Redirecting. . .
Tomorrow I re-enter society, ie, head back to school after a semester off to get my health back on track. Also, back to work after over a month off while the students were on winter break.
Oh and also, I have a psych evaluation “follow-up appointment” after my time in the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit in early December. Ahhhh.
My current Adulthood Goal is to just face my demons one at a time instead of running from them all forever. I am a master disassociator, not helped by the fact that I am also a Grade A Overthinker. I’ve been really emotionally overwhelmed in the time between getting out of the hospital and now; I “lost” a lot of time to Just Contemplating. There are a lot of complicated and overlapping things to think about, so I don’t want to be hard on myself for that though.
Lots of things are currently in flux at the same time in my life. I’m between therapists, which was sudden and therefore scary. I’ve had the same therapist through my entire diagnosis journey and she was specially trained in working with people with disabilities. She’s been a huge support and sounding board when things have been very uncertain and I’ve been struggling to trust myself. She was great at her job though and as scared as I was at first to be mentally flying solo I realized:
- that’s not the case, and I have many people in my life I can turn to when I need to talk through things
- I myself am perfectly worth trusting
It’s kind of funny to me to be getting a psych eval in the morning, in class in the afternoon, and then teaching kiddos in the evening. I’ve learned so much about myself through my epilepsy and FND diagnoses, but I was pretty scared to put it to the test all at once. A lot of what I learned is how bad stress is for me, lol.
The stress is sort of inevitable. So, back to the demons: how do I even begin to prioritize them and start picking them off, so they’re not looming over me? One way came to me earlier this week when I was at the school I teach at promoting our program. I’d been stressed about teaching too for similar reasons. I’d been doing the typical deep breathing meditating etc. to keep myself from dwelling as much as possible.
Just being at the school changed my mindset so much though! I’m really fortunate to love what I do and have the energy I get from my students almost always replenish more than deplete me. As an overthinker, though, my headspace tends to be a bit on the negative side; I was so fired up for the rest of the day after our lunchtime coloring session!
A few days prior I had created a /now page and it gave me a similar boost of positive momentum. Since my brain is prone to just running at 110% until it’s on empty, I may as well be using that in my favor. I tried to brainstorm a project that could help me do something similar and turn around my thinking about returning to school. Even when I filled out my now page and I mentioned finishing my degree and I put a little exclamation point, it felt like a lie :c At that point I didn’t care, but that was a deflection because actually I was just anxious.
But maybe faking it is a crucial step as it often is to making it. I decided to spend some time focusing in on a goal I’d had since I started my art degree in 2024: to create a dedicated website for my art. Having that goal on the backburner is part of what brought me to Bear in the first place. It was even one of my three month goals when I created my now page, which is probably part of why it was on my mind.
Since I was struggling to feel motivated about going back to school, I decided to create a page on each of the classes I’ve taken so far and a few of my favorite projects. In the beginning I told myself to get through it so I could test out and finalize a theme.
Pretty soon it was having the desired effect, and I was thinking much more positively about going back to school. Maybe it’s all the memory loss from the seizures but I honestly forgot how much artwork I’ve created in just a few years.
How much I’ve learned about art and myself, even before my diagnosis.
How fast life can turn around, and how fast it will surely turn around again.
Whatever caused me to forget in the first place I’m glad to have remembered again. These last few days leading up to class I’ve actually been sort of giddy. All those scary aspects I was thinking about too much are still there, but there are so many exciting parts I feel like I could finally see as my attitude began to shift.
Here’s to a hopeful and healing semester.