lifelauralondon:

I love reading - as Unlimited Visibility knows from our years founding the Cheecherong Book Club - and with all this time on my hands and access to the latest and greatest novels (Thank you UK bookstores for being so much better than the North American counterparts) here are the latest I’ve read and highly recommend:

Room - Emma Donoghue
Guardian Review and Lainey Gossip review

A Week in December - Sebastian Faulks
Guardian Review

I’ve been wanting to sit down and write something for the past few days, but have been really grappling with the idea that I’m putting my thoughts out there for everyone to see. “Why the hell did you start a blog then?” you might ask…and that’s kind of what I’m asking myself. I suppose part of me feels like if I make my thoughts visible to the people who care about (or complete strangers) then I’ll feel more accountable for the things I write about. For instance, if I write on here that I’m keeping a health journal with details of my daily food intake, exercise, vitamins, medication, overall feelings and mindset, I figure I’ll be more likely to stick with it because I’ve told people I’m doing it…

…but will I really? Already I feel my motivation dwindling. I started recording this health journal stuff about 4 days ago. The idea behind this was that I often can’t remember when I last ate a really healthy meal, exercised or had an emotional meltdown. I want to be able to track changes in my mental health as well as my physical health. There are two main reasons for doing this: 1) I want to eventually be medication-free and 2) I want to have children and in order to do that I need to be balanced and hopefully not on medication.

Taking medication (for anxiety-related symptoms) is a complicated thing. It helps me feel more balanced, more able to tackle every day mishaps and challenges. Yet I worry constantly about it. If I miss a day (or two, or fourteen) I immediately change. I turn into this ridiculously over-reactive beast. It’s a very physical thing for me too … I feel the change in my body. I get confused more easily, I lose my train of thought, I feel like there’s an itch inside me that I can’t scratch and pretty much any little thing can make me blow up. Not a very nice way to feel, and surely not a very nice experience for the person who lives with me and loves me. 

So medication helps. But does it really? Is it just a bandage, covering up the “real” issues? If I ween myself off of medication (like I’m planning to do this spring), will I realize that I am just destined to be on meds for the rest of my life? I have a hard time imagining that or accepting it as a possibiility. A few years ago one of my best friends pointed out to me that if I had a heart condition and was told I needed medication, I likely wouldn’t hesitate to take it. However, with a mental health issue I very often feel like I could just overcome the symptoms if I was strong enough, wise enough, “normal” enough. Logically I know this isn’t the case, but on some level I wonder if I stripped away everything….work, relationships, distractions….would my anxiety eventually just go away? 

If you’ve never experienced anxiety, it’s hard to describe. At least it’s hard for me. Sometimes it feels like I want to crawl out of my own skin. Sometimes it feels like my head is full and is starting to spill over and I can’t control my thoughts or words or reactions. Other times I just want to scream. When I recently saw a naturopath for the first time, she taught me some methods for dealing with some of these feelings…and they actually helped! One method is to put my arms at my side and gently widen them outwards with every intake of breath, essentially creating more space to hold my feelings and widening my energy field. Another method was to push against something. Either stand against a wall (facing it or beside it), make sure my feet are grounded and then just push my whole body against it. She actually did this exercise with me…we stood side by side and then she told me to just push against her, as hard or lightly as I needed. After about 15 seconds I had to stop, and I started to cry. When I tried to describe why I was crying, all I could say was that it felt so incredibly supportive. Weird, but definately food for thought with regards to what I need to deal with my “stuff”.

If you’ve ever known anyone with mental health issues - be it depression, bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia, panic-attacks, etc - you might understand that these are mostly invisible conditions that often confuse both the person experiencing the symptoms and those around them. I think with writing about my own journey with anxiety (and depression, even thought I haven’t discussed it here yet) I might help myself understand things a bit more clearly…possibly alleviating some of my worry and embarrassment about dealing with such a common disorder and possibly giving some insight to people who don’t have much experience with these types of things.

Thanks for reading…
~A~ 

This morning as Matt was getting ready to go snowboarding, he asked me “Have you been to roller derby this week?” to which I replied “no” and told him I had planned to go today but woudn’t have a vehicle to get me there (he was taking the car). A nice jab at trying to make up an excuse. After a bit of back and forth, with him pointing out the obvious (that I am not living up to my end of our ‘let’s get healthy’ plan) and me getting snarky (‘just leave me alone’) he kissed me goodbye and I returned to my toast and tea. 

Then I felt guilty. Like I do. Every. Single. Day. 

I am really out of shape. Let’s face it, I am about 32 pounds overweight and trying to exist on the same diet I did when I was in my early 20’s. The difference is that now I a) don’t have the same metabolism, b) don’t live in a city where i walk everywhere and c) am not burning a huge amount of calories every weekend by dancing my face off and having lots of sex (yes there, I said it). So really, it’s time to face the music…I’m 32 and have a long life ahead of me, so I better damn well make the most of it.

Enter the BodyRock.tv girl. Her name is Zuzana and she is RIPPED. She is also sweet, big-breasted and incredibly motivating. I decided to bite the bullet and do one of her workouts today. I trolled around on her site until I found what I thought looked like an easy-ish workout. Ninja jumps, modified push-ups, plank jumps, side crunches and something called the “snowboarder”. Hello! Of course this would be my first workout with her! 

I found a really easy online interval timer - 35 seconds per exercise, 5 second rest in between, repeated 3 times - and set myself up (which means I put on some runners and pushed my desk chair out of the way). Things were going well until I hit the plank jumps. I did my first one and then…well that’s it. I did one. The next time around I modified it so that I was doing explosive jumps trying to touch the ceiling. In a nutshell, my high point of the workout was doing 18 side crunches in 35 seconds. My low point was the one measly plank jump, but since I modified it by doing something equally as difficult for me, I’d say I had some success.

So there I have it…workout #1. I grabbed a really nice journal I’ve been meaning to write in and started a health log - with my meals, exercise results and general notes on how I’m feeling. 

In other news, something amazing happened over the weekend…my friend’s brother Joey got the double lung transplant he has been waiting years to get! He’s in ICU still, but the update is that he’s doing well. With a story like his it’s hard to justify not using the healthy lungs I have to live the best life I can. His wife Kristin updates their blog and she is a pillar of strength that we could all look towards to learn more about commitment and loyalty. 

There are so many twists and turns and bumps and scrapes in this life…so much up ahead that we can’t foresee. Sometimes it seems like you’re in the middle of a bluebird day and suddenly in roll the storm clouds.

I’ve been in the midst of some unexpected soul searching over the past few months and it’s been difficult to really delve into because I haven’t been taking the time to really look at what I need to look at. I use the excuse that I don’t have time or that I’m “not thinking about it”…but in truth I’m not making the time because I don’t want to think about it!

I type much faster than I can write, so I thought of starting a journal online…then I realized I might as well blog it (because somewhere out there may be a person actually reading it and getting something from it)!

Unlimited visibility describes a perfect day for snowboarding…where I can see everything and nothing in hidden in flat lighting or covered in clouds. That’s how I want to be able to describe the way I look at myself…without any barriers to seeing what’s underneath the surface. To be able to truly know what it means to be me…to understand why I am who I am, why I do the things I do…and where the hell I’m heading!

So in a mishmash of thoughts, I’ll just see what happens. Maybe I’ll talk about what I ate for dinner or my new therapist or the way I feel when I make mistakes or bake bread. What I’m hoping to discover is a little more of “Andrea”…the parts that are already out in the open and the ones that are hidden in dark corners…