A Life in Flux

I've entered into another period of great changes in my life. I've decided to move home for financial and mental health reasons. I'm not certain that the decision is the right one considering that I haven't lived at home in 6 years. It also means giving up certain freedoms and making compromises. That being said, I really hope that it improves my overall quality of life and gives me the much needed mental boost that I've been looking for over the past year.

For the past year I've been under a low-grade and constant depression, which has been compounded by some unresolved health issues. I'm hoping that this round of specialists and testing will be able to give me some answers or at least resolve the worry I've felt about it.

I have just under 2 months left in my current University town to wrap up loose ends, pack and hopefully finish up with my Specialists in this area. It doesn't mean that I'll be packing in my Ph.D., but rather that I'll be moving office locations and commuting when necessary. I've never been enamoured with my current city, nor with the University itself. I'm hoping that with some distance and perspective that I can learn to love my University and my degree again. In any case, I'll at least be surrounding by some very supportive people and an environment that has been restful for me in the past. I just need something stable at the moment to anchor myself to.

Olympic Pride

Today is a proud day to be a Canadian. Not only for our gold medal games in both women's and men's Hockey at the Olympics, but also for our overall performance. We stood up well to the test and I'm so proud of all our athletes, regardless of whether or not they made it to the podium.

As the host nation of the 2010 Winter Olympics I think Vancouver did a fine job showcasing our country and celebrating not only our achievements, but the achievements of all the athletes. It reminds me of why I love my country and why I am proud to say I am Canadian!

2009 in Review

Ever since Christmas day the newspapers have been running all these 'year in review' articles - everything from disasters of the year to viral videos of the year and everything in between. For the most part I've been skipping over them since I find them tedious and annoying. Do we really need to know which celebrities had the worst scandals of the year? I do not want to read my celebrity trash in my national newspaper. If I want celebrity fluff I check out dlisted, not my Canadian paper.


That being said it made me think over a few things from the past year as I changed out my old calendar for my new one. I usually write on my calendar when I've been to the gym and done what so that I can keep track and use it as motivation. This year has been rather sparse in the gym as evidenced by my ever-expanding waistline (much to my discomfort). I decided to tally up the hours.

16 hours on a spin bike
9 hours on a yoga mat

There was some other miscellaneous stuff in there, but the most significant time put in was yoga and spin.

In other areas of my life some of the 'big' things to happen in 2009 were:

- The birth of my nephew to brother #3 and his wife on January 1st

- The marriage of brother #4, the World Traveler, on February 10th.
This was a hard one since none of the family was invited and it happened spontaneously in front of a Justice of the Peace on a random Tuesday in February. We had been struggling with his wedding announcement since he had been dating his wife for only a few months when he told us, and we had only met her once. We are still struggling with this one as she came with two little boys with some interesting issues.

- In May, Quiet Confidence and I shared our one-year anniversary together and promptly celebrated by not going to Montreal like we had originally planned.

- The graduation of my 'son', brother #6 and the baby of the family, from University in June.

- The engagement of brother #2 in mid-December to a wonderful girl that he has been seeing for the past year. The whole family is excited for their upcoming summer wedding.

I can't be certain what 2010 holds for me, or my family. I can only hope it won't be such a roller coaster of a year, but it's so hard to tell at the moment. Either way it will definitely be a year of transition as Quiet Confidence looks for work, having recently completed his Bachelor's degree. I have my comprehensive exams in spring, which are monumental and signal the shift from reading and writing to research and writing for my thesis- a completely different and altogether scary prospect.

Germ Warfare

Call me crazy, but this year I just don't want to get sick. I do not want an extra cold or the flu or any other malady this winter if I can help it. It's not just the H1N1 pandemic, it is any illness that my students drag into the classroom. Many of them live in University residences which can be a hotbed of strange infectious diseases. Others live in high density housing with anywhere from 2-6 students per house. University students can be just as bad as small elementary school-age children for spreading germs and illness.

With this in mind I've taken the unconventional step of putting my students midterms in the freezer overnight (double wrapped in plastic to avoid moisture) to kill any wayward viruses and bugs. I'm not 100% convinced it will get everything, but whatever I can do to slightly decrease my chances of getting sick is welcomed. This is not something I've ever done before and I may not do it again. I'm just taking some precautions considering how much I'll be touching these midterms over the next week or so while I'm marking them. I heard about this technique through the academic grapevine. I'm not sure if it's more the stuff of urban campus legend, or scientifically proven. Either way, it won't hurt their exams.

Company's Coming

I know I missed the past two days of blogging for NaBloPoMo. I had a bit of a school related crisis that made me implode for a bit. I may or may not write about it in the next few days. Lets just say that I may decide that striving for a Ph.d is not something I want to pursue anymore.

Instead of talking about that, I've decided to talk about what I like to do in preparation for a visit from Quiet Confidence. These are some things I like to do before his arrival, in no particular order:

- Clean the bathroom. I like the smell and look of a freshly scrubbed bathroom. It's also a bit of courtesy for me to neatly put away all the toiletries and things that litter my bathroom counter during the week. It's a small space and if we're sharing it for a couple of days it means there's no counter space for his things unless I tidy up.

- Catch up on all my laundry, which includes making sure there are fresh towels in the bathroom for both of us and the sheets on my bed are new. Nothing beats sleeping in clean sheets that first night.

- Wash my dishes and clean up the kitchen.

- Buy all the groceries I need for the weekend, included drink items like coke that I never use but he likes, a bottle of wine if we're feeling decadent, or some other treat. This is when I would normally plan ahead for dinners I plan to make and potentially bake a dessert for us, or a little snack of something tasty. Baking cookies also helps to make my place smell great.

- The obligatory shave, pluck, wax and general maintenance that needs to be done. If it's summer I'll probably repaint my toenails. In winter things slide a bit more.

- I straighten all the paperwork, books and files in my office area so it has some semblance of organization. Otherwise it looks like a file cabinet vomited all over my office - the hazards of still being a student. I'm a little jealous of QC because 90% or more of his work is on computer files that are all neatly out of sight and always well organized.

- A general once over of the rest of my apartment to pick up stray books, put away all the shoes that stack up next to the door during the week, and put things in order in general.

- I may also download a couple of movies for us to watch if we choose to spend a lazy evening at home, but that's not always a given.


The list looks a little like a 1950's housewife manual, but I like having things looking clean and presentable before I have company. I also don't like wasting my precious weekend time with QC running errands for grocery items I've forgotten when I want to make something in particular for dinner. I think it's my mother's influence. Saturday's were always spent cleaning up the house, catching up on laundry and generally getting things in order for the coming week. Since I don't want to spend my Saturday with QC doing that I'll make sure it's all done the Thursday or Friday before, depending on which day he comes over.

NaBloPoMo, Day 4

I've been a bit busy today trying to prepare myself for a meeting tomorrow with one of my supervisors. I'm not feeling particularly creative, so in order to fulfill my requirements for NaBloPoMo I will post a couple things I am thankful for today. (I can't believe I'm already treating it like a task that needs to be completed instead of a creative exercise, but oh well).

1. I'm thankful that I didn't have to go to school today because it rained and snowed off and on all day.

2. I'm thankful for the wireless network that just popped up and I can use, even though it's not mine.

3. I'm thankful for the leftovers that Quiet Confidence sent home with me after the weekend, because it meant I had a decent dinner tonight without having to do much work to get it.

4. I'm thankful I had kleenex in the house, courtesy of my Mother, because my nose wouldn't stop running today. I either have the start of a cold or something is bothering my allergies.

Freedom (from the internet)

I found an application called Freedom through a roundabout way and it looked interesting. Freedom promised to help my productivity by disabling networking on Apple computers for up to 8 hours. This way even if I wanted to go online to surf randomness I couldn't. Forcing myself to concentrate on my own work for a preset time sounded like the perfect solution to my issue. The only way to circumvent the timer on Freedom meant rebooting my computer - which seemed cumbersome enough that I won't do it lightly. Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work on my computer and I couldn't figure out why not from their support page.

If you're an academic or just can't break yourself of constantly checking email or webpage updates, instead of keeping your focus on the task at hand, this seems like a very handy application. It did get a lot of good press and reviews.

NaBloPoMo

It's National Blog Posting Month again. I'm going to give it a shot and hope for the best. Last year I crashed and burned in a matter of days. Let's hope I have something to say for the next 29 days and actually remember to post it.

I suspect that weekends when Quiet Confidence is here, or I'm at his place will be the hardest.

An Odd Observation

The other morning I was in the shower when something odd dawned on me. I live alone, however I have five different shampoo's in the shower, and two different types of conditioner. I never realized I had accumulated such a collection by accident. I never did this when I lived with house mates. I wonder what other weird things I've bought multiples of without realizing it.

Memories of a Happier Day

One day in July, Quiet Confidence and I took a drive out to one of the Great Lakes to spend some time at the beach. On our way out there, driving on a random country road, we spotted a row of windmills that stretched far into the distance. It was a fascinating and beautiful sight as the propellers slowly moved, quietly and almost in sync, to the imperceptible summer breeze.

The Past Never Stays in the Past

The weather is cooling off and the students are returning to campus and my thoughts turn not to the fall term, but rather to my failures and shortcomings. Instead of feeling the optimism of a new term and the possibilities inherent in a new school year I feel the weight of the previous terms. I cast back to that fall four years ago now, where a middle-aged man I worked with in my hometown accelerated his obsession and began stalking me in my University town. It was a situation that I have come to learn is not all that uncommon, even though I feel it should be. It escalated until one night I was raped and held against my will for over four hours until I convinced him that I had to get home and couldn’t stay with him in his car all night. After that he really came undone. It all ended with a confrontation with the police one afternoon when he showed up unannounced and uninvited to my apartment building.

I think women are taught to be nice, even when perhaps it’s not in their best interests. I know that fear for my summer job, and thinking I could reason with a person completely out of touch with reality is what led me so deep into the situation. I was trying to be nice, letting him down easy- trying to redirect his attention away from me without angering him. I was completely unfit to handle the situation. I also wanted to keep it quiet from my family and friends, thinking I could get it all to go away without having it public knowledge. I tolerated behaviour and actions at work that escalated the problem because I didn’t know who to trust or who I could go to. I was also trying to be nice when I shouldn’t have tolerated any of it for a second. I was naïve. I assumed that when I left my position for the school year that the problem would go away. I was horribly wrong and have had to live with consequences of that ignorance ever since. Even after the police became involved I stayed quiet on the most horrific aspects of the case because I was thinking of his children. I also didn’t want to deal with a trial situation and having my life aired out in public. It was very much a he-said, she-said situation and I couldn’t handle the possibility that I might lose. I also thought that if he lost his job because of me that it would give him more reason to be obsessed with me, so I kept my mouth shut.

I wish I could say I’m over it and well on the road to recovery, but my past does not stay in the past. At times I’m angry that I didn’t get any kind of justice or retribution. As far as I know he went on his merry way and life did not change all that much for him, while my life changed dramatically. I still have the occasional nightmare or flashback- fall seems to have a huge amount of triggers that put me back in that place. Talking about it or even thinking about what happened during those couple of months brings me to tears or I break out in a cold sweat. I struggle with focus and motivation as well as extreme fear that has no basis in reality. I feel like I have been unable to reclaim my life, but am stuck in some kind of limbo or purgatory where I exhibit victim behaviour and can’t completely move past it all.

A Difference in Perspectives

While Quiet Confidence and I share a lot of common interests and sensibilities there is one fundamental characteristic in which we are polar opposites of each other. It is a very stark contrast and something both of us have puzzled over in private and together, not quite able to understand how the other person can be this way or how it functions.

Quiet Confidence possesses an unending optimism and positive outlook on life. It is not however, the galling kind wherein the optimism is a “Susie Sunshine” naivety in the face of incontrovertible facts to the opposite. I on the other hand seem to naturally favour a more pragmatic outlook, something I see as a starkly realistic approach to life. Sometimes it slides into pessimism on the negative side, but that I believe has more to do with the depression and happens only on my lowest days.

QC described it to me as a choice you can make, so why not choose to take the positive approach? He sees it as a “why not?” proposition- I don’t understand his choice and puzzle over how he can instinctively reach for that side of the coin. His outlook certainly isn’t because he has lived a charmed and sheltered life free from struggle or tragedy. Quite the opposite really, which is what puzzles me all the more about his mindset. Given everything he has experienced, how can he still remain so unfailingly positive?

There is something in my brain chemistry or make-up that prevents me from grabbing onto the positives in any situation as a first instinct. While I also try to make the best of any situation facing me, I chose not to put on a happy face about it, but rather to approach it with steely determination, with my eyes wide open to what I face. I would rather know exactly what kinds of highs and lows I can expect than to assume everything is positive and will be fine because life really doesn’t work that way. QC completely does not understand this about me. He doesn’t understand at all how I naturally gravitate towards the darker side of things.

This light versus dark outlook is something I know will continually mystify and intrigue each of us. Neither one of us will ever completely understand the other, but I don’t think you can ever really truly know someone and everything about him or her. Then again, that’s my pessimistic side showing itself. It has already made it difficult at times for me to explain my depression to QC because it is a phenomena that is completely foreign and new to him. He has never been exposed to it, where as this is something I have been dealing with for years now. There are plenty of times that I have struggled to find the words to describe or explain it for him adequately. I don’t think you can completely understand depression without having experienced it personally, but I will continue to help him in trying to understand it.

A Persistent Feeling

It’s like a persistent rainy day. A soft grey drizzle, more like a mist than a full-blown downpour. It’s there with me when I wake up and follows me around all day. I’m not really sure how to shake it off anymore. A low level, chronic depression has been following me around for months now and I can’t seem to find the root of it or figure a way out of it. There are moments when the clouds lift and I forget all about the depression, however after a few hours or a few days it comes creeping back in. It’s not the deeper kind of depression where I just want to sleep all the time, constantly think about suicide and enter into an almost catatonic state of emotion where I’m unable to feel or connect with others. Mostly it just saps my energy, my motivation to accomplish things and my ability to focus on a task at hand.

I’m in the process of finding a new birth control pill so I don’t want to start anti-depressants in case this is related to the switch in hormones. Part of me is hoping that with the right pill that my depression will lift, however the rational, nagging part of my brain is telling me it’s more than just birth control. There is something else pulling me down. Something else is sapping my motivation and making it difficult to concentrate, focus and realize the goals I make for myself every day.

These are the days I feel like the biggest fuck-up and nothing I do is ever good enough. Quiet Confidence say’s I should go easier on myself, but it’s almost impossible to shut off that negative voice in my head. It’s a constant litany of self-abuse in my head. It’s unrelenting and just part of the depression I’ve kind of grown accustomed to. This in and of itself is kind of sad.

Rose of Sharon Progress, II

Mirabilia's Rose of Sharon

Since early 2006 (Rose of Sharon in 2006) I have been working sporadically on a cross-stitch pattern for my mother. I'll go at it for a bit and then work or depression causes me to put it down for months. With the stress of my comprehensive readings upon me I've taken it up again. I hadn't stitched on it for 6 months prior to that, but I need something relaxing and slightly mindless in the evenings to help me unwind and forget about my comps. I've made a lot of progress since my last update (Rose of Sharon in 2007). Despite all of the progress I still have a lot of stitching to go before it's done and I can move on to another project. With lots of effort I could maybe finish it for Christmas this year, but a more conservative and realistic estimate would be early Spring in time for my Mom's birthday.

My Disordered Life

This morning after I opened up my laptop I realized that I had downloaded a bunch of files that were cluttering up my desktop. The problem being that it was research and not easily slotted into my half-hazard filing system. My computer is a mess. Parts of it are very organized and clean, while others resemble my hall closet (which honestly, lets not go there).

If I could have just one wish today it would be that I would wake up tomorrow and my computer would have magically cleaned itself up and organized itself in a logical, simplistic manner without my help. Quiet Confidence has offered before to "help" me clean up my computer and create some order around here. After seeing how neat and tidy his computer files are I'm quite aware that he knows how to organize a computer- he is after all a computer scientist. I wish I could just give it to him to do and he could magically see inside my head and understand my files, their seemingly random descriptors and how I want my computer to look when cleaned up. Alas, I am the only one who can adequately do this job and it makes me want to just delete every single thing on my computer and start over. Except I have 6 years of research on here that I need. I would cry if I lost that much work.

An Observation of a Sort

I've been visiting a bunch of blogs this morning that are on my bookmarks list, but that I haven't been to in months. I took a break from everything for a while and it seems like a lot of other people are doing the same thing. There are an overwhelming number of my old reads that have decided to either quit or take a hiatus- for some it's coming up on 3-6 months already. I don't know if it's the uncertain economic times that have caused people to refocus their priorities, or if the medium of blogging has lost some of its lustre.

In my case I feel like I've lost my voice a bit. I've also been able to share a lot of the things I previously would have written about with my partner, Quiet Confidence. A little over a year ago we started seeing each other and I finally found someone so completely supportive and non-judgemental that I could open up to. I fully opened myself up to this man and gave myself over to the experience of being with someone who fully deserved my attention and love and who gives just as much as he receives. In the process I've found a measure of balance and harmony that I have never been able to achieve with drugs or therapy. He has become that cord of steel that I can cling to when I'm spiraling out of control. I am still an imperfect person and I still have my demons to fight. I still have my down days and weeks. I still rely on medication when things become too difficult to face on my own.

For the past year I've given myself over to the process of laying a foundation for a lasting relationship. I've neglected some educational pursuits, the blog, and a couple of high-maintenance friends while I straightened my head out a bit and refocused my priorities. I needed the time off to figure out what is important to me and how to proceed from here on in. Since my birthday I've been trying to take small steps towards putting my education back on track as well as my life/career aspirations. It can be overwhelming at times given the mountain of work I have to complete as well as proving myself after my monumental fall down with the Post-Traumatic Stress. It affected my work, my completion of courses and my outlook on how I viewed myself as a scholar. Lets just say I don't think very highly of myself as a competent academic at the best of times.

Since my birthday in May I have been operating under the maxim that a healthy body creates a healthy mind. To this end I've been making small changes towards achieving that, setting micro-goals to help me towards completing a much bigger goal: namely the degree. One of the small changes I have tried to implement this week is writing for 15 minutes a day, even if its just on my blog or in my journal. I want to make writing a daily habit for me in the hopes that it will help with my career- academics labour under the notion that it is a "publish or perish" world in the University system. I'm beginning to believe this. In order to publish you have to write; something I have been unable to do for almost a year. It is my hope that by writing for 15 minutes a day it will end up not only coming easier to me, but also stretch well past 15 minutes. To keep myself in the writing habit will benefit my papers and research in the future. Writing shouldn't be a chore if I'm going to make it my primary career.

Old Hurts

There are some memories of my past that never fail to bring tears to my eyes, regardless of how long ago the event in question happened. I seem to have a rich past of trauma that still stings even though some of these memories are from as long ago as when I was 4, 8 and 10. It seems almost strange to me that talking about these memories with someone will make me well up with instant tears. Very rarely can I talk or even think about these memories without tears.

Some of these painful memories seem to be the key to some sort of intrinsic part of my personality like my overwhelming abandonment issues that crop up occasionally, or my preoccupation with food and dislike bordering on anxiety about eating in front of strangers or in groups. I have wanted to write about my history of trauma for a while, but fear and anxiety has put a stopper on those stories and emotions. There are days when I can barely hold it together and I fear swimming into the deep end of these memories and problems. It was one thing to agonize over Mr. Intellectual and my sordid relationships as they related to my depression and its a whole other level when I start to unravel the rest of the trauma.

This is part of the reason why I've allowed the blog to languish into almost irrelevance in the last year or so. I had exorcised a big demon in my life and wasn't ready to move onto other mental exercises, but I think the time is right. I have a very supportive man in my life and I feel like I'm starting to get myself back on track for the degree. I'm happier and more content with things now than I have been in years. I still have my down days and weeks, but on the whole I feel like I'm on an upswing. Now to push past the fear and actually press "publish" on some of the more troubling things I've been sitting on.

Spring on the Farm

I've escaped the city for a few days. I decided to spend the weekend and my birthday out on the Farm. It's my favourite time of year here and I didn't want to miss the blooming cherry trees. There is nothing more beautiful than hundreds of trees in full bloom. Unfortunately it was an overcast day, so the pictures aren't as great as I had hoped they would be.

A Conversation Between Two Old Friends

"You're stronger than you think."

"You've said that before, but I remain as unconvinced now as I was then. "

I'm really not sure what my friend sees in me that I don't, but I know how I feel on the inside right now. I'm hurting again. In the last few days I've slid into a dangerous depression. I'm struggling to find purpose in my life. I want to reach out for help, but there is always something holding me back- I don't see myself as important enough for some reason, or I don't know what it is I need to help me. Right now I just feel emotionally, mentally and physically fragile.

Post-Exam Recap

My students wrote their final exam this week. The subject matter is Canadian history from pre-contact to the present era, so a survey course of the entirety of Canadian history. History can get complicated, long and involved. Sometimes it's hard to boil down an event or person into a short definitive answer.

The first section of our exam was comprised of Identification and Significance questions. This is pretty standard for History exams. You get a bunch of terms, pick out the required number and then describe in 3-5 lines (or more if you're taking the shotgun approach to answers or suffer from verbal diarrhea) what/who/when/where the term was/is and how/why it is important to the overall scope of Canadian history. Simple, right? Sometimes it's anything but.

Sometimes you get some amazingly bizarre answers and you just have to wonder how their brain functions and what lecture they attended or what textbook they were reading. I had a couple of answers like that this exam. My favourite is one I'll share. I don't know what the legalities of this are, but there are no names for the guilty party.

The ID question was the Quiet Revolution. For those of you who are not versed in Canadian history, the Quiet Revolution occurred between 1960-66 in Quebec. It was a time of rapid, but nonviolent change, whereby Quebec underwent drastic evolutions in its political, social, economic and cultural structures led by Liberal Premier Jean Lesage. The Roman Catholic church's influence rapidly waned and a growing number of Quebeckers became sovereigntists, which gave rise to the separatist movements.

This particular student however, has a very different interpretation of what the Quiet Revolution meant in Canadian History:

"The Quiet Revolution is a staple of Canada's pacifistic history. When the Canadian government is mad at another country instead of outlining the problems like educated government officials they will not speak to you. If you call they will breath heavily on the phone but not utter a word. In essence a quiet revolt."

I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.