Ramblings

 No I didn’t get a nose ring, but my daughter did. She’s 18 now, so she can. I want one if I get down about another 5-10 pounds. She also said she’s on a waiting list for a tattoo. She briefly explained the tattoo, and it’s similar to mine. I might show it when I get the final picture. 

This has been a challenging week, because Kevin had to travel to the dead ass middle of Texas while I am staying behind to work locally. The chain that we usually do all over that area is being done by our Austin crew, and Kevin has to run it because none of the Austin crew knows how. Kevin seemed unnecessarily bummed out that he had to travel without me. It makes me realize that even though he said he’d be supportive if I moved on to another job, he’d still really hate traveling without me. We travel often. I would bring that up, but nah. It actually makes me feel great that he would miss me that much. After decades of being told that if I got married, my husband would want to leave me for every little thing, turns out that’s not the case. 

Next week, I’ll be on vacation. There is going to be parent orientation at the university where my daughter is going, and I’m taking her on a road trip the rest of the week. I requested it a long time ago. 

I’m struggling a lot with my anxiety, but still working hard to fight it off. I often try to not take any gabapentin at all some days. It works, in that, I don’t have that many withdrawal symptoms. I do have bad anxiety though. If I have a withdrawal problem, I just take half a capsule. Actually the one time I did have withdrawals this week, I drank my apple juice that had 400 mg inside but I drank half at a time about four hours apart. It’s easy to fall into the “I need to go see someone who can help me” trap, but in the end that would be such a bad idea. I thought about maybe seeing another psychiatrist and letting them know that I would be willing to take gabapentin and an SSRI, just because they obviously push SSRI’s so much. However, in the end that also wouldn’t be smart. The doctor would just see me doing well and attribute it to the SSRI, not the gabapentin, and then take me “off” gabapentin.  I know this from experience as well. The whole experience makes me totally look down on them. Then I saw this meme:

Oh so snarky huh!!!  The point of this meme is that “you can’t” just cheer up, you need professionals. What the meme doesn’t tell you is that you can  go see as many professionals as you want, and they also are just going to tell you to cheer up. So, in my opinion, you might as well save your money and just cheer up. In fact, you might be able to use that money to help with whatever is stressing you out. 

I have had to tell myself over and over that a big part of the reason for my anxiety is that I have been on meds so long and now I’m not. At least I have a pretty decent stash  for in case it gets really bad. If I had been taking the full dose daily, then I would be out soon. That would absolutely suck. I just need to remind myself that no one I ever go to for help is actually going to help me. I have the tools, I just need to tap in and discover them. 

I also want to say thanks for all the encouragement on my child advocate blog. That blog is slow going. Ideally, I would write a post there daily. Ideally, I would also physically exercise daily as well. Perhaps that is a nice goal that would help my anxiety. 

One thing that I wasn’t sure should go on this blog or that one is what was recently discovered about the Duggar family from 19 Kids and Counting. As you may know, their oldest son is now serving time for CSAM. More recently, a young man who was dating one of their younger daughters but since moved on and married someone else, was arrested for sexual assault of a child under 12. It appears to have happened when he was 18-19 years old. His current wife made this post, which made its way to Reddit. I have a lot to say:

One of the comments under that post was, “I read the first two words of that and was hoping the rest of it would say ‘went down to Georgia.’”

Yeah no shit!  What an absolute piece of shit this couple is!  “Victim”. She didn’t just do that. And while it’s been many years since I’ve been to church, I have seen this sentiment quite a bit among them. They tend to hold minor sins against people pretty harshly but when it comes to CSA, it’s all about forgiveness all of a sudden. I noticed a lot of young people on TikTok claiming that the heavy push for forgiveness in past decades was not actually for the right reasons. In a lot of instance, people preached forgiveness so heavily because they themselves wanted to get away with abuse. I can believe that!  And when she says that she knows a lot of people who are also doing it, I want to say “Ok- go on…”