Tag Archives: body stuff

Every day is a school day

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Today I learned that while 3C feels brisk and chilly but nice for a run 2C feels like my lips are going to fall off and I was in pain at first. I am also noticing the inherent challenge in the location of my house. In Fremont I had to be going well over 5 miles in the day before I went up a big hill. I always had over a mile and a half to warm up before I started the uphill slog. That big hill had ~305′ of elevation in a bit over a mile. BUT AFTER CLOSE TO 2 MILES OF WARM UP.

Now I walk out of my front door and start climbing because even my damn driveway is sunk compared to the road. Just to get to the top of my road before doing anything else it’s a mile and the elevation climb is ~375′. That’s my fucking warm up.

Oh my goodness. My road is harder than running up Washington Blvd to get to Mission. I’m going to cry and feel sorry for myself for a minute here.

Ok, now I’m over it. I am actually feeling absolutely elated about how quickly my legs are picking up muscle. I tried to start running when we moved here, not long after the surgery on my back that healed very poorly. I did not do well. I felt empty. I fell and got hurt a couple of times and I just went limp and quit trying. Then I got busy with my million other projects and I just went about my life using my bike and having to walk places.

I feel strong again. I feel like I am clearly increasing muscle mass. My calves are already pretty rock hard and I have missed that so much. I love that if I grab at my thighs there is some padding on them, but mostly they are getting solid too. I suspect next month is when I will start seeing change in fat location on my body. Not that I expect things to shift massively. I suspect that this round of marathon training will not have my body shift as drastically as the previous round. I’d be surprised if I ever see 150lbs again. I’m currently hovering around 200. I need to lose about 6″ around my waist if I want to get my corsets on. Rats. I feel like I am racing the clock before menopause kicks my ass.

This is kinda my last chance to get to a different baseline before the next time my body heads into a whole new stage of loving belly fat. Sigh.

Part of wanting to train for a marathon again is that I won’t maintain an exercise regime for shorter distances. I just won’t. They aren’t hard enough. I could walk a half marathon tomorrow and be ok. I wouldn’t force myself to run for that distance and the running is where I can feel my body shift.

I keep feeling surprised that every time I hit a flat space I drop into a steady 12 minute mile pace. I feel like a metronome sometimes. My body likes the passage of time very much. I expected to have my overall average time for the runs be closer to 17 minutes because of the hill and instead it is under 16 minutes. I’m gaining good speed on the flat bits to make up for how challenging the incline is. I am looking forward very much to when my entire 3 mile run can be done in under 40 minutes. That’s a fantastic feeling when I get there. The last two days were 47/48 minutes. I feel absolutely no worry about my ability to gain back those 8-9ish minutes. Even the hill is going to get easier.

I can do this.

Commit, then follow through.

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I have my eye on the Loch Ness Marathon; it’s the first weekend of October. I’ve been starting to improve fitness on the treadmill during the icy spells but today was a balmy 3C so I went outside for my 3 miles. Only 15 min/mile which isn’t fast yet but I have 35 weeks to go. I can work on fast over the next few months. It’s the uphill start that is really killing me.

This time I downloaded the Hal Higdon app since I have used his training plans for years but I did it with pen/paper and this time I don’t want to spend the time organising. Also the app gives feedback on your training and recommends workouts that will help with trying to meet intermediate goals. This is a good thing. I am going to work towards actually having a race pace this time: I want 13 minute miles. I am aware that barely qualifies as “running” and I don’t give a shit. I am going for faster than “I barely made it before they closed the finish line” this time.

I like that the app asks me to rate my effort and how tired I feel afterwards. I was really pleased that I wasn’t exhausted at the end today. I have that lovely rush of adrenaline and endorphins. I feel great.

I love my body.

Finding a new normal is hard

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Ok my morning hour and a half before breakfast now includes blogging, medicating, and walking on the treadmill. Hoo it takes some balance to do this. That’s only for days when it is too icy for us to go walk on the road, not every day. Mostly I want MC training outside. We are both noticing how it is much much much easier going really fast on a treadmill compared to outside. It’s not just about incline, we increase that on the treadmill.

I think it is kind of funny how hard it is to convince my kids that maintaining enough fitness to be able to suddenly go off on an adventure is easy compared to “Oh shit we have to start training really hard RIGHT NOW and then we will still be less fit and have less fun than we would if we didn’t slack off in between.” But then again… I haven’t been forcing time to do it on my own either. I have allowed the kids refusing to go with me to stop me. I shouldn’t have. I am sorry.

Yesterday I was super keen to get off the treadmill quickly so I did more than a mile at 6mph. That’s really fast for me. It felt so good. It’s funny in that part of what feels good about it is the way my back and side fat waddle really hard. My experience as a fat runner turned slightly less fat by running and starting up again as a fat runner is that wherever it is the most jiggly is going to reduce first. It’s not that I stop having pudge there it’s that the edge of it is what is eaten first by increased need for eating fat in exercise and then the bottom layers plump into muscle. I still look fat, but it’s less jiggly and wiggly and bouncy.

That feeling means that soon I will be able to put on my fucking shoes again without panting. I really hate panting while I’m tying my shoes because I have gotten that fat. I need more exercise than I have been getting. Riding my bike isn’t enough. I need to run. I also need the fucking yoga and I should probably be doing more strength training because I am old enough I have to worry about bone loss soon. My bones aren’t starting out fantastically strong as it is.

I have done this for the past few decades. Early in my 20’s I decided to get fit because I was on the hunt for new social groups and people to fuck and someone to marry. I started dancing a lot and I ran to get in/keep in shape for that. Early 30’s I wanted to run a marathon with my brother and then that went sideways and beautiful, wonderful Blacksheep saved my ass and proved she is better than my brother in every way. (I mean, duh?) Now I am early in my 40’s and realising that I want more than I am right now.

I want to run a marathon in less than 6 hours. I want 30 mile bike rides to not feel punishing. I want to be able to run faster and longer than my fucking kids because ha ha just because you are taller than me that doesn’t mean you are stronger or fitter. 😛

I want the strength to be basically running a small-holding through my 50’s, 60’s, and maybe even my 70’s.

The neighbor in the giant fancy house decided to stay. I reopened the negotiation for me buying the acre next to mine. I told him “Wouldn’t it be nicer if instead of yet another house being constructed that close to us between us and the 150 home housing estate that is coming up in the field on the other side we had a food forest? I would plant walnut trees cause I can’t have them on my property. I would put so so so much food and you would be welcome to come share any and all of it. I would increase the plant and animal ecosystem around here and give them a place to hide as the city is moving outward. But I can’t pay what you want me to pay for a house-plot. My spouse says my limit is £50k and I can’t pay that much just for the part with the septic system.”

It is really useful being able to blame your spouse for things.

This winter I am doing a self-study course on permaculture design. I ordered all of the course books recommended by the top permaculture education organisations. I am going to increase bio-diversity, damnit.

And let me tell you: if I had an extra acre of land I could definitely feed my family in hard times. Probably a lot more people than that.

I would build a root cellar for storing food outside in the winter for preservation. The ground will keep it stable.

Paused for breakfast. Discovered major flaw in combining treadmill and blogging. I get no count for steps. This suuuuuuucks. Now I am flapping my arm like I’m trying to take flight; I feel stupid. Fixed that. Never came back. Oh well. Time to read those books.

Like a monster uncurling from hibernation

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For most of the time I have had children my sex drive has been utterly wrecked. I have no way of knowing how much is purely biological (for much of history it’s been “normal” for carrying parents to have a new child approximately every four years) as I have started pulling out of the dip when my body is around 4.5 years postpartum both times. Of course I do have a smaller gap in between my oldest kids, but that wasn’t about “whoops I’m pregnant because I was just having sex I wanted”. Naw. Despite my outrageous whoring around I have only ever been pregnant when I intended. I consider myself both A) a stringent user of birth control and B) a completely lucky bitch. [I tell my kids: if you are not ready to be a parent each person participating in sex needs to have birth control in use every single time.] I mean, let’s be real that I was stupid a few times and I just got lucky. But it was a very few times out of a really lot of times of being stringent.

Anyway. Yeah. I think there is a lot of basic biology. Did you know that your body is not 100% postpartum for four years because it takes that long for all of your organs to fully get back into a non-pregnant state? Fucking wild.

There was also a really strong emotional aversion when I was newly a parent that I don’t think was just part of the biological. It took a long time to unpack all of my trauma around sex in a house with children. That was really hard for him and me and getting through it just about wrecked us. I really struggled with it being ok to be touched in any kind of romantic way if a child I was responsible for was even in earshot. I was too deep in abreaction to find any kind of enjoyment there.

So as I was saying I seem to be in an uptick, by which I mean occasionally Noah is all “Yeah….. I literally can’t more.” I feel victorious. It’s reminding me of all the reasons that Noah is my person even though we still have challenges. His cock is fucking amazing. Like, he has the Baby Bear of cocks. Just big enough to hurt when we want it to but it doesn’t have to hurt. Fits nicely in all of the places. Incredible stamina for someone who has been in an almost complete drought for about five years.

Not to mention that he knows exactly how to be mean to me. When we started dating I told him I was looking for an abusive relationship with an on/off switch. He has been really freaking careful to stay in the off position for a long time.

He knows how to dance around my trauma like he is doing a polka on the head of a pin. He trusts me as an authority on a great many topics and he is openly deferential. He also fucks me raw and calls me every filthy name and he loves seeing me cry. He doesn’t use just any filthy names. He knows exactly which parts of my historical trauma will get me off instantly and which parts will get me off the bed and into the bathroom to curl into a ball and sob.

It’s not an adventure until someone is crying!

He knows me at my core in a way no person ever has or ever will. He has spelunked into every twisted corner of my deeply depraved brain. When I no longer have small children hopping into the shower with me on the regular he will go back to carving on me. The absolute hottest sex is the kind where one or both of you is dripping blood onto one another. Taking my blood and wiping it on his cock before putting it inside me is the best fucking feeling. And the taste! chef’s kiss Perfect.

Strange that I don’t like period sex. The friction is just utterly terrible and I end up with jagged awful tearing. Thanks you piece of shit motherfucker who wrecked my cunt before I could even go to fucking primary school. May your name be forgotten.

Anyway, Noah. He has studied me like I am his PhD topic. As my memory degrades he often remembers my stories better than I do. I only believe him when I wrote it down somewhere and I can go check. It was very useful that I wrote so many things down. He has read my entire archive I think 6 times? It isn’t obvious here on Fetlife but I used to blog a lot, including about my kink adventures. My whole archive is in the millions of words. The word count massively went up as I went through college. I can write a 20 page paper (including putting together all the bibliographical information) in about 10 hours once I’ve done the research. I had some stretches where I hit over 100,000 words in my blog in a couple of weeks.

And now my hands are shit. Whoops.

What I like about writing is that it allows me to think through my priorities and go back and forth dithering about what matters.

Noah has supported just about every crazy thing I have ever done. He is the reason I have written books and painted giant murals and created hundreds of square feet of tile mosaics inch by inch. Noah has kissed me goodbye cheerfully every single time I have wanted to run off and have an adventure, whether it was for a few days or weeks or half a year. He holds down the fort and makes sure that things in the house keep going the way I prefer more or less entirely because deferring to my preferences is so automatic at this point.

I met him almost 19 years ago. He was the first person who said, “What happened to you that made you end up like this?” He is the reason I have any coherency in my internal narrative, because he is always my assumed Primary Reader.

He wants to read all of it. No matter how cruel or angry or bitter or nasty I am being. If I keep a separation between my thoughts and my behavior he is happy, and even prefers, to know all the shitty thoughts. My thoughts do not define me; my behavior does. He wants to know how many shitty thoughts I have on the way to manifesting the behavior I do. I haven’t been telling him lately for a whole lot of reasons.

There is this thing about kink. I cannot be a closed box and do this in a healthy way. I tried having an M/s relationship that did not allow for navigating around my trauma. That went pretty poorly and while he was absolutely the best/most healthy relationship of my life at that point I have some deep sadness about some of the permanent harms he caused my body.

So if I want to do this, if I want to let the monster out and fight and lose and hurt and still be ok at the end of it I have to start writing again. He has to know what I am holding on to control of by tip of my fingernails. Following my brain is like trying to binge a new Netflix series every day for a month. It’s really hard to keep all the storylines straight.

He will do it. He will draw fucking diagrams if he has to. He thinks I am worth it. I see the overwhelming magnitude of work he puts into being in a relationship with me. His online organising system is kind of terrifying and he archives everything. He manages his own neurodiversity through a rigid knee jerk response to the system he has in place. He has scripted himself. And he manages me like he manages when to go check the oil in the tank.

It’s kind of overwhelming looking at just how much work he has put into me. He has iterations of the recipes he has refined over the years based on feedback because he wants to cook for my palate. I think he even has lists of gifts he has given me for holidays with how I responded. I’m not fucking kidding when I say I am his PhD.

I may miss the hunt but Noah is my heart and my soul and the only happy family I have ever had.

Did I mention his dick is perfect? And when I tell him that I want him to turn on the abusive switch he barely hesitates. I am enjoying life a lot more recently.

I’m about to fucking explode, y’all.

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I am not ok and it is perseverating in my head and if I don’t set it down somewhere I am going to continue to freak out in my house with my kids and that’s not cool. So let’s start there, shall we?

My kids are acting appropriate for their varying ages. All of these stages are hard at this moment in that awesome way that sometimes cycles pop up. My oldest is a fucking teenager with a fucking rude teenager mouth. I feel like he just has to tell me I’m wrong or express exasperation at my stupidity over and over all day long. Often at times when I am not actually wrong or being stupid. I mean… when I am wrong I tolerate a fair bit of sass but it drives me insane when I’m not wrong. Middle child is not wanting to accept responsibility for some areas of forward progress and I’m struggling with that. Youngest is pushing every button and boundary like it is her job… because it is.

So that’s all fun and the background noise of every single day.

I went back and checked my logs (hi, yes I am incredibly obsessive about tracking all kinds of stupid details) and starting in June I went from sleeping 8 hours a night on average over the course of the month to sleeping 6 hours a night on average. The months since then have hovered around 7 hours a night on average. That’s pretty certainly part of why I have been doing much worse. Why did I start sleeping so much less?

Ah, fucking lockdowns are over and I feel incredibly pressured (mostly internally) to get out and Meet People and Volunteer and Be Part of the Community. Also this summer has been quite energetic with gardening tasks as I’m moving towards the permaculture/low key food forest direction. I’m super tired. Also eldest said, “Let’s go ahead and finish the lounge” and I said, “Oh uhhh ok.” I was kinda hoping to procrastinate the work long enough for the paint to go bad. Then I found out my old buddy was coming and I have some projects I said he could help me with. So I started sprinting to get stuff done before he arrived.

Reader, I fucking failed.

I’ve been very much working beyond what I should be. Oh, and late May was my first trip down to England to see A & P then in June I went back down to England to bring Noah and the kids to see A & P. That is seeming like the best decision I made all year.

Oh, and I averaged 6 hours a sleep a night the month I had fucking covid and I slept through 4 days entirely. THAT’S REALLY FUCKING BAD.

I’m not ok, y’all.

July was a sprint of work I was not physically prepared for. I have never taken time to really fully recover from covid, not really. I certainly haven’t carefully increased exercise over time to get back to the fitness I had.

August was a super sprint of work and it was exhausting. September was a lot of work sprinting plus my birthday which was absolutely fucking exhausting to the extreme and I probably made some foolish choices. I was not physically fit enough to do what I did comfortably and I have paid for it. October has been more and more work and then Noah and EC went off to Helsinki then the morning after they got home I ran off to San Francisco in a last ditch effort to say goodbye to A.

In a way there are shadows of my uncle passing. I was too late. I feel like I failed and I am upset with myself. I did get to help P with one of the thornier parts of handling A’s belongings and I am deeply grateful I could perform this service.

Being in San Francisco involved a ton of driving (ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow) and many hours of work and many different social interactions one right after another and very little sleep. I just couldn’t except for a few times when I passed out in awkward scenarios. Three people said they wanted to make plans then cancelled at the very last minute. Woo. That’s always fantastic.

My buddy is a challenge in many ways. I don’t want to say too much about that but I will say that he is very emotionally needy and he wants me to help him process and understand his entire life and that’s a fucking tall order. I am not a therapist. I feel like I am drowning in his feelings. He also can’t remember a lot of our conversations because of how much he drinks so each conversation has to be repeated a few times and that is really frustrating. I don’t begrudge him the needs but my bucket is so fucking empty.

I feel empty. I feel like I can’t take more shit being dumped on me. I feel like I want to scream and scream and scream until I have destroyed my voice from screaming. I want to sleep for several weeks in a row. I want to stop speaking to people at all and I want to go back to lockdown. I am so far into burn out I feel like a pile of ash.

I know that I am a good person to help people process grief but right now I can’t handle the flood of it. It’s not just the one buddy. I feel absolutely surrounded by loss this year. Grandmother in law, A, my buddy’s parents, other friends have lost family members, a different buddy is dealing with her kid self-harming, a somewhat surprising number of pets have passed recently and folks want to talk to me because I give them comfort. Right now it feels so hard.

Oh, yeah, and it’s been an incredibly stressful year on the money front. I think things have settled down now and while we are not fully “on track” we are in a very reasonable place and I’m no longer worried about bouncing payments. But it’s been a fucking lot.

Err, also my roof just got replaced and the scaffolding and construction fuss have been irritating and challenging because to a large degree it has meant that YC has not been able to play outside unsupervised for over a month. That’s not a great situation.

I’m not exercising enough. I stopped my yoga classes because we need to be contributing more to savings. I’m not eating well enough–I am actually not enjoying the kids cooking 4 nights a week because rarely do they put more than 1 vegetable serving in a meal and it’s not doing great things to my body. I’m sleeping for shit.

It goes on and on and on. I’m sure I’m not remembering all the fuss. My head hurts. I am tired of being tired.

Movement is good for you; I hear.

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I posted most of this on the book of faces. But I should start using this space more.

Neurotic tracking is neurotic.

I wasn’t great about tracking my bike miles for the first few months of 2021 so I am pretty sure my year total is lower than it actually was. Then in 2022 we went to Texas and did way more walking than usual… but I didn’t bring my watch charging cable so I didn’t track any of it and then the watch strap completely broke and took a bit to replace in late July/early August. So numbers are fudged a bit.

That said: in 2021 by Sep 1st I had taken 1,653,242 steps and ridden 883 miles. (By the end of the year 2,300,012 steps and 1,165 bike miles.) In 2022 by Sep 1st I have taken 1,438,755 steps and ridden 908 miles.

If I don’t want to be behind last year’s final totals I’d better get my butt moving. Last year I was under my goals for myself in terms of movement by a fair bit. I don’t shoot for 10,000 steps a day. Personally I try for 7,000 and I have not been hitting it. In a year that adds up to 2,555,000 steps. I missed it by 254,988 last year. That’s over a month of missing steps. Ugh.

This year I am so far waaaaay lower. This is not good. I am already 262,245 down this year. That’s super sucky not good. Ugh. My bike odometer says I have ridden 920 since I got it the week of Christmas, so there wasn’t a lot at the end of December on this bike due to all of the ice on the roads.

I feel like I am very much not close to where I want to be in terms of being able to run (I have not regained fast-twitch muscle activity *at all* since the youngest was born. Ugh.) I know I need to sit down with the training book Blacksheep gave me and make a plan.

I think that the work I get done in the garden this September is going to mean that next year I will not have any big structural jobs and I may even have time to go work in the volunteer gardens in town. I haven’t managed much this year because I’ve been drowning in house/garden work.

My birthday is coming up so of course I am going deep into that funk of “What the hell am I actually doing with my life?” Well this year my hide-from-life birthday retreat will involve a 90 mile round-trip bike ride before camping in the rain. No weekend long binge of The Witcher this year.

In order to catch up on steps I need 9,150 each day between now and the end of the year. *sigh* I don’t have any specific goals about bike miles between now and the end of the year… but I feel better when I ride more and my kids have never regained their full fitness after covid. So. Ugh. Fudge.

I watch this shit like a hawk because if I get too sedentary then I lose strength and then I injure myself then I am stuck in a chair for months and the recovery period is slow and nightmarish. I haven’t had a big injury… in a long time. I can’t remember the last one. I am dancing on the edge of overwork issues with my arms and back right now with all the gardening/painting. Oofta.

Ok. Now that I have reflected it’s time to get off my butt. Daylight is no longer endless and apparently I have a lot of miles to cover. It doesn’t help my sense of impending doom that my birthday is coming. Stupid birthday. I hate you. It’s not that I mind getting older. It’s just that it is usually such a very terrible day. I feel bad that I can’t be present with my kids on my birthdays. But I can’t. That’s just the reality. No sense in denying a thing that is just true. Thanks, mom, for this gift that just keeps on giving. I mean… I know it isn’t her fault at this point. She hasn’t ruined a birthday in over 20 years. But there is a broken piece there. I have tried to fix it and failed. I am putting all of my try into other places; I have none left for something as stupid as my birthday.

Alright. Time to work.

Almost here

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My birthday is coming up. Going to Texas and England this year means I am not running away by myself. (Important note: the woman we went back to Texas to see has now passed away. I have no regrets over prioritising that goodbye trip over other more fun activities for this year.) Noah wants to be thoughtful and asked me what I want. I want to not want anything so I can’t feel let down. I want to have patience for the 973,383 times I will have to remind my children to do basic chores (like brushing teeth). I want to not miss my mother. I want to go back and rewrite my back story so that my impending birthday doesn’t feel like a hand grenade about to land on my head. A buddy suggested that I go camp somewhere for cheap, but I have been working too hard. I couldn’t right now. My hands are trashed.

I have an old friend staying with me. It is complicated in the way that integrating a new person with deep grief, and addiction issues, and learned helplessness will be. To be fair, every time I feel like I am going to freak out about an issue I have to address he is responsive and polite and most of my requests have been acknowledged and respected. But negotiating and setting boundaries is hard. It’s One More Thing on my emotional chore list and I’m tired.

It has been a fucktastically busy year. Busy on so many levels and my exhaustion is, once again, bone deep and completely saturating my soul. I feel numb and on fire and empty and aching. I deeply miss the comfort of tracking things that happen in my blog because I benefit from the space to process but mostly I do not feel I can anymore. I have reached a certain age where I now have to be realistic about the fact that I am not really going to make more very close friendships. Sure I can find new activity partners, but it isn’t the same thing. The people I have met in the last few years I am deeply conscious of this careful distance I keep. They are not allowed to know me. And I cannot talk about my deep relationships anymore because when I do I ruin them and it is absolutely all my fault.

So I do small bits of processing with people but very little in my historical record. I do almost none publicly. I mostly stuff my feelings and feel disconnected. I do not expect or hope for any kind of improvement.

I worry that the adhd medication was effective and useful for a time and it has gotten to the point where it is causing as many problems as it helps and I am starting the process of weaning off (with medical supervision do not fucking criticise me).

I watch the incoming terrifying blend of natural, political, social, and financial disasters hitting the UK with a sense of grim apprehension. I have been waiting all my life for a moment like this. I feel horrible about the fact that a lot of people are going to suffer terribly, some are going to die, but it won’t be my family. I continue my grim plod towards being able to provide a variety of supplemental food because I think famine is coming. I am installing solar panels with a battery system. I am installing rain butts, many and as large as I can manage. A chicken coop is finally being built. Hell, I’m even building a firewood pile because I worry that there will be a cold snap before the solar panels are installed. By the end of fall I will finally have my polytunnel set up for next year’s food growth.

I am working as hard and as fast as I can.

Noah’s job has managed to go most of the way towards fixing the issues that were happening with his salary. This is good. It would be a terrible time to go do a job hunt. I think we only lost a year’s worth of progress towards retirement. I am deeply aware that the fact that he is so insulated from the current global difficulties with regards to fair pay that he is still going to be able to retire before 60 means that I will never really understand the rest of my generation. Marrying him was hitting the lottery. I did not expect this. There is no fair. There is no deserve.

Even in company I feel lonely. I know I am not meeting anyone else’s emotional needs and they are not meeting mine. I do not know what could be done to change this. What I do know is that I am not suicidal and I am financially and physically prepared for more hardship than 90% of the planet. Maybe my expectation that things are going to fucking suck is almost a good thing. I am going to persevere. I will endure. I don’t need to be happy. I need to get the fucking work done.

And right now the next task on my list is to go make Middle Child a birthday cake. They are turning 12. Puberty is arriving and it’s going to be a wild fucking ride.

Riding the covid wave

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I like documentation. Documentation is awesome.

On Monday the 20th at about 1:00am our first notice of a problem was middle child waking up to vomit all over the sofa bed and floor of the hotel we were in. Cleaning that up sucked because the hotel didn’t really have cleaning supplies available. Suck.

Because of the railway strikes I already knew that if we waited until the 21st to go home… we couldn’t get home from Edinburgh on the train because of strikes. In retrospect, since we took the bus anyway, we maybe should have done that? I don’t know. I also knew that our hotel was booked for right after us and no other rooms were available anywhere nearby to allow us to wait out illness/strikes.

So we cleaned up and went back to sleep. Later on Monday the 20th we got up and packed up and took a bus to Birmingham (strikes had already cancelled all trains leaving Stratford-upon-Avon). Then we boarded what was supposed to be the first of three trains home. The second train was so delayed we missed the third train. I scrambled and found a bus route home. While we were on the bus Scotrail announced that they were adding one last train to Inverness. Damnit. MC woke up long enough to make transfers and otherwise slept through the ride home.

We arrived home at about 11:45pm on Monday the 20th.

Middle child spent Tuesday the 21st in their room on quarantine after a positive covid test, mostly asleep.

Wednesday the 22nd Youngest child developed a high fever and intense exhaustion and body pain and went to bed. We decided there wasn’t a point in putting MC in quarantine if YC was sick too because she is too little. I got some chores done in a big hurry because I could see that this wasn’t going to go well. I already felt cruddy, but a walking wounded kind of cruddy. In between chores I would end up snuggling YC back to sleep every time she woke up crying. Noah and EC both felt cruddy but not incapacitated. MC was awake for more of the day and happy about lots of computer time.

Thursday YC could not handle having me get out of bed because everytime I moved she cried. She was miserable. I didn’t feel good but I didn’t feel heinously bad. I was pretty happy about the rest even though I was super upset to miss an event I was supposed to freakin host. Whine.

Friday was my day to be flat out in bed mostly asleep. The chest congestion was still minimal. I hurt everywhere and couldn’t stay awake long enough to follow most of the bad movies I had on for company. YC was up and playing and complaining that no one wanted to entertain her. MC was feeling a little better but far from perfect. EC was feeling crummy but not a lot worse. Noah was still feeling cruddy but only a little worse. Noah and EC still test negative at this point.

Saturday I was awake slightly more but the pain was worse and the congestion was starting. Lots more coughing. Very full and disgusting hanky. YC was able to get up and move about but very grumpy and whiny and miserable. Noah felt worse but still able to do stuff. MC and EC both complained about not feeling well but managed to do what they felt like doing. I was barely able to stand and walk to the the toilet. I took a covid test just so I could double check. Yup, positive. YC hates the test so we are just calling her positive.

Today is Sunday the 26th. I can stand and walk more than yesterday but not for long without intense dizziness. I need to lean over the counter and rest if I am up for more than 2-3 minutes or get a chair. I am hacking up half a lung in disgusting productive coughs. It is less prolific as I am awake/closer to sitting for more time. It took a while of hacking to be able to breathe this morning. Today will definitely be a bed day. EC and MC both say they don’t feel good but they are in playing video games. YC is in bed with me because she doesn’t want to be up. Noah says he feels worse than the previous days but he hasn’t come to bed yet.

Being sick with a fitness tracking watch is fascinating. I can watch my resting heart rate climb (over 90 when usually it is in the mid 70’s). It does its best to monitor my oxygen saturation. It is monitoring its opinion of my “stress” rate (higher than it has been through the entire time I have owned the watch). Yesterday it claimed that my stress was skyhigh and it spent the whole day begging me to rest. I was flat out in bed barely moving enough to use the toilet or eat. My “average” for the previous year was a stress level of 37 and yesterday it was up at 81. Hm. My pulse oxygen readings are also lower than normal but probably not low enough to call a doctor yet. Low enough that I am monitoring it.

I knew the chronic bronchitis would be a problem if I caught covid. I’m coughing more than the rest of the house combined. Damnit. Not that I wish they were sicker. I don’t.

This was a very bad week to lose my glasses. I have a super bad headache. Ugh. Typing this was hard. Time for a nap.

Pacing

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I am sure there are many people who would not appreciate me saying this: but I miss lock down. I didn’t have to worry about balancing the various needs of my family members with various outside the home activities and people while also figuring out when to get chores done. I slept more and more consistently. Lately my sleep is shit again.

One of the problems with the age spread of my children is that the shape of providing “structure” for each of them is different. Youngest Child is still small enough that she should mainly be around kids through classes and they all want to start mid-morning and last for around an hour before popping the kids out on the other side expecting snacks and a trip to the park. Most parents of children in similar ages are either nearly in nursery or already in nursery and they are specifically training the kids around having the habit of being out of the house 5 days a week for most of the day so the children manage the transition to primary school.

I get it… but I also find that doing that in the morning mostly shoots my wad and I’m too tired to come home and do a big project of my own unless I do it after dinner and give up sleep. If I am out for the morning the mid-afternoon to dinner chunk is mostly me interacting with the older kids around their school stuff and my brain is just not currently capable of doing something for me while I talk to them. Yay ADHD medication? It feels like too tired because I can’t push my brain into doing many things at once on this medication unless I am super well rested.

If I get a good night of sleep and I start my project early in the day then I can normally handle talking to the older kids about a second thing while I work. (Most projects of this type being garden or cleaning related.) I can talk to them about their literature reading progress first thing in the morning while we continue working on removing nails from the old shed boards because we are going to repurpose the wood. But if I try to do the exact same thing starting at 1 or 2 I get confused and befuddled and irritated and angry. My brain says I can fuck all the way off.

So I’m not making forward progress on a lot of the outside projects I want to do since YC started classes and that’s feeling frustrating. The older kids have enjoyed the descent into too-much screen time that happened during my last painting project and they are absolutely loathe to give it up. They really won’t come out in the mid-afternoon and help me. I can push it in the mornings.

This pacing is not working and I feel exhausted and crappy most of the time. It doesn’t help that Noah’s work schedule is hard to figure out and manage. Working for a company that is 5 hours behind us in time zones gets to be pretty challenging.

I am almost to the end of this session of little kid classes. I am going to try and move the timing. If I can get her into classes that are more like after lunch and less like after breakfast then maybe I can get the big kids through helping me instead of getting on video games first thing then fighting to not have to get off later.

I am getting to the point where I am low key signaling distress in ways I don’t mean to and that’s a problem. Fairly random strangers keep asking me if I have any support because it sounds like I have a lot going on. It depends on what you mean by support but mostly… no. I have been shoving my mental health care needs in a box for a couple of years now. Every so often I open the box long enough to shove something else in then I quickly tape over it again. I’m not ok. I know that lots of people aren’t ok and I don’t have it bad in the scheme of things.

I’m not ok and I don’t have a way to cope with that right now. Therapy isn’t an option–I spoke with my GP recently about head injury stuff. In the course of the conversation she asked me how I was overall coping and I told her not that well. I had previously believed that I would be a lifer in therapy then I moved here and that’s not an option. She told me that she thinks I am being very kind to notice just how limited the access to therapy is here and deliberately not put myself on a waiting list. She told me that she has seen me enough times now to have a sense of me and she thinks that any of the therapists in town could be nothing other than a kind and sympathetic ear because they don’t have more training than I do after how much therapy I’ve had.

This is not the first local expert who has told me that I am the best source of support, tools, and tactics for managing my issues and those of my children in this area. Apparently I put those decades of living in the bay and having access to experts to very good use. Every so often one or the other of the older kids has something challenging happen with regard to mental health because they are people and life is complicated. When that happens I ensure that we have privacy and we get into the heavy stuff. Both kids have said, “I’m sure if I tell you about (_____) you will be upset with me.” I tell them to give me a minute so I can fix my face. Then I put on the “I will not judge you; I will be supportive and unsurprised by anything you say because it’s ok for you to be a person on your journey” face. We talk about their big feelings and the situation and why it is both normal and ok that they are struggling. We talk about the fact that it is hard that we can’t hire therapists to be there through these sorts of things going forward. We talk about what things they can imagine doing to change the situation. I ask if they want to hear about any other options I know about–sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Boundaries, yo.

I am not your therapist. I will never be a completely neutral party. I will never be 100% on your side because I am often the person you are in the most conflict with. That is rough. But I am not going to judge all of the things you think I will judge. I am not going to be upset about even half of the things you think I will be upset about. And as you get older I will have to be less and less of who you consider when you decide how you will solve a problem. That is the way forward. I am not and I can never be your therapist but I can help you talk out some of what is bothering you. I definitely don’t have all of your answers but pretty often I do have useful questions. I have been very lucky in my life and the state of California made sure that I had access to lots of people who asked good questions.

I need to start writing even if I am afraid of consequences. I am going to be the closest thing to a therapist I have going forward. That process doesn’t work well without the blog. As my Eldest Child says: “When I write something just for me I delete it or rip it up most of the time because it never seems worth keeping. When I just go ahead and post it right away then even when it isn’t perfect I get feedback and I have to act like it was real and I have to carry on forward as if it has happened and can’t be taken back.”

Of course, she is talking about the status of her fanfic and she’s posting on Wattpad so it’s slightly different. I’ve gotta say that her comments are probably more vicious than mine ever are. I worry about the consequences of my writing because working out my feelings is not a pretty process. Sometimes I hurt people when they know what is going on inside me. If I just shut my stupid mouth and stand near them then they don’t know what an asshole I am and things carry on without too big of a problem.

Being real about all the strife inside my brain is scary. I just about always have as much pull towards people as I have push away from them. My magnetic polarity is really confused.

The thing is: I do shitty things to hurt myself when I don’t work through the stuff in my brain. I am long past the point of the kinds of self-harm that would land me in a psych ward but I am not kind to myself. I do not take good enough care. I do things that will cause long-term damage through neglect or lack of love. It’s little, cumulative things but nothing dramatic that will force other people to intervene. I am smart and I don’t want intervention so let me tell you I will stay below that fucking radar for the rest of my life. There is a lot of room under the radar line to hit a bird and have it destroy an engine.

I am not acting like I am a creature I love who needs to be taken care of. That means I can’t model what that means and that’s a problem. I am very certain that I will never again have a person I talk to all the time to help me sort out my brain. So I have to do it. I need to start doing it a lot again. Which also means I need to stop sitting in this damn chair and use the standing desk. That’s going to have to be step one, Krissy.

Good thing to notice

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I’ve been going to yoga classes for a little bit now–a couple of months? Something that I notice when I’m there is that I talk to/about my body differently than I used to. I’m not sure when it changed because I don’t write this kind of thing much anymore. It’s noticeable to me because of what the instructors say. They tell you to check in with your body then pause and then tell you to get past the negative vocies.

These days when I check in with my body it’s gratitude. Thank you for being so strong. Thank you for carrying me so far. I am so proud of what you can do. Yeah, you hurt but isn’t it nice that you hurt so much less than you used to? I’m proud of us for learning how to take care of you better. I can feel the expression of love over time in my bones. I’ve worked so hard to get to where I am. I’m happy that I’ve had this kind of support and time.

I suspect that the combination of meds that I’m on at this point is helping. Amitriptyline is both for pain and it increases serotonin so it’s an antidepressant at the same time. The lisdexamfetamine feels like what I wish i could have had since I was a teenager. I genuinely believe I would have made fewer risky/bad choices if I had been on it.

I really wish I could have been properly assessed for ADHD and ASD as a teenager. It would have changed my life. I wonder if I would have accomplished as much? I wonder if I would have accomplished less? Ah well. It is what it is and all I can do is move forward.

It’s a lot better painting on this med combo. I don’t feel the urge to paint all night long “just to get through it”. I know it will make me feel like trash later and that’s not very tempting/alluring. I’ve been painting for a few weeks in a row now. My one short night of sleep (I got over 6 hours… so not a California short night) was when I was trying to clean up after painting. It took 15 hours to put things back in place and clean up the house enough for the cleaners to be able to come in and do actual cleaning instead of just walking around piles. My average for the last four weeks of sleep is about 8 and a half hours. That’s… kind of shocking for me being in a heavy work cycle. That’s just about healthy. Whoa. Balance.

I am finding a bit of appetite suppression from the amfetamine. I am eating smaller portions at meals (2 tacos instead of 3, 2 pancakes instead of 4, 1 bowl of soup instead of 2) and I feel less desire to have a late night dessert. Sometimes I skip lunch because I’m not that hungry but I eat a lot more dinner to make up for it and I think I eat about the same amount of food. I am drinking waaaay less alcohol (I’m probably taking 3-6 units a week down from 10-15) mostly because the amfetamine means you feel the alcohol less so I don’t feel as much desire to consume it. It still tastes good so I have some. And some of the wine I like is multiple units/serving in the glass I use so there you go. I’m flirting around 200. I haven’t seen lower than 203 since I arrived in Scotland and I’ve usually been in the 210’s and 220’s over the past 2 years so I am losing some weight. With the amount I exercise it has felt kind of weird that I keep as much extra padding as I have been. When I was in my 20’s and 30’s this much exercise would have kept me down in the 160’s.

Something that I think I am feeling in my body is I have dramatically fewer spikes of cortisol with this med combo. I really don’t feel anxious. Over the past two years I have noticed that in Scotland I feel dramatically less anxiety than I did in California as a baseline… even with the help that cannabis provided. I don’t have as much hypervigilance here. Prior to trying this med combo I was still feeling anxiety though in that way that I think is about my body being programmed to worry about everything as the natural state of being. That feels like it is stopping now. In California I had to be careful with my cannabis usage because I couldn’t/wouldn’t take it when I had to drive so I had a lot of up and down effect in terms of my experience in my body. I think there was enough break in cortisol production that my body could process food normally and not turn it all into emergency fat rations for later tragedy.

Since moving and being off cannabis entirely (the weight gain started right when I left California–I could tell in how my clothes fit) there has been a slow but gradual ballooning effect. Exercise and eating a balanced diet wasn’t having any impact at all. Despite the comments of ignorant people… I eat a fairly ridiculously healthy diet compared to the average person in the western world. We eat very little that is processed. We cook from scratch for something like 12-15 meals a week. (A lot of the other meals are leftovers.) We eat 4-9 servings of fruit and veg a day. I have cut a lot of the dairy and meat from my diet. (My family eats more than I do but I’m trying to limit inflammation.) My weight creeping up is not about eating too much and moving too little. Yeah yeah it’s anecdata but I have lived in this body for 40 years now and I’ve seen it through a lot of cycles. Cortisol/stress/anxiety.

It’s really dramatic having medications that lower the level of cortisol in my body on a 24/7 basis. I am consistent with the meds. I haven’t skipped many doses since I started so this is a really level sort of experience.

But my blood pressure has creeped up. I’m hoping that losing some weight will have an effect on that so that I can keep the meds. I really like how my brain feels. I have also halved the amitriptyline dosage on the advice of my GP to see if I can keep the positive effects with a lower dosage. She is mildly skeptical because my former dosage was already the “grandma dose” (her words) and she wonders if my body will be able to feel anything with half that. I’m trying it for a few weeks to see. I think it is worth trying. I really don’t want to lose the lisdexamfetamine. I feel like this is doing so much.

It feels like such a blessing that when I quiet down and look inward what I see is liking myself.

Projects.

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I’m up to 6 hours of painting. With design, set up, and take down tack on 4 or 5 hours. I have been leaving the design time out of my tracking so far and I don’t want to. I spent over an hour of practice drawings.

I will decide whether I am doing more ceiling (over the stairwell) just to use up the colors of paint I have in smaller containers or whether I am doing walls and doors when I see how I feel on Wednesday of next week. I don’t have a lot more small containers so I’m a little worried about how I’m going to manage having a bit of every major paint color out in a small container. Maybe we need to get some more takeout… This decision also requires me finishing the ceiling above the landing on Monday. That’s a maybe, of course. I’m adding white to show the light hitting the clouds. It’s going to be fussy and fiddly and take a while. I may have to add more yellow and/or more blue.

I anticipate each door taking 4 hours. There are 4 left on the landing. I’m hoping I can do the smallish bits in between in only 6 hours. That would have the landing done in the 30 hours I guesstimated on the first day. Second day? It’s starting to blend together already. Thus I’m writing it down now.

The stairwell piece is going to be an utter nightmare. That ceiling will probably take 10-12 hours because going up and down the ladder will wear me out. The three walls are probably going to take 10-20 hours each. I already know what I want for 2 of the walls: above the downstairs hall I am going to have a rocky outcrop and a lake; the big wall that started out with the mirrors I am going to use the GIANT oak stencil I bought because I want something that is really structured to balance out how much of my stuff is freehand. I like my freehand work but I also really like having some stuff that is more strictly crafted in the middle. The stencils are fussy and difficult and I will swear a lot while I’m using it. I hope I can get that fucking stencil done in only 3 days. That’s a hope, a dream, an aspiration. The third wall above the lounge/trees? I have no idea yet. Hopefully it will come to me. I need a way to bridge the two pieces I already have in mind. Then there’s the hand rail which will probably want another 10-20 hours because I want to do a lot of detail work. Which may be a bit stupid and/or masochistic because that’s a high traffic piece of wood and it will chip. Hrm.

Then I get to downstairs!

I’m trying to pace myself and only work when I have a babysitter here so that I’m not giving up sleep so I currently have 6 hours a week to devote to this project. Thus I’m looking at this work carrying through for another 16-24 weeks. Cheers. Only half a year. No biggie. Or I could increase her hours a tiny bit and have 9 or 12 hours in a week. That would still be fairly reasonable pacing for body strain (it’s divided into 3 days) and it would let me finish the upper part of the hallway in 8-12 more weeks for a total of 10-14 weeks for this project. That’s not terrible. I could argue that it is quite sane and kind to my body with a straight face.

Then there’s the downstairs hallway, the lounge, and the dining room left to be painted. The only reason I’m pushing myself at this point is because the paint really is thick as mud and apparently is going to get less and less usable over time. Joy.

If I can get through the paint I may just not give a fuck about bathrooms or the laundry room or my bedroom any year soon. Please oh please let me finish up the paint before I feel the need to do any of those rooms. And the youngest kid will have to be old enough to express strong opinions before I paint her room.

Oh hey, and I was going to do a whole bunch of gardening this year. Sure… my body can handle this….

I’m sleeping! This is totally a healthy workload… right? I’m getting a pretty good step count. I’m eating SO MANY VEGETABLES. This qualifies as self care while working, right? Don’t answer that. You aren’t the boss of me.

A hysterectomy sounds better all the time.

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My mood is really awful for about 1/3 of the month. It turns on/off like a light switch. When I hit the day my period is actually going to arrive I suddenly have a nose full of snot, I feel like I am about to throw up, and I have vicious diarrhea. I feel like someone is stabbing me in the back with an ice pick. Bending over to pull a clean cup out of the dishwasher is stabbingly painful.

I’ll feel better in a few days. But right now I’m at the peak of bad mood plus bad body and it is a fucking nightmare. I am fairly likely to have ten more years of cycles. With 1/3 of the month being (some of it literally) a shit show.

Bodies are the worst.

Heart racing

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Here’s an Amitriptyline symptom I should note: I’m having noticeable elevated heart rate. My watch buzzes when my heart rate is too high compared to my level of movement. It’s going off almost all day right now. I’m elevated above 120 bpm for hours a day even if I’m barely moving around. That seems kind of problematic. Hm.

Because of the watch I can give specific data about my heart rate compared to exercise over a very long time period. I normally rarely hit 120 unless I’m doing prolonged fairly intense exercise. Now I hit that sitting in a chair over and over all day.

My watch is buzzing enough that the people I live with are noticing and commenting on hearing it. That seems… possibly not good.

Well I stopped tracking…

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The onramp to this medication is magnificently easy. I am stunned. I have never had such an easy time with a psych med (ok it’s considered a 4th line antidepressant so it’s not mostly a psych med but… it’s a psych med).

I saw the doctor for an in person exam. She basically said that the placement of the wound means I am almost certainly not experiencing nerve pain as a result of the surgical site. She thinks it is muscular, which tracks with my previous general experience. (My old long-term medical massage therapist and good friend thinks that it is fascia related and he sarcastically says “It’s not like I’ve watched the progress of your body up close and personal for over a decade or anything”.) For the record he was one of the early people to suggest Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.

So the doctor wants me to stay on this medication in large part because it is giving me one of the benefits I got from cannabis that is anxiety/depression/ADHD related-ish. Specifically: I really struggle with impulsive reactions to things. On pot I have this pause in my brain that allows me to stop and consider how I want to react to things that happen to me. I’m getting the same pause with this drug. It’s not that I am generally speaking super slowed down or dumber… I’m not losing words and I can still be funny and respond fairly quickly. I just have… the ability to decide how I want to react to things again and I really like that effect. Given that this drug is free from the NHS it may be almost worth the price of admission.

Other side effects that are ongoing: I’m slower to wake up than normal and it isn’t putting me to sleep much earlier or more reliably after being on it for a few weeks. I can take elephant level quantities of tranquilizers and just shake them off. Sure I can stay up all night cleaning, why not?

She doubled the amount to 20mg. I’ve now been on this a week and I’d say I’m very acclimated and it’s a mild overall impact.

She also wants me slathering gel Ibuprofen on a few times a day and I would say that is helping somewhat… if I do almost nothing with my arms. If I do much with my arms in a day it hurts about as much as normal. If I do almost nothing the Ibuprofen brings the pain level down.

I’m feeling incredible distress over the level of pain I’m experiencing because I had months of almost no pain. I’m not entirely sure what kicked it up to full speed again. It started getting bad in September/October and it’s been bad since.

I’ve been super low energy for the last week but I think it is more related to my sore throat and mild cough. Everyone in the house feels lousy so I don’t think it is medication related.

I’m having enough trouble sleeping that I used one of my last Lorazepam tonight and I had some brandy.

I just… metabolize drugs like whoa. And it’s 9:10 and I’m a little tired but not really sleepy at all. I took the Amitriptyline at around 6. The Lorazepam at 8. I’ve been nursing a glass of brandy for about 4 hours. I’m not even anxious I’m just… not sleepy. I crave interaction.

On the third day of med trial my body gave to meeeeee

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Very little notice that I am using anything new. I would say that today I felt incredibly close to normal. I feel like I was a little slowed down but in the “I need more sleep and I’m working too hard” sense rather than in the “Holy shit I’m swimming through molasses” sense. I probably feel less of a malaise of depression. Today I was more patient with the kids than I have been on a lot of days lately.

I didn’t do as much exercising as yesterday (only walked 2 miles but I rode my bike almost 5 miles and that didn’t feel hard at all–more than a mile of it was up an extremely steep hill). We went out and picked litter with a group who has been moving around the city trying to help out in different areas every weekend. It was very productive and nice. Gotta meet our local hippie comrades.

I took the pill at 5:30 tonight because 6pm last night didn’t have me feeling sleepy till 9. I also took some pain medication tonight because my back and neck are in full on fuck-you mode and I can’t keep this up.

I don’t know that it is making a big difference in the nerve pain. My hand is still going numb quite easily. My elbow is on fire. My upper arm is numb until you touch it then it tingles and hurts. I can’t reach the wound site to see how tender that is by myself.

Overall I would say that right this minute I think this dosage is not a serious/permanent solution to the problem but the side effect profile is not so bad that I am terrified of upping the dosage to play with it. I am currently taking 10mg and up to 75mg/day is within normal expected range. Apparently it is expected that it might take 6 weeks to be effective as a pain killer. As of this evening I feel very comfortable with being willing to test that long. That’s actually a pretty resounding endorsement from me. Normally 3 days into a drug means I’m already trying to figure out how to get the fuck off it.

So I’d say a C+ or B- right now? I’d like more impact on nerve pain. It could definitely do more for actual depression and anxiety. But it is a start and it’s not a bad start.

And this is all fucking free.

Another day, another chance to record what’s happening

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Med responses are very important to me. I am upset that I have so few written records of my previous drug attempts. Oh, by the way my oldest heard me make a crack about having a hangover from the drug and she flipped out. She thought I was using hard street drugs because I had just run out of cope.

Serves me right for not telling my kids in advance absolutely everything I do with my body I guess?

Today was different. Less exhaustion. I woke up at 4 for a trip to the loo. I didn’t get back to sleep for close to an hour then I was up by 6:30. I took the pill at 7 last night and was asleep by 8:30.

Tonight I took the pill at 6.

Today we had already made plans to go for a walk in the woods with a family who lives about 1.5 miles away from us who are new to home education. They have a 9 year old boy and an 11 year old girl. The two of them both turned up saying that they were hoping for a kid of their gender. I said, “How would a non-binary kid who is not a boy and not a girl who likes to do things regardless of gender fit?” They had about two questions then they both went with it. For the record: that’s where middle kid is at again.

Anyway, I was… more calm than usual? I felt like my brain was slower and on the sluggish side. It was a less pleasant experience than pot but not completely dissimilar? I didn’t have any of the uplift I get from pot but I got a little bit of the “pause” between having a thought and reacting.

My feet are going to sleep ridiculously quickly. If I kneel down to put stuff in a drawer it doesn’t take 2 minutes. Usually I can kneel for 10-15 minutes before my feet fall asleep.

My back has been hurting quite badly all day. Of course I have walked 6.5 miles after it hurt when I woke up. Cause yeah. I carried the littlest home for the final mile because she was utterly wasted.

I’m still having some nerve pain in my arms if I tweak them up to use them in an unusual position. (Putting the baby in the back carrier was a bit festive.) I feel a lot of tightness and general arm unhappiness. I have fairly deliberately not typed much today trying to rest. (Really the last couple of days.)

I have very much wanted to not add more medication to this in the first few days. So I’m not taking anything for the back pain or headache. I want to have a really solid idea of what is coming from the Amitriptyline. Normally I would definitely be medicating for those at this point because it hurts.

I’m having massive time dilation. I can check and see this is the end of the second day. It feels like a lot more than that. I labeled the pill packet with the exact date I am supposed to take each pill because I am worried about taking too much or skipping a day and not noticing.

I am utterly out of patience with the kids but I think that was happening before the meds. Right now it is hard to remember.

In unrelated news: I have 17 books to read in 34 days. Time for some graphic novels (Neil Gaiman’s American Gods 1 & 1). In another day I can finish The Cooking Gene, and I need to sit the kids down and finish Odd Girl Out. That will leave me with 14 books to go. Eep. Maybe my goal was a tad ambitious for this year…

New med tracking

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Started Amitriptyline last night, primarily for nerve pain. I got a solid 8 hours of sleep, which I don’t always do and that seems nice. As I was going to sleep I felt like I got to watch a firework show on my eyelids. Lots of bright white lights dancing. As is typical for me it took more like an hour and a half to really hit me instead of an hour.

ETA: Yeah, I barely stayed awake long enough to eat a little breakfast then I almost passed out on the table so I crawled back to bed. I was in and out for a while making sure that oldest got to school. Then I slept hard until 10:30 when I could tell that I needed to go to the bathroom to deal with blood (it’s the heaviest day of my period. What glorious timing).

My dreams were super intense and overwhelming and constant and highly sexual which I did not expect on a medication known for lowering libido.

I am so groggy that middle kid has been talking at me for a while and I have literally not retained a word of what has been said. I feel slow and stupid and exhausted.

It’s a very good thing I homeschool my 10 year old and Noah works from home because I don’t know how I could have provided care for the 2 year old today while alone. Scary thought. Woof.

I have a really intense headache at the back of my head near the top of the spine and it shoots straight through the skull to make it throb hard on my left temple. My mouth has been throbbing, which is a weird ass feeling. I keep feeling like I am falling only I’m lying prone at the time.

Strangely it was easier to sleep than usual because even though my neck/head hurt quite badly my shoulders already feel a little easier. It didn’t instantly hurt lying on my side. If I reach back gently the surgical wound site still hurts.

The headache is absolutely massive but I am worried about taking another medication on top of what is in my system.

I am sad because my lack of help today is going to mean that Noah has to work more days into December. (He was going to take the month off.) But at least I think it’ll only be a couple of days next week and not the whole month.

Also of note: my typing has been super shitty. It’s taking me 3-8 tries to figure out how to spell a lot of basic words. Yay spell check preventing me from looking in writing as stupid as I feel.

Everything hurts

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I’ve been trying really hard not to complain. Things are tough all over right now.

I’m having problems with my shoulder. Almost 11 months ago I had surgery to remove skin cancer. I had fairly extreme wound dehiscence. If you don’t know what that is (lucky you) it means after a surgery the healing wound site pops open. It was pretty fucking gory and bloody and resulted in a giant, garish, ugly scar. I don’t care that much about it being ugly.

I care that it still hurts. If I lean back on a chair a little too suddenly it hurts. If Noah gently strokes my back and he gets to within an inch of the wound I feel so much pain that my knees turn to jelly. I am not a wimp. I can endure significant pain.

My shoulders have been in bad shape for over 11 years due to nursing all night long with my oldest child and sleeping on my side in a rigid position. But it’s so bad now that I feel pretty constant pain. I miss chiropractic care and massage but with Covid it doesn’t feel like a good idea to be pursuing these sorts of intimate treatments.

Instead I endure. My brain feels cloudy. I know I am more irritable than I would be otherwise. It’s harder dealing with my general feelings of depression.

When I say it hurts I mean lifting a pot of tea to pour a cup hurts. Sometimes there is burning and stabbing pain all the way up and down my arm. Washing dishes is really painful; the pinching movement of holding things as part of the process is nasty.

To give you a bit of perspective… I have finally cracked. House cleaners are going to start coming to the house. That’s a pretty gigantic admission of defeat for me. I need help because I can’t do as much anymore because it hurts too much. I feel really despondent about this. I feel pathetic. I feel sad. I feel weak. I feel like a failure. I literally cannot carry my third child the way I did with my first two. She has to walk. Pushing a stroller is horribly painful. She has to walk. Luckily riding my bike is fairly comfortable because I have worked hard at adjusting the positioning of everything so the only time I really put pressure on my hands is when I am actively braking.

I often wake up with intense, nearly blinding pain in my neck and shoulder. I feel so embarrassed when I take pain medication first thing in the morning. It’s not that anyone in my family judges me. But I didn’t want to grow up and be like my mother.

I think I should probably reach out to the medical staff, dermatologist probably? But with Covid and cancer patients and people with urgent medical problems not being able to access necessary-for-life care I don’t feel at all comfortable raising my hand and asking for help.

So instead I sit in my house and I take the over the counter pain meds and I cry. I don’t feel any hope about ever feeling good in my body again. I am very scared of the degradation that is coming. There is nothing I can do about it. I just get to endure it. I made commitments and I take them very seriously. I will be here as long as I am physically capable of clawing my way through.

It’s going to hurt so very much and I’m scared.

Scraping the bottom of the spoon drawer

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Well fuck everything. The last two ish weeks have been absolutely horrid. I mean, there’s all the things (*wave arms in the direction of the whole world*) and then my body is being a real nightmare. My PMDD symptoms this month have been utterly unreal. My pain levels have been sky high. My mood is in the toilet. (Or rather in the scalpel drawer–not that I did anything. But I thought about it. Hell I don’t even own a scalpel at this point.)

And then when I did start my period my mood got worse and the pain got worse and I passed some clumps that were the size of golf balls and that’s just not fucking ok.

I’m watching two very different communities go through growing pains. I’m learning a lot about myself as I watch them process. I’m thinking about Sobonfu. I will never find a community; I have to make it. What are my values?

I’m more than a little bit of a dick. So my line can’t be that people can’t be dicks. I can be a bully so that can’t be the line either. Ah shit.

I try so hard to lift people up but right this minute all I can see are my failures.

So close and yet so far.

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I was done. My share of the project was finished. I had no more painting to look forward to. Then I noticed… Middle Child is really and truly not ready to do her own room. She tried. She did a lot! She did great! She can’t edge to save her life. And she takes the dark edging color and smears the brush all over the super light colored wall when she thinks she has too much paint on it. Insert head smacking emoji.

My hands are in a bad place. Holding a paint brush sucks. I’ve got about three hours of pinchy movement in my hands in a day before I have shooting pains. I did three hours of trim today. I will do three hours of painting on Sunday. And on Monday. Hopefully I will finish on Tuesday. I am both looking forward to and not looking forward to this process.

Eldest Child says she is done and her mural looks fabulous.

Now we get to wait for carpet fitting to be done. ECs room smells strongly of nicotine–that was part of the motivation for her paint job and the carpet is gross too. I don’t like the idea of her having to breathe that crap through another winter so we are making the room less nasty. Apparently the teenage boy who used to live in the room was a heavy smoker. Ugh.

MCs room had a shower/sink wash room taken out of the corner so there is a big patch with no carpet at all and that’s not going to work in the long run.

Neither bedroom has carpeting on the redone closet and they should have. The sub flooring is not meant to see the light of day.

In 34 days we have been in this house for a year. I’d really like to be done with the big fixing jobs. I’d like to spend a lot more time puttering in the yard but by the time I’m done with inside chores I’m so wiped out. I’m still trying to deal with the sleep deprivation I put myself through for the dining room. In 27 days I missed 8 full nights of sleep. That’s too much. Ah well.

I have new glasses! They are amazing! I can see better than I have in such a long time. I like the cool grey metal.

I’m having more interactions with young people here than I am used to. In California my friends group skewed noticeably older and here I seem to be finding a lot of folks in their 20’s. I suspect it is related to people my age being busy and not having time to go meet new people. This is leading to a lot of feelings. Some of the folks are really stellar–don’t get me wrong. I’m truly thrilled about some of the folks I have met. Ironically the ones that please me the most are the in person ones.

I’m having a fair number of online interactions that I’m struggling with. I am a judgy motherfucker. When I was 19 I had this interaction with a 39 year old woman who told me I shouldn’t be in the scene and I should go off and have normal people sex for a decade or so. Now I get it. These kids scare the hell out of me. They… sigh.

They scare the hell out of me. I’m not going to get into what they are doing.

I worry a lot about them as individuals and how their behavior will contribute to their community. I worry about the girls and young enbys in the community and what they have to put up with from the macho “lad” crew. I feel like I can watch this chat room for a couple of days and go “Ah. You either already have or will have a bad reputation because you are dangerous.”

These are instincts I totally lacked 20 years ago.

I have so many mixed feelings about myself these days. I have come so far.

Recently I pissed someone off when I said that I didn’t feel like 9/11, the 2008 financial crash, or this pandemic are going to be the central life changing traumas of my life. I was told that saying that meant I was rubbing my good luck and privilege in other peoples faces. 9/11 happened across the country and I was at least two or more degrees of separation away from people who were really effected. I would feel like a poseur if I said it really changed my life.

I mean, this explosion in Beirut isn’t going to be a formative trauma for me either even though it is absolutely a horrifying trauma. It isn’t mine.

Most of my friends were either above or below the 2008 financial crash. I was in the process of quitting teaching when it happened. Teaching was a career that was insulated from the results. Is that all luck or privilege? A lot of my friends were in marginal jobs or retail or child care and they weren’t impacted. Is that luck or privilege? I lived in a house that had been purchased long before the crash so my housing was secure. That was both luck and privilege.

I feel weird about having white people who started out in the exact same place as me at the brink of adulthood tell me that my life is different from theirs now because of privilege. I think almost everything that has happened to me since I got married has been about privilege. But there was this gap period that I have funny feelings about. I lived a hair above the national poverty line for the first seven years of being an adult in one of the most expensive places in the country. I definitely had times I went on dates in order to eat. Being told that everything that happened to me in that time period was because I was so privileged is complicated. I’m not saying it is wrong.

Sometimes I’m not sure what privilege means.

I’m ready for slower days. I’m ready for shorter days. I’m ready to stop with the fucking pinchy work. I am pretty sure I can finish the painting this week. When I do I think we are entirely done painting for a long while. That’s good. This year has been so slammed and I am so utterly exhausted. I feel half dead.

I want this toddler to stop waking up three times a night and climbing in my damn bed.

Oh, toddler sayings I want to remember: “I have a pooty” for I have a poopy booty. “Clean the pipes!” is emphatically screamed when I am cleaning her up after a pipe. It’s time to go to sleep.