mental health

A Set of Journals

Self-Care Strategies that Don’t Work for Me (Repost)

Erica, Review

July is a free review month! This post would normally be for Patreon subscribers, but is being reposted for free. If you’re not a Patreon subscriber, this is what the Patreon posts are like. If you are a Patreon subscriber and have been wanting to share this post, now you can! (please do).

Self-care and self-improvement have always been tricky topics for me. As someone who has struggled with both anxiety and depression since childhood, I feel like I could always be taking better care of myself. And as a member of that special cohort of high-achieving children who become average to less-than-average achieving adults, I feel like I could always just be doing better. This toxic combination of nature and nurture let me to spend much of my early 20s searching in vain for a way to live my life that would make me both happy and productive.

Suffice it to say, many of these strategies and methods simply did not work for me. And every time I tried implementing one of these methods and failed, I felt the doom and gloom set in. It took me too long to learn that not everything is for everybody, and just because something worked for someone else does not mean that it would work for me.

It can be really hard to read about how a certain organizational method or habit-forming strategy worked out wonderfully for someone else while it is simultaneously failing you. It’s also difficult when the methods described require amounts of time or other resources you just don’t have. And yet another layer of pressure is added when you’re not just reading about self-improvement from a book you can stop reading at any time, but you have unsolicited advice coming from everyone in your life. I want to detail some of the self-help and self-improvement strategies that did not work for me, so that if anyone else out there find some selves in a similar situation they know they are not alone.

“Just do” or “Just don’t do” [Insert Good or Bad Thing Here]: My contention with pronouncements like these goes all the way back to when people, including my parents, would tell me as a depressed 10-year-old to “just be happy.” Now, as an adult who does not easily establish or keep routines, I simply ignore any piece of advice that begins with those words. The key to happiness may very well be exercising every single day without fail or never looking at my phone at work again. But I know that I can’t “just do” anything. I need instruction on how to start a routine and, when I inevitably break it, how to restart a routine without shaming myself out of trying all together. Included in this category are things like “just let it go,” “just don’t take it personally,” “just stop looking at distracting websites,” etc.

Many Workplace Self-Care Initiatives I want to be clear, I’m not talking about EAPs here. Those can be a great resource. I’m talking about the “do this three minute desk yoga video and don’t say we don’t look out for you!” kind of thing. Taking care of yourself should not come with any outside expectations. You are the most qualified to evaluate your own needs and establish your own goals for yourself, whether your goal is to be more active, better rested, something else. This is not to say you cannot take advantage of an employer sponsored program if it aligns with your personal goals, just throw out any messaging about how it will help your productivity. Remember you are doing this for you, not them. Don’t do anything that would put more of a burden on you than your employer already has.

Self-Help Books I tried reading books like Gretchen Rubin’s Better than Before, which breaks people down into four basic personality types and provides tips and tricks for each of these for forming healthy habits. She begins the book with the caveat that those suffering from a variety of mental illnesses or mental health issues would likely not be able to follow her strategies. I soldiered on anyway, and found that she had the least amount of helpful advice for my personality type, often following her advice for the other three types by saying “well this probably won’t work for you.” If things change to later in the book I don’t know I stopped reading.

Cal Newport’s Deep Work is another book I gave up on about halfway through. I started it hoping that it would help me focus at work, but the his advice does not work for someone who’s job is almost entirely distractions.

I think it’s great that these people have figured out what works for them. And I’m not writing off the above books. They might work for you, they just didn’t work for me. So, if you’re also in some kind of slump, whether it’s depression, a dead-end job, or anything else, take care of yourself. Don’t expect one meditation or one candle-lit bath to solve everything. And don’t give into the sunk cost fallacy. If you’re trying something that’s supposed to make you feel better, and it’s just making you miserable, stop. Try something else. There are so many ways to get the same result, and you need to find the one that works for you. Don’t waste valuable time on the ones that don’t.

-Erica

The First Curse: Jealousy is a Powerful Motivator (Repost)

Erica, Free

It should come as no surprise, based on my childhood outbursts, that my first controlled curse was based in negative emotions. I still believe it was a success, despite Ella’s disapproval.

This curse begins, much to Ella’s dismay, in jealousy. I have never been a particularly attractive or charismatic person. Ella says this is common among magical folk as it is necessary for survival. True or not, I still ended up lacking two traits that our society highly values. I’ve done a lot of work getting to a point where I can simply live my life without worrying without comparing myself to others. Unfortunately, getting there required living through many experiences that I look back on and am ashamed of the way I felt.

In one particular instance, a friend and I went out for drinks (pre-pandemic). She tends to be busier than I am so I was excited for the opportunity to spend some time catching up with her. She is also much more attractive and charismatic than I am so I was disappointed but not surprised when a man much older than us accosted her at the beginning of the evening and kept her in conversation for the rest of the night.

I later learned that she was having just as miserable time as I was but in the moment I was too jealous to recognize the signs. There was a constant mention of her boyfriend and the maintenance of a physical distance between them. There were all of the linguistic cues women used to deaden a conversation, but not end it for fear of escalation.

I was ashamed of my thoughts and actions and how blindly I had bought into the societal dictate that for women there is no such thing as unwanted attention. I promised I would do better, be a better friend, next time the opportunity presented itself. I did not realize it would happen so soon.

This time, my friend, her boyfriend, and I we’re out with a large group of people which insulated us from skeezy older men and allowed me to passively enjoy the conversation happening around me. During a pause in conversation I glanced around the bar I just saw that same man from a few weeks before scanning the room and setting his eyes upon a group of three young college students before moving to the bar to order a drink.

I excused myself from the conversation and slipped easily behind the busy bar. Sometimes it is not so bad to be invisible. He noticed me this time. I locked eyes with him and motioned for him to come towards the bar, but he did not recognize me. He ordered a well drink. Apparently I was not someone he needed to impress with a pretentious order. As I made it, I thought of much he annoyed me that night he’d so presumptuously commandeered my conversation with a friend. And I thought of those three girls standing in a tight circle at a cocktail table in the corner of the bar, clearly not looking to interact with anybody else, and I handed him his drink. He paid with a 10 which I handed to the harried bartender at the register and told her he did not need any change and then I left.

I told my friend I thought I saw the man from a couple weeks ago on my way back from the bathroom. She recognized him with a sneer and noticed his trajectory towards the three college students in the corner. I watched with anticipation as he crossed the room, silently begging him to take a sip of his drink before he reached the table. He did, just before stepping in to their line of sight.

He approached them with all the confidence of someone who had known them for 20 years. They would have been toddlers at best. They looked at him with confusion and not a hint of recognition. Their conversation stopped with a quick flurry of glances and head shakes that confirmed none of them knew him. He set his drink down on their table, much to their shock. He opened his mouth to say something, maybe introduce himself, but no words came out. He tried again and again with the same result while the students looked on confused and concerned. One of them finally asked if he needed any help but he shook his head and managed to croak “No, I’m sorry,” and walked away. They closed ranks again and shrugged the whole incident off as drunk people antics, before returning to their conversation. I must commend them for not laughing throughout the whole ordeal. We certainly did.

-Erica

Disclaimer: This is Frustrating, But Still Worth It (Repost)

Erica, Review

July is a free review month! This post would normally be for Patreon subscribers, but is being reposted for free. If you’re not a Patreon subscriber, this is what the Patreon posts are like. If you are a Patreon subscriber and have been wanting to share this post, now you can! (please do).

To say this blog is not exactly how I imagined it is an understatement. I have been sitting on the idea starting this blog for over a year. As an avid reader of other craft and DIY blogs, I had a grand vision for my own. This grand vision involved many skills and habits I do not have. I could have waited, put my crafting projects on pause to learn these skills, but then I may have lost my momentum.

Progress photos, an essential part of any DIY blog, are the best example. I often work on my projects at night when the lighting is bad for photographs, and I have neither the budget nor space for supplemental lighting. I also sometimes just get so into whatever I’m working on at the idea of taking pictures does not even occur to me. I also don’t necessarily always have a clean and elegant setting for my photos since my coffee table is often covered with books, papers, and unfinished projects. And I’m not about to clean again just to get a quick picture.

I did think about supplementing one or two photos per post with a neat line drawing for each step. Since the lighting would again be an issue taking photos of actual drawings, I decided to purchase a drawing tablet for my computer. Well, that’s a lot harder than it seems. I haven’t given up on it yet. I’m still learning, but my skill level certainly is not in a place where I am willing to publish those drawings on the Internet.

I won’t even get into my shortcomings with WordPress and the internet in general, or crafts that I want to try, but have little experience with. If I tried to learn that before I published my first blog post, you’d never see any of this. Like all my other projects, I’ll be learning as I go, and I think that’s the most honest representation of my creative process.

I say all this not to inspire any sort of sympathy, but to say that I know it is not perfect and if I had waited until it was I would never have started. I like to create mostly because I like to control. Creating something from scratch means that I get exactly what I want, at least within my abilities. When something is beyond my abilities, I often abandon the idea without learning or asking for help.

I place an unhealthy amount of value on being naturally good at things, or at least appearing so. These warped ideals happen when you have no natural talent in areas that seem to come easily to everyone else. I’ve always been very easily overwhelmed and had trouble controlling my emotions. When I was a child, that often led to magical outbursts. They could get so bad that those around me were in danger. I was told I needed to control myself as if the outbursts were my choice, but was never taught how. My parents were ill-equipped to deal with me and professional help was out of the question. They could not trust a four-year-old to keep her mouth shut. My mother tried to teach me to cook, hoping that would help me the way it helped her, but I was so useless at it, the results were almost as dangerous as my outbursts.

Eventually, I accomplished a veneer of control. I never had an outburst when I felt good, and I felt good when I excelled and was praised. I stayed away from any activity at which I did not naturally excel. I only let myself be frustrated in private. If I had to fail at something publicly, I made a show of not putting in any effort at all. By the time I was in college, I was exhausted. I realized what I was doing was not healthy and began undoing all the harm done by the idea that I must succeed at everything.

And part of that part of undoing the damage done by those thoughts is admitting this is not perfect. It’s not how I imagined it would be. And I’m still trying really hard. But it’s still worth it, because I just need it to start.

-Erica