Tag: health

Feeling Guilty, Feeling Inadequate

My elderly Mom (a Senior) has recently been in the hospital for several days. She has had a close friend/comrade staying with her during the night in the ER and then each night she was in a hospital room.

If this were to happen again and this comrade were not available, I would have a hard time sleeping in the ER and sleeping in the chair by the bedside once my Mom moved into a room.

For my own health, I need to be in bed by 10:00pm and up around 9:00/10:00am. If my Mom were to be readmitted to the hospital, I would need to put my own health first which means taking meds at regular hours and getting a very full night’s sleep.

I feel guilty and inadequate about not being able to care for her as I would prefer. But like the saying goes on the airplane safety drill, put your oxygen on yourself first and then others.

I know the right thing is to accept what I can do for my Mom and maintain my health. It is just that my wishes are that I could be with her round-the-clock if needed.

Working for Myself as a Project Manager / Circumnavigating Stigma but Forfeiting Income

For two distinct periods in my career which includes the present day, I became a self-employed project manager so as to be able to manage both work and illness (bipolar illness).  During these times, I dedicated / have dedicated myself mostly to environmentally based volunteer work in my community.  In later years this often has translated to work in new measures for the environment and new measures in health.  Work also includes a period of service on the mayor’s environmental board in the town where I live.  In earlier years, I submitted grants for environmental development on behalf of my community.  In later years, I began to write papers that were accepted for presentation at the US government and at academic institutions in the US and abroad, including two acceptances from overseas groups.  This work includes being published by one overseas organization dedicated to sustainable development.

During both of these periods, I was able to put my health first and manage whatever bipolar symptoms or needs presented such as therapy appointments, psyche doctor appointments, meds management, or lab tests.  I also did not experience stigma in the workplace as I was working for myself. The first period was 1998 to 2001 and the second period was 2005 to the present with 5 plus jobs in the marketplace scattered among the second volunteer period and duration.  (I will recount the stories of these jobs at a later date.)  The downside of these two periods is that I was not able to make any income associated with these many accomplishments.  Work was volunteer in the community or involved publishing/posting papers that I developed on my own time. 

During this first juncture as a volunteer in my neighborhood, I was able to make important contributions to my community.  One effort resulted in a near million-dollar creek clean-up and naturalization effort about ten minutes from my house.  Another effort resulted in a survey-based community development plan for an in-town neighborhood including such priorities as walkability and economic development. I also developed three community-based sustainability grant applications to the United States Department of Agriculture recommending an environmental approach for managing agricultural waste and converting it into biofuels. 

During my later juncture of self-employment as a member of a city sustainability board, I worked on a variety of environmental agendae items including climate change.  I chaired one of the four subcommittees for a time.  This subcommittee worked on recommendations for the local tree ordinance, storm water management, and reforestation and trails development at a near-by park that was newly acquired by the city. 

Papers that I wrote and presented during the second timeframe focused on systems-based orientations to and measurements of environmental development.  The idea of much of the work at this time was that proposed adoption of systems-based measures in the Health, Energy and Food industries would correlate with simultaneous advances in all three industries.  Aligning measures for Health, Energy and Food advances means we can promote Energy work that allows for climate change concerns and we can promote Health work that allows for citizen well-being in the face of extreme weather events and the like.  This work and related work was presented and/or posted at a US government website in 2009, presented at a well-known public health university in the US in 2011, presented at a US academic non-profit geared to values in higher education (several submissions/presentations from 2010 forward), and submitted/presented/posted at two overseas non-profits dedicated to health economics and/or sustainability. 

Overall, my accomplishments during these two periods of self-employment are/were notable.  I am proud of these accomplishments, but I would not have been able to pursue this work if it had not been for support both financial and otherwise from my husband and my husband’s family.  Basically all this work in environmental development and new measures for the economy in terms of health economics and the like was financed by my family at that time.  This self-financing continues today with my blog writing and other work with which I am involved.

Some days

Some days my anxiety gets the best of me. I have to forgive myself for this and strive again to do better in the future.

I have been journaling my walking and my anxiety levels and it does appear anxiety is worse if I don’t get a walk in. Which comes first the chicken or the egg – I am not sure. Do I feel more anxiety because I have not been on a walk? Or do I not go on a walk because I am feeling anxious?

In any case, the addition of walks to my daily routine is favorable and appears in general to have favorable outcomes – with today being an exception.

Today though I could not let go of my anxiety about my daughter’s wellbeing. This comes at a time when my mother is going in for cataract surgery and I can’t be there because it involves driving across town at 5:00am when my evening meds are still strong in my system. I have had to say no to my ability to pick up my Mom at 5:30am to drive her to the hospital at 6:00am.

This makes me feel guilty that I cannot care for my Mom. It makes me aware of my own limitations in terms of being able to get outside of my regular routine. I am good with routine – horrible without it. I know I am taking care of my health and safety and the safety of others, but I still feel inadequate about it.

To boot, the anxiety about my Mom seems to overflow into anxiety about my daughter and vice versa. I guess you could call this poor boundaries setting at the moment. Realizing they’re not there or not strong — the boundaries — makes me feel even more inadequate.

All in all, I feel like chucking this up to a bad day. Tomorrow will be better I hope and maybe I will go on a longer walk rather than just a short one.

What Makes a Marriage Work?

This is a reworking of a comment I left on a prior blogpost I read and commented on….

I did not meet my husband (one and only) until I was 38 years old. Before then I had been in a series of relationships, some lasting a while (almost three years) and some not lasting long at all. I seemed for years to go back and forth between men who were like my father and men who were like my step-father. This yoyoing back in forth consumed all of my twenties and some of my early thirties. I was engaged to be married to someone before my current husband arrived on the scene.

I learned from that failed engagement that a couple does well to share a belief in God and to argue well. My fiance had clinical depression so on that level we understood each other’s behavioral health challenges. I have bipolar illness. But our relationship was toxic. We always had the same argument over and over. Why aren’t you opening up? Why aren’t you letting me in? Eventually he would call off the engagement, but it was a friendly parting. Years later he wrote and seemed to wonder about our getting back together. I had already moved on.

After the engagement broke off, I began a period of celibacy. This lasted for almost 7 years. During that time I stopped with the yoyo dating and focused inward on myself and my job. It was very important for me to validate myself during those years with something other than a relationship (short-term or otherwise) with a man. I did not even kiss a man for this 7 year period before I met my soon-to-be husband.

I met my current husband (one and only) at an online data service in 2001- this was very early in the web dating sphere. That is a story in and of itself. The first thing I noticed was that our mutual faith in God seemed to make things easier. I also noticed a couple of other characteristics of our relationship as it started to grow and mature. These are my insights into what has made my marriage a successful endeavor for someone with bipolar illness and someone with addiction issues.

For me there are three keys that help my marriage work – though I cannot guarantee these will work for everyone. Hold some sort of faith belief in common. It helps me through the darkest hour if that is not a topic that I argue about with my spouse but one that grounds me in that relationship. Second, be able to argue well. I try not to always go back to the I told you so’s. I try to make each argument have a beginning, middle and end. I try to learn from it once it’s over instead of drudging it up over and over. Finally, a sense of humor goes a very long way. I find it important to be able to laugh at myself and with my partner. It is amazing how a good laugh clears the air.

In addition to these three items, I am adding the ability to be thankful to God for people who are helpful in my life’s journey. I am still working on being thankful every day instead of always asking God for something. There is so much to be thankful for. So here is my two moments of marriage wisdom. Took me until I was 38 to figure it out – still figuring it out at 56. Oh well, later is better than never. 🙂