TinyTips

Yesterday I made a post about how it feels when I have an anxiety attack, so today I wanted to post some of the coping skills I use. This isn’t a comprehensive list since that would probably end up being a few pages long, and it takes a lot of work. As you know, I’m a slow typist—these things take time. I’ll try to make more posts about this same topic since I’m hoping this will be helpful for others, so if these tips don’t work out, stay tuned for more! 1.        Water Believe it or not, I’m not recommending water to drink it. While that might help some people, since I have sensory issues that worsen my anxiety, I prefer to use water for my skin. It started out that when I felt like I had bugs in my skin I would take a shower or wash my hands to sooth the nerves. However, sometimes when I shake, I can’t walk or even stand, preventing me from being able to get up and do that. I’ve recently started filling bowls of water that I can dip my han...

1.        Regular Fitting Shoes What other people call fitting, I call too small. Ever since I was allowed to pick out my own shoes, I’ve always bought them a full size or so too big for my feet. As you can imagine, I tripped a lot over my own shoes as a kid. It started out just being because my feet were so small that I bought bigger shoes, so they seem normal sized, but not it’s also become that I feel like my toes are smushed if my shoes are the “right” size. 2.        Shoes That Aren’t Tight Enough This might seem contradicting to my last point but let me explain. I need the extra space for my toes, but I also need my shoes to be tight enough or my feet slide around in them. I’m incredibly sensitive about this actually--to where I don’t like to let other people touch my shoes in case they mess up how I keep the laces. This makes it difficult when I’m looking to buy slip-on shoes since you can’t really adjust ...

Part of the reason I started this blog in the first place was for me to use it as an outlet and cope with my anxiety. So far, along with other things, its been working pretty well, but I want to create this post to give a little more insight on exactly what I experience. When I feel something coming on, it starts as just tiny butterflies in my chest or stomach—I simply feel a little uneasy initially. This makes it a little hard, because its almost impossible to tell the difference at this point of whether it actually is just nervousness, or if it’s actually anxiety. I can usually stop myself enough to at least be able to recognize if my nervousness is rational or not. When it’s irrational, it's always anxiety, when it’s rational, it’s impossible to tell if it’ll escalate or not. Not long after, the butterflies turn into a tightness in my chest that limits my breathing. Focusing on my breathing has helped me with this quite a bit, but my anxiety has gotten to the point t...

I wrote this a while back (it's actually my UNT Honors College admittance essay) and just came across it while browsing my computer. I thought it would be fun to post, so let me know your thoughts in the comments. Mr. Richard Preston,             I recently read your book, The Hot Zone , which I found intriguing in terms of the subject matter. However for a nonfiction piece it had misleading information and provided irrelevant detail. Subsequently, these factors make you out to be quite unprofessional. Therefore, I want to provide you with some input regarding your book, so you can avoid this reputation in the future.             I primarily want to address how misleading your writing is. As a nonfiction author, people rely on you to provide accurate information. Technically you do offer a good amount of truth, but it becomes obscured by your excessive guesswork ...

I found a little list to give me some more ideas of things to write about, and one of them recommended you write about your five strengths and weaknesses. I thought this would be a good idea since it’s such a common interview question, yet no one seems to know how to answer it. I also figure it’ll provide some more information about me for those of you who want to know more. I've put this post in the tips section, because I'm hoping it'll give you some ideas to use on your own for interviews or any other situation where you might need to share some strengths/weaknesses. Also, I feel like the tips page hasn't been touched in a while, so I wanted to add some new content to it.  Strengths 1.        Organization I am really organized. Growing up, this was not a trait I would assume I would develop, but I also didn’t think I’d develop anxiety either. That’s actually were this quality came from, I just became organized to have control ove...

Hopefully if you’re on this page, you’ve already read TheWater Castle Part 1 , which is the preface to this dream. It isn’t vital that you read that one first, but you might want to in order to understand the location where this is taking place. Reading the first part also adds to the strangeness of the dream…but anyway, you’re not here to be lectured by me, so here’s the dream: I went through my grandma’s office closet again, intentionally this time. However, when I got to the castle I turned left instead of right when I got to the fork in the road. It took me to this water park maze/obstacle course made out of those inflatable bouncy house things, and I had to go through the whole course to continue through it. Unfortunately, after each obstacle, it splashed water at you, so I was pretty wet after not too long. There was one part where I moved through some inflatable walls and Kevin from The Office was there in the maze thing with me.   He just popped out of nowhere...

Okay, so as I established in my other dream post , I have weird things going on in my head. Last time I gave you three unrelated dreams that all happened on the same night, but this time I’m here to give you part one of two related dreams that happened on different nights. These ones are more of a linear story than the last set, so they’ll probably be far more enjoyable to read. This first dream happened this past February I think. It was early in the year, I can tell you that for sure. When it started out, I was just kind of exploring my grandma’s house. I have this dream every once in a while, where I’ll just walk around her house and look at things, and then in the back bedroom, there’s always this old bookroom that doesn’t exist in real life. That’s usually the only really off thing about that dream though. This time however, she had another secret room in the back of the closet in her office. There was just another door in the back of the closet, but nothing seemed particu...

Recently, my therapist recommended I try meditation as a way to lower my anxiety and help cope with stressful situations better. I was already working on trying to rearrange my apartment and redecorate it to make it a more relaxing space, so I figured it would be really easy to incorporate a meditation corner in my room. I don’t have a job at the moment, so my spending is kind of tight. I didn’t even have things in my apartment that I could repurpose for my meditation spot, so I knew if I wanted to do this I would have to cough up some money. But hey, self-care is worth it, and I knew spending a little extra money now to take care of myself would be better option than paying for another hospital visit and missing 3 days of school from my anxiety. After looking up some ideas online, I went ahead and put together a list of things to get. I decided I wanted: ·          A pillow to sit on so I could last longer in my meditation sessio...

If you’re someone who bleeds out your uterus lining every so often, you’re probably stuck in an endless cycle of using pads and tampons each time it happens. I don’t know a single person who enjoys this. If it’s a pad, you feel like you’re peeing yourself the whole time, and if it’s a tampon, you get to drag either a block of sandpaper or a bloody mess out of your body every few hours. On top of that, every cycle you have to spend money on more hygiene products, all of which just join the ever-growing landfills when you’re done with them. Even if none of that bothers you do far, none of those products are even safe for your health. Because they aren’t regulated how they should be, you don’t know what you’re putting in or on your body. Spoiler alert, its pretty much just bleached garbage wrapped in a trash bag or attached to a string. So why are you still buying them? I’ve been telling myself to get a menstrual cup since about 2016, but I didn’t actually switch until...

I know this is more of a story than a rant, but it’s my blog, so hush. I was thinking something like this would be a cute way to bring up some old pictures of me and Cass, and it lets me talk about things that make me happy. So, if you haven’t heard the story, I hope you enjoy I, and if you haven’t heard all the details, you’re about to get more than you ever needed. The first job I worked at was as a bookseller for Barnes and Noble. I started working there not too long after my 17 th birthday, so I was easily the youngest person there. At the time, I think the next youngest person was about 19, so I was very much the baby of the store. I had been working there for about six or seven months by the time the Christmas season came around, so all the new seasonal employees were getting my hopes up for there to be someone else younger than me. I scouted out all the newbies, and only two of them looked like they could be younger than me. Like I said, it was Christmas season,...

Last night I was trying to figure out what other things I could add in or write about, and I decided my dreams would be a good problem. I tend to have pretty vivid dreams with linear plots, so they kind of just end up being quirky, nonsensical stories. Usually when I get a noteworthy one, I send it to my boyfriend or tell it to some unsuspecting victim. Fortunately, I’ll typically type out the most interesting ones to save and reread later when I’m bored, so I have a couple ready to share today. I decided I’d try to post more interesting dreams when they occur, so I was also debating if I should create a new page exclusively for dreams, or just add them to a different page. I settled on adding them to the Rants page, since they’re like short subconscious rants about nonsense. Like for one of them, I found out the REAL Santa lives in Alvin, Texas. He lives in a metal hut with a small fenced in backyard, but the backyard is 100% filled with an impressive VHS Christmas collectio...

I have a lot of problems. Most of them are taking a lot of therapy and time to work on, but some of them were really simple to fix. I came across most of these solutions on accident, or through trial an error, so I’m hoping sharing this list will facilitate the lives of those of you who have similar problems. Chronic Greasy Hair My hair was always horribly greasy for most of my life. I started having to shower in the morning because if I showered at night, my hair would be a visibly greasy as soon as I woke up. Even showering in the morning wasn’t always enough. Most days my hair would already be greasy by the time I got home from school. At my worst I would shower in the morning and have to partially wash my hair again at night. Literally nothing I did helped. So, it surprised me when a couple months ago I started using this new shampoo that I got a sample of and noticed for the first time that my hair wasn’t a disaster by the end of the day anymore. It was apparently...

Most of the lists you’ll find on the internet for what you need moving into a college dorm are pretty decent guides. Others, not so much. Even with the things that store advertisements try to tell you to get are going to be things you’ll regret wasting money on. Now I’m no expert on this, but after living with my first roommate, let me share some wisdom I gained from that terrible experience. Just keep in mind that everyone is different, so this list may not be perfect for you or your situation. Don’t Get a Shag Rug Just please. Never do this. ESPECIALLY if you or your roommate have long hair. Yes, it feels great at first, and it’s great to lay on, but after a couple weeks, all it does is collect hair. A shag rug will turn your floor into a pit of never-ending hair that will continuously get stuck in your toes. You’ll tell yourself it won’t be a problem, you’ll tell yourself you’ll just vacuum more. You won’t. Trust me on this. Just get a normal rug. Don’t Bring an Alar...