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Diaries Mental Health Oxford the Cat

Everyone Out, Now

posted on October 4, 2013

It hasn’t been a good week for my mental health.

I’ve felt a little disconnected from the blog all week, which is probably an extension of that. Monday and Tuesday were the worst — I-need-lorazepam-and-I-need-it-now bad. Wednesday was a little better, and yesterday was pretty bad again; I ended up in my pjs in bed at 11 PM, eating grilled cheese sandwiches and watching podium training videos from the World Gymnastics Championships on youtube. (Women’s all-around final tonight! I’m finding a live stream for that in case there isn’t a proper good-quality youtube upload later. Just need to remember it’s on. I’m not good at catching things in real time.) Before that, I spent a good ten minutes hugging my mom.

I’m just frustrated about my lack of alone time. It feels like every time I find myself moving forward, my sister shows up to drag me back down. She doesn’t understand that I need large amounts of alone time to focus on my work, and neither do my parents — though, to be fair, my mom tries, whereas my father seems to butt in solely to tell me how useless and selfish I am. He says things to “defend” my sister where the only possible response is, What the fuck are you talking about? This has nothing to do with what you’re saying!

By the time I’m finally alone, I’m so upset I can’t focus on anything. It’s absolutely worthless. There’s the one shortcut, which is pulling out a nail polish bottle, but then my sister goes ballistic, which can be upsetting as well depending on what she picks up and throws to the floor and depending on how my parents react. Besides, half the time I feel guilty about resorting to something that she obviously hates so much.

It might be easier if I were taking advantage of my mornings, when my sister is at school, but I haven’t got up before noon once this week, and it’s not for lack of motivation or wanting to or enjoying sleeping in the morning. Sleeping in, for me, means nightmares. This morning, I dreamed that I was sharing a room not with my sister, but with a psychotic cannibalistic serial killer who’d just been released from prison. My brain thinks it’s so funny, you guys. It’s a fucking riot up in here.

There’s the option of heading to the library with my laptop, and I do want to do that at some point, even if I have to hide in my dragonslayer hat to do it. It’s just not home where I’m comfortable and I have all my stuff and a kitchen and a bathroom and I don’t have to drag myself there. I can barely get out of bed in the morning as it is!

Whine, whine, growl. My cat gave me a belly massage (no claws! soft-paw kneading!) this morning. What has your pet done for you lately?

9 Comments

Diaries Mental Health Oxford the Cat

Things I Am Grateful For

posted on September 26, 2013

I’ve never done the Grad-itude 101 link-up before, but today a couple of people (on the Internet) responded to things in a way that made me angry and threw me off, so I decided to make an effort to ignore them in favor of things that make me happy. So here are some things I’m grateful for:

gratitudelinkup

…my work: It’s taken me a while to call it that, and it still feels a little fake-it-till-you-make-it, like calling my photography ‘fine art’ did when I first used the term in my Etsy listings. It’s also been very slow to take off — it’s only started to this month, I feel, when I began offering graphic design, and I’m still not great at managing my business. But it is taking off, and I have so much to do, and I love it. I love photography and graphic design and fashion, and maybe most importantly, I’m doing it in a way that works for me. I’m having a go at making a living from my creative pursuits, things I can do at home, without the incredible, paralyzing social anxiety that a job hunt would have given me from the get-go, at my own pace, with an international reach and more and more reasons to make the cross-continent move of my dreams.

…my cat: Because there is nothing better than a furball. Even when that furball has a penchant for biting whatever part of you he can get at. He’s small and fuzzy and a champion napper and he likes to sleep on top of people even though if you pet his face too much he’ll go and turn his back on you (at which point I usually grab his tail) and he enjoys making you move the laptop on your lap so he can take its place (and then bite you). Basically, I love him. I’m grateful for having him. I’m grateful for the mornings he comes over to my bed and steps on my bladder and then doesn’t let me get up. I am grateful because I can hear him meowing right now, and it’s adorable.

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29 Comments

Intersectionality Mental Health Read This

Read This: Kickstarter, Diversity, Feminism, and Working For Yourself

posted on September 21, 2013

Let’s do this before my list of saved links to share gets any longer.

readthis

• Kickstarter: Stop Telling Women to Smile: Around The Country. From the Kickstarter pitch: Stop Telling Women to Smile is a public art series that addresses gender-based street harassment. The work consists of drawn portraits of women who have told their stories of harassment, and wheat pasting those portraits as posters with captions that speak directly to offenders on outdoor walls.

The goal of the campaign has been met and surpassed with still 11 days to go, but the more money they raise, the further their reach, and it doesn’t hurt to spread the word about it, too. Get their message to as many people as possible. So do take a look.

• Continuing on the harassment theme (and trigger warning for that!): Teaching Naked, Part 1 and Part 2. How a teacher turned a student’s written harassment of her into a learning experience, and the obstacles (read: misogyny) along the way.

• The Uncommon Beauty of Diana Nyad, & The Relentless Corporate and Media Censorship of Real Beauty by Karen Walrond. Earlier this month, Diana Nyad, a 64-year-old swimmer, swam the entire distance from Cuba to the United States without the help of a shark cage. Proving Karen’s point: this article is all I heard about it.

• A Question for Us All by Marsha Phillips: “If the concepts we discuss in our circles are universal, why aren’t our audiences more representative of the communities that we live in? Where are the people of color?” Food for thought and suggestions for creating a more inclusive blog/site. Relevant to everyone.

• On the Huff Post: 23 Things Every Woman Should Stop Doing. My kneejerk reaction to this website is ‘ugh’ and my kneejerk reaction to the article title is ‘don’t tell women what to do,’ so really it’s anybody’s guess why I clicked on the link… but this is a good list, actually. It would only be better if it were framed differently. After all, it’s basically a list of things that male-dominated, male-run society has ingrained in women to strip them of their confidence and control their lives. Yes, women internalize those things and dole them out as advice to other women via mediums ranging from word of mouth to magazines, but to blame that behavior on them is wrong and harmful. Here’s a better title for that article: 23 Things People Expect Women To Do But Women Don’t Owe Anyone. Here’s another better title: 23 Things Women Are Taught To Do That They Should Feel Free To Stop Doing. I’m sure I could come up with something more concise if my sister weren’t using my noisy old laptop in my room right now, but you get my drift.

• Your Best Is Enough: How to Take Care of Yourself and Run a Business at the Same Time by Hannah Braime. I could quote the whole thing and talk about how relevant it is to me, but here’s a tidbit: How we show up each day depends on how we’re doing, mentally, emotionally and physically. In order to show up at our best, we might need a morning, an afternoon, a day, 10 days off. Sometimes that means that the super duper important if-I-don’t-get-this-done-today-the-world-will-collapse tasks can wait until tomorrow (because they’ll still be there then). Truly worth a read.

• On Being Multi-Passionate by Kim Lawler. For anyone who, when writing a bio, ends up with a string of words like this: fine art photographer/product photographer/model/fashion designer/seamstress/graphic designer/blogger… and then some. Apparently there’s a new label going around to describe this sort of thing, and it’s “multipassionate solopreneurs.” It… sounds interesting. Douchey, says Kim. And I wonder if it’s more or less so than the term I sometimes apply to myself in the coziness of my own head: Renaissance woman.

4 Comments

Diaries Mental Health

My Indiegogo Campaign: A Story About Poking Your Social Anxiety In The Face For Fun And Profit

posted on September 20, 2013

I’ve been meaning to make a video summarizing my Indiegogo campaign since, oh, the middle of August, but I never got around to it and I think I know why: I wouldn’t be able to keep it short and to the point. I’m a rambler and prone to tangents, and written blog posts allow for a level of skimming that videos largely don’t. They also allow for bullet points! So, without further ado, here’s a rundown of how I got a new laptop and my to-do list exploded, and why I’m running behind on a lot.

This is what I crowdfunded:

lhpcollection-pre

And this post is a (long, long) account of how that worked out for me.

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7 Comments

Diaries Mental Health

Early Morning Musings

posted on September 12, 2013

Or late night. The sun isn’t out yet and I’m having dinner, so it still feels like yesterday. I’m sure by the time I’m done writing this post it… will still feel like yesterday, actually; there’s an hour to go before sunrise.

I’m feeling sentimental, with a little self-reflection thrown in. Somehow I slept all day Wednesday — I didn’t have the energy to get in the shower, so instead I lay back in bed. Twice. I had three separate nightmares, none of which I remember even vaguely right now. If there’s one side effect from my antidepressants I wish I could get rid of, it’s the nightmares. I do okay with the diminished sex drive — at least it doesn’t distract me — and my occasional low appetite bothers my mom a lot more than it bothers me. But the nightmares are a constant reminder that whatever part of my brain takes things as badly as it can and conjures up worst-case scenarios for everything is still there, muted by the paroxetine but still there. This is particularly obvious in the mildest nightmares, the ones I wake up screaming my head off from but can easily shake off once I’m awake. I don’t really have an explanation for the rest. They’re complicated and nonsensical and they stick with me after I wake up. I like the ones I wake up screaming from better, anyway, because my parents acknowledge them and my mom worries about it. It’s not that I want my mom to worry, but rather than it’s better than the alternative: lying in bed trying to calm down while someone completely dismisses that I could possibly feel bad because of something that only happened inside my head.

That’s what living with anxiety is like, all the time.

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Meet Lix

Welcome to my blog! I'm Lix: full-time graphic designer for bloggers and freelancers, and part-time photographer. I'm an unapologetic cat lady and perpetually angry feminist nightmare. I like attention and pretty things, and that's why I run a lifestyle blog. Learn more.
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