No, Bella. The candy is not for us.
Easy to teach to parents and kids!
Nobody gets it. No worries.
My best score yet. This thing’s addictive.
I still suck at the game where you guess which four words have a connection. And it’s not timed so I can sit there for an hour thinking about how stupid I am. I wish everything was timed. At least I would give up after a reasonable amount of time. It’s more exciting that way. Easier to make bets.
Spelling Bee is also so frustrating. No bets on that one. And it also needs a timer. My score always indicates I have reached an amazing level but then says I need five more levels in order to be competitive.
A friend on Facebook – an acquaintance, I guess- posted his scores one day in games other than Wordle and it was so tempting to do all the puzzles. That’s what got me. Peer presssure. So now I do anything short. It’s really fun. We just need timers on everything.
And I started watching one hour of a funny movie at night. That makes advancement far easier on the laughing front. And I’m so excited to see so much content out there. If you’re saying there’s nothing on, maybe you watch too much tv. I see a lot of stuff. And most of it looks pretty interesting and fun. Granted, not everything can be Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or Sopranos. But laughing is just really fun.
Here are some other highlights from last week as I contemplate the week ahead. Snippets from the diaries:
This past week was really fun for seeing old Reply All comics. I really appreciate when readers post those on social. It’s especially nice if it was funny or cute. It’s almost always true ten years later. And that is always a reassuring thought. It’s reassuring to know that the stupidity and laziness of ten years ago still rings true. : )
I love this cutie. Does anyone know who she belongs to? I really like her.
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Somebody on Reddit wondered about how to remember that OCD thoughts aren’t real necessarily and may just be in your head. I interpreted that very broadly to think about how I would answer it. So I thought about this question: how can you triage your thoughts instead of having to put up with them getting lodged in your head and looping?
Here is my response.
Write down the thought as soon as you have it. Call it anything, a note, notes, a journal or list as you go through your day. Write down your thought at the moment you have the thought. Use common words that are easy for you to remember. Make your own customized keywords that you can easily remember. You do not have to write a dissertation. Just jot down your thoughts in real time. It’s not poetry. At first. It’s just raw pieces at first. For some people.
Give it enough detail that YOU can come back to it later and understand what you are referring to. Capture the time and date. Done.
Then come back to it when you can and make a decision on what you think about it or how it feels or what you might say if the same thing happened to you. And write that down.
On future bad days, at the moment the thought comes up, jot it down. Now do a keyword search for your common words related to that thought. You will get a list with links of all the times you mentioned that. You mentioned it because you were having those thoughts. And you totally analyzed it so many times, you can see from your own documenting. So now you can just note that this is a thought that comes up a lot and this is how you deal with it. A record of what works and what does now work.
And maybe the writing has been therapeutic or insightful for you. Maybe for multiple reasons. Maybe it helps you to keep those great work ideas straight.
And for some of you, like me, the writing part becomes the most fun thing. You pleasure yourself by writing. And no, you perverts. I did not say I pleasure myself while writing. I did not. Not that there’s anything wrong with it.
The cool thing is that in addition to practicing daily writing of any kind, taking these notes of your thoughts means you have research data.
Because every day you are collecting research about your mind. Just search for one of your own customized common keywords – custom to whatever you’re searching for – and you should get a bunch of your writing dating back from whenever your started, a lot of it real time. You can tell how much you ate, drank, smoked, swallowed, licked, bit, oooh. Now it’s getting gross.
You get it. You can take a calendar, notes, list, a timeline, any recorded real time memories and gather the data to become poems or books or memoirs.
I’m sure that response had nothing to do with the question. Try it anyway. You might find it entertaining.
Happy Sunday evening.
I love watching funny movies now. Thank you, scientists.
xoxoxo, d and bella
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I didn’t want to die
There’s hope as long as you haven’t tried everything.
And you haven’t.
I only wanted to satisfy my really physically strong compulsion to jump from a window, a train platform or a roof in order to stop the recurring intrusive thoughts, images and movies of crashing my car that played constantly in my brain. I cannot say it any plainer. Or any more plain. Or plainly. I’m a writer so you get all the options.
I did not want to die. I was not suicidal. Although I literally at times felt I could not continue and often felt no interest in continuing because the quality of basic daily activities of working, commuting, socializing, eating, engaging and sleeping were increasingly compromised. To the point they affected my ability to do things I wanted to do. Even little things.
It’s confusing because it is confusing. Intrusive thoughts of violence, harm, death, suicide – they sound suicidal, right? But I didn’t want them to happen. I just thought they were inevitable and so I was trying to just get it over with already. If that makes sense. I was frustrated to the point that I couldn’t do anything but try to end it finally.
But when I was finally treated for intrusive thoughts, I got medication and treatment that almost completely stops the thoughts. Almost completely to the point that the rest is pretty eff-ing manageable.
That is why I keep urging you to keep trying to find more helpful descriptive wording to convey what you are experiencing until you feel that doctors and your health advocates and support system understand what you are actually experiencing. Suicidal is not necessarily the same as intrusive thoughts of killing yourself. And the treatment can make a big difference. I am proof. And I can even believe I can say I am HAPPY to report that. Yeah. It makes me happy in an uninterrupted way.
I am happy and I can feel it. Not every minute of every day. I didn’t discover something magical or illegal. I just discovered effective treatment for my worst symptoms of a condition I never knew I had but really suffered from.
And you might be able to get happy too.
If you haven’t tried everything, there’s still hope.
I’ll add the link to the video above as soon as it’s outside the paywall. It was for the 2023 Online Conference of the International OCD Foundation
xoxoxo, d and bell
Trigger Warning |
