I’m minorly panicking.
It’s been a really crappy day today, and usually I would just drown my sorrows In front of my phone screen, try and get lost in something, try and ignore… forget… whatever was needed.
But I said I wasn’t going to do that anymore.
It’s only 8:10 at night.
I’ve had a migraine since I woke up this morning.
I haven’t eaten anything all day except an apple this morning, so I could take some migraine pills… that didn’t help.
I’m miserable. 😅
Been nauseous all day as well… that’s just part of the migraine.
Now is the time, now that I’m back in my van for the night, that I would normally veg out on something. And especially when I’m feeling crappy like this.
(sigh)
I’m not ready for this.
I’m life overwhelmed… all the time…
I’m not able to cope at all, let alone cope healthily.
But I can’t just… say, “Oh screw it. I’m not gonna do what I just barely committed to doing.”
Miserable day, in so many ways.
😅
Probably mostly my fault.
Probably have a migraine because last night, right before making my decision to try again, I ate a whole freaking half gallon (or whatever the new half gallon size is) of Rocky Road ice cream.
And I happen to be sensitive to chocolate in large quantities.
Can cause severe migraines.
I totally forgot about that. 😅
So here I am. I need to eat because maybe it’s not the chocolate ice cream. Maybe it’s just the normal messed up body, in which case, I need to eat to solve the problem.
But I’m so nauseous.
I don’t want to eat a darn thing. I haven’t all day.
And I’m also trying to go back to being vegan again, but I haven’t done the legwork to figure out how to eat vegan while living in a van without a fridge.
Man, I feel awful. 🤢
And bad heartburn decided to join the party in the afternoon after a big glass of water.
🤷
Ugh.
I’m trying to eat a bowl of granola right now.
It’s not easy. Heartburn going nuts.
Ugh.
I haven’t had a day like this, a migraine like this, in I can’t even remember how long. It’s been a while.
I guess I was due.
I poured out the rest of my root beer and brought my unopened junk food up to Liz for her family to have if they wanted it.
I brought my laundry over to my mom’s and did laundry. Mostly while I was there, I just was on my back on the floor trying to cope with the pain and nausea.
I brought over my extra computer for her, in the hopes that maybe she might be able to get some decent use out of it. Her Dell has been nothing but problems for her, it seems.
My Lenovos have always been pretty decent, So I brought her my old one, spent probably 45 minutes to an hour trying to figure out why it wouldn’t connect to the internet, didn’t even see the starlink Wi-Fi option. It could connect to my phone hotspot just fine, And it could see other networks, but it couldn’t see the starlink Network at all.
My guru brother Richard suggested that I maybe look at Windows updates since I just recently done a system restore on the computer, and lo and behold, in the middle of doing the updates, the starlink Network showed up in the list and connected.
Now I just have to bring my mom a power cable, as I only brought one, and I’m not sure where my second one is right now.
Lying on the ground on my back doing a little bit of acupressure, or whatever it is, (I don’t know what I’m doing, so I just press places and hope it helps 😅) seemed to help just a little bit.
But as soon as I would stand up, it would get worse, and then after drinking a glass of water, it went right back to being absolutely awful.
I tried to help my mom with an issue with her laptop, and this time, even with my guru brother’s help, we still weren’t able to figure out exactly what’s going on. For some reason, even though the disc shows that it is a 224 GB disc, it only actually has 144 gigs of stuff on it, yet it says that it’s only got 7 gigs left available.
So for some reason, there are 75-ish gigs left that are somewhere But don’t show up in any of the lists of files of any kind. Not operating system. Not personal documents or photos or videos. Not programs… nothing.
🤷
Stupid Dell. 😅
I gave up, and my mom had to leave anyway, and so I grabbed my clean laundry, and threw it in my little Civic, and I headed home. I needed to have gone home anyway, so I could move Rover from one side of the field to the other, so it didn’t bake in the Sun, is the sun started getting to that point where it was low enough to go underneath the limbs that shade the van during most of the day.
After moving Rover and cleaning up a little bit of trash, I put some of the records that I cleaned out yesterday in the burn bin and got them going.
Migraine doing its thing.
Then I went down to the creek, thinking maybe I could distract myself from the migraine a little bit.
I started working on damming up the part of the dam I built that was lowest, where the water was going by. As I started pulling apart a tangle of logs and branches leaves and what not that had gotten caught on that side of the creek, I saw a snake slither from the bank into the water.
It was relatively small, but it was fat, not like anything I’d ever seen before. It was a reddish orangish brownish color, blending in very very well with the reddish dirt on the bank of the creek.
It’s markings were hard to see In the short time that I was able to see it. I was preoccupied with getting out of the way, so I didn’t get a really good solid look at the coloring.
I just remember that it was blending in with the reddish orangish brownish Bank, quite well, and that it was a really odd fat shape, with the width of the body going down to the point of the tail in very short order.
I tried to follow it in the water as it swam, but because I’d been messing around with stuff, the water was cloudy, so in my efforts to see where it was going, while also watching where I was going, I lost it.
At first, I was thinking that it was a copperhead, But after looking at a bunch of pictures online and doing a little bit of research, I think it was either a juvenile cottonmouth or a banded water snake in the rare orange reddish brownish color. They come in that color, but it’s fairly rare.
I haven’t been able to learn much about the shape of a banded water snake when it’s young, but the shape that I saw is definitely how juvenile cottonmouths are described.
😅
That said, from what I understand, cottonmouths are much more likely to stay on top of the water, though they do sometimes go under the water. This one stayed on top of the water for only a few seconds before disappearing under the water like a fish.
Whatever it was, it certainly had, and still has, my attention. 🙃
I think I’ve seen poisonous snakes in the wild only twice–both rattlesnakes in Utah when hiking up Provo Canyon in Utah.
Anyway, little boy me gonna be watching a little more when he takes his baths. 😅
After the snake adventure, I drove into town to try and buy food that’s vegan friendly. I bought bananas, soy milk, and some vegetarian chili.
Tried to eat some granola. Didn’t succeed very well. Needed to, but didn’t.
Ate the chili.
Bananas aren’t ripe enough yet to eat. Might be by morning.
Anyway, that’s basically the day.
After eating and taking more pills, my migraine is down to a dull roar. It’s there, and if I move my body, it lets me know even more, but It’s down in pain level enough to be able to mostly distract myself from it… unless I move. 😅
How did I do on all of my little commitments?
Well, I’m only going to count relapses that are intentional. So if I caught myself doing something and stopped and didn’t realize I was doing it until I caught myself, then I’m not going to count it.
Full transparency.
So, before I’d even gotten out of bed this morning, I had already caught myself on espn.com. I was just reading away without a thought in the world, when it dawned on me.
So I turned it off immediately.
My language has been a heck of a lot better. I think I probably had four times where something came out that I would otherwise not include in my vocabulary, but it came out before I realized what was happening. I don’t think I had any times where I let it fly recognizing beforehand and then deliberately choosing.
So we’ll call those wins.
No wasted time with TV or movies or news or sports, at least not consciously wasted time.
I got rid of all my junk food and bought some good food. So that’s something. I’ll call that another win.
I haven’t really done anything about trying to connect to god, not directly. I’ve been reading/listening to old conversations and old experiences that were spiritual in nature.
But nothing direct.
Right now I feel like god is sort of the person in the room that I am awkwardly but deliberately ignoring–like when you are keenly aware of someone who’s just a few feet away from you, but you are purposefully doing everything you can to make sure you don’t even look in their direction.
I don’t know if I’m ready for all this.
I think I’m in the worst mental health shape of my entire life, and I’m trying to live in congruence with what I believe.
It takes a lot of work even in good mental health times.
As it is, there’s a fair bit of anxiety in these efforts that I’m making and the direction that I’m going.
Not like panic attack level. I don’t think I’ve ever had a panic attack. But there is some pretty good fear and overwhelm.
I’m afraid to hope.
And I’m afraid to try.
I’m afraid I’m going to hope and be devastated, again, when my hopes are dashed.
I don’t know if I can survive that kind of devastation again.
And I’m afraid I’m going to try again, give everything I have… only to fail again.
I don’t know if I can survive that either.
But what am I going to do? Live my life perpetually miserably because I don’t dare to have hope?
And how could I look myself in the eyes if I actually gave up?
I couldn’t.
So as much as I am very scared right now… here I go again.
(There’s not even nervous laughter or nervous chuckling: I’m just straight up scared. Wouldn’t take much to get me to break down into tears as I think about putting my heart back into this course of life.)
I’m so scared.
…and I really hope my migraine goes away over night.
🤞
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 