Oh, it's been a while...

If I don't have it written down somewhere to MAKE A BLOODY BLOG POST then it just doesn't get done. Much like dishes, laundry etc, it falls by the wayside. Then, one day I look at it and decide it REALLY NEEDS DOING NOW and here I am.

(and yes I just had to review the last post I made because I couldn't remember what it was about. TL:DR it's about getting fat)

I'm the same weight, more or less, as I was at the beginning of the month. I set goals that I thought were realistic but which were ultimately unattainable. I've reassessed those goals and got myself a new little timetable of when I feel I can do my #FatGirlWalking, and it's only 2 times a week (I was aiming for 3 but hey ho) but I am able to commit to those 2 days and times and I commit to walking for 30 minutes non-stop. Maybe that will get better over time. I think it needs to. But I need to figure out when... Can't with the kids around because I close my eyes and immerse myself in LOUD music. Safety concerns there. Similarly, Can't when kids are asleep. I'm at the top weight that the machine was designed for (I knew I shouldn't have looked up that bastarding information) and even just walking makes noise, and noise travels through these houses very effectively. If I want the kids to go to sleep and stay asleep, I can't #FGW whilst they're in bed. Can't when I'm at college (duh, 2 different places at the same time). Leaves... Monday afternoon and Thursday morning. So that's when I do it, and I cool off and grab a shower straight after. It's working for me, I do 5km a week, and there's scope to go longer and do more in those two sessions - I just need more music.

What else? Ah yes. The inauguration of the 45th President of the United States of America. I refuse to name him, he's not worth that to me. He has caused me a lot of stress and anxiety and is part of the reason I slowed and eventually halted the #FGW by the end of January. I was obsessively stalking Facebook and Twitter wondering "WTF has the tangerine shitgibbon done NOW?". My mental health diary shows my mood swandiving and anxiety skyrocketing at the same time from the 19th January. Gee, thanks, 45. Well done.

I'm also back at college. I've got Art and Social Practice as well as continuing with Creative Practice 1. I was slated for Professional Practice 1 as well, but I'm only meant to be on that unit from January 2018. I'll still linger and offer my assistance where needed, it'll help me for next year to know what is expected of this year, after all. Enjoying the writing part of A&SP - I'm not afraid to have my own opinion and make it known. Benefits of age? experience? or am I just foolish? Being unafraid got me A/B for my essays last year so I figure why the hell would I change my MO. Just be who I be.

In other news, we binge-watched "Stranger Things", me solidly backed into the corner of the sofa with the duvet drawn up to my nose so I could hide easily. Series 2 is back at Halloween. More hiding. Also binge-watched "Enterprise" and now I want to dive into "Voyager" again. Not going to rush into "DS9" though. Besides, I've got "MacGyver" (the original and the best) on DVD to watch in the meantime. Just in case you're interested, total paperclip uses up to and including S2E4 => 3. And boy were they pretty implausible - but that's why I like it!

Coming soon, "The Walking Dead". Can't wait to see the new and improved Rick go and kick some ass - Lucille notwithstanding.

Ciao for now.

Rock Bottom

I am officially the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life, including the times I was pregnant with my 8lb kids. Then, I was a mere 102kg and I was technically two people at the time. Now, I am 120.8kg and my poor, poor knees are suffering. And my hips. And my back. And I’m pretty sure I’ve shrunk in height.


So today I went to my GP and asked for a referral for gastric surgery. Biiiiig step. Many changes, lifelong changes. GP recommended I start with the usual diet (yeah, I know what to eat, what not to eat, and all about portion sizes, yadda yadda...) and exercise (aaaand here we all fall down. I hate exercise. I hate being seen to do exercise because I wibble and wobble, fall down in an asthmatic heap and am usually beyond beetroot purple at the time), but has gone ahead and referred my case to the guys in Aberdeen who will bring my case to their meeting where they discuss all the cases, that’s all she can do from there and I thank her for the way she’s handled it thus far.


Anyone who has known me longer than 5 years has known me thinner and has known me bigger. My weight fluctuates THAT much over a relatively short space of time. The only time I was able to maintain a somewhat svelte figure was when I was on Thyroxine. I was a UK size 10/12 and had just met my hubby (sooooo, Feb 2009). I was taken off Thyroxine and put back on an antidepressant around three months after that and then the weight started to creep on again. Fast forward to New Year 2013 and we started to diet together after the birth of Taylor. Late October 2013 and I’m back to a size 12 and *ping* almost 3 months pregnant with Kaiden. Sigh. I didn’t diet straight after having Kaiden because we managed to make breastfeeding work. It was June 2015 before he weaned finally, but by then I was on an antidepressant and an antipsychotic (neither known for their slimming side effects). I was around or just over the 100kg mark for New Year 2016 and a size 14/16. Taylor got meningitis at the same time we buried my Nan, cue weight gain. By June I was in size 18’s. Switched meds in November and by Xmas, size 20’s were snug. New Year 2017, 120.8kg. Fuck this shit. I’m fed up of this yo-yo dieting crap and what it’s doing to my joints.


Thankfully, I’m in a good place mentally with it, which I’m attributing to the new meds. I see my body as a vehicle that gets me from A to B. My internal shadow is a lot smaller than my actual shadow (and it’s a bigger shadow than my actual shadow when I’m skinny, go figure), so it’s only when I’m reminded of how I look that I feel what I do about this vehicle. But importantly, my size and weight doesn’t make me depressed any more. I wasn’t happy when I was skinny and I’m not exactly thrilled to bits now I’m big; it’s a huge revelation to me that my size/weight has zero implications on my mood.


But anyway - can’t carry on; joints wear out, asthma’s getting steadily worse and I really don’t want to be developing type II diabetes (which I’m at a higher risk for since I was a gestational diabetic both times). So a permanent measure is needed. That means surgery.


In the meantime, there’s no harm getting fit so that any future surgery has the best chance of a non-coffin outcome - hence the walking. At the moment it’s half an hour, any way I can manage it. We’ll see how many times a week I can manage that before trying to improve on it. Hoping that by the end of the year I’ll be #FatGirlJogging rather than #FatGirlWalking and doing it (fnar fnar) every day of the week.


Got a blood test on Friday, thyroid panel and fasting glucose. If there are any hidden nasties (like, OMG maybe she’s got an underactive thyroid or, OMG here comes the diabetes train, toot toot) we’ll know in a week or so.


Until then, imma keep on walking. Let’s make it an officially unofficial New Year’s Resolution.

Paranoia II and Hanlon's razor

When your brain is working on two opposing thoughts at the same time:


Me: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

Also me: But it's so freaking obvious I'm being singled out here OMFG!


Ugh. It honestly sucks being me at times, because I can hold two perfectly opposing thoughts in my head at the same time, and believe both with a weight of certainty that you'd find difficult to shift. What do we call that, girls and boys? cognitive dissonance.


Sometimes it's fun and can prompt debate until the little grey cells finally decide which team they're rooting for, but other times it's just a source of terrible, almost debilitating anxiety and paranoia.


Two recent examples:


1) I enrolled on my course late on in the season. Ok, very late. Just last month, actually. All the other students seem to float around on invisible cushions of knowledge, secure that they know what they need to know in order to get through the academic year. Then there's me, drowning and clawing at any titbit of information because No, I'm not actually enrolled on that VLE board whence the information came. Now, was it a slip of the mind? Was it just an admin error? Or maybe they're just screwing with me so I'll drop out?


Me: All 3. Has to be. No other explanation.

Also me: But maybe...

Me: No, seriously - it's all 3 at the same time. Go stew on it some.




2) My eldest is due to go to Primary school (aka Elementary school etc.) in 2017 and we hear on the Mom Grapevine that there's a meeting at the local school for parents of the new-kids-to-be. No word from the school itself. No word from their Nursery (aka Daycare, Kindergarten). A letter surfaces, dated T-8 days but which was actually received at T-2 days with a tear-off RSVP to be handed in at T-4 days by the latest. (See where this is going?) Slip of the mind? Admin error? Screwing with us?


Me: All 3. Has to be. No other explanation.

Also me: But maybe...

Me: No, seriously - it's all 3 at the same time. Go stew on it some.


Meanwhile the rest of the moms have no letter and thus, in theory, do not know about this meeting (which is, by the way, tomorrow morning). I swear, if a letter DOES make its way to me, there will be a fairly sharp-assed response being sent back instead of that stupid RSVP.


As it stands, we have panic, anxiety and paranoia running a race in my head over who gets to chair the latest meeting of "How do we get through college?" with Schrödinger's Primary School meeting set to happen (and not happen) tomorrow morning causing me more anxiety because this is my firstborn's future we're talking here and I have some CONCERNS I'd like to talk to the school about, thanks very much.


It's all fun and games, until it's not.

executive functioning disorder as part of the rest of my issues

Peaks and troughs, waxing and waning; my whole damn life is a rollercoaster and not in the fun way.

When I'm neutral or hyper, I get shit done. When I'm hyper I get a LOT of shit done, and sometimes to the extreme of needing done (I have a bullet journal that I started when I was hyper, it's been planned out til the middle of next year. I also started two essays when I was hyper and managed to finish one and half finish the other before the cycle ended - neither were due until the month after). When the mood screams to a halt or starts to slide over the cliff, my productivity goes down, apathy goes up and intention gets defenestrated.

This isn't the hour-to-hour or day-to-day moods, those are part of the BPD and I can ride those through to their conclusion fairly well after identifying them. No. This is the week-to-week, month-to-month mood shift that is part of the Bipolar, that is so subtle I can't see it until I'm so entrenched in it that it feels like I'm walking through treacle. And this is after a decade of knowing about the nature of these damn moods, I STILL can't fully identify them until after the fact. Fuck's sake.

Back to the EFD. This is part of the Asperger's. It waxes and wanes according to my moods and doesn't particularly care why the mood is what it is, just that it IS:

• I can be in an overall depression when the BPD comes up and goes "let's sing to ourselves for NO APPARENT REASON!" and all of a sudden I'm getting the shit done, looking fairly presentable, being fairly productive - all whilst being depressed to the point of self-harm - and then suddenly the productive mood drops. Boom. The shit is no longer getting done and I look like a homeless person caricature. 
• I can be in a hypomanic state where I'm singing all the time, excitable, nonsensical, where getting all the shit done in the blink of an eye seems just so doable but let's go do this first, eh? Too high to appreciate that the shit actually needs to get done, thanks all the same.
• When I'm euthymic, the shit to be done list is like a chores list and it gets worked through as and when. This is when I'm least affected by EFD. It's a fairly boring stage. Chores be as chores do. But hey, it's gotta get done and I'm not exactly invested in what's on the tv just now so let's get to it. Even the laundry eventually gets folded when I'm like this.

At the moment, I'm struggling. I struggle to get up through the night to attend to the goddamn nightowl spawn of satan we affectionately call "our youngest". I struggle to see the needs of others (oh? you are hungry? and you're telling me this because...?). I struggle to get anything done. You can put me in front of a sink of hot soapy water and give me the tools I need to get those few dishes that require hand-washing done... and I'll just stand there in a fog or sit down on the floor. There's three weeks of laundry to put away. Nearly 4 weeks. And I know this because NOT ONCE has it been tracked in my housework tracker, and I started that bitch on the 14th November.

I severely dislike being this way but it's not as simple as saying "suck it up buttercup, let's get going" - might work for an hour or two that day but after that I slump back down and can't be moved again. I had help a little while back from SAMH in the form of Jo, who would come around once a week and who initially got me to plan to do the work that needed doing the most. I did it. It tired me out. Wanna know what "it" was? Yeah, just putting the laundry away. Seems stupid, eh. And yet here we are. I managed to do that and a little more by the next week. Updated the plan. Eventually, at the end of 6 weeks I had a schedule to follow. Just a Monday to Friday schedule, leave the weekends free. And then it started to slide, I don't even know when. By the time I got my journal up and running, I was able to see that I wasn't doing as much as I thought I was doing. Tracker boxes going unfilled, tasks getting migrated. It's a hassle for anyone to get dressed who isn't me (because I wear the same shit over and over until it NEEDS laundering, basically - another Asperger's thing apparently), because all the clothes and towels etc are in a pile on top of a suitcase that hasn't yet been unpacked from our OCTOBER holiday. The kids still have their summer clothes in their drawers, the winter clothes safely packed away. And yet here I sit, arms like lead, typing this shit out to the 'verse where nobody will read it.


Meh.