Dealing with the Mean Girl Inside

I had a long evening a little bit ago, talking the Princess Girl down from another of her Emotional Catastophes. Goodness, that poor child has such Big Feelings about everything! However, I understand better than I would have in the past: I live with Big Feelings all the time now, and have, lucky for her, been learning new coping skills that I can share. :)

We discussed how to talk to “the Selfish Whiny Girl inside” and the “Mean Girl who says awful things to you about yourself”. You see, it’s possible to say, “Listen here, Selfish Girl, you are whining. You do not NEEEEEED the thing you are fussing about and we are NOT going to throw a hissy fit because that would be unkind and we will just feel guilty afterwards. You need to go in the corner and stop your whining.” You can say, “Mean Girl, we do NOT talk to anyone that way - not even ourselves! You be quiet now.” And you just keep telling them to be quiet and sit down until they obey.

Most of us grownups also know the Inadquate, Not Measuring Up Girl … she shows up to tell you how useless you are, and before you know it, the Scared Girl is there shouting, “We CAN’T be less than perfect! Someone will be angry and it won’t be safe! hurry, hurry, try harder!” and then Mean Girl shows up saying “you insert-nasty-words-here … you are never good enough … insert-self-deprecation-and-beat-up-words-here…”

And before you know it you have a big ol’ nasty party in your head.

And they ALL need to be told to get to their corners and behave.

Because we sometimes need these Girls - but ONLY when we REALLY need them. We need the Selfish Girl to protect us from people who will use us up with no regard to our feelings or needs – then it’s her job to come out and say “Hey, I need to be heard, I need this and you need to pay attention to me right now!” If we truly ARE NOT trying, then it’s okay for the Inadequate Girl to say “you know, we could do better if we gave this a little more oomph.” And if we are truly in danger, we need Scared Girl to say “RUN! RUN! RUN!” and if we are being bullied, we need that Mean Girl to come out and tell other people to buzz off in no uncertain terms.

But we don’t need those voices turned in on ourselves in destructive ways.

It turns out that the simple step of asking the Girls if the situation really warrants their involvement seems to help.

“Is that something we need, or just something we want? Right, we’re just whining and being unfair to the people around us. Quiet down now, Selfish Girl.”

“Am I doing my best? Yes? Well then, Inadequate Girl, you be quiet - all anyone can do is their best.”

“Is this situation actually dangerous? No? Well, then, Scared Girl, thank you but your input is not needed right now.”

“Do we EVER speak to ANYONE in that kind of language? No. Right. So Mean Girl, you need to apologize and behave.”

It sounds silly but it really works.

I told the Princess Girl that I knew about talking to these ‘Girls Inside’ from dealing with my PTSD, and explained that mostly I have a Scared Girl I need to talk to. That when I start acting strange, it’s because the Scared Girl inside me is screaming that we need to HIDE RUN DO THE THINGS THAT MAKE US SAFE! And I have to tell that Scared Girl that the things she wants me to do don’t help, they make it worse, and we really are safe and she needs to just take a few deep breaths and stop shouting. Of course, I explained all this with the full play-acting experience of me speaking sternly to the Scared Girl and the Scared Girl cowering and squeezing her eyes shut and stomping her foot and covering her ears and saying “NO NO IT’S NOT SAFE WE HAVE TO RUN AND HIDE AND ACT ALL WEIRD THAT IS HOW WE STAY SAFE!” I startled the Princess Girl, but I could see that she could relate to having such Big Feelings about things.

I explained my Big Feelings, the ones that come with my PTSD, are like when you have a nightmare and you wake up but you are still scared even though the lights are on and you know you are safe, you are still shaking and terrified: my nightmare happened in real life, and the scared from that time still comes to me, and that’s what is happening when I act so strange: my Scared Girl is shouting that we are not safe and we need to do these weird things because then we will be okay.

“I didn’t know all that,” she said, big tears in her eyes. “Is there anything I can do to help when you get like that?”

Bless her. Such a loving heart that girl has.

I said that she was very, very kind and I appreciated it very much. I suggested that when I start acting all weird (best description for it, at her age – everyone in the household recognizes it when it starts, it looks a lot like grumpy, but mostly I think it’s recognizable at a visceral level as ‘stay clear of this person, they are volatile’) … when she sees that, she can say “Hey, it’s okay, you really ARE safe now” … and then just get out of the way, in case I’m not in a place where I can hear, but it would at least be a good try and I wouldn’t get mad if she said it. :)

She promised to do that. Such a sweet kid. And then she went to bed, calm and collected, with new coping techniques.

Her brother overheard the conversation and told me that he has a Scared Kid inside sometimes, and he thought the way I suggested talking to the Scared Kid might be really helpful.

Yay for increased return on investment for therapy: sharing what I learned with others! Win all around!

This is not a gadget.

The Reluctant Farmer decided that purchasing a robotic floor cleaner would be a good investment in our relationship. I was skeptical, I mean, I ought to be doing the floors myself. It’s expensive. It’s a gadget. Surely a broom and a mop …

Well, the broom and mop haven’t really been keeping up very well, since they are powered by me. And I haven’t got a lot of extra juice these days. So I accepted his generous offer, and today, the Braava 380T arrived in the mail. A little square device, a bit smaller than those countertop sandwich makers that were popular in the 90s, it was super easy to set up. Batteries for the little cube that it uses to assist with navigation were even included in the box!

Now, I wasn’t really sure how well this thing would work. Obviously, I figured it would be better than what I was doing – sweeping with a broom every other day or so and mopping with either a steam mop or a sponge mop about once a week – but I really wasn’t sure how it would work on our floors. We have wide plank hardwood in the south wing (which is badly scratched and dinged up and needs to be sanded and refinished, but that’s another tale) and engineered hardwood in most of the north wing.

I was STUNNED by how well it cleaned.

I made things a little more straightforward by putting the chairs up on top of the dining table, like you do at the end of the shift at the restaurant, and I moved most of the spinning wheels out of the way so it would have fewer obstacles to go around. Then I just watched.

The cats weren’t quite sure what to make of it at first, but after stalking it for a little while, they decided it was harmless and ignored it. It went under the couch and around the table legs and puttered back and forth across the floor for about 45 minutes.

By the time it was done, the microfibre cloth was thoroughly loaded with pet hair and dirt, because I hadn’t done a preliminary sweep with the broom – I wanted to see what it could do by itself. As it went around the room, I did occasionally swipe the dust bunnies off the side, but when it returned the starting point and sang it’s little “all done now” song, I was amazed. The floor felt way cleaner to my bare feet than it does after sweeping: no doubt the effect of having been gone over very slowly with a microfibre cloth rather than quickly with rather tired synthetic broom bristles.

Now that the worst of the dust and dirt were picked up, I filled the little water reservoir at the sink, rinsed and wrung out one of the damp mopping pads, and set Matilda loose again.

(She is called Matilda because the movement of the mopping action looks like a waltz step to me: forward and to the right, back, forward and to the left, back, forward and to the right…)

The damp mopping amazed me even further.

The floor is CLEAN.

I am barefoot, and it feels wonderfully clean. Of course it’s not as clean as having been scrubbed on hands and knees, but it’s way cleaner than I normally get it, even with the steamer. Again, no doubt because it has been gone over slowly and methodically with a damp cloth, rather than quickly and haphazardly with a squishy mop.

And I didn’t have to do any scrubbing. Or sweeping. I washed the mats, since they needed to be picked up anyway and were pretty dusty, and I moved a few things around to clear the path, and that was it. While Matilda swept and mopped, I worked on an assignment that needs to be done for the weekend.

Now, see, you need to realize that I do not like gadgets in general. I used to have a food processor, but I got rid of it: I prefer a bowl and a spoon for mixing and a knife and board or my v-slicer for chopping things. I don’t want a rototiller. I have no need of a panini press or a toaster oven or an electric can opener or any of the fancier gadgets. This high-tech machine is not the kind of thing you’d expect a girl like me to be impressed with. I mean, it sweeps and mops. I can sweep and mop.

Except that when I sweep and mop it costs me spoons. When I sweep and mop, it costs me spoons and even then, it’s not a great job – it’s just enough: never any more than enough, and often not quite enough, truth be told. But I have so few spoons to go around and such a big list of things to do that it gets tough to prioritize floor mopping.

Matilda is not a gadget, see.

Matilda is spoons. In a little black box that meanders across my floor in near silence, quietly sweeping up the mess and leaving me free to spend my spoons on other tasks.

The Reluctant Farmer bought me spoons.

Working

I love my work.

Hand dyed yarns which will be packaged with my knitting patterns as shawl or sock kits.

Gradient dyed alpaca/wool lopi, which will be weft for a coat/vest/blanket (not sure which yet).

One blanket finished, the next started.

You might be able to tell that the twill direction changes at the centre: if you look at the second blanket, with the lighter weft thread, you can see the diamond that forms at the centre of the dark purple stripe which is the middle of the blanket, that’s where the angles meet. It isn’t particularly noticeable on the first blanket, but it’s showing up nicely on the second.

How much is ‘enough’?

I’ve had a few realizations lately: one big one being that my constant worry over whether or not I have “done enough” is actually a (really ineffective) strategy for seeking safety. See, if I can just do enough, I tell myself, then I nobody will be angry with me, then I can be sure it will be safe. So I push and push and push  myself, trying hard to do as much as I possibly can, and then I exhaust myself, and get resentful and angry and tired, and of course, my attitude annoys everyone who runs into me. And then I say, “See? they are mad! I didn’t do enough! Dammit, I gotta try harder!” It’s one of those self-perpetuating, self-defeating coping strategies that makes perfect sense to a PTSD brain.

Anyway, I’m working on that one.

One of the ways of approaching the issue was to take a good factual look at what I really do each week. I spend a lot of time telling myself I am lazy, that I hardly get a thing done, things are always a mess (that much is true, actually, no matter how hard I try, the housework always leaves a bit to be desired: a combination of a very large house, multiple pets, a farm, and a low-energy-dislikes-housework-in-general cleaning person). But you know, let’s get some hard evidence before we go off making assumptions.

I do have training in the sciences, so I know how to do observations and document what I find. Here is what I discovered:

Monday to Saturday I have chores that show up on a list on my phone: it rotates through different tasks so that everything gets done, for instance, Monday it’s do the north bathroom and the floors in the north wing, Tuesday it’s bathroom and floors in south wing. Plus things like changing sheets (one room one day, another room another day, so it gets spread out), scrubbing down the kitchen properly (white cupboard doors get nasty in very short order), getting hand prints off the walls, that kind of stuff. That work takes about 30 to 40 minutes per day (though it’s gonna go down when my robot gets here! :D).

Then there’s meals: when everyone is here (so half the time) that is taking from 2-4 hours per day! This morning, I got up at 10, had about an hour of housework stuff to do as I was away yesterday and had to catch up, then it was time to make muffins for lunch and get the table set and unload the dishwasher so I could clean up my mess and then eat and then clean up again … and by the time that was all done, it was 12:30. Feeding lunch to all five of us took … an hour and a half. Because of course there was kitchen cleanup in the midst of all that. Dinner today: I went the easy route and did pizza, but again, with all the things I do while it’s in the breadmaker/oven, that was from 4-5:30. When it’s just The Boy and I here (half the time, due to The Reluctant Farmer’s work schedule), it’s considerably less, but still, the 2 hours per day average for meal stuff is probably valid. (It includes me sitting down to eat, as well, but it’s “allocated” time, regardless).

I should do my three pages in my journal every day as well - that takes about half an hour too. My mental health is notably better when I write every day, so this is important to schedule in.

Then chores: in the winter, farm chores are about an hour a day (hopefully less if the new feeders work as I hope), in summer, maybe 15 minutes. But then there is the intermittent outside work, or bigger inside projects, so … call it 30 minutes per day average throughout the year.

So, what’re we at now, 3.5 hours a day? Yeah, approximately. Anywhere from three to five hours per day on just household and farm ‘treading water’. Six days a week, so that’s a minimum of 21 hours. Sundays I still do meal prep and some other things, but I do try to take that day off as much as possible. Since some of the days during the week probably aren’t a full three and a half hours, let’s just say it’s 21 hours per week.

Guess what that amounts to?

That’s a half time job, right there.

I am up and moving by 10 just about every day (I wake up sooner, but I have to lie in bed for awhile and get up slowly, anything else is too hard on my system at this stage of my healing), and we eat around 5-6 pm. So, 10 am - 6 pm is 8 hours: a standard full work day. Three and a half of those hours are allocated to household management and maintenance stuff and mental health maintenance work. That leaves four and a half for other things: working on the shop, weaving, writing, whatever.

And then evenings - when I really do need to be relaxing (right now I’m spending my evenings knitting small things for sale at the craft show in October, which is quite fun - small projects are so rewarding, they get done so fast!).

So what’d I learn from all this?

One, that I’m doing more than I thought I was. Yes, maybe someone else could get all this done faster or more efficiently … but given my current state of health, working fully half time is impressive. Because on top of that half time job I’m also managing Flannelberry Creek, keeping up with my writing, and doing weaving and knitting and dyeing for sale.

So, yay me.

Second, I learned that I have only got about three or four hours in a day that can be allocated to those other jobs of mine - I can arrange it so that I have more time, by planning and having quick and easy meals, for instance, or doing some of the housework a day early, but generally speaking, I shouldn’t try to book more than three hours. Then I’ll have buffer time.

Third, I learned that I can be done by suppertime and know I have, in fact, done a FULL DAY OF WORK and it is okay for me to sit down and rest. This is a big thing for me, as I never feel like I have done enough to justify sitting still and resting. I should do more. I should do more so nobody gets mad.

Right. I am already safe. I did do a good day’s work. I can sit. Right.

Now, I’ll have to see how I handle it when I maintain this pace for a few months: I’m going to keep tracking it for a while and see how things go - my husband says he can tell much sooner than I can when I’m “not coping”, so his information can shorten my feedback cycle. Still, this is a long-range experiment, not a quick “try it for a day or two and see” … more like “live this way for a few months and see”.

But, anyway, it was very educational to actually MONITOR what I was doing for a week. I highly recommend this to anyone else who, like me, feels like they’ve gotten nothing done. :)

You might just surprise yourself!

A blog post review of The Rookie’s Field Guide

Right here!

Well, not here here, over there, on the Taylor R’s blog, FlakyMomCrafts.

Cool!

If you’ve read the Field Guide and have something to say about it, we are still doing our prize giveaway for book reviews posted anywhere: your blog, Goodreads, the place you purchased the eBook, Ravelry (there is a thread in our forum), even post it here in a comment and we’ll put you in the draw for a prize.

Life is precious.

An online friend made it through breast cancer treatments and a double mastectomy in the last several months. She had reconstruction and the whole nine yards, and she was doing awesome – she even participated in the cold cap study and managed to keep her hair throughout her chemotherapy!

Then, at her follow up appointment, they found cancer in a lymph node ... and the end story is that it's metastasized throughout her chest and surgery isn’t an option, nor is radiation. Chemo may control it for awhile.

She is younger than I am. Brilliant. Married. Fabulously funny and creative and talented. And this.

I am heartbroken.

I am also chastised. I take the gift of my life for granted so often … her struggle is a reminder that I should not do that any more.

The community of friends (most of whom have never met in person) have banded together in support and we are doing what we can to encourage and share our love.

Life is a precious gift. I promise to do my very best to appreciate it from now on.

What would you tell your grade 7 self?

Someone I know on Ravelry posted a list of the advice she’d have given to younger self … and it really got me thinking.

My 7th grade self was in some turmoil - I had been in split grade classes all through elementary, and they stopped offering that at grade 6, because although our school went up to grade 8 (we had K-8 and 9-12), the 7s and 8s had classes that were more like junior high, so the split didn't work anymore.

Anyhow, I'd sort of gradually migrated up a year in school - my teachers all knew it and I just worked with the more advanced materials and that was that. But then in grade 6 when there were no more advanced materials there for me, I was horribly bored. The school sent me for a bunch of academic testing and the experts came up with this huge complicated educational plan for me that would have made me into an even stranger person than I ended up becoming by completely eliminating any hope of a normal social life. My parents, bless them, said "just put her in grade 7 and be done with it". My principal and teachers agreed, told the experts to stuff it, and I moved across the hall. It was only weird for a few weeks, I'd been in school with all these kids for years anyway so it was not too bad.

But I was always a bit of a misfit, and this made it harder, despite all the kindness and support I was shown. It was hard to be so different.

So, what would I tell that mixed up girl?

I think I'd tell her ...

Not everyone will like you. You don't like everyone else either, so that's cool: find people who DO like you to hang out with and don't change who you are so others will think you are cool. Cool isn't important: integrity is.

Find some way of creating that nourishes your soul. Reading and learning are awesome, you've got those down pat, now find a way to put something INTO the world that adds to the beauty and wonder of the place. And then do that, regularly.

Don't assume you are not creative. Just because you can't draw recognizable stick people doesn't mean you aren't creative. Find other media, other techniques. You need to create things. You just don't know that yet.

If you can look yourself in the mirror and say "I really did try my best", then you have done ENOUGH. Your best is all you can do. If someone else says you shoulda done more, or better, or tried harder, well, ask your SELF if you tried your hardest. If you didn't, and you really were slacking off, well, then try harder next time. But when's the last time you didn't try your hardest? Yeah, I can't remember either. So don't take their judgment of your capabilities as gospel. Only you live in your mind and body. You know. They don’t.

Never date anyone you don't want to be married to for longer than six months. If at six months you don't already know you want to live with this person for the rest of your life, break up and find someone new. Don't waste your time and theirs: you already know you are destined for partnership and not meant to live alone, so treat the search for a loving and supportive partner as the serious, life-impacting task it is. Don't wait for fate to drop someone in your lap. Date "on purpose", don't just fall head over heels by accident. Well, okay, you're going to fall head over heels by accident - you're wired that way. So try to at least set up the accidents so that you're falling for guys who will at least be reasonable candidates for Life Partner. It stinks to fall in love with someone who is utterly ill suited to you as a partner - no matter how awesome and fun they are to be with. Because the rubber meets the road in the end, and then it really, really hurts. Avoid that by being intentional about your romances.

And you really, truly DO deserve someone who will love you for WHO YOU ARE. Who will not see you as a renovation project, or "good enough until something better comes along". He should be your biggest fan and your honest friend and your fun companion. If he makes you feel crummy about yourself, GET OUT FAST. Dating is a *trial run* for long term partnership: if it's not fun at the start, when everything is new and exciting, what on earth makes you think it's gonna get better if you  just "try harder" and "suck it up a little more"? Ahem. See earlier conversation about "trying harder".

You are very smart: but you haven’t actually learned how to learn. Find a way to develop those skills now, before you hit university and discover that your brain is a tool that you’ve been using in ‘beginner mode’ all these years, and now you have to learn to make it work in the real grownup world, where information does not just magically soak into your brain out of the ambient atmosphere. School – even high school, even International Baccalaureate classes – is not preparing you for the world of self-directed learning, even though you think it is. Stop coasting, find real challenges, and find them now, while you are young.

There’s probably more … but those would be the big ones.

What advice would you give to your younger self?