Rhena Writes

Tag: mental-health

  • Back being a human on IG

    Well, I started a new Instagram account (Rhena Writes) yesterday or maybe it was two days ago. In any case, I’ve already wasted a bunch of time getting sucked into the scroll. But! I posted one thing on my account. It was a collage-type, multimedia thingy.

    In any case, two observations about my experience taking the leap back into social media. For a while now something (an inner voice? or an outer calling?) has been telling me to get back on Instagram. I have an internal drive towards self expression. This is called, “being human.” And, sadly, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get someone else to see my talents, gifts, and self and to grant me some kind of permission or approval to express myself. This is nonsense. And this is perhaps especially nonsensical in the age of the internet. And nonsensical to the point of tom-foolery in the age of AI.

    A lot of my hesitation around IG is that I was afraid that once I was back on, I would end up getting sucked back into doom scrolling or even hope scrolling. Either way, I’d be flicking my thumb over and over in hopes of getting another hit of … of what? Confirmation that the world as we know it is ending? Confirmation that it’s not? Some sort of sense of connection to the other?

    Well, and of course, this fear came true. I got back on IG and as soon as I opened it, I was sucked into the scroll. It was just like when I get on Duolingo (the free version, of course) and after my lesson, I’d get sucked into the advertised games. I had to encounter a few puzzle-game-app hangovers before I woke up to realize, “Where did the time go?” In a way, maybe I had to have those experiences in order to overcome the challenge of not falling into the Duolingo advertised game trap (while still getting my free Norwegian lessons). So each time an advertisement comes up now, I have the script to just click by. I have my habits and routines on stand by. (I do Duolingo with a journal, a book, and my knitting nearby so that I am ready to move on to something that brings me more joy than game apps.)

    So fortunately, I had my strategies and I was familiar with how my brain would work in these instances. So, yes, I got sucked into the scroll a few times over the past day as I went on to IG to set up my account and then to post, but by the second time, I had my journal, book, and knitting at the ready to pull me out of the scroll.

    That was issue one with getting back on IG and I dealt with that handily. Rhena: 1 Scroll: 0.

    The next issue was the doubt that comes into play when creating a post. Creating the collage brought me great joy. My watercolor paints are these charming nuggets in a little tin. I love to tear paper and watch the raw edges emerge. But I also love to use scissors to cut and reveal the shape of the paper. In any case, I was quite pleased with my final product. When I took a picture of it though, it felt flat. Of course, I went down the hole of “Oh, this isn’t worthy of posting here.” This train of thought is worsened, of course, when I’ve just been sucked into beautifully produced images and reels against which, it feels like my little paper and glue stick crafts will not stand up.

    Well, I also thought: fuck that.

    And, I posted my little picture of my little craft that brought me so much joy to make.

    So that’s what I’ve decided to do when I can: wave my little joy flag from my little corner of the internet.

  • I’m writing this instead…

    … of playing that game that was advertised to me on my language learning app. Those ads are a small price to pay for a free service. The one I got sucked into most recently is the one with the balls of yarn and the dragon going after the kitten. Did the algorithm know that I knit and what my eastern zodiac sign is? Sure I also have a cat allergy but that doesn’t make me a monster. I’m still going to try to save the kitten, right? I’m frightened by how much they know about me. It’s not really those little details about my hobbies and autoimmune issues that I’m worried about. It’s that they seem to know how my mind works. Like, how difficult a task has to be to get me and keep me engaged without it being so challenging that I give up altogether. It was so easy to just keep clicking “retry” — so much easier than putting down the phone. And the music? It just built the tension, made me feel like I was on an adventure that I needed to complete, made me feel like matching these colors was somehow important.

    I got sucked into it for far too long last night. My problem — or one of them at least — is that I didn’t prepare myself by having something else to do instead of playing the game when it was advertised to me. Next time, I’ll have a book on hand that I can just pick up and read while I wait for the ad to time out or whatever it does.

    I used to play Tetris as a kid and I remember that feeling of the little shapes falling in front of my closed eyes as I was trying to fall asleep. Last night, it was those balls of yarn and the fiery dragon.

    And somewhere in the back of my head, I think, “Well, games and playing are good for me and my brain. Puzzles keep my brain engaged and active.” But do they, really? Am I actually having fun when I’m matching these colors? Or is it just that the games are tapping into some primal part of my brain that developed when searching for patterns in the environment was tied into basic survival.

    The other day, on my walk, I went to retrieve pinecones from a nearby tree. I was aware that this was the season when this specific tree would drop its pinecones that are the perfect size for the firestarters that we like to use and make. Searching around the base of the tree, it’s that same sort of primal lizard brain that the game activates. It’s the foraging brain looking for a specific shape and color against the grass. But outside in the open as my pocket filled up, it was easier to turn that off and walk away. Easier, anyway, than clicking “retry” on the yarn-dragon-kitten game.

    And this, too, this blogging … this writing and sending my words out into some unknown world … this is one of the ways in which I’m trying to replace the easy “retry” clicks. I leave my blog page open. I joined a challenge this month in my writing community to write a certain number of words each day. In this community I’m getting cheered on and supported in my writing endeavors. I try to remember every day that what I have to write and say is important. And in these ways, I try to make writing and blogging … if not easier than clicking “retry”, then certainly more rewarding. After all, the kitten is just pixels. I’m a real person.

  • How Will They Know I Love Them?

    This is the story of how I struggle with saying no to my kids. And also the story of how I struggle to say yes to my kids. And also of how I struggle to say yes to myself. And so therefore perhaps it’s about how I struggle to say no to myself. I guess maybe I could therefore say that it’s about how I struggle with decisions. And maybe that means that I struggle — and usually fail — to recognize the abundance that has been gifted to me.

    It begins with a corn dog. It was the weekend. My daughter wanted one. What she really wanted was to go to one of her favorite restaurants to get a corn dog and a bubble tea. But she never told me this directly, she just kind of hinted around it. I would like to say that I have a strong “mother’s intuition” and that I pay attention so closely to my kids needs and wants that they never have to express them: I just know. But that’s not what’s going on here. At first, I thought that my kids don’t always ask for what they want directly because they don’t like to hear “no.” But I’m starting to realize that my kids sense that I struggle to say “no” to them. They don’t like to see that struggle and so they edit themselves before it even gets to the whole asking directly for their wants and needs. They kind of “test the waters” with hints and indirect comments. It’s not to save themselves from hearing a no. It’s to save them from having to watch me flounder and go back and forth and try to make a decision.

    So I knew that she wanted to go get a corn dog. (Honestly, she’d probably want to get a corn dog every chance she got so this wasn’t any sort of revelation.) And I went back and forth inside my own head on whether or not I wanted to take her to get one. It would take a while, a chunk from their day off from school. But it’s always nice to have these types of trips with her or, really, any of my kids. Corn dogs aren’t the healthiest option, on the one hand. On the other, part of me really does believe in a sort of “do what you enjoy” attitude. We didn’t really have a set lunch at home so why not go out and get something? But, then again, I also had things I wanted to do and enjoy at home. And she had never really asked directly to go. I’d like to think that if there’s one lesson that I’m trying to instill in my kids, it’s to ask directly for what they want from me. And here I was trying to come up with an answer to a request that she hadn’t even made yet.

    And here’s the real crux of the struggle, “If I don’t anticipate and meet their every hearts desire, how will they know that I love them?”

    So I was in this internal state of debate, letting all of these back and forths slowly eat up my morning. Finally, she asked me, directly, “Mom, do you like the corn dog restaurant?”

    It was the first direct question she’d asked all morning about lunch and it wasn’t at all the question I’d been planning for.

    “Well,” I explained to her. “I like corndogs, but they aren’t the healthiest option for me and I’m trying to focus on eating in a healthier way these days.”

    And that was it. She didn’t mention the corndog restaurant again the rest of the day to me. She asked me to help her with cutting celery and onion so she could make herself a tuna melt, which she seemed perfectly satisfied with. And we had a perfectly nice time at home. We’d played volleyball together in the morning. Later, she came to me and asked if I’d play with her again. I was in the middle of writing a poem so I told her, “no.” She tried to convince me a little more but I stuck to my commitment to my writing.

    Of course, it wasn’t easy to say “no” to her. She wanted to do something perfectly wholesome with me, her mother outside on a lovely day. And, of course, in the back of my head, there’s always the thought, “one day my kids will move out and be on their own and I won’t have a chance to play volleyball on a beautiful fall day with them.”

    Later, I found out that she took that time to clean her room.

    And I realized that my always giving more of my time, my attention, my energy every time they ask for it isn’t helping them. I realized how much they are really, truly watching everything I do and soaking it all up. When I say, “no” to them, often it forces them to figure out a way to say, “yes” to themselves, to improving their environment, to taking care of themselves and their health. I had been modeling self-love all along and didn’t even realize it. But she had seen it. And now she could practice it for herself.

    “If I don’t anticipate and fulfill their every want and need, how will they know I love them?” They will know I love them because they see how I love myself. They know I love them because I do.

  • The Fall and rise of yin. (And Happy Halloween.)

    Autumn brings the rise of yin energy, which I’m happily receiving (which, is, appropriate given that yin is in part about receiving). I live in a place where capitalism, patriarchy, etc… creates an imbalance of yang energy — the more fiery, get stuff done, always be on the go, make, produce or die kind of energy is always around. It’s a little too easy to tap into it. To the point that even when I’m even wondering: “is it possible to embrace yin energy TOO MUCH?” This is about sitting back and receiving, after all.

    The other day, I went to Trader Joe’s and picked up some flowers. At home, my daughter and I arranged them into a vase. It’s beautiful. I’m really proud of it. And every time I look at it, I think, “wow, that’s really beautiful” and I appreciate myself for having picked out and purchased the flowers and for having created a moment with my daughter from which emerged something beautiful.

    Isn’t it beautiful? Of course it is.

    I give it a 10/10 no notes. Would recommend. It was a completely perfect series of events and lovely outcome which I continue to enjoy.

    And one of the best parts of the whole thing was that I just received all of that. I didn’t doubt or question. I didn’t hedge. I didn’t think, “oh, I should have done this differently” or “this isn’t quite as good as that other bouquet, experiences, moments, thing that I saw on social media, etc…” I’ve experienced each step in the process of creating and I’ve enjoyed it and moved on to each next moment. Now, I look at this bouquet and think, “that’s really lovely, it really brings me joy and I’m so glad I did that.”

    It’s taken me work, a lot of work, to get to this point where I allow myself to just enjoy these experiences and connections and beauty. But the more I do it, the more I think, “I made something beautiful” or “I’m really proud of what I did” and the more I share these moments (for example here on my blog), the more they build and accumulate and snow ball. They drown out the hesitations and doubts.

    A thing that my daughter taught me recently. The reds and oranges and yellows and browns of autumnal leaves are always there. But from spring through summer, these colors are covered over by green. In the fall, the trees pull back their chlorophyll, which is no longer useful to them and what is revealed are those shockingly beautiful colors that have been there all along. I love a verdant summer. But I cannot sustain that: the constant going and growing and moving and producing. Even the trees can’t sustain it. And what is there underneath, once all that green has run its course and is pulled back, is just as beautiful AND has been there all along. Now is the chance I get to admire all that has been with me underneath the green all the time. I’ve always had it in me to choose a variety of flowers and arrange them into something striking. Now, in the yin energy of fall, is my time to appreciate that and all my other gifts. I hope you can too.

  • A Daily Journal Writing Practice

    It’s been about five years now that I’ve been keeping a handwritten journal. In the last few years I’ve become consistent with it. And in the last two years I’ve become downright religious about it, building up a habit where writing each morning has become automatic. I look forward to it.

    Recently, I’ve been writing the date in Thai and Norwegian because those are two languages I’m working on learning and/ or improving. So it’s become an opportunity to learn and improve in those arenas. The hope is that after a year of doing this everyday, at least the days of the week and the months of the year are locked into my memory. I find something intensely satisfying about breaking large, seemingly impossible endeavors (such as learning a language) into smaller and smaller, very possible tasks.

    I write by hand. I also find this intensely satisfying. It slows me down but at the same time, I rarely if ever cross things out. What comes out on the page, comes out on the page. It’s unlike typing in the way. In this paragraph alone, I’ve probably hit the delete key at least two dozen times to fix errors or change words. But there’s a certain amount of acceptance that comes with writing by hand. I often just write an ellipses or even “I don’t know” or “ugh.” And that stands. I don’t really look back at the previous entries even though it would be east enough to do so. Perhaps some day I will. And I hope that what I see is how far I’ve come.

    For most of my life, I wasn’t comfortable with writing in a journal. I had a few experiences when I was younger when someone else read my journals. The reactions made me feel like it wasn’t a good idea for me to write down my thoughts, ideas, feelings, and experiences. All those missed years of those writing make me sad. But they don’t detract from the writing in my journal that I do now. In fact, it probably makes me more grateful that I have this ritual now.

    I write about what’s on my mind and things that are bothering me. And in writing about them, they bother me less. My problems feel smaller, more manageable when I can put them into words on a page. Sometimes I even come to some sort of solution or even just a new way of looking at situations.

    I get to know myself through the pages of my journal. And what I’m finding is that I’m a very reliable person, for myself at least, which is the most important thing. I return to my journal pages every morning and sometimes through the day. And I always find a steadiness. Consistency. I’m always here for myself. And even when I don’t have an answer, I listen well and deeply to myself.

  • Still learning.

    Is it a boundary setting hangover? Is it a vulnerability hangover? Is it a lack of boundaries? For all of my talk (writing) about how I’m trying to focus on myself, I still do it. I give too much of myself. I let other people make decisions about how I’m using my time and my energy. I keep putting oxygen masks on everyone else because, “What will they think of me if I’m sitting here putting my oxygen mask on when there are other people who don’t have oxygen masks on?”

    I keep forgetting the rules: What other people think of me is none of my business. And also: Do unto others what I would have done unto me. I am perfectly capable of putting on my own oxygen mask. I’d rather do it for myself than have some random passenger who thinks I need help but doesn’t have his own oxygen mask situation sorted help me.

    Here’s the thing. I’m learning.

    The other day, I went for a swim. A few days later, I felt rather sore. I probably pushed myself too hard. And I can kind of remember the exact moments when I pushed myself too hard: when I wanted to get another lap or a few more strokes in when I should have actually just slowed it down a little. So the next time I went into the pool, I was a little bit better about listening to when I need to ease off a little. My body is good about telling me.

    Another day, I gave someone just a little more time than I actually had. It threw off my whole day. And it probably disrupted my sleep that night. Next time, I’ll back off a little bit more in that arena too. When I was younger, it always felt like I had endless amounts of time to give to other people. Like a cup of coffee or a beer could easily turn into two or three and then a whole afternoon or evening. When I write about it now, it sounds kind of romantic. Youthful. This kind of feeling that I had all this time.

    Maybe it’s the cliche of the mis-spent youth but that feeling of just having hours and hours, endless days? Too often I spent it on the wrong people. Not that these people who I was spending time on were bad (although some of them were) but that I wasn’t spending that time on the one person I should have been: myself.

    I’ve only learned very recently that I actually really enjoy my own company. I enjoy being by myself. Yes, of course I also enjoy being with some people, some of the time. But I enjoy being with myself all of the time.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Brain fog, bills, and breath.

    I would have liked to have gotten here, to blogging earlier today but I’ve been on the phone with insurance, e-mailing and leaving voicemails with cancer center billing departments. It seems that at least one place is trying to bill me a second time. I triple checked my credit card statements. Brain fog from chemotherapy is a very real thing, my doctor (whose office sent me a bill for a payment I already made) assures me. So triple checks it is. I pulled out my calendar to make sure the dates of the payments and appointments lined up, that I didn’t just mis-remember everything through the brain fog. Sure enough, they charged my credit card.

    I didn’t sleep well last night — another side effect of one of my medications, apparently — and so I really would rather have been taking a cat nap or even just reading. OK, let’s be honest, even if I’d slept well last night, I would not have wanted to have to spend my morning dealing with medical bills.

    And the other one, well, I guess it’s my fault for not reading the fine print before receiving radiation treatment. Or not asking questions like, “how much is this going to cost me?” ahead of time. I guess I have too much faith in insurance companies to do the right thing and for providers to be up front about how things are going to be billed.

    It’s exhausting. A good chunk of my time, I was on the phone just trying to get to a live person, inputting the same information over and over and then when I finally got a live person, it was someone from a pharmacy, not billing. TWICE. Plus, the line was all crackly and there was some sort of lag time in our conversation. As if we were all in 1979, trying to make an overseas phone call. And, yes, part of me did think that this was by design, that the insurance company makes all of this as unpleasant as possible, hoping that you’ll give up. And I guess eventually I did.

    This is hard. Really, really hard.

    And, yes, I can turn to my breathing and meditation and all the rest of it to get through these moments, but the bills are still there. I can’t breathe the bills away. If I’d known how expensive cancer was, I wouldn’t have asked for it. Oh, that’s right. I didn’t.

    Still, there’s something about not receiving bills until all of the treatment is done that feels kind of gross. It would have been easier to swallow had I been told that I was going to be billed this way ahead of time.

    And right now, I just kind of need to write through all of this, just get it out and into the world. I wish I could be using this time and energy to write something beautiful and creative, to escape into something else. But right now it’s more helpful to me to write something real. And to try to be grateful that I have some place to at least do that.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • Moving on from the Daily Prompts

    For the past several months, I’ve been posting every day to this blog. They’ve all been responses to the daily prompts. It’s been immensely helpful in building a daily posting habit. And I’ve been actually quite pleased with a lot of the writing that I’ve done in response to the daily prompts.

    There was a time in the past when I would have viewed daily prompts as a sort of crutch. What I believed was that I should be generating my own writing and ideas and creativity on my own, with no assistance from beginning to end. “Real artists”, I thought “are spontaneously inspired.”

    Of course, now I realize the ridiculousness of this way of thinking. Inspiration can come from anywhere and that includes daily prompts (even ones that are AI generated). More often than not, having the prompts pushed me into the flow state that I needed in order to write.

    They ushered me to this point of being able to push myself into that desired flow state on a day to day basis.

    Here’s the other thing. I realized that part of why I was using the daily prompts is that it connected my blog to other readers. The result was that I got views and even likes. I’ve written a big game about how I’m not in this for the likes or even for the views and yet here I was, responding to the daily prompts each day in part to get the views and likes. I’ve gotten pretty good at linking the daily prompts to whatever I wanted to write about anyway, whatever happened to be on my mind. Even today, the question is about retirement and it would be easy enough to think about this as a “retirement” from daily prompts.

    But I’m not going to do that.

    I still believe, perhaps even more fervently now, that inspiration can come from anywhere. But I’ve also decided that this blog is my own space, to do with it as I please, to express myself as I’d like to, to write about what’s on my mind and what my interests are. That is inspiration enough. I am my own inspiration. I’m glad I had these daily prompts to get me here. And also glad that I’m ready to take off on my own.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • I unlocked more truth and made myself visible.

    Daily writing prompt
    What notable things happened today?
    View all responses

    It’s still morning here. But I already had a perspective-changing moment. I don’t need to go into the details of what happened. The germane point is that I experienced a moment in which it was very clear that the only other person who was in the same space as me did not (or perhaps could not) see or notice me. I was invisible.

    This moment brought up all sorts of feelings. Initially, I was frustrated, angry, and annoyed. Part of me wanted to shout, “Hey! I’m right here!” But I had things I needed to get done so kept calm and carried on.

    But, as these things do, the moment kept returning to my mind. There’s something to be learned from this. And so I’ve been sitting with it at moments. I wrote about it in my journal. And now I’m writing about it here.

    Being invisible actually felt quite familiar, as something that I’ve experienced regularly in the past. And that’s because it is something that I’ve experienced often in the past. But I didn’t really have the words to name that feeling. Now I do. Examining this moment from today allowed me to articulate what had happened to me in many previous moments. “Oh! I was invisible all those other times too!” It feels very good to be able to name and thereby validate those other times that I’d been rendered invisible.

    But this morning’s moment of invisibility stood out because even though it was a familiar feeling, it wasn’t familiar from recent times. In other words, I’ve been able to build up my life and myself such that I am rarely rendered invisible these days. How so? I see myself. It’s actually that simple.

    And there was something else to be learned from this moment this morning. The other person (who did not see me) and I were sharing physical space (although this other person did not seem to be aware of that). I think that there have been times in my life when I have been invisible and my response has been to try to render myself visible by taking up more physical space; when the physical realm has been my primary place of interacting with the world. The physical/ bodily world has been the primary space for making myself visible.

    But as I sat with this moment, I realized that physical body-space is only one third of the story of human experience. I also have a mind and a spirit. And perhaps these moments when I am invisible in the physical worlds are small reminders from my mind and spirit that my body — and how it is seen or not seen — is not the end of my story. In fact, it’s not even a narrative thread in the story of my body. The story of my body is the story of my body, not how it is seen or not seen by other people.

    I just googled the phrase, “Invisible Man” because this experience made me think about re-reading Ralph Ellison’s novel. Of course, a good portion of what came up on the first page of this search was about the 2020 horror movie. There’s some layer of irony in that. Oh, and trust that I did get sucked into the horror film trailers. And will probably end up watching it at some point. No judgment (of myself or anyone) there. It’s telling that the book is rendered invisible by the movie. IYKYK.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!

  • My passion: myself.

    Daily writing prompt
    What are you passionate about?
    View all responses

    There was a time when I would have thought that it was “selfish” to have this answer to this question. And when I thought that being that kind of “selfish” was a bad thing, something to be avoided. I used to think that being a good person meant being completely self sacrificing, to deny myself my own needs and wants and pleasures. And therefore my passions were always tied up in what I construed as other people’s needs and wants. It wasn’t a very healthy way to live.

    Slowly, slowly, I’m starting to learn a different way of thinking about myself.

    Selfishness can, of course, be a bad thing. This sort of selfishness is when someone takes away from other people for their own benefit. But selfishness can also take the form of assuming what other people want without asking them. Even though this looks like it’s giving and not selfish, it’s actually projecting one’s own needs on to someone else. In the process (at least for me), I’ve often ignored my own needs and wants. And in this way, I thought I was a good person. But I wasn’t. Because I wasn’t taking care of the most important person in my life: myself.

    Now, I’m trying to learn about my own needs. And I’m trying to learn about myself, get to know myself better, figure out what my needs and interests are and give them to myself. This is my passion.

    How am I going about fulfilling my passion? I take it easy on myself. This sounds like the opposite of passion, but I guess you could say that I’m passionate about taking it easy on myself. I check in with myself often. I let go of trying to be “perfect”. I pause a lot lately. I’ll take a deep breath and make sure that I am not skipping breaths. When I’m excited about something — an activity or a pursuit or learning something — I let myself pursue it but not the point of neglecting myself or being in pain. I try to extend myself grace.

    Do I get it right every time? Not by any stretch of the imagination.

    But my other passion is this: beginning again. Allowing myself to start over again and again and again as many times as is necessary.

    Each new moment is exactly that: A. NEW. MOMENT.

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    If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!