A place for Vase and Berry

My good moment today was a very large flock of white ibises as I arrived on campus this morning. Usually I might see a dozen or so but this was quadruple that. Nature reminds me what is important.

Your body needed the sleep and the bus was a good spot to do it. That's actually pretty important.

You may not have much energy now, but you could have more in the morning. Overworking sometimes means a need for over resting.

My good moment for today was seeing two of my sons, both a little unexpectedly. My oldest son was feeling pretty overworked at the moment so he came in to just have a new spot to be for a few hours. I hadn't seen him in a week or so so it was nice to just be in the same house with him as he worked. His next few months are going to be crazy busy.

You can write whenever you want. Your shorter messages work just fine. You seem to feel less stressed out when you are writing them. Doing "okay" is actually quite a success. You feel like you are still overworked, but you are managing just a bit better. So if you can, be happy with okay for the time being.

Sorry that I missed last night - diarrhea kept me from doing much. Tonight the 7 cups site is a bit wonky, so I am hoping that this will post.

I am going to start out again with the good that I saw today. Today it was our cat who fell asleep on the exams that I was supposed to be grading. She was totally upside down and everything. I decided that meant I was to take a break. I still got done what I needed to, but on a different time schedule.

Halt! Stop feeling guilty about me. You don't have to answer my every question. They are just things for you to think about, not necessarily respond to. As I pointed out last night, these shorter messages are better than the longer ones. You are overall staying calmer in them because you don't have us much space or time to write. Doing your homework, etc. is quite important anyway. Don't make me part of your stress.

Walls are always going to be thin and neighbors are going to hear things. They aren't trying to listen in or watch you. Perhaps it is a sign that you shouldn't be awake at 2:15 am, but nothing else. Unluckily there is no way to be completely alone in the world. People inhabit it and most people who do are good people. I know that it is hard to see that. 

As far as your 7 cups friend goes, you need to give it more time before you start to panic. Things can go wrong with computers and accounts. They can easily come back. If they are gone, then you decide your response. You can decide it is horrible or you can decide that you will survive it even though you are mourning the loss.

Saturdays are particularly hard because you have more time to think and rest. You do need the rest but the too much thinking part can make things harder. Take mini breaks as you work, but do try to work rather than just saying "I will work an hour from now." How are you doing on setting timers? They might be particularly helpful for Saturdays.

I am going to start with the good again. It would be REALLY helpful for you to do the same. So tonight for dinner we went out to a restaurant and I had a lovely eggplant and mushroom sandwich. It was nice and crispy.

So what is the point of it all? It begins with the eggplant and mushroom sandwich. I know that sounds silly, but your brain right now is having you think too much about the past and the future and too little about the present. You aren't looking to enjoy days or weeks on end. That rarely happens for anyone because there is always the occasional bad. What you can get are moments of good that you can build a life around.

Look for a moment at the point about your friend being back on 7 Cups. Your brain made that future without your friend feel like a giant catastrophe. It ended up being perfectly fine. But you wasted tons of precious energy worrying.

You are spending too much time worrying and it is leading you to another breaking point. You wonder why should I struggle to stop that breaking point from happening? Because if it does happen and you do break or attempt something lots of even worse stuff could follow. Nearly 60% of people who attempt something fail. What happens then? They end up in a psych ward hospitalized at a bare minimum. So your parents find out, your school finds out, everyone knows. You can also end up with serious physical injuries that are lifelong.

You need to sleep more at night. You have developed some really bad sleep habits and they are ruining your ability to think clearly about all of this. DO NOT SLEEP DURING THE DAY. Keep yourself awake at all costs. Do homework standing up if you need to. 

I am not in any way minimizing your pain. I know that you are fighting hard. But do keep fighting. The earth needs you here. Keep looking for the good. It is right there in front of you. I will NEVER let you go. You can't either.

But you also don't have to do this so much alone. Try this website: teenlineonline.org or this one Befrienders India

I know that you need a place to rant. But this time I am not going to answer the rant. I will admit that it hurts and it made me feel like I was being yelled at. I know that you don't like to hear what I have to say because it involves the hard work of rethinking and reimagining the beautiful life you could have ahead if you let yourself dream. But you will only let yourself live in pain at the moment. Most days I am okay with that. Tonight I am not. 

I answer every night and am taking 15-30 minutes every day to do so. So I am tired.

I will be back tomorrow and will answer anything that you have posted since then. But I am going to ignore the long tirade.

Ok, starting from the good again from me. I am finally done with all of the grading for my mini-semester and am starting to feel a little more on track with all of my work for the regular semester which started on Monday. Being less behind that I thought is helpful. Things will get done if I stop looking down at the pile of work.

You didn't do any serious damage to my self esteem or anything. I just needed a night off and to take a mini pause. I do want our conversations to be a place where you can do a bit of venting. That is helpful for you. We just also want to move you in a better direction too.

I have never said to myself that dealing with you is no fun. We all have good days and bad days. You do too. The messages where I can see you starting to grow and become stronger are precious to me. I know that our conversations are helping you on a deeper level.

I have also never thought of you as lazy or as someone who isn't working with every once of strength that they have. I admire how you try to handle all that school work. What I'd like to see is you also putting effort into reframing how you see that homework pile and your ability to handle it. That takes effort too. You put so much energy into panicking and then needing to recover from that panic that there isn't quite enough space for you to work on the path out of it.

What that panic is causing is wide mood swings. That is typical for mental illness. It is why so many people use a combination of medication and talk therapy to find their way to a better spot. Your brain chemicals have become overreactive and you are having trouble slowing them down to breathe a bit.

I do understand that schoolwork seems pointless. In fact I was having a bit of that kind of a conversation with my 18-19 year old students today. The work that you are doing now is kind of a really boring foundation of knowledge that you need to have in order to complete your education. About a year or so for now (as my students described it to me) that foundation begins to expand and become more interesting because people start giving you more freedom to think for yourself rather than memorizing quite so much. Then the education starts to feel more valuable. Does that make sense?

I know how scared you are to dream and to start to open yourself up to the chance of thinking for yourself. Your brain is falsely arguing that you dreaming can only lead to disappointment. But your brain is wrong here.

Yes, not all dreams are going to come true. But if you stop dreaming then you stop living. I don't mean in a physical sense. It is more of an emotional death. I so want to get you off of that path. So take the scary path and dream a little. It is better than being in the state that you are in. Life can only become less pointless if you dream. All of this can lead you away from the self harm that I know is quite painful for you.

Go beyond just thinking in terms of a dream of completing your homework. Allow yourself to think a little more broadly. This isn't an overnight thing. You do it slowly. Start by focusing on the fact that today felt more okay. What made it feel that way?

Starting off again with the good today. A few hours ago, I lost all of my saved bookmarks and passwords. At first I panicked because I thought that I wouldn't be able to get on 7 Cups or anything else. But I had enough of a record that I could retrace my steps. I still lost a great deal, but I decided restarting things probably wasn't so bad. I had bookmarked a bunch of stuff that I didn't need. Creating less clutter and starting from scratch can be a good thing.

I am glad that you had such a triumph in terms of sleep! It helps more than anything else. Keep trying to find ways to get that amount and studying/life in general is going to be better. It seems backwards but you become a better student when you don't stay up late studying. Keep trying to go to bed early.

I meant it when I said that your writing is just fine and didn't do any serious damage. You are perfectly fine to chat with. I read the beginning of your message and smiled because I knew you had enough sleep. So smiling means you aren't making me unhappy all the time when I read your posts. Really and truly.

I am also not going to consider you lazy either. Always remember that people see you differently than you see yourself and sometimes they may be right (not always of course). Putting permanent labels on yourself (I know this in part is due to your mom) doesn't help. It just makes everything feel too inevitable and permanent. Nothing is. You have the opportunity to change the next day.

I know that the mood swings are really hard for you. It is part of the mental illness and it is also part of what your dad experiences too. But I also wanted to just get off the rollercoaster sometimes. For me, the best way is always going to be getting outside no matter what the weather or my mood. But different people are able to find other ways of doing this. Keep looking at the good moods carefully and analyze them. What made that moment better? Then try to repeat what you did to get there. Today it is very clearly sleep.

So, why are you studying? Ultimately, to be a more complete adult. To understand other people, the way the world works, and to find your way in to making the world a better place. And I truly believe that you can do that. But it starts from that foundation of knowledge. You can't tell at this point what is going to be important for your adult journey so you need to gather as many different types of knowledge as possible. But it is also why looking for the kinds of knowledge right now that bring you any sense of excitement (very hard to do depressed I know) is really important. You want to end up in a corner of the world where you will be happiest. This comes from knowing what your interests are. Start keeping a list.

Over the past few months, I am starting as an outsider to get a better sense of those - you like things neat and clean, you may have some interest in photography, you have a clear interest in psychology and how brains work, you care about appearances, you feel a good amount of empathy for certain people, you lean more towards English and analyzing things overall. Your mom is right to call you creative and imaginative.

All of that foundational memorization will eventually become something that you do less and less of. You can easily do things where you analyze more.

Ok, I have read everything tonight except for your last few paragraphs. I will try to get them tomorrow. Time for sleep for me.

Ok, I will try to get to the rest of your message now after reporting my good thing for the day. I guess that would be a picture from my son today. He is on a very long trip and it was nice to see a picture of him enjoying himself by being a little goofy.

You do a really nice job in your second message analyzing yourself. It was another thing that really made me smile and happy for you. Just a month ago or so you were freaked out by that assignment asking you to consider future paths. That is, I am sure, still really scary, but the real you is starting to emerge. 

I told you six months ago or more that I thought you were good at English and in some cases better than my own students. I still feel that way. You are able to analyze and be creative and not everyone can do that. Your mom is right in what she is starting to see in you in terms of interests. I too don't really like to memorize things. I like analyzing things better. What you are probably doing better than most students in school in English, etc. is asking the questions "why" and "how" and then trying to answer them. A lot of students (mine included) just try to repeat things verbatim without much curiosity. I agree that writing things neatly and in a good order also lead to good marks.

You have that curiosity so you can see links between things that other people are missing. It is a great skill to have. I can see it in how you try to figure out why other people are reacting to you in certain ways or how certain people make decisions. You don't write here in a way that is particularly out of order. Sometimes you write long but you are doing it to process as you write. And because you are on 7 Cups so much you are getting much more practice in just writing English than your fellow students. 

You have chosen a good solid stream in going with an arts track next year. I think that it will make you much happier. If you need to explain why just say that you like to analyze things rather than memorize them. That's the truth. There are also tons of jobs out there for people who use creativity to analyze things. You are on a good, solid path. No need to apologize for it. You also don't need to get any more detailed than to say you are going down a more arts based path. That is awesome for right now!

i promise i will reply later, i just cant do it now.

i'm trying to hard to get better but my mother is really pulling me back down to the hole. physically and emotionally. i just hurts so bad and nobody understands. the pain of trying to get better and someone continuing to hurt you and bring you down.

wednesday night i got a lot of sleep, remember? and thursday morning to told you i hoped for the energy to come later that day or the next day. well, guess what? it never came. never.

i was tired and sleepy for all of thursday and really dizzy too. because my mother was so sick she couldn't get up so obviously she couldn't cook. she managed the breakfast, give my father poha and gave me some puffed rice with curd because i chose that over poha. clearly i made a mistake there but i didn't know what was gonna come next.

my mother got so mad at me for not coming to help her when she needed it and for taking too long to shower. when i was done showering, i went to her and she was really angry. said she cant even sit up and asked me to do whatever i wanted about my lunch. i tired asking her what i could possibly make myself and she told me to just go to the kitchen and figure it out. she wouldn't help me at all, not even if i just wanted to ask her what quantity of ride grains i need to make enough rice just for myself.

so what did i do? ate whatever i could remember eating every time before this that my mother was so sick - puffed rice. just a big bowl of that. and i found a coconut laddu and some biscuits and at that. that was my lunch. clearly it was not enough food. and then i had sweep the floors because my mother's sick and the maid didn't come, and also do the dishes and fill the water. that sucked all the energy out of me and i decided to lie down to just breathe for a while, and feel asleep. when i woke up i was so dizzy and hungry and couldn't do anything at all. no homework. so obviously had to stay up late to do it, i went to bed at 2 am on thurdady night.

had more biscuits in the evening and i guess it helped a bit so i could do something. and i was able to make myself two rotis for dinner so i guess that was good, but i probably should have had more than my usual two rotis, because friday morning i woke up with so much stomach pain because i was really hungry and my stomach hurts when that happens.

but i don't understand, why was i hungry? i usually never am. what the heck is wrong with my body?

anyway, yeah, yesterday was a very sleepy tired day with various parts of my body aching. especially my back. it hurts today too, i dunno what's going on. i had absolutely no energy yesterday all day. so instead of doing homework which i had no motivation to do, i did my cups work which is actually fun to do, and it made me feel a bit better. so i went to bed at 1 am feeling quite okay.

i was fine when i woke up today at 8 and thought i'd get some work done today after the shopping we have to do today.

but my mother said some awful words that hurt me like crazy and i cried and feel awful and the thoughts are getting bad. suicidal thoughts, that is. it's 11 am and i'm supposed to get ready to go out right now but i'm writing here instead because i'm in so much pain. we have to go out for our durga puja shopping for clothes for me and my father. and the idea of buying new clothes always makes the thoughts bad because what's the point of buying clothes i might not even live to wear? and with everything that happened today morning...

i guess i'll just keep trying, but i dunno. i'll see if i can do some homework after we come home in the evening. we'll be out for most of today.