Let’s talk about hard things!

It is going to take me a minute to get to my point so hang in there, there’s gonna be period talk first but not like gross-gross period talk.

I have ALWAYS been one to discuss my flow because I feel like it is something that SHOULD be discussed – it is natural. I mean, half of the world experiences a menstrual cycle at some point. However, what we don’t realize is that so many women are NOT experiencing “normal” cycles. Also, with my medical history, more people have investigated my uterus than I can actually count so any “shame” I would have about it flew out the window years ago.

I have had PROBLEMS ever since Aunt Flo first made her initial stop to visit me back when I was 11.

Side note, I started my flow on my grandmother’s watch and that alone was the worst thing ever.

I used to miss school all the time because my period was a monster but back then the doctors were quick to dismiss my issues as “dramatics.” I will never forget the 3rd doctor I was taken to see and she said to me, “Honey, you need to suck it up. We all have pain. You are costing your parents money.” I remember being so deflated because I could not accept that this amount of pain and the basically never ending cycle was what I was going to experience the rest of my reproductive life. Thankfully my mom took up the battle for me- she wasn’t going to stop until we had REAL answers.

My teenage years were pretty awful and I was so depressed and in a lot of pain. I was taking birth control that was so strong I had morning sickness. My classmates made me feel like I was a misfit for missing so much school due to being “sick” (because back then you couldn’t tell people that you had a period from Hell as that would be inappropriate to discuss). And, so, for years my parents had me on all the “typical” antidepressants such as, Paxil, Zoloft, and Effexor to help me “adjust” to my fate.

My 20’s were spent trying to get control of my now surgically diagnosed Endometriosis and PCOS. I was blessed to have one child and then suffered miscarriage after miscarriage and underwent unsuccessful fertility treatment twice.

Looking back now I feel like EVERYTHING is related in one way or another. I believe my Endometriosis, PCOS, Infertility, Miscarriages and Autoimmune Disease are all connected. In fact, we know Endometriosis and Autoimmune Diseases are both based in inflammation. However, that is a post for another day.

My Endometriosis is largely “under control” in comparison to how it used to be. I have had many scrapings, D&C’s, and ablations and I have just learned to deal with the pain. I have found some relief when using CBD both topically and orally as opposed to abusing Advil and Tramadol. My PCOS is always going to be a struggle – especially with weight.

My periods, on the other hand, are still fucking awful and I will paint no picture to the contrary. In fact, the only picture one could invoke would be a crime scene. You know, I use to get so mad at the inspirational messages on my pads, “Have a happy period.” Have a happy period?! TF are you talking about pad? I am bleeding like someone severed my femoral artery while my uterus has my soul in a death grip during a lightening storm inside my body and I still have to do everything I am supposed to do in a day. Fuck you and your “happy” periods, just let me be in my misery. I would almost rather have my pad tell me a fun fact like a Snapple cap or give me a a tip on how to get blood out of my good undies because my period showed up early (btw, hydrogen peroxide works great).

You see, a period like the above is NOT NORMAL but to someone who has Endometriosis- I just hit the nail on the head!

And here it is, the point behind this post!

We need to talk about hard things.

Ladies People, don’t take things at face value. If you feel something is wrong seek clarity and if you feel like a diagnosis is wrong, get a second test done or see a new doctor. For the most part, I believe that doctors do genuinely want to help most of the time BUT a lot of them rely on text books and if you don’t fit a text book (i.e., an 11 year old girl with severe endometriosis or a 34 year old female that shows symptoms for a very rare autoimmune disease that doesn’t typically hit until the late 50’s) the doctors are going to be baffled because a lot of doctors have to operate within the guidelines of their license and the medical boards that they answer to.

I don’t do these posts because I like the attention. In fact, I often want to sign off of the internet for days until the posts blow over because it is hard to put it all out there. I don’t think it will ever get easier for me. But I will tell you this, the more I post about the hard things the more people come to me and say, “This is me too- because of your posts I saw a doctor and I am feeling so much better now” or “I have RA and wanted to take less of my medications and my doctor approved your CBD and I am feeling SO MUCH BETTER.”

Why not be real with each other? And now I am about to sound like the hippie I am, be real with each other and through that truth we can help each other. I can tell you I read and relate to the real posts on social media way more than I do the perfectly edited IG picture of someone sitting on a windowsill pretending to read Wurthering Heights.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good photo but I love real talk and being authentic. That’s why this blog is called UnSocially Acceptable because I want to talk about the things that are largely considered to be unacceptable in a social gathering or on social media… natural things that should be talked about so we can all know that we are not alone. So many people struggle. I struggle every day and I would love to hear that someone relates to me, there truly is strength in numbers. I really do believe that.

Y’all, the internet was invented for 2 reasons:

  • 1- to share hilarious and adorable animal videos; and,
  • 2- to connect with others.

It is my goal to make my connections mean something. As I get older I find that the most valuable commodity is time and I want everyone I know and love and all the people I will eventually know and love to have it in spades.

Thank you for reading, Trina

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Why I left Rodan + Fields and all my other side hustles

To start I want to say that my time with Rodan + Fields and the friendships that I created through my time as an Independent Consultant are valuable to me. I loved my time in the business and I love the friends I made.

If I loved it, then why did I leave?

The short story is that it no longer suited who I was.

The long and twisted story…

Nothing in my life seemed to suit me. That was because I was so sick and depressed that I didn’t know what I wanted and it definitely meant that I was not working any of my side hustles. I have a master’s degree in business. I KNOW how important a side hustle is to building wealth. Not to mention, the sense of purpose it gives people when they succeed at something for themselves rather than for their employer.

Side note: Multi-level Marketing is NOT a pyramid scheme. In fact, it is actually the preferred method of business outside of the U.S., it is the fastest way to for a product to reach a market, and it accounts for a very large portion of the female population that make over $100,000 a year.

Back to the story:

I cannot recall a time in my life that I was as depressed as I was this last year. I tried to pull myself out of it. I spoke to friends and doctors and the very last thing I wanted to do was take anti-depressants and just be a zombie again. I just couldn’t shake my depression and now I was starting to have panic attacks and insomnia.

Insomnia is my breaking point.

I think we all have those little lies we tell ourselves, for example, when I am “sick” I refuse to admit I am sick unless I have a runny nose. Once the runny nose sets in and if you are near me when it happens you will hear me utter the phrase, “Damn, I am sick.” I don’t admit I have a mental health problem until I can’t sleep.

It was all downhill from there.

In an act of desperation I actually took on a new side business to try to force myself to be accountable and maybe my sheer willingness to hold myself accountable to others would get me through the funk and I would find some new connections- and I did but that wasn’t enough.

Unfortunately, I had, in all of this, triggered a flare of my Autoimmune Disease (which depression, anxiety, and insomnia are some of the early signs that the system is triggering, I just didn’t know).

Y’all, I can honestly say that Fall 2018 and through Winter 2018 were some of the scariest moments in my life as new symptoms of the disease popped up and my mental health declined. I was genuinely begging my husband to hospitalize me, not for the disease but for my mental health. I wanted him to commit me. I admit that I was afraid of what I was going to do. At times, I didn’t trust myself.

I declined.

I lost who I was.

I was drowning in my own negative thoughts about who I am.

I was a miserable person.

Each day was a fight to get out of bed both physically and mentally and it was a fight to continue through my day. At work, I was frequently crying in my car. At home, whenever I thought I had a spare second, I was crying in the closet, shower, toilet room, garage, and anywhere else I could avoid my daughter.

At the end of February 2019, I had started my AI protocol and almost immediately we knew part of it had failed. Desperate to treat my physical pain, I dosed myself with cannabis. Something unexpected happened, my depression, anxiety, and insomnia started to re-balance. After 2 weeks of dosing myself my coworker noticed a positive change in me.

I knew then that I had a new purpose. I wasn’t going to get better and just return to my old life. I was going to get better and advocate for medicinal cannabis for both physical and mental health. I had actually studied cannabis for the last decade to help my special needs daughter and now I was going to use my research and my voice and tell those who will listen about the healing powers of cannabis.

So, I said all of that to say this, I left my side hustles not because the products don’t work or the business model failed. No, I left my side hustles because I saw my purpose. I spoke to my husband and told him my ideas to open a cannabis bakery and to help people find tasty and fun ways to dose themselves and I knew that Texas was going to be changing laws over the next few years and I told my husband that this is what I wanted to focus on and when the time was right, I would tell everyone of my plans.

I literally said to my husband just days before I partnered with my new company, “If only I could find a legit CBD company to start at farmer’s markets.” I had a plan and CBD would be a perfect entrance into the cannabis industry. I could do farmer’s markets on the weekend and start talking to people about how cannabis heals and hopefully get my voice heard.

If only..

Then out of no where, the opportunity to partner with my new company presented itself to me. And not just ANY opportunity. A GROUND FLOOR OPPORTUNITY with a quality brand that represented EVERYTHING I WANTED IN A CBD PRODUCT!

I felt like this was a blessing from above. I know I have so much working against me and ignorance-based stigma to battle. I have always been the person on the outside so it doesn’t bother me to once again be against the popular belief.

I am an early adopter of mainstream cannabis. I promise you all, there will be a day, sooner rather than later, that CBD will be as normal as taking a Tylenol capsule.

Thank you for reading.

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UnSocially Acceptable

It was October of 2018 that I reached a breaking point with what we all can and cannot discuss in polite conversation.

People ask you how you are doing and your response is a stock “I am doing well, and you?” Each utterance is a lie, on both sides.

The suicide rate in this country is astronomical. Your dear friend Jacob kills himself (because more men tend to take their lives than women do) and everyone is in shock. You say, “Oh I wish he would have told me, I would have tried to help him.” Or worse, “I didn’t think he was that depressed.”

The odds are Jacob did try to reach out in one small way or another but it was ignored. Not intentionally but who ever he reached out to probably got weirded out by something he said and tried to downplay the statement. Or they were listening to respond rather than listening to understand. Whatever the situation, it truly is not their fault Jacob killed himself, and it truly is not their fault that they missed his attempt at reaching out. We never learned how to handle this as a society, we just don’t teach this sort of empathy or compassion.

The sad fact of the matter is that we live in a society that we don’t talk about such things. We don’t discuss mental illness, it’s that simple. We actually don’t discuss a lot of important topics.

Back to October 2018. I was unhappy with a lot of things in my life. My job was not what I wanted it to be. My husband had taken a job to have a better work/life balance but was now working more than he was at his previous job and that was causing problems between us. All of this was the perfect recipe for my autoimmune diseases to grab hold and make my life so much worse.

In a desperate attempt to gain control of my downward spiral into depression and anxiety brought on by my current situation, I turned to my personal social media. Of course, there were a few people who thought I was “brave” to post something so raw and there were a lot of people who didn’t know how to react. A lot of people thought they should at least reach out but when it came to actually being able to “support” they still didn’t know what to do. Not their fault- society hasn’t prepared them for such deep and emotional shit.

I keep my social media small, I like it that way. I am more known for posting “funny” and “random” thoughts than I am for much else. I am sure that is all social media, the funny stuff and dog videos are all anyone cares about on Facebook. Personally, I don’t really like posting that I am so depressed that I can’t get out of bed and just slept and cried my weekend away. BUT I wanted to hold myself accountable and I wanted the other people on my social media who were doing the same thing in silence to know that they were not alone. Truly. I was going to support myself by showing the world I am vulnerable too.

However, this could have been in my mind at the time, but it actually felt like many people were just responding out of a duty but they really didn’t want that on their newsfeed. I started to get a lot of “buck up” and “it could be worse” responses. So I decided to start a blog. This blog, actually. I would keep my social media presence on the light side and I would have this blog for those who did want to read something real.

That’s how this blog was born. UnSocially Acceptable (USA, please tell me you caught how clever that is)! A place where I can talk about the things that I think we really SHOULD be talking about.

Yup, that was the plan. Then I got sicker and sicker and I physically and mentally couldn’t do it. Until now, CBD helped me.

A little bit about me, real quick(ish):

I like to write so until I get the hang of this blogging thing my posts are going to be long (TBH they will probably be long once I get the hang of it anyway).

So. Me. My name is Trina. I am 34 years old. I am from Sugar Land, Texas and I currently live in Richmond, TX. I have a couple of autoimmune diseases and because I am extra I also have endometriosis and PCOS (that’s right, we will have some postings about broken uteri too). BUT I am not my diseases, in fact, I am doing everything to make myself well despite modern medicine.

I met my husband when I was 19. The night I met him I told him I was going to marry him. That scared him away. I get it. I know I sounded like a crazy bitch. At any rate, he eventually decided my particular brand of crazy was just right for him and it all worked out. We have one daughter and she suffered a traumatic brain injury during birth 13 years ago and she is special needs. She is not her injury and she doesn’t let her TBI define her. She is an amazing young lady.

I like dogs and have 3 (2 Aussies and 1 German Shepherd).

I also have a cat and she’s an asshole.

I went to college and graduate school and did pretty well for myself in that regard. Although, I don’t have much use for my degrees in my day job.

It is my goal to turn this into a space where I can discuss my life, my cannabis advocacy and so much more.

Thank you for reading, Trina

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CBD & ME

During birth my daughter sustained a Traumatic Brain Injury and had near constant tonic-clonic (Grand Mal) seizures for the first days of her life.
 
She was about a year old when we realized she was a little slow on some “major” milestones.
 
It took 3 therapists that worked with her every day day for months before she could walk – she was 23 months old.
 
It was around age 3 when someone said that she might benefit from that “new oil from weed?!”
 
I googled and discovered Cannabidiol (“CBD“).
 
At the time, CBD was fringe science and pretty much only legal in Colorado. I begged my husband to let us [illegally] get some for our daughter. He said no. He wasn’t willing to hear me out or listen to the success stories. The stigma of the evils of weed was real we weren’t going to give our child drugs.
 
He and I are opposites. He is on the straight and narrow, work hard, do right, serve your country and always play by the rules. There’s nothing wrong with that. I love him for who he is- even when he is close-minded and stubborn as a mule… mostly.
 
I, on the other hand, am scrappy. When there are closed doors in my face, I find my own way in. I trust no one (especially the government and big pharma), I am sarcastic, I speak my mind and I cuss a lot, I question everything, and I most definitely don’t play by the rules- I study the rules and learn how to break them. I suppose he loves me because I am different.
 
Over the years, I have brought CBD up over and over as a good treatment for our daughter, she has anxiety and emotional issues- instead of CBD he agreed to put her on Zoloft– which I think is worse than CBD but he thinks a pharmaceutical from big pharma and approved by the FDA is trustworthy. His option is legal and at the time, mine wasn’t. Zoloft it was. Then it was stronger, and stronger, and stronger doses.
 
I begged him to move to Colorado where CBD was legal. This is an ongoing request of mine.
 
Fall/Winter of 2018 and early 2019. I get sick. Real sick. The kind of sick that we discussed and made plans for my family for after I left them. That. Sick. I was miserable, still working, pretending every day that I wasn’t as sick as I was. My medicine doesn’t work. I am told that if my lungs aren’t clear I will have a max of 3-5 years left. Even after hearing that, I plan to still work full time as long as I can. I am told that I probably won’t see my 40th birthday. I share a little bit here and there about my struggle with depression, anxiety, and how the disease is affecting me through my social media accounts. At home, I am a mess. I am crying non-stop thinking about how I am going to leave a special needs child without her mother. I am angry- because the doctors should have caught this disease so many times before. I am pathetically hopeful that my lungs are not damaged because then maybe I will live to see 40. 
 
The test results on my lungs come in.
 
Clear.
 
My lungs are clear. That’s the best news I could get. Maybe I will see 40 after all? With this piece of great news the doctors begin to suppress my immune system and I am prescribed Cymbalta. A few days into taking Cymbalta I lose consciousness walking into a CVS parking lot. At the ER my husband and I were told that less than 1% of people who take Cymbalta have this issue where the brain basically shuts down. Great. What will I do now for my pain? I am put on bed rest until the Cymbalta has worked its way out of my system.
 
My Rheumatologist tells me that he can’t prescribe me anything in place of the Cymbalta. Really? Of all the pharmaceuticals in the entire world, the only prescription drug to treat my neuro-muscular pain is Cymbalta? Nothing else? Fine. I nod my head and tell my doctor that I understand. Meanwhile a plan is forming in my head and I have just written this guy off as stooge of The Man.
 
I reach out to a friend who was cut from the same cloth as I was. She has MS. She tells me that there is another way.
 
A way I was already considering.
 
CBD. And, yes, even THC.
 
This time things are are different. CBD was made legal across all 50 states by the Federal government. The Farm Bill passed and CBD is legal! The question I have now is, “which on is legit and which one is a rip off?”

Thus began my deep dive into the scandalous world of the Devil’s Lettuce, cannabis.

I am an advocate of a better way as I have experienced a radical change in my health over the last 6 weeks. Just 4 days into my journey with this and my partner at work said I was different. I was, I felt different but I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just wishful thinking. I kept quiet. I didn’t want to post to social media because of the “stigma.” Then one day about a month ago I posted about CBD and few friends messaged me. I answered their questions and moved on. Then the other day I had this thought, “F the stigma, this stuff matters! People need to know!” This hasn’t affected me negatively, it has helped me. Why should I hide in shame because someone doesn’t understand what CBD really is?

 
I am still me. In fact, I feel more like the me before I got sick. 
 
The laws need to change (I do believe that eventually it will all be legal) but that change will be slow coming unless the people know about it. 
 
I am going to advocate for a better way because I do believe that CBD is the TRUE Essential Oil.
 
#CBDtheEssentialOil
 
 

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