PMDD Presentation

Happy Tuesday everyone it's not Tuesday,

In my psychology of women class, we were given a list of possible topics to do a project on and I saw, "pms in men and women" and my hand shot up and I asked if I can do my project on PMD and my professor said yes!

So here is the presentation part of my project.

Choose Happiness (A Rant)

Happy Tuesday everyone, motto

The phrase, "Choose Happiness" makes me unhappy. In fact, it makes me angry.

When I google searched, "choose happiness" for images to add to this post I was flooded with (air quote) "inspirational quotes" like, "happiness is a choice", "you are as happy as you choose to be" and "I am in charge of how I feel and today I am choosing to be happy". Let's just say I decided against the photos for this post.

Happiness is not a choice for people who live with a mental illness. Many people with mental illnesses don't have control over their emotions; they don't have the luxury to "choose happiness" or "be positive" or whatever else kind of mantra you've pulled out your butt or stitched on a throw pillow. Gandhi was a pervert anyway.

I don't always get to choose. So when I'm stuck between choosing depression or hmm depression, hearing ¹Yoga Jones trying to enlighten me with her wisdom will only upset me more with its ineffectiveness.

And even when I'm plain unhappy (not depressed just normally unhappy) and have the capability to change my mood I still don't want to hear it. I will be unhappy if I want to be unhappy. Sometimes you need wallow in your sadness. It's actually healthy to wallow a little bit and let all those feelings out. Sometimes you need to watch ²My Sister's Keeper with a tub of ice cream and cry. So hearing Yoga Jones trying to enlighten me with her wisdom will only piss me off because I'll be unhappy if I wanna be unhappy. It's my party and I'll cry if I want to. Yoga Jones can take her monogrammed pillow and shove it up her downward dog!

Also telling me not to do something is a bad idea. I'm one of those stubborn women who will do what you told me not to do because you told me not to do it. Telling me to, "cheer up" or, "smile" is about as effective as telling me to calm down. Oh, you want me to calm down? Well, I have been calm up to the point where you told me to calm down. You have yet to see me be uncalm! Don't tell me how to feel.

Totally Ky
P.S As you can see I learned how to make those numbers that are above the words which I learned are called superscripts.

¹Yoga Jones is a character in the Netflix show Orange is the New Black. She's the yoga instructor and hippie Buddhist of Litchfield.

²My Sister's Keeper is the saddest movie I have ever seen that I have in my movie library.

Doctors + Therapy

Happy Tuesday everyone,

Just a little talk today on some mental health stuff.

I've given out some advice on doctors and therapy that I've derived from my experience with the diagnostic process and having a mental illness so I thought I would share here.

One advice I gave was to a friend that has been going through the process at our school and when she was telling me about it she said they might give her medication and if they do she won't take them. Not good! If you don't want to take medication for whatever reason you must express it to your doctor. You must be 100% honest with your doctor. I know it's embarrassing when they ask teens and young adults if they are sexually active but they NEED TO KNOW and you HAVE TO TELL THEM THE TRUTH. The one person you cannot lie to is your doctor. If they think you are taking a medication they gave you and you're not, that could negatively impact their treatment. It's best to tell your doctor you don't want the medication than not taking it behind their back.

My friend had some reserves about medication, which makes sense! That is completely valid. Medication can be scary and have side effects. I was misdiagnosed with bipolar and given a medication that made me gain weight (which made me more depressed) and heightened my anxiety (one of the things we were trying to treat).  So we (my mom and I) expressed to the doctor we needed a new treatment plan because this one is not working. Doctors know the first medication they give you may not be the one for you. It can take time and trial and error to figure out what is the right treatment for you. What you have to do is be patient, honest and LOUD! Doctors can have thick heads and often times small ears. It can be hard for your wishes to be heard so BE LOUD! If something is important to you don't give up. If you don't like a side effect or how the meds make you feel tell your doctor. Tell them LOUDLY and several times. I got off the bad meds and got back on track to a better diagnosis because my mom fought for me.

I'm my experience therapists are much less frustrating than doctors. My therapist agreed that I wasn't bipolar and the drugs where doing the opposite of helping me. Her suporting us on that was also helpful to get back on track.

What my advise to anyone hesitant about therapy is not every therapist is the same. They have different styles and energy. You may not like the first therapist you go to and that can make you want to quit therapy. DON'T QUIT! You may just like a different therapist so you should go to another. I once watched a youtuber who was saying one therapist she went to pretty much only listened and didn't give any person information back and she didn't like that. For that person that therapist wasn't the right fit. Medication and therapists are a lot alike that way. You just have to find the right fit for you. That can be applied to doctors somewhat but from my experience most of them have thick heads and small ears. Our health system isn't perfect. It's difficult.

I hope this talk was helpful in that regard. Since I mentioned my own journey so much I may write another post on it. I talk about it all the time but I don't think I've done a full blown post dedicated to it.

Totally Ky

The (abridged) poetic autobiography of my life this (so) [thus] far . . . It's a working title. (Part 2 - Script)

Happy Tuesday everyone . . . Again.

See also: Part 1

I just finished my INTERPERSONAL COLAGE PRESENTATION for my Communications 135 class and I presented it off of here so that's what the last post was and now I want to give it some context with my script. Keep in mind I went off my script a bit and because of that, I had to cut some stuff out so the script is like a rough draft vs what I actually said. I included my rubric at the end if you're interested.

The (abridged) poetic autobiography of my life this (so) [thus] far . . . It's a working title

Happy Tuesday everyone,

See also: Part 2 

·

 

 

Totally Ky

I Forgot To Title This

Happy Tuesday everyone it's not Tuesday,


I've been having some bad days lately as far as mental health goes. I'm overwhelmed and stressed because of college and friend drama and it's had me really down. I'm feeling a lot better today so I thought I'd share my tips on how I get out of a funk.

1.) Stay Balanced
     I'm lumping all of these together because these are what a doctor would tell you to do so they aren't really from me.

     A.) Don't forget to eat and drink. You may not want to. You may be too tired. But it's so important. your body can't run on fumes. When you don't eat and drink enough your body gets weak and all it wants to do is sleep. This keeps you locked into that depressed state.
           a.) Eat healthily it'll make you feel proud of yourself. (Eat a little chocolate.).

          b.) Go to your favorite restaurant with a friend. Go somewhere you've never been before.

     B.) Don't sleep too much. Make sure you get enough sleep. That's why I labeled this "Stay Balanced". Some people sleep all day when they're down. Some people never sleep. Both are unhealthy and keep you in your rut.

     C.) Bathe regularly. This isn't just because you smell. You do. But that's not the only reason. Showers are soothing. After you're sick you wash off all the germs and stuff in your hair and feel so much better. It's the same thing. You feel so much better when you're nice and clean and smell good.

2.) Go Outside
    Go for a walk. Go to the park. Pull your bike out of the shed. Go grocery shopping. Just get out. Personally, I feel better when I can walk away from my problems for a little bit. Get some room to think and breathe. Now don't go running to another state. Run around the block. Get some sun and fresh air. Look at the sky. Remember that you love all the shades of blue. Make a story in the clouds. There are many bunnies up there that need names. Or go out at night and see some stars. Say good morning to the sun or say goodnight. The sun makes beautiful entrances and exits. I tried so hard not so say sunset and sunrise.

3.) Do Some Art
     I don't care how much artistic skills you have. Get a coloring book. They have millions around right now. And you don't have to be an artist to literally throw some paint on a canvas. Let loose on some paper and don't care whether or not it looks good. Relax and just let your brain think in colors. Do some drawing wars with friends. (This is when you drama something and have your friend draws something else to attack it. For example, I draw a balloon and my friend draws some scissors. Now I have to draw something to destroy the scissors and it goes on like that.) Go to Michaels and buy some stickers and put them on your cat. Or buy one of those kit things from Michaels that they make for kids. You know where you can make a castle out of foam. Trace your hand and doodle inside of it. Write your name cool. Get some chalk and take to your sidewalk. It doesn't matter. Make a child's drawing with crayons and put it on your fridge. Do it.

4.) Have Some "Me Time"
     It isn't selfish to take some time away from the world. Take a break. Re-cooperate.

     A.) Watch your favorite movie. Watch a movie that makes you cry. Watch movies from your childhood.

     B.) Personally, I love to read. So it's helpful for me to get out of my head and into someone else's. Read the oldest book you have. Read a kids book. Read your favorite book. Read the biggest book you have. Read the smallest one. Read the first book that comes to mind. Read the last book you read for school. Raid you're friends books. Go to the library and pick up the first book you see. Read your old diary.

     C.) Personally, I love to write. Write a poem (It doesn't have to rhyme. Maybe challenge yourself and make it rhyme.). Write about your day. Write in a diary. Write a grocery list. Write a to-do list.

5.) Go to your happy place.
     Mine are libraries and bookstores. I'm in my happy place right now. Where ever it is that you feel safest and happiest, go there. If you don't have one outside your room go find one. Try a coffee shop, a cafe, a diner, your friend's house, the park.

6.) Spend Time With Friends
     When I'm feeling down I tend to isolate myself. Isolation is no good. Get your girls together have a movie night. Call up your best friend from elementary who's number you still remember. Buy your friend lunch. Take your friend to your happy place. If you don't have many friends, make some. Go to a dog park. Pet someone's dog and strike up a conversation with their human. Boom friend. Go to your favorite store and find someone who's buying the T-shirt of your favorite show. Tell them you like that show. Boom friend. Most people work or go to school. Ask out a classmate or a co-worker. Find some people and surround yourself with them.

7.) Do what makes you happy. It can be something small. It can be something big and tall. Get some food and water, shower and go find some happiness. If you're afraid to go alone ask for some help.

That's all for today I'm tired and my back hurts from this chair.

Totally Ky

P.S. Currently listening to "Parentheses" by The Blow. I like the line, "If something in the deli aisle makes you cry".

"If you're going through hell . . . Keep Going."

Happy Tuesday everyone,

When you talk to someone with a mental illness. They usually reference that one bad period in their life where they hit rock bottom. For me, that was middle school. Before I was put through the year-long hassle of what do I have and how do I treat it. I went through a period in my life where I was just in the worst place a person could be. Now I obviously came out of this and lived a pretty stable life for about five years. There were tiny little dips here and there but I never went back to that place.

Sticks and Stones

Happy Tuesday everyone,

I've been overweight for as long as I can remember. Kids can be cruel so I was harassed in elementary school, but no more than anyone else. It was when I got to middle school that I was really bullied because of my size. A day didn't go by without harsh words from people who judged me based on my appearance. I was terrified to go to high school because I thought the ridicule would get worse. You hear so many horrible tales from the adult generation who suffered tremendously in high school. But when I got to high school, it's hard to describe. The bullying just stopped. And for a while I was confused. It was hard for me to trust people because I was just waiting for them to hurt me. I have not been bullied once in my high school experience. And that’s pretty amazing.

I still see the boys from my P.E class in middle school walk the hallways of high school. They go by me without a second glance, no recognition sparking in their eyes. I used to walk by them with my head down and they’d pick me out of a crowd and say even the littlest thing that would break my heart. Now I walk by them with my head held high and watch to see if they remember me and the cruel things they said to me. They don't.

This brings me to what I want to write about today. I want to discuss the fact that I remember every single person who called me twinky in the eighth grade. I remember every incident that sent me to the bathroom stall crying. Yet they don't even remember who I am. Writing this I’m remembering a specific group of boys in my P.E. class. They said such horrible things to me that I just don’t understand how they can look me in the eye now. I bumped into one of these boys accidentally once several years after their ridicule, he apologized to me and kept on walking. I stood there staring at his back completely dumbfounded. He didn’t remember a word he said to me.

I realized then that most bullies don’t understand what they’re doing. They don’t understand that a silly joke to them could just break that person’s heart. My friend once told me, after I got home and sobbed into my pillow because of what they said to me, that they were “just joking”. I told her “just joking to one person is another person’s heartbreak”.

“You don’t know a person’s daily struggle.” Is what my wise teacher Mrs. Smith always says and of all the things she said to me that has stuck on hard. Maybe those boys didn’t know that I was hurting enough without their words. To them, it could have been a “just kidding” situation. That could have been why they don’t recognize me now as the girl they hurt so much.

I felt the urge to write this entry after a recent event that occurred in my fifth-period class. One of the senior boys walked over to my table, sat down, and looked at my very good friend and said, “Hey, you know (I almost wrote his name then realized that would be rude) so-and-so . . . “ Here we go! Another joke from the annoying seniors in the corner. Would these boys ever grow up? I’ve built up a tolerance for these immature boys but what he said next, words cannot describe the anger I felt. “Well, he thinks you’re cute.” That boy was lucky I didn’t leap across the table and claw out his eyes.

I told my teacher, “Mrs. Smith, I swear to god you better get so-and-so off my table or I am going to punch him in the face.” Or something like that. The threat wasn’t my most creative but he seemed pretty alarmed and scurried off. It took me a minute to get under control. I realized then people were laughing. My friend was rolling her eyes. A girl on the next table asked me what he said to make me so upset and I told her. She laughed too.

I know, I know. It seems as if I’veoverreactedd. But like Mrs. Smith said, “You don’t know a person’s daily struggle.” No one in the class understood what that phrase meant to me. I heard those words or a variation of those words every day for most of my life. I hadn’t heard them in a while so I wasn’t ready for the response I would have.

It usually involved a group of two or more boys. One spots someone they see as "undesirable", to say it nicely. They nudge their friend, nod to the "undesirable" and say, “Hey that’s your girlfriend”. Or said "undesirable" approaches and the one who sees her first says, “Hey, my friend has a crush on you.” I was chosen as the "undesirable" so many times that just a couple simple words were weighted down with the amount of times I’d heard them. The words were weighted down until they became heavy enough to leave cuts that turned into scars on my heart.

When I was real young I didn’t understand that having some extra weight was seen as socially unacceptable. All I understood was I got more tired than any of my friends on the playground and buying clothes was a different experience for me. It took time for the other kids to convince me that I was fat. I wasn’t. I was at most overweight. I still feel overweight but looking at pictures of myself in middle school I see a big change. I know I’m still overweight but instead of crying over it I’m exercising more and eating better. Like I said in my last entry I love myself now. But as it took time for other’s to convince me I was fat it took time for others, my friends who love me, to convince me that I wasn’t. I would make a lot of self-deprecating comments about my weight. And at first, I was surprised when close friends would try to persuade me that I wasn’t what I’d grown up being called. I understood who my true friends were then. The one’s that helped me to look in the mirror for longer than a second because I hated what I saw. Words cannot describe how thankful I am to them.

Until next time,

Totally Ky

Self Harm

Happy Tuesday everyone,

Have you ever looked back on a time of your life with a grimace? I'll go ahead and classify that as a rhetorical question. Everyone in their lifetime has done things they've regretted. Whether they embarrassed themselves or just made a wrong decision.

When I look back at my years in middle school I'm overwhelmed by the need to go back and do it again. To change it. Fix my mistakes. Because my life was really a mess back then. I know it sounds weird to say that because I'm only seventeen and don't have as much wisdom as the average person. But I've grown a lot from those two years.

In middle school I hated everything about myself that made me special. I just wanted to be like everyone else. But I stuck out like a sore thumb and was a perfect target to be bullied and ridiculed. But I didn't stick out because I was different. I stuck out because I couldn't except that I was different. I didn't embrace it or celebrate it the way I do now. The reason I’ve never been bullied in high school is because I love who I am. I’m loud and weird and that’s just me. I’m unapologetic. This attitude would have come in handy when I was in middle school. Confidence is the best way to ward of bullies.

I was struggling so hard to be accepted. To be the way I thought I was supposed to be that I was completely miserable and unhappy. This leads me to the main point of this blog.

One day I broke my mechanical pencil into plastic shards as I tried to fight the tears back so no one in my English class would ask what that boy said to me during P.E. I clenched my hands tight around the sharp edges and cut my palm. I let out the breath I had been holding and looked down at my bleeding palm. I had found a way to express my pain. After the sharpened plastic dulled I used nail cutting scissors. Then I went to a hardware store by my house and bought a small pocket knife that may have been meant to open boxes. I was completely terrified the cashier would see what I was. Why was a young nervous looking girl buying a knife? I think I was begging him to see. Hoping he could have the power to stop me.

That went on for two years. I bring this up because today I made a huge step. I kept that little knife with the rusted triangle blade for three years after I stopped. I could never throw it away even though I knew I would never use it again. Sometimes when I was feeling down I would carry it around with me in my pocket. Holding it in my hand to feel safe. You can see me doing the same thing today with whatever necklace I'm wearing at the time. Sometime freshman year I realized it was ridiculous that a knife made me feel safe when it represented the complete opposite. So I threw it into a drawer and every time I did spring cleaning I found it and it rotated into different places around my room until yesterday I looked at the knife I had forgotten amongst matchbox cars, Pez dispensers, bottles of bubbles and pocket notebooks. This spring cleaning was a serious one. I got rid of stuff I’d held onto for years so as to declutter my life per se. I looked at the headbands from when I had long hair that would not work with my current style, the three pairs of jeans that were several sizes to big (YES!), the single socks that were to small (my feet got bigger but my waist got smaller?) that I must have been saving to free Dobby, and the dresses I never wear because they don’t have pockets. I didn’t need them taking up space in my life/room. I felt the same way about my old safety blanket.

This is why today is a great day. My friend (I love you!) has been going through a really hard time like I did and I wanted to show her that it does get better. I showed her the knife and explained to her what it represented for me and threw it in the trash. Doing it for her made it a lot easier. When it was done and I saw the smile on her face it felt amazing.

Years of holding onto a painful memory undone by one simple decision to let go. I truly felt free.

It got better for me and it will get better for you.

"It Gets Better" music video by Todrick Hall

Until next time,
Totally Ky

First Post

My ultimate dream when I close my eyes and imagine a perfect life, is to be a writer. It's my aspiration and my passion. I have stories running around my head all day long, more especially when I am trying to go to sleep. Sometimes this causes me to have a bit of insomnia, one of the symptoms I think of being a writer if not just being creative in general. Double-sided coin and all that. I have characters talking to me in my head almost 24/7. They take me to new places and convince me to experience life the way they would see the world through their eyes.

I once asked advice from a man I found very inspiring who interviewed me for his book. One of the things he told me was to read every day, write every day, maybe even start a blog. I thought, "hmm . . . a blog."

But I was too busy trying not to grow up to think about it. This was my sophomore year in high school. As of the day I write this, I am a junior. I take two Advanced Placement (AP) class and one honors. Only one of those is in a subject I'm actually good at which just happens to be English. And these classes have put me through more stress than I could have ever imagined sophomore year. The pressure of college-level classes pushed me to think about my future. I am finally learning how to drive. I've pretty much set my mind on college plans.

So I revisited the blog idea. And here we are. The man I spoke of, let's call him Jeff. He told me blogging can be "vulgar" if not done properly. He also said, "If you're going to tell the world something, I always think it's better to tell them about your ideas rather than your random experiences.  I think writing about your experiences is great, of course, but provided it helps other people come to some ideas about their own experiences, and not just because people should know about what we do all day.  I think most of us are actually pretty boring, and so I don't need to know what someone's doing all day. I do need to know if that person realized that something she's doing all day reveals something beautiful or true or happy or sad about what it means to be a human being." I don't think he understood how inspiring I found this simple email he sent me.

So that's what I want to do with my blog . . . From now on. I felt my blog needed an intro before I really get into it. My English teacher says it's important to know who your author is. If you have a general sense of them you can better understand their writing. 

So here's a brief (I hope) description of myself.