Hello readers! If this is your first time on my blog, welcome! If not, welcome back! I haven’t done much posting due to life transitions, but grad school will be starting up again in a couple of days (a week sooner than originally planned). Even though my classes have been moved to an online format, they will still meet at their scheduled time so we still have an interactive class as if we were in-person. My school uses Webex for online meetings.
I need to get my life in order. I’m 27 and feel like I didn’t really accomplish anything in life besides being the rare person whose mental illness can’t be treated. Hopefully that will change, but… I have some goals that I want to complete within the next year or so.
Goal #1: Write one poem every one to two months.
I like to write. If I didn’t, this blog would not exist. Besides blog posts and future poems, I write fictional things for fun. I completed (for once) a fan fiction based on Time Warp Trio that is not published and is considered Alternate Universe. It includes OCs (original characters) and the girls from the show. I’m currently stuck with writer’s block on my fictional piece that continues my first boarding school fictional work. The fictional boarding school takes all of my OCs and puts them in different grades.
Enough about my non-poetry works. I was inspired by my best friend from undergrad who has a notebook of poems she wrote in high school and university. She plans on having a book of her poem published. From that inspiration, I have started a project where I will write one poem every one or two months (no plans for a book to be published). I was going to make this one poem per month, but I need to focus on grad school and the computer science program is not an easy program. To keep me accountable to be able to sit down and write, I joined a writing group on Meetup.com which is currently meeting virtually. I don’t live near any meetup groups of interest, so I like the virtual format. I won’t be able to join them once it’s safe for group meetings again because I live more than an hour away from the county. The reason why I’m working on writing poems is due to goal #2.
Goal #2: Recite one of my poems at next year’s annual poetry service in July.
Last month, I listened to the poems during my Unitarian Universalist church’s annual poetry service. People can volunteer to recite a poem, and they can either choose a poem that has been written by someone else or a poem they wrote themselves. Due to that, I became inspired to write poems so I can choose one poem to recite in July 2021. I have written one poem so far and am thinking of ideas for future poems. The biggest challenge so far is that I’m challenging myself to write poems that don’t have strict rhyme schemes. I’m used to writing poems that rhyme. While I will still have some lines that rhyme, I am not going to struggle finding rhyming words since I want the focus to be on the message and not rhyming “cat” with “hat” if the speech of the poem doesn’t feel natural.
Goal #3: Do a lay-led service next year.
Okay, I may seem like I’m ambitious doing two major church-related things in one year. At my church (and I don’t know if this is common among all Unitarian Universalist churches), our minister takes a summer break from preaching and people from the congregation can create and lead a service with the help of the worship committee. Some of the lay-led service themes from the time I started with the church include Lord of the Rings, environmental sustainability, and how our perception of time may be wrong. The theme I want to do next year is about how you’re never too old to change the world. Or you can consider it as “Salty millennial complains about how Gen Z is allowed to make societal change, but when we pointed out social issues, we were told to shut up and that we’re SJWs”.
My saltiness was inspired by the youth leaders that have come about in the past 2 to 3 years. My inspiration for thinking we’re not too old to change the world comes from a virtual discussion I attended in June. One of the speakers said that we should step aside for Gen Z to be the new leaders. NO! Us millennials have been silenced from doing the same things. Let US have a turn! As well as complaining, I plan to discuss reasons why some people who change the world were older than college students. Maybe they weren’t allowed to (like me). Maybe they didn’t feel a passion for a cause until later in life.
I only know for sure that we are in charge of the “Call to Worship”, the sermon, a reading if we’d like, and maybe a lead in that occurs between “Call to Worship” and the reading. I’m not sure if we’re in charge of picking out the music, but I don’t have the hymn books with me and I’m trying to think of songs for the prelude, offering, and postlude. I already have one song in mind about change, so if anyone else has ideas or can point me in the right direction, let me know! The Worship Committee helps us out when we have questions and they also have a part in the service. In a typical service (whether it’s lay-led or minister-led), a member of the committee does the welcome and announcements, have been lighting the chalice in our virtual services, and announce when it’s time for offering and letting us know how we can virtually make our offerings. Typically, a child would light the chalice when we were meeting in-person, and would collect the offering.
Goal #4: Keep my grades up
In grad school, for the Master’s program and the Doctorate program, you need at least a 3.0 GPA in order to graduate. This is in comparison to the Bachelor’s program where you need only a 2.0 GPA in order to graduate. I don’t know the GPA requirements for graduating with an Associate’s degree since I never went to community college. While I still have a GPA of over 3.0, my GPA is a little lower than I’d like. Due to this, I have the goal of keeping my grades up since a goal of increasing my GPA may be a little too ambitious depending on how hard my Software Engineering and Object Oriented Methodologies classes will be.
Goal #5: Getting proper mental health help
You all know that therapy has been unsuccessful for me so far in treating my Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I want to figure out why and then no longer be treatment-resistant. I really feel like it’s due to having an undiagnosed mental illness that went undiagnosed due to lack of knowledge of more severe mental illnesses or the changing diagnosis requirements. If I get a new diagnosis, I can actually work on getting better since we can properly treat the disorder. If it’s not due to an undiagnosed condition (which I’m very sure it is), we can find another reason. I hope to not be in therapy for the rest of my life, but not getting early intervention is what’s causing my lack of success. It’s hard to find therapists who understand Highly Sensitive People and I don’t want to try EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) tapping because I heard that HSPs who do it end up getting high blood pressure that’s not treatable by medication.
I also want to try DBT group, but that requires you to commit to 20+ weeks of weekly group therapy. My grad school schedule prevents me from committing. I’d also have to play along with the mindfulness part because any of my followers will know that I hate mindfulness with a burning passion due to my previous ex, the fact that it’s popular, and it seems like victim-blaming BS (I feel like a lot of alternative/complementary mental health treatments are victim blamey. It comes across as “You wouldn’t be mentally ill if you ate healthy, exercised, and meditated”). I might write a blog post on how alternative/complementary mental health treatments seem like victim blaming. I watch a vegan on YouTube who still has depression and needs her medication, even though she’s vegan (formerly raw vegan) and gets enough Vitamin D.
We will revisit these goals either later this year or sometime in 2021 to see how I’m making progress.
Diary of Self 