“By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.”

— Robert Frost.

I got a new job at a warehouse, just for the month of December to make a little extra cash. I was really anxious to start. I have my set routine that I really like and new things in my schedule really throw me for a loop. But I still say yes to new opportunities because usually they turn out okay after I get adjusted to the change. Change is hard, I have my set schedule that works and get me where I need to go, and new things shift the timing and energy levels for the old things. With adding this new job I started skipping outings with friends and being late to work and missing runs in my training plan. Sometimes it takes hours and sometimes it takes months to adjust, with this job luckily it only took two weeks for my life to feel settled again. The job itself is not so bad, I get to listen to podcasts all day and not talk to anyone, and the pay is pretty good. It took me a little while to find my niche there though. I’m really intelligent, I swear, but I was making mistakes that even a third grader would find ridiculous. My first task was checking the sizes of the garments coming in the shipments against the standard sizes to make sure they were accurate. I would check the size and give it a thumbs up or down on sizing, but by the time I had repackaged it often I could not for the life of me remember whether it was good to go or not. Sometimes I would have to unpack, check, and repack the same garment three times in a row. Needless to say, I was slow as heck. So they moved me to inventory, but no matter how hard I tried, I made really really dumb mistakes checking two hundred clearly labeled boxes off a list. After these first two failures I felt really really bad. How could I, someone in their mid twenties with a college degree, be making these really basic errors even though I’m trying my hardest. But then they moved me to Returns, where I inspected the quality of a garment and then folded and packaged it nicely before re-shelving it. This is where I found my roll. I was twice as fast and just as accurate as the others at this job, I got my redemption on those two other tasks. I can use my ability to zone out to my advantage in Returns, because I don’t have to count or sort so I can turn on a podcast and be transported to another world. All of a sudden I snap to reality and it’s been four hours and there are piles of neatly folded garments around me. I feel like I’ve been transported in time.

My current, longer term job was hell at first until I figured out the rules and optimized the perfect dosages of caffeine and food. If I feel dizzy I eat a snack and if I get anxious/overwhelmed/brain fog I drink my tea. Now my job is just tolerable. I almost quit four different times in the first month, I was exhausted with day after day of constant failure. Luckily I had several excellent side-kicks to talk me off the ledge, after the three month mark at the job things started to stabilize and even start improving. I hate learning by trial and error, it seems crazy to me that anyone can learn that way, by just being thrown into the mix. You try your very best and then people tell you what you’re doing is wrong over and over. I tried working at a preschool once, and got in trouble so many times, for breaking all these rules I didn’t know, that I quit after a week. At this current job, to succeed, I have to turn off all my feelings and all my autonomy, I’m reduced to a typing robot. My boss is always right, even when she’s wrong, and I am often blamed for things I didn’t do. The only thing that keeps me there is that it’s a really good learning opportunity. But it’s hard to sum up the energy to pretend to care about my coworker’s granddaughters or the art class they’re taking when I have to turn off all my caring about anything just to get my job done with the least mistakes. I can’t just turn on my feelings midday for thirty minutes at lunch time and then turn them back off. I know maybe 10/50 of people’s names and I work there 25 hours a week with all of them.

My therapist told me to work on making more connections with people, it’ll be to my advantage in my career. So I’m trying to work on saying yes and engaging.

You can always tell a real friend: when you’ve made a fool of yourself he doesn’t feel you’ve done a permanent job.”

— Laurence J. Peter.

Unpopular opinion, but I really dislike holidays. Don’t get me wrong, not “the holidays,” just “holidays” themselves. The mutual time off that friends and family have around Thanksgiving and Christmas is great, but I’m pretty sure that being forced to sit still through conversations and dinners and opening gifts one by one is a freakin’ torture designed specifically for me. Having conversations can be the worst part. People talk SO SLOWLY sometimes and they tend to repeat the conversational point they just made in different phrasing while they figure out what to say next. Super unnecessary. The worst is getting cornered into talking about something I’m not interested in (which is anything that’s not related to science). Sometimes though, it’s not the the anxiety of feeling trapped by uninteresting or slow moving topics that gets me, I can usually fight through that and make an acceptable exit ASAP. Sometimes my brain sabotages me, when there are multiple conversations happening at the same time or when it gets too loud in a room. A switch flips and I go from trying to keep up to being instantly overwhelmed by noise, my mind blurs and I get super anxious and I lose track of what’s happening around me. My ears physically throb, like my pulse is drowning out the sound. It sucks. I don’t have control over it, and a lot of the time I have to get up and do something immediately: my go-to is to frantically start doing dishes or any other task that looks normal to dispel that anxious energy. I used to drink insane amounts of alcohol to cope with it, but the hangovers got pretty vicious by the ripe old age of 22, and I really don’t like who I become when I drink. I get promiscuous and loud and impulsive, I say and do dumb shit, and I don’t have an off switch, I just keep drinking. So I quit. And now even half a drink gives me a raging headache, pretty good incentive for staying away from it.

I think most of my friends are pretty accepting of who I am, I will never be at their parties (the ear throb is legit) but I will always be down for a ski trip. Sometimes I’m hyper and sometimes I just want to watch Netflix for three hours. But also it’s very rare that I feel I’ve totally opened up who I am with them. I’m afraid that if I let that last piece of my guard down, and showed them who I really am, that I would be rejected, like truly rejected because it’s just me at that point, not a guarded version. My brain takes rejection very seriously, it likes to read it into really random scenarios: I was absolutely crushing at science jeopardy in seventh grade and I had my my elbows propped on the table with my fingers kinda in front of my face, when this kid Travis gently poked fun “are you praying right now?” Instead of giving him shit right back or even just saying “no,” I gave him the classic deer-in-the-headlights look. Did he really think I was that dumb, that I needed to pray to win at science jeopardy? Dang, I was doing something weird with my hands, now he thinks I’m a psycho. My brain instantly went deep into a rejection spiral. Or a contemporary example: the other day my best friend said he bought a ticket to visit Thailand with his buddy. I immediately felt like crying and had to make up some excuse to leave the conversation. I think rationally, a friend should’ve been excited for him, but my brain punched me in the face with “you’re not good enough and he doesn’t like you enough to have asked you to go.” Like WTF brain, you are literally going to Mexico in a month without this friend, why did you decide to cause pain? It goes back to childhood I think, or maybe I’ve just been brainwashed by my excellent therapists. But when I was a kid I had best friend after best friend suddenly flip one day and start ignoring me, hardcore, like I literally haven’t talked to any of them since. The first two flipped when I was nine, the next one when I was thirteen, and the final one when I was fifteen. I added layer after layer of armor around who I really was with each rejection (I still really don’t have no idea why any of them bailed, and I’m an adult with a decade of life between these experiences and now). Now, I struggle really hard to take that armor off and to be myself. I kind of lost who I was under the weight of all those layers. I learned how to get through social situations by trial and error, a social roulette if you will. Try saying or doing something, and if it flops, it will be burned in your memory to never try again. I would just watch all these people around me interacting, from inside my fortress, trying to figure out how they just say and do the right things, the acceptable things. I would copy their styles of humor and speech and mannerisms, try them out and blend them together to chameleon into the background of every group event. I literally created this bland human to showcase to the world, someone who was the average of every situation, no one actually knew the real me for many years. I learned to slowly open up, to surround myself with people I felt safe enough to do so. I even created a code word with that friend going to Thailand, in case I get an emotional kidney-punch again, so that I can get out of the conversation and let the emotions burn hot (they only last a few hours, max) and not say or do something dumb (like try and end our friendship). We’ll see how it goes.

“Seize the moment. Remember all those women on The Titanic who waved off the dessert cart.”

— Erma Bombeck.

I’ve got food issues. So many. I remember being ten and so excited I after a long soccer match that someone had given me a doughnut. It was my favorite kind (maple frosting) and I planned to savor it the whole drive home. As soon as we got out of sight of my team though, my mom took the doughnut from me and threw it in the trash, I wasn’t allowed to eat that kind of food, not for any health reasons, but simply because my mom was a little health-crazed. I like to blame her for my issues, but in reality 2/3 of the issues are totally my own, and I share the blame with her for the other 1/3, she started ’em but I did the propagation. My therapist says I have orthorexia, which I had heard of but I assumed I wasn’t “bad enough” to merit a legitimate label. In my mind you have to be on the verge of hospitalization to get help. I don’t know why that is, but the more I thought about it, and the more I tried to purposefully break my food rules, the more I realized that I had a serious problem.

My issues stem from four places: assigning morals to foods (good and bad for you), terrible taste, weird rules that I haven’t consciously developed but are now law nonetheless, and can’t handle the texture

1. Morals: this one is tricky because the “good” foods are also the ones that are healthy and make my body objectively (think spinach/sweet potatoes vs chips/chocolate), but as a general rule my emotions are based upon what I eat, and that’s where I take it too far. If it’s been a good few days, all good food, I feel pretty happy and relaxed at baseline. If I’ve been breaking the rules and eating bad foods though, my baseline emotions are shame and disappointment. And I also take it to the point of irrationality, like yes clearly having a carrot is better than eating a spoonful of frosting, but for me eating a regular potato instead of a sweet potato would feel similar to choosing that frosting spoon, or eating brown rice with my meal would be just absolutely crazy.
2. Taste: Ok, we’ve all got foods we don’t like, but the points have been tallied and I take the title of “pickiest eater I’ve ever met” for many of my friends. Bell pepper, melons, coffee, dark chocolate, eggs, anything cooked in canola oil, seaweed… the list goes on. I try to spin it as “yay, that means more food is left for you!” But for some reason certain people take it on as their personal vendetta to try and get me to eat these foods, “c’mon it’s great, just try a bite, you’ll like it.” Ummmmm NO THANKS Karen, I’ve given bell pepper a hundred tries and it’s still disgusting. I can freaking smell if a bell pepper even enters the room. Please leave me alone as I am not bothering you whatsoever you psycho.
3. Random Rules: I don’t like it when my food touches, so I usually eat off two bowls and a plate for every meal (thank god for dishwashers). If my food does have to touch, like at a dinner party, I try to keep it as separate as possible, no touching. I don’t like foods with multiple textures, like a salad with random veggies sprinkled in or most sandwiches (burgers are the exception, as long as the meat is well done, yum). I also eat my food in a certain order, from least favorite to most favorite items. Trail mix is a good example of my weirdness, it’s actually a reverse of my normal bad to good order though: cashews first, then one almond with two M&M’s, then 1.5 peanuts to one M&M, then all the leftover raisins and peanuts all in one mouthful. I get inordinately angry when people pick through the bag, mining for the good stuff, just buy a bag of M&M’s if you’re going to do that you heathen.
4. Texture: This one is weird, mostly I just avoid these foods because I don’t like how they feel in my mouth, but a few actually make me gag from the gnarly texture. I don’t like breads or cakes or buns of any kind. I don’t like cooked leaves like spinach or kale. Cottage cheese, I tried it for the first time this year, horrible experience. Any meat that is less cooked than aggressively well done, throw it back on the barbecue for another hour or so.

Pretty much I only eat about ten different things if I’m at home. If someone cooks for me I don’t mind eating new vegetables or meats, but I HATE cooking. Cooking is really hard, I find it hard to motivate to get to the grocery store and then take an hour to prepare food, when I could just open a can of beans and eat a pile of leaves with some feta. The reward level is too low for me to invest time in preparing a meal, when the more readily available food is just fine taste-wise. Plus I have a habit of accidentally leaving burners or ovens on, and burning stuff because I get bored and try to multitask and then forget what I was doing in the first place. The only things I eat: yogurt with berries, apple and peanut butter, spinach and feta, corn tortilla quesadillas, frozen banana and milk smoothies, popcorn with nutritional yeast and butter, barbecued chicken (if my dad cooks it), tuna with mayo and pickles, most fruits, and sweet potatoes. I like cold stuff and crunchy stuff and chewy stuff, I want to be entertained during a meal, plus mushy is boring and gross.

Right now I’m working on getting more calories in my body, especially more protein calories. My therapist says my hunger signals don’t work right anymore, after ignoring them for so long, so I have to try and eat every three hours. It’s really hard and it makes my stomach hurt sometimes, right now I’m working on eating one protein bar during the 6-7 hours that I’m at work. 50% success rate my first week on the protein bar initiative, but I’m going to keep trying.

Orthorexia Definition (stolen from the internet, just for you)

• Compulsive checking of ingredient lists and nutritional labels
• An increase in concern about the health of ingredients
• Cutting out an increasing number of food groups (all sugar, all carbs, all dairy, all meat, all animal products)
• An inability to eat anything but a narrow group of foods that are deemed ‘healthy’ or ‘pure’
• Unusual interest in the health of what others are eating
• Spending hours per day thinking about what food might be served at upcoming events
• Showing high levels of distress when ‘safe’ or ‘healthy’ foods aren’t available
• Obsessive following of food and ‘healthy lifestyle’ blogs on Twitter and Instagram
• Body image concerns may or may not be present

“If anyone here believes in telekinesis, raise my hand.”

— Kurt Vonnegut.

I can hear dogs barking but the room is too quiet, it’s too hot but I need the weight of the blankets to sleep, the sheets smell weird and I can’t get the pillows right and there’s light coming through the window. The more I can’t sleep the more anxious I get about the sleep I’m missing. I hate snoozing anywhere but my own bed. Other people’s houses are the worst, they have strange sounds and smells and they just don’t feel right. You wouldn’t expect it, but some of the best sleep of my life has been in the back of my truck at a trailhead with all the windows open. It’s a safe perch in there, with all my own bedding, the cool breeze on my face. But even in my own room at home I have bad nights, especially when I’m all wound up before going to sleep, coming home from a concert or a dinner party or the like, my ears ringing and the anxiety buzzing. Sometimes even when I have perfect conditions (no light, only the sounds of the forest, every window thrown open) my mind still spins and makes me feel dizzy. My brain kaleidoscopes between images too fast for me to keep up with, it feels like watching that horrible boat scene from Willy Wonka for nine hours. I’m so tired but I can’t truly sleep, I’m ping-ponging back and forth between dream and wake, on edge the whole night. Basically, it sucks. Luckily when I have the conditions right, I usually sleep really well. That makes for tricky cohabitation with a significant other though, at their place I don’t really sleep and then I feel tired and nauseous and irritable the next day and not really inclined to be around them. I’ve tried melatonin, benadryl, valerian root (yuck), hot tea, and nothing seems to work other than finally being exhausted enough on the fourth night that I sleep soundly for one night before starting the cycle over again. I like sleeping with long sleeves and pants (bare skin is too much brain input), I like sleeping with the room at subarctic temperatures (so I can pile on the blankets, helps with dizziness), I like sleeping with specific pillows (none of that fluffy down stuff for me, I don’t understand why anyone would buy a pillow that flattens as soon as you put your head on it). But I’ve found that literally no one on earth shares these exact preferences with me, so I’m still working out how exactly to manage sleep overs. It turns out that waking up looking and acting like an angry wolverine isn’t conducive to lasting relationships.

Sometimes, I don’t feel like I’m “bad enough” to seek help, for sleep problems or for any mental or physical ailment or with tasks I’m struggling with. I constantly compare myself to others, both my positive and negative attributes, and for some reason I always compare myself to the best. Like, I’m a student and a skier and I like playing the guitar, and I’m pretty good at all of those things. But I compare my academic skills to the most crazed of brainiacs, my skiing skills to the sponsored athletes, and my guitar skills to professional musicians. So I’m always falling short. It’s tricky, because individually I know could become the best at any one thing, so I know my upper skill limit is unbounded, but in reality I do a lot of different things and so there’s not enough time and energy to be the best at anything. Logically that makes sense, but in day to day I forget and feel like I’m constantly underachieving. This “never being good enough” manifests in a lot of ways. I feel bad going to talk with my therapist because in reality, I’m functional, and there are other people on her wait list that are probably less functional and more deserving of that time slot (but I’m selfish and I’m keeping it). I may have gotten really anxious and had to leave when our three person card game turned into five because it got too loud and overwhelming, but hey, at least I have friends. I only eat maybe ten different food items, all other foods have the wrong texture or taste or I’m afraid of them because they’re “bad”, but hey, I’m maintaining my weight and eating really healthy. I might space out in every conversation and have the working memory of a goldfish, but hey, I made it through university with a 3.8 GPA. Like in my mind to deserve help, I need to have zero friends and to be malnourished and to drop out of college, it’s totally messed up. Anyway, enough of the pity party, I’ve got to go open every window to prepare my cryo chamber for optimal sleep.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Switzerland to see what the army does with those wee red knives.”

— Billy Connolly.

I find it hard to pay attention. Actually, I find it impossible to pay attention. There is no conscious thought that could possibly direct that willful attentiveness for any length of time. Either I’ve spent four hours straight researching polar bears and now I’m too hypoglycemic to cook food or I accidentally zoned out five seconds in to what you were saying to me and now I’m desperately trying to figure out what you’re talking about before you stop talking and I’m expected to reply. I don’t even realize when my attention wanders, someone says “best of both worlds” and then I’m off on a Narnia thought tangent with the wood between the worlds and what I’d do if I ended up there, and how I wouldn’t make the same mistakes that the Pevensie children did, and what I would pack and… BAM. I’m snapped back into reality and realize I have no idea how long I’ve spaced out. When I zone out, I zone out 110%. My brain tunes out all the sound and visuals of reality until I’m watching and listening to a 3D movie in my head that my thoughts bump into and alter like a cliched version of a psychedelic trip. I’ll make facial expressions and movements and even whisper without realizing it, like I’m physically in the scene in my brain. I’m not in control of what I’m seeing though, I’m along for the ride for better or for worse, I can’t choose what gets played. It’s like you combined the autoplay feature on youtube with the “random article” button on wikipedia and threw them in a kaleidoscope. This makes it frustrating to try and explain my ideas to people, none of my thoughts are in word format, they’re this complex swirl of emotions and visuals. Talking about abstract concepts for me feels like when I’m listening to a foreign language, translating it to English in my head, thinking about it, translating it back, and then speaking it. “Why do we respect the dead more than the living?” My brain pulls up swirling visuals of Dia de Los Muertos and the Founding Fathers, there’s this emotion running through me (no idea how to name it) that I get during the christmas holidays when all my family is around and I feel warm and happy, I replay the audio and visual from a funeral I attended from ten years ago and a new emotion of loneliness runs through me. And from that I answer “because they can’t defend themselves and because we’re scared of death.” You couldn’t ask me how I distilled that answer from the crazy acid trip my brain goes on, despite my twenty years of experiencing the process, I still have no freakin’ clue.

Sometimes though, I can use this crazy method of brain function to my advantage. I can occasionally recall things because the images of them swim forward in my visual landscape and I literally just describe what I’m seeing. “How many molecules of oxygen does ozone have?” Instantly the molecule appears in my mind and I know the answer by “seeing” it. Or other times I’m uncomfortable, whether it be during a long workout or at a party, and the slip out of reality into these vivid daydreams gives me a few minutes of relief. I love listening to engaging stories that people tell, I get to “watch” it happen, it’s akin to watching television. Pretty cool for an introvert such as myself. Unless it’s a particularly graphic story and then it’s like “whoaaaaaa buddy I did not want to watch you skiing naked.”

Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming, getting snapped back to reality. It seems like my brain has a mind of it’s own, flipping the switch at random times back and forth, daydream, reality, daydream, reality, daydream. It does that with all sensory stuff actually, that random flip between polar opposites. Sometimes I get into my truck and I can’t turn the music up loud enough, I’m listening and yelling along to the lyrics and I’m overflowing with happiness, and then all of a sudden what felt great suddenly hurts like none other. My ears physically throb, the sounds all blend together, and that good feeling I had splinters under the wave of anxiety to turn it off, turn it off, turn it off. The same thing happens during conversation with any group of people over four of us, sometimes their conversation suddenly is too much for my ears, they throb in time with the words said but I can’t distinguish anything that’s being said, I’m fighting to stay still through this weird type of pain. It happens with touch too, a back rub goes from the best thing ever to feeling like sandpaper in an instant. I’ll get a paper cut and whine about how much it hurts, and later in the day I’ll look down and realize I’ve been pressing on the cut to make it hurt more without realizing it. Sometimes I’ll stare into the sun because it feels good to have that intense light shining into my eyes (yeah, yeah, and I run with scissors too) and other times I barely make it outside squinting and with sunglasses. I have no clue why. Maybe the stork that delivered me to my parent’s doorstep flew through some low pressure on the way over, accidentally shook me up in the turbulent air of the thunderstorm while it flew at top speed dodging the lightning bolts crackling down around it.