If We Were Having Coffee… #WeekendCoffeeShare

Welcome to another

#WeekendCoffeeShare! 🙂

Our host is Natalie, so if you’d like to join in with your own coffee share, you can go over to her blog. 🙂

We’ve just had our lunch, and there’s still a lot of chicken breast left, so help yourself if you fancy, or if you’d rather have a lighter snack I can give you some salted peanuts, or feel free to bring something with yourself and share with other peeps if you want. Help yourself to coffee or tea or cocoa or or my Mum’s homemade black lilac juice, or I think we’ve got some kefir as well if you’d prefer that, or perhaps water. So, if you’re all sitting comfortably and have something to drink or munch on, let’s get started.

If we were having coffee, I’d ask each of you how you’ve been doing lately…? 🙂

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that, actually, this week hasn’t been very eventful, so I probably won’t have all that much to share with y’all, but I just wanted to have a coffee share, even if for a brief check-in, as I guess the last one we had was over a month ago.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that we’ve been having a fair bit of spring-like weather, interspersed with really chilly, windy and often rainy days. It was even hailing quite heavily earlier this week. Today is one of those chillier days and it’s raining all the time. As you may perhaps remember, we live by the river, it flows through our backyard, so we are at quite a high flood risk. We’ve already had a few minor floodings since we moved here which were scary, and now my Dad has been really stressed out that this year it will be more hardcore with the amount of rain we’re getting and are still supposed to get.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I’m really pleased with my linguistic development over the last few weeks, mainly when it comes to Welsh, as currently this is the language I’m learning most actively because I’m not fluent in it yet, but also Swedish to a lesser extend, because I’ve been reading a lot in the latter. Concerning the former, I catch myself more and more often on having random bits of thoughts in Welsh, and not right after learning or when I’m sleepy or tired, which is most often when my languages mix up, but just randomly. My subjective feeling is also that my listening comprehension must have improved a bit lately. That’s all very motivating.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that, despite the usual ups and downs and myy anxiety being a bit up this weekend due to having quite an interesting and lengthy sleep paralysis session on Friday, mood-wise I’m still doing really well, most of the time with my mood being around what I consider my baseline, sometimes lower but not very low or not for long and usually in clear connection to something situational. Even Maggie, aka my inner self-critic, has been strangely quiet lately, not totally quiet but noticeably less active, she mostly just wakes up when I engage more with people or especially afterwards, but if she wouldn’t do that, she wouldn’t be alive. It has been like this for over three months now and it’s quite surprising. Yes, my amazing

faza peak

is still there, which certainly contributes to it, but despite being a really long peak compared with my previous experiences, it’s not an extremely intense one at all at this point, I’ve had much more intense faza peaks before, but I’m not sure the peak is solely responsible for this, especially not for Maggie’s unusual behaviour. Whatever the cause might be though, I’m quite happy with the results, I’m just a bit worried that after being up for so long, at least for my standards, at some point I will have a spectacular slide downhill, lower than I’ve had in a long time. I guess kind of like when there’s a draught for long, then you’ll have a storm and the longer it was dry, the stronger the storm will be.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that, while I do still get migraines like once or twice weekly, they have really gotten better in terms of intensity, regardless of what medicine I take, or even if I don’t take anything. They are shorter and not so incapacitating, and often will go away or lessen very significantly when I just have a nap or will totally go away after a solid night’s sleep, so it’s really not such a problem anymore. In case you don’t know, I’ve had migraines on and off for years, but for most of that time, they really weren’t very problematic, and I considered myself lucky compared with a lot of other migraine folks. Then the year before last, in November, I suddenly started getting them a lot more often, and they were a lot more painful and difficult to get rid of, and extremely easily triggered by just about any stressful situation or anything that could possibly trigger a migraine. Admittedly, I did have quite a stressful time then and my brain was going bonkers with rumination and anxiety so my main theory was that it really must be the stress doing this. Then things got better again in January, last year which coincided with my stress levels going a bit down overall, until September when, again, I started having yucky migraines. This time, I wasn’t in a lot of stress or anxiety really, just my normal anxious brain but nothing beyond that and nothing turbulent going on in my life at that specific time of the year, so I couldn’t blame the stress anymore. That lasted again until about January this year. So, considering this, I’m fairly sure there must be some seasonal pattern, like a lot of people seem to have, and for a lot of people their migraines also seem to get worse around autumn-winter. I’m very curious why. That could perhaps also be responsible for why I always had more severe migraines right at the start of a school year, which everyone was thinking must be to do with stress – which surely was also an important factor but as it seems not the only one. – Well, I used to have recurrent allergic bronchitis almost every autumn-winter season, and now that it seems to be mostly cured finally, I’ll have seasonal migraines instead. Life’s never boring. 😀

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that, with the exception of sleep paralysis I had on Friday, I’ve been having absolutely hilarious dreams lately, and extremely vivid. I love having vivid dreams after which, when you wake up, you just have to laugh out loud at the absurdity of them. And I met some interesting folks in Dreamland that I wish could exist in real life.

What would you share if we were having coffee? 🙂