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? 🙂 

If We Were Having Coffee… #WeekendCoffeeShare.

We haven’t had a

Weekend Coffee Share

in a while, so I thought we could have one today, ’cause I have a couple things to share with you all, and I want to hear how you’ve been doing, too. 🙂 So if you feel like having a cuppa, or something yummy to eat, come along and join me, and I’ll be super happy to have you here! 🙂

Grab a cup of your favourite coffee (we only have black, whole bean coffee in here right now, which I personally think is the best, but if you’d like something fancier you can bring it with yourself). I can also offer you some tea (we do have plenty of these), or cocoa, or some orange juice, or kefir if you like it or want to find out what it’s like, or plain tap water, or you can bring some other drink that you like. I don’t have much interesting stuff where food is involved, if you’re properly hungry and are a meat eater there’s a fair bit of meat left because we didn’t manage to eat everything for lunch, or I can make you a sandwich, but otherwise I suggest you bring something yourself if you’d like a snack with your coffee or something. Yeah I know, bad Bibiel, what sort of coffee share it is without providing your guests with snacks, and a proper variety of coffees. Will try to prepare myself better next time. 😀

 

So if you’re sitting comfortably and have something to munch and/or sip on, let’s get into it. 🙂

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

If we were having coffee, I’d start with the mundane topic of weather and share what it’s been like here this week. Because it’s been quite warm, if not hot, for late summer, at least here. It’s a common thing that late August is all gloomy and rainy, and then the first few days of September it gets maliciously hot so that poor kids who are starting school are melting indoors and want to go out and play but can’t cus they have to do some goddam fractions or whatever else they have to do, but after these few days it usually gets a fair bit colder and stays this way. Well, not this year. This year, the first week of September was very very windy and rainy and quite chilly, whereas this week it was as high as 27 C on Tuesday. It felt a lot fresher outside though than the temps would suggest and was just nice and summery. Then yesterday we got pretty bad rain and storms, and today it’s cooler but still very sunny.

If we were having coffee, I’dfill you in on

the Sofi situation.

In the post above I wrote how Sofi is suspected by her new GP to possibly have Marfan syndrome and that she’s gonna have genetic testing in February. In the meantime, my Mum had been ruminating about it quite a lot, which is not her normal, but she’s now feeling a lot better about it as it seems. Like, whatever will be, will be. The good thing is that Sofi doesn’t have, to our knowledge, any major complications that can arise from this condition, so even if she ends up being diagnosed with it, I personally figure that we should feel lucky that despite this diagnosis, she’s been doing this well so far. Mum agrees with me, and Sofi herself doesn’t think much of it. What had been particularly bothering my Mum, and still does, to an extend, is Sofi’s height, as she’s already like 180 cm and shows no signs of wanting to stop growing any time soon. I mean, maybe she herself wants, but her hormones or whatever is in charge does not. Since the genetic testing is still to come and we still have to wait quite a while, there’s no other news strictly where it comes to Marfan’s, but, as you may remember, all the worry related to that also made my Mum worry that Sofi could have polycystic ovaries and that that may be the reason behind her still growing and still not menstruating. So she had her first gynaecologist’s appointment about a month ago or so, and, while she was extremely anxious before that, it all went well and there were no bad news, everything is perfectly fine with Sofiwhere gynaecology is concerned.

If we were having coffee, speaking of Sofi (wow, what a cool rhyme lol, and yes, in case you’re wondering, this Sofi is pronounced like coffee with an S, not like Sophie because that’s how most Polish people say Sophie), I’d also tell you that recently she got vaccinated. Not for Covid, but for diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough (these sound really weird in English :O ). She got the vaccine on Thursday, then started having some arm pain in the evening. The next day her arm hurt even more but she still went to school as normal, but when she came back she was feeling horrid. She had a headache, sore throat, achy muscles, couldn’t breathe normally and was very tired and weak and had a bit of a cough. She was supposed to go have her nails done after school, which she did, but as soon as she came back she just went to bed, so it all felt kind of concerning given that she’s normally very strong and healthy. But I guess that could be the exact reason why she reacted to this vaccine so fiercely. She didn’t get up for the rest of the day and by the evening she seemed like she had some fever and it got quite creepy because not only did she have muscle aches but her skin seemed extremely sensitive to touch pretty much all over her and she couldn’t even change position easily ’cause she said it hurt so badly. My Mum claims though that as long as you’re hungry while sick, things are looking good, and by late evening Sofi got a wild craving for fast food so I got her some. When I was a kid I also got wild and very specific food cravings whenever I had fever, and especially at night, so it either must be a common thing that I didn’t realise or it’s genetic for us. 😀 On Saturday things were a little bit better and Sofi really wanted to go pick mushrooms with Mum, so she did, but she was quite drained by the time she came back and spent the rest of the day in bed. So has been the case today, and she’s also got a stuffed nose. Mum doesn’t really know what to do, since these appear to be vaccine side effects so it seems counterproductive to her to give Sofi some medicines because she thinks her body needs to deal with all this on her own. If things won’t get better until tomorrow, which it doesn’t seem like they will, Mum will take her to the doctor.

If we were having coffee, I’d share with you something about which I already wrote a couple times here, but not much and only in passing. This is not like a huge news or anything breakthrough, but I think it’s worth noting in its own place. This something is that I’ve kinda sorta started learning Norwegian, I guess it was some time in July. I think I’ve written at least one coffee share since but I still had too much turmoil in my brain surrounding it so didn’t feel able to write anything constructive. Perhaps you remember that, as long as my favourite languages list is, and despite it features languages like Swedish, Faroese or Sami, Norwegian had never been on it. And I’m still not sure whether it is now. But for some reason I’ve been feeling more drawn to it lately, and also want to have a closer look at how it works, so that I have some more idea about it other than simply through my Swedish. I don’t know why I’d need it because I could already understand a fair bit of (especially written) bokmål Norwegian (there are two written Norwegian languages – bokmål which is like more classic and nynorsk which is more modern and rural) via Swedish, but that’s what’s happening right now. I started to realise my feelings for Norwegian were deepening in late June, around the time when we were on our camper trip in Masuria, and Sofi and me rode in the back of the camper, on the bed, where if the roads were bumpy, it made us jump up high to the ceiling, so when people ask me “why oh WHY Norwegian? Have you got a faza or did something specific happen involving this language that made you love it out of the blue?” I say perhaps because I got a brain injury from all the close encounters between my skull and the ceiling on the trip, ’cause I really have no better ideas. I mean, I could tell you now, at the point where I am currently, that I like Norwegian for its extreme diversity, like, it’s one language, but it’s two languages, and in practice, as some say, there are more dialects than people there. 😀 This definitely contributes to me liking it now. But I only got to experience this phenomenon first-hand after I got into it. And my feelings started to deepen before I decided to go with the flow and get into it and try to learn it. And it wasn’t like these feelings came and I embraced them right away, far from it. At the beginning it was freakishly intense and I didn’t know what was going on and I was really reluctant to do it, actually. I mean, I’m learning Welsh right now, it’s my first Celtic language and it’s more difficult than any language I’ve learned before, have still like a dozen or so languages that I want to learn in the future, Sofi says I should be treated for that ’cause something’s wrong with me, so I seriously can’t afford another language, someone save me or it’s gonna kill me! In the end though, I just had no willpower left to resist my brain any longer and got pulled into it properly. It felt like I had no choice but make room for Norwegian in my life.

The situation isn’t as bad as I feared, since I already know English and Swedish so there’s a whole lot of similarities between Swedish and Norwegian, they’re generally mutually intelligible, and Norwegian and English also share some common ancestry being both Germanic languages. That means it doesn’t really feel like I am learning a completely new language. More like a complicated dialect or something. It’s not like I have to learn everything in a sort of linear, structured way, starting from the very basics, because a lot of vocabulary I’m either completely familiar with or can figure out without much trouble, and a lot of grammar also already makes sense. Also, compared to Welsh, learning Norwegian is also way easier due to the wider availability of all sorts of materials. I’d long forgotten what sort of luxury it is to be able to learn a language via your mother tongue, and there are plenty of Polish immigrants in Norway, so plenty of Norwegian online courses, workbooks, whatever you want. Only problem is that a lot of the Polish material I’ve looked into isn’t of particularly good quality, like they teach a terribly unnatural accent if not plain wrong pronunciation (like you in Norwegian is du, where the u sound is pronounced like in the English word you, while I’ve found a Polish resource where they teach you that it’s pronounced with an oo sound, more like the German du. Except when you pronounce it like that in Norwegian it’s spelled do and it means the loo 😀 ) or only give you an idea about some stiff, official bokmål which might be a thing in writing but no one speaks like that. So I still tend to stick to the English stuff for the most part, and am also able to learn Norwegian in Norwegian itself, especially from written materials. So with a bit of effort on my part, I managed to make it work so that I can squeeze in both Welsh, which is still in the centre stage, and Norwegian, which I learn usually on weekends plus a lot of exposure in the meantime. It feels kind of weird to call it learning though, because for me language-learning is when your brain lets out steam and your brain muscles get all sore and pulsating, whereas here it’s rarely this intense. It’s still enjoyable though. I still wouldn’t say that I love Norwegian as much as I do all “my” languages, but I think if it won’t disappear as randomly as it appeared I’m probably going to get there and I do like it a lot. I mean, I’ve never disliked it, but now I like it more than ever, yet still don’t love like I do Swedish, Welsh & co. Like I said, I love the whole diversity in it and I’m loving more and more how it sounds. It’s so cheerful and childish compared to Swedish, and at the same time kind of more rugged than Swedish and less fluid, to me Swedish sounds more serious and sort of posher.

I don’t even know yet what I want to achieve with this whole Norwegian “learning” and where I want to go, what for etc. but maybe things will clear up. I guess it might come in handy when I’ll start with Sami. Maybe I’ll finally pluck up the courage to read all those Norwegian books my Mum bought me, thinking they were Swedish, including a grammar book from I guess the 50’s. :DBut overall, while I usually try to aim for as much fluency and familiiarity with a language as possible, at least for now I’m taking it very easy with Norwegian and don’t have any wild ambitions or anything, we’ll just see how it develops, I’m not in charge here anyway, my brain has taken over while I was on those Masuria holidays. Who knows, perhaps it’s just a short episode and I’ll soon be over it?

Now that I’m no more reluctant and have accepted the state of things and flowing along with it, I’m thinking that perhaps there’s something like destiny or whatever involved here, because I’ve had several people in my life who have told me in one way or another that I should learn Norwegian. My Swedish teacher started learning it at some point during the years he was teaching me and could go on and on and on about it and would often try to tempt me into it too saying stuff like that, actually, Norwegian is just like a little dialect of Swedish. It made me think what Norwegians would think of someone putting things this way and I thought it sounded quite diminishing. Like, I myself am half Kashubian, and while I don’t have a strong bond with the Kashubian language (I can barely understand it when someone speaks fluently) or culture, and also am far from supporting the separatistic notion that some Kashubians have, one of the reasons being that I personally identify as Polish far more than Kashubian, nevertheless it really irks me when people call Kashubian a dialect of Polish ’cause it’s just not a dialect. One day he devoted the entire lesson to introducing all sorts of Norwegian phrases and idioms to me that he wanted me to translate to prove to me how Norwegian is very easy when you speak English and Swedish. Sure, but at that point I just didn’t feel it, and if I don’t feel a language there’s no point in trying to convince me. It’s as if you tried to make someone be friends with or date someone else just because YOU think they’d make good friends or couple, while the individuals in question feel totally indifferent about each other. Now that I’m learning both languages, I totally agree that, while Norwegian as it is now certainly is not a dialect of Swedish, in many aspects it really seems like it could be. 😀

Then there was a classmate I had at the blind school, who didn’t know about my Scandinavian interests (which I was trying to suppress at the time because I temporarily wasn’t able to learn Swedish and it was a huge source of frustration to dwell on it or expose myself to Swedish in those circumstances) and for some weird reason he told me several times how in his mind he associates me with Norway, which I found rather hilarious. He didn’t know why either. Later my paternal cousins have come up with some weird theory I’ve no clue how, that we have some Norwegian ancestry. It’s always seemed doubtful to my Dad and my gran and me too, but in the past they would often say how I should rather learn Norwegian than Swedish ’cause we allegedly have some distant family connection to Norway.

And lastly there was my late friend Jacek from Helsinki, who shortly after we first met said that, as much as he praises my learning Swedish and considers it aesthetically superior over other Scandinavian languages, he felt that perhaps Norwegian would have been a better option for me, because of all them weird dialects and because they have two languages instead of one so I’d probably have more fun. All of these people would probably be happy now that it has come true, after all, lol.

I also have THREE uncles who all work in Norway (one full-time and two get sent there from time to time for some longer-ish periods) and one has told my family that apparently he’s learned to communicate in the language decently. He never said that to me, although we have talked about Norwegian vs Swedish several times, and he never talked Norwegian in front of me, but now I have to admit I’m looking forward to some bigger family gathering where all of these uncles of mine will be present so I can break the news to them and we can find out who can snakke (speak) better than Bibiel *evil laugh*. Or maybe I’m in for a surprise and any/all of them actually snakker better than Bibiel, which would be just as cool, they’ve certainly had more exposure than me and more potential opportunities to practice with people! 🙂

If we were having coffee, I’d mention that we’re having a bit of a national Catholic holiday today. This is because it’s the day of beatification of cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, the Primate of Poland. Beatification means that he is now known as blessed (which is like a step below canonisation when a person is proclaimed saint) and a primate is the archbishop of a country. Even due to his function alone, he was a very important and valued figure in the Polish Catholic church during his life and still is very much valued and respected due to his huge positive influence on the church and aspects like the so-called folk devotion to Mary, to name just one thing. Along with him, another person who was beatified was mother Elżbieta Róża Czacka who was the foundress of the religious order who leads the blind school I went to, and also the foundress of the school and everything around it as well. She was blind herself ever since she was 22, I believe, and is said to be the first person in Poland who has taken the problem of education of the blind seriously. This school is relatively well-known and quite a few people who have nothing or very little to do with the blind have heard about it somewhere and back in my school days they would ask my Mum whether I go to THAT school. I am talking about this because now that she and the whole blind centre and the order she founded have been talked a lot in the media and churches in the period leading up to the beatification, I’ve got quite a few people from my family and even beyond, asking me things like whether I’m happy that she’s gonna be beatified, and I found the amount of that and this specific phrasing of the question quite interesting so I thought I’d write a little bit about that and how I feel about it. Am I happy? Yes, I’m very happy! I feel tempted to throw an “obviously” in there, but since I’ve got this question so often perhaps it’s not so obvious for some reason. But I can’t think of a reason why I wouldn’t be happy. We definitely can’t complain about lack of representation of disabilities among saints but the more the merrier, and also I’ve got a feeling that blindness in general has gotten a little bit of spotlight in the Catholic church due to this, because they are telling her story everywhere now and obviously it’s impossible to tell her story without talking about blindness and the blind. Also while I can think of several blind saints, most of them have lived quite a long time ago and when reading about their lives there’s not much you can learn about their experience with blindness specifically, perhaps except for my dear patron saint bl. Margaret de Citta di Castello but she has also lived quite some time ago. So I think mother Elżbieta (or should I be saying Elizabeth in English now?… I never know if you should translate saints’/blesseds’ names or not, it seems so inconsistent) is going to be particularly relatable and close to the hearts of many blind people, and I think that sort of connection is important. I know many who have loved her long before she has been beatified, even if they were too young to know her or didn’t get a chance to meet her personally. I’ve heard of some blind people from that school who actually regard her as a sort of mother figure or something. And beyond that, whether it’s her or someone else, I think a beatification of someone new is generally a very happy event in itself for the Church as a community. My Mum also asked me whether I feel any sort of bond with her, which I think is a more interesting question. We’ve both had the same disability, so on this level I think there is some connection that I feel to her. Also, while personally I have very mixed feelings about both the school and my experience there, i feel grateful to her for the mere fact that she founded it, because the whole thing was extremely courageous of her, and that she devoted herself to the blind so much and on so many levels. One thing I’m extremely grateful to her for is that she adapted Braille to the Polish language. But I don’t feel much of an emotional bond with her like a lot of blind folks do. Or a very strong spiritual one. When I was at school, they’d talk a lot about her and I remember one person once suggested to me that if I struggle with homesickness and stuff like that, I could think of mother Elżbieta as my second mum or a mother figure or something, that some people have this sort of bond with her. I initially really tried and really wanted to, but somehow didn’t feel it. Then not much later I got truly sick of all that talking about it being our second home and stuff like that and I internally rebelled against it all, so there was no way I could think of her as my mum. When I was older, I read her writings and letters and several biographies and a couple memoirs involving her. She was incredibly wise and virtuous and strong-willed and in many aspects very extraordinary and fascinating, and while I didn’t see that at school because I had vastly different outlook on things and vastly different things on my mind, now I do admire her deep devotion to the Cross. Yet when I read her writings she doesn’t come across as someone whom I could truly feel close to. With all her admirable traits and all the great things she did, I think we just are too different for such a close bond to be possible. Or maybe I just have a somehow skewed perception of her despite all the stuff I read about her. And the mixed feelings I have about the school surely get in the way too, even though it doesn’t have to do with her directly. Like I said, the saint I do feel more of a connection to, and who also happens to have been blind and multiply disabled is bl. Margaret of Castello.

If we were having coffee, last, but not least, I’d share about a major purchase I recently made. I got myself an iPad, YAY! Now this is really a huge thing because not long ago I thought I wouldn’t be able to be able to use a smartphone, due to the touchscreen, and now I’m getting a second Apple device. This is because, actually, recently I had been considering a possibility of transitioning to a Mac from my Windows computer. Yeah, I’ve transitioned to a new computer over a year ago, but I’m sure Sofi would be more than keen to inherit this one from me, and also some of its parametres are well above what I need. I’ve recently got to hear a lot about how it looks in practice to use a Mac with VoiceOver (the built-in screen reader) and I was like, huh, this doesn’t sound quite as difficult as I thought. It sounds way more intuitive and non-geek-friendly than Windows. And I really have grown to like the way Apple does things ever since I’ve got my iPhone, while at the same time Windows irks me in more and more ways. Yet I’ve also heard about several blind people who have tried using Mac and it didn’t really work out too well, and because it’s not like I am incredibly tech savvy or anything, it felt risky, especially that Mac OS computers are not the cheapest in the world as everyone knows. So I was playing around with that idea for a long time until I figured that perhaps a cool golden mean would be getting an iPad, because I’ve heard of some blind users who just use an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard as their primary device rather than a laptop or a computer, which they only use when something is just physically impossible to do on an iPad. Perhaps if I tried that, I would be able to say more decidedly in a couple of years how worth it and how risky for me getting a Mac is. And I guess in a year or two I’ll be able to apply for funding which you can get for an assistive device, and a computer counts as one. Since I don’t need anything more than a MacBook Air, perhaps the funding would even cover that if I’m lucky and counting right.

So in the end I got an iPad 8 and Apple says it should be here tomorrow and I’m really really curious and a little bit apprehensive. One thing I’m kind of afraid of not working out as well as I’d like is typing. I do a lot of writing, but while I have a Bluetooth keyboard for my iPhone as well as my Braille-Sense which works like a Braille Display and Bluetooth keyboard at once, I find writing on iPhone a pretty arduous experience, especially on the Braille-Sense which I prefer for longer writing because it’s easier and faster to review what I write. Except in the end it’s not because the cursor often flies around so it’s hard not to make mistakes, or in some apps it will randomly throw me out of the edit field after every few characters, or it will be very slow and freezy or otherwise buggy. Since iPad is essentially the same system, I’m not sure whether I can hope for much difference there. But it’s not like I am supposed to ditch the Windows computer and rely on the iPad for everything from tomorrow on. If, after a year or a few, I’ll come to the conclusion that I like the Apple ecosystem increasingly and the only thing that stops me from using iPad full-time is the typing, I might still get the Mac as I don’t think it has the same typing issues as iOS devices do.

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

 

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… #WeekendCoffeeShare

Welcome to another

#WeekendCoffeeShare! 🙂

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

faza peak

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

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

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

What would you share if we were having coffee? 🙂

 

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? 🙂

 

If We Were Having Coffee… #WeekendCoffeeShare

Hey all you lovely people!

The

Weekend Coffee Share

link-up at Eclectic Alli’s is still lasting, so I’m happy to join in this week!

Let’s have some coffee, or anything else you’d like to drink, and maybe a snack to go with it.

It’s my Mum’s birthday, as well as Olek’s, and I’d love to share some cake with you, because it was super yummy, but, sadly, just a little while ago, the rest of it that hadn’t still got eaten, died a tragical death – Mum broke the plate with it, so the remaining cake was full of small pieces of glass. I was lucky because I got to eat the last edible piece only minutes before the accident! 😀 But I have tea, orange juice, Pepsi, and there still is a cake from bakery, but, although I haven’t had it, I’m sure it isn’t as good at my Mum’s was. And of course you can bring a drink or food of your own and have it, and share with other people if you want, as always.

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

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that last week was quite eventful. Last Monday my family – that is my parents and Sofi – had a car accident. That was of course very shocking for everyone. Mum picked up Zofijka from her tennis class, as well as two of her friends, and they were going to head home when Dad called Mum to pick him up from work. She was reluctant to do that because that time around he was quite far away and she didn’t feel okay driving that far with all those kids and would prefer to drop at least Sofi’s friends to their homes, but there was no time. When they were on their way back home, there was a crossing in our town that Mum is always kind of apprehensive of, and while she was driving through it, they got hit by some young guy who was driving just crazily fast. I don’t know how it exactly looked like but anyway apparently it was only some immense, miraculous luck, that neither my Dad, nor one of Sofi’s friends, didn’t get killed or badly hurt. At the time, I was in my room, downloading some books, and having a yucky headache and was planning that as soon as I get done with it I’ll go to bed. As I thought that, my phone rang and I heard sobbing Sofi, who was standing outside and wanted me to let her in, because she didn’t have the key. Obviously that alarmed me immediately because I knew Mum has left to pick her up, and I asked her if there was something wrong, and she said yes, so I went downstairs quickly to let her in, and then I couldn’t believe what she was saying for quite some time. Mum had to stay there and wait for the police, but a couple who witnessed the whole thing helped her and her friends get back home. Apparently that young boy was just 18 and only had his driver’s licence for about half a year, and was jittery and really scared when that happened, and Sofi heard him saying that he’ll kill himself. I really hope he didn’t, or won’t. Mum’s car is a total wreck and we don’t know yet if it can be fixed at all. But thankfully nothing happened to anyone, other than shock, but we all managed to pick ourselves up after that pretty quickly. The first thing that I thought of when it finally sank in for me what Sofi was saying was that Mum must be devastated. She’s seen many accidents and whenever she sees anything like that, even less serious, she always cries, so I was sure she must be in quite a state emotionally. Turns out she was really brave this time and very cool-headed and didn’t cry at all, and was very surprised at that herself.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I’m just going through some sort of an occupational medicine saga. I had my OM check-up two weeks ago like every 2 years, and during it, it came up that on the decision of the institution which granted me disability benefits, it’s stated that I am “completely unfit for work”. That alarmed my OM doctor who said that, although he knows that I’ve been working for 4-5 years already and am able to do it despite my disability, it needs to be clarified, because someone might have a problem with that later on, for example if I change OM doctors or something, and I may not be allowed to work. So he referred me to the Occupational Medicine Centre to clear it and asked them to interpret that particular statement. From then on, I’ve been going back and forth between my OM doctor and the OM centre and it’s getting really unpleasant. In the meantime, me and my Mum asked the institution from which I get my disability benefits, which is called Social Insurances Association or something like this in Poland, and they told us that this statement “completely unfit for work” is something that a competent OM doctor should be familiar with and not make so much fuss around it, because they always write it when someone is on social benefits because of disability, and it means that you can only work in a position that’s adjusted to your needs. Of course it’s official jargon, and this statement is weird – an average person with not much knowledge in those matters wouldn’t think that “completely unfit for work” would mean anything else than “completely unfit for work”, but since this jargon is specific for the field, and he is an OM doctor, it seems very incompetent and  no professional indeed that he doesn’t know such things and takes it literally. – My OM doctor is also a dermatologist, and it seems like he doesn’t really manage juggling those two specialisations at the same time, especially that one year when I visited him, he told me that he’s “probably the best dermatologist in the county”, so I suppose he focuses so much on being such a great dermatologist that he doesn’t have enough time on being a decent OM doctor and have the minimum knowledge. I came back to him after that, explaining to him what I’ve learnt, but he still insists on interpreting it just for him by someone from the OM Centre. It seems like, because he doesn’t know the rules and procedures and the basic terms used in his field of work, he is afraid to renew his decision that I can still work, because what if someone will say that I can’t and then he’ll have to bear the consequences. Instead of researching the topic himself or asking someone more knowledgeable, he wants me to do the job for him and interpret stuff that’s obvious for anyone who has some basic idea about how benefits work here. I’ll do that because as it seems right now I don’t have a better option, but then I think I’ll say goodbye to the best dermatologist in the county and find myself some other OM doctor. Sadly, this guy’s name is Jacek. I think he could be nice as a person, even if a bit too cocky, but even when your name is Jacek, it doesn’t immediately make you great at everything as it seems. 😀 Not that I didn’t know previously that Jaceks do have their weaknesses too, like all other people.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that I’m fighting for and stressing over some of my speech synths that I’ve lost. I don’t know if I’ve told you that or not, but in that whole wave of tech issues and computer transition I’d had, I’ve lost ALL of my licences for those voices and the accompanying app. I won’t get into the details of how it happened, but to put it shortly, you get those speech synthesisers in the app on a USB stick, and that stick comes with 3 licences that enable you to install it locally. You can have one licence on one computer and of course you can remove it from it and transfer it back on to it as you wish. Except for when you have some unpredictable system crash that requires some major repairs and digging inside of it, drive replacement, etc. Then, even if you still have the same computer, the same system and haven’t removed the licence and uninstalled the app, your licence is still there but you are unable to use it, and neither can you remove it. And because usually we are not able to predict when our computers will crash, and also because I wasn’t aware of that, I gradually lost all of my licences because of some major changes on my computers and am stuck in a dead poind with them. So I had to contact the producer, they weren’t responding for a good few weeks so finally I decided to call them, which my Mum was persuading me to do for a long time and saying that I should do that in the first place. That cost me a lot as you can imagine if you know me at least a bit, but I was just like there’s no way I’m going to lose them permanently, I have to get them to do something. So I explained in Swenglish to the girl who answered my call (I called their Swedish quarters) what happened and what I want from them, but our communication was very poor because we couldn’t hear each other very well for some reason and besides she seemed quite clueless and the only thing she could do was to collect the info on the problem for me and she said she’d pass it on to other people and when they’ll know something, they’ll call me back. No one did for over a week, so I was thinking I’ll have to start flooding them with emails, but luckily before I started out with that, I got a response to my email. I now have 3 new licences from them that I can use, but to keep things interesting, I cannot, because for some reason a licence won’t transfer on to my computer. So the guy from that company will have to do something with it remotely. That makes me quite anxious and I’m not sure why. I mean the thing has been very stressful for me since the beginning but since that has become a real possibility I’m stressing about it much more. Am I such a privacy freak, or am I anxious of what the problem might be because it looks serious and that something will go wrong and because I have little experience with getting remote assistance, or am I scared of the interacting, probably a fair bit of it, that I’ll have to do with him, or what, no idea!

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that, while my anxiety has been pretty high for a long time now and hasn’t come down to what I perceive my baseline level in months, and now has actually gotten higher recently because as you can see things have been chaotic, the good news is that my depressive symptoms, including anhedonia, have alleviated a bit, and I have more energy for things, yay! I still don’t have a faza which stinks like a skunk, and it’s still far from my “normal”, but it’s better, so let’s hope this will continue! It certainly makes life that bit easier, and makes you feel a bit less like you have to fake everything you’re supposed to feel all the time, or less shitty about yourself when you are not able to fake. Concerning fazas and continuing what I wrote about in

this post

, if I ever thought that Jack Vallier was going to be my next crush, now I know he definitely won’t! Sofi took him over from me! Despite she doesn’t like “guys with earrings”. 😀 Yesterday we were sitting in the kitchen – us and Mum – and she was listening to the music, and then she played one of Jack’s songs and said: “Mum, guess who it is, this guy who’s singing?”. Of course Mum didn’t know. “It’s Jack V… I don’t know, but he’s Jack, he was going to be Emi’s crush but he’s too normal for her. So I’m taking him over. He looks awful but I love his music so much”. 🤣 Then I heard her talking to Dad, asking him if it’s possible that she/we could go to London this summer, because she’s read somewhere that her crush is going to have a concert there. Of course Dad didn’t agree. I don’t mind Sofi taking Jack over because as I said I didn’t think I would be able to get a faza on someone so normal anyway, and he’s more Sofi’s style, I mean his music is, and I know that for her, crush is something different than for me and we both understand it differently. It probably won’t even last very long for her. However if I did have a faza on Jack that would be really unfortunate, because I can’t imagine sharing my faza objects with Sofi hahaha.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you that me and Olek collectively bought Mum a new phone for her birthday, a Samsung Galaxy, though obviously I don’t remember which one exactly. It was Olek’s idea. I thought it was cool but also was a bit apprehensive of it, my Mum had always had LG phones and liked them, so I wasn’t sure if she’d like it. Of course she now has to get used to it, which always takes some time, but so far I guess she feels positive about it which I’m glad about.

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

 

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? 🙂

 

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? 🙂

 

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? 🙂

 

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? 🙂

 

If we were having coffee… #WeekendCoffeeShare

What’s the time where you are now? Would you like a mug of coffee? Well here is 11 PM at this moment, so maybe not the best time for having coffee for most people, but who cares. Make yourself comfortable and I’ll make you a mug of strong black coffee, or a cuppa some more delicate latte, or a mug of hot tea, or anything else. 🙂 I’ve been in Sleepland for most of the day and came back not so long ago, so I guess I’ll stay up late, so let’s have a chat. 🙂 Enjoy your drink. 🙂

If we were having coffee, I’d be nosy and ask you how you’re doing and what’s going on in your life right now…

So I’ve told you I’ve been to Sleepland today for a big part of the day. That’s weird, even if someone’s biological clock is as insane as mine, well if your biological clock is crazy it’s rather foolish to make it go nuts even more on purpose and sleep during the day. I usually don’t do that if I do’t have to. But I had to, I guess. I had an awful morning with lots of awful anxiety and lots of other awful stuff, just couldn’t focus on anything properly. Don’t know clearly what caused it. I usually take my anti-anxiety meds in the evening, I don’t know what’s wrong with them or with me but most of them make me so very groggy and drowsy, I thought it’s not just me for a long time, but now I see most people who are on anti-anxiety meds and with whom I talked about it don’t have it so bad. Maybe it’s somehow related to my always low blood pressure, dunno. Anyway, because of this I rather try to avoid taking them during the day, especially if I have something important to do, or requiring. My regular anti-anxiety medication has been Hydroxizine, but if a situation is particularly bad, I also take Afobam. Afobam also makes me less groggy – which I find weird because technically it’s stronger – so usually when I’m very anxious during the day and just need something to help me, I’ll usually take Afobam. It doesn’t make me sleepy as Hydroxizine always does. But since I’ve been using it more than usual lately with the session going on and it’s apparently pretty addictive, I wanted to be careful and took a Hydroxizine, the more that it’s weekend so I can do whatever I want. I even started doing my Welsh challenge afterwards and completed it, but felt more groggy every minute, as if I hadn’t slept for days, so as I did my Welsh, I quickly packed all my goods and chattels and got on the plane to Sleepland and getting lost in Sleepland for hours. And boy did I have weird dreams! They were weird, but funny, or beautiful, or creative, or just cool. That’s another weird thing I guess because as far as I know, people usually don’t remember or even don’t have any dreams when they’re on sleepling/anti-anxiety pills. I usually don’t have them too, but today I’ve had a real abundance of dreams. Quite a few of them had to do with my current music crush Gwilym. Obviously I love having dreams with my crushes, especially if they’re bright and clear – dreams, not crushes. I haven’t had many dreams with Gwilym until now, which I thought was sad, I usually dream about my crushes a lot, since they iare a huge part of my life, inspire me, motivate me, and so on and so forth. The term crush isn’t actually accurate, I think I’ll have to come up with something more fitting. You’re lucky guys, because somehow I haven’t talked a lot about my crushes on here yet, especially in comparison to my old, Polish blogs. I just used to write about them sooo much. Don’t know what happened that I don’t do it now, maybe am too busy with these finals and stuff, but… things may change as my feelings for all of my crushes, but mostly for Gwil, since he’s my newest crush, are still as strong as they were back then. I also used to describe at least some of my dreams with my crushes on those old blogs, or parts of these dreams that were sharable and easy to explain to an incidental reader in detail. Now I won’t do it though, they were pretty intricate and very many. Anyway, I’ve had such a fantastic trip to Sleepland, and, until I got back, everything changed and started to look much better, and my anxiety, or most of it, I guess it got lost somewhere in the middle of my journey and haven’t found me until now so, shall we celebrate.

If we were having coffee I’d tell you that, ugh, my finals are coming and it’s so awful. As I told y’all last time at the coffee share, I’m not as much afraid of the results, will I pass or not etc. but the whole process is much more frightening for me. I just so desperately want it to be over!!! Luckily, my exam session at school is over, I passed my last exam on Thursday. Now we’ll have the end of the school year next Thursday and I pray to not have to be there till the end of all those celebrations. They plan on doing some slideshow presentations, my term plans, I mean, so I’d have to just sit there and pretend how very interested in everything I am, while anything I could be interested with at least theoretically is visual. 😀 I’ve also heard there will be some meeting, with coffee and cake and stuff… ughhhh! my “dream” will come true. I just absolutely LOVE eating in such official situations. I don’t even feel like I know these people well enough, I’ve been learning at home for two years, and during my first year at this school, I just felt like I’m invisible, ’cause hardly anyone besides some more sensible teachers and one guy in my class talked to me just because they wanted, the rest did it only when they really had to or didn’t do it at all. I’m curious though what they will be talking about. About school? 😀 Because usually when I heard any conversations they had, they were about school and stuff we need to do for school, which is normal, because what can a group of completely different people with their own adult lives talk about when they’re at school? My Mum is also very happy at the prospect of it and feels this situation in a similar way, at least that was what she told me. She likes socialising in general, but she also doesn’t know these people and she says she thinks it’ll be incredibly stiff to just sit there and sip coffee with all the students and teachers. In my opinion, drinking coffee together is something rather… hmm, maybe not intimate, but… I’d say reserved for our friends and close ones, just those we trust and feel comfortable with, right? Yeah… I’m glad you agree with me. 😀 So let’s have some more coffee, shall we? Anyway, I really hope we won’t have to go through all that socialising shit just because the school year is finally over and I can be free.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you I’m quite worried about my Mum lately. A few weeks ago I was mentioning she had gastroscopy and colonoscopy and how it scared me, yeah, even thinking of gastroscopy makes me feel like a jelly lol, and this week she got the results. And they say she most likely has coeliac disease. Well that’s surely better than cancer, or some other things that were coming to our minds, but still, it’s a serious thing. And it would make a lot of sense because she has anemia all the time and nothing in the world seems to be able to change it. They say she needs to do some other more speciffic tests for coeliac disease, I’d be so relieved if they would be negative.

So, because I’m so damn nosy, let me ask you again, how are you doing this week? How’s your weekend going? What would you tell me if we were having coffee? 🙂

Hope you enjoyed your coffee and the coffee share. :*

https://eclecticali.wordpress.com/2018/04/20/weekendcoffeeshare-surgery-recovery-take-2/

If we were having coffee… #weekendcoffeeshare. *long post*

If we were having coffee… wow! that’s such a cool prospect. I’d love to have a coffee with you, my lovely readers. So make yourself comfortable, grab a cuppa, or a mug, of coffee, or whatever you like to drink, and maybe even something to eat. I am having a glass of Jack Daniels with Pepsi and ice which I am sipping for about an hour now and chilli crisps. My family is out, so I thought I’d make use of it and invite you all, he he, they won’t be in until at least midnight…

If we were having coffee here in this timezone, I guess we would arrange it at a different time, I don’t think it’s popular anywhere to drink coffee at 09:08 PM. 😀 Although drinking coffee doesn’t affect me much in terms of energy, I know it does affect many people, so if you’d rather like some tea, or orange juice, or Pepsi, or whisky, or maybe even kefir, feel free and I’ll pour you. We also have a lot of yummy things to eat, my Mum was grocery shopping in the morning. She left me quite a lot of food, she’s always so worried about me when she goes anywhere for a longer time. She made me a lot of sandwiches, a salad, a mug of raspberry tea, and left me these crisps I mentioned as well as lemon ice tea and hazelnuts in chocolate and I guess she assumes I will eat it all. 😀 It’s rather impossible, so you have to help me.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you I’m very anxious lately. I mean, I am living with anxiety on a daily basis, so it’s like not a big news for anyone who knows me well, but it’s going worse lately. Today is pretty good in comparison to, say recent three weeks, but overall it’s very crappy and it affects me in many ways. My final exams are coming very soon. The first one I’ll have on 4th May. And now I am going through term session, which isn’t as much stressful as the finals, but still. I’ll have Maths exam on Wednesday. I’ll be also passing maths on the finals, which scares the shit out of me the most, because that’s the thing I am completely clueless about, despite my tutor coming to me usually twice a week and draining my brain. Actually, I even wanted to get a certifficate that I am dyscalculic, but although the woman who evaluated me for it said I theoretically match some of the criteria, for some reason blind people can’t be diagnosed with dyscalculia. That’s so weird and I completely don’t understand why. Actually I think it should be otherwise, because I think many blind people may have much more complex issues with such subjects like math or physics, because lots of things are hard to get when you can’t see. I must admit I am trying to accept that it’s pretty likely that I won’t pass this exam. I just feel so clueless about it that I feel like I’d have to experience some massive enlightenment to pass it, and you need “just” 30% correct to pass it. I don’t know whether it is my anxiety and defensive pessimism talking or whether it’s my intuition, but I really feel that as much as I may succeed with other subjects, I will completely fail with this one. My tutor seems also a bit skeptical, well she’d never tell me this, but she seems like… a bit hopeless. 😀 It won’t be a big deal in the grand scheme of things if I won’t pass it though, apart from my pride being a bit smashed and probably the exam being hard to get through and extremely anxiety provoking. I am not a perfectionist about school and I know that even if I’d pass it with 90% I’d still be as clueless as for what to do with my life as I am now, so it won’t change much. I probably wouldn’t be studying further either way, unless online, as my anxiety and mobility/orientation won’t let me. On the other hand though, if I want to develop, I might do it as well without having these exams passed, I still can learn without graduating anything, I can still learn new languages, read books and maybe even go through some courses. I can still work with my languages. My Swedish teacher put it very well. I always thought that if I’d want to work with my languages, translate Vreeswijk’s (my crush and favourite Swedish artist) poems to Polish, I’d need to be a major in linguistics and Swedish and translation and who knows what else, maybe even in Polish, and if I’d like to work in whichever way with my languages, I’d need some certifficates and other crap. And he told me something I never thought about before. If I know a language, how can someone tell me that I don’t know it? How much more will a piece of paper say about my language abilities than I could say myself? And that’s so simple and so true. He was generally so simple and true while still being wise, well I suppose he still is, but he just doesn’t teach me anymore. He said he gives up after he saw my translations of Vreeswijk’s “Vaggvisa” (Lullaby). 😀 He claimed I’d better start to teach others than still learn myself and acted like I did something very unusual. 😀 But I wouldn’t like to be a teacher. Going back to the exams, since I just feel it deep down I won’t do it well, I even wanted to give up and not take them at all, but I thought tat if I went this far in this school I am now, I should do it because it would be pointless to stop it now. And I would maybe regret it later. ‘Cause who knows, maybe it will go well. But I decided that if it won’t, I won’t redo the Math exam, evenif my family would want it, or my tutor or the committee would persuade me.

The following paragraph talks about stuff regarding religion, spirituality, Christianity, Catholicism, evil spirit and spiritual dangers from the Christian point of view. I suppose it may be triggering for some, hence I’m forewarning.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you my gramma travelled for a sort of pilgrimage to some Christian community and is praying for me today with these people. My gramma is a really religious person, but not in the way so many elderly ladies are – kind of devotee – she was always very soulful and devout and has even graduated in theology or something like this, it interests her deeply. I’ve been having sleep paralysis almost my entire life and recently it got worse, probably because of worsened anxiety and my sleep routine being rubbish, and I was talking to my Mum a lot about it. I wouldn’t think she’d be so much concerned about it, but she was very concerned and talked with gramma about it. I weren’t glad of it to be honest, I don’t like when my issues are discussed like this, but I know their intentions were and are good. And my gramma got concerned too. You know, it’s hard to describe for me what I experience during sleep paralysis, it’s just scary and that’s pretty much all I can say, but for people who have never experienced it must have think it’s even more scary, I guess, ’cause it sounds scary overall, so I guess that’s why they were so concerned. But my gramma thought it can be something more spiritual than physical. It’s because, before I really became Christian and stopped pretending I am atheist or agnostic or Wiccan or whatever else I was doing some things considered as spiritually dangerous, or immoral, , by Christian religion. I was a teenager then and wasn’t fully aware of what I was doing, I was just hurting and wanted some escape, was feeling very rebellious. I was at the boarding school lead by nuns and although my own family was very religious and practicing, all the things related to religion, I associated with the school, and in my school it all was pretty artificial. And I didn’t want to be like them. I desperately wanted to be different, even though I already was. I experienced LD (lucid dreams), OOBE (out of body experiences), used Doses (those sounds that interfer with our brain waves and work like drugs and are said to be non addictive, but mess up with our brain), I was listening to very overwhelming, kinda dark music, which made me even more depressed. I mean, I still often listen to some Gothic music if it isn’t against my views, but that was just so heavy and depressing, some of it even satanic, but I got to know about it later on and had no idea what it really is. And I had friends who did other, more serious things. It was a short period of time and then it luckily happened that some people and things helped me to find the Road I should follow again and I am so grateful for all that to happen. Then I got out of that school and was able to close that dark chapter in my life completely. I did all I could to not let that evil I once let in my life to come back again. Also, when I was like a baby, my Mum was very desperate and, like most parents of disabled children at the beginning, couldn’t accept the fact that I can’t see. And so she was looking for some hope everywhere. From doctors, to quakes, to alternative medicine specialists, to other healers like bioenergotherapists. Bioenergotherapy is something completely against Christian views and beliefs, but – as so many people – she wasn’t aware back then how much damage it could possibly make to me, her, and our family, in the spiritual sense. And my gramma, who then read some things about sleep paralysis – that you can have kind of dark and overwhelming dreams etc. etc. etc. she started to think they are consequences of all those things and are something of more spiritual nature. Although I was feeling the consequences of all these things I did as a teenager for some time afterwards, I really don’t think sleep paralysis could be one of them. I was working really hard to close all that shit and leave behind, my Mum also changed pretty much with time, we both decided to have general confession of our whole lives, seeked for help in this field, even decided to attend some exorcisms just in case, you know, no one conscious would like to carry this shit all the time if you can get rid of it. And since a few years, I must tell you I feel like I am spiritually healed and free. So, although I don’t want to exclude my Gramma’s theory completely, ’cause, you know, everything is possible in this world and she is surely wiser and more experienced than I am, I must say I highly doubt it to be true. But, anyway, I appreciate her being so caring and praying for me with all these people she’s with. If this is the reason of this crap haunting me as long as I can remember, I’ll be eternally grateful.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you I had a History exam on Monday and passed it. It was one of my term exams. I didn’t have doubts as for whether I’ll pass it or not, our school exams are stressful, but ridiculously easy to pass. I am really more and more convinced that my History teacher is more sociophobic than I am. He actually annoys me so much. He acts like he’s deadly afraid of me. Like my optic nerve hypoplasia was contagious or something. It’s really annoying and making contact so much more difficult. When he talks to me, he seems so so frightened, like he’d expect me to do something horrible, like snap at him suddenly or something. Now I am learning at home and coming to school only for exams, but two years ago, as I started at this school, I made an attempt to go to school as normal people. I had a classmate who was very helpful for me and was kinda my assistant and guide and the only one person in my class who didn’t act like I’m not there. And he also noticed how freaked out this guy is interacting with me. And he (my classmate) had a lot of laugh about it and one day he proposed me to make use of it. As he said, not many students have this privilege that a teacher is so scared of them, it gave me a certain power over him in his opinion. And he told me I should do something unpredictable on his lesson. Like start to scream and laugh like crazy out of the blue for no reason. 😀 I was a bit hesitant, but decided to give it a go! Yeah. And my classmate was thrilled. He said he was sure the teacher won’t get over it and he wanted to bet that he’ll pee in front of the class or do anything else like that. That seemed a bit scary and unlikely for me, so OK, I agreed to make a bet. We decided the one who will win will get the other a pizza. So we picked a date and were thrilled and couldn’t wait, I was also a bit anxious because I’ve never did such dramas before, at least not in public. 😀 But as that day was approaching, I was more and more worried. What if he’d really pee in front of the class? That would be real scary, wouldn’t it? So finally I told my friend I won’t do it of ity for him, he’s scared enough without it and it would be soo bitchy of me to do it. He was quite disappointed. Lol people doing such things to their teacher at a school for adults. 😀 My classmate was about 40. 😀 But still I wonder sometimes, what if I’d do it. 😀 Maybe he’d stop treating me like the air. Not that I care about what he thinks about me, but it would really help with communication and my learning if he treated me like a human being and not like I’m completely invisible. So I came in for the exam and immediately felt less anxious, because I sensed how stressed and stiff he is. You know he asked me when WW II started? I was kinda confused, like, wow, I was learning so much and you are asking me such a foolish question. 😀 It wasn’t the only one and I had some harder ones too, but anyway, it surprised me, did he really think I could not know such more than basic stuff? 😀 I got 5 from this exam. I guess 5 is something between A and B for English-speaking countries. If A is a mark you get for some excellent achievements, then 5 is B, it is very good, but not more than you should know. SO glad that another exam is over.

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

Hope you had some nice time here and you liked your coffee and that I didn’t bore you too much.

#WeekendCoffeeShare