Another highlight of my summer was attending Foreigner‘s farewell tour with Griffin. Foreigner 4 is one of my all-time favorite albums, and I just could not pass up the opportunity to see the band live just once. And – BONUS – Loverboy was their opening act. If we go waaaaay back, the second concert I ever attended was Loverboy at the New York State Fair grandstand in 1983. My best friend and I had been turned loose on the Fair with no parental supervision and we screamed our way through the concert, banging on the corrugated metal back wall of our last-row seats. It was loud and crazy and a…
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I’m back! Did you miss me? Yeah, you really should get used to this kind of thing. Dozens of posts all in a couple of weeks…and then complete silence for three months. It’s just how I do. Why? Welcome to Jennifer’s neurospicy brain! But first, some background info. I am 54 years old and I’m about 99.7% sure I’ve been living with undiagnosed ADHD since at least college, if not longer. I’m not sure that the process of getting an actual, official diagnosis would serve any purpose at this point. I am who I am and my brain is my brain and nothing is going to change that for this…
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“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.” Maya Angelou Growing up, there were two things about my body that I absolutely despised. I mean, other than my weight and my lifeless hair and generally not conforming to traditionally acknowledged standards of beauty. Yeah, other than all of that. The first thing, the one that always bothered me the most, was this birthmark on my right arm. As you can see in the second pic, I’ve had it my entire life. Side note: how adorable was I as a baby?? I think the drool on my raised hand is the highlight for me.…
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One of the things you should know about me is that I tend to get a little bit obsessive about whatever interests me at the time. I’ll be all in for one activity or another, I’ll do only that one thing for a while, and then I’ll pretty much never do it again. Especially when it comes to time-waster games on my phone. Candy Crush? I got bored when it got more challenging. Tiny Tower? Started taking way too long to add floors so I bailed. Royal Match? Kinda fun but I lost interest. Mahjong tile games? These tend to be my fallback games when I’m tired of everything else.…
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Let’s talk about my hair for a moment. It’s baby-fine, mousey brown, and a good portion of it has fled my scalp for parts unknown, leaving more skin showing than hair. In other words… It really used to bother me, being only in my early thirties when I started to lose my hair. This pic is of me and Boy #1 about twenty or so years ago. You can already see it start to thin at this point. I’ve tried so many different styles to try to camouflage the thinning parts, but I think the battle is lost at this point. I went through a wig phase a few years…
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Depression is a bitch, y’all. I’ve always been prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder, but this year it has hit me especially hard. The past several weeks have been exceptionally challenging for my mental health. I’ve lost interest in a lot of things, including reading, which shows you exactly how bad it’s been. I’ve been unable to focus on anything for more than a few minutes at a time (edit – it took me over an hour to write this post because my brain is just not functioning properly). And mostly I just want to “turtle,” which is my term for wanting to pull myself into my shell. I’ve been forcing…
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Over the past couple of years I have been working on improving my mental health, after years of suffering from anxiety and depression. I plan to be completely transparent about my journey in these posts, because I hope that reading my story will help someone else out there get the help they need. Below is a Facebook post from November of 2020, which was when I first sought help. I figured sharing that here would be a good place to start. And please, if you are struggling and need help, reach out to someone. The Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available any time, to anyone. Call 1-800-273-8255 or call, text,…
