Post-Sharing Hangover
I shared emotional stuff today with my close yoga community and ever since I've been awash in remorse in the form of a barrage of self-judgement coming from Whinnie, my Inner Asshole.
You shared TOO MUCH! What were you thinking? No one wants to know terrible details about your life? Even your therapist doesn't really want to hear it, they have to. You derailed the whole conversation and made it all about YOU! You talk too much, you monopolize everyone's time. You're so selfish!
et certera, et cetera, et cetera.
I'm getting better and figuring out what she's saying to me, discerning the exaggerations and outright lies more quickly now. For years it was just the somatic overload of crushing, physical shame, now at least I get the rest of the message. It makes it easier to tell Whinnie to fuck off.
I also cleaned the kitchen floor, which helped physically burn off some of the energy of the shame of sharing.
Ironically, we were talking about friendship and community. How we do it as adults. I burst in with how I'm really getting hit hard by Richard Miller and iRest's revelations. How I've been trying to become a part of this community and grow into working on studies for yoga interventions around aging and hospice care, but now this and it hurts. Particularly because it's the same kind of disappointment.
My life has been shaped tragically by white men behaving horribly. If you just took the instances of sexual assault and harassment I've experienced over my lifetime alone, without taking into account all the stuff from my Mother and family, it is terrible and traumatic. From my very conception onward.
When you add that to my family, my Mother's ever evolving abuse, including moving constantly, it's no wonder I feel like I never fit in comfortably and feel sometimes at a loss as to how to have relationships with people.
The conversation got steered back to community and friendship. It made me think a lot about how community can be so multilayered, it starts from mere shared interests, but that can only create a really superficial connection. In order to have supportive connection, we need to have values alignment in addition to common interests. When there is an overlap in values, it creates the structure needed to grow trust and love.
When I think about the "Yoga Therapy Community", it's really pretty big. It's easy to assume we're all aligned on some values, because there's ethical standards and guidelines we all agree we adhere to. We're all practicing with the same yamas and niyamas, but we end up on all different sides.
I wasn't feeling very creative today, but I did enjoy the emphera gifts from RS today.
Drain Loc
Had an excellent experience today getting our shower drain functioning again. A drain-sculpted loc was the disgusting culprit. I reviewed my drain maintenance routine; blessed as good. I noted I'd made a quarterly calendar reminder to do it.
It was a production to be sure the air turned over in the house. I wore a respirator mask, with a second mask over it to cover the exhaust vent, for a over 3 hours. My glasses sit in such a wonky way that it really made reading or playing ACNH impossibl headache-inducing, so I folded towels after disinfecting the bathroom.
I've had a lot of grief around how hard I'd worked to get where I was a year ago and how it's mostly gone, the income I painstakingly built up. I'm really grateful CK makes a point to share the money she makes, even portioning of part of bonuses for me. It's a good reminder of the value of my work.
I helped CK write a note to "break up" with a care provider.
New pens and paper arrived!
We still have delicious cake.
Still these COVID
Ugh, Plumbing
I tried to do a little drain maintenance today. It went great and was a total failure depending on which drain you look at.
The upstairs bathroom sinks are great. The shower in CK’s bathroom, the small en suite in our bedroom is “hers” and “mine” is hall one, won't drain.
We've had this happen once before, bit it wasn't a pandemic then. I guess this is something we'll be figuring out this week.
There was some miscommunication, which feels like failure sprinkles on top of my fiasco sundae.
I can't help but wonder that recent miscommunication is brought on by the imminent pandemiversary. At the very least it makes it all feel harder.
Tuesday Tasks
It turns out that I'm kind of loving the household calendar / diary!
I even geeked out over it with CK and she noted that she's not seen me this energetic about a tool like this before! We talked about how to leverage using it together, even though I'm the primary owner. I also thought of putting my appointments in it so she has a way to check in on stuff without needing to look at a device.
I got the 2017 tax response package nearly ready. I just want CK to review it at lunch tomorrow. I'll get a return receipt for it this time!
I hope it won't be an icy mess tomorrow after unexpected snow arrived today! Less than a half inch, not enough to make a mess if it freezes.
I also ploughed through finding gaps in my 2018 taxes. CK scanned stuff so tomorrow I'll categorize and give documents good names. Then I'll export my details and get it all uploaded. Then we can figure out what's missing.
Now to keep this energy going!
Journal page celebrating a garden in my Animal Crossing New Horizons game. Playing with markers and growing confidence with quick sketches. I'm pleased with the trees.
Last Class
Today I taught one of my Super Soothe workshops, these focus on a warm up, restorative movement and held shapes, then 30 minutes of Yoga Nidra, a guided meditation. I've offered several of these over the years, especially for the Winter Solstice.
This year it was online. Like everything else. I foresee many online workshops next year, so teaching 2 at the end of this year helps me plan for how to do these better going forward.
Now for a couple of weeks off. CK and I are going to work on taxes, sending out some holiday gifts, delivering some gifts to friends & family in town, and house chores. We're also planning to make art, play games, watch movies, and play with the kitten.
Tomorrow I'm going to suggest we work on a rough daily schedule to give us both some structure. While she's on-call next week and kind of working, she's not expected to do many of the usual tasks that fall to the primary on-call person. We'll both be off for a while together.
I included a "process" shot from a greeting card I'm making for the Reddit card exchange. Showing the way I deconstruct things like advertising postcards to remove elements for my collage.
Unhappy Mail
I received a letter today I have every reason to believe to be unpleasant. The writing of this letter was triggered by one I had sent. In response to my letter, the writer quickly wrote his response and mailed it out the same day he'd received my letter. I shook my head at this since writing my own letter took a few weeks of effort.
The letter, the response composed within a few hours, perhaps minutes, after reading mine, sits unopened on our dining room table while I decide it's fate.
The same day it arrived the writer of this letter found a place to live to go with the job he does onboarding for this Wednesday. Oddly enough, my letter suggested both of these actions as a way to salvage a friendship.
The friendship is gone. I've been seen as taking sides and I'm sure am lumped into the category of "worthless friends" he was recently complaining about.
I have begun to believe that nearly all straight, white, cisgendered men are one breakup away from becoming outright abusers.
I'm pretty sad about it.
Difficult Letter Day
Sometimes I decide that a company or a person is worth the energy to educate, or at least attempt to communicate clearly with. Because I don't like conflict I often will just disappear, ghosting as they say now. Occasionally I'll write a letter.
When I decide to write one I'll find my brain wants to get in a loop of writing a small epic. I don't like rehashing stuff that's made me unhappy, so I'll avoid writing the letter because I don't want to get pulled into it to deeply.
The problem is, this process of trying not to think about it to much for fear of setting off the epic Russian novelist part of my brain, this itself is taxing. It gets in the way of writing letters advocating for health or postcards to friends.
Yesterday I sent out a few postcards. Today I decided to tackle the most pressing letters. One essentially ends a friendship; I can't remain friends with someone who's behavior reminds me of my ex-husbands. The other attempts to improve care at a business we may need in the future; the things that weren't alright with Puck's end-of-life care. I was going to have a third about a policy at my favorite Japanese bookstore, but I can't find a mailing address. Instead I made a sternly worded request through their website.
I have drafts to review tomorrow, these letters will benefit from sleeping on them.
Tonight we put up our tree which was a good antidote to working on the letters.
Extreme Wife-ing
I took care of something unpleasant today that involved talking with the IRS.
I also confirmed that there IRS still is working their way through the backlog of taxes submitted during the period they closed down last spring. Which is to say the 2017 taxes might not be truly lost, just under the pile waiting to come up.
It brought up the Shame Monster and got in the way of making dinner, I got us takeout.
CK spent time telling me what a good job I did, am doing now. That it means more than the job I wasn't able to do well before.
Obie is increasingly social and sweet. I spent some time laying by him in the yoga room.
Basic Unemployment Benefits
I got home from physical therapy to find a letter from the State Employment Department letting me know if exhausted the basic State benefits. It has been months since I've worked, but still, the reality hits.
I'll look at the other benefits being offered. I feel even more urgency to finish the budget combined with dread at determining how much I need each month to pay for needs, therapy & floats, and some pleasures, art supply blind boxes mostly.
My physical therapist found that my lower back was likely the cause of hip pain that was causing me pain lying on my side! She also worked more on my jaw; we speculated that all the ringing in my ears and the infection might have kicked off the increased pain, leading to increased sensitivity, triggering somatic flashbacks. It's complicated, the body remembers what the brain could not process.
Gardening for Hope
I got another raised bed prepped today! Tomorrow I can plant some lettuce and kale starts CK has waiting.
We've been dealing with home repair issues too. Our washing machine needs a new cord. We've managed to diagnose the issue and next weekend will fix it. We got it running fine, we think part the problem is the outlet.
This simple stuff has been good to bring focus on what is most needed. Or top priority is our well-being.
"Us first."
We started saying this after getting my Mother out of our home and lives. She'd done her level best to undermine and destroy what we'd built together, but we're stronger.
That said, these pandemic days are far more frightening than family drama. This is saying something given what a horror show my family was.
We're at nearly 100,000 people dead of COVID19 in the USA.