Thoughts of the moment #2.

These little thoughts have been swirling around my brain recently, and letting them roam free will help, maybe. Some are fleeting, and others stay long into the night. They are what they are.

• I’m finding the subject of weight increasingly boring as the years go by, and as I get better too. Like there are so many more interesting things to think and talk about other than your body’s relationship with gravity. I’m finding it so dull and such a waste of time, kind of like if you think about bricks or chalk for too long. It’s crazy to think how my weight occupied about 80% of my time and thoughts for so many years. It’s such a waste of time and there are so many things that are better uses of your thoughts than obsessively calculating and subtracting and adding and just generally being Very Boring.
• I have a meeting with my research supervisor tomorrow morning and I’m just feeling all blessed and happy that I have access to higher education, and to be doing something that brings me joy. Bring on the sand dunes and me trying to make my research sound way cooler than it actually is!
• Oh my Lanta broccoli is quite possibly one of the best vegetables ever. And carrots. I could eat those two with literally everything.
• Getting outside is something that I’m super passionate about and you have probably read my rambles about this many times before. But being in the sun! Or in the rain! Either way just getting out from our little house shells and experiencing what it is like to simply feel, this always helps so much. Never underestimate the power of green spaces on mental health.
• I have been going for so many mindfulness walks lately and doing progressive muscle relaxation and just feeling good!
• There will always be periods of anxiety. Emotions will always wave, and to not accept this will only bring you devastation and heartbreak. Do what you need to do to respond to the feelings, and embrace the good ones.
• It’s okay to not be who you thought you were supposed to be. Just like how it is okay for you to not be perfectly disciplined and your routine impossibly sculpted. Leave room and no expectations so that you can have space to be human. Accept that your last semester isn’t going to go perfectly and that it will look a little different than you had hoped. And be okay with this shuffling space. Embrace these changes and what they bring, despite not being your ideal, manicured vision. Let go of the things that you can’t healthily accomplish, and go for gold on the rest. Take time for yourself, accept that you might not make it to every lecture, and be okay with this whole being a perfectly flawed human thing. Take care of your brain over everything else. It should always come first – before immecable grades, networking, research, and awards.
• Little experiences of feeling are so underrated. Take a bubble bath and play with the bubbles. Go dog-watching. Accomplish a few small things off your to-do list and feel your productivity shine. Brush your hand through the leaves as you walk by. Feel. Be.
• Take yourself seriously but not so seriously that anything less devastates you. Be silly. Have fun. Be disciplined but make time for being wild too.

Love,

Kaitlyn.

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Thoughts of the moment.

These little thoughts have been swirling around my brain recently, and letting them roam free will help, maybe. Some are fleeting, and others stay long into the night. They are what they are.

• Things don’t have to be perfectly curated. This could be your blog, music, image, and life. You can be a mosaic of all the little bits and pieces found along the way. You aren’t any less of a person this way, and these cracks are where we build creativity and strength.
• Figuring out when to rest and when to grind is really tricky at times. Because we know that we need both, but how do we know when to push and when to let go? Or maybe it’s more a matter of making sure that we include both consistently in life, and acknowledging that sometimes we will go too far and sometimes we won’t go far enough. And that we are human and that this is okay.
• Criticism isn’t the end of the world. It is what it is, and suggestions for improvement in your work aren’t personal attacks. They usually have nothing to do with your character at all. I am learning that knowing how to cope with criticism, and not letting it devastate you, is an important life skill. They should teach this stuff at school. Along with mindfulness. And CBT or DBT skills. I have way too many thoughts on this tangent.
• Why is “we” not spelt “whe”? I just reckon it looks better.
• Things that make me feel better about myself are – going for walks, moving about, reading books, and finding new songs.
• Peonies are literally so beautiful, and I can’t wait to grow a garden full someday.
• It is okay to not be perfect. To be wonderfully, beautifully flawed.

Love,

Kaitlyn.

Lately…

Lately life has made me amazed and in awe. Absolute awe. I feel useless at describing how golden people and moments and animals and nature and the waves of life simply are.

We are laughing so much and spending time with friends and family and there are so many good things. Kind things. Lucky things.

I feel so thankful to be alive in a world with the depths of darkness, and the heavens of light too.

To be living. To be human.

So many things flow. And are in harmony.

Lately, we have celebrated me being self-harm free for two years. It’s wild, let me tell you, because for five years that was such an engulfing part of my life, and now… I can be without it. Somehow. I still have the same thoughts, yet the daily desperate urge to act on these behaviors has finally passed. They took well over a year of not self harming to go away.

Today I have these thoughts, but I tag them and move on. They are insignificant to my life today. They just float around in the empty spaces of my brain and they wheeze a bit, but that’s about it. They are just a tiny piece of me.

Lately I’ve been going for walks with the intention of being mindful, and these are so good. To take in the grass and the dew and all of the leaves. The universe really is extraordinary.

And to be writing for a job! This was such an unexpected surprise. I never knew that writing could actually pay, you know, like real life money. Writing was always something I had deemed as only a hobby, and definitely not something that you could support yourself with, unless you suddenly turned into JK Rowling overnight. It’s so crazy how things happen.

And I’m trying to not even care that my blog posts aren’t perfect, and my writing isn’t perfect, and that my photos definitely aren’t either. But all of these things are bringing me joy, and that is what matters.

Tapering off my SNRI has been interesting. I feel as though there was a big glass pane which has been removed, and now I’m all bare and exposed. The withdrawal side effects haven’t been as bad as I had expected, and following my doctor’s plan has definitely helped. Sometimes I swear that my head is floating above my body, and that my eyes are zooming in and out way too fast to be natural. It’s all very robotic. But these things will pass. Apparently it can take a while for your brain to adjust to doing it’s own thing. Something I won’t miss are the exhausting, brutal dreams. Venlafaxine dreams, anyone? A 20 minute nap turns into a horror movie every single time. Wild stuff!

Therapy is going and going and I think it’s going good, but it’s one of those things that you don’t really ever know how exactly it’s going because you’re not exactly the right person to be judging that. Using the skills that therapy has taught me is great though, because surprise! With enough practice they can actually help! I don’t know, I’m just so content at the same time as being all out of sorts because of the medication, or lack of, and it’s weird. But good. This is progress I think?

Lately I’ve just wanted to dwell in how the ocean sparkles, and how perfect the dew is, and how beautiful being by Cameron’s side is. There are so many good things when we are able to see them.

I’m grateful. I’m grateful.

Wired.

Every single second runs and runs and flies and I can’t keep up.

Every word sounds clunky and bumpy and these sentences don’t form how they feel and I just don’t know how to say it.

My brain soars at one hundred and one miles per hour and this is unfiltered. This is me.

I don’t know how to deal with it. It has been over 700 days since I’ve last been flying. Since the ground met my feet. Since these drugs have grounded me.

I have been saved. And now I have to save myself.

I had forgotten how fast and unbearable that everything could be. How I can crash and burn and crash once again before anything even happens.

My heart beats so, so ungodly loud and with every beat I swear I can’t do it again. It beats and my thoughts pound and rattle through my ribcage, and I feel gone from my skin. From myself.

When my thoughts fly and sail through the darkest night and this feels like before. This is when all the bad things happen. And life crumbles away.

Yet this is good and this is progress and this is what I want, right?

I am here. I am sprinting. I am still.

Liquid light and all those crazy feelings.

It’s winter right now and I’m not normally one to say this, but I’m really missing summer. Wearing shorts and eating cold watermelon and downing all the water like there’s no tomorrow – it’s a stark comparison to our gray days now. Usually I find it tricky to pick one season that I like best, because honestly each can be so magical in their own way, we just have to appreciate them differently. But for now, baking in the sun and diving into the ocean is where I wish it was at. When it does get there though, I’ll probably miss being able to sleep under blankets and snuggle with Cameron and watching the rain pour outside. So for now, I’m just trying to be grateful and love the season we’re in.

So many big life things are in a time of change at the moment. I’ve almost made it through university, something I highly doubted was possible for a long time. My year-long research project about using UAVs to monitor coastal dunes is 50% driving me mad and 50% making me feel in awe of all the good that Geospatial technology can do, and how the field is really advancing at the moment. It’s a love-hate relationship! It’s the mid semester break at the moment, then I have my final few months, and then somehow it will all be over. The rush and the climb and the fall of everything is surreal.

Last week I began my new job as a content creator, and it has really showed me how weirdly life can turn out. At the start of this year when I was pouring a lot into blogging (e.g. my life and soul, literally), I made it a goal for the year to get some sort of financial return through writing, and that has certainly ended up happening! In a completely different way than I ever would have guessed though, and much better than I imagined too. Life is funny like that. How it can feel that so many doors are slamming shut one after the other, only for something better for us to be waiting at the end. Anyway, I am so thankful for this job. It has slotted into our life at just the right time, and has really helped to positively impact things for the future too. I can’t say too much about it all yet, but there are so many bright things, and we are so thankful for these.

It was strange leaving my old job and saying goodbye to everyone. I didn’t expect to be as sad, or to find it as difficult as I did. I was so happy to be leaving the job, but my coworkers were a whole different story. Seeing the same people on most days for two years makes you grow close; they become apart of your story and you apart of theirs. These endings are good though, but they are hard too. That’s how change is born.

Last night we were talking with some dear friends about how much has changed. It’s so crazy to think of how different things are compared to life one, two, five, ten years ago. How people grow. And how you can see things changing before your own eyes. It’s terrifying but it just is too. It’s the most natural thing really, but that doesn’t make it any more comfortable.

Liquid light had been abundant lately. All those moments when you know that you are exactly where you are supposed to be – they are everything. By a bonfire, or beneath the stars, or seeing the look on someone specials face. These are the moments that make life worth living, and I’m trying to remember that it’s important to search for these. What we focus on expands, and heck that has to be one of the most powerful things in the universe.

Anyway, life is crazy. We are looking for our first home. We are making big, giant, stomping steps. There is more wellness than unwellness mental health wise, which is a wonderful season.

Everything is sad and happy and wonderful and terrible, and I suppose that’s exactly how life is meant to be. Everything feels surreal.