Scamperings

Finally finally, in this time when I'm alive but might easily not be, when how much longer I have to live is fully uncertain in that it might be a year or it might be fifty, when I'm no longer chained to a hormonal cycle that drives every emotion, when I've learned to observe through every turn of that chaining, when I've withdrawn nearly completely from the constructs of human socialization, when I've come back just far enough to remember that humans abstract things and give them names, I'm learning the names for the things my younger self felt.

I'm learning that terror has been normal for me for so much of my life. I've layered it over with secondary emotions, turning fight-or-flight into drive-or-independence. In love it always manifested as pain. In joy it manifested as grief. I've coaxed it into submission with every tool, dissociation, presence, distraction but it lay underneath still.

And at the same time I'm learning this immense joy and gratitude at being alive. For so much of my life I've thought, I've had such a good life and it's been enough that if I were to die today it would be, well, enough. I'd be grateful for what I'd had. And this is bonus time for me, alive-time I have only because of the direct and unwavering support of many people. And I'm grateful for it and I also want it to continue. I want more days and more. I want to watch the acorns I planted this year come up, to see every year how much they grow. I want the trees I plant to get big enough to hug.

I want to see what happens as my soul unfolds into this world I never expected to exist, into not only the impossibly perfect haven I have here for myself but also into this incomprehensibly raw and complex and shattering world I live in. I want to know how I come to terms with these humans existing as the do, not ascending like those pseudo-narratives of evolution but instead struggling like a storm on the ocean. I Want to understand how I first cope and then accept and then love this piece of the natural world in a moral way, where I believe every piece to be important.

I have confidence in myself that I'll grow and learn and unfurl and densify and somehow both end up so far from myself I wouldn't believe it but also so much myself that gravity pulls my own self in and begins to effect the world around me.

Time is long! What if this is the midpoint of my learning myself? Who would I become?

Will I always be scared? Will I always be grateful? Can I learn to superimpose those, instead of swinging one to the other? What would love look like for me, after more years like these? Could I recognise it?

I could barely move today, too many things happened at once and I can't form them into a narrative. I had counseling and Siri came and laid on my arm, purring, the entire time. Whiskey sat on the other side of me, purring. I talked with my counselor about my need to anchor myself in a narrative and my lack of cognitive ability to do such a thing now, of the way I can only write or talk my way into it anyhow, of how I have no one I can stand to perform reciprocal emotional work of that kind for in my life right now. The cats purred. I talked, disjointedly, careening from significant point to significant point. I didn't manage to web them together as I always used to, but I could revisit them under a listening ear and that was as much as I can get of what I needed right now.

I can't weave all those threads. I can barely hold a single thread. I'll find some way to make meaning and I don't know what it is. Maybe I'll carve porcelain into jagged cliffs that I'll flow with sparkling colour and call it a cup. Maybe I'll run back and forth playing with the dog, forward-back and to-and-fro. Maybe I'll lie on my back on the ground overnight and grow roots into the ground for real.

When I'm here I'm not as scared. That evacuation in 2018 when I'd just moved in and had to leave I was so scared every moment that my soul couldn't live in my body. If it was a movie it would have had red lights and an alarm blaring so loudly everyone would have left the theatre. Since I came back from that I've only left my land through choice, knowing I could come back. Years layering on years create trust that I can be here, can keep being here, and so I am. Right now, tonight, writing all this, I am led to wonder: if I stay here long enough, will I maybe ever stop being scared? Will I lose my terror? And if I have no terror, maybe I'll no longer need a narrative.

Maybe I'll be content as a heart beating, skin leaking sweat or heat, fingertips and pain or pleasure and awareness of variation in sounds and air currents. I get there sometimes.

Too much people in the last little while. I spent a bunch of time at the studio which had a bunch of ambient folks and some time on the phone with disability folks and it's just been too much.

The pill fluctuations are catching up with me too; with PMDD it's the change in hormones that's the problem, not necessarily the levels, so I'm back to steady on the pill to suppress my body's cycles which had started to wake up. I have to remind myself that I lived through this monthly for decades, until it became super constant; I can get through this bit ok until I stabilize. The bubbles of hatred and despair and pain are just very unpleasant.

Being outside makes everything ok, though. Moving around, looking at different things, making garden beds and planting bulbs and splitting firewood-- those settle me and give me peace. I've nearly finished putting in the peonies and have added some grapes and a toka ownroot plum and three manchurian apricots, which may well be hardy here. They're all miniscule plants, of course, 2.5" pots, which take longer to mature but they're what I can afford. I can't spend as much time doing these things as I'd like, of course, or I lose use of my body, but any day that contains them is a better day.

Today the plan is to screw some pallets together to make a winter pig shelter. They can't stay in the back, and since the rescues are full they need to stay here, so I'm going to bring them in closer. We'll see how much of it I get done, but even if all I can do is move the pallets today, pound the t-posts tomorrow, and screw things together the day after then that's how it must be done. Weird to think I used to be able to do something like this in one bite in the dark after work, and work the next day.

The days are getting distinctly shorter. I think we're below 8 hours of sunlight now. I hadn't realized how this would impact my ability to be outside; because I need good long rest periods between pieces of activity I end up running out of daylight even if I'm only spending two hours outside total unless I start very early.

The ground is starting to freeze. I bet I can still get t-posts through the crust, it's not deep yet, but I'm not sure about digging anything and a bunch of stuff is likely frozen to the ground. I may have one hose encased in an ice flow on the north side of my house, which I think may not thaw till spring now, but I got most of the hoses and pallets up. I'd thought to move woodchips later in the winter but had forgotten that the outside of the chip piles, which are wet, freeze. I've moved most-ish of the chips anyhow, making the lasagne chicken-manure-and-green-deciduous-chip beds. I'd left bulbs-and-mulching the orchard until the ground on the way back there froze. It's more work slogging through mud, and anyhow, I just haven't had the ability.

A friend helped me take measurements for the automatic pattern thing (apostrophe patterns) where you feed in your measurements and it spits out a pattern. I just don't have it in me to self-draft leggings, and it's worked well for shirts in the past. Weirdly my arms are symmetrical now, biceps at least. I've lost 3" on my biceps in the last two years, which is not surprising but it makes me sad. I'm so much weaker now, and it's a combination of less physical activity and the illness.

Anyhow, the vast majority of my pants are in rags at this point. I have three pairs of comfortable-enough pants without holes, but none without stains, for winter. I have four additional pairs of pants that will work for winter with long underwear, two without stains, but that won't work for daily life, and of course I don't want to wear the ones without stains for daily life or they will stain. Either way I've been wearing the stuff with holes and trying to eke out the time between laundry, but if I can manage to put together several pairs of warm winter pants it will make a big difference.

Shirts that fit will be lovely too. I have several t-shirts -- they don't need to fit in order to stay on so I can buy them online -- but winter weather shirts that can handle chilliness and body moisture are beyond my price range, so it'll be good to put some more together. I did splurge on socks, as I have done at least every second year since moving north. Luckily I don't go through them as much as I used to when I was putting kilometers on them every day, and I don't need that level of quality, so it's a reasonable splurge.

Money is on my mind a lot. I have maybe eight months at most of the level of friends' support I've been enjoying. It's kept me alive through the worst of disability paperwork and learning to manage this, but it of course couldn't last forever. After that it will be back to survival expenses only.

As I go through the days I'm slowly saying goodbye to the luxuries I've enjoyed: premade food, steak sometimes, fresh veggies and even non-apple-or-banana fruits in the wintertime, fruit juice or pop or fancy tea or any drinks that cost more than a cheap teabag, milk and probably nut milks, gas for popping into town, a truck without check engine lights on, maybe regular membership at the pottery studio instead of saving my work at home to pop in and use the kiln every so many months, new plants, testing fancy clays maybe?, new sheets, electric blankets, keeping my home warm even in the shoulder season, running the dryer in the summer and midwinter (shoulder season is necessary I think), I know there'll be lots of things. In the meantime I need to sort out if there's anything that will substantially make my life cheaper at that time, and get it now. I've been thinking an e-bike, to get to town and back without gas, but that's only good in the summer. Maybe worth it? Maybe I can't maintain it well enough with my cognitive stuff and it's not?

I'm going to try and figure out some way of replacing my upstairs tile at least. Right now I can't wash the kitchen and bathroom floors except on my knees with a nearly dry cloth, because the tiles and grout and the MDF board underneath are so compromised that any moisture swells the MDF and further cracks or pops off the tiles and several are already missing or at an angle. So, I haven't been using my magic vacmop and in fact haven't been washing the upstairs floors at all. That just can't go on for the next 40 years. Even if I can just get it off and put well-sealed plywood in? It doesn't have to look like anything but I need it to function like a floor.

In the midst of all this, the ball I've been letting slip is meds. I've put off my covid shot, which I hear is a demanding one this year, because I haven't had enough recovery time lined up. I'm supposed to have started B vitamin shots a month ago, but again need to take the time to make sure if I have a bad effect I can recover. And I haven't been tracking meds symptoms except noticing the bubbles of intensity creeping back from hormonal fluctuations, and I notice them because they really are incapacitating.

Enough of that. I'll get the pigs tucked in somewhere warm today, or tomorrow, or the next day. I'll get the bluebells under the rest of the woodchips. Cats will snuggle with me when I rest by the woodstove. In a couple weeks I'll get the pottery area tidied so I can head back to my own wheel instead of the studio ones. It's a good life, full of things I love, and I'm very grateful to have it.