On October 7, I made a plan for 10 activities for the 10th month and even though October included a storytelling festival, a week of rain, a week of being sick, and quite a bit of volunteer work, I still managed to do 8 out of 10 activities.
Here’s what got done:
Flail along with a Zumba dance video – Rating: BIG FUN.
Do a yoga video that is longer than 30 minutes – Rating: Hard to stick with it.
Do a meditation session that is longer than 10 minutes – Rating: No problem!
Do a strength training session with exercise bands – Rating: Enjoyable! I’m going to stick with it.
Write in my journal while on the floor – Rating: My body liked it.
Spend at least 20 minutes stretching – Rating: Loved it! I’ve made it a regular practice.
Try a kickboxing video – Rating: Pretty fun. I’ll do more.
Plant bulbs for next spring – Rating: Satisfying! I didn’t plan all of the bulbs but I did some and I’m happy about it.
I enjoyed all of these activities and I was really glad I chose them.
I was also really glad that I had the slight pressure of having publicly committed to them. Without that commitment, I might have let a few of them slide and that would have been a shame.
I really feel that pushing myself a little bit to get these things done added to my fun this month.
I actually did many of the exercise-related ones more than once and I have gotten back into leaving my yoga mat unfurled on the living room floor so I can stretch whenever I watch TV – a beneficial habit, for sure.
As for the ones I didn’t get done?
I’m happy to report that I don’t feel badly about those at all.
I may not have been able to…
Meet someone for a walk instead of for tea
Walk to a meeting
But that was because of circumstances, weather, and timing, it had nothing to do with my interest, willingness, or motivation. None of my meetings happened to be within walking distance and I ended up having to cancel my plans to meet for a walk instead of for tea because I was sick.
So with a satisfying success rate for 10 things for the 10th month, I’m now considering 11 things for the 11th month (a.k.a. My BIRTHDAY MONTH!)
There are some repeats in here but I’m cool with that.
Journal while sitting on the floor once a week
Practice those three tricky TKD patterns for at least 30 minutes (total)
Try a calisthenics video
Continue the stretch band strength training program from October
I know, I have probably already reminded you about this before.
And you probably already know that you are the boss of you.
But…
But…
If you are anything like me, there is a big difference in understanding it in theory and actually practicing it.
So let’s review it together…
You get to decide what’s important to your well-being.
You get to decide how to take good care of yourself.
You get to decide how you want to move, what you want to eat, whether you want to set goals, if you want to journal, whether meditation is right for you…
YOU are the BOSS of your life and you don’t have to do what’s trendy, you don’t have to be a certain size, eat a certain way, or take up any exercise or wellness practice that you don’t want to.
Sure, we all have different needs, different pressures, different capacities, different obligations, and different abilities and those things are going to factor into our decisions but one thing we can all be sure of is that we don’t need to do ANYTHING just because someone else thinks we should.
We don’t have to do any resets, any boot camps, any ‘disappear for 30 days and become unrecognizable’ *programs that people are peddling left right and centre.
You can do any and all of those things if you want to but if you don’t want to do them then you don’t have to.
Why?
Because YOU are the BOSS of YOU and your plan is your business.
So, Team, please join me in ignoring the very notion of a ‘should’ and let’s really get in to being the boss of ourselves.
It’s hard work but we can do it.
And here’s a gold star for our efforts!
Go Team Us!
A drawing of a gold star with concentric gold stars within it (is concentric just for circles? I have basically drawn smaller and smaller stars within one another.) The background is purple with red dots and is framed with black lines.
PS – Right now (9:40PM on Monday night) boss is telling me it’s time to get ready for bed. You know, I think it’s a good idea to listen to her – she seems to know me pretty well.
*I know they are speaking metaphorically but, yet, every time I see one of those ads, I think, “I don’t want to disappear for one day, let alone thirty. And being unrecognizable just seems weird.”
The other 20% of the time it was a screencap of the info from my fitness app. That was less inspiring (less interesting!) but it kept the habit in place.
I’m sure that was partially because of my injury but it was also because it felt like I was journaling for its own sake rather than for any actual benefit.
I was essentially keeping the habit in place but for no real reason so it’s no wonder the practice just kind of dropped off my to do list.
For the record, I’m not being hard on myself about this – I’m just noting what happened and I don’t feel bad about it at all.
BUT
I think it’s time to get back into the practice of reflecting on my fitness – what I did, how I felt, how I want to feel and what activities might help me to feel that way- and obviously a journal is the direct route to that kind of thinking.
I’m probably going to do some combination of a digital journal (so I can think aloud with voice dictation) and and paper journal that has lots of room for me to write, draw, and collage.
I’ve revisited my earlier posts and developed a series of questions to use as a guideline and I (once again) plan to review my previous entry when starting a new one (extra reflection? why not?)
AND since journaling often leads me to solutions I haven’t thought about before but I promptly forget them once I close my journal – I am going to keep some index cards nearby to pull workable ideas out of my journal pages to keep for easy reference.
My plan right now is to do some fitness journaling 3x per week (I think writing once per week was part of the problem before – too much to say in one entry so it became a chore) for 3 weeks and see how it feels.
And, of course, I will probably make adjustments as I go.
Do you journal about your fitness practices? Do you find it helpful? Do you have any advice to offer?
I always feel weird when an occasion or a season or an event has a ‘make the most of it’ vibe* and summer can have A LOT of that kind of pressure-y feeling.
I kind of want to just let the days unfold however they unfold but I know that my ADHD brain often tries to talk me out of some very fun things because the energy cost of starting them feels disproportionately high.
So I need a plan for my summer fun but I have to be careful with how I do it.
If I plan in detail, my brain could decide that either I have taken all of the fun out of things OR it could check them off as if I have already done them.
If my plan is too vague, then my brain might decide that the whole thing is too much trouble.
And, in either case, my brain might decide that the plan isn’t relevant at any given moment and tuck it away so effectively that I may forget it even existed.
Yes, every day *is* an adventure with ADHD and not always in a fun way.
I want to have a fun summer but I don’t want to get too rigid about what that entails – if perfectionism ends up in this equation my chances for fun will plummet – so I made a few zines to get myself thinking about the things I want to include in the next few weeks.
The questions in these zines have been inspired by all sorts of things – a video I watched the other day, posts from my friends, stuff from previous summers, the prompts that Sam posted for the blog team in June – you get the idea.
One zine is called ‘Move, Pause, Rest’ and has prompts to consider how I want to move (walks, swimming, hula hooping), how I want to pause (meditation, drawing, having tea with friends), and how I want to rest (reading in my hammock, taking naps, etc.)
Another is called ‘Passport to Fun’ and invites me to consider what I want to be sure to include in my summer. (Yes, snacks are one of the considerations.)
The final one (but it was the first one I drew) is called ‘Summer 2025: More & Less and it’s about what I want to do more of this summer and what (you guessed it!) I want to do less of.
Here’s what the zines (and Khalee!) look like from the outside:
Unlike me, Khalee has no immediate plans to fill out these zines. Image description: my dog, Khalee, a medium-sized, light-haired dog, is relaxing in the sun-dappled grass under a tree. My three black and white zines are placed on the grass in front of her.
And here is a link for you print the zines to fill out for yourself. (No actual pressure to do this, there won’t be a quiz or anything!) Summer Zines 2025
Please note: my zest for zines is far greater than my ability to fold and scan them in a tidy way. Let’s just say their imperfection is part of their charm, hey?
And if you are feeling kind of artsy at the moment, you could give the Index Card A Day challenge a whirl. They started on June 1 but it’s the kind of challenge that you can join at any time.
*Don’t even get me started on the whole ‘you only get 18 summers with your kid!’ business. If you find that stuff inspiring, forge ahead, but to me it has a lot of potential for sadness and regret.
Thanks to a whole bunch of massage therapy (Yay for Renee!) as well as a combination of rest, stretching, and curation of my activities, my neck and back are feeling a lot better than they were two months ago.
In fact, I spent the last week at the Storytellers of Canada- Conteurs du Canada conference in Halifax – plane rides, lifting stuff, sitting for long stretches of time during concerts, meetings, and performances, telling very animated stories during my workshops, sleeping in a dorm bed, and walking for long distances with a backpack – and I had very little trouble with my back or neck.
The view from my dorm room in Loyola Residence at St. Mary’s University – a very comfortable place to stay, by the way. Image description – a photo of the view from a window on the 19th floor of a building on a sunny day. We are looking down on several university buildings with lots of windows as well as the tops of a lot of deciduous trees with glimpses of buildings and houses here and there.
All of that has really convinced me that I’m ready to get back into more strenuous exercise on a regular basis.
I’ll be careful about it, of course. I don’t want to have any sort of avoidable setbacks and I think the key to avoiding trouble is to only take on activities that let me control the intensity and duration of my efforts.
Overall my capacity for exercise has slowly increased as my back and neck have been healing and I had noticed that walking the dog was feeling easier over time and my new habit of ‘walking to work’ has been very straightforward, exercise-wise.
Then, while I was away, I really enjoyed my long walks, even though they were sometimes difficult. I liked the purposeful feeling of striding* (sometimes ambling!) along to get where I was going and it felt good to be the kind of tired that comes from solid exercise.
I think that longer walks could be a good way to take things up a notch without wearing myself out and possibly putting my neck and back at risk.
Maybe I’ll start with 1 or 2 longer walks per week and see how that feels.
More reports as events warrant.
Image description: a photo of a white paper zine cover that says “The Stories We Wear (a workbook) Presented by Christine Hennebury at the SC-CC Annual Conference – Halifax, 2025” and is decorated with stars, spirals, and dots.
Yes, you’re right, it probably would have been better to share a photo of someone telling a story or of myself leading a workshop but I somehow didn’t take or request any of those – too caught up in the moment, I guess – but I am really proud of how the cover of this little workbook turned out so I am sharing that instead. Meanwhile, to be transparent about it, I couldn’t actually get to the photocopy place before it closed so my fun workbook is going out to the attendees after the workshop instead. During my workshop they answered the questions in their own notebooks.
*Meanwhile I suspect that part of the reason I enjoyed those walks so much was because I had moved walking from the ‘exercise’ category to the ‘transportation’ category in my brain so I’m going to see if I can make that happen in my regular life as well.
When I was in my 20s I was asked in a job interview (to be a casino table dealer) if I prefer various or repetitive tasks. I knew the best answer was: you say “both.”
But…turns out it’s not true: while some ppl take comfort in it, I struggle with repetition. I don’t usually take pleasure watching the same movies again and again. I get bored eating the same food. I have little interest in returning to the same vacation spots year after year.
That’s all fine. But when I pick up then drop exercise classes, sports leagues, or health routines, I can be critical of myself. It has become part of my self-story that I can’t make good habits. Some days, I even tell myself I am lazy; as evidence of my half-efforts to stick with stuff, I point to a closet of barely user gear.
Then, last week, someone I know described themselves as a novelty seeker. And I thought, hey, me too. ME. TOO.
Novelty seeker positively reframes all my negative self-talk. Recently, I went line dancing, I disc golfed, and I played scrimmage soccer in one week. I am taking up cycling in mid-life. I run around making things. Truly, rather than focus on one sport or type of exercise, I have always sought various ones.
Being a novelty seeker means that I trade off becoming really good at one or a few things by doing them over and over for the joy of experiencing many new things all the time. It means I am not less active, just differently active.
I still seriously admire all the people I know who run long distances, lift weights daily, or play pickleball 5 times a week. And I can appreciate that there is likely great variety within these activities that perhaps I don’t notice (because I haven’t stuck with them long enough).
Perhaps ultimately it is less about the number of favourite sports and activities we have and more about the mindset we bring to what we do. The idea of novelty-seeking works for me. What works for you?
Composite of multiple sports balls from Wikipedia is CC0.
Things are getting a bit easier in my brain and in my muscles and while it’s tempting to jump back into my regular routine, I am determined not to fall into that trap.
Instead, I am working bit by bit on creating more ease for myself in my day to day actions.
And, like the title says, creating ease isn’t easy.
This ease was actually fairly easy to create. Image description: a drawing of the word ‘ease.’ Each letter is capitalized and is a different colour (blue, yellow, purple, dark pink) and the background is all kind of overlapping sets of concentric circles.
Creating ease means doing gentle yoga and stretches, breathing deeply, relaxing when and how I can and, it means spending a lot of time and energy paying close attention to how I am moving, how I am sitting, how I work, and how I do a variety of tasks.
My ADHD brain is ok with the first few things but it is not a fan of the latter part of that list – in fact, even the thought of paying that kind of attention to those details is tiring.
But I do want to feel better. And I know that unless I make some adjustments, it’s going to be a) harder for my neck/back/shoulders to heal and b) I’m going to keep having some of the same issues over and over.
Right now, I am working on two things that I hope will prevent me from exacerbating my current issues AND will help me avoid some other issues in the future.
Here are my current practices:
1) Getting up and rolling my shoulders/doing a few neck stretches every 20 minutes or so.
I already like to use the repeat timer app throughout my work day so I have a better sense of time passing AND so I don’t feel like any given task is going to take forever. (I have given myself permission to change tasks whenever the timer goes off)
Now, I don’t just note that time is passing, I use the chime as a reminder to move and stretch. It’s not perfect – I sometimes inadvertently ignore the timer – but I definitely have a higher success rate than I would without it.
2) Practicing holding my head differently when I am drawing, writing, and using my phone.
Since a lot of my leisure time is spent doing one of those activities making this change will really help.
Instead of spending so much time with my head down and my neck jutting forward, I am taking Katy Bowman‘s advice about how to hold my neck:
A video called ‘Hold Your Head Better When Using Screens’ from the Nutritious Movement YouTube channel. The still image shows a woman in a purple shirt standing in profile holding a phone in her right hand and holding her left hand up to the back of her neck.
Since I can’t necessarily put my drawing/reading/writing in the same place I would hold a phone, I am also using the same movement to take breaks during my drawing/reading/writing sessions – here’s a demo in this Facebook video of hers from a few years ago.
Between these two movement elements things, the yoga, the massage therapy, and all of the being-careful-but-not-coddling-myself, I am hoping to keep inching towards more ease in my body – especially the muscles of my neck and upper back.
Creating ease isn’t easy but it will be totally worth the effort, right?
As I work towards healing the muscles in my back, neck, and shoulders, I need to do a certain amount of movement to keep the circulation up, to create ease, and to maintain mobility but I can’t do too much or I will end up hurting myself and have a setback.
How can I tell if I am doing enough or doing too much?
It’s a conundrum – there’s actually no way to tell, it’s something that everyone has to kind of figure out for themselves.
I hate that for me because I really have NO IDEA how hard I am working at any given time – even when I am not injured – so I can’t compare how I am moving now to how I moved last time (even if ‘last time’ was 5 minutes ago.)
I’m sure you can see how that makes it very challenging to take a ‘do what you can, evaluate, then make adjustments next time’ approach for this healing process.
I know a lot of people with ADHD mention having issues with this sort of thing – a lack of perception regarding our efforts – so it seems to be one of those challenges that everyone has but is often exacerbated by ADHD.
The whole ‘how much is enough/how much is too much’ is really an unanswerable question loop so I’m really just going to hope for the best.
Conundrum #2
I woke up on Sunday morning with the sort of panicky thoughts that usually only show up when I am having the sort of migraine that doesn’t involve any actual headache. I thought that was odd until I sat up, my stomach turned and I realized that I *was* having a migraine.
I took a migraine pill, slept for another few hours, and then felt pretty ok until about 9pm on Sunday night when I suddenly stressed myself out about something and my stomach turned again. Next thing, I was lying in bed with my migraine hat on , listening to cello music , putting an ice cube in my mouth, holding a hot water bottle to my stomach, and trying to find some ease.
Did I actually have the same migraine all day but the meds in the morning put it in the background? Or did getting stressed out bring on a new migraine? Or did a pre-existing migraine make me more vulnerable to getting suddenly stressed out and the stress just brought the symptoms to the foreground again?
Is there even any point in asking myself these questions?
Since I haven’t ever been able to reliably predict my migraines there’s probably no point in going through the thought-loop but it would take a lot of energy to stop myself so I might as well travel the loop until it burns itself out.
Conundrum #3
After my Sunday night migraine, my Monday self felt pretty lousy but I also had a bunch of tasks that I needed to do.
If I had felt any worse, I would have just taken to my bed like a Victorian lady and called it a day but I wasn’t that kind of sick. It was a ‘take it easy’ day, not a ‘grind to a halt’ day so, basically, I was in the same kind of loop as the ‘enough/too much’ question above except with work and rest.
Rest is important, obviously, but my day wouldn’t be very restful if I couldn’t put those tasks out of my head, especially since I knew people would be checking in with me about them. (I never want to risk getting extra email.)
The best answer would be to identify the most important tasks and work on those but that brings me to a different challenge:
Prioritization is extremely difficult for me under the best of circumstances and a day in which I am very tired and recovering from a migraine was not the best of circumstances – especially since my ADHD meds are less effective when I haven’t slept well.
And if my meds are less effective, it not only affects my ability to prioritize, it also affects my ability to concentrate on my work so I am going to be slower and less focused.
So, I basically spent a good chunk of Monday putting a lot of mental effort into my attempts to prioritize/cut back on my work for the day so I could rest.
Conundrum #4
As I got towards the end of my day, I discovered another conundrum:
Am I too tired/out of sorts to take Khalee for a walk or will taking Khalee for a walk actually make me feel better?
Luckily, I quickly figured out the correct answer for that one:
And about 5 minutes after we got home, it started to hail (just a little, but still!) so I was really glad that my ‘Will a walk help?’ loop was far shorter than the others.
Conundrum #5
My final loop of the day was ‘Do I feel up to writing a post for the blog? What am I going to write about? Should I write about this loopy day? Will anyone want to read about that? Am I just being self-indulgent and whiny?’
And maybe I am being self-indulgent and whiny but I also know that I often feel better when I read posts like this. When other people write posts like this they always remind me that I am not alone in my frustrations, and thought loops, and in my efforts to make my way out of ordinary, fairly low-stakes conundrums.
So perhaps today is my turn to do that for you.
It’s ok to get caught in conundrums – thought loops happen to everyone.
It’s ok to struggle to balance things and lots of us find it hard to figure out how to rest.
There’s nothing wrong with you if it feels like AllOfTheThings are in your way today.
Please be kind to yourself as you make your way along.
If you work in any field remotely related to health care in the US, each week brings with it a raft of new horrors and abominations. Last Monday, The Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) investigators were informed that the Department of Health and Human Services (led by Robert F. Kennedy) was cancelling their funding at the end of the fiscal year. By the way, their annual funding is just under $10 million a year, which represents a tiny fraction of US federal government spending on health programs and services– which in FY2024, was $1.9 trillion.
By Friday, however, an HHS spokesperson announced that there had been a reversal of cuts to WHI. HHS secretary RFK even called the Monday announcement “fake news”. However, WHI investigators have receipts, like this notice in the NIH reporter site.
But has the funding actually been restored? On the WHI government site header page as of Sunday April 27, we see this:
News crawl on the WHI page says “News: Reported reversal of WHI budget cuts remains unconfirmed.
While we catch our breaths here: What is the Women’s Health Initiative, and what research has it done? Glad you asked. Here’s info from this WHI site.
WHI was launched in 1991 to study the causes and prevention of heart disease, cancer, and other serious conditions. In the decades since, the WHI has made large strides in research on aging and heart health. The WHI has collected data from over 161,000 postmenopausal women from diverse backgrounds across the United States.
The WHI has three arms: (1) Clinical trials to study health effects of low-fat dietary modifications, hormone therapies, and calcium and Vitamin D supplements. These clinical trials are now complete, and the WHI has started an extension study to monitor the health of over 93,000 original participants. (2) An observational study to track medical histories or changes in health that might point to health problems. (3) A community prevention study to create programs that encourage women to eat healthy, exercise, and stop smoking.
The Women’s Health Initiative is the largest women’s health prevention study ever conducted.
Here’s what an article JAMA this week says about the WHI’s most wide-reaching research conclusions from their long-running randomized clinical trials.
For postmenopausal women, the WHI randomized clinical trials do not support menopausal hormone therapy to prevent cardiovascular disease or other chronic diseases.
Menopausal hormone therapy is appropriate to treat bothersome vasomotor symptoms among women in early menopause, without contraindications, who are interested in taking hormone therapy.
The WHI evidence does not support routine supplementation with calcium plus vitamin D for menopausal women to prevent fractures or a low-fat diet with increased fruits, vegetables, and grains to prevent breast or colorectal cancer.
A potential role of a low-fat dietary pattern in reducing breast cancer mortality, a secondary outcome, warrants further study.
Where does the WHI stand today, given that their main research trials have concluded? Garnet Anderson, a biostatistician who runs the WHI coordinating center, was quoted in this article in Science:
WHI currently enrolls 42,000 women, who update the researchers regularly on their health. The contract cut will prevent researchers at WHI’s four sites from continuing to interact with the women in this cohort, which has enabled researchers to create the country’s largest data set on women in their 80s and 90s. “Our ability to understand what’s going on with those women will be severely curtailed,” Anderson says. “They’ve been dedicated to this process for 30 years and provide their data generously. They’ve told us they want to be followed. It’d be disrespectful not to do that.”
Now, to the big question: why in the world would anyone cut this program, which costs peanuts and stands out as a shining example of the power of medical research to improve the lives of women worldwide? After all, 55 million people in the US and 1.1 billion people worldwide are post-menopausal women. The WHI is the main research instrument used to investigate women’s aging and health conditions like cardiovascular disease.
My answer is this: there is no rhyme or reason to be found in the Trump administration’s deadly flailings-about, crashing programs, repairing some, promising restoration to others, and with no accountability on follow-through.
Take a look here at this article by STAT on “Day by day, Trump is roiling science and health”. You’ll see a chaotic and destructive pattern of cancelling programs for women, poor people, LGBTQ populations, health monitoring and international cooperation, and basic medical research. Some programs have been told that their funding would be restored, but we don’t know when or if or how that would happen.
This CNN article offers a bigger-picture view of the breadth of harms being imposed by the Trump administration’s attacks on health prevention and research programs. No state, however red it may be, is protected by these program cancellations. Health needs transcend politics, and we are starting to see the responses from health workers and patient groups all over the US.
Speaking out, following up, writing, signing, marching, donating, holding officials accountable, making people uncomfortable– it’s having effects, however small so far.
One thought that is making me smile: the idea of some percentage of those 55 million post-menopausal women marching, going on strike, taking to the airwaves and social media, reminding the administration and all their collaborators that we are out and about, taking names, organizing and voting.
My heart is not completely broken, but it definitely needs repairs. Back in January, I got what turned out to be bronchitis and eventually made the unusual (for me) decision to check in with my doctor. He heard a murmur and sent me off for tests.
Two echocardiograms and EKGs later, plus some bloodwork and a referral to the Heart Institute, it appears I have a severe murmur from a damaged mitral valve and it looks like I will need surgery to either repair or replace it.
The whole experience has been interesting. It turns out I am really bad at noticing (or admitting to) changes in my health. Also, answering subjective questions is hard! Do I feel tired? Breathless? Have swelling in my legs?
Answers: Compared to what? Under what conditions? How much do I take into account pre-existing things like the varicose veins I have had since I was a teenager?
Since being diagnosed I am noticing symptoms but again, I have questions: am I getting worse? Or allowing myself to notice what I have been ignoring for years? Or is it all psychosomatic?
The good news is that I am being encouraged to keep up my regular fitness routine. That surprised me, but the doctor says that cardio is actually good for my heart because my heart plumps blood out to my extremities, thus reducing the pressure on the heart muscle itself.
So for now I’ll keep up with my swimming and dance, and get back to cycling. Plus I am doing more walking – easy to stop if I get tired, and no worries about trying to keep up with a group.
There will be more tests at the end of May, and hopefully some decisions shortly thereafter. The pool where I work is closing for six months so I don’t need to worry about missing work if I get scheduled for surgery soon. I do worry about whether I will be able to return at all. That would be heartbreaking.
In the meantime, I’m going to try not to borrow trouble, and spend time with friends and family.
My son and daughter-in-law with my grandson when we were out for a walk last week.
