I’m Back!

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, internet! I have returned from my tiny hiatus! I honestly didn’t give a whole lot of thought to what I’d kick things back off with once I returned, and I haven’t really done any writing in the past few weeks. So in order to shake some of the rust off the writing gears in my brain, I’m going to go with the old fallback of a five-item list of things that happened while I was away:

  1. I went to Seattle for 16 hours to attend my high school best friend’s wedding. It was lovely; she and her husband are adorable, and I am so, so, so happy I was able to be there!
  2. Between Seattle and another trip with my partner, I went through airport security four times in two weeks…and got patted down every. single. time. Dear TSA: your security lines aren’t moving slowly because someone forgot to empty their water bottle or take their laptop out of their bag. They’re moving slowly because you’re making everybody go through those goddamn useless body scanners twice. (The first thing you see once you’re through security at Midway is a Ben & Jerry’s. Well played, sirs. We definitely had coffee ice cream for breakfast on our way out of town.)
  3. I threw out my back. Thankfully, it hasn’t held a candle to whatever the hell I did back around Christmas, and I’m already feeling better. But since my partner currently isn’t supposed to lift more than five pounds and can’t raise his arms over his head, it’s made for an interesting week.
  4. I had my intake call for mental health services at our local LGBT clinic. I’ll find out later this week if they’re able to fit me in with someone there; if they can’t, they’ll work with me to find a competent provider elsewhere. It’s definitely time for me to work through some of the heavier emotions I’ve been ignoring.
  5. After a couple of weeks of letting it slide, I started getting back into the habit of taking at least a few minutes each day for guided meditation with my tarot cards while we were out of town. Since I’ve been feeling a little rocky this week (mostly, I think, due to the back pain), it’s been a really great, stabilizing influence.

A Smile (and a Tiny Hiatus)

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m scrambling to write this On the bus Thursday morning. Life is particularly busy right now, and writing has fallen a bit by the wayside. 

I have had ample reasons to smile despite a slightly overwhelming schedule, though. Here are a few of them:

  1. After feeling really burned out at work for a few weeks (to the point where I was brushing up my résumé in case I decided to look elsewhere), I had a great conversation with my department manager on Tuesday that has me feeling much better about where I’m at and where I’m going, and much more appreciated for what I’ve been doing. 
  2. I’ve been hanging out with friends a lot lately. There was a long time when we moved that I felt like all my friends were really just my partner’s friends, but we’ve developed our own relationships now and can spend time with mutual friends without feeling like we both need to be there. It’s been so great finally feeling like I’m really connected here in Chicago. 
  3. There’s been a lot of medical stuff going on at our house (everyone is going to be fine, don’t worry), which has been pretty overwhelming at times. Generally, though, it’s served to remind us how well cared for we really are. I am incredibly grateful for our support network all over the country. 

The next two weeks, my partner and I will be out of town, and I’m going to take those two weeks off from blogging. I’ll have something up again on the 27th!

Silver Linings

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m still feeling pretty rattled as I try to figure out where to go for this rheumatology follow-up. I’m feeling a lot of things, really, and not many of them are particularly pleasant. But I’m trying to look for reasons to smile, and really, if I take the time to step back a little and breathe, it’s not hard to find them. So here’s a short and sweet list of some reasons I’ve found to smile this week:

  1. Even though the humidity has caused an uptick in my general discomfort and has most of my joints feeling pretty stiff, I’ve managed to keep knitting pretty regularly. I’m on a sweater/vest kick at the moment. None of my projects are progressing very quickly, but I’m enjoying them all.
  2. Next weekend I’m headed to Seattle for a wedding. I’m super excited for the couple (my high school best friend and the great guy she’s been with for several years), and looking forward to a little 24-hour adventure.
  3. I’ve been digging deeper into some friendships here in Chicago, and it feels really good. I am reminded every day that I have an incredible support network, and that makes everything else life throws my way feel a lot more manageable.

Adjusting

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I am going to be honest: I really want to write something happy this week, but I’m really not feeling it.

I have dealt with chronic pain for years, but have never brought it up to a medical professional (or much of anyone, really) before, for a variety of reasons. I went to the doctor on Saturday (luckily, my insurance card finally made it to me on Friday) with the intention of changing this, because it’s been getting steadily worse, and is starting to affect my quality of life in ways I’m not okay with.

Long story short, I spent three days waiting to hear back about lab results, wrestling with the fact that I’m probably looking at either rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia – in other words, a thing with pretty straightforward treatment options that will probably be increasingly debilitating as time goes on, or a thing that is super nebulous and hard to treat that’s debilitating in different ways.

I finally got the call from the nurse on my way home from work yesterday – these initial lab results were nothing definitive, but they weren’t normal and indicated the possibility of RA, which means I now need to schedule some further tests with a rheumatologist. And whether it’s the weather this week or the fact that I’ve been actually acknowledging that pain is happening recently, I’ve been in more noticeable amounts of pain all week. So now I am grouchy, and anxious, and generally struggling to focus on much of anything else, even though I realize there’s nothing I can really do about it right now.

Hopefully next week I’ll have more of an action plan together and will be up for writing something more profound or happy or, at least, less “woe is me”. For now, though, I’m going to give myself time to adjust to the fact that pursuing a diagnosis for whatever-this-is might illuminate the best way to deal with it, but it also means it’s real, and this is a reality I’ve been ignoring for a while.

Faulty Coping Mechanisms

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Sometimes (and this should come as a surprise to no one)…I make mistakes.

I knew, all through last week and most of the week before, that I was starting to run low on my medications. I put off sending in the refill request, because my new insurance card hadn’t come in the mail yet. Last Thursday morning, I took the last pills I had. My insurance card still hadn’t come, but I didn’t really have a choice; I put in the refill request.

Unfortunately, my insurance card continued to not show up, and the pharmacy didn’t get going on the refill right away, and I was feeling very overwhelmed and low on spoons and doing a terrible job of expressing to my partner what was happening, and, long story short, I had no meds over the weekend.

I’ve been on the same duo of medications for six years. There have been times when I’ve run out of one or the other (never both at once), or missed a day, but neither of those things have happened often, and neither have happened at all in probably two years. I had no idea what to expect. I assumed that I had a day or two, at least, before it really started working its way out of my system, but beyond that? Not a clue.

I felt increasingly off as the weekend progressed. I finally told my partner what was happening on Sunday. Monday morning I overslept  (in part because it was stormy and so dark outside that I think my brain decided it couldn’t possibly be day, and I turned off all but my last alarm in my sleep), which meant that I was already not in the best place when I got to work. A few hours into my day, I realized I was feeling pretty shaky. I started sweating profusely. My head hurt. It gradually dawned on me that the withdrawal had finally hit.

I logged into my pharmacy’s online portal and saw that the one medication that was most likely causing the worst of the withdrawals had been filled, and my old insurance had covered it (I’d forgotten that I submitted a refill request when I got a reminder email from the pharmacy a month prior, then realized that, because I only take half a pill per day, I didn’t actually need it yet, and had never picked it up). I decided I’d head to the pharmacy after work and at least pick that one up.

I ended up leaving work around lunchtime, because I realized that the withdrawal symptoms were only going to get worse, and headed straight to the pharmacy, feeling increasingly desperate.

As it turned out, even though I didn’t have my new insurance information, I was able to use a clinic discount to get my other medication at a reasonable price as well. I tried not to beat myself up too much as I headed home with the medications I probably could have picked up over the weekend, before things got out of hand.

Thankfully, in the midst of getting my brain back on track, I’ve had plenty of folks around to help me keep moving. A friend invited me to join a weekly roleplaying game, which meant I got to spend a good chunk of Monday and Tuesday coming up with character ideas. Tuesday evening was the game, and there’s nothing quite like several hours of collaborative storytelling to get you out of your own head. Work has been especially busy, which has been challenging, but has also provided a really good gauge of how quickly my mental state is improving – I felt so much more capable of focusing and getting work done yesterday than I did on Monday, which was encouraging.

I’m still waiting for my insurance card to show up, but now HR is aware that there’s a problem and is working on rectifying it. I’m making myself a list of appointments I need to schedule when it finally gets here (and I’m hoping it comes before the appointment I have scheduled for this weekend). Finding a therapist to help me work through some of the underlying emotional things that are siphoning off my supply of spoons is at the top of the list. I am not letting myself get back into the position I was in at the beginning of the week every again, if I can help it.

Here’s to finding new and more reliably effective coping mechanisms.

Drifting

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I’m writing this Wednesday evening, and it’s already been a long week. Between humidity (and who knows what else) causing pain and multiple items of unexpected (and not particularly happy) news causing anxiety and an unusually high level of work drama causing frustration, I’m not in the best place right now.

On top of (and, maybe, because of) it all, I’ve been really struggling to focus. I feel like I’m drifting aimlessly through my universe right now. It’s not so much that I feel lacking in purpose…I just don’t have the energy to devote to moving in any particular direction right now.

I’ve been thinking more lately about belief, spirituality, and ethics. In some ways, I feel like I’m having a super understated existential crisis…there’s nothing particularly earth-shattering going through my brain, and I’m not panicking. There’s something immensely comforting about being able to articulate the basics of one’s beliefs in an organized manner, and that’s something that I feel like I’m currently missing. What I want to do is make a concentrated effort to work through and be super conscious of the belief system that’s shaping how I live my life. Because I’m so low-energy these days, that’s a challenge, but I’m gathering resources and thinking a lot about it, which seems like the place to start. Several years ago I gave myself permission to ask questions; now, I think I need to give myself permission to find answers. I’m not at all interested in organized religion, but I’m slowly identifying which pieces of religious life I miss and feel a need to recreate on my own terms. There aren’t many of them, but they’re there. Meditation and ritual are two things I am finding mean a lot to me and to my mental health, and I’ve been working toward finding ways of reincorporating them into my life, but so far it’s been pretty freeform, and (as much as I hate to admit it) I think I need a bit more structure there.

And We’re Back!

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, friends! Some of you may have noticed that Accidental Fudge has been down since at least Thursday morning, when this past week’s post was supposed to go live. After a lot of attempted troubleshooting on my part and a few messages back and forth with the hosting service (which was really where I should have started, it turns out), we’re back in business. Thanks, everyone for your patience while I worked this out! The upshot of all of this is that the site actually appears to be working better and more consistently than it was before, which makes me think I may have messed something up in the setup originally that’s been fixed now. So, yay!

See you all on Thursday! (The post that was supposed to go up this past week can be found here.)

Fighting Frustration

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s 10pm Wednesday and I’m finally cranking out a blog post for this week. I’ve been trying all day to come up with something write about, but I’ve been largely unsuccessful – it was an immensely frustrating day at work, in ways that my job is not usually frustrating. I am torn between a desire to bitch about my day (which is something I promised myself I wouldn’t do often, back when I started Accidental Fudge), and a desire to put something positive out into the universe (which is a challenge today, because it’s been so frustrating).

I’m going to err on the side of positivity, though, in the hopes that it’ll set me up for a better day tomorrow. So here are three things I’m looking forward to as we launch ourselves into July:

  1. Three day weekend! Particularly in light of how frustrated my Wednesday was, I am super excited to have an extra day to myself this weekend. I’m planning to get together with a friend in the afternoon on Friday, but the morning will be me hanging out around the apartment, at this point without much of an agenda – there are some creative projects I could work on, or I might read…I’m going to try to resist the urge to sleep it all away.
  2. New (and hopefully better) health insurance! I decided last month to switch my insurance plan from a HMO to a PPO, and that kicked in as of July 1. The major thing I’m excited about is being able to go to specialists without needing to get referrals. I want to be more intentional about dealing with mental health stuff and am going to seriously pursue therapy now that I know my insurance will cover it. I’m also (finally) going to talk to my doctor about the chronic pain I’ve been dealing with for…well, years, and I’m glad I’ll have the freedom to choose a specialist in whatever field my doctor suggests, instead of being locked into one medical system.
  3. A less hectic schedule! This is the first time in two years that I’m not taking any classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music. It’s weird, but I think it’ll be good – I’ll have more time at home to work on projects (read: major reorganizing) we’re working on, and won’t have to ration my spoons as much if I’m not being as social. And I still have my weekly volunteering gig in the school’s Resource Center, so it’s not like I’ve cut the place out of my life entirely for the next couple of months.

Balance

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Having an internet presence is a constant balancing act.

I love having this blog. I love that it makes me slow down long enough to write every week, often about things I might not otherwise take the time to think about.

But it’s always a balancing act. How much do I put out into the vast expanse of the internet? How much of my life am I willing to share with friends and strangers? When can I let myself vent about specific people or situations, and to what extent, and when do I need to just keep quiet?

I’ve been dealing with some pretty major emotional stuff lately, and I haven’t known how much to share here. But I think I need to say something, because I have a feeling it’ll come up on its own sooner rather than later, and I want to give some context before it does.

I haven’t spoken to my family of origin since March.

I just wrote 1000 words of explanation, but I am not going to post them, because this is part of the balancing act: I do not want to contribute to further drama. Suffice it to say that right when things seemed to be getting a little better, they turned around and got a whole lot worse, and I had to cut ties in order to maintain my sanity.

I don’t regret the decision to establish some distance. (Boundaries are a thing I’ve always struggled with, and it’s become very clear that I came by that honestly.) But it hasn’t been easy.

I’ve also recently realized that I’ve been avoiding dealing with how I relate to my body. Dysphoria, for me, has mostly manifested in me being very detached from my body…of course, once I realized this, remaining detached got harder, and now I’m painfully aware of my discomfort with my body.

Starting next month, I’ll be on an insurance plan that will make it a lot easier for me to see a therapist, so that’s my plan at this point, because I have a lot of feelings about family and about my body that I need to process, and my partner shouldn’t have to be the only person in the world to listen to me blather as I try to work through those things.

So that’s where I’m at: seeking balance. Whether I achieve it is still hit or miss, but I think I’m getting there. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

 

A Handful of Happy Thoughts

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Suddenly, Thursday morning is here and I’m realizing I never wrote a blog for this week. Whoops! I’ve been rather stuck in my own head lately, working through some things, but here are a handful of reasons I’ve been smiling:

  • I finally have enough facial hair to experiment a little bit. I’ve had sideburns for a while now, but my chin whiskers have gotten a lot stronger recently, so I’ve been sporting a tiny goatee for the past week. My partner likes it, and (even more importantly) I like it, so I think it’s going to stick around a while.
  • We both got (long overdue) haircuts over the weekend. There are few things that make me feel really good about how I look, but getting a haircut is definitely one of them.
  • I’ve been working more on the friendships I have here in Chicago (instead of focusing all the time on how much I miss my friends in Minnesota), and I’m finally at a point where I’m starting to ditch the idea that these are all my partner’s friends and not mine, too (because he knew them all before I did). I generally feel like I’m not great at making friends, but I’m enjoying this attempt to be more intentionally social.
  • I knit tiny balloons over the weekend. They’re currently adorning my computer monitor at work, and they’re adorable.
  • My best friend is coming to visit this weekend. I haven’t been able to spend time with her in person in months, and I am so excited!