I don’t have to be productive 24/7. All that matters is that I take care of myself – everything else will follow. I matter.
Because my body is remembering it has a uterus for the first time in almost 6 months and even though it’s still worlds better than it was untreated, it still…..fucks me up a lot. I feel like it makes me lesser, but I know that’s bullshit…
I’m scared that my period problems are going to rule out any opportunities I ever have, but I know that isn’t true, also. I hope.
Daily Selfcare list
1) get dressed in day clothes that make you feel good, even if it’s just for a little while.
2) work out for 5 minutes to get your blood moving and to notice your body and feel it.
3) brush your hair if you don’t like how it feels or looks. put the dragonfly clips in, or wear the squid hat for a few minutes.
4) breathe before bed (1..2..3…1..2..3)
5) drink water.
Because sometimes I forget basic things and I feel awful.
Midday Muse
Sometimes I learn slower than I’d like. I get frustrated because PHP isn’t intuitive and I can watch a segment and then I have to take a break and let what I learned sit there for a couple days before going back for more. On the upside, I am actually grasping it this time, but I wish I knew all the things now so I could make stuff already.
But I guess no one really learns a language in a day, and I am making progress, so that’s good.
Unrelated to PHP Basics though, I am exhausted and heavy hearted. Part of me doesn’t know why, and part of me is aware that I’m just sensing the weight of the world. I’m doing the best I can to make a small piece of it better though, and I just have to keep plugging away. I can’t focus on everything, and that’s okay.
Social Media Experiment
Experiment: if I close twitter and log out of Facebook for a week (supplementing social internet needs with forum posts and reading blogs if I need to feel connected) what happens? Does the world seem less shitty? Do I break out of various funks long enough to work on projects? Am I happier?
I’ll let you know, I guess.
Hand Fish
I’ve been watching nature documentaries lately. The Blue Planet: A Natural History of the Oceans, to be specific. Because I like water, and whoever the standard BBC narrator is has a soothing voice. I’ve been learning a lot about fishes, interestingly enough, and how life in the ocean works, which isn’t surprising as it is a documentary series, but it’s left me fascinated.
I wish my actual “education” had embodied a sort of holistic approach to understanding the natural world. I love how everything is so connected….how one fish being hunted and eaten and the rest discarded is used by other fish to continue to live and every bit of every creature is as useful in death as it is in life. Their deaths aren’t nothing, they’re just a part of enabling others to survive.
Even coral reef erosion by being eaten goes on to create sand, which later, eventually creates islands, which then goes on to house birds and other animals. Land and sea animals depend on each-other to survive in a way I didn’t realize before. Also, did you know, Polar bears eat whales? If they can catch them…
Just…nothing is wasted (even in death), and that’s beautiful to me. Everything is connected and everything needs each-other to continue. I think sometimes we forget that – or sometimes, you end up having gone out of your way to not know that – but we are and it’s kinda magical.
Also hand fish.
HAND. FISH.
WHY DID MY SCIENCE BOOK NOT TELL ME ABOUT THIS.
Oh wait, it would be harder to sell evolution not being a thing with a fish with arms, wouldn’t it be?
In Which I Remind Myself I'm Important And Don't Owe Anyone Shit
I’m not going to lie, I’ve been running myself ragged lately.
Sometimes it’s like, I don’t know how to not, you know?
I don’t know what a healthy balance is, and when the bulk of my work is creative it blurs the lines between shit I do for me and shit I do for other people/my job – because I would be making shit anyway.
I don’t know how to have projects and also not feel like I need to make up for something unless I’m doing so many things the day ends in exhaustion.
Like if I’m not doing all the things all the time then I’m not contributing and I hear my mom’s voice in my head telling me I’m lazy.
But then I’m running errands and have a mental breakdown in the car, and my calm is hard to get under control and I realize I’ve been doing a lot of putting-out, and not enough taking-in.
Even now, I’m fighting the urge to make more content – to film a KieryGeek episode or write a blog on KieryGeek.com because I haven’t touched it in ages, because gamergate is still on-going and I’ve been noticing all the sexism in my PS+ games. To add the text to the E.R.A. comic I drew over the weekend….or to delve deep into my psyche and figure out what the fuck is happening and what the trigger is that’s been poking me all week.
But I need to rest. And as guilty as I feel for not doing those things, a lot of them…..at this point, as much as I convince myself they’re for me, they’re really for other people, and that’s awesome and stuff…..but I don’t owe anyone my content right now. I owe myself a break.
And I needed to write that out so I could see it.
So I could maybe get back to minecraft or load WoW, or draw with pens because that is mine.
So I could convince myself not to work, and that the only person I owe things to right now is me.
Vaccinated
I’ve started and stopped this post several times over the last couple hours. It’s not even anything particularly interesting, which is why I’ve started and stopped, I guess.
But right now I’m having jack and coke and playing lego Marvel so I figured I’d take a break while I was observing the snow and actually write this stupid post.
Wednesday I got my last HPV shot! Which is awesome! I feel like I’m actually caught up on all the shots I should have gotten – I got my TDAP when I got the first HPV vaccine in May and getting the last of the three HPV’s done this week makes me feel all accomplished and adult.
Like, I overcame a bunch of childhood shit and made health choices that are better for my future. As much crap as I got from people about how much shots hurt, I did it anyway. And you know what? The shots weren’t even that bad! I mean, they’re shots, they’re not horribly comfy and I’m favoring my right shoulder, but I only needed ibuprofen on Wednesday and it’ll be back to normal by the weekend and I’m vaccinated against HPV for the rest of my life!
So if you haven’t gotten the shot yet because pain, do yourself a favor, get the shot, it’s only 3, they’re done in 6 months, they’re not that bad, and they’re a million times better than getting cancer. Don’t listen to all the people who jump on you because it’s so painful, it sounds worse than it is. Just do it. It’s smart. You’re worth it.
Cryptic nuggets
I should do so many things.
I should write more about sexism and gaming.
I should make that ruby app I’ve been planning.
I should reboot KieryGeek.
I should be better at marketing my patreons.
I should be brave and find my voice and use it.
I should be more friendly.
I should not feel bad about not doing all of those things in lieu of taking care of myself.
I should not feel bad for being anxious and tired and overwhelmed.
I should not feel bad for feeling lost.
I should not feel useless or worthless because reasons.
Massages + Disassociation
In July I had this thing where my neck/shoulder muscles didn’t want to move, so I got a massage, and I’ve been getting them every couple weeks since to try and loosen up the (apparently insane levels of) tightness, and I noticed something…and someday I’ll draw something to illustrate this better, but, when I’m on the table, I feel connected to myself and my body.
I can tell how the muscle in my right shoulder impacts my left toes, and how every piece of me is connected to everything else. For an hour, there’s no difference between me and my body, we’re the same, connected, one – I am muscle and flesh and bone and blood, and interestingly, gender doesn’t come into play here. And maybe, it’s because I’m naked in the dark but not seen or judged, maybe it’s because massages go deeper than skin, and reach the core, the ungendered center that everyone shares, so I’m not lost in my parts, because they’re just parts, epidermis that doesn’t really say much about me or who I am…
It’s not something I’m used to experiencing, but I’m trying to find ways to ground myself, to feel less like a floating sentience in a breathing corpse. I realized, while we were checking out the Universalist church last weekend, that, I center myself to the earth, which I think is normal, but what if I centered myself to…myself? maybe if I paid attention to how my skin felt around my bones and listened to my senses, maybe that would help with the generally disconnected feeling I usually have towards my body?
Most days I feel like I’m a sentience walking ghost-hand in hand with my body, or circling around in my skull that from here looks more like a cage. On bad days, or bad nights, really, I feel like I’m a balloon and like I’ll just float away unless I’m held or touching someone to ground me and pull me back down to the earth, to my skin…but, when I’m being massaged, it’s like someone is helping me put my body back on, like a coat, and helping me back to myself.
It’s weird in a good way, but also weird. I don’t know if any of this makes sense, and when she asks me how I’m feeling after (apparently I hold up really well) I want to tell her how much it helps on a psychological level, but I don’t know how to, or if she’d even understand…but it does, it helps a lot in a way I never expected.
Then sometimes things happen, and I’m around people who tend to make me question my worth and whether or not I should even bother doing things that actually do help me. Who make me feel like a burden and like I should just suffer and I don’t deserve to try and have a healthy relationship with myself-body – who leave me reeling for days re-evaluating whether or not I’m a decent human.
Being triggered leaves me feeling like the pile of dirt I was told I was worth growing up, and it makes me feel guilty for getting massages, and taking care of myself. Because who am I to have things, to have value, to have worth, and to be worth caring for?
But I am human, and I have value because I exist, and I’m not just trouble, or burdensome, and I am worth caring for.
So next Friday I get another massage, and it’ll be good for me, because it’s okay to value and take care of myself.
rest != laziness
Sometimes I have a hard time resting.
I was never allowed to rest when I was a kid, and remember wishing I would become horribly sick just so I could rest (because if I wasn’t running a fever or vomiting, I could still totally do shit), which means that as an adult, unless I’m physically debilitated, I generally don’t really…rest.
Because rest was lazy and laziness was the epitome of evil. If I was caught taking a break or a breather outside of the 90-minute “free time” window that I had, I was assigned something to do.
I know what it feels like to be headed toward burnout, because all I can think about is “I need to stop. I need to take a break. I need to sleep for days. I need to just shut my mind off for a little while, and then I can get back to it.”
But doing that….is really hard.
If I rest for more than a day when I need to, I’m instantly plagued by just… a lot of guilt.
All of the voices from my childhood come back, thundering: You’re being lazy. You’re doing nothing. You can’t just sit around and do nothing like those lazy people. You have to work. You’re like those people who burden society. You’re not working. You’ve had your 10 minute break, now go get shit done and stop being selfish and irresponsible.
My parents spent a lot of time shitting on people they thought were lazy. Which is why they worked us like slaves while my mom sat in her chair being pregnant.
We were never allowed to rest because resting was lazy, irresponsible, and selfish, and according to mom “in the ‘real world’, you don’t get to”.
So, I worked through abscesses, I worked through periods without ibuprofen, I worked through colds and other not-flu illnesses, I worked through general soreness from being jumped on.
The two times I remember feeling cared for were when I was sick and too young to be able to do anything else. I had the chicken pox and got an oatmeal bath, and the other time, I had the flu and mom bought me a coloring book and rubbed my feet and then let me be by myself to color and sleep.
—
I have a really giant mental wall that creates itself when I need to take a break and rest and I’m not also violently ill.
It’s almost painful, sometimes, because I know I could relieve the guilt by quitting my mini-cation (which I called blanket burrito con this morning) and getting back to work, and doing all the things instead of forcing myself to just do nothing and try to be okay with letting my brain be quiet (and getting it to be quiet).
I can manage to not do anything during the day, but then while I’m sleeping I get stressed out – almost like I expect to be in trouble the next morning for having done nothing. I wake up exhausted and guilty (because I slept, I slept late, and I haven’t done anything, but…) because of this phantom of disapproval, this overwhelming sense of innate evil in the form of laziness, because everyone but myself deserves to be taken care of.
I know it’s bullshit.
I know, I know, I know it’s bullshit.
But it’s still hard (so I’ve been doing little things that help).
I’m gonna go back and snuggle in my blanket burrito now, maybe tomorrow I’ll have yellow or green nails.