Ramblings!

I was thinking about how to continue with this blog.

I would really like to talk more about mental health in itself and however I want this place to be predominantly positive I would also like to talk about all aspects of it and go a bit further than just outfit posts and recipes.

Some recent encounters and events had me thinking about some aspects of my own mental health problems and how I try to deal with them so I wanted to talk about that. I have experienced that there is still so much misunderstanding about mental health problems. It is a huge taboo. I see it every day - mental illnesses can be as deadly and devastating as any physical illness and need to be treated with the same respect and understanding. Just as you can't cure a broken leg by simply 'cheering up', you can't cure depression by cheering up. You can't cure psychosis by 'just stop acting weirdly', you can't cure ADHD by 'just calming down a bit', and you can't cure ADD simply by 'trying to focus'.  Each one of these examples needs to be treated with the same respect as a physical illness. I could go on and on with this, and I'm sure everyone with a mental or neurological illness has experienced comments like these as soon as they opened up about their mental health.
This taboo on mental illness extends to the fact that most therapy is not or only partly being included in health insurance. It is expressed in the denigrating comments on newspaper articles about suicides. It is carried out by people who do desperate and devastating things by having to conceal their issues for so long that they turn completely insane. It is created by a tendency of talking each other down and demonizing each others feelings. It is created by the inability of people to live compassionately and who fail or do not try to understand the people around them.

I hope I can contribute a bit by creating more awareness for mental illnesses by trying to help people understand what it is like to live with them, and help others to understand them and take their problems into account when interacting with sufferers. Therefore I want to be a bit more open about mine.

Today I want to talk about anxieties and how they have affected and still affect my life.

I have anxieties. My anxieties used to be a full blown anxiety disorder, now they are just regular anxieties (which is a good thing compared to what it was before, but still!). Anxieties are not the same as being afraid of something. Having to deal with anxiety sometimes gives you the feeling that you are going to die. I have hyperventilated so many times that I would keep a plastic bag in my room at all times to be able to reach for that when it would happen. The racing heartbeat and the results of the hyperventilating can actually make you panic worse and really give you the feeling that you are about to die, which can worsen the symptoms, and so on and so on.

One of my major triggers for anxiety attacks are moments when I feel verbally attacked. I am really really bad at fighting, or even general discussing, especially when discussions/fights are personal and I have the feeling I have to defend myself or my opinion. Fights make me want to scream my lungs out, cover my eyes and ears and curl up in a corner. Their results can keep me awake for nights. I can feel guilty about a fight for years. I still keep myself awake sometimes thinking about some disagreement I had with someone years ago.
This is an incredibly unpopular trigger and so much less understandable to 'normal' people than for example arachnophobia. People's first reaction is 'you just can't handle criticism'. Which is true. I wish I could. But my years of depression have made me extremely aware of my flaws. If someone points them out to me or discovers a new one, then I am able to blow it up in my head to incredible sizes, blocking out all things that I actually like about myself and leaving me with only that. My ADD mind also makes hundreds of associations to related situations in my past in the blink of an eye, making the anxiety and guilt spin out of control in mere moments.

So yeah, my anxiety used to sometimes wreck me completely in seconds. In the past I used to avoid triggers (and contact with people close to me in general) as much as possible. At high school I managed to secure a seat in every class just out of reach from the teachers eye, on my own, with a bunch of empty tables around me, and the rest of the class in the other corners of the room. That way I could avoid people talking to me and I could avoid to be picked out by a teacher to answer a question, of which I usually didn't know the answer anyway because I was too unfocused and anxious (yep, performance anxiety too!) to be able to do my homework, and in a way of not having to deal with it, I just avoided doing homework.
At home I stayed inside my room as much as possible, often only coming out when it was time for dinner, when I absolutely had to. Unfortunately certain members of my family get really witty and mouthy once they have taken a few bites so dinner time was usually the loudest time of the day. I was a popular subject to make fun of, which I usually just tried to ignore as much as possible, hold in my panic attack, and would disappear to my room or the toilet as soon as I had the chance, where I was able to let my panic attacks go without anyone noticing, and was able to freely loathe myself for what other people said about me.
If I didn't have the chance to remove myself from the room I would try to cope by getting overly defensive and yell, scream and bite around like a distressed animal driven in a corner. This usually happened at home where it wasn't always possible to avoid some people, but it has also happened at school a few times, causing my fellow classmates to think I am weird or mad or to make fun of me.

I also lied about everything that could be a potential trigger for someone to say or think something bad about me. I became a compulsive liar because of my anxiety and I am not proud of that. I lied about everything; my grades, what I had eaten at school, my homework, my school, my home situation, and I even lied about minor things such as forgetting to brush my teeth. And when these lies began to come out, they would lead to much bigger conflicts and eventually I was never believed by anyone even if I told the truth.

The constant lying and avoiding of social interaction has led to years of emotional neglect; not only because no one really understood me (this is partly my fault, because I used to be so secretive, and well, lied about everything, including to myself), but also because eventually every form of social contact with my family and class mates made me feel incredibly awful about myself, to the point that even the idea of social contact with someone I had 'bad experience' with could give me a panic attack and even suicidal thoughts. I have even had to hold in panic attacks on my way home from school because I dreaded to face the people inside my own house.

True fear makes you do terrible things. True fear can be tongue-tying, dreadful and can render you unable to speak or think or even move. It can render you utterly hopeless and defenseless, control your life and resonate in your every thought. It keeps you awake day and night and turn you into a completely different person. Fear is like a monster holding you so tight on the inside and the outside that you struggle to breathe.

This above example is just one of my anxieties. Other anxieties that I have are performance anxiety (which is probably in direct correlation with the above), I have slight claustrophobia due to locking myself up in a tiny messy bedroom for years, and I also have a fear for unexpected social situations, which probably also has something to do with the above. I also used to have an enormous fear of losing people I cared about, especially boyfriends. This was due to the fact that I had locked myself into a social confinement for years and desperately wanted to hold onto any social contact that I trusted, even if I still did not dare to truly confide in them. This usually rendered me completely dependant and there are many people who have abused that. But more on that in a later post.

I am able to speak about this much more openly now than I used to, and I don't get as many panic attacks anymore. I haven't had a true one for some time and I now only get close to it when I feel overstrung due to my ADD. I don't lie anymore either.
Over the past years I have managed to loosen the airtight grip fear used to have on me.
I still however have to deal with the consequences of this anxiety every day, which is usually the guilt part. I feel guilty that I am still not really able to handle criticism directed to me as a person. When I feel triggered I usually try to explain to the person what is happening inside my head; but I feel guilty and whiny for doing that because not being able to handle criticism is stupid, right? I'm doing my best to keep my head up high and continue my life, but I am not sure if the guilt is ever going to go away. I understand and recognize my thought patterns now and they have lessened a lot during the past few years because being able to see them from a different perspective can sometimes calm me down a bit internally. Even though I understand my thought patterns I am not always able to shut them out, which truly sucks sometimes. It is still very easy for me to fall back in those patterns of guilt and fear. I don't know if it will ever be truly gone, but I am working hard on it.

Dedicating my time to the things that I love help me deal with the bad stuff and give me something to brood and think about and look forward to instead of getting lost in thought spirals of guilt. Which is probably the reason that this blog is so full of things that I love. I am certainly going to continue to post about things I love, because I love them and I still firmly believe that dedicating your life to do the things you truly love and be aware of them is the absolute best cure for anxiety and depression, because they help you distract from the negative and focus on the positive.

I do not blame my family for what happened. They are good people and I love and care about them very much, probably more than anything in my life. They never meant to cause destruction in this way. This giant black hole in my puberty is the result of an enormous escalation that originated from misunderstanding one another. I have a really good relationship with my family since I moved out and there is some more distance between us. I have come out of the closet about my mental health issues and we have built up a wonderful relatonship of mutual understanding and trust.

I would advise to any parent to try to listen to your kids and be open to them. Try to recognize problematic behaviour and realise where it comes from instead of thinking of it as a result of laziness and arrogance, disobedience or simply puberty. And, I can't stress this enough: Listen. Understand. Empathise. Learn from each other. Understanding, believing in, taking care of and helping each other is the key to happiness; together with pursuing the things you love most in this world.

Love,

Jopie

Recipe: The most glorious savoury tofu scramble that will make even the most avid tofu hater's mouth water!

Since I have converted to veganism I have found my passion for cooking again. I love cooking and I love to experiment, and many people have been asking for recipes so I'd decided to post one once again. Sorry for the long title, I believe it was the only thing that really did it justice.

Sooo... tofu. I hated tofu. I have always hated it. I hate the texture and if it's badly prepared it will taste awful too. I could only eat it if it was well seasoned and marinated and chopped into tiny bits. Until I tried tofu scramble. It took me some time to perfect it but here it is! It's super easy too. I often make large batches and put them in the fridge so I can reheat it and have it for breakfast or lunch on a sandwich. Tofu scramble is very versatile. You can eat it in whatever way you want. Some of my favorite ways to eat it are with some toasted bread, or in a wrap, or with rice/pasta/bulgur/quinoa/whatever.

I have still got to feed this to my mum, who is an avid tofu hater (and meat eater) as well. I do hope she will like it, but I have shoven this into many people's faces already and they all loved it, so I'm definitely not afraid. The texture and taste of the tofu resembles that of scrambled egg. You can make it with any vegetables you want but today I'm talking about the specific one I made.

ANYWAY.

Recipe!

Needed for a pan full of goodness:
325g firm tofu, drained
4 small tomatoes or 3 big ones
half a broccoli
1 red bell pepper
a couple of sundried tomatoes
Mixed (roasted) nuts
1 block or 1 tablespoon of (powdered) vegetable stock
a small glass of water
A bunch of curry, cloves, nutmeg and herbs for seasoning.
Optional: nutritional yeast flakes for extra savoury goodness.


Heat up a frying pan on the stove (oil is not necessary). Scramble the firm tofu with your hands and put it in, together with the vegetable stock and glass of water. Season it with curry, cloves and a pinch of nutmeg. You should add the seasoning (but not the herbs!) first so the tofu can soak them up and become the delicous goodness that you want to stuff your mouth with.
Then chop the veggies. First, add the broccoli and the bell pepper while stirring. Then chop the tomatoes and the sundried tomatoes and add them too. I like sundried tomatoes because they have such an intense taste and basically taste good in everything. Lastly add the nuts, the herbs of your choice and the nutritional yeast and stir well.

If you add salad and some spelt baguette it should be looking something like this:

But of course, serve it with whatever you like!

Now go and stuff your face with it!


Love, Jopie :)

Happy Outfit: Alphonse Mucha

There I am, back from the dead! (?)
A lot has happened lately. Firstly I would like to announce that I got my official diagnosis for ADD! That's really good news because it means I will be eligible for several kinds of therapy and medication which will hopefully benefit my mental health a lot.
It also means that the beastie has a name (one that I have suspected for years but it's finally official) and it means that there are perfectly scientific explanations for what I experience and what is troubling me.
So, yay! Happy me!

It's also spring! That's amazing! I enjoy every flower I see, I bask in the sun and am sooo happy that the days are getting longer! Here's a picture of a flower I made because flowers make me happy:

Spring also means nice outfits! I just got this dress in a few days ago and it's amazing. I love it! I have been a fan of Alphonse Mucha for years and he is a huge inspiration to me. I visited his museum in Prague as well and I have his posters on my wall. So naturally I had to have it. It also has the La Trappistine print on it on the other side of the dress.

As you can see the leggings have the same print as the dress. They are also by Black Milk Clothing! The fabric is different though so the colouring is slightly off but I still think it looks nice together. It might be a fashion faux pas but I like it and that's good.

I also dyed my hair a more springy green. It came out a bit too yellowish but I'll fix that in the next dye.

My shoes are by Miss L Fire and my blouse and belt are vintage. I made the hair bow myself.

Love,

Jopie

Happy Places: Bagels and Beans

I still need to write about a buckload of things but I never seem to have the time and when I have I usually forget about it. I'm sorry for the silence! Here's a little post for in between since I'm working on editing my photos from Disneyland and want to write a huge post about it since I took a LOT of pictures, haha.
To begin here's a post with lots of instagram pictures of varying quality. I hope it doesn't bother you too much. If you are interested, my instagram is @ilovemyhappiness and I post a lot of happy stuff.

Anyway, I thought it would be time to write about one of my favorite places: Bagels and Beans!
For the people who don't know, Bagels and Beans is a Dutch lunchroom francise originating from Amsterdam, who, unsurprisingly, make really, really good bagels and coffee. But to me, it has become more than that.

For some reason I always find myself in Bagels and Beans if I need some cheering up. There's nearly always one in the neighborhood. The vibe and the environment just radiate happiness and more often than not I've found myself to sit in one of their lunchrooms all afternoon with a matcha latte or a bagel with avocado and hummus (yes, they are vegan friendly!) and my painting supplies. I have finished many paintings there and will probably finish many paintings to come. It's a very relaxing place to be and the decorations make me think of summer and warmth. Most of the lunchrooms also have a terrace which is awesome because painting outside is one of my favorite things.

I often get really fun and nice reactions from the staff when I'm painting and even though I do it all the time all around the city people still get surprised when I ask for a glass of water with my order and whip out my paint set. I have even painted with their coffee once! It creates very nice sepia paintings which smell lovely. The picture above was taken by one of the staff of a Bagels and Beans near my mom's house when I was painting because I wanted to do something comforting after having been to the GP who had stuck about 20 needles in my arm. Of course I ended up here.

This was what I was painting that day, by the way.

The only tiny downside is that their vegan options are limited. The staff is very friendly and willing to veganise your bagel and all of the coffees can be made with soya milk but they really only have one truly vegan bagel option on the menu and it's a bit dull compared to the rest (bagel with hummus and greens). It would be nice if they had more vegan options because they would automatically result in people eating less meat because non-vegan people would probably also order them. Their juices are obviously vegan too but their smoothies aren't. Aside from the tea, their only hot vegan drink is the Matcha Latte (pictured with my face :p).

Vegan food and drink needs to be widely available because it is awesome and not only truly cruelty free but far better for the environment as well. They are very concerned about the environment and try to work with as much organic products as possible, which is awesome, but plant based foods are so much more environmentally friendly than animal based foods!
 It is also a dream of mine that they stock a vegan hot chocolate (Oatly's oat chocolate milk is the best!! hint hint) so if they read this somehow, I hope they listen. :p

Love,
Jopie

Veganuary - my journey to becoming vegan

This January I decided to start with a little something called Veganuary - a challenge to eat vegan for the whole month of January. I eat a lot of vegan food but the step seemed too big to become a vegan, even though I always felt guilty for eating dairy or eggs. Since I'm all into trying new things I decided to take part in Veganuary. It's a british concept I believe, but is of course open to anyone who is interested.

Exactly 2 weeks in I decided that I am going to be a full time vegan. Eating vegan is not as hard as it seems and since we don't need animal products to survive (and thrive), what's the point in eating them when it causes unnecessary harm to billions of animals and there are perfectly good vegan substitutes for everything?

I am now a vegan for three weeks and a few days and I feel awesome. It is so great to have a choice to be able to eat guilt free - it is cheaper than eating omni and nearly everything you need can be bought in your local supermarket or made from ingredients that can be bought in your local supermarket. Lately I have been trying a lot of vegan substitutes for cheese and meat which can not always be bought in a supermarket but of course you don't have to. I just ate a vegan lasagne which tasted no different from the 'real deal'. For people who are concerned about my health: everything your body needs can be found in plants. Vegans do need to watch their iron and b12 levels but if you eat loads of leafy greens like fresh spinach or kale (or even regular apples) you don't have to worry about iron.
B12 isn't naturally found in plants but comes from our soil and can be derived from nutritional yeast or b12 fortified foods. I take a supplement about twice a week to make sure I don't get deficient.
I have the idea that I have been eating much healthier and much more unprocessed since I became a vegan and my body is loving it. I have loads of energy and I am losing a lot of weight that I had gained in the past months.

I am not only convinced that eating vegan is healthier for your body but it is certainly the best thing to do if you care about the environment (did you know that the livestock industry is responsible for more than half of the total greenhouse gas emission?) but is also the very best thing to do if you genuinely care about animals - if you agree with me that living breathing beings with emotions like love, fear, anger and happiness should not be exploited, enslaved, raped, tortured and murdered so we can have food that we don't actually need to survive.

I will of course extend my veganism by not buying any other products that are animal derived or tested on animals (except for necessary medicine).

I am so incredibly happy to have taken the plunge to say no to cruelty and to live happy and guilt free from now on.



Love,
Jopie

Lights in the Darkness

Finding nice things to do in these dark days is really wat keeps me going.
I had a wonderful midwinter celebration with the lovely ladies of Dance of Life.
I don't have any pictures of it as I thought that taking pictures in between all the time would distract me from the celebration itself, which was very intuitive, breathtaking and intense. I discovered a lot about myself and I laughed and cried and danced. It was beautiful.
Dance of Life did actually organise my first celebration and even though this was vastly different, they really have a knack for making me feel comfortable in a room full of strangers; which is quite an achievement. I usually feel very uneasy at parties and tend to avoid them because of that.

I'm not a fan of Christmas because I think its original purpose has been forgotten in the vast amounts of food ugly decorations and the hypocritical peace proclamations (why proclaim peace for a few days while you don't live it the rest of the year?) and I also don't like it for the fact that I'm not a christian and won't ever be. I know that most of the Christmas traditions derive from Yule/midwinter, which is a Pagan festivity that I do celebrate, but I don't like the Christian messages attached to it. Each to his own, I guess. However, Yule is all about the returning of the light and finding lights in the darkness, so that's what I want to talk about today!

Maybe it's that I'm now more aware of it this year compared to other years as I am more aware of the meaning of Yule and living it more, but it surprises me how many 'light' centered events and festivals there are in my surroundings; such as the Amsterdam Light Festival, New Years Eve with the fireworks and the China Light Festival in Utrecht. It makes me very happy to see this and I want to attend them all!

On Christmas Eve I had nothing to do so I went to the China Light Festival with my boyfriend. The China Light Festival takes place in the Botanical Gardens in Utrecht and consists of hundreds of light sculptures in various shapes and sizes - very beautiful! These are some of the pictures I took:

Afterwards, we went to visit the Utrecht city center to have dinner. It was almost surreal - there was no one on the streets at all! The city was beautifully lit though - more lights in the darkness!

The Dom tower was especially beautiful.

After looking for a restaurant for a long time (everything was closed because of Christmas unfortunately) we finally found the perfect place. The vegetarian food they cooked me was delicious. When I go out I rarely eat really good vegetarian food (most food is just a meat dish with the meat left out) but this was amazing. It was a lovely end to a romantic night out.

Love,

Jopie

Happy Things: my water colour set.

Hello there, it's been a while!

I've been incredibly busy with exams and other stuff, which is why I didn't really have time to write a new post. I still need to post something about Yule (winter solstice) as well, which I will do once I've done my personal ritual.

I've been shopping today. I needed some new colours for my water colour set. Water colours are my favorite medium. It allows me to pursue my perfectionism and when done properly gives a painting a luminous quality that you can't achieve with oils or acrylics.

My professional quality water colour set was gifted to me by my mother when I was 11. That means that I've been painting with this set for 13 years already! Every single one of my water colour paintings is made with this set. I have made hundreds, if not thousands of paintings with it.

If I didn't have it, I think that I probably would have been dead. This sounds a bit over dramatic but since painting was my sole refuge from my depression I think that if I didn't have that, I would have gone completely crazy and killed myself. 

I painted 3 to 5 paintings a week when I was in the deepest of my depression. I filled my days with it as painting was the only thing that could bring me a certain peace of mind. I still have all those paintings in boxes in the attic. To be honest most of them are not very good but I don't want to throw them away, just as I feel like I couldn't ever exchange this set for a brand new one. I once thought I lost it somewhere and I was devastated - when it turned up again I was over the moon!

When I came home with my refills I felt the urge to clean my set. I have never done that before as dried up watercolour paint can be re-used and I felt it to be a waste of paint. Needless to say, after 13 years of use it was pretty filthy. I couldn't scrub everything off and some of it is just rust but I am happy with how it looks now and I wanted to share with you the one thing that most probably saved my life. It is rusty and butched and battered, just like I am, but it is still alive, well and doing its job. Just like me!

Thank you, dear old rusty friend, for all these years that you have been there for me when nobody listened. I love you.

Love,

Jopie