Therapy Update

 Yesterday I tried to get back in with my old therapist. I had been seeing her for several months, and I spent a ton of mental effort telling her my life story and the things I struggled with. This was after a string of potential therapists rejected me in “free 15 minute consultations.”  They would always cite one thing I said in that 15 minute session that was something “they don’t specialize in”. In the beginning of 2026, this therapist started having scheduling issues. She had them before I started the new job that only lasted 8 days. I was not working for an entire month and could have seen her any time to process all that was going on, but she was not available. The woman she referred me to didn’t know me as well as she did. She was nice, but only wanted to do breathing exercises and I already know how to do those. Now that I tried to go back to the old one that had scheduling issues (because my own schedule is different now), she just refused to see me. She won’t tell me why other than scheduling. I am trying really hard not to be devastated, but it’s hard because I spent SO MUCH ENERGY talk about everything, just for nothing. It took months. 

Obviously, finding a new one is an extremely difficult task.  The thought of going through all of those “free 15 minute sessions” again, just to be rejected over and over based on these arbitrary “specialties” just sounds like a nightmare. And even if I did find one, then if I can spend months and months talking just to be dropped, what’s the point?  

It seems like if you get any actual help from therapists at all, then it might take a year or more of just talking. I REALLY don’t want to go through all of that, especially with the extremely high likelihood of being rejected by them in the process. The rejection is absolutely emotionally brutal. This therapist only gave “scheduling” as the reason, too, she didn’t even tell me what I did wrong. 

I feel like we live in a society that worships therapy so much that simply not wanting to go isn’t acceptable. No, you must “find a new one”. Since this lady had diagnosed me with PTSD, someone online suggested “someone who specializes in trauma” but I mean, she did specialize in trauma. Not only that, but one who claims to specialize in trauma might say I don’t actually have PTSD, or they might just say they don’t “specialize” in “that kind of trauma.”  It is extremely impossible to get help this way. 

I’m sometimes jealous of people for whom it’s easy to get help with their anxiety and depression. I’m jealous of the people who say their little 10 mg of SSRIs “saved their life” when SSRIs did nothing for me, even at the highest dose. Then I think about it, and am I really justified in being jealous? Because they in a way are being told that they can’t help themselves. They’re convinced that they need this and that to be happy. Since the tools that make them happy/saved their life are denied to me, then am I stronger for being forced to help myself?

I have some ideas on how to help myself. I do have my own ways. I went wrong in believing all the hype about conventional medications and therapy. Since 2015, it has brought me way down instead of helped. I have always solved my own problems and dug myself out of ruts. 

My work situation is going ok. The woman I work with three days a week doesn’t like having a caregiver. Her kids like me, and she’s pleasant to talk to when there’s nothing else happening. But this woman was very independent her whole life and didn’t even retire until she was 79. She isn’t someone who wants someone else tying her shoes for her. The other clients that I pick up here and there for gift card boss are all great. I packed myself a bag with a clean pair of scrubs just in case I need to change, and also books, notebooks and pens. 

I have a long list of journaling ideas. Kevin mentioned that what I’m doing now is “harder” than doing the inventory service. I said, not particularly. When I am doing certain tasks, those tasks might be harder than keying in inventory, but most of the tasks aren’t. This job also has a lot of down time. There’s no down time with the inventory service. For instance, when I worked overnight, the woman I was caring for was asleep most of my shift. But the woman I work with three days a week has board games as a part of her therapy, so I do that too. Playing chess and connect four isn’t harder than inventory. 

That being said, I wish I was still doing inventory. For one thing, I was in a different place every day. For another thing, the physical motion involved with all the scanning and keying in did have a tendency to ball up all the pent up anxiety and force it out. Caregiving has its plus sides, but I would rather still be at the old job. It is what it is, though. I don’t think I’ll ever know why the other couple turned on us and tried so hard to run us off. We did a great job there.  You can’t turn back time though. 

Day Off

 A few weeks ago, I applied at a caregiving company that was basically a start up at the time. It was disappointing, because she hired me, did onboarding, and then told me she didn’t have anything for me to do. So I forgot about it, went to work at that shitty ABA place, only lasted into my second week or so, and then started with this caregiving company that was reluctant to hire me because of my location and the distance. But they are only scheduling me 15 hours a week, and I was not worried about that. These places have constant crises and are always calling you to work extra. And they did ask me to work one extra shift for someone else- but the one doing it most often is now the lady with the start up company. She did some marketing I guess. She’s also having a lot of emergencies. There is a lot of last minute stuff that, if you agree to work last minute, she’ll give you a gift card of $25, $50 or $75, depending I guess on the severity of the situation. I got a $50 gift card from her for working Sunday night for her. I relieved another caregiver at 7:00 pm, who in turn came back to relieve me at 7:00 am. This lady said her Amazon gift card balance is now over $500. She’s waiting until it reaches “enough for a she-shed.”  That’s a good idea! Because of this night shift, I worked about 24 hours straight. I worked 2-6 pm for the other company, then 7pm-7am with the start up, then 9-2 with the original company again. It was totally fine, because I have not been sleeping well at all. I will be up anyway without melatonin, and sleeping with vivid nightmares if I do take melatonin. I came home and slept about 12 hours with no nightmares. Maybe working 24 hours is the trick to getting peaceful sleep. I did, however, feel like dry heaving on the final drive home in the afternoon. I didn’t dry heave, though. 

The lady with the start up then asked when I can work with a married couple, and there’s a pretty awesome shift differential for working with a couple instead of a single person. I told her I am off Tuesday and Friday from that other company (and weekends) so she scheduled me Tuesday, Friday and Sunday with the couple. I’m now holding off on telling her any more with the hopes of more gift cards for last minute stuff. 

Today I’m off and resting up. so far i have Saturday off, but keeping it open in case she has another emergency last minute thing. I think what happened with her, is that she hired a bunch of people and then had nothing for them  then they all moved on to other things.  Those other things probably offered more than 15 hours a week like my other thing, so I’m one of the ones telling her yes more often.  

I’m looking forward to getting nice checks again.

Ignorance

 The Handmaid’s Tale had a famous quote. “I would like to be ignorant; Then I wouldn’t know how ignorant I was.”  

When I was a young person, I used to pray to God to make me knowledgeable about issues affecting children and other vulnerable populations so that I could be a wise advocate. After my very short stint as an RBT trainee in an ABA center for children with autism, I kind of wish I could take that prayer back. Dear God, that’s enough knowledge. Thanks God, but no more awareness, please. I have become too aware. I have gone down several anti ABA rabbit holes, and I just wish I had never been made aware of this issue. I have been reading things from autistic adults who went through ABA as children, parents of children who both regret it and are for it (both sides with parents), speech language pathologists, teachers, occupational therapists, and a professor named Alicia Broderick who has written and speaks about “The Autism Industrial Complex”, Autism speaks and their advocacy and how all of it led to ABA being one of the only options available for many families. 

I am just so sad. I am sad all the time. I have anhedonia, but it’s not the only thing. 

A week ago, I applied in person at the office of a caregiving company who said they needed someone in Montgomery. I live an hour away in Hempstead, and she was very reluctant to hire me, because of the distance , but I was able to convince her to. So now I’m caring for an elderly woman in Montgomery, Texas. It’s what I’m used to. It’s not anything I need to learn. I know how to do this. The lady and her family are all very pleasant. But I was trying to avoid this work in order to avoid getting attached to someone and then them dying on me. For now, though, it will do. I like doing this, and I like this family, but I’m dreading her dying. I really am. The last lady I took care of in this capacity passed away 23 months ago. The lady I started caring for this week reminds me a lot of her, and there are so many similarities. Her first name is the middle name of the last lady, she has the same number of kids (opposite number of boys and girls though). 

My husband still works at the inventory service, but once he was able to take his new birth certificate to get a new drivers license, he also got in Indeed and started job hunting. The manager and his wife have really turned on both of us. Kevin started to vent to me a little bit about their antics, but I believe he has stopped due to how upset it was making me. So I try not to get upset about it so that he tells me more. Kevin hasn’t job hunted since 2009, and I helped him with resume words and such. Then he got really discouraged when a company’s aptitude test crashed on his laptop. His discouragement made me discouraged, but I tried not to let it show. I just wish I knew why the manager and his wife, my old coworkers who I thought were our friends, have turned on us so badly. He has continued to apply on indeed and plans to go tomorrow to a company that only wants people applying in person. 

Maybe someday, things will be back to being as good as they were. I don’t know, though. I’m just so sad all the time, and I have nightmares every night. 

Driver’s License Drama

 Kevin’s license is expiring, so he went to the DMV. I know that Texas recently started requiring birth certificates for license renewals, but Kevin didn’t believe me. It’s new, I explained. Still, he didn’t believe it until he actually went. He doesn’t know where his is, and has to order it from the state of Massachusetts where he was born. But, he doesn’t know the name of his biological father, nor does he know what his last name was at birth. His mother married his first stepfather when he was about two, and that’s who’s last name he and I have. His current stepfather is his mother’s third husband. I actually wasn’t even sure if his mother and biological father were married, so I asked what the name was on his birth certificate. Was it his mom’s maiden name?  The only thing he told me he ever knew about his biological father was that he was Italian. 

With needing to order his birth certificate, he had to ask his mom. He just never cared before, even though she’s always offered the information to him. She told him the first, middle, and last name of his biological father and asked if he wanted to know why they got divorced. He didn’t, but he told me the name and I burst out laughing, because it’s the most ridiculously Italian name you’ve ever heard. Then I googled him, only to find an obituary from 2003. I clicked on it, and him and Kevin were frickin twins!  It was kind of hilarious how much they looked alike, actually. I showed Kevin, and Kevin laughed at the resemblance. Kevin then started sharing a lot of memories of his first stepfather, whose last name he ended up with. It’s clear that that’s the one who earned the title of dad. 

Then he told me, thank goodness his mom is still alive because he would have needed to know this information in order to renew his driver’s license. 

Celiac Disease

 

My 18 year old daughter was diagnosed with celiac disease. She has been throwing up after meals and sometimes spacing out. Her pediatrician is referring her to an adult gastroenterologist to further confirm it. I wondered why it took until age 18 to manifest. She didn’t have these problems when she was a kid. Basically, it’s an autoimmune disease and was dormant her whole life until something triggered it recently. The trigger can be any number of things. One thing I found online is that kids with dormant celiac disease get frequent headaches, and she did. She’ll be ok, just has to eat a gluten free diet. I grocery shopped this afternoon and picked up these things. She’s packing up to go back to school at Texas State University and asked me to leave these things at my house for when she comes over. I’m just so glad she’s going to be ok. 

Shelving Unit

I got this idea from the Mormons. Buy big industrial size cans for an emergency food supply, and use them to hold up extra shelves you may have lying around. Or, you can purchase shelves that are freestanding for this project. No adhesive is needed. In fact, don’t use adhesive, because then you can’t access the cans of food if you are in an emergency or just trying to rotate them properly in the future. 

When I lived in my old-old apartment on Beamer Rd, when it was just me and my daughter from ages 3-12, I had one of these. I didn’t keep it in the kitchen, though. It was in the “foyer” area of the apartment. I had removed the commercial labels and put a small piece of tape on the top telling me what was in the cans. This way, it had a more uniform look to it. On that shelving unit, I put office supplies, mail, figurines on the bottom, and other random things. During my time there, I rotated it a couple of times. I did use it as an emergency food stash during hurricane Harvey in 2017. Aside from various types of beans and fruit, I had large cans of chef boyardee canned pasta meals. 

I didn’t get those for this one, because Kevin is a vegetarian, and Anna and I no longer really eat those. As you can probably see, I got peaches and pineapples for the bottom. There are cans of black beans behind the pinto beans. The other cans are all green beans. I guess if there’s a hurricane, we are going to have a lot of beans. There is a better selection of large cans in Arizona.  This is because Mormons are preppers. I don’t blame them. I’m a little bit of a prepper, too. I’ve lived in Texas for 23 and a half years now, and in that time there have been three major disasters, NOT including the Covid lockdown, where everything was closed and there was no electricity. Two hurricanes, and the big freeze. 

I also like this shelving idea. 

 

Happy Sunday

I deleted the post about almost being recruited into a scam. That was so interesting. I deleted it, because I did call them out my name and they have my home address. I want to undelete it, but can’t figure out how. It’s ok 👌🏼. 

One of my friends went to a baby shower. This is a diaper cake. It’s made from diapers. The diapers are held together with little rubber bands. I made one for a coworker about ten years ago, and it leaned, like the tower of Pisa. My mom semi fixed it with curling ribbon. I’m not sure what went wrong or what she did. I want to make one for a friend’s upcoming shower, but she doesn’t know the sex of the baby and won’t until birth. That’s ok, the color scheme can be green then. Hopefully this one won’t be the tower of Pisa. The problem is the cost of diapers nowadays. How on earth do they expect the birth rate to go up when they price gouge the he'll out of baby items?!?!  I still want to do it though!

With the jeans I got from 25 cent day, I want to make skirts like this. That’s because I have to cut off the waist in order to make quilting squares from the legs. Why throw the waists away?  I would wear something like this, so would my daughter. They’re cute. 

Our baby Jordan got his big boy surgery ✂️ 

He is such a good boy. So cuddly and friendly, but he does attack feet in the middle of the night and uses claws. Not sure how to break him of that. 

I had a very vivid dream last night of the Greek goddess Artemis. This dream was so real and vivid, that I was disoriented when I woke up. In the dream, she was definitely Artemis, but instead of being of Greek ancestry, she was indigenous American. She had long hair in dreadlocks as well. That was weird. In the dream, she somehow needed me and I needed her, but she was beyond reach. If I spoke to her, she couldn’t hear me. She was also speaking to me, and I couldn’t hear her. Finally after a long while, I was right next to her, and she sort of roughed me up by my shoulders (not violently, just to get my attention) and told me that I didn’t realize how much ability I had. She was semi pissed off, but mostly benevolent towards me. She had a bow and arrow with her in the dream, but it was broken and unusable. She walked away, leaving it behind and I woke up. 

I asked ChatGPT to make this image of her as I saw her in my dream. It’s not quite accurate. In my dream she wasn’t that “glamorous looking”. 

Lastly, while scrolling TikTok, I found this beautiful dance

Somehow, I have ended up on Apostolic Pentecostal TikTok. I’m not Apostolic Pentecostal, but I do have a cousin’s wife that is. They do that dancing in church, and I love it. The lady holding fabric that looks like fire is such a beautiful touch. She’s talented. Here is the song she’s dancing to.