#because i remember being a little undiagnosed girl and struggling so bad in school

[thmollusk]

me and my autism vs. the aba therapy supporting autism and disability awareness hr person at my work who will win

[olivish]

Some thoughts about Melanie Cavill and her beautiful mind. 

I agree with others that Mel is neurodivergent/ autistic. I think this helps explain her passion and focus, and also why, in S1, she was so adept at “putting on a mask” and pretending to be someone else. Basically, I think she had been masking in some way or another her entire life, so when the time came to create the “Hospitality Melanie” persona, it was already second nature. 

I think this also explains why it took Melanie so long to see Wilford for the monster he is, and why he was able to control/ manipulate her for most of her life, despite her superior intelligence.  On that note, here are some of my MC HCs (I hope it goes without saying, I don’t mean to imply that anything described below is necessarily an “autistic” trait. This is simply how I imagine Melanie the person, who also happens to have autism.)

1. Before meeting Wilford, Melanie struggled to find her place in the world. She dropped out of high school because she was bored with the lessons and couldn’t be bothered to complete assignments. She had no friends, and most adults wrote her off as a trouble-maker.

Her family was poor, so she “borrowed” things they needed for the farm (some of them rather LARGE things), which earned her a juvenile record for theft. 

2. Because of this, Melanie believed she’d never go to college. That was fine, she thought, she wouldn’t fit in there. She didn’t fit in anywhere. The only person who didn’t make her feel like a misfit was her father, John Cavill, who was a patient man who loved farming, and who taught his daughter everything he knew about the trade. 

It wasn’t long, however, before John ran out of knowledge to share. Melanie was 8 when her father took her to the local library. “So,” he said. “What do you want to know?” 

“Everything.” 

From that moment on, John watched his daughter surpass him in every subject, every field of study. It was hard, not because he was prideful, but because it felt like he was losing her. But not completely. At least, not yet. 

Because for years after that, Melanie would seek her father out, and she’d talk at length about the topics that interested her, and he listened, enjoying her company, even after he ceased to understand a single word that came out of her mouth. 

I mean that literally. 

“Certains nématodes posent problème en agriculture parce qu'ils parasites des plantes ou des animaux d'élevage, mais la plupart stimulent la croissance en améliorant le cycle des nutriments.” “Mellie.” “Oui, papa?”  “You’re speaking French again.”  “Oh. Sorry.” 

3. Melanie’s mother was a different story. Shanon Cavill, nee Shanon O’Connell, was stern, intelligent and, due to an undiagnosed mood disorder, emotionally unstable. She’d lose her temper at the drop of a hat, and although she loved her daughter, she didn’t understand her. Shanon didn’t understand why someone so brilliant was throwing her life away. Dropping out of school, getting arrested, fooling around with boys, and girls, who didn’t care about her, and who only got her into trouble. 

Shanon said many words in the heat of many moments that she could never take back. Foolish. Reckless. Lazy. Quitter. 

The day Joseph Wilford showed up at the farm looking for Melanie, Shanon peered at him through the porch screen door. “Did she steal something from you?” she asked. “Because whatever it is, we can’t pay you back, so you’d best just leave before I let the dogs out.” 

Looking back, Wilford deeply regrets not heeding the lady Cavill’s advice. 

4. Melanie saw Wilford as her missing piece. Melanie always knew she was “bad with people”. To her, human beings were confounding black boxes.  INPUT > [???] > UNEXPECTED RESULT, USUALLY BAD. 

But Wilford. Joseph Wilford was a social magician! She watched in awe. Everyone adored him. He’d tell a joke and everyone laughed. Anything they needed for their work - funding, IP rights, permits, materials, labor - he procured through sheer force of charisma. 

He was just like her, except he had that one missing piece. 

It was the apparent gap in their interpersonal skills that led Melanie to conclude that she could never be a leader like him. That’s why she allowed Wilford to take credit for her work, why she believed him when he said it was better for all involved if she remained a ‘silent partner.’ 

That’s also why she never tried to run Snowpiercer as herself. Despite having all the skills, Melanie couldn’t imagine anyone would follow her leadership. 

(I think she was wrong about that...) 

5. It was Wilford who sent Melanie to college, and it was Wilford who coached her on how to “mask.” As a sociopath, nearly all of Wilford’s social interactions are theatre. They have to be. So when he met Melanie, he immediately saw what her problem was - the silly girl wasn’t acting! 

So he sat her down one day and gave her a gift. “A chess game?” she said. 

“Not a game. This box contains the secret to the universe.” 

She smiled, but he was serious. As Wilford set up the pieces he explained, “This is the whole world. Every type of person you’ll ever meet is here. Pawns, knights, bishops. They all have their rules, their own little scripts. The trick is, figure them out, while revealing nothing about yourself.” 

She didn’t understand, but in time, she would. Wilford taught her how to survive, but not as herself. He taught her to hide, to blend in, and to trust nobody but him. 

And it worked, to a certain extent. Melanie earned degrees from MIT and Yale, graduating with the highest honors, lauded as a prodigy. A recruiter from NASA asked if she’d be interested in applying for the astronaut program. Elon Musk asked the same thing, but he offered more money. 

Melanie could have worked anywhere. Done anything. But she went back to Wilford, partly out of loyalty, and partly because she believed he was the only person in the world who truly knew her, and saw her, and valued her for who she was. 

They weren’t lovers, but Melanie considered him just as close. For many years, he was her one partner and closest friend. 

6. When Melanie got pregnant with Alex, she was afraid she’d be a bad mother. She worried that she wouldn’t have that mysterious ‘maternal instinct’ that seemed to come naturally to other women. She thought maybe she was “broken” in a very particular way and shouldn’t be a parent. 

Those worries disappeared once Alex was born. More than that, Melanie’s deep connection with Alex made her consider that maybe she’d underestimated herself. In motherhood, Melanie found courage. She built stronger friendships with Ben & Jinju, and she began to interact with Wilford on a more equal footing. 

She started speaking up about things she never dared interfere with before. She didn’t like the company’s environmental practices. Their anti-union stances. Their parental leave policies were atrocious. Wilford was beside himself. He didn’t recognize her. He couldn’t wrap his mind around what happened. 

At a loss, Wilford blamed his catch-all word for human behavior that fell outside his bounds of understanding. 

“Sentimentality.” 

7. When Melanie lost Alex, she lost faith in herself. It wasn’t just the grief, or the guilt, though those were enormous. Melanie understood now: Alex was her missing piece. Alex was the one thing that made Melanie feel like she could do anything.

It cannot be overstated what a colossal blunder it was for Wilford to return Melanie’s superpower to her. He thought he was being clever in saving Alex, but from the moment Melanie blew up Big Alice’s connector and Alex gave her that grudging look of respect, all bets were off. 

Melanie remembered who she was. The awakening started with Layton, but it ended with Alex. 

Final thoughts: Melanie’s particular neurology has been a hot-button issue in the past, so I’m a little nervous posting this. Please reach out to me with any comments or concerns. Everything here is written with an open heart in good faith, and while I’m allergic to argument, I am addicted to discussion. <3

[mandrs-writes]

My Writing Advice

Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer. I vividly remember writing stories about my dog way back when I was seven years old. And when I was eleven I was bold enough to think I could write my own novel and sent drafts to my older cousin for editing. Writing was my life, my escape, my passion. And it still is. But I haven’t always had a good relationship with it.

When I turned thirteen, I struggled severely with undiagnosed depression and anxiety. High school was terrible for me. All that passion I felt for writing? Gone. It wasn’t until I was older, that I was diagnosed with depression and began taking antidepressants. At the time, I was attending college to become a nurse, which was literally just a crapshoot because I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do with my life. Finally though, I came to the realization again that English, or writing, was more my passion. So I changed majors.

I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English literature with a focus in creative writing. Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Wow! You probably wrote a lot during college!” Wrong. While I did write a lot of thesis papers, did a short stint in poetry, I think I wrote one short story for my fiction workshop. But other than that? Nothing. I don’t know when it happened, but I developed a severe fear of writing.

What is a fear of writing, you ask? Honestly, I don’t know. All I know is, I would write something and get literal anxiety over it because I hated it that much. I would agonize over every little detail until I was ripping my hair out. I despised my writing, something I used to be so passionate about, it was now something that caused me great distress.

Why am I sharing this with you? Well, as some of you know, I am now a very active fanfic writer for ereri. I update roughly two fics a week and sometimes I sprinkle a one shot in there if I’m feeling sassy. So how did someone like me, someone who used to agonize over my writing, go from hating every detail of it, to sometimes pumping out roughly 10k words a week and actually enjoy my writing?

While I am no expert on writing, I want to share my advice, regardless. I’ve come into contact with so many great writers who I know struggle with similar things that I once did, and sometimes still do (I’m far from perfect). Here are some tips I have when it comes to writing. I hope it helps:

Get in the right headspace. Clear your area of any and all distractions. Lock yourself out of social media, turn off your phone, kick your significant other out of the house— whatever that looks like for you, just create the perfect space for you to create. Any distractions could easily pull you out of your creative mindset and ruin your flow. I personally always work in my living room, away from my desktop because I just know I’ll play video games if I try to write in my office. I find the perfect playlist for the scene I’m writing (I seriously have so many playlists for writing. If you don’t have Spotify premium for playlist making, I seriously suggest you get it), sometimes put a Pinterest aesthetic board up in the background, and just get to it. My fiancé knows when I’m writing not to bother me and he stays in the other room. Make sure you establish clear boundaries with your housemates when you’re writing. Interruptions can sometimes not be pretty. 

Once you’re in the right headspace, JUST WRITE! Seriously, I know it sounds like a no brainer, but it’s a lot easier said than done. Whatever is in your head, just write it out. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, silly or irrelevant. Just write it. Writing and editing are two very different beasts, and when you’re in writing mode you need to focus ONLY on writing. Again, I know this sounds very obvious, but I know from experience that this is much harder than it sounds. My best suggestion is to find a writing partner to do sprints with. Set a timer for 20 minutes and see how much you can write in that time frame. When you’re writing with a friend, it becomes a challenge to see who can write the most in that 20 minute time. You’d be surprised what you can do in that short amount of time. And what you write might actually be amazing! I know I’ve surprised myself on more than one occasion writing like this.

Keep editing and writing separate. I mentioned this earlier but it’s so important that you do this. Our brains work differently when we edit and write. When we write, we put our heads into a creative mindset where we are inspired to create and expand on new ideas. However, when we edit, our brain slips into an analytical mindset which is great for critiquing and finding errors but TERRIBLE for creation! That’s why you MUST keep these two things separate. Believe me, I know this is hard to do. I used to be SO SO SO bad at this. I would write a paragraph, go back and read it, edit it, and rip it apart. My confidence would be shot, and I wouldn’t be able to write anything else for that session. Eventually, I forced myself out of this bad habit with lots and lots of practice (again, writing sprints are AMAZING for this!). You might think that what you’re writing isn’t any good and you might be itching to go back and read it and fix it. But I assure it, it’s probably A LOT better than you think it is. Leave it alone. Let it sit. And when you’ve finished writing your chapter, let it sit even longer. Don’t touch it for another 12 hours. I’m serious. When you have a fresh pair of eyes and your brain is in the analytical mindset, THAT’S when you should be editing. 

Always carry something with you to write your ideas down. Whether it’s your phone or notebook and pen, always be ready to write down an idea! Sometimes a juicy idea or thought will come to you at an unexpected time like in the shower, while you’re driving, or while you’re trying to fall asleep. That idea WANTS to be written down! Whenever I’m laying in bed, thinking about my stories, I’ll grab my phone and write down a line or phrase or idea that pops into my head. It might not make sense, but my brain is trying to get it out on paper so that’s exactly what I do. I might not use it, but at least it’s there if it does end up being good!

Find a friend/beta reader to read your stuff. And I’m not just saying this for editing purposes. No, I’m saying this for confidence purposes. I’ve always struggled with self-doubt. Like I said before, I struggle severely with depression and anxiety, and sometimes I get into really bad slumps with my writing where I think I’m the worst writer there ever was. My imposter syndrome flares up and I wonder what the hell I’m even doing with myself. Luckily, I have a friend and beta reader who refuses to let me falter when times are hard. And maybe we don’t beta read each other’s works in a traditional sense (I don’t really know how a normal beta reader behaves, to be honest). What I do know is, my friend will leave interactive comments throughout my whole chapter, commenting on what she likes, what she thinks works really well or what could be better. Having her interact with my chapter and tell me what is good and what isn’t, significantly boosts my confidence and makes me feel loads better about my writing. Honestly, if it wasn’t for her, I probably would’ve given up on writing by now. But it’s reassuring knowing my number one fan is always rooting for me on the sidelines. Get yourself a fan that roots for you, too.

There’s no such thing as too many ideas. I always hear people say ‘I have too many ideas. I don’t know what to do with them’. I know what you can do with them… WRITE THEM DOWN, SILLY. If you have inspiration for an idea, WRITE IT. I know you might feel like you have too many projects and that might stress you out. And if you are stressed by the amount of wips you have then maybe you should set some aside. But if you feel a great amount of inspiration for a new idea when you already have another idea in the works, write it anyway. Whatever you do, do not squander that inspiration! That idea wants to be written. Even if you don’t think you’ll do anything with it, it’s great practice and if the inspiration is there, it should be relatively easy to get the idea out on paper. I’ve written multiple chapter fics before because I had so much inspiration for the idea and then never posted them. I was so overcome with inspiration that I just NEEDED to write them. So I did. Maybe I’ll go back to them and finish them one day when the inspiration strikes me. And if I don’t, that’s okay. It’s good practice to listen to your inspiration and use it as it comes. Stifling your inspiration will only hurt you in the long run.

That’s pretty much all the advice I’ve got. This might be a little rambly and I’m sorry for that. I literally was just thinking about this last night and wanted to get my thoughts out so that I could maybe help some people that are in similar situations that I once was a year ago. If you want to write, but you don’t think you can, just do it anyway. Writing takes practice. It’s not something you can master on the first go. It took me almost a year to find my writing voice and I’m still developing it as I go. Don’t get discouraged. If this is something you want, you can do it! Just write!

[ohhophelie]

ORIGINS & FAMILY:

Name: Ophélie Evangeline Redgrave

Nickname: O, Fee

Birthday: 31 July 1992

Age: 28

Gender: Female.

Place of Birth: London, United Kingdom

Places Lived Since: London, United Kingdom; Saint-Malo, Ille-et-Vilaine, France

Current Residence: Kensington, London, United Kingdom

Nationality: British & French

Parents: Lambert & Sérephine Redgrave, née Callac

Grandparents: Harold Redgrave (grandfather, paternal, deceased)  Hélène de Broglie (grandmother, paternal, deceased) Aurélien Callac (grandfather, maternal) Ophélie Hervé (grandmother, maternal)

Aunts & Uncles: Charlotte, Georgina Redgrave (aunts, paternal) Anita Acton (aunt, paternal)

Number of Siblings: Three brothers; Sébastian Redgrave (38), Arnaud Redgrave (36), Gaël Redgrave (32)

Relationship With Family: Ophélie is closest to Gaël, her other two brothers see her mostly as the family fuck up although they all feel somewhat protective of her as the youngest. This was particularly meaningful during the wild years of her teens when an attention starved Ophélie might find herself in places or situations she was likely too young for, they were mostly all still at home and willing to come collect her from wherever and keep her secrets from their parents. Her father has always been distant, she sometimes fears he’d rather forget she existed. Her mother is overbearing and critical - after three boys she thought Ophélie was at long last the daughter who’d belong only to her, a little doll to shape as she wished. She was very wrong.

Happiest Memory: The freedom and acceptance she finally found in university, the Christmas and New Years she spent with Gaël in New York when spent a year at NYU.  

Childhood Trauma: oh boy - see this answer HERE

PHYSICAL:

Height: 5'4”

Weight: 110lbs.

Build: Slim - some might say too skinny

Hair Color: Blonde.

Usual Hair Style: loose curls, a careless, practiced ease. Sometimes she wears it up if she's bored enough, high ponytail when she runs

Eye Color: Blue.

Glasses? Contacts?: Neither.

Style of Dress/Typical Outfit(s): Expensive as fuck - if she had to choose a ‘style’ it would be classic. She isn’t conservative in the least bit, but she also isn’t one to go into more out there fashions - that is Gaël lane. She tends to favor dresses and skirts and more feminine looks. Ophélie caught in jeans is a very rare Ophélie. When she is home alone she is usually wearing a thin robe or some form of lingerie/pjs  

Typical Style of Shoes: Ophélie does not like to wear shoes. However, given that going barefoot is usually frowned upon in society, she can usually be found in heels that match whatever she may be wearing. If she is very close with someone she will take her shoes off the moment she enters their home, and at her own flat can always be found barefoot.

Jewellery? Tattoos? Piercings?: She has both of her earlobes pierced, as expected. At one point she had a cartilage piercing, but she long ago forgot to keep it open. Unbeknownst to her mother and most of her family, she has both of her nipples pierced. Ophélie will say to anyone who knows that these are her favorite piercings. She has a tattoo of a scorpion on the nape of her neck. Everyday jewellery includes a heavy men’s watch that belonged to her grandfather, whatever earrings she fancies on any given day, as well as rings. The one ring she wears at all times is made up of three interlocking circles - when she is anxious or focusing on something Ophélie spins this around her finger.

Scars: She has a scar on her shin from falling off a horse as a child. The most recent additions include a thin line across her chest/sternum and a nearly perfect large C in the center of her back - she plans on adjusting that soon.

Unique Mannerisms/Physical Habits: When she is focusing, Ophélie will twist her ring around her finger. She has the tendency to curl her hands into fists and dig her nails into her palms. She also chews on her bottom lip, which has caused a significant investment in longwear lipstick.

Athleticism: Ophélie grew up playing tennis with her brother Gaël and got into running in her teens. She never does any actual races mostly because she couldn’t be bothered and also way too many people near her. It’s mostly a way for her to focus her own mind/punish her body.

Health Problems/Illnesses: She absolutely has an eating disorder from the unrealistic expectations of her mother when she was growing up. It is something she has struggled with most of her life that her friends are likely unaware of. Ophélie also has undiagnosed ADHD, PTSD, addiction issues that are yet to be explored.

INTELLECT:

Level of Education: BSc in Politics and Philosophy from LSE - it wasn’t exactly what she wanted to study but a compromise that got her parents off her back. If possible she’d want to go back to school for linguistics or art history.

Languages Spoken: English & French natively, Spanish fluently. Functionally fluent in Italian, a lingering understanding of Latin from prep school. She has a very good ear for languages and dialects and can pick them up quickly.

Level of Self-Esteem: Fluctuates between “I hate myself I’m such a bitch” and “I love myself I’m such a bitch.” No in between.

Gifts/Talents: Very good at languages and remembering things she’s heard if she cares enough to focus, weirdly good at crossword puzzles if she has the patience, has the ability to come off as unthreatening and use it to manipulate people.

Mathematical?: Hell no, she absolutely cheated her way through math and she is not at all sorry about it.

Makes Decisions Based Mostly On Emotions, or On Logic?: Emotions, particularly whims. She does have a vindictive streak and while that is based on emotions she can adapt logic to her purposes is.

Life Philosophy: live fast die young bad girls do it well. No joking, she doesn’t really have one or doesn’t like to consider it, but if we had to define it, somewhere along the lines of ‘never let them see you cry’ IDK TBD

Religious Stance: Was raised Anglican, not really about it. Enjoys the art and melodrama of the catholic church.

Cautious or Daring?: Daring, boarding on reckless, she has the arrogant privilege of the very wealthy, that they are untouchable and almost immortal.

Most Sensitive About/Vulnerable To: Her mother, people trying to lessen her or force her to be something she is not, her eating disorder/body image

Optimist or Pessimist?: says she's an optimist, mostly because she doesn’t let herself project any other way; deep down is def a pessimist mostly out of self preservation and years of building up armor

Extrovert or Introvert?: Extrovert.

RELATIONSHIPS:

Current Relationship Status: fucking her way through the french bros/leadership

Sexual Orientation: bisexual in that she is attracted to all beautiful women and men who are older, dangerous, and low key damaged.

Past Relationships: Only real/serious relationship was with Charles Jameson (alexa play champagne problems by taylor swift)

Primary Reason For Being Broken Up With: being caught cheating whoops

Primary Reasons For Breaking Up With People: boredom, afraid of getting to close

Ever Cheated?: yep, and if not for the way he reacted she might actually feel guilty about it.

Been Cheated On: not that she knows of

Level of Sexual Experience: very high and no she will not be slutshamed thank you very much

Story of First Kiss: A boy she met while staying with her grandmother in France. She was 11 and kissed him on a dare.

Story of Loss of Virginity: She’d just turned 14 but told him she was older, it was mediocre at best but she loved the rush of power she felt when she turned him down the next time.

A Social Person?: Very - she literally wouldn’t be able to do her job so well if she wasn’t. Plus shes a slut for attention and once you cross the threshold between casual friends and very close friends - she’s loyal as fuck.

Most Comfortable Around: Paul for sure, although she feels safe and comfortable with most of the frenchies she knows well - Noa, Laurent, Guillaume, Delphine, Sofie - its Paul she goes to first, her ride or die bitch. Outside of the French she feels comfortable around Spencer, shockingly, and within the family it's only Gaël who she feels she can even be remotely herself around.

Oldest Friend: Camilla Berkeley, her brother Gaël. Most of the people she knew through grade school and her teens she grew bored of or dropped for Paul and the French.

How Does She Think Others Perceive Her?: Dancing right on the knife’s edge between hot and hot mess; a fuck up; shallow and vain. For those who know her well she often fears they think she might be stupid or reckless, not as devoted as she actually is.

How Do Others Actually Perceive Her?: Literally dancing right on the knife’s edge between hot and hot mess. Those closest to her often think she’s smarter than she herself does, hopefully they also value and recognize her deep loyalty. All should think she's a great time.

SECRETS:

Life Goals: To be happy and find something and someone that makes her happy.

Dreams: That she will stop letting the negligence and cruelty of her parents - mostly mother, hurt her. That she will matter to someone, be loved and wanted for exactly who she is and not who they think she should be or who she pretends to be.

Greatest Fears: Being abandoned by those she loves,  being hurt by those who should care for her, never being seen for who she is. Horses - she had a bad fall as a child and doesn’t trust them.

Most Ashamed Of: The walls she builds out of self preservation, lying to her brother when he only wants to help her.

Secret Hobbies: Puzzles - the more pieces and complex the better. It isn’t really that much of a secret because there is usually one in progress on the unused dining room table. Collecting first editions of her favorite books - it's a secret because she is usually too impatient to find a better deal or negotiate and will literally pay whatever the seller asks for it, usually above what it is worth.

Crimes Committed (Was she caught? Charged?): She has never been caught or charged, but possession with intent to distribute multiple illegal drugs, selling said drugs for organized crime. There was also that one time that she may or may not have led a man to his death, which although she has done her best to block this memory, would likely make her an accessory to murder.

DETAILS/QUIRKS:

Night Owl or Early Bird?: Both really,  but that's the insomnia and stimulant usage.

Light or Heavy Sleeper?: light sleeper when she’s alone, heavy if she’s sleeping with someone she trusts

Favorite Animal: penguins

Favorite Foods: strawberries, champagne,

Least Favorite Food: anything mint

Favorite Book: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Least Favorite Book: any of the myriad of self help books well meaning psychiatrists have suggested

Favorite Movie: Heathers, Jurassic Park  

Least Favorite Movie: emotional porn - aka any movie specifically designed to make you cry without any profound or complicated themes other than ‘life is short’

Favorite Song: Kyoto by Phoebe Bridgers

Favorite Sport: she’s a tennis bitch for sure

Coffee or Tea?: coffee although she does like tea

Crunchy or Smooth Peanut Butter?: Ophélie is allergic to peanuts rip  

Type of Car She Drives: lol no one let this bitch drive

Lefty or Righty?: Left

Favorite Color: the champagne sheer of the sun pushing through the curtains in an early morning, baby pink of her favorite peonies, rich red velvet of box seats at the opera, the soft golden grey of art museum marble floors.

Cusser?: Yep - but controls it around her family because she doesn't have the patience or stamina for the lecture/scandal it would cause her mother.

Smoker? Drinker? Drug User?: Never smokes, drinks pretty often, regular cocaine use since her teens, a more recent venture into pills.

Biggest Regret: Letting it go on so long with Charles, the fact that she still lets her mother’s cruelty hurt her, not going to school for what she actually was interested in.

Pets: two italian greyhounds named Pogo & Banana

[just-another-dead-blog]

Truly livid to this day about how my ADHD went undiagnosed my whole life and my difficulties were blamed on me and made out to be my failures as a person because I wasn't acting like some disruptive class clown Dennis the menace "boy ADHD" stereotype and THEN when I was older I was made to feel even weirder about myself while pursuing a diagnosis when the still outdated diagnostic thinking was like oh...maybe you have the wEirDer and rArEr inattentive GIRL type ADHD which is still sOooo mysterious to us so who can know for sure. And then so late in my life after failing my way through all of school and dropping out of uni because I had been led to believe that I'm just naturally dumb and lazy and Don't Work Properly, only then do I find a massive community of gays and girls and trans people and every kind of queer people who are in the same boat as me. whose heads are just sometimes filled with white noise and whose thoughts either run on too much or too little rocket fuel and can talk the legs off a table about the most complex concepts which we can understand in a heartbeat on good days and on bad days we can barely remember our own names or to eat but underneath it all we have powerful intellects and unlimited potential. And let's be real we are all smarter and more insightful than most straight people we have ever been ridiculed by. And to know we have all been failed by the mental health community and left to our own devices and to struggle and suffer and hate ourselves not because we're beyond help or even slightly subtle in our presentation of symptoms but because most people never bothered to consider how certain disorders effect anyone but cis straight men because their thinking is so closed minded that they think there is such a thing as being normally abnormal. The world really said let's only focus on how to help the cishet boys and fuck everyone else. It makes me want to fucking breathe fire!!!!

[notesfromthebench]

Letter 1

Dear Friend,

I felt unintelligent for the majority of my school life. Specifically though, from the age of 12, I felt hugely inferior to everyone else in my class and my year group. Looking back now, I can see that I wasn’t given the tools to truly understand how being dyslexic, and dealing with (as of that time undiagnosed) severe mental health problems, would affect my ability to learn. What appeared easy to grasp and do for my friends would seem impossible to me. I would come home from school and not do my homework, as I felt that there was no point working on something which I didn’t understand and would be incorrect. I knew I would fail, so I did nothing; I didn’t want to really set my mind to working independently at home, away from the help of may peers and my teachers, to ultimately have my worst fears confirmed: that I wasn’t good enough, and never would be.

The feeling of being less than, and never enough, would live inside me, corrupting my every thought, until I turned 18 or 19. To my younger self, there was just one way to release this, and that was to physically give it room to escape my body. I had been self-harming on and off from the age of 11, but it grew to a near nightly ritual when I was 14. I would come home from school, head upstairs to my room, shut the door, put my schoolbag down on the floor, head over to the back corner and begin. In the span of five or ten minutes, I could work out my frustrations about my day into my skin. I would attend school with arms and thighs covered in cuts, scars, burns and bruises. I was cautious, and to my knowledge, no teacher ever found out – or if they did, they never said anything. Looking back, it’s laughable that to me that, at the time, I thought I wasn’t unwell- I knew that hurting yourself wasn’t normal, but I also was aware that there were hundreds of people online with far more dramatic injuries than myself, or friends who were also struggling: I wasn’t that bad. Nevertheless, I knew that what I was doing to myself was abnormal, and should be kept secret. I would wear my PE skort under my uniform to hide my thighs, and I would play sports in my school jumper- changing quickly, in order to expose my arms for the shortest possible period of time.

Throughout the school day, I would go to a bathroom stall and just stare at what I had done to myself, proud of the fact that I was finally taking control and punishing myself for not being good enough. I would skip lunch, saying that I had homework to complete, and I would just stay on the floor of my form room, listening to music, and running through every reason as to why I was an awful human being. And this created a cycle. I would head to class, where I would be reprimanded for not completing my homework, and have my flaws pointed out to me in red pen, and to me, I would take this as confirmation that every time I hurt myself, that I deserved it, and that it would ultimately help me. I had literally fallen into a routine of self destruction; I had fallen into having a fully fledged addiction without really realising it. I was convinced that I was in control- hell, the element of control was the appeal. However, I would then notice scars fading under new ones, and I would feel a huge sense of dread and loss, and rush to replace them. My greatest fear was that someone would notice and make me stop – I needed this to function. Once, when sat in my safe space, against the radiator in my form room, a group of people were sat around me talking about self harm. I remember being petrified when one girl, sat in front of me, grabbed my right hand and rolled up my sleeve. I still can vividly feel the relief I felt that she had selected the wrong arm. However, that event made me more manipulative, and far better at hiding it. I would lie about injuries, claiming sprains in order to wear a bandage over my arms, I would permanently hold my jumper sleeve down by my fingers, I would cover my wrist in plasters, under my watch and wristbands.

I’m so lucky that my scars have faded the way that they have, and although the ones on my thighs are noticeable, I am able to conceal the ones of my arms with make-up easily enough. However, all these memories have been dredged up in the past few days. Lately, the weather has been getting colder and we’re heading towards fall. But with colder weather, comes the fact that older faded scars become more prevalent on the skin, especially being as fair as I am. Brushing my teeth, and groggily leaning against the sink for support, I glanced down and noticed that there were patches of my arm looking darker than usual. After heading to collect my glasses, I saw the remnants of a scar I had all but forgotten about (unless dredging through old journals, or in a particularly difficult spiral of shame and depression). Anyone could see it, and not notice the significance, but memories came flooding back.

When I was 16, after getting a mock GCSE paper back and gaining a mark considerably lower than my friends, I went home in shame, and carved the word stupid into my forearm. I remember it vividly, how calm I was, despite falling apart and screaming on the inside. I was methodical. I remember thinking I wanted it to be ‘unintelligent’ but I was scared that it wouldn’t fit, or that I would spell it wrong, and that I would be saddled with a spelling mistake blazoned on my arm for the rest of my life, validating my lack of intelligence to all who saw. I settled with stupid- this thought process was further confirmation to me that this brand was exactly what I needed. I remember finishing and being very proud of myself. I cleaned myself up, and settled in for a night of sitting on the internet, and neglecting the mounting pile of homework I was studiously ignoring. It wasn’t until I lay in bed that night that I realised that the very next day. I had another HPV jab due at school. Panic filled me. I grabbed my journal, and came up with plans of action of how to hide my forearm when being injected by a nurse in my upper bicep. Bullet points to detail how I was planning on lying about my dominant hand, wearing an arm brace and saying that I had slammed it into the car door, or faking illness and saying that I couldn’t have the vaccine that day. It was as though I were writing a shopping list. Seeing that now, it hurts to know that i was so isolated, and yet so convinced that this behaviour was rational. I was so proud of myself for coming up with my backup plan of wearing the brace, as the nurse who administered my vaccine that day said that it did not matter that I was supposedly left-handed, and proceeded to roll up my left sleeve. Still, after having the vaccine, I went to the little seating area, and, whilst the other people there were helping a classmate who was so terrified she had brought her stuffed toy frog to accompany her that day, I quickly rolled down my sleeve and felt safe in the knowledge that I had gotten away with it. I had outsmarted everyone, and continued to hide my destructive routine.

I’m 23. I left my home city and had the greatest time at University, and whilst relapse is an inevitable part of recovery, I can look back and see how far I’ve come, and realise all the hard work I had to put in, in order to claw my way out of that mental space which would worsen dramatically before it would get better. And, I’m not stupid. I categorically am not. Yes, I need extra time, and I need to put in more work than someone who doesn’t have dyslexia or any other learning disability, but that doesn’t make me stupid. It means that I’m willing to work my butt off in order to get where I want to go. It functions as a daily reminder that, regardless of the fact that there are days when it’s harder to locate than others, I’m determined to get to a place where I’m happy, both career wise, and mentally.

I am also old enough, and have enough hindsight and reassurance, that just because someone else is a lot smarter than you, it doesn’t make you any less intelligent. I would never dream of conflating a grade on a paper or test now with my personal worth. It wouldn’t even cross my mind. Around this time, I read Harvey and found this quotation, which in a way only a 16 year old could, displayed it across my social media platforms: “Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, […] ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.” Look at me, I’m philosophical and I read. Maybe I was hugely missing the point of what Elwood was attempting to convey here, or I was setting a goal for myself, either way, it’s laughable to look back at 16 year old me, obsessed with this quote, and thinking that I had also chosen being oh so pleasant. I was cruel to myself, and was permanently grumpy due to lack of sleep and exhaustion. I was not a nice teenager. Nonetheless, at some point over the last 4 years, I chose to be oh so pleasant, and my intelligence didn’t falter, but grew, when in an environment in which I was wholly supported. I leaned that, although I was so unbelievably privileged and lucky to have been given the education I had, an environment which strives for academic excellence, and prides itself on league table positioning was not one in which I could thrive. Whilst this is obviously beneficial to lots of students, it’s taken a long time to not feel guilty in saying that the system that prioritises those things was not one which was helpful to me, especially when I consider the handful of teachers who really did positively impact my life. And that’s ok. People learn in different ways. It just took me a little bit longer, and a little bit more work, than everyone else.

From,

Your Friend on the Bench

[hereliesbitches--me]

The Writeup on Rosie's parents:

I dont think anyone actually knows it, and it's probably the faintest quality that could he given away in Rosie's hair, but she is in fact a Hispanic gal. Rosie was born in Miami, Florida in March of 1983, to a Puerto Rican mother and her father can be assumed to be of Italian descent given his last name, though he is not very culturally inclined at all.

Carmellia Hidalgo was a young woman at 22 when she had Rosie, and Roland Valentine had been in his later years at 28 years old. They were a couple definitely formed out of puppy love a few years prior: Roland admired the life and free spirit in Carmellia, and Carmellia was very easily swayed by Roland's gentleman charm and mannerism. Given that this is the 80s, a time where being Hispanic wasnt exactly welcomed (even if Puerto Rico is considered a US territory), it was a breath of fresh air to Carmellia to be respected, and she fell hard. Unfortunately, shortly after Rosie was born, with rising stress trying to manage a baby and their own life goals, tension grows when love fades as those endearing qualities of free spirit become an unwillinhness to compromise and make change. Roland was more of a reserved, traditional man. He wanted to help Carmella in her situation, encouraged her to go to college and he helped pay for it as she worked towards becoming a nurse while he himself was working towards becoming a politician, but he was not blind to her impulsive and irrational behavior. Roland wanted to try to correct his wife, and in retaliation Carmellia was notorious to defensive and aggressive behavior. This would be the source of many of their fights, with Carmellia being the violent one throwing objects and jabbing at Roland for trying to deem her as something unwell, or something lesser than him (as she interpreted it).

In reflection, Rosie inherited her Bipolar disorder from her mother. And just like her mother, they are undiagnosed.

The difference lies in the time period as well. The condition was not well understood in the 70s-80s time period. It was briefly understood but just like all mental illnesses its stigmatized. Carmellia knew something was off, but she was in denial. There was too much to be done to stop and try to get an illness treated, and being a minority already made it hard enough. When Rosie was 5 years old, frightened by another one of their violent fights , she tried to run away to get away from the sounds, and wound up getting hit by a car that had killed her (in which, at this point, is where the Moon spirit steps into the body and takes on her life ) but she miraculously revives with some major head trauma and memory problems.

This fight was the breaker, when Roland realize it was a danger to their daughter. He left within a few months of this incident, for the sake of stopping the fighting, but despite his insistence Carmellia refused to let him take Rosie with him. While he had a better standing and mental state, he rather not make little Rosita suffer by confusing her with their fight. He yields to Carmellia, and he remained in Florida for a few months, until eventually leaving to DC to pursue his career as a politician when Carmellia continued to refuse to let him see Rosie. He sent money down to support them, but he would not see his daughter for 5 years. Rosie could hardly remember him since he left. Roland never stopped loving Carmellia, even if she couldn't stand him , but he couldnt handle her anymore.

Life with Carmellia was difficult for both Rosie and her mother. She was a single mother, becoming a nurse in this big city, and trying to manage bouts of mania and depression. an Impulsive move 2 years (1990) later winds Carmellia up in a situation with an unfaithful, abusive lover, who will eventually be the father to Rosie’s younger brother, Alexander. He leaves them when Alexander was about a few months old, with Carmellia forcing him out of their lives after he threatened them for the last time. what was already a tight situation only worsened with a baby involved. Rosie hardly ever really saw her mother, but she was taught early how to take care of herself with what they had. She never questioned anything that happened, why she was always the one taking the brunt of everything -- Her mother's impulsive verbal lashing and tendency to break things in anger, Rosie being the oldest was held at a higher standard of expectations. It was just how things were, while her mother doted on the baby Alexander with the time she had. Rosie had even learned how take care of her brother so her mom could rest in those very rare occasions she wasnt working.

While Carmellia was not an intentionally bad mother, but she was mentally ill and would not admit it. She loved her children, but was possessive with her fear of being alone, to the point of suffocation. Too prideful to admit she needed help, her children often suffered with her, and this was Rosie's life until August of 1992.

August 26, 1992, Hurricane Andrew makes landfall in Florida, and in a matter of hours Miami is flattened and ripped apart by a category 5 hurricane. In its wake, millions were left homeless, which would have included Carmellia and her two kids. Living in a shelter, Carmellia was left struggling with aiding in medical care because she was a nurse, and keeping track of her little ones. Elsewhere, an opportunity presented itself, and Roland took it as a chance to get his daughter back. Leaving from DC to Florida to help with the relief efforts, Roland tracked down Carmellia and the family at long last in a crowded shelter. Much to Carmellia's fury and horror, Roland did not shy away from telling her what he came for. The man who was a better suited caretaker, with more to offer for the safety of Rosie and her future, and he was there to take Rosie from her. To say there was no battle was an understatement. Carmellia could scream, she could curse him, she could get angry, but in the end she knew she had no standing even if they had gone from a legal standpoint. She had no home, no safe environment but the ruins of a shattered life, and no one would ever take her side against a wealthy man. She tried to scold Rosie into staying with her, when Roland made the option to let Rosie decide, but in the end that fearful little girl saw the opportunity to escape, and she turned her back on her mother for the first time. The first time she ever ran away, and in retrospect it feels like Rosie never stopped running since that time. Shes learned to always run.

Now, life with Roland wasnt as rough as with her mother.. but it wasnt the perfect childhood either. Roland had wealth and prestige being a skillful politician and a man of the people, but that didnt mean he was prepared to really be a dedicated parent.

Roland had lived a generally independent life. He didnt bother with remarrying, he didnt have much family he was connected to, he had workers who cared for the house, and he was dedicated to the work for the common people and working on issues which affected the lower class, minorities especially. He even delved into dealing with the criminal underworld, though that was only known to him. Having Rosie with him was more for the sake of having the peace of mind that she was with him, and he was providing, even I'd he wasnt always actively there. He had control of the situation, and that was enough. He kept her occupied by buying her whatever she wanted to entertain her, to make her feel like he did care and he loved her in order to make up for his lack of presence. Nonetheless, even having his daughter there, he continued to work in the same fashion he did before. Rosie was left in the trusted care of the head house keeper, Alfred, who himself was an age old friend/Mentor for Roland. Rosie saw him like a grandfather, and one of the most constant people in her life. The most she saw of her father were in the morning they shared over breakfast, listening to old vinyl records and dancing around the kitchen. She saw him sometimes in the evening briefly before bed, and that was it for the most part. She had simple expectations: to do well in school, to behave herself, to act with dignity of someone with high status because she was representing him as his daughter. She would have to learn to act proper as a lady from upper class, learn the ways of diplomacy and the two faced ways of politics. She couldn't truly be herself if she wanted to get somewhere with people, that was one of the first life lessons she picked up from her father. It would be one of the stepping stones which shapes her personality today, and even a basis of the creation of alternate personalities. A traditional man as her father was, he thought Rosie like his delicate daughter, and believed as a lady she shouldn't work in anything too laborious. Just like himself, he wanted her to take up in politics, or become a lawyer if she wanted to deal with law. His views often annoyed her, but she was never one to argue, and simply did what was asked of her, up until she grew older. She wanted to make a difference, she wanted to show that she wasnt delicate, and with some help of Alfred she was able to convince her father to let her do more-- which would set the stage of being put in the Calvary, with the help of Clifton, a friend of her father's. This would be the next stepping stone of her life after her father was found dead, ruled as a suicide and unsolved because they could not find any evidence that would say otherwise. Within rosie resided bitter feelings when she knew foul play was involved, but like always, no one ever listened. Once more, shes shuffled forward onto the next person.

The life Rosie shared with both her parents was always somewhat negligent, though it was not out of pure Malice. They gave her what she needed, but they both had a hand in controlling the way she went. Her father more so than her mother, given she lived with him from age 9 to 15. Both believing they knew what was best for her, her father consistently offering her to the world for all sorts of opportunities, but it was not always what Rosie herself wanted. Nothing was ever constant, and she was constantly handed off to the next person in line to deal with her. The relationship between Carmellia and Roland was never a healthy one, and that alone would be one of the major flaws Rosie had to discover on her own. How to love, who to love, how to be a parent. Love would hurt, it would break you down in the worst possible ways, it could make you Elated, or it wouldnt always last. Her parents taught simply how to survive enough in the world, her father taught her how to be superficial, but sincere relationships? How to be a good parent?

That was all trial and error she had to learn one step at a time. And it burned her, more often than not. One thing she learned what she had to do everything for her children that her parents didnt do for her, but much to her own horror, the older she gets the more she realizes it just played as a cycle. She could be like the both of them. As much as she tries to fight it, the older she was, the more she understands why things happen the way they do.

The condition of her mother is one of the biggest reasons Rosie prefers a partner that would need her. It attracts her to the troubled and the lonely, and urges her to make things better. To help them in a way no one helped her or her mother

Because deep down, a part of her feels things could have been different if someone could have just stayed. Her resilience to a lost cause may be the thing that gets Rosie killed one day, or even draws her into unhealthy relationships no matter how it hurts her.

[what-the-hekate]

The Becoming

There’s a lot I want to do with this blog, and I’m still putting it together in my head. I do know that I want to use it as a space to share my thoughts on witchcraft and related subjects, some of it centered around research into particular topics, and some of it just what I’ve been thinking about.

Right now, I have a lot of stray thoughts that aren’t ready to be developed into posts of their own. As I sat down to type some of them out and see where they went, I ended up running pretty far with a piece about my personal journey into witchcraft. And that seems as good a place as any to start.

I suppose I’ve always been attracted to the strange and supernatural, but I didn’t think of myself a witch (or even consider it) until I was a teenager. This was during the teen witch craze of the 1990s, when the movie The Craft and the TV series Charmed reintroduced the idea of witchcraft as something appealing and empowering to young women. I don’t remember which of my friends first got the idea to dabble in witchcraft; maybe it was me, maybe not. I do remember that someone got hold of a copy of a Silver RavenWolf book, probably Teen Witch, and that we had to pass it around because the girl who actually owned it was afraid her parents would find it in her room.

Looking back, I have mixed feelings about those books. I feel lucky that I was the right age at the right time to have that option offered to me—that I was a teenage girl in the 90s listening to Tori Amos and Liz Phair and Ani DiFranco and Paula Cole and Alanis Morissette, and that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on TV, and that pop culture in general was telling me I had power at the point in my life when I could’ve felt the most powerless.

Which Witch? A wordgame

At the same time, I wish there had been a greater variety of voices to hear about witchcraft from. Silver RavenWolf may have been a driving force behind a generation’s interest in witchcraft and Wicca, but her books were also full of bad information and skewed heavily towards one version of witchcraft. She doesn’t clearly distinguish between “witch” and “Wiccan”, and I think the passage in To Ride a Silver Broomstick about her associations with those two words explains why, but I also think it’s important to be clear that they aren’t wholly interchangeable. You can be a witch and not be a Wiccan; her books are about how to be a Wiccan. That’s what I tried to be as a teenager, and ultimately it’s why I drifted away from witchcraft in general over the next few years.

(Let me go ahead and say: Wicca is right for some people, and that’s fine. It’s not right for me.)

Some of my aversion to the Wiccan version of being a witch is instinctual and was pinged early on. when I was reading those Silver RavenWolf books. For me, being a witch was about female empowerment and independence, so I was confused when I got to the bit about worshiping a dual deity, the Goddess and the God. I never gelled with the Horned God on any level. It wasn’t to do with the similarity to the Christian devil; I wasn’t raised religious and I had no particularly strong feelings about anything in the Christian universe. I just didn’t feel at all compelled to adopt a central deity (or two) in general, and I really wasn’t interested in a male one.

Nor did I really care for the heterosexual duality of the Goddess/God, and all the binary sexual symbolism of things like the Great Rite and chalices and athames. At the time, I wasn’t consciously aware that I was queer (probably because it just wasn’t a possibility that I was exposed to very much). But I reacted to this whole Goddess/God thing turning up in my magical female empowerment pretty much the same way I reacted to a romance subplot suddenly taking center stage in a book I was enjoying. It wasn’t a dealbreaker, but I couldn’t help being annoyed that it was distracting from the stuff I was really there for.

Honestly, what probably played the biggest overt role in my move away from Wicca was simply that it was a religion. I’m just not cut out for religions. I find them interesting, and there are pieces of them that work for me sometimes, but on the whole it’s just not something that’s ever going to be a part of my life. Wicca is a very demanding religion. It’s highly ritualized, from the major holidays (the eight sabbats, plus the 12-13 esbats) down to the daily practices of spellwork. There is just a lot to do, and a lot of specificity about when and how to do it. I have enough trouble disciplining myself to do the other things I’m obligated to do in my life, like work and school and errands and keeping my house reasonably tidy and eating a vegetable on a regular basis. I was way worse at this at 14 or 15 years old. I got tired of rituals fast.

So TL;DR, I did not end up being a Wiccan. And because I’d gotten the idea that, in real life, witch = Wiccan, I didn’t think of myself as a witch anymore, either. If I have any lasting bitterness toward that segment of my path, that’s it. The identity of “witch” was an empowering, beautiful thing that I wish I’d been able to keep in my life even after my dalliance with Wicca was over. There were definitely times I could’ve used it.

In the years after that, I kept on being a little spooky and magical and all the things I’d been that had drawn me to witchcraft in the first place, just without a central identity to pin it all to. It’s interesting how things drift in and out of focus and concreteness depending on whether they have a name. The witch fad gave way to something else the way fads do, Buffy and Charmed eventually ended, and I didn’t think much about witches again until recently.

There’s a lot to delve into about why witchcraft has its resurgences when it has them; probably there are already a lot of essays on the subject. But generally, I think you tend to find women thinking witchy thoughts at times when they’re particularly under threat.

Much of my early/middle-early adult life coincided with the Obama administration. I’d only become really aware of politics toward the end of the Bush era. When 9/11 happened, I was in the middle of an unrelated nervous breakdown and just did not have the spoons to think critically about political issues; I was also 16 years old. I didn’t realize how fucked up things like the PATRIOT Act were until years down the line. I was in the dark in more ways than one, dealing with undiagnosed depression and anxiety and having to claw my way up out of its depths without even medication to give me a boost.

A Musical Interlude: What does this have to do with witchcraft...?

Two things kept me just this side of insane when I was in the depths: writing and listening to music. Of the latter, I still had the female artists who’d taught me how to be a woman, thank fucking god for them. And as I was trying to find a foothold in the long slow climb out of my depressive pit, I’d come across a Finnish band called HIM; for whatever reason, their particular brand of gothy romantic macabre intellectual music was exactly what my soul resonated with at that moment. I realized that I could vibe with men sometimes, provided they were the type of men who wrote poetry and wore eyeliner and a lot of black. This is probably how I ended up listening to Nine Inch Nails.

I was aware of NIN, as anyone who experienced the 90s was; even if that wasn’t your particular scene, you heard “Closer”. A lot of women around my age credit David Bowie in Labyrinth for their early confusing sexuality-related experience; mine was probably the “Closer” video. I think this explains a lot about me. But besides that, I hadn’t paid much attention to NIN until I ran into them again in 2007 or so, when they were doing this crazy metafictional thing called Year Zero around their latest album. I don’t remember exactly how I found it; maybe via Lost, which had its own thing like that and led me to the niche narrative medium of alternate reality games. Anyway, it was highly political, which was not what I remembered NIN being about, and as I was listening through the band’s back catalog and reading a bazillion interviews with brooding, sarcastic, witty, thoughtful Trent Reznor (look, I’m not completely gay), I got sucked into this thing.

I don’t remember whether I read this while I was diving into Year Zero or after, but in some interview or other I found out that Trent had just come out of his own darkness. He’d struggled with drugs and depression and nearly died, and when he finally got his shit together, he realized how much he’d been oblivious to, in his own life and in the world around him. Year Zero was political because he’d woken up, and it woke me up.

It’s interesting to me now to think that female music and male music acted like an alternating current in my life, one then the other driving me forward, yet I got absolutely zilch out of the hetero-duality of Wicca. I don’t know what to tell you. It’s also interesting that the avatars of that dynamic in my life were Tori Amos and Trent Reznor, since they had an important impact on each others’ lives too (that I didn’t know about till much later). There’s a bit in Tori’s book Piece By Piece where she talks about reconciling with the angry masculine energies she was drawn to at points in her life (I can’t remember if she specifically mentions Trent in that part, but I assume it’s at least somewhat about him), and her realization that she had a need to tap into energy like that sometimes. If anyone is the embodiment of feminine power to me it’s Tori, and reading her words about needing to channel masculine rage did and does resonate with me about the time in my life when male artists’ energies were what I needed to survive and evolve.

So anyway, back on the path: my dark times led me to Nine Inch Nails which, while the music was also helping me heal my soul, also focused my brain on the world I’d been ignoring. I became aware of, and pissed off about, politics in no time flat. I devoured Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot. I watched C-SPAN of my own volition. In short, I realized that the system is fucked up. I realized that the things happening in America were literally insane, and I knew insanity. I learned the word “patriarchy”, but I’d known the thing it named for a long, long time. This was also the point when I realized I’d exhausted my lifetime stores of patience for bullshit and being fucked with; they have not, to this day, been replenished.

And then, like a lot of people, I thought the Obama years meant everything was okay forever. I mean, god, I sure felt like I deserved a break. There were ups and downs even then, but I really had no idea how fast and how far we could plummet down again until 2016.

Witch 2: The Rewitchening

I don’t believe you can be a woman and be aware of what’s going on in the world and not be angry. As I write this, my home state of Alabama has just passed an amendment (which may be useless; we do have the longest mess of a constitution in the world) aimed at undermining women’s right to an abortion. We have a president who says the most vile things about women on a regular basis, and a new Supreme Court Justice who is a rapist. There are a lot of rapists. There are a lot of men who beat up their wives and girlfriends and then go on to shoot up a school or a nightclub or a shopping mall, and we keep acting surprised, and we keep forcing women to share custody with their abusers and berating them for being abused. Women, everywhere, are under attack.

If there’s a single predominant reason I came back to witchcraft now, and why I think a lot of women are coming to witchcraft now, this is it. We are threatened, and that idea of female empowerment and strength and the potential to be feared by those who would harm us and to be fearless... it is as potent and attractive to us now as it was in the 90s, and the 60s, and probably so many times before.

I am a witch. I don’t belong to a religion, and I don’t feel obligated to be a witch according to anyone’s definition but my own. My witchery is a product of the path I’ve taken to this point, and is highly focused around female empowerment; that said, I recognize that other people’s witchery has a different shape, and different (or no) gender, and is religious or isn’t, and I acknowledge and respect that, too. I have zero interest in telling anyone else how to be a witch, or whether they can be.

I started this blog because I need to express myself, but also because I want to contribute to a diversity of voices about witchcraft that wasn’t available to me as a teenager. I want to put things out there in case someone else needs them. Honestly, I’m writing and gathering all the things that will eventually be here for a hypothetical, imaginary-but-maybe-real young witch who is maybe just a ghost of my teenage past, to tell her the things I wish I could’ve heard, and just to remind her that no one can tell you how to be a witch, and no one should try, and that there are so many different ideas and beliefs and voices and experiences out there for her to learn from, including the ones inside herself.

That’s my origin story.

[revivedxfighter]

I don’t think you need to worry so much in actually changing your character. You should focus on replying to the threads you have started. You forget about them and seek activity when you don’t carry on with the things you have.

Send in some constructive criticism.

Hello Anon. Thank you for telling me your thoughts. I hope you’ll see this. I didn’t get to answer this sooner and I feel bad for that.

 I spent the day thinking about how to come clean. I know I’ve been behind on threads and starters. I’m very sorry about that. There’s a reason why behind it. School and work are only a part of it. I haven’t been completely honest because the main problem is even interfering my classes and projects at work.

 I didn’t want to say anything yet because I’m waiting for what the doctor will say. I did some tests a few weeks ago and waiting for what he will say before deciding what are my options for treatment.  I’m honestly afraid to say anything and I’ll say why under the cut. It’s kind of a long story, but important to understand what’s going on.  I’m sorry if I made you or anyone feel ignored. It’s not that I’m uninterested. Yeah, I’m busy, just not 24/7.

You have the right to know why I haven’t kept up on some things. That’s why I’m going to say it now.

I’ll start from the beginning. Ever since I was little, I knew I was a little different. I always got good grades at school, but I used to be hyperactive. I wouldn’t be able to sit still and had a knack of interrupting people. I tried not to, but I would get in trouble for not being still for very long. I always had trouble concentrating, but I always thought I wasn’t trying hard enough.  I always tried to compensate to concentrate. I used to be upset and antsy when I couldn’t stick to the task long enough. My parents thought I was fine. I thought I was too, just a typical bratty kid. 

Years went by and as I got older, it got harder to focus or stick to a task. I would get by with planners, lists, and organizing everything as a teen, but when I reached my twenties, not even that helped to stay on top of things. I forget memos, lists I made just an hour prior to needing it, and forget to check my planner or even know where it is. I lose things more often and I’m more forgetful. I get so discouraged over keeping lists and reminders because I would lose them. I try not to. I sometimes lose my keys and wallet without thinking. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about that because it’s not normal to forget them in a short time, and happening so frequently.

Life feels like it’s going a million miles a minute. I always had thoughts clashing and becoming an entangled mess. When I roleplayed on Tumblr, I kept a list of threads and checked it frequently. After two years of that, I forgot I even have these lists and don’t remember where to find them or what I need to reply or delete. 

I struggled when I was in school to be a med lab tech. I got so anxious and second guess myself, forgetting to do things, I was barred from getting an internship which was required for a degree. That was 6 years ago. I’m so hard at myself because everyone else was doing so well. I didn’t understand why I was having trouble. People would do diagnostic tests after watching it once, but I needed to see it demonstrated more than once and I couldn’t run more than two tests within a few minutes. I never understood why I struggled and wondered if there was something wrong with me. Like if I was incompetent or mentally incapable to do simple tests. I can’t tell you how many times I cried. I thought I was a failure. A miserable failure.  

I kept pushing harder in my new school, that between frequent moving was hard, but I managed. I didn’t have a stable home for several years. I didn’t admit that until many years later because I have too much pride to ask for help with money. There were days when I worked twelve-hour shifts to help feed my family and have just enough gas to go to school that was over an hour away from the reservation I used to live on.  I struggled with working, trying to concentrate to give correct change and price checks, forgetting what product is in which aisle. It was awful. I liked the little store I worked in, but it wasn’t the best. I had customers be upset with me for messing up. I did great in my last few years as an undergrad, but then I started to struggle again. Since the spring, reading papers, writing assignments, and completing projects feel like pulling teeth. Nothing  I did that help before worked.  I struggled a few months ago in Belize. My anxiety was at its worst and I would forget constantly or be focused on something that people in my team would run into me. 

I visited my primary doctor after the trip. She took over when my last doctor wasn’t sure why I wasn’t responding to every treatment for my depression and anxiety. For the first time, I was honest. I told my doctor about how my thoughts are, the intrusive thoughts, inability to concentrate. She suspects that I have ADD. 

I didn’t think that was a big deal at first. My brother was diagnosed with it as a kid. My dad was never diagnosed but is suspected to have it because he can’t sit still all the time either and has trouble paying attention. My parents didn’t think I have it. It was seen more common in children, particularly boys. Of course, I don’t think ADD even had a name or was as well known in the 90′s. At least, my parents never heard of it until my brother was diagnosed. When I told my parents this, they apologized. My mother even admitted that she felt she messed up for not catching it and get help when I was a kid. They understand it more now and she’s sure one of my sisters has it too because of the similar symptoms. I feel it’s my fault for not insisting that I have ADD. I probably would have got treatment years ago and not lose so many people or messed up so bad in school work and professions. I always wonder if I pushed for it, would things be different?

My doctor thinks my anxiety is feeding off my ADD, making it worse.  I take Ritalin for it and it worked for a couple of weeks. Now it doesn’t help much unless I take higher doses, but I end up with terrible headaches. 

I went to my school’s counseling center where I met a doctor who ran screenings on disorders like ADD. I’m waiting on him to contact me to see if there’s confirmation. I’ll have more treatment options if it’s confirmed. Right now, they can’t do much for me. At least, that’s what I was told. All I can do is wait and try harder. I still think I’m just being lazy or not trying enough, but I think ADD was the missing piece. The piece of why I seem a little different and why I struggle so much.  I just compensated for it growing up but it became harder and more severe over years of being undiagnosed. 

I told some of my friends about this, but I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to say anything here. Millions of people have ADD and ADHD. I should get along just fine like that. I don’t know why I feel like I have to fight tooth and nail just to get anything done. I kind of see that as laziness, really. ADD and ADHD happens to girls too, but I feel weird that I was undetected until my mid-twenties. 

I’m not admitting this to make anyone feel sorry for me. I don’t want to be treated differently. I don’t want to be seen as someone saying shit to get attention, trying to have an excuse to be on the pedestal or get away from responsibilities. Things like that. I wasn’t sure if I should admit it even if it was confirmed. If it wasn’t, I would feel like I lied to the community and that there’s something truly wrong with me. Like I’m someone who just can’t be helped. I don’t want to live in despair like that. I’m trying so damn hard to hold on to the hope that things will get better and I’ll actually be on top of everything. 

 It affects writing, which is what I love. I would posts updates as reminders but forget. I forget starters and threads and I hate it so much. I believe I let everyone down and that’s not fair for you. I can’t even manage something like ADD on my own. I don’t have anywhere else to go except student health because I don’t have insurance and I’m not wealthy. This isn’t to shut down all my options. I sought help. All that’s left is waiting and hoping that even if I don’t get the confirmation, I’ll still get help. I’m afraid I’ll be turned away if the counseling center’s doctor rejects the diagnosis. The therapist who did my intake doubts I have it because I’m working on my master’s degree. I’m not sure what to think of that. I didn’t think that was a fair statement. Just because someone does great in school doesn’t mean they didn’t struggle.

I love being here. Roleplay was the only stable thing I had when I lost almost everything years ago. I didn’t know where I would sleep or if I worked enough hours to get dinner. I didn’t have rl friends because I moved so frequently. I didn’t think I had much of a future, but I felt wanted in this community. I was wanted, liked, and became successful here. I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to be a disappointment. I don’t want to fail you. 

My hope is that my confession won’t turn people away. I hope it wouldn’t make people think I’m an attention seeker lying out of her ass. I don’t want my activity to keep dropping and have fewer people interested in writing with me or like my muse. I’m sorry for being absent and not keeping up. I want to write with you. I want to rp with you, and most of all, I want to be your friend.  

I hope this doesn’t change anything. I didn’t want to admit it, but I think I have to. You have the right to know why I haven’t been answering things. I’m busy, but that’s not the main problem, and I’m ashamed of it. I’m ashamed of falling behind and not doing enough to work harder. I would forget what I need to do, forget the reminders, and when I try to work on something, my brain goes into overdrive, and these intrusive thoughts and worries get overwhelming. Sometimes I dread looking at my dash because I see so much activity and I want to be a part of it so bad that I just reblog memes nonstop. Yet I feel I have to keep an eye on my dashboard just in case I got a new DM or updates, 

I would think that people don’t like me and if I don’t reblog memes to show I’m active and open for interactions, then people wouldn’t have interest in my muse and leave me behind. My brain is weird.  These thoughts would just pop up and they wouldn’t leave me alone no matter how hard I try to ignore them to the point of nearly having a panic attack. They come and go or pop up at random and repeat like a broken record. Like I said, I reached out for help and I’m waiting for an answer.  I’m very sorry for letting you guys down. 

[morethannotenough]

...there we were.

Well, I ruined it! Within about 7 months of meeting my goal I have gained every. single. ounce. back. 

Frustrated, disgusted, disappointed, angry... these don’t even begin to explain what I’m feeling. The back pain, the shortness of breath, the fatigue, it’s all back too. What’s killing me is my mind is still obsessed with that goal, but I can’t motivate my body to do anything about it. That’s not to say I’m not trying. Things are just going to be a little more complicated this time, because clearly the whole “well I’ll just not eat for 6 months” approach to weight loss ISN’T WORKING, and I understand why now, which helps, but also means I have to address some gigantic, well-established thought processes. That ish is hard. 

That being said, I do think I’m making a little bit of progress, and I’d like to kind of track it here if I have the willpower to keep writing. I use to write in a journal every day, but I felt like it kept me stewing in my negative emotions too much (because what else would a 16-year-old girl write about except her emotional turmoil?!), so I stopped and have been hesitant to pick up the habit again. Also... I’m an adult with responsibilities now, so spending hours a day pouring my soul out to the internet isn’t really an option anymore. I’ve thought about doing some sort of daily or weekly blog/journal/whatever during this whole process, but like everything else in my life, I put it off. What a great self-deprecating segue!

So the first thing I think I’ve figured out is that I have **undiagnosed** (that’s important, I’m not trying to claim anything here, it just all makes too much sense to not be at least a possibility) ADHD. I remember wondering this in high school. I even remember telling my mom once that I thought I had it. She immediately offered to get me tested, and I refused, thinking there wasn’t really anything they could do to help me. I kinda want to go back and shake that girl now. What I didn’t realize then, and wouldn’t realize until just a few months ago, is that ADHD is SO MUCH MORE than just an inability to pay attention to things and being easily distracted. It messes with your entire life. Your productivity, your executive function (the part of your brain that tells you to start the thing you want to do), your relationships, your time-management skills, your hyperfixations that take over your entire life but only last for a finite period of time, your dopamine reception, all of it. That last one is especially important. If I’m correct, and I do have ADHD, it means that my brain doesn’t produce enough dopamine, so I am constantly looking for more. You know what gives an awesome, instant dopamine boost? Eating carbs and sugar. 

I think I’ve had this for a long time and I subconsciously learned from a young age, both from the midwestern food culture (celebrating? food! grieving? food! stressed? let’s get some food! bored? food!) telling me that any kind of emotion can be improved with food, and my sneaky little ADHD friend compounding the comfort/reward aspects of those food solutions, that food will make me feel good, no matter what else is going on. Throw in the fact that I’ve been slightly overweight my whole life, and while I was not actively bullied persay, I was passively bullied (by myself and others) enough that I was already insecure (it was called “shy” at that time) by the age of about 7. We’ll go into all of that later because it played more of a part than I originally gave it credit for. Anyway, ADHD has a lot of what are called co-morbid disorders, which are basically conditions that are likely to occur with an ADHD diagnosis. These can include depression, anxiety, OCD, oppositional defiant disorder, learning disabilities, executive function disabilities, aaaaand eating disorders, especially binge eating disorder. Binge eating disorder (BED) with anorexic and bulimic tendencies is what my current diagnosis is, I think. At least the BED part. What a coincidence.

Now, I’m not trying to say that my current weight is all due to my potentially existing ADHD. I clearly made some choices along the way to get here, but I have spent so many hours and sleepless nights wondering WHY I can’t just ‘eat healthier’ or stick to a diet and lose the weight. Why do I struggle so much with these things that other people are totally capable of? Having an explanation is such a comfort. Knowing that there’s a reason why this process is so hard for me, when it seems so easy for others keeps me from falling into depression and helplessness. Prior to talking with my therapist and my dietitian, I would sit and think about what it would take for me to be a healthier, fitter version of myself. I would picture myself years from now eating salads and veggies while my family ate pizza, like my mom use to do while she was on weight watchers. I would picture just wanting to take a lazy day but I needed to get my 4 mile run in first, and that future looked miserable. But the only way I had ever been successful at losing weight was by literally starving myself and pushing my body to the extreme with exercise, so clearly that was the only way to do it. I’m learning that this all or nothing thinking is deeply flawed, and honestly a big part of the reason I’ve been so unsuccessful in the past. Restriction (especially extreme restriction) is not sustainable, and studies have shown that it actually causes people to gain more weight back than they originally lost. Because diet culture is a huge money maker and they need a way to have repeat customers. Once you fall into the binge/restrict cycle, it is very difficult to get back out. That’s where I am now. 

Even though I want this thing so bad, and I have a path that’s going to be easier this time, I’m having trouble actually making the small changes I need to start with, because my body literally does not trust me anymore. Every time I eat a food I like, I have to eat as much as I possibly can, just in case this is the last time I’ll let myself have it for months. If I make a small change, eat a healthy snack, do a quick workout before work in the morning--the little voice in my head says, good, we’ve started, now don’t eat anything else the rest of the day so we can keep up our progress, and more often than not I listen. Moderation is not always easy when you’ve lived in these extremes your entire life. 

I don’t think I’m alone in this. I think there are a lot of people who can identify with these same struggles, even if they haven’t recognized these issues in themselves yet. So I’ve decided to try to chronical this journey to healthier thought patterns, and see where that takes me physically. You always hear the stories of the successful people after they’ve been successful. Let’s get through the gritty part together. I’ve been in therapy about weight loss for almost 2 years now, and I’ve made some major shifts in my thought processes already, I still have a lot to do. If I can help even one other person escape this cycle, it will be worth it. 

I’m going to end today with an assignment my dietitian gave me, which is finding other reasons to fix my relationship with food other than weight loss. Some of these still have to do with losing weight, but don’t focus on a number on the scale. Hopefully I can check these off and more over the coming years!

1. I miss riding horses, but I don’t feel like I can fairly do it right now at the weight I am. 

2. On that same thread, there are a lot of activities I’d like to try that look like a lot of fun, but my weight holds me back both physically (weight limits) and mentally (fear of judging, looking stupid, failing and deciding it’s because of my size, associating a severely negative emotion with the activity and giving up interest in it before giving it a fair shot, etc.) Some of those things include, aerial silks, pole dancing (not stripping, but like, the exercise classes), kayaking, rock wall climbing, dancing, and a bunch more that I’ll think of later. I love doing outdoor activities, but I don’t because my weight makes me so uncomfortable. 

3. Losing the stress of going to an unfamiliar restaurant, and the judgement around ordering the same, bland thing every time. I have been chastised for being a picky eater my entire life, so I have a lot of stress around choosing foods in front of other people. This is also something that formed, unknowingly to me, at a young age. It results in an almost panic-like state of mind if the trip is sprung on me and I don’t have time to prepare (like the time I started my new job and another employee was assigned to take me to lunch, and almost chose a sushi restaurant before we realized we wouldn’t have time to get there and back. I don’t do sushi, I had no idea what to order, and I barely paid attention to the rest of my orientation that morning because I was panicking about lunch.), or, if I know it’s coming, I will binge on something I do like and that I know will keep me full before I go. Then I can order a small side salad or something, tell the person I’m with that I’m “just not that hungry today” and not have to worry about my stomach growls giving me away. This also spills over into places that I really like to go to. If I know we’re going to Old Chicago, for example, and I can easily put away one of their individual pizzas in one sitting, but I’m scared the people I’m with will judge me for that, I’ll binge before I go there too, so I can eat half of it, ask for a box, and finish the rest on the way home or later that night. It’s not healthy, and I didn’t even consciously realize I was doing it until a few months ago. 

4. Having a truly open mind about trying new things. I hate being so picky. Hate it. But textures and certain flavors activate my gag reflex and I cannot eat them. There are some foods that are ‘okay’, or “I’ll eat it, but I probably wouldn’t make it for myself.” but for the most part it’s I LOVE THIS SO MUCH (read: anything made of bread and cheese), or I HATE THIS SO MUCH I CANT EVEN SWALLOW IT. Because of those extremes, I don’t try a lot of new foods, because history shows I don’t like most things. When I do, I try to have an open mind, or try to look and sound like I have an open mind, but I’m already prepared to spit it out before I even take the fist bite. I want to more more foods into my “its okay” range, and maybe eventually form a “hey, this is pretty good” range. I want to be able to go to my boyfriend’s parents’ house and eat what his dad cooks (he’s always trying new recipes with a lot of different foods and spices. He takes great pride in his cooking, which he should, and I feel like I constantly offend him with my 6-year-old tastebuds. I avoid going over there if I know there’s going to be food because I’m so stressed about not hurting his feelings. 

5. I want to be able to have options about where to buy my clothes. Right now I’m limited to a few things at Walmart (which are sometimes super cute, but are usually very not cute), and Torrid which is always cute but sooooo expensive. I’d love to see a cute shirt in a store window or even online and think, hey, I should try that on! Instead of, “well that will never fit me.” 

6. I want to want vegetables. I want to be able to choose foods based on how they make my body feel instead of the taste. I want to crave a lunch that gives me energy to get through the rest of my day, instead of something that tastes delicious (hello giant bowl of ravioli), but leaves me in a carb crash and not wanting to do anything the rest of the day. I want to see my food as fuel.

7. I want to not feel so guilty about eating the things I do like! It isn’t so bad when I’m by myself (hence my continued secret eating), but even if I’ve been good (or put up a facade of being good) all week, if I’m the one who asks to order pizza or make pasta for dinner, I feel heavily judged. I do it to myself a bit as well, but especially if there are others, and especially if they know I’m trying to lose weight. 

8. I want to have kids one day (part 1). My doctor told me at my last appointment that she wants to see me get to around 200 lbs to give me the best shot at a healthy pregnancy. That’s not unreasonable, and I think she’s right. I’m in my 30s and my window to have kids will close sooner rather than later, so I want to get my body to a place where I can confidently make that choice when I’m ready.

9. I Want to have kids one day (part 2). I want to teach my kids to enjoy healthy foods so they don’t have to go through this same struggle. How am I suppose to expect them to try vegetables and healthier foods if I wont?

10. I want my life to stop being about food and weight all the time. It literally never leaves my mind. I want to be able to stop obsessing about it and just live and know that I can trust my body to make the right choices and maintain my optimum lifestyle without stressing and obsessing over food every single day.

I think that’s a start. I want to start diving into this more and doing more frequent entries so these aren’t all 10 pages long. I don’t have a great track record with that, but I want to try. I want to be able to look back on the work I put in while I celebrate reaching those 10 goals I just listed. I want to help other people reach their goals too without having to go through the mental anguish I’ve been experiencing for the last 20-something years. 

One day at a time, one meal at a time. I’ve got help, I’ve got goals, I’ve got time and ability. I’ve just got to do it.

[pojkflata]

My emo ass backstory

This was originally the script to a draw my life video, but I realized that it was becoming so ridiculously long that it could only work in text form

Nevertheless, I wanted to get this out of my system. I don’t think I’ve ever truly told anyone about my past in more detail than “I was bullied”, and just getting in depth about it for the first time in my life felt. Good.

CW for bullying, abuse and animal death

I was born in 1998, in a city called Helsingborg in southern Sweden, actually only a few miles away from Denmark by boat. My father worked as a cashier at the time, and my mother was unemployed. She used to breed dogs, but had to give it up when my big brother, Jakob, was born in 1997 in order to be able to raise him, and later me and my siblings. We still had some dogs around though, including one named Bandit who I adored.

During my early years, my family was struggling financially, because the only one out of my parents who had a job (my dad) had a pretty poorly paying one, and not only did my parents have me, my big brother and dogs to care about, I also had a little brother, Filip, and a little sister, Klowbi. We very rarely got things like toys or games, since my parents couldn’t afford them, so Jakob and I early showed interest in the internet as a nice way to spend our free time. The internet was a much more empty place back then, but we still found a lot of fun things to do, moreso than with the few toys we had.

When I was maybe five years old, my parents got more well paid jobs, my mother as a politician and my father in the advertisement industry, and my family’s economical situation became a lot better.

I began 1st grade in 2005, and oh jeez… I was bullied for nine entire years, and most of it stems from the fact that I was an undiagnosed autistic. Worth noting is that I was dfab, and presented as a ”girl” at that time, but it’s not like nobody noticed my symptoms just because of that. A lot of people noticed actually, but my mom did not believe them when people expressed concern.

I changed schools a lot, but I always ended up bullied, and my teachers would never support me, instead saying it was my fault for various reasons. A lot of the bullying was about harrassing me to the point that I would get meltdowns, because my classmates thought that was hilarious. I was a circus animal, in every sense of the word. Other fun stuff that happened to me in school was being asked out as a joke, being assaulted in gym class and being threatened with assault and bloody murder.

One particular story I remember takes place when I was in 7th grade. One of the popular girls asked me if I were a lesbian, and me, not knowing when to keep my mouth shut, said that I was not sure of my sexuality, and that there was a possibility I was not het. It quickly became the hottest meme that ever hit the school, and I was very heavily sexually harrassed over my statement. After four days of no peace, I decided I’ve had enough and attacked the girl. I ended up cracking her phone’s screen, and she promptly threw a fit and started playing the victim. Of course, she played the entire school, teachers included, like a piano, and I was demonized yet again.

At the time, I trusted my mother a lot, so you might wonder how she reacted to the whole thing… not ideally. She completely ignored that I was being subjected to homophobic harrassment, and instead just talked to her friends about how brave I was for being too autistic to know how to avoid giving my abusers ammunition. And yes, she chewed me out for cracking that phone screen. That was when I first realized my mother might not be as fantastic as everyone in my life had told me, and it would only get worse from that point on.

So how did I cope with being so heavily bullied? Not very well, mind you, but I still somehow survived. And I, knowing how pathetic this sounds, owe my life to the internet and my pets. I had a lot of wonderful animal friends. Those I loved the most include a Cocker Spaniel named Tim, a really fat mackerel tabby cat named Pikachu, a white cat with yellow/blue heterochromia named Kitty, and a gray tux cat named Pyret, who is still alive, actually! There was a time where Kitty was my absolute best friend. Kitty was a really antisocial and hissy cat, so it was all the more heartwarming that when no one really cared for me, at least I had a friend in a grouchy hissy cat who hated everyone else but me.

Unfortunately, that meant that Kitty despised other cats too, which became a problem when my family was forced to take in a new kitten back in 2012, the aforementioned Pyret. Kitty attacked Pyret whenever given the chance, and Pyret’s presence put Kitty in such a bad mood that she ended up attacking my at the time 9 year old sister. That was the point where my parents realized that the situation was going out of hand, so we took Kitty to the vet, and she was diagnosed with gastric cancer. The vet speculated that Kitty became unusually aggressive because she couldn’t handle her pain. There was nothing the vets could do, so Kitty had to be put to sleep.

Tim the Cocker Spaniel also suffered a similar fate: I was his very best friend, but one day, he got a disorder that affected the nerves in his eye area. That meant that slowly, his eyesight became much worse, and eventually, he recognized everyone as a threat, and reacted accordingly: aggressively. I was the only one who he could still recognize as a friend. Because of this, as well as the fact that he was clearly suffering, he had to be put to sleep as well.

Both of their deaths caused me great grief, but I’m still glad that I got to know these wonderful pets who helped me during the worst time of my life.

When it comes to coping using the internet, some of my fondest memories come from the website KPWebben, a website for a Swedish magazine directed at kids in the ages 8-15. From 2007 to 2012, the website had a community with a forum. I created a name around myself on said forum. I was spunky, snappy and not afraid to call the BS when I saw it. I was frequently questoning the authority in the moderators at the site, and I loved to make people think and question the reality around them. In many ways, on KPWebben I was allowed to be myself without facing consequences (from peers, mind you: the moderators loathed me). To some extent, I may have taken it too far, because I would often end up doing questionable things and create discourse around myself. I didn’t mind that much, though: I would much rather be known as the really cool and well spoken person that was a little too confident at times than as the human waste of space most people in meatspace saw me as.

This attitude actually gave me a lot of friends, including the person who is now my best friend and favorite person. I may have mellowed down a bit since my KPWebben days, but I still adore her.

Eventually, I graduated 9th grade and began secondary school, and somehow, I was bullied no more. But gradually, another problem surfaced in my life. My mother. Long story short, she was abusive to me. She isolated me from my friends, insulted me, and she expected me to have all the responsibility of an adult but none of the benefits. She was neglectful, as mentioned before, she wouldn’t listen to people who suspected I was autistic, and she never really cared about how I was suffering from being bullied. At times, she would even blame me for being bullied, much like my teachers would do. During this time, I realized that I was non-binary, and I had come out to my family, but my mother aggressively refused (and still refuses) to use my preferred pronouns, saying that ”it’s so hard :(” whenever I corrected her, and would scold me for correcting other people about my pronouns, because apparently me wanting to be referred to using my correct pronouns was embarrassing and annoying.

My mother also showed heavy favoritism towards Jakob and constantly compared me to him. Now, it is true that there’s only a 15 month age gap between him and I, so we are twins in everything but name. But Jakob is not me. Jakob is neurotypical and has not suffered the trauma I have. Jakob is an aspiring musician and while he hasn’t technically made a hit, he is talented and he probably will make it big. Being constantly compared to a person like that really hurts, especially when the people making these comparisions know you can’t become anywhere as good, and that they are just making these comparisions to make you feel bad about yourself.

While the bullying from my classmates was technically worse, what made my relationship with my mother so bad was the sense of betrayal. When I was younger, I thought that my mom was a real life super hero. She worked in politics and all of her motivations stemmed from her wish to make children’s lives better. She had made an extremely good name around herself, and she is a really likable person on the surface. So I didn’t know what I did wrong when she suddenly turned on me and all her talk about wanting to improve children’s lives went out the window. And her good reputation acted as a safety net as well, because no one believed me when I told them about what was going on beneath her facade.

My father was just not there. He was physically there, but he lacked a spine. He constantly enabled my mother’s disgusting actions, and always told me that she cared and that she doesn’t know how to raise me. Because a person with the kind of positive reputation my mother has cannot possibly raise an autistic child, right?

A lot of things happened to me in 2015. I was run over by a bus, for starters. I was on my way home from school, on my bike, when a bus appeared and ran over my left foot. The bus driver was breaking several traffic related laws, but they never faced any consequences despite me pressing the police to do so. The accident led to some minor fractures in the bones in my foot, but I was really lucky in that accident. It could have been so much worse. I’m still here, and able to walk, and that’s nothing short of a miracle.

I was also finally diagnosed with autism later that year, and I was enrolled on a boarding school for autistic people. This was a massive turning point in my life, because it let me move out at the age of 17 and escape the clutches of my mother. It’s far away enough from Helsingborg that my family can’t just visit me randomly, and I have my very own apartment. I still visit my family every other weekend and on breaks and such. I do miss my cat a lot while I’m here, but it’s a small price to pay for the peace and quiet and a place where no one really abuses me anymore.

There are however two downsides to this: I had be held back a year because my autism was making my studies suffer in 10th grade, before I moved to the boarding school, and I effectively won’t graduate until 2019. And Klowbi, my little sister, seems to be affected negatively by this change. We were pretty close to begin with, and me moving so far away when she was only 12 meant that she lost an otherwise ever-present friend. On top of that, she appears to be neurodivergent, but as I’m writing this, she has no access to therapy. And if that wasn’t bad enough, my mother appears to have moved on to abusing Klowbi instead of me. I don’t know too many details, since I don’t spend a lot of time with my family (and my mother seems to act as nice as she can in that slimy abusive way whenever I’m visiting). I try my very best to help my sister, because in my age, I did not have anyone who cared about me or my situation (that wasn’t an animal that couldn’t do a lot to help me), and I don’t want Klowbi to experience what I did.

[phillymakerfaire]

https://milkstreetmarketing.com/img/itunes.png

  Subscribe:

    Break Through is a podcast series about making. Making discoveries, making a difference in the community and making the world a better place. It’s the stories of startups and inventors who are developing products that have social value by solving real world problems. It’s about artisans and entrepreneurs who have broken through the mold to live their best lives.



Welcome to episode number seven of Break Through, a NextFab made podcast series. I’m your host, Ron Bauman, founder of Milk Street Marketing and a member of NextFab. Our guest on this episode is Jessie Garcia, a technical entrepreneur whose bowling accident as a child led to the idea for Tozuda, a collision detection sensor that helps identify potential concussions. After experiencing high impact collisions throughout her life playing softball and rugby, Jessie has devoted her life to preventing the long-lasting effects of concussions.

Ron Bauman: Good morning Jessie, how are you today?

Jessie Garcia: I’m doing good, thank you.

Ron Bauman: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us this morning.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, for sure, anytime.

Ron Bauman: So we’re here at NextFab South Philadelphia in your project space for Tozuda. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, a little bit about myself? Name’s Jessie Garcia. I’m the CEO and founder of Tozuda and we manufacture head impact sensors for concussion awareness. But I guess before I got into all of this, I was an athlete my whole life, I love playing sports and realized there was a big need for people to know when they get hit to hard, especially know they have a concussion.

Ron Bauman: So you played sports? What did you play?

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, so growing up I played softball. I traveled competitively starting at the age of six and just traveled nationally for that. And then when I went to college, I was at a club there and someone’s like, “You look like a rugby player.” And I was like, “Yeah, let me try rugby,” and fell in love with that sport.

Ron Bauman: Now, did you have a concussion at some point that prompted all of this?

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, so I’ve always been hard headed.

Ron Bauman: Okay.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, always been hard headed and I have a history of concussions actually. So my first concussion actually happened in bowling, believe it or not.

Ron Bauman: Really?

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, people are always like, “This is the safest sport ever.” And I’m like-

Ron Bauman: Tell us about that, all about that.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, so it was my eight birthday party and I was tying my shoe and my friend went back with the bowling ball and knocked me unconscious. So that was my first concussion, but I was knocked out cold so that was always that. And then playing softball, I got hit in the head with a softball, also knocked out cold. So it was very clear instances of being hurt. But the one that was my worst one was in rugby and what was crazy about it was that I wasn’t knocked unconscious. I was going in for a try, which is a touchdown, touchdown equivalent, and got blindsided by this girl and just kept playing. And three days later, my coach emailed me and was like, “Jessie, I was looking at the footage. I’m so sorry, you were definitely concussed.” But even though I wasn’t knocked out, it was my worst one because I did everything wrong to recover.

Ron Bauman: Did you know at the time that you had taken a shot at that point?

Jessie Garcia: I knew I took a shot but I just-

Ron Bauman: You didn’t have any effects or anything like that?

Jessie Garcia: I didn’t know what the effects even were. That was back in 2009 so I remember, if I think about it, I was like, “Oh, why am I making myself go cross eyed? Why do I have such a bad headache after this game?”

Ron Bauman: You had symptoms but you didn’t really know it.

Jessie Garcia: Correct, there just wasn’t a lot of education about it. It was a club team so we didn’t a trainer on site. At least my coach notice three days later, “Hey, don’t play for the next couple of weeks.” But I really struggled in school, I had a hard time reading and writing for about six months. I had constant headaches. There was a lack of focus so I really struggled. And I think, or I know it was because those 24 hours after the injury happens are really critical with how your recovery will be later on. And like I said, I just didn’t even know to take care of myself and that’s kind of where this whole product was inspired.

Ron Bauman: So the coach of your rugby team notices that you were obviously had taken a shot, you were suffering some effects, tells you not to play for a couple weeks. At what point did you realize that these other symptoms were a result of that hit? I mean, was it a couple of months later after you started-

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, it took a couple months. It really took a couple months to realize that this was the lasting effects of an undiagnosed concussion. I did not have guidance from a doctor, my coach at least sat me out. And it was funny, I actually wanted to play.

Ron Bauman: Right, I’m sure.

Jessie Garcia: Because that’s a common symptom, like, “Oh, I’m fine.” I didn’t think anything of it. But realizing, “Wow, why am I struggling so much in school this semester, why is it taking me 20 minutes to read one page of book?” That really made me realize what was going on. And then I just started educating myself and realizing it was that.

Ron Bauman: Was there anything that could be done at that point, I mean medically?

Jessie Garcia: No.

Ron Bauman: You sort of had to wait it out?

Jessie Garcia: At that time, there was some rehab things going on. But as a college student, that wasn’t necessarily in the top of my mind that I have to go to rehab or even go to a doctor to get checked out. Hindsight’s 20/20 that I’m like, “I could’ve done a lot differently.” I’ve always was student athlete, I wasn’t trying to go pro for rugby or for softball, I always put my academics first and I wish I would’ve just known and that’s kind of where-

Ron Bauman: Do you still feel any of the effects today?

Jessie Garcia: I do feel a little different, if that makes… I don’t know how to describe it. Not that I’m cognitively different, but I used to read through… just go through crazy, reading really fast, speed reading. Lately, I just do a lot of audio books for my content. And it’s just the lack of able to focus and move as quickly. It is frustrating.

Jessie continued to tell us about her time as a student athlete at Lehigh University, how she got the idea Tozuda and where she found her entrepreneurial spirit.

Jessie Garcia: So I majored in global studies. I did minors in entrepreneurship and gender studies while I was an undergrad. So my academic career took a lot of crazy turns. I went into school thinking I was going to do bio-premed. I loved science, loved biology. Did great in labs, I loved being hands-on. In the classroom, it didn’t translate so well in the bio sense. But then, was thinking about doing global studies minor because I loved learning about problems in the world around me and fell in love with that major. And as I was graduating, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do and I heard about this masters program called technical entrepreneurship and it was basically half product design, half business. And went into that full-

Ron Bauman: At Lehigh?

Jessie Garcia: It was at Lehigh as well. And that’s basically where I started developing Tozuda because the whole idea of the program was think of an issue you’ve dealt with personally.

Ron Bauman: That was going to be my next question, where did you get the idea for Tozuda?

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, it was just start… We took creativity classes, and prototyping classes.

Ron Bauman: At some point during this masters program for technical entrepreneurship, being prompted to come up with an idea, something, a product that solves a problem or an issue, you drew from your own past experiences and came up with the idea for Tozuda.

Jessie Garcia: Correct, yeah, I was able to come up with Tozuda during the technical entrepreneurship program at Lehigh. Essentially, what it came down to was I was a broke college student and I was playing-

Ron Bauman: As most are.

Jessie Garcia: As most are. Well, I was a broke college student, I had this injury, I looked into product on the market that would’ve told me, “Jessie, stop what you’re doing,” and there this $200 mouthguard. And I’m like, “Wow, this is awesome.” I go through four mouthgards a season because I chew through them or I lose them.

Ron Bauman: Now is that preventive, or was that sort of what you have there, in a sense?

Jessie Garcia: Similar to what we have today, just that it was an alert to let you know that you have a head injury. And I was like, “Cool, I would totally buy this if I could.”

Ron Bauman: But $200 a pop, going four times or five times a year.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, it would’ve been way too much, definitely way to cost prohibitive. I started exploring that and I realized I was not alone in that story. 60% of high schools and teams use refurbished equipment. And as I talked to coaches and players, I realized cost is factor for them as well. So I was just like, “How could I make this affordable? How can I make this accessible for people like me?” Because I wish I could still be playing sports, I loved hitting people. You know what I mean? That’s a great feeling to play contact sports and be a part of team and unfortunately I can’t do that just because of my history with head injuries.

Ron Bauman: Well you in luck. We set up a little rugby match across the street in the park for the B roll footage so we’re going to go at it.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, no, I don’t know to describe it but it’s something that I want people to keep doing safely and at least to know when to stop. Because we know to ice our ankles, we know to tape up before a game, but since head injuries are in invisible injury, it’s a lot harder to know when to stop because your brain can play funny games with you. You’re just like, “Oh, why am doing that? Why am I making myself go cross eyed?” And it’s like, “No, you can’t control what’s happening right now.”

Ron Bauman: So you’re in the technical entrepreneurship program, you come up with the idea for Tozuda. You graduate from the program, then what? What happens next?

Jessie Garcia: I go to work for my family’s business.

Ron Bauman: Okay, which is?

Jessie Garcia: So they do Hispanic food marketing and food brokerage so their company is called HAP Hispanic Advertising Promotions and they help large CPG companies enter into the latino food market. So yeah, so I grew up around entrepreneurship, seeing with them. They stared off doing supermarket demos, street festivals, things like that. With Tozuda, Tozuda is an idea at that point. When I graduated, it was just provisional patent, I was still trying to figure out how to make the technology work. I knew I wanted to make it non-electronic but I didn’t know how. So there was a lot of testing and nights and the weekends, but I was just living at home in New Jersey, saving-

Ron Bauman: So you’re working full-time during the day for your family business.

Jessie Garcia: Working full time for them, yeah,

Ron Bauman: And putting in nights and weekend on your passion, on Tozuda.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, putting as much time and effort, saving all of my money, living of… Thanks mom and dad. Just living as frugally as possible because I knew I wanted to do something with it eventually. But I think part of that too, I didn’t really believe in myself at that point yet. I’m like, “Who am I to be doing this type of stuff?” I was a global studies major and had this crazy career path. But I started gaining more confidence by learning more skills. So when I was home, I took a class on… I’m sorry, I’m forgetting everything, forgetting, 3D modeling and design, yeah. So I did that at community college, taught myself how to do it. Then I took an art welding class for fun to just start playing around, being more hand-on because I realized that’s what I liked from labs.

Jessie and I then talked about how she found NextFab. How’s she learned by working with it’s members and the challenges of product development.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, my cousin Nikki, she had gone to grad school at Penn, she’s gotten a job as an architect. They had taken a tour here and she was just like, “Oh, you should work here because you’re working in food brokerage and food marketing.” She knew I was trying to break out of that but I didn’t know how yet. I get an interview here at NextFab and during the interview-

Ron Bauman: What position did you interview for?

Jessie Garcia: I interviewed for a marketing manager position. But during my interview, they asked, “What are you doing with Tozuda?” And I said, “I don’t know really. I’m working on it but I haven’t really put all of my eggs into one basked yet.” They’re like, “Oh, you should.” Whoever I was speaking to in HR was like, “You should.” They made me think about it, like, “Why aren’t I doing it-”

Ron Bauman: They gave you a little nudge, they gave you a little shove.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, they totally gave me that little shove. I didn’t get the job but I came to visit and take a tour of NextFab and realized, “Okay, if I want to actually make this product, this is the place to do it.” So took a big leap of faith and quit my job and moved with my fiance, Chris, and moved to Bensalem or the Philly area.

Ron Bauman: Where were you at originally?

Jessie Garcia: I was in Clifton New Jersey.

Ron Bauman: Okay, so farther up north.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, further up north. And that was the other crazy thing too-

Ron Bauman: Is that were you grew up?

Jessie Garcia: I grew up in Bloomfield New Jersey which is right outside New York. And then my parents moved to Clifton after. And they were like, “Why don’t you find something in New York, closer to home so you can still live at home.” They were really trying to push me to stay.

Ron Bauman: Sure, of course.

Jessie Garcia: And that was the crazy thing, there was nothing in those areas. You would think New York City, I think they have-

Ron Bauman: Nothing like this?

Jessie Garcia: No. And then other maker spaces are very much connected to schools. So you could find them at local universities, but if you’re not a student, you don’t have access. So it was either Philly, Pittsburgh or San Francisco. And then Philly-

Ron Bauman: Philly was closest.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, Philly was closest. Chris got a job up in Warminster so it made sense to…

Ron Bauman: So you settle into idyllic Bensalem.

Jessie Garcia: Idyllic Bensalem.

Ron Bauman: In lower Bucks County.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah.

Ron Bauman: I know it very went very well.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, idyllic Bensalem, it’s been great so far. And then just got a dedicated desk here.

Ron Bauman: That was my question, what was your first membership level? How did you first become a member? What was that like when you first started here?

Jessie Garcia: Oh, when I first started here-

Ron Bauman: You started as a full-time member right from the get-go?

Jessie Garcia: Yeah.

Ron Bauman: Wow.

Jessie Garcia: I started full-time member-

Ron Bauman: You were like, “I’m diving right in.”

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, and I bought crazy class package because I was like, “I’m going to learn everything. So I was like, “Metal shop, vertical mill, lathe, MIG, TIG, pulse welding, laser cutting, illustrator, 3D model.” I was like, “I want to know how to use everything here.”

Ron Bauman: Software, tools, everything.

Jessie Garcia: Software tools, everything. Because I was like, “This is what I’m going to need to build this product, so why not?” Well, especially in the beginning too, it was just myself working on it. Actually, we had met an intern, Matt, he was our first intern for Tozuda. He was from Jersey and he came and moved in with us for the first summer.

Ron Bauman: Nice.

Jessie Garcia: Crazy. Julie, was an HR here, she always laughed. She was like, “That’s crazy that you did that.” But he was awesome and we got him hooked up and basically helped me start making the product, going from 3D printing to actually fabrication in the metal shop.

Ron Bauman: So that was sort of the prototyping phase was you were making 3D models or using a 3D printer to create basic prototypes. Talk about that product development process here at NextFab and how they helped with that and helped guide you through that.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, definitely started 3D printing, like you said, for the majority of our prototypes and then we realized that we need a little bit more repeatability and tolerancing when it came to how the device activated and worked. That’s when we started moving into the metal shop and we started using the lathe a lot to make small tubes by hand. And we would get much better quality control using the lathes. We got to the point though, where the sensor function was a little differently at the point, was a magnetic base sensor, it’s spring based now. But we got to the point where we were like, “Okay, how do we make 100 of these?” And since we had a mechanical device, we knew we had to go into injection molding. So that was when I started talking to people at NextFab, I was like, “Hey, can you connect me to some manufactures in the area?” And they did. But all the manufactures contract, quotes came back for $30, $50K a pop for a mold that we don’t even know if it would translate into how the device would work, if that makes sense?

Ron Bauman: Sure.

Jessie Garcia: So I was like, “I don’t blow through all my savings that I worked really hard for to do.” And then we bought our first tabletop injection molding machine, it used to make golf tees. So you just load the plastic. It was really hard to even get it to… It was a piece of crap. But it worked, we shot plastic, we taught ourselves how to the use the Hoss. Matt and Chris on our team taught themselves how to use the Hoss and make molds. And then we realized, we were like, “Okay, we can get better at this.” And then I bought the machine behind us off of Ebay. Once we realized the tabletop wasn’t sufficient enough, we bought that machine off Ebay, also didn’t work when we first bought it. And it took about nine moths of refurbishing it with Chris to get it up and running to make parts and learn the mold making behind.

Ron Bauman: It’s been a journey, it’s been a process.

Jessie Garcia: It’s been a crazy journey.

Ron Bauman: But look at all the cool things you know how to do now.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, I learned by being hands-on, for sure. And this is definitely the place to play and fail and keep learning. And I’ve also have learned a lot by just bringing on really great team members who know a lot more than I do.

Ron Bauman: That’s always important.

Jessie Garcia: It’s always super important and I do look at the staff of NextFab kind of an extension of our team. So when we’re doing things in the metal shop, we always know that there’s someone who knows a little bit more than we do to refine it to that next level that we need it to be.

We went on to discuss the NextFab community, how Jessie employs various methodologies and her dedicated project space for Tozuda.

Jessie Garcia: Being up in the incubator space, it’s really motivating to be around such an energetic environment because you see other companies starting up, struggling, succeeding and it just kind of gives you that motivation every day to keep going even when you have a bad day. Because lots of highs and lows when comes to building startup and a product because some days it works great, sometimes it doesn’t and you have to figure out why not. Everyone up there is really encouraging and it’s nice that during different stages of development, you could talk to Charlie next door. Charlie’s company just raised a ton of money so I’m like, “Hey, how do I start fundraising?” And you can chat with him about it or people come to us and they’re like, “Hey, you injection mold stuff, how do we design for injection molding?” So it’s really collaborative.

Ron Bauman: A lot of shared knowledge?

Jessie Garcia: Oh yeah. And that’s the crazy thing, our team knows a lot, but when we don’t, which happens, we can go 10 feet out-

Ron Bauman: Somebody here’s going to know the answer.

Jessie Garcia: Yes, someone’s going to know the answer and if not, find the right person.

Ron Bauman: Make the right connection.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah.

Ron Bauman: That’s a great resource to have.

Jessie Garcia: Oh, it’s a huge resource. We don’t leave here a lot but you could do so much.

Ron Bauman: That’s a recurring theme that we’re hearing from people that are here when we ask them. I just conversationally asked them, “Where do you live?” The most common answer is, here.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, no, it’s totally here. It’s so convenient to have every type of tool you would need to make something in one place. Because like I said, you could go to a library and they might have a 3D printer and a laser cutter, but they don’t have any electronic section. This is just everything under one roof. I love the metal shop, I think it’s a huge aspect with scaling, manufacturing and production.

Ron Bauman: And you’re one of the few members that actually hit almost every department in NextFab.

Jessie Garcia: Oh, yeah. For sure, yeah, we are utilizing the metal shop for all of our modeling tool making, we are using the wood shop for some of our assembly fixtures. Laser cutter for assembly fixtures, 2D printing for marketing materials, electronics.

Ron Bauman: So even beyond product development, actually helping to grow the business.

Jessie Garcia: Oh yeah, we could basically fix anything on our machine here if we need to run maintenance on it or stickers for trade shows. Just little nice touches that you would always have to outsource that somewhere else and you could just do it yourself which save a lot of money, at least in the get-go until you could outsource it eventually. But for right now, it’s perfect.

Ron Bauman: So you started out as a full-time member, you had dedicated desk, you have an office up in the incubator space and your footprint has been expanding. And now we’re here, you have your own project space. Tell us about some of the little trinkets that we… and all these things that we have around here in your project space.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, so we mostly moved into the project space for testing capability. So we had to build a test rig to do drop testing with our sensor so that’s what back there. And we could attach helmets, drop in any orientation that we want to do the different specs and testing.

Ron Bauman: So you don’t just put the helmet on and run into a wall?

Jessie Garcia: I’ve done it. No, just kidding. Yeah, no, we have that, we have our injection molding back here. So I have a dry hopper, so we treat our plastic, could run the machine, an ultrasonic welder so we could fuse plastic together with hermetic seals. We do have a little CNC machine that we’re actually hacking. We would use it as a CNC machine to cut metal, but we use it a spring line tester. We’re using the touch probe for quality assurance because any variance of the tolerance in the spring will change how the device works. So we test all of our spring there. Assembly table, we have a helmet to helmet test rig too. Little bit of everything. Sorry.

Ron Bauman: It’s all right.

Jessie Garcia: So yeah, so it’s been a great space. I like that it’s a raw space because I built out for exactly what we needed and it’s nice that not only do we have their equipment right next door, but we have the tools that we need.

Ron Bauman: Next, we learned about how Jessie launched Tozuda, how it works and where she derives her passion for keeping people safe from the effects of concussions.

Jessie Garcia: This is an exciting year for us because we’re finally in production for selling.

Ron Bauman: Okay, great, congratulations.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, it’s been a long process of R&D and the crazy thing that I like to think of is that we actually developed a new technology which sounds… I don’t know. I’m really proud of it. I’m really proud of it.

Ron Bauman: Yeah, you should be. Yeah, that’s amazing.

Jessie Garcia: Super, super proud of it. But it took a lot of R&D to figure out how it works, how to calibrate it. So yeah, so we’re going into the market this year, most with direct to consumer, direct to team product. And we’re scaling our production capabilities, we finally found an assembly group that’s putting together all of our products. The goal is to get these out on to as many different mediums as possible, or different application, mostly team sports, recreational sports.

Ron Bauman: So tell us a little bit about how it actually works. So it goes into any type of football helmet or any hockey helmet? I mean, is it retrofitted into any sport of sporting headgear?

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, so it’s a tiny device, it’s about the size of a AA battery. And how the tech works is that it’s a spring based mechanism that hold two balls in place horizontally. And we calibrate the spring to dislodge at certain g-force levels, either lineally where the spring will compress out of place, or rotational where the balls will rotate the spring out of place.

Ron Bauman: Interesting.

Jessie Garcia: So how we looked at it, the two masses or the two balls that are in the spring, I’m sorry, in the sensor itself, move independently like your brain does. So with a concussion, you’re brain will slosh back and forth and will hit your skull causing that TBI. And we just thought of how, basically how these balls act in the sensor is how your brain kind of mimics or the force that it feels. So you get hit in the head in any direction, you don’t even have to hit your head for the device to work or to trigger because it just works independently, feeling the force of whatever your body feels.

Ron Bauman: Interesting. Have you had any attention from NFL teams or NHL or professional sports? You would think that this is something they would jump on, or I guess the manufactures who make the helmets, right?

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, I was just going to say, no interest from the NFL just yet.

Ron Bauman: I’m sure you will.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, you know what? One day. But my focus is more the youth and kids under the college age. Mostly because I think they are the most-

Ron Bauman: It’s a great place to start.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, I was just going to say, that’s where the most athletes are. Guys who get into the NFL, the size of players get a lot smaller. But they’re, to me, the most important demographic of knowing that, hey, if you recover safely, I’m sorry, recover properly after an injury like this, you could keep playing until you’re in the NFL or aspirations of being there.

Ron Bauman: And you won’t have these lingering effects as you grow older like we’re seeing some of these unfortunate cases that are happening with people that suffered concussions and didn’t know it and they get latter in life and they’re having major issues, obviously.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, absolutely. So I would say we’re more focused on youth and high school, college level players. We do have adults that use it just for their personal interest. We have some motorcycle riders, adult hockey players, and even construction workers using that too. So we do have different activation levels based on age and level of play. But I’m focused on the majority of people rather than the pros. But yeah, if they want it, I’m ready.

Ron Bauman: I think that’s a great place to apply your focus. Where are you finding passion and inspiration today and moving forward? We know your background, we know your connection to the product and how you got there, what’s really driving that passion at the end of the day?

Jessie Garcia: I was pissed off. Yeah, I don’t know if that’s a good answer but-

Ron Bauman: It’s great.

Jessie Garcia: … I was pissed off that, one, I had to struggle with this type of injury. And I didn’t like how could I not know I was hurt? That just boggled my mind. I was angry that I couldn’t’ afford the one thing that was out there. So I was like, “I have to do that.” And then I found out I wasn’t alone in that. Tons of people felt the same way, they wanted a device to let them know that they were safe or might have a head injury and they knew that they couldn’t afford a lot of the tech out there. So I was like, “That’s what motivates me.” Is that there are a lot of people that are in my exact situation that I was and loves sports want to keep playing and that’s what I could do. I’m just trying to stay really disciplined and focused and bring this product to life with the awesome team that we’ve developed.

We concluded by discussing women in the field of hardware technology, her other projects at NextFab, and, as always on Break Through, advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Jessie Garcia: Being in manufacturing, it always catches people… not catches people off guard that we actually manufacture our own product. But I wish I would’ve gotten into it sooner, at least in my academic career. I didn’t realize what I like to do is make things. And at the end of the day, that’s what I like to do, I like to make things and making this product. I think there are some people that had a lot of disbelief with this tech and how our approach is so different and, “Oh, why wouldn’t you go IoT or electronic?” Which we could have, but I’m just like, “No, I listened to our users.” So there’s some skepticism I think from our company, because I am female entrepreneur but I love it, it just kind of drives me and I want to prove them wrong. I want to prove them wrong. Yeah. No, for sure, I definitely want to prove them wrong and show them that we could create an amazing solution differently.

Ron Bauman: And if you like to make things, you’re obviously in the right place here at NextFab.

Jessie Garcia: Oh yeah, yeah. I was like, “When I have free time, I’m building other things.”

Ron Bauman: What other kind of things?

Jessie Garcia: I like welding. Weldings my favorite. Well, it’s a been a process of building my bookshelf.

Ron Bauman: Oh, nice.

Jessie Garcia: But yeah, when I have some free time, it’s really relaxing just to follow the little V and do that. I make all my presents, I don’t buy anything anymore.

Ron Bauman: That’s great. Last question for you, what advice would you give to young budding entrepreneurs out there?

Jessie Garcia: Start with whatever skill level you have. So I started with model magic clay. I would literally show up and had this little mouthguard and it was made out of model magic. And I’m like, “Hey, this could tell you you might have a concussion. Would you buy it?” Everyone was like, “Yeah, this is awesome except I hate mouth guards and I just need to be able to afford it.” And so whatever skill level you have, you just have to start. It doesn’t matter if it’s a sketch, a really crappy sketch or it’s not refined. You just have to put yourself out there and keep getting feedback and it will lead you down this crazy path. You just have to start so start with whatever level and constantly learn, develop your skillset and you’ll find the people to help you out, fill the gaps that you don’t have yourself.

Ron Bauman: How did you come up with the name Tozuda?

Jessie Garcia: Tozuda? So Tozuda actually in Spanish means hardheaded. Yeah, so my [family member], always called be Tozuda growing up and, I don’t know, I guess I’m the type of person where I’m told not to touch something for the millionth time, I always have to touch it or try. I don’t know, I always say I have big dreams for Tozuda but I thought when you hear the Superbowl, brought to you buy Toyota, I was like, “Brought to you by Tozuda.” I thought it had the same type of-

Ron Bauman: Oh, it’s got a great ring to it.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’ve embarrassed the hardheaded mentality and definitely dedicated to seeing this through and bringing it to life.

Ron Bauman: I think if you want to be a business leader and an entrepreneur, you have to be hardheaded.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, just a little bit. You got to listen, but-

Ron Bauman: You got to kick in those doors whether you use your foot or your head.

Jessie Garcia: Yeah, but when those challenges come up and you’re like, “Is this worth continuing?” You got to keep moving forward.

Ron Bauman: Well Jessie, thank you so much for speaking with us today. We really appreciate your time. We have big hopes for Tozuda.

Jessie Garcia: Thank you .

Ron Bauman: Sounds like you’re going places and we can’t wait to watch and see where it goes.

Jessie Garcia: I appreciate you guys for interviewing me and taking the time today.

Ron Bauman: Awesome. All right, we’ll see you around the shop.

Jessie Garcia: Awesome, yes, definitely, for sure.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Break Through. I’m your host Ron Bauman, serial entrepreneur, founder of Milk Street Marketing and NextFab member. If you are enjoying our show, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a review. To learn more about how NextFab could make your ideas come to life, visit NextFab.com and follow hashtag NextFab made on social to see what our members are making.

Come back for our next episode feature Eleanor Brennan, a Philadelphia based fashion entrepreneur who left the world of adverting to follow her dreams and launch her own brand, Bus Stop X.

The post Break Through: Jessie Garcia appeared first on NextFab.

[bishiglomper]

I've tried to post about this twice now but here we go.

This is an article I found after finding out that boys are 4x more likely to be diagnosed with autism than girls. I've always been curious and found several things I connected with as far as symptoms but this lists everything an autistic woman might present with. Girls and women often go undiagnosed because they don't present the same. Like boys are more likely to have the more apparent signs, like social awkwardness and meltdowns. Women chameleon and mask socially better.

My sister described the differences in how her children present their ADHD. Her daughter's was centered inward-- things would bubble up inside until she would have a meltdown. But her son's issues are affected by the outside world. From what I read, I think that pretty much describes the differences between male and female autistics..

I was afraid to bring this up to my family but combined with the fact that autism appears to have a big genetic link (nephew just diagnosed), coupled with what I remember in my childhood? And finally this article? I'm pretty damn sure I'm on the spectrum.

The things I remember from when I was little: I used to rock my head into the wall. I had a few periods of eating NOTHING but one thing. I'd have to cover my ears anytime someone closed a car trunk. I did/still have food/textile texture issues. I HATED being scooped up and smothered in affection. I sucked my thumb until my 20s. I was so introverted and quiet they often thought I was delayed. I had lots of IEPs. Speech therapy. I think my childhood best friend might be on the spectrum. I KNOW my current best friend is, as she was just diagnosed.

I went to the nurse a lot for stomach problems. While I did have legit issues, I think most visits were because I needed the quiet retreat. One nurse had the brilliant suggestion to let me eat lunch in there instead of the cafeteria. It drastically cut the visits.

I have most of the social signs. But I try to act normal. I always thought my social anxiety stemmed from my single-sided deafness though. Now I think that's only a small part...

The biggest thing that makes me dubious is that I understand metaphors and the like just fine. But I've always had an interest in the language arts.. I get sarcasm 98% of the time.

I was so spoiled. My mom was with me so much throughout my childhood. She was always a volunteer if there were a trip or club. She went to girlscouts with me. All my field trips. Every school event. It probably helped the anxiety aspect a LOT. And since I could do all that, the socializing too. Unfortunately I think I'm also pretty damn dependant because of that..

I showed mom the article. I was afraid she might think I were attention-seeking or using autism as my new health theory (I'm always trying to find out what's wrong with me lol) but halfway down the list, not only did she agree with me, she's convinced she is too! She says it made her sad.. but that it also gave her that epiphany that had it all make sense.

I'm really interested in pursuing an official diagnoses... but really apprehensive about it.

I once had testing done because I thought I might have a learning problem after struggling so badly with trying to take the GED.

Also with my doctor (whom I adore) always telling me to get out, get a job, get a life, etc. Not to mention the certain family members always going on about the nephew's behavioral problems, I'm like... really not wanting to encounter the whole "WHAT?! You're not autistic!" thing.

I was asked questions like "who was the President during the civil war; what would you do if lost in the woods; etc" and he had me do puzzles. He basically told mom that I was just stupid and needed to be educated. (I'm paraphrasing. He wasn't THAT bad but it's what I got from it.) I was like 18.

So. I don't know. I just had to get that out.

[pinteressay]

Sickly Skinny:  A mosaic memoir by Cristina Casas

“Have you lost weight?” was my grandmother’s way of saying “I love you”. The women of my extended family who developed type II diabetes from being overweight would constantly and relentlessly fat-shame other women as a way to hide their own insecurities about their weight. Both of my parents wanted to lose weight but couldn’t stick to a diet and exercise plan. But I was the one to develop an eating disorder at 14. The kid who had never cared what others thought, who put about five minutes of time into her appearance every day, who when she wasn’t in a school uniform was in her self-appointed uniform of solid colored t-shirts and dark washed skinny jeans. That was the kid that went from 135 lbs to 100 lbs in two months.

The Worst Things I Heard When I Lost 35 Lbs in Two Months at 15

1.   “Have you lost weight?!?!?!”

2.   “You look absolutely amazing!”

3.   “What diet are you on? And how can I do it too?”

4.   “I won’t eat unless you will too” - my best friend (soon to be boyfriend) who thought he was helping

5.   “What’s your secret?”

6.   “Let’s go shopping so you can donate all your old clothes that are too big!”

7.   “You’re so lucky to be a double zero!”

8.   “I’m so jealous of your size!”

9.   “You look so much sexier now.” - my 40 year old godmother

10. “Whatever you’re doing to look like this, keep it up!”

He’s never explicitly said it but, my dad had an eating disorder as a teenager. His situation was different than mine, his immediate family was extremely fat phobic, and he was a chubby child. As a teenager, he had a job working for Coca-Cola as a delivery person. He was part of a two-person delivery team, his partner would drive the truck, and my dad would unload the boxes of soda. When he talks about this experience, he focuses on that part of it; offhandedly adding that every single day he did that job, for lunch, he would have a snickers bar and a diet coke. When talking about this period of his life, he drops the fact in casually, but it is always included. He can’t talk about high school without mentioning the lunches of 0 calorie soda and a candy bar. I’ve seen the photos of my dad’s transformation - it wasn’t typical puberty baby fat shedding; he went from being an overweight kid to an underweight teenager. It’s sad. He played football but got injured so he had to quit and that’s when this started. My guess: he felt like if he was big but didn’t play football, he’d lose his popularity so he “became attractive”. I don’t think he knew he had an eating disorder; he may not even realize it now. There’s this stereotype that eating disorders are only for, well, people who look like me: skinny, relatively attractive, white girls with long hair. They’re not for boys, particularly not for Hispanic boys. 

Eating disorders can be genetically linked, so it’s not much of a stretch to realize he had an eating disorder as a teenager, despite us never explicitly talking about it. Eating disorders are much less sociocultural than people seem to think as they are neurological disorders, though they do have deep psychological links and triggers though. Both anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are linked to certain genes, this research is still very new, but neurologists and geneticists are exploring. A study done on twins showed that pathological attitudes such as body dissatisfaction, eating and weight concerns, and weight preoccupation, show heritabilities of roughly 32 to 72 percent. While this isn’t the same as a parent-child relationship, it does show that eating disorders can be shared between family members. As with many mental disorders, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how/why these disorders manifest in certain people as opposed to others but studies have shown that “greater than 50 percent of the variance in liability to eating disorders and disordered eating behaviors can be accounted for by additive genetic effects” (Berrettini).

Things I Wanted To Hear When I Lost 35 Lbs in Two Months at 15

1.   “We can see your ribs; are you okay?”

2.   “You aren’t broken.”

3.   “We accept you no matter what.”

4.   “We want to help you.”

5.   “We love you always.”

6.   “I understand what you’re going through.”

The DSM V categorizes five main eating disorders but when I was first diagnosed four years ago, there were four major eating disorders in the DSM IV: anorexia nervosa (binge/purge and restricting), bulimia nervosa (purge and non-purge), and eating disorder not otherwise specified (EDNOS) with binge eating disorder as a specific subcategory of EDNOS. I have EDNOS. People with EDNOS either have atypical anorexia or bulimia, mixed features of both disorders, or behaviors that are not categorized in either bulimia or anorexia (Psychology Today). Basically, if you have disordered eating to the point where it could be considered an eating disorder, but you don’t have one of the other three, you have EDNOS. My eating disorder manifests as a mix of both anorexia (restricting) and bulimia (non-purge). My own personal way of looking at it is that I am an atypical anorexic with the mentality of a bulimic person. Unlike typical anorexics, I am completely aware of my condition and even at my very worst never let myself go more than 72 hours without eating. Additionally, atypical anorexics, never drop into a weight range that would be considered underweight. I fully understand the health detriments, but it’s not something you logically choose - it's a neurological and psychological disease that you have to fight. Typical bulimics binge eat and then fast, but I tend to fast and then mildly binge, which at this point means eating a slightly larger than “normal” meal and allow myself to eat more sweets than I should.

EDNOS is the most prominent eating disorder, affecting 75% of people with eating disorders (Machado). It affects nearly 10% of the total population of the United States: 4.78% of adolescents and 4.64% of adults. The disorder is difficult to study because, like all other mental disorders, it is so highly individualistic; EDNOS doesn’t affect any two people in the same way. Since there is a range of subcategories of EDNOS, which are each highly volatile,  little can be said about the category as a whole. What can be stated is that like with other eating disorders EDNOS is widely under-treated and often undiagnosed, it also can lead to severe long-term health detriments such as potentially permanent kidney damage, heart damage, and brain damage if left untreated (Le Grange).

Things My Eating Disorder Made Me Do:

1.   Obsess over calories - something I had never even considered before

2.   Skip meals

3.   Completely stop eating breakfast

4.   Obsessively drink water

5.   Avoid kitchens and cafeterias like the plague

6.   Fight with my boyfriend about eating and anything having to do with food

7.   Become nauseated at the smell of most food

8.   Ignore the worsening of my chronic migraines - one of my migraine triggers is low blood sugar

9.   Rationalize binging after not eating

10. Fight all logic when it came to food and eating

11. Eat fewer than 500 calories a day

As children, people who later develop eating disorders are often characterized as “anxious, obsessive, perfectionistic and achievement-oriented,” I fit that description pretty perfectly, both as a child and now as a college freshman (Weir). These character traits certainly aren’t the reason I developed ENDOS, but once I had it they exacerbated it: I’m anxious about my weight and people noticing my odd eating habits. I’m obsessive about calories. I’m a perfectionist in so many aspects of my life that it causes me extreme emotional stress that I cannot gain enough control over my brain to be able to fend off this disorder. I am always oriented towards both finally freeing myself from ENDOS and giving in to achieve my “goal weight”.

I remember the day my boyfriend asked me if I was anorexic and I had a complete meltdown; denying vehemently to save face. I knew I had an eating disorder before we started dating, I had accepted that struggle as part of my life. That sounds passive, but like any other mental disorder, ENDOS won’t go away because you pretend you don’t have it, it’ll just get worse. I have never in my life thought I was overweight, but for some reason at 14 going on 15, my brain decided that the extra tummy pudge I had was no longer acceptable. I already had depression and anxiety at that point; and because they were unrelated, my eating disorder perversely helped me get over my depression. As I lost weight, I became less depressed, not necessarily because I was happy I lost the weight, that certainly factored in, but almost because my brain could only handle so many things so my eating disorder sort of absorbed the depression. If I was feeling emotionally shitty, my brain suggested I had eaten too much the day before and was feeling bad about that. Logically, I knew that not eating was probably contributing to the shitty feeling but like with most mental disorders, there is no room for logical though - my own or that of others. 

My boyfriend would try to convince me to eat with logical arguments such as “the human body needs more than 1000 calories a day Cristina, you’re actually killing yourself” and “Cristina, you know that when you fast you retain water so you gain water weight and you actually lose weight more slowly” and I knew all of these things in my brain, but the eating disorder always found a way to render them void. My responses to these very logical arguments were usually along the lines of “I’m fine” and “Look, I’m getting better really, I’m just not hungry right now”. Like my father, for a period of time, I would eat a candy bar for lunch; these “lunches” would be eaten around 2 PM, after my third class of the day when I would begin to feel a migraine coming on and would only eat so that I could make it through the rest of the day because raising my blood sugar often helps me fend off a migraine. I passed out three times from lack of food but I always blamed it on my migraines, which are equally serious, but wouldn’t warrant a call to the school psychologist. 

I developed a habit of lying about eating; I would tell my theater castmates that I was going to eat dinner once I got home from rehearsal and my parents that I had eaten dinner at rehearsal; I never told my mom about the skipped meals - to her knowledge I was getting three meals plus snacks every day. 

Battling an eating disorder has become a huge part of my identity because it’s hard for a mental disorder not to become a big part of who you are - there's a constant battle in my head between the disorder and my self; eating disorders shift your whole perception of yourself whether you want them to or not, no matter how hard you fight them. It plays a huge role in my confidence and general self-image, not just my physical appearance either. A large part of me is so outraged that I “allowed” the eating disorder to do this to me, I have spent the past four years so ashamed of it. 

Things My Eating Disorder Didn’t Make Me Do:

1.   Eat less shit/healthier

2.   Exercise

3.   Feel the need to purge

4.   Obsess over my body image to a degree of dysphoria

5.   Think that I needed to see my ribs to be beautiful - I was disgusted when I got to my thinnest and could see my skin suctioning around my ribs like cling wrap, but I couldn’t stop

6.   Deny having an eating disorder

The first step of recovery is acknowledgement, something I had from the get-go. Step two is actually wanting to recover, which was the hardest part. Unlike most other disorders, people are amazed and impressed with the physical results of an eating disorder. The amount of compliments I received after losing the weight, did not at all make me want to regain a healthier weight. So for two years, I stayed at 100-105 lbs. My senior year of high school, I snapped; I didn’t care what anyone thought of me anymore, about anything. I decided once and for all that I needed to actively change the way I thought about food and my eating disorder. I had gained a bit of weight over the summer and was up to 110 lbs, and I decided that instead of panicking like I did when I first saw the number on the scale, I would make this my new “acceptable” weight, I could live with being a zero instead of a double zero. It seems so dumb that I let the arbitrary numbers put on clothing define how I live my life, but to me, it matters, and I have made that my safe zone. I decided to start practicing yoga and eating in a less disordered fashion. The exercise certainly helped me become okay with gaining a little weight. Coming to college I have gained a little more weight but increased the level of exercise without trying due to the pedestrian lifestyle, so my clothing all still fits which helps put my eating disorder at ease. I am still in the recovery process, but I recently I have become increasingly happy with my body, and I can feel the disorder retreating, it’s not gone but the mental wounds opened by my EDNOS are starting to scar over.

Bibliography

Andersen, Arnold E., et al. “A Slimming Program For Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified.” Psychiatric Clinics of North America, vol. 24, no. 2, 2001, pp. 271–280.

Berrettini, Wade. “The Genetics of Eating Disorders.” Psychiatry (Edgmont) 1.3 (2004): 18–25. Print.

Bischoff-Grethe, Amanda et al. “Altered Brain Response to Reward and Punishment in Adolescents with Anorexia Nervosa.” Psychiatry research 214.3 (2013): 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2013.07.004. PMC. Web. 22 Nov. 2017.

“Eating Disorders.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 3 June 2017, www.psychologytoday.com/conditions/eating-disorders.Eddy, Kamryn T, et al. 

“Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified in Adolescents.”American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol. 47, no. 2, Feb. 2008, pp. 156–164.

Elices, Matilde, et al. “Direct Experience While Eating: Laboratory Outcomes among Individuals with Eating Disorders versus Healthy Controls.” Eating Behaviors, vol. 27, 2017, pp. 23–26.

Foerde, Karin et al. “Neural Mechanisms Supporting Maladaptive Food Choices in Anorexia Nervosa.” Nature neuroscience 18.11 (2015): 1571–1573. PMC. Web. 22 Nov. 2017.

Kerr, Kara L et al. “Altered Insula Activity during Visceral Interoception in Weight-Restored Patients with Anorexia Nervosa.” Neuropsychopharmacology 41.2 (2016): 521–528. PMC. Web. 22 Nov. 2017.

Le Grange, Daniel et al. “Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified Presentation in the US Population.” The International journal of eating disorders 45.5 (2012): 711–718. PMC. Web. 22 Nov. 2017.

Machado, Paulo P.P., et al. “The Prevalence of Eating Disorders Not Otherwise Specified.”International Journal of Eating Disorders, vol. 40, no. 3, 2007, pp. 212–217.

Weir, Kirsten. “New Insights on Eating Disorders.” Monitor on Psychology, vol. 47, no. 4, Apr. 2016, p. 36., www.apa.org/monitor/2016/04/eating-disorders.aspx.

[phawareglobal]

Cheryl Wegener - Transcript 122

Pediatric pulmonary hypertension caregiver, Cheryl Wegener discusses her daughter Madison’s road to a PH diagnosis and the impact living with this rare disease has had on the entire family.

Hi, my name is Cheryl Wegener, and I live in Michigan with my family. My daughter Madison is our Pher.

Madison passed out in her first-grade gym class, and that was our first indication that something was wrong. Prior to that, she was pretty much asymptomatic. We went to a doctor. Even the school nurse, when they called, they said, "Look, you don't even need to pick her up from school, she's good. She was a little freaked out. Her levels are fine, her blood pressure's fine. Did you feed her this morning?" Yes, we fed her. "Okay, you might just want to follow up."

We were new to that community, so we didn't even have a pediatrician that we knew and loved for years, but somebody said, "Okay, go see this guy." And so, we took her, just for a follow up. Everything looked good there, but thankfully he wasn't okay with the fact that the six-and-a-half-year-old passed out. And so, he's like, "You know, let's just do an EKG. We don't do a lot of them here, but let's just try it and just to be sure." And that EKG came back with a couple red flags. And again, he was like, "We don't do a lot of them here. Maybe our leads run a little off, but I'm just not okay telling you ... I want you to see a pediatric cardiologist. If I tell you to make the call, you'll be on a six-month waiting list." He goes, "I'm not okay with that. So, let me make a call, I know a friend."

He made a call. This was on a Thursday, got us in to see her on a Monday. And thankfully, we weren't one of the people that go undiagnosed for years and years and years. We went to see her. We did an echo and she knew exactly what she was looking at. And they come in and they give you, you know the pictures, they're trying to explain what this all is and there's two different versions and neither version is good. And we were basically told to go home, pack your bags, drive to Dallas, which was an hour away, and you're gonna go there for a bunch of tests. There is a team of doctors waiting to meet with you in ICU. And her pressures were probably in the 120s at that point. They couldn't believe that she hadn't turned blue, she hadn't passed out, she hadn't had all the symptoms before this period.

And so, when we did that, we went to Dallas. We were in the hospital 15 days. That was our first introduction to the PH world. It's interesting for me, when I go back and I reread our Caring Bridge page, and you watch our understanding unfold. Nobody came in that first day and said, "Your daughter has a terminal illness." Nobody gave us the severity. They told us, "Stay off the internet." So of course, at three in the morning when you're in the hospital room, you're on the internet, reading stats and hearing the good, the bad, the ugly. And as we journaled about it, I think we knew, the first thing we read, one of the first things, was that Madison wouldn't be able, or should not get pregnant. And we knew that before we knew of the implications of the disease. And I remember writing about that, and how sad I was about that.

And then fast forward a few days, and we learned how much more serious this disease was, and we learned about transplant possibilities and how, what a really serious road this was going to be. And I think as we go back, and you read our journal, you just kind of watch this unfolding of our understanding. Dallas told us that their PH team had recently went on to bigger, better things. So, they used to have a PH specialist, they no longer had a PH specialist. Ironically, what they did have was a doctor that used to work with Dr. Dunbar Ivy. He was on their transplant team. And so, they borrowed him for our ICU case, and he called the shots for us while we were in Dallas. But they also said, "You need a PH specialist and we don't have one."

And so, we're like, "Okay, where are these gods of PH?" And they started naming off places like New York and Colorado of course, and Boston. And they said, "Where are you guys from?" And we said, "We're from Michigan." And they said, "Okay, U of M. There you go." And we had only lived in Texas less than a year, and we were supposed to be here two years plus for my husband's job, and said, "Okay." You get a diagnosis like this, you're supposed to be with friends and family. And so that's where we ended up, was going back home. And so everything kind of worked out the way it was supposed to. From the early diagnosis, from Dr. Ivy's former colleague being there to direct the doctors what to do and what to test, to us getting back to our home base and having that specialist live 30 minutes from where we used to live. That was great.

Since then, I mean it's been a roller coaster. This is a disease that rocks your family to the core. On some days, it's going to bring you together and it's going to tighten your unit and tighten your relationships. And other days, it's just going to shake you and it's going to make you question everything and it's going to cause lots of stress and it's going to cause lots of strife in the relationships. And then other days are just completely normal. We're a family, and we're still a family, still a unit. But we're a family with PH, and some days that makes us dramatically different than other families, and other days we're just a normal family.

Despite the fact that we have a PH team close, when you go to ER, you're not dealing with the PH team. You're dealing with the ER people. And when we were first hospitalized with that, which was about maybe a week, two weeks after she had received her central line, so we were by no means experts on mixing. We were still learning the ropes. We weren't experts on the pump. And when we ended up back in the hospital, it became clear that maybe one person on that floor, knew how to work the pump. We weren't okay with that. And so we started advocating for, "Okay, somebody else needs to know that." And we had a great PH fellow, that really went to bat for not just us, but for the program. Saying, "You know, all these nurses on this floor need to learn how to use the pump." And from there, she started training the ER doctors. And we know, when we go to ER, it's game on. We have to have our game hat on, we need to know the program, we need to know how many clicks does it take to re-prime the pump, when you're moving from a peripheral back to the central line and all of that. You have to know, but you're also kind of doing some teaching at the same time.

Probably our biggest struggle right now, as a family unit, is with the kids. There's the normal sibling jealousy, the sibling fighting, the sibling rivalry. And then add a disease on top and it's that on steroids. So, there's days where I believe Madison is jealous of things that Matthew can do that she can no longer do, or do as well. And there's very often days, where Matthew is jealous of the seemingly amount of attention that Madison receives that he doesn't receive. Which, people are very good. If Madison ends up in the hospital and they're bringing her gifts, they almost always remember to bring him something too. People are conscious of that. But that's definitely, that's a balancing act that we haven't mastered yet. We're still juggling that one.

How do we make both kids feel that they are equally as important? Because they are. But they both have different needs, and they both have different ways of showing those needs and showing those wants, showing those emotions, those frustrations. And right now, Matthew is still young enough where he has the feelings, he has the emotions, he has the fears, but he doesn't necessarily have the words to put those appropriately into words. And so, we're seeing that come out in his actions. And as parents, that's so hard, because on the one hand, you want to discipline, you want to raise this nice, strong young man that doesn't have these behavioral issues. Then on the other hand, you're like, "Dude, I get it. It must suck to be the other kid. It must suck to be the sibling." And there's days where I am so angry and I'm frustrated or I'm sad or I have those emotions too, but I'm an adult. And how does a second grader process some of the same fears and things that I'm having to process as an adult? That's not fair to him, but yet that's not something we can change. So, it's definitely a juggling act.

From day one, we said we weren't going to put her in a bubble and not let her live. So when she, she was going to be a swimmer from early on. She was just a fish. And so it was really hard when we got a central line, maybe four months in to diagnosis. It was like, "Well, what do you mean we can't swim?" And then we heard about these dry suits. And then our doctor's position was kind of "Don't ask, don't tell. You know, we get it." And so we ordered a dry suit. So, she swims. She swims differently than she did. She can't dive, she can't do that, but she still swims. She got in to horseback riding for a while. And so that was a passion and we knew, we just made sure that as soon as you're entering that barn, you have a helmet on, because of the risk of a head injury. And we made that work.

She dabbled in to archery for a year. That became kind of really cool after the Hunger Games, for girls to be in to archery and stuff. And that was pretty cool and so she tried that out for a while and said, "You know, I'm going to try this, see if I like this." So, she tries a lot of different things. And we haven't found the one passion yet. She started piano. She likes choir at school, so we thought, "Maybe this summer we'll do a drama program." Things that she probably wouldn't have tried before PH, she's now willing to try, because it's a new path. And that's important.

I'm Cheryl Wegener, and I'm aware that I'm rare.

Learn more about pulmonary hypertension at phaware365.global. Never miss an episode with the phaware® podcast app. Follow us on facebook, twitter, instagram, youtube & linkedin @phaware #phaware

Listen and View more on the official phaware™ podcast site

[maybejustlaurie]

Daddy

Well, fuck. I’m getting old and I haven’t mentally dealt with something that I fear has undermined me, and will continue to undermine me if I don’t address it.

I have an issue with feeling rejected. If I feel I’m not loved completely and unwaveringly, I have historically pushed people away and sought love and / or attention elsewhere.

My first memory of this is in primary school, year 4 or year 5. There was a girl in a grade above me who saw through the little shit I had become by that age (7 primary schools by that age, i had learned to NOT bother making friends) Sharn Skinner. Bless your sweet soul, I still remember clearly you playing cricket with me using a wooden ruler and a barbie shoe, while you took time to write to my mother telling her how sweet I was.

And of course, given the feeling I had but was not yet conscious enough to identify or articulate: that I was not loved / cherished / cared for, I crushed hard on this girl. Massively. Made a right 11yo tool of myself. But I see now that I was just reaching out for the care I had felt, and wanted more of.

I’ve rationalised certain things to myself over time: that my single mother had me at 18, no partner, and she did her best. That she struggled with an undiagnosed mental illness, and self medicated smoking pot. That she truly grew and filled her role of mother over time. But honestly: she was a flawed human like the rest of us, and some of her failings were just what they were. There were highlights and lowlights. Some of the lowlights will feature here, but that’s not to say she was a bad person, bad mother, or that I don’t miss her sincerely today, nearly 2 years after her passing.

I remember when I was 4 & 5 years old, playing in my room in a sydney suburb alone often, due to the low-hanging cloud of pot smoke due to mum & her friends smoking it up. She was smart enough to not want me breathing that.

There are swings and roundabouts with some things. I became smart. I learned to read early (credit to mum on that one), and would read to myself getting lost in fantasy when I was alone. Later in life I would read the Brittanica Children’s Encyclopaedia from cover to cover. To this day I have a broad general knowledge!

When I look back at my childhood behaviour I can’t spot any serious misbehaviour until we moved to Northern NSW.

In Sydney, where I was born and raised until I started year 2 at school, I had friends on the block who I could go outside and play with. We would ride our small bikes up and down the street as fast as we could. I still remember one of those boys had a ‘70’s style Harley-handlebar bike, it was slow off the line, but boy could be motor once he had some speed.

I had my grandparents, 2 uncles and an aunt (none all that much older than me) in the same suburb. Great grandmother and grandfather just a couple of suburbs over. I would even visit my paternal grandparents, I remember their harsh cockney accents, my aunt Dy being a complete sweetheart.

Then we were up there, first on a cattle farm my uncle was managing, then in our own house in the closest town, which had maybe 300 people. That was… ok. Not a lot of kids my age, but really only a few streets in size, so easy enough to play with other kids when I wanted. Evenings, the younger/more social adults went to the sole town pub. Mum made friends with the kitchen staff, and I remember I used to get raspberry lemonade for free. There was also a cocktail arcade machine (the low ones you’d sit on a stool at) and I remember playing pacman or galaga until I ran out of 20c pieces, and drifting off into daydreams until it was time to go home.

It was in this town mum met my future stepdad. Clearly something went on, because we suddenly moved out of town first to a caravan on a friend’s property, the to an old wooden farmhouse in the middle of a cane field. No car, I remember mum meeting me at school, and walking the 7km back to the farmhouse with her. I remember times being poor and mum fretting about food. I was young, but I didn’t miss the fact that money was tight.

Then we moved, moved, moved. Many places I’d go to more than 1 school as I first went to a public school, and once my great grandmother (a devout catholic) kicked up a fuss, then to a catholic school.

My Stepdad was an alcoholic at this time, and physically abusive. He hit mum, he hit me, he played favourites with the children he had previously. I remember one time when I was around 12 or 13, lending my BMX to his son, a few years younger. Now, I didn’t really want to, because he wasn’t great on a bike, but I knew I’d get hit if he went inside and created a fuss because I wasn’t playing nice. So I let him have a ride, he stacked it, hurt himself, and my stepdad came at me, fist swinging. He must have realised mid swing and pulled the punch, as I didn’t go flying across the yard. But the message was clear: that boy was more important than I was. I think it was about this time I really started acting out. Ran away from home (yawn), started stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down. Shit, I remember going on a rampage in town with my neighbours (from a km down the road) one day and literally stealing a remote control car, and even a ladies pay packet out of her car. I’m sorry, lady. If I knew who you were, I’d send you a large sum today to make up for the terrible time I’m sure you had without your pay. :(

There were a number of notable lowlights: getting cast as the secondary lead in a school play only to miss rehearsals due to whatever level of intoxication they had, getting busted down to a small role, and eventually not even taking part. Missing soccer matches due to people being too drunk or too busy socialising to take me the 12km to the field. I only ever played home games, away was just out of the question. On the many house moves we made in that time, one was to a women’s refuge, one was to government provided housing for abused women.

As it stands, at the end of year 10 as mum & stepdad were separating (triggered in large due to a government intervention over his physical abuse of one of my sisters) I asked to be sent to boarding school. I tell the story to people that it was an academic choice, as I was doing well at school and my young siblings made it hard to study. But in reality, I was desperately lonely, and I disliked spending time around the adults in the household. It wasn’t my young siblings’ fault I was distracted. It was the fact I was used as a babysitter and had to keep them quiet as best as I could. Impossible to focus on schoolwork while keeping 3 children between early primary school and toddler happy.

As an adult I’ve had a better time. I’ve been free to move back to Sydney, which I always viewed as home. It was the place things felt normal, the place I had friends and felt loved. I’ve made friends who are smart weirdos like I am, with dark humour but genuine and caring sides to them. They are few and far between, but I love them wholeheartedly, and I feel that in return from them. Never judgement; always understanding and care.

Romantic relations have not been as easy. Anyone who has shown a sign or a period of not being fully into me, I’ve pushed away. I’ve been so sensitive to not being a focus as a child that I can’t handle not being a focus as an adult. I’ve dated some absolute sweethearts and still been a horrid person pushing them away because I’ve dwelled on some item that I felt didn’t show me what I wanted and used that as an excuse to ditch them. Now, I’m not saying all were saints, some truly did treat me poorly, but I know there are examples of amazing people I just didn’t jump in with both feet with because I’m STILL, TODAY so damn scared of being treated as unimportant, as second best, of reliving some of that childhood trauma.

It’s ok, I tell myself. You’re an adult now, it’s all in the past. Except it’s not, that shit is still in my head, and it was there for so much of my childhood that it’s part of me. It defines many aspects of who I am. Smart loner with attachment issues. Great worker until he develops an issue with his boss (parent/power figure) and makes waves. I mean, fuck. It’s there to see, I see it.

So out of all this I’m left with a question: WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU, DAD?

I know my mum could be a right bitch to deal with. Trust me. I had to deal with it. For years, many times alone.

But we had times of being nearly homeless. We lived in a refuge! We had times of being hungry. There was no housing stability. There was abuse. There was so much questionable activity and there was drug haze in our loungeroom for a solid 12 years.

I’m sure if my mother felt she had an option, there were many occasions on which she’d have left my worthless POS stepdad. But she had no money, no family nearby, she was abused. There was no fallback, no safety net. She first had a son to provide for, and later several children to worry about.

Shit, even if you hadn’t fulfilled YOUR RESPONSIBILTY in paying child support, I’m certain there was a time when I was maybe 13 when mum called Joan and Sid to reach out for help. I remember because she was too ashamed to call herself and made me place the call. I remember someone picking up, and I responded automatically “nan-dad” - which is what I remembered calling my grandfather when I was younger. It was Dy on the phone, and she laughed when I said that. I didn’t hear the conversation once mum took the handset, but as an adult I know exactly what that call would have been… and yet our situation remained the same.

For that absence when it counted; I’m not sure I’ve ever forgiven you.

Now, I know full well that forgiveness is for the self, not for the other person.

But it’s so hard to reconcile my childhood with the fact that, even if not as a constant, you weren’t even there when it counted.

What kind of human being does that to their own?

I recently reached out to some of my siblings; the children you had after me, and I was shocked to find that they’ve heard a lot about me. When you weren’t there, when I never got to speak to you, even though I asked for you by name. (I remember knowing you as Keith, not “dad”)

I’ve honestly found it difficult to progress the conversation after reaching out to my siblings, I’m so scared that I’ll just say something like “oh, so he was a dad to you? What was that like?”

I need to deal with this. To eliminate the issues it creates in my personal and professional lives.

But I also need to say a sincere FUCK YOU. Life was hard without you around, and it’s sincerely un-fucking-cool to know that some of the darker periods would have been better if you’d just stepped up to the responsibility you had. You fucking coward. Mum could be horrible, but you had a son. Becoming a parent means that person is more important than you. End of story.

Even if I didn’t have an “always dad” a “sometimes dad” would have really changed things. It would have allowed my mother to escape some of her worst situations (regardless of how how much she’d created them herself). It would have given me a voice of reason in some traumatic times where I had no real adults to turn to. It would have given me more stability when that’s what any child needs in life. Learning to NOT make friends is not a lesson any child should learn. Stealing not just because you’re acting out, but because you’re truly going without is not a lesson any child should learn.

*sigh*

It’s good to get that out, but now I know I need to dismantle this anger, this disappointment, and the end results of the maelstrom this creates in my mind.

And to any partner I’ve hurt by pushing them away unnecessarily: I’m truly sorry. I know it’s a massive movie cliche, but I can say with certainty: it wasn’t you, it was me.

I’ll try, really try, to accept the love that I see and not judge everything through the lens of missing (physically or metaphorically) love.