Through the Rain

Hey Mark... Think Fast!!! Please forgive me. I’m still reeling from the movie “Tick… Tick… BOOM!” my husband and I just watched about how precious time is. I made a whole other post that got away from me. I didn’t know how to end it, and I feel like it might need to be its own series rather than what I wanted to say New Year’s Eve/Day. I wanted to talk about the power of small steps. I’m sure you’ve heard the laughability of it, but did you try it, and if you did, are you laughing now? The popularity of the New Year’s resolution seems to have died off around the crowd I hang around… and my circle has gotten a lot smaller on Facebook. What do you want to change about yourself in the next year? Where do you see yourself in five years? Where do you see yourself in ten years? I hear these questions mostly in seminars that want you to think what they want you to think. But I want you to think about what YOU want to think about.  I’m a list person. In Partial Hospitalization, they had a ...

Let It All Burn To The Ground No, don’t let it all burn to the ground. Then you would be left with nothing but grief and nothing to start from. Change comes slowly and from using what you already have. I had a brilliant idea as I was falling asleep for a blog post, but of course I didn’t write it down or type it up, so poof it went! I needed some time by myself (which isn’t that difficult since I’m alone when my husband goes to work in the mornings as I’m searching for a job). I made it my self-care today to stare into a candle for five minutes and put on some music, hoping that would rejuvenate me. I was also hoping it would inspire me to write a post. I’ve been holding off on what I’ve been learning in Partial until after the New Year, making way this past week for change and hope and New Year stuff, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I felt like Christmas just went awry in my attempts at changing others. And I shouldn’t have been seeking to change others in the first place. So I’m sittin...

The Lives We Live I feel like I’m leading three or four different lives right now. There’s the blogger life which I have to keep going at all times and process everything emotionally, and don’t get me wrong. It’s fun! It’s what I need! It’s just… like a lot of trauma processing… exhausting after a while! I love it, but everything I love turns to expectation, from myself mostly and then from “others”: outside voices that tell me that I need to do something or that whatever I’m doing is wrong or I need to do more of it or whatever the case may be. Don’t get me wrong. It’s gotten me through very rough times and keeps me motivated nearly every day. Most days, actually. But after Partial, I found a new spark of joy and motivation within myself. It was because I felt like I was helping myself and helping others help themselves. Encouraging other people to find the spark in themselves to empower themselves to break free of something holding them back…there’s nothing like it! But after Partial...

Yeah, But Is It Nice? I am sorry. I have used this platform in an irresponsible way and must apologize. All of what I said in my last post was true, but one thing that was taught in Partial Hospitalization when asking for honesty is posing the question is it nice, and it was not nice. Now, will I ever apologize for trying to defend a minority even if some of my information is off or needs tweaked? I will never stoop down and make sure to sugar-coat to people who have no empathy towards those who spew nonsense towards a minority and call it “facts.” But these weren’t people like that. These were people who thought they were getting the truth and weren’t. They were getting more questions, more “one-way assumptions” and instead of researching it themselves, they thought they had all the information. They trusted what was being told to them. And it pissed me off.  Several things pissed me off. Not only can we apparently not trust the “news” to handle facts anymore and give us complete ...

Wait, What? Two days of nobody reading my blog and my self-esteem has crumbled to the ground. Haha. I just wanted a hundred views, and you surpassed that in a week, so I am very impressed with you all1 You’ve made my dreams come true! You’ve made me feel heard! “Drunk Uncle Boundaries” itself got the most views of any post so far! But you didn’t keep me accountable. It’s okay. It’s the holidays. All bets are off when it’s the holidays! I returned from my crazy trip less than an hour ago, and it was a wild ride. I think I managed to accidentally or on purpose offend almost everyone in my family who I tried setting up boundaries with. I forgot one of the most important things about boundaries: I can’t control other people. I wanted to help everyone, and in trying to help everyone, I noticed bad things that had been happening for decades, and those weren’t going to change, no matter what therapeutic insight I threw their way. They weren’t looking for it. They weren’t open to it. And they ...

Did I Just Hear That Come Out of My Mouth? I’ve had a lot of conversations over the last week or so, but three really stuck with me. Three different women with three very different relationships in my life, but listening to each of these conversations was wildly different, and it showed. I am not proud of the way I handled all of them. I am going to be upfront and honest and say that. But I hope we can all glean some wisdom from these. The first one I want to talk about happened with someone where my defenses were up. I was ready for boundaries to happen, not a fight, but an assertion of my rights. In the past, I didn’t know how to make requests of this person to stop things that bothered me, and I wanted to try. I did not expect it to go well, but I never expect anything to go well. She knows I have a religious background so she brought up a famous religious person whom she adores. “Do you know so and so? I love him!” My face dropped. “I hate him.” The next however long it took for th...

Be I woke up like I usually do, barely conscious, reaching for my meditation, hoping that would give me insight to the day. My brain has been in panic mode even with the solid meditation I had last night. This morning was no different. I kept trying to center myself and clear my mind. People aren’t perfect. They get it wrong. Towards the end, I decided to let go of having “the perfect session” and just let be what was going to be. My mind fog cleared a lot, thoughts ebbed, and I was able to just be. Even though the Bible still triggers me, there is a verse that mentions “Be still, and know that I am God.” It is very simple, yet very profound. Be still. Take moments out of our busy day to clear our mind and just be still. And know. Know the truth. Know justice and mercy. Know love and compassion. Know kindness. BE and KNOW. So I just sat there for a while after the meditation being. I wasn’t “trying” to be anything. I was just being. I am still learning my innate worth in being a human....

Are You Sure??? What About...Colorado???? I just had the craziest dream, and even as I’m typing it’s going away, but it’s the type of scary that’s Black Mirror terrifying, that it going away is part of what’s terrifying. I woke up in a giant room full of beds in a hospital gown. The lights were mostly off, but there were computer screens at the edge of the room. We were all terrified, but got to know each other. One of the people was my college roommate Molly, so we knew each other right off the bat. As we started to get to know each other, we started noticing we would forget each other. The room started filled with hospital beds, but people literally started disappearing. There were hovering computer assistants, but I don’t remember what in the world they were doing except “providing us with information”, so we tried looking up information on the people who kept disappearing, except there was no information on them… in the entire internet! We really started freaking out. It was like t...

What Had Happened Was… I just came from a great guided meditation, and I feel like my calm self again. I feel like my family riled me up and I had to put on a protective layer to “be who I needed to be” in order to show my authentic self, and I hate that. It makes me sad. So I’m going to walk you through a little of what I just did. I would send you the meditation, but it’s specifically for trauma and PTSD and panic attacks and copyrighted, and I would rather not mess with their research nor start my own. Do you have a few minutes for yourself? Let me walk you through a meditation. The first few minutes is slow, and is centered around your breathing. Breath is basically the most important thing in mediation work. It’s the easiest voluntary thing you can do to change the physiology of your body to relax. Once you think about your breathing and only your breathing, think about slowing it down and pulling the breath from deeper in your body. Some say from the diaphragm, others say from th...

Putting the Self Back in Self-Care I need more self-care. I was doing a meditation, and all I could think about was other things. I berated myself thinking “you’ve been doing this for a while now. Breathe in through the abdomen, let the body relax itself. Let the mind clear." But the mind didn’t clear. I didn’t make space for myself. Perhaps I still had too many unprocessed thoughts still wandering around from sleep, but I couldn’t center myself. Even this post has been hijacked by worry instead of by positivity. Let me try again. I am going to try to take care of myself better. My two aunts lovingly but without personal boundaries messed with my hair last night claiming it looked better swished to the side. They encouraged me to take just a little more time with myself, and I would be looking better than ever. I was too embarrassed to admit that if I had a few more minutes that I wanted to devote to myself, I would try to work on flossing more and shaving more. Basics. Not hairst...

Can I Just Shut Up? I am so tired of talking. These past two days have stretched my social energy to its limits and beyond. I have social anxiety, and talking seems easy until it is over. Then it’s like running face first into a brick wall. You never know how much energy it really takes until it wears you down. There are signs that you’re starting to run on empty, but when you’re face-first less than six inches away from a relative’s face, you can’t take a second to see the smoke start to pour out of your ears. You sit at the couch, and they sit with you. You face the TV, and they either pretend to watch with you for a couple seconds until they dive back in or not even pretend.  I don’t mind the face to face talks when it’s just us though. Talking without more stimulation keeps it at a tolerable level. With a movie playing and three more conversations trying to be heard over the movie, I can’t hear myself think, much less what the other person is trying to tell me. I have processin...

Pain...And Maybe Hope? Merry Christmas, even to those of you who it’s not very merry especially to those of you who it’s not very merry. I hope this day gives you presence to look forward to, but if it doesn’t, I hope you find a smile somewhere today. I know what it’s like to wonder how the world can keep turning when your world, your heart, seems to stop forever in pain and grief. It cannot be ignored. It can only be felt. I am here with you today if you need someone to sit with you. I cannot offer words of wisdom. There aren’t any that I know of. But hugs are there for you! I was going to end there, but there’s something I feel I have to add. There’s about a week left until the year ends. To many of us, it’s just another year, but maybe we can think of it as an opportunity for a small step of growth? Not these giant leaps that big commercials want you to think about, but small changes in mindsets of “I want to be more positive and I’m going to do A, B, and C to do that” or “I want to...

With or In Remembrance It’s one of the emotion-filled days of the year. You are either feeling happy or sad, stressed or alone or wishing you could be alone. Last night I wrote myself a list of things to do that already overwhelmed me, mostly because I didn’t know how much time I would have until all the things needed to be done and ready to pack before the five or more hour trip to my in-law’s house to spend Christmas holidays with them. I woke up at 5:45 with my husband coming down the stairs ready to get to work, and already I was ready (in my adrenaline-filled body but not in my decaffeinated mind) to start the day. After a few minutes of Facebook motivation, I went to it. I got my coffee and parfait, trying to hurry up because the rest of my list couldn’t be done sitting down at the table eating breakfast. Packing five different bags of drinks, clothes and bathroom stuff, pills (which is its own thirty minute thing since I conveniently had to restock for the week, so twenty or so ...

The Pigeon Lady So every year as a Christmas tradition, my husband watches the first two Home Alone movies. It’s just what he likes to do. I wasn’t raised with the Home Alone movies, so for me, it’s a series I watch every…thirteen years or so? I mean, it’s not bad, but it’s not like “we have to watch it!” You know? But I think with Home Alone 2 it cuts deeper than that. It touches on the importance of family, which I have outgrown the importance of flesh and blood family, and I am at the point where very few people reach out to me on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis to see how I’m doing. So there are not many people I would call friends. I identify with the pigeon lady scene in the opera house. She got used to being let down by people in general. Her family, her friends, people she hardly knew, then she just stopped trying.  Since it wasn’t the first time watching it, I saw things I didn’t notice before, like her first lines weren’t until the creepy music started backing off ...

Dystoni What? Because of what I mentioned about death, I would feel amiss if I didn’t bring up what it has done to me. Past posts have told you that I have Major Depressive Disorder that I received from my mother. That was the only hereditary thing I hope I received from my parents. I also have General Anxiety Disorder which has been dropped or added at different points and Social Anxiety Disorder, which I didn’t know was a real thing, but makes sense. I rehearse and have to think extra hard about the beginnings of sentences and sometimes wing the endings of sentences because it takes too long. That causes me more anxiety, but people get impatient. I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which isn’t keeping everything neat, but I did alphabetize everything growing up or had them sorted by color or height (not kidding). I’m sorry Mike Fobair for alphabetizing your DVDs that one time. It pissed you off, but I asked the wrong person before I did it. When I’m overly stressed, I wash my hands...

"Death Comes For Us All" I’ve been putting this off, hinting at it but never facing it head on. I have an afternoon free, so why not. Death and life seem intermingled. You can’t have one without the other it seems. I’ve been lucky. Some people have literally lost their entire families to death. I’ve figuratively lost most of my family to differences in beliefs and the great adage “agree to disagree”, but there are certain things you just can’t do that about. Like whether two of the same gender can marry or if there are more than two genders to begin with. Hell is their trump card. Killing someone in an accident was my trump card, and someone in Partial unfazed surpassed it and then shut down without any more information. So there is more pain out there than what you believe there is. I’ve met people who have lost their child. Lost their brother. Lost their spouse. As “Agatha All Along” points out “Death comes for us all.” For me, death first came for my sister who I never met...

Did That Seriously Come Out of Their Mouth? We all have that friend or family member who we wince when cornered by. They lock eyes, and it seems the conversation never ends. Worse, it seems like they have opposite views as you do, but they don’t care. They just nod their heads until you nod your head and pretend like you’re enjoying the conversation. Then they take that as their cue to continue for half an hour more. If someone tries to save you, there’s a 50/50 chance they will be pulled into the conversation too, depending on how skillful they are it could lean more heavily on the side of damage. I get you. There are fortunately many Facebook reels about this very topic. Just keep researching “narcissist” and eventually Facebook will point you to these very people. Some of them don’t possess empathy. Some of them have no idea what another person could feel or think besides themselves. They are stuck in their own corner of the world. I am no expert in this, but I took classes on bound...

 Oh No, She Didn't!!! I just want to get this out there so people know that you aren’t alone in grieving during the holidays. My dad did what was best for him when he and my mom got divorced. I am trying to see from his perspective and not blame him for protecting himself and his feelings, but what he did really hurt me. My parents divorced; my mom moved with my oldest brother, Luke, into another apartment in town; my dad started dating someone else he used to work with; my mom and brother were in a car accident and my mother died on impact; and at one of the holiday parties we were begging, BEGGING my dad for us to have a year to grieve. For it to just be the Webbs without adding anyone else to the family. He didn’t respect our wishes. Our family tradition was to go to a family friends’ place for a Christmas Eve party and then beg my parents to open one present before we went to bed that night. It went from a strict “no” over the years to some years they would relent to some years...

Like Brushing Your Teeth But For Dreaming On a much lighter note, with Christmas coming up, I’m sure we are all having a little more trouble sleeping. It just so happens that the next day in Partial Hospitalization, they covered sleep hygiene. It’s kind of like it sounds, tricks to help you sleep better. Unfortunately I was still in and out for some of this, but they did send me the notes! I am eager to share with you what I learned and how I utterly failed to put it into practice, but mostly what I learned! Most importantly, consistency is key. Kids have a set bedtime. A lot of adults don’t quite have an exact bedtime. But lay down in that bed for sleepy time (and sexy time) only, and at the same time each night, and your body is trained “oh, time to shut down!” Even before learning about it, my body would naturally start shutting down around 7pm. I know, snooze fest I am, but with depression and anxiety using up every ounce of strength my body has, it needed as much sleep as I could ...

Moving Out to My Own Closet So there are three different beliefs in the LGBTQIA+ community, though I have only personally seen it addressed for the LGB parts of the community. Side X is that everything is a sin. Side B is that everything “gay” is outside of God’s will, whether or not it’s in a committed marriage, and Side A, which is that God loves you as you are, and that a committed relationship pleasing to God. I hope I got that right. Please someone correct me if I am wrong. For a long time after “struggling” I was Side B. That God would allow me to be in a marriage and have someone I could spend the rest of my life with, especially since I was a romantic seemed too good to be true for me. I went from being a romantic to being a cynic when I found out I was gay. I would gag at straight marriages and relationships because I was envious of what they had. I could never have the American dream, and churches always tried hooking up single people. They never had a space for celibate sing...

AND NO, I AM NOT GAY!!!! Trigger Warning: Talk about porn So everyone blossoms at different ages, and it affects how we socialize with different people. Who becomes our friends and who we don’t even talk to centers somewhat around who we are attracted to, who we are supposed to be attracted to, and who we find common interests with. I was fortunate to be one of the smart ones in my grade. The nerds had their own clique that spanned gender. It wasn’t the jocks and the cheerleaders or groups like that which had to be separated into boys vs girls, which was good for me, because most of my friends were girls. Well, most of my friends were boys until the ages of seven or eight. Then we all drifted apart. I became interested in science and religion and movies, and they became interested in girls and cars and sports. I still don’t see the interest in girls and cars and sports. Through the years, I had a couple emotional crushes on girls, and I thought “this is it! I’m straight!” But it never ...

I Used To Be A Lesbian... When I say “I grew up in the church,” I mean my earliest memories were of school, home, and church. One of my earliest memories that stick to me this day is one of my most jarring, probably why it stuck with me so much. I was old enough to understand what was going on, old enough to be “saved” (in the church I grew up in, saved basically meant you accepted Jesus into your heart as your Lord and Savior, knew that you had sinned (committed bad things), and that he died for those sins on the cross a long time ago so that you could be forgiven for those sins. In exchange, you were to live for him, do good things in his name, ‘earn out your own salvation with fear and trembling’, love him, and live, breathe, and die for him…oh, and don’t let any demons into your life), and old enough to partake in an exorcism. I know what you all are thinking. It’s not like in the movies. Basically what happened is we were praying for people and sometimes a demon would “manifest it...

Brushes With Suicidal Depression Trigger warning: suicidal thoughts, thoughts of self-harm I know what you’re thinking. It’s around Christmas time. Write about something cheerful. I think this time, more than ever, it’s important to address this issue. It both happens to fall in line with the timeline of what I am writing about in Partial Hospitalization, and something we all need to remember. The first couple days of PHP, they give you an intake into what’s been going on in life. I will try to explain as much of the pertinent background to the stories as I can so it makes sense as I am going along so you can easily read this, since I haven’t fleshed out a full history of my life yet, and I am so sorry about that. My life has been… complicated. So they got to the generic questions about depression and suicide. Have you ever thought about hurting yourself or anyone else? Yes, myself. Have you ever harmed yourself?                ...

The Circle of My Identity I wondered what this blog post would be about. I figured after Partial Hospitalization that I would dig deep into my past and try to heal the traumatic moments, or at least see them from a different perspective, and that perspective was that my dad was a narcissist. Turns out it didn’t end well. I sent them to him, and he had stuff to do before he wanted to read “a downer” because he knows he and I don’t get along. He knows we don’t see things eye to eye and remembers things differently. I wonder why that is… Anyways, I want to heal and grow. So I’m going to start at the start of PHP and work through some of what we worked at and see if I can gain deeper appreciation and insight on my own through what we went through. The first day I was there, we talked about identity and what makes up our identity. It was rough for me since I always saw my identity growing up as this giving, spirited child turned into this intelligent kid at school and at church. And that’s ...

 Every Thing I’m so excited I get to give for Christmas! I think that is one of the things that nobody can take away from me, but they can manipulate for me and make me question whether it is me doing it because I like it or because I expect it. My family said I was “such a giver”, “always a giver”, things like that. I heard it so much that I just assumed that giving was what I did. I gave until it hurt, and it hurt badly at some points. As much as it has been misconstrued in my past, this year, it’s back to being a good thing. I wish I could give more. Perhaps it is consumer culture telling me I need to look at this sale and that sale. Perhaps it is FOMO on the next thing that someone I know might be able to use. That might be it. But now that the shopping is finished, I am so glad we got the shopping and wrapping finished! Another part of stuff is having. I’ve been with more books than I could possibly read in years due to my father letting us have control of my mother’s Social S...

Words of Meditation I wanted to cry last night during my meditation. And it’s weird. I’ve been doing this same meditation for several weeks now. The first few days were easier to focus on the words and the relaxing and the clearing of the mind. It actually happened that I got so relaxed that my body sensed “RELAXATION! OH NO! CUE FLASHBACK!” which it did, but it was in slow motion, and I was in charge…kind of. I had limited frames to work with but I could zoom in and out and pan right and left and see some of my car accident. I will explain my car accident in a different post coming up. Anyways, since that happened, my body is determined to never get that relaxed again, so it will do everything it can to throw thoughts, tiny spasms, whatever it can my way to distract me from being purely relaxed. It’s gotten so frustrating! So anyways, about last night, I’ve been ruminating on being kind to myself. I know I need to show compassion to myself because my inner critic is a big one and my p...

"Insightful" People have called me insightful. Sorry. People in my last Partial Hospitalization Program (PHP) including group members and facilitators have called me insightful. But the truth is, I think I have been over-actively studying people all my life, and for most of my like I have been in a terrified, adrenaline-filled state worrying I would do or say the wrong thing to set someone off. I think I seriously never understood people because people were never to be understood. Most of what I have come to understand about people has been because something went wrong in my life and I understood how people were “supposed” to react. I gained empathy by watching other people’s reactions to life’s many tragedies, mostly because they happened to me. My husband can still tell you that I am terrible at comforting him, because I am scared of saying or doing the wrong thing. I am getting better at that, but I didn’t have a strong role model growing up about how a husband sho...