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.

   How much coffee do you drink in a day? 

   My answer:

   Sadly, usually none. I used to be a very enthusiastic coffee drinker, because I tend to have pretty low blood pressure (or as  – dr Jacek, aka “probably the best dermatologist in the county” told me this year when I had a checkup with him, it’s “Unmeasurable” 😀 ) and especially in the mornings, which, coupled with weird sleep patterns and dysthymia, means that most days my brains take quite a while to boot properly, and it’s not just that I feel sleepy – in fact if I had a good night’s sleep I don’t have to feel sleepy at all – I simply have very little energy, physical and mental. – It typically gets better on its own over time, but with coffee it’s faster, which is helpful if you have or want to be more or less functional soon after you wake up. So I developed a routine of having a cuppa strong, black coffee, either before or with my breakfast and it was one of the things that motivated me to get up because I loved my coffee very much. Then, if I woke up quite early, i’d often also have another cup later in the morning or around noon, either because the previous one didn’t quite do the trick on its own or simply because I felt like it, or sometimes I’d have it later in the afternoon instead, but it never was like a fixed part of my routine or something like that first cup of coffee was. Or if my Mum or Dad were having a cuppa, I’d often have it with them cuz why not, even if I just finished my morning coffee. So I’d typically have 1-3 cups of coffee daily. Or sometimes I’d have some iced coffee or something like that, but I don’t really see it as regular coffee.

   I always thought I had strangely high tolerance to caffeine, all the more strangely that things have suddenly changed at some point. In the past, I never felt particularly affected by coffee, as in, I never noticed that having coffee later in the day would interfere with my circadian rhythm, or even when I had my daily morning coffee, despite it was always strong coffee, it had never made me jittery or make me feel somehow extremely full of beans, just to a degree that was desirable or sometimes it didn’t even do that. I was actually often quite surprised whenever I heard someone saying that they get headaches from too much coffee, or coffee in general, no matter the amount, or can’t drink it past certain hour. But I supposed I might have it after my Mum, who is also very much dependent on her coffee and it doesn’t matter for her system if she drinks it at 6 AM or 11 PM.

   But then, some two or three years later, I started noticing that I was often feeling shaky in the morning, all my muscles felt really tense and some even quite sore as a result, and I had loads of anxiety seemingly for no reason, or for some really trivial reasons that weren’t quite my normal, if we can’t speak about normal here that is. 😀 Despite I was all jittery and jumpy and hypervigilant, I would also feel really weak physically and often had nausea and stuff like that, which I’m not sure if it was the result of anxiety because I often feel nauseated when I’m anxious, or perhaps it was a totally independent thing. I often physically felt as if I was really hungry, but at the same time had no appetite due to nausea and could barely eat anything when I felt like that. I didn’t see the correlation of that and coffee for a long time, but at some point someone suggested to me that if I have an anxious brain, coffee could be making things worse and that’s what is the case with her. So I started observing it and, very unfortunately for me, it started to be clear that coffee could well be a culprit, because my weird symptoms would start soon after I drank it. If I drank it early enough during the day, they would usually dissipate over time, but if I happened to wake up late, or have another coffee in the afternoon, my whole day would be screwed and I had even less physical energy than before I drank the coffee, and all the energy I did have was used on dealing with anxiety, so that sometimes I would just lie in bed and be unable to stop shaking, with my brain racing 1000000 miles/h and every little thing felt absolutely creepifying so I felt like it was some sort of sim game of what it’s like to be Misha so that I could understand him better, because he’s a lot like that. Whenever I did not drink coffee at all in a day, I never had these symptoms. But still, I loved coffee so much that it took me some time to come to the conclusion that, hm, actually, it could be a good idea to quit it, if that’s what it’s doing to me. I really didn’t want to do that, because I didn’t have anything else to wake up my brain in the mornings (not that coffee did it properly anymore either) and I was desperately holding on to the hope that perhaps if I used to have such high tolerance to coffee and this thing has come on so suddenly, perhaps it’s just a phase and I’ll be back to normal soon. ‘Cause I’d never heard of anyone’s caffeine tolerance regressing like that, in fact I still haven’t and I think it would be interesting to know why this happens. But nothing was changing and so I eventually had to make that move and quit caffeine colld turkey. I guess I didn’t really have any particular withdrawal symptoms beyond my normal sluggishly booting brains and really missing the taste of coffee (which I still do very much), which was a nice surprise, as I was suspecting it would be quite nasty after years of daily coffeeing. 

   I was looking for some alternative and tried a lot of green teas and some even worked and weren’t as yucky as the others, but despite I tried to convince myself otherwise, I don’t really like green teas, and I didn’t like how it felt so much more like a chore compared with drinking coffee. Then I tried cocoa ‘cause my Mum read somewhere that since it also has caffeine, it can be used as a good substitute for coffee. Well, I guess if that’s true, you’d have to drink quite an impressive amount, ‘cause for me it does absolutely nothing. Still, I love to have a mug of cocoa that’s strong enough to taste almost like coffee, and it can be a great flavour substitute for coffee. I’m very envious of people who can just drink coffee no problem and whenever someone says they’ll be making coffee, I still get a bad craving, so then I drink cocoa instead. It’s not the same, but still very good. I also really like Kopiko hard candies which have some caffeine in it. I guess it wouldn’t really work on anyone unless you’re super sensitive or allergic, but it’s always something that tastes kinda like coffee. I never even tried to drink decaf ‘cause it’s  profanation. As for brain-booting alternative, I just try to take in a lot of fluids (as in actual fluids, so usually simply water, not dehydrating stuff like coffee) in the morning and will suck on a few grains of our Polish Kłodawa rock salt if I feel like it. 

   Sometimes I do give in and have a cup of coffee, but it’s very rarely, and I always have to assess beforehand what my anxiety level is to begin with, so that it doesn’t get through the roof, and make sure I don’t have to do any peopling or other stuff for which you at least need to make an impression of functioning, and if I can allow myself for that, I’ll have that cup of coffee on occasion, even if I’ll regret it half an hour later. I remember one time after I’ve already quit coffee, but my Dad was having one on a Sunday morning and I decided I can’t be worst, so I had one too, and then we went for lunch to a restaurant, but I was so anxious and shaky that I couldn’t even hold my utensils properly, and was sure that someone is going to see it and think I’d either had something a lot stronger that just coffeine, or that I’m having a seizure or something like that, which obviously didn’t make me feel any less anxious, even though theoretically I’m pretty sure that people rarely notice my shaking even if it feels really intense from my perspective. So I’ll never do coffee again unless I’m absolutely sure that I won’t be going out anywhere or dealing with people etc. 

   How about your coffee intake? Or if you don’t drink coffee at all, do you have a drink that is like a part of your routine, like coffee is to a lot of folks? 🙂 

If we were having coffee… #WeekendCoffeeShare

Wow, it feels like I really haven’t done a longer post in a long time. I mean, I published the mini series about emetophobia quite recently, but writing that took me a REALLY long time, a good few months, so that’s probably why it feels so to me, and this is also largely why I haven’t been posting anything longer lately, as I wanted to be done with those vomit posts. 😀

Anyway, I love coffee shares, so thought I’d join

#WeekendCoffeeShare

today. Thanks so much to Natalie for hosting the link-up. 🙂

There’s not a whole lot going on here at the moment, but there are still things that I feel are worth mentioning and filling y’all in on. But first off, let’s get ourselves some drinks, and maybe something more than just a drink. As you may or may not know, I used to be an avid coffee drinker but can no longer drink it quite so carelessly as it seems, however, my Mum was grocery shopping yesterday and she bought loads of iced coffee as both Sofi and me love it a lot, so I’m just having a cup of it right now and it’s delicious. Iced coffee like this one is okay with my brain though, as it’s very weak, which I’m fine with for an iced coffee, but not when it comes to regular, black coffee. Plus I’m having a low-key day and decent anxiety levels so even if it will end up screwing me up a little it wouldn’t be a big deal. So I can make you a cup of this too, if you wish. Otherwise, we have black coffee (also a Swedish whole beans coffee that is actually my Mum’s but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind coffee sharing), loads of different teas, cocoa, and I guess there’s also some orange juice left. We also happen to have loads and loads of Swedish yummilicious candy and other goodies, so there’s lots of good stuff to share. So essentially we can say we’re actually having a proper fika (that’s very basically how you call a coffee break in Sweden, that you take together with friends or colleagues, where you have something small to eat to go with it, just a way of socialising). But how come we suddenly have so much Swedish food around here? Well, come fika with me and you’ll find out. 🙂 Oh, wait, there are also muffins! These are Polish, but I’m sure they’ll work for fika perfectly, if you’d like one.

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

If we were having coffee, I would fill you in on what’s currently going on with Misha. Misha, as many of you will know, is a very adventurous type, and despite being an exclusively in-door cat, he still has high hopes of conquering the great outdoors someday, and never misses a chance to try and make it happen. If he somehow manages to escape, he’ll then cry his poor little heart out for days or weeks to come because he wants out again. Sometimes we’ll let him out just to make him happy, because we know that this is what he loves the most, but we regret it almost as soon as we do it, because of that endless crying that we all find both excruciatingly annoying and heartbreaking. A couple weeks ago, somehow it had become more difficult than usual to keep Misha outdoors. There were several instances of him sneaking out so that no one even knew when that happened, and we seemed to have little control over it. What surprised us though was that Misha always came back without having to be made to do so, and never left our backyard, which is quite huge so definitely enough for him. That was interesting, as previously, whenever someone would take him out for a little while, it would be really difficult to get him to go back home and he’d run away and could be rather unpredictable. After each of those escapades the crying was even worse, so at some point my Mum decided that, actually, if he’s always been coming back from his adventures so far, we could take the risk and let him go wherever he wants. Misha was very happy, he sniffed the flowers, laid in the sun on the grass, and walked around like a lord examining his property, with Jocky jumping behind him like his faithful servant. As always, he got all magpies agitated and they yelled at him as loud as they could, but he didn’t even bother. That was again a surprise, because normally when we go out with him, he’s a lot more fearful and makes an impression like he’s quite overwhelmed with all the sounds and movements, whereas now he was very majestically placid. Once he even fell asleep on the grass. And then he came back, and slept through the rest of the day, probably totally exhausted with all the stimuli. When he’d wake up, he’d cry again, so we’d let him out, and the whole cycle would repeat. Only, what was quite easy to predict, each time Misha would go further and further. He would still stick to the backyard, but was becoming more and more courageous by the day, and took longer and longer every day to come back. Meanwhile, at home he would only sleep, and very soundly so. If he wasn’t asleep and wasn’t outside, he would cry, louder than before. Finally one such day Misha just spent the whole day outside, and couldn’t be seen from any window, so Mum went out to get him back. The problem was that he flat out refused to go anywhere with her and wanted to run away, but somehow she managed to catch him.

From then on, we became rather apprehensive of letting him out. As a result, we were constantly tortured by his wailing. Day and night. Sometimes the sounds he would make would be so mournful and pitiful that you could cry with him, while at other times it sounded very deliberately rude, annoyed, or plain manipulative. It never ceases to impress me how he can convey such an extremely wide range of emotions with what could seem as just one, wailing sound. My Dad started to threaten that he’s going to kill him someday, Sofi would yell at him if he came near her even if he wasn’t crying, because she was so fed up with him, Mum started to close him in the laundry room for the night, where he likes to be and where we’d hear him a bit less, and I was reluctant to have him in my room, as the only reason for which he seemed to come in here was to keep wailing. Yet we all felt very sorry for him and wanted to help him somehow. Letting him be outside just didn’t seem like the right way to help long-term, and we were short of any other ideas.

Mum and me, however, had been considering for quite a long time to take him to a cat behaviourist to talk about some of his problems, like the constant grooming. So finally it seemed like the time was more than right. Mum already went to that behaviourist with Misha and Sasha (the little kitten we had for a while with whom, or should I say due to whom, we had some problems), and he was very helpful and insightful. So I guess both of us were hoping for something similar this time around. Some insight, about what we might be doing wrong, and what we should do etc… Maybe he would help us understand this little Mish brain a little better.

Yet he didn’t offer us anyy insight. Looking at it in perspective, I don’t really know what he could say and this really doesn’t seem like the sort of thing where talking would help a lot. He simply concluded that there are two ways for Misha to live. One option is that we make a compromise and let Misha go in and out precisely as he pleases. But this isn’t really an option, even by his – the vet’s – standards, as obviously Misha is totally inexperienced when it comes to the outdoor life, while on the other hand he is used to sleeping on and in beds, or wherever he fancies, and it would be difficult and quite cruel to now tell him that he cannot do this anymore and I’m not quite sure how we’d go about making him adhere to this rule. And our house would get real filthy in no time, my pedantic Mum wouldn’t survive that. So there’s just the second option left, that is medication. So what we were ultimately offered was a supply of Prozac, which Misha was to take half a pill daily and he told us to come back in two weeks for a follow-up.

I really didn’t like the idea on so many levels but… what else can you do? As expected, Misha’s appetite worsened a lot, so I had to stock up on his favourite foods so that he’d eat anything. He also became really drowsy, which I didn’t realise was a thing with Prozac nor did the behaviourist tell us that it was possible. Like, he slept ALL the time! He’d hardly wake up to eat or pee. He was also very apathetic. In the short moments between his sleeps, I sometimes picked him up and cuddled. He doesn’t always love to be picked up, but now it was like he didn’t care either way. He didn’t object or tense up as he does when he’s not in the cuddly mood, but neither was he cuddly and affectionate, he would just lay in my arms completely still. But I thought, oh well, his body probably must just get used to it.

But things just continued like that, with no change at all. Both Mum and me tried to give him his favourite foods, both where regular meals and snacks were concerned, but a lot of food just went to waste because he’d just take a bite and would no longer be interested in it. Giving him the pills, which is never an easy thing, was becoming harder every day as he would protest against it more every day, it’s really unpleasant for everyone involved to give him any kind of medication. One day he threw it up almost straight after Mum managed to get him to swallow it. When Misha slept like that all the time, he would never slept cosily as usual, on a bed or in his own bed, or in some other comfy place. Instead he’d usually hide under a bed and clearly didn’t want anyone to see him. One of those days, when he was sleeping under Mum’s bed, she took a peek down there and found him lying there still but his eyes were actually wide open, plus his pupils were still very dilated so apparently it looked quite creepy. The next day Sofi told me the same thing, very surprised, that he’s not sleeping but simply laying like that all the time.

We didn’t go full two weeks, but as the situation wasn’t any better after over a week, I got really frustrated and decided that I don’t want a zombie here, I want my Misha back. I’d rather have him cry twice as loudly and obnoxiously than be just an empty shell of himself. I’m not sure he’s happy with this kind of existence either. Mum told me she was afraid that one day she’d just find him laying somewhere dead. So we wanted to go back to the behaviourist earlier and tell him that yeah, it solved the problem, but now we have no cat. Like, I literally haven’t seen him for a week as he was in that comatous state, even though on a few of these days he actually laid under my bed. There was also no “Hhrrru?”ing, no purrs, no nothing. But since we are now kind of afraid of testing other drugs on our Mishball, in the end Mum simply stopped giving him the Prozac and he isn’t taking anything else instead. He has almost fully recovered by now. Surprisingly, the crying’s not that bad at all either. He does cry a little bit, especially when he sees someone going out, but he also did cry a little bit during his waking minutes on the Prozac, and he’s been crying ever since he’s been with us. But it’s not the same, desperate kind of crying and he isn’t so quick to go out as he was for a couple months prior to this. We decided that we’ll only try some new medication if things go really bad again. Misha is also a little more sociable now, of course within his norm, which is so delightful. It’s really sad that there doesn’t seem to be any good way of lessening his distress.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that we’ve had quite a heatwave lately. The last two days have been a bit cooler, but I’m not expecting this to be the case for very long. It’s also very humid, especially that we live by the river, it’s like even the walls are sweating. 😀 I’m just so very grateful for finally having the AC in my room, as it makes it noticeably easier to function.

If we were having coffee, I’d finally share about where I’ve got all these Swedish sweets from. When Sofi had her birthday in May, I shared with my Swedish penfriend that I ordered a package from Scrummy for Sofi and me. Scrummy is a Polish online shop selling all sorts of sweets, snacks, drinks, instant desserts and what not from other countries, I believe mainly from Asia. And she kindly suggested that she could send us some Swedish ones to test. I had some Swedish candy in Stockholm and also in Ikea, but I still felt rather inexperienced in the matter, and I thought Sofi would be particularly happy, so I jumped at the chance and offered that we could do an exchange and we could send her some Polish sweets as well. When I later told my Mum about it, she asked if my penfriend could send her “that delicious coffee from Sweden”. She drank some whole beans coffee that she considered really great at the hotel where we stayed in Stockholm, but didn’t know the name of it, unfortunately, so I just asked my penfriend if she could find some whole beans, low acidity and high intensity coffee, because these are the sort of coffees my Mum likes. Our post office is really snail-paced with packages both from and to other countries, so it took almost a month to arrive, but we finally got it on Thursday, yay! 🙂 Since we were only talking about “testing”, rather than gluttonising hehe, we were really surprised that it was so huge, even for the two of us, so you can imagine we were really excited! 😀 I actually never got to it any licorice candy in Stockholm, and was always curious if I’d like it or not. Turns out that not really, and Sofi isn’t a fan of it either, but it was very interesting to finally try it. And my Dad, true to his alleged Nordic roots (which as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before I personally don’t really believe are truly Nordic, that’s what my cousins say though) discovered that he really does like it. I’m very curious if he’ll like the salty one as well.

What would you tell me if we were having coffee, or fika, for that matter? 🙂

 

If We Were Having Coffee… #WeekendCoffee Share

Oh my, I haven’t done a Weekend Coffee Share in quite some time!

Since the last time I participated, we have a new host, who is

Natalie (thank you so much for hosting 🙂 ).

If you would also like to join in on your own blog, go over to her post, where you’ll find the link-up.

So we can consider this coffee share a bit special, because it was Misha’s birthday on Saturday (he is 5 now and I’m still in a deep shock, especially that it’s apparently 36 in human years, is 36 middle age? :O ), and then it was my birthday on Monday (I’m 24 now in case you’re curious 😀 ). Also, this is my first coffee share ever since I’ve found my new

faza subject

which I was waiting for to happen for a long time, so I’m now in a nice faza peak, and I think a new faza does deserve a Weekend Coffee Share to be celebrated with, even though I probably won’t be talking much about my faza as such in this post. In case you don’t know but are curious, his name is Jacob Elwy and you can read more

here.

We don’t really have a huge variety of drinks right now, I’ve even run out of kefir, but we do have the usual black coffee and quite a lot of teas, so if you like some interesting teas, especially herbal, you’ll probably be able to find something cool for yourself, or you can bring your own drink and let us know what you’re having or contribute to the coffee share and share with people.

Because it was my birthday, I’ve got loads and loads of candies that I’m happy to share with you all, things like gummy bears or Toffifee or various chocolates. Just about an hour ago, I got some crisps from Olek, so perhaps I can share with you if you ask me very nicely. Sofi claims he must consider me very cool for some reason or something, because she didn’t get anything from him, nor did anyone else, he just bought himself an energy drink and crisps for me, according to her investigation. 😀 Wow, I feel honoured, wonder what makes me so cool! 😀 Or if you need something more substantial we have a lot of chicken. Or, again, you can bring something yourself and share with people if you feel like it.

So if everyone has some yummy food and drink and a comfy place, let’s start our coffee share properly, shall we?

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

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that, despite I was having some situational stressors last week and at the beginning of this week (to do with my birthday, which is usually quite a stressor for me and even this year, with the pandemic, I couldn’t escape all the peopling), I’ve been feeling quite well lately mood- and mental health-wise. In fact, I had a lot of peopling to deal with, and yes, it was difficult and overwhelming, and I especially don’t like it around my birthday because then the attention is focused on me way more than normal and I just hate it, it usually makes me feel so overloaded that it happened a few times already that I would end up self-harming on my birthday after having had done it in months and being very proud of it, which was obviously quite disheartening, if nothing else. This time, I’m even more proud that it didn’t happen and despite all the yuckiness and even some really quite nasty situations with my family along the way that I perhaps better won’t be describing here in detail, it was manageable. Misha helped me a lot, and obviously the fact that I’m in a faza peak so everything feels easier, better and what not. Right now I’m having a period and while I’m feeling quite crappy physically, I haven’t have particularly bad PMS symptoms which I often do have. Oh and what some of you may already know, my migraines have mysteriously stopped like three weeks ago, where previously, for the last few months I’d been having at least one per week. I did have a slight tension headache the day before Jack the Ripper aka Jack the Butcher (which is how I affectionately call my period, in case you don’t know) came, but that’s normal and it didn’t make me non-functional. And my Welsh learning is going great. So, yay, good news from Bibiel land!

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that it’s been frrrreezing this week! Which I’m happy with, except for the fact that it makes it very slippery which is annoying when your balance is shitty to begin with, but I don’t have to go out much now so it’s not a huge problem. It’s also been snowing so much that even Sofi’s fed up with it. I’ve heard that in some regions of Poland it could get as cold as -30 C (-22 F apparently), although I don’t know where exactly. Sounds exciting to me! Well, definitely way better than +30, so I won’t be complaining if it’ll be the case for us, although my Mum is missing spring. Spring is great, but summer not so much for me, so I’m appreciating it when it’s cooler. Misha is totally fascinated with the snow and likes to watch it longingly through the window. Sofi took him outside once and gave him a snow bath. I was worried that, because he doesn’t go out at all normally, he’d get sick or something. Physically he managed it really well (I guess he has this Russian fur for a reason after all), but he seemed not quite his own self and very jittery for the rest of the day and I think he had quite an emotional shock from being let out, even though it wasn’t much longer than a minute.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that yesterday, my parents finally bought a camper van. You may or may not know that it’s been my Dad’s life-long dream to have a camper van and he’s been entertaining these visions of himself being in retirement and driving through the world. We’d always taken it with a grain of salt, because he’s the type of dreamer who just gets stuck on the dreaming part, but for some reason doesn’t seem to want to accept it and at the same time will never admit it to himself that he won’t take it any further than dreaming and hoping. Or at least, so we thought. Also he is always very stressed and it just seemed very incongruent with his personality that suddenly he’d be wandering the world with no purpose, spontaneously and with no hurry. That’s something that perhaps my Mum could do – being very spontaneous, impulsive, living in the moment and following her dreams – but she wouldn’t either, because she feels better at home. Also it always made us laugh, because my Dad is a tanker driver, so he is driving all the time, and always whining about it when he has to travel somewhere far, and then he wants to spend even his retirement years driving even further. But, at some point it really came to that Dad started seriously looking for a camper van to buy. Something used and as cheap as possible, of course, but still. It was a huge step forward. We all observed it from a bit of a distance, with a lot of interest but no hopes or anything, because while it sure would be fun to travel in a camper van sometimes, neither of us is so crazy about it as he is, perhaps Sofi a bit.

Then he started actually contacting sellers, travelling to see various vehicles, but it seemed like he had some bad luck with it really and he had several situations where he’d arrange with a seller that he’d come see his camper van at such and such time, and then at the last minute he’d learn that it was sold, or he’d travell the whole country with the rain pouring all the way back and forth just to see something that looked way worse than on the pictures. Sometimes in turn he’d have some really good offers almost right in front of his nose, and would turn them down for no apparent reason, and continued to kill his free time by scrolling through camper vans for sale. We started thinking that he actually indeed does prefer dreaming, and may be afraid of achieving this dream or something. Sofi was a bit disappointed, Mum was a bit condescending, a bit amused but mostly neutral, and I could understand it a bit that now he was so close to achieving this, perhaps he was having second thoughts, for some reason, maybe because now he could also see that he is not suited for the life he was imagining.

And finally, he found some quite a bit more expensive camper van that he really liked, and earlier this week suddenly I hear that they – he and Mum of course – are going by train all the way to Silesia to see a new camper van. At this point, if they were going by train, and not by car or with someone else as another driver, I knew that things have developed seriously, because who would go see something to the other end of a country rising at half past 3 AM to do this, and then go back home with nothing. Even if it would be awful, they’d probably buy it anyway. 😀 Then I even heard that it was “almost bought”. And, yes, they went to see it yesterday, and bought it properly, and now we have a camper van, and they’re quite satisfied with it. This is quite nice, because with my vestibular problems, any kind of further travelling is a bit of a hassle, but while it’s doable by car with the right strategies, it is much more difficult on the sea and I haven’t even had the courage to try an aeroplane because the mere thought makes me floaty and dizzy, so that was also one of Dad’s crucial arguments when someone was asking him why he wants a camper van so badly – to be able to go abroad more, and to go abroad he thinks he has to go with Bibiel, because Bibiel can speak English and he can’t, and Bibiel won’t go anywhere by plane. – And whenever he’d drink a bit more he’d be giving me elaborate promises of how when he’ll have a camper van we’ll go to all my favourite countries etc. etc. etc. even though I’ve never pressured him for that. So, yeah, that could be fun, even if we don’t actually end up going to my favourite countries, it can still be nice to even go on holidays somewhere closer, and have your own place to sleep in.

Now, your turn. What would you tell me if we were having coffee? 🙂

 

Leah Nobel – “Coffee Sunday NYT”.

Hey people! 🙂

Today I’d like to introduce you to Leah Nobel’s music – if you haven’t known her before, that is. – I haven’t until just a few weeks ago. Leah is from Phoenix, AZ.

What caught my attention about her is that she seems to be a really interesting person, with a lot of ideas, a lot of sides to her personality, and – yes – a lot of projects. Aside from creating music under her own name, she also has an alter ego – Hael – making more electronic music, and as Hael her music has been featured in quite a few ad campaigns for different companies, like Apple, Motorola and Toyota. She is also known as a rapper under the name of Lil Cheesecake. I like versatile people and this is a pretty wide spectrum of musical interests!

But what I find even more interesting is what she did last year. She interviewed 100 people from all walks of life, and used it as a material for her new album – “Running In Borrowed Shoes”. I like to listen to people, I like stories about people, and even more so I like to people watch and observe people and the dynamics between them, and I found that such an intriguing idea! Rather than focusing on herself, her own feelings, thoughts, interests, which would be totally fine and justifiable since it’s her album and her artistic expression, she decided to become a voice for all those people, and to inspire herself with their stories. Definitely an interesting source of inspiration and I guess not all that common in the songwriting world. I like interesting lyrics, or even just lyrics with interesting backgrounds. Leah says that it is a “‘hybrid creative endeavor’ combining journalism, empathy, advocacy and music. I really like the idea of such a combination, especially the empathy and advocacy part because you don’t normally think about them in conjunction with music even though they could complement each other so well, and I also like the results of this combination.

The song I want to share with you comes from that same 2019 album, and is all about having time for yourself, self-care, even self-pampering or maybe even laziness, being alone with yourself and chilling. I really like it and the vibe of it itself really makes you feel more chilled out.

Question of the day (31st May).

Hey people! 🙂

Do you like coffee? If so, black, or with cream? What kind of creamer?

My answer:

I’ve asked you coffee/drink related questions before, but since different people may see different questions, and those questions are always a bit different from each other, I thought that why not, and the question was partially inspired by my own adventure with coffee yesterday. I hadn’t had real, proper, black coffee in over half a year, and the night before the last I didn’t sleep very well due to migraine and generally “jet-lagged” brain, so I felt a little sluggish yesterday and when I saw Mum make coffee for herself I decided that, what the flip, why can everyone drink coffee but not me? I guess I can have it sometimes, right? It’s not the end of the world, especially that I wasn’t going anywhere, so even if my anxiety raised nothing overly bad would happen. So I did have my coffee and relished it thoroughly. But afterwards, it did get quite serious. I guess partially because I just didn’t drink proper, strong coffee for so long so my brain weaned off caffeine completely and was not prepared for such a dose out of the blue, but also now I suspect I really must have some sort of caffeine hypersensitivity. The strange thing is though that in my first years of drinking coffee I didn’t feel anything like that at all, or can’t recall at least, so it couldn’t have been this intense. I was actually very immune to any effects, or side effects, of coffee. I think when I started to notice that anxiety thing after drinking coffee must have been about a year ago or so, and then I also started to feel some light physical symptoms like that I would feel a bit queasy, have a slight diarrhoea or my muscles would get weak, or I’d be shaky or my sugar would go a bit low, but that wasn’t much of a problem, the high anxiety was the only reason why I stopped drinking coffee. But yesterday not only my anxiety sky-rocketed after coffee, where earlier in the morning I wasn’t almost at all anxious, but also I felt dreadful physically, it was a real nightmare of a day and I had only myself to blame for it. It’s strange though how intensely I seem to react to it. I don’t have anything like this after black tea, or even green tea, nor Pepsi or other such drinks, though energy drinks did make me a little edgy when I used to drink them but it’s not a big deal at all since I don’t like them anyway. Thankfully it’s all okay now, but hopefully now I’ll think twice before having a coffee.

Anyways, let’s get to the question. So yes, I do like coffee, I love coffee, and now I also hate coffee because it seems to hate me. I like strong black coffee, ideally with a teaspoon of sugar or honey but it’s not necessary, coffee without it is just as good. I also love iced coffee and then I like it with a bit more sugar and cream, but I don’t drink and never had drunk iced coffee often enough to be an expert in different creamer varieties and say which ones I like particularly better than others.

You? 🙂

If We Were Having Coffee… #WeekendCoffeeShare.

The weekend is over, but Weekend Coffee Share at

Eclectic Alli’s

is still open so I thought I’d take part and have a coffee with you guys.

As you know, I don’t really drink coffee now since quite a few months as I discovered it doesn’t agree with my brain, except for some very special occasions, but you can have it, or you can help yourself to some tea, I have a lot of different teas, as well as orange juice, Pepsi, milk, water, or you can take your own drink with you and share it with others as well if you want. For those who – like me – love coffee but don’t drink it, I can offer you some Kopiko candy – Kopiko are Indonesian coffee-flavoured sweets that actually contain caffeine, but not enough to send your brain to Freakland, unless you eat really many, and they do taste like coffee, unlike so many -flavoured things which are not particularly convincing. I also have some chocolate that I can share with you guys (oh, and we have hot chocolate and cocoa as well if you wish), and also I have hazelnuts in chocolate. My Mum is really awesome, because Christmas is over but she made Christmas pierogi for us again. Well, after all Christmas period is actually still lasting until Sunday. Anyway, if you’d like to try them, feel free to do so. I hope everyone is sitting comfortably and has something yummy to drink, and eat if you want. I’ve just had a glass of orange juice and now I’m sucking a Kopiko.

If we were having coffee, I’d ask all of you how you are doing…? 🙂

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that it’s been quite a tough week for me. I am struggling with a lot of anxiety lately, and my anhedonia has been increasing slowly but steadily since a few months and these days it’s more noticeable for me. It feels strange because, while I’ve been familiar with feeling depressed and struggling with depression and depressive thoughts since forever, I don’t have as much experience with anhedonia. I’m kind of scared that it’ll stay with me, and I’m pretty sure it will if I don’t find myself a faza/crush very soon. Probably the whole transition process to my new computer and having to get used to it doesn’t help as changes hardly help me to feel better. I’m hoping it’s temporary. I’ve also had quite a bit of socialising to do this week.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that there was a bit of a party in our house on Monday. My uncle and his family came. I think I like him the most out of my Mum’s siblings because he’s quite laid back and often looks sort of different at things than the majority of mediocre people, and is funny, although he’s also very noisy and drawing lots of attention to himself, and goodness they all were making soo much noise that I managed to spend only a little while with them and then me and Misha escaped to my room! 😀 They were all partying until like 2 AM, which is longer than my family usually does, haha, especially that there were children too.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you that we were visiting all my grandparents last Tuesday, because it was Grandma’s Day, and on Wednesday Grandad’s Day. We couldn’t really break it down somehow because on Grandad’s Day, we were having other plans. So there was a lot of riding around and sitting behind the tables and socialising and eating and that, and I wasn’t really doing well as my blood pressure was very low and my mood definitely not up to socialising, but I was trying my best. Sofi was in an even worse situation, because she had a headache all day long after not a very good night’s sleep and the party, and you know how awful it is to have a headache while having to travel or visit other people, I really felt for her.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that we had a priest’s visit on Wednesday. I don’t think it’s a thing in Catholic parishes in other countries but here it definitely is. It’s like, during the whole period after Christmas, that is until February 2nd, priests visit all houses in their parishes to consecrate them and pray with people, also talk a little bit, get to know the family a little etc. It’s a very short visit, maybe 15 minutes, but, in our case, usually the waiting for it is sooooo long and daunting. They usually start on the neighbouring street to us, go through it, and then along our street but from the opposite end towards where we live. So the visits start, say, at 4 PM, but ours take place at 8 PM or so. And there’s no communication between the houses really and you have to be prepared because you don’t really know how long it will take this time. This year was a pleasant surprise though, because we were one of the first who were visited on our street, so we didn’t have to sit in the living room the whole afternoon and get bored and frustrated. It went very quickly and we were free. Although such events usually stress me a bit, it’s usually quite awkward if I’m honest, no one really knows what to talk about, so it’s good that we have Zofijka.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I got another computer related scare on Friday. My antivirus informed me that I got some malware and that apparently it was a Trojan, which freaked me out mostly because I’d never had a major infection of a computer before, but also because as I said I’m still not fully used to it. Also I was very suspicious because this computer is still very new, and I had no idea how I could get it, because I haven’t really got to using anything else on it other than the apps I’ve always been using for ages, and same about websites. My antivirus “cured” the thing and then I made a full scan and now there seem to be no dangers, and I haven’t seen any weird behaviours of my computer or any issues that coould be down to a virus or stuff, so I believe it’s okay, and Olek actually says it probably was a false alarm and my antivirus must be just very hypervigilant, although I have no idea if that’s really possible. Anyway, it certainly didn’t help my anxiety as you can imagine.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that yesterday was my grandpa’s 16th death anniversary, and because of that, on Saturday we went to the Mass for him and after that, we had another family gathering, that was for some reason even more difficult for me to go through although I’m not sure why. Perhaps just because I don’t get along with my gran and the whole Dad’s side of family, or perhaps because of all the anxiety bubbling in my brain. Anyway, it was very difficult for me and there was a lot of food. I always find it more or less difficult to eat among many people or people I don’t know, but on the other hand I feel like it’s awful not to ever do it because someone may just feel offended or something, and it’s awkward when everyone else is eating. But this time round it was really difficult for me to eat anything at all. I caught up on that though when we got back home and I devoured a whole packet of crisps right away. It’s funny how much stress can impact you. For me it’s always like this. When I feel very stressed, I virtually can’t eat, but then when it passes away, I become ravenously hungry. 😀

I think that would be all from me for now in this coffee share. It’s not much, because I wrote a sort of smaller update post not long ago, and also because apart from some chaos in my brain and what I’ve already told you about, right now not much is happening.

Oh, Misha’s birthday is coming on Thursday! Hope things will be looking a bit better by then, although on the other hand I don’t suppose they will.

What would YOU tell me if we were having coffee? 🙂

 

A mid-week coffee and everything else share.

I wanted to do a Weekend Coffee Share post this past weekend (finally), but didn’t end up doing it, of course. I planned to do it on Sunday but had a terrible headache for pretty much all day and didn’t feel like writing anything overly complicated. And, actually, I’m not even sure what I’m going to write about because there’s not that very much going on, or I can’t write about everything that is publicly. So we’ll see where this coffee and tea and everything else share will take us. I hope you’ll join in.

Get yourself a mug or a glass of something delicious to drink, maybe a snack or a meal and let’s get started. I’m just going to drink water because that’s what I feel like drinking right now, and I’ve actually just had supper. But if water doesn’t feel sophisticated enough we can pretend it’s champagne because my water bottle is glass and, according to my Dad, looks very much like a champagne. 😀 You can have some of my Mum’s chicken and pasta casserole or bring something to the party yourself. 🙂

If we were having coffee, I’d ask all of you how you’re doing…?

If we were having coffee, I would tell you that I am getting more and more excited and thrilled about my project of My Inner Mishmash Readership Award. The official announcement of the winners is going to take place on November 26 (I would like it so anyway) the day when the awards will be sent out to people. I tell everyone that it’s the first year in a long time that I’m excited about Christmas time and can’t wait for it, hahaha. I’d like to make this award my yearly, Christmas tradition, unless the winners will be exactly the same every year. But it’s also quite stressful. I’m not preparing it on my own, my Mum helps me a whole lot obviously and I depend on other people too to prepare some things, so I’m quite stressed out and desperately praying that it’ll be all ready on time, and rushing my Mum all the time because we haven’t even got the half of it done yet. My Mum takes it very slowly with such things, and is often late, so I’m glad I’ve started it out in late September, and if it gets very hectic I might get to it even earlier next year, just in case. But anyway it’s gonna be lots of fun I think, and I hope my winners will feel appreciated and I’ll make them happy.
If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that our dog, Jocky, who is 1-and-something-year-old, has been fixed last week. He looks so poorly. It was necessary because there is an awful, old bitch in the neighbourhood who seems to appeal to all the dogs in the area and attracts them with an unbelievable strength. We didn’t want him to go there, and not letting him go was so awful because he would howl all nights and seemed so unhappy. Now he just seems miserable, and the whole experience of getting Jocky fixed was very unpleasant and unsettling for Zofijka, but I believe it’s all temporary.
If we were having coffee I’d tell you that I had a Zombie day on Wednesday. My horse riding instructor offered me that I could go riding that day but I said no, because it just didn’t seem right to ride on a Zombie day. I feel dizzy and floaty on a Zombie day and so my balance on horseback would be even worse, and that would only make me more anxious. Also, well, it requires a good deal of focus for me to ride and do all those exercises that I do, and to do them well, so I would just feel disappointed with myself, and obviously you never have enough energy after a sleepless night. I went riding only once during a Zombie day, and got a massive panic attack and couldn’t recover for ages, and I don’t normally get panic attack as my anxiety is more of a chronic and generalised kind. Anyway, I didn’t go and had a very lazy, hazy and crazy, lousy and drowsy day at home, but it was one of such things that no matter what I would do, I would regret it, so all day I was like “Oh no, why didn’t I go riding? What a pity I couldn’t go riding. Maybe I should go riding? Why did I miss my riding this week?”. Especially that, as you may remember from my post about Zombie days, I struggle a lot with decision making on such days. By the evening I was absolutely exhausted but, already in bed, I tuned in to BBC Radio Cymru and realised with a thrill that this was the day on which the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards ceremony was about to happen, and my current music crush –
Gwilym Bowen Rhys – was one of the nominees for the Folk Singer of the Year Award. So I switched to BBC 2 and, instead of going to sleep as a proper Zombie should at 9 PM, if not much earlier, I listened to the ceremony, and enjoyed it a lot because there were other people too that were either nominated or won some awards, whom I knew and liked. A bit sadly, Gwilym didn’t win, but oh well, I think he has a chance to do so in the future if he’s been already nominated this year. The next day, my instructor said she could fit me in as well, but I decided not to go again, I just didn’t feel quite well mentally, just not in the mood whatsoever.
If we were having coffee I’d tell you that, thankfully, last week my instructor was flexible and could also fit me in on Friday, which I did accept and went riding, as I felt much less shitty. Still not very well but I thought I could manage it and I don’t like having too long breaks because then it’s just harder and I feel more anxious and unsettled beforehand, and it’s just a pity when I have to miss a whole week, and, because my instructor is very busy, it does happen a lot of the time. I was very anxious beforehand despite I still take my medication before riding to feel a bit more at ease. It took me a long time to relax, the more that we decided to go to the forest and ride there. I hadn’t been riding in the forest for about two years! And I had to sort of get used to it again. To the different ground and landforms and it just took me a while to feel more confident. I generally love to ride in the woods far more than just in the hall where you go round and round all the time but this time it was a bit more stressful than enjoyable. I just hope next time, whenever it’ll be, will be better. It was Rudy’s 20th birthday (60 or 60-something in human years) so he’s got lots of carrots afterwards. But before we finished, we came back to the hall for a while, and I did quite a few circles of both sitting trot and rising to the trot and some balance exercises, and riding sidesaddle – like ladies used to in the olden days. – We have no sidesaddle as such in the stud but I was just riding as if I was in a sidesaddle, in such a position. It is also a very good (and very scary) balance exercise. Previously I was able to do only one circle of it and was all dizzy afterwards, but this time I dared to do a few circles, though still with my instructor’s assistance. I am hoping I’ll soon get better at it and it’ll be less scary haha, and then maybe will also be able to try riding backwards again. I used to once but could only manage a few steps and it scared the shit out of my brain. 😀 But yeah, overall I enjoyed it a lot. Rudy’s hair is very thick now though, for the winter, so he was completely worn out and sweaty when we finished. I just have to remember to take my allergy meds before the riding, and not after, haha, so I can be more efficient and have my airways clear. My horse allergy is not strong but it really is a pain in the neck, especially if you forget your meds. 😀 I won’t be able to ride this week because my instructor is very busy.
If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I had an awful day on Sunday. I had lots of nightmares and woke up with my head throbbing like hell, and couldn’t get out of bed, so I didn’t until afternoon. A very lousy Bibiel I was! Zofijka fell down and got a mild concussion which scared her, but then she said that after all she doesn’t use her brain anyway, so she doesn’t care if some of it has spilled out. How honest! 😀 My headache went away in the evening but I was still anxious and just blah. My parents had their acquaintances come over in the evening and had a little but very loud dancing party, which really annoyed Zofijka, who was tired and her head was hurting after the fall, and all the noise didn’t let her fall asleep. Thankfully, her brain seems to feel better now.
What would you tell me if we were having coffee?

If We Were Having Coffee… a midweek coffee share.

Anyone up for a cuppa coffee at 9 PM? Or probably it will be even later by the time I finish this post. But perhaps it’s earlier where you are so if you want a coffee, grab a cup of it and join in. Or drink whatever you feel like. I can offer you a coffee, or an iced coffee, green tea, black tea, some herbal teas, or raspberry tea, kefir, Pepsi, or water. Or you can bring something yourself so that it’ll be more diverse.

I have a lot of snacks this time that I can share with you, I’ve made a big big shopping last week, thinking I’ll be alone for a week so will need a lot of yummy stuff to munch on. A lot of sweets, like biscuits, chocolate, some hard candy, gummybears, lots of stuff that it’ll probably take me weeks or months to deal with myself so I’ll need people to help me out! But you can still bring in your own food. We don’t have much serious food here right now, no yummy dishes or anything like that, as Mum is the one who cooks those and she’s just come back from my uncle’s funeral, but I’ve also stocked the house with instant soups, pasta sauces and all sorts of cereal and yoghurts and such.

I won’t be eating anything this time, actually I only ate a little today, a late breakfast and some cookies with Zofijka, I feel kinda weird physically and don’t even have an idea why, I’m tired and a bit nauseous and lousy and I felt like not doing this coffee share today, but I need to catch up with you and tell you about an idea I had, so I don’t want to delay it all the time.

So, grab something you feel like drinking and eating, find yourself a cosy and comfy place to sit, and let’s start our coffee share properly.

If we were having coffee I’d ask all of you how are you doing and how has the last week and this week so far been for you?… 🙂

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I was on a very unexpected trip to Masuria last week. my Dad just got kind of a suden idea that he’d like to go to Masuria because he’s on holidays for over two weeks now. Masuria is a sort of go-to, traditional place for some longer holidays for us. My Mum has family there, and my Dad is very much into WWII stuff so there’s a lot to explore for him. The food is heavenly there, and so are the views and just the general atmosphere. We didn’t have much time to spend there, as they were supposed to go on another trip with my Mum’s family to the Bieszczady mountains, so we left on… Thursday, I guess, and were meant to go back home on Saturday if not earlier. We didn’t do much there though, because the plans regarding their other trip were changing constantly, and my Dad got cross about it, so in the end we were home on Friday early evening. Still, I mostly liked the trip, despite my Dad’s constant irritability getting on my nerves and my own moods shifting quite a bit which was difficult to contain but I think I succeeded at it very much. It helped me to sort of get away from my anxieties, clear my mind a little, and, while the depression was still echoing somewhere in the background, my anxiety and rumination had significantly lessened while I was away, which was actually surprising, normally I’m one big nervous wreck when travelling for longer than a day and sleeping in a stranger place and all.

We went to one small town called Mikołajki and were just wandering aimlessly around it, I bought myself a cat figurine made of porcelain, it’s blue, as in the Russian blue Misha. 😀 Oh yeah and I mised Misha terribly! I guess I’ll always have that messed up in my brain, when longing for someone, it feels like I’m never going to see them anymore or will have to lose them again very soon, it feels much more of a loss than it is, no matter what I tell myself, no matter that I know I’ll see Misha in 2 days, which is ridiculously short, it’s so stupid and shitty, I hate it. My Dad really wanted to take a ship there, around the lake in Mikołajki, but I flat out refused because it was very windy and I was afraid my vestibular system won’t cooperate, so he was enraged, but couldn’t have any discussion with me. The next day Mum wanted to go somewhere by ship, and it wasn’t that windy so I gritted my teeth and said OK, but to my surprise Dad said we don’t have to and he doesn’t want to force me. Not quite like him, but while I would deal with that, after all we’ve sailed to Sweden and such and I dealt with it, I was happy I didn’t have to go through it again without a sound reason. 😀

After we’ve seen almost the entire Mikołajki, we went to Ełk where we very supposed to sleep, but my Dad – always planning ahead and even a bit stiff – went all wild and spontaneous this time and hadn’t booked us a place anywhere. He doesn’t have a debit/credit card, I left mine at home and Mum was almost skint so couldn’t pay for us, while all the online booking stuff only accepts cards obviously. So he was all raging, until we finally found a hotel that he could plain phone and pay them directly with cash. 😀 I was starting to think that we might end up going back home at night, so fumin he was.

I had really weird, like really weird and rather creepy dreams, some in a cool creepy way and very creative, one was gloomy-creepy and even more odd, and involved me having ECT. Only that if ECT really looked like that… it was even worse than in “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”. I don’t know what I had that for, was it depression or whatever, I just know I was seeing a very authoritarian doctor there who said something is definitely very wrong with my brain and I need ECT to get it working properly, he was the kind of person who knows everything about you before you even get a chance to say anything. It was a really gloomy and awfully depressing hospital, I felt sick just being there, and I guess it was quite a long distance from my home, because when he announced to me that I’d have to come there I guess every month me and my Mum were very unsatisfied. He first wanted me to sit there and wait for my turn while there were like a dozen of odd, metal beds with people on them, who had all something wrong with their brains, they had some stuff connected to their brains, I don’t know, wires or electrodes or whatever it was, something was beeping all the time like in a trashy medical thriller movie, the doctors were doing something to their brains, like manipulating with them with their hands, they were bound to their beds, and they had awful, like horrible, horrifying seizures, it looked gross, heart-wrenching and creepy and their dignity was taken away from them. I guess they weren’t unconscious but in some altered state of consciousness. And then I had all that stuff too, only that I didn’t have the seizures, instead I felt awful and woke up with no memory. And I know I talked with some of those people who were there, one of them was very much like my friend Jacek from Helsinki, and he told me he’s been having that for 5 years every month and he feels less and less like himself and that I should run away from there. I came back home and my whole extended family came to me to wish me speedy recovery but I didn’t even care about anything and it felt really strenuous to think. And then slowly, life would just go back to normal, and as soon as I’d start regaining my colourful brain, feeling OK, getting back my memories and was less scared of what happened, it was time to go back to that prick. It was weird that I couldn’t even just refuse, everyone was saying I have to, they were very sad about it but were saying it will help me in the end. I often have dreams when people force me to do things and no matter how hard I refuse or fight, or how diplomatically I’d try to persuade them out of it, they have to have it their way. I wonder does that mean something? 😀 So yeah, that was my dream, in a nutshell, I was going back and forth from there and seeing all those people and having it done to myself and recovering, until finally when I came there and he put me on the bed I just woke up. First I was creeped out and wondered why the hell I had such a gross dream, and it haunted me for a while, but then I started laughing at how creative my brain is. Guess I really could write thrillers based on my dreams, only I don’t like thrillers! 😀 Would like to have a talk with my brain and ask it where it got it from, during your average jolly family trip. Maybe something was wrong with that hotel! 😀

Anyway, as I told you, the next day we had to go back home, but before we did that, we visited Augustów and I had the yummiest iced latte there. And both on our way to Masuria and back home we stopped for a dinner in a lovely restaurant where I had absolutely scrumptious pierogi. Apart from my Mum’s and perhaps my grandma’s, I don’t think I’ve eaten better. Not in a restaurant for sure, and most often we eat frozen which are rather dull, so it was a great surprise! But pierogi in Masuria usually tend to be very good. So as I said my parents were supposed to go for another trip on Sunday, and they did, but had to go back, because my uncle died that same day from cancer. They normally probably wouldn’t go back, but grandma was going with them and she wanted to take part in the funeral. Coincidentally, my uncle lived in Masuria, so yesterday in the morning my family were heading back there and have just come back. I was at home with Zofijka and Misha, and Olek, but Olek’s mostly at work. For those of you who read my “Some Random Questions” post, if you’re curious, no, our house didn’t catch fire, Misha didn’t choke and Zofijka didn’t bring a norovirus home from her swimming camp, although I’m feeling really interestingly today so actually who knows… (no, brain, don’t think about that now!), instead, Zofijka came home sobbing hysterically, but didn’t want to talk so I asked Mum as for how I should handle it and Mum said I should ignore it and that means she really enjoyed the camp… Yeah, I see… No, seriously, I get it. There’s a whole long school year until another camp. I hated camps but still, I know the feeling. She’s better now, and has been out with her mates for most of the day. But my parents are going for another trip yet (my Dad’s determination to challenge the  fate is pretty admirable) only not to Bieszczady but somewhere nearer, so hopefully the smaller distance will help in making it a success finally. 😀

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that Misha is being really sweet to me lately, which helps me a lot every day. I suspect it’s my little secret bottle of Mish ice cream (his favourite thick sauce) that I’ve got that made him feel so amicably towards me. Those sauces come in little tubes, so you squeeze them out and if we want to have fun Misha can lick it like ice-cream, but it gets messy and I don’t wfind those tubes very user-friendly. So Mum came up with an idea that for the time when they’ll be away she’ll put a few sauces into a bottle so I’ll have it easier to give it to him and dose properly, it’s like an oil bottle. The thing is you of course have to store those sauces in the fridge, or at least in a dark place, so I had to use up that bottle quick. I used up most of it, but sadly, some of the sauce had turned sour, I was afraid not to overfeed him. I still have his normal snacks, but the sauce effect hasn’t worn out yet and Misha graciously spends most of his very precious time with me and sleeps in his bed next to me at night, as well as has his longest day nap always here. It’s really so lovely! 🙂

If we were having coffee, I’d share my idea with you, which I think is great, but I need your feedback, as it has to do with my blog and with you as my readers! I’ve been thinking about it loads and it’s not a very new idea, but, as is most often the case with me, I needed to thoroughly think it through. The idea is such – I’ve been thinking about doing something like a yearly My Inner MishMash reader award – don’t know what its actual name could be yet but that’s a secondary thing. – There are tons of awards in the blogosphere, some people like them and find them nice, for some they’re annoying, so I wasn’t thinking a blog award, like write a post and nominate people etc. Especially that, as far as I am aware, those awards tend to be connected with badges, or other banners or pics, as a way to emphasise and show that someone’s blog has been awarded and I have no idea about that. My idea is more about expressing my gratitude to my readers, having fun blogging, and just connecting with people in a fun way, and also it’d be like a small giveaway. Every year, I would pick three readers of My Inner MishMash that I think have been most involved, that come here regularly, comment etc. and that I feel particularly grateful for having them around. That would be based on my own judgment and feelings, but also on the comments stats. Then I would send out small packages to those folks, with mini things like some typically Polish yummies, T-Shirts with Misha, Mish-themed Christmas cards (as that would be sometime around Christmas and New Year) and such, I’m open for suggestions here. I’d also make an official post announcing the “winners” (although it’s not about winning and losing, obviously I’m grateful for all my engaged/reglar readers who enjoy being here at My Inner MishMash, whether you comment a lot or just read my posts, but I can’t send gratitude packages to all of you every year 😀 ). Or maybe that post would go before I’d send the packages, and it could have a bit of an award form, that part needs deeper thinking. But what I need most at the moment is for you to say what you think, if you like the idea, are you up for it? Any ideas for a name for this invention? Right now I’m considering My Inner Mishmash Involvement Award (MIMIA) or My Inner MishMash Readership Award (MIMRA), it’s not really an award but it looks better in the acronyms than giveaway, but that feels a little stiff, or maybe it’s just me. My other idea is just simple EMisha’s Christmas Mini Care Package. Yeah, could use some feedback… I love baby names, but titles and such aren’t my ground as much.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you I’m getting lots of new equipment soon! I’m happy not happy. I’ve got the maximum funding for my new Braille-Sense and Plextalk, so I really don’t have to pay much myself compared with the original price especially of Braille-Sense, which is good. I also decided to get a new computer, the one I have right now is about 5 and just seems to feel like retiring soon. My current computer is a laptop, but the one I’m going to get is a desktop, simply because it seems more logical for me, I almost only use my laptop in my room anyway. I’m happy because the change is really needed, especially re Braille-Sense, which is a geriatric, but I’m not happy and all anxious and fidgety because I hate hate hate changes and seem to have some internal problem with tech stuff and changing it, arrrghhhh. It’s not because of the sentiment, I just hate change, I’m afraid something will go wrong, or I won’t be able to transition and adjust, I won’t learn to handle the different things, which is quite unlikely. I guess I’d never had that strong anxiety with tech related transitions before, I guess before most of them I was very happy most of all, I don’t like the intensity of it at all. I’m gonna have my new stuff in the end of August.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that, although I’m not sleepy, because I woke up at about 11:30 AM today, I feel very tired for some reason and kind of weird so I’m going to bed soon.

What would you tell me if we were having coffee? 🙂

 

If We Were Having Coffee… or whatever else you fancy. #WeekendCoffeeShare

#WeekendCoffeeShare at Eclectic Alli’s.

Welcome to another coffee share, quite an early one, especially as for me, but I haven’t been too regular with posting lately and I might not be for a few more days so I thought we’d have another coffee share as some longer, catch-up post.

I’ve had my green tea already in the morning as I woke up early and needed it badly so I’m now having sparkling water with lemon, and very yummy Polish biscuits called Delicje – they are round sponge biscuits covered in chocolate with a jelly filling, mine are with orange jelly and as much as I love Delicje, the orange-flavoured ones are the only ones I find acceptable, OK, raspberry ones are OK, but just OK. – Help yourselves! I’ve also made a cake earlier today – a sponge cake with jelly and raspberries – (wow I’m kinda monotematic today with sponge, fruit and jelly, perhaps someone has an idea why? :D). It’s my name day on Sunday, hence I made it. And Mum made yummilicious croquettes (I don’t even know if that’s exactly the same thing in English, but oh well) with rice and mushrooms. I love them, and so does Olek, so if you’d like to sample, you need to hurry as he’ll soon be back from work and there will be nothing left. 😀 And I guess that’s all really yummy food (in my opinion) we have today, and you can bring something you have to our coffee share to make it more diverse than just sponge with jelly. 😀 Get yourself a comfortable place to chill and let’s start our chat, shall we? 🙂

If we were having coffee, or not coffee, I’d ask you how things have been going for you and what has happened in your life this week…?

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I’m feeling like rubbish today. Not the most optimistic note to start a coffee share and a weekend in general but what can I do. I don’t even know why. I woke up feeling OK, like near the baseline, but things have started spiraling down since early afternoon. I can’t get to why that is really. I feel depressed, and even a bit anhedonic, which is not my usual definitely, even if I am badly depressed I can often still feel the pleasure from things I love to some degree but I just feel kind of apathetic and sort of disconnected and don’t care about things too much, I also feel lonely because I feel disconnected, and don’t know what’s going on with my brain. Not like it would change a lot if I knew, and like it matters to me at the moment very much, but it’s always nice to be able to have a clue at least about your brain. I’ve also been having extremely sad and emotional dreams for a couple days which I don’t get either. I mean, scary dreams – yes, – intense, in whatever way – definitely, – strange – all the time, – but I don’t normally have plain sad dreams in which I’d feel all emotional and vulnerable, and yesterday I actually woke up crying. Today I had a sad dream too but it wasn’t quite as unsettling and I mostly remember the emotions of it, not the plot, so I didn’t think much about it, but the phenomenon of such an abundance of sad dreams is interesting. I get emotional dreams like this sometimes around the periods of time that used to be difficult for me in the past but now it’s not the case. Sometimes I wish my brain could speak, or write, or something. I’m so used to bottling up stuff that now I often don’t understand what it’s trying to tell me, ’cause I suppose it must want something from me if there’s no straightforward explanation.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you we’ve had another hot week here, but thankfully today it’s very nicely fresh and chilly, apparently only for a while, Dad says we’ll have another hot day on Sunday. But it’s a relief for all the people I think that at least now it’s cooler.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that at the beginning of this week, my router died. I had to get a new one and installing it and configuring was quite a pain, and I had a whole long boring day and a half with no Internet and not much to do, but now things are back to normal.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that Misha has a new hiding place, and this time, it’s a really good one, ’cause we still can’t figure out where it is, after over a week. He just disappears every day for a good few hours and then suddenly comes back out of nowhere. It’s amazing how after 3 years of living here, he still hasn’t ran out of ideas! 😀

If we were having coffee I’d tell you that I’m going to another meeting – like the one I went to earlier this month, in that sort of foundation or association that Zofijka’s friend’s mum works in – this time with a woman who used to live in Ireland, she’s Polish. That’s going to be very interesting for me for sure, since I love Ireland! I’m quite anxious again, even though I’ve already been there and it went well. It’s going to be on Monday.

If we were having coffee I’d also tell you that Zofijka’s friend’s mum was supposed to visit us yesterday, and then today, or on Sunday, but it seems like nothing will come out of it. While I’m happy for her to come over, I’m also secretly relieved that she won’t be coming today, as I’m definitely not in the mood for socialising whatsoever and wouldn’t be able to do it right the way I’m feeling now, just normal smalltalk feels so depressing and exhausting at the moment. As if I ever was good at smalltalk hahaha.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that we’re most likely going to the beach on Sunday, which I’m quite glad about, the sea usually makes me feel very good and I feel a strong connection with it, and I love being by the sea. We have our very special beach that is quite far away from us, it’s situated in a village in Słowiński National Park, and it’s really clean and tranquil there, there are few beaches that are that quiet and clean. And we had a plan of going there, but because it’s apparently going to be rather hot, and the ride is long there, and then you have to walk 2 km through a nature reserve back and forth it would be quite tiring and time consuming compared to how much time we’d actually spend on the beach, so we probably won’t be going there and somewhere much closer and filled with people. 😀 In any case, I hope it’ll be cool and I’ll feel less depressed by then. Also as I said it’s my name day on Sunday so that’s going to be a nice way of spending it I hope.

What would you tell me if we were having coffee? 🙂

 

If we were having coffee… or maybe not coffee… #WeekendCoffeeShare

#WeekendCoffeeShare at Eclectic Ali’s.

Hi people! 🙂 Welcome to a rather late “Weekend” Coffee (or whatever else you want) Share! I would like to be inclusive of all possible drink preferences, especially since I’ve had to stop drinking coffee myself. So grab your favourite drink, and/or a snack, or a full meal if you want, or I can get something for you, and let’s have a little chat. I have lots of teas, herbal teas and green teas, and Yerba Mate, and other such, since I’ve been doing a lot of drink testing since I had to stop drinking coffee to see what would work for me now, for my low blood pressure I mean, and I’ve been trying lots of green teas. We have coffees too, and even Cappuccino. Or I can pour you some Pepsi, or water. Mum’s made very yummy split pea soup, and spaghetti, the spaghetti is good although all of us didn’t like the pasta this time because it was one of those very healthy ones but not quite as good as it was apparently healthy. 😀 I have some very good German chocolate, and Mum’s gonna bake a cake, but I don’t think it’ll be ready until we finish our coffee share so I’m afraid you’ll miss on it. 😀 In any case, I’m sure we can have plenty of yummy food and drinks. I’m not going to have anything big this time ’cause I’m full after eating the split pea soup so I’m just going to have some water with ice.Make yourself cosy and comfortable and let’s start our coffee/not coffee chat.

If we were having “coffee”, I’d ask all of you how you’re doing…?

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that we hadn’t had coffee together in ages, I guess my last coffee share was around Christmas plus was very exclusive as it was passworded. So I’m glad we’re having one now.

If we were having coffee, of course I would update you on my coffee alternatives hunting progress. 😀 I guess I’m already getting used to not having coffee every morning very well, OK I’m not overly neurotic about that and I did have two or three cups of coffee in all the time since I stopped drinking it regularly, and it was while I was at other people’s, and I was more anxious after it again, but it was manageable. I tried some green tea earlier already, if it could give me the same positive effect as coffee – get me going in the morning and lift my blood pressure and energise me – but without the side effect – more anxiety and jitteriness – but it didn’t work too well, I just didn’t feel it worked at all for me, in any way, good or bad. Plus I’m not a very big fan of green tea. I also tried Yerba Mate more recently but while I can tolerate green tea and drink it if I have to, I didn’t like Yerba Mate at all. So a couple days ago my Mum got hold of some other green tea, I don’t really get what’s the difference between them, which also doesn’t taste quite as good as coffee, but (I hope I won’t jinx it 😀 ) it seems to be working. Which is really good, because it’s summer, and the heat doesn’t give me much more energy and I’m even more dizzy than normally. So it’s too short to say anything specific, but it seems to be working so far. Let’s be hopeful it’ll continue.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that recently we’d had some pretty hot temps. Now it’s much cooler and nicer, but it was roasting for the whole last week except for the weekend, and neither me nor my brain liked it. It was generally a hard week for me, because I was having a period, and was very depressed, and had a migraine and a lot of anxiety and crazy overthinking, like really crazy, I’m always overthinking but that was really intense and hard to control. I also had a failed attempt at intermittent fasting, that my Mum’s doing all the time since about a month, and which as I wrote in one of my recent posts I thought would be a good idea for me for a while as a bit of a detox plus spiritually. But I guess the timing was completely wrong, because as I was already feeing crappy, IF made me feel even worse, in that because I wasn’t eating for a good part of the day and starting to eat late in the morning I was having even less energy. I may though, and probably will, come back to it at some other time when it’ll be more doable for me.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that there is someone in my surroundings who’s making me feel pretty uneasy. I won’t go into very many details right now, I might do another post on that that will be protected, didn’t want to protect this one just because of mentioning her, but I am only 99% sure I can write about it publicly with details and I don’t want to risk, even if the risk is very very small. She, or them, but it’s mainly her I’m getting sick of, lives close to us, and I may be overinterpreting, and that’s the subtle message I get from my Mum that I am overinterpreting and overreacting being so wary of her, but I feel very much like I’ve got a new clingy type(s) to my lifelong collection of clingies, despite I was so happy I’m finally free from all of them and only closely associating with people I really like, and I don’t even seem to have much choice here so far. That feels distressing and trapping for me and I currently don’t really know what I should do about it and it’s confusing.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that tomorrow I’m going to a meeting. I don’t even know exactly what it will be about, but it’s Zofijka’s friend’s mum who organises it as far as I am aware, it’s going to be at her work, and she invited my Mum, because our Mum and Zofijka’s friend’s mum are kinda friends or acquaintances at least, but the thing is there will be a woman from Canada, and they’ll be speaking English there, and I gues she didn’t know my Mum doesn’t speak English. But my Mum is crazy about the fact that I speak English and when she meets anyone who claims that they can speak English well, she wants us to talk to each other in English, which of course always fails since the mere fact that we both can speak English doesn’t really make for much in common. 😀 If it was Swedish, or Welsh, then I would understand, but English? duh, most of the world speaks English. It’s a bit funny. So of course although Mum didn’t want and couldn’t really go there on her own, she immediately said that to me, because I can speak English. 😀 I didn’t like the idea of mingling with random people I didn’t know anything about just because they can speak English, plus when I go on meetings or such, I’m usually very inactive, I feel rather disoriented when many people talk all at once and I generally feel easily disoriented at social gatherings, and didn’t even know what this one was about. But then I started thinking more rationally and thought that actually, there can’t be very many people there, I doubted there would be many people in my town who’d feel confident with their English enough to talk in it just because, so A smaller meeting wouldn’t be a bad thing, so I told Mum I could try it and she texted her that she’ll be going with me because she doesn’t speak English but I do. And then it turned out that Zofijka’s friend’s mum is really very nice, and I don’t even know her yet, but I think we’ll like each other. And then she wrote to my Mum that the meeting’s only going to be for women (so that narrows down the potential group of people coming even more haha), and that the starter topic is probably going to be education, so both my Mum and me have tons of very diverse experience in that matter. 😀 It actually looks to me like it’s going to be a very very small meeting, and I’m now looking forward to it very much because actually I haven’t talked much in English to anyone else than Misha or myself in about a year, when I had my English tutor for final exams, he didn’t actually teach me anything new which I felt a bit frustrated at the time but boy was he chatty! Because we chatted in English, and I think he was even more happy about it than I was (that he has someone to chat in English to), I guess that actually in the end that helped me quite a bit with my oral English exam, as I felt even more confident with it and had a lot of experience. I’m curious what it’s going to be like, although a bit anxious too, but not in an overwhelming way, so I guess my anti-anxiety medication will deal with that and as I often say, my linguophilia is usually stronger than anxiety.

Talking of linguophilias, if we were having coffee, I’d tell you that just before I’ve started to write this post, I did some more Welsh again. It wasn’t as much as usual in my weekly Welsh marathons, but it was very interesting, and the results are fairly positive again, so I’m still hopeful there is some development, even if it often doesn’t seem so for me at all. So my inner Cymrophile is very happy. 😀

If we were having coffee, I would also tell you that next Sunday is my cousin’s Communion. I’m happy for her, but not at all for my own sake. I hate First Communions, they’re always so horribly long and boring and you don’t know what to do there, well, I don’t know for sure. The only upside to that is that at least it’s going to be in my grandparents’ house, not in some restaurant, which makes a tiny little bit of difference to me. This cousin is a daughter of my Godmother, with whom I haven’t been having the best relationship lately and seeing her almost always makes me feel like shit. I might be able to go only to the mass and skip the party if I’ll find someone understanding and able to give me a liftback home but am not too hopeful on that as it’s not very likely. My Mum is helping out with the food there, so if I was to leave with her I’d have to stay to the very end and longer. But I also wouldn’t like to not go there at all as that wouldn’t be cool.

OK, that’s all from me. Now, what would you tell me if we were having coffee? 🙂

 

Question of the day (6th May).

Have you ever quit caffeine? What was it like? Did you wean yourself off, or did you quit cold turkey?

My answer:

Yes, I’ve quit caffeine very recently. I felt I had to. I was feeling very jittery in the mornings and my anxiety was often sky high and I couldn’t put my finger on it for a long time why it was this way. I used to drink only a cup of coffee a day most of the time, but very strong coffee, because for me it felt more like a necessity than simply something I did only because I wanted, though yeah, I loved my coffee. I had to drink it because my blood pressure is always very low, so it kinda helped me in the mornings to have the energy levels that little bit higher. It wasn’t really helping spectacularly, I gseem to have fairly high caffeine tolerance and it had happened to me a few times that I actually had a nap after my strong coffee without a problem, but I’d tried lots of other things like strong teas or energy drinks and couldn’t feel any effect at all. Coffee helped at least a bit in a way that I could actually feel somehow. Yet most often after a while it would become so that my anxiety and jitteriness would increase while energy would drop again, and all the dizziness and stuff would be back, and that was pretty bad. So, despite I really loved my coffee, I quit it cold turkey, I was really surprised by that discovery but also kind of relieved that I’ve figured it out. I don’t think I’d been addicted like on a physiological level, I didn’t have any withdrawal symptoms or anything like that despite my coffee was really strong and EVERY single day, which confirms my theory that I probably tolerate it very well but just react strangely. But I’ve surely become addicted on the psychological level and I miss my morning coffee ritual a lot, I miss the taste of coffee. And there is my low blood pressure stil with which I don’t know what to do, I really don’t like the idea of taking supplements or medications for that, yet neither green teas nor anything alike that I’ve tried seems to help significantly. I’ve kinda get used to it over the years but now as I don’t even have my coffee it’s a pain in the neck a bit. So I feel the lack of it.

Have YOU ever quit caffeine? 🙂

Protected: If We Were Having Coffee… Christmas coffee share – special edition.

This content is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Question of the day (19th December).

Hi guys. 🙂

Sorry for being late with this, my question for you for yesterday is:

What’s your go-to coffee or tea order?

My answer:

If coffee, then strong, black coffee, with a tiny little bit of milk, or without milk at all is also good, and with a spoon of honey. Of course if there’s no honey I’ll drink it with sugar but I really like to drink my coffee with a bit of honey. On the other hand though I love cappucino, and latte, and sweet iced coffee, gosh I didn’t have the latter for years actually, will have to get it for myself in the new year, this is going to be my goal for the new year- to drink an iced coffee hahaha.

And as for tea, I like most of teas, maybe apart from mint and some particularly yucky herbal ones like nettle, or maybe some others that I’ve just never drank, but usually my go-to tea is raspberry tea, I also like chamomile tea, or melissa, green tea is good once in a while, or English Breakfast.

You? 🙂

If We Were Having Coffee… #WeekendCoffeeShare.

Weekend Coffee Share at Eclectic Alli’s.

 

Welcome to another coffee share. We’ve had some rain today so it’s cooler (a little bit), but still I’d rather recommend ice coffee than normal hot coffee.

If we were having coffee I’d ask everyone of you how you’re doing and what’s been going on for you…

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you I’ve had a rather rough week, particularly last days of it, but I’ll get into it later on.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you it was my aunt’s 40th birthday on Monday. I supposed she’d be doing something massive as it would be quite her style but there was only a small, or relatively small, family gathering. I planned not to go and just phone her and wish her happy birthday, but eventually I decided to go because she wouldn’t answer. We aren’t really getting along too well with that aunt, despite she’s my God mother and it wasn’t always this way, I guess our personalities clash totally and in a way are too similar, but on the other hand we’re too different in other aspects at the same time. And there was a minor but quite nasty incident with her that regarded me which left me feeling quite unstable, but I got over it rather quickly since it’s rather about her issues than mine or anyone else’s.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you I’ve started some collaboration with Nameberry. Don’t know yet what if anything will come out of it long term, but as you could notice I wrote a guest post for their blog. It was a lot of fun and I feel quite excited about it, and proud of myself cause I think the post is really good.

The following few paragraphs may be a bit lengthy and might feel hard or perhaps potentially triggering for someone, so if you feel uncomfortable just skip them.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you I had an awful, absolutely shitty day on Thursday. I just thought my brain will explode with anxiety, even on my extra anxiety meds, it was just nuts. That night my Mum couldn’t sleep so she came to me – ’cause if anyone can’t sleep in this house it’s of course usually me so she usually comes to me when she can’t sleep and checks if I’m up too so we can share the pain haha. She took a mattress with her and said it’s very hot in her room and whether she could sleep in mine, so I agreed. There was my poor Braille-Sense charging and the light was flickering so I told her she can switch it off and she did. Then we both fell asleep and slept rather soundly. But at like 6 Braille-Sense couldn’t stand it any longer and woke us up that it wants to eat. It’s so old it literally can’t make it without a recharger, even when you don’t do anything to him, a total addict. So I jumped out of the bed to shut him up immediately. Unfortunately Mum woke up too and decided it’s time for her to get up. We chatted for a while and she went out, I still felt quite sleepy though so went back to bed. Despite sleepiness, I couldn’t fall asleep for like 15 minutes, maybe a bit more. Usually, when I wake up at night but still want to get back to sleep but the break is too long, like 30 minutes or longer, and I still can’t fall asleep, I don’t try anymore, because then I usually end up with sleep paralysis. But it was just like about 15 minutes and I definitely felt like I still could use some sleep. I guess my brain was in a rather malicious mood and it wouldn’t let me. Instead, I did fall into sleep paralysis. Sometimes it lasts longer, I can notice when I float away and with some physical and mental effort get away from there, but this time it all just happened so rapidly, plus like I said I felt sleepy so didn’t fully realise when my sleepiness turned out into floatiness and everything felt distant, gloomy. It was only when I felt that awful, huge wave of anxiety washing over me, actually filling in the atmosphere arund me, that I realised what’s going on, and it was way too late. My brain felt tired and floaty, my consciousness started to change in that weird way and my limbs felt heavy. I started to feel dizzy and slip down into the darkness with light speed, I actually never was falling so quickly before, or can’t remember.

I won’t go into details as for what happened next, I mean as for the exact content, because it’s incredibly hard to describe those, hm, “dreams”, first because it’s just all so abstractive, elusive, subjective, but also because it’s just too scary. Sometimes I feel I maybe should write about it in detail somewhere or talk to someone but it’s always too scary and way too hard to describe. But what I can tell you is that it was al full of anxiety, doom and gloom. I feel like maybe in other circumstances it wouldn’t be so scary, it’s mainly just the atmosphere of anxiety and inevitable danger around that makes it so horrifying, most of the anxiety provoking things are actually things I was very afraid of in childhood, now either not so much (in real life) or I just don’t have contact with these things anymore. These dreams are full of very anxiety provoking, aggressive sounds, don’t know if they’d sound so for everyone, but so are they for me, often with very intricate, gloomy harmonies. All those anxiety stimuli are actually weirdly personified, they’re all like real people, spirting with hatred towards me and doing everything in their might to make me feel more helpless.

Besides all those anxieties, there’s also often some plot in those dreams, often very chaotic and consisting of single, not related, scary events, although I’ve been having those dreams since very early childhood and at the beginning they were always very schematic and predictable.

I actually don’t know if it’s exactly sleep paralysis, because people who have sleep paralysis usually seem to have full consciousness, while in my case it’s like I’m half-conscious most of the time, and often things that happen in the outside world mix quite creepily with my dreams. Sometimes I am only aware that I am dreaming, or sometimes I have sort of two perspectives – one is inner where I only see what’s in my dreams, and another is where I only can see what’s on the outside, can hear the music, people talking, but obviously can’t interact or anything. Sometimes I know I am dreaming but I don’t know what’s going on on the outside and my brain makes up things that don’t happen, but are very, very, very realistic. Also, people with sleep paralysis often have a sensation that someone or something is literaly sitting on them, like they feel strong pressure which makes breathing harder. For me breathing in those dreams is often very difficult but I had this pressure only once, however I’ve had the motive of someone assailing me, knocking me off, wanting to harm me physically, not letting me move etc. But I too, like many people with this condition often feel some sense of someone’s presence before I fully fall into it and am having other sorts of delusions before it really starts. Besides those people with sleep paralysis I know of usually feel very frustrated with not being able to move, they are aware they can’t move, while I often am not aware that I can’t. I see myself doing different things in dreams, hear myself screaming, fighting with my dream “friends”, getting up, etc. while in fact nothing happens and I’m just lying. Sometimes it may be that I dream I am going to my Mum to help me, and then another creepy thing happens, making me realise I’m still at the very same dead point I was before and no one is going to help me except for myself. I dream I am turning on music on my Plextalk to get rid of the nasty sounds and the anxiety but of course since I can’t move my hands I don’t do it in reality, so either my Plextalk also is against me, or doesn’t work, or something creepy happens. Also some other things don’t look exactly like sleep paralysis but I don’t know what else it could be and still it’s incredibly similar to what I experience so that’s why I call it this way, since I didn’t know for years what it actually is, I just thought everyone’s nightmares look this way for a long time.

And what’s very characteristic to those dreams for me lately, and the most exhausting I guess, are false awakenings. I just hate them so much.

If you don’t know what a false awakening is, although I guess it’s pretty easy to guess, imagine that you sleep happily, or not happily, doesn’t matter, then you get up as every normal human being, do your morning routines, go out to work, or do whatever else, and out of the blue you realise you’ve been  in your bed all the time and it was just a dream. Incredibly realistic, with all the things you do during the day, just in the same order as you do them, with people saying normal things, the only abnormal thing being it was just a dream. And, if you’re particularly lucky and dreamy, then it can go over and over and over again. Wake up, get dressed, eat breakfast… back in bed…

And so it is often for me, only that if it happens during sleep paralysis, it occurs in a very scary form.

I scream, fight, run away, choke, fall down, rise up, do whatever to just survive, and then… boom! it’s as if you fell down from somewhere high on your bed. Oh, great, so I’m awake! Thanks Goodness, finally! Get up, get dressed, feed Misha, and suddenly… hmm, where did actually Misha disappear? he was right in front of me a second ago wasn’t he? But now it’s not Misha, but one of my dream “friends” right in front of me, laughing at me like crazy, everything is dizzy and I slip back right where I was before. Etc. etc. etc. in the same pattern.

But most often it’s like I am in there, in my dreams, and desperately want to get back to life, try to move, test whether everything around me is real or not, do anything to get rid of the floatiness in my brain and get closer to the real world. I often hear people calling me, like my Mum waking me up, even if it is not true, motivate myself to get up and… finally I manage. I am glad, but still the anxiety flows everywhere I feel floaty, and often even like I was still in some way paralysed, like I wouldn’t have much control over my moves or something. But I try to not care, or ignore it completely, usually in this situation I go to whoever is around to help me and make me feel safer, although I never do this when I really wake up. They often help me, are very compassionate, sometimes are cruel and turns out they’re collaborating with my dreammates, like when I was a kid I once dreamt that my Mum wanted to cut my foot because they forced her. 😀 Sometimes they don’t want to cooperate with them but have to, sometimes they’re very willing. Whatever happens though, finally I always slip back there, scared and disappointed, and confused as for what is real. Sometimes it is so that I may live my “normal” life for quite long and then finally realise that something doesn’t really look very realistic and that then it has to mean it is a dream, and then everything starts over with a lot of chaos. Usually then I see some creepy scenes not necessarily with me in one of the main roles, often as an observer. And then again I’m scared and want to wake up, gradually more and more confused as for what is real, am I sleeping or awake, what’s generally going on.

Often after that episode I’m exhausted and fall into very deep, heavy sleep, sometimes it’s completely dreamless and sometimes I have some disturbing bad or weird dreams, but rather mildly bad in comparison to the sleep paralysis. But despite it’s so heavy it’s rarely really good sleep.

When I finally wake up for good, I am usually very puzzled for a little while and obviously usually feel a lot of anxiety, but it usually passes away quickly. I mean, I can be anxious for quite a while, but not as much as when I wake up, when it can be really really high. I usually get over it quickly.

But the last time, that Thursday morning, it waas a hardcore. It lasted for like THREE HOURS, I fel like it was scarier than ever. I have very good dream memory, which is also a blessing in many circumstances, but when I woke up after all that and remembered what I dreamt about, it was hard to get over it and get some distance to it, just feeling relief that it was only a dream. When I wake up for real, after all those false awakenings, I always know well I’m awake and am no longer confused, but last time I started to wonder. What if I am still asleep? Deep down I knew it’s over, but what if not? What if some day I’ll wake up and just won’t be able to tell what’s real from what’s not? It scared me even more.

I went downstairs still feeling a bit floaty from the dream and very scared, tired as if I really was fighting with someone for three hours and unsettled. Mum was in the kitchen and said she couldn’t wait for me to come and that now I am surely well rested after so much sleep. She said she was in my room twice and I slept so heavily. I guess I could hear her once, or it was my imagination.

I usually try not to make too much drama around my dreams because I know there isn’t any universal cure for it and that it always distresses my Mum cause she doesn’t know what to do about it and feels helpless, but this time it was that little bit too much to bear for me. I felt shaky like jelly and couldn’t stop tears from falling so she was quite amazed what’s going on, and it took her a while to get it out of me because I was a real real mess. I took all my anxiety meds, I mean two pills of my basic one and one of the extra med, but I was still shaky, my head was hurting like a bitch, and I felt like a true drama queen because it was actually Mum’s nameday so the guests were about to come. Poor Zofijka was looking around puzzled askign everyone what happened and not getting any consistent answer. Finally I managed to take a long bath and then Mum sent me back to bed although I was really anxious as for that since I didn’t want to get trapped by my beautiful brain again.

I was so tired that I did fall asleep almost immediately but slept very soundly. Things have changed a little bit after I woke up, I mean outside, not so much inside, I was still in pieces and very hypervigilant and all. But felt good enough to get down to the guests for a while and keep a socially decent and logical conversation.

I got back to my room and then I realised the cold, hard truth… the Internet was off! That meant a really hard day for me. After those dreams I am always very sensitive as for silence and can’t stand it, same as some particular sounds. Most of my music was online. Most of things I could do at that moment to distract myself the best were online, particularly now as the guests were in. Smalltalk isn’t particularly stimulating nor distracting for me and I would rather feel bored, and I couldn’t ask my parents for any help as they were with them, and Zofijka was playing with other kids who came in. Misha always escapes when too many people are around, and usually to my room, but when they came I was asleep and my room was closed so he went somewhere else and I didn’t know where he was. So there weren’t many things I could do, I was mostly reading, and listening to music I had, helped Mum in the kitchen afterwards, but was still incredibly tense and overloaded. It was just so horrifying, I haven’t feel such extreme things for a long while before then.

The Internet hasn’t come back even at night, so again I was left to only my own resources, and night was twice as hard, even though sometime later on Misha had mercy on me and came to me. It was nightmare and I had a feeling I’m just going crazy and things won’t be as they were before anymore, that I’ll just always live with such high level of anxiety. Needless to say I didn’t even try to fall asleep, quite the opposite.

The next day it was slightly better though. And you know what turned out then? My brilliant Mum, when she slept in my room, she messed up with the router somehow while she was switching things off. And it only needed to be rebooted. It was funny but also frustrating because I really needed some distraction that day and Mum told me there is probably some more general damage like at our Internet provider or something, so I just accepted it and didn’t even try to fix it myself. 😀

I was still very anxious, but since I had many more productive things to do then, and some time has passed, it was much more manageable.

And so it is now. I still haven’t recovered fuly from that nasty episode, I feel. But I am a bit more stable and don’t freak out without Misha.

I wonder what was actually going on with those dreams. Was it just an accident it was so long and so rough, just a random thing, or is something changing and it is going to get worse? If so, I think I’ll really need to try hitting it with antidepressants, I once saw a neurologist for that and she said it sometimes works for people, but then I decided I will try to handle it with some better sleep hygiene and stuff. But if you have messed up sleep cycle by nature, regular sleeping and waking up and maintaining sleep hygiene isn’t always that easy, so I guess the time for antidepressants will finaly come sooner or later, even though I haven’t heard about people for whom it would be helpful. But it shouldn’t be harmful, so I guess I’ll try if it’s going to stay this way.

If we were having coffee I’d tel you today is my friend’s 1st death anniversary. Man I still can’t believe he’s dead. I never told you about that, I feel weird talking about his death still, not like I can’t accept it but like it’s just so weird to talk about him that he’s dead. I am talking about Jacek, that Jacek who was writing the novel about vikings. He was such a lively, energetic person, always full of ideas and so bubbly. But he got osteosarcoma and then there were some nasty metastases, it just progressed very quickly. I couldn’t get it for weeks that he was dead, and still my brain doesn’t fully get it I guess. I will maybe do some longer post in memory of him, because he was such a remarkable man, I need to think about this. He was only 25 when he died. And he told me he’s going to Valhalla. 🙂

And quite in the same topic, if we were having coffee I’d tell you that yesterday my friend wrote to me, with whom I haven’t have any contact since before Jacek has passed away. She is our mutual friend Jacek’s and mine. She is Swedish – Jacek had lots of friends in Sweden and Finland and I’ve met some interesting people via him – and this particular girl I met when we were all three collaborating on Jacek’s online radiostation, I was volunteeering as a sound engineer there and has learned a lot during that short episode, about broadcasting, vikings, not to mention sound engineering, and many other things. And that girl, Annika, she was one of the presenters and that’s how we met online. She is a Slavic languages freak and has been learning Polish and other Slavic languages since early childhood just as it’s been with my Swedish. ANyway. We were never very close because we just knew each other through Jacek, but I’ve always liked her, she’s really sweet and down to earth. We haven’t talked almost at all since Jacek’s death though, there just weren’t any occasion. And I was greatly surprised seeing a message from her. She wrote to me to say she’ll be getting married soon. With a Pole, haha. And I am very happy she shared it with me and that I could catch up on her, and that she seems to be in a happy and already quite long lasting relationship. And because it was so close to Jacek’s death anniversary we also talked about this in length. And seems like we both feel the same way about this, that we don’t quite believe it yet. I was really glad to be able to write with her for a while. And it’s so cool she’ll be living in Poland for good now.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you we went to the beach today. My parents, Zofijka, me, and uncle and aunt, from Dad’s side. But, turns out, we’re incredibly lucky. We’ve been having an incredibly hot week, but due to various things happening we couldn’t go to the beach earlier, so we just waited for Sunday to come. and, as soon as we came to the beach, the rain started falling. We were all wet and me and Zofijka were feeling very cold and now we both have sore throat, I hope we won’t be sick. 😀 Moreover, when we came home, got rid of all the mud we’ve brought in, showered and stuff, the clouds disappeared and it’s hot again, only more humid. Isn’t that a pure luck? 😀 Mum has some sort of ear infection, I actually was telling her not to go to the beach with it as it could only get worse, and it looks like it did get worse, she’s barely hearing on that ear. She tried using geranium for it and other home remedies, but looks like our lifestyle guru will have to see a laryngologist, probably tomorrow.

And if we were having coffee I’d tell you that Mum went to a coeliac disease specialist last Wednesday, but it looks like her referral didn’t get through to them. So now she’ll go to another one that can see her much quicker, on Tuesday, and without a referral. So she’ll have a real health week. But I hope the news she’ll get will be good.

What would you tell me if we were having coffee? 🙂

 

If We Were Having Coffee… #WeekendCoffeeShare.

Weekend Coffee Share at Eclectic Alli’s.

Let’s have some coffee guys, or whatever you like to drink. I’m curious what has happened to you this past week and how your weekend is going, and I haven’t made a Weekend Coffee Share for a while here so there are some things I need to update you on.

Aside from coffee we also have a rabbit that my Dad has made in an apparently Kashubian way, which tastes really cool. As I told you before Mum has also made a mole cake, and we still have a lot of blueberries as we bought a lot of them. And there are some muffins with raspberries as well. So make yourself comfortable and grab whatever you’d like to drink and eat.

If we were having coffee, I’d ask all of you how you’re doing…

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you Zofijka has been on a trip with some of our Mum’s family, they were in the mountains, in Lower silesia. They are coming back today, and I think she’ll be home pretty soon. It’s good, but it was also really good without Zofijka, so calm and quiet, and we bonded some more with Misha, it really feels like he opened for me more, and is more trustful. Mum has less to do as well, and less to worry about. Misha is currently sleeping in my room in his little bed, he’s sleeping just like a baby. My uncle has come to Dad to help him do some technical stuff o the backyard, and he came in the house for a while, and scared Misha to death. He is so loud, jovial  and very extroverted, like when he’s talking “normally”, he’s just shouting, which annoys me greatly as well, but some people just seem to be so haha, anyway Misha was the first being he stumbled upon in the house and started screaming – Kitty!!! Kitty! What a lovely kitty you are!!! Come here! – but Misha ran away and escaped to my room. A very wise decision, screamers are never ever allowed in here. This little incident seemed to exhaust him completely, ’cause he just literally crawled up to his bed and fell down on it. He’s just my boy hahaha, poor child. He looks so cute in his sleep.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you once again that my crush Gwilym Bowen Rhys has released his new album on Thursday and I am so damn excited and having a major crush peak. It feels so good having a crush peak. Life would be so much more boring without having crushes haha. I think I’d dwell on it for much longer if we were really having coffee. 😀

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you I already wrote to two Polish magazines with the offer that I could write articles about names for them. One is a parenting magazine, and I know they’ve tried doing something with names in the past, but the effects, in my own opinion, were rather miserable. And the other is astrological/paranormal, you name it, generally a magazine for women. I actually didn’t plan to write to them, but my Mum told me I could, and write about the influence of names on personalities. I’m anxiously, or rather impatiently, I’m not that very anxious about it at least now, awaiting any response from them. I have no idea technically about writing articles for magazines and I don’t know anything about all the procedures they might have, but I hope it’ll work out. I have many ideas on name related articles so maybe something will interest them.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you we will be having two parties next week. One is my aunt’s 40th birthday, and one is my Mum’s nameday. My Mum is planning to make a bonfire, and I don’t know anything about my aunt’s plans, but knowing her, I would be greatly surprised if she wouldn’t do anything spectacular. I’m quite anxious about it if I’m honest, though I don’t know yet whether I’ll actually go to my aunt’s. Another thing I’m pretty anxious about is the fact that my Mum will be having all the tests for coeliac disease done next week. I’m anxious about her results. Like I know something’s wrong with her health for sure, and most likely it’s some absorbtion disorder, but, quite unlike me, I still hope it’s not coeliac disease, despite quite obvious evidence. Maybe it’s just gluten intolerance? But, does it really make that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things? She hasn’t felt the best lately, so on the other hand I am actually looking forward to these tests.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you it’s freakin’ hot today. and awfully humid. We’ve had a lot of rains lately, and while most of Europe was roasting in the recent few weeks, we’ve been in quite good situation, having warm, but usually not too hot weather. But since a few days it’s awfully hot. It makes me feel sluggish and my brain, I mean head obviously, hurts like I’m going to get a migraine, but I hope that won’t happen, I’ve just had a migraine last week, I usually don’t have them so often.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you I’ll be having feet massage next week. Just for relaxation. And my Mum too. Not at our massage therapist’s, in a different place, but anyway I am pretty curious and looking forward to it. It’ll apparently be Thai massage.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you it’s likely we’ll go to the sea tomorrow. Well unless I won’t get a migraine. 😀 Then I won’t go for sure.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you we have a lot of fruit and vegetables now in our garden. While Dad is caring for the vegetables, as it seems to be his new passion, and they don’t require much preserving or anything, Mum is constantly making juices, preserves, jams, jellies etc. We have particularly a lot of currants. I’ve been helping Mum a lot in the garden as there is really a lot to pick, and my Mum isn’t particularly into gardening and stuff, but as she says it’s always beter to have your own fruit, plus she’s having spine issues. I help her with processing it all too if I can, yesterday we spent a whole afternoon picking currants and making juice. Usually Zofijka is the one who helps her because Zofijka likes gardening, but since now Zofijka isn’t home, I help her. We’ve been having lots of interesting and funny conversations meanwhile.

What would you tell me if we were having coffee? 🙂

 

Question of the day.

Did you have coffee or tea, this morning? If so, how did you take it?

My answer:

I often have both, coffee before breakfast and then tea with breakfast, but today I just had tea. Raspberry tea. It’s my favourite one right now. Mum bought lump sugar recently, we don’t usually use it but she just said it’s more fun haha, so we’re now using it, so I’ve had raspberry tea with two sugars.

How about you? 🙂

Question of the day.

What was the last thing you drank?

My answer:

Coffee!

You? 🙂

Gwibdaith Hen Frân – Coffi Du (Black Coffee).

Hi guys! 🙂

Dw i’n hoffi coffi! That’s I like coffee in Welsh, doesn’t it sound cool? 😀

Any other coffee addicts here? This is a song for you. 😀 I love it, because it describes my relationship with coffee so well! OK, I don’t think I’m an addict, I can manage a day without coffee or more in necessary, it can just be damn hard when you have always very low blood pressure, but when I really want to feel the effects of coffee, I need to drink a few because I’ve never was particularly sensitive to caffeine. My Mum just laughed when I read the lyrics to her, she’s been drinking coffee everyday since she’s grown up and if by some accident she sometimes don’t do it on time, so right after she wakes up, she quickly gets an awful headache. But at least she manages on one coffee a day.

So yeah, today’s song is for the love of coffee, it’s just fabulous. And, as for the band, Gwibdaith Hen Frân are a trip folk band from north Wales, and I must say I like their quirkiness.

The lyrics are in the video, both Welsh and English. Enjoy. 🙂

If We Were Having Coffee… #WeekendCoffeeShare.

Weekend Coffee Share – Eclectic Alli

 

Anyone up for a cuppa? 🙂 Me, definitely so! Although I’ve had one before.

But I didn’t get any sleep last night, so for me it’s normal that I can’t live without coffee then.

If we were having coffee, I’d ask each one of you how you’re doing…

If we were having coffee, I’d like to thank those of you who supported me on Thursday when I was in so much anxiety. If you’d like to catch up on what happened to get what I’m writing about and what’s been  such a big deal for me, read this post.

And even if we weren’t having coffee, I’d like to thank all of you for your support, it means so so much to me. This past week wasn’t the worst, but it was a bit scary sometimes, for some reason my anxiety was really through the roof sometimes. And today it isn’t the best either, but it’s much better now and I manage. Plus who isn’t anxious when having a Zombie day? Even normal people are, I guess, even just a bit. As for my emetophobia, it stayed with me for quite a while after that incident, I’m so happy nothing major happened to Zofijka’s friend, but I couldn’t eat anything at all until the next DAY when I woke up, and I had some emetophobic dreams, very yucky, my brain can be really inventive sometimes when it comes to creating dreams, full respect to it for that, even I don’t think I could ever be as inventive as my brain is with some of my dreams.

And, as for that appointment with massage therapist, ugh, I was very very very scared. I just had so much crappy experience with all sorts of orthopaedists, physiotherapists, surgeons, massage therapists, naah… I’m not gonna talk about it now, I told you a bit in that earlier post and that’s already quite a lot I think. And I was just sure it’s gonna be just the same. But the more rational part of me wanted to go to see if he can help me maybe do better at horse riding, or the Tibetan exercises. I was shaky, but I went there although I wuld most gladly not do it. And it turned out that I indeed did a good thig going there. This guy, and how he approached me, was completely different than I expected. I thought he’d be just like everyone of similar profession before, very condescending, talking to my Mum instead of me, and looking at me as a museum exhibit and scaring the shit out of me way more than necessary, if it’s necessary at all.

At first I waited while he massaged my Mum. I brought my book with me, but it turned out useless, because I really engaged in the conversation they both had. I mostly listened, but it was very interesting. Mum’s massage therapist is from Ukraine, and apart from being a massage therapist he’s also a physician, iridologist and such, I’d say a bit like a quake, but with a medical education. And they talked about many interesting things. Mostly my Mum – who is very interested in lifestyle asked him about what he thinks about different things that she does or uses to improve her health, and he also was describing to us how e’s working with people as a hypnotherapist, which was fascinating to listen to, even though I’m not that much convinced that hypnotherapy could work, but still, I like to hear different people’s opinions on such things. He seemed very laid back and communicative overall, and I knew why Mum told I’ll like him, we both generally like versatile people.

Then it was time for me. I was very very very scared. He wanted to look at me at first so he could see if and how my muscles are indeed contracted. I felt very exposed, I’m not really comfortable with people studying me like that, but luckily it didn’t last long, and I don’t think my anxiety was very visible. He told me that yes, I do have some muscles very tense but it’s probably just stress-related. So my Mum felt relieved because she thought it’s something serious. Then he looked at my feet and he said there can’t be much done now, but it’s not that bad as it could be and he doesn’t understand all the drama the other doctors have made about it if it’s not painful for me in normal life circumstances. Like sure it is a defect but way too small to make so much fuss about it. Oh, that was just how I’ve been always feeling about it, but of course have never told anyone abut it, because, apparently, health professionals should know their business and what they do and why, so who I or my Mum was to argue. So then he told me that it would be good if I had massages from time to time just to relax my muscles and my body and my brain So I agreed and then he massaged me for like an hour.

I wasn’t triggered anymore, so I started to feel like the anxiety is letting out of me slowly, and the massage really helped me to relax, in fact at one point when no one of us talked I almost fell asleep, even though it was rather dynamic. We talked about people’s brains, and our cat who is Misha and his brother who is Misha too and how similar they are. He gave me many advices. He told me that I am “way too skinny”, which, well, actually doesn’t bother me and I don’t know what to do about it to change it, I don’t stick to any restrictive diet, well any diet at all, other than eat whatever you want, well except for my emetophobic quirks, I don’t move more than I want to or have to, and that’s one of the reasons why I actually don’t believe I could have hypothyroidism, just only hypopituitarism. After some long discussion he agreed with me that I could be misdiagnosed or “overdiagnosed” in childhood, and that let us all to discussing our health services and health services across the Europe, actually, and then we even talked about politics. I hate smalltalking with people I don’t know, so it started to feel much more at ease that we talked about something speciffic. 😀 He gave me a lot of advices as for what I should eat to gain some more weight in a healthy way, well, we’ll try how it works. And he told me how I can naturally deal with low blood pressure, and my Mum too. Then my Mum talked to him about her most favurite topic which is honestly becoming very boring to me lately because she’s constantly nagging at me about it – namely vitamin D. And by the way he told me something I was really glad to hear, that I don’t have to sit directly on the sun and roast like my Mum to get vitamin D. Actually I shouldn’t, my Mum has a very dark complexion in comparison to me, so for her it’s OK, but I should apparently rather sit in more shady places and that apparently when the sun light is reflecting for example through the trees it still can give you vitamin D. So I can still stay my Gothic self while getting enough vitamin D. 😀 I really don’t feel like myself with the sunburn. 😀 So it was a huge relief. And OMG I made a shocking discovery I love when people massage my feet. Later on I told Mum about it that it felt so cool, and she told me that when I was a baby she was massaging my feet because she heard that when you press on some places on your feet you can stimulate optic nerve via acupressure or something like that, and, ya know, she was desperate for me to see, obviously, so maybe that’s why I like it so much if she did it so often. And she laughed that when I’ll finally start to look for a husband, I should not only look for a Jack with both Viking and Celtic blood, but also for a Jack, who would be eager to massage my feet. 😀 Lol that’s undoubtedly something to consider, if I’ll be ever looking for my Jack seriously. 😀 I have been to other massage therapists before and of course since I have issues with feet I’ve had feet massages, but they were mainly to stretch my legs muscles, and it hurt like hell, so that afterwards I felt like a jelly and could barely walk normally.

Anyway, afterwards, I felt like most of the anxiety I had was gone. I was so glad it wasn’t so triggering as I thought it’d be assuming from my previous experiences, I would never expect that. He told me that if I’ll feel a lot of tension I can come back and after like four sessions I should definitely see some difference. Honestly I’m a bit skeptical, because I’ve been so tense and hypervigilant all my life that I don’t really know how it is to feel otherwise, but that sounds very cool.

On the way back we got chips – a certainly very healthy food that will help me gain weight healthily, but, oh, wel, we just wanted to have chips, who cares.

I actually thought I’d sleep just fine after so much relaxation but also stimulation for my muscles, I was exhausted as we got home, but for some reason I couldn’t. My Mum couldn’t as well though (a very rare thing for her, she’s normally a heavy sleeper).

As I wrote you in last post, we have some issues with Dad recently, but I won’t go int it now since I’ve already wrote about it. That’s just soo annoying.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you we’ll probably have a bonfire tonight. I don’t know though whether I’ll be there with them, depends how I’ll be functioning in the evening without sleep and how late it will be, there will be some Dad’s family, so I wouldn’t like to fall asleep and fall off the bench in front of them, they’re always so judgmental I can imagine them anxiously making suspicions that I have to be addicted to something and trying to guess what could it be. 😀 No of course I’m trying to kid rather poorly, but I don’t think I’ll be in the mood to talk to people and laugh at their poor jokes when the only thing I’ll be thinking about will be sleep.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you that holidays have finally started for everyone f us, not just for me. Zofijka and Olek got their diplomas and Olek has officially graduated and is a car mechanic. I really hope he’ll find a good job and will be able to do something interesting for him in life.

Oh, and if we were having coffee I’d tell you that yesterday I made another interesting discovery – I can understand MORE Welsh. Like, I started level 3 of my course, and, without some more sophisticated words, and with some deduction and more focusing, I can pretty much understand the news on BBC Radio Cymru. YAAAAAAAYYYYYYY! That was so rewarding. I didn’t feel any major progress in months until now, and it started to feel a little, little bit frustrating. Not like I’m not prepared or familiar with frustration related to learning a language so even if I wouldn’t see any progress in the next few months I wouldn’t give up, but it felt good that finally I was able to see something is really going forward. Though, have I told you I’m planning to get some additional Swedish lessons online? When I’m reading something more intellectual, I feel like my linguistic skills are often not enough, I have to check up so many things yet. I would like to polish it a bit more, to make it more natural, get more vocabulary in, and there still are some little grammar things that always confuse me. Oh but I guess I was writing abut it before.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you that my parents’ friend’s mum has died. They went to her funeral today. I am at home with Zofijka and Misha. Zofijka’s fascination with skunks is flourishing! She’s starting to notice though how niche her interest is. Recently she was looking for a skunk emoji, and couldn’t find any. That’s the life of a freak. 😀 Well I don’t think she’s one, she’s a fairly typical girl her age besides those skunks, but at least now she has a choice and can choose herself, what she wants to be. Although there was a period in my life when I was quite a typical girl too (what? you don’t believe me?! :O ), I really was, and when I finally saw how it is to be different, I chose to be different.

OK, so that’s it from me today, I think.

What would YOU tell me if we were having coffee? 🙂