In the northern hemisphere, today marks the winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night of the year.
My life is awash in messages about enduring through the darkness, about faith in the light, about getting through the bad and believing the good will come again. These are all good messages, especially at this juncture of American history. If we don't believe this particular long night will end, we might not keep going.
I've been contemplating another approach to the solstice this year. On that shortest day, when the least light is given to me, I'm going to cram a full day into it -- not necessarily the activities, but the joy and the living of it. I'm eating delicious food and reveling in it. I'm loving my friends and family a full day's worth in these short bright hours. I began my work day with focused productivity and accomplishment, and met three concrete deadline goals by 10 am.
Headlong, heedless, I embrace this day as if the setting sun were my own ending.
That setting sun will find me on the road, hurtling towards loved ones as the light dies and the long darkness falls across the land.
Into that darkness, I am cast with a choice. I can hold the light, clinging to it and willing its return. Some years I do this, because I need that lifeline to get myself to the next moment. Hope and faith as acts of resilience are essential to humanity.
This year, though, I release the light and let myself fall into that night. Stronger and more deeply rooted than I've been in years past, I believe that I will fall through that darkness and out through the other side of it. The light will be there.
As the slow beats of my own heart echo through me, I can embrace my own darknesses.
A span of heartbeats for my fears, which I respect as my careful guardians and meet with courage.
A span of heartbeats for my grief, which I consider as the touch of love upon my life, and meet with compassion.
A span of heartbeats for my anger, which I tend carefully as a righteous fire to light a path to justice.
A beat for my anxiety, a beat for my worry, a beat for my temper, a long flurry of beats for my pride followed by a matching cadence for self-doubt.
With my heart resounding in my ears, I dive down into that silence, that peace. I am the falcon diving, the falling star, the razored edge of the descending blade. And there, at the center of the darkness, I find the stillness, the silence, the space between my own breath and body, and I hold there.
One moment, and a heartbeat.
Two, and a heartbeat.
Three, stretching out into timelessness, the darkness all and eternal around me.
As the distance between the last heartbeat and the next one expands, I wait and I gather myself. I gather the peace at the center of all, to hold when chaos spins around me. I gather the silence of midnight, to give myself time to reflect when wisdom is needed. I gather the tiniest kernel of the essence of nothing, as a powerful tool of banishment in the coming year.
Outside of light, outside of time, outside of life itself, I honor the parts of me that have always been hardest for me to love, and I embrace them, rushing back into myself to meet my own beating heart.
And the fall continues, but now I tumble towards where the light will be, towards the future, towards the spring. Still in darkness, I hit solid earth, meeting it with both feet. I stand, and take one last moment to thank the night, before I turn to face the coming day.
Blessed solstice, my darlings. I love you all.
Friday, December 21, 2018
Thursday, July 12, 2018
Eviction Plus Three Hundred Sixty-Five
One year.
One year since I took my first-ever sincere pregnancy test to be sure the uterus about to be removed contained no life but my own.
One year since a one-hour surgery stretched to three while my family and friends waited, trying not to think something had gone wrong.
One year since one of the most difficult hysterectomies my gynecologist says she's performed.
One year since the last time a stranger's blood kept me alive.
One year since I woke up, confused and disoriented, unable to feel anything between bellybutton and upper thighs, to the news that the difficult surgery had been a success but I'd lost so very much blood that I needed oxygen for a little while more, and to rest while the local they'd used on top of the general wore off.
One year since I tried to explain to the nurse that losing so very much blood was a thing I just did on a regular basis, but probably just hurled garbled syllables at her.
It was a mess in there, I'm told. Endometrioma, asymptomatic endometriosis, massive fibroids, something called 'spongy uterus' and an ovary so deeply grafted into it that there was no hope of saving it. My fallopian tubes were nowhere to be found; there's no way to tell if the uterus ate them or they were simply never there. My reproductive organs, at their end, were a collection of womanhood gone rogue. One lone half-ovary lingers, spiking my life with cravings and mood swings that no longer act as harbingers of, well, anything.
They couldn't stop the bleeding for a long time during the surgery, the doctor told me frankly when she came to see me. I told her not to worry, I'd never been able to stop it either.
But it's stopped now, and the change is extraordinary.
A little over three years ago I staggered, crying, towards the top of the Panoramic Trail in Muir Woods, where my then-boyfriend was hoping to propose. I was defeated long before we reached the top, moving a hundred, two hundred feet at a time before I had to hold a tree to stand. He chose a more accessible location for his proposal, and I accepted, because (among many other reasons) what better metaphor for married life can there be than kindly and patiently holding your beloved's hand while she tries to overcome her own malfunctions and fight her way to the top of the trail?
Three months later I was in the emergency room, with doctors explaining that my iron level was life-threatening and probably had been for months. I'd known I was anemic, but not how deep that particular crisis had become. I fought my way through supplements, infusions, transfusions, hormones, exercises, and every other suggestion made to me, until finally the only thing left was "Stop losing blood, for good."
So what's life like now?
I still wake up tired a lot of days, because my sleep habits have never been great, but it's "Man I stayed up too late again," not "I'm not sure I can move my legs today." I can actually, if I don't set an alarm, sleep long enough in a single night to wake up refreshed. I come home from work and sometimes I just...do housework or work on a project because I feel like it, not because I'm racing a deadline and out of time.
I started back to the gym eleven months ago with gentle treadmill walks, and added in light weight training a few weeks later. I miss sometimes because I'm busy, but I don't skip workouts any more because I'm too exhausted to do them, and I've steadily put on muscle. I can walk on the treadmill at a three-mile pace, or run on the elliptical, for thirty solid minutes without stopping.
My husband and I just got back from a trip to Ireland, where we walked over fifty miles in two weeks, including a grueling trek through the London Underground with all our luggage, hefting our fully loaded suitcases up and down the steps with one hand at times. One of the highlights of that trip was the day I took off solo hiking, only to end up slightly lost in a Galway sheep pasture, falling and badly injuring my knee. I could still walk, but a year before an injury of any severity would have been perfect reason to head back to the B&B and declare myself done for the day, or maybe the week. Instead, I hiked another three miles that day and more the two days following.
But it's the little things, the small changes most people don't understand, that really stick with me. Today I'm wearing a pale lacy peach dress and a white sweater. I never would have dared before; my pre-hysterectomy wardrobe is a cavalcade of long, full, dark skirts chosen because they wouldn't show blood as badly, and dark or patterned tops that I wouldn't stain with bloody hands by accident. I pack extra tie-dye in the space in my camping gear that used to be reserved for a massive supply of cloth and disposable backup pads. We planned our recent vacation around when we wanted to travel, not when I hoped to have the best chance not to be navigating airplane bathrooms on a half-hourly basis and trying to explain to flight attendants that their choices were let me up out of my seat or clean up the blood themselves. An entire complicating factor has simply just been...taken out of my calculations.
My body no longer sets the conditions on me that it once did; gone is the constant awareness of the possibility that a miscalculation or delay will ruin both outfit and afternoon. Getting distracted while working on a project just means I'm stiff from sitting too long, not a dismayed realisation that I've missed one too many warnings from my body that catastrophic bleeding is imminent. I no longer have to plan to carve out six to eight days off work each year to receive iron infusions and see doctors, or an extra three to five sick days for pure exhaustion. I've found new confidence at work, to talk about projects I want to take on and challenges I want to seek out.
What strikes me the most is how the haze has lifted, and continued to lift. I have no idea how far down I was into chronic exhaustion after years of constant anemia, but about three weeks ago I found a new level of energy: having done all the things I *needed* to do, and all the things on my dedicated to-do list, I created a new long-term project for myself, and sat down to give several hours of time and intellectual labor to it.
As to that Panorama Trail that kicked my ass three years ago, we revisited Muir Woods last fall, and I'll simply say that a picture speaks a thousand words.
One year since I took my first-ever sincere pregnancy test to be sure the uterus about to be removed contained no life but my own.
One year since a one-hour surgery stretched to three while my family and friends waited, trying not to think something had gone wrong.
One year since one of the most difficult hysterectomies my gynecologist says she's performed.
One year since the last time a stranger's blood kept me alive.
One year since I woke up, confused and disoriented, unable to feel anything between bellybutton and upper thighs, to the news that the difficult surgery had been a success but I'd lost so very much blood that I needed oxygen for a little while more, and to rest while the local they'd used on top of the general wore off.
One year since I tried to explain to the nurse that losing so very much blood was a thing I just did on a regular basis, but probably just hurled garbled syllables at her.
It was a mess in there, I'm told. Endometrioma, asymptomatic endometriosis, massive fibroids, something called 'spongy uterus' and an ovary so deeply grafted into it that there was no hope of saving it. My fallopian tubes were nowhere to be found; there's no way to tell if the uterus ate them or they were simply never there. My reproductive organs, at their end, were a collection of womanhood gone rogue. One lone half-ovary lingers, spiking my life with cravings and mood swings that no longer act as harbingers of, well, anything.
They couldn't stop the bleeding for a long time during the surgery, the doctor told me frankly when she came to see me. I told her not to worry, I'd never been able to stop it either.
But it's stopped now, and the change is extraordinary.
A little over three years ago I staggered, crying, towards the top of the Panoramic Trail in Muir Woods, where my then-boyfriend was hoping to propose. I was defeated long before we reached the top, moving a hundred, two hundred feet at a time before I had to hold a tree to stand. He chose a more accessible location for his proposal, and I accepted, because (among many other reasons) what better metaphor for married life can there be than kindly and patiently holding your beloved's hand while she tries to overcome her own malfunctions and fight her way to the top of the trail?
Three months later I was in the emergency room, with doctors explaining that my iron level was life-threatening and probably had been for months. I'd known I was anemic, but not how deep that particular crisis had become. I fought my way through supplements, infusions, transfusions, hormones, exercises, and every other suggestion made to me, until finally the only thing left was "Stop losing blood, for good."
So what's life like now?
I still wake up tired a lot of days, because my sleep habits have never been great, but it's "Man I stayed up too late again," not "I'm not sure I can move my legs today." I can actually, if I don't set an alarm, sleep long enough in a single night to wake up refreshed. I come home from work and sometimes I just...do housework or work on a project because I feel like it, not because I'm racing a deadline and out of time.
I started back to the gym eleven months ago with gentle treadmill walks, and added in light weight training a few weeks later. I miss sometimes because I'm busy, but I don't skip workouts any more because I'm too exhausted to do them, and I've steadily put on muscle. I can walk on the treadmill at a three-mile pace, or run on the elliptical, for thirty solid minutes without stopping.
My husband and I just got back from a trip to Ireland, where we walked over fifty miles in two weeks, including a grueling trek through the London Underground with all our luggage, hefting our fully loaded suitcases up and down the steps with one hand at times. One of the highlights of that trip was the day I took off solo hiking, only to end up slightly lost in a Galway sheep pasture, falling and badly injuring my knee. I could still walk, but a year before an injury of any severity would have been perfect reason to head back to the B&B and declare myself done for the day, or maybe the week. Instead, I hiked another three miles that day and more the two days following.
But it's the little things, the small changes most people don't understand, that really stick with me. Today I'm wearing a pale lacy peach dress and a white sweater. I never would have dared before; my pre-hysterectomy wardrobe is a cavalcade of long, full, dark skirts chosen because they wouldn't show blood as badly, and dark or patterned tops that I wouldn't stain with bloody hands by accident. I pack extra tie-dye in the space in my camping gear that used to be reserved for a massive supply of cloth and disposable backup pads. We planned our recent vacation around when we wanted to travel, not when I hoped to have the best chance not to be navigating airplane bathrooms on a half-hourly basis and trying to explain to flight attendants that their choices were let me up out of my seat or clean up the blood themselves. An entire complicating factor has simply just been...taken out of my calculations.
My body no longer sets the conditions on me that it once did; gone is the constant awareness of the possibility that a miscalculation or delay will ruin both outfit and afternoon. Getting distracted while working on a project just means I'm stiff from sitting too long, not a dismayed realisation that I've missed one too many warnings from my body that catastrophic bleeding is imminent. I no longer have to plan to carve out six to eight days off work each year to receive iron infusions and see doctors, or an extra three to five sick days for pure exhaustion. I've found new confidence at work, to talk about projects I want to take on and challenges I want to seek out.
What strikes me the most is how the haze has lifted, and continued to lift. I have no idea how far down I was into chronic exhaustion after years of constant anemia, but about three weeks ago I found a new level of energy: having done all the things I *needed* to do, and all the things on my dedicated to-do list, I created a new long-term project for myself, and sat down to give several hours of time and intellectual labor to it.
As to that Panorama Trail that kicked my ass three years ago, we revisited Muir Woods last fall, and I'll simply say that a picture speaks a thousand words.
Thursday, May 3, 2018
Here I Am, Walking on the Moon
Some days I feel like KUTX does particularly well at mining my nostalgia musically, hitting songs that resonate with specific times for me but might not connect for other people. Today they've managed to call up the last half of 1989 for me, when I was navigating high school and struggling with my whole concept of identity, while trying to resolve feelings about my parents' divorce.
I was already thinking about it because of Mity Myhr's presentation about 1989 at last night's Dionysium, but then a couple of songs I listened to a lot that year popped up in the musical rotation: Lyle Lovett's "Here I Am," for which I memorised the spoken part because I loved how the words fit together, and "Walking on the Moon," which was included in my mild obsession with the Police (I have no idea how my long-suffering mother endured the constant repetition of the Synchronicity album I'd appropriated from my older sister, especially when the first track started to skip and you kind of couldn't tell it was repeating...).
So here I am thinking about what it was like to BE a Smart Girl in the late 80s, especially an extroverted one. The desire to dim your shine so you can get along and be liked is a powerful counter to the drive to excel. That was the year I really discovered how few men in this world actually like women who are smarter or stronger than they are (and how many others are lying about it), and it started a 20-year-long fight with myself to accept "it's better to be alone than to cut off pieces of yourself to be loved." That's when I started to have enough awareness to see the boys getting praised and called on for knowing the answers I was 'showing off' by having. That was the year I decided a weight I'll never see again was 'obese' and really dove into that cycle of food-shaming and body-hatred that governed my 20s and early 30s. That's the first time I can really remember being aware of all the different directions in which the world demanded I become less.
One thing I really remember about that year was how rarely I talked about the things that I loved. In fact, several of the high school friends with whom I've reconnected are probably thinking to themselves, "I never knew she was low-key obsessed with the Police..." None of my friends really did, because by then they'd broken up but it hadn't been long enough for them to be retro so no one else I knew was into them; I was afraid if I said, "Oh hey this thing that no one else is doing is really cool to me!" everyone would think I was weird and liked stupid things. Enjoying them was just a thing I did on my own.
How does this tie into being an Extroverted Smart Girl? I built my arguments like brick houses because speaking an unpopular idea opened me up to criticism and unless I could support that idea, the criticism quickly became personal. Every point defensible, every position at least touching on if not anchored in objective fact. I got used to having to defend my positions in science classes with ridiculous amounts of backup because my hypotheses themselves held no value. Even now, if you ask me what I think, you'll likely get an answer on the tip of an evidentiary iceberg. I also got used to gauging, in a room, whether anyone wanted or needed to hear the opinion I held, and if I decided that answer was no I just opted out of voicing one.
Years later, when I started learning about different forms of intimacy, I realised that the one that's hardest for me is a specific kind of intellectual intimacy: the ability to express completely subjective opinion. The idea of sharing my online playlists, or my reading list, or making my Netflix queue public, horrifies me. What if I tell people what I'm reading and they think it's stupid and pedestrian? What if I tell you the band I like, that no one else likes, and everyone else thinks they objectively suck? How can I defend "I just like this song because it makes me feel happy," to my musically adept friends who will recognise that the beats are lame and the lyrics are trite? What if I'm the last person I know to find out this artist who creates beautiful things is also a terrible anti-Semite?
There's an irony in this, because I'm a huge advocate for letting people enjoy the shit they like without judging them for it, and for the ability to appreciate the artistic merits of problematic stuff. If you like a band I think is complete shit, I'll tell you they're not my cup of tea but I'm glad you enjoy them. I'll advocate against enjoying *actively harmful media* but not shitty media. I've got ten thousand words on why "Fifty Shades of Grey" is dangerous and promotes abuse, but if it was just badly written I'd shrug and say "Everyone enjoys different things. Some people juggle geese."
Also, I legitimately don't *have* a lot of strong subjective opinions. A surprising amount of how I feel about various media is "Well, it seems nice enough." Maybe 10% of what's out there falls into either "I love that" or "I think that's terrible" territory. The rest is reasonably pleasant and generally unremarkable.
And yet still, when I start to talk or post about something I love, I'll stop to think of the people whose opinions I particularly respect on the matter, and worry that loving a thing they think is low quality will make them think I am low quality. For a long time, this was reinforced by the kinds of geeks I hung out with, the sort who trash one another's appreciations and play hateful one-upmanship games about who's got more cred because they like the more authentic or more complex or more...whatever...thing. For years I avoided admitting I'm really not interested in anime because every single discussion of anime devolved into one person railing against why some series or other is complete and utter garbage before I could voice any thoughts at all. I'm sure there's several dozen people out there under the mistaken impression that I agree with their vehement anime-related opinions because I did not have the expected opposition reaction of screaming at them and attempting to strangle them during the discussion of those opinions.
I've changed to a different sort of geek, the kind that offers reasoned and intelligent criticism and supports people finding things that they love, and it's made a real difference. "That's not really for me," is no longer met with a wall of self-righteous advocacy, so much as "Yeah, it's not everyone's cup of tea but I really enjoy it and it's been meaningful to me."
Maybe I'll still never be comfortable voicing subjective opinions, and maybe that's OK. For what it's worth, though, I still totally love The Police and will turn them up very very loud if they are on the radio, and probably sing.
You've been warned.
I was already thinking about it because of Mity Myhr's presentation about 1989 at last night's Dionysium, but then a couple of songs I listened to a lot that year popped up in the musical rotation: Lyle Lovett's "Here I Am," for which I memorised the spoken part because I loved how the words fit together, and "Walking on the Moon," which was included in my mild obsession with the Police (I have no idea how my long-suffering mother endured the constant repetition of the Synchronicity album I'd appropriated from my older sister, especially when the first track started to skip and you kind of couldn't tell it was repeating...).
So here I am thinking about what it was like to BE a Smart Girl in the late 80s, especially an extroverted one. The desire to dim your shine so you can get along and be liked is a powerful counter to the drive to excel. That was the year I really discovered how few men in this world actually like women who are smarter or stronger than they are (and how many others are lying about it), and it started a 20-year-long fight with myself to accept "it's better to be alone than to cut off pieces of yourself to be loved." That's when I started to have enough awareness to see the boys getting praised and called on for knowing the answers I was 'showing off' by having. That was the year I decided a weight I'll never see again was 'obese' and really dove into that cycle of food-shaming and body-hatred that governed my 20s and early 30s. That's the first time I can really remember being aware of all the different directions in which the world demanded I become less.
One thing I really remember about that year was how rarely I talked about the things that I loved. In fact, several of the high school friends with whom I've reconnected are probably thinking to themselves, "I never knew she was low-key obsessed with the Police..." None of my friends really did, because by then they'd broken up but it hadn't been long enough for them to be retro so no one else I knew was into them; I was afraid if I said, "Oh hey this thing that no one else is doing is really cool to me!" everyone would think I was weird and liked stupid things. Enjoying them was just a thing I did on my own.
How does this tie into being an Extroverted Smart Girl? I built my arguments like brick houses because speaking an unpopular idea opened me up to criticism and unless I could support that idea, the criticism quickly became personal. Every point defensible, every position at least touching on if not anchored in objective fact. I got used to having to defend my positions in science classes with ridiculous amounts of backup because my hypotheses themselves held no value. Even now, if you ask me what I think, you'll likely get an answer on the tip of an evidentiary iceberg. I also got used to gauging, in a room, whether anyone wanted or needed to hear the opinion I held, and if I decided that answer was no I just opted out of voicing one.
Years later, when I started learning about different forms of intimacy, I realised that the one that's hardest for me is a specific kind of intellectual intimacy: the ability to express completely subjective opinion. The idea of sharing my online playlists, or my reading list, or making my Netflix queue public, horrifies me. What if I tell people what I'm reading and they think it's stupid and pedestrian? What if I tell you the band I like, that no one else likes, and everyone else thinks they objectively suck? How can I defend "I just like this song because it makes me feel happy," to my musically adept friends who will recognise that the beats are lame and the lyrics are trite? What if I'm the last person I know to find out this artist who creates beautiful things is also a terrible anti-Semite?
There's an irony in this, because I'm a huge advocate for letting people enjoy the shit they like without judging them for it, and for the ability to appreciate the artistic merits of problematic stuff. If you like a band I think is complete shit, I'll tell you they're not my cup of tea but I'm glad you enjoy them. I'll advocate against enjoying *actively harmful media* but not shitty media. I've got ten thousand words on why "Fifty Shades of Grey" is dangerous and promotes abuse, but if it was just badly written I'd shrug and say "Everyone enjoys different things. Some people juggle geese."
Also, I legitimately don't *have* a lot of strong subjective opinions. A surprising amount of how I feel about various media is "Well, it seems nice enough." Maybe 10% of what's out there falls into either "I love that" or "I think that's terrible" territory. The rest is reasonably pleasant and generally unremarkable.
I've changed to a different sort of geek, the kind that offers reasoned and intelligent criticism and supports people finding things that they love, and it's made a real difference. "That's not really for me," is no longer met with a wall of self-righteous advocacy, so much as "Yeah, it's not everyone's cup of tea but I really enjoy it and it's been meaningful to me."
Maybe I'll still never be comfortable voicing subjective opinions, and maybe that's OK. For what it's worth, though, I still totally love The Police and will turn them up very very loud if they are on the radio, and probably sing.
You've been warned.
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Embracing the Breakdown
Several weeks ago, I woke up one morning and I couldn't get out of bed. It wasn't that I didn't want to, that I was tired or comfortable, it was that I could not physically summon the ability to move. When I thought about how hard it was going to be to walk to the shower ten feet away, I wanted to cry.
This isn't the first time it's happened. I'm a busy person. Much of my life revolves around service to others; I pretty consistently take on responsibilities and projects that push me to that point of exhaustion where I've been running at a sleep and energy deficit for several weeks, until I take a long weekend and just hermit/crash when it's convenient. Generally, when I wake up too exhausted to move, my response is, "I have to get up, because people are depending on me." So I do. I summon the will and I *force* myself through it. I drop things physically and intellectually, I'm short-tempered, I'm barely effective at all the things I need to do, but dammit I got up and did the thing. I've spent years moving from crisis to crisis like that, always reacting, rarely acting, never planning. I'm Good In A Crisis; it's a fundamental part of my identity.
Over the last couple of years, though, I've been doing a lot of work on self-care and healthy life patterns, trying to build sustainable habits. My ability to 'power through' is a good trait, but it's not a lifestyle. I'm also Good When There Is No Crisis and I'm not using that skill set enough. So this time, I said, "I can't get up. People are depending on me. They're depending on me to be whole and healthy. They're depending on me to be here in 10 years to help with their kids. They're depending on me to do things *later* that I can't do if I don't rest *now*." So I called in sick and stayed home, even though it screwed up some plans. I slept another 6 hours. I ate some good food. And then I took serious stock of where my energy was going; that was pretty hard to look at.
On a sort of autopilot, I'd set up my weekdays as: wake up at 7:30 already late and tired, struggle out of bed, get to work late, stay at work long after hours sometimes working but sometimes just fucking around online, maybe work out and maybe don't, eat dinner around 10pm, get to bed around 2 or maybe 3, repeat. My weekends were either exhausted collapsing, frenetic social activity, or projects to help friends. I'd been putting off "get some real relaxation and have some real fun," so far into the future that I couldn't actually see when it would happen. I'd barely gotten to spend significant time with the friends who feed my soul, and only managed to do so by 'stealing' time and energy from other commitments.
I was still, in some ways, recovering from major surgery. I'd gotten past the actual physical recovery, but in trying to catch back up on organising the house and doing my workouts and finishing my projects, I'd been running about double. I also put, for a variety of reasons, a tremendous amount of emotional labor in over the winter, without really honoring the degree to which it had taxed me. I had started to have severe muscle weakness and facial tics, and had gotten dizzy a couple of times, all from a combination of stress and depleted resources.
Understand, no part of this was unfamiliar territory. I've been running through various iterations of "Power through until it's convenient to collapse, no matter what you have to burn," for probably the last 20 years, doubly so since the anemia added in a new variable. I just finally hit a point where that practice became incompatible with my changing attitudes on self-care and sustainable habits.
This also shouldn't sound like unfamiliar territory to most of my friends, who also power through more than not, who overbook and overcommit and make it all come together through the power of coffee and sarcasm, and who run the razor's edge of holding it all together. Birds of a feather and all that, you know?
At first, I started to look at how I needed to change in the nebulous 'soon' and not at immediate change. Part of my assessment, though, was an understanding that I had to stop pushing through the now to get to when it would be convenient because I wasn't making lasting change. So, I set myself solid goals: minimum calorie and protein consumption, minimum nightly and average sleep requirements, hard limits on when I leave work, a defined bedtime, a specific limit on new projects and physical activities. None of these is a particularly revolutionary goal: they're the things healthy people do. And I set one other: if this isn't better in a couple of weeks of rest and self-care, it's doctor time.
Overall, I did pretty well. I still missed a couple of bedtimes and had a couple of unnecessary late nights at work, and I have a seriously hard time cramming as much protein as the fitness tracker says I need into my diet, but the limits I'd established set a much more reasonable pace where I didn't feel like I always had to catch up. I'm feeling much steadier and more balanced. My planning ahead has stopped entirely revolving around what I HAVE to do, and started including what I WANT to do. I'm comfortable making a note of it to mention to the doc when I see him next time, instead of actively scheduling a visit.
More importantly, though, by allowing the breakdown even when it wasn't convenient, I hope to break the pattern of 'push past exhaustion, crash, run to catch everything I dropped when I crashed, start the push toward exhaustion again'. I'm not changing who I am: I'm going to take on responsibilities. I'm going to take on projects. I have a loving tribe of friends who rely on me, and I rely on them. I will continue to be Good In A Crisis because I don't really know how else to be. All of this is important to me, and none of it is anything I actually want to give up.
What I *am* changing is the habit of letting non-emergencies pull from my reserves. There have been too many times in my life when the only thing keeping me from crashing was the sheer number of people I'd let down if I did, and far too many times when the refusal to let anyone down in the short term meant letting everyone down in the long term. I've had just enough situations in the last few years where having just a little reserve made the difference, and it's finally sinking through my head that I either need to give up the part of my psyche that serves and supports others, or put in actual work to build the reserves that will let me do it without cannibalizing my own health.
Thursday, March 8, 2018
International Women's Day
I've been watching as the International Day of Women posts go by, and it's been wonderful to see so many messages of inspiration and solidarity. I love all the support for women!
It's a good day to remember ALL the women.
Remember women in poverty, especially those struggling to lift their children out of it. Advocate for the safety nets they need.
Remember women living in abusive relationships, and look for ways to help them get out.
Remember women of color, because they face additional barriers to success and justice. Ensure that their voices are heard as well as your own and fight against racism.
Remember trans women, because they're in terrible danger just for being their true selves. Welcome them without question into women's spaces, and fight for their safety.
Remember disabled women, because their perceived weakness makes them targets. Demand accessibility, especially in feminist spaces.
Remember women in prison; they're much more likely to be raped or otherwise abused. Fight for reform to our justice system.
Remember women in forced marriage and prostitution, especially the young girls taken from their families. Support laws and organisations that help them.
Remember undocumented and refugee women. They're often desperately fleeing terrible conditions, but their status leaves them vulnerable where they should find safety. Seek meaningful, compassionate immigration reform.
There are as many ways to value and support women as there are to BE a woman, and we can't afford to leave anyone behind it hope they'll 'catch up' if we forge on ahead without them. So much of the work for women has been done by those who receive the least support, and for far too long we've failed to center *all women* and talk about issues beyond equal pay and reproductive choice.
Demand intersectionality. Demand inclusion. Demand opportunity for all women. Demand justice. And if anyone tells you the feminist movement can't support that, demand a new feminist movement.
Friday, January 5, 2018
New Year's Resolutions
Every year, I wade through the resolution posts and blogs, watching people far and near set goals to improve their lives. Everyone has things about themselves they want to change, me included.
This time of year doesn't sit that well with me, though. Everyone is busily rejecting their weight, their habits, their indolence, their smoking, and any number of other things about themselves. There's a massive industry dedicated to helping you cut away the parts of yourself you don't want.
I'm not just talking about the weight loss industry, though it profits the most from this time of year. We're decluttering, downsizing, streamlining. We pick out something we don't like about ourselves, like financial irresponsibility or a habit we haven't previously been able to kick, and we build a huge plan to defeat it. We declare enemies (sugar is the devil, laziness is weakness, Netflix is a trap), and gird up for battle.
Few people seem to remember, when they're declaring enemies, to declare allies as well. I want to be stronger, sleep better, and spend more time doing the things that are important to me. My love of working out is an ally; if I indulge it I'll hit the first two of those. If I get stronger, I can hike more, and take more pictures, and create beautiful things. If I get more sleep, I have more energy during the day to get necessary tasks out of the way early and go do things I want to do. My tribe is an ally. They support me and love me and reach out to spend time with me, creating fun and wonderful experiences. They encourage me to grow, cheer my victories, and commiserate with my losses and failures. They love and value me, keeping me grounded in an understanding of and appreciation for the person I am right now.
Right out of the gate, a lot of people fail because the plan relies on them already being the person they're trying to become. They want to be the sort of person who gets daily exercise, so they exercise every day until they strain a hamstring and then never go back to the gym once it heals. They want to be the sort of person who contributes enough to their 401K to retire early, so they double their payroll contribution on the assumption that they can cut down on expenditures, and put off new shoes or car repairs until they're emergencies that end up costing more. Then, when the big plan fails to pay off because they weren't ready to start living it 100% of the time, they get demoralized and give up altogether.
You're not the person you want to grow up to be yet. You're the person you are, and that person has an entire gorgeous rich life that has formed you. Everything about you is an evolution, a culmination of generations of lives that came before you and years (if not decades) of decisions you've made for yourself and your life. You're a whole complex being right now, and setting goals for that person as if they were a stranger is never going to work. To be effective, a goal is a map from where you are to where you want to be, but maps are no good if they only list a destination and no other points of reference.
If you've embarked on a new plan or a new goal this year, let me ask you: what are you keeping? What is it you love about yourself, that fits in with the person you are right now and the life you want to have? Have you also resolved, in addition to all your changes, to keep your empathy and your good sense or your optimism and your self-care habits? When you took stock of your life, to decide where change needed to happen, did you mark out, as immutable boundaries, what you're preserving in yourself because it has value?
For those who make resolutions each year, I hope that you'll stop and lay out, for each thing you've resolved to change, something about yourself that you love enough to preserve. I hope you'll look at your allies and how you can help yourself reinforce your goals and dreams. I hope you'll be able to embrace the person you are now as valuable and worthy instead of regarding yourself as just an ingredient in some finished product.
Because I have a sad secret: if you can't love anything about yourself now, you won't be able to love the new you either. Life's not a set of Cinderella shoes you'll be able to fit if you just cut off the right bits and pieces of who you are. It's a long messy process of hurling yourself towards death and hoping to find enough joy and beauty on the way that you're not wasting the trip.
I love you all.
This time of year doesn't sit that well with me, though. Everyone is busily rejecting their weight, their habits, their indolence, their smoking, and any number of other things about themselves. There's a massive industry dedicated to helping you cut away the parts of yourself you don't want.
I'm not just talking about the weight loss industry, though it profits the most from this time of year. We're decluttering, downsizing, streamlining. We pick out something we don't like about ourselves, like financial irresponsibility or a habit we haven't previously been able to kick, and we build a huge plan to defeat it. We declare enemies (sugar is the devil, laziness is weakness, Netflix is a trap), and gird up for battle.
Few people seem to remember, when they're declaring enemies, to declare allies as well. I want to be stronger, sleep better, and spend more time doing the things that are important to me. My love of working out is an ally; if I indulge it I'll hit the first two of those. If I get stronger, I can hike more, and take more pictures, and create beautiful things. If I get more sleep, I have more energy during the day to get necessary tasks out of the way early and go do things I want to do. My tribe is an ally. They support me and love me and reach out to spend time with me, creating fun and wonderful experiences. They encourage me to grow, cheer my victories, and commiserate with my losses and failures. They love and value me, keeping me grounded in an understanding of and appreciation for the person I am right now.
Right out of the gate, a lot of people fail because the plan relies on them already being the person they're trying to become. They want to be the sort of person who gets daily exercise, so they exercise every day until they strain a hamstring and then never go back to the gym once it heals. They want to be the sort of person who contributes enough to their 401K to retire early, so they double their payroll contribution on the assumption that they can cut down on expenditures, and put off new shoes or car repairs until they're emergencies that end up costing more. Then, when the big plan fails to pay off because they weren't ready to start living it 100% of the time, they get demoralized and give up altogether.
You're not the person you want to grow up to be yet. You're the person you are, and that person has an entire gorgeous rich life that has formed you. Everything about you is an evolution, a culmination of generations of lives that came before you and years (if not decades) of decisions you've made for yourself and your life. You're a whole complex being right now, and setting goals for that person as if they were a stranger is never going to work. To be effective, a goal is a map from where you are to where you want to be, but maps are no good if they only list a destination and no other points of reference.
If you've embarked on a new plan or a new goal this year, let me ask you: what are you keeping? What is it you love about yourself, that fits in with the person you are right now and the life you want to have? Have you also resolved, in addition to all your changes, to keep your empathy and your good sense or your optimism and your self-care habits? When you took stock of your life, to decide where change needed to happen, did you mark out, as immutable boundaries, what you're preserving in yourself because it has value?
For those who make resolutions each year, I hope that you'll stop and lay out, for each thing you've resolved to change, something about yourself that you love enough to preserve. I hope you'll look at your allies and how you can help yourself reinforce your goals and dreams. I hope you'll be able to embrace the person you are now as valuable and worthy instead of regarding yourself as just an ingredient in some finished product.
Because I have a sad secret: if you can't love anything about yourself now, you won't be able to love the new you either. Life's not a set of Cinderella shoes you'll be able to fit if you just cut off the right bits and pieces of who you are. It's a long messy process of hurling yourself towards death and hoping to find enough joy and beauty on the way that you're not wasting the trip.
I love you all.
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