Impromptu Photoshoots

Up until this past year I pretty much hated being in pictures and refused to take pictures of myself. I have always wanted to wait until I liked (forget loved) what I saw in the mirror, I want to be skinnier and have a more defined muscular physique. What I refused to acknowledge was the reason I hated taking and being in photographs was the lack of self-acceptance and self-love rather than how I fit in the frame. Do I want to be healthier and fitter? Absolutely! But I'd also like to have memories along that journey and enjoy the fun things I do during this time still creating memories. Another classic anxious thought that runs rampant in my mind especially during my travels is that everyone-or at least someone is watching me take these photos, and seeing me be out of my comfort zone. I have this somewhat loud irrational fear that everyone around me will see me do something "silly/weird". Instead of just going with the flow with what feels good and fun to me I have this internal voice that tries to shut down any comfort and enjoyment of myself at the moment. In turn with the figuring out more of the weird twisted thoughts in my mind I try to challenge these thoughts, I had a chance to do this on a family trip to France to visit family this past winter we were walking by a Christmas tree and water fountain and my sister asked me to take some photos of her, I did and enjoyed being the photographer but then decided to push myself and get her to take some photos of me. Posing felt awkward of course as the internalized voice saying why are you moving your body, why are you smiling, who are you trying to copy or look like. I tried to shut that voice off and just smile and enjoy the moment with my sister trying to laugh the internal awkward feeling away. So do I love my body and the pictures without noticing the flaws? No, but I try to enjoy the photos and my body for what they are and where I am in life. Do I feel this weird internalized feeling of being super touristy and taking posey photos in Europe? Totally! But I love the memories of pushing myself way out of my comfort zone and having a great experience with my sister, and moving my body a bit and taking shots and freezing memories of a trip in time. Looking back at the photos, I like how far I've come in accepting myself and where I'm at enjoying and loving the moment. Hopefully, my evolution of self-love will continue and I will have photos to remember it by.

2020's Forgotten Dreams

I wrote the draft for this post right when I got back from a trip to my grandparents in December. For a variety of reasons, I haven't posted anything for a bit before that. Classwork got intense at university and till last week I was super busy with finals. I've been in a fog since then and I knew a decent amount of it was locking up my emotions and thoughts trying to just focus completely on schoolwork. So now to the actual topic at hand, Toyota ads in the Zurich airport and the wave of emotions I completely forgot I had regarding 2020.
"2020" For years I had an imaginary finish line that I wanted to cross at "Tokyo 2020". It was a somewhat elusive sports goal of making the Paralympics after my paralympic dream for 2016 fell apart for a variety of realities that combined to remove the goal from reach. When I returned to Israel in 2016 my focus changed from being consumed by sports dreams and goals trying to be achieved through workouts and pretty much eating, sleeping, and breathing sport, to focusing on university and Israel and the process that entailed to make it there. I worked on myself, mentally and physically in different ways trying to balance the idea of working out without focusing on a paralympic dream and goal. Throughout these past three years, I went through a variety of hospitalizations, between a voluntary in-patient program at an eating disorder clinic for a couple of months, where I gained new tools and friends. I started wheelchair tennis only to end up with a few different short stints in the neurological unit of the hospital where I got much less help and made no friends. The lack of explanation and ability to solve the pain and loss of sensation, led to pressure being put on me to do fewer sports and working out less in hopes that the pain and loss of sensation would disappear. In that my paralympic hopes and dreams seemingly disappeared from my mind completely and the focus turned to university and a job. Of course, my body and mind sometimes what I feel conspire to make me take a step back and between trying to work 20 hour weeks, falling and spraining my wrist the first week of the semester and getting incredibly sick, by December of 2018 I was at one of my darkest places I had been in a very long time and ended up suicidal in a psych ward needing to hospitalize myself for proper mental health care. Forget dreams of Paralympic medals I didn't want to wake up the next morning. A large focus in the care was focusing firstly on just the day to day and then just basic monthly goals, no need to focus on big dreams and goals as they can overwhelm and send you back down the dark spiral. This all made sense and for a while, I was ok with just focusing on putting one foot in front of the other and slowly but surely get back to university and while getting into the basic grind and doing it well is great, at the end of the day I'm still a hopeless dreamer regardless if I always share the dreams and goals. There is a constant inner fight in my brain of wanting to just be an elite athlete and push my body to the extreme and blank out the racing thoughts and the mandatory other parts of life that I need to achieve. So I had thought that I completely turned off the inner clock and timer to "Tokyo 2020" I'm not training in any sport that has any relevance for me at the Paralympics at this time, so why this wave of emotions in response to seeing the symbols and words? It brought back to the forefront of my mind this clock ticking down to the Paralympics that I thought I turned off completely but it turns out I seem to just have hit snooze enough times. It's not like I forgot I still love to compete and push myself to my physical limits but considering I had literally no training in any sport at any level even close to being relevant to the Paralympics, I almost didn't believe it was something that I still considered a dream. So after figuring out that it is still a dream, I am working on balancing my mental health needs, university and work needs and physical needs, while believing that dreams are important but creating the small achievable goals for now and as my path through life evolves hopefully I will be able to bring the paralympic dream back into my life. For now, I'm focusing on growth and evolution, and maybe I'll be able to cheer on others at Tokyo and maybe not, but now at least I know where I'm at and have actually processed what I wished and in the back of my mind hoped for some kind of paralympic dream. Heres to me owning the year 2020 regardless of if my dreams were gold medals and now they are good grades.

19 Lessons I learned from 2019

These are lessons I learned along the year of 2019, which was a whirlwind of ups and downs and full of lessons.

1. Lean in and feel the feelings, its the only way to process and grow.
2. The darkness (both in the feeling and process) always leads to stronger and longer-lasting light.
3. When your mind tells you you've reached your limits, pause, listen, figure out if its fear of failure, and when it is; pause breathe and push forward.
4. Self-acceptance doesn't equal self-love, rather opens the door for that process to start.
5. Acceptance isn't complacency rather an important tool for change.
6. Family exists, their acceptance and love doesn't determine your worth.
7. Asking for help doesn't make people think less of you, rather it gives new options to connect.
8. Sharing your pain and fears in a healthy way doesn't hurt healthy people, rather it builds bonds.
9. When you build inner boundaries, the lack of them surrounding you doesn't impact you as much.
10. The voice in your head telling you not to try and that everyone is watching is lying.
11. Change and Growth are not linear, you will get to what feels like the same point, but with new tools and from a different view.
12. Changes are not always constant continuous lines, sometimes they are small dots, keep going dots make pictures too.
13. Cry. Let yourself be vulnerable and cry. Instead of leading yourself into an illusion of processing feelings by trying to block them out.
14. The lies society spins about psychiatric medications and hospitals are just that-lies. The help is worth breaking through those societal barriers
15. Respect the need for pauses both from mind or body, but let it just be a pause and not a full stop.
16. You are what you say you are, so stop saying you aren't anyone worth saving and sharing with the world what you are.
17. Keep trying to love yourself, in different ways at different times, never give up on yourself.
18. Asking for help to save your own life is hard but makes living so much easier.
19. It's really hard to save yourself, but not as hard as giving up on yourself.

On to 2020, I am adopting a new idea from someone I follow who gives each year a theme and a word so, wait for the next post to see what they are.

Musings from the Bench

Sitting me on the bench for the first basketball game of the season makes sense. I mean it's my first game in my return- if you can even call it a return, then maybe to basketball as a game but practically, its a start, for sure competing in a league. I'm not a good player, I have miles to go before, I believe I will really have any helpful impact on my team during a game. This means logically I know that it makes no sense to put me on the court if there are better players, that give our team a better chance to win. Internally I am still super competitive and "game-day" brings up the nerves and stress of competition. Which for me led to the two hours before we were meeting up for warm-up, I was dysfunctionally stressed and nervous. What came up in my mind was the feeling that I had no idea in my mind how to process these pre-game emotions and nerves. The only other competitive history I had was rowing competitions, and my mental preparation for these competitions consisted of intense (depending on who you asked too intense) internal focus, closing into myself. I spent time breaking down specific moments of the race and what my plan was for each time, and going over the repetitive movement in my mind, these tools helped calm my nerves, and as I liked to say "focused me into a coiled spring" ready to release all the power during the race. This structure to me felt non-transferable as basketball is a team sport and I'm on the court moving constantly in different ways, to me this felt like there was no repetition which I find hard. I reached out to a friend who competes in both these sports at the highest level and her response made a lot of sense "your skills, your shots and movements are more repetitive than it seems on the surface, you focus on your shot, and repetition of making the different shots, and your movements on court." Sitting on the bench after the warm-up I fell into the focus, of just the movements and shots of my teammates on the court, which made me super quiet and focused on the shots and plays on the court, almost taking me back to pre-race levels of focus, which for me personally felt good, I felt a comfort in that level of focus, which controlled my nerves. A teammate though reminded me about the difference, of sitting on the bench to pre-race. Yes, you are sitting on the bench, but you are still part of the team, which means cheering for your teammates and pumping up the energy. Yes learn from what is going on, but part of that is also being involved with everyone else. While my first thought was that she doesn't get what I'm doing, the reality was I could still focus pretty well on the specific skills on the court that I was trying to focus on as well as cheer super loud and make myself part of the team. In reality, while I still really wanted to get out on the court, I mean c'mon there is nothing like the wheels hitting the court and the ball bounce, that is one of my happy places, and yea I wanted a workout as well, but I learned plenty from sitting on the bench. Team isn't yea, I'll play with the team, but wanting to focus on your own skills and goals. Self-learning doesn't mean shutting out the team, and sometimes shouting loudly teaches more on the silent inside than you think. Here's to learning and growing on and off the bench.

Donut Deliberations

Its December, and in Israel that means the month of donuts, yes they come out earlier but this is when you are bombarded with them in social media and pretty much everywhere else. I mean literally everywhere. For years I would tell myself I have to find the perfect donut to try because they are full of calories and not healthy and I can't just eat one it has the be "worth it". What does "worth it" mean? What checklist does this donut have to fill? For years I would read reviews and look at photos of donuts and pass the bakeries searching for the perfect donut, then go home and binge on something else unhealthy that I didn't want to eat but I didn't give in to eating the "nonperfect" donut. During my time at the eating disorder clinic, my dietician worked on this idea of finding the "perfect" food worth breaking this illusion of a diet, rather just restriction my mind convinced myself I was on. The idea of just eating one of what your body craved, and it didn't have to be "perfect", yes there are "healthier" (Ill explain the quotation marks another time) foods, but if by not eating one fresh donut, you went on to binge on four or five boxes of cookies that you didn't want that night, you're just hurting yourself both mentally and physically. We spoke about this in June of 2018, which sometimes feels like eons ago and sometimes feels like yesterday. I dont remember if I ate a donut last year, but today, when walking past the bakery, the donuts looked pretty good and I was craving a sweet treat, so instead of listening to my mind which said: "no dont buy one donut, you have to find the perfect one, just buy a box of cookies, there are so many more in the box." I shut my mind off for a second, bought an imperfect looking donut, without letting myself analyze if it's my "favorite flavor" and looks like the best donut on the tray. Getting back to my place I pushed past the thoughts of you can't eat it, its not your favorite flavor (mind you I haven't had donuts in so long, the idea of a perfect flavor, is based on what flavors I like in other things and totally being used by my eating disorder mind to stop me), I poured myself a nice cup of coffee and sat, shut off my racing thoughts and enjoyed the imperfect donut. Because it was perfect at this moment, and I wanted one so I had one. I will work out later, but not to "get rid" of the donut, rather because its a habit I'm trying to build. I ate a delicious imperfect donut and I enjoyed it. ED today I won.

Personal North Star

I don't like letting the idea of something help lead my life. Part of that is my personality and part of that is the fact that being disabled throughout my life people close to me and not have always tried to help. Sometimes the help was needed but many of the times it was "Help". I'll write about that another time, but basically, it created an almost constant feeling me that I was given help, and expected to receive help. This along with being raised with a complicated description of what god is and how you are supposed to relate to it, made me hate the idea that someone else was in control of my life and I had to communicate with "God" for him to give me a good life. I hated the fact that the answer to anything going bad or good that it was god, with no responsibility for any of the people involved(this is not everyone's relationship with god, this is the feeling I got from my education both formal and informal at home.)
This complicated relationship led me to a long while of pulling away from any version of god and religion, I wanted to be in charge of my own life, including the choices and outcomes. I didn't want any connection with something or idea of some kind of god that removed my individual thoughts, actions, goals, and ideas. This lead to pulling back from anything of any sort of religion and focusing on myself, regardless of my enjoyment of reading some religious texts, I cut it all out.

These thoughts came to the surface when I started listening to the book Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein, a main focus in her book is connecting to a higher power, labeled in any way that works for you to connect. To be able to let go in some areas of life while gaining a lot more in many ways. When I first heard this I balked, I said it sounds like everything else I've heard a hundred times and I want nothing of this god that takes all the responsibility out of my own actions in my life. The more I listened and relistened I understood more of the point that it is creating a personal channel with a higher power in the world to create balance and growth inside you, to give you direction in which to use your skills and abilities in the best way to change the world. Creating the balance of what you want to achieve and what the universe has for you as well.  After I realized this wouldn't be the worst thing in my life, maybe it could create a different balance and a release of some of the non-helpful responsibilities.  I have piled on many different "types" of responsibilities in order to keep control of my life around me, most of them don't work because at the end of the day, they make me stressed and anxious without any ability to change most of it.

The first thought I had when I came to this conclusion was "You have heard this 100x times, in many different forms of religious/ Chassidic words, written, spoken, discussed. Why does it take listening to a non-Jewish book to somehow connect and hit me in a place that created a desire to create a personal name and connection to something larger than me." It took a conversation with someone close to me to come to the conclusion of "whatever way of connection and an ability to process an idea is great, just because you have heard it in many different ways, you connected with this one, so run with it." Among Gabrielle's many different words she threw out for connection with a higher power was "North Star".This term spoke to me on a few levels, firstly I love nature and love the idea of finding the north star in the forest or by the ocean. Secondly, part of my very detailed and personal tattoo (I'll go into detail in another post on the meaning of the tattoo) is the form of a compass and the four directions. I love the idea of being able to look at my arm and be reminded amongst other things to connect and listen to the information coming through the personal connection to the universe and find the calm and direction from my channel with the universe. I am still in charge of my actions and goals, yet I am able to focus and listen to the inner connection between me and my north star.

Balancing Listening and Self Hate

I hate listening to my body. Living with cerebral palsy and chronic pain, you cant always listen to your body if you want to get things done, or just like have a daily routine. The problem is when  I get under the weather, I like to just power through until I get super sick and then I'm out for way too long . I got under the weather this past weekend when I stayed out too late listening to a friend, on top of just dysfunctional body issues. So for once, I listened to my body and slept more and actually took days off from working out. This created the feeling of failure, as I have been on this consist workout routine, with the point being to do the same workout for 100 days. Now my mind took this and decided that it had to be every day for 100 days, which was good for some points, it meant when I was on vacation in London I still made sure to do the same workout every day all weekend. The second side of this coin though was not wanting to give myself the time I need to heal when I'm just a little under the weather rather than waiting till I'm completely out cold. The problem is that the feelings of guilt, self-hate, a lack of consistency and inability to follow through on a routine, these thoughts rise up and overwhelm my mind entirely. This stronghold on my brain makes it harder as then it continues making excuses convincing me my body isn't well enough to work out for a variety of reasons, breaking through these reasons are harder than just getting up and working out. This can very easily derail the entire process of already working out the same workout for 26 days. Picking myself back up and controlling my mind while balancing my body is hard, but the feeling after the workout makes it worth it. Not the physical spasms and sweat, rather the feeling of owning my mind for that short time.