I finally started pelvic floor therapy last Thursday. I was told by the therapist who did my intake that most pelvic floor patients only come once a week, but I’m a special case because of course I am. I mean, why wouldn’t an obscure yet common condition impact me for multiple reasons instead of just one?
She confirmed I do have vaginismus, which was kind of obvious given that twelve years ago I had to be given general anesthesia for a pelvic exam and hysteroscopy. But it was still nice to officially have someone who knows how “my down there” works confirm it. (“My down there” was something that slipped out once in a conversation with Chris so now it’s something we joke about.) Anyway, she found out about my history of trauma, which she said is definitely a factor. Then she found out about my history of hip problems and attempted & successful orthopedic surgeries on it. And she found out about my hypermobility and how my joints can be “really flexible” but my muscles lack flexibility and can be extremely stiff.
It’s going to be hard for me to do some of the therapies required because relaxing muscles is extremely difficult for me. Like my brain will send the message for them to relax and my body will send one back asking WTAF it’s talking about. Physical therapists have literally had to slap and jerk my legs (not in a painful way) to make the muscles ease up before. And one of my new therapists, because I can’t just have one, will be doing dry needling for part of mine.
She decided on that path because checking my body for orthopedic clues about “my down there” (cute right?) always seemed to lead me to feel tensing & spasming in my vagina. She discovered my piriformis muscle, which has been a dick to me for years, was extremely stiff and just pressing once almost automatically caused a spasm for me. She said normally she could work it out with her hands, but she thought that could set me back weeks. So she is going to do dry needling instead.
If it works, it works.
And she will be focusing on my external therapy. The other therapist, who I haven’t met yet, will be working on my internal therapy. Not internal as in psychotherapy but internal as in INTERNAL. So that’ll be different, right? Because I need external pelvic floor/orthopedic physical therapy in addition to the internal pelvic floor therapy, I get to see them twice a week.
Oh, and to get any of this done, I had to ask my rheumatologist for a referral/order for it & set the appointment up myself because it was taking my family doctor too damn long to do a second one. I’m also still a bit annoyed at her office staff for trying to send me to a clinic that doesn’t take my insurance. (What is even up with that?)
So yeah. Now I get to go to pelvic floor therapy in the morning twice a week because that’s when the internal therapist works at this clinic. The morning part is what I dread the most.
I was minding my business, checking a former college classmate’s Facebook when I saw a name that I recognized and that I actively try not to think of whenever I can. Of course I gave in to my worst instincts and clicked. And what did I find? A post that made me roll my eyes.
Positivity+ is a proven application that provides students and members with affordable coaching, therapy and assessment support through Teletherapy Services. Check it out, free service offered this week. Telll [sic] a friend. Download the app! So many young people and individuals in general are having a hard time now. Assistance with any concern/issue; college, relationships with friends, classmates, professors and or mental health; Positivity+ can help.
It’s interesting she cares so much about the mental health of young people or people having a hard time or people with issues with professors now. She didn’t care about them when she was my professor and she marked off on tests where my handwriting was shaky due to lithium. She didn’t care when she refused throughout Fall 2006 to find a placement for my internship until the last moment (because I couldn’t drive at the time due to my disability) and she had no problem ending that internship prematurely either.
She didn’t care when she mocked me publicly as she taught Art of Interviewing and when she mocked me in front of my internship class. She didn’t care as she mocked me privately to my classmates, who would later tell me about it. She didn’t care when she mocked my family being too poor to afford Caller ID or when she knew I couldn’t afford nicer shoes or better clothes because of my being poor. She didn’t care that her decision (along with another professor) to coerce me into allowing them to attend a therapy/psychiatrist appointment with me caused me emotional distress & was traumatizing; nor did she care when it nearly caused me to be hospitalized. She didn’t care when she told me to my face that my diagnosis of bipolar disorder meant that I wouldn’t be allowed to graduate from the program when I had 11 hours to go in the program, that should get a degree in business instead (which I’ve never understood where that came from), and that I really shouldn’t be around people at all. She didn’t actually care when she said I could complete my internship Fall 2007 in January 2007, for me to call her about it in February or early March; nor did she care when she ghosted me on that until the fateful meeting in Fall 2007.
She didn’t care about healthy interactions between professors and students. She didn’t care that her actions and her words caused my mental health to worsen for a variety of reasons and that she made it harder for me to trust authority figures. She didn’t care that she violated my rights or that her actions caused me to be unable to not only get my degree but to get a job, thus making it almost impossible for me to escape poverty.
Maybe she’s not the woman she once was. Maybe she actually gives a shit about mentally ill people like she claims on her Facebook profile. I sincerely hope she’s changed but I doubt it with every fiber of my being because I don’t know that she’s capable of ever having that kind of empathy. I used to question why someone like her would become a social worker, but I’ve learned over the years that social work isn’t free of ableism. In fact, it may be more prevalent in this field than in others; and part of that is probably because people who lack empathy or basic compassion toward disabled people know that they can get away with taking advantage of them very easily in it.
I don’t really even know how today’s argument became an argument.
My mom asked what was in a Walmart bag in the kitchen. I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about because I didn’t, and she accused me of having an attitude. I told her I just didn’t know what was in the bag.
At this point she said that if I wanted to know what was in it, then I would know, so it was obvious I just didn’t want to know so I didn’t have to answer her or that I was pretending not to know to upset her. I responded that I didn’t know what was in the bag because I didn’t know what bag it was. She said I should know since it was obviously mine, because anything that comes in the house is automatically mine even though I don’t really get anything for myself these days.
I pointed out that when my stuff comes in that it often gets moved or destroyed so I can’t really keep up with my stuff anymore. So she started in on how I always say dad moves my stuff (he does) and he always says I mess with things, then I say he hates me. I stopped her to point on that that tidbit is something I’ve been told by him myself and through her. She said that was not something he ever said about me and that was just how I interpreted what she’s said and what he’s said. I told her she has explicitly said Dad’s said it to me repeatedly and she said I was making that up as usual.
I made the mistake of saying “Oh God” out of exasperation so I had to explain that I was upset because there was literally nowhere I could be tonight to get away from this. That I had no one I knew I could go to in that moment and felt trapped. And that just made her more upset with me.
That’s when I broke the fuck down and started crying because I am so tired of being accused of lying and being told that things I’ve heard or experienced didn’t happen. I cried for an hour and a half. And what was my mom’s big concern? That I cook dinner since my plans were all canceled for the night.
Eventually she halfway apologized for upsetting me before telling me it was justified because my dad and I annoy her so much. Apparently it’s okay to gaslight someone if you’re annoyed with them.
So I will probably regret writing this later, but I’m on Flexeril so I’ll worry about that then.
As you may or may not know, for years, I didn’t have the best experiences in life when it comes to sex positivity, sex education, and sexual experiences. That I was sexually abused as a child, raped as an adult, part of a very conservative religion for most of my life, and forced to grow up in the “sex-is-bad-bigotry-is-good” state of Alabama probably all have contributed to my vaginismus. If you don’t know what that is, it basically means that my vagina closed up shop without letting me know and refuses to reopen for no goddamn reason. It can be painful, but it’s mostly embarrassing as fuck and emotionally devastating.
I can be super turned on, but if my vagina wants, it will close up like it’s Spirit Halloween on November 3rd. It practically disappears from the face of the earth. And by face of the earth, I mean my “down there” region. It’s so exhausting and it’s painful, and sometimes I feel like I’m failing at being a girlfriend and a human being.
There are treatments for it, including dilators and physical therapy. The problem is that dilators can take hours, which is kinda shitty when you really want to have sex right this minute. And the problem with physical therapy is that pelvic floor physical therapy can’t be done by just anyone and the people who do it won’t fucking schedule my appointment. My family doctor sent the first referral the week before Valentine’s Day. They sent another almost two weeks ago. Still nothing.
What does a girl have to do to have a functional vagina so she can have a lot of sex with the love of her life? Also, so I can stop having the vagina spasms that hurt like a motherfucker. Mainly the sex though because priorities.
I did something bad last night. I brought up consent and boundaries when someone made a thread about their sex life. This caused a bit of a kerfuffle amongst dudebros entitled men and some pick-mes brainwashed women.
I am always sexually available to my husband. That's my number one priority as a wife. Obviously there are times when it's not appropriate to have sex ,but these are much more bearable for both of us because we do not withhold from each other when it is within our power to give.
— Mountain Housewife ❄️ (@mtnhousewife) March 3, 2022
I will add that I always respond enthusiastically whether I feel like it or not (mostly I do because it really is such a pleasure!). I have found in doing this I start getting all into it and we both end up in a heap of ecstasy. And this is one reason why I'm happy at home. ♥️
— Mountain Housewife ❄️ (@mtnhousewife) March 3, 2022
I pointed out that it’s toxic to have sex when she doesn’t want to—because that’s true. I am a firm believer in enthusiastic consent and in establishing & respecting boundaries. Shit hit the fan over this and I can honestly say that I learned a lot.
— John X. Beef, PhD 🇺🇲🇺🇦🇷🇺 (@sector_prime99) March 4, 2022
I don’t understand how wanting both parties to be consenting and into the sex means I’m prude? Like how does that make sense? Also, being labeled as prude feels like a joke. I may not have had sex until I was 30, but I was never prude. (Chris laughed hard when I told him about John’s comment. If anyone knows about my lack of prudeness, it would be him.)
If you have a problem with consent and boundaries, then that is a you problem. It’s also a sign you should not be having sex with anyone other than yourself—and even you deserve better than that. Please don’t have sex with someone if they don’t want to have sex with you or if you don’t want to have sex with them. You don’t need a reason for saying no. You can say no to a person you just met and you can say it to a spouse. Sex should be something that all parties involved should want. There is no “need” for sex that trumps that.
Yes, it’s time for another tale from the hacking of my Facebook account. Do you know how the motherfucking hacker got into my account? You will absolutely never guess it.
Do you remember my message boards? They started as fps.com message boards. Then we had a contest to rename them and the name Celestial was chosen. For a while I used the email address janet@celestialmb.org for logins and communicating with people online. But it wasn’t a really long time. By 2008-2009, I had stopped, but I put that in as an email I’d had that people could search for me on Facebook—back when that’s a way you could find friends. I left it on there with the setting “only me” to keep it private. And since they’d been in my account earlier, thus my change of passwords that night, they’d been able to see the list of current and former email addresses.
I quit renewing that domain years ago, and forgot it existed. Well, this motherfucker decided to resurrect it so that they could make an email address. Not just any email address.
My. old. fucking. email. address.
Mine.
With my goddamn name on it.
After they set up my old fucking email address, they just submitted a password reset and got the code there. They found a workaround to two factor authentication. They’re probably why the code generator quit working.
A few people I had told about the hack had been kind of placating and some had even talked down to me. This morning I saw an email saying they were sure the PayPal being compromised was just a simple mistake:
Given my 4-decades of doing networks/cyber, I have yet to see Facebook (Meta) hack PayPal accounts to increase their ad revenue. I am also not aware of any Cyber-Crime wave where hackers target PayPal accounts to purchase ads on Facebook (steal your money, yes. Run a Facebook Ad, no.)
Again, with the information I have, I would suspect that a simple mistake was made somewhere. An errant click on something bound to the PayPal account, or some such. Facebook is not above trickery, but not outright theft. Hanlon’s Razor states “never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity”, and while I don’t think this was an act of stupidity, the most likely and plausible explanation was a mistake.
Admittedly, he wasn’t included in all of the emails about my hacked account, but most of the other folks in the email were. And most had been acting like it was unfortunate but no big deal, so I decided to give them an idea of just how everything happened and when my problem became their problem too. His response was leas condescending, but still a tad clueless:
That was clearly information that I was not privy too. Perhaps the ad buys were just a probe to see if the PP account was valid, before a full scale compromise.
I don’t think this was about HAL’s PayPal or HAL in general. Why would someone hack my account to get at them? Why would they buy a domain name that belonged to me to do this from? It doesn’t make sense to me.
So you know how my Facebook was hacked over the weekend? I might have mentioned it in the last blog post about my shitty week. Basically, someone hacked into my account while I was sleeping on Saturday night/Sunday morning, changed the password, took one of my emails off the account, added some of their accounts to the Huntsville Art League business/ad account, and did enough to get my account disabled & put on a thirty day countdown for permanent deletion. I’m having it reviewed by Facebook but there’s little to no hope of recovering it.
Well, today it got worse.
When I realized what went down Sunday, I messaged two HAL members to let them know that the organization’s Facebook was compromised. The guy in charge of the page kept telling me that he didn’t see any of what Facebook had emailed to tell me happened. I couldn’t check because my account is disabled, so I had to take his word for it.
Today, I got notifications for Facebook ads that were being paid for via HAL’s PayPal. The treasurer got notifications from PayPal. The same two guys I’d told focused on changing passwords, but I told them they had to cancel/pull the merchant agreement to cut off the money. They told me again that they’d changed the passwords so it should be fine, but the treasurer listened and pulled the agreement. Now, HAL should be safe, but it looks like they’ve started charging a former President of HAL. I’ve contacted her on Instagram and I hope she can pull hers too.
I don’t think they can access my bank/credit cards because I had terminated my agreements a long time ago. But if they do, I’ll file a dispute at the bank and update the FTC and IC3 complaints.
I still don’t know how any of this could have happened.
This past week has been a struggle. No, really it has. There have been several times where I wanted to scream into a pillow or start crying and never stop. It’s been bad enough that I can’t even remember all of the badness.
The worst of it started on Monday morning. (Prior to this, the freezer we keep my ice packs in died.) Mom had a steroid injection in her neck. She’d thought it was funny when they scheduled it that they could either do it on Valentine’s Day or on my birthday (Thursday); and she didn’t understand the concept of: I have plans those days that don’t involve hours of waiting in a car for a shot that never actually gives any lasting relief. But I agreed to Valentine’s Day because I knew it’d be easier that day than on my birthday.
So because of their newest Covid protocols, I sat in the car for three hours. When you have a notoriously bad hip, sitting in the car can be beyond painful. I was stiff and in a lot of pain during my date with Chris, but the date was nice, cute, and fun. We watched YouTube videos afterwards.
An hour before my dad had to leave for an appointment on Tuesday morning, mom fell. I checked on her and asked if I needed to take him. She said she was okay, and she took him to his appointment. When they got back, she was talking about how the next afternoon he needed to go to the pharmacy to get his pneumonia vaccine. I told her that wasn’t possible since I had to work Wednesday. She then said she’d do it on Thursday afternoon. When I reminded her I had plans on Thursday, she told me other people in the house have plans too and she didn’t understand why I had to do whatever it was on Thursday. I told her she could take him early on Thursday, but I wasn’t going to give up that afternoon. She never seemed to recognize why I was so adamant about Thursday.
I had to take her to a lab appointment that afternoon and I had to sit in the car in the parking lot for another hour, which inflamed my hip even more. When we got home, I went to grab my bag and I saw that a painting of mine had been cut in two places. I assumed it was damaged by my dad because he does that with my stuff quite a bit. I showed my mom and she didn’t seem to understand why I would be so upset.
Normally, Tuesday is Writers’ Club night. So I would usually be staying at Chris’s overnight after we all went home. But Tuesday it was canceled. I texted to make sure I could still stay over, since I know sometimes he might not feel like it, and he said of course I could. So I went over and started napping on the bed with him at around 5 pm.
At 5:59, we both woke up to a special ringtone I have set for mom. She might need to go to the ER. Her throat hurt, she couldn’t swallow, her back hurt, she couldn’t move, and she couldn’t see her doctor the next day because he wasn’t going to be in. I drove home and picked her up; I waited while she got ready. Then I drove her to the ER and, at about 7 pm, let her out before I went to park the car in the parking deck. That’s when it happened, and, by it, I mean I wrecked my car.
I hit a concrete pillar/support/column as I was entering the parking space. A doctor witnessed it and tried to prevent my oncoming panic attack. This led to an asthma attack and texts to Ashley, Chris, mom, my aunt, Laura, and Kitty. They helped calm me down.
While in the ER’s visitor waiting area out in the parking deck, there was a guy who was reciting rap lyrics, yelling obscenities & slurs, and said “I’m going to fucking kill you” as a state trooper headed into the ER. The cop grabbed his vest and turned really quickly. I was sure something bad was about to go down. It didn’t. Security moved the guy a few times. Eventually Chris suggested I go wait in my car, so I did.
At about 1:45, mom texted me that she got a room in the ER. This meant I could go wait with her in the hospital, which I did. We were told that the doctor would be in soon. Soon ended up being 5:30. He said she pulled a muscle and just had a sore throat; her throat had already started feeling better by now. He said we’d get discharged soon. Soon ended up being 7 am.
Around 24 hours after I first woke up.
I went home to take a nap before my HAL shift, and got about 4.5 hours sleep in. Luckily, things were fairly dead on Wednesday, so I just sat and watched my friend Sara get married via livestream. Oh, and I answered a new text from mom about how I needed to change my birthday plans. (Not because she was in pain.)
She told me that there would be storms the next day and there was a risk they’d been strong. I had been monitoring the system for days. She wanted us to cancel our plans to go to The Cheesecake Factory. I told her that I would just make sure we got there and back to Chris’s house before the storms arrived. So even though I suck at time management, I worked out a timeline for the next day so that we could do what we’d planned on doing for months. (Mom had been told a while before that this was our plan.)
Because of the importance of the timeline, I was the one who took dad to get his vaccine, not her. And I was able to get to Chris’s house well before I needed to to make sure we could go to The Cheesecake Factory.
Our date was actually one of the best birthdays ever, and not just because I was finally able to try Chicken Parmesan Pizza Style, which I loved. No, it was one of the best because I was with Chris.
He’s so pretty.
At 4:54, mom texted to check if we’d gotten back. We had been back since shortly before 3:30, which was when I had told Chris we needed to be back. She asked if I was staying overnight and I told her I was. She said that was fine.
Two hours later, she let me know that dad was upset by his new glucose monitor. She was describing him as losing control, snapping, and yelling, which he does these things as part of his dementia and his bipolar disorder and his sparkling personality. He can be violent and it’s important to keep him as calm as possible to prevent that violence. His violence is something that mom knows scares the shit out of me because I’m usually the person he targets. So bringing it up was a good way to make me come home. But I sensed that he wasn’t really in that mind frame, so I tried giving ideas to soothe him. She told me nothing could soothe him but she’d leave him alone. Chris asked if she realized how her texts sound. I told him that she says she doesn’t, but that I’ve told her in the past and she claims that isn’t her intention.
I don’t think anything major happened on Friday, but on Saturday night while I was sleeping my Facebook got hacked. I was able to convince Facebook to let me change the password, but my account is currently disabled, pending a review.
From what I’ve gathered, the hackers posted an ad for some kind of good or service that violates Facebook’s Terms of Service. The community standards link leads to this page. If they compared the ads to any other post I’ve made since 2007, they’d notice that none of those goods/services line up with my values.
So, in 28 days, I may officially have a permanently disabled Facebook profile for things I didn’t even do. Fun. Things will get better soon. They have to.
The drama on Twitter I talked about last night in the Taylor Swift gif laden post has continued to build and build. This time I wasn’t hard-blocked by someone who was once a friend, I got the more passive aggressive soft-block from someone who was once a friend.
Yet again it was a person who had tried gaslighting me about my experiences or set boundaries when it came to acknowledging her friends had been abusive toward me. Yet again I knew beforehand that if she was given an ultimatum in a dm room or publicly about them or me, she would pick them, so it didn’t really hurt.
I get that she’s loyal to them. I’ve gotten that the whole time. That was never in doubt, but there’s something cringeworthy in you telling people that they can’t possibly be having mental health crises at times that are inconvenient for you or for your toxic friends. That’s especially true when the same friends are the ones who claim mental health crises around the time they start shit.
Honestly, I never fully trusted her. Honestly, I doubt that I will miss her in the long run. Honestly, I’m glad I won’t have to see her retweets of the people who harassed me last January or the people who harassed my best friend the year before.
O’s birthday was a couple of weeks ago, Chris’s birthday was Monday, my birthday is in just over two weeks, and mom’s is five days after that. This time of year is always pretty hectic for me in terms of birthdays & other family things.
We used to also have the days and weeks Nana would mourn the losses on the anniversaries of deaths, including Granddaddy’s, which happened 26 years ago this past Monday. I sometimes wonder how she would react to knowing Chris’s birthday was Granddaddy’s death day.
This last weekend was also Chris’s weekend with O. I drove him to pick up O on Friday and I drove them to drop O off on Sunday. It was the first time I was in the vicinity of O’s mom, a woman I have felt intimidated by for a while. But now I don’t, which I’m counting as an achievement.
After dropping O off, we went on a quest to find dinner for his family. We were going to go to Popeyes but there were technical issues and a lack of sides that prevented that, so instead we got food at KFC. Then we watched Charlotte Dobre and Evan & Katelyn videos on YouTube. Eventually mom texted to passive aggressively remind me to come home because she wouldn’t get to see me for the next two nights so she needed to spend time with me.
I spent Monday with Chris. He had to get his hair cut and his beard trimmed. I have previously attempted to trim his mustache before and accidentally gave him half of a Hitler-stache, so I defer to professionals on that. We then hung out at his house for a while until his mom was ready for dinner, which we ate at his favorite Japanese restaurant. We ate, and I tried sushi for the second time and found out I do like it. I also found out that my first sushi was probably bad, as in rotten or on its way to being rotten; this rice was vinegary and the fish was super fishy to the point that I barely finished a couple of rolls. Chris told me that it’s probably a good thing I didn’t finish the sushi that time because it was bad. The food Monday night was good; so good that I overate & ended up vomiting part of it when we got back to his house.
Then we watched The Legend of Vox Machina before going back to YouTube videos while we regretted our life choices. (Mostly, the overeating, but also any movement we made after overeating.) Mom texted at around ten, which caused the night to come to an abrupt end.
Chris was still feeling bad after the food choices today, so, to give him a chance to recover, we didn’t get to go to Writers’ Club together tonight. I’ll admit I cried a bit when I found that out because I’m on my period and I do that a lot on my period, as I mentioned a few posts ago. Apparently it had to do with the extra progesterone that gets released around the time of your period causing borderline personality disorder to go into overdrive.
I found out about the change of plans prior to getting my labs done for my primary care doctor. And I’m sure my lipids and sugar levels will be great after the mukbang that was this weekend.
The first Tiktok I got to post about my labs this morning. The first I started recording this morning about my labs.
Oh, and I found out before the labs that Adore Me decided to claim I sent back another empty box with their Elite subscription, so I was fucking pissed about that. Later in the day, they’d claim they actually received it, but everything was unsanitary so they had to give me an almost $200 penalty for items they actually received. I’ve contacted the BBB and plan to make YouTube & TikTok videos about their scamming tendencies. (Last month, they claimed I sent back an empty box because they say they never received anything from me. The month before, they claimed I sent something back dirty. I’m not sure how I could dirty up something I never touched.)
Oh, and I started figuring out how extensive my disordered eating really is. I’ve been exhibiting signs not just of binge eating disorder but also bulimia, and that’s freaked me out a little. But otherwise things in my life are awesome.
Basically, I had a lot going on and didn’t really have a lot of time for drama llamas on social media, so when I got home and found out a person I considered a friend blocked me on Twitter, I was about ready to laugh. No really. Apparently I may have been blocked for failing to block another friend of mine sometime over the weekend because some of their friends got into it with some of hers.
I don’t know all of what happened nor do I care to, especially since the blocker is being hypocritical as fuck over all of it. A few months ago another person said that if you didn’t like two people they both happen to like, then you are a bad/questionable person. I made a TikTok about how this kind of behavior hurt my feelings. The blocker sent me half a dozen comments invalidating my feelings & gaslighting the fuck out of me. Then she deleted them so as to not look bad. We never spoke of it again, but she’s seemed sus to me since then.
It used to make me uncomfortable how close she was with people who had been even more hurtful toward me. There was one in particular who compared a breakdown in borderline personality disorder to being a little depressed or anxious. That person claimed I was ableist because I disagreed with them and had pointed out that they had excused their friend’s ableist rhetoric. They claimed I hated autistic people and some other bullshit. I have a lot of mutuals with this person, but most don’t make me uncomfortable. The blocker did.
Today I realized her block didn’t matter all that much to me. I had an amazing weekend. I’m hormonal and cry over anything, but being dumped by a person I used to think of as a friend didn’t matter to me. There are other people who I know it would hurt coming from, but not her.
And I know this coming weekend will be amazing too, and I know that not being able to share it with this person doesn’t bother me at all. So I guess I should thank her for the learning experience?
