Why I Stopped Using Tiimo

The short answer: Tiimo delivers exactly what it promises, and it still didn’t work for me.

The scheduling app Tiimo, popular in neurodivergent circles, serves to automate a schedule. Input an event or task, and at the appointed time Tiimo will send you a notification about what’s next on your list. It’s intended for children who really need a routine, but I’m 30 and I gave it a try.

Problem 1:

The first problem, which I mentioned in my original review of Tiimo, is that it’s too complex to input events and tasks. The learning curve is steep, but even once you have it largely figured out, the customizations are so endless that it takes too much time to input even something basic. There are color-coding options and icon options and repetition options and routine options and it quickly becomes too much. Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing to have all that customizability— it’s just too much for regular use.

Problem 2:

I never stuck to the routines I set up and it began to get frustrating. This is another thing I mentioned in my original review— I never followed my routine exactly, and it began to weigh heavy on my mind that I was supposed to be doing dishes while I finished up a book chapter, or if I went to bed a few minutes late.

For a while, I tried only inputting things that couldn’t be negotiated (like work and doctors’ appointments) but then it’s no different than Google Calendar.

I haven’t been using Tiimo for awhile, because I’ve switched to a points system to manage my days, but I’d be interested to know what other neurodivergent adults think of it! Please let me know in the comments below!

Thoughts on My Will (With a Capital W)

My psychodynamic therapy journey has focused a lot on my Will. Will is defined, by my therapist, as what I want, but in a way that truly benefits me. It’s not just doing whatever I feel like; it’s doing what’s best for me personally and what matches my true self.

Through a process of questioning, we came to the hard-to-hear conclusion that most of the things that I do, I do to please my abusers. Of course, I don’t do everything my parents would want, to the letter. (After all, I am transgender– my parents are definitely weird about that.)

But yes, this includes my getting better journey. I go to therapy and try my damnedest because I know my parents want me to be more functional and “normal.” (But what kind of a goal is that?)

After therapy, I was given the homework of listening to my body for when it says “yes” to something. It doesn’t happen super often, and my “no” is much louder, but it did happen a few times over the course of the week.

One of the rather strange things I discovered is that I want to do witchcraft relating to bees. I love bees, guys!

This whole thing is actually great news to me. Now that I’ve realized I do so many things in service to my parents, I can start figuring out what I truly want. I am excited to discover more about myself!

On Turning 30

To be honest, my twenties sucked.

Sometimes, getting out of a shitty environment can be “out of the frying pan and into the fire.” I started out the decade in a four-year-long abusive relationship. Then I moved back home to finish my undergrad degree, where I was also abused by my parents. I started a freelance writing career which was absolutely awful (more about that in this post) and, to get out of my parents’ house, started a situation-ship and moved in with him into a dilapidated church owned by my abuser’s best friend. We went through -11 degree winters with no heat. I continued to try to make a freelance writing career happen, even though I spent most of my time apologizing to clients for handing work in late because I couldn’t make my brain behave. I did sex work despite my history of sexual abuse. And for ten years after I came out as a transgender man, I made no progress in my medical transition.

I have small pangs of regret sometimes when I think about my twenties, as if I had wasted a decade, but my thirties are so far a vast improvement. My environment is much healthier, but more importantly, my brain is much healthier. Nothing is ever perfect, and it would be a waste of time trying to make it that way, but I am surrounded by people who care about me, even if they’re struggling too. My rented house has central heating, and central air conditioning as well. I have a job with a steady schedule, which helps me immensely, and I have plans to go to grad school in the same field and get started with a career I can be proud of. I started testosterone, and I’m working on getting top surgery. Probably most importantly, I have found a therapist who has actually helped me improve.

My knees don’t work, and I still can’t drive, but I am much happier.

April 2023 State of the Blog

When I started this blog, I intended it to be focused on improving one’s mental health. I had a lot to say on the subject. I am an intellectual-izer (I made that word up just now) and, once diagnosed in my twenties with Major Depression and PTSD, had made it my life’s mission to learn about the mental illnesses that plagued me and stopped me from living the life I wanted. I became an armchair expert, which I will not discount— I don’t generally think a lack of formal education makes one’s expertise invalid, after all.

But recently, in my journeys with psychodynamic therapy and actually improving from my treatment for the first time, I have realized that I don’t actually know all that much about mental health. This Beginner’s Mind (or Socratean realization that I only know that I know nothing) has helped me make strides in my recovery by reminding me not to be set in my ways. Knowledge is not necessarily wisdom, and knowing the difference between dopamine and serotonin did not make me any happier or more functional. Obviously, despite all my research, I still had a lot to learn, and I want this blog to reflect that.

From now on, this blog will be loosely themed around becoming a better person. There will still be poems and book reviews and other musings and anything I feel like publishing (tbh), but I have decided I want to take the “meat and potatoes” of the blog in a new direction. There will probably still be a lot of stuff about mental and emotional health, but I also want to write about stuff like:

• social justice (especially transgender issues)
• being your true, authentic self
• learning (both formally and informally)
• anti-capitalist ethics and leftism
• setting and achieving goals
• healthy masculinity and what it means to be a man
• healthy relationships (especially polyamory)
• getting organized (especially Bullet Journaling)

On to my credentials: I have none. I am not a psychologist, psychiatrist, or therapist. I am not an influencer or a wildly successful business owner. I am just someone who has struggled to improve himself over the course of about 10 years.

A note on money: My job doesn’t pay all that well, but I make enough to survive. Write Mind will never involve affiliate marketing, selling ads, or upselling (beyond basic SEO to get my words seen by people who could use them). The point of Write Mind is not to make money. Any money I make will be from Patreon, in which subscribers can contribute donations freely and without coercion. If I make any resources or downloads, they will be free for anyone to use and not require an email list sign-up. If you appreciate my content and would like to be someone who helps me out, I’d love that!

If you’d like to be part of my journey, please stick around to read more!

Review: Lavender House

Title: Lavender HouseAuthor: Lev AC RosenPublished: 2022Summary: The year is 1952, and Andy is a recently disgraced investigator on the San Francisco police force. Despite the rollicking local queer scene, Andy has never been able to be out and proud, and instead used his insider knowledge to avoid the clubs getting busted by his colleagues. His secret finally catches up to him, so he decides to get drunk enough to throw himself into the bay when he is approached by a woman named Pearl. Pearl knows his secret and wants to hire him to investigate the death of her wife, Irene.What I Liked:

• When talking about this book, I described it as a “gay murder mystery.” Several times, I got asked if the detective was gay or if the suspects were gay. The answer is: both. Almost every single person in the entire book is queer, which is the opposite of tokenism and I am here for it.The ending was absolutely perfect. I won’t spoil it, but I felt it wrapped up the themes in a satisfying way.I am against what I call “copaganda,” or the insistence on painting the police as heroes in fiction. Despite the main character being a former police detective, he is regularly forced to confront the evils of the system he upheld, and I really appreciated that.

What I Didn’t Like:

• The only thing I didn’t like was the inclusion of some hate-crimey violence. It was very explicit and felt unnecessary, a harsh reality that intruded on an otherwise relatively cozy story.

Rating: 4/5.I’m not rating it a full 5 stars because it isn’t one of my favorite books of all time, but it is extremely solid, and queer people who like murder mysteries better than I do should definitely pick it up.

Self Care as Bowling Bumpers

The other day in therapy I came across a metaphor.

Doing self care (like eating regularly, staying hydrated, taking your meds on time, and resting) is like having the bumpers up when you’re bowling. If you go off course and bounce a little, it’s not a big deal.

I used to wait so long to eat that I was incapable of preparing something, so I would sit on the kitchen floor and cry until someone came across me and rescued me by making me a sandwich.

Now, if I wait a little too long to eat, the rest of my self care shores me up and I am capable of making myself something (or asking for help).

Doing the absolute most to take care of yourself will pay off in the moments that you falter.

Untitled (11/17/22)

every day is another pill.
i collect them in a jar,
until it’s overflowing.

every day is another step
in the snow. i can barely see
the house where i started.

inside my chest, my joy
stretches and yawns
and gets comfortable.

my dad

near bedtime, very often and for years now, i get this unnameable WANT

it’s not h*rny of any variety and it’s not chocolate (which is what i always try first lol) (because it’s what my ex would feed me every time i had a ptsd nightmare)

but i think i figured it out? i think it’s cinnamon sugar toast, which my dad would make for me when I couldn’t sleep.

when i was a kid my dad was a really bad insomniac, getting about 30 minutes of sleep a night, and so if i wandered out of my shared bedroom in our tiny house he would be there in the garage, chainsmoking and watching cartoons.

(there are certain key phrases, ive found, that can activate even non-caretaking types into caretaking mode. for my dad, it’s “I can’t sleep.”)

he insisted, at all times of day, that the worst thing you could do for insomnia was lay around. he advocated for flipping your pillow and switching your head to the other end of the bed, and if that didn’t work, he would say the next step is to get out of bed and do something to tire yourself out.

when i whined “dad, I can’t sleep!” he would jump into action, using his rusty diner prep cook skills to make perfect toast with margarine (always margarine in our house). i would grab my star trek novel collection, which was a fat purple book with transcriptions of the episodes. i would read and munch until i was frankly bored to tears by the blow by blow account of the episode Charlie X, and i would then go to bed and finally be able to sleep.

as i transition, i think more and more about what it means to be a man, and what it meant and means to my dad. i wonder if we all become our parents in the end, and which parent I’m going to end up as. i think a lot about laying in bed at age 12 wishing for a “sex change” and then deciding i was going to stop thinking about it because there was no way my parents could afford it. i think about age 9 begging to be allowed to shave my head, and my dad saying he doesn’t want to look at anyone’s knobbly scalp, regardless of gender. i think a lot about how my mom insists she doesn’t snore.

when people have emotions around my dad, he is instantly bewildered. you can see it in the way his eyes widen into circles. he wants to fix you like you’re leaking oil. sometimes this comes in the form of an explosion, the impulse to beat you back into line. other times he is practically begging you to stop. but no matter what, he is absolutely appalled by any show of feeling.

im not like that, am i? when people have emotions around me, do i just wish for it to stop? am i a safe person to cry to? am i a safe person to slam doors around? do i laugh and joke and do a little jig to avoid anything, anything that might smack of strife?

i am my dad, but shorter. i am my dad but ive been r*ped. i am my dad but with the knowledge that my perspective isn’t always the truth. i am just a man, with hands.

this = reality

i.

i found it washing dishes
after sharing supper. i am not
a biographer. i am not
a biographer.

i am just a man, with hands.
the kind that put themselves to work
tearing trinkets off my skin.
i am just a man, with skin.

i have visions of future kitchens,
warm and full.

ii.

    this is socks in bed and a lazy eye.
this is the alchemy of the interrogative. this is
every millimeter of eyelashes and
the seashell curl of a lip. this is pouring jaegermeister
and three day warm cider
into cheap sweet wine and
sharing it.

    this is a dropout genius allotting 25 IQ points to crime
at all times. this is warm skin
and depth perception. this is knowing
death in your cells, and with your hands,
and on your mouth.

    this is cutting potatoes in your palm. this is
an obsession with neurochemistry. this is nightmares.

iii. 

what is in the folds of your brain
is not belly button lint. what leaks out of you
is not shameful. you are not
a wide-eyed deer.
you are not
a place to plant a flag. you are not
a work horse.
learn what it feels like.

you exist.
you exist.
you exist.

Mother

i. fifteen months

my brother, head too wide for thin hips,
had been extracted with a scalpel. the new nurse
pressed the afterbirth out of her belly and
she screamed. i screamed longer.

ii. eight years

i smoothed my brother's hair while i held him
alone on grandmother's stained couch and told him
mom wasn't dead, just blown up
like a red balloon, tongue swollen into silence.
i thought i was lying.

iii. sixteen years

when she couldn't carry her own spine,
i held her purse and followed her rented scooter
through the grocery store. she
backed beeping into the fresh pie display
and, jointly splashed with raspberries,
we exploded in laughter.

iv. twenty-one years

bracing one foot against the porcelain,
i fished my mother out of the bathtub
when she had taken one pill too many and

her blood had split apart. she
was coated in spilled shampoo
but i tucked her into bed
and talked to her about the attractive weatherman
on channel thirteen news, until she asked
to be helped outside for a cigarette.