Pickles and Vodka: a Mental Health Podcast · Christina & Lauren

#222 The Groundwork Is There

·44 min·2 clips

Christina stuffs a pink bandana in her nose rather than wake her counselor: "I don't want to inconvenience someone."

1. Pickles and Vodka episode #222, "The Groundwork Is There," pairs a mental health check-in with a round of childhood stories from both co-hosts. 2. Co-hosts Lauren and Christina (full name Christina Jumper) speak from personal experience with treatment, ADHD, possible OCD, body dysmorphia and addiction. 3. The thesis, voiced near the end, is that "no shit things went how they did, the groundwork was there" when early memories are traced forward to adult patterns. 4. Lauren opens by comparing herself to the burning-room dog meme, saying she has not been on medication for over a year since leaving treatment about two years earlier, and Christina urges her to pursue an ADHD diagnosis after a year of dosage adjustments of her own. 5. Christina shares three writing and personal updates, including her first paid publication in an online magazine and an invitation to submit to an eating disorder anthology, while saying addictions and body dysmorphia have crept back in. 6. Lauren recounts her parents discussing a Tennessee timeshare trip for weeks without telling her, then laughing when she said "we are?" the week before, which she links to feeling invisible and to communication at her job. 7. Christina describes being named "chum of the month" at Awana at age 5 or 6 and crying on stage, then a nosebleed at an Officers' Christian Fellowship camp where she used a pink bandana instead of waking her counselor. 8. Lauren describes being hit by a car on her bike in seventh grade, knocked unconscious, refusing an overnight hospital stay, and dancing in a Friday-Saturday recital with a headache while a classmate said she was faking it. 9. Lauren also shares, with a stated trigger warning, a first sexual assault at about age 16 or 17 in her cousin's boyfriend's house, which she says she pushed out of her memory for roughly 10 years. 10. Suited to listeners who like candid, unpolished conversation about trauma and neurodivergence.

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