keep on keeping on

I think the real problem is getting triggered and because it was an emotional flashback it took us forever to figure out what it was even about. I still feel tense, can you imagine. emotional flashbacks are so much harder to manage.

for now we should finally do what Annett has been telling us for months. pretty much all year. and reduce our online time. it's not just the blog comments, there are a lot of interactions on social media too.
I should not read emails and very specifically not early in the morning. we are pretty vulnerable when we aren't fully awake.
and generally, we will change goals a bit. for this year the goal was to publish at least 2 posts a month. we have to move away from fixed numbers. some of the stuff we wrote took weeks of research and reading. we need the flexibility to write more or less, depending on how we are and what happens in therapy.
we are heading into phase 2, basically the last exercise we worked on was already pretty deep in phase 2... and all of therapy has been heading that way lately. we need the freedom to not write. and not feel bad about it. as long as we have the 2/month rules we would feel guilty, even if it is a totally made up rule.
When we started, we planned for 3 years. we thought we would throw out the basics quickly, sometimes 3 a week, for months and months, because we knew this time would come and that we would have to slow down eventually, both for research and our own therapy.
the new 'rule' will probably be something like 'writing when we feel inspired'. we have reached 426 blog posts total right now. its not like people won't have anything to read...
we are in the 4th year now anyway and we never had a plan for a 4th year

the routine will only be about skin care. when we grew up our mother taught us nothing.

****TW menstruation****
we had to figure out all about our period on our own, she never even noticed or cared. all the 3 girls in the family just silently started using her tampons
****end trigger warning****
I was in my 20s before I understood how to use conditioner. to this day someone inside reminds us to wash behind our ears cause nobody ever did that as a child. teeth were super damanged too... thank god we got all the dentist stuff done for now...
the current project is learning how to take care of our face. we used to have some products but ran out of them one after the other, never had used them regularly before anyway and by now we aren't even sure how long it is since we did anything but get water in our face under the shower.
someone gave us a big gift card and I got us some decent products, did some research, so that will be the start of our new morning and evening routines. our skin is currently so dry it is flaking off and make-up won't even stick, it flakes off too.
we can learn this, the way we learned a lot of adult stuff that women do.
sometimes I feel very sad that nobody taught us as a teen and that we didn't even have friends who could have shared some knowledge.
the level of neglect rarely is as visible as it is when we try to learn stuff that is 100% normal for the majority of people and we don't even know where to begin asking questions.

birdsong87 wrote:the level of neglect rarely is as visible as it is when we try to learn stuff that is 100% normal for the majority of people and we don't even know where to begin asking questions.

Yeah. Sometimes we say "Wonder what the normal people are doing tonight?"

Hi Annett. Sounds like you are doing good stuff for your system. We're doing a thing with the news. We look at the title then ask "Can we do anything about that?" If the answer is 'no' we don't read it. No video news because we don't have control.

Colin & Iain

we run into major triggers every other day.
it makes finding balance extra hard.
preparing for a trigger elimination exercise for next week, see if that is possible.

the application for financial help for therapy-related things we sent in around this time last year was approved.
it means that they will give us a refund on our body work therapy and a couple of other things that support therapy. they also pay for textbooks that we use for blogging. it will be a great relief, even if it will cause a lot of paper work to get all the refunds for everything. so it will take time to sort things out but we should end up with a lot more financial freedom.
although that is amazing news we got badly triggered. money topics... they still hit us hard.

our self-care project is going well. we are coping with the depression.
still mourning our friend S.

Just letting you know that we're reading, that we care, and that we're glad that you're getting the various types of help that you need.

MDs