Tag Archives: sleep

Shards and training

Leave a reply

It is funny to me how the ravenous cavern of emptiness inside of me feels different now. I notice that there has been a qualitative change in me in this AN time period. (After Noah, of course.) I’m at 15 months AN. It’s such a short time, really. Progress when measured in reverse is pretty shocking. We are doing ok. I am doing ok. No, I don’t feel “all better” but I can see where I am headed. I can see that I am doing what I need to be doing. More importantly, I can see that I really do need to chill on some pieces of impulsive joy even though I want to say yes to all of it.

I keep dating people who want to go to loud places with me. Why do I do this? Why am I picking loud musicians right now? Where are my Cheese damned priorities? I can’t hear. No, this is not a venue for deep conversation. So we will look at each for a few hours in an overwhelmingly loud space. Ok. This is happening. Also, I am too fucking old to make out in a pub.

It is really funny watching these layers of inhibition unfold within me. I can feel in my body how a younger me would have acted. No, I can’t do that anymore. No, I can’t ignore the whole audience and do whatever I want. No. The audience is desperately important. This is why I want to go to sex inclusive bdsm parties the most. That is literally the only environment where I don’t have to feel fucking paranoid about squelching shit I acted out for 25 years. I know how inappropriate I used to be. I have learned. It took a lot of researching child development for me to fully understand why I was so horrifying as a foster child. Right. That’s why they kicked me out. I was uhm, acting out in age inappropriate ways. I didn’t have much internal inhibition about sexual behaviour of any kind.

I’m 6 weeks away from having seen a whole healthy childhood. That’s been fucking wild. I have learned a lot of inhibition in service to being able to provide this to someone else.

My kids asked who I was going on a date with. I appreciated the wide eyes and big gasp before “Niiiiiiiiiiiiice.”

The show we attended involved a lot of the performers being there with their whole families in attendance. No, I was not going to make out. No matter how much that clearly would have been fine with Pretty Lady. She’s past caring. I am not. If I want to be useful as an ambassador for weird I am going to have to keep a lot of it behind closed doors.

When I was 21 I would have had my fingers up her skirt. When I was 23 I had been teaching long enough that I would have limited myself to making out with hands only around her waist. Now I could feel a shock in my body and I recoiled from her intense kissing. It felt out of place and wrong. That’s interesting and I should pay attention to that. It’s not that I’m opposed to the idea of kissing her, not even a little bit.

There are an interesting large number of power dynamic differences in this relationship. I am trying to pay attention to where I need to manage shit with a tight hand or it isn’t going to be sustainable to me. She has more ability to function on less sleep than I do. I suffer physically for days when I fuck up my sleep schedule. It’s why my pain levels are as bad as they are right now. My sleep keeps getting fucked up. I’m having too many late nights.

As much as I want to be all “Say yes!” I think I am hurting myself in stupid and predictable ways and it’s becoming a choice. I don’t love this form of self harm. It is really uhh crappy. Like, if I could cut and get a jolt of energy and power through my life with good cheer that would be a very small cost to me. Sleep deprivation makes every single aspect of being alive hard.

While the musicians were nice and all I need to say no next time. I need to be having one or two late nights in a whole month not one a week. This is getting really stupid. I am hurting myself and the amount of backlash in my body is exceeding coping methods. I’m struggling with exercise over the last few days. I’m having patches of numbness. Normal tasks are taking longer because I’m physically depleted and I’m dropping important bits of information out of my head.

I can’t keep impulsively adding late night joy. I am doing lots of planning around my body being able to handle specific events. I need to stick to those long term plans if I don’t want to get sick. I’m being stupid.

Saying no is hard. Saying yes is far harder on me.

My therapist asked me who is feeding me yesterday. They noted that I opt in to a lot of mentor type relationships, I offer help for parents who are overwhelmed, and I deliver food to neighbours who are going through tough times. All of this has pretty much resumed a close to normal pace on my calendar. I have a lot of relationships with people who need me to give. It was really nice that I could immediately rattle off a lot of people who are there for me near and far.

I want to get my sleep schedule back on track because it being fucked up means I miss the monthly check in call with my Elders. I don’t like doing that. It means that I don’t get to nurture that connection and it is important to me. It’s important to me that these people love me and believe in me and really want to continue being support to me throughout my life. They have been there through a lot of things.

I think I am messing up the balance and it’s not sustainable. New is good. Old is also very important. The thing about the long term friendships is the way we are witnesses to the arcs of our lives. Being impressed is not based on glamour it is based on experience and earned esteem. It’s like time with Bestie. The people who have known me the longest give me constant verbal affirmation about how far I have come. They saw the story happen. I don’t have to say anything or ask for anything from them. We talk about what has been happening for us each month and they stare at me with overwhelming intensity because I can see them playing the story arc out in their heads. They tell me I am doing so good and I can believe them because they saw how fucking hard I had to work to get to this moment.

I don’t have any scale for evaluating the evaluations of new people. When they give me compliments mostly I shrug. I don’t know how to hear them and understand them. I don’t accept any compliment without thinking really hard about it. I mean, in the moment I say, “Thank you” or if I’m feeling saucy, “I know.” The thing is, I know that each of these opinions is subjective and people vary in how they assign value.

I’m sorry to be so blunt about it, but compliments are part of positive behaviour modification. It’s a really common way that people train the folk around them. It’s usually utterly unconscious. I don’t think most people are trying really hard to be manipulative with a plan. I mean, I do but it’s because I’m super fucking autistic and I have learned that I need a detailed plan or I just don’t leave the fucking house. I have to know what is expected and what will be acceptable from me in a given environment. I no longer like places with fuzzy attitudes about behaviour. I have fucking learned the Social Contract like I want to stay out of jail. I will always err on the side of not drawing attention.

Wow. I really am scared in a way I’m not paying enough attention to. I think it is funny that three different woo fuckers have observed that I have a lot of blocked root chakra energy in the last two weeks. My life is hilarious. Yeah. Sure. Why not? Frankly, is that a worse thing to say than Generalised Anxiety Disorder? Enh? It’s funny how much more explanatory root chakra descriptions are than the DSM ones. It talks about where in my body I am experiencing different forms of stress around existing in the world. These things are often common among people. It’s kinda like how I can clock ECSA people by their bathroom habits. If you are raped a lot as a little kid you often have bathroom issues for the whole of your life. “Fun” fact.

I think that this kind of fucking around with my schedule because I want to please people is why I’m going to need to stick really hard with solo poly shit. I need to give people appointment slots. I can perform the kind of behaviour you want from me between these hours. During these other hours, should we be in the same space, I will be fucking sleeping. You can enjoy listening to live music without me. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck.

I’m torn because I want to support local artists. Also I feel like starting at 8pm is fucking insane and painful and cruel. Who the fuck are you people? How in the world are you fucking moving around and trying to be engaging at bedtime? What is wrong with you?

This is why I stopped doing theatre at 19. That was not a good career match for my body. I prefer jobs that start between 5 and 7am. I think this is partly because early afternoon is my preferred time for sex. Always has been. Noah and I literally built our life around making sure we spent as much of that time having sex as possible. Nights and mornings were more chancy because of vagaries of the day.

I’m going to have to be better about asserting my limits if I am going to date this woman. It’s on me. It’s fine that she asked. I should have said no. I made a bad choice. I’m not entirely sorry. It was nice to be asked. It was fun to dress up and catch at least 15 of the words she said all night. It was a high cost activity though and I am finding myself starting Saturday in spoon deficit. This was not smart. I am going to be limited in what I accomplish today. That’s not what I wanted for the day.

It’s my day to go make the big sweet breakfast for Saturday. I really don’t want to. That sounds vaguely like torture. It’s going to be the kind of day where I either get a burn or cut myself. Woo. I love days when I feel this bad and have no adult in the house to take over. Woo.

I miss Noah. Also, I see what I did to him by over-extending myself a lot more clearly. I see why he got increasingly picky about what I was allowed to do as our life went on. He had to pick up the pieces. I get it. Literally he was devoting his whole life to figuring out how to get me to rest more for the last 4 or so years. He was trying so hard to be a container the size and shape that would force me into healthier patterns. Of course that means there was behaviour other people interpret as abusive, duh. We were weirdos. We needed things other people don’t and we negotiated about them very directly.

Now I have to be an adult and carefully negotiate tiny pieces of interdependence over very long term periods. Itty bitty. Absolutely nothing is mandatory ever. Every step has to be explicitly agreed to. Every breech of decorum and assertion of an aberrant need must be explicit.

I am going to need to write a letter to talk to her. I need it to not sound like a rebuke because it isn’t. I am going to have to find a tone of explaining my needs that doesn’t sound like negative judgment about her. She is in an exciting period of her life. I get that she is going to be impulsive like a teenager. My whole life is dealing with what it means to live with impulsive teenagers. I feel really lucky that the main big impulsive things in my house are cooking, baking, writing, making or otherwise creating something.

Ack. I am summoned.

So this is what is going on with me.

Leave a reply

Right now I am on a brief rest break before I either decide if this is a longer break so I can go to the queer social night or if I am going to go outside to work in the garden. Right now I am trying to get the house/garden set up for an open house with the home ed folks so I feel a lot of get up and go for the work. I’m trying to figure out how I can lay out walkways that let people understand clearly where I don’t want them stepping in my chaotic garden full of plants and different kinds of mulch all over the place.

So that is one piece. I have various irons in the fire with the home education community. I’m trying to figure out which relationships I should cultivate harder and which ones are unlikely to be a good usage of my time. I am feeling incredibly scheduled again. Time is, as it will be for the rest of my life, the biggest limiting factor for everything I do.

Exercise is going to be really over-represented in my schedule for the next five months. I am increasingly conscious of just how much cross training I need to build supportive muscles that are not used in running and to relieve tightness. I’m old. I need so much more effort to get to baseline and it fucking sucks. I’m tired.

Which means that if I am going to effectively absorb and use this exercise to actually get stronger I must sleep. Like, a lot. Even though it looks like daytime until almost midnight and then it is dusk for a little while again before it is daytime again. I’ve never been a great daytime sleeper. Which means I have to get up pretty dang early every single day and get in bed before 10 every single night. I don’t do well with adding in a run later in the day. As my runs get longer and longer I need to mostly just start earlier.

Dang, the other day in the park I met this older lady who told me that she ran her first marathon at 51 and she did it in 4 hours and 45 minutes. Fuck. I can’t even. I am really really really really really really hoping that I will be at least 1 minute less than 6 hours. I am not greedy. My previous shitty time was 6 hours and 45 minutes. I would desperately like it to be shorter than 6 hours. But I’m nervous sending that wish into the universe because I kept saying “I would just like to finish labour in 24 hours” for all three births and I never fucking did. That was a giant failure to manage a prediction/hope/goal for my bodily functioning. I actually went into the first marathon thinking I’d be something in the neighbourhood of 5 hours and 30 minutes. lololololsob

Since I am trying to decide if I am going out tonight: I could go find the giant pride flag and figure out the flagpole situation right *now* and have it up for my ride in since it’s pride month. 🏳️‍🌈 And it is pride month. Seems like a great time to be bonding with my local homies before the big event happens with all the folks who travel in from the villages.

Sometimes I wonder if we really understand people in the past as much as we think we do. Like, if I did not practically tattoo “queer” on my forehead every so often I would be entirely unremarkable and perceived as a normal cis-het mother. I really do believe that queerness is an aspect of my personality that is outside of what other people describe as their normal. It is part of the ravenous predatory streak I have. I sit on myself so hard at this point. Although the funny thing is that I don’t feel it as intensely as I used to. I suppose I would describe it as once upon a time I know I would have gone there. I am not going to speculate if that would have gone well back when. That would not go well now. Ok, bounce eyes.

Sex is complicated in a place this small. Holy crap. The dynamics scare me. Like, honestly. I fucked around so casually for so long. I would not understand how to avoid pissing in other people’s cheerios. No freaking wonder most human beings have low body counts. Yikes it could get really challenging in a place this small. I think I lack the diplomacy to do this tactfully. I am glad I don’t have to find out. It will never matter because Noah is not allowed to die before me. He has been informed.

But good golly I’ll dress as a garish motherfucker and wave a flag sometimes and coyly answer questions about for whom am I advertising. Since it really will never get to anything other than friendship I must fly that kind of outrageously if I am going to find my people and I am going to find them and find ways to integrate them into my life. I believe that queers need each other. Many of us don’t have families of origin we maintain contact with. A very large percentage of us do not have children. That doesn’t mean that any of us deserve to be alone. We have to find each other.

I mean, I can literally say: “Hey if you are one of those queers who feels like they really want a place to go and spend time and make deep community… I am going to be buying a tiny piece of land.” A piece of land small enough that we can do the vast majority of work by hand with folks not feeling exhausted at the end. I know so many people who talk about how much they wish they could build something like that. I want to make community. You’ll be welcome to come hang out in the forest you build anytime. The gates don’t lock.

I don’t wanna be Auntie… but I wanna be Auntie. That woman has had a full house of people she has been helping all of her life. First it was foster kids her mom took in and then it was all the stray people having troubles she knew. She raised her sister… and her sister’s kids… and her sister’s grandkids…

I wanna be Auntie with upgrades. She helped people in a way that resulted in a lot of deeply dependent, incapable people. Not all of them. Some of them just needed a safe place to sleep and eat for a couple of months then they went on their way and did fine. But then there are most of the rest of them. Last I knew she was in her late 70’s and working to pay a mortgage to cover the refinances her husband took out and to pay to take care of all three of her children who live with her.

I am not fucking interested in disabling my children.

I want to help people learn more about how they can teach themselves the things they need to learn in order to move forward. I mean physical skills, intellectual skills, emotional skills, academic skills, and most importantly how to set goals and work towards something they want. They get to figure out what that is. As long as you are not able to pick one I’ll push you through picking something for a while and we will both learn a lot as you learn why you end up disliking it. Over time they gradually pick better and better projects for themselves. They still fuck up… a lot… but that is the point. Fuck up now. Fuck up in ways that won’t matter in 10, 20, 50 years. Hell, most of these fuck ups won’t matter in 5 minutes. Just do it. Fuck up. Learn the lesson. Don’t hold back and wait. Don’t waste time. Think of all the better decisions you will make once you learn this. Doesn’t that sound nice? At some point it will be easier for you to figure out which decision will work for you without having to suffer so much at so many junctions.

BUT THEN YOU MOVE TO ANOTHER FUCKING COUNTRY AND HAVE TO LEARN ANOTHER FUCKING CULTURE AND JUST FUCK YOURSELF ALL THE WAY UP.

Cheezits mother trucker.

So I’m sorta categorising my community efforts as:

  • bike
  • queer
  • kink
  • maker
  • community resource sharing
  • gardening
  • political
  • proximity

That’s why I feel like whoa. That’s why I don’t feel like I’m getting to know people quickly. I’m trying to duplicate the full spread of the type of web I had in California and build all aspects of it at the same rate at the same time. While I’m fucking exercising a lot. I suppose the bike community is sorta good for that but a lot of my time there feels super awkward because I am not able to hear that well.

I mean look at the size of the fucking social life I’m planning for the next few decades. I’m going to need to be a fit bitch to ride my bike around to all that shit.

Cause that is what I’m aiming for. I’m going to go do shit. I’m go to make things with people. I am going to invite people to help me with the property.

It’s a whole fucking thing. If you ask people to do something for you they will like you more. And co-working is my biggest love language so I will invite people into my bubble and see who self selects in. And that will be a lot of the inner layers of the core of the web. That’s how it tends to work. It won’t be a perfect alignment, sometimes those very first points on the web are smaller but they lead to a giant nexxus.

That’s how your bestie picked by proximity ends up being the one to tell you “You really should go to the Disaster House Party. I think you will have a very good time.” Reader: I married the guy throwing the party. And then she leaves you to marry an admittedly rather cool guy who happened to live almost halfway around the world. So you name your children after each other because you miss each other so much. Then you decide that 10 years is long enough and you move 2 fucking miles away from her.

I mean, some aspects of my story are pretty hilarious. I follow arcs a long way. I know I should write you an email Pam. Hello, this is my social anxiety voice. You write your journals privately and share them selectively in email. You have what normal people might call “boundaries”.

Hello internet I’ve missed you. I miss this part of my inner story. Most of the time since I moved here I shut it off as fast as I can. In any conversation there can only be a couple of paragraphs and I know that I’d better keep my transition points SUPER FUCKING OBVIOUS while not in any way shape or form seeming to put effort into my, inevitably slightly graceless, transition into the next topic. Cheers, mother trucker.

Fuck every person who has ever told me to just be myself. Dude you don’t even know. Cultivated, curated, deeply thought about choice goes into so much of how I hold my body. I fucking pre-game for social events. I specifically think about what attitude I am supposed to exhibit. I think about how I need to hold my body to get the response I want. It varies based on the crowd and reason for the event. I am not natural but I am comfortable with what I am doing. I have worn this personality/skin-suit mechanism for quite some time. I struggle when I know I’m going to spend a lot of time pin-ball whacking against a lot of barriers. That is the natural and normal early stage of a relationship.

That’s where you have to refine your mental image of this person to progressively more specificity as they become more and more of an actual specific ensemble cast member instead of being part of the chorus in setting B. This is an especially graceless stage for me. Because I am shifting through everything I remember about someone as I talk to new people. I’m trying to come up with every detail of every conversation for the first long while. That way I can follow up on specific topics and build a sense of connection. What? You don’t think through this process? You think I just know so much about you because I happened to have that for you? Nah, babe. I am far from perfect but good golly I work hard. It’s hilarious how often whatever that person’s name is doesn’t make the connection. It depends on how often I hear other people talk about them. It depends on how well embedded in the web they are from multiple directions. If I hear their name I place it in a storyline in a way that I don’t from talking to someone and looking at their face. I will remember all the feelings I’ve had with them and I can sometimes, when I’m lucky, get people to also have that glimmer of oh yes. We had fun. I’m fun. Then we go on with our lives without even having to get into it. But goddess that takes time.

I’d really like to figure out how to figure more rhythm around my efforts in various places based on moon stuff just so that I have to synch with it more. I think it would benefit my garden tremendously. There are a lot of gardening tasks that want about a month in between the next thing. I need to build that feeling into my body and associate it with other definitive parts of my routine and that means I need to tie it in with patterns in the house.

I get to play with building a system. The funny thing is that it will go best if I make a plan and organise and make whatever decisions I want to make then I inform the kids what work they will be doing the next day so they’d better make sure they don’t have an emergency project to do tomorrow morning. Planning and making an agreement about what you will do 100% OF THE TIME RESULTS IN SOMEONE BEING EXTREMELY ANGRY AND FURIOUS.

See, I’m teaching them life skills. Muahahaha.

We have a real live group project all around us every day. We are all working on projects big and small all day long. We bounce around talking to one another and then going off to do one on one with someone for a while then we have another most-of the group contact for a while then the whole family again. We do it over and over all day. They are all managing different pieces of it.

Dude. I need to start clearing off one wall at a time in the studio and deep cleaning it. Cause then I can invite other people to scribble on the wall when they come over. I’ll clean it very slowly adding new nice white space only gradually. That way if people ever want to come claim a new place much further around the room their part of the weft will show up brightly.

But right now I feel absolutely knackered. I feel like I have a 20lb sack on my head; I am so tired. I am going to be running 3 miles tomorrow morning. I am going to be running 6 miles on Saturday morning. I uhhh think that I probably ought to stay home tonight and not go out. Ok, one decision made. I need to be in bed by 9, not in a bar in town starting home at 9.

Yeah. I think I am out of typing. That’s all I can be semi-coherent about and I doubt any of that was coherent. But I feel better. And that is good enough.

It’s not about you, David.

Time to get back on track.

Leave a reply

I really like it when Noah is on vacation. I will like it when Noah is retired. I know more than a few relationships that have ended after lockdowns because people found out they didn’t like each other as much as they thought. I like Noah more with every passing year. I like alone time too, and time with other people. Every single day I am reminded that I am blessed because Noah is my person. He annoys me. He tells absolutely ridiculous jokes. He squicks me on a regular basis but in a way I apparently find incredibly endearing.

No one else in the whole world wants me to be as big as Noah does. Err, Ironically I do mean that in the feeder sense as well as in the spiritual sense. We were talking about some of the ways in which he is socially deferential, to the point that folks in the local bdsm community are assuming our dynamic is very different than it is. People are complicated. Noah wants me to be complicated and he doesn’t mind that it means my needs keep changing.

I am super scattered this morning. I can’t get into a flow. I stayed up too late, mostly through inertia. I need to get into the house a little early this morning. Time for Noah to go back to work and I need to be trying harder for fewer things, more consistently. I have been really needing, and taking, a fair bit of time off but if Noah needs to be working then I need to check back in.

Get ready for the day, wake the big kids, help Shorty with the morning chore, do planners with the kids. It’s time to teach backward planning. If you need to get all of these things done, when should you do them and how are you going to remind yourself? Getting too big for me to be the one who decides and reminds. It’s your turn, darlings.

Easier to do it with a smile on my face after yesterday’s delicious date. I like my husband a whoooooole lot.

Praying and sleep

Leave a reply

Tonight I managed to get some time with my fingers in dirt. It was after I probably should have been in bed, resting. I am told resting is important. But I have been rather a nasty bitch for a few days and I needed to get a serotonin boost somehow.

I am working on a stone spiral for herbs; I won’t really be able to plant in it this year because the growing season is short here in Inverness. As I was grunting and laughing as I dragged up rocks that I probably should not have been lifting I thought about what it means when I say that I will pray for you.

If I say that I will pray for you I mean that I will think of you when I shove my hands into the soil. As I pile rock on top of rock and I shove sticks and compost into gaps I will think your name and I will hope that this universe grants you the nutrients you need to grow. I think of the people in your life who build you up and whom you in turn support. I think of how I want the universe to build a safe and stable place for you to rest. I want you to have the right amount of support so you can present exactly the angle of yourself into life you want to project.

I think of how I want you to have space around you to spread your roots into new directions. I think of how I wish water would flow around you to bring growth and moisture and sustenance as you go through your life. I think of how I want you to have seeds of new life, whatever that means for you, come to you with the wind and the birds and the flow of the seasons. I want you to thrive.

And around then I noticed that it was just about pitch black and I should probably stop. Given when in the year we are I guessed it to be close to midnight. Cell phone said it was 11:40. I’m pretty good at time. Then I laughed and thought of something that my son said to me recently. He said, “I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this but I didn’t really think you slept until after you had our little sister. That pregnancy was the first time I really saw you sleep.”

I tried to protest that it was ridiculous. Of course I sleep. He stopped and looked at me all deadpan. Then he raised his hands to melodramatically indicate the walls and the ceilings of the room we were in that I had in fact painted in the middle of the night while everyone else slept. He said, “Really mom. You do?”

As I softly shift dirt back and forth and move rocks to create the form I want even when there is no longer light I have to admit…. no. I don’t. Not really. Maybe if I did my body would hate me less. But would I really live longer or would it just feel longer?

I know the garden I want to stand in on my 50th birthday. It is going to be fucking amazing. I am going to be able to push my toes down deep into the soil and harvest fruits and vegetables that I made flourish. There will be flowers and wee beasties and a whole damn ecosystem. It might already be cold or there might be a last gasping heat wave. Either way I am going to sit in a rocking chair and hold Noah’s hand. Maybe I will already be wrapped up in a blanket or maybe I’ll be wearing barely anything at all–global warming is even coming for the north. I’ll have some whisky.

And if I am very very lucky I will even have a smile before I fall asleep for a well deserved nap.

Clickbait trash

1 Reply

I was foolish last night. I was procrastinating on sleep and I gave in to clickbait. Habits of highly productive people. Ugh. I have this constant internal tug of war over productivity. You might have noticed that I don’t write much anymore. There are so many reasons. One of them is that I use my hands a lot and if I want to reduce pain something has to go. Another reason is that I have largely been able to write over the last 12 years by giving up sleep.

One of the neat things about tracking lots of data about my body is I can tell you fairly conclusively that Scotland has been fucking fantastic for my sleep habits. In California I went years getting 4-7 hours of sleep. 7 hours was somewhat rare and I would pat myself on the back for doing it. When I was deep in project mode 4 hours for weeks or months was not unusual.

I’ve had 4 weeks of project mode since I arrived here: painting the dining room. Otherwise I have been getting 8-10 hours of sleep. I’m certain the Amitriptyline helps. It doesn’t make me pass out in a drugged stupor instantly anymore but it keeps me asleep longer. I like that.

I don’t need to read bullshit about how if I went back to waking up at 4 am I could be a much more productive person as if productivity is the same thing as measuring how moral I am.

Every so often I will talk to another immigrant here and they will almost inevitably complain about how hard it is to deal with the less intense work ethic of Scottish people. I always say that I am trying as hard as I can to move in that direction. I don’t want to maintain my California work ethic. I don’t think it is healthy to believe that 60 hours a week is a minimum amount of acceptable work or you deserve to be fired. I don’t think it is healthy that everyone believes you must monetize every hobby and interest you have or you are wasting your time.

I find it really interesting just how happy I am to be out of California and the US as a whole. It’s not that Scotland is perfect–there is no such thing as perfect. But I don’t worry about having to find a tactful way to play 20 questions with new parents-of-friends to find out how they handle gun safety in their house because the expectation is that people might/probably have guns. I think the US has lost the plot when it comes to gun ownership. Gun ownership in the US is not about keeping the gun owner safe. It is about letting people who own guns feel powerful and mostly they put themselves and their families at greater risk for the charade of being powerful. It’s gross. I know that I know a lot of people who own guns. As much as I love you I am glad I no longer have to navigate the emotional/anxiety minefield of ever walking through your front door again. Your desire to feel powerful makes me feel sick.

When I talk to my older kids about what they want from the future: where would they like to school, where do they think they want to live? They say that even if they don’t stay in the Highlands for the rest of their lives there is no chance they want to go back to the US. I can’t say I blame them. I mean, feelings might change. That happens.

I have been reading books on gardening in this climate about as fast as I can get them. Sure, a lot of them are more England centric and don’t perfectly answer my needs for Northern Scotland but it is teaching me more relevant information than my background education in California gardening. The UK is so hilariously on the nose about naming: Flowerdew (the jokes write themselves), Cox (a kind of apple), Titmarsh (I think of little birds in the marshes telling me the ancient lore).

An immigrant buddy told me that it takes a good 7 years to settle into a place. With the pandemic I feel like that process is frozen in time in a bizarre way. I think of 80’s tv “magic” moments where someone froze time so that someone could get something done without it impacting anyone else. I am setting up my garden. I am working on the house. I’m about to start painting again: maybe that’s why I feel the need to write something down again. I feel like I am being given this weird slice of time where I am here but I am not here. I learned how to paint by doing set design. I learned about creating a setting so that things could be perceived a way, so the characters could be perceived a way, so the plot could be advanced with as little acting effort as possible.

By the time anyone is allowed into my house and I’m actually working hard on making a social place, the backdrop will be pretty much finished. Some folks are making noise about it being fine to come visit this autumn. I have serious doubts.

I want to paint soon in large part because apparently UK paint doesn’t store the way that US paint does. I need to use it up before it isn’t good anymore. I bought too much volume. Next time I will only buy 1 liter cans. Life lesson.

I have been out in the yard a lot over the past week. The kids had an academic break and the effort I normally put into schoolwork we put into yard work. It was nice. Things are coming along. I am most of the way through making the raised mount beds. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCgelkultur) I have been taking it very slowly because it is a lot of shoveling and lifting and carrying. Mostly what I am doing is cleaning up all the debris all over my yard and putting it in long-term compost-in-place mounds on top of felled trees. How long they will be functional is difficult to fully determine. Opinions vary between 5 and 20 years. I will find out! It’s an experiment.

I am doing quite well with my current pass at increasing fitness. In the past I have set strenuous goals and reached them (by sacrificing sleep, other healthy activities, giving up almost all other hobbies) and I’m just not in a place to do that emotionally. So I have been very gradually increasing my personal step count goals and I’m ignoring the watch’s direction for how much I “should” be doing. I am consistently reaching my personal/lower goals and I’ve managed to bump them up very slowly over many months and that’s going well. I haven’t injured myself in months and at this stage of decrepitude I am treating that as a major victory.

I don’t enjoy how much “don’t injure myself extra” is a huge sticking point at this stage of my life. But it is.

I am making forward progress on fitness. I am moving the garden along. I am homes educating my kids. I am keeping a household running (thanks Noah for doing most of the cooking). I am keeping us on a budget. I am maintaining a low and slow drip of getting to know home education folk here through online meetings and randomly meeting people out on the trail (that’s pretty darn thrilling, I’ll tell you). I’m going to be painting again in a week or so.

I don’t need to be told that if I just gave up all my rest time I could be more productive as if higher productivity level is the measure of a life. I have worked really hard on increasing how much rest I get. I take weekend time to sit in my room and do nothing as a conscious choice. Yeah I am watching shit on Netflix. I am also reading books. I am also planning for the future. I’m sketching out ideas for how to solve future problems we don’t have yet but will appear like magic over the next 10 years or so.

I don’t need to give up sleep. I don’t need to give up all recreation on the altar of “Work is all that is moral”. Fuck your clickbait in the ear with a pointy stick.

Drifting

Leave a reply

If I didn’t feel so afraid I would have a lot to document. Life is being quite eventful but I feel like talking about it will cause problems that greatly outweigh how stressful it is. This is the least therapized my life has been… I don’t know, ever? I’ve been pulling back from my US friends. Not because I love them less but because I am utterly exhausted and weary and pursuing them takes enormous energy. I’m not able to put much into creating new friendships here in Scotland. I’m trying, but it feels like swimming uphill through a river of molasses.

My body feels so desperately tired. I’m sleeping a ton–that’s not like me. I’m sleeping 8, 9, 10 hours a night. Historically it is difficult for me to get more than 7 hours of sleep. After these longer stretches I am so weary getting up from a chair feels like a struggle. Is this a deeper manifestation of depression than I am used to? Is this the result of still healing from surgery? Is this trying to actually unwind from the years of anxiety in California/traveling? I don’t know but I feel existentially exhausted. I feel empty.

I don’t know how to fill my bucket. I want to feel more whole. I want to feel like I am thriving instead of treading water to survive.

It’s hard that I am not cleared to go work with plants yet. It’s hard that I feel like I’m not allowed to do much. I’m still in the “spending money to get established” stage (we don’t have enough bed-sized blankets… we have a ton of baby blankets though…). We found some teeny bugs in the food storage area, so protective containers must be acquired or we risk food spoilage. Not stuff we can just not buy. I mean… we could burn more oil keeping the house hotter. That’s penny wise and pound foolish.

There’s a lot I wish I could document for my own sake. But pieces of it aren’t my story to tell and I am deeply afraid of the consequences for other parts.

So I don’t talk much about how I’m feeling with my voice and I write about it even less with my hands.

Is this bone deep discomfort how other people feel? Finding a therapist isn’t really an option for a variety of reasons. Living here may mean that I am permanently out of therapy for a variety of reasons. Well, unless I pursue a degree and it becomes a mandatory part of my job. Wouldn’t that be a funny reason to become a therapist? It’s a way to make sure I have to be in therapy too?

I think a lot about the massive waiting lists in this country for mental health support. I think about what it meant when I was a kid that I had help even though some of it wasn’t the best. It was a lot better than nothing.

Comparing one’s life to other people’s lives is such a complicated and tricky thing. Sure, other people may have X, Y, and Z that you don’t have… but they also have A, B, and C that you don’t have and would you really prefer that balance? This isn’t a fence with one side or the other. It’s a grid with many many many different squares and balances and problems.

I like that often every ends up in my room a bit before bed time to curl up together and read. MC has decided to read Tamora Pierce books. They are a bit above her reading level, but if she sits close to me and asks for occasional help with words she is making her way through. She absolutely loves them. She is stunned that even in a magical temple school there is still bullying. Yeah honey… people jockeying for dominance is absolutely universal. That’s just life.

Today we have our first health visitor experience to check on YC’s growth. I have two doctor appointments next week: a pap smear and a trip to my GP to go over genetic testing results and talk about next steps for EDS assessment. I get the impression that beyond the genetic testing (that’s super fucking expensive to run) Scotland wants to rerun all assessments because they are not interested in foreign medical records. That’s going to be interesting. At least I have the results of 35 years of forcing my way through the US system like a determined train to use as a guide.

My hands hurt really badly. I am trying various handicrafts because I’m bored as fuck. Arthritis is going to be my forever nightmare.

I feel like a fucking whiner. I am definitely in the “but you don’t look sick” camp but my body is degrading really fast. It’s hard feeling like if I don’t talk about how poorly I’m doing I just look like a lazy lump but if I do talk about it I’m a whiner. I’m not lazy; I’m in pain.

I’ve gained weight again. Ha. Good thing I bought my trousers so large.

It’s time for a day.

whine

22 Replies

I've been waking up at 3am and I can't get back to sleep. This would be worse if I didn't pass out at 8pm. As it is I'm getting some sleep. But my day feels off balance. I'm tired mid-day. I'm ready to be winding down for sleep around dinner. Tired. We are going to go learn about animals today. I feel tired before we leave the house. Needs to happen. Get up. Make food. Ugh.

The more I hear the message "just don't think about _____" the more I want to say, "Why? What are you hiding there?"

It's going to be a festive Thursday. Cheers.

Feeling cranky

4 Replies

1) I don’t appreciate the people who are telling Noah to take a huge pay cut or work nights/weekends so that he can change careers. Yes, I do support him in moving in a different direction. I do want him to be happy. Doing so at the complete expense of our family is not an option I’m really thrilled about. (For the record: Noah isn’t agreeing with them. I just want to tell them to take a flying leap.)

2) I don’t appreciate the recruiters who wake Shanna up from a nap at least three days a week. Today she got about 20 minutes of sleep and now won’t go down again despite crying and being very upset about being awake. God fucking damnit.

3) The cat keeps scratching Shanna in the face. I wish they could leave one another alone.

4) I really should get more housework done today but I’m feeling very fussy about doing it with Shanna hanging on me and crying. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

5) I didn’t sleep much last night. I just couldn’t fall asleep. This makes it much harder for me to be patient.

6) I still don’t know if I am in the ASL class. *sigh*

Other than that my life is good. All of this would be less cranky making if I had gotten sleep last night.

I don’t get it.

6 Replies

Why will she transfer from my tummy to the bed for a nap during the day but absolutely refuses at night when I want to sleep?

Although I must say, Shanna has earned some gratitude today. I explained to her this morning when she was being fairly fussy that I was having trouble staying patient because we had a very sleepless night and I needed her to settle down for a couple of hours and take a nap with me. She looked at me and fussed for another few seconds. Then she turned to the boob, latched without being fussy and fell asleep a few minutes later. She slept soundly for a few hours and I got in a much needed nap.

I’ve been surprised several times by how well she responds to verbal negotiation. I’m pretty sure I can’t count on it at this point, but… it’s been working. I don’t do it constantly and in general I let her do her thing without trying to change whatever it is she is doing. But a few times I’ve told her what I needed from her and she just did it. Very cool. 🙂

Sleeeeeeeeeep

4 Replies

For some stupid reason we have been staying awake later and later at night. Last night I noticed that it was 1:30. So we went to bed. I’ve had two nights out of the last week where my bladder has made it to a six hour stretch, usually I get four hours of sleep then two, then one, then one, then get up. This morning I woke up at 6 am so hungry that my stomach ached. So I went and ate. Then couldn’t get back to sleep till 7. Then woke up for good around 9 because that’s when Noah got up. I’m tired and brain dead. Everything feels wonky.

And what do I do about it? Whine on lj.

Although, to be fair, other than being really tired I’m actually in fairly good spirits. 🙂 I keep feeling like I should get up and “get busy” and then I think… naw…. 🙂

Sleep

Leave a reply

Amusingly, apparently I can sleep. I can sleep starting at 7:30 pm. I can wake up four times during the night to pee and never be awake for more than about 15 minutes so I got at least 9 hours of (broken) sleep. And I’m still so tired I feel like I could walk into a wall. My tummy hurts and I’m whiny.

I am having horrible nightmares all the time. Weird, random nightmares all the time. Thankfully Noah doesn’t mind being woken up to comfort me. It is looking more and more like there is no chance of me going part time. That means six more full-time weeks till I stop working. Four of those weeks are before Christmas break and then the two weeks after are review and finals. The four weeks are going to be a little tough physically but if I wuss down what I am teaching I think I can do it. The two weeks of finals prep and taking exams is no big deal. That means I will get paid until February due to having my paychecks divided up over the year instead of just the months I am teaching.

Babbling. Out of it. Tired. Ugh. Not feeling good. Is today over yet?