Did I Ever Tell You About That Time?

Hey, did I ever tell you about that time that I had a job I really hated deep down into the very middlest parts of me, and then I had to leave that job on stress leave, because it was so awful that it broke my brain, and then when I got a little bit better I went to work at a shoe store, and I really loved selling shoes, because shoes are fantastic, but then I had to leave that shoe store job a week ago because working from home has turned into doing what I love full time?

Yeah, that was awesome.

I'm Cranky AND Blessed. I Just Thought You Should Know.

I'm feeling kind of cranky, but I'm also in the mood to write, so here I am both being cranky and writing.

Aren't you lucky you stopped by?

I am feeling all foot stompy, because haven't been in the mood to do anything over the last week or two. I want to just put everything down and go on an extended vacation where I just sit somewhere warm and maybe go for a few walks but feel absolutely no obligation to take in culture or learn anything new or accomplish a single task. I want to wave a big old middle finger at anyone who would even say hello to me, because that hello comes with an expectation that I will say hello, and even that amount of obligation feels like you're rubbing my fur backwards.

I'm irritable.

While I'm irritable tonight, though, I haven't been irritable 100% of the time lately, and I've been thinking about how I have been writing all of this serious material about my newish sobriety and the kid-free kerfuffle thing and anxiety and seasonal depression, and I haven't been writing about how freaking excellent so much of my life is.

I write about how hard sobriety is, but I haven't talked at length about how much I feel like embracing my sober life and cover it in slobbery dog kisses, because I like more things and enjoy people more and remember the things I've done and don't feel hungover all the time that I'm not drunk.

I went on about how horrible some people can be to those of us kid-free types with their assumptions about everyone wanting and needing children, but I didn't talk about all of the wonderful people who stood up and said Me, too and thanked me for creating a space for them and shared their experiences and offered their support.

I talked about how I suffer from anxiety and have some bandaid ways for dealing with the panic that it can bring on, but I didn't talk about the real gift of which anxiety is a side effect, which is a heightened sensitivity to my environment and the people in it that allows me to experience and take in my environment at a level that lends to my deepening understanding of myself and the world around me and absolutely founds my creativity.

I can't think of something awesome about seasonal depression. Depression as a seasonal affliction can suck it.

I have stumbled and fumbled my way into a life that allows me to eat and sleep regularly under a roof of my choosing with a life partner of my choosing in a culture that doesn't outrightly count me as chattel, and beyond that I have the great fortune of seeking others of my kind and creating art and words and communities through an incredible set of technologies that I never dreamed possible as an isolated child.

I really do feel this fantastic sense of being blessed somehow, of having fallen into an incredible pocket filled with chance and good luck, especially now that I am sober enough to see it all.

By all of the above, I mean to say that MY LIFE IS GOOD. I just forget to talk about how my life is good, because once I explain all the dark stuff to myself here on the internet, I tend to go out into the world or eat good food or have a nice nap and feel good about stuff, because I worked it out here.

And, by all of the above, I also mean to say that I WANT TO WRITE ABOUT THE GOOD STUFF MORE OFTEN, because there is a lot of good stuff, and it's worth writing down.

So, I may be cranky lately, but I am also blessed and happy, and I think it's worthwhile to make some noise about both sides of the coin.

And you? How's your crankiness? Well-tainted with the happy, I hope.

I Nearly Became A Giant, Yellow Sun To Beat Back The Winter Depression

Late February/early March has me questioning my sanity every year. I managed my seasonal depression exceptionally well this winter, especially if you take into consideration that it's the first winter of my adult life that I have had to face it sober, and I almost had myself convinced that I going to make it through to late spring without having to consider hiding all the kitchen knives.

I was such a fool.

About a week ago, the sadness, the deep and terrible sadness that eats joy for breakfast and hates baby animals, started to creep in. It was gaining a pretty strong puchase, too, convincing me that I was becoming really very much too fat to leave the house and that the Palinode was feeling unhappily trapped by marriage to his uninspired lump of a spouse and that, seeing as my life is nearly half over, I should give up vain pursuits like plucking my chin hair and shaving the hobbit fur off my disgusting feet.

This hostile psychological takeover wasn't sitting well with me, so I decided that NO WAY WAS MARCH GOING TO EAT MY BRAIN, and I decided to expose myself to rainbow toe socks! and cherry-scented nail polish!



My socks felt cozy and warm , and the nail polish smelled sweet, but I still found myself tearing up at the thought that children grow older and we all die. I obviously needed more of an injection of happiness than rainbow toe socks and and cherry-scented nail polish were bringing me.

This is when my brain took a sharp left turn and screamed WE SHOULD GO BUY SOME YELLOW BRISTLE BOARD AND DRESS UP LIKE A GIANT SUN AND TAKE OUR PICTURE WITH STRANGERS ON THE STREET.

To which I replied SHUT UP.

If it hadn't been below -30°C outside, and if I hadn't been paranoid about handing off my iPhone to strangers to take pictures, and if you lived in Regina, Saskatchewan, you might have seen me dancing up and down 11th Avenue in a giant sun costume acting out THE HAPPY-HAPPY-JOY-JOY-THAT-CAN-BE-OURS-EVEN-IF-WE-HAVE-TO-DRESS-UP-LIKE-GIANT-YELLOW-SUNS-AND-DANCE-ON-THE-STREET DANCE.



This being the first sober February/March of my adult life, I am learning a few things:

1. My past winter depressions were not solely due to my drinking, although it likely did contribute.
2. Drinking cut out a lot of anxiety for me, which is probably why I did it so much.
3. Sobriety can be just as fucked up as being liquored out of my gourd.

I did not end up dressing like a giant yellow sun, though, even though it seemed like one of my most brilliant ideas ever in the history of my ideas at the time. Instead, I trudged home and spent the rest of the afternoon wiggling my be-socked toes together and sniffing my cherry-scented nail polish. There may have been some rocking. And then I ate a lot of potatoes with a chocolate ice cream chaser.

Looking back, I do kind of regret not jumping on my giant yellow sun bandwagon of one, but my discovery of this new reflex to defend my joy has stuck with me. This being present in my own life thing is powerful stuff.

Sober me apparently believes in my right to happiness, and

sober me has the chutzpah to be my own little army of one against the fearsome depression, and

sober me is a bit of a freak with a brain that refers to US and WE when it's running its little internal monologues, but WE LIKE IT THAT WAY.

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PS.  Check out my daily Phoneography pic. It's the thing I do daily.

Worrying The Past

Sometimes I lie awake at night, on nights just like tonight, and I try to draw the lines down from my childhood to where I lie in bed wondering about how I got here to this place.

I am so much happier, so much more well-adjusted than I once was, so much more hopeful and able to dream than at any other point in my life, but there is an urgency that starts ticking away now in the wee hours, an urgency that is stuck to my waxing sense of mortality and the speed of time, and I feel a greater and greater need to make these connections. How did I get here from there? Why were more than twenty-five years so unhappy? Am I merely on a honeymoon with middle age? Will I find myself there again for another twenty-five, dark and foundering?

I am at the happiest point to date in my life at thirty-eight, and yet I lie awake worried that the past will find me. It will point me out and say This Is Not The Real You.

There were, of course, happy moments in my childhood, but most of them seem lumped into the time before I was five. After that, a deep and keening sadness crept in, as though I were mourning the passage of all things, because all things were always passing. I lay awake at night then, too, but filled with a pain I couldn't shake, and I would panic silent scream into my pillow, because being alive was inescapable. There was nowhere to go with what I felt.

That wasn't all there was, of course. There were sprinklers on the lawn and digging toes into the beach sand in summer and hollowed out snow forts in winter and getting lost inside books, but all of it was touched with the sad and terribly anxious undercurrent that none of this was mine, that I did not belong here.

And now I am happy, and yet here I sit in the wee hours of a Wednesday morning trying to draw lines down from then to now. How did I come to be here? Will I somehow be made to go back there? I worry that I am out on a day pass. I think that if I can find another way to look at my history, if I can just tilt it a bit to the left and change my perspective, I will be able to shake more happiness out of it, and that maybe, if I squint hard enough, I will finally fix the records and be granted release.