Author: damynx

I write. I journal. I blog. I share.

Peanut Butter Withdrawal

To say I like peanut butter is an understatement. I LOVE peanut butter. For the last several months I have been pretty much living on the spread. I buy it at Costco in the double 40 oz jars and can lick the plastic clean in two weeks. I don’t think it’s just the peanut butter, but the honey I squeeze into it and mix in before hand. Yum!

I had deluded myself into thinking peanut butter is a healthy food. It’s high in protein and that is my only requirement for my diet right now. It’s easy. I just have to take the lid off and grab a spoon, no cooking, no prep, just eat. And, if a little is good for you, a lot has to be sooooo much better, right? Hence the killing of 40oz jars in record time.

There are some health benefits to eating peanut butter, including reducing heart disease, weight loss and satiation. And believe me, you are satiated when you eat four or five recommended serving sizes. With honey.

Peanut butter has been a staple in my life since I was in grade school. We rarely had jelly, jam or apple butter but we did have a dense wheat bread and peanut butter for lunches. I would put it on so thick it would get stuck in my throat and I’d have to run to the water fountain to push it all the way down my throat. We never had the money to buy milk at school, and knowing this I’d still slather the bread with an unhealthy serving.

I don’t know if it’s the taste, the texture, the childhood connection or just that it’s fast and easy but I do love me some peanut butter. Until I realized I was going through 40 oz of it in 7-10 days….not to mention a hive full of honey as well. Even when I was doing it I knew it was a reaction to the stress of the holidays, unemployment, no money, terror of the political climate being unemployed, coupled with depression and anxiety and, well, life. But I knew it had to go.

I went cold turkey on the peanut butter. I still smell it and it sets my mind wandering the empty shelves looking for it, but I refuse to be addicted to it. I have tendencies towards binge eating, which is what I was doing with my delulu attachment to the peanut butter. My compromise for binging currently is I can have anything I want out of the house, I just can’t bring it home because I eat it…..ALL OF IT….in one sitting. So if I want ice cream I go out and get it but not have a stock pile of Ben and Jerry’s in the freezer. However, it’s hard to go out and have a small jar of peanut butter, so it’ll be gone from my life until a time when I can be reasonable about my portions and contain my emotional need between two pieces of bread.

What do you use to satiate your emotional hunger?

Update

I found out peanut butter is good for depression.  Junk food science?  Maybe.  I’ve switched from regular Skippy to Natural Skippy and I don’t buy it from Costco, so I don’t have as much on hand but it is nice to have it back. 

There is always another way…..

you just have to keep looking.

Glimmers

This is something I learned about at the beginning of the year. It’s called a Glimmer…

A glimmer is the opposite of a trigger. Glimmers are those moments in your day that make you feel joy, happiness, peace or gratitude. Once you train your brain to be on the lookout for glimmers, those tiny moments will appear more and more.

So, I’m going to try and post my daily glimmers which I normally find on my morning walks. Some make me smile, some remind me of truisms I often forget when I’m busy trying. Stay tuned.

Starting Over…..Again

Although no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start now and make a brand new ending.

Carl Bard

I used this quote in my Birthday Blues Early post what feels like 100 years ago. It is more relevant now than it was then because it feels like I’m starting from zero in my public life. I’m trying to step in time with the spring renewal and make a new start with what seems to be a world against me. As an unemployed woman who is actively battling high functioning depression with a heaping side of anxiety I feel most days aren’t worth getting out of bed for. I toy with the idea of going on disability but I know it won’t get me to my goals…..and my goals are everything. But I am getting out of bed, and I am fighting the good fight most days.

The absence…

My absence from the blog wasn’t planned. I thought about it often but my job had become too much for me to do anything else other than work, eat and sleep. I stopped going to church, I stopped writing in my journal, I stopped writing period and I stopped sharing my struggle (which had almost become a pleasant journey instead of the arduous saga of anger and sadness it started as).

I’ve been able to track this physical change back to January 2024 when I got COVID-19 for the first time. My symptoms started a week before the traditional COVID symptoms started. I got the gastro-intestinal start, and with IBS it’s hard to tell the difference. I used all my sick days (5 work days) and went back to work feeling not totally well but I persevered and I slowly eased back into the workload.

then, people quit, people were fired, people changed positions and I ended up working alone which caused the lingering COVID to encourage my IBS into overload……or over un-load, if you will. I was taking an antidiarrheal every third day and being completely exhausted when I got home to the point I had to sit in my car for 15-20 minutes after the drive to just rest.

My symptoms progressed to sever bouts of nausea, light headedness and my eyes pinning down to a single point of light if I stood to long……Essentially I couldn’t work. I took a month off to find out what was going on. When I went back I was okay according to the tests and paperwork but I wasn’t. The company and I found it mutually beneficial if we parted ways and I’ve been unemployed since.

Now…

Being unemployed is both a boon and a bane. My hope is these intervening months of rest have strengthened me physically and mentally. I will say, the holidays were hard and dark and somewhat dicey for my mental health. I continued to employ the tools I have learned in therapy like breathing and CBT, I took my medication religiously, and I crocheted a lot and listened to a multitude of books.

Additionally, I’ve prepared the first book in my trilogy for publication, completely wrote the second book and I am outlining the third book….when I’m not telling myself I’d be better off dead. Suicide does not align with my goals for life or the afterlife so I know not to take it seriously but it upsets me when my brain falls back to the old coping mechanisms. It does remind me how much I need to be ever mindful of my recovery. I don’t like feeling ‘the void’ in the background but I am very proud of myself that I am aware of it and I am fighting the good fight to get away from it.

People Are Annoying

Not all people are annoying, just the ones that seem to come into my office this week. To help take the edge off we’ve devised a Bingo game called C.R.A.Z.Y., so when stupid/funny/annoying things happen we get to mark a square. We have five different cards with some overlapping squares. Everyone gets a FAINTS and OLD MAN TAKES OFF HIS SHIRT INSTEAD OF ROLLING UP HIS SLEEVE, and of course the FREE square.

The most annoying thing which happened this week is people feel the need to tell me all the things that are wrong with my company, as if I could actually do something about it for them. I’m all for customer service from the time you walk into the office until you walk out again, and that’s where it stops. I will not tilt at the capitalist machine for anyone. I have no power. I have no control. I’m good with that. I bluntly tell them in hopes they would just shut up and go away but they interpret my plastic smile as an invitation to continue. One man couldn’t set up an appointment on our website because he wanted to do it during our closed hours. (not making this up). He complained that he had made several appointments for the same day but his name didn’t show up in the confirmation. Finally he called IT and they gave him an appointment for a time he didn’t want because…..he had already booked them with Name Unknown. Luckily for me the conversation took place on the phone and he couldn’t see me trying to do a Darth Vader neck squeeze at the handset.

Another one came in complaining about how America is all messed up because no one can do their job right. He broke a bone and after three hospitals and two ambulance rides in Hong Kong he was all better and paid less than $100 for his trouble. That, in his opinion, is medicine done right. He was in getting a stool sample kit for a hospital transmitted illness. Irony totally flew over this retired pilots head. He brought our competitions requisition for the super delux stool sample kit he paid for which said in perfectly modulated text the name of a single test. Again, he acted as if I or my colleagues could or would do something to fix the whole grand scheme. As a pilot for a well known airline he assured me if anyone had experienced the same level of incompetence on a flight they would recieve a check for $5,000. In this day and age, if the plane took someone to the wrong destination I can assure you it’s because the idiot got on the wrong plane and the airline would be charging his credit card to its limit for the extra cost of the fare. He brought his son in on his second trip in to assure me I didn’t give him an order for a different test. He ordered him around like some assistant, making him get the information we already had off his phone to prove to me he had an order for a full gastro-intestinal stool sample kit, which had nothing to do with what I asked him to bring in. While I was researching it, again, my co-workers and other patients in the lobby were regaled about how his son is going to be a pilot and how his starting salary is going to be $300k a year. His son was silent and just stood there miserable and cringing at his elderly fathers behavior. I say elderly not because he was old but because he brought up how old he was and how it would be unfair for me to make him to go home again and look for the requisition and bring it back in because of his advanced age.

Maybe it’s just because of my experiences but is the whole freaking world filled with narcissists? Or do I just attract them? I get technology is frustrating if you haven’t bothered to keep up with it, or if you don’t have Geeks in your family to tell you to Google it when you have problems, I get closures are inconvenient but that doesn’t guarantee you a pass when it comes to the necessary information needed to process an order in the medical world with all the mandatory rules and government regulations imposed on labs.

These encounters are stirring up some subconscious detritus adding to my already stressed out nature with the season and work in general. My dreams last night were of my mother, She moved out and sent an ombudsman to inform me she was leaving and it was my fault. I told my sister I wanted to move far away for when she decided the place couldn’t meet her expectations and would manipulate her way back. I told the man she was a narcissist and abusive he just replied, “I know.” But he was still doing his job.

So, what have I learned? People are unbelievably annoying. I’ve lived this and I know this, and all I can do is take deep breaths and keep doing my job.

Passive Participation

I’m waiting for the third keynote speaker of the conference to step up to the podium at the 8th annual (I think) LDSPMA Conference 2023 Saturday Morning Session. I thought I was paying for more but I just get live feed of the keynotes and then access to recordings of of the breakout sessions in November. Which is fine because I couldn’t afford to fly to Utah, pay for a hotel/car/food and boarding for Sammy this year. This is the conference I was pushing myself to get my first draft done in Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed so I could pitch it to publishers. I decided I would pitch my other completed novel to the publishers in the virtual fast-pitch at the end of next week but those publishers had already rejected the manuscript several years ago. [If you’d like to read the first chapter you can find it here.]

There is a lot of in-person networking involved at the conference which, honestly, terrifies me. I’m affable enough when my anxiety is ramped up to full luminosity, which is how I’ve survived and functioned in the world my whole life. However, the fall-out of pushing myself is very painful and lasts for weeks after as I nit-pick and denigrate myself for every little mistake the anxiety has magnified from that time. Doing social things like meeting strangers, remembering their names and the conversations, yadda, yadda, yadda quickly depletes my nerves and temporarily wipes my memory like a prolonged trauma. Doing that over a three day period makes me winge over how long it would take for me to recover sufficiently to function in my life again. My job requires me to be out and among the world every day and to be cheerful and nice to EVERYONE even when they annoy the living daylights out of me. I will say I am stronger for the daily torture it provides but I see the effects on my emotional state at the end of the week. And that’s when it doesn’t matter. This matters! This is my foothold into the publishing world and possibly an agent. Someone who will do the footwork and networking for me so I can passively sit in my writing space and, well, write.

So the goals are to sit and watch the keynote speakers, to listen to the breakout sessions in my track, and then apply them into my writing life. Next year I will choose to actively participate and be prepared with manuscript(s) in hand, a smile genuinely plastered on my painted face and an emotional equilibrium to sustain me until I get home to read through all the offers to publish my copious selection of completed works. Wish me luck!!

Preverication

a false or deliberate misstatement; lie:

Dictionary.com

Last Saturday I volunteered to close at the site we staff 365 days a year. I came in at open so it would be a nine hour day…ten if you count the hour I get for lunch…away from home and out of bed. I was trying to be helpful to my team and my bank balance. Mostly my bank balance. I made the decision before I left home actually, so when the offer came I didn’t ask the necessary question…Who am I working with?

I was working with a person who’s opinion of herself in regards to the rest of the team is of a queen bee over her drones. When I worked with her a few weeks ago, she said I “You are so slow. I’m fast.” When I scowled at her she quickly clarified “Because I just ate sugar.” Yes, I hadn’t gotten much processed for the first pack (40 something), but I got something done and it was correct. I tried processing the first pack early on in my tenure with the company which ended with me in tears and my manager and I agreeing I shouldn’t do the first pack until I felt I was ready. I did it that Saturday because I wanted to see if I was ready. Her jab, though self-aggrandizing, placed a spotlight on my self doubt and discomfort at the job I had done. I decided I shouldn’t do it again for another several months.

Saturday she came out and told me she talked to our manager and our manager said “She wants you to do the first pack,” I objected and said I was more comfortable doing the evening pack, she cut me off before I could finish with “No, our manager said I should do the closing pack so it’s done right.”

Saturday was our managers first day of vacation and gave instructions to contact someone else. If she actually did talk to our manager, our manager wouldn’t have green-lighted me working the first pack because of our past discussion. I could have called her on it, but I didn’t. I was angry and instead of confronting her about it I allowed the fury to transform into a soul darkening I’ll-show-you mantra knowing if I failed she’d have to clean up the mess ‘so it’s done right’. I processed and packed over 80.

I’m very pleased I did so well. People do more during the first pack but people do less too. I don’t need to be the best; the middle of herd of phlebotomists is just fine with me. What I am upset about is how I handled it. Though I’m not caught up in the anger of being so blatantly lied to, I am upset I didn’t stand up for myself. I am upset I didn’t protect me from what my psyche sees as a bully, a manipulator. I hate I still fall prey to those people. My protection for now is to not work with her again. Meaning, not working the closing shift which she normally covers and if that leaves my team in a bind then it leaves my team in a bind. I don’t like being around abrasive and abusive personalities, and if I can avoid it I will.

My other need to do is to talk to my manager. On the off chance she actually *did* talk to her on Saturday I need to clarify with her we hadn’t decided I was ready to do the first pack and to tell her I can do the first pack if called upon to do so. The discovery I am just as good and bad as anyone else in the group is the one positive thing from this negative episode at work.

Why am I so focused on this? That is the question. I’m still not back to writing other than here and my journal. I haven’t really discussed this in my journal, but I will. I think I’m taking this person’s behavior as a personal attack on me when I know she does this to EVERYBODY. What I’m realizing as I write this, which is why I love writing here, is if I were back doing what I’m supposed to be doing with my life-Writing-things like this roll off my back because I gain strength in and for myself when I write. Starting this weekend I’m going to force myself, in a nice way, to sit at my computer and try to push past the last of the debris of my fall and start taking those small steps I talked about. I need to stop self-prevaricating that I can’t so I shouldn’t try, for there is strength and honor in the trying.

Slow Small Steps

That’s what I’m doing, slow small steps out of the madness I pushed myself into. I’ve been writing, but just in my journal. I can say anything I want in my journal; no one is listening. It’s the only true place where I can open a vein and allow the words to flow out with the pain. The writing there is a pressure bandage on the gushing self-inflicted wounds I’ve made. Yet to truly stem the flow I need to make plans. Real plans. I’ve found opening my heart here helps me form the lumps of ideas into a solid sculpture; something I can work with and towards.

My last blog “Humpty Dumpty was Pushed!” I talked about needing to go back to basics. Journaling. {check}. Chilling {check}. Blogging { }. That’s where I am today. Where chilling has been mostly watching TV/Movies and Miss Fisher (I don’t know why but the show is the best at relieving me of my need for reality for a short time). As things have quickly changed I’ve changed my to-do list as well….

Murphy’s Law popped up and ripped the rug out from underneath me with the news I had to close down my site and work at the other one in the same town. Not a horrific thing, I’m still employed and it’s only temporary, but it’s a new site, new people (not absolutely new, I’ve worked with the other two at different times). Today was the first day in the new work environment. It’s not horrible. I still get lost, it’s like four times larger than my site and there are two room dedicated to just employee space. Quite posh for a PSC. (Patient Service Center). I still turn into the wrong room for processing and I always go the wrong way to find the employee bathroom. But it is just the first day. Knowing this would be a challenge I spent the weekend trying to put my life (room) in order. I didn’t get it all the way there but enough so I can try and do a little bit every day to keep it neat and orderly. I don’t need orderly, per se, but it is nice to find what you’re looking for or having a nice clean space to write it when the urge hits. So, that’s the other small step out of madness: Making space for healing.

The writing…

The writing still scares me. I hate how pathetic that looks on the screen. Something I love, something I feel defines who I am and what I’m suppose to be doing with my life scares me. Even still, my brain is simmering the storyline in the back of my brain as a way to keep the aroma wafting in the air to call me back to the page with intriguing turns in the plot….but I just can’t do it. It’s too soon. I was hoping to do something this weekend, but instead I cleaned. I work next weekend and I’ve made plans with my niece for The Renaissance Faire for the 14th. Again, a way to chill and allow the pieces to come back together and solidify to bear the weight of my working again. So, in essence, I won’t be ready to present anything to anyone by the following weekend. And, as badly as I wanted it a few weeks ago, I think I’m okay with that. I’m not beating myself up about it, or berating myself…I’m just taking care of myself. Maybe the next time I push myself off the wall I will only crack, and the time after that I should have enough epoxy on my soul to bounce and laugh it off like a whole person.

Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed!

…and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men didn’t want to put Humpty back together again.

I’m not Ms. Dumpty, but I pushed myself over the edge…again. And now I’m AGAIN trying to put myself back together. I want to be put back together again because the heights I reached when I was whole was GLORIOUS. I’m sorry you we’re along for the ride, but as I explained in One Ball Juggler I can only really do one thing at a time without completely overwhelming myself. So, I’ve been working five to six days a week as a vampyre and spending my off days writing for five to seven hours at a stretch. The week I took off for my birthday in July I finished the first draft of my second-go-round of a book I’m breaking into three parts. I jumped straight into editing.

I hate editing. It’s a journey into everything that’s wrong with your writing, with you, and it screams why you shouldn’t be a writer. Amazingly it went smoothly and I was proud of the finished product. During this time I was aware I was feeling unnaturally drained, loss of appetite and wanting to crawl into bed long before the sun goes down. So I ignored it and pushed past it, like I used to do because this was more important. I would go to my room and sit at my desk, give myself an hour to do some more editing, and push beyond the hour and then try to turn off the chatter of the people in my head trying to explain to me how I can better present them on the page. (I know it sounds crazy to a non-writer but the fiction writers out there are just nodding their heads). The task was to just edit on my lunch hour but I kept pushing for more and more to get done.

I got time off work in October to attend a writing/media conference where I want to make some contacts (Maybe meet someone special: an agent!) so I’ve been trying to get the second pink edits done. This round is editing the edits and approving the edits before I actually make the edits in the computer. The goal was to have the lavender edits done before the end of October. (Pink and Lavender are just the color of paper I print on to keep track of where I am in the process) Every night I would go to sleep reminding myself that I only had X amount of weeks to have this done then calm myself with sweet words of “It’s plenty of time. You can do it.”. I was excited by the challenge and so proud of myself for getting so much done so quickly.

Then life happened.

Before I could manage the stimulus I tripped over old habits and I was crying in fear and rage and I think disappointment in myself. Physical manifestations of anxiety began to run roughshod over my emotional state; palpitations, shortness of breath, sleeplessness. Walking from the bathroom to my bed (maybe 10 steps total) felt like I did in PE class when I had to run the mile for the first time. I was overcome with the fear I was dying but I was too afraid to do anything about it, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to alert anyone in the family of what was going on. I went to work because I thought if I ignored it it would go away and it did when we were busy, but it always came back. I asked to leave early and I talked to a doctor in my car, he agreed it was probably anxiety but suggested to keep a low threshold and go into urgent care if it doesn’t subside in a reasonable amount of time with a reasonable amount of medication. I told my family I was sick, they assumed it was gastro-intestinal which wasn’t far off because anxiety viciously works both ends in my life.

Luckily, I had therapy scheduled for that evening. We worked through the anger I was feeling, the fulcrum which catapulted me off the wall. I felt better emotionally and not horrible about my choices to protect myself. I felt safe again. Physically I was still dealing with the palpitations, shallow breathing and a rapid heart rate. I did more deep breathing before I went to sleep and slept fairly well thanks to the wonders of pharmacology. In the morning my Oura Ring told me my resting heart rate was 123 which wasn’t good. (It’s back down to it’s normal mid-50’s)

Deep breathing has healed a lot and has allowed me to rebuild my center. Pulling back on my mad-dash to get my book done before the end of October has been painful yet when I sit to work on it I feel like I’m trying to stuff myself into a box where I can’t breathe. What editing I have done has been, dare I say, revolutionary and changing some of the tone of the story. I respect the voices that are showing up on paper.

In the clear light of rationality I realize I broke on some of the old mended cracks, pieces that might not have had enough E6000 to weld them together, so I am going slowly and not pushing myself. I need to get back to the other things in life which were left behind in my pursuit of publication; journaling, blogging and just chilling. I’ve not picked up my journal since my birthday. Journaling and blogging has often been the alert bell when the cogs and wheels of my inner-workings are in need of a little oil or TLC. I’m back scheduling journaling, blogging and looking forward to Sunday drives and playing with my parrot. Writing to publication is my raison d’être it can’t be all there is to my life.

Another Spare

My mother used to joke when people asked how many daughters she had and she would laughingly reply “A pair and a spare,”.  I didn’t realize how she really saw us until later on in life when the spare had to take care of her.  She  wanted, and invested in, the pair with full rights to demand care when she could no longer care for herself, or when she was just tired of taking care of herself (We’ll never know which).  Both my sisters, twins, knew how to cook, knew how to clean, had practice with their own children on how to change diapers and how to take care of another human being.  I can barely take care of myself even now and I’ve been practicing.  I prefered to write or craft rather than clean house, sue me.

I just finish listening to Spare by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex.  I appreciated his experiences with depression and anxiety and felt a kinship with the rage that accompanied his depression which he called “the red mist”.  Though he was allowed to wallop his brother and friends to get it out of his system, a perk of not  having any proper parental supervision and being a boy, he described the pain of it very succinctly.  Though each journey through depression is unique to each individual it’s nice to know you aren’t alone in the void.

We are reading/listening to the book for the Aunt/Niece book club.  The chapters read like blog posts, chronologically from the death of his remarkable mother to the present.  I know the book was about his coming to terms with the unnecessary and tragic death of his mother, the lethal abuse of the tabloid press, the absolute narcisism of his father, his service, his stumbles in the public eye, the rank racism towards his wife and children and ending with his separation from the institutionalized dysfunction of his family.  That was the point of the autobiography; to take control of his own narrative and his own life. I guess, on a microscopic scale that’s what I’m doing here as well.

I pulled a different meaning from the whole of the book.  I saw it as his fight and flight from the void, almost completely on his own.  But more important, discovering the happiness to be had in the light.   He reached a point in his recovery when he realized  he had progressed beyond the constraints of the little bubble universe the family and the tabloids created for him.  I’m still occadionally bumping my head on the constraints my up-bringing (such as it was) put on me.  Writing here has helped me push my mental and emotional boundaries to realize I am the master of my own mind/life/soul.  Like Harry, I understand the need to move far away from the funk in the my dysfunctional family because I’m afraid I will go back to where I was.   That is not a crack at my family in any way. We are all on different paths now, nolonger slaved to the one our mother picked. I like the path I’m on but it’s new and it’s scary and it would be so easy to go backwards and be, instead of moving on my chosen path to becoming.

The book as a whole is an interesting, albeit asingle hyperfocused view of the monarchy. He is very respectful to the Queen yet didn’t exclude her from the spotlight of dysfunction either. He owned up to the things he had done wrong, the few things the news outlets got right and how he is working to move forward in his life. I appreciated his honesty. If you are an anglophile you should enjoy it.