Kim is a Velociraptor

  Perhaps it is an easy thing for you, but in my personal experience, everyone suffers with maintaining a good balance of mental health in today’s society.  In some way or another.  But when you add on to our situations, and surround that with an underlying mental illness and/or neurodivergentcy, then things get hard. That’s what things have been for me the last few weeks.  Hard.  Motivation has been at war with fear, anxiety, Anxiety, and self-worth.   I’m not sure about you, but a lot of my friends and loved ones are sick, or have been sick, in the last month.  Our Covid numbers in Georgia are no joke, and no, I will not tolerate anyone joking about them or saying this isn’t a big deal.  I have lost people to Covid.  I love people who will be dealing with the long term effects of Covid for the rest of their lives.  I am a person who has several health conditions directly impacted by Covid and it is likely that even though I am vax...

Something that I’ve always prided myself on is the capacity to drop everything and be able to support someone.  I am an introvert, but one of the ways that I gain energy is from helping others.  Hence, why even though I’m introverted as all get out, I enjoy teaching. When I was healthier (I say this because looking back I don’t know if I was ever actually healthy), I was able to do this, no matter the time or circumstance.  I guess you could say that I also had crap boundaries and was a people pleaser, but because this was something I enjoyed doing, I got something out of listening and offering advice to others, I thought it was okay. In the last few years, as my mental health plummeted in response to being in such a toxic, unsustainable work environment, my fear at the state of the world, and now the Pandemic, I found myself, for the first time in my life, unable to be there for others.  It was a very, very hard realization.  It hurts that I cannot help others ...

Like, not me by myself.  But with a team.   I’ve actually been working on a virtual reality game with a team of people.  If you want to see what that’s like, you can check out this vid.  But with that same team, we signed up for ArcJam 2021 and we made a game in a weekend.  It’s called Gremlins in Space!   I’m actually really proud of it.   I’m actually really ashamed of all of the issues and errors that I know are there that I cannot continue to fix.   This plays in pretty heavily to Imposter Syndrome and all of my issues with not feeling good enough, or worthful, or important. Like, I know that I’m good at things.  I know I am capable of completing good things.  But my brain focuses on all of the real and factual evidence that I have of failure.  Of being looked over for someone else.  For being discarded.  For not living up to my potential.  Or what I think is my potential.  For not fitting in ...

  So one of the things about going undiagnosed with mental illnesses for your entire childhood and most of your adult life is that I’ve had to find coping mechanisms that worked in order to live.  Like, literally, in order to live.   An example of a coping strategy that I use in order to live: I am doing Activity A.  I am getting some enjoyment out of Activity A, maybe a sense of accomplishment because I’m in a groove while working or playing a video game, or reading, or something.  Just doing something.  And I think, “huh, I’m hungry.  What should I eat?” And then I think that there are no leftovers and that if I am going to eat something I have to make it myself.  Mind you, while I’m doing this thinking, I am still doing Activity A.   And I hate cooking.  It gives me anxiety.  I don’t enjoy standing there.  I don’t enjoy the possibility of messing it up so badly that I don’t, in fact, have something I can use to nou...

  I had one yesterday.  It was not a fun time. TW: yellow jackets, wasps, stings, injury Yesterday we did some much needed yardwork.  The kid who cuts our lawn for a very small price (literally $35 for both front and back) hasn’t been by in over a month.  The grass had gotten out of control.  We both hate yardwork and grass in general, like actively making plans to kill the grass and replace it with something that doesn’t need mowing.  It’s the first time in weeks that it hasn’t rained, it’s 5pm so it won’t be hot as, well, Georgia.  We gear up in pants and boots and head out.  I continue my project of pulling up pokeweek by the root to stop it from growing in my yard (it wouldn’t be a problem, but it gets to like 8 feet tall and doesn’t look “purposeful” enough for my county’s codes.  My husband works on getting the mowers to start working.  I mow the back with the regular mower, he tackles the front with the brush mower (yeah, it was t...

I don’t like cussing in writing.  The more you do it, the less impact any cussing has.  So, why did I cuss in the title of my second post?  Because “medical shit” is a term in and of itself.  It encompasses all of the things that can go wrong medically with a body, especially those outside of your control.  I’ll do my best to keep the cussing to solely this term.   I take about 16 pills a day.  Some of those are for small things that improve my quality of life.  Some of those keep me alive.   Society for the longest time told me to hide the problems I went through.  It’s partly the reason I went undiagnosed and just suffered with so much shit (same use of term) for so long.  I thought a lot of it was just normal for me and not a big deal.  I didn’t want to make a fuss.  I didn’t want to take time off work.  I didn’t want to fold medical expenses into my budget because it was always a bit too tight anyway. So...

  I love writing.  I enjoy being able to sit down and create something that wasn’t there before and to be able to connect with people while writing.  I love it, but I don’t do it very often. I used to have a livejournal, waaaaaay back in the day.  And I liked it because I truly felt like I could write whatever I wanted and if no one read it it didn’t matter because it was a journal for me and not for anyone else.   When livejournal died and everyone moved to facebook, it felt a lot less intimate.  It wasn’t just for me, what I posted was more for other people.  While I would occasionally get extremely personal in my facebook, doing so was hard.  Some of the feedback I got hurt my willingness to open up. (A lot of things in my life hurt my willingness to open up, but that’s a trauma topic for another time.) Flash forward many years and finally getting more comfortable with myself and my struggles.  I am nuero-divergent.  My brain ...