Category: Etc.

Tuesday Morning

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I am on the balcony having a cigarette in the freezing cold again. As one does, when they don’t smoke in the house and it’s fucking cold outside.

I’m up past my bedtime, which is usually midnight. In bed by midnight, but I might stay up for another hour poking at idle games before I pass out. But I’m determined to stay up for the BLOOD WORM MOON.

I need something to do, and something to look forward to, because this afternoon it will be a year since I had to put down my dog.

My brain pulls up an improvised bridge from a live performance of “Iieee” by Tori Amos. “I know you understand the way I feel, you shove it back in my face.”

I’ve been, just. Unwell. Ain’t Doin Right. Not feeling anywhere near qualified or useful (which I have not yet uncoupled from feeling worthwhile) to remark on current events. Because what the absolute fuck is going on with Iran. I make an effort to stay informed but it doesn’t mean I understand anything. My brain is fried from the constant stress between late 2023—early 2025. I just feel like I don’t know how to do anything anymore. I have not recovered in basically any aspect of my life. Not emotionally, not financially, only dubiously physically. I’m not, like, actively disabled, right now, right this very second, but I live with the constant anxiety of overdoing it and losing my ability to function as a person in a body for weeks to months. I stay small, because small is safe.

Small is also fucking boring and the fact that we’re not safely into spring weather makes my world much smaller. (And my muscles tighter.)

I make tiny, awkward steps towards being a social being as a pagan again but I do it haltingly. It was a big step for me to send a CUUPs group an email. I have not heard back. I don’t have, I don’t know, ownership, I guess, of how people respond to me. I become distressed when I have to socialize as a pagan because of the number of instances where I have chosen messy company for the sake of being around my “peers.”

I mean, slim pickings, but god damn.

The biggest loss—aside from, you know, my dead dog as the number one loss here—was my belief in my ability to make good decisions. It seemed like every step I took to protect what was left of my dog’s quality of life and try to claw back my own health bit us in the ass. Having to go solo as a Heathen meant I had basically nobody left. I used to be good at excavating meaning out of bad situations but I feel like in this metaphor I’ve hit a destruction horizon of compacted ash left behind by some hypothetical douchebag loser version of Boudicca.

A blood worm moon sounds just ridiculous enough for some levity. Especially after finishing a 16-hour series on the theology and hagiography of Love Has Won and going to sit on a yoga block on the very fucking cold balcony to keep myself from hurting my hips while I smoke.

…When googling “does prolonged stress cause brain damage” I misspell it as “damange” and misspell “misspell” in this sentence as “missipell.” Some of that is from having covid in 2022. Suddenly I just couldn’t fucking talk or spell. It has gotten better but I still mix homophones and words that share a syllable in common. It’s less obvious when I type and can backtrack before sending. It’s more obvious when I speak.

Of course, refusing to go to bed because I’m waiting to see the moon look weird between 3am and sunrise is also not going to do positive things for my cognitive function, so I resort to finding online radio stations and clicking my way through AccuRadio, which, despite having a page for “nordic folk songs” does not have any, you know, nordic folk songs.

Maybe let me put that station together for you. I’d be very good at it. I am normal and can be trusted with Hedningarna tracks.

What they do have, however, is a massive “celtic” section (no celtic folktronica section though; so how am I supposed to listen to INYAL and Peatbog Faeries?), which feeds me “Tuesday Morning” by the Pogues

I fell through the window
And I found that I was still breathing
I thought of tomorrow
And the fear that you might leave me
I thought of tomorrow
And I wished it was Monday evening

God dammit.

Jólablót, Day Two

Falkabarn2 Comments

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.

Speaking of muscle:

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What could you do more of?

Sleep.

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.

Ugh.

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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.

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Goddess Worship Doesn’t Replace Feminist Praxis

“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?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin