Share Your World (July 3, 2023) #SYW

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today I’m joining Share Your World. The questions for this week are so intriguing. Let’s go.

1. Do you own your own home, rent, or something else?
It’s complicated. While my spouse and I are homeowners, I don’t live in our home. Instead, I live in an institution. We actually went to the solicitor to sign the contract to our house in Lobith in the same week I moved into my old care home.

2. What is your favorite “go to” food when you’re feeling under par?
Licorice. I love indulging in it whenever I’m in need of a pick-me-up, but also when I’m feeling under the weather.

3. Do you indulge in retail therapy?
Absolutely, but for me, online window shopping is almost as comforting as actually spending money when I’m in a bad mood. Currently, I’m loving looking at clay cutters, jewelry-making supplies and other crafty stuff, but I’m restraining myself from buying any until my mother-in-law has visited me, because she might bring me some of the things I could’ve bought otherwise.

4. How many pairs of shoes do you own?
Four pairs of walking shoes, three of which are so damaged they really shouldn’t be worn anymore but I still wear them because I don’t want to buy a new pair of walking shoes every month. My orthopedic shoes. Two pairs of gym shoes. My horseback riding shoes. Does that make eight?

Gratitude:
Take pride in the person you are, you are unique.
I agree 100%. How could I not, as an Enneagram type 4?

The Wednesday HodgePodge (February 15, 2023)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m once again joining the Wednesday HodgePodge today. Here goes.

1. Pantone’s color of the year for 2023 is Viva Magenta. Etsy’s color(s) of the year are indigo and honeycomb. Your thoughts? Would we find any of these three shades in your home or wardrobe? Is there a room in your house that needs painting this year? Will you do it yourself or hire out?
I don’t care for magenta and have no idea what color honeycomb is. I do love indigo. I do have magenta as a polymer clay color, but use it for mixing my own colors. For instance, I’m pretty sure magenta was in the color recipe for creating indigo I once read (although I’ve never tried it yet).

I have no idea whether any room in my and my husband’s house in Lobith needs painting. If it does, I guess my husband will do it.

2. Something you had to do recently that could be described “as exciting as watching paint dry”?
Try to condition my blue agate polymer clay. Though it was Fimo Soft, it was quite hard and crumbly. Doing the conditioning is a very repetitive process, which can be exciting if it yields results, but this time, it hardly did. I eventually gave up and chose another color.

3. Who would you most like to sit beside on a 10-hour flight? Tell us why? Have you ever taken a 10-hour flight?
My husband, of course. If I get bored of him talking about his latest special interest, I can just tell him I’m minding my own business and he won’t be disappointed. Oh wait, you can’t use mobile devices on flights. However, I can sleep on flights. Also, my husband would be the one I’d least easily get bored of sitting next to for ten hours anyway. I’ve never been on that long a flight. My longest (and first) one was 3 1/2 hours from Amsterdam to Moscow in 2000.

4. What’s something you did growing up that would get you into trouble?
Argue with my younger sister, throw temper tantrums, have meltdowns that were perceived as temper tantrums, engage in self-injurious behavior, but also general autistic weirdness. I’d get in trouble almost on a daily basis.

5. According to Google the top searches in 2022 were- Wordle, election results, Betty White, Queen Elizabeth, Bob Saget, Ukraine, Mega Millions, Powerball numbers, Anne Heche, and Jeffrey Dahmer.

Hmmm…what does this say about us? How many of these words did you search last year? What would you guess was your most “googled” word/phrase/question?
I think it just says that we search for what’s in the news currently (mostly). I mean, Ukraine and Queen Elizabeth were and I guess the election results refer to some election somewhere (no idea where). I saw the Jeffrey Dahmer thing too and think it relates to a movie about him which came out last year. Never heard of any of the other things.

I didn’t Google any of these things myself but did click through to the Jeffrey Dahmer Wikipedia article when it was trending on there.

My most searched for phrase on Google, no idea. On YouTube, probably something like “polymer clay unicorn”.

6. Insert your own random thought here.
My husband and I went to Apeldoorn on Sunday. At Hema, which my husband claims is his favorite store, we saw alien-style cookie cutters. My husband suggested they may be useful for polymer clay, if a bit large. I said that if they’d come in a unicorn shape, I’d get them.

Then yesterday when we were on the phone, he told me my Valentine’s present hadn’t yet arrived. I didn’t even really expect one, but I told him his Valentine’s present would soon go into the oven, as I had indeed finally managed to craft something. He then went on to guess (jokingly) that I’d baked him unicorn cookies, a particular brand of cookies that aren’t unicorn-shaped at all but that we keep talking about since I got them in my Christmas hamper. He then told me that, if I’d make cookies with my Valentine’s present, they’d automatically turn into unicorn cookies. So my guess is he found me some unicorn-shaped cutters. How cool!

Five Things I Take for Granted #5Things

Posted on by Astrid

Yesterday, DrTanya’s topic for the #5Things challenge was things you (sometimes) take for granted. I realize I take a lot of things for granted that I really shouldn’t. Here are just five.

1. My intelligence. I don’t take it as much for granted as I used to when in school, but i still feel that I pretty much consider my high IQ a given. Not only that, but I usually find that I’m surprised when others aren’t as intellectually capable as I am. Of course, I don’t mean my fellow clients at the care facility. In fact, they have taught me quite a lesson in humility.

2. My access to medical care. I don’t take my access to long-term care for granted, because that was a fight, but my basic health insurance coverage, I certainly do take for granted. Of course, it is mandatory here in the Netherlands and even those who don’t pay their premiums can’t be refused insurance for at least six months while the insurance company tries to sort things out with them.

3. A roof over my head. I’ve never been without shelter, although in a sense I’ve often felt “homeless”. In the psychiatric hospital, I knew several ppatients who had no home other than the hospital and who were regularly suspended from the ward into the homeless shelter. In this sense, it is really surprising that I never even considered this would happen to me, since I too for several years had no home other than the hospital. I think this signals how secure I felt, in a sense, at the ward I resided at back then.

4. Electricity. I never had to pay my own electricity bills, at least not directly. I mean, even when my husband and I lived together, my husband paid the electricity bills. As a result, I’m hardly aware of how much energy really costs. My husband did tell me how well we did compared to other households and we were always relatively frugal. Even so, it all seems a bit abstract to me.

5. Access to a computer. I don’t take Internet access for granted, but access to a computer, I certainly do. Even in my early days at the locked psychiatric ward, I had my laptop with me and there was no way anyone could take it from me, regardless of what the rules said about only certain electronics being permitted. Thankfully, my nursing staff did understand.

What things do you take for granted?

#WeekendCoffeeShare (February 19, 2022)

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone on this gloomy Saturday evening. I’m joining #WeekendCoffeeShare today. I’m right between my dinner and my evening coffee and I cannot offer you a drink other than water right now, as my staff is busy and I don’t want to leave my room. I’ll get to that bit later. So, can I get you a drink of water? Otherwise you’ll have to wait until my staff returns. Anyway, let’s have a chat.

If we were having coffee (or water, in this case), I’d share that we’re quarantining right now, as four or five of my fellow clients are positive for COVID. Four are confirmed and the fifth one can’t be tested but is treated as having COVID too. I took a lateral flow test right after dinner this evening and so far I’m still negative, as are the four other clients supported by the same staff as me outside of my one-on-one hours.

This is the reason the staff are busy, with the staff who care for the COVID-positive clients having to wear PPE and the other staff having to remain out of these clients’ way. It is all rather chaotic.

If we were having coffee, I’d share some of my new clay creations with you too. Like I think I said yesterday, I finally created a cactus on Monday evening.

Polymer Clay Cactus

Then on Wednesday, I created my second-ever polymer clay cane. This one I did using a heart-shaped cutter for the image. I managed to do the reducing all by myself! Then I had my staff cut it into slices, which we then made into beads.

I also created several possible charms to go with these beads. One is a heart which I do kind of like. The other was a unicorn, but I threw that one away. I now only need to make more beads, because, even though I have more than just the four beads shown in the picture above, I don’t have enough for a necklace.

If we were having coffee, I’d share that, this afternoon, I have been experimenting with photo editing and meme making again. I didn’t have any success, of course. I mean, I found a photo editing app called Snapseed, which is relatively accessible with VoiceOver, but the one thing I wanted to do, ie. add text to an image, was not. That is, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to enter the text I wanted to add onto the image.

The result of all my experimenting is that now I have eight apps in my Photography folder on my iPhone rather than the four I used to have. And those four already seemed excessive, being that, besides the camera and default photos app, I only use one out of the two image recognition apps I have. Oh well.

If we were having coffee, I’d share about my nurse practitioner’s appointment on Thursday. I am so thankful we were still allowed to leave the home back then, because the appt was really productive. With respect to my new medication, the pregabalin, my nurse practitioner recommended I wait and see another two weeks before concluding it’s ineffective for my anxiety. We discussed my anxiety in a little more depth and also for the first time in a long while went into my diagnosis. He actually said he believes my diagnosis is DID (dissociative identity disorder) or at least some variation of it (ie. other specified dissociative disorder). I quickly talked over it saying it doesn’t really matter, as I know firstly he can’t diagnose me (but then again the psychiatrist can) and secondly I still haven’t had the extensive assessment required for a DID diagnosis in most places here in the Netherlands. That being said, it felt so good to be validated like this! My nurse practitioner also finally will make room for us to discuss my flashbacks at a later appt. He said the reason he didn’t go into it right then was the limited time left in our appt, but he’d definitely like to discuss it with me. That feels kind of weird, but in a good way.

If we were having coffee, lastly I’d share that I’m so glad the storms are finally over. Last Wednesday night, I hardly slept at all due to the high winds. Thankfully, last night and the night before that were better. My husband’s and my house did suffer some damage to the roof though. Hopefully insurance will be able to cover the cost of getting it repaired.

How have you been?

House Inspection

Posted on by Astrid

One of Mama Kat’s writing prompts for this week is to tell us about a time someone showed up at your front door. Since I no longer live in regular housing since moving into the care facility, no-one ever shows up at my front door unexpectedly and, if they do, the staff will open it for me. When I still lived with my husband though, several times, people would show up at my front door unexpectedly. Not salespeople, thankfully. However, my experiences with the housing corporation were so bad that my husband actually asked me not to open the door. I always reflexively did anyway.

One time, the housing corporation, or I’m assuming some technical company sent by them, showed up when I did expect them. They were supposed to be repairing our gutter, but asked a ton of questions about where the problem was located and what kind of gutter we had. I had no idea and the people said they couldn’t just climb onto the roof and have a look. I called my husband to inquire, but he didn’t answer the phone, so they left without having done anything. This encounter led me to get into a mental crisis.

The first time the housing corporation showed up unannounced was in early August of 2017, just two weeks after the gutter repair guys had showed up. They came to ask us to weed the path behind our backyard. I had no idea there even grew plants there, but, under pressure, agreed to ask my husband to do it within a couple of weeks. Apparently, the back neighbors had been complaining, since I don’t expect the housing corporation to come out from the town to check on our tiny village house for no reason.

The other time was in September of 2019. My husband had scheduled the final inspection of our home for the 26th, when I’d be at the care facility and he’d be home alone. However, they showed up a week early when I was home alone. I was sleeping when I heard the doorbell and felt I had no time to dress into my day clothes, so quickly ran downstairs to open the door.

I told them they were a week early, but they insisted they take a look around “now that we’re here anyway”. After their inspection, they asked me to sign a document. I initially refused, but they insisted I am a renter too (I was). Then they asked: “Can you read?” I explained that I can, but not print, since I am blind. “There’s nothing to worry about in this document,” they told me. In my overwhelm, I signed and sent them on their way. My husband did complain about the way they’d treated me this time and it was my final reminder of why I want to never live in regular housing again.

Mama’s Losin’ It

My Ideal Home

Posted on by Astrid

I’ve been thinking since yesterday about the prompt I mentioned I found in Day One: What would your ideal home look like? And since I have nothing else I want to write about right now, I thought I’d paint a word picture of my ideal home. Of course, this post is going to describe the physical look of the house. Like I said yesterday, home is where I can be myself and that cannot mostly be achieved with material things.

I’m going to design my ideal home as I want my living space to be. I’m assuming in this case that, if it will be a home where I live with my husband, he’ll get his own space. I am also not going to bother with practicalities such as having to clean a large space, since, well, this is just a dream.

First, my house would have a bottom floor and a top floor. It might have an attic too for storing random bits and stuff, but I haven’t decided on that one yet. In my husband’s and my real homes, both back in the tiny village and in Lobith, I could not/cannot reach the attic, after all.

The bottom floor would have a living room with two very comfy, large couches. In addition, there’d be a recliner. There’d be a living room table just about big enough for drinking tea. There’d of course be a TV.

The living room would be attached to the dining room, where there’d be a dining table. We’d have an open kitchen, so it’d be in the dining room really. That way, if my husband is cooking and I’m in the living room or diner, we can still talk.

The kitchen would of course have an oven, a microwave, a dishwasher and a stove. If I get my way (and yes, I do, as this is my blog!), it’ll be an induction stove.

Then on to the top floor. That floor would have three separate bedrooms for me: one bedroom which I’d share with my husband, one sensory room and a craft room. Oh, I’d also need an office, but that’s as simple as a desk and a chair so could be crammed in with one of the other rooms.

The sensory room would of course have a water bed with its own internal music system. It would also have an essential oil diffuser. Other than that, there’d be lots of soft toys, and my yoga mat and fitness ball.

The craft room would have enough room for a table to work on and a chair, as well as lots of storage shelves. It would have its own microwave, fridge and sink to clean my hands.

Lastly, there’d be a bathroom. That one would have a bathtub that could be filled enough with warm water to cover my entire body (my care facility’s bathtub can’t). There’d also be a separate shower for when I don’t feel like having a bath. There’d obviously be a washbasin to brush my teeth at. I don’t think I’d want a second toilet here. Now of course I forgot to put a first one at the bottom floor, but oh well, I’m not an actual architect, am I?

That’s it I think. What would you want to include in your ideal home?

Home Is Where…

Posted on by Astrid

Some say home is where my bed is. Then again, do they mean the care facility’s bed or my husband’s bed?

Others say home is where my toothbrush is. Then again, I take it with me wherever I go.

Dallas Moore would say home is where the highway is. My husband might’ve agreed when he was still a truck driver. Then again, neither his home in Lobith nor my care facility in Raalte is on a major highway.

I say home is where…
I can feel safe. I can feel comfortable. I can be myself.
That place, I’m not yet sure I’ve found.

This post was written for My Vivid Blog’s writing challenge: “Where”. I am also joining Writers’ Pantry #81. This post was inspired by today’s daily prompt in Day One, my diary app, which asks me to describe my ideal home. It was also inspired by this song.

#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?

Places I and My Family Have Lived

Posted on by Astrid

Today, I once again looked to a book of journaling prompts for inspiration for a blog post. One of the prompts in the first chapter of Journal Writing Prompts for Child Abuse Survivors is to list all the places you’ve lived. There may not be any need to elaborate on them, but I am going to share my thoughts and feelings that come up. For this post, I’m just going to talk about the houses I lived in with my parents. Otherwise, this post is going to be way too long.

First up is my parental house in Rotterdam. My parents bought the house a year before I was born. To be quite honest, I have very few memories of this house, even though I lived there until I was nine. I do remember my and my sister’s bedroom, which had a bunk bed in it. My sister slept at the top and I slept at the bottom.

I don’t remember most other rooms in the house. I know my parents must have had a bedroom, but I can’t remember its location relative to the kids’ bedroom.

I do remember the garden. It was small, but still big enough to play in. It had swings and a sandpit. I loved to play here with my childhood friend Kim.

I also remember the neighborhood. I played in the “thick street”, a square bit of pavement between two blocks of houses. I also often went to the playground across the road from there. When I had lost some of my vision at around age eight, I felt too scared to cross the road.

Like I said, I lived here until I was nine. Then, my family and I moved to Apeldoorn. We moved to a quiet neighborhood. The house we moved into, had a large kitchen-diner and a living room downstairs. We called the living room the “library” because it housed my mother’s huge book collection. Upstairs where three bedrooms, two large and one very small. One was my parents’ bedroom. The small room was my mother’s office, while the other large bedroom was my father’s.

My sister and I each had a bedroom in the attic. I remember not wanting to have my own bedroom at first, probably because I was used to my sister’s company when going to sleep. I eventually grew to like it though. I had the same bed for all of the years I lived here, one of the original bunk beds. My sister claims I got hers and she got mine after the move.

The other two smaller rooms in the attic were a laundry room and a guest bedroom.

We had a large garden. The first summer we lived here, my paternal grandma gifted us a wooden play set that had swings and climbing equipment. I could be found on the swings many hours each dry day until I was at least fourteen.

During the first few years that I lived in this house, I loved exploring the neighborhood. It had at least four playgrounds within a five-minute walking distance from my home. I would often roam about trying to find new playgrounds farther and farther off. When I lost more of my vision at around age twelve, that mostly stopped. Besides, of course I was too old for playgrounds then. I still went to the nearby shopping center regularly, often getting lost on my way.

I generally really liked the house in Apeldoorn. When my parents were trying to sell it and my husband and I were looking for a home, my parents initially offered it for rent to us. We however had the provision that it’d go off the market for a while. Of course, this wasn’t really reasonable. My parents sold the house in December of 2013. I am glad in a way now that they did, as now I have no need to be reminded of the house and my childhood when I don’t want to be.

Home Sweet Home

Posted on by Astrid

This week, Eugi’s weekly prompt is “Home sweet home”. I’ve never participated in this prompt before, but I thought I’d now.

Two weeks from now, I’ll be living in the care facility one year. It feels closer to home than any of the homes and facilities I’ve lived in before did. That feels weird. My parents’ house felt like home, but that’s just because I knew nothing else. My parents felt as safe as possible, but again that was because I knew nothing else.

Then I went into the training home. That was temporary, as you were supposed to live there for at most two years while training for independent living. That’s what I did eighteen months later. I cried my eyes out the first day, in front of my mother, who got angry with me.

It felt horrible to know that this was it forever. I mean, for at least the duration of my university studies, so four years, I’d live there. Then I’d live in a rented house on my own. It completely overwhelmed me.

As regular readers know, it didn’t last. Three months in, I landed in a mental crisis and was hospitalized. Though I stayed in the psych hospital for 9 1/2 years total and for over four years on one ward, it never felt like home. I knew it was temporary, after all.

And then I got kicked out. I lived with my husband in our rented house in the tiny village for 2 1/2 years. Even though I got by okay, it never felt good.

And now I’m here. I got that overwhelming feeling that this is it forever in the first weeks too, but this time, it was good.

I struggle to believe that this is not yet another temporary living arrangement or one in which I cannot cope. I act in and out a lot, probably to somehow “prove” that I’m not suited to this home. That I’m not suited to any home in the world. That there is no home sweet home for me.

Yet my staff so far say that I can stay here for the rest of my life. That, too, feels kind of overwhelming, but like I said, in a good way.

I also of course have my and my husband’s home in Lobith. That one still feels a bit odd to me. I never really lived in it, since we bought it two days after I moved into the care facility. In fact, I struggle to consider it my house too. When I write about it, I often write that it’s my husband’s house, then correct myself and add “and my”. I want to keep a connection to that house too, but it doesn’t feel like home.