Reminders to My Struggling Self

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. In one of my many collections of journaling prompts, I came across a prompt about what you’d like to remind yourself of the next time you’re in a downward spiral. I’m pretty sure I responded to this prompt already at least once, but I’ll do it again. After all, today is the first day in a while that I didn’t have any significant stressors. Not that I’ll likely look at this list when I’m spiraling into crisis, but oh well. Here are some notes to my struggling self.

1. I have a friend. My spouse and I may be in the process of divorcing, but that doesn’t mean we won’t stay friends.

2. I have supportive people to connect with online and in real life. I’m thinking of my in-laws, but also of my support circle online. Some of these people, I’ve known for 15 years.

3. My staff may not always do the right thing, but they mean well. Yes, it’s a myth that they’re completely working in my best interest (simply because they have other people’s and the organization’s interest in mind too), but they do want to help me.

4. I have survived much worse than I’m enduring now. This doesn’t mean that my current suffering isn’t valid, but it does show that I am strong.

5. I am allowed to feel like crap, but wallowing in my feelings doesn’t help the situation.

6. The world may not have been made for me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t work towards improving it.

7. I can still write. And I can still create with polymer clay and other materials. I can express myself.

8. I can still move. Even if walking is painful (it currently is, but thankfully less so than it used to be), I can move in other ways.

9. I know myself best and know what’s best for me. I should really use my voice.

10. Pain (be it physical or emotional) is temporary. Things will (most likely) get better.

11. I have the capacity to find joy in little things. Such as homemade latte, my staff having repaired an old handmade necklace, or a staff complimenting me on my ability to adapt that particular moment.

12. A day doesn’t need to be perfect. I don’t need to listen to what my former assigned staff at the intensive support home said: that I’m negative because I didn’t have a perfect day even when my day schedule was followed without interruption. I am allowed to say “Okay” when people ask me how I am. I am not a bad person for not being upbeat.

13. I’m not a monster for being in crisis. I am still me.

I’m joining Thursday Thirteen (even though it’s still Wednesday here). I’m also joining #WWWhimsy.

The Most Important Life Lesson

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Today Sadje asks us in her Sunday Poser to share life lessons we’ve learned. I was pretty sure I’d done a post on the most important lesson I’d learned in life some years ago, so went to look and indeed, I wrote about this topic in 2018. Wow, how time has flown!

And it doesn’t surprise me that, when I read Sadje’s question, my initial thought was to share the exact same lesson I shared back then: that it’s important to stay true to yourself. Today though, I’m going to make it even bolder: I am the most important person in my life. That sounds selfish, right? But guess what? Each of us is the most important person in our own life. You can’t live for anyone else, by which I mean no-one else can make you happy. No, not even when you think that someone else does; it’s still your understanding of their love or acceptance that makes you happy.

To word it even more bluntly, if everyone thinks of themself first, no-one will be forgotten. This doesn’t mean we need to be going against moral sensibility or harming other people just because we want it. After all, harming others isn’t in our own best interest in the long run either.

By saying that no-one else can make us happy, I also didn’t mean we don’t need connections. However, no-one else can live our life for us.

I also want to share what learning this life lesson has helped me with since 2018. I still struggle with everyday decisions, but I attribute this to the fact that I often get overwhelmed with them.

I am happy to report that, since indeed landing in a less than supportive environment (ie. the intensive support home) in 2022, I was able to stand up for what I needed. I’m now back in quite a supportive place, but I’m glad I’m still able to advocate for myself. This doesn’t mean that the thought that everyone will ultimately abandon me if I’m myself, is gone. It’s worse than ever, in fact. I still need to work on the idea that, even if they do, that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person.

Life Always Offers Me a Second Chance

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I haven’t touched the blog in a few days once again. It’s getting old. I often do want to write, but don’t know what about except how shitty things are here at the care home and how I still haven’t got a moving date. Endless venting about the care home isn’t going to please my readers though, so I usually end up trashing those posts. After all, even though I originally intended this blog to be for me to write from the heart, I do care about my readership.

I do still read blogs, albeit not as much as I used to. Today, I came across an inspirational one-liner by Tanya: life always offers you a second chance. It is called tomorrow.

This definitely speaks to me. Of course, it isn’t always true, in that eventually we’ll all die and not have a second chance. However, until that point comes around, we can always create a better rest of our life. It doesn’t even have to be tomorrow, if that just leads to procrastination. It can also be a minute from now.

I employ this logic when it comes to my disordered eating and other unhealthy coping mechanisms. I see each day – or if needed, each moment – as its own opportunity for growth. For this reason, I don’t count the days I’m free from self-harm, in the sense that I’ll have to “start over” when I’ve had a slip up. I don’t do “cheat days” either. Not that I’m on a diet, but even when I did follow a stricter food plan than I currently do, I didn’t consider a day ruined when I had binged. Interestingly, I did at one point struggle with letting go of my 300-odd day streak of reaching my movement goal on my Apple Watch. However, I am happy to report it doesn’t start over when it comes to calculating when I’ve reached 365 days of completing my movement goal (I think it’s going to be this Thursday or Friday).

In a sense, the idea that life will always give me a second chance tomorrow, might be an excuse to laze around. However, that’s not the point. The point of this idea probably is that there’s no use in dwelling on my past mistakes, because as long as I live, there’s time to set them straight.

Life Challenges I’ve Overcome

Posted on by Astrid

Earlier today, I saw Emilia’s post about challenging life lessons. It was based on a prompt from Listify. I have this book too and thought it’s an interesting prompt indeed. It asks us to list the challenges we’ve overcome in life and explain what life lessons we’ve learned from them. Here goes.

1. I spent the first three months of my life in the hospital. I was born prematurely and had to be in the incubator and on a ventilator for several weeks. Then I spent the remaining time I should’ve been in the womb in hospital. Of course, I can’t remember this at all, but it might’ve caused some early attachment issues.

2. I lost my vision. Okay, I was born legally blind, but still relied on my vision quite a bit until I was around twelve. All official documents say that I lost what little vision I did have at the age of eight, because that was when my parents and doctor decided not to pursue further sight-saving treatment. In truth, though right now I consider myself totally blind, I still have light perception in one eye and had it in both eyes until at least age nineteen. At that interesting age of eight, I still had about 20/1000 vision. Yes, I was considered functionally blind. That’s how sighted people look at it. However, when I attended the rehabilitation center for the blind in 2005, I was told by someone who’d gone from fully sighted to totally blind, that losing the last bit of residual vision was harder than losing most of the sight he’d had before.

3. I endured childhood trauma. I wrote some about this before, but I don’t know whether my family reads this blog, so I won’t go into detail right now. It mostly boils down to my parents not having a clue how to raise a multiply-disabled child and as a result being pretty harsh. None of the trauma I endured was severe, but the long-term nature of it still means I have significant complex PTSD symptoms.

4. I was bullied. At the school for the blind as well as the mainstream school I attended, I was regularly bullied by my peers. It didn’t help that my teachers and parents more or less blamed me for the bullying. I was too nerdy, too socially awkward, too dependent, too much and not enough.

5. I endured some medical trauma. Well, I’m not 100% sure of this being genuinely traumatic, but I certainly endured a lot of hospital stays, surgeries, etc. Most times, the doctors and nurses were really caring. A few times, they were ignorant. For example, when I had my wisdoom teeth extracted in 2010, the medical staff almost didn’t put a sheet over my face because “she’s blind anyway”.

6. I experienced long-term psychiatric hospitalization. I’m realizing more and more how much of an impact this has on me. With my not having felt safe with my parents at least some of my life, and me having been more or less in temporary placements most of my adult life, I’ve never felt that I can be safe anywhere. As a result, I’m constantly challenging my current staff, believing they’ll kick me out of here anyway.

7. I survived two medication overdoses. Both happened in 2017 and I wasn’t really suicidal at the time, but I wasn’t coping either. I never actually realized how things could’ve gone until my mother-in-law told me after my second overdose that the medical staff had asked me whether I wanted to be resuscitated should it come to that. I can’t remember the question or what I said. Both of these made me realize that I needed more help than I was getting at the time. At the time, unfortunately, I had a rather unsupportive psychiatric treatment team, who were very much focused on my independence. As a result, it took me a year from my second overdose to be truly honest that I needed long-term care.

The Greatest Life Lesson #Write31Days

Posted on by Astrid

Welcome to day eleven in #Write31Days. Today, I picked a prompt from 100 Self-Help Journal Prompts by Francie Brunswick. It asks us about the greatest lesson we’ve learned in life and what makes this lesson so important.

Here I’m going to be a bit repetitive, as I covered this topic already in my letter to my younger self. The greatest lesson I’ve learnd in life is that you need to stay true to yourself.

I have some codependent tendencies. In other words, I tend to be a people-pleaser. For years, I thought that to make up for the burden that I was due to my blindness and other disabilities, I’d need to let other people make everyday decisions for me. In that sense, at age seventeen or eighteen, I definitely would’ve met the criteria for dependent personality disorder. Not because I wanted others to do stuff for me or because I claimed support I didn’t really need, but rather because I allowed others to take responsibility for my life. Conversely though, practically, I thought I had to be extremely independent, never asking for help, for fear of losing other people’s approval.

Until my mental crisis of 2007, I let my parents rule my life. That may be normal’ish for someone at that age, but it wasn’t healthy. Then when I went into the mental hospital, I let my social worker make decisions for me. She was a very authoritarian person, threatening me with forced discharge from the hospital or guardianship if I didn’t do as she wanted.

Then, of course, I let my psychologist on the long-term care unit make decisions for me. Ironically, when she diagnosed me with dependent personality disorder in 2016, she used as one of the reasons the fact that I wouldn’t openly disagree with her. I told her half-jokingly that I assumed she’d remove my diagnosis again if I fought her hard enough on it. She wouldn’t. Her diagnosing me as dependent was based on her screwed beliefs about disability and mental health.

I am now 32. I have the most supportive care team I could wish for. However, if I ever get to deal with less supportive staff in my life again, I know I can and must stick up for myself. I cherish Leonie, my fights-like-a-lioness insider, who emerged when I most needed her, when fighting my psychologist on the DPD diagnosis. I have a right to be myself. I am not dependent on anyone for making my decisions.

Lessons Learned from Regret #Write31Days

Posted on by Astrid

Welcome to day three in my #Write31Days challenge on personal growth. Today, I picked a writing prompt from The Self-Exploration Journal, which is a 90-day challenge. The prompt is about something you regret. What did this experience teach you in the end?

I am choosing my decision to move from the city of Nijmegen psychiatric resocialization unit to a long-term care unit in Wolfheze, a town near Arnhem in 2013.

The rationale for this decision was totally understandable. My husband lived in Doorwerth, a town neighboring on Wolfheze. Since we were exploring the possibility of me moving out of the mental institution and in with him, it seemed just about logical that I’d move to Wolfheze.

What I hadn’t anticipated was that I’d encounter less than supportive staff in Wolfheze. When I went for an intake interview, the responsible psychologist wanted to place me in a sociotherapeutic house, whch meant you’d live practically independently with a few other clients but the staff would come to your house at set times. They reasoned this would be the best preparation for independent living. I don’t think they’re wrong about that, but it became more and more apparent that I couldn’t cope with independent living like this.

So I opted to go into the long-term unit with 24-hour care instead. Even this was a huge adjustment, as staff started expecting me to learn practical independence skills that were too overwhelming.

My new psychologist also pretty soon removed my diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder and PTSD, changing it to borderline personality disorder. From there, it went further downhill. My first psychologist was good enough. She eventually did realize that I’d need lots of long-term support even when going into independent living.

In 2014, I got a new psychologist. This wasn’t my decision, but the old one was leaving. This psychologist had the worst impact on me of all mental health professionals I’ve had in those 9 1/2 years in an institution. She decided right from the start that I’m not autistic. She started to tell me I have acquired brain injury and need to go into a training home to learn independence skills for that. Now let me tell you, i already went into a training home that caters to among other people, those who are blind and those with acquired brain injury. I am confident that this training home offered me the best possible independence training. Yet because it failed, I had failed and I had to try all over again. Since I didn’twant that, I was dependent and misusing care and needed to be kicked out of the institution.

I was eventually kicked out of the institution in 2017. I only later learned that it wasn’t about me, but about the huge budgets cuts to mental health. Of course, the Nijmegen institution would have to face budget cuts too, so I might’ve gone the same route had I stayed in Nijmegen. However, then at least I’d have had supportive staff.

What I learned from this whole thing is that supportive people are the most important. You can live in a better home or a better area, but if the people who support you through and through aren’t there, it’s not going to work.