Just another reminder that The Spastic Blog has changed it’s name to My Gordian Knot and moved to another web page(still in WordPress) due to my discovering that Spastic is an ablist slur. To continue receiving articles, please follow the new blog instead. This Website will be taken down January first.
My New Site
Two or Three days ago I found out that the title of my blog contains an ableist slur. Being human I didn’t want to change it because of the incredible amount of stress and inconvenience I thought it would cause me and I kept trying to find a way to justify it to myself. But I really couldn’t stop worrying over this. It may be difficult and stressful to fix this problem, but it’ll be more stressful for me not to (thanks for nothing conscience) Besides changing it is the right thing to do.
Unfortunately, that meant creating a new name, a new facebook page, a new twitter account, a new email for my blogs, and an entirely new website with a new URL and everything. It also means new business cards, which actually made me cry a little. Five hundred new and now useless business cards :(. But my mom is helping me get new ones, so that’s one good thing.
I actually thought it would take a lot more work than it did. I was expecting days of moving files and changing over emails and things like that (thanks to my clinical anxiety and a sleepless night) but actually, the hardest part was deciding on new names.
Instead of the offensive ‘The Spastic Blog’ my new site is called ‘My Gordian Knot’ in honor of the ridiculously tangled mass of thoughts and emotions that is my poor anxious and depressed brain. All the articles have been imported from the old site and it’s all ready for you to read. So, if you’d still like to follow me, and I hope you will, just head over to http:\\mygordianknot.home.blog (yay I just learned how to insert links into my blog!)
I am still going to take a week off to decompress, but I’ll be back next Monday with more posts. For now, you can enjoy the old ones or check out my original short stories on my other blog Homespun Stories (formerly The Spastic Storyteller) at homespunstories.home.blog
Thank you for your understanding.
Rebecca Fahrudeen
How I Deal With Waiting
I have a hard time being patient sometimes. For me those times are accompanied by being stuck in a situation where I have nothing to do but wait. And I mean literally nothing to do. I end up frustrated and feeling like my time is being wasted. So what I try to do is always have something on me that I could do to occupy my mind.
That could be e-books mindless games, some way to work on my blogs and my goals, clearing my emails, doing my affirmations, working on improving my skills. When you can fill the time you have to spend waiting with something either entertaining or productive, you can find it much easier to bear the time between then and what you want.
If it helps you can make a list of little things you can do while waiting to help further your work or other goals, like paying bills online, clearing out your emails, things like that. You can even just take the time to research something related to your goals.
This is true for either short-term waiting or long-term waiting. Mindfulness is also a useful tool for these situations. Meditation, guided imagery and breathing exercises can help to both occupy your time and help you to remain calm. Daydreaming is also useful in these situations. But most of all there’s radical acceptance.
Radical acceptance is when you stop fighting against things you can’t control, like traffic, the lateness of another party, weather delays, the speed of the DMV and accept that this is just how it’s going to be. Then you can shift your focus from fervently willing things to go faster, to finding ways to occupy your time. This also helps when your phone and internet stops working ( usually a recipe for instant panic.)It enables you to move on to the next thing without wasting time on regret.
When you see me sitting quietly, calmly, just waiting without concern for whatever I’m waiting for, all this is why.
That Was Easier Than I Expected
Well, it seems that It only took me a couple hours to take care of everything from the switch. Instead of the offensive ‘The Spastic Blog’ my site is now called ‘My Gordian Knot’. All the articles have been imported from the old site and We’re ready to go on our way. I am still going to take a week off to decompress, but I’ll be back next Monday with more posts. For now, you can enjoy the old ones or check out my original short stories on my other blog Homespun Stories (formerly The Spastic Storyteller) at homespunstories.home.blog
If you’d still like to follow me, head over to mygordianknot.home.blog and click follow. Thank you for your understanding.
I’m Moving\ Changing The Blog
Two or Three days ago I found out that the title of my blog contains an ableist slur. Being human I didn’t want to change it because of the incredible amount of stress and inconvenience it would cause me and I kept trying to find a way to justify it to myself. But I really couldn’t stop worrying over this. It may be difficult and stressful to fix this problem, but it’ll be more stressful for me (thanks for nothing conscience) Besides changing it is the right thing to do.
Unfortunately, that means creating a new name, a new facebook page, a new twitter account, a new email for my blogs, and an entirely new website with a new URL and everything. It also means new business cards, which actually made me cry a little. Five hundred now useless business cards :(. But my mom is helping me get new ones, so that’s one good thing. It also means a butt load of stress for me, so I’m going to be taking a break from blogging for a week. I’ll put up another post here when the new blog is ready and link you to it.
Thanks for following and bearing with me, and I hope you all follow me over to the new blog.
Rebecca Fahrudeen
Isms and Individuals
It’s 2 am and I can’t sleep so I was looking up blog posts to read. The last ones being feminist ones because as a woman I’m interested in a movement created to make my life less shitty, unfair and oppressive. And it got me to wondering, when will the day come when people’s flaws are attributed to them and not the entire movement and ideology they are associated with?
There’s this thing I noticed where leaders and spokesmen aren’t allowed to have flaws. The existence of imperfection is used to invalidate everything they stand for. This is especially true for anyone who’s not rich, white or male in this country. In fact the further away from rich white male you get the more perfect you’re required to be to be listened to at all by society at large.
There’s also this tendency to have an all or nothing view of an individual and their thoughts and ideas and policies. It’s like there’s this belief that if you believe and support one part of what a person says and stands for you’re validating everything they say and stand for and if you disagree with one thing you’re helping others to invalidate everything else about them.
When are we going to give ourselves and others the human right to imperfection? When are we going to accept that we can agree with someone without validating everything they say and think. When are we going to accept that we can disagree with some things a person says without saying everything they stand for is also wrong.
There’s so much rage and frustration and stress and we all tend to lash out at each other pushing each other further and further back into ideological corners. It’s not just in politics it’s in every movement and it’s just so toxic and harmful we have to learn to stop.
We have to stop painting people as villains and hero’s and allies and enemies and start seeing them as individuals first and foremost. What’s more when are we going to start seeing people as human?
Everyone is just trying to survive. Some people don’t need to try as hard and some people, alot of people are just treading water. Way too many of us are drowning. When people are drowning they’ll grab for anything, and do anything even climb on another person to try and stay alive, even if that person dies.
We keep looking at other drowning people that grab the wrong thing or are drowning other people to stay float and see something else. We see villains standing in shallow water drowning people for pleasure. But they’re not they’re panicked human beings consumed with self preservation.
Sure there are some mother fuckers on yachts shouting to those treading water to look at those bastards struggling in the water lest they drown. But they’re more concerned about keeping people from trying to get on their boat.
Christ I think I’ve extended this metaphor enough. The point is that most of us are struggling, some of us are doing terrible things because we think we need to in order to survive and some people will latch onto anything that helps keep them afloat. Racism, bigotry, mysogyny, the belief that America is a meritocra cy. The belief that trans women are a tool of the patriarchy to discredit or steal attention from feminism. Or the belief that feminism is about destroying men.
I wish we could all just try to work on getting everyone to a place where fear does not rule our lives and cloud our judgement.
I want everyone to be fed, clothed, housed, protected from harm, medically and mentally cared for with security and even handedness. I want people to know that they always will be. And then we can all be free to think without fear or panic. We can afford to look at the things that helped keep us afloat and not be afraid of drowning if we discard them.
I dunno. Maybe working towards everyone’s mutual survival and basic needs is a tall order, but everyone deserves to be able to live. And that’s the only way I can think of to make it so we can all afford to treat other people as human beings.
The Name of the Game
So I’ve found out two unpleasant things this weekend. One that there are a bazillion vampire novels with the name ‘Bite Me’. And two that I have accidentally titled my blog with a word that’s an incredibly offensive slur in the U.K. and Australia. This fucking blows.
I was distressed and worried all day yesterday about the fact that I called my blog the spastic blog. I mean I’m definitely not using it as a slur or making fun or insulting anybody. At best I’m poking fun at myself. I went back and forth all day on whether or not I should change it. On one hand I just bought five hundred business cards, and on the other I may want to expand my reach into the UK and Australia one day and expand my potential market.
Now, let’s face it neither of these things is the right way to think about something like offensive words. I don’t want to insult anyone, but the only person I would possibly insulting is me. But let’s face it. This word is not an ablist slur here, that’s not the definition and it’s not how I’m using it. This is an entirely different country and expecting another country not to use a word because yours happened to turn it into something offensive and insulting is kind of, well it’s not a thing you do. After all (I hope to god) we Americans don’t demand that people in the U.K. stop calling cigarrettes fags because we managed to turn the word fag into an offensive slur for gay men in our country.
I called my blog The Spastic Blog for a reason. Because it was a record of my thoughts and efforts and both are generally disorganized, inconsistent, random, of varying intensity, and off and on again and probably always will be. Or in other words, it’s a blog where I just crap out my thoughts and feelings whenever. The same with my short story blog. The word is just very me. Hopefully one day it won’t be so much, but there you have it. So I’m not going to change it and if I lose viewers that’s fine, but other countries don’t get to define my words for me. I will certainly remember not to bring it up in polite conversation if I go over there, which let’s face it, probably won’t happen. , and I don’t see any reason to call anyone that so, there. We have to be on the receiving end of tolerating cultural differences sometimes, right? So I’m leaving it.
The problem with my book title, though is a purely financial/ business one. Do I leave the name as it is and risk letting it get lost in a sea of Bite Me’s? Or do I rename it? I can fairly easily, but what do I rename it to? What kind of title implies humor and fits a vampire book about a young woman getting repeatedly injured and inconvenienced by vampires because of her rare blood type? I’ve come up with a few ones: A Rare Vintage, Damn Vampires…, More than I can Chew, Pain and Probies, and This Bites. The first one seems a little too dramatic. the third is not quite there and the fourth doesn’t really seem vampiric. I dunno. What do you think? Do you have any suggestions?
How Did I Get Here?
That sounds a little like a complaint, to be honest, but this time it’s just an honest question of wondering. On a thread in a blogging forum on facebook, I asked a question and it ended up into a long conversation with someone where I sort of made a mini post about it being okay to grieve. Someone commented on it and asked how I come up with what I said and stuff like that and that really got me thinking. I kind of answered but my brain is still going and I didn’t want to turn that thread into more of a ‘me’ fest that it was starting to be.
How did I get to this point? How did I get to believing and understanding and knowing what I think I do? It might be relevant to the people who are reading I guess in terms of credentials, I dunno. But I decided to blog about it, If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve seen me go from okay to a complete and utter breakdown this summer. I do not have it all together, even remotely. That is one thing I’m never going to claim. But I am intelligent. I always have been. And I’m creative and sometimes intuitive and think outside the box. I love reading and I love learning and for as long as I can remember I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with me.
I started out reading self-help books up the ying yang. My favorite was Deepak Chopra’s The Way of The Wizard, which I thought was something else when I picked it up, but it was great and inspiring and did me no good and I can’t remember a word of it now. I’m kind of afraid to read it again in case I find it as vapid and limited as a lot of self-help books look to me now. This was before the internet was as useful as it became, and so self-help books from the library were it. Nothing helped. Nothing. I eventually grew so sick of them that I couldn’t even look at them anymore. They just frustrated and angered me so much and I couldn’t pinpoint why.
Then I went to college up in Connecticut (in my early twenties) and studied psychology, sociology, criminology, and as many other social science classes as I could fit in. I was hooked, but I was also severely depressed and anxious and untreated and having trouble taking care of myself and my living environment and my daughter. I had to leave college and ended up crashing so hard I ended up in Maryland, homeless in a shelter, trying to find treatment for my mental illnesses.
I ended up in a day program and a residential program where I had my first classes. They were kind of terrible. I was in my twenties so I went to the young adult class, which consisted of a very large jovial young man having the same three conversations over and over and over again. I’d memorized them at one point. I can still remember ‘That Donald Faisan he’s a trip.’ It drove me insane. All our outings were being piled into the van and driven around for a few hours, not to anywhere, or anything, we’d just drive. I hated it so much. I just brought notebooks and wrote and tried not to yell at the big guy to shut up. I succeeded but my blood pressure didn’t fare too well.
I’ve been in an eating disorder clinic, with Shepherd-Pratt, and been to their partial hospitalization program. I’ve been in DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy) groups. I’ve been to various other day programs that actually taught stuff. I’ve had intellectual discussions with my doctors. I’ve researched topics and articles and psychological questions online going to reputable sources such as psychology today or the new york times and places like that for the information. I’ve spent hours in deep introspection trying to figure out where things went wrong, who to blame, what to do.
Even in high school I was a little junior psychiatrist. I think one of my most mortifying moments was when I was in high school and ended up telling my dad I wasn’t a virgin anymore and that I had decided that I slept with a couple guys because he didn’t pay me enough attention. I still don’t know what I the hell I was thinking. But I guess self-help books and talk show psychiatry had a hell of a lot to do with it. Plus my being a friggin dumbass teenage idiot.
Anyways I have been studying in one form or another psychology, mindfullness, self care etc since I was a teenager, so like 25 years. And I’ve had my own experiences and moments of improvement and a general upward progression, granted with some severe dip. I mean I’d never have been able to do this blog at all even five years ago. I learned hard lessons, and am still learning, will always be learning. I know so much, but the problem is that it’s incredibly hard to do practical applications of psychological concepts. This science is so incredibly new. Treatment is often a lot of guesswork and trial an error, and that’s with medication, the most scientifically sound part of it. We still don’t always know exactly what works with whom and why it does or doesn’t.
It’s been incredibly hard for me to realize that I would have to find out what works for me and that it probably wouldn’t be a cookie cutter solution presented to me. And that’s because I have my own unique personal set of problems and strengths, and challenges and limitations and advantages, all of which affect my life. And that’s not even taking into account what I’ve learned about how diet and gut flora imbalances can also affect your mood and energy. The recognition of how mind and body aren’t actually as separate as everyone thinks is only recently becoming acknowledged in the psychology world and it’s not nearly widespread enough of an idea.
I’ve been studying and experimenting with psychological concepts and self-improvement techniques both in school and out of it for most of my life. The only thing I’ve been doing longer is writing. Hopefully, I’ll find my way into a niche that allows me to live and prosper and grow into the person I was meant to be. Even more hopefully, chronicling my journey on my blog, the highs and the lows, will help people with their own journeys. Maybe they can help me with mine, too.
Out Of My Depth
So I’ve been researching how to better operate my blog, get more readers, improve the content and so on and so forth, and I have to say, it’s all a little overwhelming. I don’t understand half the vocabulary. I can’t afford half of the things they’re suggesting. And it just seems like such a huge pile of things I need to do and I’m not entirely sure how or when to get it all done or in what order.
I know what SEO is now, search engine optimization, but I haven’t found any substantial information on how to do it anywhere. I know to do blog portals, blog carnivals and things like that but I don’t know where to find them or even what exactly they are. Googling blog portals just brings me to blog hosting sites or references to video games. I still don’t understand why I need to belong to an RSS feed or something. And any thought of dealing with html makes my eyes bug out.
Then there are things I definitely need, like the full edition of Grammarly which costs about a hundred something for a years subscription. Problogger subscriptions are the same, though that’s an iffy one on whether or not I really need it. The biggest one is Word Press. Apparently most applications or whatever that I need for services to help me maximize my blog potential are only available to me here with a business membership. Do you know how much a business membership costs? $25 a month and that’s in a yearly subscription payment of $300. I’d need five hundred dollars for this crap. And that doesn’t even cover content.
What is a pillar article besides some kind of how-to thing? Can I even do a pillar article? I’m not a professional, I’m not an expert on anything. Sure I have a few answers but they apply to me and that’s all I kind of know about them. Can a pillar article be a ‘how I do things’ article? I don’t even know. Then there’s copy blogging which no one I’ve tried to look up has given me a decent frickin’ answer about what it actually is, or an example. Except it involves selling things. I can’t sell things. I don’t use anything I can promote. I do everything the hard way usually by organizing and reorganizing blank sheets of paper.
I don’t know what I’m doing. I just don’t. I’m beginning to wonder if I ever will if I have what it takes to make this blog into anything. I mean it’s not just a hobby. I kind of hope to make it, well, self-sustainable at least, though I’m not sure how. Right now all I have for resources are time, effort, my cool b-day/xmas laptop, the internet, and my own world of struggles chaos and my attempts to tame it somehow. That’s not a hell of a lot. Oh well, I dunno. Maybe I just need to step back and just… keep doing what I’m doing, focus on the free stuff and write my ever loving heart out.
Still, I wish sometimes I wish it didn’t feel like I was constantly starting from last place.
Progress Report Affirmations
Back in June, I decided to try and redefine Affirmations and use them to help change my attitudes about myself and my situation. I have to be honest, it lasted for a few weeks, then petered out and then I started it up again when I was in the Crisis Bed back in August and September. So I’ve been doing them semi-regularly for three months or so. I think it’s about time to try to assess whether it’s had any positive effects on me or not.
I didn’t really think this through when starting to use them. How do you judge how well an affirmation works? How long do you have to repeat a single affirmation for it to have an effect? How would you know what kind of effect to attribute to an affirmation? I wasn’t very scientific about this. Of course, I wasn’t thinking of it in terms of a scientific experiment. I also wasn’t thinking of it in much greater terms than how do I get myself to actually do these things consistently. Then there’s the problem of that I often do a different set of affirmations every day based on what I’m struggling with at the time.
I understand the principles of how affirmations work. It’s paving more positive neural pathways in your brain to replace negative ones. So maybe if I take a look at some of the most frequent affirmations I’ve been using and which of my problems they address, I can try and see if I’ve made any progress in those areas. Alright, so what are the most frequent affirmations I’ve been writing down in the last 30 day period?
Alright so over the past thirty days or writing and forgetting to write affirmations, I used a total of twenty different affirmations. Eleven of them I used less than five times each, and the rest went from 9 to sixteen. So I’m going to use the top 5 affirmations to see how well it went.
#1 HARD WORK BREEDS GOOD RESULTS (19 uses)
This one was made to help encourage me in working on my blog and publishing my novel, especially when I started trying to post something every day (or as close to it as I can). I get nervous and I get tired and I tend to wonder if things are worth all the effort I’m putting in, you know. I have a habit of burning out and getting discouraged and quitting when I start something. I tried starting a newspaper in high school got discouraged and quit. I tried starting a few blogs or facebook page and ended up quitting. There are a whole bunch of factors, but I wanted to remind myself that even though it’s hard, good things will come of it. even if not the ones I expected.
I think I’ve been doing better the last couple of weeks going forwards. I’ve actually been putting more time and effort into working on my blogs. It’s helped that I’m learning things to do for it. My mood’s been up and down a lot so I can’t attribute this to the medication. At least some of it has to be due to a change in my attitude and the main thing I’ve been doing to attempt to change my attitudes and thought patterns are the affirmations, so with 19 repetitions I think it’s reasonable to say that this one’s helped.
2. I AM A CREATIVE INTELLIGENT RESOURCEFUL WOMAN CAPABLE OF SOLVING EVERY PROBLEM THAT COMES HER WAY. (9)
This one, as you can guess is a confidence builder. I’ve actually been using this one a lot since I started blogging and have felt like I needed it less and less lately. At first writing it down made me feel iffy at best, I knew it was true but did it really matter? Would other people see that about me? There are so many things that can get in the way. When I use it lately, though, I’ve been feeling more confident and determined and that’s a feeling I want to keep having. Hopefully, I’ll feel it more in my everyday life, for example when I go up to the front of the room during the morning meeting on Tuesday and talk to people about my blog and ask them for guest posts or story suggestions.
I’m still not as confident as I could be and it’s hard to muster at times, but how writing the affirmation makes me feel has gone from doubtful and insecure to confident and ready and that’s definitely an improvement in my thought patterns and emotional state. It’ll probably take a long time for me to get it really thoroughly ingrained though, but progress is progress, and I’ve definitely had progress.
3. I WANT TO EXERCISE AND EAT A HEALTHY DIET BECAUSE IT MAKES ME FEEL GOOD ( 9 uses)
It’s kind of hard to think of diet and exercise as anything but a torment, or ordeal we go through in order to reap the rewards of thinness and attractiveness. It’s presented that way everywhere except the people trying to get you to sign up to diet programs. It ends up easily being something you feel you should do or have to do. But I actually want to do these things for a dozen reasons that have nothing to do with my weight. A lot of them actually have a lot to do with my mental health. Especially gut health. It’s so easy to lose sight of these things, which are far more important to my wellbeing than weight loss.
Let’s see. I’m not sure how to judge this one. I still have hella negative feelings about diets and ‘lifestyle changes’ but the truth is that according to scientific research I have a right to. They rarely ever work more than temporarily. And the bouncing up and down of your weight this causes does more harm to your body physically than just staying your original weight would have. What’s more, it also increases your maximum body weight making you end up larger than you were before. I wish I had known that and never tried to diet in the first place. I might be way smaller now.
The thing is though, I am feeling better about making modifications and repairs to my current way of eating. And it’s easier for me to think about with less stress and self-condemnation. I’m not sure what the exact difference between eating because you have to and eating because you want to but I guess it’s entirely an attitude thing and I feel just fine about the thought of eating healthier and exercising (though I am struggling with going back to the gym for stupid vanity reasons and a fear of being asked why I was away so long) I think I’ve successfully separated the two from the ideas of weight loss and torture and being an ordeal to overcome. That’s an improvement. I mean I’m still having trouble eating healthy food, but it’s for other more practical reason not because of a negative attitude towards doing so. There hasn’t really been anything else that would change my attitudes besides the affirmation, and I have improved, so I’ll consider that a win.
4. HEALTHY FOOD IS DELICIOUS, FILLING AND SATISFYING
Yup, this is another food one. This one is reminding me about what I already know about healthy food. Especially as I’ve grown older and things don’t taste as bitter to me anymore. I love candy and chocolate and sweets and snacks and often have sugar cravings. I’d go for something sweet and unhealthy, and still do half out of habit. Even when what I’m really craving is something like grapes or string cheese or something, I’d grab a candy bar from the rack or some Little Debbie’s cakes. It wasn’t even satisfying but the thought was ingrained, junk food tastes better. but it doesn’t, not really, and I never believed that it was filling and it’s become less and less satisfying as time’s gone on.
It’s actually become a bit easier to admit to myself, that what I really want is some grapes, or borscht or mashed root veggies and stuff. I can’t always get them, but I can admit to myself that biting into a nice crisp sweet grape is a million times more satisfying than sucking on a root beer barrel. And it’s easier to remember at other times than when I had no real option but to eat the grapes because I didn’t have sweets like it used to be. I can remember it right now while sucking a root beer barrel because my intestines can’t handle any more prunes and I want something sweet. Now I just have to work on affording these healthy things that I more easily remember that I actually enjoy eating. Friggin’ A.
5. IF YOU’RE NO LONGER HUNGRY, OR THE FOOD NO LONGER TASTES GOOD YOU DON’T HAVE TO EAT IT.
Yeah, I have a hard time with this one. I hate food waste with a passion. I’ve been extremely hungry at times with little to no options for food so yeah. Plus there’s the whole clean plate club thing, and my eating disorder influenced habits. It’s very, very hard for me sometimes just dealing with food in general.
Well, I’m not nearly as obsessed with food as I used to be and don’t focus on it more than I have to, both for good and bad at the moment. So it’s hard to think of indicators of how far I’ve progressed. Well, I actually did, today, make up a can of pork and beans with some cut up chicken hot dogs for lunch. And I ate a bowl and it was delicious and I went back for more and emptied the rest of the pan into my bowl and realized that I was actually kind of full. Of course, it was followed by the thought that, yes I was full but it would still taste really good. Usually it ends there with me eating the rest of the food. But actually went to myself, nah, I can eat it later, and I left it for later. That’s a pretty significant improvement.
Of course, I’ve also been working on my gut health which has sharply reduced my food and sugar cravings in general, thus reducing my binging and desire to binge. So that might have something to do with it. So This one’s a little iffy on whether it’s what affected the change. Maybe, maybe not. either way, I still need to remember it. I think if I can remember it and can still stop myself when I’m in the middle of being stressed out, or emotional eating or something, then I can count it as a win. I’ll be watching out for this for next time.
I guess my affirmations are working pretty well. I can’t wait to see what further effects they have on me next month, or what I end up focusing on.
The Spastic Blog 