Incremental steps for Everyone

16
Aug

Why do we tend to think we need to change overnight? We do we insist on expecting ourselves to wake up and be a totally renewed person simply because we decided to become one as we went to bed the night before?

I discover a few exercises, think they look quick and manageable, and the next day I check to see how my pants fit and I haven’t even done any of the exercises I discovered.

That’s unrealistic, to say the least. But we do things similar when we expect ourselves to just snap into new ways of behaving or new outlooks. We consider our attempts as failures rather than what they are…

Incremental steps.

I’m thinking about this today because we A. bought school supplies for the kids and B. dropped off my daughter at day camp (don’t worry – we picked her up at the end of the day).

These incremental steps toward independence — this allowing of our children to be away from us for long periods of time — are often good for them. They are also often a real act of faith, especially if there are any health needs for the kids. It’s hard enough if your child is of an uncomplicated health scenario; it’s a whole different experience when there are significant risks to factor in.

For example, my daughter has Type 1 Diabetes. That means (among other things) she’s insulin dependent, and for every meal, snack, or treat she has to count out carbohydrates and administer insulin accordingly. Since my husband and I want to take that responsibility for as long as we can (she’ll handle it the rest of her life so we’ll do it when she’s a child), that means WE count the carbs and administer the insulin accordingly.

That also means that any time she’s away from us, someone else has to take on that responsibility.

This week, that’s the good folks at Camp Daypoint, a day camp specifically for kids with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D).

Remember how we were talking now about incremental steps? Yeah, those are hard.

After an entire year of carrying her bag of T1D “equipment” (and trust me, there’s plenty of equipment) to and from everything with us, including everything from bike rides to sledding, basketball to swimming, I left her at day camp without her bag.

She didn’t need it.

They provide everything she needs for managing her T1D.

They would take care of her.

It’s a good step torward greater independence both for her and for us as her parents.

It’s a pretty significant, and yet incremental, first step.

Photo taken by TC Larson

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I got to thinking that this is a lot like sending your kids off to school.

You can think this is a great idea, it’s the best thing for them, it’s a good step toward greater independence and self-actualization (psychobabble and all that child development mumbo-jumbo), but When the times comes to put that kindergartener on the bus, it seems like the worst planned out plan you ever heard of. Who sends these tiny human on an enormous metal death trap THAT HAS NO SEAT BELTS on a highway with a speed limit that’s just clearly meant to mimic the environment of NASCAR, to a place where they do not allow Nanny Cams/Go-Pros that will equip us to supervise their interactions? What if they don’t wash their hands? What if they use someone else’s comb? What if they climb UP the slide when clearly playground protocol is to only go DOWN the slide?

It’s unreasonable.

And now they want us to send these tiny humans there all day long, even as kindergarten tiny humans, children who were, let’s be honest, just moments away from their initial entry into the world? Infants, I tell you, infants!

We get through it. Maybe with tears and more wine than is advisable, but we do it. Why?

Because it is the significant incremental step we must take.

That doesn’t make it easy, that doesn’t mean we’re good at it. We just have to do the thing.

Maybe we’ll get better at it over time, maybe not. We just have to keep trying.

Good luck, all you parents of the world. We’ll get through this, and I’ve heard tales of people actually enjoying it. Maybe we’ll be those people someday.

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The point is, we could all use more grace as we travel through life. Grace toward others, grace torward ourselves. The older I get, the more I realize how much grace and long-suffering was extended to me without my knowledge. That makes me want to do the same for all those other know-it-alls who, like I did, think they’ve got a bead on the “right” way to think/act/speak etc.

I hope that as I take my own incremental steps, I’ll learn to be grace-filled toward my attempts, no matter how small.

Parents of Kids with T1D

30
Nov

When you have Type 1 Diabetes, you don’t get to take a day off. You can’t ignore it (safely) and slacking on being prepared can have dangerous consequences.

Since I’m not the one in our family who has diabetes, I can’t tell you what it’s like for our daughter to live with it. But I can tell you more of what it’s like for us as her parents.

It’s persistent, ever-present, demanding, and confounding. You can do everything according to the specific ratios that were effective the days before, and get a totally different result. Talk about crazy-making!

Early on in our diagnosis, I was trying to be so careful, accounting for every tiny gram of carbohydrate while being unfamiliar with the process. I wanted our daughter to have access to any food she wanted, regardless of carbs. We’ve wanted to keep food neutral, not giving foods the power to be “good” or “bad” simply because they do or do not require insulin. Therefore, when she asked to have chocolate milk, I said yes and calculated the carbs into her shot.

Then I completely forgot to give her the chocolate milk.

Because I had accounted for chocolate milk, I had given her enough insulin to process the carbs in the chocolate milk. That meant that without the carbs to process, the insulin made her blood sugar drop.

I sent my daughter low.

I felt terrible.

I felt so responsible for endangering her, so inadequate to the task that was before me, so ill-equipped to manage something so potentially dangerous.

She was given some carbs, and her blood sugar rebounded quickly. It was not at all a crisis, but so early on, it felt like one. I had no idea how many times it would feel that way, reality or not.

That has dissipated some with gained knowledge and experience. It has not, however, become something that’s quite “second nature” to me yet. I don’t know if it ever will.

If you’re the stressed out parent or care giver of a young one with T1D, someone who could feel the tightness in your shoulders if only you could get a moment to think about how your shoulders felt, I get it.

You’re amazing.

Seriously. When you consider the task given to you, even with occasional slipups or miscalculations, you’re handling an amazing amount of information and subtleties that can be hard to articulate.

Humor me for a minute. Take this moment to inhale deeply through your nose, and slowly exhale out your mouth. I’m not kidding. Sit up straight, lower your shoulders, and take another long breath. Sometimes we have to take whatever moments we can get to breathe, slow down our busy brains, and hear this:

You’re doing it right.

You’re doing it well.

It’s going to be okay.

You can pick up T1D again in a few minutes, but right now, know that you’re not in this alone, even though it can feel like nobody understands what this is like. They probably don’t, but that doesn’t mean you’re on your own. There are lots of us out there, counting out free snacks, checking carb labels, refilling prescriptions, doing the things necessary to make this work. And we wouldn’t dream of calling those things a burden, because our children aren’t burdens, ever.

That doesn’t make it easy.

Hang in there. Drink some cool water. Sit in a sunny patch where the light comes through your window. Listen to the wind in the trees. Hang in there. You’re doing great. Go easy on yourself, and remember all the things you’re doing right.

We can all get through this together, until the day comes when there’s a cure and nobody has to do this anymore.

We can dream. And we can do it.

Thankfulness in the midst of Diabetes

23
Nov

When your child has Type 1 Diabetes, it’s easy to feel like she got short-changed. What did she do to receive this life-sentence? How will this affect the way she moves through the world? How will it impede her? What a raw deal.

Instagram: @tclmn

It’s good to step back and find things to be thankful for, even in the midst of coming to terms with the implications of this serious diagnosis. And since Thanksgiving is this week, it seems appropriate to express that gratitude here.

I’m grateful that my husband had the presence of mind to raise the idea of diabetes before things got to an emergency state with our daughter.
In a complex tension of thankfulness, I suppose I’m thankful that she’s young as she receives this diagnosis and won’t really know anything different as she matures. It will be part of her every day life.
I’m thankful for her personality which is responsible, conscientious as well as being fun-loving and playful. She’s able to advocate for herself already, and express her needs and/or situation matter -of-factly, even to those who may be unfamiliar with T1D.
Our daughter is healthy and doesn’t struggle with other underlying health issues that could complicate this further. I’m grateful for that.
My husband is an equal partner in caring for our daughter’s T1D. For that I am profoundly grateful.
I also trust that God loves our daughter and will walk alongside her. There may not be a miraculous healing, but she’s not in it alone, even when we’re not around. It may be cold comfort at times, but it may also be a source she can turn to when we inevitably screw things up for her (we are her human parents, after all). This doesn’t mean that God and I have made peace over this, but we’re still duking it out, and I’m still in the ring.

That’s what I can come up with today. Maybe next year I’ll be able to find more gratitude for other things related to diabetes. I know there are more and I hope that as we become more familiar with our diagnosis, I can become more aware, zooming in to those things I’m skimming over.

I wish you all (all three of you wonderful readers) a happy Thanksgiving. May you cultivate ever deeper gratitude and joy in the year to come.

A Constantly Moving Target: Type 1 Diabetes and Blood Glucose Management

16
Nov

It’s late at night as I’m writing this.

The reason I’m up is because of Type 1 Diabetes. One of our kids has it, and we have to check her blood sugar (or blood glucose — the terms are pretty interchangeable unless you’re working to educated someone that no, there’s not granulated sugar inside someone’s veins) at a certain time tonight.

The reason we have to check it is because she has insulin in her system right now and we have to make sure that her blood glucose is at a good over-night level and won’t dip low while she’s sleeping. Having low blood glucose can be dangerous, and we want to avoid that.

The reason she has insulin in her system is because as we were getting into jammies and reading bedtime books, her blood glucose (BG for short) was not in her target range — it was too high. That required an injection (we use syringes and are just now beginning to look into the insulin pump system of delivering insulin) of fast acting insulin. That insulin stays active a certain amount of time, and we have to make sure she’s at a certain BG so she’s safe from experiencing lows overnight.

In true Give-a-mouse-a-cookie form, we’ve got reasons all over the place up there but none of them can tell us why exactly her levels were high or, for that matter, why our daughter even has T1D.

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Instagram: tclmn

Many people learn to discern when they are having a low. Some people are irritable, some feel shaky, others get super hungry or tired. These are things our daughter is learning to recognize, but it’s pretty hard to tell when you’re asleep.

The thing is, there was every indicator to believe that tonight our daughter would have a lower BG at bedtime than on some other nights since she had a bath. [‘Once a month whether you need it or not’ my dad used to joke.] Baths tend to send her low. So when we checked her and discovered she was high, it put us in a tricky spot.

Based on prior experience and information we know baths send her BG low.
She still had active insulin in her system when she had the bath. In theory, this should have sent her lower rather than higher.
Now that’s she’s high, if we give her insulin, will it hit all at once and send her low?
If we don’t give her insulin, will her BG stay at this high level or even climb higher overnight?
Can we cheat and just give her a little bit and check on her when it wears off and give her more if she needs it?

Lots of factors in that one decision.

What I’m learning is that this is the nature of the beast when it comes to T1D. We can follow the guidelines and ratios exactly two days in a row and get different results on each of those days. People’s BGs are so variable for so many reasons, many of which are unseen, that it feels like being at that tea party in the Alice in Wonderland story, constantly swapping seats and people shouting out new rules and then changing them or not following along. This doesn’t mean we’re doing anything wrong, even though it’s easy to second guess every decision you make when you’re managing someone’s T1D. The stakes feel very high. Every decision feels like it carries implications for her overall health and welfare. I already felt that pressure as a parent before our diagnosis. It’s only amplified now.

Knowing that we can do what we can do when it comes to managing Type 1 Diabetes helps release me from its grip. Knowing that we can never completely factor in stress, growth spurts, hormone changes, outdoor temperatures, excitement, activity lets me realize that I’ve placed unrealistic expectations on myself. We can keep her safe, we can be as prepared as possible, but we’re not going to stay within that target BG range constantly. That’s just the way it is with BG, with T1D. It doesn’t mean we’ve done anything wrong, or overlooked something we should have caught.

It’s just the way it is.

Food and Type 1 Diabetes

8
Nov

People need food to survive. People thrive when they have healthy food and their bodies have the capacity to process that food. Food contains important stuff in it, like calories, minerals, vitamins (do I sound like a cereal commercial yet?), proteins and carbohydrates. Yes, carbohydrates are important, just like calories are. We’re so used to the verbiage of “counting calories” or “low-carb diets” that we have negative associations around those terms.

However, for a person to function, they need calories, and they need carbs. When they don’t get enough, their body slowly begins to shut down, even consume every last thing it had stored away.

People with Type 1 Diabetes don’t produce the magical substance needed to access the carbs in their food. The carbs turn to sugars in their blood and just sit there accumulating. Meanwhile, the person with T1D isn’t getting what they need to be healthy. Prolonged high blood sugars are really really bad for you, like put you in a coma bad. The body doesn’t have a way to get rid of the excess sugars except to try and flush them out (pardon the pun) through giving the person a powerful thirst and hoping to get rid of the sugars by urinating them out.

The only thing that can get rid of the excess sugar in the blood, and allow the person to use those carbs for energy?

Insulin.

Every carb, every time.

Instagram: tclmn

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It’s not that carb-rich foods are bad. At our house, we try to use the term “free” foods vs. a food that has carbs, rather than a “good” food or a “bad” food. There really aren’t any “bad” foods, it’s just that for someone with T1D, any food that has carbs requires them to receive insulin. There are definitely foods that are “extra” foods, ones that are not required for healthy living, but we were using that term even before our diagnosis.

Type 1 Diabetes doesn’t happen because a person ate too many carbs. Early in our diagnosis, our daughter was invited to a classmate’s birthday party. I had to explain that I’d have to come along because with her having T1D, she’d need a shot before she ate. The gentleman hosting the party joked, “Too many hamburgers, huh?”

No. Not too many hamburgers, sir.

It was so surprising, I didn’t have time to be offended…until later.

No, she didn’t develop T1D because she ate too many hamburgers, or ate too many anything-elses. She just developed it. The medical community doesn’t even know exactly why it happens.

Another comment was made recently about how our daughter “didn’t do anything bad, like eating too many cupcakes.” This type of comment was mentioned more than once by this person. While I understand they were trying to affirm that my daughter did not play an active role in promoting the onset of the diabetes, I feel uncomfortable with that verbage. Eating too many cupcakes isn’t “bad” and it doesn’t make you a bad person. I think we need to be careful how we stigmatize people who develop any kind of diabetes, whether that’s a result of less-than-optimum diet and lack of exercise, heredity, being pregnant, or because their pancreas quit doing its job.

While there are differences in the control some people might have in the onset of diabetes, there are also a lot of factors at play, and one of those factors is privilege. Some communities have better access to healthy food options, and some have fewer realistic options.

I have a car and easy access to at least three different grocery stores with a wide variety of foods available to me.
I also get to decide what I spend my money on when I’m at the grocery store.
Time is also not an issue for us, because if we need to run out for something at the grocery store, my husband or I can stay with the kids while the other one does that run.
My husband and I each work one job.

Not everyone has these privileges. People are working multiple jobs, spending a long time on a bus or train, having to stretch their dollars, having little time to cook homemade meals, or not even having good grocery options available. So let’s not stigmatize anyone. Diabetes is not an easy road. *end soapbox moment*

Food doesn’t cause diabetes. Food in and of itself is neutral. We anthromophoricize (<– spelling nightmare) food, giving it feelings or motives. Food’s just food. It’s not out to get us. Those with T1D can eat anything they want, they just have to know how many carbs are in it so they can give themselves the right dose of insulin to process the carbs contained in that food.

There are few other factors at work when deciding how much insulin is needed, but we’ll talk about those another time.

Next week we’ll hear more about what it looks like to be an elementary-age child with T1D. Hope to see you back here!

Do you know anyone with any form of diabetes? What impressions have you had of their diabetes? Have you silently had some ideas about how they manage their diabetes? How can you be a support to them?

Living life alongside Type 1 Diabetes

2
Nov

November is Diabetes Awareness month. I’ve never known this before. I didn’t know this a year ago. But 11 months ago, one of our kids was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) and I now know things I never dreamed of knowing, such as how to give shots, how to analyze blood glucose numbers and insulin ratios, how to check for ketones, what ketones even are, and an abundance of worst-case-scenario preparedness measures.

It kind of sucks.

^^^

That’s true and it’s not.

I’m tempted to dismiss the hardness of T1D by saying it isn’t a fatal diagnosis, it isn’t some rare, exotic disease that no one knows how to treat. You can live with it, and one of the first things the ER doc said to us when we were in the initial throes of diagnosis, was that with all the advancements they’re making, it’s entirely possible it will be cured within our child’s lifetime.

That’s absolutely wonderful, encouraging information.

That doesn’t change the reality of living alongside T1D now.

Because it isn’t my diagnosis, I’m protective of sharing too much, protective of putting out there something that isn’t mine to talk about. I would never want any of our children to feel like we’d “talked out of turn” with information that was theirs. Therefore, I’m going to leave her name out of this. It’s important to me that you know I’ve talked to her about it, that I’ve asked and received her permission to talk about it, and my husband is also comfortable with me writing about it.

This month I’d like to try and share a little about what it’s like to have T1D, but I don’t have it. My child has it. So I’ll do the best I can to share what its like to support someone who has it, especially since you never grow out of T1D, the children who are diagnosed eventually become adults. And you will probably know someone with T1 at some point in your life.

This comes with us everywhere.

First off, Type 1 Diabetes means insulin dependent diabetes. It is different than Type 2 Diabetes/adult onset diabetes. An adult can have Type 1 but usually they were first diagnosed before they hit adulthood. I’m not even going to address Type 2, because I know so little about it — it’s very different from Type 1.

Type 1 is not managed by exercise or diet.

Type 1 is not caused by poor diet or lack of exercise.

Type 1 is considered an autoimmune disorder.

When you have T1D, the pancreas quits making insulin. Everybody needs insulin. It is the key to working with the glucose (also called sugar) in our blood. A person with Type 1 has a pancreas that is not producing enough insulin and will eventually stop producing it at all. Without insulin, our bodies can’t unlock many of the nutrients needed from our food. People with Type 1 require insulin to be administered before taking in carbohydrates (which turn into glucose in the blood). This means every carb needs to be counted and the insulin must match the carbs, but every body is different and we aren’t static, so the amount of insulin it takes frequently changes. It can feel like a constantly changing target.

Next Monday I’ll write more about our story, what this looks like in real life. Our daughter is healthy and well, and coping marvelously with her diagnoses, which is more than I could say for myself for quite a while. More on that next week. See you then.

Do you know anyone with Type 1 Diabetes? How did you find out they had it? Are there any misconceptions you may have had before getting to know more about T1D?

Medicine is a Practice

20
Apr

The following is a letter sent to me by a friend I’ve known for more than twenty years. After I read it, I asked her permission to post it here for Medical Monday. It’s a honest perspective from someone in the medical field who has walked alongside people in some of their most vulnerable moments. The only edits I made were in paragraph breaks so it would be easier to read on a screen.

Thank you, Kris, for your friendship and for allowing us to hear how your experience with your dad shaped the course of your life.

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TC,

I was so sorry to hear that your child has been diagnosed with diabetes. Not because I don’t think that you can handle it, just that it is a long road and must seem quite overwhelming after just losing your dad.

I work in Medicine, the practice of medicine and although we wish we had all the cures there are some things that we can only help, not cure. As I am sure you recall, my dad had a seizure when I was in 8th grade. It changed our family forever. Dad was no longer a larger than life person, he was mortal, frail and they said he could die at any time. Living with death knocking at our door became a horrible reality as we watched him, waiting for the next big something that would take his heart out completely after the first episode had weakened his heart so severely.

He lived, and I do not pretend that I have been through the grief that you have had to bear, however knowing someone close to you can go at any time….. well it shook my whole world.

I had no safety net.

I had no place to curl in the security of this world.

I had to lean into the eternal. I had to look at what does last, knowing every breath could be our last. It was a horrible and wonderful place all at the same time. Those moments, days, months, years of waiting to see if my dad would live created a hunger for the eternal. They created a place in me that hoped to help others as they live with things nobody can cure. They created a space inside that hungers only for what really matters and what will truly last forever.

I work with bodies, broken bodies. Ailing health and diagnosis that don’t become a distant memory, however in the midst of all that tragedy the light of the eternal shines bright. The hope that we are not home yet, and as my daughter said yesterday, there won’t be anybody crying in heaven. No more pain, no more sorrow. The Lord that we cannot fully understand sent his Son to die so that we could have an eternity with no more pain. I live my life in medicine in hopes that I can always give a glimpse of what really matters to the patients I see. I take care of ailing bodies hoping they know the One that will make them whole and complete. I try to be joyful, but I cry a lot with those who mourn and those who have broken spirits. The fact that God loved us enough to save us by sending His son to die, that hits home so much more when you have lost someone close to you.

So in honor of medical Mondays, I say medicine is a practice, and we are all on the same team. Trying to help as much as we can and yet remembering that on our knees is where the real help comes. Medicine is wonderful, however God is always in control. So thankful that He is a God that loves us, even if we don’t always understand.

Love you friend, keep clinging to Jesus. -Kris

Medical Mondays: An Occasional Series

30
Mar

We are in Spring Break this week, and as further evidence of my tendency to forget to look at the calendar more than a week or so in advance (that’s if I’m lucky; many times i only look out a day or two), I neglected to schedule anything for Medical Monday.

Call it a symptom of my mental state.

While I think there’s a place for discussion here of all things health and wellness, it may be better for Medical Mondays to become a less regular occurrence — call it an occasional series. With our family’s sudden exposure to more aspects of the world of healthcare and chronic health issues, as well as emotional wellbeing, it makes sense to state for the record that these things are an important part of our lives and deserving of attention. Maybe that’s the intention of this series — trying to give these things more attention in my own life and have that intention reflected here.

If you have a desire to share your story, please connect with me. There’s space here for you.

Thank you for reading and being a part of this community. If you’ll excuse me now, I get to go have some vacation.

No shortcuts, no Passes

23
Mar

It took me forty-five minutes to drive there, but I barely noticed. I didn’t have a good grasp of time; my attention was elsewhere. I think even if time marched by playing a tuba it would barely have registered (I probably wasn’t the safest driver on the road). So forty-five minute drive up felt like a blip, and the forty-five minute drive home was a good recovery time so I didn’t look like I’d been crying. Although, I probably always looked like I’d been crying…because usually I had been, or if not fully crying all the time, then on the brink of it.

Something told me to get help. Something inside me said I’d better call for reinforcements ’cause I was working above my pay grade.

Thus I found a counselor who was probably going to be a good match with my personality (I have counselor friends so that helps in weeding through the seemingly boundless choices) who happened to be forty-five minutes away. Worth it, if the counseling helped to assuage the gushing pain from losing my dad. I’d have been willing to drive for hours to make that happen.

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When my husband and I were first dating and also in the early years of our married life, if we had a disagreement I would want to address it right away. I’d want to talk it out and work through it. I felt very unsettled until we had come to some conclusion or found a middle ground of compromise — an action plan, if you will.

Need more communication? Set aside a specific time to connect each day so things are kept current.

Not sure about the finances? Decide in advance how much you’ve got to spend that week and stick to it.

How are we going to coordinate schedules to make summer plans work smoothly? Pull out the calendars and mark ’em up with who’s going where and when.

This drove my husband a little batty (I’m putting words in his mouth, but I think he’d agree). It must have felt like constantly making New Year’s resolutions every single day.

He wasn’t always ready to crush a problem the way I was. He might first need to be made aware of the issue. Then if it was deemed to really be a problem, he’d need time to analyze it and consider the different aspects of it. And one possibility was that there was no resolution to be made.

Hubba-whuh??

No resolution? No action plan? No CLOSURE???

You’ve got to be kidding me.

This approach caused problems for me in many ways. It required patience — not my strong suit. It required thorough analysis — again, not always my area of expertise. And it required an ability to acknowledge that some things could not be given a clean answer — for sure not my forte at the time.

In this period (which may have lasted longer than I care to admit) I found it challenging to discover my own propensity for being defensive and reactionary. I also have a great imagination, which can be less-than-helpful in conflict situations. The longer something dragged out, the more imaginary issues I infused it with and the more complex I made the problem. But in trying to force the discussion before he’d had time to mull it over, I was bullying my own agenda through. It would actually lead to more conflict, since then we’d have to unravel the additional subject of our different ways of processing problems.

What a headache.

I used to hear people wait to bring things up with their spouses, and I thought it was such a funny way of coming at something. If you wanted to talk about something, you talked about it, the moment it popped into your head, which was usually one nanosecond before you brought it up. What was this waiting business? Why would you need to wait to talk about something if it was important to you, and if you were talking to someone who loved you? It made no sense to me.

It does now.

Waiting to talk to my husband about something is a consideration to his process. It’s appreciative of the way he ticks. It’s not a matter of manipulation, nor is it a form of being subservient. It’s a matter of courtesy. It’s also ends up being better for me, since if I address every little blip that pops into my head, I’ll be addressing things that end up being much smaller in significance, and I’ll waste a lot of mental and emotional energy inconsequential stuff.

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When I started going to the counselor, I thought she’d have some solutions for me. I expected her to recommend a few books, maybe a YouTube video I should watch, even some natural supplements I should try. I figured we’d confront the issue of kids, deal with it and be done.

She gave me nothing.

There was nothing she could give me that would deliver what I wanted from her.

I wanted to find a loophole.

I wanted a shortcut.

I wanted to bypass feeling so horrible all the time, feeling like I couldn’t gather a thought, like I was walking around with my head in a sound-proof helmet with a tinted visor.

There was no way she’d be able to offer me anything to help with any of that.

What I needed was to settle down into the grief and quit trying to leapfrog over it. I wouldn’t be able to speed it up, and more time would have to go by before I could have any hope of feeling those things less frequently.

Did I mention that I started seeing the counselor in September? My dad passed away at the end of June.

I guess you could say I was trying to get a jump on that grieving thing, really trying grab hold of it and get it all out, rip off that Band-Aid.

It’s a wonder the counselor didn’t toss me out of her office.

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There’s no short cut in grief. You can’t expect to face the thing head-on and somehow beat it into submission. You can be present in it, mindful of your needs and respectful of your own process. There’s no closure that I can see, no end point. My dad keeps on being gone and missing out on stuff he ought to be here for. That’s not going to change. He will forever miss out from this point forward, and we will forever miss out. There’s no amount of processing or action-planning that can alleviate that.

Yes, maybe counseling will end up helping. Maybe if I can be clear about what I hope to gain from it (besides catapulting me over the sorrow) I’ll benefit from it. I’d better if it takes me forty-five minutes just to get there.

What’s your view of the benefits of counseling? Have you had times when you felt it would be helpful? How do you “get the most” out of counseling — or is that the wrong mindset?

Remember, this Medical Mondays series is open to anyone who might want to share. Just contact me if you’re interested in guest posting, and we’ll talk details. Tell your friends!

Creative pursuits are healthy Pursuits

16
Mar

Today you’ll see a short list of different articles and websites that document the benefits of pursuing creative outlets. This is by no means exhaustive, but meant to whet our appetites for incorporating small acts of creativity into our lives, or helping us see where we’ve already have worked these into our regular routine, maybe even unknowingly.

We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the eccentric creative person, plagued by substance abuse and unmet deadlines, stumbling around the city while mumbling to herself about changing the wording on page 78 or some encoded rant about a Muse. These ideas don’t reflect the best parts a life spent in pursuit of creative expression. These are the shadow side, the side when a person (who may’ve been somewhat fragile to begin with) allows their drive to become obsession and their discipline to become enslavement. That’s not what we’re talking about.

While creativity is a mysterious thing, that doesn’t have to mean it’s somehow malevolent. Tapping into our creativity doesn’t mean we unleash some pent up darkness (although, let’s be honest, a little aggression thrown down on a canvas does release some inner negativity in a constructive way). It means we bring out to play a child-like part of ourselves we’ve ignored — we’re big grown-ups now, after all — , a part that is willing to try new things without the expectation of instant mastery, a teachable part that is curious and adventurous. It is this part we engage when we allow ourselves to express our creativity, in whatever form that may take.

We’re talking about the freedom that comes with play, the ingenuity that develops when you allow your mind to wander and make connections between seemingly unrelated things, and the exploration of purpose and wellbeing that comes as you discover the intrinsic fullness of exercising your brain and your heart through creative outlets. Sound good?

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Here’s the brief roundup of just a few websites with information about the healthiness of creative endeavors.

An article researched by people at the website Art and Healing.org lists the health benefits from different creative activities, as well as different movements (yoga, tai chi, etc.). Another article, this one from News in Health, cites the benefits of listening to music, doodling, writing, and other creative activities. It stresses that you don’t have to be a professional artist in order to reap the positives of artistic activities.

This article by Be Brain Fit includes a video that discusses the benefits of art therapy.

This article offers an interview with an art therapist, and in my own experience with art journaling, I echo her statement that “the point” isn’t about the end product but about the process. And I love this piece from Psychology Today about the merits of meaningful activities done with our hands, not just mindless key-tapping or scrolling, but the act of transforming something, be it veggies for supper, yarn and textiles, or paper and paint.

Are you a little more visual? Need to see something in action? Here’s a short experiment in art therapy which measured its influence on happiness: In this video they even say you don’t have to be an artist in order to see the positives that can come out of artistic expression (and it’s from Soul Pancake, which is just a super fun, sweet phenomenon).

And finally, here you can watch a program about people who’ve been diagnosed with cancer and how exploring the arts adds to their wellness and sense of fullness.

Creativity is a wide open field, with room to spread out and inclusive of many different forms. Don’t be too quick to discount yourself from the party.

I’d love to hear your responses, and whether you feel you take time to invest in this important part of yourself. Please chime in in the comments, and be sure to share what form your creativity takes.