Why me? Why me? Why? Why? WHY??? Why me, why not someone else? Why can’t I have the good healthy life? Why did I get picked for this? Didn’t I give enough already? Must I give more? How much more? WHYYYY????

For years I asked this question. It was like a huge snowball of words, rolling around in my head, every minute, every hour, day and night, a constant mantra that never relented. The darkness crawled by minute by slow minute as my brain rolled, why – why – WHY??? – why me? – whyyyyyy ???

There was never an answer, just the void of an unanswered question. The same question. Over and over. Why????

For years, there was no answer. There was only the question. I struggled with the question. I just wanted to know why. WHY?? Why was I sick? Why.

I didn’t wake up one day and have answers. Although I tried to process through this infernal borderline obsession with WHY during my short stint in therapy, those efforts didn’t get anywhere; it’s like they couldn’t get deep enough to actually address the broken record itself. It wasn’t until over 3 years had passed and I’d been unceremoniously punted out of a bad personal situation that I really cracked open enough, way deep down, to be able to apply a salve and work on healing. Read the rest of this entry

When Triggered, we MUST Keep On Keepin’ On.

I don’t say that lightly. I know how hard it is. Two hours ago I was sobbing my eyeballs out, and an hour ago I was still sure that chucking my sites and everything that I have going on (or should I say, what little I have going on) was the only viable way to move forward.

It took a little time, and it took a lot of chewing and asking questions — of myself and of God. But way deep down, I knew that no matter how upset I got, I wasn’t in charge. What happens to me, and the direction I am supposed to go, is all up to GOD, not me. I can try to engineer everything and everybody, and yet God is still the Master In Command, and He will get me where I’m supposed to be, one way or another. (Kicking and screaming, or willingly — it’s up to me!)

Even as I bawled, I had to concede (begrudgingly at first) that this situation was a matter of faith, and harder still, I had to allow my faith to go to God in search of the answer. Oh man, was that hard! … because what if I didn’t like the answer???

God nudged me through the "coincidental" appearance of an email in my inbox just then.

Read the rest of this entry

If you are like me, clutter, "failure to clean," "lack of follow-through," "God-awful mess" … whatever fits :) … is a big problem. It’s no wonder! Our brains are already flooded with stress hormones, we start each day already tired out, and frankly have so much crap going on in our heads that the smaller "details," like cleaning, are way way down at the bottom of the list. W 

Not that we don’t find it important! We do. We just can’t seem to get there. We’re busy surviving, and all…

I wish I had had this simple guide back during the "bad times." I do clean now (not Martha Stewart quality, but still in the "normal" range), but back then, I couldn’t even break it down into these simple AND EASY steps.

It’s a quick read. Maybe print it up and tack it to your fridge!

Dr Oz’s De-Clutter Checklist

Ellen Martin, organizing consultant for TLC’s "Hoarding: Buried Alive" series, shares 3 steps to help you de-clutter your life. Free your space and…

The title sounds ominous, doesn’t it? The Great Downgrade. *shiver*

We’ve been taught all our lives to move up, up, UP! in life. Society measures success by accomplishment. If you’re not moving onward and upward, you’re a failure!

Pretty hard-core, eh?

And UTTERLY RIDICULOUS. As young idealistic people we idolize these measuring sticks… and we think nothing of looking down on anyone who doesn’t measure up. When we’re young, so full of vigor and life and potential, we haven’t experienced enough to have the necessary perspective to know those measuring sticks are pure bullshit. But we know what we have seen, and we believe that makes us experts, so we march right along not even realizing how utterly stupid we look. :)

I decided to make a Great Downgrade a few weeks ago.

I am an EMT. I developed PTSD as a result of a bad call in July 2006. I didn’t even have patient contact that night; I was the fire dept. photographer. It was that bad. Since then, I’ve been unable to go on medical calls.

This bothered me terribly every single freaking day since July 21, 2006, but there wasn’t a doggone thing I could do about it. I was trying to fix my head. But my head wasn’t listening to me, and there was no way in hell that I could go on calls.

I’ve loved being an EMT and wanted to be out there, doing my thing, making a difference. Helping other people is what I get out of bed for. It is my purpose. And EMS has been my calling for as long as I remember. I’ve been certified for over 17 years.

But now I couldn’t do it. I won’t go into the painful scenarios here, but bottom line, every call I did try wound up badly in my head. It was obvious I was best served staying home.

I forced my utterly broken PTSD brain through EMT recert in January 2008. One word: HELL. Ugh.

Read the rest of this entry

Found this in a journal from August 14, 2008:

I’ve been sick the last 3 days. I adore people who can suck it up, put on their big girl panties and trudge off through daily life when they are sick; I’ve never been able to do that, not even when I was a kid. My immune system is touchier than most, so if I try to push through it, I am invariably 3/4 dead the next day. Seriously. Literally. Dead. Bad, bad stuff.

I learned this the really hard way back in the winter of 2003 when I contracted pneumonia twice. Not once. Twice. I spent six months in bed. I never, never, ever want to go through that again.

Incidentally, the Pneumonia Winter was also when I discovered the sheer joy of laptop computers. Seeing that I was going to be in bed for a protracted period of time, I bought a used tangerine iBook, so at least I could entertain my brain with the internet. I spent an enormous amount of time on the Country Business forums, which is how I caught the attention of editor Susan Wagner and ended up profiled in the March-April ’03 E-Commerce issue.

And no, they didn’t show pictures of me with my sickly ass in bed, although that would have been the most accurate picture at the time.

Anyway.

Life the last 2+ years has been a river of mental bits and pieces. It is barely contained by its banks, and I float and bob and flail wildly from one bit to the next, trying to hold on for dear life. The result is a thought and work pattern very similar to those with ADD. I bounce and boing from one thing to the next as they occur to me, and they occur to me when I am reminded by some random-ass thing I’m doing in the here & now.

Let’s not go into coping strategies right now — that is fodder for about sixteen blog posts over @ PTSDJourney. :)

The result of this roiling, random mess in my head is that I feel super *awesome* when I actually accomplish something. 99.999% of things I just barely work a little bit on, and then it gets dropped when I bounce to something else. So to actually see a project through start-to-finish, or get a project to the place I want it? is kick-butt.

Tonight I finally got one of my major website projects to where I want it, appearance-wise.

Five stars for me!!

I’ve been running this particular site for about 20 months now. It’s been through 4 templates. FOUR. Not counting the ones that I “tried on for size” for a few minutes and promptly abandoned. And finally, a template, with the colors I wanted — popped up. That, in a nutshell, was what I wanted. It looked and felt right. (Note: I’m not talking about this/The Bailey Daily site, I’m talking about different site that I haven’t discussed or divulged before. And it’s staying secret for awhile. Sorry!)

So I guess the moral of the story is, Persistence Pays! Hang in there!

Sometimes, especially with software and websites, sometimes you have to wait a good long while for the software to catch up to what you see in your mind’s eye. That’s what I was fighting here; it’s a WordPress site and there just weren’t any templates that looked quite right. Then one day I found this one, and tonight I got the bug in my bonnet to install it and fix it up.

I do still have to Widgetize the sidebars, but Automattic assures me that doing so is a fairly easy process.

As I want to relish the feeling of accomplishment for a while, and not erase it by inadvertently breaking the site (because you know if I start monkeying with it and break it, then I’m going to get pissed off and have to nail down where the problem is), I’m going to work on Widgetizing at a later date.

Actually it will be fairly soon, because I need to install Adsense and my Amazon links ASAP. The site has actually earned me about $8 in Adsense over 20 months’ time. (LOL!)

So, there’s hope for us bouncy flounderers. Hang in there. You’re bound to finish something eventually. :) ##

The Nightmares are back.

My nightly nightmares/night terrors ended September 20, 2008. There was a major life event in my family that occurred, and it was like someone flipped a switch in my head: Nightly Horrow Show = OFF.

It was not fixed by a pill, a ritual, therapy, controlled breathing, visualization, none of that. One of my major external influences changed, and apparently that made the ol’ amygdala calm down a little bit. Or something.

But tonight was night #4 of Nightmares & Disturbing Crap, and dammit, I’ve had enough of it. Nobody’s getting burned up or blown up, but it’s just shy of that. I wake up totally worn out and upset. I sit on the side of my bed trying to manually process them, "it was just a dream, it was just a dream, it isn’t real."

The "not real" part is a tough sell. My brain reallllly thinks…

Read the rest of this entry

I noticed from this site’s stats that a few visitors are searching for ‘Pharmawest Pharmacy’, and I assume y’all are wondering if they are for real, and reputable. After all, who isn’t nervous ordering medications on the internet? (I won’t even go into the visions/nightmares I have in my head about this. Bottom line, I order basically no medication & supplements online.)

But once you make the decision to start looking for meds in Canada, well, you can’t help but ask questions. You should ask questions!!!

Read the rest of this entry

Ugggghhhhh. This bug has skidded into a full-blown head cold + bronchitis. I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t hear, and oh yeah, I can’t breathe. I have evolved into a first-class mouth breather. (Yuck!) And I’m reacting to something I ate; I have hives all over my mouth???? I can’t imagine why, as I haven’t eaten anything new in the last week+.

Anyway, don’t be worried if I don’t poke my head up here for a few days. I feel rotten and pretty much barely have the energy to roll myself up like a burrito in the covers and stare glassy-eyed at the TV. Bleh. ##

For years I’ve avoided mirrors, not wanting to see what was reflected back, because I’ve been thoroughly disgusted with what was shown there. I mean, repulsed. So my solution was to just not look, and if I didn’t see it, it wasn’t really there. I could continue to mentally see myself as the pretty, curvy little thing I was in college — even though I wasn’t.

In the past couple of years, I’ve taken much closer stock, and finally this summer I think it finally sunk in that yes, everybody else really does see me looking that nasty EVERY DAY, ALL THE TIME. That really was me. And, Ewwwwwwwww.

So it was probably not a big surprise that one day this fall, I finally up and got pissed off enough to change it.

Today I shucked my jeans off as the shower was heating up, and was turning to head over to the scale, when something caught my eye. My thighs were narrower. Thinner, smaller, whatever — they were not as far across <——–> in the mirror. ‘Whoa! Where’d they go?’ I thought, and really looked in the mirror again to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. No, they really were a little smaller! Huh.

So I stepped on the scale. Sure enough, 2 lbs down from Tuesday.

So I’m losing about a 1/2 lb a day, which is fine. That’s 3.5 lbs/week, just a bit shy of what I’d been hoping for initially (5 lbs/week) but still totally workable. If this is the rate my body is comfortable at — seriously, that’s A-OK.

The holidays are going to be really tough though. I know, everybody bemoans the holidays :-P this is hardly new territory. But honestly I’ve never been trying to lose weight through the holidays before, and dangit, I’m leery of slowing progress. I’m so dang happy to be losing it, that I just can’t reconcile giving that up.

But then I think of stuffing, and turkey, and pumpkin pie ………………. OMG. These have been the joyous staples of the holidays my whole life. I’ve never cut back on food during the holidays. Ever.

(And don’t even make quips about "gee, no wonder you got where you are." Not true. My weight gain has been no different over the holidays than any other time of year, and for over 2.5 decades I was able to pig out at the holidays and not gain an ounce.)

But then, today, I had a couple hot dogs (no bun) & onions with mustard and a couple dill pickles and ….. you know, I was full, for a long time. It’s been a good 5.5 hrs. and I’m first now getting hungry again. After a couple hot dogs and pickles?! I wonder if the food was put in front of me, if I’d even eat that much, anyway!

I’m kind of thinking that maybe I should go ahead and make a dish of stuffing (going to make it w/ tons of celery, whole wheat bread, and w/ ground turkey mixed in) but then just plan on freezing 3/4 of it in small serving-size portions. Then I can grab one when I have a taste for it. And that way I get the happy-happy of holiday smells and tastes up-front, but it doesn’t go to waste, either. (And it’s less cooking I have to do later, too. Hah!)

So I’m kind of thinking that even with it being the holidays, that I probably won’t take bucketloads in serving sizes anyhow. It is still just as much the holidays if I still eat the things I like — everything :) — but not in mountainous portions. It’s not about volume, it’s about enjoying what you do eat. Hmmmmm.

For what it’s worth, I did pick up a small jug of Egg Nog at the grocery store. You know, the dairy case kind. :) It has like 180 cal. per 1/2 cup serving (OMG!!!) but, I decided that even if I only drink a little bit at a time, I am still enjoying it and it’s still worth buying.

(There’s definitely a pattern here — a belief that if I don’t wolf down every little scrap of the item before it spoils [4-5 days] that it’s not worth being bought in the first place; as if I am only deserving to eat apples and ground beef. That’s just not true and I have to break my brain of thinking that way.)

On October 29th I posted about having lost 11 lbs. I was so stinkin’ proud of how quick that first 10 had come off, and frustrated with (at that point) a 1-2 week plateau… but I thought I’d be able to get right back on the Fast Drop Train.

Didn’t happen.

I spent the next 7 days, ’til about Nov. 6th, gaining weight. I actually gained 4 lbs. back total (so I was at a net loss of 7). Essentially, I wasted/lost a month on a plateau, then 4 lb. gain. Urrrghhh!! That was seriously maddening.

It was all food-related, of course, I was eating too much and too much of the wrong thing. Even complex carbs just stick to me if I don’t eat them at about 1:10 with protein.

I finally figured this carb thing out though. It’s not just that I "love carbs" or am a "Carbohydrate Addict" or even that I’m "pre-diabetic" (the last being my mother’s explanation for the panoply of odd symptoms).

I’m Sugar Sensitive. Sugar is a drug to my brain. Literally. This is a brain chemistry thing… low baseline serotonin and beta-endorphins, leading to more serotonin and beta-endorphin receptors in each synapse, which creates an extra-big "hit" of serotonin and its partner beta-endorphin when I eat sugar or simple carbs. I am an addict. Physically, addicted. Because of how my brain has been built from the start …….. structure which incidentally also causes depression (check), anxiety (check), and clearly contributes to my PTSD.

So now that I understand my tempestuous relationship with sugar, I’m finding it much easier not only to not eat it (I don’t want it), but when I do crave it, I’m listening to my body and just eating a little. No drama, no resisting, no struggle … just up and eat some. *shrug* This is a long-term battle, and I’m not going to be able to cut it out 100% right now. But I can slowly work in that direction. :)

Since that discovery, I’ve dropped 6 lbs in 10 days. For a net total of 13 GONE.

And I’m not hungry, and I’m not eating much at all. :) Now if I could just get rid of this damn migraine (hormones again, *sigh*) I’d be golden.