Makes you fly

(Gotta get up – Rich Mullins)

I learned a lot on Thanksgiving this year…

I learned that my bedside table which was also doubling as a tiny dresser was growing a very significant amount of some kind of yucky growth on the underside that was made of particle board…which explains why random things around that area kept having weird spots that I’d have to clean off…I mean, considering I’ve had mice and until recently significant humidity that kept my clothes and linens from ever fully drying it shouldn’t be that surprising, but also I really wanted it to last a little longer. Like sure, it has looked like it was on its last legs for multiple years and multiple moves, but when you only have a very few pieces of furniture it makes a big difference to not have it anymore. As I turns out, a Kleenex box is not a very effective bedside table – especially when you are mostly blind, ‘cause now in trying to grab my phone I’ve managed to yank almost all the Kleenexes out of the box…also, despite the thing looking like it was falling apart, it definitely required every single screw to be unscrewed in order to take the thing apart. Hulk smash was not an effective strategy.

I learned that if you offer space in your fridge for someone’s turkey you should put it in a bag or a pan or something…or at least not put it on the top shelf of the fridge totally uncontained unless you want to have another round of throwing everything away like you did not that long ago because of the mice. At least the refrigerator only has food and not furniture or other expensive and destroyable household goods…but yeah, I went through over half a roll of paper towels, half a container of sanitizing wipes, and a few more trash bags of contaminated food. And then I realized that I have cuts on my fingers and potentially should have been wearing gloves when mopping up the pools of turkey blood in the refrigerator so that my fingers weren’t swimming in possible salmonella. So if I die this week that is probably why. Lol. I am thankful that at least a few food items were sealed in plastic bags so they could be salvaged…’cause wasting food is something I avoid at almost all costs, but getting sick is an even higher priority.

I learned there is a reason you are supposed to let the bread rest before dumping it out of the pan…and ended up with a loaf of bread that got ripped in half…

And I learned that apparently although I am the kind of person that unplugs the dehumidifier when I’m not home or am going to bed in case of fire and the kind of person who turns the temperature way down in the winter and way up in the summer to save energy, I am also the person who gets distracted and leaves the burner on the stove on high for 12 hours…yep, noticed that when I could see a pretty blue glow when I got home in the evening. So that’s gonna be a fun bill to pay this month. At least nothing was close enough to set the place on fire…that would probably be more frustrating even if it may ultimately not be more expensive since people tend to help you replace all the things you need and want if you go through a fire. But, like, not that many people get to come home to the warm glowing warming glow of the stovetop…or of a house fire…but both are quite literally warming glows…my home sure was cozy and warm.

Mostly unrelated, but I recently completed ASHP’s Wellbeing Certificate course, and am now working my way through their leadership/management certificate, and while most of the curriculum in both courses is geared towards people who are actually in management and also most of the wellbeing course was soft skills that honestly most people already know anyway, the courses have been very validating. It feels so good to hear this is what a healthy (and legally sound) workplace looks like and this is what it does not look like, and this is what a good manager acts like and does not act like. It feels good to know definitively that what I experienced was very wrong (and not legal) and that what I yearned for was what should have been happening in the first place. I mean, like no, I shouldn’t need someone to tell me that what I went through wasn’t okay, but there was so much gaslighting that it can be hard sometimes to fully believe it. It is certainly a job-focused trauma response to feel like you are in a great position because you aren’t terrified walking into the hospital, but these courses have taught me that I legitimately should be able to expect to have a work place that is free of physical AND verbal abuse. There are so many other little things that made me want to hug little Wiggle Worm and let her know what she was experiencing was not an appropriate work place. It kinda also made me wish I’d been brave enough to stand up for myself and gotten outsiders involved…or at least to have demanded legitimate answers. My past trauma is what keeps me now from asking for things I want and need to better care for my patients. And it isn’t fair to my patients that my PGY-2 manager and RPD are getting in the way of bettering their care. But it took my longer than I’d like to admit, for example, to ask for access to the tracking board for the floor I was working on…but within about a day of asking I no longer had to click through super long lists of past present and future patients to find the ones I actually needed to review and what had easily become an hour long task of finding the relevant patients became about 3-4 minutes saving the rest of that hour for actually optimizing the care of my patients and/or working with my team…and I still have a list of similarly simple things that I haven’t gotten the bravery to ask, and a few bigger things that I’m not sure I’ll ever be brave enough to ask. But the validation in these courses of how a good manager should respond is a helpful part of healing and hopefully moving closer to what I need over time.

Refuse to Fear

(Get up, get in the game – don’t know the exact name of this song or who it’s by…just that I used to play it in DDR…”reject rejection and refuse to fear, believe the truth about you. Seize the moment ‘cause it’s very clear that you have got some living to do. Impossible you say. Impossible today. Maybe when, maybe when, maybe when we’re old and gray, but impossibility is only possibility waiting for someone like you to believe. Get up. Get in the game; it’s get up, get in the game. It’s get up, get in the game. It’s time to play).”

This week in my trauma group I felt less alone. While I really don’t want anyone to suffer so I’d really rather be the only one struggling, it felt so good to hear that I wasn’t the only one who never really escapes the fear. I’m not the only one constantly scanning for exits and running what if scenarios. I’m not the only one for whom even sleep isn’t an escape because I have nightmares surrounding being found. I’m not the only one who sometimes feels like every day her attempts at normalcy just dig her deeper into the hole trauma created that I don’t feel like I’ll ever fully escape. It just feels like someday I’ll be so deep I won’t even be able to approximate normal anymore…even though theoretically over time it is supposed to get easier. I’m not the only one struggling with a piece of me wanting justice yet a larger piece of me wanting to be the bigger person and extend grace and kindness to those who only wanted to hurt me.

And so with that…a big part of why it has been so long since I’ve posted is the intensity of my fear of being found. And I don’t want it to take over my life so I decided that it is time to put something out into the world again. I can’t hide forever. Or, well, I totally can hide forever, it just really isn’t good for me to do so…

I’ve got like 5 million (slight exaggeration) (or possibly more than slight) half written posts from the past like 2 months so I deleted all but one randomly selected post which is now here for your reading pleasure…lol…

Have you ever seen a news article so incredibly illogical that you have to go back and look at it in depth trying to make it make sense? And it makes even less sense the harder you try to make sense of it?

That was me recently. I saw a news article on how the United States perpetuated the pandemic. I don’t want to get into politics today, because that isn’t the issue I am talking about today, so I’m not going to discuss overall whether the United States response did or did not perpetuate the pandemic. What I am going to discuss is the (only) reason this article gave. See, according to this article, the United States perpetuated the pandemic by (gasp) starting to vaccinate their population before some other countries governments had even started to purchase vaccines. Therefore (according to the article) the pandemic got out of control because vaccine access wasn’t equal all over the world.

From a public health standpoint, this makes no sense.

From a look at the COVID statistics standpoint, this claim appears invalid.

Basically however you look at it there isn’t a standpoint in which this claim makes any sense at all.

Ideally would every country have started vaccinating their population as soon as possible, sure, but I’m also fairly certain that the United States was not the first country to start this initiative, so I’m very unclear as to how it is our fault when I’m fairly certain England was vaccinating their population long before we were. If vaccinating one group of people before another is a problem then surely it is the biggest problem in whoever does it first, not the people in the middle. Honestly, when this article brought up vaccination I initially thought they were going to finish their thought with it is our fault because we didn’t vaccinate enough people soon enough…because that could actually be a logical conclusion…but when it was the opposite I was like are you sure you don’t have dementia right now?

Another article I thought was particularly dumb recently was for another reason…the intent of the article was clearly to inflame people rather than to actually provide any real information…the article discussed the downsides of zoning (Mr. Jones owns this land but isn’t allowed to build what he want on his own land and can get in trouble if he tries to build a high rise shopping center and apartment duo building in an area zoned for single family homes or vice versa and that is clearly problematic)…which already didn’t make a whole lot of sense, because of the principle that your freedom end where mine begins, and also just for the personal responsibility aspect – you bought the land knowing how it was zoned, and if that isn’t what you wanted to do with that land you probably shouldn’t have purchased it. Plus, a high rise in a residential area isn’t going to go well because you’re going to make a lot of families unhappy and ultimately there is a good chance people will leave and people aren’t going to want to live in your high rise that is surrounded by a broken down ghost town, and without occupied homes or apartments nearby the stores are also going to fail…and similarly I doubt many people would intentionally purchase a single family home in the middle of an apartment complex, so your property value is going to plummet. But anyway, they also briefly recognized that they wouldn’t want to live in those situations and maybe you don’t either, so clearly we shouldn’t change the zoning in our neighborhoods, but we should all push for zoning to be eliminated in “other places.” And I was like, so your solution is that we shouldn’t inconvenience ourselves but it is okay to change other people’s situations…like do you realize that these other people are actual real live people who have real live feelings who also do not wish to be inconvenienced? Just ‘cause you don’t personally know them doesn’t mean that they don’t matter…and then the article ended by pointing out that a few cities had tried taking away zoning so clearly it was a great idea…what they failed to mention is the numerous stories that came out after those changes that shared that it really destroyed those cities – what were previously vibrant communities became areas no one wanted to live and homes people previously cared for and loved quickly became run down as people who cared about their community left.

Bad things always happen to *other* people until you are other people.

You know how you know your stress levels have risen too high even if they aren’t impacting your work yet? When you are crying because in the place you want to move there is a towel ring instead of a towel rod in the bathroom and you really wanted a towel rod, not a towel ring. Like looking back on that moment I can see like seriously girl? That is what you are going to get worked up over? But also, I know it isn’t really about a towel holding apparatus. And it isn’t about the irrational OCD that associates a towel ring with more germs in addition to being less visually attractive and less functional. It is about fear of being found and other general stress bubbling up until something small became the last straw…and then I reminded myself about when I was looking for apartments in college when I didn’t get a spot in the dorm my third year. I can remember many tearful nights that I was never going to find an apartment. Everything I looked at was both at the top of my price range and either disgustingly dirty or incredibly run down and falling apart…with the exception of one place that had a long waitlist. The day I was moving out of my dorm I saw one more apartment that was only cleanably dirty but with a price above every other place AND further away than other places, but in desperation I put in a deposit there too. As it turns out I eventually got an apartment that served me well before it was time to move back to school…(and the very first week a police man gave me a parking ticket but was kind enough to write a quick note on the back explaining the complicated parking rules in the area so I’d know how to not do that again)…But yeah, I know things will work out some way in the end, and if nothing else, I will certainly learn something in the process. I’m also remembering that almost nothing is permanent…although I’m hoping the cards play out in such a way that this can be my last move. I’m not sure it will, and I am fearful it won’t be sooner than I had hoped, but I know God has a plan and maybe my move into this place will open the door for someone who needs it more than I do who otherwise couldn’t move in if someone staying longer than me had moved in, and maybe it is giving me the skills to be better at navigating finding a new place to live in the future. I mean, I’ve had a lot of practice with that already, but I feel like it is different at every stage of life…

…and I gotta post this because I said close to a week ago it was time to be brave and hit post, and I am running out of hours to make that anywhere close to true that I would post within a week…(lol, although someone told me today the definition of courage is knowing something is going to hurt and doing it anyway. And the definition of stupidity is the same. So chew on that).