It’s been a weird day for me.

I’ve really, really struggled. Putting on a happy face has been nearly impossible.  I failed multiple times.  I snapped, not reacting properly or saying the wrong thing.  I let my guard down and was myself instead of the caricature of myself that I inevitably play in these situations.

The thing is, some humans just don’t understand other humans.  And even if it isn’t meant or isn’t intentional,  things are said and meaning is implied and feelings get hurt and everyone is unhappy, misunderstood and exhausted by the end.  Over it.  Spending time with people who just aren’t compatible with you wears on you.  After years your nerves are exposed and raw and tired.  And the charade gets harder and harder.

We are in the throes of one of the toughest times in our country’s recent history.  Politically, socially, economically.  We are all tired.  We are all feeling a little bit on edge.

Anyway.  I can justify it all I want but today was a tough one and I was not my best self.  And that’s all, really.

Xox, g

Yesterday was a scary day.  The aftermath playing out today is also … frightening?  Grounding? Eye-opening?  Sad.

I am sitting in a cabin tonight in the woods.  The WiFi is bad.  Getting on to blog is about the only thing I’ll be able to do (& even accomplishing this has been a challenge as I’m trying very hard not to move and lose connection).  We spent four plus hours on the road after spending the morning packing and running last minute errands and calming our frantic dog so I haven’t been as tuned in as I’d like to what is happening.  The last news brief that registered on my phone was the resignation of Betsy DeVos (umm… ok?).  I received an email survey from my U.S. House Representative as to whether or not I felt V.P. Pence and the Cabinet should invoke the 25th Amendment.  I read that both Schumer and Pelosi supported the effort.  Apparently Trump is trying to save face by agreeing to the peaceful transfer of power.  It’s hard to keep up when there is no internet and no TV.  Which… normally … is kinda nice.  But right now makes me feel vulnerable.

I am immensely proud to be an American.  Immensely.  As the daughter of an immigrant I grew up with many different viewpoints about the world.  I am grateful for those perspectives because it’s always challenged me to look at things from multiple angles. Today I am struggling to understand the logic behind the people who stormed our Capitol building yesterday.  I am just really, really struggling to understand a whole section of Americans who believe things so contrary to what I believe America is.  And yet claim to be patriots.

If we don’t take swift action to condemn what happened and that our current sitting President condoned it, where will that leave our country?  Our democracy?

It is very difficult to contemplate.  I feel as though I’ve never been quite this heartbroken, this heartsick, about something I loved so much.  Something that has changed and become so distorted as to be unrecognizable.

Xox, g

When I come to write here, I don’t usually plan what I’m going to say.  Sometimes I have something on my mind, sometimes I’m frustrated or sad or nostalgic or trying to work through something.  Other times I’m just talking to talk.  I start writing and then I quickly check for spelling errors and hit publish.

Recently I’ve read a few blogs and I realize that other people put a lot more time and thought into their posts.  Which might explain why mine isn’t a rampant success but rather just one in a sea of millions of websites that no one visits.

It’s all good.  I’m okay with that.  It’s my glorified diary, my outlet for my rambling mind.

Today I made cacio e pepe for dinner with the remainder of the pasta I rolled out for Christmas Eve.  We’d shoved it in a bag and thrown it in the freezer because we just had no idea when we’d use it, and the leftovers from Christmas Eve are still lingering in our fridge, waiting for trash day on Thursday.    (One can only eat so many stuffed squid before one can no longer eat any more stuffed squid … and yet somehow, a plethora remain …).

What I loved about the recipe (which I’d attempted once before) is its claim of simplicity.  Like many Italian dishes, that’s somewhat misleading.  It is indeed simple (aka, only four ingredients! Minimal prep and preparation time! Yay!!).  However, there’s an art to cacio e pepe like there’s an art to agli e olio … and I haven’t mastered it yet.

It tasted fine.  I mean, cheese and pepper can’t be bad, right?  But it didn’t melt properly and I used too much pasta water (I think?) and while it was an incredibly edible meal, I was bummed.  On the plus side, the burst cherry tomatoes that I made to top it came out excellently (if I do say so myself, and I do!).  I’ve been playing with the timing and the heat of those for awhile but haven’t done it for a minute so for them to come out so well was a pleasant surprise.

I like cooking but I don’t like the *responsibility* of it.  The duty of it.  The monotonous “we must eat” of it all.  However, making and eating a meal that resembles something nutritious and filling (and adult!) is always a win.  It can feel like art, a creative outlet that is also wildly enjoyable for the taste buds.

But it’s hard.  I don’t know how my grandmother did it.  And she did it EVERY.SINGLE.NIGHT.   My entire life.  Dinner on the table, all of us crowded around, me usually pouting because I didn’t find it appealing (if only I’d understood at the time the genuine privilege to have it at all!).  Always protein and starch and a veg.  Cookies for dessert.  I mean … it’s absolutely amazing when I think about it.

It’s Monday and life has gone back to what it was before the holidays.  There is comfort in that but also some sadness.  For some reason January never feels as warm and cozy as December.  It feels austere, as we all battle to keep our resolutions.  As we struggle to be an ideal that is unrealistic and unattainable.

I mean, I wanted to give up falling asleep to movies during the week and I’ve already decided it was a bad resolution.  And it’s only the 4th day.  (Insert forehead palm emoji here).

But I don’t have a raging headache.  And I get to fall asleep next to John, listening to Lucy chase rabbits in her sleep.  And so today is a good day.

Xox, g

It’s my third day off social media and it feels as though I’m dying of thirst in the middle of a dessert as tumbleweeds roll by.

It’s a funny thing to realize how many times I would idly click through my feed or watch some stories … and now, I pick up my phone, click through my apps and then put it back down again.  Unfulfilled.  Empty.  Listless.

I think I’m currently caught in the middle passage …missing the connection and the cacophony of constantly being in touch with people, in the midst of conversations …  and not yet fully appreciating the silence.  Being with my own thoughts, my own creativity.  My own words.

It’s also been a strange few days because I have been sidelined by one of my least favorite things … a multi-day headache.  Which just sucks the life right out of me; it makes everything blurry and run-together as though there are no beginnings or endings …. just constant, throbbing pain.

I chose to give up social media and simultaneously attempt to blog for sixty-six days because I needed to find focus again and during December everything felt so fragmented.  Not that I couldn’t say the same for all the months of 2020 that preceded December, but it just reached this intense fever pitch of being pulled in too many directions and losing all track of myself.

And then, New Years Day and deafening silence.  And nauseous pain.  And all the resolutions and promises and fresh starts felt beyond my grasp — it was about surviving.

And now I’ve arrived at today, or to be more precise, tonight.  The eve before life resumes it’s normal cadence (we hope).  The night is dark and damp and I think I’m at the tail end of the headache … and all I want to do is curl up and finally sleep.  But before I do that, I’m typing away in my newly re-organized office, about to go do my nightly meditation, and I’m just so damn thankful that I can manage those few things when yesterday everything felt out of reach.

New Year’s Resolutions are funny things.  There’s so much pressure and so much angst to make these sweeping changes in life … and so often, all efforts fail, or fade out when the clock marches forward through January into February.  I think I’m probably way more successful at keeping resolutions that I begin at random throughout the year.  Like riding the bike — something that began on March 16 I believe.  Or nightly meditation (which took a few stops and starts) that began last year as the pandemic raged around us.  Or smoothies.  Or water consumption.  Or vitamins … or a myriad of other things J+I have added into life over the years.

We tried to make manageable resolutions this year.  We don’t know how long the pandemic will continue to affect our lives but we do know that we want to find joy in every day, find gratitude and happiness in the way we choose to live. We want to read more books and purposefully listen to more music.  We want to continue to pursue the things we love (fishing & hunting for him, yoga & wellness for me).  Travel if we can.  Drive too fast in the Porsche with the roof down in the sunshine.

Anyway.  I’m just rambling because after three days of headache and terrible sleep, my mind is a blur and my exhaustion is off the charts.

Xox, g

I climbed upstairs to go to bed, feeling like absolute death, and remembered I hadn’t written today.  Normally, that would only make me slightly disappointed in myself with a promise to find time tomorrow.  But today, the second day of a new year, isn’t quite like any other day.  I can’t break a promise I’ve made to myself on the second day.

So, even though I’ve been battling a wicked headache for more than twenty-four hours, I’m diligently sitting in my office typing away.  I had a lot of thoughts today about what to say, floating through my brain in the lulls of the raging pain, but to endeavor to write any of them right now would do myself a disservice.  I’m tired, I’m in pain (like, the worst kind, the incurable kind, the lingering and nagging and haunting kind) and all I want is to sleep, even though I know it will not mean an escape from how I’m feeling right now.

It bums me out, it makes me mad.  Time slipping by while I’m barely able to function, focus or think.  While my whole body submits to this unending (normally 3-4 days) pain, asleep and awake.  It’s been so many years since my diagnosis, I can’t always remember what it was like to feel ‘normal’.  How do people exist like this — fighting, feeling so fatigued it doesn’t even feel worth it, and functioning?  I have hazy memories of soldiering through hangovers … but nothing like this.  Nothing like the erasure of my consciousness.

There’s something funny, too, about reading things I write when I’m languishing in the depths of this … it is sensitive and overpowering, exaggerated and elongated.  Distorted.  Perhaps because it’s so hard to focus on the calmness of my mind when it’s raging so unendingly.

Anyway.  Those are some disjointed thoughts of mine on this second day of January.  As I keep my promise to myself to write.  Write write write.  Like the bike.  Like quitting drinking.  And smoking.  One day at a time.  Then the next day … until it just feels like part of the whole story, and not an uncomfortable anomaly.

Xox, g

Today, John went fishing.

He wanted to begin a tradition of fishing every January first, so he duly got up, got his gear together and headed out.  I dragged my feet, enjoying the comfort of my warm, snuggly bed, believing (as I always do) that I had all the time in the world.

I had ideas for what I wanted to accomplish.  I had a loose plan.

I, of course, got side-tracked halfway through reading about a man who contributed to the first ever Oxford English Dictionary (we watched a movie about it yesterday).

Anyway, it made me laugh when John messaged that he was one his way home and I’d accomplished all of … none of the things on my list.  I’d begun a lot (and per my Stoics email this morning, that’s all I can truly control) so the wash is getting done and I finished my first ride of 2021 and I made porridge.  I didn’t submit the final invoices needed in our FSA portal, or do any banking or curl up in my new chair to do a little bit of reading while listening to “Last of the Mohicans” movie soundtrack on vinyl (a gift from Santa this year).  And I guess that’s the way of things.

It’s certainly the way of my life.  Lofty goals and valiant efforts.  Eventually the tasks get done.  Eventually I collapse on the couch or in the new chair and just stare into nothing-ness for a bit, my legs unable to hold me up any longer, my brain too exhausted to think anything through clearly.

Maybe thats a lesson I take with me through this next year.  Maybe I remember that just getting started is enough, that putting in effort still counts, and that eventually, everything will get done.

Happy 2021.  I hope!

Xoxo, g

I feel sad today.

I am not sure exactly why.  It just doesn’t feel like the end of anything.  It feels like … another day.

Yet here we are, at the end of 2020.  A very long, very challenging, very difficult year.  A year where people heard the word “No” a lot more than they were used to and it made them mad.

Welcome to the world of a chronically ill person.  But … I digress.

I’m 41 now and I have been gainfully unemployed for nearly 4 years (well, mostly except for a few efforts on my part to rejoin the human race that inevitably ended).  I’ve felt lost, drifting, unsure of what the point of my life is.  No, I am not suicidal.  But think about it sometime… the point of your life.  It’s an interesting question.  Especially for those of us handicapped in some way, restricted or unable to exist as most humans do.

Contemplating life is humbling.  It’s grounding.  It’s vast and terrifying and then, somehow, up lifting.  To have this life on this planet and eyes to see it and ears to hear it … and a finite amount of time to do something with it.  Profound.

So I ripped the bandaid off and shut down the social media on my phone (which has dominated my time this year) in an effort to exist fully in my life.  To enjoy what I’m doing just for the sake of enjoying it, not for the sake of documenting it for others to see.  I thought a lot about that as well — the motivation behind things I was doing.  Was I riding the Peloton just because I love it or was I doing it to take a picture and show everyone else that I was riding the Peloton?  ( With relief I can report it’s because I just deeply love riding my bike to nowhere).  Anyway, that sentiment could be applied to so many things … and it made me feel disingenuous (whether I was or not).   Most things I do I do because I love them, but I also felt compelled to visually document it, as though other people cared about my daily oatmeal habit.  I want to just live, and create and read and discover and then, maybe write something that isn’t attached to a a picture on Instagram.

John and I wrote down our resolutions for the upcoming year.  We were thoughtful about not over-stretching, but we wanted to be on the same page, so that our home and our life together was a joint effort.  I look forward to exploring those in the coming days when I come back to this blog and just shout into the universe.

For myself, I want to finally sit down and practice the piano, I want to be consistent with my French lessons.  I want to write.  I really, really just want to write.

And, fun fact, whether I do or not depends entirely on me.

Happy 2021 World.  May it be a year of moving forward, healing wounds and learning.

Xoxo, g

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my social media bio line.  I proclaim that we should all “Love the Life You Live.”  Which seems … preposterously positive and conversely,  painfully problematic.

Because, of course, in theory, we should all love the lives we are living.  Right?  I mean, that makes sense.  But … how exactly can we make sure we are loving the life we are living?  How can we break free of the rules that have been dictated and set in stone of how one achieves happiness, and what steps must be taken in order to get there?

What if  … and just bear with me for a minute … but what if what is expected of me, as a human wandering Earth, isn’t what makes me inherently joyful?  And then, what if I recognize that simple fact, but have trouble gauging my life becaue all the milestones, all the accomplishments, all the ‘you’ve been successful’ marks have been set by someone with different ideals than me?

What am I to do?  How am I to ‘Love the Life I Live’ if the rules tell me that the choices I’m going to make are the wrong ones?  Even if the rules stipulate that what I’m supposed to do, to earn the recognition of a ‘life well lived’ is in direct oppostion to what makes me happy?

It’s a conundrum.

I just took a little time out to get sweaty on my bike.  I needed a minute to try to re-frame my thoughts.  Lemme get specific rather than generic.

The rules –> go to college, get a good job (we’ll get back to good/bad etc but for now, I’m leaving it), marry a good man (because I was born with female genetalia), have children.  Learn to cook and clean and contribute to society by being a wife & mother.

Where I’m at –> I went to college.  Eh.  I got … a job that paid me money.  I married … a man, then quickly got divorced.  I did not have children.  I do not contibute to society as a wife & mother.  I got re-married.  I still didn’t have children.  I got diagnosed with an incurable auto-immune disease.  I left my job that paid me money.  My husband does 80% of the cooking.  I am lost.  Maybe.

I also turned forty and then the whole world flipped upside down.  So that’s been … interesting.

College sucked for me.  I didn’t love it, I don’t know that I learned amazing things, and the things I did learn, I don’t use.  Ever.  Then I felt pressure to go back and get *another* degree — something higher, to prove my self-worth.  I felt pressure … subliminal, haunting pressure — to prove myself with a degree.  Because that’s quantifiable.  If I am a lawyer, if I’ve earned my Masters, then I’m clearly valuable.  There are a lot of starts in my life to higher education.  And no finishes.

I got married the first time because … well, it was both complicated and super simple.  I wanted companionship, I wanted an ally (all stemming from lots of crazy family dynamic bulls*t if I’m honest) and he wanted a green card.  I think maybe he liked me for a minute.  I told myself that to make the catastrophic end of things more bearable.  But we were incredibly different people, and just because he wasn’t as abusive as the myriad of men I’d dated before him, didn’t make him the right match for me.  It just made him … less abusive than all the men I’d dated before him.  (Low self-esteem is a bitch sometimes).

When my marriage fell apart, and my resume was a giant list of waitressing jobs, that was rock bottom.  Why?  Because society told me so.  Because waitressing was bad, not respectable, not challenging, something people who weren’t smart did.  And failed marriages … that meant you’d failed at being a human.  And obviously, that was bad.

People offered encouragement, direction, tough love.  Get your life together, figure it out, find a direction.  Which meant, find a direction that’s acceptable for a person of your social standing, skin color and perceived ‘potential.’

When you hit rock bottom, the rules stop meaning anything.  You’ve withdrawn from the race, you’ve scratched at the Kentucky Derby.  Your parents (the ones who hopefully were betting on you) have lost a chunk of change.  They have a dud.  (Cue guilt).  But a lot of it stops mattering.  And I guess I could have fallen into a hole of self-pitty (I did, for a minute) and complete worthlessness (ditto).  But somehow, I managed to emerge on the other side.  I managed to pick up the pieces.

It started when my Dad handed me a newspaper (yeah, I’m that old) and told me it was time I got a job.  I don’t think he cared what kind of job, but just something to get me off their couch eating potato chips with sour cream and out of my sweatpants.

When you hit rock bottom, you claw your way back up anyway you know how.  And you leave all the heavy stuff — the expectations, the guilt, the judgement —  down at the bottom because they are too heavy to keep carrying.

I clawed my way out and ended up with a nice enough job, with enough prestige and with a fancy sounding title.  I *did* marry a good man (whew!  did it!).  I did all the things, I checked all the boxes.  And after it all, after I left that job and dealt with MS (on-going) and the shape of my world changed when my mother died  … I looked around and wondered again … what am I doing?

Life is about survival, and somewhere along the way, the checklist of how to achieve survival was written, and then amended as the world changed.  But the basis remained the same.  Do the things you need to do to survive and continue the species.

I have been thinking though, that I want to change that narrative for myself because otherwise, I’m going to keep feeling as though I am failing, and I don’t think I am.

Comparison is the thief of joy.  So I want to stop comparing my track record to anyone elses.  What I ‘should’ have versus what I ‘do’ have.  I want to live in my skin and in my world feeling ease about who I am, what I believe, what I fight for, how I spend my time.  Because those things, those choices I make, bring me joy.  Not because in some race that I’m unaware of and un-privy to the standings, I’m falling behind.

I guess that’s how I Love the Life I Live.

xo, g