What my kids don't know about me…

TMS Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. This is a treatment used on people with severe depression and severe anxiety. It’s still a fairly new and experimental process but I was encouraged and cohersed into doing it.

It’s a weird process. The first appointment after your intake is figuring out where the placement of the device sits on your head to target the right spot. There’s some looking for hand response involved and that helps decide where your brains internal points are. Everyone is slightly different.

The treatment portion is having this magnet placed on one side of your head and it sends a magnetic stimulating impulse to your brain. The time and frequency (amount per second) depends on your needs. Mine was 16 minutes on the left side of my head and 43 seconds on the right.

Is it painful? Not till you get further into treatments and they intensify the magnetic impulse. It felt like a bunch of needles poking my head in one spot. More uncomfortable than anything else.

It was very time consuming though. Even though the treatment took less than 20 minutes everytime, I had to drive half an hour there, and half an hour home everyday for 30 days. That’s Monday through Friday daily getting the treatments done. I got tired of driving at the end because it started to feel pointless.

In the end, did it work?? Everyone wanted to know. Well there’s statistics about what percentage of people it does help and doesn’t help. Based on suffering from major depressive disorder and severe anxiety/social anxiety, it only helped my anxiety. It’s more known to help depression than it is anything else and a majority of people get the treatments for depression. I know all of this because I researched it before I did it.

The problem is, if you take medication, you’ll still have to take it during and after treatment. It’s not supposed to be a cure all and that kind of disheartened me. I mean no one wants to have to admit they have something wrong and take a bunch of pills forever. I’m just lucky I guess.

In the end I am only feeling an improvement in my feelings of anxiety and I feel like that’s 30 days I can’t get back.

I do a secret sister gift exchange that occurs monthly online with an affiliation I’m linked to. This past month, March, I made someone a Altoids tin “uplift me” box. I decorated an empty Altoids tin and used clay to bake some flowers and a butterfly I attached to the outside of the tin. I created a small book inside, inspired from my mom’s creation, and painted the paper with watercolor. Each page had a comment that was positive or uplifting for the person. I didn’t really know this woman, I don’t live anywhere near her, and we have never talked but this tin was everything to her. At this time in her life she was going through a very steep down on her roller coaster and the positive affirmations I wrote made her feel like she mattered. I just want to remind the world that unless you are literally in the middle of a person’s life day in and day out you never actually know what it’s like for them. How they feel, what they are thinking, what they are dealing with, and what might be happening. This is called being mindful, thinking of these things when you prepare to interact with a person. There are situations where if you assume things you are possibly correct, but always remember that not everyone is a fake beggar on the corner looking for change from you. I didn’t take any pictures of this tin or any of the things I wrote because it’s a special piece of my own heart that I handed out to her. There are a few people I want to do this for and if you think about it, doing good and being good is giving out a piece of your heart to another so that they can feel loved if only for a brief moment. I think my heart grows double when I give it out this way.

So it’s been a few days since my last post. Nothing too crazy has been going on. I have been sick. Had stomach problems and I’ve been real exhausted and tired. I guess it’s mostly from my anxiety and depression that gives me issues. But it could also be the regular bread and dairy I had last week. I don’t eat gluten, meat, or dairy if I do, it causes me stomach pain, bloating, migraines, aches and pains and horrible gas. I have been tested for an autoimmune disease but everything came back perfect. It’s just my stomach that is the issue.

I play kickball, or try to for fun. I guess it’s been fun. It’s hard when you don’t win though to keep a happy face on. I feel like I’m trying to learn how to play everytime I go out there for a game. Like everyone still doesn’t understand their spaces. I’m not a coach for the team so I just do what they tell me, but I will say, morale is low. I know I’m not the only one who feels it.

I’m so tired and I even took a nap today. I’ve been asleep more than I’ve been awake today. My leg and hip are killing me as well as my back. I just wish I could go an entire week, 7 days without feeling exhausted, depressed, anxious, in pain, and never caught up. It always snowballs until I just can’t anymore. I’m almost there I think. I’ll keep pushing through though because right now I’m the mom and dad and I have to be tough and sweet and ready for anything. Go sleep and get up in the morning, Heather, you’ve got adulting and parenting to do.

S

And that’s because we need a reminder that things are real and that things aren’t always perfect.

I pulled my oldest out of school here in AZ because the ELA (English Language Arts) teacher was lazy and didn’t care to actually teach. I enrolled her in online school only to find that their set up is hard to decipher and confusing to the point where now my kid is failing. I just can’t seem to make the right choices lately. I know that this is not an option again for her, but it makes me so angry that this is happening after she did so well in Kansas. She really misses KS and it had made her depressed. Hell, it made me depressed, and I’m still unhappy.

It makes it hard to teach my daughter resiliency when I can’t wrap my head around this place. I hate seeing her like this and the fact that no one is neighbourly or actually takes responsibility for their kids jackassery, makes it harder.

She made some friends at first and ended up staying over only to be made fun of by the girls. I couldn’t believe it, and she hates them now because they made her cry. I can’t believe the girls were able to treat her like that without the parents ever knowing but it made me so mad to find out she didn’t really feel comfortable or safe there.

My point today? I don’t really have one, but these things float around my mind daily. I’m vigilant because of the way people treat each other here and it makes my heart hurt that my daughter now has no friends.

There’s ALOT that my kids don’t know about me. Sure, you say, mine don’t get to know everything about me either. Well, that’s where life lessons come in. You explain whatever stupid thing happened to you to your kids and then you assure them it’s stupid on all levels, and that they shall not be prone to make the same mistake. But do you ever stop and think about the stuff you don’t tell them? Like the one time I climbed out my window around 11pm at night so I could pick up a friend and stay out all night just sitting around while everyone smoked cigarettes or weed and it was the best time ever? I didn’t smoke weed, but we made fun of the people who did. And I made it back home around 2 or 3 in the morning and slept pretty much most of the day. What would they learn from that? Well when I looked back on it I thought, “I was in a pretty shifty neighborhood and I could have gotten shot at, raped, beat down, or any other things like that, why was I so stupid?”

Being a mom of 2 girls I wonder if they will have the same fears of being kidnapped or sexually assaulted? Or will they just have that thought, that fearless invincibility thought making them deflect all things bad? I doubt it. I was fearless if nothing else which ended up bad for me.

Half of my life I was a complete dumbass and did the stupidest things. I sometimes wish my parents would have paid more attention to me, and actually pretended to support and encouragement me when I was younger. Part of my problem is I can’t go on without acceptance or approval when I want to do something because I’m afraid it’s always the wrong choice. It sucks living like that, and I suppose making decisions to be rebellious and sneak out at 11 or 2am made sense to me because I knew my parents felt one way about it. Can’t ask for approval if you know they never will approve of it anyway!

The moral of the story is, there really isn’t one. I’m sort of messed up and nothing can fix years of personal anguish.

As I was just texting my mom about whether I wanted a white or off white coffee mat it made me remember something she told me a lot when I was growing up. It’s that the color white is hard to “take care of”. She is totally right BTW. I took that advice with me forever and made choices that were almost always the least amount of white. This applies to everything for me, not just clothes. I chose the off white mat by the way, in case you were wondering.

Now I could tell you some ways to keep your white stuff looking super clean but this is not something I can actually attest to. I can tell you how to turn clothes different colors by washing them! I turned all my daughters’ shirts a shade of blue due to their uniform skirts and they were sooooo mad. Those skirts are like the bane of my existence. I basically ruined anything I washed with them that was not black or dark blue. 

So I guess that my point is I use the advice from my mom and not just about white fabric anything. There’s a few other things spoken and unspoken that she’s taught me and I use. So listen to the person you look up to because they actually might have been around long enough to give you some great advice.

So lately I have been trying to figure out what to do now that we have moved here to the firepit. I graduated June of 2015 with Graphic Design under my belt but was searching for an internship or entry level graphic design job. Absolutely no luck whatsoever, no jobs, so here I am twiddling my thumbs and staring at the wall with boredom everyday. My next step is to figure out something to do that will actually be a career, not just a minimum wage job. That pretty much requires me to go back to school. Now, normally I might be able to work anywhere any day of the week with my Bachelor’s, but I can’t rely 100% on my husband to be home because his job makes his schedule somewhat random. Sometimes he has to go out of town for a week or even a month which for a month I don’t know what job would let me only work the hours that my kids are in school. So I’m just trying to figure out what to do, how to do it and where I’m going. So much for having any kind of plan. Oh and I know I have to plan for the fact that we aren’t staying here for more than 5 years so it needs to be something I can do anywhere . I’m just going to keep looking into my options and maybe I will figure out a semi-plan for the close future.