Embodied Lives

My aunt died this morning after suffering through a terrible degenerative disease that I don’t think any of us ever fully understood.

The last time I saw her she was making apologies for her “alien arm” - so called because she no longer had any control over its sporadic movements. She apologized for it each time I got too near her. I didn’t like to see her fretting over her arm’s uncontrollable behavior even as she had difficulty walking and forming words. So I asked about the grandkids and what they thought about the diagnosis the doctors had given her arm, reminding her that an “alien arm” sounds like a pretty amazing thing to have through the eyes of her beloved grandkids. She mentioned that when my uncle, a known curmudgeon, is helping her she sometimes hits him with her rogue arm. I joked that he probably deserved it and we all got a chuckle out of that. That was eight months ago, and now she’s gone.

Last spring, I was managing my own insecurities about a body being affected by illness that I didn’t know how to control. In November I began using an app to help me track my water intake after discovering that chronic dehydration was a significant contributor to my health challenges. Each morning I start my day with the same beloved routine: after washing my face and brushing my teeth I put the kettle on and make a cup of herbal tea. I return to my bedroom, push back the lace curtains, greet my garden, and sit in my floral chair by the window. I read a book as I sip my tea. Once I finish my tea, it’s time to make breakfast and fill my first water bottle for the day. The ritual of making tea and filling my water bottle are what start my hydration mindfulness each day.

But this morning I woke up to the text with the news of my aunt’s death - so I lingered in bed all morning thinking about her and intermittently playing a game on my phone and watching tv so as not to be alone with my thoughts. The house is empty today with my housemates either at work or home for the holidays and so the house felt especially still and quiet. Then, having long tired of television or games, but without the gumption to rise, I received a text from a friend inquiring about the water tracking app I’ve been using. Opening the app and seeing that it was after 11am and that I was at 0%, I felt my resolve to start my day rise up. I love my morning routine. I anticipate and look forward to it at the close of each day as I fall asleep. The inquiry from my friend reconnected the circuit to that enjoyment and roused me from my cocoon.

As I began my morning routine I considered the oddity of life after a death. My aunt is gone. Someone is missing and has left a hole in the world where they should be. She’s always been there, my whole life, and before my life began. She’s the first of my parent’s generation to leave us and a reminder that more of them will follow as time moves on. These are all of the things that I contemplated (or avoided thinking too much about) as I lingered in bed this morning. And yet… my body still needs to be cared for. She (my body) still needs me to go through my morning rituals to set myself up for a good day. She needs me to hydrate and feed her and to stretch out her sore, stiff muscles after a week of intense activity. There’s a cognitive dissonance there: the cosmos has shifted and someone is gone who shouldn’t be, and yet I still need to concern myself with the temporal business of brushing my teeth, making my cup of tea and other simple routines. But it’s these rituals that ground me and keep me from contemplating current and anticipated losses too hard, so really it’s a mercy that these acts of living must not be overlooked.

I don’t want to over-inflate my experience of losing my aunt. I come from a small extended family that’s not close. Each branch carefully keeps to itself. But still, in a family that’s scattered about and got together only sporadically throughout the years, this aunt was the one who loved me best. She always loved me well and showed me kindness when I saw her. She’s the one who taught me how to pet a dog (stroke them gently in the same direction as the fur). She had a beautiful smile and a warmth to her and you don’t have to see someone often or know them well to miss them all the same. I’m sad that she’s gone and that she suffered in her later years. I’m sad because fresh losses always stir up remembrances of previous losses. And I’m sad because her death is a reminder that the inevitable march of time will keep taking others in her generation away from us.

But I’m also grateful for friends who text with app inquiries, for cherished, simple morning routines, and for muscles that ask to be tended to and stretched out. I’m grateful for the cheerful faces of colorful pansies to greet me outside my window and for hot, herbal tea to warm my insides and whet my appetite for breakfast. While my thoughts may stray far into the cosmos today, I will tend to my body well, which will keep me grounded and prevent me from spinning off too far into the what-if thoughts of grief. Bodies certainly give us some real trouble sometimes, but they’re also faithful companions that keep us humble and rooted in the present moment. Today I’m finding myself deeply grateful for my embodied state and for being able to turn my focus towards my physical needs, which will crop up like clockwork all day long. Each prompt from my body is an invitation to a meditative practice, in the physical realm, to keep me from dwelling too much in the messier parts of my head.

Permission to Dwell (4 of 4)

Last December, I accompanied my dad to the senior center to pick up my grandmother’s lunch. I enjoy going with him because I know several of my grandmother’s friends and I like greeting them and exchanging hugs. On this particular day, one [large] woman that I didn’t know (but who knew me) said to me, straight out of the gate and somewhat snidely, ‘Well, I guess you just don’t ever put on any weight do you?’ In an attempt to diffuse and move on I chuckled and vaguely said ‘well sometimes more than others.’

But let’s be clear… I didn’t find it one bit chuckle-worthy. 

As a kid I was sensitive about being called ‘skinny’ because it was used derogatorily against me. (It was also used against my mom when she was young, which she told me in an attempt to help me feel better - solidarity and such - but it only compounded the injustice of my own experience. I wondered why people would be mean to her too). When I met Benjamin I asked him to please never refer to me as ‘skinny’ because of those hurtful associations and asked that he instead refer to me, if he must at all, as ‘slender.’ The change in words lessened the blow for me and ‘slender’ seemed at least graceful.

As an adult woman who gained weight in her early twenties, I sustained comments about my weight-gain from family members. When I lost weight rapidly in my late twenties (after abandoning sugar and dairy) I sustained criticism from family and coworkers for that too.

The truth is that since I found the weight range that’s right for me (confirmed by how consistently my body lingers there when I listen to it and feed it what it asks of me) I started thinking less about my body and my weight. My self-image improved because I felt healthy in my skin. Yes, this is the privilege of being born a scrawny kid in a society that’s wholly obsessed with underweight women. My privilege is that I don’t struggle with being overweight. But I’m sometimes reminded that others look at me and see me as a body type - one that makes them feel and say the kinds of things that leave me at a loss of words.

While I may be exempt from the kind of insecurity that comes with having curves in an emaciation-obsessed society, hear me when I tell you that I have some sort of weird reverse insecurity from having a thin body. I feel the eyes on me of other, fuller-figured women who want what I have (I’m not saying this in vanity. I’m speaking from my lived experience of hearing these comments both in ways that are wistful and in ways that are straight-up hateful. Both of these kinds of comments leave me wordless because what really can one say to either in return?) I’ve sustained many hurtful comments about my skinny body. (Once, I was told by an older family member that Benjamin and I would have lizard-children because we were both so slim. They thought this was a funny joke. That was more than 10 years ago and I still look at my naked body in the mirror sometimes and hear that lizard comment in my head). Just like other women around me, I don’t have the freedom to exist in my own body without people thinking, feeling and saying things to me about it.

When it was hard for me to digest even small portions of food and I was just needing to get back to some semblance of manageable health, I found myself worrying about explaining my diet and inescapably visible weight loss to others as my clothes hung loose on me and I declined food that I couldn’t eat. While my focus should have wholly been on rebuilding my health, my attention was divided because of insecurity fueled entirely by comments like the aforementioned. That’s both sad and ridiculous. Can we please just all agree to let each other be, to acknowledge that we’re wonderfully different, and that none of us know each other well enough to provide commentary on others’ lives?

Comments about someone’s body can be hurtful even if that person isn’t overweight. When I walked into the senior center and the old woman made her comment to me I would have liked to have said to her all of the things I’ve shared with y’all in the last seven posts - to her, to the lizard-joker, to the middle-aged family member who hated me for my slim physique, and to all the other people who have commentaries whether they’re haters or allies: “You may see my body or how I eat, but you don’t know me at all and you haven’t seen the road that’s brought me here.”

The same is true for you too, which is why I’m finally speaking up and saying something. Be kind to yourself. Find what wellness means to you and then give yourself permission to dwell there and savor yourself and your goodness, just as you are, where you are right now (even if you have future hopes and goals for your health). Do all you can to quiet the voices of those around you who don’t understand yet still insist on speaking up. And most of all, let’s all do more to shed light where there is darkness. Let’s lift each other up every chance we get. And when we find ourselves on the receiving end of hurtful words about our bodies, we don’t have to absorb them. We can speak up with kindness and let others know how their words make us feel.

I’m not doing all I can to make that vision a reality. I’ve said things that I realized later probably landed insensitively. I’m guilty of not praising others (or myself) enough. And I’ve definitely never stood up for myself and told a single person how their words affect me or how I play those words over again in my head. But I’m imagining myself as kinder (to myself and others both) and as bolder because that’s the kind of world I want to live in and be a part of. I’m starting by writing this series (which wasn’t entirely easy to share), imagining how I can be more to others, and offering genuine gratitude to my body in its struggling state even as I work to bring it back into more fullness health. Won’t you please join me by doing the same for yourself and others alike?

The Path to Healing (3 of 4)

Finding myself in a situation that felt hopeless, and knowing I needed help with my out of control anxiety and physical symptoms, I called and made an appointment with my clinic. With the help of the loveliest of practitioners I started getting back on course and learning even more about myself (and what my body needs from me) in the process. (Side note: he retired as I neared the end of my treatment, which truly pains me. He was the most compassionate and gentle man and I’m so grateful to have met him, especially during a time when I felt so rotten, afraid-of-everything, and vulnerable).

After towing the line during my active recovery phase, I grew more lax during the holidays thinking I was well! This was malarky and I relapsed fiercely, this time without my doctor and nutritionist just a bus ride away. It was up to me to figure out how to solve it myself with the tools and knowledge that they gave me.

It’s taken a lot of doing, but I’ve seen some progress since then. It’s been a powerful experience to feel agency and control over my healing practices and to facilitate my body’s work of healing itself. While I couldn’t have done it without the knowledge, support and teaching I previously gained from my doctor and nutritionist, it’s been incredibly empowering to have to ‘go it alone’ these last few weeks and find that I am capable of trusting my intuition and successfully navigating this terrain of illness and healing.

But even as I’ve experienced empowerment with my healing practices, I’ve also had some concerns. As I went through the weeks where I could only stomach limited portion sizes, I could tell I was losing weight. Eventually the weight loss started to worry me. Without my trusty scale on hand to give me a measurable number, my imagination feared the worst. Realizing there was a scale in the house where I’m currently staying was a relief because I was able to deal with a hard number again. While the number was much lower than it should be, it wasn’t low enough to warrant panic. I clocked in at 22 lbs underweight from the low-end of my 10 lb target range, which put me at having lost 27+ lbs since leaving Seattle (hard to be sure since I wasn’t weighing myself then, but I usually hang around the middle of my range).

Although I’ve lost significant weight, by sticking to my diet and a regular eating routine, my stomach has healed enough to eat normal-sized portions again! I’m not afraid of my underweight body anymore because I have a solid number to work up from and am eating with more ease than before. With the help of a scale I’ll be able to visibly see some numerically measurable progress and know that I’m improving over time. It relieves my mind to be able to integrate quantitative information into my healing, because qualitative knowledge is just squidgy enough to fuel my anxiety (“I can tell I’m losing weight! OMG, how much have I lost!?” An overactive, fearful imagination can run quite far with a question like that).

But it wasn’t only the weight loss itself that worried me, it was also what others would think about it. Now that you’ve been properly introduced to my body, my habits (both maladaptive and healthy) and the journey of illness and healing I’ve been on of late, there’s one final thing that must be addressed, which brings us full circle back to the beginning. In the post that started this whole cascade of tell-all narratives about food and bodies, I spoke of my weariness about others providing commentary on how I eat. While it’s fair to say that those comments get old after a while, they aren’t insensitive and are easy to shrug off. Sometimes though, they’re accompanied by another narrative, one that leaves insecurities behind and voices lingering in my head. The rubber meets the road in the last post and I speak frankly about these voices and I ask you to join me in imagining a kinder, more compassionate future.

Click here to read Part 4: Permission to Dwell

Little Indulgences

It was oatmeal for breakfast and lunch last Monday because I was on a quest to upgrade my experience.

One of the many things I’ve learned from my lovely friends is how much small details can make a difference. As I’m learning the gifts of disciplined routine, I’m taking a page out of their book and looking for ways to create ritual and indulgence (I do dearly love both ritual and indulgence). When routine is elevated into something a little extra-special it makes it something to look forward to and a joy to stick with. For me, the ritual that’s nourished me the most thus far is my morning bowl of oatmeal. I’ve been relying heavily on canned foods and microwaves during this season of healing because it was the easiest way to make sure I got fed. But now, as I’m moving back into more balance, I’m ready to return to fresh fruits and veggies and stovetop cooking (because microwaves kind of freak me out even as I’m grateful for them).

Honestly, I didn’t even know how to make stovetop oatmeal before last Monday. Back home I just poured boiling water over raw oats and here I’ve used the microwave. The great discovery that the microwave yielded was how much I greatly preferred the delicious cooked oats, even from a microwave! So the trick was to learn how to make stovetop oats with the same creamy consistency I’d come to love from the microwave but without all the freaky gamma rays. The first stovetop breakfast was a disappointment - too chewy. (I like my oats as a runny porridge). But I tried again during Monday’s lunch, this time with a mini-dutch oven. I picked up the little vessel for only a few bucks just for making breakfast time special… and I *nailed it* my second time around with a rewarding bowl full of creamy goodness.

The tiny dutch-oven is my gift to my morning routine. It’s a way to elevate my experience, to make standing and stirring at the stove feel indulgent and worthwhile, and to make eating feel more indulgent and nourishing as well. It’s keeps my food piping hot through the whole meal and it’s just the right size for a single-serving that fills to the brim so that it feels like a liberal portion. (Seriously, one of my favorite life hacks of all time is getting smaller plates and bowls so I can pile them up high and feel super indulgent about my full dish, while not eating more than I need). This little addition paired with dialing in my procedure (thanks to a quick internet query) yielded a really exciting bowl of oatmeal for my lunchtime experiment, leaving me so excited for many future breakfasts to come.

I used to endlessly drag my feet when it was time to go to bed and ride my night-owl tendencies deep into the night. This was partially because of the second burst of energy I’d get each night, but also equally because I dreaded starting my day the next day (starting days is hard for me). Now, I can feel that changing. When I told Benjamin that I’ve been surprised that I go to bed at night with an eager anticipation about waking up the next day to savor another morning ritual, he smiled and wasn’t at all surprised. He said that’s how he’s felt about his morning routine for a long time. ♥︎

Routine

One of the lessons I’ve been learning from the season of illness I’m in is how much I need routine. While I’m good at to-do lists and making schedules for myself (which either flicker out or burn me out) I’ve never tried the kind of self-disciplined, steady approach to life that routine offers. To be honest, I crave a fancy-free approach to life, which is both my joy (free floating creativity that fully immerses me) and my biggest failure - because while I’m excitedly (or sometimes maniacally) pursuing whatever I’m focused on in that moment I’m also forgetting to eat, hydrate, stretch, or just generally take a break and relax. This has not served me well and chronic pain, digestive issues and anxiety have plagued me.

Even so, the thought of adding more discipline in my life felt like a jail-sentence. Why would I ever want to give up all of my wandering, captivated, creative freedom for a disciplined routine - especially when such discipline felt so unattainable?

For the past 9 years, my focus has been on nailing down what I do (and don’t) eat while simultaneously hanging on to beliefs that adding more routines in my day-to-day schedule would be oppressively limiting. It took my recent illness pushing me to a place where I could understand that controlling what I eat is no longer enough. Now I’ve been faced with having to carefully moderate portion sizes and maintain regularly scheduled mealtimes in addition to tightening up my safe-foods list to a very small rotation. Because it’s become necessary to cultivate routine around mealtimes, I’ve finally started to see some benefits to routine.

Benjamin (the master of routine) has long known of these benefits. (Don’t get between him and his morning routine, it’s sacred time for him!). Paying more attention to when I need to eat has helped me identify systemic lifestyle problems. For example, as a night owl who loves working deep into the night on the second-wind that comes to me post 10pm, I sleep in late. This throws my eating into disarray because when I pair that sleep schedule with what my new, regulated eating schedule asks of me, I’m not finishing breakfast until 11, or lunch until 4, or dinner until 8… and since I can’t go to bed on a full stomach, I stay up… it’s gotten quite out of hand! None of this was a problem when I ate erratically as I floated through each day.

Perhaps if I lived alone this would be no trouble. But when I’m finishing lunch about the time others are starting to think about making dinner, I’m not present to be part of family activities the way I’d like to be. Then, working on going to bed earlier has necessitated evaluating my wind-down routine in the evenings (which is mostly non-existent). I’ve become more aware of the amount of time I spend in front of screens before bed and I’ve made a concerted effort to read more before bed instead - and to read enjoyable fiction for pleasure instead of just nonfiction to learn. It’s created a cascading Give-a-Mouse-a-Cookie effect where I’m having to build an entirely new structure of daily practices from the ground up due to re-evaluating so many things at once.

On my good days, I can find gratitude for the digestive woes that have come to stay for a while because they’re helping me build a healthier, more mindful life. I’m not only seeing the value of routine, but I’m starting to crave it. Over the years I’ve gained so much skill with knowing what to eat. Now I’m finally learning how to eat, and it’s this ‘how’ that’s exposing all of the other habits in my daily life for what they are: chaos.

There are two lovely friends in my life who excel at self-discipline. For the past few years I’ve watched them and wondered how they do it. In fact, I’ve felt intimidated by them, thinking: “they’re so perfect! I could never measure up to that!” What I failed to see and have only just realized over the last few weeks (as I’ve been receiving even more comments about my food and weight since arriving in Texas and also as I’ve been having lovely correspondence with these friends back home) is that they don’t do it because they’re more pious or have discipline as a superpower, they are doing it for baseline survival so they can feel normal instead of terrible. Just like me with my diet.

While I used to look at my friends and not understand (and feel intimidation) I now see that routine is the best way that they know how to make life feel more manageable and friendly for themselves (and that they’re right!). I was thinking the same way about them that others think about me and my diet: that they were somehow more perfect or that discipline came easy to them. I was wrong. I’m not more perfect than those who comment on my food habits, I’m more desperate - and the byproduct of this desperation is better health. What if my friends are not more perfect than me, they were just more desperate to cope sooner than I was and the byproduct of their desperation manifests as impressive self-discipline in their routine? Just as I feel others don’t really see me when they comment about my diet and my body, I wasn’t fully seeing my friends and how their struggle has shaped them.

Photo of me sipping tea by Katie at seekwalfare. Katie is one of the aforementioned friends who knows how to nurture routine. She also nurtures others with her writing and creative work.

Eating Habits

Our traveling pantry.

This week marks 9 years since I first assessed my eating habits in hopes of solving some long-time symptoms. I eliminated sugar and dairy and was completely confirmed in my suspicions of them when I unexpectedly dropped 50 pounds in the following weeks and stopped feeling the routine dizziness, nausea, and stomach pain to which I was accustomed. It was powerful confirmation that I was on the right track. In the coming years, and later with the help of a nutritionist, I was able to single out a few other sensitivities to take out of my rotation and kept finding more health and balance in my life.

More often than not the refrain that I hear from others who observe how I eat (whether in homes, eating out, or at work) is some variation of ‘oh I could never do that.’ Patiently, I reply that if they’d felt as bad as I did before sorting all this stuff out, they most certainly could. Desperate times can drive us to desperate measures. 

Of course I want to eat all the delicious things that others eat! (It’s especially rough being a baker who doesn’t get along with gluten, dairy, and sugar!) It’s just that I know what the trade off is, and while I’ll cheat with some things some of the time, there are other things I won’t yield on. In some seasons I’ll be fully back on with sugar (because it’s the hardest one of those three to sub for in baking and also it’s delicious). I start by assessing it as I go to see how I feel, but all too often one successful experiment after another encourages me to turn a blind eye which eventually lands me in trouble and puts me back into a cycle of unwellness that requires me to go cold turkey again for a while.

Anyone who meets me during a particularly restrictive cycle might find think me a dietary puritan. What they fail to see, however, is that I don’t do this because I’m pious or have discipline as a superpower. I do it for baseline survival so that I can feel normal instead of terrible. I’m not even aiming to feel great. I’m literally aiming to just not feel awful. This is what makes the commentary on my dietary discipline so tiring.

My weary feelings about this rote dialogue is more acutely felt in the present moment because I am feeling extra poorly and am having to watch what I eat very carefully. I also find myself in a region of the country where the local dietary preferences differ from those in the PNW. My foreign and limited diet draws attention and so I’ve been receiving more comments of late. But, as with any situation with some measure of intensity, it’s a time full of growth, so I’m writing my experiences here to share with you. Stay tuned. ♥︎

Fun Food

Frito pie, pigs in a blanket, green bean bacon wraps (with a brown sugar glaze!), Caramel Delite Girl Scout cookies, guacamole with pan-fried corn tortillas, hard ciders, kombucha and a sandwich cake. These are the indulgent components of a Super Bowl spread for two. I am not one of those two.

While I don’t care a whit about football, I do love an excuse for ritual around food and fellowship and the Super Bowl gives that gift to me each year. We always set aside the day for making some sort of indulgent meal full of what we call ‘fun food.’ Fun Food can be as simple as boxes from the freezer aisle (like frozen pizza for Benjamin and frozen gluten-free corndogs for me) or crockpot-pulled-pork nachos. It’s the kind of rich, indulgent fare that scratches the urge for junk food that we don’t usually make for ourselves.

Yesterday’s menu was decided on by Benjamin and his mom and shared between them. While they feasted on rich delicacies, I had to get creative about turning my regular fare into something a little more fun and exciting for the festive occasion. Since the end of June my digestive system’s been quite ill. With plenty of visits to the doctor over the course of 3 months, I got things stabilized by sticking to my prescribed diet, taking a few supplements as needed, and creating a rather extensive daily self-care routine. While it was harder to stick to specific parts of my diet and self-care once we hit the road, I modified things the best that I could to ensure I stayed on track. My goal was singular: to be healed enough to enjoy traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with family.

Thanksgiving went well, but Christmas (four of them) was much more indulgent and then my birthday followed just a week later. By the start of January my symptoms were returning. Stupidly, I stubbornly ignored them because I was in denial - naturally this only made things worse. In painful desperation I returned strictly to my prescribed diet two weeks ago and I haven’t looked back. Slowly I’m gaining ground, but it’s more of a lifestyle commitment than a quick fix and I absolutely can’t afford to make any compromises (the Denial ship has sailed and I am now fully on board with Acceptance of my situation!).

Still though, the ritual around fun food is a cherished one - so the question became ‘how can I make my prescribed diet feel more festive?’ Here’s what I can eat these days - for every lunch and dinner this is pretty much what I’ve eaten the last two weeks: baked fish, baked sweet potato, and this thing called ‘green composite’ in which I cook the heck out of leafy veggie greens for over an hour then puree them with a couple of other ingredients including a fresh, uncooked herbal kind of green. I use ghee and prescribed salt and herbs to season my food.

Another facet to my digestive woes is that I absolutely cannot go too long between meals under any circumstances or it will start to make me feel ill again. Luckily I’ve found that basic Lara bars (no chocolate) sit well enough with me if I eat them slowly. A bar can get me through an oncoming attack if I’m out running errands and can’t get a meal in my stomach right away. These days I don’t leave the house without a Lara Bar (or two) in my bag. The last component of my eating these days is almond milk. If I’m still feeling a little hungry after a snack, I’ll have a swig of unsweetened almond milk. It’s filling and it hasn’t upset my stomach.

So there was my challenge: how to make a festive, indulgent meal out of those items alone. I’m very pleased to say I totally pulled it off! I started by making a fresh green-composite. While I rotate my cooked veggie greens each time I make it, I’ve only found cilantro palatable for the fresh herbal green (parsley was just way too strong!). But there’s also delicious, tasty, beautiful basil. I love basil so much, I just don’t use it regularly because it’s so much more expensive than cilantro. But for a festive game-day meal, basil was the perfect indulgent component!

So with my fish, sweet-potato, and greens fortified with delicious basil I was left to solve the conundrum of drinks and dessert. For dessert I cut up the four Lara Bars that I can eat into small squares and heaped a bowl full of them. This allowed for the indulgence of a little something sweet, in tiny bite-sized pieces, with a mix of flavors (a surprise in every bite!) and I could just snack on a few (since I certainly didn’t need to eat a whole bar in addition to my meal). It worked out perfectly! It was also a dessert that others would enjoy. Contributing to the spread and sharing with others made me feel more like part of the party.

When we were traveling in southern California last November we pulled into a Whole Foods because I found myself in need of putting something in my stomach right away. While browsing for readymade food and drink that I could travel with I discovered individual-sized date-sweetened almond milk and I was filled with so much excitement and joy! When basically all I can drink is water, herbal tea, unsweetened almond milk, and aloe vera gel (and I’m so, so tired of water and herbal tea from drinking it so much) you can bet that finding a travel-sized serving of creamy almond milk that was made with legal ingredients was such an exciting highlight for me!

Yesterday, in a grocery store in west Texas, I walked by an end-cap full of kombucha and stopped to pick one out for Benjamin. There in the top, right corner was that same brand of Californian almond milk! I bought two of them and added them to my meal like I’d found the crowning glory to my festive feast (which, let’s be honest, I had).

After 6.5 hours of grocery shopping followed by crafting the festive contribution for others that was most certainly not on my diet, I heated up my fish and sweet-potatoes (baked the day before), added my fresh-made basil greens, chopped up my Lara Bars, and selected the most indulgent of the two almond milks and sat down to enjoy the final minutes of the football game.

I’m most delighted to say that I succeeded. The food was savory and delicious, the Lara Bars were a sweet treat, and the creamy golden almond milk was a chai-lover’s dream. I ate all the food on my plate, just a few of the Lara Bar pieces, and about 2/3 of the almond milk, and it all sat pretty decently in my tummy. Truly a massive success and one of which I’m most proud.

In the early weeks of January during my Denial period I kept eating the rich indulgent foods offered to me because I so badly wanted the delicious food and the fellowship that came with it. But it only made things worse. I’m much more satisfied by accepting the current situation and putting my creativity to the test to find a solution that makes me feel both indulgent and part of the fellowship all at the same time. As Benjamin often reminds me, ‘creativity likes constraints.’ It led me to a winning situation where my body, mind and heart were all nurtured and delighted.

The Stirring of Spring Yet to Come

Over the last year, I fell away from my spiritual practices. Anxiety, discouragement and disillusionment crafted a wedge to pull me away from people and practices that were once a source of light, strength and hope. This shadow phase did prove helpful in its own way (as shadow periods tend to do). It helped filter out voices that had grown too loud and influential in my life and got me back to the basic essentials for healthy spiritual practice.

But I sure have missed it - the introspection, celebration, and reflection that marks each seasonal turn of the year. Even the high holidays of Samhain and Yule went by last year with very little ritual, although I did find small ways to commemorate each day. Waking this morning on the eve of Imbolc, I felt the stirring of Spring yet to come. I felt a readiness to reconnect and root myself in spiritual practices again and I’m so grateful for it. My weariness is now replaced with hunger. I was weary and disillusioned with the [harmful] dismantling of systems and communities that I witnessed during the last year. Now I’m hungry to reconnect with the systems and communities who remain after the dismantling.

Several years ago when I first found this lovely, wandering path, I picked up the Llewellyn’s Sabbats Almanac to become better acquainted with each seasonal turn of the year. It was so helpful to me as I began to understand roots and contexts for observations, feelings and practices I’d long been observing already, some of them since childhood. After many months away from spiritual practice I find myself on the road, untethered from the ritual and routine that a home can provide. So once again I turned to the same book to help me step readily into the mindset of the season.

I’m grateful for books that I can download straight to my iPad and start reading right away, even as I’m far away from like-minded folk. I’m grateful that summarized compendiums such as these exist for beginners and regular spiritual practitioners alike. I’m grateful that my appetite for ritual and practice has returned, this time on more assured footing.

Because we are traveling tomorrow on Imbolc, I’m making the most of Imbolc Eve. I’m cleaning out the disorder from my current living space (a guest room) and wrapping up loose ends on some smaller unfinished projects to free up my energy for larger creative tasks that need my attention.

Tomorrow morning I’ll rise early for some straightening, ritual cleaning and small ceremony in our vehicle, our constant, homey companion over these last few months regardless of which guest rooms we frequent intermittently. I’m looking forward to spending that time with her and giving her that gift - she’s so much happier as a beloved, lived-in home than as only a vehicle for transport.

In addition to practical and ritual cleaning, I’m also letting go of unhealthy relationships and opening myself up to wholesome ones based on love, respect, acceptance and mutual trust. In all these ways I’m making way for the coming Spring - for light and life and growth. It feels good to be budding again.

Low Key Optimism for the New Year

The best way to describe my approach to 2019, and the summation of my feels about it, is “low-key optimism.” When 2018 rolled around, I made all sorts of lofty goals and declarations. They were all well-intended, things I value, and reasonable (I thought). But just one month into the year everything fell apart. It wasn’t just my goals that fell to the wayside, all of my thoughts about the future started turning on their head.

By the beginning of February 2018, I was having chronic arm pain in my writing arm. So my plans for sending letters on a regular basis were put on hold. By the end of February 2018, we started asking ourselves the tough questions: what were we doing and why? We weren’t headed quite in the direction that we wanted to be going, our apartment would be ejecting us in some upcoming month yet to be determined for a remodel (and subsequent rent hike), and for the past two years we’d talked about leaving Seattle but hadn’t made any concrete plans. It became apparent that the time had come to make those plans.

The challenge was that we hadn’t settled on where we wanted to move yet. Despite spending two years traveling to neighboring communities to seek out the place where we might like to make our new home, not a one felt like the right fit. So we kept staying in Seattle. But by the first quarter of 2018, I was asking: “if not now, then when?” We’d been looking for two years without a lead and yet we were ready to move on, so where did that leave us?

We decided the time had come to leave anyway. So we made plans to go on a quest to learn more about what our future path could look like. As ideas began to emerge it was decided that we would hit the open road and put our belongings into storage, taking only what we needed for extended travel. From March through October we worked on executing a plan that often unfolded itself as we went, with plenty of twists we couldn’t have anticipated.

By May, after 2 months of research and discussion, we’d bought a vehicle and secured a storage unit. By June we’d moved into our storage unit and secured temporary housing to bridge the gap between our terminated lease and our scheduled departure. We began demolition on our vehicle’s interior and over the course of the next few months, Benjamin crafted a beautiful buildout using what we already had: a handsaw, a jigsaw, and a drill. He did all of the work himself, curbside, in whatever parallel parking spot he could find in the neighborhood.

On the first weekend in August we took our vehicle out for her first overnight. We back-country camped in the North Cascades. She had a floor installed by then, but no walls, ceiling, or built-in storage. That trip helped us problem-solve not only ideas for the rest of the buildout, but also safety and preparedness.

By the time September rolled around we were entering our final stages of preparing for our long travels. We were tying up all manner of loose ends and finishing up all the details of our buildout and prep. One night we pulled an almost-all-nighter as we sewed all of the curtains we’d need for privacy in our vehicle. The first season of Queer Eye kept us cheerful and awake as we worked into the night.

On October 21, eight months after our initial assessment and decision to leave the city, we turned in the keys to our micro-unit, dropped the last stuff off at the storage unit, put our plants in foster-care with friends and left the city with a general direction in mind but no idea where we’d stop to sleep for the night.

Since then we’ve traveled through six states and seen a long list of beautiful natural wonders. We’ve enjoyed even more time with family than we’d originally planned or hoped for, with more to come. We’ve celebrated holidays with friends and family and have both reconnected with each other’s families for the first time in a few years. We’re indulging in creative problem-solving projects that have presented themselves to us that were inaccessible to us in Seattle (helping out on our families’ properties and a few refurbishing projects Benjamin’s taken on to name a couple). We’re savoring a winter interspersed with warmer days and lots of sunlight and for the first time in years we’re entering the new year without low-key seasonal depression.

But all of these blessings we’ve savored these last couple of months came at a cost. Not only did we carefully plan, work really hard, and save our finances for a full year to make all of this possible, but we also endured terrible bouts of debilitating anxiety, fear, and stress. (I say we, because when those things engage with me and my brain, it most definitely affects both of us). It was a very difficult year for me. All of the change, the unknowns and unanswerable questions, the living on faith, the lack of routine, the unknowns (yes, they’re worth mentioning twice), the necessary and ongoing changing of plans, moving out of two apartments in the span of four months… well, it was a lot. And I didn’t handle it well at all. It got to me so deeply that I spent July-October working with my doctor on restoring balance to my body, which was messed up with stress related illness. I’m still dealing with that fallout now as I enter the new year and currently find myself relapsing with symptoms.

There’s no way I could have predicted any of that. I never dreamed I’d leave Seattle without a concrete plan for my future next-steps. I never dreamed of all the change and uncertainty that would come my way during the year. I couldn’t have predicted all of the stress and stress-related illness that would manifest for me and throw me into the necessary reality of being diligently focused on long-term healing. Through it all I couldn’t find my voice to write about any of it. Everything in my life felt like a tossed salad and I had no perspective whatsoever. It was an all-consuming year of life transition that I never saw coming until I was in it but then found myself actively planning for on an ongoing basis.

It was a messy, painful, empowering, frightening, exciting, exhausting, hopeful year and it was nothing at all like what I expected for 2018 as I entered into the year last January.

So this year, I’m entering 2019 exhausted, relieved, and grateful. I don’t have the gall to make even one plan for this year because there is too much uncertainty afoot. We’ll be on the road through March? Or June? We don’t really know. We’re figuring things out as we go. We’ll settle in a new home that’s yet to be determined by this summer perhaps? Maybe? We’ll live as frugally as we can on the savings we have and find work to earn more as we need to and trust that we’ll have what we need when we need it. 2019 is all about flexibility and faith.

So that’s why I have low-key optimism. We’re birthing something really exciting. There’s no way we’ll remain unchanged after all of the work we put into shifting things in 2018. We are in the process of being transformed and we’re still waiting to find out what that might look like on the other side. I’m hopeful and optimistic about what’s to come, but I don’t really have an idea of what it might be. So I’m staying low-key, not over-thinking or over-planning anything and learning how to lean in and let it be. It’s a valuable life-lesson for this gal who likes to over-control everything, have a plan, and have all the answers. Perhaps it’s precisely because I’ve always been wound up tight in those areas that these life lessons found me and are teaching me to live with more uncertainty and ease.

This year, in all honesty, my hope is for peace, joy, and health. Because after a year like 2018 where I was full of unrest, fear, and subsequently waning health… my priorities have majorly shifted away from task-oriented goals or resolutions. In that vein, my focuses for the year will be on gentle exercise, art, baking, and writing. Through exercise I will treat my body tenderly and compassionately with movement. With my art I will prioritize my creative self to live my greatest dream which is to grow as an artist. Baking, especially at holidays, is a self-care ritual for me that soothes my mental-health. Writing helps me make sense of the world and has lately also been integral to practicing gratitude.

Even as I’m grateful for all that 2018 taught me, I’m so grateful to have it fully behind me. i’m ready to watch 2019 unfold with a tempered hope. May each of you reading this also find peace, joy, health and hope in the new year, in whatever ways those things manifest for you.

We celebrated Samhain with shrimp soup and a lovely fire.

Apologies

I’m confessing that despite all of my resolve to stay out of trouble during the holidays that I’ve already stepped in it with my big mouth.

I want to be a person of love who asks questions instead of making assumptions. Who seeks to be open instead of quick to judge. Who listens more than speaks (sometimes that’s an especially hard one for me, especially when I have big feels, whether excited to upset).

Mostly it’s all gone well the last couple of days. A few moments felt sticky, but we got through them just fine. And then this evening I popped off a single, sassy, sarcastic remark. It was just a few words long and we moved past it without much further talk and everyone really enjoyed the evening. There was a lot of laughter and fun.

I didn’t think a at all about what I’d said until I fell into bed just now, exhausted from consecutive late nights of visiting. I began to feel the unease rising in me. I thought of all the times I felt uncomfortable today when we inched too close to some topic where there were opposing viewpoints and beliefs. Today I mostly listened and inwardly rejoiced when someone made a good point that helped restore some balance without wavering in conviction and I waited for each wave to pass. But then I replayed how I so ungraciously popped off and felt sick in my stomach.

So I rolled over and pulled out my phone to draft a sincere letter of apology on my notes app in the dark. Writing the letter allowed me to start thinking through what I’d like to say to this person tomorrow, so that I can do it genuinely and graciously without stumbling over my words. It gave me a chance to consider whether I need to apologize to the others who were present (ie: everyone) and why or why not. And it helped me understand why I popped off in the first place.

The truth is that I’ve spent my life feeling tender about my gender within my family and I’ve mostly felt completely unseen in these moments of frustration/anger/resentment/inner-struggle and also sometimes ganged up on. My experiences, and therefore my self, feel unseen because any protests from childhood (and beyond) seem to fall on deaf ears. I hate being treated differently because I’m a girl and I am *so* frustrated by those in my life who can’t see it and continue to perpetuate gender stereotypes.

So something was said that stirred all this up (I have no idea what it was by now, and it’s not important anyway) and I popped off with a truly unhelpful (and worse, divisive and attacking) comment. I’m super not proud of it, and was rather ill over it when it resurfaced in my mind. I may not always feel understood by this group of folks, but I love them dearly. And the thought of being party to inflicting harm on them because my mouth popped off while fueled by my feels... well, I hate that.

So my resolutions for tomorrow include the following:

• Apologize privately and individually at an early opportunity. - I decided that private, individual apologies were the way to go because then I can tailor each apology to the individual and seek to create more connection that way.

• Go for a long walk at some time during the day to get out, clear my head, diffuse my fuse, stretch my body, and create space for mental and physical self-care.

And that’s about it. It’s a short list and neither thing is difficult. Although apologies can sometimes feel uncomfortable, I need not overthink it. I need only 60-90 seconds of uninterrupted time with each person to say that I see them and that I also see how my words were harsh and how sorry I am for that. It’s a simple list, but it will make all the difference in both the energy within this space that we share and in my ability to keep myself appropriately on track with my own well-being and subsequent behavior.

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This squirrel is smiling and enjoying his Thanksgiving dinner because he doesn’t have to navigate controversial topics when they accidentally come up or deal with the ramifications of running his mouth. - Photo by Benjamin.

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A Traveling Sick Day

Photo courtesy of Benjamin.

In March through October, as we were planning for our travels, I knew that the time would come when one of us would be sick while traveling. At the very least, autumn and winter usually bring at least one seasonal cold to our home. I’m glad I knew to expect it so that I could file it in my mind as part of the natural rhythms of living life instead of seeing it as an inconvenience, disappointment, or interruption to our travels.

On the tail-end of Day 12 I felt the foreboding feeling of the pre-symptoms of a cold. Sure enough, Day 13 rolled in with a sore, scratchy, swollen throat and drainage.

Of course I’d prefer if it hadn’t happened during the one week I’d been anticipating more than any other week during Phase 1 of our travels. But, in truth, as I write this I’m still in bed where I’m warm and cozy, it’s rainy and windy outside (so I’d be indoors today anyway), and if I sit up I can see the ocean from my bed, which is heaven.

The ocean. It was my first request as we started planning our itinerary: one week on the Washington coast. It’s been too long since I’ve been here, and even then those visits have only been stop-offs as we drove through. This is my first time to sit and soak it up over a period of days.

I love the ocean. We arrived just before nightfall last night and I headed straight out onto the beach with Pepper. I stood and watched the water and cried. It felt like such a relief to finally be back with it. Pepper chased billowy balls of golden foam as it blew across the wet sand and he sniffed at piles of bullwhip kelp. The fog hung low over the foothills lining the shore and the sea stacks in the water. Everything felt gray except for the luminous foam pushed ashore by the rolling waves. Pepper and I ran along the beach and for one brief glorious moment, I released him from the confines of his leash and he flew across the landscape with the youthful exuberance of a pup.

The Pacific Ocean is my favorite. It’s raw and wild and powerful and it frightens me in a way that fuels my love and respect for it all the more. It stretches from Hawaii and my treasured memories there to the Pacific Northwest that I call home, tying the two together.

So here I lay, hot tea beside me, blankets piled high. I’m taking a resting day to give my cold the best chance I can to move through without too much fuss. I’m grateful for the cooperation of the weather so that I don’t feel like I should be up and out and ‘doing something.’ A rainy, cloudy, wet and windy day is the perfect day to curl up with a book or take a nap, so I’ll take advantage of the serendipitous alignment of my body’s request for rest and the hibernation-conducive weather we’re having.

As I lay here I can hear the roar of the ocean not far behind me, and the rain on the roof above. If I’m going to be sick, it’s not a bad way to wait it out.

- - -

Postscript:

As I finished writing this, I received notice that it was time for my morning constitutional. This meant digging out pants, coat, and damp sand-covered shoes and walking a short distance in the cold rain and wind (20-30mph) to a porta-potty where I proceeded to have an experience that had the germaphobe in me low-key-asking, “Am I going to die?” Then walking back in the aforementioned weather to declothe, hand-sanitize and get back in bed.

So, in an effort to keep it real... yes, being in a warm bed just a stones throw from the ocean is a dream come true. But being sick is never fun no matter how you slice it and especially on a sick-day it sure would be nice to stay pantsless and in my houseshoes and savor the comfort of a clean, private bathroom instead of dressing to brave the elements and the germs. So I’m counting my blessings and savoring the heck out of them. But I’m not only going to paint a rosy-picture for y’all, because that would be so inauthentic to our lived experience. :)

A Missive From the Road

This past week we shared our salt-watered, forested neighborhood with a pair of nesting bald eagles, a barred owl, an American mink, a gray squirrel, a Douglas squirrel, large red slugs, garden slugs, a chatty frog and a wide array of birds (for the sake of my own personal record-keeping they were: pacific wren, brown creeper, dark-eyed junco, gulls, Brandt’s and double-breasted cormorants, and possibly a great blue heron which was scared off by an incoming dog).

We’ve heard the squirrels chatter, the eagles chirp, the frog croak, and the owl hoot and we watched the birds flit about, the squirrels fuss and the slugs munch. We’ve enjoyed the company of our neighbors.

We’ve stayed warmer this week than last since we’re close to the water and away from the mountains. But it’s been cloudy and rainy much of the time. Although it’s been no trouble and is just what we expected, we are longing to head south and savor the sunshine we know is coming!

In addition to all this loveliness, just to keep it real and paint a full picture, here’s the other side.

Based on some inquiries we’ve received, I think some expect that this whole ‘getting back to nature thing’ is one big vacation. But the truth is that it was a tremendous amount of work to prepare for (both practically and emotionally) and it takes work to maintain daily (where will we sleep each night? Where will we buy our next round of groceries or find a bathroom?) because basic activities of daily living are always changing with the weather and as we move from one place to the next.

On top of that, there’s the baggage. My beloved pieces of furniture, books and mementos? I put those in storage for some hoped-for future time. But my brain? I can’t put that in storage. It comes with me and it brings all its baggage.

I’ve been losing sleep due to worry and stress about a matter yet to be resolved back in the city that keeps me preoccupied. I’ve also had vivid and strange dreams every single night since we left. Nothing in my life is actually calamitous, these are just things my brain does when something is worrying it.

So rather than a vacation, it’s better described as a lifestyle change. We’ve traded human neighbors for animal ones, and just like our old neighbors, our new ones are sometimes funny, sometimes stressed, and sometimes shocking (I’m looking at you, slugs!). We’ve traded one kind of survival for another. In the city we earned money to have food and shelter. Now we conserve money and find shelter (or rather a new place to set up camp) and cook as the weather permits.

We still don’t find as much time as we’d like for creative pursuits (although we do find more than we did before) and we still putter around doing chores as a means of procrastinating and avoiding the difficulty of sitting down and beginning creative work. We still struggle with motivation and mental blocks and mental stress.

So, we’re working hard to maintain our routines from before and adapt them to our new life. We’re establishing new routines and holding each other accountable to taking care of ourselves and each other. There’s still plenty of additional self-care routines that I could be doing that I haven’t made space for yet. So it’s all a work in progress.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that a move is a move, whether you move to a new apartment or move into your vehicle. Sure, there’s less stuff that needs to be sorted or arranged, but it still must all be stored and organized and it takes a while to figure out what systems work and which ones don’t, just like in any new home.

So there it is in a nutshell. Overall, I can say that I am less stressed. Just being closer to trees and water has helped with that. It’s also helped to be distracted with the daily survival routine. Things that I might let slide at home (hello dishes!) are essential now. Dishes must be washed after each meal. Food must be made before it spoils in the cooler. I’m eating more regularly and healthfully and snacking less and doing chores regularly because there’s no other option. This infusion of discipline is so good for me because it keeps my mental chatter at bay. But the chatter is still there and I’m working on it. You can put your stuff in storage, but you can’t leave your brain behind. All of that stuff comes with you. 💛

The Third F

I spent most of the day in bed yesterday, and I didn’t really understand why. I just knew I had a billion things to do and I felt weighted down and glued to my bed. I sensed that if I stayed still and warm and cozy enough that I would be okay.

This week I’ve been operating with a Master List that I made on my phone and shared with Benjamin. It has all of the many tasks that must be done before we leave and they are broken down and prioritized by day. It’s honestly the only reason anything has gotten done this week. My brain would be utter jelly without it!

But despite having a Master List to guide me through every single step of each day and help me maintain some sense of direction, I couldn’t get out of bed yesterday.

I admit I’ve been lingering in bed longer and longer each day these last couple of weeks. In part, I’m exhausted. We’ve been working non-stop to wrap up our lives here and I’m worn thin. Dinners and tea dates have been sprinkled throughout the last few weeks as we savor dear friendships and say our goodbyes (for now) and they have been life rafts of normalcy and respite for me. These scheduled, carved out moments with friends gave me a chance to sit and eat a real meal and really connect with people. Even though it’s the kind of simple ritual that my days with Benjamin are usually made of, he and I haven’t had those luxuries together for too long. We eat on the go, work evenings and weekends, and we each go to our separate corners to divide and conquer the tasks at hand. I miss him. I miss our casual, normal, average time together. And I miss real, nourishing meals.

So I’ve been lingering in bed a little longer each day the last couple of weeks. It’s felt like reasonable self-care to let myself rest. But yesterday was different. I felt weighted to my bed; glued down and in need of it. Once afternoon rolled around and Benjamin suggested I get out of bed, I felt myself get heavier. It felt physically impossible to move. Furthermore, I didn’t want to. It wasn’t exhaustion or avoidance or procrastination. It wasn’t depression or overwhelm. (All the reasons I’m used to lingering in bed). Instead I felt fine. Content even.

Finally, around 2, I took to the internet to try to understand what was going on and I realized it was anxiety all along! Throughout my life my anxiety has manifested in a myriad of physical ways. Although these ways have changed and shifted throughout the years, there’s always been physical symptoms. I wasn’t tracking this ‘non-symptom’ of seemingly ‘feeling fine’ as any kind of anxiety.

Everything came into focus when I found this article and was reminded of the third F. I’m well acquainted with Fight and Flight, but I always forget about Freeze. Recognizing myself in the words on the screen, I realized how deeply I’d disconnected from my body as I suddenly began to reconnect and felt the physical sensations of anxiety start strongly prickling through my body. This led to a quick rise of panic in my throat and tears started to spill over. It all came on so suddenly that at first I felt it might overtake me. It felt scary. But as the initial rush began to subside, I settled back into the anxious physical feelings I’m so familiar with and leaned into deeper understanding.

The reconnection to myself helped me realize frankly that I’m scared of the next few days. I realized that the reason I feel lonely isn’t because Benjamin hasn’t been a full partner in this whole endeavor (he has) but because I’m scared. I’m anxious because I’m scared. The list isn’t helping because overwhelm isn’t the problem. It’s just plain old fear about leaving everything behind and taking leaps of faith in ways we never have before.

Understanding the root of why I felt frozen and why I felt alone gave me the breakthrough I needed to mobilize again. Because although fear and anxiety are unpleasant, they are also familiar. I’ve spent years working to develop tools and resources to make peace with this anxiety-companion of mine, honor its requests for support, and nurture myself.

Because I associate being stuck in bed with feeling bad, sad, or stressed, I didn’t know that I could both feel fine and also stuck at the same time. Once I understood what was going on and got past the initial scary feeling of all of the anxiety rushing over me all at once, I was able to get out of bed and take out the trash and make some food and feel confident that I had the tools to take care of myself. Simply gaining self-awareness about what was really going on freed me to get unstuck.

The third F is the one I most often turn to but also the one I most often forget about.

So Long, Seattle

Last night at a local drawing meet-up, I knew I wanted to contemplate our upcoming trip by drawing the vehicle that will be our home for the next many months. After nearly 8 years, we’re leaving Seattle, not because there’s somewhere else we want to be more (if so, it would be easy because we’d just go there to that place and continue our daily lives), but because it just hasn’t been working out with Seattle for the last couple of years or so. As I begin the descent into the backside of my mid-thirties I can no longer ignore that the life that I dream of (although modest) is completely beyond my reach here in the city. And after some discouraging turns, we just don’t want to keep building a life here.

When we arrived in January of 2011, we were filled with optimism and excitement. We drove in from the south on I-5 with ‘Hello Seattle’ (by Owl City) playing on the radio. Seattle was the place of my dreams and I was so in love. Since then, Seattle has been everything we hoped for and more. But the challenge of rising rents has also been pressing in and we’ve watched the culture of one of our favorite neighborhoods change, and even turn violent. Over the last few years we’ve felt ourselves letting go and have watched doors close as city ‘progress’ displaced us once, then twice from our homes.

As I drew, I thought through many common break-up phrases and considered which ones might be appropriate for my parting with this city that I once loved deeply, but which also increasingly disappoints me again and again:

Seattle, we need to talk.

Where is this going?

I can’t do this anymore.

It’s not you, it’s me? or It’s not me, it’s you! - In truth, Seattle, it’s both of us. Rampant growth and development at the expense of harming and/or displacing local communities? That’s you. Wanting different things out of life now that I’m moving into the backside of my thirties? That’s me. I could go back and forth with the ‘it’s you, it’s me’ stuff, but what it comes down to is that we just aren’t compatible anymore. You aren’t who I fell in love with. And to be honest, I feel like I’ve put in the bulk of the work at trying to make things work out in this relationship. Living here has been one big compromise (studio apartments, no yard for a garden or our dog), and until now it’s been worth it. But it’s never enough, you keep asking for more, and I’ve reached my limit (I really can’t go any smaller than the space I’m living in now, Seattle. I’ve downsized all I can).

So this isn’t working and I’m not willing to do what it takes to make it work anymore.

I just need some time to think about things. I need some space. So I’m hitting the open road to clear my head and re-evaluate. I’ll be back in the Spring for my stuff, and with any luck to move into a hoped-for co-housing situation with some friends. Seattle, if it works out between us it will be because of the generosity, friendship, and community that we’ve found here, not because you’ve changed your ways. Actually, it’s always been because of the generosity of community that we’ve found a home here as long as we have.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s so much that’s still lovely about you and I wouldn’t mind spending more time together. But when we return next Spring, it won’t be because of you. It will be because of the supportive community that we’ve carved out here that we love. Despite the challenges you pose to my family, my friends, and my neighbors, community continues to flourish and thrive here. Seattle, if it works out between us, it will be because of them. Until then, so long.

Imagination

When I was a kid laying in bed at night, waiting to fall asleep, I would often become aware of my heartbeat. This reminder of mortality always frightened me and so I’d often go find my mom and ask her to feel my heartbeat and reassure me that I was safe and healthy. She would, but then I’d want to feel hers and was always alarmed that hers was slower than mine. Each time she’d explain that it’s normal for kids and grownups to have different heart rates, but I was certain that either she or I wouldn’t make it through the night because either mine was too fast or hers was too slow.

I guess I stopped noticing my heartbeat at some point. But last night as I lay awake unable to fall asleep and trying to quiet my mind, I noticed it again. I thought back to my fearful feelings as a kid and I thought again of mortality. This time I didn’t worry about my own death, I thought of Benjamin: the worst loss of all.

Last week I was contemplating imagination. I read an interesting snippet about why humans have imagination and how it contributes to our survival. The writer suggested that imagination is what allowed early humans to, for example, pass a cave and imagine it filled with the warm glow of a campfire and kin. Now, that memory is tucked away for when shelter is needed come winter. Next, the passerby might imagine discovering a bear deep inside the cave. Now the person is better prepared to take preventative measures when seeking shelter or evasive maneuvers if in danger.

Last night, for the first time, I followed my heartbeat thoughts without letting them turn to fear. I imagined how I would survive if I found myself suddenly alone in our currently tumultuous season of life. I considered where I would find support and help and how I would move through everything that’s coming up these next few months. With each turn of thought I checked in to see if I was getting anxious and needed to abandon my thought process. But consistently, I kept finding comfort in envisioning survival, resiliency, and my supportive community, and so I followed the thoughts until I could fully envision a path forward and then I fell asleep.

My imagination often takes me to dark and scary places. But I’m learning how to turn those thoughts around and use my imagination to nurture resilience instead of fear.

Chaos & Panic

I went to my first Creative Mornings gathering today and the topic was Chaos. I froze when I saw the question on my name tag. I wanted to write something bold or creative, but ‘panic’ was honestly all I could come up with.

My world’s been turned upside down this year. Although I chose all of it, I sure didn’t see it coming. Benjamin and I have been talking for a couple of years about someday leaving the city. Living here has been such a rich experience, but it’s not a place we can build the future we dream of.

But leaving has always been somewhere in the distant future. It’s perpetually been 1-2 years away. So when we sat down in February and had the same old conversation we’d already had so many times about ‘what next and when’ it honestly surprised me that the time had come.

See, I’d always thought we’d have everything figured out by the time we left. That we’d know where we were heading next and what we’d be doing there. Instead, the time to leave became real and necessary before the next pieces fell into place. So we decided to do some extended travel during that in-between time. We’ve been saving for some time for this trip, I just thought it would be next year. When it became apparent it was happening this autumn instead, I felt unprepared.

Despite years of conversations and planning, the fear, uncertainty, and grief in this shift gripped me hard. During the height of the transitional turmoil (through May and June) when we were finalizing all of the details, my anxiety skyrocketed. I still can’t put words to it although heaven knows I’ve tried. I’m still very much in recovery and management and working diligently to avoid a relapse so as to be physically and emotionally ready for leaving the city in five weeks time and then traveling for 2-4 months.

People ask if I’m excited about our trip. Yes, I’m excited about seeing wondrous things, getting out of the city and spending time in forests and oceans, and seeing friends and family. But right now I’m mostly just focused on survival: on all the loose ends and projects that need to be tied up before we can go, and on diligent self-care that keeps me grounded during this time of upheaval.

So yeah, there was really truly only one pressing answer to the question on my name tag because it’s been the story of my summer. I’m Hilary. My life feels like a tossed salad. And when I’m tossed into chaos, I will panic. But I’m also working hard to manage that. And this morning’s awesome talk had a lot of really helpful, relevant, and encouraging stuff to share about navigating chaos. It couldn’t have come at a better time.