Through the Rain

On the Road to Happiness I’m trying to search for happiness like everyone else. I keep thinking there is a secret key, and that if I can just find it, my life will be much better. Unhappiness has been growing and growing inside me. I can’t figure out why; same reason I can’t figure out the why of the opposite. Everything is getting strained. Nothing seems like enough anymore. I can’t just let myself be. Every time I stop long enough to actually take a deep breath I want to cry. Most of our country voted for a man who has a terrible personality and character. Beyond that, he has proven the last few days that he has no idea what he is doing besides pointing fingers and firing people. This is no longer “The Apprentice” Mr. Trump. You’re trying to run a country, and somehow you think you have the ego to know everyone’s job well enough to appoint people who lick your feet AND know their area of expertise well enough to solidly run the country. You have divided families more than probably a ...

My Own Worst Enemy At the beginning of my time spent by myself without a job, I told myself that I would work on me. I would be productive and use this time and not fall into depression. Well, I used the time to be productive. But in that productivity, I was so scared of myself that I refused to be alone. When my thoughts of decluttering weren’t enough, I would listen to upbeat music. When I needed a break, I would watch TV, and when I couldn’t watch TV, I would listen to reels and podcasts and whatever else I could get my hands on. I told myself that I was reflecting inwardly. I was either reflecting too inwardly, or I was simply too scared to see what was actually inside. I was avoiding myself. It's all come to a head the last week or so. My growing discontent, the house being nearly decluttered, or me being unhappy with the way things have been decluttered, growing distant from my husband but telling myself that I was growing independent and finding my voice. I think it was all ...

People Pleasing…Again Though I mention my husband in this, it is not about my husband. It is about me. What I say about my husband in no way reflects on him but how I perceive him, and that is what this article is about…that and how I perceive people and their opinions and expectations in general. I have been very discontent recently. I started a kick on minimalism, but I also had a realization that everything we own pretty much is four years old or older, and most things are falling apart and might need replaced. I still don’t have a job, but the steps to getting a job are getting closer and closer and closer every day. I have hopes that within the next month or two, I will have a job. I am excited to contribute to the household financially again! I feel like this has been a great time for me to process trauma and to find out what needs to stay and what needs to go, but I’m starting to squander it a bit. I thought my new hobbies of minimalism and food shopping and cooking were all goo...

Consumerism vs. Minimalism I am being torn apart, and I don’t know who to talk to about it. I don’t know who would understand it. I’m going through a minimalist period, but it seems like the more I get rid of, the more I find I didn’t get good quality this, or that is falling apart, or this no longer fits, or I’m about to start a new job and there’s a 48 hour sale on brand new Cole Haan’s that take them from $200 to less than $70, but I still feel guilty spending that much money when we aren’t supposed to be spending money on unnecessary things. Plus see minimalism above. I have two comfortable pairs of dress shoes that I would love to keep, but I don’t know if they are up to snuff for the new job I might be getting soon. A lot is up in the air. Plus there are boxes everywhere. I am researching things left and right trying to find the right deal for the right quality, and it seems like there is no right answer. It’s like the South Park episode about voting between a giant douche or a t...

But I Don’t Want To! I am forcing myself to sit at my computer and write. I guess the honeymoon period of me writing my blog is over, or it has been taken over by all the YouTube videos and podcasts I have been watching over the last week or so. While at first I thought I was finding my personality, I recently thought between the blog and the minimalism and recently the shopping (mostly food), that I was finally getting my life organized and that my thoughts would follow. My OCD followed. It was usually always in the background except for when I was fully anxious and really stressed out, but I was never stressed out until my husband noticed the piles of clutter I had decluttered, and then it hit me. As soon as he noticed, I noticed. I could only see the spaces I was clearing out, because that’s what I was focused on. He was working tirelessly and coming home to piles of bags and boxes all over the place and couldn’t see the clean spaces because the junk was still hiding the clean space...

Anger I hesitate to write this because it’s so raw for me right now. I just got through with therapy and tapped into an emotion I’ve been feeling more and more: anger. For those of you who haven’t been to years of therapy like I have, anger is a secondary emotion, meaning that it’s an emotion that only happens when a deeper emotion triggers it. I’ve been feeling anger more and more at injustice. I won’t go into details about my therapy session, but there’s the phrase “anger turned inward is depression.” For so long I’ve been in depression that to feel anger is so new, so empowering, so scary! Anger was always used as a weapon against me, usually violently, but I’ve also seen it used with passion in speeches to speak truth when others were too scared to speak the truth. I’m used to depression. Now, I’m finding my voice. I’m finding my passion again. I have no idea what social work and injustice has to do with minimalism and organization. I know that emotionally and mentally and physical...

Helplessness at the Hands of an Angry God There are a few places where we feel absolutely helpless in life no matter how much we plan for it. Weather does whatever it wants to. No matter how much snow the meteorologist predicts, the sky will do what the sky wills to do. And Public Works will do the best they can with the staff they have. That’s a whole other issue. I’m talking about what’s out of our control, and weather is out of our control. Snow, a tornado, a hurricane, a flood, out of our control. Genetics and health, out of our control. The wait at the doctor’s office, out of our control. No matter how much we plan on our week looking a certain way, things always mess up our schedule. Take my Botox appointment for instance. I started with one doctor, then moved onto her student. Then moved back to her doctor for a few appointments while they switched me to a new student who I was supposed to meet this time. A couple weeks ago, they changed my appointment to a neurologist. I don’t ...

Vulnerability and Empathy I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Brene Brown and her Netflix special A Call to Courage or her TED Talk on shame and vulnerability, but she is an amazing speaker, researcher, and social worker. A lot of things started making sense tonight after watching her special again. I need to be more open and vulnerable. I need to stop lying and having secrets. I need to be open with people close to me, no matter how much it hurts them, because it’s hurting me, and they have no idea. My blog posts have mentioned me donating a lot of my clothes, books, and other items in my house. My psychiatrist and husband and friends all thought it was a bad thing or could potentially be a bad thing since I have OCD. It turned sour at one point. I’m not going to lie. But they made me paranoid that I was going crazy, over the top, and needed to stop for my own health. Well, it’s time for me to be vulnerable. I told my husband I would only say nice things about him, and that is what I...

Breathing With Your Heart This has been a long time coming, and I almost let it go, but I was up with a nightmare anyway, so it’s time I write this. I’ve been having a hard time being kind to myself. I beat myself up on a continual basis for never doing enough and it never being perfect enough. It started in childhood, but I let it continue into adulthood, and I have let it ruin the way I view myself. A couple things recently changed the way I see myself. My Facebook reels had been flooded with therapy videos to the point where I had been therapied out. Me, therapied out? I know, right!!! It happened. But a series that I first thought was really stupid but couldn’t stop watching was the Drew Barrymore Show. She talks a lot about being kind to yourself and really being enough to the point where you don’t need another person to fulfill you. She’s single, so she’s always taking dating advice, but her guests usually turn it around to self-compassion and being okay with being yourself. So o...

Who Am I? It’s amazing how much of us think we own stuff when a lot of times it goes the other way around. I know I’m talking about material possessions a lot, but I’ve been thinking about it for hours and hours each day. Today I was moving bathroom materials around, and I told myself it didn’t matter how many times I moved it around, I still wanted to keep these things, whether it was in a shoebox or in this shelf in the actual bathroom or outside the bathroom in the storage cubby. Marie Kondo and professional organization shows make it look so easy, like 1, 2, 3, everything is in its correct spot, but that is so often not the case.  I watched a professional organizer say that they first pick out the zones that are being done first, then the storage amounts needed for each. These shows can usually buy walls of shelves and clear plastic bins or labels with everything in them. I was working with six fabric bins and several shoeboxes to move things around as well as the packaging eve...

Marie Kondo and the Angels Take Manhattan I don’t know how much I’ve mentioned my decluttering over the past few weeks of my blog, but I’ve been watching Marie Kondo’s Netflix shows and The Minimalists documentary to keep myself inspired and to show myself new techniques and remind myself why I’m removing items from my house. It’s not just because there is so much stuff in there that it makes both my husband and me anxious walking around and looking at the full open closets and drawers and bookcases and everything. We don’t have the fanciest furniture, nor do we need to. It was never about the furniture (though I tried to make it about getting more canvas storage bins—more and more and more until EVERYTHING MATCHED IN THE HOUSE). Honestly it was like a light switch went on as soon as I lost my job and wondered how long I could afford to buy things. I thought “I will sell everything I own, then I will be able to pay for as long as I need to!” But that wasn’t it either. We decided not to...

What is New With You? The universe has a way of teaching you things you never thought possible. I started this blog as a way to heal myself. Really, after writing letters to my dad and siblings about past traumas I had endured, I started this as a mental health journey to share my story so no one else would ever have to feel alone. I never thought it would actually reach someone. It turns out that by blocking a few hundred people and by getting writer’s block, by decluttering the house and by being unemployed, I had some free time to ask people how they were and reconnect with old friends. And old friends reconnected with me??? I had a story of a friend who I met over the course of less than two months. She had been following my life. I hadn’t been quite so attentive to her life, I’ll admit it. But she was always a cool person in my eyes. I don’t know why I do, but some people I just can’t let go of, and she was one of them. I blocked the rest of the people in our “group” over time, bu...

Excellent Tea (Terms and Conditions May Apply) It’s taken me a few days to write this. I got the idea, and instead of plopping on my computer and typing it all out in an hour like I usually do, this one had to marinate. I think I have to do it because it hurts more. I need to feel the pain of this loss, and I have. Unlike the friend I posted about earlier who I had a disagreement with and was unfriended by, this friendship was forged by years of secrets, prayers, brotherhood, and then snip, just gone. I grew up interested in languages. I didn’t have much to say at the time, but I thought that’s what the Bible was for! Looking for colleges, I thought American Sign Language would be my dream choice. Any person could get into Spanish or French or whatever other language, but ASL to a small-town boy in Missouri was hitting it the big-time! And there happened to be ONE college in Missouri that taught it as a major. You might be surprised at this, but last I checked, there were less colleges...

Stop! Wait a Minute We just watched an episode of Queer Eye, and the show is all about finding the beauty within yourself and being content with who you are and finding joy in the now. I got inspired…until I sat down to write this blog. Then I got on my phone and got a push notification from Target. The new weekly ad had come in. Since it’s the beginning of the year, everything is about healthy eating, taking your vitamins, working out, etc. But pizzas are buy one, get one half off. Two weeks ago was the same thing. I LOVE pizza. Even at the core of my identity growing up, I never grew out of my pizza phase like everyone else seems to do. I eat pizza every other day if not once a day. I’m excited! But I started thinking about canvas storage bins again. I know it’s just another obsession, just like getting a grill was, just like narcissism and boundaries was, just like a lot of things in my life have been. I want my house to be HGTV perfect, but I need to be grateful for what I have. I ...

Finding Contentedness in a House Full of Clutter I think I want to clean up my life. I want to buy fabric bins and label everything, and everything that doesn’t belong in a bin, toss. I’ve been doing that with most of the house. Clothing that doesn’t fit? Put into bags. Which bags? That’s complicated by the day. See, I want to do something good with them, but I also need to make money, but I don’t want to put in the effort to sell it on Marketplace or Amazon or any of those places. I also don’t want them to go to homophobic Salvation Army. I wouldn’t mind it going to Goodwill, but that’s a last resort. I want them to go to a place nobody thinks of like CYF or someplace teenagers or adults trying to find jobs would use them instead of them just being sold for $5, not that it’s necessarily a bad thing! It’s just the social worker in me coming out. Then there’s the change. We have to declutter the change, but then that takes a teller’s time to count all the change and us knowing how much ...

Untitled I don’t know what it is, but ever since I found out I’m losing my job AND it was Christmas time, there has been this tension between spending money on sales and not spending money at all, and it’s turned me into a shopaholic for sales. I’ve always been a sucker for sales, ever since my family didn’t grow up with much and we always looked for sales to save a few bucks on what we needed. I was shopping for groceries at Dollar Tree when my husband found me, and he teases me about it to this day. Meanwhile I spent $15 on a pair of brand new jeans at the mall but kept the receipt in case we need to return them. I have enough pants (even though I don’t have jeans) to last me a while. I have shoes enough to last me through several years. I don’t know where they all came from! As I’m decluttering, I’m finding tea and snacks and crackers that I found essential to everyday living for bargain prices, but I haven’t used them yet. Now is my chance to use them! I have a whole fabric bin ful...

I Can’t Be Superman I am not emotionally regulated. Basically what that means is that I don’t have a steady baseline of emotions that I stay at. I have different moods that can switch from an hour long nap to several days. I don’t have bipolar disorder. I just seem to have good days where I can be productive and conquer the world and bad days where I don’t do so hot. Someone close to me pointed out that I was just on a high when I thought maybe I was on a new baseline, and that started me spiraling down. I’ve been trying to hide it from everyone, because the last thing I wanted was for him to be right. I wanted to be productive a few hours each day. I wanted to generally be in a good mood with enough rest and naps, even though I wake up several times each night for a couple hours each. I want to be future thinking and not stuck in the past. Speaking of which, I finally dropped off the last of my stuff at work. I am officially forever free from that job. Every time I tried to do it myse...

1/7/25 Mr. Smith Was Buried in Washington No, not an actual Mr. Smith. President Jimmy Carter was eulogized in Washington D.C. tonight amongst family, politicians, and military personnel. I didn’t get to the parts of the eulogies. I listened to some of the broadcasters’ comments before and during, and I know it’s not the same. I’ve just had a rough day, and it made me so sad to see such a good man laid to rest. How did I know he was a good man? Besides even the news agreeing with that statement, they showed him years ago helping build houses for those without houses. I thought “what a great guy! If money was no issue, I would travel the world, speak languages, and help out people like he’s doing!” No, I have to be honest. That first part is true. I would travel. I would speak other languages. But my heart wasn’t yet in America. It was in other countries. I always thought there was more need in other countries than in my own backyard. And that’s probably the case, don’t get me wrong! Bu...

Losing A Friend I know I won’t be able to do anything until I get this out, so here I go. I’ve been so busy trying to oust toxic people from my life that I never stopped to realize what if I was the toxic one that needed ousted from someone’s life? I lost a friend last night. He unfriended me on Facebook. We got into an argument, he set a boundary, I crossed it. He gave me plenty of warning. He set the boundary the correct way. Looking back, to be friends, one of us would have to change who we would have been our entire lives or one of us would have to change who we were becoming, and neither of those things was going to happen. It’s still sad, and I can’t get it off my mind. I’ve lost many people before. They chose through their own belief systems to disregard my reality, and I tried to respect them for that. The people I lost so far came down to opposing religious beliefs, death, or just drifting apart. This one felt different. I will try not to get into the specifics, because I don’...

Rest This will be short but might take me a while to write. I am burned out trying to make myself productive. I still tie my productivity to my worth, and I don’t know how to stop it. I’m going to bring it up yet again to my therapist tomorrow. It is this constant cycle of everything that I do for fun eventually turns into an expectation, and once that happens, pressure builds until it turns into something I hate. So every hobby turns into something I hate. I don’t hate blogging. I think I just need a day or two to rest. I have been writing letters to my family since the beginning of December, and then I started writing this blog, at least one post a day, sometimes three or four posts, and I love doing it, but I don’t know how to stop. I told my husband that I’m over my past, and then the past two nights, I’ve woken up multiple times to my breathing being highly erratic and strangled thinking about the job I left. I’ve fooled myself. I have put most of my past behind me, but have just ...

Criminally Insane or Mental Health Issues? In preparation for watching the second Joker movie with Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga in it, we watched the first one, simply titled “Joker” (2019). This movie highlights the story of one man who loses temporary coverage of mental health medication, social services, and job security because of budget cuts and mental health issues. The movie does nothing to excuse his behavior. It seeks to shed light on a society already on the brink of meltdown because of these issues, and the hope of a rich mayor who has lost touch with the reality of most of its citizens by reinforcing the stereotype that the poor are simply “clowns.”  Even as a person who struggles with many mental health issues, or particularly because I struggle with so many, I found this movie difficult to watch the first time and almost unbearable to watch the second time. I thought it would be interesting in a “Wicked” way, not unbearably realistic and cruel. Cutting funding of soc...

Essential Tremors, Dystonia, and FND So I’ve been getting Botox every three months since 2021. 2024 was its own hell at work. I had ten minutes of “extra time” at work, so they decided to give me a two hour responsibility “as a backup” in case the person was gone. If the person was gone, obviously some of my work wouldn’t get done as long as she was gone. She retired at the end of February. It was just assumed that since I was her backup, that I would take that responsibility. I remember laughing in the face of the boss who told me that. They didn’t see what was so funny about expecting someone with a full plate to magically have two extra hours each day to do work. So my work piled up. August came, and a coworker with mysterious health conditions who was still trying to get diagnosed died. A five-minute meeting later, and all of us were expected to get back to work. A week later, I was called into a meeting with an HR representative and given a written warning. These things were behin...

Botox for Blepharospasms I’m so lucky I found this Facebook group for people with Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) that’s centered around finding the positive side of the disorder. I needed it. Let me tell you a little bit of my story. It started at work in 2021. I was walking across the bridge to home, thinking about work, stressed to the max, when all the sudden I lost control of my eyes. They started blinking, and they wouldn’t stop. I tried to make them stop. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t see where I was going, but it was terrifying that I couldn’t control this blinking. Blinking is an involuntary thing, but when you blink several times, there’s something in your eyes, or you’re about to cry. I thought I was about to cry. I wasn’t. I was just stressed. This made me more stressed. The more stressed I was, the worse it seemed to blink. I called up my psychiatrist who referred me to a neurologist. Do you KNOW how scared I was to be seen by a neurologist??? Those doctors are people ...

Addicted to God I just woke up from a church service. That’s a good thing…right? No. I have church trauma. I was raised in the church. I learned that being gay was either a choice or a demon. I turned out gay and learned that it was neither. I had to convince my father that it wasn’t a choice. So now… The first church wasn’t good enough, so we traveled an hour and a half to a different church. This one had the right teachings. This one had different friends. Say hello friends! I had my first coffee here. Real men drink coffee. I “liked” coffee. I wanted to be a real man like my father. That church suddenly didn’t work out. We had moved to be closer to that church, but we went back to a different church in the town we grew up in. An hour and a half away. Say hello to new friends! This one had a parking lot on a steep hill and was housed in a Branson show! I remember the steep climb up and down back and forth to the car. We spent the entire day there because we had services at night too!...

I'm Sorry I should be taking a break, but I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, like I shouldn’t be, listening to therapy reels, like I shouldn’t be, and one came up that completely changed my perspective, so of course I have to write about it. I am emotional. I won’t apologize for it. I feel emotionally complicated, so sometimes my blogs come across more from a woman’s perspective than from a man’s, especially when it talks about narcissism and how I have been hurt by men. For that, I cannot apologize. My life has been one way, and I can only write what I know. Perhaps it was because I was conceived directly after the miscarriage of my sister, another thing that nobody in our family ever talks about, that I got more estrogen than the average guy. Who knows? I don’t care. Whether or not that is the case, I am who I am, and I will not apologize for it. I will, however, apologize for making men out to be the bad guy in the conversation. That was never my intent! The video I watch...

My Past Abusive Relationship I am reaching burnout. I don’t know why, but lovely PTSD decided to trigger thinking about him: my first boyfriend. I haven’t said much about him to anybody. If I have, it was a casual “It was a transition period in my life” or “I lived with him for a couple months.” Just now I realized what he did to me, and why he upset me so much. It was shortly after the car accident where my coworker died and my hospital stint where I stayed in the psych ward from Wednesday night until Saturday morning. My psych ward story is another one that needs to be told, but not today. I started finding solace getting free DVDs from the Columbia library, which was about a half hour from my apartment. It was just a couple minutes from his. When I went on Grindr, I just expected the usual college guys. I didn’t expect a mature car salesman who had his life together and was recently single. I spent a little time with him, and I’m not afraid to admit that I took advantage of his hosp...