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Are We There Yet?

October 7, 2020 //
2

The week began with unexpected (but welcome) contractors. It continued, yesterday, with the return of the (now expected, still welcome) contractors and the completion of the dry walling, taping, texturing, and painting. Today? Carpet, and, I think, the completion of the last bit of our moving “adventure” (which was the discovery of a leak, by way of the visible damage it had caused). Finally.

New homeowner shit. I’m not bitching – I’m delighted to have a home. I’m just counting down the days (hours, now?) until I can sigh contentedly, feel safe, settled, and at home – without huge holes in the walls, and an entirely unfinished closet, and paintings stacked everywhere in a seemingly haphazard way. lol 🙂 I’m sipping my coffee feeling grateful for this house, our home, this partnership, and my partner – and mentally listing for myself all of the many things we’ve gotten done since we moved in, just 98 days ago. 😀

…Time is a funny thing, isn’t it? I feel simultaneously that I’ve “been here a long time” (and thus, it feels unreasonable that I’m not yet wholly “moved in”) and also feel as if we just moved in “a couple weeks ago” (in which case, it totally seems reasonable to still be “sorting out some details”).

In early April, we began looking for a home of our own together, quite seriously. The search became “urgent” in an earnest “this has to get done because we’ve got to move” sort of way, in spite of the pandemic, at the end of April. By May 19th, we’d found what we were looking for, and made an offer. I’m still surprised by how quickly that went. We closed at the end of June, and began moving in. Pandemic restrictions at their most severe (up to that point), we did the move ourselves, and it took just shy of 10 days to get it all “done”, such that we were no longer moving out of anywhere, just putting finishing touches on moving in. That makes it all sound rather easy – and it was as easy as my Traveling Partner could make it, no doubt. Organized. Well-considered. Planned carefully. Executed skillfully. Still hard. Still a lot of manual labor. Some fussing. Some crying.

…There were some trying moments, that’s just real…

Since we moved in, there has been what now seems like an inevitable cascade of “small things” to handle. Squeaky doors. A hot tub leak. Quite a bit of spilled water. Cleaning. Things to assemble. Small repairs. Totally ordinary homeowner stuff. lol At first it mostly felt new, and delightfully autonomous (no call to a landlord, no delay in getting stuff done that wasn’t chosen), then it began to feel sort of “crushing”. (Strictly temporary. Change is.) We fixed things, and moved on. I feel a bit as if this last bit of contractor work really finishes the move, is what I’m saying. (Omg, so many words just to get to that idea. Sorry.)

No idea what comes next. New adventures. Everyday life. Contentment. Romance. New recipes? New neighbors.

A sunny day on the deck, a view of the forest beyond.

It’s time to begin again. 🙂

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Categories Allegories, autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, gratitude, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Spring, Summer

Be Careful What You Wish For…

October 5, 2020 //
2

I’d settled into work for the day, with a reminder to myself to phone the contractor handling the repair work (for the recent water damage). Having heard nothing for more than a week (again), it seemed wise to reach out pro-actively and see what could be delaying the work, and maybe get it scheduled. I felt very grown-up to be so on top of things on a Monday…

…Yeah…

So, just as I was preparing some routine work for follow-up with key stakeholders, fingers flying across my keyboard, I heard the doorbell. A package? So early? (I bet you know where this one is heading!) Yep. Contractors. Here to do dry wall. Wtf?? Nothing on my calendar… nothing coordinated with me… no follow-up since materials were picked. What. The. Fuck.

My Traveling Partner was wakened by the door bell. Hadn’t even had his coffee. My studio and the adjacent room were not ready for contractors to do work; I’d moved a bunch of stuff while my stepson was visiting. Paintings. Computer equipment. Paperwork. Book shelving complete with books. So, I did the only obvious thing… I smiled and welcomed the contractors in after alerting my partner they were here to work. I moved stuff out of their way. I did my best to keep my shit together while my work space was disrupted yet again. Fucking hell.

Things got moved. Including me; I’m in my partner’s game room, working. Whatever. It works, and I greatly appreciate having a partner who is flexible and quick-thinking. I managed to shed minimal tears over generally being faced with further upheaval. Win.

…Now all that’s left is to begin again. 😉

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, art and the artist, autumn, Brain Injury, Frustration, gratitude, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Sleepless Nights

Painful? Peaceful

October 4, 2020 //
0

It’s a lovely autumn day. I’ve spent it on mindful service to hearth and home, and some pleasant opportunities to enjoy the company of my Traveling Partner. We both seem to be having a very good day. I’m enjoying that, unreservedly. I’m also in pain.

The forest beyond the deck, on an autumn morning.

If I allowed my physical pain to stop me from getting things done or enjoying my experience in every moment I am experiencing physical pain, I’d have to just give in. Do nothing. Enjoy nothing. Go nowhere. That doesn’t sound like the best possible way to experience life, so… mostly I choose differently. It sometimes feels like an endurance race. A test of will. A hex. Today? Today it feels like a lovely autumn day on which I happen to be in pain. Verbs. Choices. Practices. Self-care.

We each walk our own hard mile. Sometimes it’s not “well-paved” or “smooth and level”. Sometimes that hard mile is miserable, tedious, or painful. Sometimes it feels endless. Persist. Endure. Choose. Don’t like the outcome? Try choosing something else. Begin again. If every mile of this journey called life was easy, effortless, and on an obvious path, it would likely also be incredibly dull, and certainly there’d be damned little reason to grow, to learn, or to change. So… there’s that.

There’s also this pain, but… it’s wrapped in a sunny day, and I feel wrapped in love. 🙂 It’s enough.

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Categories Allegories, autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, gratitude, health, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, The Art of Being

Time & Timing

October 2, 2020 //
0

Here it is already Friday. How did the time pass so quickly without notice? Living life, I guess, instead of measuring the minutes and weighing the value of the time involved. I’m okay with that. I hope you are, too.

3 or 4 days into my headache, after a work day of sort of being “half there”, and making a lot of dumb mistakes as I moved through various tasks and ran an errand or two (little stuff, like forgetting to close the cover on the hot tub after I got out, or misplacing a coffee cup in a strange place), my Traveling Partner encouraged me to make an early night of it. I wasn’t certain I could sleep so early, or that I needed sleep, or that sleep would help… but I “wasn’t all there”, as it was, and felt pretty miserable. So. I crashed early, figuring I could read quietly in a quiet dimly lit room, or some such thing.

…I woke abruptly shortly after midnight, with a recollection of conversing with my Traveling Partner sometime after I crashed… was that a dream? That’s what woke me; wondering if that conversation was real, or a fragment of a dream. I still don’t know. I fell back to sleep before I could do more than wonder. I woke again, around 2am, and got up for a few minutes. Drank some water. Realized I didn’t actually care to be awake, yet, and that I was, rather oddly, still sleepy. I went back to bed, only waking when the alarm went off.

Funny how fragile and high-maintenance these sacks of flesh are, is it not? Self-care matters. Giving ourselves time to heal with we’re injured or sick matters. Taking time for real rest matters. All of those things matter more than any household chore or errand. Generally, they even matter more than the jobs we work. (I mean, seriously, if I become so ill or fatigued that I can’t work at all… how important is the job, then? Just saying – not very.)

I sip my coffee making new promises (on top of old promises) to give myself better self-care and more of my own time. There will be verbs involved. Practices. My results will continue to vary. I notice that my coffee cup is empty, the rim cold against my lips. It must be time to begin again. 😉

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Categories Allegories, autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, health, Healthy Living, Mindfulness, Moments, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices

This Headache, Though

September 28, 2020 //
1

I woke early with a headache. I didn’t sleep well, waking several times for (sometimes) no obvious reason. More than once I woke from dreams of … noise. Just that. Car noise. Truck noise. Construction noise. I would wake to hear only quiet. No real noise. Back to sleep, to dream of noise. It wasn’t a great night.

I woke earlier than the alarm would have gone off by a bit more than an hour. I got up. Meditation. Some yoga. I felt restless and annoyed, headache persisting. I put on my boots and went for a walk. It was dark, quiet, and still. The chilly morning air felt wonderful. The quiet was lovely. The silhouettes of trees and shrubbery created fantastical scenes ahead of me along the way. The headache persisted.

I returned home, still before dawn and no hint of sunrise visible. I made coffee, and sat down with that – and my headache. I finished off the water in my water bottle while I waited for my coffee to cool enough to drink that, instead. About half-way through my coffee, I admitted that “nothing else” had worked to improve this headache, thus far, and took something for it. My Traveling Partner woke, perhaps I banged the drawer or rattled a pill bottle? We spent a pleasant half an hour or so hanging out with our morning coffee before my work day began.

I started my workday with this headache, and it is with me, even now. A soak in the hot tub in the chill of an autumn morning was lovely. Didn’t help with the headache. Lunch with my partner and his son was quite pleasant, too. Still enduring the headache. I’d taken a stronger headache remedy shortly before lunch, and it’s now about an hour later than we finished that meal. I’ve still got the headache, but… maybe it’s improved a bit? It only hurts when I move… and when I sit still. Sometimes it fades into the background for a moment (that’s definitely an improvement).

…I’m not really just whinging about this headache as much as I mean to be pointing out how important the self-care is, even though it isn’t helping the headache much. The self-care is keeping me from becoming a fucking monster and treating everyone around me badly. That’s worth something. It’s not so much that I can feel any notable improvement where the headache is concerned (I can’t) – but I’m not snarling at people. Not blasting anyone with negative emotion over some small thing. I haven’t lost my sense of humor, or become stern. I’m mostly enjoying my day, mostly being someone I can appreciate in my interactions with others (from my own perspective). I’m in pain. I’m not enjoying that, but I’m also not devolving into some shattered broken down thing, or causing a fuck ton of chaos for everyone around me. That’s worth something. Apologies only go so far, so often – sooner or later we have to take steps to change problem behavior. For real. Headaches and all.

Fuck this headache, though. Damn.

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Categories autumn, Brain Injury, Free Will, health, Healthy Living, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Practices, Relationships, Sleepless Nights
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