Music Therapy
I’ve been wanting to post an update for a while now, and I’m finally carving out some time to actually do it! In mid-November, my team told me that because COVID numbers are rising, they were moving Intensive Outpatient (IOP) online again. They invited me to join, and because our semester ended December 1, I […]
Art Therapy
Tuesday was another day of art therapy—potentially my last, in fact, for reasons that I’ll explain in another post. Thus far, I’ve stuck with mostly geometric designs or tiny drawings on a corner of a piece of paper. A peer pointed out last week that I took up a little more space than I had […]
Just One Day
My dietitian suggested that I try following a meal plan for one day. “Just one day; you can do anything for one day!” The meal plan involved three meals and five snacks—it felt excessive, even if one of the snacks was a string cheese and I was able to eat a little less at meals […]
Conflict and Confusion
It’s midnight, and I can’t sleep. My brain, as it often does, is thinking about my weight and shape. For whatever reason, this time, I wonder whether a medication that I started six months ago could be the cause of my recent weight gain. When we were talking about medications, I told the neurologist that […]
Permission
Today in group, the dietitian gave us the opportunity to write a little bit about permission. What can we give ourselves permission to do today? What can we give ourselves permission to do in recovery? What gets in the way of giving ourselves permission? It got me thinking about how I feel so much better […]
Week Three of IOP
Just a short update: Things are starting to fall into a routine. The composition of the group has changed somewhat, and it now consists mostly of people roughly my age. I feel stronger than I have before; I can be a role model. I feel more open and vulnerable than I have before; I can […]
Who am I?
I actually started this a few days ago, and we were then given the same prompt I had started writing about in Art Therapy. I think I’m still trying to convince myself of this last part… but I am trying. I am a mature professor who tries to be a role model for their students. […]
Day Two: Art Therapy
Day two of IOP was interesting. We had art therapy, which I’ll admit I was kind of skeptical about, though I wanted to try. I’ve had such a rocky relationship with art that I didn’t see how it could be helpful for me, someone who has never been good at it. However, I’ve seen so […]
Day One of Intensive Outpatient
A short update—I had my first day of Intensive Outpatient (IOP) today. I felt just a little out of place for being older and larger than everyone else, but people were very nice about it. The dietitian and therapist were both great, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow! I’m still struggling with recording everything I […]
Intake Appointments
A friend drove me a couple hours to a few intake appointments for Intensive Outpatient (IOP)—the program will be on Zoom, but I had to do a few things in person. My meeting with the nurse went very well, but the psychiatrist meeting was a disaster. She required a weight, even though I had just […]