In April of 2020, I posted about this idea I found: The Coping Skills Toolbox. I shared the above photo of the box I put together to help me with quarantine anxiety (not only was the world gripped by a pandemic with no preventative medication and few effective treatments for some populations, including my own, but I was laid off from my job of six years due to the pandemic).
Looking back at that post reminds me that I’ve been forthright on this site for at least the last four years about how anxiety has been a lifelong struggle for me. I was prescribed medication for it when I was eighteen that I never used. In 2022, I was prescribed medication on an as-needed basis, which I used very little of. I will occasionally take medication to help me sleep.
Medications are rarely my first option. What I have to take for my physical health, I take. But I’ll always try to manage anxiety in other ways. This is not in any way a judgment about people who manage their physical and emotional health through medication. For a variety of reasons, it’s simply not my first choice.
I still have that “toolbox.” I’ve long-since rewatched the comfort movies and reread the comfort novels that were in it, so they’re no longer in there. It still holds my Magnetic Poetry Journal that I sometimes put poems in, along with the magnetic board I can use to arrange words. It still holds a small coloring book and two tins of coloring pencils. The toys–Superman, Batman, and the tiny plastic cars–are still in there. The bottle of bubbles is not.
After looking at the book I often use as ideas for my Tiny Tuesday posts (shown above, on the right), I decided to add to the box again because of two things I found listed in the book.
This morning, I added my Magnetic Poetry Haiku Kit and a movie. I don’t know if Sliding Doors is a classic at twenty-six years old, but it’s a comfort movie for me. I watched it earlier, and it inspired the haiku I created which is now written in the journal, too. As you can see from my photo below, all the words I wanted weren’t available to me, so I added them to the photo. The haiku goes with the theme of the chapter I’ll be writing when I can get my brain directed that way again.
There is a quote from the movie that’s one of my favorites, when one of the characters says, “I’m a novelist. I’m never going to finish the book.”
Hope you’re all having a good Tuesday and being kind to yourselves.
As much as I like the coping toolbox idea, I don’t know if I could. I do have an emergency run outside bag with a day of clothes and minimal supplies. Since the leapyear’s day, all of my records are now housed inside a solid wooden credenza/thingy that was advertised to store plates and such in with a burnt wax finish. All of my CDs and DVDs are in drawers that someone might try to put clothes in, but are basically a modern take of that card catalog. And lurking around the kitchen are the Animals of Chocolate Tin. There’s so much to choose from, that such a toolbox would be the living, dining and kitchen rooms when the airconditioning is working and its 118 outside.
Your entire apartment is your coping toolbox–and that’s actually a good thing.