Well, I want to do an update on my February Post when I was thinking about ways to improve my mental health. At the time, my list was:
- Bring ADHD meds with me to Ketamine
- Consider EMDR
- Research IFS
- Attend the Unitarian Universalist church
- Exercise
- Use my sun lamp in the mornings
- Read Grandma’s books
- Drink water
So, bringing the ADHD meds to Ketamine has been a total success. The others have been… mostly failure 😭
I looked into EMDR (✅️) but I don’t really have the time, plus it’s super hard to find a clinician who even has space on their waiting list. I haven’t done anything with IFS, because I already have a huge reading list and I can’t let any more books into my life right now. I skip church every week. I downloaded an exercise game on my laptop (✅️) that is supposed to be be able to mimic what a video game console would do, but I have yet to actually launch it. However, I do get a walk in twice a week when I go to neurofeedback, so maybe that’s sort of a win? I don’t usually use the sun lamp. I don’t read Grandma’s books and I think a lot of that is from still-unprocessed grief that she’s no longer with us. (Which is one more thing that happened in the spring!) Drinking water… I would say I meet my goal an average of one day a week 😕 However, with my current water bottle system, I at least drink >0 water most days ✅️
So, I don’t know if I keep trying, or table the items above and focus my energies on other things. Which, other things would include:
- Put more time, energy, and resources into having palatable food
- Prioritize nesting
- Get a new job
Food
Being vegan lately has been really, really hard 😥 When the food available to me feels “gross,” I don’t eat. Then, I get so hungry that either my mental health tanks, or I cheat and buy macaroni and cheese, or both. If it weren’t really, really important, I would scrap the whole thing, but being vegan is imperative for me to be living according to my values. So, my new plan is to decrease how much I care about nutrition and increase how much I care about whether my food tastes good and feels satisfying. While I have some time, I’ve been finding recipes for vegan comfort foods:
https://sarahsvegankitchen.com/recipes/marry-me-tofu/
I also have a ton of recipes in my collection that I keep in a binder at home, plus I’ve made a lot of extremely successful recipes from the Chinese vegan cookbook I’ve written about by Hannah Che. Maybe a good plan for the next few days could include converting the videos above to printable text.
Nesting
I’m realizing more and more how important it is to me for my space to look nice. I think that I might need to actually add organization/décor to my short list of values. The house I was homeschooled in was disgusting. It was hoarded, disorganized, dirty, and unsanitary. I always desperately wanted to at least clean my room, but I shared a room with my sister and I wasn’t allowed to touch her stuff. And we had bunk beds so I didn’t get a half of the room that was “mine.” So I never learned the skill. My house now looks better than my mom’s did, but (for example) I never put clean laundry away and I rarely clean the bathroom. These are things that I think would really improve my mental health! It’s just a matter of actually doing it. Which, I think about it, like, all day every day. The solution would definitely be body-doubling. So, maybe I can coax a friend to come over and watch me clean?
New Job
Substitute teaching has become totally unsustainable. I could enumerate the reasons it’s triggering, but it’s not working out. So far I’ve managed to make this nobody’s problem except mine, but it’s really been destroying me. So, I think I should either go back to working with infants, or get a job with animals. That’s just going to need to happen asap because I don’t have money to be “between jobs.” Unfortunately, having poor mental health is expensive enough that right now it’s costing me more than I’m earning.
Conclusion
So, EMDR and IFS are going to have to wait. I’m already bringing my meds to Ketamine, and my three established weekly appointments are individual therapy, neurofeedback, and Ketamine. This leaves:
- Attend the Unitarian Universalist church
- Exercise
- Use my sun lamp in the mornings
- Read Grandma’s books
- Drink water
- Palatable food
- Prioritize nesting
- Get a new job
This feels like a lot 😕