“I” is for “Imposter Syndrome” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

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Show of hands: who here has ever heard of something called “Imposter Syndrome”? I know I certainly hadn’t, until maybe six or seven months ago, but like the anxiety that I mentioned coming to terms with back in my “A” post, once I knew that this was a thing, I realized immediately that I suffer from it in a big way.

Basically, what “Imposter Syndrome” is, is a mental condition in which high-achieving individuals are unable to internalize their own achievements and accomplishments and suffer from a persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud. It tends to afflict adults who were “naturals” as children; the kinds of kids who got perfect grades with very little effort, or were just naturally talented at things like sports, the arts, and so on. As adults, those children feel, for whatever reason, that the things they accomplish are mere luck, that they aren’t truly accomplishing anything at all, and that one day the people around them are going to wake up and realize that they’ve just been tricking everyone into thinking they’re anything other than a charlatan.

It might sound weird to someone who has never experienced it, but the second I had someone explain to me what this phenomena is all about I knew that it described me perfectly, and it explained a great deal about the random bouts of anxiety and depression that I’ve had on a regular basis for the past decade or more.

As a kid I was a total nerd, naturally intelligent and moderately talented musically and artistically. I regularly had the highest grades in my classes, read the most books, won awards, and so on and so on. In that sense I held myself in high regard. I knew I was smart, I knew I was talented. I knew that I was going to be the kid who grew up to do great things, one way or the other. Even though I was teased for my geekiness, tormented for being a nerd, and was kinda socially awkward, I always had that knowledge in the back of my head that I was a winner.

And I can pretty much pinpoint the moment when that all fell apart.

Our school system does not properly prepare young people for college, in my opinion. There’s so much hand-holding and pushing-through in the K-12 system that once you hit college, where your decisions have real world consequences (fail class – lose money, etc), a lot of young people fall apart. For me the moment was second-semester Calculus. My program didn’t require Calculus, but after seeing my excellent Pre-Cal marks from high school, the dean suggested that I take the two semesters of Calculus rather than the four semesters of required “Technical Math” in order to save both time and money. I thought that sounded totally logical, so I went for it. Unfortunately, our university happened to have two of the worst Calculus teachers a student could possibly imagine, and they were the only options. My professor, in particular, refused to answer questions in class (because it would disturb his precious plan), and failed to ever be available outside of class hours to help students who were having trouble. I’d always been excellent at math – my high school marks averaged around 98 – so at first it wasn’t a problem, but by the time I hit the second semester the vast quantity of new information that was being thrown at me began to pile up, get confused in my head, and everything began to fall apart. All of a sudden I had no idea what the heck was going on. Math didn’t make sense anymore, and I couldn’t wrangle two seconds with my professor to  help me figure things out. My fellow students were just as confused, so I had no one to help me, and I began flunking quizzes and doing miserably on assignments. I wrote several tests that I barely passed by the skin of my teeth. It was all going to hell in a handbasket.

And then the moment of truth happened. It was the night before the final exam. I was cramming like crazy, but it didn’t seem like anything was sinking in. At some point I took a break and looked through all my quiz/assignment/test scores to figure out what kind of score I needed on the exam in order to pass the course. I don’t remember what the exact number was, but it was  higher than I thought I could manage. In that moment, my brain kinda broke. I know now that it was hardly the end of the world, but as someone who had never failed anything before in her life up until that point, I had a total nervous breakdown.

I won’t go into the details about what happened after that, but in the end I just managed to pass Calculus with a mark of 52, and I considered it both the biggest failure and biggest relief of my life.

And after that, my mindset just seemed to do a 180. I no longer considered myself to be a “winner”. From then on, in the back of my mind, I always had this little voice telling me that I’d only ever been lucky, that I’d never really been smart or talented, and that it had all come to a head with that Calculus class. Practically everything in my life after that seemed like I was just acting. In my work I’ve often considered myself to be the least-knowledgeable and least-useful member of the crew, even when I was doing good work. In my writing I’ve regularly told myself that everyone who ever liked my books was just lying to make me feel good. Even in day-to-day life I’ve found that voice telling me that my friends and family were just humoring me, and that someday everyone I’ve ever known would turn around and finally start treating me like the useless failure I really am.

Logically I know that this line of thinking is ridiculous. I’ve done some great things with my adult life, not the least of which has been raising a smart, beautiful daughter, publishing two books, and making a ton of awesome friends through my YouTube channel. But that voice is still there, all the time, whispering horrible things in my ear, telling me that I’m a fraud, a failure, and a miserable imposter, and that everyone around me can see it too. And every time I fail anything in the slightest or do something that my boss/a friend/a family member scolds me for, that voice gets twice as loud and twice as bold.

The good side to all of this? Once I knew what it was called, it became a hell of a lot easier to deal with. Because, for the past decade, it’s just been the voice in my brain, but now I know that it’s something that’s been studied, something that lots of people deal with every day, just like anxiety or depression. And knowing that takes some of the loneliness out of it, even if I know that I’ll probably always be this way.

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What do you think of “Imposter Syndrome”? Have you ever suffered from it, or do you know someone who you think might suffer from it? Please feel free to leave a comment!

“A” is for “Anxiety” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

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Well hell! I went and told you guys that I was going to make these posts all about ME, and then I go and pick a topic like this for the very first post? Well, come on, it’s not my fault that “anxiety” happens to start with the first letter of the alphabet, and it also happens that the affliction is a bit of an important part of my life.

People aren’t readily willing to diagnose children with mental disorders like anxiety and depression because there’s a stigma that children have no good reason to feel those sorts of things. Kids (or, at least, I guess I should say kids with relatively “good” lives) don’t have “real” troubles and worries, so why should they have troubled minds? It’s a poor mindset that has done many, many children absolutely no favors.

I’m not blaming anyone or anything – I just wanted to start off by pointing this issue out, because I doubt anyone throughout my childhood would have ever guessed that I was suffering from anxiety, even though it’s very obvious in retrospect – at least to me. I was the kind of kid who threw up on the first day of school every year. Whenever we went on a family trip I’d give myself headaches and stomachaches, and need to go to the bathroom ten times more often than was normally necessary. I’d panic before tests, even if I knew the material like the back of my hand, and then panic after the tests even if I’d felt confident that I was doing well during them. All of that might seem totally normal and benign to anyone who has never felt truly “anxious”, but a few years ago, when I finally realized that I do, in fact, suffer from anxiety problems, all those childhood moments came rushing back and it finally sank in that the intensity of those feelings was not normal.

I didn’t really realize that anxiety was a real problem for me until a job I had a few years ago. This particular job involved living on a work camp and busing to and from the site every day. That was the kind of thing I’d been doing for a while, but this site was different in two key aspects. One: the bus ride was an hour long each way. Two: the extraordinarily cheap company we worked for wouldn’t spring for an actual coach bus, and instead crammed us all onto a refurbished school bus with no toilet. At first it didn’t bother me too much, because I’d mostly lean back and try to catch a few z’s on those bus rides, but sooner or later it was bound to happen that my stomach had a bad day. That evening, on the bus ride back to camp, I was practically crying as I watched the seconds tick by on my watch, knowing that I had literally no way to escape and no options besides waiting. Our bus ride was through wilderness in the middle-of-nowhere, so it wasn’t like I could just ask the bus driver to pull into a gas station or something. I just had to wait and suffer.

After that day, I developed an anxiety toward the bus rides that I can’t even describe. Every day, as we neared time to get on the vehicle, I’d completely lose it. My heart would race, my skin would burn. I’d run to the bathroom three, four, five times just to make sure that I’d be okay, but the anxiety itself would cause my stomach to twist, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. For the weeks that followed, nearly every day was worse than the one before, to the point that I’d be staring toward the bus stop, willing myself not to burst into tears in front of my coworkers. A few times I even delayed our departure by sprinting off the bus at the last second to run to the bathroom one last time.

Now, I had great coworkers. They knew what I was dealing with. I’d explained to them how I felt. Some of them even experienced it themselves (come on, fifty people on a bus two hours a day with NO TOILET?). And I knew that I had nothing to worry about with them. If the absolute worst happened, it would be mortifying, for sure, but it certainly wouldn’t be the end of the world.

And yet, that’s the thing with anxiety. The logic is there, on one side of your mind, telling you that even the worst possible outcome isn’t really that big a deal. You know that you’re being unreasonable and that there’s no need of getting so worked up. But you can’t stop it anyway. That’s the thing that a lot of people don’t understand; you can’t just turn it off. You can’t just say, “This is dumb,” and stop feeling that way. There is no kill-switch.

I explained it to one particularly cheery, not-a-problem-in-the-world coworker like this:

Imagine that you’re trapped in your car, on a bridge that’s collapsing. Your car is surrounded by other cars, such that there’s no way you can open any of the doors, and no matter how hard you kick and punch you can’t break any of the windows. You’re trapped, and you can see the collapse working it’s way toward you. There’s a hundred-foot drop and you know that this is it – you’re going to die, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re screaming inside, terrified, heart racing so hard you think you’re going to pass out. You feel like the world is coming to an end.

Now imagine that feeling…but it crops into your mind and body for the most ridiculous reasons even though you know the reaction doesn’t suit the situation. That’s what anxiety feels like. Or, at least, that’s how it feels to me.

I’ve been able to work through my anxiety in recent years through facing it (via YouTube) and calming it (via meditation), but it’s something that will always be there, waiting to pop up at the worst possible moments. I wanted to share that fact for my first “All About Me” A-to-Z post, because I know there are plenty of people out there dealing with the same or similar issues, and it’s important to know that you’re not alone, not by a long shot. There are a lot of anxiety-sufferers out there, and even if the closest people in your life don’t understand what you’re going through, they do, so seek them out. It helps a great deal.

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Have you ever had to deal with anxiety? Was there a defining moment that made it become a major issue in your life? Please feel free to share in the comments below.

 

 

 

 

Blogging 101, Day Twelve: Be Inspired By the Community

Day eleven of Blogging 101 was about being a good neighbor, visiting other blogs, and commenting on the stuff you find interesting. Day twelve takes that concept a bit further by challenging us to build upon one of those comments. Day twelve’s assignment is to write a post that builds on one of the comments you left yesterday. Also, Don’t forget to link to the other blog!

The reasons for this assignment are triplicate. For one thing, if the post that you commented on was worth commenting on then it’s probably worth talking about in more detail on your own blog. Additionally, building upon a post written by someone else allows you to expand your own ideas. Finally, responding to other blogger’s posts, interacting with each other and sharing information conversationally, is a big part of the blogging community and helps you to be tracked down by new readers.

Now, please keep in mind that I’m writing this post a couple of weeks in advance, so the post that I commented on – and am now replying to via this post – is a couple of weeks old. Regardless, I encourage you to take a look at writermummy‘s post, and then check out what she’s written recently, because she’s one of my favorite down-to-earth, real-feeling bloggers. 🙂

The comment that I’m building up was written on a post entitled, Stepping Back From the Brink. In the post writermummy talks about how she has a hard time dealing in extremes when it comes to her mood…either “the world is coming to an end or it’s fantastic”. I commented on the post to let her know that I often feel the same, and so I’m going to elaborate on that today.

Basically, like writermummy, I often feel that my mood goes to complete extremes and that there is very rarely any middle ground. I’m not necessarily talking about mood swings happening within moments of one another, but when I’m up I’m really up, and when I’m down I’m really down. There are days when I’ll be super-motivated, energetic, and just happy in general; I’m ready to face the world and get everything done. Then other days there’s just no making me happy; I’m tired and lethargic, depressed and moody, quick to anger and a complete dip. This trend really shows itself in my writing. One day I think I’m the greatest thing since sliced bread, and the next I want to delete or burn every word I’ve ever written and just pretend like this writing thing never happened. These extreme feelings also tend to show themselves while I’m working out West. Usually on the first few days of work I’m feeling pretty good, energetic, like I’m a model employee and everything is good and happy. The very end of my shift is generally pretty similar because I’m happy and excited to be going home soon. But the middle of my shift almost always sees me as a miserable mess. I hate my job, I hate the camp, I hate how tired and lazy I’m feeling, and I just want to curl up in bed and pretend like I came down with something horrible so that everyone will leave me alone.

The thing is, as writermummy explains, that when I come out of the “down” funks, it’s almost always with the feeling that I’ve been a complete and utter twit. When I’m down I feel like the world is a horrible place, and when I get back up again I look back at my “down” self and think, “Dammit, what the hell is wrong with you, you dumb-ass? Just lighten up!”

It’s not a great feeling either way, but it’s nice to know that I’m not the only one who gets this way, and it’s important for people with these kinds of problems to support each other. Thus, the blogging community. You see? It’s all coming together. 🙂

Finding the Answer to the Problem

Before I start this story I want to mention that I’ve never sat down and spoken about this particular topic before; not with my husband or my parents, or anyone else close to me. People may have caught glimpses of the issue here and there, every now and then, but I’ve never taken the initiative to grab someone important to me and just talk about what I was feeling. Honestly, that’s just the kind of person I am. I like to keep my baggage to myself. But today, inpsired by a fellow blogger who recently had a very helpful doctor’s appointment, I’m going to tell you a little about what I dealt with internally for several years.

Some time before I was married, I found myself in my doctor’s office with a laundry list of complaints. I wasn’t sure if they were connected in any way, but I was hoping that there was some simple answer for why I was tired all the time (regardless of how much sleep I got), was often very lethargic, and had a lot of difficulty losing weight, amongst other annoyances. I’d done a bit of research and thought that perhaps I had a thyroid problem. Communicating this idea to my doctor was a bit tricky because he’s a difficult man to talk to sometimes; he tends to quickly make up his mind about what he thinks the problem is, and then he’s like a dog with a bone, refusing to let go even when new information is presented. For comparison, when my daughter was an infant and was constipated for over a week, I had three separate appointements with this doctor during which all he kept telling me was to give her fruit juice…despite the fact that I’d explained several times that she flat-out refused to swallow it.

So here I am, talking to my one-track-mind doctor, trying to convince him that I think I have a thyroid problem and that I’d like to be tested, and he comes out with this gem: “I think you’re depressed. I’m going to prescribe you an antidepressant.”

I was flabbergasted. I honestly couldn’t see how the complaints I had added up to a mental problem. I was certain that it had to be a physical issue – something that was off about my body, not my brain. “And besides,” I thought, “I’m not sad.” I knew that depression could come in many forms and that being depressed doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re sobbing all the time, but I genuinely didn’t feel like I was anything resembling depressed.

Somehow that day I managed to convince dog-with-a-bone to send me for the thyroid test before pushing pills on me, and I left that appointment satisfied that I was going to get some blood drawn, return to my doc, and get a prescription for thyroid meds that would make me feel loads better. But then my tests came back perfectly normal – on the low end of normal, perhaps, but still normal. I was honestly quite surprised, and the dog took his opportunity to start gnawing at that old bone again. I left the second appointment with a prescription for antidepressants and a gut feeling that they weren’t going to do a thing for me.

Now here’s the thing: I’m sure that there are lots of depressed people out there who truly don’t believe that they are depressed, or know that they are but don’t believe that medication will help, or are so concerned with all the stigmas that are associated with mental health problems that they refuse to admit that they might have one. But I wasn’t one of those people. I knew that depression wasn’t my problem. I couldn’t tell you how I knew, but I knew. And I was right. After over a year of taking the antidepressants as prescribed, I felt absolutely no different.

I officially stopped taking the pills after my wedding, when my husband and I decided that I was going to go off my birth control. I figured that since I was getting nothing out of them anyway, there was no point in risking that the medication might have an affect on a possible pregnancy. I stopped taking both the antidepressants and my birth control pills at the beginning of November 2009. In March of 2010 I took a positive pregnancy test, and in early December of 2010 I gave birth to my beautiful baby girl.

Fast forward to about two months after my daughter’s first birthday. Though I hadn’t thought about them in a while, I started to notice that some of my old symptoms were bothering me again, with an added joy: I started to have some pretty awful mood swings. I didn’t often express them out loud, but I would find myself getting extremely over-emotional about stupid, pointless things. If my husband left his clothes on the floor I would get enraged and want to put my fist through a wall. If I couldn’t get the baby to eat I would have to struggle to fight back the tears. At first I attributed it all to stress, since at this point my husband and I had both been unemployed for about five months and were just starting to seek employment out West. But the mood swings continued in full force even after I was back to work. I would be perfectly fine one moment, and then with the slightest provocation I would find my face growing hot and my throat choking up as I fought to keep myself from either bursting into tears or punching someone right in the nose. For the most part I managed to keep this inner turmoil stuffed firmly down in the bottom of my stomach, but every now and then I would say or do something that would have people looking at me like I’d suddenly lost my mind. It was all terribly frustrating and I wondered on several occasions if Iwas losing my mind. I almost went back to my doctor to ask for another antidepressant prescription. I was still confident that it wouldn’t help, but I hated feeling this way and couldn’t think of anything else to do.

It wasn’t until early 2013 that I started to realize some things. First, I’d had a truly excellent pregnancy. Though I would up with some pretty bad back pain in the last trimester, I’d been quite happy and issue-free throughout the pregnancy. Second, although I’d had to deal with the lack of sleep and mountain of emotions that come with having a young baby, the first year of my daughter’s life had ultimately been quite normal as well. My various complaints, along with the descent into Mood Swing Hell, had only cropped back up a little while after my daughter’s first birthday. So, I thought to myself, what was the common thread between the time before I’d gotten pregnant and the time after my daughter’s first birthday?

It didn’t take me very long to come up with the answer: my birth control pills. I’d gone off the pill in order to get pregnant, and had gotten pregnant only a few months later. After my daughter was born I’d opted for an IUD for birth control because I’d read that the hormones from the pill can leech into breastmilk. But then, when I officially decided that I was finished with breastmilk, I’d gone back to the pill because I’d had issues with the IUD – and that was right around the time of my daughter’s first birthday. My symptoms had disappeared a few months after I stopped taking my birth control pill, and had returned (with friends) a few months after I started taking them again.

Luckily, only a few weeks after my revelation, I had an appointment with my OB-GYN, who is a much easier doctor to communicate with. So, determined to prove to myself that I wasn’t simply insane, I took a deep breath and asked the doc, “Could my birth control pills be giving me mood swings?” You can’t imagine the relief I felt when she looked back at me and replied, “Oh, absolutely.”

I left that appointment with a prescription for a different brand of birth control pills – one that is known for being less likely to cause mood problems. And though the changeover to the new pill caused a couple of issues with my cycle for the first few months, I’ve felt a hundred times better ever since. My moods are back to normal (or as normal as the moods of the mother of a toddler can ever be), I’ve been sleeping better and subsequently feeling more awake and alert, and I’ve found that I’ve been gaining a rekindled interest in things that I had once been too lazy and lethargic to bother with for a long time. I’m still having a hard time losing weight, but there are a host of other reasons for that.

The reasons I’m choosing to share this story now are threefold:

One, as a reminder that it’s okay to complain if you aren’t feeling well. Even if you think that your complaints are trifling or that no one will take you seriously, you should still see someone if you think that there might be something wrong. Follow your gut.

Two, if you think that your doc isn’t taking you seriously, or that they are taking you in the wrong direction on something, insist on a second opinion. Find another practitioner or ask to see a specialist. Just don’t settle for the first opinion if it doesn’t feel right. Medical diagnostics is not an exact science; doctor’s make mistakes.

Third, sometimes it’s just nice to talk about these things – or in my case, write about these things. It can be embarassing, it can make you feel weak and pathetic, but it can also feel great. We all keep our crap buried down deep inside where it sits and festers, but if you’re brave enough to turn over that soil and plant some seeds, maybe – just maybe – something beautiful will grow.

Be Your Kid’s Cheerleader, Not Their Bodyguard

As a kid I was what some people might refer to as a “nerd”, and other people might refer to as a “geek”. Some people may have even classified me as a “loser” or a “dork”. It wouldn’t have been way out there to hear someone call me a “dweeb”. I had all the qualities of these many descriptors: I enjoyed school and was good at it, I loved writing and drawing, I only had one or two good friends, I had no sense of fashion or what was “cool” at any given time, I was fairly shy, and I liked lots of things that were considered to be (at the time) things that only nerds liked, like Star Wars, anime, and RPG video games.

I mean, come on…look at those walls! LOOK AT THOSE WALLS!

The thing is, when I look back at my childhood I know that I actually had it pretty good. I got along with kids from all social groups, and though I was often teased and tormented I was actually fairly well-liked overall. And yet, if you had asked 10-year-old me, or 12-year-old me, or 15-year-old me, she would have had a grocery list of complaints to make, because that’s the thing about kids: they see things very differently and react explosively. That’s what we have to remember when dealing with young’uns.

For example, when I was young I was an excellent student, but I was dramatically lacking when it came to things that were important to all the other kids. I remember once when I was in the 5th grade, a couple of kids in my class were talking about “Green Day”. I remember wondering why they were talking about Saint Patrick’s Day in the middle of November. I had absolutely no idea that Green Day was a band and I felt like a total loser when I finally figured it out. I was regularly tormented for not knowing about the “important” bands, TV shows, and celebrities.

I was even pretty pathetic when it came to normal “kid” lingo. I read constantly and had a great vocabulary for my age, but when it came to things that kids say to one another I just didn’t get it. Once, I can remember one of the girls in my class told me that one of the boys in my class thought I was a “fox”. I had absolutely no idea what that meant. I didn’t know whether to be amused or upset. The boy in question was the kind of guy who was friendly enough but also a bit of a torment, so I didn’t know if being a “fox” was a good thing or if he was teasing me. In this particular case my ignorance showed clear through; the girl actually ended up asking me if I knew what a “fox” was because she could see the twitchy confusion on my face. I felt like a complete idiot as I tried to convince her that I did, even though I didn’t. And then even after I was clear on the definition, I didn’t know if the boy was being serious or mean, because I was not the kind of girl that boys liked and I knew it.

These kinds of things were exacerbated by the “normal” kid’s ability to be annoyingly ignorant toward the “nerdy” kid. When I would draw, for instance, I tended to draw in an anime style, and the result was a constant barrage of, “Oooh, is that Sailor Moon?” which is significantly more annoying than it sounds. In this vein everything I did or said was assumed to be related to Sailor Moon or Star Wars, because if a kid happens to like these kinds of things every other kid in the world will assume that that’s all there is to that kid. For a large chuck of my life I was designated to be the “kid who likes Star Wars”, and as far as some were concerned that was my only defining feature.

As I’ve mentioned before, these kinds of things, though they seem meaningless to an adult, are a huge deal to kids. Kids are emotional. Kids are quick to temper. Kids are cruel to each other. Kids are stupid.

The reason I mention all of this is because when you have a bunch of little things slowly building up and niggling at a kid’s mind, eventually it will come to a head and there will be an outburst of some kind. For me, the eventual outburst was a good thing. You see, my two best friends and I were picked on fairly regularly in junior high school. One of those two friends was the biggest target simply because she was the quietest and therefore the easiest (see previous paragraph about kids being cruel). One day in gym class we were going to be playing badminton, and while our teacher was distracted by showing one of the kids the proper swing, some of the “popular” kids were amusing themselves by hitting birdies at my friend. It was the kind of thing that she had endured before, and normally did so by gritting her teeth and trying to ignore them. On this day, however, she cracked, and on the tenth or eleventh birdie to the back of the head she twirled around and chucked her racket at the kids as hard as she could. Her reaction was the straw that broke the camel’s back for the other friend and I. Up until that point we had always been calm, quiet, and soft-spoken, but at that moment we snapped. I don’t even remember half of what either of us said. I do remember that there was an incredible amount of profanity involved, and that I ended up with my finger right in the face of one particular girl who looked, in that moment, like she was absolutely terrified that I was going to beat her face in. And the thing is, I actually may have, if our teacher hadn’t run over at that moment, grabbed my friends and I, and dragged us off to her office. I don’t remember much of that talk either, except for the fact that I was crying while we were trying to defend ourselves and I was so mad that I couldn’t stop.

We three ended up getting sent home for lunch early that day. At my grandmother’s house I explained to my mother and grandmother what had happened and that my two friends had already said that they weren’t going back to school that afternoon. After listening carefully my mother told me that I could stay home too if I wanted, but that she strongly suggested I return for the afternoon classes. She told me that not showing up would just show those kids that they’d won in the end. I hated that so much, you have no idea, but I returned to school that afternoon and spent the entire rest of the day sitting alone, knowing that the entire class was watching me, waiting to see if I’d snap again. Those three or so hours were some of the hardest I’d ever experienced. It was all I could do not to burst into tears every time I saw someone staring at me.

But as I said, in the end, the outburst that my friends and I had turned out to be a good thing for us. No one messed with us after that, and in honesty we seemed to gain quite a bit of respect. Life became a hell of a lot easier from there on out. And I truly believe that those “popular” kids learned something that day…in fact, one of them recently informed me that she’d felt extremely bad about that incident and apologized profusely for being a jerk.

Here’s the thing though…that incident could have gone a hell of a lot differently. For one thing, I could have forgone the screaming and cursing and gone right to bashing a girl’s face in. We could have done nothing at all and instead self-medicated in secret with drugs or self-harm. My friends and I could have let everything build and build and build until we ended up with major depression or anxiety or any other number of things. We could have wound up in a very different place. One of us could have even resorted to suicide. I would never in a million years have said that any of us were ever capable of that, but people often say that of kids who do end up taking the final plunge.

Now, these days we pay a lot of attention to bullying, especially it’s cyber-counterpart. And that’s good, for sure. We definitely don’t want to ignore the problem. But if you want to know my honest opinion, I think we spend way too much time focusing on the cause and not enough time focusing on the effects. Sure, it would be great if we could stop bullying all together and save all our kids from having to deal with that kind of mental, emotional, and sometimes even physical anguish, but we can’t. Not really. We can’t be on top of our kids every hour of every day, and no matter what we do or say to bullies they will continue to do what they do because that’s just the way they are. To reiterate: kids are cruel. They will always be cruel. We as parents and teachers and concerned adults can do what we can, but  some bullies will always work around the systems and thus some kids will always be bullied. Therefore, I suggest focusing more on the effects. Look for the signs. Keep your eyes open for changes in the way your kid acts. Be vigilant, but don’t hover, because kids recognize that kind of thing and they hate it. Don’t be forceful and demanding, but talk to your kids, let them know that they can talk to you. Don’t overreact. Kids won’t tell you that they’re being bullied if they think you’re going to go stomping over to the bully’s house to yell at their parents (hint: no matter how much you think it’s a good idea, that kind of thing results in MORE BULLYING). Your kids want you on their side, but they want you on their side on their terms. Your kids don’t always need you to fix the problem: sometimes they just need you to acknowledge the problem and let them know that you have faith in them to deal with it. Like my mother listened to my story about my breakdown and encouraged me to return to school to show the bullies that they hadn’t won, sometimes all your kid really needs is to know that you believe in their ability to face their own problems head-on.

Being a kid is rarely easy, and lots of horrible things have happened as a result of that, but our kids don’t need us to be their bodyguards; they need us to be their cheerleaders.

You Know What Opinions are Like, Don’t You?

A fellow blogger, one I happen to follow, has started up an interesting project. This blogger is known as Opinionated Man, and on his blog HarsH ReaLiTy he has come up with the idea for “Project O“. Basically, throughout the month of September he is going to be researching and discussing the concept of “opinions”, what they are, where they come from, what factors in our lives affect the ones we have. He plans to do this by way of information gathered from us, the bloggers, the readers, the people around the world connected together by the internet.

I thought this sounded particularly interesting, so when I saw that he released a template of questions for use in the project, I decided to write a blog post answering them. As per his requests, I will also be emailing my answers to him for use in the project, and I urge you to do so as well, should you decide to take part on your own blogs.

So without further ado, here we go:

Question 1: Please provide a window into who you are, some background information in a not too overwhelming profile here.

I’m a wife and mother, and an only child, but I grew up positively surrounded by cousins. I was a book-nerd kind of kid growing up, as well as a bit of a geek (I liked Star Wars, anime, video games, etc). I never had a lot of friends, but I loved the few I did have. I’ve wanted to be a fiction writer since the third grade, but somehow or other I became an instrumentation technician by trade. It’s a very male-dominated field but I’ve had surprisingly few issues in my seven years in the trade. These days I write whenever I can and aspire to become published sooner rather than later.

Question 2: If you haven’t already done so please provide your country of origin, whether you are male or female, an age would be nice, and where you currently live if that differs from the country of origin.

Country of origin and the country I’m currently living in are both Canada. I’m female and 29 years old.

Question 3: Recount the first time you remember having a differing opinion from someone significantly older than you. Do you remember what the topic was about? Did you voice your opinion or hold it to yourself?

The first time I can remember having a really strong opinion to the opposite of my elders was when I first started to realize that I thought religion was hooey. I was in the 7th or 8th grade, I believe, which is when Catholic kids complete their “Confirmation” ritual. It involves going to church every week for so many weeks and doing this and that and there’s a big ceremony at the end…and after a couple of weeks of church (I hadn’t really gone since I was little) I remember thinking, “This is ridiculous, I don’t believe a word of it, and so why am I trying to become a permanent member of this church?”

I did voice my opinion to my father, who more or less told me that I could believe whatever I wanted, but that it would probably be worth it to just complete the confirmation and be done with it since some of my family is very religious and it would likely have ended up in a huge fight. I took his advice and never went to church again after that ceremony.

Question 4: What levels of respect were practiced around you when you were a child? Was there bowing involved, handshakes, “yes Sirs and yes Ma’ams,” or some  other equivalent respectfulness in your culture’s tongue? Is an honorific given to someone older than you and do you often respect and practice that? How might the culture you were brought up in have affected the growth of your own opinions?

There weren’t a lot of honorifics in my childhood. Mostly we were just expected to watch our mouths (no profanity) and our tones (no smart-mouthing). I don’t know if it was a product of my upbringing, or if it’s a general feeling that I absorbed from my environment, but I grew up believing that age has nothing to do with respect, and that it doesn’t matter if you’re 100 years old and I’m five, you do not automatically get my respect if you haven’t earned it. There are, in my opinion, too many older people out there who feel that they should be respected by the sheer fact that they’ve survived for a while longer.

Question 5: How traveled are you and to what degree do you keep up with international news? You might also provide an educational background if you wish and if that education was gained from somewhere other than your current location. How available is the news and what goes on in the outside world to you in your country?

I’m not particularly traveled. I’ve only traveled within Canada, and not even all the way across (I’ve started in Nova Scotia and gone as far as Alberta). I obtained my education (Bachelor of Technology) in Nova Scotia. International news is available enough here (if not a little bit “tweeked” by the media), but I can honestly say that the degree to which I keep up with it is minimal at best. I glean my news stories from what others deem to be important (my husband might tell me about something, or my father might post a status update about it on Facebook). It’s not that I don’t care what’s happening in other areas of the world, but I’m the kind of person who can barely handle the events going on in her own life, never mind the lives of people I’ve never met.

Question 6: If you could share an opinion on a single international incident or topic that you either feel strongly about or that might not be known to the rest of the world what would it be? You have our attention.

As mentioned above, I don’t really keep up on the news or international incidents, but if there was one topic that I’d impress upon the world if I could, it would be the stigmas surrounding depression. These days it’s been proven that depression can stem from any number of factors, including physical (hormonal, for instance) ones that in no way reflect a person’s life or situation. I’ve seen people be berated for “pretending to be depressed” because the feeling is that someone can’t be depressed if they have what is considered to be a “good life”. Too many people think that depression is only allowed if the person has “real” reasons (got fired, wife left, someone close died) to be depressed, but there are scads of reasons for someone being depressed. I myself had a doctor check me out for chemical-imbalance depression because of a couple of other complaints I had brought to him, and the reaction I got from a few people close to me was very simply, “you’re not depressed”, as if it was an impossibility. I wasn’t, but that doesn’t give anyone the right to presume to know what’s going on in my mind and body, and true depression – whatever the cause – is a very dangerous thing to ignore and scoff away.

Question 7: What does the right to an opinion mean to you? Is it essential to freedom to have this right? How far would you go to protect that ability? The world is on fire with people of passion, how passionate are you about things you value?

This is a tough one because while I believe everyone has a right to their opinion, there are plenty of cases in which someone’s opinion is clearly wrong or psychotic. For instance, a kid who shot up his school because he was being bullied had the opinion that his tormenters deserved to die.

I do believe that everyone has a right to their opinion, but how you act on that opinion is the real trick.

I’m passionate about a great many things (the depression issue above, acts that I consider to be extremely poor parenting, the current employment insurance scandal going on in Canada, and so on), and this kind of passion inevitably leads to a battling of opinions. It can be very difficult, in these situations, to grit your teeth and accept that other people have different opinions. How does one find a happy medium in this sense when your opinion is that another person’s opinion is wrong? It’s a bit of a catch-22, isn’t it?

Question 8: Is it ever right for you to be allowed an opinion while someone else is denied that same right on the same topic?

In my opinion (haha, this is getting silly…) there are plenty of situations where I would deny someone their opinion. People are going to have an opinion whether you like it or not, because that’s the way that works, but I would deny someone their opinion if they had absolutely no knowledge or experience of the topic at hand. For instance, say I’m yelling at my daughter in the mall for doing something bad, and someone comes up to me and berates me for yelling at her because I’m “causing her psychological issues”. If that person has no kids of their own, has experienced no psychological issues as a result of the same kind of situation, and has never so much as opened a book on psychology, then what right do they have to impress their completely-pulled-out-of-my-ass opinion on me?

Question 9: The last question. upon completing this template and hopefully contemplating the issue what does this project mean to you? How can Project O potentially enlighten or help the world?

Mostly I’m interested to see some of the outcomes of these questions. Opinions are a tricky concept because they can come from so many different places, including but not limited to plain old base emotion. I hope that reading other peoples’ responses to these questions will help people to understand each other a bit, and maybe even help them learn a bit of tolerance.

Difficulty Level: Hard

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

85. The most difficult scene or piece you’ve ever written.

This prompt could be looked at in a couple of different ways depending on your definition of “difficult”. The first thought that came into my head was difficult in the emotional sense, in that it was difficult to write because of some personal issue. Then I thought about difficulty in the sense of being hard to write because the words won’t come or you can’t figure out how to explain what you’re imagining.

So in my typical, indecisive manner, I decided to write about both. Lucky you, hmm?

First, emotional difficulty:
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve done some of my best writing while I was depressed, so you would expect that there would be lots of examples of this, but there actually aren’t. I’ve written a lot while depressed, but I’ve rarely written something that made me depressed.

There is one scene, however, that I found very difficult to write emotionally. It wasn’t difficult because of any personal issues; it was difficult because it involved the death of a character. Now call me crazy if you wish (I know some of you are thinking it, don’t lie!) but I know there are lots of writers out there who have my back on this one. I had a very, very difficult time writing the scene because it genuinely hurt. I had invested a lot in this character, had created a person who I cared about. And then, for the good of the story, I had to write about life leaving this character as their friends looked on in horror. I’m not proud…I got a little choked up. It was like choosing to kill a friend. That might seem a little ridiculous to some, but I look at it as a good sign. After all, how can I expect my readers to be touched by the scene if it doesn’t even affect me?

As for literal difficulty, the hardest scene I ever had to write was definitely the first battle scene I ever wrote. It was very difficult because I could visualize what I wanted to be happening, but I couldn’t determine the words I needed to convey that scene. I don’t have a great deal of knowledge about weaponry, swordplay, fighting stances, and so on, so my descriptions boiled down to oversimplified sentences such as, “the swords clashed against one another” and “he dodged and slashed out his own attack”. It drove me mad because as I was writing it I knew that anyone who read it would be imaging something tame and boring, while I had this epic battle raging through my head.

Since that first scene I’ve gotten much more practice writing fights and battles. I’ve made a point of attempting to retain the information I glean from others’ books, as well as from movies and other sources, and I’ve found that it has helped a great deal. To this day I still find battles very difficult, but they are much easier than they used to be, which hopefully means I’m learning. No pain, no gain!

The World Won’t Stop…Keep Writing

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

81. Writing through difficult / stressful situations

Two words: use it.

Of course it’s not always going to be as easy as all that…there are going to be difficult or stressful situations that are so difficult or stressful that you can hardly function as a human being, never mind forcing yourself to write. But when you are able to pick yourself back up enough to do some work again, I think the best thing you can do is to use that stress to produce something a little different from what you’re used to.

The thing is, emotion absolutely affects the way you write, so writing under different stresses can produce different results, and that might turn out to be a good thing. A death scene, for instance, might not come out so hot if you write it while in the best mood of your life, but it might be the best piece of literature you’ve ever written if you happen to write it after suffering a loss of your own. That might sound a little cold and callous, but why not put some use to these emotions if you’re going to be stuck with them anyway?

I’ll be honest: some of the best writing I’ve produced has been stuff I wrote while depressed. I’m not talking about angsty emo poems or anything like that…I’m not even necessarily talking about sad scenes. Some of the stuff I’m talking about was downright cheerful. It’s just that for some reason being down in the dumps makes me write better. I consider the words more closely, put myself in the character’s shoes more fully. I know I can’t be the only writer who reacts this way, and I actually think this phenomenon might be part of what makes writers tend toward being so eclectic. We need to be able to put ourselves in our characters’ shoes, so we use our own emotions to foster them, and inversely our emotions are affected by our characters.

I’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent here, but the point is that if you can grin and bear it and force yourself to write through a difficult situation you just might be surprised by what you accomplish.

Epic Fail

A reminder: This post courtesy of Julie Jarnagin’s 101 Blog Post Ideas for Writers.

37. What to do if you’ve failed at the goals you set

Have you ever heard the phrase, “You’ve just gotta get back on the horse”? If you have, you should understand what I’m about to talk about. If you haven’t, what rock have you been living under for the past hundred years?

Everyone fails at goals. Maybe not all the time, maybe some more often than others, but everyone at some point in time fails at a goal they’ve set for themselves. It’s the nature of the situation that even if we have all the best of intentions, things will go wrong, other issues will intrude, and any number of problems will arise to keep us from reaching the end of the line. Maybe it’s something we can’t control, like the fact that our new job requires us to work 70-hour weeks and we can’t work on our goal if we want to be able to eat and sleep as well. Maybe it’s something absolutely controllable, like being just plain lazy. It doesn’t really matter what the reason is. It doesn’t make you a better or worse failure. Failure is failure.

But failure is also just a chance to start over again. Failure shows us what we’ve done wrong, which issues we failed to take into consideration, and what we have to change to do better next time. If you’re a really optimistic type, failure might even be motivation to try harder. If you’re the pessimistic type, things might be a little more difficult, but the same points still apply.

And excellent example of failure and moving on from it is rejection in writing. An author can put their heart and soul – and a ridiculous number of work-hours – into a manuscript, only to have it rejected by the publisher…and then rejected by another…and another…and another. Regardless of how good a manuscript may be, it is almost certain that the author will receive multiple rejections before (hopefully) receiving a publication offer. This situation really defines the whole “get back on the horse” thing because if these authors were to just give up, where would we be? Were you aware that J.K. Rowling received 12 rejections for the first Harry Potter book before finally getting published? We all know now that the Harry Potter books are well-written, well-loved, and have ultimately sold bucketloads. So why did she receive so many rejection letters? There are any number of reasons, but the point is that she had a goal set (to publish that damn book!) and she didn’t let failure upon failure stop her from continuing to try and try, getting back on the horse again and again.

It’s definitely hard sometimes…humans are naturally depressive and easily-discouraged creatures…but if the goal you’ve set for yourself is something that’s important to you, something that you know you’re not going to be happy just giving up on, then you have to press on. If you’ve done something wrong, figure out what it is. If outside issues are holding you back, figure out a way around them. And if the problem is just timing, situation, or reliance on others to react the way you need them to, you just have to keep trying, trying, trying, until all the puzzle pieces fall into place. In the end you’ll be better off for having to have worked for it, and the end of the line will be that much more beautiful when you reach it.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself, and I hope you’re able to hold on to that hope as well. 🙂