Find a hobby

 There comes a time in every anxious, grown-ass woman's life when her therapist tells her that she really needs to find a hobby besides taking her blind, deaf, and anosmic should-be toddler to various medical appointments. Apparently, googling the adjectival form of anosmia is also not a valid hobby.

When pressed further about my hobbies, all I can come up with is watching YouTube videos of outraged people reacting to other YouTube videos made by outraged fat activists while I try not to think about how many croissants I ate today. There we go, I found a hobby--binge eating!

I suppose that's not my only hobby. Another thing I do when I'm trying not to dry heave from imagining my daughter existing in a never-ending sensory deprivation chamber without even a memory of sensations besides touch to look back on is listen to 75% of an Italian podcast on history. I don't mean that I stop the podcast with 25% of it left to go, I just mean that I only understand 75%. Unfortunately the 25% is all the words that carry meaning, rendering the experience something like, "Hitler thought that the Jews were ____." I do kind of like my alternate history podcasts that I listen to in the car, with my brain sometimes filling in the blanks with more peaceful substitutions. And I can think to myself, "You know, today I'd like to live in a reality where Hitler thought that the Jews were unremarkable people, just like everyone else."

Occasionally I like to take my Italian show on the road, especially since there's a new Italian meet up happening monthly. It's nice to take a break from bumming people out by mentioning my disabled daughter in English, and instead getting to do it with additional grammatical errors. If I'm lucky, someone present will ask what "cieca" means. Then by the time the more advanced Italian speakers have had time to compose themselves after their initial horrified reaction, I'll get a new crop of horrified and pitying looks from the beginners.

Still, I suppose it's a nice break from talking about my mentally ill husband.