Question of the day.

Let’s have a question today, shall we? 🙂

 

What do you have that others don’t and will never have? 

 

My answer: 

 

Beyond the obvious, like my fingerprints, facial features, voice, DNA, soul or mind, I have Misha! Well, you could say that my family has Misha too, but they don’t really have him as much as I do, because I bought him so he’s officially mine. I’m not sure about the “will never have” part because, as I often say, if I were to ever move from here, like if I were to live on my own or in some place where crazy  Bibielz go when they don’t know how to make their own food or interact with people, and Misha would still be alive by then, I wouldn’t take him with me, because I wouldn’t be able to care for him the way he needs in every single situation, like when he needs his eyedrops for example. And also it would be a huge stress for him.

 

I’d be surprised if someone else had the same faza peep as me. I mean a proper, actual faza. I’d be quite surprised. Especially regarding Gwilym or Jacob because they’re really niche outside of Wales. I of course know people who like Cornelis or Gwilym and their respective music, but fazas as such seem to be quite rare. And if you want to be very thorough and precise, even if there is someone who has a faza on one of these people, theirs surely feels different than mine. And even if theirs would be similar, I can totally bet that there’s no other person who’s had fazas on all three of these people during their life. 😀 

 

I bet no one has an identical room as mine, and even if someone will live here in the future, I’m sure they’ll make it look very different so it won’t really be the same room anymore. 

 

I often wonder if there is any people who know exactly the same combination of languages that I do: Polish, English, Swedish, Welsh and Norwegian. Without Welsh in the mix, I’m sure there are thousands of such people, but one little language can change so much. People don’t own languages they speak in a literal sense obviously, but in a more metaphorical/symbolical/poetic, I think they do. Oh yeah, and we do say that someone can have a good command of a language. That’s not necessarily what I would say about my Welsh, and I would hesitate a lot about Norwegian, but I do have some degree of command over them, right? 

 

Oh wait, can two gem stones look identical? ‘Cause if not, I have a lot of gem stones that no one else has. And even if there can be identical stones, I’m sure that still a good deal of mine must be quite unique. Like my pyrite, it looks really odd and if there’s someone else who has an identical one, I want to meet that peep ‘cause they must be cool if they have such a cool piece of pyrite (I should really take those pics of my gem stones that I’ve wanted to do for ages and share them here so then at least the chances of that peep & I  meeting can increase). 

 

Also, who else in this creepy world is both blind and has AVPD? I feel like there should be more of us, but I don’t know anyone else who has both these things at once so it feels kinda lonely. But then I sometimes think that some aspects of these two things make it a really malicious combination to live with so for that reason I do hope no one else’s stuck with it. But even if there are blind folks with AVPD, I wonder if anyone of them is totally blind like me and due to optic nerve hypoplasia/septo-optic dysplasia also like me. Septo-optic dysplasia is rare and such a combination would be super rare, because from what I see, most people with either optic nerve hypoplasie alone or septo-optic dysplasia have some vision left and they may qualify/identify as low-vision rather than blind.

 

Actually, speaking of SOD, I’d like to share something weird I discovered recently, but I want to give you a fuller picture, so beware, long-ish digression ahead. When I was born, my parents had to basically figure out over time that I was blind, and then that on top of that I had hormonal issues, but even when I ended up in the care of an endocrinologist when I was already in preschool, they were never told that these two things are related and that there is a rare genetic condition where a child is born with underdeveloped optic nerve and pituitary, and often other issues that can range in severity quite a lot between people, even though as we learned later I displayed classic and creepily specific signs from the beginning. They most likely didn’t know, because it’s so rare and even now when you Google “septo-optic dysplasia” in Polish, what you mostly see is just fundraisers of parents who want to get treatment for their children, rather than any resources where you could learn something substantial. There are people with SOD who are intellectually disabled with severe hormonal issues, visual impairments, seizures and cerebral palsy, , there are people kinda like me who are blind and on top of that have some mild to severe hormonal issues, or people who have low vision but good enough that they can even drive but are still struggling with the hormones, or anything in between. Some people claim it’s a spectrum which makes sense. I only found out that such a thing exists when I was about 17 or so and trying to wrap my brain around what actually the problem with my hormones is, because no one really told me that in a normal way and my parents were very confused too. I couldn’t have found that out earlier, because to be able to do this, I had to understand English more or less, and when I was 17 I started essentially self-teaching English and my fluency  suddenly leapt forward, though was still rather lame compared with what it’s like now so I didn’t really understand all that medical language. But when I found out about SOD, I told my Mum about it and she was a bit shocked so we went to a neurologist who said that yeah, it seems logical that this must be the case, but was so vague that my Mum suspected that he probably hadn’t heard about it before and just didn’t want to say it. I never pursued any official diagnosis because I didn’t think that would give me anything at this point, it feels sort of too late or something, though it could have potentially helped both me and my family when I was a kid. Sometimes I wonder if it did something else to my brain that I’m not aware of and might be partially or completely responsible for what I call my “weird-brainedness” but it’s not like it matters hugely I guess. Since I didn’t have an official diagnosis and since SOD is so rare, I rarely even tell people that I have it, most often if I talk about the cause of my blindness I just say ONH. Anyway, recently some life circumstances made me dive deeper into the topic of SOD, which, now that my English is a lot better than at 17, made me discover a lot of quite interesting stuff. But one thing that I found interesting specifically because it clearly applied to me was that I came across an abstract of a scholarly piece where they said that there have been cases of people with SOD who also have… anosmia, because of underdeveloped olfactory bulbs. :O This world is full of mysteries. For those unaware, I am anosmic, although when I was younger I often wondered whether perhaps I’m just such a freak that I don’t even know how to use my sense of smell and interpret what it tells me, because, like, why would I even not have it? It would be a sick coincidence to be blind and anosmic (even if anosmia isn’t really a problem or not in my experience anyway, it just kind of reeks of morbid humour when you look at it from the outside I guess). And people would repeatedly tell me that I must have it, maybe it’s just weak or something or maybe it’s because I have allergies and hay fever all the time. At school, when we did gardening and smelled spring or autumn flowers, or other fragrant things, I would just pretend like people in “Emperor’s New Clothes”: “Mmmm yeah, it smells lovely!” It’s so ingrained in me that even now I still tell Misha that he smells beautifully even though I’ve never felt his smell, but Sofi often says that and my Mum too so when I tell him it means more that he’s just beautiful all round. I’ve only started being more open about my anosmia when Covid hit and a lot of people were in the same situation as me. Except people would think that if my sense of smell is nonexistent, then my sense of taste must be, too, because that’s what they experienced with Covid. But I assure you people that my sense of taste works perfectly well, or even better than that, because I think I’ve always had some taste hypersensitivity actually, and I have gustatory synaesthesia after all. But some people would still tell me that if I wouldn’t have the sense of smell, I wouldn’t have the sense of taste either, so I can either have none, or both and it’s probably my autosuggestion and shit like that. It’s such a simple and small thing, and my anosmia doesn’t affect my life in any bad way beyond it being low-key frustrating that I don’t know what it means that Misha “smells like sleep”, but it made me feel oddly happy to learn that it’s actually a real thing and that there’s a proper reason for that. My Mum got a laughing fit when I told her about that, I wasn’t exactly sure why, but it turned out infectious so we both ended up in stitches over this anosmia thing. And then I even came across a YouTube channel of a woman who has SOD and she’s totally blind and has anosmia as well. But I’ve never come across any info about gustatory problems related to SOD, and I think I dug deep, or at least long. So I resolved that from now on, if someone will try to discredit the existence or clarity of my sense of smell, I will  just flipping eat them, and once we meet in eternity I’ll make sure to let them know what they tasted like. So yeah, it may sound miserable to you or like I should be a vegetable but now it’s confirmed that I have three senses lol (at least when you count only the five senses as senses, and not proprioception and all that other sophisticated stuff). 

 

So, going back to the question finally, it would be even more intriguing to learn if there’s anyone else who has AVPD, no vision and anosmia all at the same time. 😀 

 

Ugh, and I’m absolutely sure that no one else has the same “Ian” living in their brain. But then no one has the same other, Brainworld peeps that I have either, the ones that are fun, and generally the same Brainworld/paracosm structure as mine. 

 

And no one has the same passworded diary files as I do on their computer, haha, at least I hope so. 😀 

 

I’m thinking but can’t think of anything else interesting or worth mentioning, so that’s probably it for me. 

 

How about you? And how do you feel about being the only one who has the thing that you have? 🙂 

 

Question of the day.

   What kind of sense of humour would you say you have? 

 

My answer: 

 

I honestly don’t really know, I guess I”ve never really thought much about it, and I guess it’s difficult to describe your own sense of humour accurately, well, in any case it seems to be for me. So I can only say how I’ve heard others describe it. A lot of people have told me that I have a dry sense of humour. I do like dry humour a lot, but I’m not that sure mine could be described as such, because as gloomy as I am, and despite I don’t smile a lot if I don’t have to and don’t show much facial expression, at the same time I am also quite a giggly person and I laugh a lot and dry humour vs being giggly seem rather contradictory to me. My brother has a very dry humour and he hardly ever laughs. Same about my Dad, who uses it less often but when he does, he does it masterfully and people keep quoting his dry statements for decades. And my Dad never laughs properly. He may chuckle sometimes if it’s either socially expected or something is like REALLY funny but he never laughs, he sometimes only fake-laughs for derisive purposes. 

 

I remember when I first saw my psychiatrist when I was 17 and one of the first things she told me was that she likes my dark sense of humour. I do like making psychologists, therapists and psychiatrists laugh and always do my best to achieve it, because some of them are very stiff and clinical otherwise, and even with those who are not (that psychiatrist wasn’t, in case you’re curious), it just makes everything less serious and pathetic. I had a friend at school who once described my sense of humour as gallows humour, and that’s how people described some of my silly little poems that I wrote as a teen, and I guess that’s much the same as dark humour as well.

 

Speaking of psychiatrists and therapists, my last therapist (the psychodynamic one who had a problem with my blindness and told me how she classifies humans into schizoid and non-schizoid), kept telling me that I have a very self-deprecative sense of humour, in a way that made it seem that it was a very sad and worrisome thing. I get that it’s a bit of a problem when there’s something like AVPD thrown into the mix, but overall, I think a self-deprecative sense of humour is a very healthy thing that prevents you from treating yourself too seriously. It’s quite paradoxical though that most people I know who excel at this kind of humour and seem to have a lot of distance to themselves and pretty much everything, are at the same time extremely sensitive to criticism from other people. Sarcasm is also something that I use profusely, I guess less as a sense of humour thing but more a coping strategy because I don’t know how to be expressive like a normal person, well unless in writing, to the point that often if I say something that I genuinely mean once in a while, even my own family often think I’m being sarcastic. I suppose it’s my own sarcasm that’s also to blame for the fact that I interpret as what other people say to me as dripping with sarcasm all the time. Like most sarcastic people I guess, I also enjoy absurd, paradoxical and grotesque humour. I generally like the surreal. 

 

Something that our Sofi excels at catching ever since she was a toddler and that we both really enjoy but no one else in our family seems to understand is a sort of situational humour. It’s not exactly what people typically call situational humour, but I’m not even really sure how to call it, I totally wouldn’t be surprised if it was something that only makes us two laugh in the whole world. But basically we both like to observe the world and people in it, and a lot of stuff that seems to be very normal and neutral on the surface feels really funny to us, often because there’s something else to it under the surface that makes the whole thing really funny, or it shows when you look at a situation from a different perspective or something like that. It’s really weird. That’s also why we both liked to play pretend all kinds of different scenes when we were younger. All kids play-pretend, but they usually play house, doctor etc. we did too, but what we enjoyed most was acting out situations in which we found something funny and showed it in a sort of odd, exaggerated way. So we often played drunk men, court trials like in the TV shows, truck drivers, grandma and granddaughter etc. Perhaps sometimes if someone sensitive observed those scenes they could find them offensive because of all the exaggeration, but we never really meant it in a way that would mock people as such, more just situations. 

 

At the same time, I can be very childish, and so can be my sense of humour. I thought I’d probably grow out of it at some point, but so far it has never happened so I guess the hope is lost. I laugh at a lot of weird and silly things that most self-respecting adults just don’t. I remember one time when I was a teenager, I was chatting with my good friend from our online blind community on the phone and we had giggle fits over everything possible, and I heard my Mum muse to Dad about how it’s so weird that a lot of smart people laugh at really silly things and why that is. I don’t know if it’s a “smart people” thing, or even if I am part of the “smart people” club outside of my Mum’s brain because I never had an IQ test done as it’s practically impossible to measure blind people’s intelligence beyond verbal, but maybe there is something to it indeed, because I too know a lot of really intelligent people whose sense of humour is not that very sophisticated and it’s incredibly easy to cause them to be in stitches. I get quite frequent giggle fits ever since I was a little kid, especially in the evenings or at night, it’s almost like everything’s way funnier just because it’s night time. One thing will make me laugh and then suddenly everything feels extremely amusing. I sometimes also get giggle fits in very inappropriate situations, like publicly or when everyone else is somberly serious or upset, because some little, hilarious detail catches my attention, or I have an amusing thought, or suddenly I am reminded of something funny that happened X years ago. And then it’s not fun, it’s exhausting to have to focus all your brainergy on not exploding with laughter and not making weird expressions. You dream about being able to leave and relieve yourself, but as soon as you leave, suddenly you no longer feel the need to laugh anymore. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t somehow related to my social difficulties and emotional regulation and how I normally keep stifling stuff and bottling it up, because I have the same thing with crying as well. I typically can’t cry when I’m alone even if I really feel the need to or think it could help me, unless I’m really very distressed or more angry than sad, but when I’m in social situations, I often feel like crying for seemingly no reason. I’m kind of scared that with time, my years of bottling up which has by now become my normal and I don’t know how not to bottle up, will take a revenge on me and I’ll turn into a hysterical, deranged old lady who will laugh her brain out at funerals, cry rivers on her birthday and blurt things out loud unpredictably. My grandma is actually very weepy and it’s progressively worse as she ages, my Mum too, so I fear it’s genetic. 

 

And since I’m a lingua- and logophile, I also really enjoy all kinds of wordplay, puns and word humour, and making up my own words that I find hilarious. This is something that my grandad shares with me as well so perhaps I take it after him. My Dad also likes word humour though less sophisticated and more immature than my grandad. 

 

How about you and your sense of humour? 🙂 

Book Review – It’s a Shame I Can’t Share: Living with Avoidant Personality Disorder by Jake Ware.

When I started this blog over five years ago, I swore that I would never do book reviews here. I did a lot of them on my previous Polish language blogs because, as someone who reads a lot, it almost felt like I should, but I don’t think I was very good at it. And it didn’t seem to fit in with what I wanted this blog to be, at least originally. But here I am, breaking my vow and writing a book review. I feel I really need to do it with this particular book. It was supposed to be a mini review (ha, ha, ha!), but in order to make it Bibiel-style, I have decided that it WILL contain a lot of personal reflections, so consider yourselves warned.

   It’s a shame I can’t share: Living with Avoidant Personality Disorder is Jake Ware’s memoir about his own experiences with avoidant personality disorder, published in February this year. Jake also has a YouTube channel dedicated to sharing his experiences and raising awareness of the disorder, which I discovered quite shortly before the book came out. As you may know, I have also been diagnosed with it and have talked about it on here many times, so you may be more or less familiar with the term and what it means. Jake has done a great job of explaining what avoidant personality disorder is in his book, but let me give you some basic definitions here, just so you know what we’re dealing with.

   Avoidant Personality Disorder (AVPD) is one of the so-called Cluster C (anxious/fearful) personality disorders. It is characterised by severe, ingrained social anxiety, which is not limited to a single type of situation such as public speaking or meeting new people, or being afraid of very specific things such as blushing, but occurs in pretty much any type of social interaction, and is often accompanied by more generalised anxiety. I often say simplistically, that it is like social anxiety, only more intense, more firmly rooted in the brain, and with a few extra gimmicks. People who suffer from it also experience intense feelings of inadequacy and fear of social rejection or criticism. They therefore avoid social interaction as a way of coping with the symptoms. There is much more to AVPD than this, but these are the key features used to diagnose people with the disorder. Other common symptoms include, but are not limited to: low or non-existent self-esteem, fantasising/maladaptive daydreaming/unhealthy escapism, paranoid traits, high sensory processing sensitivity, preoccupation with what other people think of you and whether or not you are making them feel uncomfortable, inhibited emotional expression, inability to share thoughts or interests freely with others, depressive tendencies, and what I personally call a low humiliation threshold and a low cringe/embarrassment threshold. Of course, as with any mental illness, it’s important to remember that the presentation can vary from person to person and also depends on what comorbidities, if any, they have. 

   I’ve always found it frustrating and disheartening that there is so little information, so few resources about AVPD, especially when you compare it to other personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder. When you think about it, this is not at all surprising given that the very nature of AVPD means that people with it often find it very difficult, if not impossible, to seek treatment, and as a result doctors rarely come into contact with it outside of textbooks, and there are very likely many people who are undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. Even if they are diagnosed, they may be very reluctant to talk openly about their struggles for fear of coming across as cringey (even if only to themselves) or just plain whiny. Even I myself, despite mentioning my AVPD a lot and writing posts from the perspective of someone with AVPD, have still not written a proper, more general, detailed post about AVPD, although I have thought about it more times than I care to admit. As a result, Most of the personal stories of AVPD I have come across come from relatively high functioning people, certainly more high functioning than myself in most respects, which in turn has often led me to wonder if what I have is really AVPD, if people with it can do things like have a responsible job that involves peopling, engage in intimate relationships, have a genuine real life friendship, or raise children. Yes, it’s still more challenging for them than for the average peep, even a very introverted but brain-healthy peep, but they can actually do it, which means that their AVPD and my AVPD must be two different pairs of rain boots, to use our Polish idiom. 

   I was thinking about this one day in January when I had what I call an AVPD flare-up (feeling much worse AVPD symptom-wise than my baseline) and I thought that maybe with AVPD it’s like many other conditions that they’re more like a spectrum, think of how there’s so-called high-functioning and low-functioning depression, or high-functioning and low-functioning autism. I’ve also heard of high and low functioning Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and Borderline Personality Disorder (although in the case of the latter, the high functioning type seems to be better known as quiet BPD). So if other personality disorders work this way, it seems logical that AVPD does too. I’m not going to discuss the (un)helpfulness of labelling conditions as high or low functioning, which, as someone who also has persistent depressive disorder, often colloquially referred to as high-functioning depression, I’m certainly aware of. That’s way beyond the scope of this post. It led me to google “low-functioning AVPD”/”low-functioning avoidant personality disorder” (in quotes), which yielded very few results, but one of them was Jake’s channel, where he describes his condition as such. I ended up watching every single one of his videos. With a few exceptions, mostly simply due to the fact that we are two different people with very different external circumstances, our AVPD experiences felt incredibly similar. Which, as sad as it was to hear that someone else was dealing with pretty much the same shit as me, was also extremely uplifting to find out. Enough, in fact, to help me out of the stinky rabbit hole I’d been stuck in. So when I found out that Jake was about to release a book all about AVPD, I was really excited. I read it a whole month after it was released, though, because apparently I hadn’t been on YouTube for over a month 😀 I think this book really deserves some recognition, if not for anything else, then at least for all the courage it must have taken Jake to open up, both on his channel and in the book. I mean, as someone with AVPD, I would know. I can’t even think about talking to the camera about my AVPD without feeling more or less like I’m standing in stilettos on the edge of an icy cliff, just after a spin on a merry-go-round and about to fall into the deep, freezing sea. Also, as I said, it’s the first real book about AVPD I’ve read, and a pretty in-depth one, from a perspective very similar to mine, so it seems only logical that I should write a review so that hopefully more people will read it and become aware of what AVPD is and feels like, as it seems to be aimed primarily at people without AVPD who want to understand it better. 

   The book opens with a poignant introduction that gives a brief but very candid account of what it’s really like to live with AVPD. Jake writes about the constant self-loathing and self-doubt, unconsciously analysing people for clues to what they might be thinking about you, constantly analysing your own behaviour, dwelling on all the things you did wrong in the past, never mind that no one else remembers or even cares, etc.

   In the next chapter, the author introduces himself and explains AVPD in a more general, but still very detailed way. He talks not only about his own AVPD, but also about what he has learnt from other people with AVPD through his channel. He explains what AVPD is in a very clear and descriptive way. He also writes about what AVPD is not, which I think could also be very helpful to many, because I see it so often that people confuse avoidant personality disorder with avoidant attachment style, when they are two completely different things. So for that reason alone I hope a lot of people will read this book. Already here, it touches on a lot of interesting things that are rarely mentioned when talking about AVPD, such as the very likely correlation of AVPD with being a so-called HSP (highly sensitive person), which I honestly didn’t know prior to finding Jake’s channel, or how a lot of AVPD folks, including himself, which is evident throughout the book, have a tendency to use a lot of sarcasm and weird self-deprecating humour as a sort of coping strategy when socialising. 

   Later in the book, Jake writes about his life in more detail, focusing on the signs of developing AVPD and what might have caused it. I was already familiar with some of this from his YouTube channel, where he talks about how his symptoms developed over time, but it was still interesting to read his life story in more detail. At the same time, reading these chapters was a surprisingly emotional experience for me. Perhaps because, although my childhood, family and schools were quite different from Jake’s, I am also a Gen Z, so for both of us our AVPD-related experiences to date have largely been with the education system, and the regular people on here know how much I hate the education system, regardless of country, I think. I felt for Jake right from the start when he described how he tried to hide from his mum and school staff to avoid going to preschool. I guess it reminded me of my own similar attempts – locking myself in the loo to avoid going to school, or going out on the snow-covered balcony in the middle of the night, barefoot and in my pyjamas, to get sick and not have to go to school the next day. People here often idealise American schools based on pop culture, but from what I’ve read in Jake’s book, I feel that for an anxious student, they must be even worse than our Polish ones. Perhaps part of the reason it was so emotional was that it was the first book I’ve ever read about AVPD, so even though I was more or less familiar with his life story, I couldn’t help but compare the severity of my AVPD to his. Whenever something made me feel that in some way my symptoms were less severe than Jake’s, my inner monologue would go something like this: “And you think you have AVPD? Look what real AVPD is like, you little pathetic fake Bibiel!” If mine seemed more severe, my brain would go: “You’re such a freaky, broken Bibiel that even people with AVPD can deal with life better than you” 😀 Eventually I rationally accepted that everyone’s limitations and struggles will obviously be different, even with the same condition and more or less similar presentation, but it was still pretty rough. 

   I could also relate to the somatic signs of Jake’s anxiety – constant nausea, stomachaches, headaches, what not. – He also writes in detail about his experiences with various extra-curricular activities he took part in, including marching band, which was particularly difficult for him, and for me to read about because I could literally feel all the yucky feelings and got a lot of memories of my own. At one point, it actually made me cry a little bit, and you guys probably know that I’m not an easy cryer when it comes to empathising with someone or feeling moved by something. Of course, there’s also a lot of focus on his family, particularly his parents, as he believes that it was largely the never-ending conflict between them that he and his siblings were dragged into, and their very specific expectations that he couldn’t meet, that contributed to his anxiety eventually turning into full-blown AVPD. This was also very sad to read, but in this case because for the most part, I do not have similar family experiences, so I always feel for people who have been less fortunate than me in this regard. 

   As I mentioned earlier, it’s a common problem for people with AVPD that they are really afraid to share their interests with others for fear of being judged, criticised or stereotyped based on them. Personally, I think I deal with this less than many other people whose AVPD stories I’ve read or heard. I can be quite apprehensive and self-conscious about sharing my interests with people, especially in-depth, and I can also be very afraid of their reactions. Oddly enough (or maybe not), the more strongly I feel about something, the more I’m afraid to share it, so one of the things I’m particularly apprehensive of is talking to others about my faza people. If someone says something vaguely resembling criticism about my faza peep or their music, I feel as if they said it about me, or sometimes like they did something almost sacrilegious, and it really makes me cringe. … But at the same time, I LOVE sharing my interests with people and if I could, I would go on and on and on about them. Especially – yes – my faza people. It’s so fun and exciting, and I feel like the thrill is stronger than the fear for me, though of course it depends on the situation and with whom. Maybe it’s because I generally find it a lot harder to bottle up the happy stuff than the difficult stuff. Seriously though, just a few weeks ago my Dad suddenly wanted to listen to my current faza peep’s – Gwilym’s – music with me, just out of curiosity I guess. Normally I have to plan these things in advance, what to show a person when, what to say, how to handle it emotionally without showing my brain state etc, but this was so sudden that I got a mini-shock. We did listen to Gwil for quite a while and it was fun and he seemed to like his music even though he doesn’t know anything about folk music and doesn’t understand a word of Welsh, so he couldn’t appreciate his music properly, but I couldn’t settle for hours afterwards. I couldn’t sleep, I was buzzing with so much anxious, shaky energy, mulling over everything that had happened and wondering what my Dad could have been thinking every single second of that hour. My heart was racing the whole time, and when I looked at my Apple Watch, my pulse rate during the time I spent with Dad went up to 140 at one point. And it was just my own Father! 😀 But as I said, despite the anxiety, I generally feel able to share my interests with others and to enjoy doing it more or less, which is why I find it heartbreaking that many others with the same disorder, including Jake, find it much more difficult. Jake has quite a few interests, some relatively niche, which he writes about in his book and how he would love to share them with like-minded people, but at the same time it feels impossible. 

   Jake had to drop out of college after one semester because of increasing anxiety, as well as depression that he’d already developed by that time, and he couldn’t get a job after that. He felt very suicidal, and his parents didn’t really understand what was going on. Eventually he found a psychologist who used CBT, and in the book he describes his experiences with this therapeutic modality, which I found really validating because now I know I’m not the only person with AVPD for whom it didn’t work. My first therapist, the one I worked with for years as a child and who eventually helped me get a diagnosis, worked mostly with CBT, although her approach was rather integrative, and then when she dumped me, my next therapist’s approach was very much rooted in CBT. I never really felt that it helped me in any meaningful way. And CBT is supposed to be like the default therapeutic approach for AVPD. Which makes perfect sense if you think of it as social anxiety plus, except in practice I don’t think thatt’s really what it is. As Jake writes in his book, it was not the insight into his thoughts and beliefs that he needed, because he already had it. I think most of us with AVPD have it, perhaps too much of it. But I suppose that’s another problem that comes from the fact that there is so little research into the disorder. Admittedly, when I later tried psychodynamic therapy, it didn’t work for me either, in fact I think it made me worse, but I’m not sure whether the problem was with the therapy, or  the therapist and me clashing big time, though the latter certainly must have played some part. It was also through that psychologist that Jake was first diagnosed with social anxiety disorder. 

   Later, Jake describes his difficulties with AVPD fantasising/intrusive thoughts. I think it’s really interesting how it seems to have nothing to do with the disorder and yet so many of us experience it. It looks different for everyone and in his book Jake describes what it looks like for him. What I found particularly interesting was that he started experiencing it as an adult. As someone who’s always had very vivid fantasies, I used to think you just had to be born with a brain like that. 

   Jake then writes about his journey to finally being diagnosed. If not social anxiety, what could it be? Like me, he considered autism and it turned out not to be that either. Eventually he found out about AVPD and decided, again like me, to seek an official diagnosis for the sake of his family, to help them understand what he was going through, why he acted the way he did, why many things were so much harder for him than they were for them, and so on. Which unfortunately, but expectedly, didn’t have the intended effect. He also describes the whole evaluation process, which, although I think it looks different depending on where you get evaluated, might be helpful for people considering it to have a basic idea of what it’s more or less like. 

   The final part of the book is mostly dedicated to people who do not have AVPD to help them understand those who do, or who are very socially anxious. However, as someone with AVPD I also found it valuable and I think many others with the disorder will too. It is very well written and well thought out. The advice is broken down into different sections for different types of relationships, from strangers to people you care about. The last and longest section is particularly insightful and encouraging for people with and without AVPD. It contains a lot of very practical, honest advice and covers a lot of different things quite comprehensively, even though it’s only one chapter. I think it could be a hugely helpful resource for anyone in a deeper relationship with someone with AVPD. I’ve come across articles about relationships with AVPD in the mix in the past, but they barely scratched the surface and felt quite generic and clichéd compared to this. 

   The book ends on a positive, if bittersweet, note. Jake is still in the process of finding the right therapy and medication, and gradually improving his life, which I really hope he will one day succeed with, as much as possible. But what I think is most important is that he’s already taken the first steps, quite big steps I think, by opening himself up to people as much as he has. It’s easy to write a book if you’ve managed to overcome something. But I think it really takes courage to write a book about something that you’re still dealing with and will probably struggle with in one way or another for the rest of your life. 

   Jake’s writing is really good stylistically, as far as I can tell as a non-native. It’s very honest and raw, reflective and vulnerable, warm and engaging, sprinkled with some dry, sarcastic humour, which is always a good seasoning to balance things out when you’re writing about shit. 

   I think I could recommend this book to pretty much anyone. Those who don’t have AVPD and want to understand it better, those with AVPD who want to read about someone else’s experience, anyone interested in psychology and how the brain works. Just, everyone should read this book. While reading it, I found myself thinking that I would like to translate it and give it to my non-English speaking Mum to read, which in turn made me think that it would be good for parents in general to read this book, especially parents of children who have any kind of social anxiety, or parents who are socially anxious themselves; in other words, parents whose children have any chance of developing AVPD in the future, so that they know what it looks like and can spot the potential signs early on and do something, because most of the time parents CAN do something. 

   Gosh, this is long! So, what do I say in conclusion…? Well, I probably shouldn’t say this was a great book or anything like that, because honestly, this was a really hard read emotionally, as I said, the first part anyway. It was depressing, nauseating, and inducing violent second-hand cringe fits, although of course none of this is in any way a fault of the book itself. I’m very proud of Jake for writing it, very happy that it exists, very grateful that I got to read it, and very hopeful that a lot of other people will do it too. 

   Official thanks to the author for providing me with a DRM-free copy of the book 😀

   It’s a Shame I Can’t Share is available on Amazon. You can visit Jake Ware’s Youtube channel (Jake – AVPD) to learn more about him, and avoidant personality disorder. 

Question of the day.

   How do you deal with loneliness? 

   My answer: 

   For me, it really depends. I generally like to be alone and can emotionally handle being alone for quite long, so while aloneness and loneliness are two different things, I think that also makes my threshold of feeling loneliness a fair bit higher than many people’s. I have also experienced many kinds of loneliness often so in a way I’m sort of used to it. I guess it’s like when you suffer with chronic pain your pain tolerance goes up gradually, or when you chronically under-sleep you function better on no sleep than an average person who sleeps 8 hours per night typically. So most of the time I don’t really even have to deal with it in any special way, I just notice that I’m feeling a bit lonely and move on. When the feeling gets more intense, I will try to alleviate it by talking to my family, or Misha, or people online, or go into my Brainworld.

   Sometimes, however, I feel a kind of loneliness that I have talked about on here many times before, which isn’t so much about craving contact with other people but more something from deep within, which does not go away when I interact with others. In fact, it can be the opposite if I am feeling this way while being surrounded by a lot of people, because then I see the disconnection between me and the people even more clearly. With this kind of loneliness, it really doesn’t matter if someone is physically present with you or not. You feel as if there is a huge wall between you and the other person/people, and while you can still communicate, it sort of feels as if each of you were speaking a different language and they’re not really mutually intelligible. Also, the world on either side of the wall is completely different and neither of you can have a clue what it’s like on the opposite side. So it’s actually easier to be alone while feeling this way, though you sort of feel lonely even with yourself, I really don’t know how to put it better. I think this kind of loneliness is the worst, because it’s so intense and gnawing at your brain that you can’t really ignore it completely, while at the same time there isn’t really a good way to get rid of it. It just has to lift on its own until the next time it comes. I usually get it particularly strongly during what I call AVPD flare-ups, which typically happen to me right after I had to do a lot of peopling, so I assume that this must be an AVPD symptom for me. What usually works best for me is just trying to distract myself, do something fun or intellectually and emotionally absorbing. I suppose there must be some link between this thing and distraction, because I often feel this kind of loneliness at night.

   Another thing that I experience that sort of feels like a kind of loneliness is in relation to the phenomenon that I call sensory anxiety, which is a complex thing that I don’t know how to describe well but I’ve already written on here a bit a couple times before so won’t go into detail here. When this sensory anxiety hits me particularly hard, I find silence very difficult, and I tend to feel safer when there are people around me, or Misha. This sometimes leads to very conflicting and weird feelings when I feel I can’t handle social stuff at the moment but at the same time feel scared of being alone. Or when there’s such a situation that the people are actually unwittingly the source of my anxiety in a way or are contributing to it. Here, distraction also helps to a degree, although it depends how high the anxiety is, because when it’s like through the roof I obviously can’t focus on anything else anyway. I also always listen to some music that has no creepifying potential at all or whatever else that I feel like listening to, and generally try to surround myself with a lot of friendly sensory stimuli, especially auditory ones. This always helps, though the degree varies depending on how anxious I am. 

   Generally though, I deal with loneliness of any kind a lot better ever since I have Misha in my life. Misha is also a creature who needs a lot of his own space, and he may not necessarily be up to spending time with me whenever I’m feeling lonely, but just knowing that he’s somewhere in the house often makes me feel a bit better.  

   How about your coping strategies? Do you actually experience loneliness a lot? 🙂 

(What) Do I Deserve? One tradCat Bibiel’z musings on “deserving” through a Warped Lens of avoidant personality disorder.

I feel like I haven’t done a rambling type post in a while, so it’s time to do one. As you may know, I have several books of journal prompts that I like to use to write in my diary from time to time. Sometimes, if I have a lot to say about a particular topic, or if it’s fun, or if I think my perspective might be interesting, I’ll write a blog post about it. Such is the case today.

   The prompt that inspired my thoughts today comes from a book called 200+ Journal Prompt Ideas for the Mind, Body and Soul by Riley Reigns, and it goes like this:

   What do you deserve best in life? 

   Now, that is quite a question. A rather, um, strange question, both in its essence and, according to my proofreading tool, even grammatically. And an annoying one for me, because I hate, HATE the word “deserve”. In most contexts, anyway. It’s so vague and clichéd and makes me roll my eyes most of the time when I hear it (well, at least inwardly, as I have nystagmus so can’t really do a convincing voluntary eyeroll 😀 ) and gives me terrible coach-speak vibes. A bit like the word “unique” when used to describe people, but in a different way, and being “deserving” is even worse than being “unique” 😀 When I wrote about it in my personal diary, I didn’t have an exact answer to this question (frankly, can you even have one?), but I had a lot of related thoughts rushing into my brain at the speed of light, so the resulting entry ended up lacking a bit of coherence. Which is totally fine, because it’s my diary and I actually prefer writing like this rather than after thinking things through, because it’s a more accurate reflection of my brain at the time, which in turn might be useful for a future Bibiel as a point of reference or for drawing conclusions or something. But of course I didn’t want that to be the case with my blog post. I felt I needed someone to help me sort out my thoughts a bit, and so, as is my wont when writing such posts, I turned to my Mum, about whom I knew she’d have a similar perspective to mine. My Mum agreed with my point of view for the most part, but didn’t really have any ideas of her own, as she admitted she’d never thought about it before. Still, we ended up talking about a few more aspects of ‘deserving’ that hadn’t occurred to me before. That’s why I love having these fun and deep conversations with my Mum. Next, to help me refine the jumble in my brain, I turned to everyone’s new favourite know-it-all polyglot pal – ChatGPT. – So he too (because he talks about himself as he in Polish, Polish verbs indicate the gender of the speaker) deserves some credit as a consultant and a little bit as a proof-reader, though the proof-reading is more courtesy of (also AI-powered) DeepL Write (the one who thought the question ungrammatical), which I prefer for this because it does its job very well without altering my writing style and making it sound bland and shallow, which is what ChatGPT does. And yes, I got his permission to write “Bibiel’z” instead of “Bibiel’s” in the title. So, with the credits out of the way, get yourself a coffee or whatever you like and let’s have a bit of a philosophical, a bit psychological, inevitably theological, but mostly terribly subjective, and hopefully just  fun and interesting chat about deserving. 

   I think that I may be someone who is easily hurt, yet not someone who is easily offended. However, I suppose I have always been oddly sensitive to things around the subject of an individual’s worth, deserving or worthiness, because I have vivid memories, from a very early age, of watching various adverts on TV, especially those aimed at women, and also those for candy and such, and feeling that they really did demean not only the intelligence of the viewer (as most adverts tend to do), but also something deeper, like their worth. Although of course, I didn’t always have these big words to put what I was thinking into 😀 Maybe it’s because my Mum is a bit like that, and she probably made loud observations about it in front of me. The most vivid memory I have is of hearing L’Oreal’s “Because you’re worth it” slogan countless times over the years, and flinching at it. Because I’m worth what? Your cosmetics? I mean, really? Thank you, what a flipping honour! Like, wow, I didn’t even realise that. But is that really all I’m worth? I know they don’t say it explicitly, and it’s meant to sound empowering or whatever, but am I seriously the only one who finds this stuff patronising and low-key insulting?

   And the whole deserving thing is often a very similar kettle of fish. “You deserve this. You deserve love. You deserve to feel good. You deserve some rest.” Well, who doesn’t? And ultimately, who gets to judge what you deserve? It certainly shouldn’t be us, because we can’t be objective about our efforts and achievements, and we have a terrible tendency to justify ourselves whenever we do something wrong. But neither can other people, because they never have access to the whole picture and have an equally terrible tendency to judge others harshly without having the full picture. More importantly, and more interestingly to me at least, why do we deserve? The etymology of the word implies that it involves some kind of service, and if you serve well you may deserve something. We might think that someone deserves a rest because they’ve worked hard all day. That makes sense. But if that’s the case, does that mean that, for example, sick people who can’t work because of their illness don’t deserve a rest? Of course they do! But if we insist on using the word “deserve”, it seems only logical to me to ask “what for”. Or what makes one deserving of love? Is it being lovable or loving others? Then do people who don’t seem lovable (which I think is a very subjective thing anyway), or have some deficiencies in that area, or can’t express their love in the right way, don’t deserve to be loved? 

   I’d like to approach this from a theological-ish perspective because that seems to make the most sense to me. But it’s a difficult and delicate subject, and I don’t know if I’m completely right about everything I’m going to say, and it’s probably going to be quite simplistic, because I think I may still have a lot of gaps in my knowledge and understanding of a lot of things related to the faith, which are only gradually being filled in since I turned to the Catholic tradition just over a year ago, and I still have some leftover errors or inaccuracies in my thinking. I mean, back when I was happily going to the Novus Ordo and all that, I thought I was quite knowledgeable on the subject, maybe even very knowledgeable, considering my age and all, but when we started exploring the tradition and going to the TLM (Traditional Latin Mass), I was quite quickly and starkly confronted with the shallowness and superficiality of my knowledge. Our Sofi, with the help of Mum, is now doing a sort of correspondence catechetic  course for children, and I like listening to her do it, because both I and Mum still learn a lot of new things from these catecheses that we either didn’t know about and certainly weren’t taught in religion classes or anything like that, or just never thought about before. And this particular course she’s doing now is actually for children a year younger than Sofi and is pretty basic, I think. :O Oh yeah, and let’s not forget that most of the Catholic stuff I read or listen to is in Polish, because I just prefer it that way. It feels kind of weird and oddly trivial to do it in English, like it’s a different religion or something lol. For me it’s just like every language has a different purpose I guess. So my wording here might be a bit weird at times.

   As a Catholic, I think there are two different ways of looking at it that can be compatible to a certain extent. Let’s call them the divine way and the secular way. Just for the purposes of this post, we’ll start with the secular way (albeit still from a Christian point of view, because that’s my point of view), to hopefully better illustrate and acknowledge the importance of the latter. 

  We are human, and as such we are the only beings in the world made in the image of God. This alone makes us inherently good, because God is good. He loves us, and the fact that we are made in His image and have immortal souls like Him means that we all have an inherent, innate dignity that cannot be taken away. This, in turn, makes us deserving of certain things in the eyes of our fellow human beings. For example, we deserve to live, we deserve to be loved and respected by our fellow people, we deserve to be treated in a humane way that reflects our dignity, and so on. As a result, we have our basic human rights, such as to have enough to eat, sleep, rest, etc. In a sense, we can say that we deserve all these things. But do we literally “deserve” them? Personally, I don’t think so. A much more appropriate phrase here would simply be that we have a right to them. These two expressions may be very closely related, and in some contexts may even work well as mutual synonyms, and I guess I can sort of see why “deserve” may sometimes be a more appealing alternative, but generally they are not synonyms, because again, deserving implies some kind of service. We may or may not have done anything special to deserve any of these basic things, but we still have a moral right to them. So the conclusion of thinking about deserving in a secular way would be that Bibiel “deserves” (if we really insist on using this particular phrase) pretty much the same things as everyone else, and there’s nothing special that Bibiel “deserves best in life”. 

   Now let’s move on to the divine way. As I’ve said before, God loves each and every one of us infinitely, because our souls are made in His image, and so we are the pinnacle of His creation. There is nothing that we ourselves have done to make Him love us, to make us the pinnacle of God’s creation, or to make us the most like Him in all of creation. There’s nothing we have done or are doing that makes us good, whether humanity as a whole or each individual. All the good that is in us, all the virtues and impulses to do good that we have, all the good that we do, comes from Him. He gave us countless precious gifts when He created us, and none of them were because of anything we did. Just because it was His whim to do so, if I may put it so colloquially, and because He could. What we have done, however, is to turn away from Him towards sin, original sin and then actual sins, which has caused our souls to become tainted, His image in them to become less clear, and our bond with Him to weaken. Yet, despite our weakness, God continues to love us no less and continues to shower us with gifts, both material and spiritual, every single day, most importantly by letting His own Son die to save us. He continues to offer us help and to give us new opportunities and more grace to change, and He rewards the slightest effort on our part, even though, strictly speaking, if it weren’t for His infinite love and mercy towards us, none of our efforts would matter at all, because we are just tiny, insignificant pieces of dust compared to His greatness, and if He were only just and not merciful, offending Him even once venially could make us suffer serious consequences both here on earth and in eternity. Yet, as I said, He continues to care for us and provide for us in every way. When you consider it all and think about it more deeply, what He’s doing seems totally crazy, when looking at it with people logic. And of course He doesn’t give His graces only to His most faithful and heroically virtuous children, not even only to all those who have been christened. His common grace, i.e. all the undeserved blessings that people receive from God, such as health, talents, happiness, the beauty that exists in the world, etc., etc., are given to ALL people. And let’s just think about the word “grace” and what exactly it means in Christianity for a minute. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as: “Free and unmerited favour of God, as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings”. The Catechism of St. Pius X (which I use as the only traditional catechism I have found in electronic format) gives the following definition of grace: “Grace is an inward and supernatural gift, given to us without any merit of our own, but through the merits of Jesus Christ, in order to gain eternal life”. Free and unmerited. There’s even a kind of grace called gratuitous grace, or grace freely given, which term shows this even more clearly. So if all the good things we have are because of God’s grace, and we theoretically deserve much worse because of our sinful nature, even if some of these blessings are given to us because we are sort of entitled to them as God’s creation, then it seems even clearer that we don’t really “deserve” these good things in any way. At the same time, however, we are supposed to be God’s servants, and if we serve well, we can acquire merits that will help us on our way to salvation, although our merits alone are not enough to save us, because they only have value when they are combined with the infinite merits of Jesus, which He acquired for our sake during His earthly life and especially on the Cross. These merits of ours are meant to be more like proof that we actually care about our salvation and are willing to make an effort to achieve it, rather than actually contributing directly to our salvation as such, because Jesus’ merits would be enough for that. We can acquire our merits by doing all kinds of good deeds or offering things up to God, as long as our intentions are completely pure and the soul is in the state of sanctifying grace, otherwise they have no value. Such merits, in turn, will further increase God’s graces in a soul, making it much easier for us to attain salvation. So while we often say that from a Catholic/Christian perspective we deserve nothing and everything is gratuitously given to us by God, just because He felt like it, I think in a sense we can talk about deserving, because we have to deserve salvation, even if in the end it is not by our own merits that we can be saved. It is not given to everyone and you have to serve God here on earth before you gain it. Going back to our prompt, this still leaves us with much the same conclusion as if we looked at deserving in a secular way. There is nothing that Bibiel “deserves best in life”, because all the great things Bibiel has in this life are completely undeserved, and it’s certainly not Bibiel who gets to judge what Bibiel or anyone else deserves best in eternal life, instead Bibiel should rather focus on the serving part for now. 

   So yeah, outside of that very narrow and specific religious context, and a few other contexts where the word actually makes perfect sense, I just don’t like the word “deserve”. 

   As the regular people here will know, as well as being a Christian, I am also someone who has AVPD (Avoidant Personality Disorder), and this is probably why I cringe a lot when pondering such egocentric questions as this one, and which could potentially affect my feelings about deserving in general to some extent. For those who might be new or something and don’t know what AVPD is, let me just explain it VERY basically and briefly. It is like a more extreme and generalised form of social anxiety, causing social inhibition in most if not all social situations. It is also characterised by strong feelings of inadequacy and inferiority, and a higher than normal sensitivity to criticism and/or rejection. It interferes with all kinds of relationships and social interactions and causes a kind of intense loneliness that doesn’t lift when you’re around people, in fact it’s often quite the opposite because when you’re around people, it can make you feel even more alienated. So, given what AVPD is, I guess it makes sense that it could potentially make people feel less deserving or worthy of anything. On a cognitive level, I may realise and believe what I wrote earlier, that Bibiel deserves and is worthy of the same things as everyone else, but emotionally it never quite sinks in. To be honest, I’m always quite baffled and confused when someone seems to like me, because why the flip would they? 😀 I must be deluding myself if I think they do. I feel this way even more if I like the person a lot myself. Similarly, on an emotional level, it’s confusing to me when people seem interested in me, even on such a basic level as asking “How are you?”. I usually assume they’re just making polite small talk and don’t give half a flip about how I’m actually doing, because why would they be interested in that? If I answer honestly and with anything longer than “Fine, thanks”, I later get cringe fits thinking I must have bored them to death with my talk about how beautifully Misha purred today and/or my own messy brain and whatever’s going on in it at the time. Or sometimes I think that when people ask questions that make them seem interested, they must have some ulterior motive, like they’re either being sarcastic or doing it out of pity for me or whatever. When I have what I call AVPD flare-ups for short (so when my AVPD symptoms get worse than my baseline), I tend to struggle with things like eating or basic self-care. It’s hard to explain and put into words, but it feels like the fact that I have to eat makes me extremely weak and needy, and I’d rather not have those needs, so I pretend I don’t have them. It sounds ridiculous and almost pathetic to say this, but in a way I suppose you could say that at times like this I somehow feel that I don’t deserve things like food. In the same way, I find a lot of basic self-care pointless, because when you feel intense self-loathing, why bother looking good? Things are complicated by the fact that I’m disabled and there are a lot of things I can’t do independently, like more complex meals or some personal hygiene stuff, and help isn’t really something I deserve either, according to Maggie, my stinky and snarky inner critic. I struggle with these things less now than when I was a teenager, but I still have these feelings, no matter what I think cognitively or what someone tells me, even if I believe them rationally. In general, there seem to be a lot of things that I think are more than OK for other people to have or do: normal relationships with people, sharing their deeper feelings spontaneously without cringing for the next 20 years, giving and receiving physical and verbal affection normally, etc. But whenever I think I’d like to experience one of these things freely, I immediately hear Maggie cackling and saying in her cynical tone something like: “Oh, really, Bibiel?!” So, to look at the prompt question from the AVPD point of view (which is always an unusual point of view, considering how rarely AVPD is talked about), I wanted to ask Maggie how she would answer this question, but she just snorted at it. So I asked another peep in my highly populated and diverse paracosm/brainworld – Fiadh (it’s just pronounced sort of like FEE-uh, in case you can’t work it out, it’s an Irish name) – who is much more likeable and not as nasty as Maggie, but who embodies a lot of my AVPD feelings, for lack of a less awkward way to put it – and she giggled and said: “Misha’s shit”. It’s actually hilarious! 😀 

   So, over to you, dear people. What do you think you deserve most in life? And what do you think about deserving in general, no matter what angle(s) you’re looking at it from? I’m really curious! 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What could you talk about for thirty minutes with absolutely no prep? 

   My answer: 

   Lolll, probably a lot of things. I once asked you a similar question about what topic you would give a lecture on to five thousands people if you had only fifteen minutes to prepare for it. What I didn’t say in that post is that, while I’m generally not one for peopling, I have, kind of paradoxically perhaps, often found public speaking to be less challenging than actual interaction with a group of people. Probably because, when just speaking to people, you can prepare yourself better, including all the possible worst case scenarios, and there’s some kind of script so I know what to actually do. The challenging aspect of that lecture scenario would be that I never actually spoke to a crowd THAT huge, so it could feel rather intimidating in a way, and also that I would have such a short time to prepare for that lecture, which would make me feel very insecure about its quality. But like I wrote in that post, I could still talk about something that’s more based on my views/opinions, rather than raw facts, and there is some decent chance that it could go not too badly. I’d just have to pray that my Xanax would kick in on time. 😀

There are a lot of things that I’m interested in long-term,    But just plain talking is a lot less pressuring than a lecture, so it could be even easier, though it would also depend on other things like how large that group of people would be and whether this would be more of a both-sided interaction or Bibiel monologuing, because if it were to be a two-sided talk, I’d do better in a smaller group of people. And I’ve also written about it several times before that my brain can be quite unpredictable when it comes to socialising, more so I guess than with simple social anxiety with a clear specific trigger(s), because sometimes I might have no problem having a convo with a total stranger and they will end up considering me very outgoing or even sometimes “charismatic”, whereas another time I feel cripplingly self-conscious around my own Mother, whom I live with every single day and most of the time my anxiety when interacting with Mum is at my baseline level or above. Sometimes I can spend half an hour with people and not say a single word, whereas other times I get logorrhoea that’s almost as powerful as my late friend Jacek’s, about whom I always jokingly said that he could talk people to death if he wanted. 😀 I sometimes just seem to have very little active control over which Bibiel kicks in when, perhaps because I can’t see very much rhyme or reason to the way it works. 

   Aside from that though, given that just talking is a lot less pressuring than a spontaneous lecture, I think I would have quite a wide range of topics to choose from and bore my interlocutors/listeners with. People that have ever lived with me for any extended period of time know that I can go on for ages about my fazas and anything related, especially during a peak, so much so at times that they think I’m an extrovert, or for others I am overwhelming aka “too colourful”. 😀 Generally as much as I like to bottle up any so-called “negative” feelings, I’ve always found it difficult to keep stuff that I feel excited or enthusiastic about inside. If I can’t talk about it without feeling like I might be bothering people, I will write pages about it in my personal diary. Same applies if I happen to be in some very interesting but temporary rabbit hole at a given time. And there are quite a lot of things that I’m strongly interested in long-term, be it “my” languages and language overall, all the name-nerdy stuff, all things folklore etc. So, because there’s so much to choose from, I’m afraid I can’t really tell you one single thing that I could talk about for thirty minutes. I think I would either choose something that would be of some interest to the folks that I’d be talking with/to, or if I wouldn’t be familiar with them beforehand then go with my most intense obsession at the time of having such talk, but then right now I have a few strong interests going on at once, so it still would be hard to choose one. So, if all else fails and I couldn’t make up my mind, or if I’d have to talk to some totally random people and wouldn’t want to exhibit my personal and quite intense stuff to them very much, there’s always the safe small talk topic of Misha which has saved me numerous times in social situations, particularly when Misha himself is present. I could definitely talk for thirty minutes about Misha. 

   How about you? 🙂 

If We Were Having Coffee… #WeekendCoffeeShare. Sofi, AVPD mess and birthday season.

   Let’s have a coffee today, shall we? Or whatever else, if you’re unfortunate like me and can’t have coffee, or just don’t like coffee. We have a huge assortment of teas, and cocoa, both real and instant. Or if you’d prefer a cold drink, I can pour you a glass of refreshing kefir, or water, either sparkling or just regular tap water. Oh yeah, and my Mum has made broth. My Mum makes broth almost every day these days, because, well, if you’re a regular on here, you know my Mum is a health and lifestyle geek and right now she’s all about keto, and she says that broth is super healthy for the skin and such because it has collagen, and Sofi and I are supposed to get in more sodium for health reasons so this is a good way. Regardless of how healthy it is, it’s actually yummy, and I always have mine with parsley. Or you can have some noodles with it and get chicken soup. Sofi and I have got a huge box of candy for Christmas from Olek, and I’ll happily share some with y’all so you have some snack to go with your coffee/tea, and if you’d rather have the broth, you can also have some of my Mum’s keto salad with it, it has chicken, mushrooms, cheese and pineapple in it. Well, since it has pineapple I guess it would be more appropriate to call it low-carb, but who cares? Obviously you’re also more than welcome to bring your own drink and/or food, either just for yourself or to share if you want. As always, thanks to Natalie  who hosts the Weekend Coffee Share linky. 🙂 So, if everyone has something to drink and/or eat and is sitting comfortably, let’s catch up. 

   If we were having coffee, I’d ask each of you how you’ve been doing since my last coffee share, and in particular this week…? 

   If we were having coffee, I would share with you that this has been quite a mentally messy week for me. Well, not just this week really, but the last few weeks, with a few-days-long breaks in between the messy times. Very emotional and moodswingy, low-key paranoid, filled with rumination, cringe fits, self-loathing and other fun things. I call that AVPD flare-ups for short (if you’re new and don’t know, AVPD stands for avoidant personality disorder which is a condition that I have), even though technically personality disorders don’t have flare-ups, but I call it an AVPD flare-up when my symptoms get a lot worse than my baseline. Usually it happens to me after a lot of peopling, but lately it seems like even very small things throw me totally off kilter for days, sometimes I don’t even need any external event really. It’s been very emotionally exhausting and is very difficult to even put into words properly or express in any other way to other people, so the experience feels quite isolating because you can’t really talk to anyone about this no matter how understanding they may be, and on one hand you want to do it and share it with someone, but on the other you absolutely do not. All the more that communication pin general is also more difficult when I feel like that. But the weekend has been a bit better. Or else I probably wouldn’t be writing about this haha. We’ll see how long it lasts. 

   [For the next paragraph, tw for self-harm, not very graphic but at one point kind of Tmi and possibly a little gross  and mentioning methods of self-harm]

******

On a similarly glum note, if we were having coffee, I’d tell you that Sofi has also been struggling lately, and we’ve only learned about it this month… Since a couple of months, Sofi has been telling us that her cousin is going to therapy, and how Sofi would really really really like to go to therapy too. Mum tried asking her why, but Sofi would never give any specific answer, so she just figured that Sofi simply doesn’t know what she’s talking about and doesn’t understand what therapy is all about so thinks that it’s something fun. I agreed, but at the same time it popped into my mind that perhaps this is Sofi’s way of asking for help or something, perhaps she doesn’t want to talk about something to Mum, whom, after all, she sees every single day, so sometimes it’s really awkward to talk to your family about some difficult things. And I suggested that to Mum and told her that perhaps she could get Sofi into some free therapy via the National Health Fund that we have here, at least for starters, and if she doesn’t have a problem, she’ll get bored with it after one or two sessions and the topic will be over, but at least we’ll know that there’s nothing serious going on. Well, but it turned out not to be so easy to get free therapy for a teenager who doesn’t really have any obvious issues and just really wants to go to therapy, plus, despite my having been in therapy for years as a child, my Mum didn’t really know how to best go about it. So it took some time before she found a therapist for Sofi, and in the end she’s paying for it herself. Already during her first session, Sofi’s therapist called Mum, telling her that Sofi has got some uncontrollable crying fit and doesn’t really say much, and that she has admitted to cutting herself, which shocked Mum because Sofi generally used to be a very happy child, and Mum had no idea why she could be doing this. Later at night Mum came into my room and just completely out of the blue asked me if I could tell her why I’ve been self-harming. I didn’t know about Sofi yet, so obviously I immediately got suspicious and defensive, but then she told me that Sofi is doing it too, and she just wants to understand why people do such things, and that she feels that maybe she is to blame. I was just as shocked as Mum was, I couldn’t stop thinking about Sofi for the whole night. I didn’t really tell her why *I* have been self-harming (too complicated story, and I didn’t really feel up for that so suddenly) but just generally told her about various reasons why people, and especially kids, may do such things, and that it’s unlikely to have anything to do with her directly. I get why she has such feelings though, after all, it’s two of her three children that do this now, I’d probably also take it personally if I were a mother. The therapist advised for Sofi to be seen by a psychiatrist and continue therapy, but the soonest appointment my Mum could book with any child psychiatrist was in May. Since then, Mum would often talk to me about Sofi’s self-harm, which I wouldn’t have minded if not the fact that she sort of expected me to be like some sort of specialist on the matter, as if I were a therapist or something. Which would make sense if I were completely over it, but unfortunately, I’m probably not. I self-harm a lot less frequently now than I used to, but I still do. In fact, the shitty truth is that, about a week or so before Sofi’s disclosure, I got this paronychia thing (some sort of nail infection that you can get from zealous nail biting or picking, which I already had once a couple years ago) but this time round in my toe rather than a finger, which must have happened when I was picking at my nail at night while ruminating and picked almost my whole nail off. It wasn’t fully intentional and more like absent-minded or compulsive, but also not fully unintentional, but I let my Mum believe that it was just accidental. (It’s almost healed up now, in case anyone is worried or something) So I felt really weird with her asking me stuff like what she should do now. What could I know? 😀 Thankfully, after Sofi has shared some more, looking at it with cooler heads, we think that this could (hopefully) have been a one-off incident for Sofi. It seems that her former toxic friend has played some significant role in all this, probably multiplied by the general suckiness of puberty and the raging teenage hormones. Sofi has been rather grumpy and a little withdrawn from family life for a couple years now (though some degree of grumpiness and sulkiness is just part of her personality and has always been), but as far as I can tell as someone outside of her brain, she doesn’t seem very depressed, luckily. She hangs out with her friends a lot, spends long hours chatting to them and laughing on the phone, and seems to genuinely enjoy all the other things that she did previously and to have normal energy. She doesn’t really seem chronically sad or anything like that. I believe Sofi doesn’t know that I know about her cutting, or even if she does we don’t talk about it, but you regular people on here may know that we have this play with Sofi where we pretend that Misha can connect to either of us’ brain and speak through us, and I like to use that sometimes to get stuff out of Sofi because she is more inclined to talk about things that are difficult for some reason with Misha, rather than directly with me or with Mum, because with Misha it’s more fun and relaxed and Misha never draws any conclusions out loud. So one day, I, as Misha, tried to get an idea of what she generally thinks about life nowadays, is it good, is it bad, whatever, and that didn’t sound too depressing either, though of course I do realise that she could be hiding what she was actually thinking, but it doesn’t look like it’s the case, and Sofi was never good at hiding that sort of things as an extrovert. . I also had a gentle feel of her wrists when she was sleeping in my room one night and while they were pretty much covered in  cuts which were quite heartbreaking to see on someone like Sofi, they seemed to be rather superficial at first glance. I think it’s also a really positive sign that Sofi was so open about it with the therapist and told her about it right during the first session. I feel extremely sad for Sofi and I wish I could help her in some meaningful way, but now that both Mum and I have cooled off a bit after the initial news, we are very hopeful that with further therapy, this won’t repeat again. Honestly though, I feel like chopping her “friend” up into pieces and grilling and sacrificing to Misha. Oh wait, that’s probably a really bad idea, he could get intoxicated too! 

   [End of the potentially triggering bit]  

   ***** 

   If we were having coffee, I would tell you that, after barely over three months of usage, my Mum’s Apple Watch died! :O One day she went swimming in a swimming pool with it, which I personally thought was a risky business to begin with – I’m just generally ultra careful and would feel really weird putting any electronic device into water – but Mum said she had previously swum in a lake with it, and anyway Apple says you can swim with an Apple Watch, so why not. Her Apple Watch worked just fine when she went out of the pool, but by the time she got home, it was practically dead. She tried rinsing it, thinking some chlorine could have gotten into it, and then kept it in rice in case there was some water left in it, despite she obviously had the water lock on while swimming, but all those things didn’t help much. She managed to resurrect it for brief moments several times, but it was REALLY sluggish and its battery died within minutes of powering on when it was originally fully charged, and the Digital Crown apparently didn’t work properly as well. Mum was really pissed. Apple Watch is a luxury to begin with, hardly anyone who has it seriously needs it for anything, it’s just a whim, and same is for my Mum. So it’s all the more frustrating when such an unnecessary yet expensive whim object breaks after just a little bit of use, especially when Apple says that it’s okay to swim with it. So, as I needed to go to iSpot (Apple’s authorised service and reseller here in Poland) to get a new battery for my iPhone, we brought Mum’s poor, sick Apple Watch as well. My Mum was even more pissed when she learned out that Apple Watches are not fixable and that the warranty doesn’t cover water damage. The woman who was helping us with our devices was so kind that she didn’t write that Mum’s Apple Watch was actually swimming prior to its death when preparing it to be sent for servicing, so we had a very slight glimmer of hope that perhaps they won’t figure out that it had anything to do with water and will give her a new Apple Watch. Not that Mum needed one, or even seriously wanted at this point, but it would be fair. The whole week after that, my Mum was telling everyone who wanted to listen that Apple just sells lies or something like that. She got even more pissed when a couple people with Android watches were really surprised that this happened to her and told her that they can swim with theirs no problem. She thought an Apple Watch would be better than Android since she has an iPhone now and likes it, and if it’s so much more expensive than, say, a Garmin, it should be for a reason. But, well, surprise of surprises, a few days ago, Mum got a text saying that a brand new Apple Watch was waiting for her in iSpot. Some people are lucky, haha. I set it up for her all over again and now she’s happy and no longer curses Apple. 

   If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that birthday season is about to start in our family. Ughhhh! 😩 Tomorrow is Misha’s seventh birthday (so he’s going to be 44 in human years, HOW THE FLIP?!) Then on Wednesday it’s Bibiel’s birthday, which I should probably be happy about or something but I’m not sure what’s so cool about getting older, and I’m not really looking forward to peopling, which will probably be unavoidable because everyone will want to make me happy lol. And besides, I still haven’t figured out why it’s such an unbreakable tradition, but, oddly enough, my birthday usually messes up with my brain. Either I get period PRECISELY on that day and have disgusting PMS, or I get really overwhelmed with peopling and all the attention, or someone vomits and my emetophobia wakes up, or something awful happens, etc. etc. Then next week after that it’s my Dad’s name day, and he didn’t have any celebration for his birthday last year, so he’ll probably have a proper name day this year. And finally two weeks after Dad, Mum and Olek have their birthdays on the exact same day. This is going to be already during Lent, so there won’t be any major celebrations for sure, but the thing is, it’s my Mum’s 50th birthday. She always used to say that she’s not going to do a huge 50th birthday celebration like a lot of people in our family do, because it’s cringey and childish, but then at some point she started saying that she probably should, and more recently that maybe she’d even like, and started seriously looking into where she could organise it and talking a lot about it, how she’d like it to be a dancing party etc. except she won’t be doing it now, but on her name day in July. I’ll have to think about some super fancy cool and fun present for her in exchange for not having to be there. 😀 

   Oh, and lastly, if we were having coffee, I’d share about something that happened a little earlier than last week, but I thought it would be good to update you all on that. Well, so the big news is that I was fired from job! For the uninitiated, I used to work at my Dad’s, who works as a lorry/truck driver for a larger company and delivers fuel, but that larger company requires him to formally have his own business because it’s more lucrative for them this way. When I was eighteen, his accountant advised him to take advantage of it and hire me, because, since I am disabled, it wouldn’t cost him anything. Here in Poland it works (or rather used to work) so that when you employ a disabled person, the State Fund for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled pays you back the entire salary of such an employee and returns the cost of any adaptive equipment or other such things that make employing such person possible. So he wouldn’t suffer anything, and I would have some additional money alongside my regular disability benefits. I worked as an office worker, so basically helped him out with all the tech stuff that he needed to do as part of his job, which wasn’t much. Writing emails to his clients, printing stuff, tracking ships that he was supposed to tank etc. Except this year things have changed a bit and while my salary was still paid back to him, he also had to pay significant insurance premiums for  me, so it didn’t really pay off. So he officially fired me earlier this month. Most people (especially such as myself who aren’t really employable) would probably be really upset over this, but I knew that this was only going to be temporary, though honestly I did hope that it would last for a bit longer than it did. Still, I’m grateful for it anyways, as even working for those seven years that I did has helped me to save a fair bit, so that now that I don’t work, my financial situation will probably still be stable for a while. 

   Okay, I think that’s all from me. What would you tell me if we were having coffee? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   Simple question today, as we haven’t had any in a long time: 

   What did you do today or will do? 

   My answer: 

   Well, it’s half past noon here right now. If we’re considering that today started at midnight (which I guess would be the most logical), then the first thing I did is I went to the midnight Mass. Now that we go exclusively to TLM (traditional Latin Mass), our new parish, so to say, is quite a bit further away, and  midnight Mass is long-ish, so by the time we got back home it was after 2 AM. Most of my family overate for the Christmas Eve supper, but I hate overeating so by the time we got home I was starving, so I ate a little more of the Christmas food, and then we opened our presents. It’s fun opening Christmas presents at 2 AM. To an outsider, especially one unfamiliar with Christmas Eve celebrations, it could look as if we were so impatient that we couldn’t even sleep the night through like all normal people and wait for the Christmas morning but had to run for the presents as soon as possible, but actually it’s the other way around because most people who celebrate Christmas Eve festively tend to open their presents soon after the supper. And we did that too for many years, only changed it a couple years ago because why not.  Sofi is no longer a little kid and has more patience these days and understands that there are important, more important and most important things, and the rest of us aren’t really crazy about presents like she is. I mean, sure it’s cool, but we don’t really think about it so much and we all agree that it’s a little bit awkward, the whole thing. Without Sofi, perhaps we wouldn’t feel the need to do them at all? So it’s good that we have Sofi, as she brings a bit more spontaneity in here. 

   We all got Sofi new AirPods. Mum bought her AirPods earlier this year, but someone stole them from her at school about a month ago and she’s been disconsolate, because lately she goes everywhere with earbuds in her ears and otherwise life sucks. Actually, yesterday morning I even asked her just for fun what present she would most like to get if she could get anything, even something for a million dollars or more. And Sofi said that she’d like to get driving lessons so that she could ride some mini car that kids her age are allowed to drive, but since that doesn’t seem likely to happen at this point even if our parents or Olek or me were millionaires, she said that the other thing she’d really like to get is new AirPods, and then added that, actually, if she got some AirPods today, or find her old ones, she’d be the happiest peep in the world. And she really was happy when she got her AirPods. 

   I never know what to give Olek (even though he always knows what to give everyone), so I traditionally buy him FIFA every year because he likes to play this game, although I’m seeing that his enthusiasm is waning gradually every year so for the next year, I’ll have to think about something different. 

   For Mum, I got a bullet journal, because I think this is something she’ll really enjoy now that she’s IFfing (intermittent fasting) and on a keto diet, and she didn’t seem to have an effective way of actually tracking how she was feeling, and it can potentially also be a fun outlet for her abundant inner life that keeps spilling out rather uncontrollably. 

   Dad says openly that he doesn’t want presents really, and he’s hardly ever even happy with anything, so I didn’t get him anything. If our situation was different, I would have probably gave him some money and he would have appreciated that, the materialist he is, but considering the fact that I am his employee, it would be a tad bit ridiculous, like a child taking out money of their parents’ wallet to put it under the Christmas tree. 😀 

   And Misha got a water fountain. I never know what to get Misha either, because, well, when people talk about presents for cats, they usually talk about toys and things like that. And Misha isn’t really big on toys. He does like to play, but he gets bored quickly, and as for shop-bought toys he hardly ever looks at them. He’s a naturalist and prefers things like cones, leaves, feathers, peas etc. Oh yeah, and he likes marbles, but he must take that after me. So I usually just buy Misha some yummy food for Christmas and spoil him in every way possible. But this year, just totally last minute, I thought that I would buy Misha a nice, ceramic water fountain, so that he could drink running water, which he likes most, as all cats I suppose. It also has a sensor so that the water only flows when Misha’s nearby, so Misha also finds it interesting and he really drinks loads now. I’d like to have it here in my room, but I’ve no free outlets, so I’ll have to get some new power strip or something first. For now it’s standing in the kitchen. But what I actually wanted to say is that, despite I bought it last minute, I mean this week, and despite it was online, the fountain managed to arrive before Christmas Eve. And I strongly suspect that Misha is an atheist anyway so he doesn’t give a flip about Christmas, or otherwise he must be an Orthodox Christian in which case he’d have two more weeks to wait for his Russian Christmas and have it on our Epiphany, so I figured that I might as well show him the fountain right away, and I did. 

   As for myself, I got a beautiful, rough chunk of jasper from Mum. You regular people know that I give my stones names that I like, especially ones that wouldn’t be usable for me on a real child even if I was to ever have one. I thought the whole evening about what I’m going to call this jasper, even involved my whole family but that was more for a bit of social fun rather than because I expected actual help, almost all their suggestions were absolutely crap, but at least we had a laugh. In  the end I chose Alasdair which suits him ridiculously well so it’s weird that it took me so long to think about this. I also got a very delicate bracelet which is made of carnelians. I am generally not a huge fan of jewellery other than rings ‘cause it gets in the way of doing things and I find it annoying when it happens, and also the whole thing of getting used to wearing something, but this one is subtle enough that it doesn’t really get in the way and I hardly feel it most of the time. 

   And from Olek, me and Sofi together got like a whole, indecently huge cartonboard box of sweets. I mean seriously, if anyone wants some candy, come to us! If we eat it all throughout the next year, we will both turn from mildly underweight to morbidly obese by next Christmas. 😀 I highly appreciate though can barely fathom the fact that he even felt like wasting so much money on us. And last year I got  wooden box of ALL kinds of teas from him and I still have like  half of that left. 

   And then we went to sleep… well okay, at least to bed. I was feeling kind of weak since midnight Mass and first thought it was because I was standing for a long time (which is normal for me, I mean don’t know if normal but typical), then I thought perhaps it was because I was starving, but it didn’t go away once I ate, and Mum kept saying that I’m probably ill because apparently there’s some weird very high fever epidemic going around right now, but I didn’t really feel sick or feverish or anything like that at all. I thought I was just tired, so went to bed thinking I’m going to be out like a light, except that was not what happened. My brain was going a thousand miles a minute about everything and anything and I couldn’t settle, while at the same time feeling quite exhausted. And I didn’t get a wink of sleep ALL night long. In other words, I’m having a zombie day. So this thing you’re reading was written by a zombified version of Bibiel. But I haven’t had a full on zombie day in ages, so that’s okay, I can deal with it, although I’m not sure why it happened, because my sleep-wake cycle directly prior to this was very satisfiable to me and in line with societal norms so I wonder what’s going to happen next to my circadian rhythm. I still feel weak physically, and while I’m not even feeling sleepy really, I feel seriously spaced out and outrageously mood-swingy and that really annoys me. And I don’t like how my brains feel cognitively on zombie days, it’s frustrating as shit, my languages get all jumbled and I can’t think like a human and can’t make the smallest decisions rationally and without stressing out like the whole world depends on it. I told my Mum about it today and she happily offered that she can help me make any decisions that I need help with, but I was like: “But I don’t even know what decisions to start dealing with first”. 😀 It’s as trivial as: should I eat now or in half an hour? Do I first let Misha in or finish this sentence? Do I listen to this song or that now? I’m not normally like that, not to this extent for sure. Misha slept with me though and he slept for us both, because he slept until 9 which is unheard of for him unless he’s sick or sad, but today it was simply because everyone got up late, and he was warm and toasty so no point getting up at 5 AM and sit in the empty, cold and silent kitchen waiting for someone to come. 

   Hm, what else did I do…? I can’t think! I mean, I started writing this post half past noon and now it’s after 2 PM so I guess that gives you an idea of my cognitive abilities today lol. Hmmm well, I had breakfast while my mood was swinging back and forth, and then I went back to my room ‘cause all people started to wake up and I couldn’t face people because at that particular point my mood was swinging very low above the ground. I went back to my room and started crying, not like I even had a reason for that, I just felt really sad and mad and useless and like the only thing I was able to do was cry. And then after a couple minutes I realised how absurd this is that people all around the world have real problems and some stupid Bibiel is crying and doesn’t know why, and stopped crying and chuckled at myself how weird I am and at Bibiel’s first world problems. My parents went for a 10 km walk and Olek and Sofi watched a movie. 

   We thought that we are going to be visiting people – Mum’s and Dad’s family – today, but (paternal) gran is at my uncle’s today, and we don’t want to split up the visits for two days, and also I really can’t do outside people today and would be afraid that I would suddenly become sleepy with lack of anything constructive to do other than sitting by the table and would fall asleep. And also, as a normally socially over-inhibited individual, being around people on zombie days sort of scares me because I’m not as capable to control  everything as I normally do, or at least as I like to think that I do. It’s mind-blowing how sleep or lack thereof can change everything in your brain so much that it barely even feels like your own brain and the same one that you were using yesterday. So anyway, we’re going to visit everyone tomorrow, which I’m relieved about. 

   So no big peopling today, and no other big plans either. We’re just going to do whatever we feel like for the rest of the day. Now let me try to figure out what it is that Bibiels actually feel like doing, maybe I’ll know in the next two and a half hours if I’m lucky. 😀 

   So how about you? How’s your Christmas going? 🙂 

Charm of Finches – “Concentrate on Breathing”.

   Hey all you people! 🙂 

   Today, I want to share  a song with you from an Australian duo called Charm of Finches. They’re relatively new to me, but as soon as I heard about them, I knew I would like their music, because they’ve been compared to so many other artists that I enjoy, such as First Aid Kit, Tiny Ruins, Agnes Obel, Pentangle, Kate Bush and PJ Harvey. – It’s safe to say that I’ve become quite a fan, as evidenced by this post.

   Charm of Finches is made up of two sisters, Ivy and Mabel Windred-Wornes hailing from Melbourne. They create contemporary indie folk with  an ethereal, angelic sound, and harmonise when they sing. As a name nerd, I do have to add that their names really fit their music. 😀 They play violin, cello, guitar and piano, and are skilled songwriters, crafting songs based on their personal experiences.

   The song I’m sharing with you today is from their 2021 album “Wonderful Oblivion”. This particular song was inspired by the sisters’ experiences during the Covid-19 lockdown, when they were in isolation for an extended period of time. They tried  different ways of coping with  the difficult feelings that  many people faced during that time, and one of the things they turned to was meditation and concentrating on their breathing as a way to alleviate stress. That’s what this song is about. I think this soothing piece could potentially speak to a lot of my fellow angsty people. 

   As someone with chronic generalised anxiety, I can tell you that it’s not always  easy to concentrate on and regulate breathing when your brain is overwhelmed.  I used to think it’s ridiculous when  my Mum, who is famously mindful of her lifestyle and health, would say things like: “Just breathe”. But now, I do wholeheartedly agree that if you are able to do this, it can be incredibly helpful and the right breathing techniques can make a bigger difference than you might think. 

Question of the day.

   What’s something you do all the time and think is normal, but others don’t? 

   My answer: 

   I talk to myself all the time, and think it’s a very healthy way of processing things, a very normal way of making things stick around in your brain for longer, the only natural way of learning a foreign language when you’re a hermit, plus as my Mum says (jokingly of course, she’s not that conceited), it’s very interesting to talk to yourself because when you do you can be sure you’re talking with an intelligent person. And sometimes it just happens accidentally because, as I think I’ve written before, both my Mum and me have such rich inner lives that they spill out sometimes. My Mum’s is so rich, in fact (or her brain is so leaky) that she doesn’t even filter when/where something spills out and seems to have little control over it and people overhear her all the time. What’s funny about it is that she then has no idea that she said what she thought out loud and thinks people are telepaths that they know what she was just thinking. Or she says that when she’s out running or cycling, usually with headphones, she often sees people looking at her oddly. I’m more than sure that it’s because her brain is leaking as well, especially that she claims to indulge in a lot of thinking while «working out» as our Apple Watches would annoyingly phrase it. But she doesn’t even seem to care when someone hears it and is not interested in fixing the leakage, which is probably for the better because how the flip do you fix a leaky brain? I’ve no idea. My inner life might be spilling out just as much or even more, but thanks to years of practicing my bottling up skills, it very rarely does when I don’t want it, unless I’m just not aware that for example there are people close to me or I’m really really so engrossed in thought/tired that something leaks out but that’s very rare ‘cause I try to be ultra careful. And then there are also things that people normally consider the same thing as talking to yourself or at least it’s the same level of abnormal to them because they don’t do it. Like I talk a lot to Misha and apparently according to normal, grounded, practical people, like my Dad, for example, you’re not supposed to talk to a cat ‘cause (in case someone didn’t know) it can’t talk back to you. I’m not sure I understand the relationship between these two things though, sometimes it’s fun to talk to someone precisely because they can’t talk to you, imho, ‘cause they can’t tell you to shut the flip up when they’ve got too much of the good thing. Also I don’t even agree with it ‘cause Misha can definitely talk back to me, so what if we don’t really understand each other? We can pretend that we do. What’s more worrying is that Bibiel also tends to talk to people who aren’t really there… Like purgatory souls that I like and care about, or when I listen to something like a Youtube video or a podcast, or read something like an email or a blog post or an article, I talk to that other person. Sometimes I even talk to people who don’t exist at all like from my Brainworld ‘cause I like pretending that they do, or with others whom I don’t like, like Maggie or «Ian» or «Victoria» etc. , I mumble threats at them or something. Bibiel even talks to objects! 😨 Like I regularly talk back at my speech synths (but then don’t other people who use them?) or talk to my various devices when they misbehave or chat to my crystals when polishing them. But I guess the craziest part is that Bibiel laughs to herself a lot. I don’t even know how come Bibiel’s still out in the world with normal people and not locked up in some institution – oh, well, probably because Bibiel had already spent almost half of her life in an institution, lol. – 🤣 Oh, and I almost forgot that Bibielz also sing to themselves, like in the shower or something, or to Misha. I wonder is that odd too because a cat, or a shower all the more, can’t sing back to you? I’ll have to ask my Dad this vital question. 🤔

   Anyway, yeah, I totally don’t get why talking to yourself is seen as badly as it is by so many people. I guess it’s not as bad anymore as it used to be, but still lots of people seem to be either ashamed of doing it, or consider it something extremely weird or crazy when others do it. So even though it’s totally normal to me, it doesn’t seem to be normal at all to the society. 

   What’s such a thing to you? 🙂 

   

Question of the day.

   Today’s question of the day is courtesy of Meg: 

  Were you ever afraid of anything as a child that turned out to (probably) not exist? 

   My answer: 

   That’s an interesting question from my perspective, because I guess I could say yes and no. 😀 Let me find Misha before I continue though, I don’t want to get the creeps. 

   Okay, Misha’s here sleeping now. The biggest fear of my childhood, that is still very much a thing, were definitely all things that had something to do with my sensory anxiety. I feared a lot of different sounds, sequences of sounds etc. even some words or clusters of language sounds, that for one reason or another sounded kind of weird to me and didn’t agree with my brain. It could be even a very normal sound for the rest of the world, no horror soundtracks or anything like that required, but to me it would feel super scary and often in a very personally threatening, aggressive way. Like I said, it’s still a thing, although I was even more sensitive to that as a child. When I heard a sound like that, as a small child, I would often start screaming and shrieking, and sometimes would run away from it, or if it scared me totally shitless it happened to me a few times that I would just flop down on the floor right where I stood because the fear made me feel so weak and like someone turned my legs off simultaneously with that sound appearing. 😀 Later on when I started bottling up my feelings and all that I wouldn’t shriek anymore but hearing something creepy in that way typically made me freeze for a little moment, and still does, which is really annoying as you can’t remove yourself from it or anything. Then after I’d hear something like that, it would get stuck in my brain and be particularly intrusive whenever it would be silent around me or whenever I wouldn’t have much to do, like right before sleep or something like that. Simultaneously, my brain would also make up a sort of personification of that sound, like what they looked like more or less, were they a man or a woman, how scary they would be and in what way exactly etc. etc. etc. The most prominent one in my early childhood was a woman whom, for the purpose of this post, we’ll call «Victoria», who was the personification of all the radio jingles from one particular local radio station that doesn’t exist anymore but all their jingles were super scary to me and were all the worse that that  station had an interesting approach to them, playing them mid-songs and mid-everything, so they could pop up literally anytime. My Dad really liked that radio station, and although it wasn’t very easy to get hold of in our specific area, as it was geared more towards West Pomerania, my Dad put a can over the antenna in his car and this way he could receive it with only minimal disruption. I had a bit of an ambivalent relationship with that radio station, because while its jingles were super scary, as a child I was also very much into radio, which manifested itself, among other things, in that I got always super excited when I could get hold of a station that wasn’t normally or easily reachable in our area, and this was definitely the case with that one. As for «Victoria» though, she was a very tall, super strong and rather androgynous woman, who wore loads of clinking jewellery and was very brash and unpredictable and, unlike her equally prominent successor, was very intelligent and constantly found other, different ways of tormenting Bibiel. It feels like she’s always been there because I don’t remember a specific moment when she came to life or when I’d first heard that radio station, so I guess I must have been very young when my mind created her. She was super loud and aggressive. After that radio station morphed into a different one, I never heard that sound again until much later when we tried to do exposure therapy with my therapist, but she still stayed the dominant figure in the murky corner of my Brainworld for quite a while. Then when I was a pre-teen she was replaced by «Ian», which is also not his actual name but obviously I’m not gonna share that (writing this post is already making me feel way too jittery, thank God for Misha 😀 ), although she hasn’t disappeared completely to this day. And «Ian” is mostly a personification of a word, which unfortunately exists in multiple languages because it’s a short word so in each of those languages that I’m aware of it means something else entirely and it can even be a fragment of many other words. Out of all the languages that I know to some degree currently, only Swedish and Norwegian are completely free of «Ian», and English is full of him so it’s absolutely impossible to avoid him while listening to English or speaking English. I once wrote a story on here inspired by my sleep paralysis  which isn’t exactly what I experience but it’s very close and it features an «Ian» who is very much based on mine. Mine has red eyes, a bulky frame, a very deep voice and despite he’s not particularly clever, definitely not as much as Victoria, he can be even more scary and in a way I think it’s precisely because of that, ‘cause he only thinks on a very primitive level. He can be super quiet when he wants, which can be even more menacing than when he yells, and he has disgusting claws. Also I always feel that while «Victoria» was generally an unpleasant person and probably didn’t like anyone, «Ian» has some very particular kind of dislike for Bibiel, I wonder why he hates me so much more than the rest of humans. 

   And whenever I’d be alone or in a quiet space or something like that, I’d be afraid that, at some point, when I will least expect it, the sound that was only being stuck in my brain at a given point, will suddenly manifest itself in front of me in this personified form and do something real scary to me. I couldn’t say what, but I knew it would be super scary. So not only was that scary sound stuck in my brain and I was feeling scared because of that, but I also felt like things could get a lot more scary any second or minute when my fear will actually become the reality and I’ll hear this thing for real all over again and possibly other stuff will happen simultaneously, like, dunno, they’re going to kill me or something. Or I’d be scared that they’re actually already somewhere very close to me and lurking, especially «Ian», just waiting for the right moment to reveal themselves to me. 

   And, in a way, my fears were well-founded, because I got to see all them creepy peeps in my sleep paralysis dreams countless times, which feel as real as anything real. I have no problem with having regular-people nightmares, like, dunno, running away from someone «normal», falling, people dying and whatever other normal nightmares people have. I wake up from them and feel either relieved that it was just a dream, or even laugh at it because it was so vivid and creative and how come my brain creates such suspense-rich plots, even if they’re not pleasant while lasting. But when it’s sleep paralysis that features my actual creeps so realistically, I get really scared of it and it doesn’t go away as soon as I wake up. Especially that I experience a lot of false awakenings in sleep paralysis and I can think that «Phew, at least it’s over now!» And dream about how I told someone about my creepy dream and started my day as I normally would, and then realise that, oops, it’s not quite finished yet, part two is coming. So even though theoretically you always know it when you’ve woken up for good, you can’t help but feel a bit distrustful of your judgement after so many false awakenings in which you’d also thought that you’d woken up for real. So usually when I wake up it takes me a lot of time to recover both physically and mentally. Anyway, when «Victoria» was the dominant creepy character in my sleep paralysis episodes, they would usually start with me having a bath, and my Mum unceremoniously coming in and saying excitedly that I have to get out quickly because someone wants to see me. We both knew who it was, and Mum knew how much I hated «Victoria», but every time she was either oblivious to my protests, or like she felt for me but couldn’t do anything. Then my Mum disappeared and before I even got a chance to get out of the bath, everything would start to spin, with me often banging my head on the bathtub as a result, and I’d hear the dreaded jingle, and «Victoria» would storm in, and other creep peeps following and assisting her. They would put me on something that I can best describe as some sort of mini couch thing made of metal and padded with leather, and strapped me to it so that I laid on it on my back with  arms stretched out behind my head. This couch had wheels and they wheeled me super fast to wherever «Victoria’s» place and spun it a lot n the meantime and obviously in the meantime I heard a lot of creepy jingles. Once we’d get there, «Victoria» would yell into my ears super loud, tickle me under my armpits in a way that wasn’t funny at all but quite threatening, and showed me various mini dreams in which all sorts of scary things happened to my family or me or stuff like that. At some point though, I’d always be able to end the dream if I was quick enough to spot that moment, by making some sort of manoeuvre and saying some weird nonsensical word that I could never recall while awake except that it started with G, lol, all in the dream, not for real, and then everything vanished slowly. I’m not as fortunate with «Ian» though. With «Ian», aside from some details and stuff, I largely described the experience in the short story linked above, aside from stuff that is difficult to describe or that changes every time. «Ian» also visits me in sleep paralysis a lot more frequently than «Victoria» did. «Victoria» still visits me occasionally without «Ian», but when she does these days she’s a lot more malicious than she used to be before «Ian» and often even more malicious than «Ian». 

   So, yeah, I guess it’s hard to say in a way whether my childhood existed or not. You can say that they did, because obviously the sounds did exist, and my sleep paralysis experiences did exist, but their personifications and my perception of threat from the sounds were just imaginary. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What’s the best thing about being an introvert/ambivert/extrovert? 

   My answer: 

   I wrote about introversion/ambiversion/extraversion and the advantages from it that we get in the society in a bit more detail in the past, so you can read that post as well, and the comments under it. 

   I quite like being an introvert and I don’t understand how so many people, even introverts themselves or introvert-leaning ambiverts think about it as a problem, something that is only a burden in life or something abnormal that you have to at least try your best to change. I think if it reaches a burdensome/abnormal level, it isn’t the introversion that is the actual problem, but anxiety/shyness/other people-related issues. It really irks me when people look at introversion as something pathological or inferior in relation to extroversion, and it’s weird since I guess the distribution of introverts vs extroverts seems pretty equal, extroverts  just make a bit more of a screamy impression usually as a whole, even if not all of them are necessarily screamy as separate individuals. So, since I like my introversion, it’s hard to say what is the actual BEST thing about it. 

   But I guess it’s the fact that introverts can be more self-sufficient emotionally is the best thing in strictly practical terms. I guess it must be quite difficult, especially for people who are very strongly extroverted, when they don’t have people around for a longer period and can’t really control it and feel lousy mentally as a result. As an introvert, I don’t need other people to make me happy, to provide me with things to do or meaning to my life. Sure, people can have an enhancing (or diminishing just as well, depends on a situation and specific individuals) impact on those things and make things even more interesting sometimes, but I can manage without that as well, sometimes even better because I’ve already mentioned on here a lot how I often have this thing going on when I’m around people where I can feel all the more lonely and kind of disconnected the more people there are around me, and it’s an extremely tiring feeling, way more difficult for me to tolerate than the normal aloneness. I feel all the more appreciative of that self-sufficiency that Sofi is the opposite, and so I can easily observe how difficult it can be for a pure extrovert when they don’t have that external stimulation from other people or when it’s greatly reduced, as was the case for Sofi during the pandemic, for example. I feel also really grateful for it because I am not very independent in other areas of life, so if I was also very emotionally dependent on other people on top of everything else, life would probably be quite shitty for people around me as I would likely turn into a proper parasitic being. 😀 

   How about you? 🙂 

TToT (Misha, Traditional Latin Mass, pillows, etc.)

   I thought that today is a good day for writing a gratitude list. I always try to include things that I’m thankful for at least once a week  when writing in my personal diary, but I think I haven’t written a grateful blog post in quite a while and I feel like it today. I’m linking up with Ten Things of Thankful. 

1.    The fact that I’m feeling well physically. My family – that is Sofi, Dad and Olek – have been mildly sick with something and while it isn’t serious, no fever or anything, it seems to be dragging on for quite a while, especially for Sofi. So far, I’ve been spared. Jack the Ripper is visiting me this week and I had two migraines, but overall I’m feeling well. 
2.    Misha spending a lot of time with me, particularly at nights. Misha has recently taken a particular liking for my armchair and sleeps at night either there, or on my bed as usual. I always love it when Misha sleeps with me, his mere presence instantly creates such a pleasant, peaceful, Mishful atmosphere. But this week I’ve been particularly appreciative of it as I’ve had some yucky dreams and night time anxiety, and waking up in such Mishful atmosphere makes things so much easier. 
3.    That I’ll probably soon be able to get a new cable for my scanner. I haven’t been scanning anything for a long time, because it’s such a huge hassle and difficult to do well on my own. But now that I’m attending Traditional Latin Mass, I sorely feel the lack of quality Catholic books in accessible formats, especially older ones, and feel almmost envious of my Mum who keeps buying herself all kinds of such books. They are very useful for prayer, reflection or even simple reading as a form of deepening your faith, and I always have to go looking for things like that on the Internet, which in the end means that what I find won’t necessarily be traditionalist at all. I have always struggled with focusing during prayer, and not having materials to help me out and help my mind go in the right direction makes it even more difficult sometimes. Even the missal that I have in epub is a lot shorter than the one my Mum has as a physical book, and I’m limited here anyway because I can’t just take my Braille-Sense with the missal with me to church like all the other people take their books because that would be super unpractical, I have to read it before the Mass at home. So my Mum has wanted to help me out and scan at least some of her huge collection of these “saintly books” as she collectively calls them for short, but then we couldn’t find the power cable for the scanner absolutely anywhere, and it appears to be such a niche cable that it can’t be replaced with just any average cable. So Mum phoned the company that distributes those scanners and asked if there’s any way of getting another cable or something, and they said that next time they’ll be ordering from the company that produces those scanners which is in the UK, they’ll order a cable for Bibielz as well. So Bibielz can’t wait for it and for all them saintly books. 
4.    Speaking of TLM, I still feel so incredibly grateful to God every time I think about it, that we’ve been able to become part of the Catholic Tradition and attend this beautiful Mass and generally change our lives thanks to this. It will soon be a year since we “converted” as my Mum puts it and Mum and Sofi and me often reflect on how much things have changed for us since then, not even only spiritually but generally in how we think, and laugh at the difference sometimes. 

   My pillows. Yeah I always love my pillows, but today is a good day for being grateful for them because I have new pillowcases. Not for the regular, big pillows, but two smaller ones, one of which I put on top of my big pillow when I sleep and keep my PlexTalk  under it, and the other is for all kinds of unexpected needs and situations and for Misha when he wants to sleep in the bed rather than on it as he usually does. And then I also have three larger, additional pillows just in case, haha, but that’s not relevant here. Anyway, the pillowcases I had on the two, smaller pillows got badly torn as I had them for ages, and before I got some new pillowcases for these  pillows, for some time I slept without an additional pillow and that sucked because I’m totally not used to it – my Dad only sleeps on one, flat pillow and now I’m not surprised he has sleep apnea, I think it wouldn’t take long for me to develop it sleeping like that all the time – so then I got a different pillow, which was bulkier than the one I usually put on top of my regular pillow, so then in turn it felt way too high, and it muffled my PlexTalk quite effectively. So I was really happy and relieved when I finally got brand new pillowcases  and could sleep with my actual pillow. The right or wrong pillow can really make a huge change. 😀 

1.    That I can be helpful for my Mum with her iPhone. I really like it when I can be helpful for people, and while my Mum likes her iPhone and says that it is indeed a lot more comfortable than any of her previous Android phones, she also needs a bit of help or a tip on how to do something with it quite regularly. Even if I don’t know how to do something, it looks like it’s easier to research it for me than for Mum. Perhaps because I always automatically do it in English and there’s more info on most topics in English online. Funnily enough, since last week, she’s been saying that perhaps she’d like to buy herself an Apple Watch, because it would make it easier for her to take calls when out and about and she hopes it would be better for measuring how many kilometres she runs and bikes. I think it’s funny at what pace we’re becoming the Apple family. 😀 I am very seriously planning to sway Dad to the Apple camp by the end of next year as well, just cus why not? Olek will be all alone with a Samsung. 😀 I know it’s beyond my abilities to convince Olek as his choice is fully conscious and informed, and because of that I wouldn’t even want to change it as it wouldn’t make too much sense. I already told Dad how Apple has CarPlay and that seems to have appealed to him as a lorry driver. 
2.    doing relatively well mentally. July and August were awful for me with loads of what I call sensory anxiety for the purpose of this blog, which was going up and downn a lot and which was mostly caused by an unusual amount of sleep paralysis episodes that I had at that time and that they also were quite unusually intense and long, so that things felt quite out of control and I had a hard time functioning normally. Lately things have calmed down significantly and for long enough that I think I can say this month has been better, even despite horrid dreams and anxiety at night afterwards that I had earlier this week. 
3.    Lots of yummy fruit. We still have raspberries in our garden! They haven’t been very sweet this year, but are still good, and it’s always nice to have home-grown raspberries rather than have to buy them from someone/somewhere else. We also have loads of pears, more than we can eat, in fact, so Mum is making some sort of mousse from themm or something. We also have a lot of apples (as befits the Apple family lol). And even blueberries, though these aren’t home-grown, Mum just bought a lot of them a while back to freeze. So we eat a lot of fruits and it’s really nice that we can do it. 
4.    Chilly weather, which is chilly and cosy enough for me to be able to wear my fluffy overalls in the evenings again. For me that always means that autumn has properly started. 😀 
5.    My language progress. It hasn’t felt like anything huge, but I’m always grateful even for a very little bit that my brain absorbs. Also what I feel particularly happy about, and what is particularly tangible for me, is that because of my Norwegian learning, I can feel my Swedish strengthening significantly as well. I was kind of worried it would be the oppposite and that I’d end up having a jumble of the two and would regret my silly out-of-the-blue affair with Norwegian. I’m so glad that it’s not the case, as well as that, for that matter, my relationship with Norwegian has definitely become a steady one by now, as we’ve been together for over a year now. 

   How about you, lovely people? What are you grateful for this week? How has it been for you overall? 🙂 

Question of the day.

   What genuinely disgusts you? 

   My answer: 

   Well, while generally I’d say I’m not a super easily disgusted person, when things do disgust me, they disgust me quite strongly, and the main such thing, since I’m emetophobic, is vomit, so for me the answer is very easy really. That means the sound of someone vomiting, very graphic descriptions of vomit or vomiting, the feel of vomit (luckily I don’t have to deal with human vomit directly like that but Misha’s vomit is something I do come in contact with once in a while and it really grosses me out), as well as sounds very similar or kind of related to vomiting like choking or belching, and textures that remind me of vomit like semolina or most mashy foods really or a lot of drinks that have bits of something like fruit floating in them. Also to a much lesser degree now but also words for vomit in all the languages I know and any sort of synonyms or related words like puke. I no longer find them as disgusting as I. used to, but they still do seem weirdly graphic to me and when I have a particularly difficult time with the emetophobia they can feel quite triggery. I particularly hate the Swedish word for it and the English word throw up feels way too descriptive for my liking so I don’t even get why apparently people consider it better than vomit. 

   How about you? 

Question of the day.

   Whether you’re an introvert or extrovert, what’s a nightmare situation for your respective personality type? 

   My answer: 

   Well for those who may be very new here I am an introvert, and based on my personal experience, the winner of The Introvert’s Nightmare Situation Contest would be First Communions! Except I don’t mean the actual First Holy Communion celebration at church when the child receives the Sacrament of Eucharist for the first time, as a Catholic, I think it is amazing, as long as the child has actually been prepared well and knows what it’s all about and so does their family, because these days this is so often not the case, as people focus on everything else except what’s actually important – whose child will be best dressed, or if all are to be dressed the same than what they should be wearing, how to take the hugest amounts of photos possible during the ceremony, which child should recite a poem, which Mum should thank the priest, which child should thank the mums, whom to invite, what presents should family members get a child, and the poor children are stressed out about loads of little details and excited about what presents they’ll get etc. etc. etc. – which is why I think children should receive Holy Communion individually rather than in large groups like based on grade or age, that Communion age should be younger for most children and the whole Communion party thing should take place the day before or after or whatever makes sense in a given situation but not on the day of the actual Communion. – But that’s a whole different pair of rain boots, as we say in Polish. 

   Communion parties are usually quite nightmarish though. They usually take place in some sort of a restaurant, because who wants to do that sort of thing at home and prepare all the food or even if they get catering who wants to play waiter and dishwasher all day. My Mum did that with Sofi and ended up with a badly strained leg. Such events are usually a lot more introvert-unfriendly when they take place in a restaurant vs at home, because usually the place isn’t very familiar to you or not at all, so you can’t just sneak out somewhere less peopled as you likely would in a family member’s or friend’s house, you can’t help out in the kitchen or something like that, or even lock yourself in a loo for very long. Taking a French leave may also be more tricky. There are no pets that you could talk to and focus on instead, like when I’m at people’s houses I usually play with their cats or dogs or something but at a restaurant there’s just nothing to do. You can probably go outside for a little while, but soon there’s going to be another course or dessert or something, and you just don’t have such freedom as you could during a similar celebration in a private house, where there may be some sort of a backyard, garden, lawn or whatever where you could de-people a bit. But generally you’re supposed to sit at the table and talk and either keep loading food into yourself or wait for the next delivery. The whole thing usually also takes a lot longer in a restaurant than it does at a house, but even at a house, for some odd reason it tends to take way longer than a birthday or stuff like that. There are usually  more people around you, as it may be some sort of collective party for more than one child, or there may be other guests at the place so even if you don’t interact with them, it may also contribute to the whole situation feeling overwhelming. Oh yeah and food. Well I don’t know if this is actually an introvert thing, probably not, but for me eating out is generally a problem for quite a few different reasons. Most importantly in this particular situation though, that I just don’t like to eat in social situations, and that I can’t get quite as much food into myself in one go as most other people seem to be able, so having a two-course lunch plus several different desserts plus snacks plus a huge dinner… I mean how do people even do this?! 😀 

   So yeah, if you’ve never been to a Communion, trust me, they’re pretty bad on brain batteries. I suppose wedding receptions must be even worse, but I haven’t been to one in a very long time so thankfully don’t have the experience really. Olek (who is also an introvert, though more functional than me and he claims that he just “doesn’t like people”, which I’d say is something different because while I’m very much an introvert I certainly wouldn’t say that I dislike people) has been to a wedding reception last weekend though , and, judging from how he slept pretty much til late afternoon after it, it must have been extremely rough. 🙃

   I just asked my Mum this question and thought I’d share her answer too. My Mum is kind of a curious case because I’d say she’s very much an extrovert, whereas she says she feels more like an ambivert and usually a more introvert-leaning one. So I guess she knows better what she is. ANyways, I asked her this and she said that for her as an ambivert, such a nightmare situation would be to be in a group of stranger people that she’s never met before, like the parents-teacher meeting that she’s going to go to tomorrow at Sofi’s school, and having to speak to them all, like introduce an idea that she has and thinks is good, and then if everyone was against her idea and she had to defend it publicly. Or, alternatively, if she had the idea but ended up not sharing it at all for fear of speaking publicly and her idea being criticised, and would then really regret it because, after all, she knows that it was a good idea. I think it’s interesting how there seems to be that sort of dichotomy or inner conflict when you’ve an ambivert. Because if I were in the same situation as an introvert, there would be no dilemma. I am just not going to share the idea, no matter how good it is, and I’m not even going to regret it, because I never share my ideas with stranger people, so I’ll just entertain myself watching them and chuckle internally at how weird they are that they haven’t come up with the same idea as me yet. Whereas here you have this weird push and pull in both directions, although of course it’s not all just a matter of ambiversion but also my Mum’s sensitivity to criticism. 

   How about your nightmare situation? 🙂 

Elin Grace – “Breathe”.

Hey people! 🙂 

   The song I have for you today is quite special, because it hasn’t been officially released yet, and I don’t think I’ve ever done that before on here that I’d share something ahead of its release. It’s also special because there’s so much for me to like about it, as it’s by a Welsh singer, all about mental health, and just sounds very good to me. 

   It comes from Elin Grace – a very interesting independent singer and songwriter – who is about to release her debut EP in two weeks’ time, and “Breathe” is the lead single from it, which will come out a week before the EP, on 16 September. 

   When I first heard it, it immediately sparked my attention, not just because Elin is Welsh, from Llandrindod Wells more exactly, and I’m sure that you all or at least the regular people on here know that I love Welsh music and try to follow what’s going on on the Welsh music scene, but also because this song struck me as very authentic and raw where the lyrics are concerned. And I really appreciate people who can make music that is genuine, that expresses their true, complex feelings or talks about difficult experiences in a candid or even raw way, because it lets me get to know them better, and I just am like this that whenever I listen to a song/album or read a book, I wonder who’s the person behind it and what they are like, so when someone is authentic like that it gives me more of a picture and lets me get to know them a little bit better. That’s also why I like to listen to music by people who write both their music and lyrics themselves, which is  the case with Elin. Besides, I’m sure it isn’t easy at all to let it all out like that and expose some very deep, vulnerable, fearful bit of oneself to the listener – so basically some totally random peep whom you don’t even know. – And for us as listeners, such songs have the potential to be highly relatable, despite paradoxically being very personal at the same time. And I have a feeling that Elin’s whole EP, not just this song, has such potential. 

   “Breathe” was written by Elin when she was eighteen, and it reflects her own struggles with anxiety and panic attacks. Mental health is a recurring topic on this EP, but tis particular song deals with it very explicitly, as we have the lyrical subject here who clearly is experiencing a panic attack, finding it difficult to breathe and trying to manage it by hiding in a chicken shed. As someone with mental illnesses and a mental health blogger, I like how Elin tackles this topic head on, describing it very vividly. While my own anxiety generally looks different from that of the lyrical subject’s, as it’s more of the lingering, always somewhere in the background variety rather than panicky and gripping you all of a sudden, the latter certainly sounds very familiar as well. 

   Musically, the inspiration was that cool keyboard riff we can hear in the second and last chorus that Elin came up with, which was the base for the whole melody. I like how, in a bit of a contrast to the angsty-themed lyrics, there is something oddly soothing and almost cosy to this song and Elin’s smooth yet strong vocals, and the song ends on a more peaceful note as well. Elin is a classically trained pianist who seems to enjoy and draw inspirations from many different genres, and  it shows in this song. 

   I am definitely looking forward to seeing Bee Without Wings come out and plan to spend some time with it once it does, so perhaps I’ll end up sharing something else from it at some point as well. It is also going to handle such topics as love, coming of age or self-esteem. 

   What I think is also worth mentioning is that Elin has previously supported another young Welsh indie folk singer – Mari Mathias – whom I also really like. She has also been compared to the great English singer Laura Marling whom I like as well, and she does indeed sound a bit similar. 

Question of the day (8th September).

   What are small problems you have daily? 

   My answer: 

   The first thing that comes to my mind is definitely peopling. I have all kinds of problems around peopling, big and small. But, to mention a small one, I always have a problem deciding if saying or doing something when interacting with someone is okay. I always overthink it massively and end up making the conclusion that either way it can potentially be seen as rude or something like that. Like today, I was thinking a lot about an interaction I’ve been having with someone, and had a bucket load of dilemmas. Should I ask them this question, or will they think it’s daft or intrusive? But if I don’t ask anything, it’ll seem like I’m generally uninterested and don’t care. How should I respond to this? Will this message even sound coherent to someone else than me? etc. etc. etc. All kinds of things. That’s why I say that online communication doesn’t always necessarily make it easier for me to talk to people. Especially if I write to someone new, I proofread a flipping three-line message ten times, and then sit in front of it for five minutes scared of sending it. Other times, I tell myself I think about it too much and no one does it and I should do whatever my gut feeling tells me, and only ruminate afterwards, and often regret something as well, because as much as I generally find my intuition to be very helpful, it isn’t necessarily so helpful when it comes to interactions with people, so if I go with my gut feeling I often end up either revealing myself more than I’d like or seeming very stiff. It’s not always what people will think of me type of dilemmas but also what’s appropriate more practically, like what people generally do in such and such situation, or finding a sort of balance when interacting with people so that you don’t do something too much or too little. So what I often do is I ask my Mum for advice and ask her all kinds of dumb questions. She isn’t always able to help, because she hasn’t always been in the same situations or because she just doesn’t get my perspective, but very often she can help at least a bit. When my  friend Jacek from Helsinki was still a part of this world and when we got a bit closer to each other, I would often also ask him, because he was an extreme extrovert and always knew what to do when peopling and was very successful at it, but at the same time he could understand my difficulties fairly well despite that, I would even ask him about in person peopling and whether something I did looked alright or not so much, or whether something wouldn’t draw too much attention etc. and he’d generally have more distance than my Mum so his input could be very valuable. I often also learn about such things from books and observing people. But while it is all helpful, I still deal with a lot of problems around peopling every single day. Many of them I’m so used to that I don’t even consciously think about them very often as problems, but I probably would if I, say, had a job that would involve me interacting with people a lot, and would require what they call soft skills these days. 

   How about you? 🙂 

Song of the day (7th September) – Cornelis Vreeswijk – “Hopeloos Blues” (Hopeless Blues).

   For yesterday, I planned to share with you this song by Cornelis that I really like. Or actually, I planned to share with y’all the Swedish version of it mostly because that’s what I know better and actually understand the lyrics and also like slightly more (not that I have anything against the Dutch version, it’s really good too), and then perhaps share the Dutch one as well more for comparison or something, but, surprise, surprise… the Swedish version doesn’t seem to be available to stream anywhere! :O I was totally unaware of this before I started preparing for this post, as I usually don’t listen to Cornelis online, because I have his discography and a lot of live recordings and just all kinds of stuff I could get anywhere on an SD card, and I was a bit shocked, because it’s from a fairly popular album of his – “Poem, Ballader och Lite BLues” (Poems, Ballads and a bit of Blues) – which is one of my favourite albums of his, by the way. The album technically exists on Spotify, but only some tracks are actually playable so they’re either deleted or have location restrictions perhaps, and there’s nothing on YouTube. Even good ol’ Songwhip didn’t seem to find anything, all it found was either covers of this song, or wasn’t available despite SongWhip was showing a link to it. So quite interesting. And I guess it wouldn’t really be okay if I just shared a link to my own audio file with it even if I took it down after some time. 

   But yeah, we still have the Dutch version! I’ve shared very little of Cornelis music in his native language, and he’s apparently a lot less known in the Netherlands than he is in Sweden, so that’s a good opportunity to share something Dutch by him. 

   As I said I really like this song because it’s so freakishly relatable. I think anyone who has depression, especiallly of the very long-term, chronic, lingering or constantly recurring variety that sticks to your brain like thick, crusty mucus (ewww Bibiel!), whether it’s dysthymia like for me or major depression or bipolar or anything like that, will be able to relate to it, and I guess particularly so if anhedonia is in the picture for someone as well, since this hopeless blues basically steals from you anything that has any kind of meaning or that you like. Another way in which it’s relatable for me is also that hopeless blues’ parasitic relationship with Cornelis/the lyrical subject reminds me in a lot of ways of my sleep paralysis and sensory anxiety “friend” whom I call “Ian”  on here, who is not a blues as such but also follows me everywhere and doesn’t  let me forget about himself for too long and can spoil anything fun. 

   Before I realised that there’s no Swedish version available that I could share with you, I already did a translation of it into English, and I don’t like my brainergy to go to waste so even though I’m not sharing the song in Swedish with you, I’ll still share the translation of it. The Dutch version isn’t very different from what I know, just some details are different that don’t really change the whole point. 

   

Hopeless blues
Has moved to where I live
He is lying under the bed, chewing on my shoes

It was late at night
I came from somewhere
It was late at night
I came from somewhere
And when I turned the light on
There was hopeless blues sitting in the corner
Hopeless blues
You are a parasite
Hopeless blues
You are a parasite
What are you doing here?
Why did you came here?

Every morning when I wake up
Hopeless blues lies in my kitchen
Every morning when I wake up
Hopeless blues lies in my kitchen
He drinks up my coffee
Nicks my last cig

He borrows my clothes
And he borrows my guitar as well
He borrows my clothes
And he borrows my guitar as well
He scares away all the ladies
Who come here and visit

My home is a desert
My life a parody
My home is a desert
My life a parody
I have been saddled with hopeless blues
I will never be free
Please, Ms. Therapist
I can’t take it anymore
Please, Ms. Therapist
I can’t take it anymore
May I ask hopeless blues
To move in with you? 

   Edited to add: 

   Hiya, T’is Bibiel from the future chiming in. 🙂 In addition to the Swedish translation shared above, now I also have a translation of the Dutch version for you, which was kindly written for me by Hans Heemsbergen. 

   Hopeless blues, lives where I live these days

Hopeless blues, lives where I live these days

He’s in my smoking chair and he’s playing on my gramophone

I was out one night, it was getting late my luck was gone

I was out one night, it was getting late my luck was gone

And when I finally got home, hopeless blues was sitting in a corner

 

Hopeless blues, you’re a parasite

Hopeless blues, you’re a parasite

What are you doing here because I really don’t need you

Every morning when I wake up he is sitting next to my bed

Every morning when I wake up he is sitting next to my bed

He drinks my coffee and he steals my last cigarette

 

He’s in my winter coat, he’s even in my guitar

He’s in my winter coat, he’s even in my guitar

All the ladies who come here think it’s weird

 

Hopeless blues, even in my beer

Hopeless blues, even in my beer

He wishes me good night wishes me good luck

Miss Curator, I’m tired of my life

Miss Curator, I’m tired of my life

I’m sending hopeless blues to your private office

 

Question of the day.

   Which song sounds normal to people, but for you, for some reason, it sounds creepy? 

   My answer: 

   No, I haven’t actually thought about asking you this question myself, I just found it online and it sounded like it well could have been me asking it, because I experience that with a lot of songs, and I wonder if other people have that too and with which songs. Even if the experience itself is totally different than it is for me, because for me it’s kind of “sensory” and I don’t know many people who have a similar thing going on with creepy sounds as me. Nevertheless, regardless of the way in which someone might experience such creeps and the reasons or origins of that, I’m simply curious. 

   While there sure are such songs that I find creepy because there’s something rather objective that’s off about them that some people notice or pay attention to and others just don’t, mostly when I think of songs, or any sounds really, as “creepy” I actually mean creepy as in my so-called “sensory/silence/sound anxiety” way. This means that they’re creepy for me in a way that I often can’t even describe properly, and I usually realise that they wouldn’t be creepy for most people, or really I guess anyone else at all. It’s just that when I hear them, I get like a sudden rush of adrenaline in my brain and everything feels just off and extremely scary and I feel overwhelmed and all the creepiness of that sound or cluster of sounds or song or whatever it might be is just aimed directly at me. It often feels like it’s just seething with aggression and something evil, and outwardly it may be just a very calm-sounding thing or totally neutral and unobtrusive for other people. It’s almost like there’s some special creepy message in there just for Bibiel, and someone has actually once suggested to me that, since I get these creeps a lot with all sorts of jingles or commercials or stuff like that and get that feeling of it being directed at me and being aggressive, I could be somehow weirdly sensitive to subliminal messaging. And it in a way made sense to me but not all of the things I’m creeped out by are these kinds of sounds, if I’m particularly jittery and hyper-alert or something even people talking in a specific intonation can set me off. Or, like, a few years back, to my horror, I discovered that there’s a language that, for some reason, I find kind of scary. I just totally cannot explain it and it’s absolutely crazy, and I assure you that it’s not like I have anything against that language or people who speak it or anything, it just makes me feel really weird when I hear it. This language is guaraní. I mean, how can a language as such have subliminal messaging in it? It would have to be hidden in phonemes and that just makes no sense at all. And why would it be guaraní, out of all the freaking languages in the world? 😀 I don’t know why I have this thing going on and part of me would really like to know, but I suppose it must actually be several different factors, because the whole thing that I call sensory anxiety are actually several different things that kind of overlap and influence each other. When I hear something creepy like that, it’ll be coming back to me in a rather intrusive way, like when it’s quiet or I am not focused on anything specific, or it’ll develop a scary personification who will visit me in my next sleep paralysis episode. And when I get creeped out by one thing, it takes me from a couple days to weeks to recover and sort of desensitise from it, and if I get sleep paralysis in the meantime it obviously makes things worse so then I need more time to desensitise, and during that time I’m often more prone to being creeped out by something else because it’s a bit like everything feels creepy and my senses are on high alert as if I was expecting something really awful to happen any minute, because in a way it’s true that I sort of am. And with some sounds I just never recover and there are such that I’ve been deadly scared of ever since I was a ridiculously young child, and some I haven’t even heard in ages but still it feels like I remember them very clearly. 

   So, rather than focusing on songs that are creepy to me in a way that I guess is more objective, I thought I’d tell you about a very innocent song that once creeped me out as a kid in that more subjective way. I’ve long recovered from that since and don’t even remember exactly what that song sounded  in the version I heard, and I think I’d actually almost forgotten about it but quite recently heard someone mentioning this song and the memory of me being creeped out by it came back to me quite clearly. Which makes it the perfect topic for this post, because I’ve actually been struggling with sensory anxiety  a lot on and off for over a month now because I’ve been getting sleep paralyses all the time lately, and wouldn’t like to make it worse myself by talking about any active or recent creeps, the more that I’m actually home alone so it would be literally asking for trouble. 😀 

   This song is… a nursery rhyme! An English nursery rhyme. Ten Green Bottles, more exactly. 😀 (Wonder what subliminal messaging is in there.) I was twelve when I first heard it, and it was shortly after I’d come back to the blind school, after having left it for an inclusion school for two years. It was obviously a difficult time for me emotionally because change and because school 😀 and then as soon as I more or less dealt with the emotional stuff, I remember the sensory anxiety hit me extremely hard and quite out of the blue, it was so hard it was actually difficult to function with it because I was constantly on tenterhooks and either overstimulated with the sounds around me or even simply a lot of stuff going on, or understimulated and flooded with stimuli from the inside, and it was just super annoying because it wouldn’t go away or lessen for ages no matter what I did, and I felt like I was going totally crazy. I think it was Teacher’s Day, so 14th October here, in any case we didn’t have any real lessons and at some point we were just sitting in our classroom and talking and there was some CD playing in the background that must have gone along with some English textbook or something I suppose. I’m pretty sure the CD wasn’t even what we were using for actual English learning because if it had Ten Green Bottles on it then it was quite a fair bit below 4th grade level. 😀 Someone had probably just put it on to make an impression that we were actually learning something. And I was sitting there mostly quietly and listening to what my classmates were talking about, feeling on high alert like always then, and then at some point that song started playing. It wasn’t any spectacular, massive creepout like some I’ve experienced that would make me freeze or anything, but it immediately struck me as really odd and creepy. I only remember that it was sung by a man, and that it was its arrangement that felt creepy for some reason. And then as I kept hearing it, it kept feeling creepier and creepier and I couldn’t get my attention off it, so that even the lyrics started to seem weird to me.  I guess usually in this song the bottles are “hanging on the wall” but I’m pretty sure that in that one they were “standing”, or else I misunderstood it, because I can vividly recall thinking that that must’ve been some weird wall if something can stand on it. Back then I would only understand the English word wall as in a wall in the house, between the rooms, rather than just any brick structure, and so I could hardly imagine anything standing on a wall. And there was the sound of the bottles breaking as they kept falling down to the floor, and I thought that was kind of creepy too that they keep falling like that, “accidentally”.

   Once I get creeped out by something, it’s really easy for my brain to find other creepy things, the more that I often start overthinking on it and how come it feels so creepy. Im pretty sure that if I was in a normal brainstate and not already creeped out by everything, this song wouldn’t really make any impression at all on me, it doesn’t really have a creepy melody or harmony or anything and the fact that I don’t even remember that arrangement anymore speaks for itself pretty much, but that’s how it is once such a chain of creeps starts. 

   Now you share your creeps, if you have any. 🙂 

Question of the day.

   How are you today? 

   My answer: 

   I’m definitely better than I was, say, even on Friday, but this whole week has been a bit crappy for me, mentally at least. I’ve been having loads of sensory anxiety stuff going on lately and feeling quite emotional for some unspecified reason, or perhaps actually for lots of different reasons, depending on from which angle you look at it, with self-harm urges on top of that, and now that all these things have quietened downn a little bit, mostly I’d say I’m just kind of blah. Usually Misha helps me a lot with the sensory anxiety, but now that the prozac is flushed out of his system for good, he’s become quite wired again as is typical at this time of the year, so he doesn’t really sleep in my room all that much or spend much time with me. 

   How about you? 🙂