Welcome to July!! I actually can’t believe that we’re in the seventh month of this year. I’ve been back in my childhood home for seven months after finishing college. I’ve been working for my dad for seven months. I just can’t believe that so much time has passed already. It doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, and I think that makes me a little bit nervous. I’m really not in a rush to move into a different place or start a new job, but I think I’m just a tiny bit afraid that I’m going to completely lose sense of time and become complacent and never move out of my parents’ house and never start my own life and before I know it my sister will be graduating high school and going off to college and I still won’t have gotten myself anywhere. What a silly thought, but it is a tiny feeling in the back of my head. Moving on…
This past weekend was pretty busy for me. Saturday morning around 8:45 my friends AP, AJ, and their friend A and I headed up to Fresno to visit the zoo. We tried to get a head start to beat the heat, but we had a few delays so we didn’t get on the freeway until a little later. We had a good drive up, and it was pretty busy when we got there. I had never navigated the zoo through the lens of accessibility. For the most part we didn’t have any problems; the ramp on the way up to the orangutans was pretty slippery and would definitely be a hazard to anyone in the rain I think, and a couple of the exhibits weren’t as visible from a wheelchair perspective, but no major issues otherwise. Since we had a bit of a delayed start, a lot of our time walking around the zoo was pretty warm and we took advantage of every mister and shady spot they had in that place. We got to see the tiger come right up and sit in front of the glass, AJ and A fed the giraffes, AP and AJ got to pet the stingrays, and I enjoyed watching the orangutan swing on the ropes. We all split mac and cheese in the African animal section and I bought the flamingo souvenir cup so I had a $10 cup of Dr. Pepper (it was so worth it). I got a couple of super cute necklaces in the gift shop and we headed out. We stopped at Dutch Bros on the way home and that iced vanilla chai really hit the spot after all that walking and sweating.
Once we got back into our area, we stopped at my house and then AP’s house to pick up our bathing suits before heading to AJ’s house to use her family’s dipping pool (it’s a big plastic water trough with a filtration system and an umbrella). We put our bathing suits on and hopped in there, and it was soooo nice. It’s only a couple feet deep and 7ish feet across, but I was definitely making the most of it. AP dared me to do a flip, which I did with my “Keep on truckin” baseball cap on, I was butt bouncing from edge to edge, trying to stretch my body across the diameter of the pool, forming myself to the curve of the walls; I was all over that thing. It was a blast. We laughed a lot. So much, actually, that my throat hurt for the rest of the night. We came in and had dinner with AJ’s parents, whom I have known since first grade so it was fun to get to talk and catch up with them. After dinner we stayed and talked for a while and around the time I was getting sleepy and feeling ready to go home, it was AJ’s mom’s mandatory bedtime anyway, so we got “kicked out,” so that worked out pretty perfectly. Nonetheless, once I got home I stayed up until 3am doing god-knows-what and Snapchatting Rocky ( ;) ).
As I am writing this, it’s Sunday and I’m actually in a hotel room at the beach, which is so not where I expected to be tonight. Since I knew that Saturday was going to be a long and social day, I purposefully left Sunday pretty open so I could recharge before the work week starts again. I knew I wanted to sit down and write, and AP and I had been hoping we could have all stopped by Barnes & Noble in Fresno after the zoo, which didn’t happen, so I offered for us to head to our B&N location so we could peruse the books again before sitting down to write, since I know she has some things she’s working on too. She picked me up around 11:45 and we drove into town. We drove through Dunkin to get some coffee and we got some lunch at my favorite Chinese restaurant that I introduced to her the last time we hung out together. While we were sitting in the restaurant, finishing up our food, my sister called me to tell me that the family had decided to go to the beach, they were leaving in 45 minutes, and asked me if I was going with them. I felt bad to abandon AP and our plans, but when I get an opportunity to go to the beach, I sure don’t want to pass it up. I told her I needed a couple minutes to figure out what to do and I would text her with a decision. I was excited to sit down and write, I was already in a position to be able to do it, and I thought it might be fun to have the house to myself for the night, which has never happened before. I ran it by AP and we decided that we would still hit Barnes & Noble to look at the books and my family would pick me up from there. Shout out to my sister who grabbed the few things I asked her to pack for me. I ended up finding two books that I wanted to read, which was exciting because they’re both fiction, which is a big deal for me. Both are from the same author, and they’re retellings of Disney princess stories. I was most intrigued by The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast ones, but I may have to go back for the Sleeping Beauty and Aladdin ones too. I’ve been reading Part of Your World, the one about The Little Mermaid, and it has been so fun so far. I’m so glad I got those books. We also made a quick trip to Sprouts, which is only a couple doors down the way since we had a few extra minutes and I needed a couple of things. My family met us in the parking lot and we parted ways.
It takes about three hours to get to the beach that we go to and it was a good drive. We took a different way this time, which was kind of fun. I think I like this route better. I read a little bit in the car, and I listened to my music, which was fun. My sister and I also shared some of our music with each other, which I loved because I actually added a couple of her songs to my Spotify. Looking back, that drive totally didn’t feel like it was that long at all, and I didn’t even sleep during it. It was around dinner time when we got here, so we looked for a place to eat. We originally were going to eat at our go-to restaurant for dinner, but it was really busy and we didn’t feel like waiting, so we went to the next town over and decided to try something new. The restaurant we picked had a few people, but it was really quiet, which I think was better for all of us. The food was soooooooo delicious and fresh. Others in the family didn’t enjoy it as much as I did, but I couldn’t stop eating and I actually ate way too much and caused myself a stomach ache. I thought it was a huge success and everyone at least enjoyed it well enough. And we have leftovers! After that, we stopped at a little bakery to get some breakfast for tomorrow morning since we’re leaving at 6am. We took our food back to the hotel room, grabbed a couple of things, and headed to the beach. My family walked on the pier while I set up my towel in the sand to lie down and keep reading my new book. It got pretty windy and chilly, even with my mom’s sweater that I borrowed from the back of the car, but it was still so refreshing to relax and read with the sounds of the waves. I kind of wish I had at least touched the water, but I really didn’t need to get any colder than I already felt. Then we came back to the hotel, played the New York Times Spelling Bee game like we do every night, and now I’m here.
I also wanted to talk about my appointment with my primary care physician. I had my appointment on Friday at 8:30 am and I was walking back to my car just after 9am, so I wasn’t there very long. I know each patient only has 15 minutes allotted with the doctor, but I wish I had gotten to talk with him a tiny bit longer. I told him that I quit taking hormonal birth control in December, I’ve only had two periods in the past 6-7 months, and I wanted to know if there was anything he thought I could do to get my cycle back to being more regular. He said the only thing I could do for that would be to go back on hormonal birth control, but he in no way pressured me to get back on it. The other thing we talked about is how my cycle affects my mental health, because it’s actually crazy how much it can wreck me. I updated him that I had lowered my Lexapro dose from 20mg to 10mg after I finished school, since he had been the provider to put me on Lexapro back in the day. He offered to supplement with Wellbutrin, but we had already tried that in the past and felt that it didn’t really add anything extra to what the Lexapro was doing, so he pivoted to Buspar instead. We’re going to try adding a 5mg dose of that for a month and see if it helps even out my mental health throughout my cycle. In the meantime, I’m holding firm in my decision to stay off of hormonal birth control, which he completely respected. He advised that it may be helpful to get back on it so that at least I have an understanding of where I am in my cycle at any given time, so the mental health stuff might be easier to manage, but I really want to see if I can continue to work on and heal it myself. At this moment, I feel hesitant to take the new medication, which I have to pick up Monday after work, I think because I’ve been doing really well for the past week or so. When I start to feel good again I tend to kind of fall into the illusion that there isn’t anything wrong at all anymore, so when it inevitably does creep back in, it just makes it even worse. So I’ll try it and I’ll keep you updated on how things go leading up to and after my follow-up appointment at the end of the month. In addition, I just signed up for a course with Emma Robles, a holistic nutritionist who I follow on TikTok, and I’m really excited to learn about how I can support my body so it can function well and feel great. I can’t lie though, I’m having some mixed emotions about it because I feel like it really could be the right step for me and I’m excited to learn and grow and really change my life, but it’s $444 and it really scares me to commit to spending that much money on something when I already have a few other things I’m trying to save for. But I also feel like I didn’t listen to all of those podcasts over the last few years about that moment when you know you have to pull the trigger and do something big and different even when there’s something about it that scares you or it feels like there are barriers in the way. I never could truly understand that or connect with it, but I think this is that moment and I know what I have to do.
I feel like I could keep yapping, but the last thing I want to share is that I’ve decided that I want to make this summer feel the most magical that I possibly can. I made a little mood board so that when my mental health inevitably dips with my cycle, I can still remember how I felt and how I want to feel and align my actions with that even when life seems a little dimmer. I usually make square mood boards, but I made this one vertical so I could use it as my phone lock screen to remind me all of the time of the life I want to be living outside of my phone. I’m really excited about the trajectory I’m on right now, which now that I’m thinking about it, seems to almost completely contradict how I felt about my life in the first paragraph, but that’s what can happen over the span of 2300+ words. Plus, are humans really human without contradictory beliefs? I don’t think so.
Talk to you Thursday. Much love <3
Nicole
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