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

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

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

   What do you deserve best in life? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do I feel about my age?

   Thought I’d do some journal prompt-based post again, ‘cause, well, why not? 😀 

   I chose a prompt from Hannah Braime’s book The Year of You, which is the following: 

   How do you feel about your age? 

   Well, I think I’ve written on here before about how I feel there’s a kind of dissonance or something between my emotional vs intellectual maturity. There are people who get such an impression of me that I’m an old soul, and it makes sense in a way because ever since I was a child I always tended to prefer to hang out with people at least slightly older than me, I always found that a lot more interesting. Actually, as a very young child, I very much preferred hanging out with adults than other children, and especially being in adults’ centre of attention, like show off my singing abilities and stuff. 😀 I didn’t really do how to relate to other children back then, I guess. There are people, including, as I often share on here, my own Mother, who come for advice or opinions to me and seem to treat what I say very seriously, which in a way is cool because at least I guess I can be helpful for people, and it’s quite an honour, but also kind of fun and weird because, well, I have very little actual life experience, if not for any other reason then at least because I’m just 25, and sometimes it feels like a lot of responsibility to try to help people with their life experiences when they are not something that I have ever experienced. I guess part of why people see me the way they do is that I have a keen interest in analysing the characters and behaviours of my fellow humans and seem to have a very useful ability to often draw fairly accurate conclusions, and it gives others the idea that if you can judge someone’s character more or less accurately, you must be a very wise person as a whole. I am also considered intelligent by those who know me well like my immediate family, and I guess a lot of people see (verbal) intelligence as synonymous with wisdom. 

   But while I may well be a good judge of character and like to have deep or intellectual convos with people, I don’t actually consider myself very emotionally mature. Most of the time I feel very childish and clueless about life and most things really, apart from all the niche stuff that I’m into, to the point that it actually often feels pretty ridiculous. And most people, even those who simultaneously think of me as an old soul, especially those who actually know me in person, also see me as very child-like, if not infantile at times, in a lot of ways. I look pretty child-like and often react to things in child-like ways or have a lot of child-like behaviours in general. All my regular readers know that I like, especially in Polish, to talk about myself as Bibiel, as in “Bibiel likes this” or “Bibiel did that”. I used to do that all the time as a kid and teen, I wrote on one of my blogs like that all the time, now I usually do it when I’m really excited about something or stuff like that, but also when it simply kind of feels more adequate than just say I or me. Sometimes Bibiel feels just the only right thing to say. As I’ve written before, people have had all sorts of reactions to that – some think it’s cute, others think it’s eccentric and creative, others yet think it’s annoying or just plain childish or kind of sick. – And some like my Dad actually call me Bibiel pretty much all the time and think it’s kind of funny and really weird at the same time (btw just when I’ve been writing this post he yelled Bibiel outside my window so loud  that I almost shitted myself, not to mention Misha 😀 😀 😀 at least I know from whom I inherited my immaturity). In English I generally say Bibiel less, I’m kind of worried that since I’m not a native people might sometimes have a problem understanding me even without my throwing neologisms and weird constructions in, but recently I’ve been saying Bibiel more especially on here ‘cause it feels more genuine to just say “I” all the time, especially that it’s used so much more in English than it’s Polish equivalent, ‘cause in Polish everyone knows that you’re talking about yourself from the verb form. And unlike in Polish, I’ve also started to say Bibiels or Bibielz in English, even though there’s obviously only one Bibiel – well okay there are apparently some people in Brazil called Bibiel because years after we made up this word with Sofi I learned that it’s a (masculine) name in Brazil though it’s pronounced differently, but Bibielz in this sense as me, there aren’t any more  Bibielz in this sense I suppose so that’s just why it’s so funny to say Bibielz and make it seem like the whole universe must be bursting with Bibielz and literally creaking and cracking and moaning under the weight of all the billions of Bibielz and then some more and then their offspring, even though it’s not. 🙃 Does that even make sense what I’m saying to non-Bibielz? 😀 Aside from just calling myself Bibiel simply because I like that, I imagine Bibiel to be like the more child-like, spontaneous and carefree and crazy, but at the same time more mentally healthy, part of me. One who has a horribly childish sense of humour and likes to laugh a lot and is almost constantly either excited or obsessed in a positive way with one thing or another and can’t stop talking when she gets a chance to start. And while being kind of older and kind of younger than you actually are at the same time  can be tricky, I would never like to get rid of Bibiel, because also at the same time Bibiel makes everything easier. 

   I guess while in a way so far I’ve never grown up properly, in another way, I sort of had to grow up faster than most kids my age when I went to boarding school when I was five. And my little theory is that part of why I’m still so childish now is because Bibiel wants to make up for all that time. And there’s Sofi around, oh yeah, and Misha, and Jocky (and then my Dad, if all else fails) so there’s always someone to play, laugh and goof around with. Thankfully, even now that Sofi is 15, she’s also still pretty child-like herself, although sometimes I already start to feel that she’s becoming more mature than myself. 😀 Am I concerned? A part of me thinks that I probably should be, but mostly I’m not really. Sometimes I wonder whether some part of why I feel a lot younger than I am most of the time could be due to AVPD, because it seems to be a common experience of people with this disorder, so I’m curious if there’s really some link and how it works. 

   When Misha joined our family, Sofi and me felt it was such a pity that he can’t actually talk and tell us what he thinks and just chat with us. I still think it’s a pity, but one day I came up with an idea that we could play that Misha can have a connection with either of us, a brain connection, something kind of like Bluetooth or Internet or phone connection or stuff like that. He can connect to either of us, whoever is willing, and use this person to communicate through them. So we started playing like that and Misha would connect either to me or to Sofi and we could talk with him like that and incorporate him in our plays even more. But Sofi, while she liked the idea, felt awkward when lending her brain to Misha, because when she talked to Misha it could sound to an outsider like she was having a dialogue with herself and part of it in a child-like voice ‘cause of course we imagine that Misha would be rather child-like if he could talk, he might be middle-aged by cat standards but he’s so small and has only lived for six years, after all. I had no such inhibitions since I talk to myself anyway, so since then Misha talks mostly via me. It’s a very useful psychological tool, because even now when Sofi’s fair bit older than when we started doing this, she’s still more willing to share some of her more personal or deeper thoughts or problems with Misha than with Mum or just me, and it’s kind of easier and more fun for both of us, when she hears something from Misha who often points things out to her indirectly or asks her funny questions to make her think herself, rather than Mum or me directly lecturing her. I often come to Sofi with Misha when she’s in bed so that she can have a chat with him or we three can play together. Sometimes we even have distance chats, that is when Misha isn’t physically present in the same room as we are, but that doesn’t usually feel quite as genuine. Now the only thing we need is for someone to find a way to phone pets whenever  humans are away from home so that we could check on them. Over time, Sofi herself came up with an idea that it would also be cool if Misha could do other things through us, and for that he sometimes connects to me, and sometimes to Sofi, so like he can try peep food through us, do crafty stuff (or plast plast, as we call it) through Sofi, and write emails to Sofi through me. I wonder how many people my age or older do stuff like that. 😀 

   When I was a child, I never actually even wanted to be an adult, it always seemed insanely scary to me and I didn’t like how lots of kids seemed to look forward to it ‘cause I totally didn’t share the enthusiasm. I think I’ve shared with you how once when I was in nursery/preschool and laying in bed, I had that weird dream or other sort of vision or whatever (because I didn’t feel like I was really sleeping when it happened so I’m not sure how to call it) of myself as an adult, it was absolutely ridiculous and back then a bit scary for me because it felt so realistic. I saw myself standing in the middle of a huge but very crammed, messy kitchen, something was frying and it seemed like I was in the midst of or about to prepare a meal or something like that, the whole place was super hot, and I was wearing some sort of huge, wide apron which made me feel like an old lady, and I was apparently an adult, though I totally didn’t feel like I was. The worst thing was that there were small children literally all around, clinging to me and wanting something from me, and I felt utterly confused and didn’t know what to do with all that. I suppose my idea of adulthood then – so as a 5-year-old – must have been based on my Mum – that you have a family and kids and make them meals and you have to have everything together even if you don’t (although my Mum actually does, and she doesn’t have a messy kitchen, nor does she wear aprons usually 😀 ) and I didn’t think like I could ever be able to do that. After that dream thing, whenever someone would ask me what I wanted to do when I grow up, for a long time I responded that I wouldn’t have a baby, because if women want to, they can have a baby, but if they don’t, they don’t have to. 😀 Adulting is still something that I find scary, so while I indeed don’t have children and don’t even make my own food beyond the most basic like sandwiches or cereal, my premonition was kind of correct. 

   Im very much a daydreamer and a bit of an escapist, and generally the idea of some major responsibility freaks me out. I’m terrible with stuff like money, for example, it feels very confusing and kind of abstractive to me. I generally don’t have a problem with abstract thinking, but thinking about stuff that has to do with counting, amounts of things etc. Takes a lot of brain CPU for me and I feel much better having someone assist me in making major purchase decisions, not because I cannot make my own decisions but to kind of make sense of things. Not to mention that I don’t do socialising. Socialising in general is pretty stressful for me as y’all probably know but sometimes an equally difficult thing is that I cannot make sense of social stuff, like when to do what, and need to ask my Mum for advice whether doing/saying, or not doing/saying something is appropriate, or what people usually do in such and such situation. I usually learn such things from books, stuff like body language for example, but I still don’t know loads of things. 

   I usually don’t think much about people’s ages unless it’s relevant for some reason, and so I normally don’t think a whole lot about mine either, but I usually totally donn’t feel my age. Usually I  feel a lot younger, especially when it’s my birthday I’m internally always like: “Really?! Am I this old already?! No way!” 😀 Or other times I feel like a total granny – cynical, weary of life, lacking brainergy after a migraine,   shaking my head at what kids do these days and what awful slang they use and what crap music they listen to and how people no longer do emails and can’t write properly but beatbox instead. 😀 Like, I remember once being part of a Polish forum for introverts, and they had a whole section with stuff like personality tests and such, including some sort of mental age test, and when I did that test (I must have been around 17 then) it said my mental age was 40. I wasn’t sure whether it was saying something more along the lines of: “Awww Bibiel, you’re so mature beyond your years, that’s amazing!” Or more like: “Your brain is rotting prematurely, do something!” 😀 

   But now that I’m 25, I do care a bit more about being this particular age, though for a very silly reason. 

   When I was in primary, I made up a really weird game together with one of my groupmates at  boarding school, that was supposed to predict your more or less distant future, or give you insight in whatever you wanted to know. When it was very quiet, so especially at night before falling asleep, you had to really focus and listen to your mind, until some random words, preferably a more or less coherent sentence, would pop into your mind, and that would be your prediction. Sometimes these ended up, at least for me, not to be sentences, but more complex imaginings, you know what sort of things can pop into your mind when you’re about to fall asleep, and I guess it’s all the stronger when you’re blind because when it’s quiet and your brain doesn’t get even auditory input, it likes to make things up. At least I am very prone to this. Sometimes the results we got from that were really hilarious, like my friend hear something like: “You’ll be bouncing on the waves of dynamite” and we were wondering whatever that might mean, or I once heard that I will be queen of Egypt, and then another time that my Dad will die by stoning in Sweden. It was all for fun and very hilarious. But one night, as I was falling asleep and trying to “predict” something, I ended up having an absolutely eerie half-dream or whatever it was. Inn it, I was aware that I was a lot older than I was at the time, I was climbing up the stairs of the old building of our boarding school (the building itself is pretty creepy for many newbies who come there, it’s pre-WWI, with a lot of corridors that go on and on, rooms within rooms that you can quite easily get lost in, and even some bathtubs with taps with black water running from them when you try to use them, and after all the groups were moved to the new building, that old building has become a lot quieter and one of its purposes was providing guest rooms for any family members staying for weekends, so for example my aunt whenever she visited me she was really creeped out by the place. For me it definitely wasn’t creepy because we were still living there when I had that dream so it was just normal and perhaps a bit atmospheric, but in this dream, it definitely added to the overall creepiness, and after having that dream I always got the creeps whenever walking those stairs. Then I opened what would normally be the door to our then-group, but as soon as I opened it, I heard an absolute cacophony of sounds, and the place I found myself in wasn’t anything like our group, it was like a small house within that huge building. That cacophony of sounds were all sorts of sounds that have given me sensory heebiejeebies in the past, and on top of them was certain evil British song with a Jamaican Patois chorus from 2005 which for some evil reason was topping the charts in Poland around that time and even still gives me the heebiejeebies whenever I hear it (probably because I never get to recover from it because Olek likes it and thinks it’s funny that I don’t and likes to tease me by playing it, at least I suppose in his mind it’s just supposed to be teasing, but the result is Bibiel z freezing 😀 ). It was my biggest sensory anxiety trigger at the time, so I got really scared. And as is often the case with my dreams, all these sensory anxiety triggers had like their personifications, and the one that personified that song came up to me and told me that they’ll be waiting for me here, and when I’ll be 25, I’ll die and I’ll come to them and we will spend the eternity together. Then it all disappeared, and that was the end of my playing the predictions game, because I was absolutely convinced that since I was expecting to have a prediction and ended up having this weird dream thing, then that was what I wanted – a prediction of what is going to happen to me. – Except that I would probably die some time before turning 25, of fear of what was going to happen to me. Over time, of course I started thinking that it must have been just a dream, things like that don’t come true, ‘cause how would it even be supposed to happen, is it like a form of hell or something? 😀 But still, for a long time I had that niggling feeling, what if, maybe it won’t happen exactly like in the dream, but what if something really creepy was to happen to me when I was 25? I’d never shared this with anyone, because for a long time it felt too scary and I couldn’t even articulate it I guess, and then it felt too silly. I only told my Mum about it shortly before my last birthday, when I was actually able to have more distance to it. And even though I no longer believe that this is what is going to happen to me and am able to laugh at this dream and that whole game thing, I guess the original impression was so strong that deep within my brain I still have a very small niggling feeling, what if something real creepy will happen to me soon? Other than that though, as I said, age is usually not a very important thing for me, whether it’s my age or someone else’s. 

   Now you tell me. How do you feel about your age? Do you care about such things? 🙂 

Is my glass half full or half empty? Or, Bibiel’s take on defensive pessimism.

   Let’s do another journal prompt-inspired post, shall we?! For today, I chose the following prompt from Hannah Braime’s collection of journal prompts called The Year of You: 

   Would you describe your glass as half full or half empty? 

   I figured that with so much toxic, overrated, farting sweet, bright red and just ewwww yuck positivity floating around the world, it won’t hurt if I share my perspective on the glass dilemma, which, based solely on how often people seem to misunderstand it, must be not a very common perspective to have. Besides, I already wrote about it briefly quite recently in this post, so why not expand it further. 

   Like I wrote in that post, people who know me a bit, even some who know me a lot like my Mum, often tend to think of me as an extreme, incurable, even “hopeless” pessimist. And that’s kind of true except it’s not, and not just because I am not hopeless. My brain is definitely  on the gloomy side, and I am indeed a fan of thoroughly thinking through all possible worst case scenarios of a situation, which sometimes ends up spinning into proper catastrophising. Also if I happen to be very anxious, especially for a prolonged time or over a lot of stuff at once or one thing that feels really difficult to deal with, it’s extremely easy for me to slip into ruminating and overthinking, which as far as I know are all classic pessimistic traits. Yet, I don’t think I’m a real, pure pessimist. Many people I know who declare to be or are seen as pessimists don’t seem to get anything good out of the mindset that they have. It only stresses them out, makes it difficult to enjoy the good things in life while they are lasting, and often is very toxic, creating a really unpleasant and tense atmosphere in their surroundings that affects other people around them. For me, ruminating and overthinking can naturally be very stressful too and I’d much rather not deal with them, depression is also really shitty, but I tend to consider these more like brain malfunctions, even if deeply ingrained ones and ones which have been with me for a large part of my life, rather than a  mindset, definitely not a fixed one anyway. Those brain malfunctions can surely affect my mindset, especially when I feel particularly mentally unwell and have very low mood, but they can’t fully replace it because they’re entirely different things. I hope that makes sense.

   My pessimism is not about constant complaining (not that I think there’s anything wrong with complaining as such, as long as there isn’t too much of it and something constructive comes out of it, like yourself feeling better after getting something off your chest), constant/excessive grumpiness, finding faults with everything/everyone or never being satisfied with the good things that you have or that happen to you. 

   So what is it? My pessimism is defensive, so aside from being a way of thinking, it’s also a coping strategy for me. I firmly believe that it’s a lot better to always prepare yourself for the absolute worst possible thing and keep your expectations rather low, rather than hope for the best. Hoping for the best might be easier during the waiting  for whatever is supposed to happen, but if something positive that you’ve been waiting for doesn’t end up happening, or isn’t nearly as good as you imagined, the crash down from so high up will most often be  a really unpleasant experience, and you’re ultimately left with nothing other than your disappointment, and possibly other difficult feelings, depending on a particular situation. Whereas if you don’t expect much, you can only go higher. You won’t end up dramatically and painfully crashing down from anywhere, but you can end up feeling very pleasantly surprised. And, as a defensive pessimist rather than a plain grumpy pessimist, if something does exceed my expectations, I try to appreciate it as much as I can, rather than be like: “Oh well, it’s just an exception from the rule, something will surely go wrong”. It may or may not be an exception from the rule, and something else may or may not go wrong very soon, but I try to be very appreciative and grateful for the things that do go well, and enjoy them nevertheless. In fact, perhaps a little paradoxically, despite being an anxious melancholic with dysthymia, I am also blessed with the ability of finding even small things in life enjoyable and pleasurable, and if my mood is somewhere around what I consider my baseline, I don’t have to try very hard to make myself feel these feelings or focus on it very much. 

   Similarly, when you’re awaiting something that you consider stressful or otherwise difficult, for example an exam like Sofi does tomorrow, I personally don’t think it’s a good idea to try to convince yourself for all means that everything will be fine. I think it’s worth considering things that might go wrong, so that when something does go wrong, you can handle it better emotionally at worst, because you’ve sort of already been through it in your brain, and prevent it from happening altogether at best. You sure can’t always think of every possible thing that could go wrong in a given situation and prepare yourself for everything, but still, going through a few different difficult scenarios in your brain before a situation takes place, even if the actual situation won’t look exactly like any of the things you imagined, can be helpful in handling things in my opinion. 

   I guess though that while this works for me, it doesn’t necessarily have to work for everyone. I guess if so many people promote positivity, positive affirmations and stuff, it must work for them. I only know that my approach works well for me. I’d tried being more optimistic, because everyone, and especially my Mum, says that when you think of good things, then good things happen to you, and when you think about bad things, then you get bad things. And I have no reason to believe that this is not the case for people who say so. But for me, most of the time it just doesn’t work this way. I can seriously count on my fingers all the times when my very positive thinking led to a very positive outcomes, not counting all the situations when I just had a very strong gut feeling bordering on certainty that everything will go well and didn’t feel like I needed to either think of worst case scenarios or force myself to optimism, because when I have very strong gut feelings like that, they’re usually right. Most of the time when I tried hard to think positively about something, the actual outcome made me feel really anxious and overwhelmed because I totally didn’t see that thing coming. Meanwhile, very often, if I think of all the possible awful outcomes of something, and think that one of them is probably more likely than a positive outcome, the thing ends up very positively for me. Not always, but very often. This is part of why I’ve always considered myself an almost ridiculously lucky person, ‘cause apparently I do everything to attract all the bad things yet so many good things happen to me and, more importantly, so many bad things that could happen to me, just don’t. 😀 Admittedly, I’m perhaps not as insanely, , incessantly, provocatively, in-your-face lucky as my optimistic Mum, but still extremely, miraculously lucky. So if my defensive pessimism gives me very similar results to those that optimists get from optimism, I really don’t feel like changing my  brain and re-learning optimism just because optimism is more well-seen by society. It’s also rather boring. 

   I’ve actually been using the term defensive pessimism to describe this before I even learned that there actually is such a term in psychology, which has been coined by Nancy Cantor. I guess mine is a bit different though because it seems like that official definition of defensive pessimism is a little more narrow, only viewing it as a cognitive strategy, whereas I’d say mine is a mix of that plus just a more general way of thinking that is quite stable, I guess like a personality trait, or an attitude or something…? Not sure how to describe it well. Anyway, when I read that defensive pessimists perform worse in experimental tasks when encouraged to use a more positive cognitive strategy, it made me think that perhaps that’s just how it’s supposed to be, not only with cognitive strategies but also the more stable attitudes – that is, whether you’re an optimist, realist, pessimist or whatever else there is, you should just follow your brain and think the way you’re made to think, or the way you’ve learnt to think, in order to make things go well for you and be successful, rather than twist your brain wires at uncomfortable angles to tweak your thinking to what most people consider best and risk electrocuting yourself in the meantime. – What do you think? 

   Interestingly, I guess I haven’t always been a defensive pessimist. Similarly to how I wasn’t always quite as introverted as I am now. I’m pretty sure that the little Bibiel, like below age 8 or so, must’ve been an optimist, and the defensive pessimism thing has developed later on as I was gaining  new life experiences. When I wrote a post about defensive pessimism on one of my old Polish blogs as a teenager (which I remember I called “A Recipe for Luck” 😀 ) I said in there that I thought the main reason for why I ended up being a defensive pessimist was that I often experienced disappointment when expecting to go home from school, or my Mum to visit me in there during a weekend, which often ended up being cancelled or delayed multiple times for all sorts of reasons, which was an absolute catastrophe for me every single time, and that this way of coping became even more strengthened during my recovery from the Achilles tendons surgery, about which everyone kept reassuring me that it will  be okay, and which I also really wanted to believe, but didn’t really have much of an idea at all what to expect, and the whole recovery thing was a lot more difficult than I expected and I was totally unprepared mentally to handle that sort of thing. Even though I remember writing all that with a lot of certainty, I’m not sure it’s truly the direct cause of my defensive pessimism, and I don’t think it matters very much what exactly had caused it, but it sure is possible. My Mum is a bit impulsive and she would often get my hopes up telling me that she’d take me home next weekend, so then that was what kept me going all week long, until when it was almost Friday I’d learn that it won’t be happening just yet.  And so I guess over time my brain could have learned that the more frantically and desperately it’s hoping for something positive to be true, the more likely it is that it will be the opposite. If I didn’t expect to go home next weekend and lived as if it wasn’t supposed to happen, it was a lot easier to deal with such disappointments when they came, because they weren’t really actual disappointments anymore, and when I was able to go home, in a way it felt even better because I wasn’t really expecting it so it had a bit of a surprise factor to it. Generally I’ve never liked surprises very much ‘cause they’re really awkward, but a surprise weekend at home or visit from Mum was always more than cool. By the time I had the surgery I guess I was already quite an experienced  pessimist, and ruminator for sure, but it could have indeed been the ultimate thing that has cemented it into my brain for good. Regardless whatever it was that made me a defensive pessimist, in the end I can say I actually feel grateful for that, because it works for me, so why not. 

   So to answer the prompt question, is my glass half full or half empty, I’ll say the same thing that I said in the post linked above, that Bibielz expect an empty glass, and when Bibielz get a glass that’s half full, Bibielz go “Yayyyyyy! There’s water in it!” This is such a cool feeling, when you don’t expect to be able to find a single metaphorical drop of water to drink all day long, and then someone gives you a whopping HALF a glass. Who cares if it’s half empty or half full? There’s actually something in it, that’s what matters! And you relish every single metaphorical drop of it, because you don’t know when the next time will be that you’ll be granted such a luxury, and it tastes a lot better than if you were expecting it to begin with, because then it would be just normal water and you’d likely take it for granted. And it’s even better when you get half a glass of metaphorical kefir… 😉 

   Now, you tell me about your glass. 🙂 Oh yeah, and what is it actually filled with? 😀 Also if you have a mental illness, I’m curious if/how it affects the way you see your glass. 

Five physical features that I like about myself.

   A while ago, I wrote a post inspired by a journalling prompt in the 200+ Journal Prompts Ideas for the Mind, Body and Soul book by Riley Reigns about (almost) ten things I’m really good at and today I thought I’d do another not just oh-so-self-centred but also oh-so-vain post based on a prompt from this book, which goes as follows: 

   What are 5 physical features that you love about yourself

   That previous post was fiendishly difficult for me to write, even with the help of my family, and I suppose this one is going to be quite challenging as well. While I don’t consider myself unattractive, I also donn’t think I have such physical traits that I would as much as LOVE. So instead, I’ll focus on those that I like, and we’ll see if I can come up with five. As I do usually with lists like these, instead of just listing stuff, which would be boring, uninventive and ridiculously short, I’ll try to expand on all of these as much or as little as I see fit. 

1.  My hair. I quite like my hair, specifically how thick, soft and strong it is. Most of people in my family have very thick and fast-growing hair, except for my Dad. I like that it’s very healthy, looks good and people usually compliment me on my hair, and you can do a lot with it if you want. Even when I was younger and my hypothyroidism (which I’ve had as a result of congenital hypopituitarism) was difficult to control which made my hair fall out like crazy, it still didn’t show and it didn’t look like my hair was thinning so my Mum kept saying that it’s probably for the better that I lose so much of it because God knows what would happen if I didn’t. Now I don’t lose quite as much of it and no disaster has happened so far, thankfully. As a young child, I had reeeeal long hair, which I generally really liked, and I liked the added bonus of being able to hide behind it if I didn’t want people to stare at me or something. But long hair is loads of hassle, so even though I still love the idea in theory, in practice it’s a different kettle of fish. Thick hair can be quite a lot of trouble if, like me, you don’t do a whole lot with your hair. It grows really quickly, so I have to have a haircut once a month or sometimes more often, and I hate having my hair cut and everything to do with it, I generally hate people messing with my hair and I totally don’t get how it can be relaxing for some people. :O Because it’s so thhick, haircuts and other hairdressing maintenance and stuff takes longer than with average-thick hair. Actually recently one hairdresser told me that she never had to do with more difficult hair than mine. Though my Mum said that probably means she just hasn’t had much experience in general. Even with my short-ish hairstyle (currently it’s with a strong emphasis on the -ish part ‘cause I haven’t had it cut in over a month and of course it also depends on a specific hairstyle I’m having at a given time, but usually my hair-length oscillates somewhere within the short-ish spectrum these days) I sometimes simply don’t have enough either physical energy or brainergy to wash my hair and do stuff with it, the more that when you have frequent migraines, playing around with your hair feels even more annoying while you’re migraine-y, and even though I most of the time don’t need to worry overly about hairstyles anymore, like I said I still have to have it cut more or less regularly. I’mm also not overly thrilled about its colour, which is kind of mousey and just not all that exciting. Someone once told me that it would be super cool if I died my black hair, and so that was what I promptly did, the more that my Gothic interests started to emerge. I liked it, and I got a lot of positive feedback from people. What irked me though was the fact that it was difficult to find black/deep dark brown dyes that wouldn’t have a reddish shade to it, which I didn’t like the idea of and which apparently didn’t make the effect so good either. So eventually, as my Celtic interests started to grow, I decided that if I have to have some red in my hair, I’d much rather be a full-blown redhead than a reddish brunette or something like that, and so I was happily a redhead for a while, which I also got a lot of positive feedback on and I don’t even know which I liked more, having properly black or red hair. However, we’ve already established that my hair grows like crazy, and when I did all those experiments I was still going to the boarding school, so I could only dye my hair (or rather my Mum did for me to be specific) when I was at home, and I was at home on average once a month, so my roots would start to show quickly. Also, since I don’t like people playing with my hair, I dreaded the procedure itself. Then the second in my life major depressive episode hit me and I just stopped bothering with it, and have never bothered with it since anymore. 
2. My eyelashes. As much as I don’t like my eyebrows and would like them to be at least a bit thicker and a bit darker, I do quite like my eyelashes. I don’t know if there’s some big reason why. I just do. They’re cool, and it’s considered a good thing  to have thick eyelashes it seems. It looks like you’re dreamy, and I am dreamy, so that happens to be pretty accurate. And, for what it’s worth, I remember that my late friend Jacek from Helsinki told me once that apparently it’s the most striking physical part of me, whatever he meant, but I guess he meant it as a positive thing or otherwise he probably wouldn’t have said that. I only don’t like them when they get inside my eyes and I can’t get them out. 😀 
3. My fingers. I have long fingers, and I think that’s more practical than to have short fingers, and for some reason I generally like long fingers in humans. Ever since Sofi was born, I’ve loved her fingers to pieces. I also really liked to play with my Dad’s fingers when I was a kid, I even still do sometimes. I remember once sitting in the living room with Dad as he was watching the telly, and overhearing Mum talking to someone how “Jacek has such shapeless fingers” This was weird because it’s not something my Mum would tell like that to someone else, even if she thought so. My Dad did indeed have an accident as a teenager that affected his hand and fingers. He was grinding food for ducks and accidentally put his hand into the machine as it was working. He ended up with 34 stitches in his hand and had it in some sort of a cast or something for a year. It’s apparently some sort of miracle that he can actually use it, let alone that he’s still as marvellously dexterous as he is. One of his fingers is kind of crooked and there is still some scarring and marks from the stitches visible and palpable, nonetheless, I would never call his fingers shapeless. In fact, I think they’re very shapely and strong. And so, whether that was something that my Mum actually said or something my mind made up, I felt really indignant and sad and concerned that he might have heard it too, so I just started playing with them and that’s what I did ever since whenever we sat together. My fingers are definitely not as strong and as big as his, which I’m perfectly okay with being a woman, haha, in fact they’re very small and soft and people tell me all the time that I have baby hands, which is a bit weird but oh well okay. 😀 My fingers are also nowhere near as dexterous as my Dad’s, but that’s definitely not the fault of my fingers as such, rather, it’s my brain and coordination that is to blame. 
4. My figure. Well… I have very mixed feelings about this. I’m thin and curvy, with large breasts, defined waist and wide hips. Apparently, it’s the “ideal” shape of a female body but I’m not sure what exactly ideal means in this context and for whom it’s so ideal. 😀 On one hand, as a female, I do like looking decidedly feminine, and I like being thin. But other than that, I don’t really like my boobs. I don’t think they need to be THIS huge to still make me fit into the “ideal” category, but I can’t do anything about it because coincidentally, I also happen to have mild pectus excavatum (a chest deformity) which from what I’ve heard would make mammoplasty complicated. The more that apparently the combo of pectus excavatum plus large boobs is uncommon, as pectus excavatum much more often co-occurs with boobs that are too small. As it is, I think it’s quite unhealthy, given that I tend to be either underweight or close to it, as sometimes it feels like my weight consists mainly of my bust. 😀 It’s not practical either, bra shopping is a nightmare. But overall, I guess I could have been in a much worse situation, and I’d rather have a lot of boobs than for example be overweight so that there would be a lot of me in general. 
5. My skin. Aside from that it can get dry and itchy in winter, I generally feel very lucky in this regard and grateful about my skin being so easy to maintain, though I guess it’s only now that I’m writing this that I’m fully realising it. 😀 I”ve always liked my light complexion, especially when I was a Goth but I still do, unless I don’t have proper sunscreen when it’s needed and go red in the sunlight. Generally, I have a very soft skin without having to do much about it, even when it’s actually always more on the dry side, so no huge skincare routines here, I only sometimes need to moisturise it or have an occasional face peeling. Even when my thyroid was bad, I didn’t have most of the classic manifestations of hypothyroidism that a lot of people with this condition talk about and seem to struggle with a lot. On the other hand, I’ve never had bad acne either, despite it has plagued Sofi very badly, and my Mum struggled with it a lot too. I’ll get an odd pimple when Jack the Ripper (period) is about to arrive but nothing dramatic, though perhaps a part of why it never gets dramatic is that I never pop pimples because I think it is more gross than actually having them, though I can understand it must be different for sighted people. Apparently if your skin has more of a tendency to dryness and not much acne you could get wrinkles earlier than people who get a lot of acne, but I don’t think I mind that very much, I guess wrinkles are less problematic than acne and at least stranger people will no longer automatically assume I’m Sofi’s peer lol. The only thing that I definitely don’t like about my skin is the amount of moles I have, which is surely genetic as both my Mum and my gran on Dad’s side also do. When I was little my Dad used to say they’re “beauty spots” but I totally don’t get that and would get rid of them all if there weren’t any potential complications of that. I just hope I wonn’t get hair growing on them like my  gran. 😀 

WOW, I did it! Go Bibiel!!! But I’m pretty sure that if it would be six, I wouldn’t be able to come up with anything else. And if I did it, so can you! 

   So, what are your five things? Or feel free to name more, if you wish. 🙂 

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 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? 🙂