Day 49: Stress eating my way through unemployment.

Stress eating is a real issue for me. I’m sad to even say that out loud. When I get stressed I start to eat. And when I start eating, I don’t stop.

Last night I ate an entire bag of fuzzy peach candies at 2 am. Why? I can’t tell you why as I don’t even know myself.

After I was unceremoniously fired on New Year’s Eve, I remember going home and eating an entire pie. The feeling of stress that I felt that day hasn’t really gone away, or even lessened for that matter. I would say that, if anything, it’s increased.

On paper I have an extremely strong resume. In person I am an even stronger candidate. Somehow, though, I can’t seem to figure this job market out. And I’m noticing that I really like to stress eat. Most times not even realizing that I am doing so.

My mom, bless her heart is going through chemotherapy treatments right now, has been continually trying to pump up my mood, every day. Every day. I do have some incredibly loving and wonderful people in my life. I do. And when I am around them, it’s a welcome distraction and what I need to keep myself moving forward.

Those moments when I am alone, though… those are the moments I don’t trust myself. Those are the moments when the stress eating happens.

I wish that I could retrain my psyche to tell me I need to spend 5 hours in the gym every time I get stressed. I wish I could retrain my mind to stop reaching for food. Oh, we’re all a little flawed somehow. Me, I have no will power. When things go wrong, I reach for food.

It’s not good. I know. I’ve been lectured on it enough in my life. But hey, at least it’s not cocaine or something stupid like that. That’s all I’m telling myself for now. At least until life calms down a little…. until my mom’s cancer is in remission, until I’m a member of the working class once again… until I can wake up in the morning and be excited for the day ahead.

For now, in the words of Dory, I ‘just keep swimming’.

Day 48: A sign, an earring and a reminder to just breathe.

Gabe, the three legged chihuahua is giving me some hardcore side-eye right now. How dare I sit on this bed without allowing him to sit on my lap.

It’s been a little more than one month since I created a wordpress account and subsequently, this blog. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined the sincere and genuine kindness that I would have come across just by making a blog ‘on-the-line’. (Shout out to anyone who has seen ‘The Intern’) I’ve come to find that the interwebs are filled with incredibly kind and genuine people with nothing but love to share and provide total strangers. It’s a nice feeling to know that there are so many of you out there. It gives me hope. Thank you to each and every one of you who has shown me kindness. Especially to those of you who left me suggestions on how to help with my anxiety.

In other news, on February 11th I placed an order for earrings on a boutique website. I’d been eyeing them up for a while, deciding whether or not I could justify spending the money on them, and finally decided to pull the trigger. I paid for express shipping in hopes that the ‘2-3 Business days’ promised under the express column meant there might be a slight chance that I could have them for Valentine’s Day. When I hadn’t received a shipping notification by February 14th I sent an email to the boutique to ask where my earrings were. Apparently, unbeknownst to anyone, there’s a 5-10 business day handling period prior to shipping. So paying for express shipping would be 2-3 to ship following the 5-10 handling period at the boutique. As a small business, I can understand a need for time to process orders. What I cannot understand is why you don’t tell your customers that. Had I known that there was a handling period, I would not have paid for express shipping. Perhaps it’s just my needing to rant, but as a small business, you should be willing to be transparent with your customers about things like that. It’s good business and it’s good for survival.

My anxiety has gone down considerable amounts since yesterday. I think that I was overly nervous for my cat-scan last night. Being confined to small spaces, especially a cat scan machine, wasn’t sitting well with me. It’s nerve-wracking thinking something could be wrong with me. I’m trying to practice patience, though. And also, to find solace in the fact that they are trying to figure out what’s wrong and not just leaving me be. Knight and I went to the gym today t blow off some steam and that helped considerably. I’m going to take some of the suggestions that were left in the comments of my last post and try to start working them into my days. The way I figure, it’s worth a shot.

Plans for tomorrow include sending off my resume to a few more leads. Also – there’s apparently a coffee shop in town that has a wall of old books you can sit and read while you’re in there. Perhaps I’ll take my laptop and spend a few hours outside of the house.

Reminder to self: just breathe.

It’s time to find a job. A job that furthers my career. Just waiting on someone to realize what a badass addition I would be to their office.

Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

Sending love ❤

The struggle is real today.

Every time that I let my mind fall blank for a moment… every time… I am overcome with anxious thoughts, an anxious heart and an extremely anxious soul.

I can’t control my thoughts.

I can’t.

I’ve had two clonazepams today and my heart is still racing. This is the feeling I wish that I could explain to those that don’t struggle with anxiety. This is what I wish they could understand. Nothing needs to be overly wrong, it’s just… some days are worse than others. Some days it’s harder to leave your room. Some days it’s all you can do to just be alive.

I know this. I do. And I know that if I jut give myself some time I will eventually calm down. At least I hope that I will. But for the time being, I need a distraction. I need something to put my mind towards. I need a project. I need to make myself busy so that my mind doesn’t have time to get the better of me.

Any suggestions?

Pet Peeve: “Don’t be such a girl” and so on and so forth.

It makes me angry when I hear people say things like “don’t be such a girl” or “you fight like a girl” or “you throw like a girl”. As a female it gets thrown your direction so dang much that eventually you just start to believe that being female is a bad thing. You just accept it. You know what it means and you don’t argue with it because arguing would take far too much time and effort on someone who doesn’t want to understand.

I am a girl. I have a short stature, and long hair, curvy hips and small hands. I’m proud to be a girl. I do fight like a girl – because I am a girl. Fighting like a girl doesn’t mean that I’m a bad fighter, or that I’m weak, or that I’m incompetent. I’m extremely competent and if it came down to a physical fight I could hold my own with many men.

I do throw like a girl. It might not be as far as my male counterparts, but that doesn’t stop me from sinking baskets, or clinching that out at home plate. It doesn’t stop me from hitting the waste basket EVERY…SINGLE…TIME.

Being a girl is not a bad thing. It pisses me off when people throw it around as though it’s an insult. Just because I was born female does not mean that I am slower, dumber, weaker and not as good as a man. I make my own money, I pay my own bills, I work, I work out, I fix broken pipes, change flat tires, lift heavy boxes, and can turn around and put on a dress and heels after it’s all done.

I am not weak. And being who I am is not less than anyone else in this world.

Being female is not a bad thing. It’s not a weak thing. It’s not something that we should be ashamed of, sad about, or made to feel as though we’re not good enough when a man wants to put down another man. And women do it to, don’t get me wrong. I would say that infuriates me even more – when women say it to one another. I just want to hold a playback button to their ears and ask ‘do you her yourself right now?’

As a gender, we should not be treated as though we’re lesser than because we don’t grow up to play in the NBA. ‘You throw like a girl’ is not an insult and should not be used as such. ‘Don’t be such a pussy’ should never be used as a means to make someone look weak.

Firstly, do you really need to insult this person? Could your efforts be put forth to something more positive? Secondly, if your insulting someone is coming at the cost of degrading or demeaning an entire gender then you need to work on your insults. Tearing other people down is not a way to get your point across.

You know what, save the insults all together. When your girlfriend beats you in an arm wrestle, I hope you’re proud of her. When you’re daughter hits a home-run at bat, I hope you’re extremely proud of her. If you really, genuinely, must make reference to someone you know as being weak, just use the term weak. That’s it. Nothing more. Leave women and girls out of it.

Let us throw how we want to throw and live how we want to live. The world is a much nicer place when we’re not verbally or physically beating up on one another for the gender which we’re born into.

Tired and uninspired.

2019 has been kicking my ass. That’s become a phrase that I’m using a lot this year. At 1.5 months into this year, I’m wondering where the time went while also wondering why everything is going so slowly.

This just in – I am still unemployed. And it’s not for lack of trying. I even had a professional writer take a look at my resume to tell me what was wrong with it. It’s good. Trust me, it’s good. Somehow though, that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that I have ten years experience, a degree, or anything that’s listed on my resume. I am just another one of the bunch. And since the bunch is plentiful, here I am… serving as the token unemployed millennial. Such a stereotype. Such I am.

In other news, my mother’s chemotherapy has been delayed. The poor woman seems to be allergic to just about everything, so, I guess the doctor’s are hesitant to completely destroy her immune system until they know that she’s not going to adversely react to the medications she’s required to take through the process. Knowing that this process is being prolonged is affecting my anxiety in copious amounts. It’s hard enough to have to watch your mom go through something like this, but it’s getting harder knowing that it’s so much more complicated than we originally thought it would be.

I’m still homeless. It’s been difficult. Though I’ve lasted 12 days at this point so I am pretty proud of myself for that. I find myself missing simple things… like being able to open the cupboard and see exactly what I want to eat in there… or being able to leave the dishes in the sink and wash them later. Or just sitting down on my own couch. Things are just things, I am aware of this. I am now realizing though just how much comfort some of these things can bring… especially when you might just be in a frail state yourself (and not wanting to admit to it).

I have a CT-Scan booked for Saturday. I was quite amazed that I actually got it booked so quickly. Hopefully though, they’ll be able to see what’s really going on inside of my head and provide me some relief to this constant pressure in my face. The doctor thinks it’s internal damage from a broken nose, but needs a CT-Scan to see the extent of the damage. I guess we’ll find out on Saturday. As if there wasn’t enough to worry about in my life already…

To take a moment and talk about the bonuses – Knight and I travelled to Lake Louise to see the Ice Magic Festival this past weekend. It was magical, and everything I’d ever wanted it to be. I’ve had dreams of seeing it since I was a kid, so being able to be there and see it up close and personal was a pretty big check off my bucket-list.

Here’s to trying to see the positives through all the mess.

And self-care. Self care is very important.

You just never know.

When you’re suffering from mental illness or struggling from mental issues, it’s easy to think you’re the only one in the world who feels the way that you feel. I know because I do that. I’ve done that. There’s something about the human condition that forces us to keep the negative in our lives bottled up, eating away at our happiness, little by little, day after day.

I don’t understand it.

This past week has been eye opening for me in that I’ve been able to realize I’m not alone. Both my best friend and my sister have mentioned to me they take medication for anxiety.

I know that it’s incredibly naive of me to say that I thought I was the only one, but that’s how I thought. I thought I was the only one. I was hard-wired to believe that I was the only one who couldn’t handle it. ‘IT’ being the proverbial shit-storm that’s been running through my head.

I’m not alone, though. I’m not. And while I don’t like thinking about the people in my life struggling in a way that I understand all too well, it makes me feel better to know that I’m not alone, and, that we can talk about it. We can talk about it.

And being able to talk about it make’s me feel a little bit more like it’s not winning. Like it’s not going to get the best of me. Like there’s room to fight back.

Day 32: February, how did you get here so quickly?

Today is not going well for me. My anxiety is skyrocketing to the point where I’m struggling to catch my breath. What’s triggering it? It would be nice to know. How is it February already? Where is the time going and why does it feel like it’s slipping away from me faster than sand running through my fingertips?

More questions. Every time I get anxious it seems as though all I am filled with is questions. Questions, questions, questions. It’d be nice to have some answers for a change.

I don’t tell people about my anxiety. I haven’t really ever. I’m not ashamed of it, I just don’t know how to explain it. Talking about anxiety to someone who doesn’t suffer from it really doesn’t understand. Trying to answer their questions just seems like an arduous feat I’m not capable of at this stage in my life.

We’re a month into the year and all I can feel is that I don’t have my shit together.

My mom starts chemotherapy on the 7th and though I know they caught her cancer early and I know they’re incredibly optimistic she will come out of this clear and healthy, I’m still scared.

The job hunt has become more frustrating by the day. Step 1 – Upload your resume. Step 2 – Rewrite everything that is listed on your resume in our form. Step 3 – Answer a bunch of questions that we should be asking you in an interview but don’t because we’re not going to interview you. Step 4 – Waste a lot of your time.

And, for the interviews that I have had, I’m now playing the waiting game. And the waiting game sucks. Everything feels unsettled. Everything feels out of place. It’s as though the world is off-kilter and I just can’t keep my feet firmly planted on the ground. Life happens.

Waiting for this to pass. Hoping it passes soon.

I really need to stop pouring my thoughts out to the internet.