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.

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.

Uniforming My Ally

I have been some form of 'overweight' for my entire adult life.  For the first couple of decades out of high school, I agonised about my body, how to make it thinner, how to make it prettier, how to squish and scrape and starve it into acceptability.

As a Fat Girl, I convinced myself I deserved only frumpy, uninteresting, practical clothes.  I fooled myself that I wanted a 'classical, practical style' when what I really meant was "I don't feel comfortable wearing clothes that attract attention."  For years, my 'look' was a pair of sturdy jeans or cargo shorts, a solid-color tee for work and a funny tee for play.  Dresses were reserved, conservative.  Long skirts, dark colors, to the point that at least one set of co-workers assumed I was Pentecostal based on my style of dress.  My one concession to color and vibrancy was a collection of tie-dye dresses bought at festivals, all long and full-skirted.

I envied those other Fat Girls who wore the pretty dresses, who always looked nice and put together, who rocked the bright colors and the feminine lines.  I told myself, "Well, when I get thinner, when I look better, when I reach the goal, I can dress like I mean it, too."  I also envied them their comfort with their bodies, their ability to adorn and joyfully decorate something all social pressure pushed them to hide behind a sweatshirt or baggy pants.  A smaller voice whispered, "If I ever stop resenting my body, maybe I'll dress nice BEFORE I get thin."

Clothes shopping in America as a woman of my size is an exercise in demoralization and disappointment.  You see something lovely and fun, you envision having it, and you find out that in no universe does it exist in your size.  The brick-and-mortar stores that do carry things in your size are reinforcing the frumpy theme, or presenting you with 'fashion' garments in a style three years expired and a pattern ripped from the finest hotel wallpaper.  Online shopping's made it both better and worse, because now a dedicated shopper can struggle through ten times as many disappointments to find the few pearls and hope that the reviews are correct about 'size runs true'.  There are shops that offer better sizing and options, but they can be both hard to find and expensive, and the ability to Google search opens up a huge range of opportunities to find that for some people 8 is still a 'plus size'.

I spent a lot of time not wanting to risk that 'runs true' should have said 'runs small', and convincing myself that jeans and solid color tees and long full black skirts were a perfectly respectable style, until a friend introduced me to a site that takes your measurements and sends you a custom dress, and offers dozens of styles, colors, patterns, and fabrics.

This recommendation fell on exceedingly fertile ground.  Some five years ago, I wrote about my body as my ally, about embracing and loving myself with my own best interests as my highest priority, and I've been trying to live that since.  I've discarded the idea that my body needs to be a specific weight for me to be healthy and happy, and shifted my body goals to functional things I want to be able to do.

The health trials of my last couple of years, and the attendant weight gains and shifts, have really taxed that resolve.  Random abdominal expansion due to fibroids, plus exhaustion due to anemia and energy loss, have left me struggling to reach a space of peace with how I look and feel.  I was down to wearing broomstick skirts I bought at festivals, and a collection of black t-shirts, because so few of my clothes still fit and buying more was emotionally devastating.

But, you see, at my core I love all things that speak of luxury and the personal touch.  I couldn't pass up a dress made just for me, my own dress chosen and sewn as if I had a private seamstress.  Just one, I thought, a nice pretty dress for my wedding, that's an occasion that deserves a dress just for you, right?

So my then-fiance took my measurements for me, and I chose my dress and sent off my numbers and prepared myself for disappointment.  When it arrived, I put on my dress nervously, to find that it fit perfectly and it was so pretty and so comfortable.  The deep V neckline, though, mandated a new bra.  Off I went to the Fancy Bra Store, where they fit you and help you choose, because it's my wedding, right?  I deserve a special bra for my wedding!

It's easy to shout down the demons that tell you that you don't deserve to have nice or special things, when it's only for one occasion.  Shut up, Traitor Brain, I'm the BRIDE you know and the BRIDE can have nice things.  Not me, but this alter ego I get to wear for one day.  And sometimes you can use an alter ego as cover to sneak into an entirely new way of managing some part of your life.

Once I had tried it, I was hooked.  I culled out all my sad, battered, frumpy clothes.  Armed with a set of my measurements, I slowly began to replace my work wardrobe with clothes that not only fit and flattered, but *expressed*.  I looked at things and I thought, "I would look pretty in that," and if they fit into the budget and could be made in my numbers, I bought them regardless of whether they were flashy or brightly colored or Fat Girl Appropriate.

I replaced all my too-small bras with correctly-sized models, dropping band sizes and increasing cups to find that life is way better when you're not crushing your boobs into your armpits.  Over the course of the last year and a half, as budget has allowed, I've cut the amount of clothing my wardrobe in half, but every piece fits, looks good, and is comfortable.  I've cut my shoe collection by more than half, but replaced many of them with cute, whimsical flats.

Don't get me wrong.  I still have my funny tees and my cargo shorts and my carefully-amassed collection of Converse.  I'll never give up comfortable blue jeans, or oversized hoodies.  I'm not getting rid of who I am, just letting out the part I've been hiding behind this layer of fat all my life.

Somewhere along the way, I became one of the Stylish Fat Girls I've always envied.  I have a manicure with flowers on it, glasses chosen because they accentuate both the color of my eyes and the highlights in my hair, lots of socks with cheerful profanity, a variety of comfortable and interesting shoes, and a small collection of clothes that make me look and feel put-together and in control of my appearance.

When I started reframing my body as my ally, I began to try and consider the way I treat myself as "Would I treat my beloved friend this way?"  I am not indulging myself, I am outfitting my beloved friend.  I am putting a uniform on my ally, so we can keep fighting together.

The other day at the gym, two women about my size stopped me to compliment my dress.  I showed them the pockets and told them where I got it, and one of the women said, "Oh, I've been meaning to try them, but I wasn't sure...I thought I should wait until I lost some weight."  I saw in her eyes the reflection of my own struggles with 'deserve' and 'maybe someday', and I said, "No, really, do it now.  If you can afford it, do it.  Don't wait.  This has completely changed my relationship with my body and how I look at myself.  It's so worth it."

(I've left out the names of the sites I shop at, because this isn't an advertisement for them.  It's an advertisement for the idea that you should come to terms with your body as it is, and understand its shape and its needs, and adorn it joyfully no matter its size.)

Eviction

This post will discuss female medical issues in explicit detail.  If that's not your thing, please consider this your warning and move on.  I am talking about this because I can't possibly be the only woman experiencing it and it might help others to know they're not either.  Also, I am under the care of several competent medical professionals.  If you feel moved to offer me unsolicited medical advice, and you are not a doctor (preferably my doctor), please rethink that plan.

About a year and a half ago, in the course of the collection of medical catastrophes that was October 2015, I was diagnosed with uterine fibroids.  As they were 'merely annoying' as opposed to the several other issues rated at 'genuinely troubling' and 'potentially life-threatening', I set the matter aside to address when I had the others stable.  Once my iron levels returned to a reasonable norm, and I recovered from surgery and then from food poisoning, and got my foot out of the orthopedic boot, I set about looking for a new gynecologist (I had fired my previous gyno) who accepts my insurance and isn't an hour from home/work.

Meanwhile, my periods were moving from the moderately heavy ones I've had my entire adult life to something else entirely.  Since my 20s, I've had periods that were slightly heavier than most people's, but still didn't seem to cause the kind of anemia my late 30s offered (I could give blood about half the time up until 2010).  It was about 6-8 ounces of fluid loss (including but not exclusively blood), measured using the menstrual cup:  two heavy-heavy days, two moderate days, a day of spotting at the beginning and the end.  I've always had a lot of clotting, ever since my teens, and that hasn't changed.

They gradually got longer over the last year and a half, though only a little heavier.  By last fall, it was two heavy-heavy days, two moderate days, and ten days of intermittent spotting just heavy enough to need some form of protection.  Sometimes there'd be a day or two of nothing, then SURPRISE!  I understand this is common with fibroids, so it makes sense that as they've gotten larger the periods have gotten more annoying.  Additionally, the clotting's gotten much worse, which makes a cup particularly irritating:  Check cup on schedule, cup is empty, wash hands, walk back to desk, feel breakthrough, return to bathroom, cup is full of single clot.  Empty clot, spend rest of day anxiously waiting for another clot while nothing happens.

After consultation with my gyno and another uncomfortable vaginal ultrasound, we acknowledged that the first priority is to get the bleeding under control so that we can consider fibroid removal vs hysterectomy without the crushing pressure of the anemia driving the decision.  I also explained that the recovery from any surgery needed to take into account the festivals at which I camp in April and October.  To that end, she put me on a 14-day rotation of progesterone in February.  She said, "The next period will be as bad as usual, but after that they should start to taper off fairly soon."  I talked to a friend who's got similar issues, and was put on the same rotation; over three months her periods went from 10 days of wanting to die including 2 days of hourly bathroom trips, to four days of "hey, that's not too bad!" I did a lot of research and by and large the treatment I was put on seemed to help a lot of women.  So, I was hopeful.

It's at this point that someone invariably pops up to tell me the wonders of hormonal birth control and express amazement that I haven't been on it all along.  I agree, hormonal birth control is a wonderful thing...if you don't have migraines, especially migraines with visual auras.  I was never willing to take on a daily maintenance medication that increased my level of stroke that much.  It also turns out that it probably wouldn't have worked, if the progesterone was any indicator.

First period:  About normal.  Second period:  early.  I called the gyno and they said that since it was just a couple of days, it could just be my body adjusting to the schedule.  Slightly heavy flow, which was frustrating, but I told myself "Think how wonderful it will be when you taper off!"  Third period:  again a couple days early, arriving the Sunday morning of a camping festival I attended.  OK, annoying, but they should be tapering off now, right?  Also, gyno appt set up for the first time after festival I'm sure I won't be bleeding, because now my summer is open and I've got cleared time for recovery.  Heavy period.  Like, I've only had maybe ten periods in my life this heavy.  Three solid days of heavy bleeding, severe cramps for the first time in years.  I tell myself I'm ready for this 'tapering off' to kick in any time.

My gyno's office uses this electronic scheduler, where you go and pick out an appointment, but the scheduler doesn't allow you to differentiate between the actual doc and her nurse, who handles a lot of stuff very well but cannot have the "I think it's time to make surgery a priority" conversation with me.  The appointment I made for the first reasonable opportunity after festival gets moved because it was a nurse appointment, so I go into my fourth period of the progesterone.  The thing that I should have done was tell them how much worse it was instead of just telling them I was still having kinda heavy periods and some side effects.  They told me it usually kicks in after a month, but sometimes it could take longer, and if the side effects were too much, I could stop.  This is where I should probably have detailed the side effects, and the degree to which I meant 'still heavy' because when I told the doc about it in the appointment, her eyes got big and she said, "No, no, stop taking that, don't take any more of that."  Instead, having heard and read all the women talking about how bleeding less was so worth it, I soldiered on with it, unaware that the worst was still ahead.

So, about those side effects.  It started with headaches, which every site lists as a normal effect.  Fourteen days a month of what felt like low-grade dehydration headaches.  Lemme tell you, I was one hydrated motherfucker, because I kept drinking water to try and make them go away.  It never worked, but the massive water consumption is probably the only thing that saved my skin, when the hormonal widgeting started flinging the oil levels all over the place.  I haven't broken out this much since I was 15.  I also haven't had this much trouble regulating my moods since then either.  I've spent the last four months completely done with people's bullshit.  I've mostly managed to restrain it to 'snippy' but I've also unfriended about ten people because I just wasn't having any more pussyfooting maintenance of their delicate sensibilities and bigoted 'friends of friends'.  Turns out that part's been surprisingly good for my mental health; with 20% less fucks to give, I have heavily prioritized them.

However, the side effect that's affected me most is known as 'breakthrough bleeding'.  Randomly, at any time in my cycle, in amounts that varied from 'a few drops' to 'ruined outfit', I was bleeding.  Because this occurred in conjunction with an ankle injury that sidelined my cardio, I quit working out entirely.  It only took one instance of stopping mid-lift for a panicked rush to the bathroom to find that only the foresight of wearing a pad had kept me from bleeding all over the machine to make me extremely nervous about weights.  I stopped hiking, because a sudden rush of blood three miles from anywhere is a day-ruiner.  I've had to give up a lot of protests/rallies/marches because I couldn't be sure of bathrooms, of somewhere to check my "is that sweat or is it blood?" anxiety.  To say that I've missed these parts of my life is a tremendous understatement.

Uncertainty over whether Today Is A Bleeding Day has colored pretty much every aspect of my life for almost four months.  Yes, I carry pads everywhere, yes I wear them pretty much 100% of the time now, but the other thing about it is that it's demoralizing on a level it's hard for me to explain and the frustration and constant anxiety over whether I'm bleeding again is exhausting.  My body has been my ally, and I have been its, and now part of it is not cooperating with the plan we had by which I surrender a chunk of each month to it and I get my freedom the rest of the time.  I want to be mad at my uterus, but I know that it's not healthy, that it's decided to build itself some little fibroid friends and give away all my iron to them, but it's not really thinking as its best self right now.

Any of this, all of this, would have been on some level worth it, if it stopped the bleeding.  It hasn't.  This last period was something I can only describe as a nightmare.  Two days of showering while standing in my own blood.  A breakthrough while brushing my teeth that I was just too tired to fight so I finished brushing and then mopped up the puddle.  Less than an hour between cup changes (it holds an ounce, for reference).  The bleeding tapers off at night a little, so I can catch an hour, sometimes two, of sleep before the feeling of a breakthrough wakes me up to run to the bathroom.  I slept on a towel, just in case. I've bled on the office floor at work, I've bled on the bathroom floor at work.  Two loads of bloody towels in three days.  Just before I was ready to take myself to the ER and say "Something has gone very wrong," it slowed abruptly (there were no moderate days, just three days of non-stop then just over two WEEKS of very intermittent spotting).

Through all of this, I found the final fuck-you from the progesterone:  cluster migraines that happened to intersect with a round of weather changes to exacerbate them.  I hadn't had a migraine in two years; I got three in one week.  By the second day of excruciating pain, I had made up my mind to tell the doc that if she wouldn't take me off the progesterone I was finding a new doctor because I was absolutely done with that shit and never taking another pill.  Thankfully, her response was much more "No, no, that's not at all what was supposed to happen, clearly this is not the medicine for you."

In a perverse bit of luck, I started this entire progesterone debacle with dangerously high ferritin due to my liver's inability to cope with the last round of iron infusions.  I was lucky enough to escape any liver damage (in part because my ferritin's fallen from 1100 to 450 in the last two months to recover from the bleeding), but also lucky enough to have enough iron to turn into blood, so I am miraculously only my normal level of slightly anemic.  Score one for the Ally Body there, at least.

The only question at the gynecologist's appointment was which surgery and when, no question of whether.  I had essentially made up my own mind that fibroid removal was a losing game.  Last time I was checked, there are three and they are fairly large, so removal *could* have been an option depending on how they were attached, but I'm not even perimenopausal, so there's a strong chance they'd grow right back and I'd just begin a years-long process of regularly carving out chunks of a uterus I have no plans to use.  So, hysterectomy it is, about a month from now.  I managed to get them to move my surgery up from the last week of July, which would have been monumentally inconvenient for so many reasons.  I'll be out of work for at least a week; I plan to be hardcore serious about doing nothing that week but read books and pet cats.

Those who've seen me have been very kind not to remark on the fact that no matter how much I worked out, and especially the more I worked out, my stomach has just gotten...rounder.  The fibroids, per what I hope is the last incredibly and uncomfortable vaginal ultrasound for a very long time, currently approximate a 24-week pregnancy in size, and expand my uterus up to my navel.  When I was really heavy, this was not so noticeable.  But the reality is that the only reason I can still wear half my clothes in the waist (all the pants are long since given up on) is that I lost fat almost as fast as the fibroids grew over the last year and a half.  I don't know what my body looks like without fibroids any more; I've been holding off buying new work clothes for four months because I have no idea what will change.

The size means that I can not do the easier, quicker, vaginal removal.  I'll have a thoroughly badass lower abdomen scar, and a slower recovery.  I only asked about the fibroids on the last scan, and not if I've still got any ovarian cysts, which I've had the previous two scans; the fact that they have been in different places suggests they may just be a function of when in my cycle I was getting the procedure (usually about day 14), or it may mean that she'll be removing a couple of cysts while she's in there.  Aside from that, she won't remove or otherwise interfere with my ovaries unless she has strong reason to suspect ovarian cancer.  I have no interest in abrupt menopause, so I appreciate that.

I've been referring to this as the 'nuclear option' for resolving the anemia, and it really is.  My periods have been a contributing factor, but the absorption problem won't go away, so I'll still need to monitor my iron.  However, I expect this will end the need for infusions, and I might someday be able to give blood again.  My only real regret is that robot surgery is not an option, so I can't use this to threaten the other organs with robots if they get out of line.

Every Child a Wanted Child

When I was younger, I had a good friend.  I'll call her 'Jane' for the sake of her privacy.

Jane was born at the end of 1972.  Her mother had not wanted her, or her older sibling, but had no access to reliable birth control, and she had a husband with needs and expectations who wouldn't have allowed any child of his to be put up for adoption.  It became clear to me, the longer I knew her, that Jane's mother was one of those people who should never have had children, and she knew it.

Rather than try to become the good mother she was singularly ill-equipped to be, Jane's mom let the resentment through.  My friend was regularly beaten; she confided to me once that her mom had started using the belt on her upper thighs, because she'd had her ass beaten so frequently it no longer really hurt that much, and her mom had figured that out.

The thing that sticks with me, more than any other, is Jane finding out when my birthday was, and saying enviously, "You were wanted."  I was born *after* the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision.  Our friendship fell across that historic cusp.

Since she could remember, my good friend's mother had told her, on a regular basis, that she wished abortion had been legal in her state.  She told her "If it had been six months later or if I could have afforded to drive to another state, I would have aborted you."  She told her "you never should have been born and I wish you hadn't."  She told her children "Your father left after you were born and it was your fault.  He wouldn't have left me if not for you."  Jane looked at everyone she knew through an age-related filter, with everyone younger than her living in this miracle land of being a wanted child, because the law hadn't forced their mothers to have them like it had hers.

Everything Jane had done to improve her life, from studying hard to taking up hobbies to applying to colleges and getting a part-time job, her mother met with, "Why bother?  You'll just ruin your own life like you ruined mine."  When she started dating, she was told, "When you've gone and gotten yourself knocked up, I'll take you to get an abortion because even you don't deserve a child like you."

I can't explain what it was like to be in proximity to this kind of toxic relationship.  Jane made me promise not to tell anyone because every time someone tried to help it got worse.  I was much younger then, so I kept her secret.

As the years wore on and we moved to different cities, Jane and I had our fallings-out.  She was always a difficult person to be friends with, so quick to reject friendship if she had any fear that it might hurt her, so guarded against trust.  But when she was in an emotionally healthy space the friendship was good and solid.  Jane at her best was bright, kind, and witty.

Looking back I wish I'd tried harder to hold the connection, but that was tough to do in the days before email, and cellphones with free long distance, and jobs that pay enough for road trips.  She started making some dangerous choices with drugs and sex, and the last straw for a close relationship was me trying to talk to her about that.  I was not particularly subtle or empathetic about it, and she was not open to having her slow suicide through deliberate irresponsibility called out.  She told me she should never have been born anyway, so why did it matter?  We spoke occasionally after that, but the real closeness and trust were gone.  Eventually, the relationship just dissolved, and she faded out of my life.

Whenever abortion comes up, I think of Jane.  I hope she's all right and that she eventually managed to get the help she needed to deal with her abuse.  I hope that she's never become the mother she feared she'd be if she had kids.  I hope that her life, today, is one of joy and freedom.  Every so often I put her name in a search engine to no real effect, and I'm not even sure what I'd say to her if I found her.

Most stories of the days before Roe focus on the women, the ones who lost their lives or suffered desperate health crises as a result of a botched illegal abortion.  We tell a lot of stories about women whose lives were derailed or forever altered by a pregnancy and motherhood they didn't choose.

We talk about how now, because abortion is not as readily available as it should be, we have not reached the goal of making every pregnancy wanted and healthy.  We talk so much about the effects of abortion restriction upon the women who are forced to bear by them.

I can never deny, though, that the deepest part of my own opinions on the necessity of safe, legal, accessible abortion doesn't come from my own identity as a woman, or from my belief in my bodily autonomy.  It was formed by being helpless to stop the pain of a child who would not have existed if abortion access had been a reality for her mother.

Compersion is Not Just About Romance

If you hang around polyamorous circles long enough, you run into the concept of 'compersion'.  It refers to the state, when you and a partner are involved in multiple relationships, where a partner's happiness with another person brings you happiness because you're genuinely invested in their own well-being and you don't view that relationship as a threat to your own.

Whether it's a natural outgrowth of healthy polyamory or a general goal some people struggle towards is a matter of hotly debated opinion, and I'm not going to weigh in on it here.  I'm here today to talk about a different type of compersion: the manner in which it relates to the people your partner loves but is specifically not involved romantically with.  I'm talking about seeking compersion with your partner's friend group.

I am part of a large, caring, close-knit tribe.  We're loud, loving, honest and heavily invested in our success as individuals and as a group.  Many of us struggle with some form of chronic physical or mental illness, so we support one another on the bad days and celebrate the good ones.  We've got a diverse skillset that includes domestic, medical, technical, literary, financial, and social skills, and each of us is happy to put those skills to use to help one another, so that we all benefit from what we each have.  Without this group, my depression would have claimed me years ago; other friends would have failed in things they wanted or needed.

Over the years, some of the people I've dated have been intimidated by my tribe.  They see this group of unfailing advocates as somehow arrayed *against* them, in competition for my time, energy, or affection.  One poor fellow once told me, "Well, I just feel like if they don't like me, you won't like me."

He had it backwards.  If I love you and they see that you love me, my tribe will look at you through that filter, and if they don't understand what I see in you, they'll try to find it, try to build a relationship with you, try to meet you on some common ground, because they want my highest good.  They are invested in me being well and happy, and they consider anyone who is invested in me being well and happy as their ally.  It takes a lot for them to say, "No, I'm sorry, I know that this person is important to you, but I can't accept them."  And in most cases, that starts with a partner rejecting the friends, not the other way around.

The effects of having a tribe like mine have been twofold.  The first was that I chose not to pursue a relationship with anyone who treated my tribe as adversaries, and I feel that I'm much better for it.  If someone couldn't respect the people who love and support me as an important part of my life and necessary to my emotional health, then that person wasn't committed to my happiness.  My partner, on the other hand, has been delighted to find that I had such a wonderful support system, and he has really enjoyed building relationships with them.  Our wedding was a celebration of shared happiness surrounded by people committed to supporting it.

The other effect is that I view my partner's friends as MY allies in his happiness.  He has a group of good friends, and I have made it a point to know and have relationships with his friends, because if they are the people he enjoys and loves, who share in his triumphs and support him in his troubles, then they're on my side because they're on his.  When he goes out with them, and has a good time, I get the benefit of seeing him happy.  When we hang out together, we all have the shared baseline of valuing my partner upon which to build our own friendships.

That's where, for me, non-romantic compersion comes into play.  I have some interests my partner does not share.  He likes to do some things I either don't have time and energy for or an interest in doing.  If we tried to be everything to one another, tried to be the sole support, then we'd both be less happy.  But I can see him come home from an afternoon of games with his buddies, or plan to go out with a friend to see a show, and celebrate the joy he has in doing things he enjoys.  When we have separate experiences, we have things to talk about together.  Even in our monogamous relationship, we can embrace the things and people outside our relationship that make one another happy, and take our own pleasure from it.

Too often, I see the partners of friends or loved ones look at established friendships with suspicion, as obstacles to be navigated or power struggles to be won.  I've seen partners who treated friends as competition for a finite resource, and that hurts everyone.

Love is never a finite resource; time is.  And you have the choice, in your relationships, to compete for that finite resource and ensure that someone doesn't get enough of it, or to share it with the people who, when your beloved's demons come calling, will stand beside you as you help to fight them.

BFFs are Totally a Commie Plot

I'm gonna talk about some things that will sound like Communism to some folks now.

Specifically:  from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.

If that sounds familiar (which it should), it's because it's a paraphrase of one of the central tenets espoused in The Communist Manifesto, which is where people might get the idea that I'm talking Communism.  I am.

I'm also talking community.

In recent decades, as Americans have stopped living in large extended family groups, as we've moved for jobs or schools or partners to cities where family and the friends of childhood don't provide a close-knit peer group, a lot of us have sought to recreate that social network.

We build tribes, squads, groups, phamilies, whatever word we choose to designate "these people are My People, they are more than friends, we are a unified entity," and what we are creating are communities.  Some are huge (the 'Burner community' or the 'pagan community' which have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of associated people).  Some are small, like a group of six or seven who meet up for dinner each week.  They're online, they're in-person, they spring up at annual events.

We talk a lot about 'intentional community' and 'building community' and 'community standards', all of which is shorthand for "we were all raised with different sets of ethics and morals, with different ways of treating people and establishing relationships, and we need to navigate the process of developing a consistent set of ethics and mores for a group that will thrive and support all its members."

It's a struggle to create space that includes free speech and excludes expressions of hate and bigotry.  Where laughter has a place, but people don't mock each other.  Where those in need are supported, but those with more than they need aren't exploited to do it.  All these things are important, but that last one is especially so, because it contains the seeds of ruination for every community:  unequal resource flow.

This may sound cold, but it's true:  all relationships are transactional, most of them unconsciously.  You may not think "My friend bought me dinner when I was broke, so now I 'owe' her dinner when she is broke," or "My friend has spent seven hours listening to me complain about my job, and I have spent six and a half hours listening to him bitch about his partner, so in half an hour his time is up," but you can probably describe several times your friends have helped you out, and part of the value of any relationship is how much you have personally gotten out of it.

In healthy relationships, the transactions are most likely both unconscious and balanced.  You don't stop to think what your best friend has done for you lately before doing something for them.  You just know that this person makes you laugh, gives you insights, provides real value to your life in being there, and that having a relationship that makes your life better generally makes you want to make the other person's life better.  As the scale expands and more people are added into the relationship, it becomes a community and the value of healthy relationships within that community increases.

One of the things that makes a community a community is the sharing of resources to improve the condition of everyone in the community.  Resources can mean a lot of things: money, space, time, creativity, energy, emotional labor, physical labor, intellectual labor, physical assets like cars or tools, anything that the members of the community share with each other.  That sharing allows the community to do more than its members could do alone, and it 'evens out' the experiences of the individuals, because having that resource pool to tap instead of needing to go it alone expands your ability to handle problems.  Healthy community operates on the same principles as ideal Communist theory: we all put in what we can, and we all take out what we need, and it all balances eventually.

We've all seen it: you've got your friend group, your buddies, and over a few years you build a really solid structure.  No one ever has to carry a sofa alone, everyone has someone to cheer them up after a breakup, you know that if you were about to be homeless there'd be a couch with your name on it till you got back on your feet.  It's all good, all easy, all balanced.

Then something shifts.  Maybe a new member comes in and doesn't quite understand the established give-and-take.  Maybe an existing member suffers several setbacks in a row and just stops trying.  Maybe someone has a sudden windfall that drastically improves their personal resources.  Whatever happens, it exposes a problem you'd never realised: everyone is not working with the same understanding of how community resources should be shared, or even what should be community resources.  The transactional nature of the relationships becomes both apparent, and ugly.

This is a make-or-break point for a community.  If you're genuinely willing to face hard questions with integrity, and talk openly about your own philosophies on support structures and resources, you can come away stronger.  If you try to avoid conflict and force the peace, you can end up with a badly unbalanced community.  It can manifest as someone taking a disproportionate share of the community's focus and resources without demonstrating any inclination to share their own.  It can *also* manifest as someone providing a much greater share of the community's resources, and expecting that to 'buy' them a greater voice in the ethics and philosophies of the community.  There are a lot of possibilities for where the imbalance can lead.  In any case, it's usually based in an expectation that someone should 'win' at relationships and someone else should 'lose' at them: the capitalist model of human relationships.

I've been a manager, moderator, guide, or leader in a number of different communities, and the percentage of them that ultimately failed because of resource inequality is high.  My own failing as a leader was that I was not willing to put the health of the community as a whole ahead of each individual feeling completely included and happy on the terms they dictated.  In trying to meet everyone's demands, leaders empower a few greedy and entitled individuals to destroy what we've built, when we should defend it.

The hardest thing: sometimes this means kicking someone out of your community, or just letting them walk away without trying to win them back.  Someone who may be fun and funny, but who also doesn't feel inclined to support or share with others, while gladly availing themselves of what others offer.  Sometimes it means telling someone that they have to fall, because they have worn everyone out with catching them and they refuse to stop jumping off cliffs.  It *hurts* to do this.  You feel like a bad person, a bad friend.  Guilty.

It means standing up to a bully, saying "I don't care how much you give, you don't 'own' this."  That's scary too, because maybe your community's gotten used to having what this person shares, and if you make them mad they'll take it, and leave.  Will everyone blame you that you can't have pool parties any more, because you told the guy with the pool to stop making sexist comments to the women in the group?

We need to be willing to stand up for the value of our communities as their own entities, as discrete things, and be open and honest about expectations in the group, community ethics and ideals, and goals.  We need to get honest about the real value of people's intangible contributions to our communities, and respect creative, emotional, or intellectual labor on behalf of the community as essential and worthy.

The days of the widespread family unit with consistent traditions and philosophy are gone, and if the structures we're building to replace it are to survive, they can't be based in capitalist theories of 'value' that view 'success' as coming out ahead of others.  They have to be based in a communal understanding that we all do well when we *all* do well.

Un-Scheduled to Within an Inch of My Life

A lot of articles and conversations have been wafting through my life lately like this one, Exhaustion is Not a Status Symbol, and each time I tell myself I'm going to talk about my experience with this destructive mentality, and then I don't.  So now I am.

One year ago, if you asked me how I had been, the answer was a sort of helpless, "Oh, you know, SO BUSY.  I am made of busy.  I am doing All The Things."  It took a lot of things, multiple articles highlighting that the glorification of busy is part of a system that was eating so many people alive, before I really started to ask myself important questions.

Important questions like, "What, exactly, are my own goals?" or "What is it that I would do if I ever stopped taking on others' priorities as my own?" or "So, what am I afraid I'll have to deal with if I ever sit still?"

My life is very full.  I work, I volunteer, I have a few creative gigs and hobbies, I am in a relationship, I'm part of a closely-knit community, I serve as a priestess, and I'm working on my own personal development, plus managing episodic depression and occasional bouts of anemia.  I also moved last year and my company underwent a transition of ownership.

I used to take a great deal of pride in that list, because the eyes of anyone who heard it got very round, and they said, "Wow, you ARE busy."  There was a sort of self-satisfaction in knowing that I lived under a schedule that others considered crushing and impressive.  I joked about being 'scheduled to within an inch of my life,' but the truth is that I wasn't really joking.  I was at the very edge of what I could reasonably live.

The primary problem, of course, lies in that episodic depression and occasional anemia.  Because there were occasionally days where I looked at the catalogue of obligations I'd built myself, and I...couldn't (I should probably also mention the migraines here, most common in January and February when dry air and pressure changes are particularly vicious).  I had to stop, to hide, to take a full day to recover from the basics of my life.  Of course, everyone tells you, when you need to take three to five 'mental health' days a year, that you're perfectly entitled to them, that you have 'every right' to the time.

But what if I didn't need it?  What if I started structuring a life I never needed to take time from, because it was ordered in a way that included time off, relaxation, and recovery time as normal facets of human existence?

I had this moment where a friend asked if I wanted to have coffee or dinner or something, and my calendar was literally full, something scheduled every single day, for weeks.  That was a trigger; the night I found myself weeping into the laundry at 2am because I couldn't sleep until I had washed the sheets and made the bed but I hadn't gotten home until almost midnight was another.  I started working towards balance, towards the notion that relaxation didn't have to represent 'hiding from' my life, that it could be an integral part.  I started to consider that maybe it might be reasonable to be able to do interesting things at the last minute.  I started offloading small tasks and obligations to people I could trust with them.

If you had told me that stepping back from a life of obligation would increase the time I had to spend managing it, I'd never have believed it.  But it's true.  Anything I dropped without a clear transition plan, without figuring out who would take it on, came back upon me with a vengeance, unpredictably and in crisis.  So I exhausted myself, carving out bits and pieces of time in hopes that it would create space for that transition.

Gradually, slowly, it worked.  I found that in spaces where I have taken leadership roles, I could comfortably delegate to trusted team members.  I found that in spaces where leadership was lacking, I could advise and suggest rather than doing the work and owning the process.  Some of it has to do with the change in work, from 'ten vacation days and five sick days a year' to 'twenty undifferentiated PTO days, plus three floating holidays to use as desired.'

I've had to let a lot go.  I've had to trust.  I've had to set boundaries.  It's been hard, because my natural tendency, when someone says, "We need this done," is to say "Of course, I can help with that.  I'll just take on that responsibility."  Rather than simply refuse all requests, which is its own trap, I've been forcing myself to stop and consider which things are good uses of my time, which things will feed me.  I am looking at trips as real plans, and not as someday hopes for 'years when the anemia and the festivals leave me enough time.'

About six months ago, I turned the corner that was "The process of transitioning things out of my life no longer occupies more space than the things I have transitioned out of my life," which is to say I started to develop occasional free time.  It's been amazing.

The hardest thing is that there are SO MANY OPTIONS for filling that time, for busying back up, for a show and a party and a movie and a dinner and a coffee every single week.  There are more hobbies I'd love to take up, and more events I'd love to see, but for now, at least, I'm stopping to take a breath and center myself at home, and establish what a healthy boundary set of my own time really looks like in the long term, rather than create another cycle of busy-and-purge down the road.

I do not delude myself that this is anything other than a landing on my life's staircase.  At each turning, I cull obligation and replace it with passion, in hopes that someday my life will be full only of things that feed and nourish me, of things that all actively contribute to me being my best self.

I love you all.

Little Things Matter to Big People

Dear Fitness Center:

When we joined your gym a few months ago, my partner mentioned that he'd been a member previously.  He was asked, "Why did you quit last time?"  I understand the purpose of this question, to try and help someone tailor their experience differently in a way that retains customers.  The answer, as it is for many people who join gyms and quit them, was a complex muddle of "It cost more in time and money than I was willing/able to spend to get the benefits I wanted."

But if I ever have to answer that question, here's what I'll say:

It's your towels.

Not specifically the towels themselves, you see, but what they represent in the context of your gym and how you manage it.

The best time for me to work out is at lunch, which means I drive over, hit the elliptical for 20-25 minutes, shower, and drive back to work for the afternoon.  This is, for me, a workout routine I can establish as a habit, meaning that regular activity 3-5 times a week becomes a set part of my life.  All the studies I've read say that, whatever my size, that is an improvement and a positive thing over spending the same lunch hour working, or sitting at my desk and reading.

But here we find...the towels.  I am not particularly body-shy.  I have used communal showers for almost two decades now, so being unclothed around a bunch of other women in the locker room isn't really a thing with me.  But I'd like to wrap a towel around me as I walk from the shower to the locker, in part because it's a bit chilly in there, and in part because that seems to be the standard of behaviour everyone else is engaging in, and I'd like to respect others' comfort levels.

The towel won't wrap, though.  Each time I work out, each time I shower, I attempt to squish my body into one of your towels, unable to even convince it to tuck neatly around my chest, and it simply gapes below.  My hips and stomach are completely exposed, in all their rounded glory, as I scurry to my locker, trying to juggle my workout clothes and shoes and my glasses and my conditioner, and keep the towel from falling off.  I have yet to succeed; every day or two I hold my head up defiantly as that inadequate towel pools around my feet.  I can't go back to work unshowered, and packing a towel for my own use adds a load of laundry each week to an already-full domestic schedule, so I face the towel every day, and it demoralizes me, removing some of that endorphin high from my workout.

I look around at all the pictures you have, of people enjoying their workouts, happily swimming and biking and practicing yoga, and every last one of those people is thin.  Not just an average-weight person, but a deliberately thin one, one who fits in the towel with ease.  There are no pictures of happy fat people working out in your gym, not anywhere.  I have never, in fact, worked out in a gym where there were pictures of happy healthy fat people, despite the fact that I know a lot of happy healthy fat people who enjoy working out.

When I came in for my 'free consultation', I explained "I am trying to rebuild healthy habits, so what I plan to do is get in the habit of coming in, just to hit the elliptical, or the treadmill or the stairmaster, several times a week.  I have about 25 minutes.  Eventually I will want to put together a weights routine that I can switch out with that, even though I know it'll have to be limited."  The trainer explained patiently that 25 minutes of weight lifting just wasn't even worth doing, and if I wasn't willing to commit to more time than that, then probably I should just stick to the elliptical, because that would have to be enough and it was 'better than nothing'.  I was pushed and pushed and pushed to weigh myself and lay out a 'goal weight' and a 'target weight loss rate' no matter how many times I said it wasn't about getting skinny.

All of this, over and together, tells me that the story you're selling is this one:  thin people go to the gym.  Thin, happy people are people who work out.  People who work out are thin, happy people.  There is no space for the fat fit.  They do not exist, they do not belong here, this is a place where inadequate people come and they get thin, because thin is how you win when you commit to fitness as a lifestyle.

I will never be thin.  Even at my 'goal weight', five or ten pounds above where my face starts to look a little uncanny-angular, I am a 36DDD.  As for the bottom half of my body, this train is an express to Callipygia and it is equipped with a full caboose.  There is no changing that, and I do not want there to be.

My 'ideal body' is measured in my functionality.  At my peak of fitness, I can't tell you my waist size, but I can tell you that I can hike 8 desert miles with ease, and manage Hill Country hikes with hundreds of feet of change in elevation.  I can run five back-to-back 20-hour active days without exhaustion.  I can lift, carry, and push almost anything I'm likely to need to.  My long-term goal is a solo overnight 20 or 30 mile hike.  But when I explain to people at your gym these functional goals I have, I hear "Ok, so at what weight do you think you'd be able to do all that?"

So, I get that this is a gym and selling fitness is your job.  I get that your job is easiest when I'm satisfied with easy metrics like weight and body fat percentage, and when I'm willing to simply do what I'm told, make getting to the gym on your terms a priority in my life, and live out a 'success story' for your ads.  Joe Sixpack who lost 60 pounds and umpty inches makes a much better photo op than the woman who hauls her size fourteen fluffy ass up 15 miles of Big Bend trails.

And I get that you're telling the story larger culture taught you:  There is no room in fitness for fat people.  A fat person in the gym can't possibly be working on any goal beyond self-erasure.  I cannot possibly have a workout goal that includes expanding anything about myself, not even my capacity for physical endurance, because expanse should be my enemy.

I also get that you can't change that larger culture.  That asking a business to change its entire philosophy when most of us can't even find pants in our size or doctors who'll consider non-weight-related causes is not so realistic.  You can't change how the world views me, you can't change the American perception of fitness to include the fact that it is a thing personally defined, by each and every one of us, that it is a constantly-changing idea based on the capacity of the body you inhabit, not a cookie-cutter image of fat-free triathletes smiling past their water bottles.

You can't singlehandedly end shaming and misinformation about weight, you can't singlehandedly make people understand that the entire idea of 'extreme diet and workout program to get to the right size' is a path to failure every single time because it can never be sustainable, you cannot completely revolutionize the world so that fat people feel welcome, so that we feel we have a right to exist in this world.

But you know what you can do?

Get bigger towels.

Deciding Which End of the Electronic Leash To Be On

I have recently acquired a shiny new tablet.  One of the interesting things is that once I connected it to my Google account, it began to port over the games and apps I had downloaded.  I started adding or deleting things to customize the different devices.  The tablet, for example, is much better for netflix and several of the games I like.  I find that even though the screen is smaller, the phone works much better for chat and messaging.

I've been making choices about it based on the different roles I want each device to play, and it's been interesting to evaluate my changing relationship with technology.  Today was a pretty significant choice:  I am not going to set up my work email access from my tablet.

This goes to a deeper set of decisions I'm making about it, congruent with the fact that I got it in part to help me sort and manage my pictures (I may not be able to get tablet lightroom, but I *can* review and sort the pics so I know which ones go in the 'processing' folder and which ones go in the "I will probably never do anything with this" folder) and keep some books and movies on for downtime.  Eventually there may be podcasts, and I've already loaded a substantial chunk of my music onto it.  But I'm finding myself being very mindful of what I put on it, as far as 'productivity' goes.  Maybe I don't want to use it to increase my productivity further.

One of the defining characteristics of Gen X, more so than those who came before or after us, is that we wrestle with the changing role of technology in our lives, as it moves (for some) from servant to master.  When I graduated high school in 1991, computer literacy was a rarity.  Five years after high school, as I was looking to enter the professional workforce, suddenly computer literacy was a basic requirement.  Every desk at every job, every classroom, every home now had a computer, and life began to be increasingly affected by your ability to navigate your relationship with it.  The more you could integrate technology to 'work smarter' and get more done and be more accessible, the more likely it was you'd succeed.

Several of my first temp jobs used dialup e-mail accounts, so that you had to remember, once an hour or so, to sign on and check the company e-mail.  There was rarely any, but you had to check it anyway.  If you forgot you could still blame 'server problems' for a two-day delay and no one questioned it.  Today I can receive work e-mails minutes after they're sent pretty much anywhere, anytime, and my employer operates on that premise.

I have made the transition, as an adult, from having to seek out communication and connection to having to seek out opportunities to disconnect.  I have adapted to the world as it is, and I tend to appreciate the benefits of that connection.  But as I hear things like "I sent you a text and you didn't reply right away," or "I know you got my e-mail on your phone, why didn't you answer?" I start to wonder if I'll be among the last generation to feel that an individual has the right to set the speed of communication and response.

Lately my phone's been a source of mild anxiety for me.  If I want to play a game or check a website, it perkily lets me know that I have a voice mail, and an e-mail, and a couple of text messages, and a new update to download, and and and...

Its effectiveness lies in it maintaining that constant pipeline so that I can know, at a glance, what the world needs me to know.  The problem has been that I can't *give* that glance without getting the whole fire hose.

Enter the tablet.  It is purely for leisure, for doing things that feed me socially, personally, culturally, and intellectually.  I am deliberately choosing to use it in a wholly selfish manner.  The phone is a tool for communication, connectivity, awareness.  It shouts for my attention and points things out to me.  I'm considering uninstalling all the games and timewasters from it, so that it can be purely for staying in touch with the world. The laptop and desktop computers are for work, for things that require my words most of all, because 90 wpm on a keyboard is far preferable to 30 wpm on a tablet, and because that allows me to say "Now I will sit down, and I will work."

I'm really looking forward to the division of leisure and productivity.  With the tablet, there are no conversations I tell myself I need to be following, no messages I'm chiding myself for not having the time to respond to, no notifications that People Need Me To Tell Them Things, no work I probably ought to be doing.  I can enjoy connectivity on my terms, with the whole array of available knowledge laid out before me, or simply a mindless color-matching game to clear my head.

Over the next few years, I'm going to be closely watching my relationship with technology, as connectivity and access increase, to make sure that I don't blur too many lines between work and play, between my time and others' time, between what I want to do and what I feel obligated to do.   I expect this to be a large part of the social battlefield, the fight between whether technology gives the world the ability to control you, or gives you the ability to control the world.  I will remain firmly upon the side of "My time is mine and you can't use an electronic leash to demand my focus unless I choose to give it to you."

Now I Am Prime Again

A year ago today, I was returning from riding roller coasters with my best friend, musing on what it really means to be an adult.  The entire notion that because of the hard work and effort I'd put into building a career and a community and structures and relationships, my fortieth birthday literally meant turning a profit riding roller coasters because it cost me less than a day's wages to do so, has colored my year.

The last ten years, more than anything, have been spent building.  Building communities, building trust, building relationships.  Growing into my own identity as a priestess, as a counselor, as a friend, as a woman.

The hardest lesson in these ten years is that though my choices have far-reaching effects, my power stops at the ends of my arms.  If it's not within my control, then it's a variable beyond my influence.

It's hard to watch someone you love struggle through unhappiness, unable to help him figure out the key, that it has to start in your heart and move outwards, because no amount of pressure will drive it in to your core.  I see people I love moving towards what look like painful life lessons, and I can only point and call out, "Mind that first step, there."  Sometimes I can't even do that, because they're so well-shielded against anything that will crack the facade of bitterly determined vengeful happiness they're forging.

It's hard to watch communities tear at themselves, and be unable to stop them because patterns of hate lie like railroad tracks, driving people inexorably towards conflict.  To hope desperately that common sense will prevail, as reason shatters upon the rocks.

It's hard to see people grinding themselves to nothing in the name of justice, compassion, and mercy, because there is so much work and it will never be done in our lifetimes but we cannot stop trying.  To watch hearts break as hope fails, and to work to gather the pieces and begin to build with what can be salvaged.

That little voice that tells me to take up arms and rise against the windmills that plague others has been a guiding force of my life, and it's only really been this year that I see:  It drives me to their battles to avoid acknowledging my own.

I can't say what's triggered this self-knowledge, this realisation that I must, in the next ten years, begin to get a real handle on the lessons I can use with my own two hands to keep my own life at the center of my priorities, but it's been a strong and powerful month.

A while ago, I began the process of reclaiming my life, of pulling back into control and learning to focus my energies on what feeds me in some way.  And this process of building a life outside of meeting the needs of others has been ongoing for about three years now.  But I see now that the realisations I thought were answers were only the beginning of a thousand more questions.

The first question I am asking, the one it is hardest to face, is "What can I build that serves me alone, that does not benefit me as a side effect of serving someone else?"

I Am Apparently My Own Bloodless Coup?

Over the last several days, I've been slowly wrestling with the possibility that the anemia is forever.  That it's not a matter of making sure I get enough of the right kind of iron, that this is not a thing I can eat my way out of.  That something is wrong with me beyond my ability to maintain my own health myself.

Two weeks ago, I had what I thought was the last hematologist appointment for half a year.  Everything looked good, she said, hemoglobin and hematocrit numbers holding steady.  My color is back, my energy is up.  My hair and nails have been growing much stronger and thicker, my skin is better, and I just, overall, feel healthy.

Then, Monday morning, I got a call from the hematologist's office.  My serum iron is in the 30's (normal is 50+) and my percent saturation is 9% (normal is 12).  Four more infusions.  Four more lost days of work.  Four more trips to the chemo lab to sleep away three hours in a Benadryl haze.  Four more anxious moments as I watch the first injection of the iron solution, knowing that if I have a reaction this door may be closed to me forever.  Four more weeks of my body pulling energy away from cognition and motivation, to turn the glut of iron into healthy blood.

What the numbers mean, by the way, is that I'm walking a tightrope of deficiency.  I have enough oxygen in my blood *now*, but one false step and I don't have the reserves to cover it.  One bad nosebleed.  One nasty cut while slicing vegetables, and I can't replace what will wash down the drain.  And as the cells die, I'm at the very edge of being able to replace them.

Through it all, the anxiety.  Is this just what my life is now?  Semi-annual injections of something the entire rest of the world can get from a spinach salad or a hamburger?  Watching for the pica, the shortness of breath, the cracked nails and the diminished energy, all the little ways my body tells me it's failing?  Second-guessing every groggy morning and every brief moment of chill?  Looking, every time I miss it, for a new metric that would have warned me?  Accepting, after each episode, that that wasn't the right way to track it.  Even a home iron test wouldn't have found this; it tests hemoglobin and hematocrit, which were fine.

Adding 'hematocrit' to my spell checker, because it seems I may need to be using it a lot.  It suggests 'crematorium' instead.  No, thank you, spell check.

The scariest thing a doctor can say to you is "I don't know why this is happening to you, and I don't know where else to look."  I have no symptoms of deeper problems, no signs of cancer or internal bleeding or failing bone marrow or my liver gone rogue, mad with the power to destroy blood cells.  That would be reassuring, except...I have no symptoms of anemia either, and I seem to have that.

Feeling simultaneously betrayed by my body, which is refusing to conform to the agreement we made in which I will give it good food and exercise and it will function as I need it to -- and compassionate towards it, because I can feel myself *trying* to compensate, to keep up, to do what is needed with what I have.  It really doesn't help that within five minutes of the confirmation phone call, I started feeling cold and dizzy and weak.  No, I told my feet, I can feel you just fine, dammit.  This is psychosomatic and you KNOW IT so stop it!

The thing is, anemia doesn't kill you, because it's resolvable and treatable.  It's not a thing people really die from, because iron is easy to replace, until it's not.  Once you have a reaction to the iron treatments, your options become very limited.  I've been in the lab, once, when someone started to have a reaction.  He said, "It's swelling.  It doesn't usually swell like this.  Is something wrong?"  I drifted into the Benadryl haze about that time; my last conscious thought was a panicked glance at my own injection site.  When I woke, he was gone.  I don't know where he went, or what his options are now.  I asked, once, what if I can't have infusions any more?  The nurse looked away and said, "Don't worry about that right now.  Just focus on getting better."

The part of my brain I call Traitor Brain is having a field day.

"You're broken," she says.  "You have bad blood.  There are secret things wrong with you, things you should have seen, but now they're going to kill you and you're missing the significance of the only warning you're being given.  This is your fault, for all those years when you couldn't get a job that gave you insurance.  You'd already know what was wrong, but you were too busy being a fuckup to have the stability to find out."

She also says, "Get over yourself.  This isn't a real illness.  This isn't a thing.  You know people with real things.  They have real, bona fide illnesses and you're, what, a little chilly?  Put on a fucking sweater and tough it up.  Look around that fucking chemo lab and then say you're afraid with a straight face, that you're dealing with anything even close to what those people are facing.  You should be ashamed of this, it's stupid narcissistic weakness."

I know that Traitor Brain is a bitch and she wants me to fail.  That's why I named her that.  I've had her on the run pretty well the last year or so, and she's trying to make me pay for it.  I repeat her words here, because when I say them out loud I can hear how full of shit she is, but when she's hiding in my head, those insidious whispers are self-reinforcing.

There's another voice, too.  It says, "Um, what if there's nothing wrong with you?  What if this is just...how you are?  How your body works?"  I have started finding things on web searches that say that with steady hemoglobin levels, lots of women function fine with a serum iron in the 40s if they're not having any symptoms.  That's not far from where I am.  It's possible, remotely, that I am at a confluence of 'does not absorb iron well' and 'turns serum iron into hemoglobin VERY FAST' so that what looks like cruising disaster is actually my normal state of being, and my crises were triggered by something as simple as "eating a heavily vegetarian diet without noticing."  This is where the lack of insurance comes in.  I have hemoglobin levels from 10 years ago, and they were low, but I've never really had regular serum iron tests when I was healthy.  I have no baseline, just the last several years of extremely problematic hemoglobin levels.  And in the absence of that baseline, the doctor treats what she sees, and what she sees is blood on the dangerous edge.  I'll talk to her about the possibility of it, and she's been very receptive, but "I think this may be an OK place for me to be as long as I'm careful" is going to be a hard sell.

I've wrestled with talking to the people in my life about all this, this week, but there are so many people who are important to me, that I knew I'd have to have this conversation too many times, and I'd forget things, or get angry when the same suggestion came from five people who didn't know I'd already addressed and considered it.

The long and the short of it is that while I've always considered my depression a chronic condition, it was something that I didn't really need medical intervention to manage.  It's been something that just *knowing* about seemed to help.  But this is the first time I have fully had to face the idea of the anemia as a chronic condition, one I must maintain with medical treatment, instead of an occasional one.  I can no longer shrug it off as "I should eat more steaks!" and ignore the possibility that there is something to be concerned about.  That's been really hard for me, this week.

And let me say one last thing:  every hemogoblin joke, every Magneto reference, Every goofy picture of iron toys, every offer to staple things to me because "every little bit helps, right?" is a blessing.  Making light of this is helping me, tremendously, navigate a very difficult and scary course.  My twisted, disturbing, irreverent and loving friends continue to remind me that I have chosen to fill my life with the right people.

I love you all.

I Am Capable of Procuring My Own Freshly Dismembered Plant Genitalia

I love cut flowers.  I love them a lot, probably to an unreasonable extent.  There's just something bright and cheery about them, a little bit of outside come in to beautify the day.  If I could, I'd have cut flowers in every room of my house, every day, all the time; they're one of the few things that never loses its 'special' quality.  It's possible I've played the Smithereens' "Cut Flowers" a few (thousand) times.

As a young woman, I absorbed the cultural narrative that cut flowers were a thing boys gave you.  If you didn't have a boy, you didn't get any flowers.  Sure, sometimes your dad sent them to you, and if you were in Texas for Homecoming your best friend got you a giant mum, but the 'flowers come from boys' meme was firmly entrenched in my head.

I was not a girl the boys pursued, and my luck ran to not-particularly-romantic gentlemen.  "Happy Valentine's Day, I got you a tool set!" was always conflicting for me, because I *liked* the tool set, and I *needed* new tools, so it was a wonderful gift and I loved it, but I sure would have liked some flowers, and I had said so, but I still usually got told "Oh, you know, you're so fierce and strong and practical I thought you wouldn't go in for silly romantic stuff!"  In between practical non-romantic boyfriends, I've been single for a lot of my adult life, so receiving flowers is still a rarity for me, something I find special every time.

Years ago, I was lamenting my perennial flowerlessness to an older friend, and she said, "Just buy your own flowers."  When I protested that doing that seemed like giving up, like settling for what I could get, she said, "No.  It's not giving up at all.  It's independence.  Flowers are easy.  You walk into the store and you buy some, and then you have flowers.  No meaning, no hidden statements about your worth as a person, just flowers."

The first time I gave myself flowers, I stood sort of furtively in the grocery store line, sure that everyone knew I was a pathetic loser who didn't have anyone to send her flowers.  The cashier stopped, looked at them, looked at me, and then picked them up and SNIFFED them delightedly.  "I love flowers," she said.  "I wish someone would buy some for me, too.  Your friend or whoever is lucky."  I almost told her the truth, but couldn't quite admit that I didn't have someone to buy them for or someone to buy them for me, so I smiled and said, "I love flowers too."

Since then, I buy myself flowers regularly.  I also go to movies alone if I want to see them, instead of waiting for a date to see them with.  If I feel like dinner in a nice restaurant, I eat dinner in a nice restaurant, enjoying it whether my companion is a boyfriend or a book.

I'm not saying it happened overnight, the belief that going ahead and doing the 'date things' myself isn't settling.  Even now I fight the curious looks from hostesses when I cheerfully say, "No, I'm not waiting for anyone.  Just one, please," and refuse the suggestion that I sit in an uncomfortable chair at the bar and eat my furtive lonely dinner under a giant football game on the TV.  No, I'll sit in the dining room, thank you, and enjoy my meal just like anyone else.  And when the cashier asks me who the flowers are for, I smile and say "They're for me.  I just love flowers."  One or two of them even said, "I never thought of buying them for myself.  I should do that!" and I always agree enthusiastically.

The journey to loving myself so that I didn't depend on someone else to do it for me has been so worthwhile, though.  While I'm dating a lovely man who does buy me flowers and plan sweet romantic weekends, I'm able to look at those gestures and appreciate them all the more because I don't depend on them to 'prove' I am loved.  They are allowed to be exactly what they are: expressions of love and appreciation that are sweeter for not being required, for not filling in some relationship check-box.  If you're depending on someone else's love to make you feel worthwhile, then you never will.  The void has to be filled from the inside; it'll just consume whatever you're given by others, voracious and unchanging.

Today is Valentine's Day, a difficult day for many.  For some, the holiday is just a stupid commercial Hallmark holiday designed to throw another set of rapids into relationship navigation.  For others, it's a genuinely painful reminder of love lost or missed, of personal emptiness.  Some of my friends have lost a partner in the last year, and my heart goes out to them.  Today, more than any other day of the year, we fight the social machine that tries to make us worthless, that slams binary genders into heteronormative monogamous constructs and dismisses everything else as 'weird'.  If you don't have love, if your love is wrong, if the love you have is incorrectly expressed, you're told that it makes you different, ugly, deviant, less-than.

I'm lucky, in my life, to have so many shining examples of love done right.  In all manner of incarnations, from freewheeling uncommitted singles to stable, dedicated polyamorous blended families, I am surrounded by people making love work, and making love into a life.  Maybe it's maturity, maybe it's the power of attraction drawing people like me to me, but the core of people who form the closest and most important structures in my life all share one thing, regardless of relationship status: we all recognise the value of loving yourself, of being happy to buy your own flowers and delighted when someone else buys them for you.  We all see, in ourselves, something worthy of loving and we're all committed to bringing that out into our daily lives.  When we look at each other, our partners, and ourselves, we see beings of light and wonder, souls we embrace without reservation, and individuals worthy of love, and we love each other, and that's good.

I love you all.

Solutions, Tools, Sympathy, and Experience

Imagine for a moment that you are a mechanic, with an old, lovingly-maintained but still quirky car.  Periodically, some part on this car fails on you, and replacement parts are harder to get, but to you it's still worth it.  One day, this car won't start.

You investigate, and because you're pretty familiar with this car you quickly determine that the problem is a bad part in your ignition system.  You call around with no luck, but finally find one at a junkyard in another state; they tell you they're pretty sure they can have it to you early next week.  You're a little bummed out about this, because you'd planned a road trip for the weekend to see a friend and show him your car, but there's really no help for it.

One of your buddies, who is not a mechanic, drops by, and you invite him in for a beer because you've had a frustrating day and you could use some company.  You're telling him about having to reschedule your trip, and he interrupts you.

Him:  Why don't you just rent a car and go anyway?  I'll even lend you my car.
You:  That's really nice of you to offer.  But I wanted to show my other friend my car.  He's thinking of buying one, and wanted to get a feel for how working on it would be if he did.
Him:  Well, can't he come here then?
You:  No, that's not an option for him.  Next weekend will work.  I'm just bummed because we were gonna get awesome barbecue.
Him:  Are you sure the battery's not dead?  Did you try jump-starting it?
You:  Yeah, it's just a part in the ignition.  I've got another one coming, it's just inconveniently scheduled and frustrating.
Him:  Did you put gas in it?  Maybe it's out of gas.
You:  Uh, no, I'm pretty sure I learned to read a gas gauge at a pretty early age.
Him:  Well, you don't have to get defensive.  Hey, it is blue.  I read somewhere that blue cars break down more often.  I've got some time this afternoon.  Let's paint it green.  I'll help you!
You: ...
Him:  Oh!  Maybe it's out of oil.  You have to put oil in cars, you know, between oil changes.  I used to have this old Chevy, burned a quart of oil a week...let's go put some oil in your car and see if that fixes it.
You:  No, it's fine on oil, and by the way, if you've got a car losing a quart of oil a week, that's really bad...how long did you drive it like that?  Your current car isn't leaking like that, is it?
Him:  Well, it was running fine.  Anyway, why don't you just go to the part store and get the part?  I'm sure they've got whatever you need at the AutoZone.  I got headlight lamps there last week!
You:  This is a forty-year-old car.  It hasn't been made since the mid-70s.  There wasn't one at the local junkyard, but I found a guy who specializes in this model and he's getting me the part.
Him:  Well, but let's just go to the AutoZone and check.
You:  No, the AutoZone won't have it...who are you calling?
Him:  The AutoZone.  I'll just check for you, because you never know.  Hello, AutoZone, I need a...what's the part called?
You:  (specify part, plus make and model and year of the car)
Him:  (gives info)  You don't?  Since when?  Well, there's no need to be RUDE!  (*hangs up*)  The clerk laughed at me.
You:  No real surprise there.
Him:  Why don't you just let me take a look at it?  I might be able to rewire it for you.
You:  You know I do this for a living, right?  I know what I'm doing, and it's just a part I'll get replaced, OK?
Him:  Well, I'm just trying to help.  I do have a knack for mechanical things.
You:  Last year you set your workshop on fire 'fixing the toaster'.  Can't you just sit here and enjoy a beer and hang out with me?
Him:  That's your problem.  You always want to TALK about your problems, you never want to actually hear how to FIX them.

This conversation is how I feel when the men in my life talk about how "women just want sympathy instead of solutions because they're not invested in fixing their problems.  Men are solution-driven, so we have to just learn to listen tolerantly and not try to give any real help."

Generally, the 'problems' I am talking about are well beyond the three-minute understanding of anyone who's not me, and the last thing I need are simplistic, uninformed and unhelpful solutions from someone who doesn't have any idea of the full scope of what's going on, who then gets angry at me for the fact that his suggestions don't solve my problem, and accuses me of either 'not telling the whole story first' or 'just throwing up roadblocks' when I try to explain the complexities.  I don't 'just want sympathy' because I don't want solutions.  I 'just want sympathy' because you probably don't have the skills, experience, and tools to solve the problem right now, or because your goals and needs and expectations are different than mine and what would work for you in the same situation won't get me where I want to be.  Or because I've already set the solution in motion, but some part of that solution frustrates, upsets, or irritates me and I want to vent to a friend I trust to offer empathy.

If the solutions are that 'glaringly obvious' do you really believe I can't see them myself?  Or is it a more likely explanation that the glaringly obvious solution has a hidden cost, anything from incurring a social debt I don't want, to a hit to self-esteem I can't afford right now, to abandoning a larger goal that doesn't appear connected from your perspective, but is?

I'm not saying, guys, that I don't want your help or your perspectives.  But unless I've started the conversation with "I could use some advice..." or ended it with "...so what do you think I should do?" then accusing me of 'not wanting to fix' a problem I'm having just because what's readily apparent and obvious to you isn't a reasonable solution to me is pretty insulting.  And writing off the entire female gender as 'not really interested in SOLVING problems as much as talking about them' is a pretty good way to keep me from trusting you enough to talk to you about problems you can help solve.

On Being Alone In Your Head

Here's a question:  when's the last time you were alone in your brain?

Here's another one:  was it a comfortable experience?

When I say 'alone in your brain' I mean really, truly alone.  Not only no other people, but no internet or phone.  No book or movie or music to distract you.  No input except looking at what's there, hearing the ambient noise.  No goal-ended project to focus on.  Just you, and your brain.

Since I've been dealing with severe anemia, I have not been able to safely hike alone.  I've noticed that I miss the time with my brain.  This isn't about 'too many people'.  It's that the distractions never go away unless I deliberately leave them.  The phone is there, with its little games.  The internet beckons me with blogs and facebook and chat.  Even offline, I'm surrounded by books, and radio stations playing catchy music.  There's *manufactured content* everywhere for me to consume and I live in a world of active distraction, and unless I make a conscious effort, I'm never fully alone.

A lot of people ask me, "What's wrong with manufactured content?"  They say, "I get inspiration all the time from things I read or hear on the radio or see on TV."  And I agree that there's nothing wrong with it; it's just other people's brains.  And when you're listening to other people's brains, working on other people's deadlines, you don't have much incentive to stop and listen to the voices in your own head.

You get a clarity, left to face those voices.  You come to understand more about what you want and where you're going and who you are.  You also have to face the big life truths out there in the brain-black, ask the big questions:  Am I happy?  Am I a good person?  How can I be a better person?  How can I navigate the experiences of my life without compromising who I need to be and what I want to become?  If you establish a regular relationship with them, you develop a dialogue and an understanding, and you can really work through some serious growth.  Intuition is based in being able to hear and respect those voices.  So is inspiration.  They represent your subconscious collating information you didn't even know you'd taken in and pulling together your *own* conclusions from it.

Meditation helps, but it's hard to meditate long enough to really achieve the flow and stillness of your own mind.  Driving long distances without the radio is good, but not terribly environmentally sound.  Even when I work out, I'm listening to an audiobook or watching the TV above the elliptical.  I get a few minutes in the shower each morning, but I'm usually going over my day in my head and making lists.  Most of the people I know only spend quality time with their brains at one time: when they're trying to fall asleep.  I've been in that position lately, and I'm starting to notice that I'm having a little more trouble dropping off at night.

I suppose it makes a certain sense.  Is it any wonder that your mind, shouted down all day with television and conversation and books and blogs and work, takes that moment when you're not quite tired enough to fall asleep, grabs you by the face, and drags you off to hear all the things it wants to say?  You're a captive audience.  And when I'm trying to fall asleep, I'm still not in a place where I can engage my brain constructively.  I'm still trying to shut it down with my *own* worries and anxieties: If you do not let me go to sleep, brain, I will not wake up in time tomorrow and I will be late and groggy for work and the whole day will go badly.

I'm feeling much stronger now, and should be able to start heading back out for regular solo hikes.  I'm looking forward to finding out what my brain's been doing without me this summer.