Category: Child abuse

Posted in Child abuse, Depression, Emotions

Energy of Activation

Posted on by debthumanblog

That’s from a college biology class. Enzymes lower the energy necessary for activation of cell processes. There is nothing to lower the energy of activation necessary for an entire body to act, to create, to do something besides sit.

Do I bat away the unwanted memories and feelings? All from childhood and all caused by parents who hated me. Is there ever a time when the memories stay quiet?

I have no happy memories of childhood. Just times with my mother snarled at me, times when I was expected to know what adults know without the benefit of anyone telling me what it was I was supposed to know.

The memories have been coming in waves the last couple days. All unbidden. All unwanted as I was unwanted.

The memory of begging my mother to come to my college graduation. She didn’t allow me to take science or math classes in high school. I graduated from college with a degree in biology and another degree in journalism. She refused to come to my graduation.

I want to make the memories go away and never come back. While the abuse was happening, I stuffed the trauma into brain rooms I kept closed. Once I no longer lived with my hateful parents, the memories insisted on being heard and seen. Removing my toxic, drunken, violent, narcissistic mother from my life at age 37 didn’t make the memories stay quiet.

The horror of complex PTSD is the memories that refuse to stay quiet.

Let it go they said. How do I do that, I asked. There was no answer. Forgive they said. I don’t know how I said. There was no answer, no advice, no roadmap to inner peace.

I wrote out my anger and frustration. I painted out my childhood misery. I quilted out what I felt. The pain never leaves.

I can’t remember how many times I’ve been suicidal. Five or six is my best estimate. Times when I stood on the edge of death and turned around to walk away.

Will I always be able to walk away?

Or will my life end with a bullet?

I’m never going to have real parents who love me. Would it have spoiled some vast, eternal plan if I were to have had real parents? When I die, will God explain to me why I was singled out for such horrendous treatment?

I never deserved the abuse, but I got abused anyway. What purpose did that serve?

Make friends. How? What do I do with a friend? I grew up hiding in my room so I wouldn’t have to hear the hate and flinch from the blows. Blows that eventually caused the retina in my right eye to detach in places. Places where my retina was glued back down via laser.

Memory: I got dragged into church every Sunday. My mother once told me I didn’t have to sit with the family. But where else could I sit? Every seat was filled with loneliness and ever present sadness.

I tried other churches, but I never fit in.

When I started taking adult education classes at a temple, I suddenly fit in. I met other women who had demanding, professional careers. They could talk about something other than toilet training.

I learned to survive. I didn’t learn to live.

I’m always going to struggle to figure out what to do in social situations. At least I taught myself which fork to use. Hint: Start from the outside of the knives and forks and work your way into the mass of cutlery implement by implement until you reach your plate.

Every year, I got the flu the second day of Christmas vacation. Being sick meant I could mentally be somewhere else in my brain on Christmas. I remember being dragged to Christmas dinner clad in pajamas because I had the flu. Being sick never got me out of mandatory misery.

Each year, I get older. Each year, I read more about how social interactions (what the hell are those?) are necessary to stave off depression and dementia. I am terrified that I will be alone, unable to drive, and be miserable. More miserable than I am now.

I used to have people I chatted with after services. But then there was a pandemic. And then there was a rabbi I wasn’t fond of. I will force myself to go to a “women’s night out” at Chabad. I’m not sure why I’m reluctant to go.

I love taking classes at the local university. I don’t interact with my classmates. I am older than their grandmothers. What would we talk about?

One day, classmates talked about video games they played as they grew up. I couldn’t stand it. I told them that I grew up watching dead bodies being dragged out of Vietnam on the evening news. I didn’t tell them the first question when meeting a man was to ask what his draft number was. That number told me how involved I should get. No sense loving someone who would be shipped off to die.

I want to go to Hanukkah on the plaza. A giant menorah, city Christmas tree, lighted Christmas decorations. I want to stay home. I want to go and take photographs. I want to photograph the lights at night. I still want to stay home.

If I stay home, I won’t be disappointed. If I go, I will still be lonely and alone.

Something inside of me never learned how to navigate life.

Posted in Child abuse, Emotions, Grief, PTSD

Being Thankful

Posted on by debthumanblog

Thanksgiving is this Thursday. I’ll celebrate, but it won’t be anything envisioned by Normal Rockwell. 

I’ll celebrate having the courage to remove toxic family members from my life.

I’ll celebrate by remembering that I graduated college with degrees in journalism and biology although I wasn’t allowed to take any math or science classes in high school.

I’ll celebrate by remembering I put myself through law school, graduated, passed the bar exam, ran my own practice, took another bar exam, and drove 2000 miles across the US to work in the New Mexico Public Defender Department.

I’ll celebrate by remembering I’m working on healing from 16 years of child abuse followed by 18 years of adult abuse.

I’ll celebrate finally being able to feel the horror of what I endured growing up.

I’ll celebrate by remembering that every time I wanted to kill myself, I lived.

I’ll celebrate by remembering I’ve only been married once – 53 years and still married.

I’ll celebrate rate by realizing how big an accomplishment my life has been. A lesser person would have died long ago.

Posted in Child abuse, Fiber, Sewing

Healing

Posted on by debthumanblog

I have been using ketamine through Mindbloom for a couple years now and I’ve made great progress healing from an abusive childhood. One of the things Mindbloom offers is something called Integration Circles. These are zoom meetings led by a facilitator and offer peer support. What happens in the circles is confidential, so I am limited in what I can share.

After listening to one member speak, bells, whistles, lights and sirens went off in my brain. I thought about the idea of a container for feelings that I had suppressed and which were surfacing. I’m working on an idea to make a fabric box to contain these feelings. I’m not sure I can get into my sewing room – it’s not a walker-friendly room and I’m still using a walker to get around while my broken foot continues to heal.

I’m at the thinking about and sketching about stage of the design process.

This is how far I’ve gotten. I’m thinking about a box with a lid. The lid has a flap so I have a way of keeping the feelings contained. I’m thinking that if I cut the stiff interfacing into individual pieces, the fabric with interfacing will be easier to fold into a box. The sketch shows a cube, but I wonder if I want to play with a rectangle instead. I’d like to be able to use my embroidery machine for the design on each side and the lid of the box. To keep the box closed, I’m thinking I’d like to use a ribbon on the flap. The ribbon would wind around a button keeping the box closed.

Once I get the design worked out, I will need to determine if I can get into my sewing room. Then, it will be a matter of auditioning fabric and sewing the box.

My online store, Deb Thuman Art, is here: http://www.DebThumanArt.com

My Spoonflower shop is here: https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/deb_thuman

I’m linking with Nina Marie here: https://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com

Posted in Abstract Art, Child abuse, Judiasm

Trying to figure out what’s next

Posted on by debthumanblog

Some people wear their heart on their sleeve. I wear my heart on my art. I know what I want to say, but I haven’t figured out how I want to say it although I have some ideas.

I have my grandmother’s candlesticks. We always had candles on the table for holiday dinners. My family came from Dittersdorf, East Prussia cleverly disguised as German Lutherans. It took a lot of research, 120 years, and pure dumb luck discovering my grandmother’s bad German was Yiddish to see past the disguise. It wasn’t safe to be openly Jewish when my great-great-grandparents arrived in America although Jewish traditions were kept. Sort of. Cleaning had to be done on Friday and only on Friday. When I was little, we didn’t go anywhere on Saturday. And lit candles had to be on the table for holiday dinners. Jim’s family was different. On the rare occasions there were candles, they weren’t lit. We lost sight of who we are and what we believe since 1888 when my great-great-grandparents arrived in America. But we’ve kept our traditions. Now, I keep our faith and I don’t hide the fact I’m Jewish even though being openly Jewish right now is dangerous. This piece could work as either a quilt or a painting.

This is about child abuse and how I would hide from my mother and The Drunk. I would like it to be on three levels. Blue on the bottom, gray in the middle and green on the top. After the inauguration in 2017, I was so angry, I made a quilt featuring a life-size, nearly anatomically correct, 3-d depiction of a vulva – complete with a Swarovski crystal for the clitoris. It was quite the challenge to figure out how to sew it onto the quilt and then to actually sew it onto the quilt. I don’t think I want to try a 3-d quilt again. I’m not sure this would work as a flat quilt.

It could be a painting. I’d need Jim to make the “canvas” out of wood and float the gray and green levels. My painting teacher would like to see more work where Jim helps me fashion the “canvas.”

Eventually, I’ll get it all figured out.

I’m linking with Nina Marie here: https://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com/2025/01/american-art-and-portraiture-on-off.html

My store, Deb Thuman Art, is here: http://www.DebThumanArt.com

My Spoonflower shop is here: https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/deb_thuman

Posted in bipolar disorder, Child abuse, Depression, Emotions, Fiber, Mental Illness, Photography, Psych meds, PTSD

I’m Not Myself Right Now

Posted on by debthumanblog

I’ve finally reached the point where I can start to integrate the crap that happened to me growing up, feel the feelings it wasn’t safe to feel then, and start to heal both mentally and physically. If you’re wondering what I’m writing about, it’s child abuse. My mother was a violent, drunken narcissist who had four children she didn’t want and made real sure we knew she didn’t want us. Her husband was a violent drunk. By the time I was 10, I had myself and three siblings to raise. I mirrored what I was my mother doing and did a lousy job of raising myself and siblings. I grew up hiding in my room so I wouldn’t have to hear them yell, literally, at me and hit me. I had no idea there was anything unusual about my family. At the age of 9, I had such severe depression that even the kids in my class noticed. One boy asked me what was wrong. His words had to go through many layers of water before I could hear them. Then, I had to formulate an answer, and the words had to go through many layers of water before I could say them. I eventually told him nothing was wrong. I wasn’t lying or covering anything up. I truly had no idea that there was any other kind of family.

I’ve been reading The Body Keeps The Score. It’s not an easy book to read and I can only read it in small doses. I’ve been doing micro-dosing with ketamine for little longer than a year and I finally found a therapist who takes my insurance and accepts new patients. The combination is allowing me to feel what I felt at the time the crap was happening. I’m even getting the stress pains I had at the time. It sucks. But it’s the only way to integrate what happened into whole memories and process them into something I can live with. At the moment, they are fractured memories that cause a plethora of physical problems.

Meanwhile, I’m working my way through the current trauma of a hate crime, antisemitism, and confronting terrorist wannabes – students being manipulated by real terrorists and being conned into thinking antisemitism is a good thing. I’m angry. I’m pissed. I want to scream. I’m considering a civil rights suit against the university.

And so I’m not myself. I’m having reactions out of proportion to events. I’m sounding like a crazed woman. I’m not having fun. It sucks.

Art. It ain’t called art therapy for nothing. I can lose myself in art. I can figure myself out in art. So often, I don’t understand what’s going on inside of me until it comes out of my hands. I’m working on a sequel to the novel I finished. Like the first novel, the main characters are a woman who is my age, Jewish, and a criminal defense attorney. Her lover is a police officer. In the first novel, I wrote about an officer involved shooting, mental illness and people who are homeless. (Unhoused is such a sanitary, offensive PC word and I won’t use it.) This time, I’ll be writing about antisemitism and hate crimes. What’s inside of me needs a voice. I’m considering taking a writing class in the fall. That could be dangerous for me. I’m hoping I can bring Brady, my service dog in training and the world’s cutest labradoodle, to class with me.

I’ve been playing around with my embroidery machine. And I’ve been surfing eBay for embroidery thread bargains. I found a doozy and it will arrive on Monday. I’ve played a bit with making my own designs.

The ferns are my design, the border is a stock design from the embroidery machine.

I bought a set of Hebrew fonts and started playing with them. The Hebrew is shalom. Shalom is one of those multi-purpose words. It’s use for hello, goodby and peace. Peace meaning the absence of war, but also a deep personal inner peace. The Star of David is done with variegated thread and I like how it came out.

We had a particularly bright moon last night. It’s a smidge past full, but well worth photographing. I used a 400mm lens. Sure would be nice to have something like a 12,000 mm lens, but that’s far outside of my photography budget.

I’m linking with Nina Marie here: https://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com

My Spoonflower shop is here: https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/deb_thuman

My store, Deb Thuman Art, is here: http://www.DebThumanArt.com

Posted in Child abuse, Emotions, Grief

Tina

Posted on by debthumanblog

I have three horrible days a year:

April 1. The day my sister, Tina, was born.

June 24. The day she died.

Sivan 19. Tina’s yahrzeit when kaddish is said for her in the temple.

My sister was an incredible person. She could see the best in misery and she was fearless. She was 10 years younger than me and the last of four children.

When she was 13 months old, my mother watched her play under the kitchen sink and pour oven cleaner over herself. My mother cleaned her off and put the oven cleaner soaked sneaker back on her foot. Then, my mother spent the next several hours screaming at Tina to stop crying. Eventually, Tina’s diaper needed changing. That’s when my mother saw the burns. Tina had second and third degree burns from the waist down. The foot wearing the oven cleaner soaked sneaker was burned nearly to the bone. Eventually, the burns healed leaving only a huge scar on top of her foot. Tina thought the scar was interesting. I thought it was an outward scar from child abuse rather than an inward, hidden scar.

When she was in high school, she went skiing with some of her friends. Tina tore wild down the mountain. It’s an Olympic sport now, but then it was called hot dogging. One of her friends asked her where she learned to hot dog. She told her friend that she didn’t know how to ski.

Years later, after I discovered I was adopted and was searching for my father, Tina told me no one wants to see me hurting. She then offered to put me in touch with someone who could, albeit not legally, help me find my father. I declined.

Years later, after her daughter was born, Tina told me she had wanted to be a surgeon. Our parents, being jealous of anyone who had an education and certain it was a waste of money to send a girl to college, decreed we couldn’t go to college. Instead, Tina went to B.O.C.E.S, part of the education system that taught students a trade, and learned to be a hairdresser. But she had wanted to be a surgeon. I told her to go to college and med school. I started college when I was 25, and started law school on my 38th birthday. I had been admitted to the New York State bar four months before my niece was born. Tina told me it was too late for her and what she wanted to do was take cooking classes. She made me sauteed eggplant with onions and garlic for dinner. It was delicious. I still can’t eat eggplant without crying.

Tina was a fantastic hairdresser. She had moved to New York City, found a job at an upscale salon, and concentrated on hair coloring. She hated it when I referred to hair coloring as a dye job. Tina was Brad Pitt’s hairdresser which means Brad isn’t a natural blond.

Although Tina died 26 years ago, I’ve never recovered from her death. My mother, a truly horrible person, told my other siblings that if they told me Tina had cancer or that she died they would be disinherited. My mother died after spending a few years in a nursing home so there was nothing left to inherit. My siblings had sold their humanity for nothing.

As each horrible day approaches, I wait in anxiety and fear. Will this year be especially painful? Will this year be only sad?

This past Friday, we read kaddish for Tina in my temple. I cried through the entire prayer.  I dread the coming anniversary of her death on the 24th.

Posted in Child abuse, Depression, Emotions, Memories, PTSD, Unwanted Children

This Weekend Will Again Be Painful

Posted on by debthumanblog

I’ll be staying home on Sunday. I detest mother’s day. My mother was a violent, drunken narcissist and it would be bordering on impossible to find a time she when was nice to me. I vividly remember when acne started for me. Not because of worrying about dates or classmates. I didn’t have dates because I was what she called her “built in babysitter.” I had to watch her kids while she went out and got drunk. After getting dressed one school day morning, I walked into the kitchen, and my mother gleefully announced, “Debby has a pimple on her nose. She looks just like a witch.”

Nothing I did was right. Nothing I did made her proud. Although I wasn’t allowed to take math and science courses in high school, I put myself through college starting at age 25. I wasn’t allowed to go to college after high school although I badly wanted a college education. I earned two degrees. One in journalism and the other in biology. It was not easy to take science courses having never had any science classes in high school. I did it anyway. My mother refused to come to my graduation because she had to “open up the cottage.” My mother and her husband, hereinafter The Drunk, owned a cottage at a lake in the Southern Tier of New York. My siblings, their friends, and the hired help could spend weekends at the cottage. I wasn’t allowed to go there. One year, The Drunk told Jim to fix the dock at the cottage so there would be a nice place for them to play. Jim declined.

One summer, my mother and siblings went to the cottage during the week, and I had to stay home and babysit The Drunk. I’d spend the day going through cookbooks looking for interesting recipes to make for dinner. The Drunk would always come home late, tell me he had already eaten, and stagger up the stairs to go to bed. I asked to go with my mother and siblings, and she told me I couldn’t.

When I would spend the night at a friend’s house, my mother would tell me after I got home, “It was so peaceful while you were gone.”

Imagine a hurt so deep that even 51 years later I can vividly remember what she said to me.

One year, I got her an especially appropriate mother’s day gift: a Venus flytrap. She let it die. Another year, I drove to her house to give her a mother’s day gift – can’t remember what it was – and sat in her driveway crying. That’s how much I didn’t want to see her. I forced myself to get out of the car, walk up to the front door and ring the doorbell.  It never occurred to me to just walk in. It wasn’t my house.

At my maternal grandmother’s funeral, she bragged to the extended family about drinking so much she puked. She then proceeded to talk about her kids growing up. I remained silent simultaneously wishing she said anything about me and dreading her saying anything about me because I knew whatever she said would be hurtful. My sister-in-law said a friend had made a casserole for the family. I silently wondered if it would be okay for me to stay and eat some of the casserole. I wasn’t part of the family. No one threw me out, so I stayed and ate.

One day, my sister-in-law was at my mother’s house. She gave my SIL wine. She didn’t offer me even lukewarm water in a cracked cup. When I mentioned that to her, she made it my fault that I had nothing to drink. After all, she insisted, it was my house. It was never my house.

While I was working between high school and marriage, I asked – I knew better than to just take – to have an egg so I could have an egg salad sandwich for lunch the next day. She refused to let me have an egg.

I don’t have children  – a decision I’ve never regretted – because I could never do to another person what was done to me and I knew no other way. One therapy session I asked my psychologist why anyone would want to have children. He thought I was making a joke. I still can’t imagine why anyone would want children.  It isn’t easy not to have children. I got pressured by both friends and family who, for some reason, thought biology was destiny. Turning 40 was a relief. People stopped pressuring me because, science notwithstanding, people think pregnancy after age 40 is too dangerous. What an incredible relief to be allowed to be myself.

At age 66, I discovered being without children was one of the healthiest things I’ve done. A biopsy revealed I have a septate uterus. If I had managed to get pregnant, I would have had a 90% chance of a miscarriage. Deciding not to have children didn’t just save my sanity; it may well have saved my life.  

Time, and a whole lot of therapy, removed from me a longing to have a mother. I still hate mother’s day.

Posted in bipolar disorder, Child abuse, Depression, Mental Illness

Ketamine

Posted on by debthumanblog

I’ve finished five ketamine treatments and have one to go. My original goal was to be able to decrease the dose of my psych meds. I was trying to find a dosage that was high enough to be effective and low enough that I didn’t turn into a zombie.

Ketamine is supposed to cause the brain to form new neural connections. And it does. After I had a ketamine infusion in 2021, my brain felt full and illuminated by a golden white light. Suddenly, the debilitating depression was gone. I was hoping at home ketamine would be as helpful.

I’m using ketamine from Mindbloom https://www.mindbloom.com/?utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=PM_Search_Branded_Exact_12.2021&utm_device=c&utm_content=634257646790&gclid=Cj0KCQjw2v-gBhC1ARIsAOQdKY3DwvUHrMYjpVEMOfzeIRw_Vp33LvOZiZEw9mBxC2bj0EcZkQ7l1nIaAvhDEALw_wcB, an on-line treatment for depression. Instead of the Magical Mystery Tour with hallucinations, I was merely relaxed during the ketamine session. My brain would daydream. And progress was made without hallucinations.

I’ve been able to decrease the dosage of lamictal and wellbutrin. I have less brain fog. I still lose words and thoughts, but not as often as before ketamine.

There have been some interesting effects I hadn’t expected. Sixteen years of child abuse followed by 18 years of being treated like crap left me with complex PTSD. While I don’t remember the last time I had a repeating nightmare, I still had flashbacks. The flashbacks were no longer debilitating, but they were unwanted and irritating. After struggling with flashbacks for more than 50 years, the flashbacks are gone. The memories are now powerless. I feel stable. Freedom from complex PTSD was unexpected, and wonderful.

I find I’m eating less. My misery with food has a history. The earliest memories are about my grandmother making me toast and a soft boiled egg for breakfast and my mother making pancakes on a weekend. The pancake memory features me sitting in a high chair. A month before my 4th birthday, my mother married, and my life became confusing hell in which I tried to stay quiet and small enough that I wouldn’t get hit. I was never successful. My mother didn’t eat breakfast, so she refused to feed me, or my siblings, breakfast. I remember sitting in school being so hungry and waiting for lunch. Food became a symbol of love. As I tried so hard to get my mother and her husband to love me, all I had of love was food. And fear of fat. So I ate. Or I didn’t eat. Am I “cured” of emotional eating? I don’t know. I just know I’m not eating as much.

My sixth and final dose of ketamine will be sometime this coming week. I haven’t yet scheduled the session. I have options. I can do nothing and watch my emotional responses. I can go to the next step, going deeper, and have another six sessions. I haven’t yet made a decision although I’m leaning towards going deeper. I don’t want to lose the healing momentum.

Posted in bipolar disorder, Child abuse, Depression, Emotions, PTSD

In Honor Of The 49th Anniversary of Roe v Wade

Posted on by debthumanblog

I’m alive because abortion was illegal in 1952.

My mother was a violent, drunken narcissist who was single when I was born. Four years later, she married a violent drunk. Although he adopted me, something I didn’t know until I was 34, he never forgot I was someone else’s kid. I’m told to be grateful The Drunk gave me a name – the same name of a Nazi war criminal who was tried and executed by the British. The Drunk and the Nazi were related – both by blood and by hateful ideology.

My mother and The Drunk had three children – none of which my mother wanted and she made sure we knew we were unwanted. By the time I was 10, I had myself and three siblings to raise. I didn’t do a very good job; children aren’t capable of raising children. Don’t tell me to be grateful for a childhood in hell.

I endured 16 years of child abuse hell which resulted in bipolar disorder. The first time I tried to kill myself, I was 11. The last of six suicidal episodes was the fall of 2019. I live in terror that there will be another episode and eventually, an episode will kill me. Don’t tell me to be grateful.

When I was 25, I put myself through college and earned degrees in journalism and biology – even though I wasn’t allowed to take any math or science classes in high school. When I was 38, I put myself through law school.

50 years after marrying and leaving a home run by a pair of violent drunks, I still have complex PTSD. I still have flashbacks. After many years of therapy, the flashbacks are annoying rather than debilitating as they were 50 years ago. There is no cure for complex PTSD and I will have flashbacks as long as I live. Don’t tell me to be grateful for a lifetime of internal hell.

I’d have been better off if my mother had had an abortion.

Think about that the next time you want to condemn a pregnant woman to motherhood.

Posted in Beads, Brady, Child abuse, Fiber, Jewelry, Memories, Photography, Quilts

Maybe Making Progress

Posted on by debthumanblog

I’ve been making progress on the spirit dancing quilt. I gave up on using iridescent fabrics because they just didn’t work against a dark background. Instead, I’ve re-designed the quilt and now it’s about dancing in the place where I buried the ghosts. This is one of the trails at Rushford Lake. We had a cottage there. I used to walk these trails every weekend because I needed to get away from my toxic family. One summer, my mother decided to take my siblings out to the lake for the week and left me home to babysit the drunk. I’d spend the day going through cookbooks to find something interesting to make for dinner. Eventually, the drunk would stagger in and announce he had already eaten dinner. I asked my mother if I could go out to the lake with her and my siblings. No. That’s how much she hated me. Later, I discovered that although my siblings and spouses could go to the lake and stay at the cottage, I couldn’t. In 2018, we traveled to Rushford Lake and I buried the ghosts that had haunted me for 50 years. 

I’m not sure if I like what I’ve done so I’m letting the quilt sit for a few days. Frequently, something I thought looked terrible, looked much better the next day. 

Brady looks so innocent when she’s asleep. Usually, I don’t like a photo to be this grainy, but I like how this shot came out. I used my cell phone for this shot. 

I’ve been playing with fabric designs. 

Eventually, these will be in my Spoonflower shop here: https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/deb_thuman

I’ve been playing with beads The blue stones on this necklace are recycled glass.

The pendant on this necklace is agate. Eventually, these will go into my store, Deb Thuman Art http://www.DebThumanArt.com. 

I’m linking with Nina Marie. http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com

Posted in anxiety, Beads, Child abuse, Emotions, Jewelry, PTSD

Dealing With Anxiety By Making Art

Posted on by debthumanblog

As I write this, I’m awaiting the results of my covid-19 test. Jim called Thursday morning and said his work study student called in sick and it might be strep throat. There’s an overlap between strep throat and covid-19.The phone call triggered a massive anxiety attack. I was scheduled to model on Thursday, but the class got cancelled. Covid-19 has to be taken seriously. Covid-19 kills.  

The first appointment I could get for a Covid-19 test was yesterday, Saturday, morning. The PRC test is the most accurate, but there’s no way to know how long it will take to get the results and I’m scheduled to model on Tuesday. I need the results before Tuesday morning. The least accurate test results are theoretically available in an hour. I chose the Rapid Response test. Although it’s not as accurate as the PRC test, I can get the results in 24 hours. Except I can’t It’s been 27 hours and I don’t have results. I’m scared. Although I was vaccinated in March, it’s possible, albeit unlikely, to have a breakthrough infection. The vaccine gives me the best chance of staying out of the hospital and living. I waited in line for 45 minutes to get tested. I had to stick a swab as far up my nose as I could and move the swab around. It felt weird and I kept wanting to sneeze. I have no symptoms but that doesn’t mean the test will be negative. It’s possible to be asymptomatic and shedding virus for several days before having symptoms. I’m still having that massive anxiety attack. 

The best way for me to stay calm is to make art. I have lots, and lots, and lots, of beads. And now I have seven new necklaces. I haven’t decided if they will go in my store or if I’ll take them to the farmers and craft market to sell. I also haven’t figured out a price for each necklace. Prices are based on time, cost of materials, multiplied by the number of times I have to swear at the beads and adding the square of the number of times I have to go on a search and recovery mission to retrieve the beads I dropped on the floor. 

I’ve been working with my dwindling supply of Swarovski crystals. Someone at Swarovski decided to dump the bead line and concentrate on unimaginative jewelry, tacky knickknacks and rhinestone cellphone covers. That’s it. There are no other products. Then one of the honchos stated the bead line should have been dumped years ago. It’s a horrible insult being told the honcho considers me not worth the trouble regardless of how many beads I buy. 

I’ve also got a good supply of semi-precious stones. 

The blue beads at the center of the necklace are K2. The stones are granite – an igneous mineral. What makes these granite stones special is they come from the base of K2 – the second tallest mountain in the world. The mine is in a remote spot so the beads are expensive. 

Carved amazonite in the center.

Dumorterite, mosaic shell, and shell pears. Shell pearls are made from ground up shell and compressed into spheres. Nicer than glass pearls but not as expensive as cultured pearls.

I like ladder pendants and this one is lepidolite. I like this shade of purple and I like the sparkles in the stones.

Smoky quartz and rutilated quartz, tiger eye, assorted other semi-precious stones.

When I updated the operating system for my MacBook Pro, the update played hell with my email accounts. I’m now unable to access my Facebook account. Facebook has no tech support. No support chat. No number to call. It appears Zuckerberg is too busy selling ads to dubious and sometimes fraudulent advertisers to consider the people who use Facebook. 

I think I’ve finally processed my reactions and emotions from September 11, 2001. I couldn’t express my feelings at the time and my reactions seemed to be about a week behind everyone else’s reactions. As they were recovering, I was starting to feel something other than numb. This year, I read everything I could find abut 9/11. I cried. I watched documentaries. I cried. I felt the edge of fury. I felt the edge of outrage. Maybe someday I’ll be able to feel the fury and outrage in their entirety. I’ve healed to the extent I’m able to heal right nowI’m having flashbacks of the crap that happened to me as I grew up. As I raised myself and three siblings and listened to my drunken, violent, narcissistic mother tell me I was lazy and selfish. If I were gone for a bit, I’d come home and be told by her how peaceful it was while I was gone. I hate that woman although I haven’t felt the extent of my hatred for her. PTSD is an emotional landmine and there’s no telling when a trigger will step on one of those landmines. I rarely cry anymore when I have a flashback. I used to cry uncontrollably when the flashbacks first started 49 years ago. Now, the flashbacks are a nuisance. Unwelcome. A pain in the emotional ass. I’ve given up thinking I’ll ever be free of PTSD. It gets tolerable – I can’t remember the last time I had a nightmare – but PTSD never gets gone. 

Armed with a coupon and about $43 Spoon Dollars I put together a 42 cheater square yard featuring the best 42 designs from what I’ve been creating lately.  I also splurged on five yards of fabric to make myself a dress that will double as a robe when I model nude. I will be the best dressed nude model in the art department. But only if my test results are negative. 

I’m linking with Nina Marie here: http://ninamariesayre.blogspot.com

My Spoonflower store is here: https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/deb_thuman

My store, Deb Thuman Art is here: http://www.DebThumanArt.com

Posted in Child abuse, Emotions

Celebrating Swimming Against The Current

Posted on by debthumanblog

I detest Mother’s Day. I grew up in a house run by a violent, drunken narcissist and her violent drunken husband. My mother had four children she didn’t want and made sure we knew she didn’t want us. We used to go camping when I was a kid. As we would pull into a campground, we’d be asked if we have any pets. “No, just four rotten kids.” She thought she was funny. Ha. Ha. Ha. 

Later, my narcissistic mother would tell my siblings if I were invited to the party, christening, First Communion, or other family functions, she wouldn’t come. My siblings, who have oatmeal where their backbones should be, always acquiesced. 

Once, I made the mistake of asking my mother and the drunk to go with me to my psychologist. 
During my session, my mother told me, “No one likes you and you know that’s true.” 

I cannot honor a mother who hated me. 

I’ve never wanted children and I made sure I never got pregnant. I cringe when clerks and servers wish me a happy mother’s day. Why do these people assume I have children? 

I cannot participate in a day where I’m constantly reminded I didn’t buy into the Feminine Mystique. The undercurrent of their wishes is that I’m somehow not normal.  

 I’ll spend tomorrow being grateful that my email box will no longer be filled with ads for mother’s day. I’ll be grateful that the ugly memories can be safely put away for another year. I’ll rejoice that I had the courage to swim upstream.