Jewelry, every color, every metal, was on my dresser. I would literally purchase jewelry from everywhere, Paparazzi, Avon, you name it. Hello, my name is Regina and I was addicted to jewelry. Well, sort of still am, just a little. So, it didn’t help that I learned to make my own. My jewelry-making started out as a hobby during a depression phase in my life. It was a mechanism of focusing on something that I could actually control. It was my means of meditating and winding down, not worrying about my troubles, as I was meticulous with the placing of each and every bead. But somehow it became a passion, because I would come up with a design just by looking at beads in the store. Like, those beads and accents can go with that, and vice versa. I would literally spend hours in the bead aisle at Hobby Lobby or Joann’s trying to pair up beads. The crazy thing was I just wanted to make it, not wear it. I find serenity and am in a place of focus when I grab the beading thread, take my scissors, and cut it preparing to bring the design in my head to fruition. I am in a state of Zen, as I turn off the phone, the TV, focusing on the creation at hand. No distractions for me, I am in the process of creating something unique that popped up in my head. Added happiness came when these creations became gifts for others, who were amazed and deeply appreciative. But I never imagined that the fruits of my hobby could turn into something much bigger. My designs were one of a kind, and those who were recipients of my jewelry knew they were getting an original design hand-made with concentration and love. That is when Ver’Evie Jewelry emerged as an idea. A multitude of hand-designed jewelry sets were created through my passion, not being worn, but just created. Why not start a business from my passion? Why not give all women a chance to own a one-of-a-kind design? This hobby grew out of something dark but allowed me to create beautiful things. This hobby was started by just watching a YouTube video. There was a bout of nervousness in pursuing this venture, but when you are given a gift, you must use it. Figuring out what to name my business was a process, going to my dad for suggestions. Then he suggested naming it after my mom. But there were two amazing women who made a great impact in my life. These women in their own way were one-of-a-kind. Ver’Evie Jewelry was named using part of my mother and grandmother’s first names. They were a big part of who I am today and wanted to honor them in some way. I can’t sew like my grandmother; she would always let me try my hand at it. I cannot bake cakes like my mother could, but I was always there next to her trying to learn. Their talents and gifts touched others, made them smile. Those are the memories that sparked Ver’Evie Jewelry. Beautiful, unique creations designed and put together by hand. Although, Ver’Evie Jewelry is just starting out and is small, my designs are my passion. Sometimes I look at what I made and redo them, so they are perfect. I am in amazement sometimes that I actually made some of those designs, no plan, no sketchbook, just my imagination. Being given a gift to make something is not always about profit, but something that could possibly brighten someone’s day, make them feel beautiful.
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I AM SHE, SHE IS ME
It has been almost 21 years since my mom passed and although life goes on, it still feels unreal. Grief holds no expiration date, but in spite of my tears, I hold fast to what my mom instilled within me. I hold fast to the memories of her that help make me the woman I am today. My mother wasn’t perfect, but she was there for me. Truth be told, my mother dealt with so many demons in the form of insecurities. Many of the lessons that I could have learned at an early age, I was shielded from. I had to learn most of them from my own experiences. However, I know my mom loved me dearly and I miss her every day. However, my mom taught me a lesson in strength because there was so much in her childhood that she dealt with. She had to deal with the loss of a parent, and she had to give up so much to help take care of her siblings. There was so much she didn’t tell me. Yet, she kept a smile on her face to keep a smile on my face. That takes strength and that is something I have learned. Life is not perfect, but strength built on faith will help you to persevere. But even in her strength, she taught me that it is okay to not be okay. This is something that I learned on my own because she held so much in. She endured a lot of disappointments and loss, but she never broke down. She suffered multiple miscarriages, one before I was born and two before my little brother. Maybe she thought she had to keep it together, fake it to make it, and I thought I had to do the same after she died. I thought I had to be strong for my brother, my dad, that I didn’t take the time to grieve. Breaking down can be a means of healing, of letting things go. I wish she had known that she could have cried those tears she thought were meaningless. She deserved to let it go because she gave of herself so much. My mother taught me to stand up for myself. Although, she, herself learned this later in life, she and my father instilled it into me. You must never be afraid to stand up and speak out. Although my mom rarely spoke up when it came to herself, she would speak up when it came to her children. I have no children, but when it comes to those I love and my self-respect, I speak up boldly. My mother became a mom at a young age and many of the goals she had were set on the backburner. She did not get to achieve some goals. One major lesson that I learned from her memory and one that my father always tells me is to achieve my dreams while I can. I am grateful for her sacrifice. Although, I dealt with some of the same insecurities and disappointments, I knew her struggles and pain, it wasn’t pretty. It is my belief that her lessons came from letting me see her battle those storms. Maybe she wanted me to recognize those things that would test me later on in life, to prepare me. Maybe she knew my strength better than I knew it. Her beauty and grace will always inspire me to love myself, her loving spirit will always remind me to be giving but not gullible. The lessons that I learned from her inspire me to go on with her close to my heart.
By Regina Greathouse3 years ago in Humans
Neurologists Debunk 11 Brain Myths
It seems like you're presenting some common misconceptions, so let's clarify each point:"We only use 10% of our brains."nothat's not true that's very not true actually hi i'm dr santoshi bilakota i'm a clinical assistant professor in neurology at the nyu grossman school of medicine i'm dr brad kamitaki i'm a neurologist and assistant professor at rutgers robert wood johnson medical school and today we'll be debunking myths about the human brain the bigger the brain the smarter the creature size actually does not matter when it comes to the brain because there are creatures out there with bigger brains than us but probably not as complex your brain is really determined by your body proportion right so when you think of like a big brown bear that's way bigger than us their brain is going to be bigger but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are smarter than us we don't know that for sure because it hasn't been fully studied but we've seen that in instances such as chimpanzees they do have smaller brains but we do know for a fact that chimpanzees are probably as smart as we are certainly it's not the size of the brain that matters but probably how complex it is and how well developed certain areas are certain areas in humans are for example our language centers are just much more developed than a cow or even a chimpanzee yeah that's important in determining intelligence rather than the size itself and also how do we measure intelligence that also becomes tricky because not everyone is intelligent in the same way non-cognitive factors also play a role like what's your social intelligence what's your emotional intelligence all of that i think is very complex and really difficult to measure iq tests are always an accurate measure of intelligence so this is false there's so much that goes into intelligence normal intelligence tests might measure things like executive function or planning verbal skills reading skills things like that but it's only an approximation of what you can do and highly influenced by the conditions of the test how you're feeling at the time of the test your educational level it'll be nice to say that there's one test or one way that we can determine how intelligent someone is but there's so much that goes into intelligence that one test or even multiple different tests can't measure that very well so the popular iq test was developed in the early 1900s and it was a way to determine which french students were cognitively delayed so we could offer them better resources that got adopted in america at stanford where for all the reasons brad laid out it doesn't take all of those things into account so i think although it is nice to say hey i am smart i did well on an iq test really don't think that means too much neither of us were born being doctors right we had to learn and develop those skills under many years of training i think that education is the best way to kind of make that happen education very broadly that might not necessarily be school for everyone definitely some people are savants some people are prodigies it's really hard to say what determines that they might be better at certain things but not necessarily good at others we're all individuals we all have different talents and different aptitudes for different things so iq tests just kind of measure your intelligence in that one specific area not how overall intelligent you are we only use 10 of our brains so this is not true we actually use all of our brain not all of the time but most of the time we're using some percentage of her brain this myth came into fruition i think in the early 1800s where people were trying to figure out why injuring different parts of the brain caused disabilities in people so a bunch of psychologists came up with the theory that we only use about ten percent of our brains versus people who are smarter who use more now we simply know that that is not the case we know that because we have something called a pet mri and a functional mri study we have the frontal lobe which we use for a lot of different purposes motor function language function executive functioning or planning activities behind that our parietal lobe here which is our sensory cortex in the back of the brain we have the occipital lobe which is our visual processing center and then here on the side we have the temporal lobe which is involved in memory language comprehension on the left side so to give you an example if you are reading something you're going to be using your temporal lobes for comprehension you're going to be using your frontal lobes for comprehension you'll also be using the back of your head where your visual cortex sits because that's where information from your eyeballs travel and your body kind of makes sense of it that way and then also if we take the brain apart a little bit we have our brain stem over here which is kind of our lizard brain it's our primitive brain that controls things like level of arousal breathing respirations heart rate blood pressure we have some deep motor functions here in the brain as well another part of the brain that we have is our cerebellum kind of on the bottom which is also involved in motor control and motor planning in doing one task you could be using multiple parts of your brain but you're not using everything at the same time video games rot your brain so this is a myth video games in and of themselves don't actually rot your brain it's something that i definitely heard a lot when i was younger from my grandma my mom a lot of our literature has shown that video games especially the ones that focus on team building on solving riddles solving puzzles building strategy are actually pretty good for you they actually do build up those centers of your brain especially when you're a child you know games can be used for other purposes for example our colleagues in surgery when they do scopes they practice those skills with things like video game simulators looking at the trials no one has actually defined what too much video games is every literature study that i've looked at quotes between 12 hours to 90 hours a week is okay i feel like 90 hours might be a little excessive but i think in reality the bigger signs of someone withdrawing from social activities and wanting to just stay at home and play video games and they'd prefer to do that then do other things that's more of a red flag i always say everything in moderation like if it's affecting your social life if you're just stuck in front of the tv all day that's not good psychologically memory gets worse as you age so this is false in fact there are some types of memory that improve as you get older for example things like semantic memory your vocabulary reading procedural memory for example people that are very good at musical instruments like can play the piano often will retain those skills some people will notice some changing memory that's often things like episodic memory which is kind of our memory of recent events episodic memories basically like the who what where and when so where did i put my keys where did i park my car those kind of things do tend to decline and i think a lot of it is because we just aren't as focused on things it's not necessarily something that's pathological or suggests dementia not everyone will get dementia but that risk does increase as you get older right now we don't have any medications or treatments that can prevent someone from getting alzheimer's disease there are some environmental risk factors that if you address can prevent you from getting dementia or at least prevent your memory from getting worse so some of those things include just general health eating healthy foods taking care of your heart moderate exercise making sure that you stay healthy cardiovascularly which is also going to help your brain left brain people are logical and right-brained people are creative i think this myth came from the 1800s when as neurologists are trying to figure out different functions of the brain they discovered that the left side of our brain and most people is dominant for language verbal memory whereas the right brain was much more of our visual spatial functions but there's no structural brain difference in people who are more logical or versus more creative rather it's more their environment the way that they were raised in neurology when we talk about brain hemispheric dominance we typically are talking about language and verbal memory dominance where does that live and for most people that's on the left side of the brain so if you're right-handed about 90 of the time you're going to be left hemisphere dominant which means a lot of your memory and speech production and understanding comprehension that kind of stuff is going to sit on the left side of your brain whereas if you're a left-handed it can kind of go both ways so i think the reality is we say that someone is left brain dominant or right brain dominant and it doesn't really mean that one person is more creative and the other one is more logical these are just talents and sort of skills that people develop whether inherently or through their personalities but it really has nothing to do with the side of their brain that they use more you can't prevent a stroke no that's not true that's very not true actually you can definitely prevent a stroke how to do that is by really addressing all the factors that could result in a stroke we know very clearly that things like high blood pressure smoking high cholesterol diabetes unfortunately increase your risk for a stroke which is basically when there's sign of blood flow going to your brain because of a blood clot or bleeding in the brain there's no quick and easy fix again it's about maintaining your cardiovascular and brain health over time so that you never get into a situation where a stroke will occur if you do ever have symptoms of a stroke and we often tell people this fast mnemonic so facial droop arm weakness slurred speech or language problems and then t is time call 9-1-1 and get to the hospital right away emergency medicine physicians can give you plot-busting medications to break up the clot that's causing the stroke so there's things that we can do to address it and prevent it from getting worse and i think there's a misconception that stroke is an old person's disease we know this isn't true anyone of any age can have a stroke the reason why you're going to have it is going to be different if you're older versus when you're younger but a big cause of stroke in young people is brain bleeds if you have a family history of aneurysm you should definitely get screened i think that's actually recommended eating fish makes you smarter so i actually don't know where this one came from but maybe it's like an immigrant household thing but i heard this a lot yeah yeah i mean in asian households for sure this is tricky because fish doesn't necessarily make you smarter but it is good for you and some fish more than others have omega-3s which we know are good for heart health good for brain health and just good for your overall body health so i think maybe that's why this one came into place but i don't think it makes you smarter what do you think yeah no i think it was my parents way of getting more efficient you do have to be careful about eating too much fish we know that certain types of fish have more mercury than others like tuna you don't want to overdo it i should add that fish is part of a mediterranean diet which we advocate for all of our patients mediterranean diets are diets that are rich in good fats like fish for example olive oils vegetables healthy grains and that is going to be helpful for stroke prevention it's going to be good for cholesterol for hypertension for diabetes all kinds of stuff so fish as part of a healthy diet is good for you but it will not make you smarter you can always trust your senses i'd say that's a myth our senses can play tricks on us and cause things like illusions or even sometimes hallucinations for example people with schizophrenia might hear voices of people talking that aren't actually there our senses are not 100 objective they're dependent on how well our brains and you know eyes ears are functioning at that time everyone is different my pain tolerance might be lower than rats or vice versa i don't think we have a really good neurological way of explaining why that might be that's still something that we don't fully understand also your senses can be a little influenced by emotions and memories i think if you see something that reminds you of someone the way you're going to react to it might be a little different i don't know if what i'm seeing is the same thing that everyone else is seeing like how can we ever it's like when they had that blue dress and the black dress and people were saying different things different sexes have different brains so no that's not true and i'm going to rip it again because that was funny i should start with saying that we're all born with the same brain regardless of what your gender identity is regardless of what your sexual orientation is there's really no structural differences so if a neurosurgeon was looking at two different brains they wouldn't know who was assigned male at birth and who was assigned female at birth there have been studies out there that have shown that those have been assigned female at birth might have more robust emotional pathways versus those who've been assigned male at birth are more executive thinkers we now know that that's not true as you get older if you've been exposed to different things how you relate to the outside world that's what develops the structures of your brain and the connectivity it has really nothing to do with what gender you were assigned at birth it's more nurture it's not necessarily nature and how you're made if you have a seizure you have epilepsy no i'm going to rip this a few times because i want to make my point what a seizure is is hypersynchronation of brain cells so what is that your brain talks to itself using electricity if something goes wrong with electricity in your brain you have a seizure basically when all of your neurons freak out and fire at once your body hyper synchronizes and we have a seizure seizures can be due to a lot of things not necessarily epilepsy which is a lifelong neurological condition you have to have multiple unprovoked seizures and that's the difference between a seizure and epilepsy also if you have epilepsy you have to take daily medication to keep your brain from having seizures so if you have had your first seizure of lifetime or if you're someone with seizures there are a few things that you should do one definitely get checked out by a neurologist there are tests that we can order that can be helpful for you one of them is an eeg we put stickers on your head look at your brain waves and see where the abnormalities are and the second one is the imaging that we have mris and pet mris are both used and if a diagnosis of epilepsy is made the most important thing for you to do is take your medications and lastly keep communicating with your doctor because you're not going to get to that period of seizure freedom unless you communicate with your doctor you only get one brain you're born with all the brain cells that you are going to have and it's up to you to take care of them there's a grain of truth in a lot of these myths but they're just not fully accurate just make sure that you do your research and take care of yourself
By wassim memabout 11 hours ago in Humans
Letter to our Queer & Trans Youth
Hey, you. I thought I’d start this letter by telling you a little about myself, just so you know who you’re dealing with. I’m an emotional dad, father to three amazing kids who we met through the foster care system, and whose presence in our lives has really transformed my sense of responsibility to the communities that surround us. The connections we’ve made with one another, with our extended families, and with the communities where we live and look for belonging have catapulted us into this whirlwind of emotional tumult which, while not easy by any stretch of the measure, has also been remarkably healing. I realize ours is really only a one-sided chosen family, since our kids didn’t get to choose to live here, but I’d like to think that they did choose to let us love them, which allowed them to grow to love us. And I think that’s where I want to go with this letter- to a place where you can find belonging and healing- even if the pathway there may be peppered with some emotional tumult.
By F Cade Swanson7 days ago in Pride
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