Skellington

Slow garden...

I'm growing a path.

I wanted a path and I looked at “how to make a garden path” online and found lots of directions for putting down pavers or gravel and... that's heavy.

I want a path that is soft and alive and smells good when I walk on it.

So I decided to grow a path.

After researching no-dig garden methods I started saving up cardboard boxes of similar size for a year. Then once my time was freed up in November, I figured out how to do the math and mark out the long arc that I wanted to cut across the yard and to the edge of the woods where I want to build a wooded walking path/labyrinth.

Spouse helped me measure the arc and mark it out, then I had to figure out how to get my layers down and wet. This stumped me briefly as I'd already winterized the outdoor water system and didn't feel like hauling that much water from inside the house.

Then it rained. I set out the cardboard next to the path and let it rain for a day. After that I flipped the wet cardboard into place on the wet grass and let the rain get the other side.

After that it snowed some, so I started moving loads of leaves from my compost heaps. Snow mixed in with everything and I piled it all along the route of the path.

Today I finished the layer of leaves and decided to break up my mushroom patch from this year. Oddly enough, when a very wet pile of hay and mycillia sits outside in the freezing weather, it freezes into a solid form. I flipped this form off of its raised table surface and broke it up with a wood-splitting maul. The chunks are now spread along the path.

Next I'll gather the grass that has been in the compost tumbler since mid summer. After that, a layer of the composted leaves that were under the fresh leaves that I already pulled off of that pile. I'll mix in some blood meal to increase the nitrogen in the blend and hopefully there will be plenty of snow and melt to sog everything together and let it cook quietly all winter.

As I was working today I thought back to those guides for putting in a path and how those all sounded like weekend projects for people who 1) can afford to buy a pallet of pavers and a couple tons of gravel and 2) have the physical capacity to do that much work in a weekend.

I don't have the physical capacity to do that, and I don't have the physical capacity to do all of this in one go. I can do about an hour of work at a time, but I plan every step so it requires the least amount of work and it takes me three or four days to recover before I can do another hour of work.

But, those guides. They end up with a path that looks like a product. Like some kind of professional landscaping. Shiny and paid for. Like.... I don't know... fast gardening.

I want my path to look like it happened to grow there. That takes time. I know that it probably won't look like I want it to look and feel for three or four years. I'm okay with that.

Thinking about this, I turned to look at the path. I saw the mycelium and hay. The hay that probably grew last year, and the mycelium which spread and grew this summer, but comes from a long line of mushroom that stretches back for thousands and thousands of year.

I saw the leaves that I'd collected this fall. The leaves that fell from the oak and maple trees that were fully mature large trees back when my father first moved to this house almost 80 years ago. The leaves that have been on the compost heap, the youngest one we've been working. That heap was started over 25 years ago.

Slow slow slow gardening.

I finally have five year plans and ten year plans and twenty-five year plans and they're mostly centered around nurturing yards and trees and stands of wood.

It fits my tastes for my home and it fits my physical capacity for work. What could be better. Every bit of it takes time, but I find it beautiful at every stage. My gardens and my yard and my paths and labyrinth will never be “done”. But they will all be beautiful and a joy to work with at every stage. That is enough for now.

What we can, and what we teach...

I once studied a sport under a teacher who was a natural and who practiced and performed in the way that felt right and worked right for him. He won many competitions and was highly regarded for his skill, but his teaching was mostly him setting examples for me and answering my questions. One day, when I was feeling a little frustrated that my education was not following a clear and predictable path, another teacher spoke to me and said, “Well, it all comes naturally to him, doesn't it? Think of something you do naturally and then consider how you'd try to teach it. Much easier to teach something that is very difficult for you to do, isn't it? That way, you know for sure where all of the struggle points are and you don't end up thinking that it should be obvious for the student.”

This made me think back to my time in High School where I had an amazing music teacher. I remember him saying, “My job, as your teacher, is to be able to explain any concept we cover in at least three completely different ways. If you, my student, do not comfortably understand the concept after I have tried my three ways, it is my obligation to find you someone else who can explain it in more ways until you are satisfied.”

My experiences in teaching have all been volunteer situations and the only formal training in education has been the sharp observation I brought of the TRADOC system while I was in Basic Training in the Army. When I'm learning a skill on my own, I tend to break it down for myself as I might explain each step to someone else. I can frame my questions as though someone else is asking them and work together an explanation that makes logical sense. This way, even if I forget the next step of a process I have that memory of the logical line of things and I can frequently muddle myself through figuring it out.

My Spouse is a marvelous fiber geek. She can start with raw greazy sheep wool and process it through to the most marvelous fine thread using hand processing with water and paddle combs and then spinning on drop spindles or simple wheels or fancy wheels or even electric wheels. Through her process of learning I've often been in the position to support her by making conversation. I ask questions about the fiber and the equipment and the process and... everything I can think of to stay engaged and keep her feeling comfortable about her knowledge and giving her ideas of what to learn more about next.

One day we were all at some kind of gathering. Most everyone else was in a different room and one lady and I were behind in the room where all of the learning equipment had been left. We weren't friends. We barely knew each other. We made small talk. It was awful.

She said, “I've always wanted to learn how to spin. But it looks so hard.”

I said, “Well, it is a series of very precise actions that look really complicated when you see them all at once, but I think they make a kind of sense if you take them one at a time. Are you interested in learning?”

She said, “Could you teach me?”

I said, “I will do my best to explain everything in as many ways as I can, and if I can't explain it well enough, I'll help you find someone else who can. How's that sound?”

She said, “That sounds like fun!”

So, I sat back in my chair and tossed her a bag of roving that Spouse had prepared for her teaching that day. I described the nature of sheep wool fibers and how and why people process them the way they do. I suggested ways that she could explore how the wool behaved under certain twistings and combings.

Through these suggestions, I helped her replicate the earliest form of spinning, where a roving is twisted by rubbing the flat palm along the thigh to put a twist in.

That was the first fifteen minutes.

In the next twenty minutes she took up a drop spindle that had already been started spinning for teaching. She had that going very quickly with only a brief description.

Ten minutes more and she was going great guns on a wheel that had been similarly started and provided for people to learn on.

I have never been so proud of someone in my entire life. She fearlessly leapt into to doing something that someone else was only describing to her. I showed her nothing, only guided her exploration with my words of knowledge about the materials and the tools.

Once she was spinning along solidly enough to make conversation she asked me, “How long have you been spinning?”

I blushed from the crown of my head down to about my navel, “I've never spun.”

She looked absolutely gobsmacked for a moment and then roared with laughter.

What it comes down to is that if I have a hobby that I'm really not very good at (I've got several dozen) it's okay. I don't have to know how to do everything perfectly. The things that I struggle with, I can still describe how it works to someone else and they may have a receptive mind and a knack for the skill.

It puts me in mind of another thing a teacher showed me. She offered me praise for work done by others at my suggestion. I clarified that I hadn't done any of the work and hadn't earned any praise. She smiled and said, “One person can only ever do the work of one person; one person can engage others and get much more done. That, too, is work and is praiseworthy.”

So, I don't have to be able to do everything well and I don't have to be able to get everything done with the labor of my own hands.

And if I don't, neither do you.

I've been very fortunate that life has sent me so many teachers. It's really good for me to pause and remember them. All three of the teachers I've mentioned here have passed on now. Their influence hasn't left this place, though. Not yet. Not as long as I can keep working to pay it forward.

Tubing the Anxium...

I've reached the point in Covid recovery where my body is still tired much of the time but my brain has enough energy that it resists sleep. I let it go for a while, but I am shifting almost completely to my purely nocturnal form and that really isn't sustainable with the things I wish to do with my time. Last night I stayed up extra late, then I got up at my new usual time. My plan was to refuse naps of any kind and get to bed early.

This is clearly why I am essaying at 0312 rather than sleeping.

See, I've been tardy with the estate stuff because I've been sick. Understandable. Then it was Thanksgiving. Understandable. And then I procrastinated a week. Today I made a totally doable list and scheduled myself time to work in the functional workspace that I've been putting together with all of the documents and tools that I need to do the work.

I even built in a time limit for working so that if the time ran out and there was still stuff on the list, it would be done another day.

I got showered and ready for bed and then got distracted. It happens.

When I finally got into bed I felt my body waking up and then ramping up and when I noticed that I had shifted into Internal Family Systems mode and was comforting myself I figured out that I was having a lovely anxiety attack.

So, I've gotten up and taken my acute anxiety meds and I'm essaying at you while I wait for them to kick in.

See, I've totally done all of this paperwork, made these calls, gotten amazing support, and been completely surprised at how easy it was and how kind everybody was. But that doesn't matter. Having the proof of lived experience that this can be easy and even friendly doesn't make me a whit less terrified that something is going to go horribly wrong and I'm going to get yelled at and kicked out of my home.

I guess that pushing myself to do Dad's estate stuff was easier because I started it right away while I was still dealing with the immediate aftermath and the horror of the realization that I was now the “man of the house”. Mom being gone mostly means that I feel that I have Fewer responsibilities instead of more. Given a mission I focus like a laser and butch through every obstacle. Given a completed mission I diffuse and refract off of every surface.

Still, I suppose that many people deal with intense emotions after the death of a mother and probably don't knock out all of the paperwork in the first week. Death of a mother plus debilitating virus probably justifies another couple of weeks. It's been a month today and... seriously, nobody has yet yelled at me when I've asked for help in dealing with post parental death paperwork.

And, you know, if someone did yell at me? I could practice acting and cry at them. I hate to use manipulative faux tears, but knowing that I COULD do so as an OPTION feels comforting to me right now as I navigate the turbulent waters of the Anxium.

I have the skills that I need to navigate this work. I can ask for help. I can portray strong emotion on demand. I can also portray curious friendliness and gracious acceptance of help. In the past month I have been researching potential SNAFUs that may be in my path and all of them have proven to be paper tigers.

It's also possible that the one month anniversary of her passing is triggering some feelings, and the evidence of security and safety in a home of my own with Spouse and I spending a lot of time together doing things we love together is triggering my PTSD and sparking that feeling of “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” I would consider both of those to be entirely normal things to happen, if someone else described this experience to me.

Shall I extend the same consideration to myself? I think I shall.

I think I'll head back to bed now as I notice the absence of irritability coursing through my blood. There are reasons that I feel the things I feel and think the things I think and I deserve just as much kindness and consideration as any of those things.

Planning...

Since I'm finally feeling well enough to sit up and focus on paperwork it's time to start dealing with my parents' estate and working through their wills.

It is very intimidating.

As a person who has lived the majority of my life in a state of poverty, and yet surrounded by people living in poverty and people living in wealth, it all seems very surreal.

On one hand, my responsibilities have multiplied significantly.

On the other hand, my resources have increased in an amount that I have no frame of reference to describe.

There are accounts that have numbers, but I'm not sure how those numbers relate to the needs under my responsibility.

I'm also coming into a place where, for the first time in my life, the majority of things under my responsibility are legally mine.

In the past I've worked with technical equipment and delivered things that are worth multiple millions of dollars. I've been legally responsible for those things and I was able to care for, use, and or deliver them as required.

This feels very different.

Also, I'm suddenly in a position where I can plan for my Spouse should anything happen to me. That feels intimidating, and yet terribly important.

I have a lawyer for the estate stuff, and I have a contact at a financial place that Dad used to use, but I'm not sure how to really learn about my options in a way that doesn't assume my goals or have a stake in whatever I decide.

I also need to figure out how to look into how inheriting stuff might affect my disability income.

I suppose that the first thing I need to do is make an appointment to speak with the lawyer in person, set up a list of questions and concerns, and make sure that I get answers or referrals for all of my questions.

This is just a lot to sit with.

I feel overwhelmed because I am overwhelmed. I'm just not sure who to trust to ask for help without pushing me into doing things or telling me what to do. I want help, but too often I've had to trade away my agency for help and I really don't want to do that right now.

Maybe that's the root of the thing. I feel like I've always had agency or help. I'm not sure I've had very many experiences of having both at the same time.

Welp, along with writing up that list of questions, I should probably hammer out a statement of my desire to have both help and agency in the decision making process.

So, tomorrow I do a little writing and I send out a couple of emails and I work to make values based decisions and then I get on with living with the consequences. As one does.

How green was my laundry...

When I moved back home to take care of my parents, the one thing I was really pretty psyched about was getting to do gardening stuff with my father. I love the feeling of working on growing things and I enjoy composting as a full contact sport. I love enriching my land and encouraging a wide range of pretty native ground covers and edible plants to grow up where they already want to grow.

I had two giant ruts in the front yard where a utility truck had to pull in last year. I filled them with compost and transplanted the wild mint that wants to grow in the garden by the house. Along with that I shifted some of the other wild plants that like to grow, and threw in a bunch of cabbage and broccoli seeds that were laying around. In a few months I had gotten rid of the ruts and the front yard smelled amazing whenever I mowed.

My container plants started out doing well but, due to other obligations and the fact that it rained twice this summer, the plants didn't do great and I wasn't left feeling like it was a huge success.

I'd attempted to grow some companion plants in one garden, but the critters ate the sunflower seeds before they could get started, only two of the bean plants wanted to be involved with the project, and the amaranth (perhaps trying to make up for the no-shows) filled the entire plot with beautiful giant stalks with fierce red flowers and seed heads. Definitely doing amaranth again. Spreading the seeds MUCH farther apart.

I was so busy this year that my composting went entirely abandoned and the only planting venture that was a complete success was my whimsical attempt at hydroponic gardening in my kitchen. I did a set of herbs first and that worked wonderfully. When the plants got too big, I transplanted them to dirt pots and they grew the summer outside. Then I grew a mini jalapeno plant in my hydroponic grower and that was MASSIVELY productive. We had fresh peppers with dinner three times a week for six weeks and then I had enough to make a whole quart of pickled slices that will serve us for another few months.

As it's getting colder, I've shifted to some Japanese salad greens and that has been a lovely addition to the super simple dinners I've been making from my dried bean and rice supplies since we don't feel like going shopping at all.

Over the past couple of months I was not able to keep up with tending my potted herbs and they have all died, except the ginger. The ginger looks pretty sad and keeps trying to make me sit with it and listen to stories about the good old days.

Instead of feeling like crap because I failed to maintain my herbs into the winter, I started looking at learning more about growing the herbs and plants I like in pots. I already have pots and seeds and stuff, but I only have one window with a Southern exposure and Spouse really isn't happy about the shelving unit I've placed in front of that window to try and grow my plants. Once I added up the physical cost of starting and planting and tending the potted plants, plus the cost of daily watering and clean up, I was feeling pretty frustrated.

Then I thought, “Why don't I shift completely to hydroponics for herb and salad production for the winter? I've kept my small unit running perfectly all this time and used everything that I grew in it. Why not get a larger one for the laundry room?”

And I did. It seems expensive at startup, but when I budget in my energy and physical capacity to do plant care, it gets a lot cheaper. It's a lot like my robot vacuum. When I consider my ability to do the things that are important to me, tools that seem like vanity novelties are reasonable investments. Honestly, they become fairly frugal investments.

It's strange how many of the things in my life that are otherwise coded as luxuries really function as staples of healthy living. I remember how my grandmother told me stories about her first electric washtub with the power wringer on it. How that advancement was so exciting for her and she felt so fancy being able to do her laundry with only having to feed the wet clothes into the wringer and then catch them into the basket before taking them out to the line for drying. I remember my father telling me about how happy he was to get an electric iron so that he could just do the ironing without having to keep stopping to wait for the iron to heat up on the stove before doing the next bit. I'm not sure that my robot vacuum and hydroponic gardens are any different.

Just like with a mobility aid, instrumental activities of daily living aids are great things. If they help you, it's cool to use them. You don't have to prove to anybody else that you deserve it, or that you're worth it. Use a cane. Use a robot vacuum. Figure out what makes your life better and make it happen.

Expensive speech...

I was reading a book a while back and one character takes a tangent to rail against a specific concept of free speech. At first I was startled by the violence of the character's opinion, but as I read their argument I saw that they were not talking about a definition of the term devoid of context, but the actionable meaning of the word in a series of very specific contexts.

I was used to that phrase meaning an abstract idea meaning general freedom from government interference with criticism from the populace, but... I already know that that description doesn't reflect reality. I'd been thinking about free speech being as expensive as all other free things: You can do what you like, but you don't get to whine about the consequences.

This character talking about a very specific definition of “free speech” that does real harm to people, groups of people, and the relationships between groups of people.

This all shook my brain up like a snow globe, but then I started seeing exactly what they were talking about all over the place. People using the cover of an abstract and unrealistically defined term indoctrinated into them as children, and making it into a weapon against others. I suspect that they are following the example that the government sets when they use the term and pretend it means something other than what they do with it.

We end up with a whole bunch of people who have never checked in on their indoctrination to see if what they've been told is an absolute right for them is maybe more like a nursery rhyme that soothes enough to keep them quiet.

I've noticed that people describe some instances as “free speech” instances. The first time I read I knew exactly what it meant. I knew that those were the people who specifically want to say harmful and counter-factual things to each other and egg each other on until someone does something violent and hurts someone outside their core group to help the group bond together more tightly around the struggle against the outsiders.

I maybe told a lie earlier on there. I read that part of the book and I was startled, but I was also really focused on finding out what happened in the story. I didn't really stop and challenge my indoctrination when I read that part of the book. I did really stop and challenge myself when I read another reader's rant about that part of the book. Their rant was based on the idea that this character in this world saying these things made no sense whatsoever.

That surprised me and made me revisit the scene. I found the character's argument to be really clear and to make a lot of sense in the framework as they presented in and in relation to the history of the world they described from their perspective and education.

I returned to the review and eventually decided that the reviewer's concept of “free speech” was held entirely apart from the concept as it was described in the book. That dissonance made me feel emotionally upset. I felt gratitude for that reviewer and her willingness to vent about the topic because I might not have noticed it otherwise. I'm also a great fan of venting about things that annoy me and learning things when one of my friends smacks me with correction and education. That's what friends are for.

I'm curious to find out what other simple beliefs and definitions have been learned by me and will someday be challenged by some author or reviewer who is willing to speak the expensive speech of challenge and questioning.

The hoodie...

One upon a time I was a girl who liked to date really big and tall girls.

At some point non-monogamy became the norm for my relationships.

Eventually I found my best understanding of myself as Genderqueer.

Then I went out and found a super heavy grey Carhartt work hoodie that is about four sizes too large for me and bought it for myself.

When I found the best understanding of myself as I am at this time, I was able to determine what it was that I really wanted out of life and get it for myself without harming myself or anybody else.

It's all well and good to steal your sweetie's hoodie, or to “borrow” your sweeties' sweeties' hoodies, but just because that's the way it's always shown in the stories and the movies doesn't mean that it's the best way to feel warm and snuggly whenever you want to.

Also, I feel that wanting to steal someone's clothing is a perfectly cromulent reason to have sex with them, and I think we should see more of that in all media.

Power resting...

When I tested positive for Covid on Sunday I allowed a moment for grumping silently to myself, and then I messaged one of my friends. T is a person who was disabled and immunocompromised before she got Covid and she has been able to examine the experience and articulate the variables very well.

She gave me a very simple list of things to do and an even simpler list of patterns of symptoms to look for that signal time to call the ER and then go to the ER. This was hugely helpful as it gave me very simple things to focus on. The rest of my life did not line up for the simplicity so well, but I emailed and texted people until they participated enough to let me have a full week to do nothing but care for myself. She did not harp on the one thing that she'd mentioned to me in the past, the thing about resting. I remembered that because that's one of those complicated things. Resting is not simple. Resting is hard.

Every day I have an ambient level of body pain, headache, and lethargy. I'm used to pushing through it and knowing in advance how much interest I'll have to pay off for my debt. What T had told me was that with Covid, using that kind of credit can lead to damage.

When you have chronic pain, you learn that some pain signals do not mean that damage is happening. Pain is a great way to communicate, “Don't do that” until that message is being sent all the time and there are no consequences for doing that and no absence of the message for not doing that. Having to remember that this pain that feels like my normal ambient pain means something new requires an uncomfortable level of mindfulness.

Today I told T that I was limiting myself to 10 minutes of activity in every 3 hour block of time. That let me get food and clean myself, take the puppy outside briefly, and throw the sweats that I sweated through last night into the laundry. She cheered and was very proud of me for setting a limit and holding myself to it. I don't sleep all that much, but I keep myself to watching shows I've seen many times before, cuddling the dog, and scrolling the internet.

The thing I was not as sure how to limit has been the cognitive shift. Brain fog is hell. Brain fog is not unusual for me, but this week has me feeling like someone replaced my Cray with a Commodore 64. Still, they got guys to the moon and back with something about the size of a Commodore 64 (and a huge team of hardcore bio-computers) so I'm not panicking. I've just been trying to consciously break down my processing tasks into smaller programs and letting them run for as long as they take.

Rather than processing lots of things (plans, worries, contingency plans, defense systems, escape routes, emotions, past emotions, literary critiques, scientific study reviews, academic papers, and plans for what to do if Batman comes to town) I keep things right in the present by hitting the snooze button for all of those other things. “I'll start gathering estate paperwork on Sunday.” “I'll sort through the mail on Saturday.” “I'll make a pile for cards and set up a folder for thank you notes on Monday.” I'm not procrastinating, I'm implementing a previously devised plan to focus on my own health before tackling important things. Then I throw my mind a bone to chew on. I gnaw on it gently all day and pop out a simplified and brief essay in the evening. There's nothing going on so vital that it needs to be dealt with before I'm sure I have the stamina and coherence to do it reasonably successfully.

But rest is hard. I'm not so tired that I want to sleep, but I'm not up for doing more than the most meager tasks. I stretch out in my chair for a bit, and then I sit up because my nose clogs less that way. I zone out while watching a show and then I sit on the floor and pet the puppy.

Hopefully these essays will serve as a sample of my processing for the duration of this week and until I feel stable enough to have a “new normal.”

It's really easy to get caught up in trying to get a lot of things done. Be that paid work, house work, social connection management, cognitive processing, but there are times when we really need rest. Finding ways to make rest happen is not easy, but when we fail to rest things will break down in far messier and less recoverable ways.

Shit jobs and stubbed toes...

When I was young people would tell me, “You gotta get a good job.” when I asked what made a job good they said, “They pay you a lot and you love what you do.” and that made sense to me because why would you have to pay someone a lot if they love what they do. I'd think you'd have to pay more to get people to do things they don't love to do. This was a childish take on the topic, but the people talking to me when I was young were often very childish.

If a young person asked me for job advice at this point in my life I wouldn't even know where to start. The best advice I think I could get anybody starting out working would be: Find the shittiest jobs you can and do them hard until you learn something.

What I mean by this is that on my first day working retail at a craft and fabric store, the manager sent me to organize the bead aisle. The whole thing. By myself. When I walked into that aisle it looked like Las Vegas had puked all over it. Four hours later it looked like Piet Mondrian's christmas tree. I also knew where everything was in that display.

I assumed that the manager sent me there to give me something frustrating to do to test my resilience and how I might handle frustration and unsupervised work, and also to give me a crash course in understanding. Turned out she was just trying to get me to quit. That's cool. I took the first lessons from it and grew and thrived in that environment.

Once I've successfully done the worst task in a job, I know where the mud is. I know how deep the mud is. I know when to ask for help and when to delegate help. And ever after, every task I do is either, “This isn't as bad as sorting out the bead aisle.” or “Whoa. I have a new metric of suck that surpasses the bead aisle.” Either way, I win.

I'm thinking about this today because last night I tripped on the wire gate we use to keep the puppy confined to half of the living room. It was the middle of the night, Spouse, puppy, and cats were all asleep. I got my toes tangled in the top of the wire gate and my options became A. Fall on the piano. or B. Step down on the tangled foot and accept acute physical pain free of any late-night family drama.

I cromched the foot. I sweared silently and at great length. I untangled myself and got over to a chair.

Then I realized that it wasn't that bad. There is probably a bone bruise in one spot or a very minor fracture. The skin got scraped but not badly enough to bleed. And the pain passed very quickly.

Then I realized it's because I've already got a metric of suck for toe pain that is so much greater than a little mashing, that in comparison this is a love tap. When my gout is flaring up, a baby kitten kissing the tip of my toe can leave me crying like a little lost lamb. It's bad. It's really bad. It's so bad. And compared with days of throbbing, burning agony that keeps me awake and makes walking to the bathroom a world of horror, a little bruise and scrape is ephemeral and soon released to the past.

Now, this is the point at which my father or uncle would turn this into a lesson that everyone needs to suck it up and drive on when things are hard and when something hurts. “Rub some dirt in it and get back in the game!” Fuck that.

My lesson, what I take away from these experiences, is that things are going to suck. Some jobs are going to suck so bad that you need to leave. Some jobs are going to be things that you have to get done but can't complete alone or all in one go. All of these experiences are rich and fertilize our lives.

Now when I'm given a stupid-ass job to test my capacity, I involve others, ask for help/advice, consider if the hazing is proportionate to the esprit de corps. When I have a job I can't do all at once, I do part of it, or I half-ass the job and come back later to do some more on it. When I run into something that hurts, I find a different way to do it.

Yeah, it was nice that my previous experience of foot pain made this experience seem trivial by comparison, but I have learned to walk to the edge of the gate and move it and walk around it instead of stepping over it.

I wonder if people who never do shit jobs or people who've never had sports injuries or disabilities (temporary or permanent) are missing out on how bad things can be. Do they know that rushing a shit job often leads to having to do it again? Do they know that healing and recovery take a lot of time and pushing the body and mind to heal faster prolongs the process and can result in lasting issues?

And if they've never had to consider these situations and the consequences of those decisions for themselves, are they going to be capable of recognizing the experiences of others with compassionate awareness and patience?

Universe grant me the wisdom to avoid falling into the, “I did the shit jobs/worked through the pain and I turned out alright, you'll be fine.” because I did not turn out fine and there is not a bit of moral value in being fine or not fine. Each of our metrics of suck SUCK. Pain is not something that can be compared objectively.

And yet... we each have our own experiences of suck and pain that can help us learn things and find ways to work toward less suck and pain. If my experiences of suck and pain have not helped me become soft and gentle about your suck and pain, then I've missed the biggest lesson of all.

My feelings don't fit into your taxonomy...

As children, we're taught that a smiley face means happy, a frowny face means sad, and eyebrows that point in and down in the center mean angry. We're showed one version of scared, with the big eyes, but nobody ever talks about flat affect or people who hide their feelings out of fear or malice. We don't learn about secondary emotions, like when we feel angry because we're feeling scared. Maybe some people learn these things from their family? Sounds fake to me.

Growing up I learned emotional repression and emotional obedience as a survival skill. I didn't get co-regulation, I got ordered to comply behaviorally and learned to isolate my feelings and hide them away (until they caused an unsightly meltdown of some sort, but even that was usually turned inward against myself rather than outward at others.)

A couple of years ago my therapists started introducing me to somatic connection and feeling my feelings. Let me tell you, after 45 years of repressing feelings and performing feelings as I've learned people respond to the performances, trying to get in touch with my own feelings was a clusterfuck of epic proportions. If I had to do it again I would delve way more deeply into emotional regulation and co-regulation before I started unpacking feelings. That shit is like an Acme Jack In The Box with a boxing glove on the spring.

What I did was break out the old Feelings Wheel. It is free to use at feelingswheel dot com and is a great resource. Once I learned the symptoms of having a feeling and began to notice that I was having a feeling (these are huge steps, very praiseworthy, I am so proud of myself for getting to that point) I could look at the Feelings Wheel and find words that helped me describe what I was feeling.

It helped. But I found that the words weren't completely accurate. My feelings were nuanced in ways that felt important to me. They were all way more complicated than terms like “Excluded”, “Confident” or “Creative” could describe. I could feel the tendrils of how what I was feeling was connected to past experiences and those words didn't make sense outside of the full context.

There's a big difference for me between saying, “I felt excluded.” and “I felt excluded because I offered my vulnerability and work but people reacted like they were afraid that I wanted to take over or gain clout in their group and in the past I've been socially ostracized by people who feared my influence over others. This is scary and makes me feel like I might be a bad person.”

There is a big difference for me between saying, “I feel confident that I can do this.” and “I feel confident that I can do this because I have done similar things like this in the past and my skillset seems adequate and I know at least three people I can call on for advice if things go wrong.”

There is a big difference for me between saying, “I'm feeling creative.” and “I feel creative and I have a deep desire to use my skills and knowledge to try something new with my bread recipe. It could turn out terrible, but I think that risking adding some Einkorn flour in the sponge and doing a second slow rise in the fridge could make for a really rich texture and flavor.”

Each of those feelings are intimately connected to social and personal experiences. Those feelings are not isolated from the whole of my being and my reality tunnel.

When I did make an effort to respond to, “How are you feeling?” in therapy with a few approved words from the Feelings Wheel, the therapist would invariably start to delve into the exact elements that I'd wanted to communicate when asked how I was feeling. When I asked why I had to offer the simplified answer first if we were only going to end up in the same place, I was always told that I have to get away from my Intellectualizing.

Like, dude, seriously? Intellectualizing is my primary survival skill. Between it and my ventral vagal nerve smacking me into Freeze shut down, I have successfully survived 100% of my days on this planet thus far. Would you blindfold a sighted person and then send them to walk across a busy 8 land highway? Would you make a monolinguist figure out the instruction manual for their life-saving medical equipment written in a different language? Would you let a baby cry until they gave up crying rather than answering the only survival mechanism they have and offering comfort?

Why can we not employ my strongest survival skill in this work and include it with its strengths to find ways that I can succeed in connecting with my somatic being and my emotions?

They didn't.

I did.

They can't stop me from working on my own shit between therapy sessions. I found a copy of How Emotions Are Made by Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett. I do not recommend this book. It's got some great science, but it is written more like a grant proposal than an academic book, and the author's examples are limited to upper class academic cis het white married people with children between the ages of 8-17. She also completely avoids the topic of emotions in people with trauma and instead dedicates a chapter to “do pets have feelings?” That said, her premise is fucking brilliant.

If you're familiar with neuroscience, you may have come across the idea that the brain is really complicated and really fast. So complicated and fast that our nervous system will respond to stimuli and then fabricate a justification or explanation after the fact, but this will seem to us as though we have made a choice and then done an action. Our brains are attenuating our senses to avoid overload, cross referencing everything we perceive with our memories, running everything through a poorly programmed risk analysis system, and then churning out a thought or an opinion that feels completely reasonable and sensible. Should be obvious to everyone. We're all just guessing our way through life.

LFB suggests that feelings are processed in very much the same way, but include somatic input. You know how we don't want to go hungry to the grocery store, or how we make bad decisions when sleepless, hungry, or drunk? Feelings, because they include complex memories and physical state in the present and physical state in the past, are a neuro-somatic construct and not an absolute state of the being.

Now, when I cross-reference that concept with Ekman's study of facial expressions (another scientist whose work is deeply problematic, but has been very helpful for my learning about emotions), we can consider how a micro-expression is not an absolute sign of deceit, but a signal that tells us that something is going on and we Do Not Know What, but we have the Opportunity to stay curious and open to find out.

Anything that I am feeling is a super complicated conglomeration of my somatic state, my mental state, my past experiences, my trauma, and my cognitive understanding of the situation.

Earlier today I got really frustrated with Spouse because I am sick with Covid and, although she keeps testing negative, she has a head cold. When she whines to me about her symptoms, I feel frustrated and angry and excluded and minimized and violent. Because I can make the time to approach those feelings as signals that something else is going on, I can use my intellect to consider the past events that contribute to that feeling, the somatic state of my being which is super grumpy and needy, and stay curious to reexamine my understanding of the situation.

I was snarky, but then I went in (masked) where she was getting into her bed. I apologized and said that I'd forgotten that people complain about symptoms to share pain and lessen it, and not always because they expect me to do something about it or actively work to comfort them. What I'd interpreted as a demand for attention and physical care was intended as a request for companionship in suffering and commiseration.

Without the willingness to make time to focus on that, the ability to compartmentalize those feelings away from actions while I considered them, and the curiosity to use my intellect to explore concepts outside of my immediate experience and past experience, I would not have been able to act in a way that I respect. I would not have been able to apologize, I would not have been able to shift my attitude moving forward. I would have increased my own suffering, her suffering, and probably extended our recoveries.

My feelings do not fit in any taxonomy, and that's okay. I can still use the tools of taxonomy along with my other tools to live a more skillful life and be kinder to myself and others. I don't like it, but I don't have to like it.

I just have to remember to stay away from gatherings of academics whose books have pissed me off even as they've helped me learn to thrive.