Tag: personal

On realizing I was Skinny

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Content/trigger warning: This post may be difficult or triggering to read it if you are struggling with your relationship with food or your body and contains mentions of disordered eating.

I grew up skinny, most of my family did. But I didn’t know how abnormal it was for me to be so skinny until a specific moment in the 5th grade. I loved my 5th grade teacher, but I still remember — 2 decades later — being at an ice cream social with teachers and classmates and hearing her tell me:

I wish I could eat that much ice cream and stay as skinny as you!

I remember feeling immediately embarrassed that I was eating so much ice cream, especially because I was apparently so skinny that no one expected me to eat this much ice cream. This moment also contributed to an unhealthy mentality I think I adopted later, wherein I felt a need to prove myself as a “skinny girl who can really eat!” but I’ll get to that later.

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Headaches

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Hello all and happy Saint Patrick’s Day if you are observing!

I’ve been having a really incredible March so far, not least of all because DC had its first actual snowstorm a week before the vernal equinox, aka the first day of spring!

And maybe that’s why I’ve been having a lot of headaches. Allergies? I’ve always been prone to headaches, usually with my monthly cycle and occasionally outside of that, but lately it’s been an almost daily throbbing pain in my head.

I saw a doctor about it and she recommended I take a few supplements to see if that helps, so I’ve added magnesium and riboflavin vitamins to my routine and am hoping for the best. I have definitely been feeling out of sorts of late, but there are so many good things happening this month. I saw Christine last weekend in San Francisco and I get to see her next weekend here in DC, with her birthday sandwiched in between during this weekend!

Posts to look forward to for the rest of the month:

  • At least two movie reviews (I saw two these week, so those will be going up very soon)
  • Any lingering China posts
  • San Francisco posts
  • Christine in DC posts

And if somehow that doesn’t fill March, I have even more drafts ready to go for my experience with Blue Apron and ClassPass (crazy, I know) so keep an eye out for all these things!

But in the meantime, if you have any suggestions for how you manage headaches and migraines, they would be very welcome. Thanks!

Bit of a Slump

Starr2 Comments

Hello friends 🙂

I just wanted to check in to say hi, because it’s Friday and I told myself I post on all Fridays now! (But I didn’t have the foresight to have something planned in case I wasn’t able to get something good up for you all.)

Unfortunately, I am in a bit of an emotional slump. It sometimes feels like I’m going through the motions of how I usually behave, and that feels very forced and unnatural. When I see my friends, I tell myself I’m happy to see them and I laugh real hard at their jokes because my friends are funny!

But I’ve been feeling a bit off. I thought this feeling would stop by the beginning of the week and it’s still here. I have to not only accommodate this but I need to actively work to push myself out of this mental ditch I’ve fallen into so I can do the things I would like to do.

In the meantime, if you have anything that helps get you out of little slumps like this, I’d really appreciate if you could share them! Last week, I was feeling very… nothing, but I watched a bunch of cute animal videos and that really did help get my emotions flowing again.

Thanks and I hope you all have a lovely weekend! I’m off to see Darren Criss and Betsy Wolfe tonight at the Kennedy Center!

Anhedonia

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I feel like I end up blogging about anhedonia quite often, although those posts get lost in the archives of the blogosphere.

Anhedonia is defined as the inability to experience pleasure from activities that one usually enjoys.

As someone who indulges in the glamour of being sad, I experience periods of mild anhedonia from time to time. It’s frustrating to do day-to-day activities and not like them, but then to try to force yourself to do things that you do like and… still not find pleasure or solace in doing so. The tedium of the ordinary leaks into what would have and should have been extraordinary.

This got particularly frustrating for me lately because I was always able to take solace in my relationships with other people, being a social butterfly and an extrovert who draws energy from social interactions. During the last 2 years of college, I found myself feeling a bit weary of maintaining many of my friendships, which upset me because I felt like I was pruning my social circle, which would naturally shrink as I graduated.

Of late, I realized that I was feeling very emotionally distant from my boyfriend ever since I left for my family vacation to Europe. (Those posts are coming, I swear it.) (There are drafts and everything.) I thought that this would stop when I got back and got out of “family vacation mode” but… it lingered a little longer than I wanted and a lot longer than I was comfortable with.

Today, I realized that not only did I feel really guilty about this inexplicable distance I was putting between myself and my boyfriend, but I felt a lot of frustration with the fact that this was the one part of my life where my anhedonia didn’t run its ugly head and now it had. There was less pleasure in seeing him, in talking to him on the phone. And that frustrated me so much, because I want to enjoy things that I think I can depend on enjoying.

Imagine going to your favorite ice cream shop and ordering your favorite ice cream flavor. This has been your favorite flavor for a while, and even if you try other flavors, you always come back to this one. It’s always the best one.
One day, you walk into the shop, order your favorite flavor, and you find that…
… you don’t really know why it’s your favorite. It doesn’t taste bad, and it doesn’t even really taste different. But you don’t really like it more than anything else, and you’re not sure you want to order it the next time you go.

That’s kind of how I’ve been experiencing anhedonia.

In any case, I am working pretty hard on digging myself out of these little trenches of apathy. Apathy is not a good emotion (or lack of emotion) for me, as a person who really experiences the world by feeling and caring too much rather than too little.