Sep 8, 2024 | Brain Tumor, Cancer, Chronic Illness, Long-Term Disability, Personal
I took an ADA shower today. I haven’t talked about it much, but I’ve been scared to take a shower for a while. In an attempt to make it easier on myself, I’ve tried to figure out why. The hope was that if I could figure out why, I could work on not being scared of it.
My theories are 1.) I am afraid of falling*, and 2.) I’m put off by the sensory overload. The water hurts, the room is cold and loud, and for 12-24 hours post-shower I have shivers and extreme body temp dysregulation. Like I’m in shock.
The reasons I don’t think the muscle spasms and paralysis that make me unsteady are tumor-related are: MRIs show my tumor is unchanged, and I can move more fluidly in the mornings after I wake up. But the improvement only lasts until I’m fully awake.
(I’ve tried Xanax and weed, they make me weaker and dizzier.)
Working with my anxiety has made things better, but almost imperceptibly so. It doesn’t help that I feel like this is all my fault. See, I thought I knew what I wanted when the bathroom was finished, and my brother specified an ADA-compliant fixture that fit my request exactly.
But it doesn’t work for me anymore, and we’ve only been here about two years. I wanted something that would accommodate me if I needed a wheelchair. And, I don’t know, maybe I need one, but I don’t use one in the house. So getting in and out of the shower is terrifying, even with grab bars.
Anxious Me wonders if I was planning too far ahead again, by thinking I needed this shower. Dan hates it, and understandably so, but his stress adds to my own self-loathing, I cringe and tense just hearing the water turned on now.
Mom would let me bathe upstairs in a heartbeat, but I don’t think it’ll do my mental health any good to list the reasons why even with one of those swivel chairs, her fixtures are a physical impossibility in my current state.
I daydream sometimes about getting one of those walk-in tubs, but I don’t have money. And the contractor basically told us back in the day the current shower wasn’t coming out in one piece. (Not maliciously; it came up in conversation.)
So in addition to not having the money, I’d feel guilty about having to destroy the very expensive existing one (which I fundraised for) to install a different model.
Plus, I can’t help but wonder if I’m still just clueless about what I need. Nothing like having a second ADA fixture put in only to realize that’s not helping me either.
I make do with bath cloths and spread out the showers until I feel disgusted with myself, but I don’t think that’s helping me relax.
I dunno. I’m not expecting someone to trundle a long with a solution. I just wanted to write about what’s on my mind.
* It’s been a while since I’ve fallen, but my anxiety is convinced that’s because I only get out of bed when I need to and don’t risk anything otherwise. Some of the falls I have taken were severely traumatic.
Sep 4, 2024 | Brain Tumor, Personal
Something I’ve come to realize is that the villains in my mind appear larger than they actually are. Is that just me being me, or is that the nature of trauma? All I know is that when I take a closer look these days, I see tiny villains where giant evils once loomed.
Maybe this is what E. Jean Carroll was describing in her interview when she said of Trump “He’s nothing.”
Maybe I’ve been conflating the effect of the harm perpetrated by the perpetrator with the actual perpetrator.
Like, yes, the Rheumatologist from Hell was a terrible doctor, but is he statistically significant? Should I develop anxiety over being misunderstood by all doctors? Is that level of caution necessary to my survival now?
It’s hard to be too hard on myself—given how seriously, life-threateningly wrong that doctor was—but I do feel like I’m asking important questions.
Another example: Rodney’s* asshole-ish nature infiltrated such a large space in my brain when we were married, but when I stop and think about how I’ve been divorced from him three times as long as I was married to him, the math kind of blows my mind.
My life’s villains are tiny yet taking up an outsized amount of space in my brain. I’ve got a tumor, I need to reclaim that space.
I despise the triteness of telling someone else something’s living rent-free in their head because although it’s often true, it’s decidedly unhelpful. Even where the stakes are much lower than, like, having brain cancer.
I think what I’m struggling with now is the desire for my tiny villains to acknowledge what they did to me, but they were there. They know.
And if I see them rationalizing their behavior, it’s only because I imagine it. I could just as easily imagine them contrite and remorseful.
I think that’s what I’ll do.
* Not his real name, just the one I use for WYGB.
Sep 3, 2024 | Personal
The movie Ever After: A Cinderella Story is on Disney+ now, and I watched it for the first time in twenty-something years today.
I’ve seen all the damsel in distress jokes made by the feminists of Twitter. And there’s certainly a point to be made about how Sleeping Beauty couldn’t consent to that kiss. How Beauty and the Beast was really a story about Stockholm Syndrome. And Snow White’s stepmother was just a garden variety narcissist.
Today, though, I was struck by how real the villains are in the Cinderella retelling. Just classic abuse staring me straight in the face. I didn’t pick up on it at all then.
Ever After came out in 1998, when I was 18, and I think the reason I liked it so much is because it was a retelling of Cinderella where the Prince acknowledged he was a jerk and Cinderella saved herself. Coupling welcome but not required.
That message was kind of novel to me in my 20s, and the empowerment of it was likely the reason I didn’t mind watching the movie weekly.
I’d come home from work on Fridays and order a delivery pizza from Papa John’s. (Hey, delivery options were limited back in the day.)
Then, being an introvert before being an introvert was cool, I’d treat myself to watching the VHS I purchased on eBay. (There were several months I couldn’t afford cable and didn’t have a TV antenna.)
True story: I watched EA so much I had to replace the VHS more than once.
Anyway, watching Ever After today was restorative, helping me reconnect and see again that not everything about the early aughts was awful.
The thing about relying too heavily on dissociating and compartmentalizing is that it can get out of hand. Takes out the baby and the bathwater, so to speak.
I’m better today than I was yesterday.
Sep 2, 2024 | Personal
I hate you now
For burdening me with shame
For binding me with expectation
For burying me with guilt
For whispering “less than me” while closing the lid
***
Please pardon me as I attempt to vaguebook my way through some adolescent trauma.
Today was a high pain day. Pain triggers my anxiety. And in an effort to calm my anxious mind, I sometimes trip over stuff I didn’t anticipate thinking about.
These days I don’t know if I’m needlessly re-living the past or finally coming to terms with stuff I’ve bottled up. But if I think I can sit with my feels, I do. I’m less likely to have nightmares that way.
As usual, blogging is cheaper than therapy. Some say this flippantly; I say it pragmatically.
The YouTube algorithm sent me a video on emotional abuse and reminded me that an abuser need not be present for a target to heal.
That’s empowering AF, by the way.
There’s a petty part of me that wants to run down the laundry list of degrading and manipulative wrongs I suffered as a result of this person’s insecurities.* There’s another part of me that’s been chastised one too many times for being bold and angry.
But I think right this second, if I’m blunt, I’m just not interested in defending myself to myself. I’m trying to cut back on the pointless overthinking.
*”Insecurities” might be putting it charitably. But I have discovered changing the word doesn’t alter the damage, so I’m opting to see the glass as half full. For me.
Sep 1, 2024 | Personal
Some years ago Ben (not his real name) died. I don’t know the specifics, but I think I read about his passing through the Facebook grapevine, and overthinking about him has got me thinking I’m broken, y’all.
Ben was a classmate of mine in elementary school and was in the aforementioned gifted and talented program with me. (I brought G&T up last post.) Since fifth grade, I’ve had a pretty low opinion of Ben.
Knowing that he died, I felt cruddy about myself for harboring that grudge as an adult. But I’m starting to see my 11-year-old self differently. And, if I want to move those thoughts from an anxiety loop in my overthinking brain, I need to write about them.
So here goes nothing.
Ben is the kid who came across the hall from the library to the classroom to gleefully tell me (at Mrs. Hardass’s bidding) that I couldn’t quit G&T without a parent’s permission. (Read this, if you have no clue what I am on about.)
He also asked me “How long did this take you?” A week or two before that—at what I think could be a precipitating event.
See, I was feeling imposter syndrome before I knew imposter syndrome was a thing. I’d worked for hours on a project for G&T when I had the thought I was trying too hard, and everyone was going to notice out loud that I wasn’t genuinely smart.
(I knew I wasn’t smart because there was an in-class G&T brain teaser quiz I couldn’t noodle out. If you were smart, quizzes were easy, right?)
Anyway, after hours of labor and then hours more of imposter anxiety, I pared my project waaaaay back. Following my anxious mini presentation, a smug Ben asked me how long I spent on my project. It was an 11 year old asking another 11 year old a gotcha question.
I didn’t find it easy to forgive and forget the teacher’s pet doing me dirty like that. Did I confess how long I agonized over my mock newspaper project before realizing I wasn’t good enough?
Of course not. I was 11. I pretended that I did my best, belonged where I didn’t want to be, and Ben’s question didn’t sting. I swallowed my anxiety instead of asking for help with it.
And here I am 33 years later pretty sure I have ignored my anxiety for decades. To my own peril.
To be fair, when I was a kid and young adult, suppression was a workable strategy. But I’ve seen some stuff in the last couple of decades. I dated a manipulative predator for a while, married a compulsive liar, and worried nonstop for a few years what was wrong with me and then sat for a lot of MRIs and PET scans and CT scans and appointments I couldn’t afford while people told me how strong I was.
So now I’m stuck in an anxiety loop because I’m really mad at a dead guy.
I think I’m broken, y’all.
