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…

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. :) ##

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…

it’s gotta be real — at least an element of it, in that psychic foreboding kinda way. It was just a dream I keep repeating to myself, rubbing my eyes, massaging forehead muscles that have been sore for days now, the subconscious tension squeezing my head in a constant never-easing vice. Just like the old days.

Oh hell, I don’t need to describe what they’re like, do I? When you’ve got The Nightmares, you know it. You know what they are.

They haven’t popped up out of the blue. I’ve been triggered. A firefighter was killed and 8 injured in an explosion downstate several days ago. I was already fragile due to the abnormally early arrival of my period, and ta-da, we had the Perfect Storm of body chemistry. The dumpster blew in St. Anna and the Shit cascaded in my head.

I’m craving carbs like crazy. Not like PMS-craving (any woman knows what that’s about, LOL) but brain chemistry craving… it’s like a brain drive. Sustenance, survival… not just "I want I want I want." I’m sleeping weird hours around-the-clock and exhausted all the time. When I wake from a 2-hr nap I feel good, and rested, then 35 minutes later I’m sinking into deep core tiredness and needing to sleep again. Somehow I can take 2- and 3-hr naps all day long and then go right back to sleep for the night at bedtime.

I’m obsessed with every movement outside my window, "who’s here? who’s here?" even though nobody’s here. Every blink of a headlight through the trees from the road makes my heart race. I stare. I watch. I hold my breath. Nobody comes after a couple of minutes so I let myself start to breathe again — really shallowly, so they can’t see me move. *sigh*

Tonight was a fun addition. Every time I slipped into REM sleep, I heard thunder. Really LOUD thunder, so loud it shakes the house & wakes me up, every time. FIVE TIMES IN A ROW. Oh, right… I did mention it’s a clear, bitterly cold moonlit January night in Wisconsin, right? The closest thunder is over 2,500 miles away. *snicker*

This time I just stayed awake, it was time to feed the cats anyway and obviously I wasn’t going to make any decent headway on the sleep front so long as my brain is stuck in Thunder Mode. (LOL!) But I am so tiiiiiirrrrrred……. what I would give for some real rest. *sigh*

I don’t know what the "answer" will be. I haven’t been triggered this bad since moving, and I think the only reason it isn’t worse is because of where I live now. (My new home is a "safe place," where my previous home was very much not safe. As in PTSD-safe, you guys know what I mean.) If I was living at the old place, I’d be a lump wadded up in a ball on the floor, rocking like a baby, glassy-eyed from the exhaustion of the constant panic, cowering from every little sound like a wild animal in the corner. Living in a safe place at least gives me some limited function, if only for the regular simple routines of the day, the mindless maintenance. The clock tells me what to do. As long as I don’t have to move much, I’m okay. I don’t have energy for much more than peeing or cooking noodles.

I am 3.5 yrs post-trauma. In some ways I have healed. When I’m not triggered, there are sweet, calm lights of hope shimmering through. But in other ways the injury is still a gaping lesion in my head that has only been covered by a very thin layer of skin. If something tears that skin open, there is the lesion again, festering and sensitive and sore and still very much broken underneath. It’s like the skin that gives the illusion of healing is just covering up what still lies broken underneath.

I have known this all along, I suppose, because I’ve backslid in recovery the last few months. The net gain has actually been a loss. But I am so wanting to be done with this already. I am so ready to move on, move forward. And then I get hit with a rough spot like this, and it’s all the more frustrating.

Despite my rational brain assuring me this is temporary, I don’t feel like it might be temporary. I fear that it’s permanent and I am back on the road of nightly night terrors with no end in sight — no end, because there was no magic pill, therapy, exercise, nothing I did to make them go away the first time. All I have is hope, prayer and faith. (And a person could reasonably argue I am pretty thin on those.)

Calm night music on now (Celtic Woman, Enya, and some piano solos by David Lanz and Wayne Gratz — the latter some favorites from happy college days 20 yrs ago) I’m going to roll over and try to catch a couple peaceful, recuperative hours of sleep………. ##

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. ##

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.)

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.

A month ago my Dad had a heart attack and spent about a week in the hospital. He actually died 3 times. Died. Flat-ass coded. Luckily his mistress was there the one time to do CPR, otherwise he would have been found really dead some unknown time later in the bathroom. (Nice. *roll eyes*)

The best place to sort this unexpected turn of events out was on a trail.

And somewhere out in the woods, sitting on a rock, beneath the bluff, watching the sunshine glitter and sparkle between the green leaves on the trees, I realized … I’m letting life pass me on by. And even worse yet, I’m letting life pass me by WHILE I’M UGLY.

No, no, no, no, no …….. that is not okay with me. It’s bad enough to be mentally semi-broken. But I realized I am putting things in my mouth that are making (or keeping) me fat, and that when I look in the mirror, the girl who looks back at me is UGLY. And I hate that. I HATE that.

So I decided, I was thin and pretty once upon a time. In fact, I don’t even recognize myself in pictures from college *blush* that girl looks nothing like I look today. And I want to be the pretty girl again. I want to be a Trophy Wife! And to become a Trophy Wife ………. I must lose weight.

(Never mind the getting married part. I have a feeling once I fix the things that are broken inside of me, the rest of the outside stuff will fall into place.)

So I cut my calories to 600-700/day (it would be more if I wasn’t so freaking unnerved by feeling hungry). Ideally I am eating no white sugar and no white flour. I say "ideally" because in practice, I end up making a 1/2 batch of cookie dough every other week :) usually as a result of hormone cravings. And I am discovering if I just make the damn cookie dough and eat it, then I actually feel much better emotionally, all the way around. And when I feel better, I don’t want to eat, period. Not even crap food. :)

(Who ever knew the secret to success was cookie dough?! LOL)

So far I’ve lost 11 lbs. in the past month. I was hoping for 20 lbs at this point :\ but between my period and some serious over-eating/cheating, my weight has plateaued the past 2 weeks. It sucks though … I was losing 0.5-2 lbs per day for the first 2 weeks. And then the hormones hit, and it STOPPED. *grumble* Dammit anyway!! I’ve got like 80 more lbs. to go (to get to Trophy Wife weight) and I want to lose them NOW!!

Lest people wonder and worry, I am not being stupid about this; I’m not trying to exist on Cheerios and lettuce. *wink* My diet is indeed simple though …

• Water. Lots and lots and lots of unlimited, clean, refreshing, stomach-filling water.
• 1 protein a day (either 3 eggs over-easy, or a palm-sized serving of other protein like chicken, fish or beef),
• Unlimited fresh veggies – usually onions and tomato (but really, how much onion and tomato can a person eat?! – not that much … "unlimited" just sounds good.)
• 1-2 cups all-natural unsweetened applesauce with lots of cinnamon (apples vs. applesauce – whatever you like, doesn’t matter)
• 1/4 cup cheese with anything else hot (sharp cheddar is my cheese of choice, melted on the eggs or melted on a big mountain of broccoli)
• unlimited broccoli, if I have it in the house :) — love the broc! (Apparently it’s pretty kick-ass for blood pressure, too.)
• and, 1/2 cup low-fat cottage cheese

The applesauce and cottage cheese, quite frankly, are what tide me through the day. I can snack on the applesauce off-and-on all day, and it doesn’t jack up my blood sugar. It gives my stomach something productive to do and has greater nutritional value than like, celery. ;) The rest of the food – protein + veggie + cheese are one meal, period …….. and I don’t eat great huge quantities, I’ve cut my portion sizes down to about 1/3 what I used to eat. Cripes, no wonder I was constantly gaining weight …….. :-P

I still eat carbs. There’s carbs in dairy. There’s all kinds of carbs in applesauce. There’s carbs in barley and whole grain rice, too. I have a "wild rice"/seed-like mix I like, and frankly I really like slow-cook barley, too. Melt a little butter on it, and OMG! :) It’s just that the carbs I eat are either not processed sugar, or they’re complex carbs. No more white sugar. (The only caveat being, of course, the cookie dough. *giggle*)

So, 11 lbs.

My next goal is to vacuum the living room floor, put down the high-density foam squares and plug in the DVD player ………. so I can start doing my Beach Body DVDs. It’s no-impact and seems to focus on core muscles, which is perfect for me – exactly what I need.

The weather is supposed to be gorgeous for the most of the next week (even if all the leaves have fallen off the trees – bleh) so I want to get out and walk every day I possibly can. My knee is probably 90% so I need to break this new bad stay-off-my-feet-and-rest-my-knee habit and GET BACK WALKING !!!

Too bad I can’t safely hike the park at night. I mean, I can, it’s not like I’ll get mugged :-P but I’m worried about getting lost. I’m not a big fan of the whole getting lost in the woods at night thing. ;)

11 lbs! Anybody wanna race me? Maybe that will break my plateau. *giggle*

I’ve been triggered several times while on Wellbutrin, but this was the first time that I’d been triggered by old family issues. I didn’t know I wasn’t King of that mountain emotionally, and I didn’t know the Same Old Crap™ could trigger me. So now I know.

The fact that it triggered me through the Wellbutrin, tells me that it is a pretty strong trigger, and I need to treat all the classic Same Old Crap™ family issues with a good dose of distance. The farther away I can stay from that B.S., the better.

The fact that it triggered me through the Wellbutrin is also another big fat sign on the wall that MY PTSD IS ALIVE AND WELL. Dammit. Why won’t it just freakin’ go away already?!?!?!?

Stupid thing.