I was at work on day two and have nothing to report. Here’s what’s on my yule playlist.
For the harshness of winter:
For the midway mark:
For a good year and peace:
I don’t feel informed or articulate anymore, and I feel like an atrophied husk when I try to psych myself up to be helpful, or even just useful. I forgot how to be human because I was putting it off until I had the energy (and the funds, and the social and emotional safety) to be human. I forget where I got the energy.
Turns out some of it can come from letting myself enjoy “useless” things and re-train the metaphorical muscle.
Chronic pain makes me tired. Hormone therapy makes me tired. Work makes me tired. The Bullshitskrieg of global democratic backsliding, and living in the US, and being too poor and ~medically burdensome~ to move anywhere else and too principled to leave if I had the means, makes me tired.
I am digging through my drafts trying to either find or make something publishable, but nothing is really there.
Between the bullshit that led to me shutting down most of my online presence, stepping back from the majority of my social circle, a massive increase in my day to day pain that has become periodically disabling (I finally broke down and started using a cane, I had to change jobs, and am looking down the barrel of doing it again because my workplace is fighting me over accomodations), major financial issues, and the prolonged illness and eventual death of my dog, I’m more exhausted than I was a few years ago when I genuinely thought it couldn’t get worse.
Maybe I was tempting fate. Whatever.
I think I have to just sit (or lay down, which is easier on my hips and back anyway) with the fact that I am not the same person I was when I could write here consistently. Unfortunately that, and all the circumstances surrounding that, also mean accepting that a lot of the external trappings I relied on as a frame of reference for who (or at least what) I am as a person are gone, and I have to reevaluate.
I don’t like that. It’s a lot of work. And pain and distress literally shrink your brain. It gets better when those get better. (Hooray for neuroplasticity.) But I have no idea what kind of timeline I’m on for getting better in a way that’s load bearing.
I didn’t want to talk about any of that because I didn’t want to grant that kind of satisfaction to people who I know would enjoy learning that I’m struggling. I don’t place a lot of trust in the likelihood of something stirring their conscience. I didn’t want to show weakness.
On the personal level I also resented my own weakness due to how abruptly I went from being a physically powerful, capable person to someone who can’t stand for more than a few hours on some days.
But giving into that, making concessions that go beyond my actual limitations, is just obeying people whose opinion isn’t actually that valuable. It’s letting other people run my life. I’ve had enough of that shit.
The weather is cooling off now and this was the time of year where I was starting on my very goofy path towards Heathenry. It is a little weird to think about how a religion I got into by accident ended up having such a deep (and unfortunately somewhat destructive) impact on my life. I feel a little more alive and hopeful. My body tolerated recent farm chores better than I anticipated, though I’m watching my physical state closely to make sure I don’t overdo it and get stuck in another flare.
Maybe it’ll be okay. Maybe not. Still not a fan of uncertainty. But I’m trying to let myself at least enjoy feeling something good.
Since I don’t have any active social media tied to this blog anymore (the Facebook page still exists, but is deactivated and unviewable)…here. An altar cleaned after sitting half-dead for a year, minus one hammer because I’m willing to wear it again.
Don’t get too excited, my offline life mattered more than my online life. This blog mostly still exists because I forgot I had my hosting costs on autopay.
Don’t ask me what’s up with the Jord devotional, though. I don’t know either. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”
Falkabarn 