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A Moth Eaten Musical Brocade

@motheatenmusicalbrocade / motheatenmusicalbrocade.tumblr.com

"You are terrifying and strange and beautiful, something not everyone knows how to love" Warsan Shire
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A Positive Update

My last post was super depressing but I’ve made some big strides!

I have 3 jobs now! I be able to make decent monthly wage. It will be a few hundred dollars less than what I was making at HCP but it’s doable. 

I’m excited for all the 3 jobs I have!

I’m working Saturdays at the music school I use to work at (even though I quit to go to HCP, I started doing contract work for them so I never really quit?!)

I have contract position through the end of January with a non-profit (THE PEOPLE ARE COMPETENT! IT”S NOT A SHIT SHOW!) and I’m helping them coordinate their annual fundraiser.

And today, I signed a contract to be a PT Office Manager for a moving company that a mom I met at the music started with her husband this year. I’m facebook friends with her and few weeks ago she posted she was looking for an office manager. I immediately messaged her and now I have the job! It’s contract through the end of January but can turn into full time! Woo! I’m excited because I will be working out of their house and creating ALL the organization systems, etc. I will have a lot of autonomy. 

Also, my art project is getting off the ground! Next week I’m having an event so I can get work samples for my grant application. I’ve been working on this project since Jan and now all that hard work is paying off. The deadline to submit the grant Nov 6th. I plan on submitting it earlier bc I’m 75% done with the application. I hope I get the grant. I just want the 7k so I can hit the ground running next year and get my programs started.

Lastly, I’m going to start doing research and help my friend co-author a policy paper and literature review. My friend has PhD in Medical Humanities and introduced me to the field of Mad Studies. Researching Mad Studies has had a huge influence on my art project. Doing my project has made me realize how much I miss doing academic research. 

I’m leaning towards getting an MPH focusing on mental health and health disparities. My friend told me she needs help with several research projects because she is a post-doc research fellow at this mental health think tank. My involvement just kind of fell in my lap when we got coffee one day. So now I have a way to get hands on experience with mental health and mad studies research! This could also lead to a paid experience in 2018.

I’m glad I’m cultivating a work situation with flexibility that allows me to pursue my outside projects and interests. Even if my job at the moving company turns full time, I would still have a lot of flexibility with my schedule.  

HCP was traumatizing but now my mental health is in a decent place and even though I’m super broke and have had moments of panic, I’ve never felt this satisfied with my life. Work/life balance is the key to my mental sanity.

Let’s up I keep making progress!

#personal
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im going to make less than $500 this month.

i dont know how im going to survive. im paranoid my landlord is going to evict me soon. she’s been really cold to me lately (she’s always been super nice). i’ve barely been able to pay half my rent since july. we agreed upon this but i bet she’s tired of me. i’ve been avoiding her and hiding in my room. when i hear her walk in the hallway, i get super anxious and worried she’s going to knock on my door and be like “you need to get out” which is irrational.but i can no longer able to relax when im at home.

i calculated and  i need $3k to get me through the end of the year. 3k will cover rent, phone bill, psychiatrist appointments, therapy appointments and my meds. Luckily, I have food stamps. I don’t have a car anymore (which sucks) but one more less expense.

I seriously feel like I need to rob a bank. I dont know how I’m going to make it through the end of the year with two super part time jobs. I’m still so mentally broken I can’t see myself working full time but I’m too functional to qualify for disability. My friends will only let me borrow so much money.

I’ve hit rock bottom. I’m either going to have to get my shit together or move back in with my mom (the worst option in the world) or be homeless/couch surf until the end of time.

Honestly, if I lose my place to live I’m probably going to end it for real. I’d rather die than live with either one of my parents and i’m so tired of suffering. my brain is too broken and it’s going to be awhile before i can hold down a full time job without having a breakdown.

what is my life!?!

#personal#tw: sucide mention
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i’ve been unemployed/underemployed for 3 months. ive been working a few times a month at the music school i use to work at but im not making enough to really survive.Luckily, I have friends who have been helping me and an understand landlord (I rent a room in a house).

 i worked at starbucks for a month part time but had to resign because i kept having panic attacks almost every shift. my brain is so fucked and traumatized from my last job. It’s frustrating.

 i also got a new diagnosis. besides bipolar 2, i have borderline personality disorder. now im going to be going into intense DBT therapy for who knows how long. my new diagnosis explains soooo much about my live and my emotions. People with BDP have suffered childhood trauma which is meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Over 23 years of trauma under my belt. BDP explains why I’ve always felt things so intensely that it was sometimes self sabotaging or destructive. These past 3 months my moods have been so volatile. I oscillate between numbness and immense panic or depression or suicidal thoughts with no rhyme or reason. It’s calmed down in the last 2 weeks but I’m still hyper sensitive. 

My life feels like I could fall apart any moment but if i dont focus on my mental health, im never going to make anymore progress in life.

#personal#tw: sucide mention
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I'm mentally drained.

I feel sick to my stomach and I've been crying on/off tonight. It hasn't stopped raining for 72 hours. There have been short breaks but not enough. This tropical storm is suppose to last through Thursday and who knows how long it will take for the city to drain. I love Houston so much but I'm so scared and devastated of the current situation and aftermath. Luckily, I'm safe. It's almost comical how lucky I am compared to the rest of the city Please keep houston and myself in your thoughts.

#personal#Houston#hurricane harvey
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bedbugbiting
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apanoplyofsong

Helping with Hurricane Harvey

If you haven’t heard, the biggest hurricane to hit the US coast in over a decade is about to make landfall in Texas. Harvey is a category 4 with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph and is incredibly slow moving with an abnormal path (both very bad things with hurricanes), expected to dump a possible 40 inches of rain in areas. 

To compare: Corpus Christi, the city it is making landfall near, has an average annual rainfall of ~32 inches and Houston, also expected to be inundated with over 30 inches of rain in places, has an average annual rainfall 45 inches.

This is happening in a weekend. And then it’s going to remain over the region. So what are the avenues through which you can help? I’m sure more will be apparent in the coming days, but here’s a few places to start:

  • Donate to the Red Cross–already mounting relief efforts; a reliable go-to in disaster relief. You can also text HARVEY to 90999 to make a $10 donation. (Monetary donations are often more helpful than materials until the area can be accessed and needs assessed.)
  • or consider donating blood through your local Red Cross, as there’s always a drain on blood banks as people seek care in the aftermath
  • Donate to Direct Relief–Direct Relief is in contact with Community Health Centers and offers Emergency Health Kits, which contain key medicines and supplies often requested after major disasters. There is an option to direct your donation to support Hurricane Harvey relief efforts.
  • Donate to Austin Pets Alive–Austin Pets Alive! is working with shelters in direct line of the storm to transport as many animals as possible to their (safe, inland) shelter, but needs help to care for this influx.
  • Driscoll’s Children Hospital in Corpus Christi, directly in the path of Harvey, cares for children from 31 counties of the region, including a pediatric and neonatal ICU. They have evacuated patients, but will probably need help in rebuilding and outreach, so consider keeping them in mind as things develop.

In Harvey’s path?

(also just a petty governmental note that the National Hurricane Center is without an official director as we encounter this natural disaster okay go help people bye!)

#Houston#hurricane harvey
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I'm so devastated. Houston needs all the love right now.

Hurricane Harvey is the worst hurricane/tropical storm in Houston’s history. We’re experiencing the worst flooding of all time in Houston. My house/neighborhood is safe. I’ve gotten off so easy. But Houston is now a lake and we&;re expected to get more rain until Wed. Every freeway is submerged. There is no way to leave the city. One part of a freeway collapsed from the flooding. I feel like I’m living in a dystopian novel.

This is so catastrophic. This is Houston’s version of Katrina.

Send all the positive vibes. We are going to need them. We are no where in the clear yet.

Also, here is a good, short article explaining what’s been happening with the weather and what’s to come: https://spacecityweather.com/harvey-late-night-water-levels-rising-across-houston-metro-area/

I’m trying to stay sane but I’m so mentally exhausted. It’s taking everything inside me not cry. I hate seeing the city I love like this.

#personal#Houston#hurricane harvey
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Houston is under water.

I’m safe and my neighborhood/house is not in danger of flooding but my roommates and I won’t be able to leave the house because every freeway and underpass is submerged in water. This is the worst hurricane to hit Houston in 12+ years. It’s been raining since Friday and we’re expected to get 50 inches more rain over the next 2-3 days. Let’s just say the city is already crazy flooded and it is going to get worse.

All the positive vibes please. Several people have died and so many people have already lost their homes.

#Houston#hurricane harvey
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big-wired
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madamebadger

A story that may have relevance for others, or then again, maybe not:

When I was in college, about ten or so years ago, I was a history major. I wanted to learn to dance, so I joined a swing dance club on campus. To my surprise, this club had about twice as many men as women (in high school, the last time I’d tried dancing, the ratio had gone the other way–lots of girls, and boys only that you could drag by their ears).

But apparently, there had been some kind of word spread specifically to the STEM guys that dance was a way that they could meet girls.

So anyway. I joined the swing dance club, and met a few guys. And at one point, when socializing with the guys outside of dance class, one of them asked me what my research was on. (I had already established that I was an honors history student doing a thesis, just as he had established that he was an honors… I’m not sure if he was CS or Math, but it was one of those.)

So I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my research. Now, to be clear, an honors senior thesis, while nothing like what a graduate student would do, was still fairly in-depth. I had to translate primary sources from the original late-Classical Latin. (My professor said, basically, that while there were plenty of translations of my source material, that I’d only be able to comfortably trust them if I had at least made a stab at a translation of my own. And he was right.) And there was so much secondary material, often contradictory, that I had been carefully sorting through.

But I was able to sift it into a three-sentence summary of my senior thesis work, you know, as one does.

So I gave him that summary, and then asked–since he was also an undergraduate senior doing an honors thesis–what his research was on.

“Oh,” he said, “you wouldn’t understand it.”

Reader, I went home in a frothing rage. Because I had thought we were playing one game–a game of ‘let’s talk about what we’re passionate about!’– and he had been playing another game, which was, one-upsmanship. I had done my best to give a basically understandable brief of my research–and he had used that against me. As if my research, my painstaking translation, my digging through archives and ILLs of esoteric works, my reading of ten thousand articles in Speculum (yes, the pre-eminent medievalist journal in North America is called Speculum, I’m sorry, it’s hilarious/sad but also true), and then my effort to sum it up for him, was nothing. Because his research into some kind of algorithm or other was just too complex for my tiny brain to conceive of. Because I just couldn’t possibly understand his work.

Now, the important note here is that the person I went home to was my senior year roommate. She was a graduate student–normally undergrads and graduate students couldn’t be roommates, but we’d been friends for years, and the tenured faculty-in-residence used his powers for good and permitted us to be roommates that year. Anyway. My senior year roommate was basically… in retrospect I think possibly an avatar of Athena. She was six feet tall, blonde, attractive in a muscular athletic way, a rock climber and racquetball player, sweet but sharp, extremely socially awkward, exceptionally kind even when it cost her to be kind, and an incredibly brilliant computer science major who spent most of her time working on extremely complicated mathematical algorithms. (Yes, I was a little in love with her, why do you ask? But she was as straight as a length of rope, and is now happily married, and so am I, so it worked out.)

(Still, yes, she is my mental image of Athena, to this day.)

Anyway, I came home in a frothing rage to my roommate, the Athena avatar. And I said, “He made me feel like such an idiot, that I could sum up my research to him but his research was just too smart for stupid little me.”

And she shut her book, and smiled at me, with her dark eyes and her high cheekbones and her bright hair, and said, “If he can’t explain his research to you, then he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”

Now I hesitated, because I’d be in college long enough to have sort of bought into the ridiculous idea that if you couldn’t dazzle them with your brilliance, you should baffle them with your bullshit. But she said, “Look, I’ve been doing work on computer science algorithms that have significantly complicated mathematical underpinnings. What do I do?”

And I said, “Genetic algorithms–that is, self-optimizing algorithms–for prioritization, specifically for scheduling.”

“Right,” she said. “You couldn’t code them because you’re not a computer scientist or a mathematician. But you can understand what I do. If someone can’t explain it like that, it isn’t a problem with you as a person. It’s a problem with them. They either don’t understand it as well as they think they do–or they want to make you feel inferior. And neither is a positive thing.”

So. There.

If you are looking into something and have a question, and someone treats you like an idiot for not understanding right away… here is what I have to say: maybe it isn’t you who is the idiot.

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coffeeforcollege

ATTN: ALL COLLEGE STUDENTS EVERYWHERE PLS READ

HEED ATHENA AVATAR’S WORDS BBCAKES EVERYWHERE.

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reynardreblogs

As an academic working in academia: this this this. Never buy into the elitist bullcrap of ‘oh, you wouldn’t understand.’ And never perpetuate that crap yourself, either out of pretension or even simple laziness. If you can’t explain it to a ten-year-old, go back and hit the books again cause you’re not there yet.

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buttermellow

I literally always reblog this when it comes around. I was always made to ‘teach’ the subject back to my mum or dad (I was homeschooled) cause in their eyes ‘if you can’t teach it, you don’t understand it’

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wocinsolidarity
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4 Suggested Boundaries And Techniques While Writing About Trauma
By Luna Merbruja
thisbridgecalledourhealth.wordpress.com
Dearly Beloved,
If you are reading this article, it’s probably because you’re taking the time to start intentionally processing your trauma. I know the pathway to beginning a healing journey is often met with overwhelming confusion and too many starting points.
Perhaps in your search for a starting place, you found this guide nestled in a list of resources. Or maybe you weren’t looking, but saw this shared by friends online. However this reached you, I’m glad it did.
We have very few step-by-step guides to dealing with life after trauma, and my hope is to share wisdom around processing trauma through writing while also holding healthy boundaries and care techniques. I learned these tools while writing and editing my memoir, Trauma Queen, and working as a Project Advisor for Mirror Memoirs.
Feel free to keep what works for you, and change or discard what doesn’t.
#words words words
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bedbugbiting
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madmoths
I want to go home, I want to go home, but what I mean, what I’m grasping for, is not a place, it’s a feeling. I want to go back. But back where? Maybe to the first time I heard Stevie Nicks, to watching the snow fall outside the window with a paperback folded open in my lap, to the moment before I tasted alcohol, to virginity and not really knowing that things die, back to believing that something great is still up ahead, back to before I made the choices that would hem me in to the life I live now. A life that I regret sometimes, I think, only because it’s mine, because it’s turned out this way and not some other way, because I can’t go back and change what will happen.

Marlena by Julie Buntin (via madmoths)

#words words words
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toxicrants

Seriously, if you think poor, white, rural folk had the money to fly and drive to Charlottesville, pay for lodging and food and all other expenses to attend a Nazi rally, i don’t know what to tell you

These folk are probably professionals in cushy positions, business owners or public employees.

During their torchlight rally they literally wore white polo shirts with little swastikas embroidered on them.

Libs want it to be “the ignorant poors” so bad when it’s their fucking bosses and managers.

#once more for the cheap seats in the back
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