Getting Older, Being Happier?

Posted on by Astrid

Today’s prompt for Friday Faithfuls is aging. I used to think aging was scary. Even at the early age of four, I didn’t want my classmates to sing in a birthday song that I was growing up.

Then, a few years ago, I heard an episode of All in the Mind, an Australian psychology radio show (I listened to it as a podcast), about aging. In it, people were discussing the positive aspects of getting older and mentioned that, for people who got to age ninety or beyond, the happiest age they’d ever been in their entire life was 82. How they got to such an exact number, I don’t know, but I’ve since clung to that number. It helped that my assigned day activities staff at my old care home always said she was going to live to age 93. Since she is eleven years older than me, we had this inside joke about the two of us meeting up near the end of our lives when she was 93 and I was at my happiest ever, ie. 82.

There actually is, or so the people on the show said, some logic behind older people being happier than younger people. The reason is the fact that the amygdala, one of the parts of the brain responsible for registering fear, shrinks as we age.

Also, many people become more resilient as they experience more of life. Whether this is a biological, social or psychological thing or more likely a combination of all three, it does mean older people may be generally happier than those in their twenties and thirties, for example. Borderline personality disorder, also known as emotionally unstable personality disorder or emotion regulation disorder, of which I have some traits, tends to lessen as people get older as well. This lessening of symptoms usually starts in a sufferer’s early thirties. Indeed, though I cannot say I’m necessarily happier now that I’m nearly 37 than I was ten or twenty years ago, I am generally more emotionally stable.

Older People With an Intellectual Disability #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m halfway through the #AtoZChallenge and this means I’m getting a bit weary of it. Today’s post for the letter O is going to be short I think, as I covered issues around cognitive decline in older people with intellectual disabilities already yesterday. However, today I want to focus on aging in general.

People with intellectual and developmental disabilities are at increased risk of developing chronic health conditions at a younger age compared to those without disabilities. These risks sometimes vary depending on the cause of someone’s intellectual disability. For instance, people with Down Syndrome, like I said yesterday, are at increased risk of developing early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease. People with Fragile X Syndrome are at increased risk of heart problems. People with cerebral palsy (which isn’t in itself an intellectual disability, but can be comorbid with it) are at increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke and various issues related to their mobility impairment, such as bone problems.

I once heard my staff at my previous care home say that, for people with significant intellectual disability, you need to add at least ten years to their chronological age to get their biological, health-related age. Of course, this doesn’t mean no severely intellectually disabled person can live into their eighties or even nineties – several at the care home next door did. However, it’s a rarity.

People with mild intellectual disability even more so than those with more severe disabilities often live into old age. This poses challenges to the healthcare system as well as causing these individuals dual risk of discrimination, based both on their age and their disability. Additionally, some older adults with mild intellectual disability, who may or may not have been identified as such, are caregivers to their even older parents.

Some people with unidentified mild intellectual disability end up in nursing homes as they age, where staff are not equipped to support them with their disability-related needs. Here in the Netherlands, thankfully, the intellectual disability care system is quite good, and most agencies have homes for older adults.

The Wednesday HodgePodge (February 8, 2023)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m joining the Wednesday HodgePodge once again today. This week, it has a love theme, which had me a little confused about the date, since Valentine’s Day isn’t till next week. However, who cares? Here goes.

1. Something you’ve done recently that might be considered a labor of love?
I honestly can’t think of anything. I don’t really do much for others, truthfully, shameful as this is. I still haven’t even crafted anything for my husband for Valentine’s Day yet, even though I usually do something each year.

2. What’s one thing you love about being the age you are now?ab
I’m 36. This means, or so I think, still being young enough that my body isn’t completely betraying me yet (although due to my disabilities aging is starting to set in), but old enough to have at least some knowledge of who I am.

3. What do you value more: careful planning or the freedom to be spontaneous? Elaborate.
A little of both, I think. I mean, my days are fairly structured with my day schedule and I still think they aren’t structured enough. My desire for more clarity though isn’t because I don’t want to do anything sort of spontaneously, but because any transition is hard for me. And there still are many in my current day schedule.

4. A home cooked meal or a fancy restaurant? pink or red? watch the sunrise or watch the sunset? wine and cheese or champagne and chocolate?
Home-cooked meal, just because I can’t stand fancy restaurants due to the expectation of my table manners. Pink. Sunset. Chocolate (but skip the champagne please). In all honesty, none of the above particularly appeal to me.

5. What’s your definition of romance? Are you a romantic?
I have no idea about my personal definition of romance. It probably has to do with showing your significant other your love in a special, attuned-to-them way, or something. I’m not a romantic at all. I usually think up ways to show my love in a particularly special way to my husband, but in the planning, things often go horribly wrong so that I end up with nothing at all. As with my idea for a Valentine’s gift this year.

6. Insert your own random thought here.
I am struggling with too many ideas in my head for crafty projects and not enough of something I can’t quite pinpoint to actually make them happen. It could be the fact that my ideas are a chaotic mess and I have no sense of how to actually go from idea to plan to project. Of course, I blame my day schedule, but I’m pretty sure that’s not everything there is to it. Yes, the problem is in part that watching a YouTube tutorial on something takes time, something I do have in only hour-long segments with no guarantee that, when I start on something with one staff (say, watching a tutorial), I can actually follow it up with them too. I am not sure this is the entire problem though.

#WeekendCoffeeShare (April 10, 2022)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone! I’m joining #WeekendCoffeeShare today. I just had a soft drink and a glass of water, but if you’d like a cup of coffee or tea, I’m pretty sure my staff can make you one too. Let’s have a drink and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that a fellow client passed away on Wednesday. He had had COVID back in February, like most of us, but he didn’t fully recover. This client had been hospitalized several times during December and January because of seizures, but these finally seemed to be well under control. Unfortunately, COVID was the last straw. He had been on a feeding pump ever since he’d had COVID, but because he became increasingly uncomfortable and unresponsive, the doctor and staff decided to discontinue his feedings on Monday. I last saw him alive Monday evening. He actually lifted up his body, smiled and squealed with delight upon hearing my voice. I made the conscious decision, having already been informed that he’d be dying soon, to keep this memory as my last memory of him while alive.

If we were having coffee, I’d share that I finally managed to craft another butterfly with the silicone mold I’d gotten for Christmas last December. I badly wanted to create a butterfly to go with the fellow client’s coffin, but wasn’t sure whether I could use the mold. However, other tutorials seemed even more complicated, so I eventually decided to give it a try. I did the wings in Fimo Effect color blue ice quartz. The body is pacific blue and the antennae are black.

If we were having coffee, I would also tell you that I have finally given in to the polymer clay color mixing thing and bought a precision kitchen scale. That plus a collection of 60 Fimo soft color recipes. Of course, I haven’t tried Fimo professional yet, but if I have to believe my staff, the colors I’ve mixed so far turn out gorgeous despite not being done with the true primary colors.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you about the nationwide cerebral palsy day I went to yesterday. Of course, because the ParaTransit taxi had arrived at 8AM and we didn’t have to pick up any other passengers along the way, I was in Apeldoorn, where the day would be held, by 9AM. Thankfully, I had called my mother-in-law when I entered the taxi and she’d made sure to be there on time too.

The day started with a live-streamed lecture by Erik Scherder, a neuroscientist from Amsterdam. The message was quite similar to the one he’d conveyed in 2018 when I’d attended the cerebral palsy day too: that exerting yourself physically is needed to stimulate your overall neurological wellbeing. In 2018, the lecture had mostly been geared towards (young) adults, while yesterday it was more focused on children and their parents.

I attended two workshops during the day. One was on aging with cerebral palsy, mostly geared towards those age 40+, so I was a little outside of the scope, but I could relate (sad as it may be) to some of the increasing discomfort that older adults with CP face. The other was a yoga class.

As regular readers of my blog might know, I am not 100% sure I even have cerebral palsy, in that my parents never told me and, by the time I was an adult, things got so overshadowed with other diagnoses it’s unclear. For this reason, I felt validated knowing that I appeared not to be the most mildly affected person, strange as this may seem. In fact, during the yoga class, we had to loosen up our muscles and my mother-in-law told me to loosen up. Someone else half-joked: “That’s about the hardest thing to tell a spastic.” That made me feel good.

How have you been?

#WeekendCoffeeShare (May 8, 2021)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi and welcome to my #WeekendCoffeeShare post for this week. Grab a cup of coffee, be it Senseo or traditionally-made, a glass of your favorite soft drink or a glass of water and let’s catch up.

If we were having coffee, I’d share that the weather here is still all over the place and mostly not in a good way. It’s mostly rather chilly for the time of year and has been raining everyday for the past week. Tomorrow, the temperature’s supposed to rise to a whopping 25°C, but we’re still supposed to get rain and of course thunderstorms. Not fun!

If we were having coffee, I would tell you that, despite the weather, I still managed to get in an average of about 8000 steps each day. I’m still experiencing foot pain when wearing my AFO for longer than say fifteen minutes at a time, but it’s okay if I don’t go for long walks.

If we were having coffee, I would share that I am so happy that my Braille display got fixed. Like I said yesterday, it was quite the ordeal.

If we were having coffee, I’d also share that the construction crew finally came by my and my husband’s house in Lobith to get us a new front door and backdoor. They still need to fix one window, which has a crack in it. Thankfully, they weren’t as stubborn as the Braille display company, so my husband won’t have to pay for the broken window.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you about the talk I had with my facility’s behavior specialist on Thursday. I was able to express my continuing feelings of not belonging in my current care home. This, for clarity’s sake, has nothing to do with the care home itself or the way the staff treat me, which is great. I am pretty sure it’s my search for some ideal that really doesn’t exist. After all, wherever I go, I always take my insecure self with me.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you about the online cerebral palsy (CP) meeting I had this morning. It was a regional meeting, because in the future CP Netherlands hopes to organize them in real life. It was quite an interesting meeting. Having recently become more and more aware of my CP, I was able to feel validated by people’s experiences of the long-term effects of this disability.

I also signed up for an online workshop on aging with CP that’s being held next month. I am still considering whether to sign up for the workshop on development of people with CP from birth to age 35, as it sounds interesting despite the fact that I’m nearly 35 myself.

If we were having coffee, lastly I’d share that my husband and I are planning on having lunch tomorrow. As usual, we’re going to get a takeout lunch at Subway.

How have you been?

Truthful Tuesday: Birthdays

Posted on by Astrid

Hi all! It’s Tuesday and I’m feeling a little better still than I was yesterday. I’m still having a cold, but it’s mostly manageable now.

Today I’m participating in Truthful Tuesday. This week’s question is: as you have gotten older, do you still celebrate your birthday, or has it become just another day to you?

The presumption behind this question is that, as we get older and the effects of aging become less positive than they were when we were a child or teen, some people no longer appreciate their birthdays.

I find, and maybe this will change when I get even older, that the opposite is true. I will be 35 in June and have found that, with increased age, does come increased wisdom. I am probably not old enough yet to start feeling depressed about my life’s regrets. That doesn’t mean I don’t have many, but they don’t weigh me down that much as of yet. I hope that won’t come either, but I’m pretty sure it will.

In contrast, when I was a child, I feared growing up. My birthdays were fun because of the gifts I got, but that’s about it. I never felt that flash of excitement that some children and teens feel as they get older. No, not even (or especially not) when I turned twelve, sixteen or eighteen.

When I turned 30 in 2016, I did have some mixed feelings. I was excited to be allowed into the over-30s groups on Facebook but also felt that, at my age, I could no longer have emotional outbursts. I still did. That latter feeling subsided over time though as I realized a neurotypical ten-year-old wouldn’t have meltdowns like mine.

My birthday has always been an exciting yet stressful event. Now though, it’s more exciting than stressful usually. My parents don’t make a point of telling me to act grown-up anymore. For this reason, them visiting me for this occasion – usually the only time a year I see them in real life -, is mostly fun.

I do indeed still celebrate my birthday. Months in advance, my husband starts asking me what I want for my birthday. It’s also a bit of a tradition that he takes the week around my birthday off from work.

Most years, I spread out my birthday party over several days, as I don’t want to have the house full of visitors. Last year, the visiting restrictions due to COVID were lifted the day before my birthday. This meant that my parents could actually take me out for a ride in their car rather than having to sit in the care facility’s garden for the entirety of the visit.

My mother-in-law visited me the day before and brought me the giant bear soft toy. That’s another thing that makes birthdays fun: I love getting gifts. Of course, I can buy myself the things I really want too, but I actually like the fact that people give me something I wouldn’t buy myself.

Maybe, now that I’m inn my thirties and don’t have to act grown-up, as I’m on disability and in long-term care, I can finally feel the excitement of being a kid at heart.