Trust and Trustworthiness

Posted on by Astrid

Hi all. Today’s topic for Tranquil Thursday is trust. This topic is relevant to my life in so many ways.

Maggie starts her post with a quote which says that, for there to be betrayal, there has to have been trust first. This hits home quite hard. As someone who was at least partly rejected by my parents from infancy on, I am not sure I even remember what it is like to have had that basic sense of trust babies need. It may be for this reason that I never felt particularly affected when family members passed away. Even with my maternal grandmother, with whom I was quite close, I never even felt a sense of grief.

Then again, I did feel this sense of grief when my former assigned staff back at my old care home left her job at the care agency in July of 2022. She was the first person I’d ever fully trusted in my entire life. There were others at that care home whom I trusted almost as much.

I am pretty sure I’ll never trust a professional ever again. Not because of this staff, mind you, but because of the way the staff here at my current care home handle the relationship they have with us residents. Several staff have left their jobs here without ever saying a word and then I didn’t find out until after they’d left. Yesterday a staff I’d repeatedly talked about this to, left as well and I only found out, from his colleague, at the beginning of his last shift.

You may be wondering where my spouse is in all this. Well, I do trust my spouse not to betray me – in the sense of leaving me, mistreating me, or the like -, but it’s only been over the past few months that I’ve been able to truly be myself around my partner.

I am, generally speaking, a very distrustful person. When someone enters my life, their first impression has to be really good for me to have a positive idea about them and, when they mess up, I feel very easily betrayed.

With respect to being trustworthy myself, I’m not sure. I don’t think I am very trustworthy, but it isn’t intentionally. I mean, often I struggle with distinguishing between safe and unsafe people and in this sense end up putting myself at risk as well as potentially betraying my spouse. I remember one time a fellow patient at the psych hospital offering to hold my hand when guiding me and he commented about our spouses not liking this if they saw it. I up till that point was cool with this man as a peer and I initially didn’t see the signs that I was firstly betraying my spouse and secondly also possibly being groomed.

In addition, I can be quite impulsive and dysregulated. I’ve told my spouse that I’m leaving too many times to count. I understand my spouse sees this as significant betrayal too. I know – and my spouse knows this too – that we are meant for each other, but still it probably comes across quite harsh.

Trying to Live a Balanced Life

Posted on by Astrid

This week’s topic for Tranquil Thursday is balance. Maggie’s first question is about work/life balance. Since I don’t work and never have, I can’t speak to that. However, it made me think of the ways in which I need to create a balanced life in general.

I don’t currently have formal day activities. Of course, I have four hour-long activity slots a day, but I can spend them pretty much however I please and sometimes (most times, actually) I feel so uncomfortable with the staff assigned to me that we can’t do more than play a simple card game. I do feel I need to find a balance in my life between being active and passive.

Active, in this sense, does not necessarily mean exercising, although that too needs to happen. I probably don’t need to worry about being extremely sedentary. I fell pretty badly yesterday and still I managed to meet my movement goal on my Apple Watch today. Okay, my goal is just set to 300 active calories, but that’s so that it’s within easy reach even on bad days like today.

What I do mean by being more active is engaging more in stimulating activities such as crafting, food prep such as smoothie making, etc. I also intend to be more active where it comes to actually learning about these topics. I mean, I love copying recipes and experimenting just a tiny bit, but it’d be great if I knew about the science behind them. For this reason, I just downloaded a book off Bookshare on the fragrance aspects of essential oils. How great would it be if I could create my own blends rather than relying on some shady subscription website.

This doesn’t mean I need to be active mentally or physically all day. It’s about balance, after all. I also need to rest. But currently, I feel my life is a bit too much “on hold” for my liking.

Another way in which I need to find balance, which Maggie didn’t ask about, is health. Last week, I agreed with the dietitian on a weight range I need to stay in to maintain a healthy (or near-healthy) BMI and not go overboard with my weight loss. As long as I stay within this range, I am in control of my eating habits. I do need to make sure I don’t slip back into my bulimic tendencies though. I will see the dietitian again in mid-June and will ask her to continue check-ins with me, although they don’t need to be monthly anymore I think. Over the past few weeks, I gained a little weight, but I’m still within the agreed upon range, though I do notice I’m having “cheat” foods more regularly than I’m probably supposed to.

Another question Maggie asked is about your life pie. This is a drawing of a pie divided into six slices for each area of life. You then put dots in each slice to see how well you do in each area and connect them to see which area is relatively unfulfilled. This is a visual exercise, of course, which I can’t do, but it did make me think. My life is most fulfilled in the area of exercise and least, unless you count work (but that’s by societal standards only), in the areas of friends and play. That last one might surprise my staff, as I play card games on a daily basis. However, what I mean by this is truly being creative.

My Life Story Isn’t Over Yet

Posted on by Astrid

Hi all. Today I’m joining Tranquil Thursday. This replaces Throwback Thursday while Lauren is dealing with her health issues. This week’s topic is (un)written aspects of our life story.

I am 36. On average, this means I’m about at midlife or slightly before there. This should mean about as much of my life story has been written already as the part that’s still unwritten. I struggle to see it this way though. In my mind, I’m perpetually in end-of-life mode.

Especially since moving to my current care home, I no longer make plans. I blame the chaotic situation here, but I’m not sure that’s all there is to it.

I do look back at a life that has been hard, but it definitely has had its positives. Meeting my husband and getting married is an absolutely amazing thing about my life.

As a teen and young adult, I always wanted to write and publish my autobiography. I obviously never did. It had as its working title “Some former preemies will go to university”, after the title of an article in the newspaper my parents read in 2004. The article was about giving preemies born at 24 weeks gestation a chance at active treatment. The neonatologist arguing for this said that some preemies will later go to university. In other words, they’ll prove their worthiness of having been treated actively.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I received active treatment as a preemie too, even though my parents weren’t completely sure I should. I did, indeed, at some point go to university. And failed miserably. But I did sort of prove my worth. Or did I?

My life story isn’t over yet. I might indeed someday be relatively successful at life, whatever that may be. Or I might deteriorate even further than I am now. Then again, everyone deteriorates in old age. And if you need to have had a college degree and worked for 40’ish years before that in order to prove your life is worth it, human values are rather distorted.