More Invisalign Shenanigans

Friends, I haven't talked about this in a while, but I am six weeks and change away from being done with the first phase of invisalign.

I hope.

ANYWHO. There's still some stuff to be done - I know there will be a likely refinement stage that may last a few months before I am able to get my retainers, but when I look at the progress, I'm actually pretty stunned.

This was taken on the day I got invisalign - July 13, 2017 - when I got in my car right after my first appointment:














This one was taken today:



(Don't mind my teeth. I just ate a whole bunch of cheese.)

HUGE progress. It wasn't without some shenanigans (like emergency dentist appointments for IPR on several occasions, constant wrestling matches with floss and/or my waterpik, and more than one occasion...ahem...maybe daily, where I just decided to throw caution to the wind and just drink some coffee, damn it), but my teeth are getting there. I still can't get over the difference, ESPECIALLY in my bottom teeth. Shenanigans aside, to say that I'm pleased with the outcome so far would be an understatement. Not only have my teeth straightened, but it feels like my whole jaw has changed. There isn't as much clicking all the time, I'm able to open my mouth better, and I think, but I can't be sure, that I have stopped grinding my teeth when I'm sleeping, and that's to say nothing of how much more confident I am in my smile. If someone were asking my opinion about getting invisalign, I would tell them that it's worth every penny. People tend to be judged for making cosmetic changes to their body, and I wholeheartedly used to be one of them - if I found out that someone got plastic surgery or enhanced their appearance in any way, I would internally roll my eyes. Now, I get it. This is not to say that I'm about to go out and do something drastic to anywhere else on my body, but I think that if you have the money and you can feel better about yourself and you have a concrete way to get there and it won't turn into a slippery slope that just serves to make you feel like shit about other parts of your body, get to it. We only have this one life, and we deserve to spend it feeling as good about ourselves as we can.

In other news, lots has changed about my life in other ways in recent months too, and I am ready to talk about exactly none of it. I've had to up my therapy to weekly again for a little while to sort it all out, but I think the outcome, overall, will be good. I'm trying hard to prioritize what I need versus the reactions that will inevitably elicit from others, and I'm getting there.

Getting Smacked by Grief

It has been an interesting few weeks, friends. I’m sitting on my old campus and I’m supposed to be at a memorial service, but I’m not there. I couldn’t bring myself to go.

Grief is funny. It smacks us in the face when we least expect it. This man’s death messed with me before it even happened - I bumped into a former classmate in the grocery store, and she told me that he was in hospice care. Since that time, I have been grappling with the imminent mortality of this man who was such an integral part of my undergraduate education, and it has messed with me without me being able to pinpoint why. Ever the lover of puzzles, I avoided this one for reasons I couldn’t understand. I knew he was sick, I knew it was serious, and yet...

Today it hit me.

Our relationship was complicated. Is still, I suppose. There was a lot left unsaid, a lot left unaddressed, and I will never get resolution, ever. Our relationship was complicated. He was such an important part of my education, and I really valued him as a mentor. He was also, at times, borderline verbally abusive in the interest of and under the guise of helping me grow as a leader. Shooting people down was not his strategy with everyone I’m sure, but it was with me. There are things that he has said to me that I still hang on to nearly 20 years later, that have stuck all this time. This is not a good thing and I acknowledge that, but some of the lessons that have stuck are good ones.

I was talking to a colleague about it earlier today and she outright said to me, “it sounds like there’s some trauma there.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather. I had literally never put this time in the context of my traumatic history but it makes so much sense that I can’t ignore it.

Undergrad was traumatic. It remains, some 20 years later, one of the worst periods of my life. I suffered through four losses, three of which were pretty traumatic, I struggled to find my way through the utter mess that was my life at the time, and I did it all under the constant gauntlet of being a music student and the constant judgment, criticism, and self-doubt that this brings.

I say gauntlet like I could see what was coming, because you usually can and that’s half the torture of it - knowing what is coming. I couldn’t.

So I came to the realization that I absolutely do not have to go if it’s not what I can do and how I want to honor this man’s memory for myself. I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to go, I was driving up here, and I just let it go. I let go of the idea of needing to grieve in a way that didn’t resonate with me. I let go of the idea that I have to show my face or people would be angry. I just let that shit go. Did it feel good? Not really in the moment. But, I was allowing my own process, and that ain’t nothing. And it certainly took the pressure off to put on a face and pretend that our relationship was awesome, because it, at times, was colossally not and I couldn’t pretend with this one, for my own sake.

So now I sit near my campus BFF Robert Frost, I drink an iced coffee, and I toast in my own way the lessons in our crossed paths. For better or for worse, I am different because of him.

Phew.

The last few months have been hairy, friends. Downright hairy.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about my future, and the idea of getting a doctorate, and I've been coming around to an idea that I've really been struggling with: I don't think I want to be a counselor educator.

Don't get me wrong, there has been a lot of good. A whole lot of good. A whole lot of good that is still happening, even. However, there have also been a lot of disappointments and bumps and they, at this moment, feel insurmountable. I thought this was what I wanted for a really, really long time. The seed was planted in like my third term of grad school about the idea of being a counselor educator and I've been thinking about it ever since. And then I started positioning myself to get there. I wrote a thesis. Then I submitted an article. I've presented at national and regional conferences. I started teaching. I became a clinical supervisor. I did all of the things you do when you want to put yourself in the best position possible to go for your doctorate in Counselor Education and Supervision and succeed at it. Then I got an adjunct position. Then I got another one. I was teaching, the glow was still new, but there was a lot of stuff that was going on in the background outside of my awareness that I am still trying to wrap my head around now that I see it.

There's a lot of bureaucratic stuff that I'd have to deal with if I go on to get a doctorate and then teach full time. We're not even talking dissertation and tenure. We're talking just existing in the context of a department. I had an abrupt moment a couple of weeks ago and was like "I think I want absolutely nothing to do with this bullshit." It's not that I'm not a team player - I am, and I can (and do) function very well as a part of a team. I do it every day. But this is a different kind of politics than those to which I am accustomed, and I'm not entirely sure if I like it or if I can function in that kind of environment. I'm leaning more toward "fuck no I don't, I'm running as far away from this as possible" than "maybe I could make this work". I'm trying hard to listen to that screaming side of myself and make sense of it, but like any situation, it's hard to listen to someone when they're yelling at you.

Maybe I'll continue to teach adjunct. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll go back to being a therapist. Maybe I'll continue supervising. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll go into private practice. Maybe I'll find a cushy counseling job at a college. Maybe I'll go for my doctorate in a different area of counseling. Maybe I'll fashion myself a box and go live in the woods for a while. Or work at Target or something equally brainless. That seems pretty nice right about now. Plus I've started to fancy red shirts, so maybe it's a better fit.

I just need to get through the summer and get all of this behind me, and then I'll be good, I think. I'm also no longer bordering on I Officially Have Too Much to Do Territory - I'm fully entrenched. Teaching two classes, working full time, and helping to plan a regional conference has tipped me over the cliff. Like, fully over it. Nothing to grab on to, nothing to break my fall, just screaming on down. The good thing is that now that I've hit my limit, I know exactly where it is and I will know better than to hit that point again.

I've just got to find a way to stop fucking falling already and claw my way back up.

Holy Shit.

Dudes, Hashimoto's is no joke.

The way that it works is that the immune system attacks the thyroid. What happens as a result of this is generally being hypothyroid, with an occasional "thyroid hormone flush" where symptoms swing wildly into hyperthyroidism. This is generally an indication of a flare-up, which is caused often by changes in diet that cause inflammation through the body and increased autoimmune response.

The long and short of it is that I'm pretty sure that I'm in the middle of one of those flare-ups right now.

I know that googling symptoms or googling specific conditions is generally not a good idea, but I do it a lot around Hashimoto's because it's relatively unknown to me. I was given the diagnosis and encouraged to do research on it and more, to be mindful of my symptoms in order to figure out what exactly a flare-up looks like for me, with the knowledge that they're different for everyone.

I think I'd been having them a lot before I started getting treated for it. I had been humming along really well taking the thyroid hormone that I've been prescribed and feeling a general increase in energy and mood. It's been pretty good.

Then this past weekend happened.

I chalked it up to a stressful week at work as well as dietary changes since I reincorporated gluten, and this past week (and this current one) are a DOOZY. But I had NO patience, my anxiety level was higher than it has been in years, and while that has reduced, there are other things that have not.

Primarily, I'm hot. Anyone who knows me knows that I am perpetually cold. I wear sweaters until it's in the 80s, and then I graduate to long-sleeved shirts. I wear pants year-round, but if I'm comfortable, I might throw on some capris or cropped pants. Never shorts. I get too cold. Even if it's like 90 degrees outside. However, it's like 30 degrees out right now, and I just walked outside to take out the garbage with no jacket or anything on and I was fine.

Sleep has also been an issue, but I just chalked that up to stress - I was up at 4:30 this morning, wide awake. That NEVER happens. I have also been struggling to get to sleep the past few nights. My energy levels have also been through the roof and I have had a difficult time concentrating - all stress-induced, I thought. Most alarmingly though (and again, this also happens at high levels of stress for me), I have been having pretty significant heart palpitations since Monday. I'll just be sitting there in a meeting and all of a sudden my heart will start fluttering and I'll feel like I'm going to faint.

Nope. Not stress.

I just looked up the common symptoms for thyroid hormone flush, and I have every single one.

So, I'm not taking my thyroid meds today, because that will only make it worse, and calling my doctor to see if I can get in earlier than the appointment I have in April. I'm also going to get some blood drawn in the next day or two and see if my counts have changed. I can all but guarantee that they have.

In the meantime, I'll just keep telling myself that this is only temporary.

Finding Joy

So, my vacation is coming to a close.

Sad, but also not. I'm ready to get back to work.

The nice part was that this was a really balanced vacation. Rob and I set about the tidying task before us, and while we got a shit ton done and it resulted in getting well over half of our stuff (yes, you read that right) in its rightful place at goodwill, we also took time to rest and detach from our respective jobs.

In short, I think this might be the best vacation I've ever had.

I've really started to consider this idea of intentionally practicing joy, and I realized that I do it a good chunk of the time. I find joy in my job, I find joy in my non-work life, and I find joy in my relationships. A lot of changes over the past year have happened in my relationships in particular, and I think without these changes, I actually would feel less joyful. I've been more intentional about the time I spend with others, and this whole experience this week has helped my living space match how I have been feeling inside.

Take my wardrobe, for example. I had all of these clothes, some of which I felt indifferent about, others that I just felt like I had to have as staples in my wardrobe, and I realized that I needed exactly none of these things. So you know what I did? I got rid of about 75% of my wardrobe. No exaggeration WHATSOEVER. 75% of my clothes, gone. I started off feeling pretty nervous, but by the end, I looked at my clothes, and every single item I kept are items that I genuinely love. Not a single placeholder t-shirt to be found. Not a single sweater that I keep "just in case I need something to keep me warm". Only clothes that make me feel good to be wearing them, and only clothes that fit exactly how I want them to.

I also had the opportunity to do some decluttering of other stuff, like my electronics, and I found our wedding and honeymoon pictures. It's so fun to look back on those times and have them all in one place (now) where we can access them anytime we want.

I also unloaded (or will be unloading tomorrow) something huge - I'm submitting my article to its first publication tomorrow. This two and a half-year labor of love, and I have a publishable article. I'm so effing excited about this that I could puke. Even if it doesn't get accepted (which doesn't entirely feel likely, because in discussing it with the editor of the publication at a conference last year, he was more excited about it than I was at that point because I had just started writing), I still got this big huge thing done. I have a few other publications that I can submit to in case it doesn't get accepted, but because the counseling field has this annoying (but understandable) ethical code that says that we can only submit to one publication at a time, I will hit the submit button tomorrow and (hopefully) shove it to the back of my brain for three months.

In the same vein, you know what will bring me joy? If I can figure out how to get my signature in a word document. As soon as I have that part done, it's goin' in.

Fingers crossed! :)

De-Cluttering

Because we're looking at selling our condo in the next year, Rob and I have started to really think about our clutter.

We have accumulated A LOT of stuff since we moved in here. Like, a lot. We have also changed a lot of stuff in this place - we've repainted, we redid the bathroom upstairs, and we potentially have to purchase a new furnace and potentially a new water heater before we move, which will cost in the neighborhood of $10,000. Daunting? Yes. But we've been saving for it since we learned that our furnace is going kaput, so we should be fine.

We also have a ton of shit to fix, like the paint jobs in various rooms and repainting certain places, and we're repainting one of the rooms because it's too bright a green to be in any way appealing to a potential buyer.

But we're taking this opportunity to be prepared to move.

In the past, we have purged both before and after a move, and it has helped us to keep the amount of stuff we have in check. This time, though, I think it's going to be a bigger job than ever before.

I've been starting to think about being mentally ready for this change, particularly the change in the level of clutter. We always have battled clutter, but it seems bigger lately. Coming home often feels overwhelming because we're so cluttered, and I don't want to live like that anymore. I also don't want to move into a new house with all of this shit hanging over us. To that end, I downloaded this Marie Kondo book, with the hope that I will be able to give myself some mental space to get ready to de-clutter.

WHAT A PAGE-TURNER. She talks about the idea of putting all of your stuff in one place, taking each thing in your hands, and determining whether or not it gives you joy. If it doesn't, out it goes. She also talks about tidying by category rather than by room, and that makes a lot of sense - for instance, we have this closet that just has a ton of shit in it, and most of it we haven't touched since we moved in and is kitchen stuff. To put all of that stuff together and get our kitchen stuff together and go through all of it I think will be excellent.

She also talks about the idea of tidying once. One time. That way, we know where everything goes and put it back there when we're done. It's a pretty interesting read!

We're taking February vacation off together, and we're taking that entire week to get ourselves organized, or at least start the process. It'll be a long one to be sure, but it will be worth it when it's time to move and get into a new place. I'm pretty excited.