Author

Jen

Speech-Language Pathologist. Nature-loving, book-reading, coffee-drinking, mismatched-socks-wearing, Autism-Awesomeness-finder, sensitive-soul Bostonian.

Just one little thing

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If you’ve interacted with me at all in the past year or two, you know that I don’t have a lot of hope for our world. Well, mostly for our country. That’s a whole post in and of itself (that I actually wrote months ago but haven’t posted yet).

There’s just so much bad, so much danger, so much hatred, and while I’m aware there are amazing, miraculous, love-filled things happening each day, it doesn’t seem to be enough.

But sometimes it’s just one little thing that can give you a boost of hope.

Today I was in Target with my daughter and while we were browsing in the toddler clothing section we saw (well, heard, really) a family of 6 in the same section. They had 4 kids under the age of 10 or so, and they were loud and crazy. The parents were snapping and squabbling at each other and their kids (“I cannot watch them all on my own!” “What the heck is going on?!” “Can’t you help out for once?!” “Guys! Come on, what are you DOING?!”) while the kids ran around crazily. At one point, their youngest, probably around 2 years old, ran over to where we were standing and grabbed a bright pink, orange, and yellow dress with a giant tutu, and brought it back to his family.

“Ugh,” the oldest rolled his eyes. “Why does he always wear girl clothes?”

“Because he likes girl clothes,” the dad answered, “and that’s fine with us.”

“It’s just weird,” the oldest said.

“It makes him happy,” said the mom, “so we don’t care. He can wear whatever he wants.”

“Plus,” the dad added, “with little kids most things are a phase.”

“But if it’s not a phase, we’re fine with that too,” said the mom.

“I KNOW,” said the dad, “I’m just SAYING.”

“I KNOW, but it’s important to CLARIFY!” said the mom. And they began snapping at each other again and yelling at the kids to stop running around like clowns, and I smiled as we walked away.

That, right there. Amidst the chaos, amidst the stress, the exhaustion, the frustration – that was love. That was acceptance. That was HOPE.

Those special moments

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I haven’t watched Law and Order SVU in years, but the other night when my husband was out and the little one was sleeping, and I miraculously had nothing else to do, I put on some newer episodes I hadn’t seen.

In college, this show was everything to me. Having not spoken about all that I had gone through yet (except for one person briefly, and only about one of the incidents), Olivia Benson was my savior. And this is not uncommon; look at Twitter and you will see hundreds of survivors posting about Olivia. Her character was designed so perfectly. So compassionate and loving, and not only does she hold your hand, but she catches the bad guys and locks them up.

So when I was watching and I saw her look into a survivor’s eyes, grab her hand, and say, “Honey, this was NOT your fault,” I was transported back to those moments in college where I listened to her say those words every single episode and a tiny bit of me healed. And that was just from a t.v. character!

And I remembered how powerful those moments are. A friend of mine once said, “There’s something special about a hard time,” and how true it is. Trauma (of any kind) is horrific, but the moment of sitting with someone, when they look into your eyes and hold space when you tell your story? It’s one of the most beautiful and powerful experiences in the world. For BOTH people.

I replay some of those moments that I’ve experienced over and over again, and I hold them near and dear to my heart.

(And it’s not just trauma. It’s any real talk. Grief and love and fear and secrets and stories, of any kind.)

I guess what I am thinking about tonight, like I think about so often, is all the people who have not experienced those moments that I have. Keeping secrets ruins you. And even if you’ve told your secret before, but you haven’t had that special moment sitting across from a friend in a coffee shop, or next to them on the couch late at night, or walking with them in the woods, breathing in the fresh air, talking about whatever it is you’re holding inside of you – you need it.

Find a person. Find me, if you want. Talk. Tell your thoughts and your secrets and your stories, whatever they are.

Trust me.

Feeling person. Messy world.

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Here is a question that popped into my brain the other day:

Is there a difference between depression and being highly-sensitive?

If it causal? Can a person be depressed due to being highly-sensitive?

Does it matter?

If you know me in the slightest, you know that I’m a highly-sensitive person. This means a variety of things: I feel things stronger than most people, I’m affected by things that most people wouldn’t be affected by, and when things do affect me, it stays with me for a while. It also means that I feel other people’s feelings, and sometimes I even feel feelings of animals or non-living things.

Sometimes it makes me feel crazy. Often, I hate it. Sometimes, I love it.

I’ve learned that while much of my “depression” as an adolescent was clearly due to trauma, a chunk of it that still lingers with me today is due to this highly-sensitive personality I have.

Have you ever had something happen to you, and it makes you so upset or so sad that you feel like there’s a heavy weight pressing on your chest and you can’t really breathe freely?

That’s what happens to me, all the time, to the extreme, even when it’s not actually happening to me. It goes something like this:

I walk outside in the morning and the sun isn’t out. I feel the gloom and doom of the darkness and lack of light and color and it weighs on me. Each organ in my body is craving sunlight. On the drive to school, I am flooded by the feelings of everyone else in their cars. I feel their exhaustion, their sadness, their lack of desire to go to work. I hear a lone bird chirping and I feel sad for the bird because what if it’s all alone? I get a news alert that there was another shooting. My heart sinks and my chest contracts. An image pops into my brain of a loved one dying. I force myself to take a deep breath and instinctively shake the thought away. I know it’s just a thought, but what if thinking thoughts could make them true? [As an aside: this is where being highly-sensitive intersects with anxiety and OCD, and THAT is a post for another day] I finally get to work and a student walks into my office talking about how tired she is and how she did nothing over the weekend and home is not a fun place for her, and I feel her loneliness seep into the cells in my body. And…on and on it goes.

Now, look. I’m obviously able to function. This doesn’t consume me every moment of every day – if it did, I would be unable to do anything. I have learned about my personality and my sensitivities and my tendencies and I’ve learned to manage them. And I’m thankful for that.

But sometimes within functioning, it’s in this sad, heavy state. It’s working with my students despite the weight of the world on my shoulders. It’s playing with my daughter while I feel sad for the blades of grass we’re stepping on. It’s snuggling with my cats while a heavy cloud descends upon me as images pop up of all the animals who aren’t warm and safe and loved.

And I don’t know that I would call that “depression.” For me, at least.

(Although, labels are a whole other discussion. They have merit sometimes and they’re unhelpful sometimes and sometimes they just don’t matter because regardless of what you’re calling it, you’re living it.)

It makes me think of Glennon’s quote (eek, when do I NOT think of Glennon’s quotes): “You are not a mess. You are a feeling person in a messy world.”

Yes.

That’s exactly what I am. EXACTLY.

And I suspect many of you are, too. I suspect this is not a just me thing. Well, maybe the intensity is, but I would imagine others can relate. Talk about it. You’re not crazy. You’re not a mess. I get it.

You’re a feeling person. In a messy world.

Postpartum anxiety

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Okay, it’s time that postpartum anxiety is talked about. In fact, it’s way overdue, but better late than never.

First of all, it isn’t even really a thing. Which is absurd. There’s no test for it, no evaluations for it. We kind of have to be aware of it and self-diagnose it to then even know to reach out for support.

Postpartum psychosis is fairly easy to diagnose – yes, I’m having thoughts of hurting my baby and there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind: that’s not normal.

Then there’s postpartum depression – no, I have no enjoyment in anything, I feel hopeless, I’ve withdrawn from family and friends. But that is sometimes hard – because, after you’ve had a baby, of course there are times you feel hopeless. Will I ever sleep again? Will I ever stop bleeding? Will she ever stop crying? Of course you don’t enjoy anything – you don’t DO anything other than feed, change diapers, soothe. And of course you’ve withdrawn from family and friends- there’s no TIME to connect or maintain relationships. Consequently, I think too many people get told “Yep – totally normal, it’ll get easier as she gets older!” (Which IS true, but it’s only helpful if what the person is experiencing is typical and not pathological. Also, don’t get me started on the lack of postpartum care – both physical and mental, and how there is ONE screening for PPD at your ONE postpartum physical.)

And then postpartum anxiety – a whole other ball game. Postpartum anxiety gets normalized. It’s also a really fine line, because it is NORMAL to be anxious as a new parent – but there’s no method for rating/qualifying just how intense the anxiety is, and just where normal ends and pathological begins. Do you have constant worry? Of course you do. You’re a new mom. Moms worry about everything. Do you worry something bad is going to happen? Of course. You’re responsible for this tiny human.

You see?

When you have (undiagnosed) postpartum anxiety (and/or OCD – I’ll lump them together per my own experience), it goes multiple steps further.

People talk about giving birth and kind of laugh it off – “Yup, gooooood times,” they joke. Oh. So it must be normal that I can’t stop replaying my horrific labor experience in my mind, that I can’t stop thinking about all those days in pain, that my body still feels it happening, that I know I will never in my entire life not recall every awful moment of it.

“Oh yes, I definitely obsessed over how much my baby was eating!” they say. Well, I check and recheck that her bottles are filled with EXACTLY 4oz of my pumped milk – not a speck over or under. Is that normal too? She eats every 3 hours, so I tell day care that they need to feed her at 9:05 exactly, and then 12:05 exactly. Um…that’s also normal….right?

“Yep, the days can definitely be long,” they say. So is it normal that I burst into tears every Friday afternoon because I’m afraid of how we are going to get through the weekend, just us in our house? It’s better at day care, she’s happier at day care, every other baby is happy at home….something is wrong with me.

Others joke about how complicated it can be to get a baby out of the house. I agree. That’s why I never, ever take her anywhere other than to and from day care and to and from my parents’ house. It’s just too much. The world is too unsafe and it’s better to just stay in our own little bubble. Right?

Some mothers talk about making sure their babies are warm enough. Oh, good. So it must be normal to open the hourly weather forecast every five seconds and then wonder if I should put her in a long-sleeved shirt with an undershirt underneath or a long-sleeved shirt with a sweater over it. What if one way she’s too hot or one way she’s too cold? What if it ends up being 70 degrees in the day care room instead of 71? What about when she sleeps at night? What if the temperature in her room rises from 72 to 73? Will she overheat?

They talk about making sure their babies are safe in their cribs. You wonder if that means it’s “normal” to reach over to feel your newborn’s chest and make sure it’s rising and falling, multiple times every night, to the point where it interferes with your own limited sleep. You wonder about the times you wake up gasping, frantically searching the sheets, because you know you fell asleep nursing her and now she’s going to be dead in the sheets – but then you reach over and she’s actually in her bassinet, because of course you put her back, you always do. And by the time your breath slows and the sweat dries, she needs to nurse again and it starts all over.

You wonder about how you can never nap while she naps because you just know that if you aren’t awake listening to the monitor and watching her breathe, she will die, and it will be your fault. I’ll just check one more time. Just one more time. Just. one. more. time.

But every parent worries, right?

—

Look, I had a physically hard pregnancy, a unimaginably hard labor and delivery, and an even more long, awful recovery. I had panic, anxiety, and OCD prior to pregnancy – it’s no wonder I developed it all postpartum also. But the point is, it’s so often a fine line. It’s easy to question the normalcy of our thoughts and behaviors, even if we are primed for it and are expecting it. We second-guess ourselves. I was primed for it and I didn’t even realize what it was.

And not nearly enough focus is placed on the mental health of postpartum mothers. And I’m not just talking when they’re infants – this can take hold and not go away, even into toddlerhood. Trust me.

I will always be an anxious mother. It’s in my wiring. I have my moments, but overall right now, at least for now, I’m not pathologically anxious or obsessive, and I am very aware of that line. I just am who I am, and who I am translates into parenthood. I am working on caring about the things I care about, and standing firm behind my beliefs as long as they are rooted in a healthy place, which nowadays, they are (even if other parents raise their children in different ways or have different beliefs – but that’s a post for another day).

But this – motherhood, postpartum experiences, labor, delivery, parenting, relationships after having a baby – it really needs to be talked about, so so much more. Better out than in, better to know than not know, better to have people to relate to than to feel alone, better to heal collectively than suffer silently.

(Seems that’s the case for everything, am I right?)

Another panicky post

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I would say about 99% of my panic (today) is caused by worrying that I might have a panic attack.

This is not uncommon.

People with anxiety and panic typically have a lot of panic about panic, almost as if it’s a PTSD response.

My heart skips a beat, because sometimes hearts skip beats, and that triggers a thought: Ohmygod. What was that? Was that panic? AM I GOING TO HAVE ANOTHER PANIC ATTACK? What do I do if that happens?! And THAT makes me anxious, so my heart races faster, which solidifies my belief that it is indeed a panic attack, and before I know it it’s a full attack all because of a stupid trigger. Not because of anything even legitimate! (Not that panic is legitimate – but you know what I mean.)

There are people I have had panic attacks in front of before – even a full decade ago – and I still get anxious when I am with them. Not because of THEM, but because deep in my brain, there is still an association there. Every time I go to Whole Foods I get on the verge of a panic attack because that happened one time last summer. Today I wore a sweater that I once wore during a panic attack and that brief memory put me on edge.

It’s annoying and exhausting.

But I think it’s important in distinguishing that difference between a true isolated panic attack and one that’s really just a traumatic response because panic attacks are freaking traumatic. For me at least it helps me understand that it’s my brain responding in faulty, stuck ways (just like with PTSD) and not because I am designed to panic in response to everything. I don’t know – it makes sense to me.

It also motivates me to find ways to break that faulty cycle.

Exercise is a huge one. There’s a lot of research that says that exercise helps panic and anxiety but I didn’t care about that until I understood why. And a big reason (aside from that the neurotransmitters that get released and bind to receptors, causing calming the same way medication would) is because your brain makes new associations. You learn to associate a pounding heart and sweating palms with the feeling of a good workout, instead of panic that’s going to leave you vomiting and passed out on the ground. And it works, for sure. Following an immensely panic-filled summer and fall, I made it a priority to make sure I got even 15 minutes of a good workout multiple times a week, and I saw a difference when I did.

Sometimes I face the panic head on. I know it’s likely to happen, given where I’m going or who I’m going to be with, and I do things to counteract it. Holding onto my cold water bottle is grounding. I choose where I sit and ensure I have an exit. I rub my oils on my wrists before I enter that situation. I remind myself that I can just get up and leave if I need to and it doesn’t matter what people think. (Although as an aside, having people know about my panic is immensely helpful because then the fear of what they would think is eliminated). I try to do something to get my heart moving before a potentially hard situation, even if it’s just walking up a flight of stairs or three jumping jacks.

I try ,and lately I’ve been succeeding. Sometimes I don’t, and I hate when I don’t, but that’s the journey, right? Also, sometimes when I get annoyed about it, I remember myself from 3, 5, 10 years ago and I am comforted by how much more I understand now, how much more control I’m in now. So while my brain can sometimes take hold and spin me out of control, the magnitude and frequency is negligible compared to what it used to be – and that, my friends, is freaking wonderful.

Race matters.

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Today with a group of 8th graders in their speech/language therapy session, we read a passage about Ruby Bridges, coupled with vocabulary words and comprehension questions.

When we read the part about some people not wanting to integrate, we talked about the word. “When her school integrated,” I said, “it meant that they started to allow blacks and whites to go to school together. It didn’t matter what color your skin was, you could go to that school.” Trying to draw a connection, I continued, “For example, our school is integrated.”

“No it’s not!!!” an 8th grade boy piped in.

“Well, it is,” I explained. “Students of any race can come to this school.”

“No,” he continued. “Most people are white here. There are a few black kids but I’m Hispanic and I think there’s only one other Hispanic kid! And let me think…yeah, there’s only one Chinese kid!” He sat defensively on the edge of his seat and knowing him as well as I do, I could see he was gearing up for a fight.

“You’re right,” I simply said. “Most people here are white. You’re right. We are an integrated school, but we are not a balanced school. You are in the minority. That means there are less people who are Hispanic than people who are white.”

He kind of did a double take and I could see his brain thinking, like, wait, what? She’s going to acknowledge that? She’s not going to convince me that it doesn’t matter that there aren’t many kids like me? She’s not going to tell me that I’m just like everyone else and the color of my skin doesn’t matter?

He thought about it. “I’m not white,” he said.

“I know.” I replied.

—
In an effort to be SO accepting and encompassing of everyone, I think we’ve actually swung the pendulum too far. We [and I’m not referring to me, or you, just a general we as a general population] often don’t even discuss race, dismissing it right away, assuming that is the right thing to do.

“Race doesn’t matter!” we smile and say.

“But I’m different,” they say.

“No you’re not!” we respond. “We don’t even see the color of your skin! It doesn’t matter! We aren’t even going to talk about it – let’s move on!”

You’re not hearing me, they think. You’re not seeing me. I know you aren’t judging me by the color of my skin, but people DO judge me. And I AM different. And I just wish someone would acknowledge that.

—
In not talking about it, we’ve made it taboo. In trying to avoid highlighting others’ differences, we are highlighting their differences. We are stopping people from talking about things that matter to them.

I have a younger student who is black and in nearly every opportunity she gets, she brings in race. “I was out to lunch and then the server was mixed and I ordered ice cream,” or “Yeah and I was at my friend’s house who is white like you,” or “In the book I’m reading a black kid like me is the main character.” It matters to her. She’s trying to understand the world.

We tell kids it doesn’t matter how they look because we’re trying to comfort them. What we really mean is, “I like you and care about you independent of what you look like. The color of your skin doesn’t make me like you any less.” Our intentions are good. But when we refuse to talk about it even though it matters to them, even though they want to talk about it, even though across the country people are being treated differently because of the color of their skin, we’re closing them off and sending the message that they don’t matter.

—

They matter.

I will never stop learning lessons from my students.

Why I’m not writing

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Every day I have a desperate urge to write and every time I sit down to write, nothing comes out. It feels like more than writer’s block.

When I first started blogging, I wrote about my work with kids on the spectrum. Not a lot of people were writing about that wonderful population at the time, and many reached out and said they got helpful ideas from what I wrote, and that made me happy.

Then I started writing about my life with anxiety during a time where nobody was writing about anxiety, and I was this big Truth-Teller, and people came out of the woodwork to tell me how brave I was, that they had anxiety too, that they could relate, that my bravery in sharing made them feel less alone and less stigmatized. And that was amazing. Except now – anxiety is just something widely accepted, that everyone has, that every celebrity talks about, that people admit to, that really isn’t stigmatized much at all anymore. So, why bother writing about it?

And then, again, I became this Brave Truth-Teller when I started writing about sexual assault, and yet again, people came out of the woodwork to tell me “me too” and share their experiences and say that me writing about it helped them talk about it or acknowledge it, and it was amazing and I connected with people and felt like again, I was making a difference. Except now, again, everyone is talking about it. Between the “me too” movement and the Kavanaugh hearings, and the USA gymnastics, and Time’s Up Now, it’s EVERYWHERE. And that’s amazing too, and I’m glad it’s so public, and while I know that there are still plenty of people keeping it a dark shameful secret, it’s so out there in the media that is there really any point to little tiny insignificant me writing about it more?

And so now I feel stuck. Blogging to me used to feel like this exciting, brave thing I was doing, because I knew how many people I was reaching and impacting. I would sit down and think, “What would one of my younger selves – my 7-year-old self, my 15-year-old self, my 28-year-old self, need to read?” and then I would write it. Because nobody else was. But what do I write about now? Do I stick with those same topics and carry on, hoping there are still people out there who will benefit? Do I write about boring and mundane topics like the fact that I’m still a sensitive person blah blah blah and motherhood is amazing and exhausting blah blah blah and here is how I’m managing my anxiety blah blah blah? Or do I stop? I really just wonder if I did my thing, made my difference, and now it’s time to let this blog go.