Some days it’s easier to focus on the failures rather than the successes. Not today! Gotta start somewhere.
Dorothy had it easy
She had a goal she was pursuing
and came to a fork in the road
where the Scarecrow to gave her two options
of which road to go down
Only two choices
That way is a very nice way
he pointed
It’s pleasant down that way, too
See, Dorothy
You have two options
And both are described as nice and pleasant
Plain and simple
I, like Dorothy
have an end goal I am trying to reach
A wizard waiting for me in the Emerald City
But instead of a scarecrow
pointing to two distinct choices
There lies a tangle of vines
All whipping in the wind
Each end pointing in a different direction
There is no friendly face
There is no pleasant choice
There are endless trails with no clear beginning
that I must forge myself
by cutting through the bramble
But which way to go?
How do I reach the
Great and Powerful Oz?
This is what I face
in my depressive mind
Every decision is coming to a fork
in the road
But the fork isn’t a fork
It’s a tangle of vines
And no matter which direction
I choose
Cutting through the thorns will hurt
and I can’t see through it to the
other side
Nothing is pleasant or nice
It’s scary and exhausting and
more often than not
not worth it as the
fog that fills my mind
twists my life into one long
puzzle that will never get solved
Count yourself lucky Dorothy
Life isn’t always in multicolor
With friendly scarecrows to
join you on your journey
to hold your hand and pull
you forward
in one direction or another
There are endless roads
Never-ending paths that
seem too daunting to start
So I just
stay where I am
sunken into the earth
too confused and tired to
pick myself up off the
Yellow Brick Road
and skip towards a
new direction
Instead I sleep like the
Tin Man waiting for someone
to free him from his
Stillness
exhaustion
Happy #MentalHealthMonday everyone! I thought I would spend today discussing effectiveness and its relationship with depression (or anxiety, or eating disorders, or anything you may be struggling with).
*Disclaimer: I am not a therapist. My word is not gospel. What works for me, may not work for you, so take this advice with a grain of salt.
A funny thing happens when you let a disorder take control of your life. Suddenly, impatience increases, self-confidence drops, maladaptive behaviors get reinforced, and your life worth living seems farther and farther away. By that point, it’s hard to take baby steps in the direction of your long-term goals, because you are so caught up in whatever disorder is holding you back.
For me, depression kept getting in the way. It told me that my long-term goals were too far away that they weren’t worth working towards. If I couldn’t achieve them immediately, they weren’t worth achieving. This is what we like to call “black and white thinking.” All or nothing. I am the queen of black and white thinking. I always say impatience is my fatal flaw. Recently, I’ve edited that statement to now say “Impatience is Sasha’s secret weapon.” That said, how do I get Sasha to put that weapon back where it came from?
Well, it helped me identify what long-term goal drives my motivation; what reminder will be the kick in the pants I need to get out of bed, to apply for that job, to eat that meal. Once you identify the goal, you can then tailor your kick in the pants around that. For me, one of the goals I am most excited about achieving is owning my own dog. Particularly a German Shepherd. So, I found an adorable dog on the German Shepherd Rescue of Orange County’s website, took a screenshot, and sent it to my therapist. I then told her to send it to me anytime I get stuck with a strong urge to act on an ineffective behavior. When that wasn’t enough, I took the additional step to really reinforce the positive of achieving this goal; I set a picture of a German Shepherd puppy as the lock screen on my phone. Any time I looked at my phone- Bam! A reminder to keep crawling, to continue putting down the rope of my depression/anxiety/ED/perfectionism.
Maybe you want to be a pet owner, like me. Maybe there’s a job you want to apply for, or a place you want to travel to. Whatever the goal, figure out a way to create a positive reinforcer that you can encounter regularly to jump start your effective behaviors. Each day you are effective, you get closer and closer to your long-term goals.
Someday, I will wake up every day looking at a face like this. But before that can happen, I need to stay recovery minded, eliminate maladaptive behaviors, and take it one step at a time. Sasha can put down that weapon; it doesn’t matter how far away this puppy is, he will be in my life someday. And someday is good enough for me.
i am a snail
on a road one thousand miles long
every inch i crawl is exhausting
but the more slime i leave in my wake
is a reminder of how far i’ve come
and how good it will feel once i reach
the end
Happy Easter, y’all. Keep crawling!
I remember when I was first suggested to go to a treatment center for eating disorders. I laughed at my therapist. I’m fine, I continued to reason with myself. It’ll get better on it’s own.
Fun fact: It didn’t. It got worse. Two months into treatment, I can finally see that.
I thought my eating disorder started less than a year ago. Well, that’s a big fat lie. It started so long ago, so slightly, that I barely noticed. And it has just continued to creep into my life until it reached hurricane status, category 5. Now I feel trapped in a house that’s flooding faster than I can get the water out.
When my disorder became more acute last year I went to doctors who listened to my eating disorder symptoms and chose to focus on other things, or tell me that I “really should eat more” and let me walk out of their office and back into my disorder world. Even the first time I saw a dietician, she told me she would rather focus on my GI distress rather than the fact that I admitted to only eating goldfish and vitamin water for the last few months. It was like I was being reinforced by my doctors because of their ignorance about eating disorders. It wasn’t until I mentioned it to my new therapist here in San Diego that I even realized how severe this was. I figured I was just going through something and I would snap out of it eventually. Meanwhile, my body was lacking essential nutrients, my anxiety and depression worsened, and my bone density decreased.
So now, I sit in program every day and have to confront my fears. I have to nourish my body. My wise mind would never tell me to starve myself. It would never trick me into thinking food was not safe. But Sasha, my personified emotion mind, likes to tell me differently.
I am in a constant battle with myself to stay afloat, to keep making progress. But just as quickly as I progress, I sink again. I never thought I would be here. I certainly didn’t think I would be two months into treatment and still struggle every day to eat three meals. Seeing what proper nutrition is- what people who don’t have eating disorders eat- I’m in shock. I have had this disorder for so long without knowing it. Which is why this recovery process has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And let me tell you, I’ve been through some shit in my life. Nothing tops this. I thought it would be smooth sailing. I thought I’d be in and out of treatment in a month. I can’t tell you how happy I am to be wrong.
Even on my worst days, when I have behavior after behavior outside of program, when I can’t complete any of my meals for the day, I somehow see the tiniest sliver of what life could be like outside of this never-ending hurricane. The rain will die down, the destruction will stop, and the rainbow will appear. I don’t know when that will be. On my worst days I can barely tell myself that it will ever stop. It’s just the smallest sliver of light peaking through the wind and clouds. But I know that it has to stop. I just have to keep fighting. As hard as it is, as scared as I am to keep facing my fears and exposing myself to the things that brought me into an eating disorder center in the first place, I have to keep fighting.
I’m scared every day. I’m anxious every day. I fight every day. And I certainly never thought I would be writing this post.
But here I am, sharing my story. Because I want anyone who is reading this that struggles with an eating disorder to know that you are not alone. Treatment has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I know it will be one of the best. You can fight alongside me. Because I can’t stop. I have to fight for my future. For my family to have a healthy daughter, sister, cousin, niece. For my friends to have someone they can invite over for pizza or takeout and a movie. For myself, so I don’t have to limit my dreams.
In the middle of my day at the Del Mar Dog Beach (yes, that is a thing and it is glorious), my friend’s dog Scout (on the left) who is a bit shy, finally got up to explore a few feet from our towels after a couple hours of hiding behind his mom. A few minutes in, another dog approached, but maintained some distance. They looked at each other and then both laid down at the same time. They made eye contact for a while and then accepted each others’ presence, and just lay there enjoying the beach. Pelicans flew overhead, waves lapped, and dogs ran around us, playing with their owners or other dogs. Two shy dogs, putting themselves outside of their comfort zone.
This day reminded me of my long term goals. One of them is to be able to afford a dog of my own, that I can take to the dog beach and watch socialize and put himself out of his comfort zone to make new dog friends and get the full dog beach experience. In order to do that, I need to put myself outside of my comfort zone in treatment and work hard to take back control from my ED.
My future dog depends on it.
Food is everywhere
On Facebook, Instagram, TV
I scroll past it daily
Recipes, photos, how-to videos
Each time a small reminder that
My relationship with food is
different
I am bound by my eating disorder
It consumes me
Even when I will it not to
I hope someday I will scroll through my feed
And not cringe
Recovery road is longer
than I ever expected it to be
I can see no end
Only a dot on the horizon
Yet I keep walking
Each step brings hope I absorb
Like the sun’s rays
Allow me to share a brief lesson in DBT, aka Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. I’m pretty well-versed in this modality, mostly because in both treatment programs I’ve been in for various mental health concerns, this is what I was taught.
So, all of us have three states of mind: Reason Mind, Emotion Mind, and Wise Mind.
Reason Mind is where your logic lies; all of your objectivity, fact-based thoughts/evidence resides here. As you can imagine, Emotion Mind is on the other end of the spectrum- it’s the part of you that hold all of your emotions, your gut instincts, your subjectivity. And finally, Wise Mind is the intersection of both Emotion and Reason Minds. This is the headspace you should primarily reside in, though not completely. When making a decision about moving to a new city or selecting the college you will attend, maybe your Reason Mind takes the reins a bit. When you’re working on a passion project that you’re excited about, your Emotion Mind might jump in. The thing is, if you spend all of your time living in Emotion Mind, you become mood dependent, impulsive, or reactive. Same with primarily being in Reason Mind, you might be disconnected in relationships, be more rigid, or ignore your feelings.
Wise Mind is where you get your intuition. It’s the happy medium where you are the most aware and effective. For folks with mental health struggles- and even those without- Wise Mind can be particularly difficult to access. Wise Mind was first described to me as being deep in a well. And that well is full of trauma, grief, financial stress, relationship struggles, etc. so your Wise Mind is harder to access. And sometimes, using your Wise Mind doesn’t always feel good initially. At the same time, it’s usually the most effective, even if your Emotion Mind tells you it’s not.
This is also tricky because your Emotion Mind is really good at impersonating your Wise Mind. It thinks it’s telling you what you need to hear, when really it’s just telling you what you want to hear. In the end, your Emotion Mind tricking you into thinking it’s your Wise Mind is more reactive than responsive. I had a therapist who helped me with this a while back. She said, “Your wise mind would never tell you to hurt yourself.” Boom. Life changed.
Now, with the lesson out of the way, I wanted to share a bit about my personal journey with the three states of mind. As many artists tend to do, I often reside more in Emotion Mind. She’s a sly one, that Emotion Mind. And she’s gotten so used to being in my head, she set up her own personal bedroom there. Because of this, I personified her, to help myself separate my Emotion Mind from my Wise Mind.
Her name is Sasha. She’s a badass- usually dressed in black with long dark hair, with sass and swag that goes on for miles. Sasha often thinks she is protecting me, or caring for me, when in actuality, she’s creating unhealthy coping habits, difficulty managing mood, and dependency upon things like perfectionism and people-pleasing. In fact, Sasha had a pretty good handle on me tonight; I almost didn’t write a post for today. She told me that no one cared what I had to say, and staying in bed with Netflix was the best thing for me. It took me a while to realize it was her. She loves disguises, that one.
So, here I am, telling Sasha to go back to her bedroom and knit herself a sweater, because I’ve got a life that’s worth living, and a blog that I’m excited about.
Our brains are pretty wild, as are our emotions. Now that I’ve identified Sasha, she’s become a bit easier to spot. And if all else fails, I can always remind myself that my Wise Mind would never tell me to hurt myself. In whatever capacity that may be.
Thanks for trying to protect me, Sasha. But I got this.
I have grown up in a constant state of change. My family moved a lot, so I was forced to adapt to a new city, school, and home every few years. Many people often express pity or apologize that I had to move around so often, but I actually enjoyed it. I got to start fresh, meet new people, and experience more of this country. Not to mention, it gave me a lot of skills that I still use in my professional and personal life.
Whenever I moved, I made friends quickly- another skill, I suppose. (Or perhaps just luck.) It helped that I was usually in school, so finding new friends was easier because I was always surrounded by people my own age. Then, when I moved to Los Angeles after graduation, I got lucky; I moved in to a co-op- an intentional community- where I shared a house with roughly twenty people. The Technicolor Tree Tribe was everything I needed after moving across the country on my own. I had built in friends that I happened to live with! And I loved each and every one of them. They quickly became my family. And once I started working, I had friends outside of my house, as well.
Flash forward to about six months ago, when I accepted a new job and moved from LA to San Diego. Suddenly, my world turned upside down. Everything I had once relied on to find friends no longer worked for me. I became friends with my roommate pretty quickly, but aside from that, I was having a tough time. I have been lucky to grow up with a handful of close friends in every city I’ve moved to. Now I felt empty. Alone. Lonely.
I realized I had never dealt with loneliness like this before. And when I started treatment, I stopped working as much; limiting my opportunities to make friends. Now that I’ve got the feeling of loneliness more or less sorted, I’m not quite sure what to do. How do adults make friends in new places? I have mad respect for my parents, who had to face this every time they moved us to a new place.
In some ways it’s nice, a fresh start. And I’ve learned who I am, and have stayed true to myself throughout all of these transitions. There was no “new city, new me” mentality…I always ended up being who I was, regardless of what a new setting meant. But now that I’m older and no longer in school, I don’t really understand how to do this.
There’s a lot of shame that I experience when I see the friends I graduated with making new friends in their respective cities. I often wonder what I’m doing wrong that I can’t seem to figure it out. And of course, challenging my perfectionism because it isn’t simply black or white.
I love San Diego. More than I thought I would. But the move was harder than I ever imagined. And the loneliness makes it that much harder. I’m very fortunate with the friends I have made in San Diego, and for the friends in LA who supported and encouraged me to pursue my dreams and take the leap down here. Life isn’t completely horrible because I’m lonely. It hurts sometimes, and not so much other times. After all, San Diego is not a bad place to be lonely…
If anyone reading this can relate, or can offer advice on how you made friends in new places, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment or send me a message. 🙂
putting down the rope 