The Curiosity Chronicles

This episode is ALL over the place. JUST HEADS UP

So if you don’t want to hear me ramble all over the place, which I totes understand, I’d skip this one lol or if you want to skim the transcript or just read it, it is below :)

Love you all!

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Okay, welcome back to the second episode of the Curiosity Chronicles.

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I just wanted to let you know that I already have two guests lined up to talk to,

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and those will come after I do a,

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like,

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I'm going to do a periodical or a chronicle,

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I guess,

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in decades of my life.

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It'll be a three-part series, and this is going to be part one.

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So we're going to talk about zero to ten.

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Woo-hoo!

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I don't know if anyone else is actually curious about my life, but whatever.

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I don't care.

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I like talking.

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So, and yes, I use I don't care, whatever, as a wall sometimes.

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It is what it is.

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Anyway, okay.

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So I was born in Texas, lived in America my whole life.

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I was born in Texas and then I lived in Kansas for the first 12 years of my life, I think.

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So from zero to 10, I was in Kansas most of that time.

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And we moved around until I was like five because my parents were really young.

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My dad was 19.

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Mom was 21.

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This is cool.

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I really like saying this.

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She graduated when I was three months old.

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So she graduated with her bachelor's when I was three months old.

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So that's pretty cool.

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But anyway, anyway, anyway, the house I grew up in,

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for the first few years of my life from five to 12,

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I already discussed that,

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is probably one of the best houses I've ever lived in.

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And it was such a good place for me to grow up.

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We grew up in this little quaint neighborhood in the middle of Kansas and

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technically Northeast,

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but it was in the middle of the city.

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I was super close to my school and there was like tons and tons and tons of kids on my block.

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But what's interesting is I was, am a very social person.

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Now, socializing exhausts me like 15 times more than it used to.

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But I've always been a very social person and I genuinely enjoy talking to people.

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That's why I'm doing this podcast.

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And that was a challenge because I was an only child.

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And not only was I an only child,

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all the kids on my block were much younger than me,

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except for one person across the street.

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And she was very mean to me all the time.

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But I still played with her because I had no one else to play with.

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And she had a trampoline.

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What's funny is we're still friends to this day.

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And like once she became an adult, she became a really chill person.

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And I like her now.

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But she was just a typical kid.

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She was a brat.

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She was mean, you know.

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But I didn't get to see her all the time.

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Because her parents were divorced and she went back and forth from her parents and

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her schedule was all kinds of weird.

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So ironically, her mom used to have to drive her across town to go to school.

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And that's what I have to do with my kid.

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Anyway, I spent a lot of my time alone.

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And one of the things that I have found the most challenging about raising children

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is I don't remember playing pretend at all.

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from five to 10, which is really what I remember the most.

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I spent a majority of my time either in an activity at school,

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in my room,

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listening to music or playing outside.

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Like I know my parents,

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like,

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well,

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really my dad played games with me and stuff every now and then,

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but,

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and I watched a little TV,

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but I've never really been a big TV person,

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like really ever.

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Um,

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and especially back then,

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I think I would watch the Disney channel every now and then by the time I was seven,

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we didn't have cable anymore.

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Um, and if I wasn't with them, I was with my grandfather.

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Now this is an important detail because my grandfather,

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my mom's dad was a huge,

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huge influence in my life.

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I'm actually going to post the eulogy I wrote for him because,

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well,

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he's just fucking amazing and I miss him a lot,

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but

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when I was, wasn't at home, I was with him at his house.

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So I grew up just tagging along with him and it was just one of the coolest things ever.

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We would go to the recycling place together and he wasn't able-bodied.

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Um, he had polio when he was 12 years old.

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So it paralyzed his diaphragm after being in the iron lung for quite a while.

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And so he, as he got older, the more parts of him degenerated, um,

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And I mean, that's part of post polio syndrome.

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That's why he had to stop being a psychiatrist, actually.

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But so because he was an abled body, I was his body for him.

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And so I would.

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you know, help him with errands.

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We'd go to the grocery store and I would push the cart or put things in his scooter.

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And he is the reason why I love music the way I do.

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He is the reason why I love to bake and love to cook and love to read and love to explore.

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He was such a curious person.

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This man literally came from his dad was a doctor and his mom was a nurse.

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And but his dad was also an engineer, I think, too.

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And my grandpa wanted to be an engineer.

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He

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graduated with an engineering degree and started working for GM,

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realized he was too much of a social butterfly to work with engineers.

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So he decided, oh, I'll just go to medical school.

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Yeah, let's just go to medical school.

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What?

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What?

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But that was the type of person he was.

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And so he went to medical school.

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And because of his challenges physically, there was a lot of things he couldn't do.

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But he ended up settling on psychiatry and he was a fantastic psychiatrist.

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And I loved visiting him when I was super, super little.

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And until he retired, I think when I was six or seven was when he retired.

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He had a voicemail of me

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calling and telling him I love him.

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And I just wanted to say hi, which is just so precious to me.

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Um, but anyway, I digressed.

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I would spend most of my time with him.

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Um, and he taught me to bake and cook and I cooked with my mom too.

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She also taught me how to cook,

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but we would,

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my grandpa and I would spend hours and hours and hours trying to perfect a French bread.

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And we never did literally never.

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Um,

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He is the one who really pushed me to work with computers more.

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He was very tech savvy.

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So from five to 10, it was really just me being a kid, but I was alone a lot.

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And that was really challenging as someone who is social.

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And so I would spend a lot of time outside singing.

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I would spend a lot of time in my room singing.

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I now understand as an adult that singing is actually one of my biggest forms of

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stemming for my whatever I have.

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And when I don't get to, that's when all the anxiety starts to build up.

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It's super fun.

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Not really.

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But...

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because I had nothing else to do.

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And but I don't remember pretending.

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I don't remember playing pretend.

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I vaguely remember making mud pies when I was like seven in my backyard,

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but I was just making mud pies to make mud pies.

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I wasn't giving them to anyone.

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I don't remember playing kitchen or house or anything like that in school or with my friends.

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Like when I would go to a friend's house, it was usually we were doing something.

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We were

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making up a dance or jumping on the trampoline or swinging on the swings.

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Like, I was never a kid who pretended.

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And so now, as an adult with children who love to pretend, my daughters have crazy imaginations.

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And apparently I did too, but I don't remember any of this.

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Apparently I had an imaginary friend when I was four.

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I made up a whole story about a brother that didn't exist.

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Um...

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to my preschool teachers and my mom was like nope nope she most definitely does not

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have a brother um so I did have an imagination at one point in my life but

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somewhere along the lines it disappeared and I am really curious as to what caused

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it to disappear what happened in my life where my brain was like oh we're gonna

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shut down we're not doing this anymore I do wonder

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if it happened around six, that was when I noticed my brain changed a lot.

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And after I wrote it all out, that was when I developed PANDAS.

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And my mom knew that this was a possibility.

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She just never really pursued any diagnoses because she felt like it didn't change anything.

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I think it would have changed something because I really would have loved to have

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help with the OCD at a much younger age.

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I probably would not have developed the OCD

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an emetophobia, whatever fear of vomiting is, uh, or fear of vomit.

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But anyway, that was when OCD really became a huge prominent problem in my brain.

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Um,

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And I, my, most of my day was consumed with this.

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And that was when song lyrics started popping up in my head.

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And this was when the,

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it was when I was seven years old was when my eating disorder became a star person.

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That bitch became a star inside of my brain.

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She was like fucking happiness from inside out.

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That's not her joy.

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Her name was joy.

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There we go.

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Instead of joy being joy.

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My front and center person, the eating disorder, was my front and center person.

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And her co-pilot was fucking OCD.

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And so it was either constant loops of songs playing in my head or conversations

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playing again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

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Or it was me looking at everybody, seeing how skinny they were, me thinking that I'm fat.

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It's so comical looking back because, like, guys, I was –

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underweight and under height for years.

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I did not become quote unquote normal until I was 14.

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So for me to think that I was fat or overweight or chunky or anything like that is

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absolutely insane to me because it literally wasn't a thing.

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Like I wasn't, I was not fat, not even possible.

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Like I was in the 10 percentile of weight for my age.

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And so I remember feeling these feelings.

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And I remember thinking these thoughts.

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And in fourth grade, I remember telling my dad that I thought I was fat.

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And he didn't even know what to do with that.

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I was crying.

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I was yelling.

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I've always been a yeller.

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I'm a loud person.

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It's a quality I'm working on.

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But I was crying and I don't even know why I brought up that I was fat.

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I'm assuming I was probably having some hormones course through me at that point in time.

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But I told him I was fat and he just looked so dumbfounded because he didn't even

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understand how I could come to that conclusion.

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But here's the thing.

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I grew up with a mom and grandparents who were extremely fat phobic.

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And then I was a gymnast.

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I started gymnastics at two and I did not leave the gymnastics world until I was 13.

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And so...

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you know,

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most of my prominent coming of age age was spent in a gym where everybody around me

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is skinny and no one has Buddha bellies.

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I didn't realize no one,

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no one told me,

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I wish someone would have told me,

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Hey,

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your stomach sticks out like that because you have a really short torso and you're

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too short right now.

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Like it'll get better as you grow.

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I just don't have a long torso.

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So all my intestines and organs and shit don't have as much space.

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I learned that while pregnant, it was terrible.

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Um,

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But there's all these things that I think my life would have been a little bit

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different had I learned to talk to people,

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had I had a family who talked about things.

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I don't blame my parents, but they are very emotionally immature people.

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They're better now than they were 15 years ago, but they're still pretty rough.

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But I wasn't even taught how to have those kinds of discussions.

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So I...

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I just didn't think it was okay.

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And showing emotions was a little strange in my house.

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And so I just didn't.

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And I just assumed that everybody else thought like this too,

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because I grew up in around people who are like,

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pay attention to your weight,

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suck it in,

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pull your shoulders back,

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you know,

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just all of that kind of stuff.

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And in like, my mom was an ingredient mom, if you know what that means.

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Um,

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and I remember her doing the South Beach diet and going to Jazzercise and all of

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these different things.

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And it just was never somewhere that felt safe to even think about that kind of stuff.

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And I just assumed everybody was worried about being fat.

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No, that's not true.

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That happened when I got curious about eating disorders.

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Um,

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To this day, it's still something I struggle with.

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Now, it's significantly better than it was five years ago, 10 years ago.

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I'm eating more than 1,200 calories a day.

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I'm not exercising an obsessive amount.

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I still struggle.

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And it's still a huge work in progress for me.

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But it does not bring in the physical sensations as much as it used to.

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When I was younger, I remember closing my eyes when I would go to bed and

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It would feel like I had these giant, fuzzy, poofy walls closing in on me.

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And it was almost like internally, like my brain was getting fat, which doesn't even make any sense.

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But in my mind's eye, that's what was happening.

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And so it made it really difficult to sleep.

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And that was when the singing myself to sleep thing started,

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which then gave me twinkle,

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twinkle little star stuck in my head all the fucking time.

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Um, but that was just one little, little tiny part of me.

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I think I need to redo this whole episode with a guide because I feel like there

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was no direction with anything I just talked about and my computer's about to die

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and we're 15 minutes in and I don't want to do long podcasts.

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I really don't.

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That's just not my thing.

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And I got to be careful because I can talk and talk and talk and talk and talk.

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Um, again, I'm sober.

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Uh, which is very new for me.

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Um, yeah, but I think I'm still going to put this one out there.

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I'm just not going to title it all about me part one.

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Uh, cause I just went everywhere with this.

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Maybe I should call this the diary podcast where I just talk or the just talk.

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I don't know.

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Um,

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I'm just going off on random things here.

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But I'm going to read, I'm going to think some more about how I'm going to structure these things.

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And I'm going to try to do a better job with my structure and staying on topic with the next one.

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And I'm going to write myself a little like, what are those called?

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Outline.

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There we go.

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Write myself a little outline so I can actually know what I'm talking about.

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I like to just go and do things and it doesn't always work out for me.

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So I'm going to try to work on them.

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Okay, bye.