Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: self-care

Let’s talk about health, bay-bee

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I’m going to talk more about taking care of myself. Here is the post from yesterday in which I explained why I did not care for the Instapot. I think one of the things that I have accepted about myself is that I am not going to do more than the bare minimum when it comes to feeding myself; I just am not. I am not going to cook more than pasta and premade sauce or rice and steamed veggies with rotisserie chicken from Cubs.

I wish I could find joy in cooking; I really do. It seems like something that would be great to get into, and you have a delicious result at the end. The problem is that–well, there are more than one issue with cooking for me.

One. I have so many food restrictions, and while substitutions are better now than they have ever been, it can be hard to find them in my local Cubs. And they’re more expensive than the regular items. I used to buy Lactaid cottage cheese, but for some reason, it’s not made any longer. I can’t find it at Cubs or online. I looked up recipes for something similar and easy to make. I tried it (out of tofu), and it was horrid. It did not taste like cottage cheese at all.

I knew better. Fake food items rarely taste like the real thing. They are better these days than thirty years ago, but you have to keep in mind that they are not the real thing. In other words, you have to try to appreciate them for what they are. There are some that are delicious in and of themselves, and there are some that are really close to what the original tastes like.

The one exception is cheese. Daiya is the closest I’ve found to the real thing, but I still wouldn’t eat it on its own. It has to be on something and melted. It has the right consistency and that boingy spring that cheese has when melted. Eat it on its own and cold, though? Hell, no.

I’m really grooving on the doing the Cane Form with the saber. It’s amazing how much it’s changed my feelings about both the cane and the saber. Before this, I would have put them both at the bottom of my weapons. Now, I have to say I love practicing with them. Would I put them at the top of my faves list? I wouldn’t go that far, but I have a new appreciation for them. I’m including the video of my teacher’s teacher doing it below. Yes, again, because it’s that amazing.


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More talking about my health in general

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In yesterday’s post, I was talking planning on talking about health in general, but I quickly derailed myself to talking about family dysfunction instead. It’s related to health, though, so  I don’t feel completely bad about it. Let’s face it–family dysfunction is baked into so many things, I could unpack it forever. I’m also still ignoring *waves at the world around me* everything because I have to figure out how to deal with it in a not rage-inducing way.

In yesterday’s post, my intent was to talk about eating more healthily and doing things to better my health in general. That’s not the way it went, but that was my intent. Instead, I went on a rant about how my mother made me feel like shit about my body from thet time of seven and sent me down a very dark and painful path because of her obsession with how the ideal girl/woman should look like.

It got so bad that after my last visit to Taiwan (gotta update my passport ASAP, just a side thought), I had to put my foot down and tell my mother that she could not mention my health ever  again. I had forbade her from talking about my weight at some point, which meant she just changed from talking about my weight to talking about my health–but she meant my weight.

How do I know? Well, first of all, I know her very well. Secondly, when I was in college and anorexic, my junior counselors called her in to talk to her about it. They did it out of good intentions, but it was not a good thing for them to do. Why? Because it embarrassed the hell out of her, and she gets nasty when she’s shown up. Not in the any typical way, but in underhanded, manipulative, guiltt-induucing ways.

I remember my mother sitting there with her face sour. I could tell she was upset–at me. Not for being anorexic and bulimic, but for making it look like she was a bad mother.

Did she have anything to say about me being anorexic and bulimic? No. Did she have any concern to show about my health? No. In fact, the only time she ever said anything about me when I was skinny was during my second dance with anorexia. She looked at me for several long seconds and then said, “Your waist is tinier than mine.” She said it with such hate and jealousy, I internally recoiled.

This is how I know that her concern abouut my health is bullshit. If she were really concerned about my health, she would be worried that my thighs didn’t touch, and I could not make it up a flight of stairs without gasping for breath. Do you want to know how distorted her thinking was on the subject? Before I went to college, I used to blast my boombox (yes, I’m that old) and dance on the living room floor for hours as my exercise. My mother once said, “Should you be doing that? I’m worried that the floor will collapse.”


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Self-soothing the pain away

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It’s been four days. Four exhaustive days. Here is my post from yesterday on the situation. I am still reeling, and I am not the only one. I am phasing in and out of the outraged/sickened state on the regular. In my private lesson yesterday, we did Push Hands (which I mentioned in yesterday’s post). I mentioned wanting to learn it to my teacher months ago, but it seems more urgent now. She has been teaching it in her classes (the ones I don’t attend), and I’m down to do more.

It’s interesting because when we talked about doing it, I was not sure I would be down with it. I remember how much I hated it the first time around. Though, I will say, there was one time when…ok. There is long power and short power. To drastically simplify it, long power is using your back leg to push off on and short power is using your front leg. There is more to it than that, but that’s the ten-second primer on it. Short power is really hard to do properly. Most people (including me) will ‘pop’ the leg rather than do it smoothly. Just because it short, it does not mean it needs to pop. Popping up diffuses the power rather than just keeping it smooth.

Short power is way harder to do correctly–at least for me. As I said, it was too easy to ‘pop’ rather than do it smoothly, which defeated the purpose. I did my best, but I was so tense the entire time. It’s really weird to bet that close to someone. You’re both in a bow stance with your front toes overlapping (not actually touching, but just all up in each other’s grills), and you have to put your hand all over the other person’s body. Most of us are not doing that on the regular basis with people who are not dear loved ones. At least in Ameriac. That is not a comfortable distance nor something we do to strangers (touch them).

When you are in the proper position, the giver places their hand on the other person’s body. Usually, it starts with the shoulder for Willow One. If I remember correctly, it’s called willow because we’re supposed to move like willow trees. With the most basic Willow, you simply push nine areas of the other person’s body. Shoulders (front and back), chest bone (between the breasts), stomach, back, hips (front and back). You want to push the other person to the point of giving them a gentle stretch. You are not trying to push them out of their stance or hurt them. This is for stretching and flexibility.


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My (non)optimal way of dealing with self-isolation

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There are several posts/videos out there telling you the proper way to work at home in this time of self-isolation. This is for those who don’t work from home normally, and they are full of fine information, such as to have a routine, get dressed as if you were going into the office, and have a way to separate your ‘work’ life from your, er, life life. As I said, this is all good advice. I also break two of the three with abandon. The first one, I mostly do. I get up, feed the cat, have a half cig, do my taiji for half an hour, then sit down to work. First, blog post. Then, quick (or not-so-quick) break. Content writing for a few hours. Another break. Fiction writing. Then, whatever. So my work is interspersed throughout my day, but I do the same thing in the same order every day, so that qualifies as a routine. I wear sweats and a t-shirt to work, and that’s what I wear to sleep as well. I work from my couch with my cat on my legs for much of it, and I get up for breaks every few hours. So, here we go with how I’m dealing with the covid-19 self-isolation, and I would not advise it for anyone else. I’m going to do it in the format of the conventional wisdom and how I deal with it (or not. Mostly not). Shall we start? Let’s go!

1. Go outside for at least thirty minutes. Outside is not my friend. Outside is where everything is trying to kill me. I am allergic to everything under the sun, and probably including the sun. As such, I flinch whenever I’m outside. Last time I went to Cubs, there was a man wearing so much cologne, I almost vomited. No, that’s not nature, but it was me going through nature to get there. And it’s technically outside of my house. Anyway, I don’t like outside is my point. I do go outside to smoke a quarter cig every three hours or so, and that’s how I get my thirty minutes of outside. Five minutes six times a day. Done. Sorted!

2. Get thirty minutes of exercise a day. I got that one sorted with my morning taiji routine. I also stretch every time I get up, so no worries here. By the way, I watch a shit-ton of British content, so that’s why some Britishisms creep into my vocabulary like ‘sorted’. I used shattered to mean emotionally drained to Ian, and he was confused for a hot second. I’ve always had a thing for the Brits, and it’s even stronger now.

3. Get thirty minutes a day (yes, that’s a theme emerging) of contact with other people. No. Moving on. Kidding. I’ll elaborate. Most of them are talking about real people, not internet people. Obviously, we’re all trying to self-isolate, but they mean by calling or by Zoom meetings or whatever. By the way, I didn’t know what Zoom was a month ago, and now it’s all over the place. That’s what my teacher uses for our online classes. I’m a loner in the best of times, and the last thing I want to do when it’s not the best of times is to make extra-effort to talk to people. I mean, I want to touch base with *my* people on a more than regular basis, but I don’t need to talk to someone every day. And, the idea of attending more meetings, social or not, exhausts me. So, yeah, no. I’ll watch streams and participate in chats now and again, but I don’t want any more than what I normally do.

4. Shut off social media apps while you are working. I don’t use apps. I don’t use my phone except when I’m on a smoke break. I work on my laptop, so I have the social media open at all times. Right now, I’m accepting that my brain is fragmented and will be for some time. I am getting my work done, but it’s just taking longer over all because I’m taking mini-breaks along the way. I’ll write for ten minutes, then check social media. Write a few more minutes, then browse an article on whatever. Rinse, lather, repeat. It’s hard not to berate myself because my day-to-day life hasn’t changed that much. However, that doesn’t help anything so I’m trying to be a bit more gentle with myself and just accept that I’ll get it done when I get it done.


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With age, hopefully, comes wisdom

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but not when i first wake up.
All of this looks soooooo good.

I’ve been thinking lately about all the things I learned as a kid that are not relevant to me now. For the purpose of this post, I’m going to stick with the ideas related to health, mental and physical.

1. When and how I eat. If you’re around my age (late forties), I’m sure you were taught the four food groups, how much you should eat of each, that you should eat three square meals a day, and that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that all of this is different now. Some of it is just science. There are now five groups (fruits and veggies got split up), and in the old days it was 4-4-3-2, that’s the way to eat for you (or something like that). I don’t remember which number goes with what group, but that was taught to me as a kid. Now, it’s ounces/cups per day, and the amount of each group has changed. I don’t have an issue with that. Things change over time.

When I should eat has always been a struggle for me. I don’t like to eat when I first awake, and usually it’s more than an hour after I get up before I’m even remotely hungry. In addition, I take a medication that requires that you don’t eat for an hour after you take it.

Side note: It would have been nice for my first doctor to tell me that when I was fourteen–which was when I first started having to take this med. He didn’t, though, and he was a bad doctor all around. Then again, he might have said it and I didn’t listen because I was overwhelmed with the new information and was exceedingly depressed at the time. Either way, it wasn’t until I was in my thirties that my (new and great) doctor told me that I wasn’t supposed to take the medication with an hour of eating.

Anyway, I sometimes don’t eat for hours after I awake. It just depends. I have a history of eating disorders, so I’m trying to honor my body by eating only when I’m hungry. It doesn’t work all the time (or even most), but I’m working on it. As for the three square meals thing, I’ve found that I feel better if I eat a little bit several times a day rather than a lot three times a day. I think it makes more sense, too, to keep my hunger at a reasonable level, rather than have a feast or famine mentality. When I go out to eat, I never eat more than half, especially if I order an appetizer and/or dessert. I don’t like feeling stuffed, so it’s easier for me to eat many times a day.

I also have to take into account all my sensitivities. I’ve been gluten-free/dairy-free for almost two years, and I’m currently troubleshooting what else is wrong with me. Food-wise, I mean. I thought it was nuts, but now I’m finding it’s not. It might be hydrogenated oil? I’m not sure. I haven’t had a serious stomach issue in a week or two, which is nice, but I would like to pinpoint what made it happen.

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Self-Care in the Time of Hate and Cholera

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I’ve written a post or two about the elections, and now I want to write about why I’m not paying more attention to it. I know it’s important–probably the most important presidential election in my life. The consequences are great, and the idea of a President Trump makes me want to cry. I have issues with Clinton, most notably, her hawkish nature when it comes to foreign policy, but I have no doubt that she will be a highly competent president in most ways. Trump on the other hand would be a total disaster. That’s not hyperbole. Look at how he reacts to someone ribbing him on Twitter and imagine how he’d react the first time Vladimir Putin openly laughs at him. When Trump first entered the race, everybody was laughing about it, but I couldn’t even muster a forced giggle. Why? Because I was afraid of this. Trump being one of two people who might become president of America. Even though it was such a slim chance at the time, slim was too much for me. In addition, the sight/sound of him does something weird to my brain, and I ignored him as much as possible. People said he would never make it out of the primary, but he just kept climbing in the polls. Then, the unthinkable happened and he was the Republican candidate for president, and it wasn’t a laughing matter any longer.

Quite side note: I didn’t watch any of the primary debates. I don’t see the point in them because they’re not going to tell me anything I don’t already know. They seem to be more about scoring points and optics, two things in which I have no interest. I already knew I was going to vote for Sanders on the Democratic side, and I couldn’t stomach watching the shit show that was the Republican primary on the other side. I’ve been burned out on politics for quite some time, even though I’m more conversant on politics than the majority of Americans. Once we stumbled our way into the generals, I was totally done with the election, even if it wasn’t done with me.


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