place, low to medium income people were covered under the sick fund, which was similar to the UK’s NHS, including its problems of extreme waiting lists and bureaucracy. People with higher incomes would need to get private insurance, but I don’t think it was much better for them, in the sense that those with private insurance would be treated favorably. That’s a good thing.

A note about those who cannot afford to pay for health insurance at all: as a general rule, basic insurance is mandatory and there are several ways in which the government aids low-income people, but ultimately if a person doesn’t pay at all, insurers have the ability to stop insuring them. In that case, hospitals can refuse care, but not in acutely life-threatening circumstances such as when someone has a heart attack. In that sense, you have a right not to die on the health system, but not an ultimate right to medical care.

Benzos As a “Bandaid” for Serious Mental Illness: My Experiences

Posted on by Astrid

Earlier today, Ashley of Mental Health @ Home wrote an interesting article about the role of benzodiazepines in mental health treatment. While benzos can be useful as short-term treatment or PRN medication for panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety or insomnia, they are often used as a go-to “bandaid” med for all kinds of mental health conditions. And by “bandaid”, I don’t just mean short-term.

The first benzodiazepine I was prescribed, was the sleeping pill temazepam (Restoril) by my GP in 2006. I was suffering with significant insomnia, but really I was suffering with what I now know is a combination of the onset of autistic burnout and my dissociative shell cracking, if that makes sense. I was given ten pills to use over the course of a month at least. I took six weeks to use them up and refused to get a refill even though my staff at the independence training home nagged me about it.

Then, once in the psychiatric hospital a year later, I used a number of different benzos, one after the other, mostly for sleep too. I however also got put on oxazepam (Serax) as a PRN medication for my agitation. Whenever I took it, I’d become hazy, fall asleep for an hour or so and wake up just as agitated as I was before or more so.

At the time though, I was seen as just autistic if that at all. More so, I was seen as a manipulative, challenging pain in the neck of the nursing staff. It hadn’t been come to the surface yet that I was a trauma survivor and, if it had, no-one cared.

Benzos can cause dissociation to worsen in people with dissociative disorders. Indeed, I find that I do become more fuzzy and I really don’t like it. Benzos can also cause people with borderline personality disorder to become more irritable or impulsive. While I personally haven’t noticed I become particularly aggressive on benzos, like I mentioned above, after the first effects wear off, I do notice I become at least as irritable as I was before taking the medication. I used to attribute this to the fact that the reason for my agitation wasn’t solved by my taking a pill.

After all, one thing that Ashley doesn’t cover is the fact that people with severe mental illness who get prescribed benzos as bandaids for agitation, may very well have good reason to be agitated. I found that often the nursing staff in the mental hospital weren’t following my care plan or my crisis prevention plan at all and, when I got irritable as a result, I was quickly directed to take my Serax.

All this took place in 2007 or 2008, before I was diagnosed with DID or PTSD or BPD for that matter. Once diagnosed with these, I still ended up with a prescription for lorazepam (Ativan) though. In fact, I at one point took it at a relatively high dose of 3mg per day for several months. Thankfully, my withdrawal symptoms once quitting cold turkey due to a miscommunication with my psychiatrist, were physical only and I was able to go back on it and taper slowly soon enough.

Currently, I do have a prescription for lorazepam as a tranquilizer for when I have a dental procedure. Now that I am thinking about all the things I read in Ashley’s article, as well as what I’ve been discussing with my psychiatrist recently about my fear of losing control, I’m not even sure I’m going to take the medication when the time comes to have dental work done. Which, I hope, isn’t anytime soon.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (February 6, 2022)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone on this rainy, windy Sunday afternoon. I’m really regretting having started the landing page for #Write28Days rather than just having linked up some archive of the tag or something, as today I’m already a day behind and it looks weird to add posts to my landing page again now. Okay, maybe that’s just my autistic brain acting up. Anyway, this afternoon I’m joining #WeekendCoffeeShare. If I feel so inclined, I’m going to add another post on my #Write28Days topic tonight, but again I won’t promise I will.

I’ve just had my afternoon coffee. I’m supposed to have a serving of fruit with that. Since the supermarket delivered 5kg of pears yesterday, the staff badly wanted me to eat a pear. Thing is, I’m not a fan. Besides, it’s not my problem either the supermarket got the order wrong or my staff mistyped it in the system. They should have been five pears, not 5kg. Anyway, I chose a banana, but if you all would like a pear (or two) with your coffee, tea or soft drink, we’ve got loads! Let’s have a drink and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, I’d share some more details than I did yesterday about my psychiatrist’s appointment on Tuesday. First, we decided to decrease my topiramate (Topamax) dose again to 25mg morning and 25mg evening, because the other 25mg I was taking in the evening was only giving me side effects and no positive effects. We also discussed my fear of letting go of my sense of control particularly in the evening and at night when getting ready for sleep. This means that traditional anti-anxiety medications or sleeping pills are pretty much out of the question for me, since they’d cause me to get drowsy and hence by definition lose a bit of control. Then, I’d fight the effect of those pills and get even more anxious. The psychiatrist instead prescribed me pregabalin (Lyrica). This, like topiramate, is originally an anticonvulsant, but it also works for anxiety. I would be starting with one 75mg tablet on Saturday early evening (around 5PM, when we have dinner here).

The psychiatrist also recommended that my nurse practitioner talk to the mental health agency’s psychologist to see if she can offer me ideas for coping with the anxiety. My nurse practitioner is also going to discuss this with my care facility’s behavior specialist.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that, indeed, I started on my decreased topiramate dosage on Tuesday right away. I slept great my first night and originally thought maybe this was the solution after all. It wasn’t to be though, as the next day I was right back to being sleepless and anxious.

Then yesterday I was anxiously awaiting starting my pregabalin at 5PM only to find out first that the staff thought it was put in the med system for 8PM. Then, once they took a closer look, they found out the pharmacy had put it in there for 8AM and the morning staff had indeed given it to me. I’d apparently taken it without noticing. No side effects so far, but this really is quite stupid, as there’s a reason I should be taking it early in the evening. I E-mailed my nurse practitioner, who will hopefully get back to me tomorrow. By the way, I also noticed I got a capsule rather than a tablet. The dosage is right, thankfully.

If we were having coffee, I would share that, yesterday, I decided to order soft pastels to use with my polymer clay. They should be getting here any moment, as thanks to my Select membership with Bol.com, I can have stuff delivered for free any day of the week.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I asked about sealing my polymer clay creations if I’d used acrylic paint or soft pastels on them. I particularly commented that I don’t want to use resin for this, as it’s rather risky with the UV or fumes of the two-component epoxy. Thankfully, I was reassured that sealing isn’t really necessary and, if it is, I can use other products than resin, such as floorboard protector or liquid clay.

If we were having coffee, lastly I’d share that, due to the high winds, my husband didn’t visit today. He didn’t want to risk driving on the highway in his small Daihatsu Cuore, particularly near Lobith, where they’d issued a weather warning. Better luck next week!

How have you been?

Gratitude List (February 5, 2022) #TToT

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone on this Saturday evening. I’m doing a gratitude list again. I don’t promise I’ll have time for another post for #Write28Days, but I’ll try. As usual, with this post, I am joining in with Ten Things of Thankful (#TToT). Here goes.

1. I am grateful for a good psychiatrist’s appt on Tuesday. I went to the mental health outpatient clinic to meet my nurse practitioner face-to-face and we talked to the psychiatrist via the eHealth system, as she was working from home. I got a new medication, which should hopefully help reduce my anxiety.

2. I am grateful I got a license code for the latest JAWS, my screen reader. I don’t know how the screen reader company managed to arrange for it so quickly, as I haven’t seen the bill in my health insurance app yet, but oh well.

3. I am grateful WordPress still provides the classic editor as an option. The latest JAWS does work with the block editor, so I tried that for a few days, but I kept accidentally deleting random paragraph blocks and overall, I consider it still quite a cumbersome editor.

4. I am grateful I have been able to be crafty again. My flower fairy or whatever it was, didn’t turn out as good as I’d liked. Besides, in the tutorial, they did the body in light flesh color, same as the head, so it looks like the thingy is naked. For this reason, I’m not going to show it on my blog in case I offend anyone.

I did create a Disney princess figurine out of polymer clay on Thursday. Most staff immediately guessed correctly who it was when looking at her: Elsa from Frozen. Since it’s quite small (only about 3cm high), I wasn’t able to refine her facial features or whatever. That’s okay though.

Polymer Clay Elsa from Frozen

5. I am grateful for a trip to Action, a budget store, in a town about a 20-minute drive away on Friday. We do have an Action here in Raalte too, but the one in that town was larger or so my staff said. I bought acrylic paint to paint details like eyes on my polymer clay creations, thin paintbrushes to use with the acrylic paint or with glitters or Fimo liquid, a utility knife and some other things. I was looking for soft pastels too, since the site said they sell them, but apparently this particular store didn’t have them in stock.

6. I am grateful for decent sleep most nights this week. I slept really poorly on Wednesday, but the other nights, I slept okay.

7. I am grateful to have been accepted into some lovely Christian E-mail groups. I am grateful for the kind people on there and for the fact that they don’t judge me for not living with my husband, which I know isn’t a traditional Christian marriage setup.

8. I am grateful I have been able to blog consistently for a few days now. I am not sure how long I’ll be able to keep it up, but we’ll just have to see.

9. I am grateful I am able to make relatively healthy food choices on days even when I did have a “bad” food for lunch for example. I mean, I don’t do “cheat days” where I ditch the food plan altogether and that’s good. Every healthy food choice I make contributes to my ultimate goal of a healthier lifestyle.

10. I am grateful for no side effects from the new medication so far. I was supposed to get it at 5PM this evening, but due to some mistake the pharmacy made, it got in the system for 8AM. The staff gave it to me this morning and I took it without concern. I am so glad we found out before the evening staff gave me an extra dose.

What are you grateful for?

Where I Think I’ll Be in a Year’s Time Based on My Current Daily Actions #Write28Days

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Welcome to day four in #Write28Days. Today’s optional word prompt, “nesting”, didn’t quite speak to me. I also wasn’t really inspired to write any sort of in-depth personal growth article. Rather, I picked up a collection of journaling prompts called The Self Exploration Journal and chose a prompt I hadn’t used on this blog before. It asks us to reflect on where, based on our current daily actions, we can expect to be in a year’s time.

Now I know that my future is in God’s hands, not mine. I have no way of knowing where I will be one year from now. That however doesn’t mean that I can’t take daily actions to hopefully live a healthier and more enriched life. Today, let me share some things I’m doing to take care of myself and some things in which I could still improve on and what I think these will mean for my future.

First, last month, I started on a healthier diet. It’s been a rocky road and I’m still struggling to find my balance on it. During the first week, I felt like I was just eating lettuce and carrots and was disappointed that I’d lost only 0.5kg. Now, I think I’ve found a better balance, but I might’ve swung slightly too far to the other side again. After all, this week, I had a sausage roll for lunch on Wednesday and a cheese roll today. I still am losing weight (or at least, I had a maintain this week). Based on my overall daily actions, I can expect to probably have lost a few kilograms next year, but I can’t expect to be anywhere close to a healthy BMI. Then again, that isn’t my goal.

Given that I hardly walk or exercise in other ways lately, I can’t expect my physical fitness level to improve. It’ll probably have declined by next year.

Mental health-wise, I can expect to still be in treatment and take my medication as prescribed, but I can also expect to still be quite vulnerable. Of course, I am always hoping that the next med tweak or change of treatment will be the thing that’s going to help me stabilize forever, but I have to be realistic: that’s not going to happen.

In the creative department, I can expect to experience ebbs and flows. I will probably have improved my polymer clay craft, having explored mixed media. I will likely still be a blogger, publishing several posts a week at least.

Given that, even though I look at other living places almost daily but haven’t actively decided I want to move, next year, I’ll likely still live in my current care facility. I’ll likely still be married to my husband too.

In summary, I can’t expect anything major to change for the better in the coming year but I am hopeful that I won’t make a turn for the worse either. I am hoping for slight improvements in the healthy eating and crafty departments. And, of course, I do really need to get my behind off the chair, but we’re talking current daily actions and that’s not happening right now.

Accepting My Ordinary Identity in Christ #Write28Days

Posted on by Astrid

Welcome to day two in #Write28Days. Today’s optional prompt is “Ordinary”. Immediately, I thought: what a dull prompt! I don’t want to be ordinary. I don’t even want to write about it!

Like I said yesterday, I am an Enneagram type Four. One of the descriptors for type Fours is “The Individualist”. Another, less kind one, is “Specials”. As these denominators say, we don’t want to be boring, like everyone else, ordinary.

When I had just been admitted to the psychiatric hospital in 2007, my parents came to talk to my doctor. They said that, in order to avoid accepting the fact that I am blind, I sought out to be different in every other way possible. For example, as a teen I thought I was a lesbian. I had just gotten acquainted with my now husband at the time that my parents used this against me, but we were by no means dating yet. Besides, in my mental state at the time, my sexual orientation was about the last thing on my mind. That being said, at the core, my parents were probably right: I saw myself as a complicated, unique, special person. Extraordinary.

Now we’re nearly fifteen years on. In a way, I still see myself as different from “ordinary” people in many ways. For instance, I am multiply-disabled, including blind and autistic. I am a trauma survivor and identify as a plural system (dissociative identity disorder). I, however, also now see that I am loved by God and by others as I am. And that is what matters most: my ordinary identity in Christ.

I still sometimes focus on the aspects of my identity that make me different from most other human beings. That’s okay though, as long as my “otherness” doesn’t become all-encompassing. Ultimately, my main identity is as a person loved by God.

#IWSG: A Tribute to My High School Tutor

Posted on by Astrid
IWSG
Insecure Writer’s Support Group Badge

Today is the first Wednesday of the month and my regular readers know what this means: it’s time for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group (#IWSG) to meet. I just got an authorization for the latest JAWS, my screen reader, which turns out to support the WordPress block editor, so I’m trying that out now as I type.

I did quite well in the writing department over the month of January, having published 29 blog posts, including a poem and a piece of flash fiction. For February, I signed up for #Write28Days, so my main goal is to write a post for that challenge each day.

Now on to this month’s optional question. For the month of February, we are asked to share about someone who supported or influenced us in our writing who isn’t around anymore. Immediately, my thoughts went to my high school tutor. Even as I type this, I am still not sure whether I want to name him by his full name, as in general my relationship with him was tainted by the many conflicting interests he had to juggle as my high school tutor and the assistant principal, with me being the only student with a major disability in his mainstream school. That being said, he was a major supporter of my writing.

I must explain here that he wasn’t originally my tutor from the start, but my original tutor went on long-term sick leave, never to return, shortly before winter break my second year in this school in the middle of eighth grade. The teacher I talk about here became my tutor shortly after the winter break. In one of our first one-on-one tutor-student talks, he asked me about my hobbies I think and we somehow got talking about writing. He asked if he could read one of my stories and I eagerly agreed. I think I even wrote an original story specifically to show him.

This story was rather autobiographically-based, but not so clearly so that it could be transferred one-to-one into my school situation. My tutor did immediately notice the autobiographical elements though.

I was quite a troubled teen and struggled greatly, being multiply-disabled in a mainstream school. Sometimes, I struggled to speak. Over the years, my tutor encouraged me to write things down when I couldn’t speak, be it in fictionalized form or not. Once I got a public online diary, which later morphed into a blog, I permitted my tutor to read it, reasoning that, since it’s public, he shouldn’t even have to ask my permission.

He remained my tutor until I graduated high school in 2005. He also was the one arranging for me to go to the blindness training center after graduation, even though he full on knew this meant I couldn’t go to university right away then.

Sadly, about a year after my graduation, my now former tutor was diagnosed with cancer. He did live for another about ten years and did make it to the reunion in celebration of my high school existing 100 years in 2013. I, though, did not. My tutor died in 2016.

I am not sure whether my tutor felt I was a good writer per se. He might have thought, like my parents did during my teens, that I was overly self-centered in my writing. If he did though, he didn’t say so. In any case, he was one of the people who, whether he wanted to or not, influenced me to be a regular blogger.