You're tired of Covid-19 and all the restrictions, I get it.

 I'll state it again. I get that you're tired of Covid-19 and all the restrictions. I get that you want to go back to life like it was before Covid-19 showed up. I get that you feel stifled with the mask rules and the social distancing. It's restrictive and unpleasant. I can empathize with your discontent and ire.

You do understand, however, that these rules, restrictions, and such like are keeping people like me safe? I'm not the only immuno-compromised person out there. There's a lot of us. The ages range from tiny little newborn babies to elderly nursing home residents. You may think only of the extremes for whom these restrictions are keeping safe but there's plenty of us who are in that in between age group who appreciate your keeping us safe as well.

There's talk of a vaccine. Rumors are its going to go to the most vulnerable populations first. I don't believe our government is that effective. I think it's going to go to the people that it is most profitable to send it to first. I mean, let's look at how testing kits went out way back at the beginning of this. If we're lucky and we keep playing ball, we might see the vaccine available to 70 to 80 percent of the population by next JUNE. 

The trick here is to hold the line. It's not the doctors and hospital workers who are on the front line of keeping this pandemic under control in our individual towns and homes. It is us, the famous We the People. I know you're tired and this is very stressful. It's been very tiring and stressful for those of us who have been trapped in our homes since this began. It's been very tiring and stressful for everyone. We, however, are strong enough together when we work together to survive this.

Please, work together. Please stick with the mask rules, social distancing, and other rules that come along so that we can get through this mess faster. Because the more we work together, the quicker we can find our way out of this mess.

Keep your shield up and push forward. In this case, your shield is your mask. We can do this.

Holiday To Do List

 Just a post as a reminder of the stuff I have to get done over the next few weeks:

• Finish Snuggle Bug's Socks
• Make Cuddle Bear's Bells
  
• Fix Beloved's satchel
• Make soap to go with MiL's wash cloth
  
• Bake or acquire cookies for FiL
• Clean up living room to decorate
• Put up yule tree
• Put up stockings for kids
• Fill the 12 days of Yule gift boxs w/ trinkets & goodies for kids
• Pick out Yule projects to do for 13 days of yule
• Repot african violet
• Repot rando orchid
• Make Apple Pie Moonshine
  
• Get picture frames for school pics
• Finish NaNoWriMo project no. 3

Ramblings

 Last night was another bad night. I was barely functional when I woke up this morning. I stumbled around trying to do things for a few hours and then I took a nap. Now I sit here feeling a profound sense of ennui and questioning the point to existence. To say the least, the nap wasn't very helpful. I'm trying to find some spark of the 'holiday' spirit or something that could be mistaken for it by the unaware. I've got nothing. 

I hate the christmas music. I hate christmas. I hate the forced cheerfulness of this damn time of year. I hate the fact that I have a big ol' stack of trauma memories that pop up between now and the middle of February. I feel guilty for being like this. I feel like there's something wrong with me because of my loathing of this season. 

Maybe it's because during the holidays, money was tighter than usual and my parents were more prone to lash out due to it. Maybe it's because during the holidays, I was always hoping for that 'holiday miracle' which turned a dysfunctional family into a 'normal' family for at least one day. It doesn't work that way, Hallmark lies. Maybe it's because when I was brought to see Santa (which happened once), I asked that my family be nice to each other for christmas. I'm pretty sure that was the reason why we went only once, because it raised some eyebrows. 

Maybe it's because during the holidays, my brothers and I watched my mom prepare tons of food for other people but we got berated for being greedy when we asked for some, mind you there wasn't much to go around for a while but mom did her army of cookies for the rest of the family instead of baking bread or something for our own household when we were short on food. I asked her why she did it and she answered that it was because we didn't have the money to give gifts to people outside of our household so we HAD to make the cookies. If she decided that we were particularly well behaved as she was cooking up those heaps of cookies, we were allowed a few.

It was torture to see her making all that food for everybody else and we were waiting on a food basket from one of the local churches, trying to stretch the remains of the last one out a little farther. It's a wonder that I can still eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Oh, wait, because of the diabetes, its just peanut butter now. Home canned tomatoes, rice, and ground beef was a regular dinner during the lean times. I hated it. I will never eat it again if I can avoid it. But, this time of year, the memory of it is so strong I can nearly taste it at times.

I have so many bad memories attached to this time of year. I try to put them out of mind and act like they didn't happen. I try to build new ones. But the old ones echo and haunt me. This business of being sick or super stressed out or whatever it is that's got my blood sugar bouncing around is only making the situation worse. I get hungry and I want to eat but I can't because I don't want my blood sugar to spike. I drink copious amounts of water and coffee in an effort to pad my stomach and sooth away some of these feelings (because coffee is one of my few comfort foods that I can still have).

I feel like I would kill someone to be able to sit down and have a bite of Grandma's apple crisp. I have the recipe. I have all the ingredients. But I wouldn't be able to eat it because of my diabetes. things like this seem to be the theme right now. Add to that the fact that I randomly get seized with terror that my parents are going to show up on my door step and drag me back to the farm to be a serf (because there's no other way to describe that dynamic) or I find myself on the verge of tears for no apparent reason ... I'm not doing well right now.

I hate CPTSD.

 I'm on a cocktail of medications that do a pretty good job of knocking me out when its bed time. Some of them wear off around 4 am. That's when the nightmares have been hitting me for the last few weeks. I didn't really get that I was having nightmares because I wasn't quite fully awake at 4 am. But last night was awful. I got to relive verbal abuse and harassment in full detail. I got to relive gaslighting. It was awful. I woke up so upset that I had to walk around my home to reassure myself that my waking reality was real.

All day today, I have felt disconnected from reality. It doesn't help that my blood sugar is out of whack. It doesn't help that I am exhausted. But the persistent low level dissociation that makes things feel unreal is really maddening. The worry that I am actually 16 and cowering in my room for fear of my parents' wrath and that this life I have is fantasy just won't go away. I confess, I used checking my blood as a way to focus myself on the present via the pain of the finger stick. It didn't work for very long. I just want to sleep. But if I sleep, I will have nightmares (daymares?) and sleep poorly.

Every time a vehicle pulls up in the drive way, I look out, afraid that I'll see my parents getting out of it and coming to drag me back to the farm. I have music playing fairly loud right now in an attempt to drown out the racing thoughts of anxiety. I don't know what made last night and today so bad. But I am in a state and struggling to get a handle on it before the kids get home from school.

Can I launch them into the sun?

 Rocker Chick was in a hard spot recently. I called on some people I knew to help her out and gave her some of the extras we had in the pantry so that they had food. She's about to hit her second trimester. Rather than being excited about this, she's filled with anxiety because she and her husband are having a hard time financially. (Thanks Covid-19 and 2020! /sarcasm) We've helped them a bit in the past and didn't think anything of it.

The extended family ... Well, I'm angry at them all over again. She called them to ask for some help and what she got told was pull herself up by her bootstraps, ignored, and to be the dumping ground of one of the more toxic members of the family's emotional garbage. The poor woman was in tears when she got ahold of me and feeling like she was a failure because she was broke.

To say the least, I rallied my allies and got them enough food to last until the food basket from one of the local churches arrives. I informed her about that program and exhorted her not to give up on getting financial assistance from the county (who kept dropping the ball and putting her off because my county is run by idiots). By the end of the day, Rocker Chick and her hubby had what they needed as well as a good start on getting that financial assistance. 

Here's what I am furious about. My late grandparents set up a family trust fund. There are members of the extended family pissing it away on frivolous crap when they should be using it to help Rocker Chick and other members of the family who are experiencing hardship. There are emotionally abusive members of the family who are taking every opportunity to be toxic and harmful emotionally to Rocker Chick when ever she makes contact (which is rarely because of their behavior). I want to launch them all into the sun.

This kind of crap is why I generally disowned them. The total number of family members from the extended family that I still have contact with that are of my parents' generation can be counted on one hand with fingers leftover. Why? Because the others would demand that I make 'nice' with my parents and resume my role of being the emotional punching bag for them. Fuck that noise. Rocker Chick is increasingly of the same mind on this because of their behavior.

Sick again? Fuck.

 I don't know what I have. I only know that my blood sugar is running absurdly high, which means I am sick. My anxiety is saying that it's Covid-19, the rest of me is saying it's likely to be another stupid cold. I don't really have any symptoms yet aside from high blood sugar readings. My morning fasting number was 180 something. I said to myself, "Ok, I can't have that bowl of oatmeal that I've been wanting. I'll do the 3 carb yogurt and the 21 carb meal bar. That shouldn't be too many carbs." In about 20 minutes, I was taking a nap on the couch instead of doing stuff like packing Beloved's lunch for work. Because I felt exhausted. I passed it off because I slept poorly last night.

Last night, I had a bunch of nightmares. They were sufficient in volume that they broke through the barrier that one of my medications causes by lowering my blood pressure. Basically, my bed time medication cocktail is one that pretty heavily sedates me and I usually sleep through the night. This time, I was up in the middle of the night in deep anxiety after having a nightmare of a screaming fight with my parents. I tried to sleep for the rest of the night but I kept having nightmares of fights. These are not memories but nightmares of the fights that I rehearse in my head when my anxiety peaks. So, basically, the rehearsing of fights is nonstop when my anxiety is bad. 

Looking at my log of where my mood has been for the last month, it's been moderately depressed and mildly anxious. I'm now wondering if I am dissociating and I'm actually far more anxious than I realize. It makes me wonder if I have been dissociating to some extent for months and that I'm not 'ok' as I seem to be to other people. It doesn't help that it's the holiday season. It doesn't help that I'm still mourning my grandparents. It doesn't help that I can't go interact with my side of the family because 90% of them are toxic and harmful for me to be around (or at least the ones who are local).

I don't know what's going on with me. That's terrifying for me. The last time I had no clear idea what was going on with me, only that I wasn't well, I got my diabetes diagnosis. The time before that, I got my bipolar diagnosis. Now, I find myself waiting for the other shoe to drop and for it to be one more serious problem to juggle. One more serious thing that people around me dismiss because I don't look sick. (Beloved always takes it seriously, but there's a good number of other people who just don't.)

Yay, it's the holiday season.

 I've just finished the first three of the projects on my list. I'm not at a good headspace because I'm depressed and Thanksgiving took a toll on me. It wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't for the fact that the meal was two hours late (thank goodness I had enough sense to bring an emergency snack in case that happened) and the fact that politics came up. 

Once they started on the topic, they didn't stop. It just got progressively worse to sit and listen to them downplay my concerns about Covid-19. The people at dinner were vehemently anti-mask. They decried the Governor as a "medical tyrant" and compared the Covid-19 pandemic to the flu, making a point of saying it was nothing like the Spanish Flu pandemic. The real burn came when someone talked piteously about an associate they knew with type 1 diabetes and asthma, describing them as "medically fragile" and how they were stuck in their house for months because of this business.

Most everyone in the room was somehow aware that I have diabetes and asthma. But they conveniently forgot it for the sake of their ranting. And then were baffled by the fact that I was upset with the entire conversation. At least no one said anything funny about the fact that I was limited in what I could eat. They've just decided that I am on a diet or something. Because I don't look sick.

This was also the second Thanksgiving with out my paternal grandparents around. The only reason why I'd have considered going back to the farm. But, I think conversation would have been the same. The FB posts of relatives have been along those lines and calling people who mask up cowards. These are the same people who say that instead of psychiatric care, I need a pair of running shoes and a daily routine of exercise to cure my bipolar. They're the same people who would say emotionally harmful stuff and then gaslight me about it. So, as per the last decade or so, I did not bring my family to the farm.

I'm seriously tempted to say fuck the holidays. But the kids are looking forward to the 13 days of Yule that I've done just about every year. They want to decorate. They want to make cookies. They want to have holiday fun. I just want to disappear into a black hole and not come out until it's spring.

NaBloPoMo 15: I surrender.

 There's no way that I am going to make up the missing posts for the remainder of this month. Being sick for two weeks with that sinus infection threw everything off. Then I got hyper-focused on writing books. Add to that the chaos of a few days of distance learning, the kids being off from school for a few days, and the typical afternoon/evening chaos when they get home from school ... Well, you can see why I made it to fifteen posts before I hung up my hat on this front.

NaBloPoMo 14? It's been chaos.

 I wrote two books in two weeks. One of those weeks, I was half out of it because I was still sick with that sinus infection. Fortunately, it did clear up. I'm exhausted because I haven't slept well for about a month now. I keep waking up in the middle of the night. Some nights, it is because I'm thirsty. Most nights, it is because I am anxious. 

For my birthday, my maternal grandmother sent me a very passive aggressive card that just served to reconfirm my decision to distance myself from her. When the card says 'I keep losing friends, don't know if they're dead or just missing' it makes me want to send back a 'Sorry for your bereavement' card and a bunch of lilies. Bonus points if the lilies are withered when they arrive. I am not going to waste the time or the money to do it, but the thought crossed my mind.

I find that as it draws closer to Thanksgiving my anxiety is creeping up higher and I'm anticipating a fight. According to Beloved, I get like this every year around Thanksgiving. I don't like rehearsing arguments in my head. I am still angry with comments that have been dropped out of ignorance. I don't know if I am going to be able to hold back if more comments like that come out over things like my using measuring cups to make sure that I am getting a safe carb load out of my meal.

It's been worse over the last few years because of the diabetes. I get afraid that my carbs are going to make my blood sugar spike and I'll get very sick. Beloved seems to be the one who understands that fear. Everyone else around me just doesn't seem to get it. So they keep offering me cookies and shit. I get the side eye when I say "I can't eat that." and I hate it.

NaBloPoMo 13: Forgot to add a song.

 I've been listening on repeat to Lawless's version of Dear God. It's been something that just goes with the election bullshit. I've also been listening to Les Friction's Louder than Words.

NaBloPoMo 12: Books? oh yeah, I write books.

 Still doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Somehow, I'm at 41k. If I have a good day writing, I'll be caught up on my blog posts across all my blogs and get to 45k words. This project is going well and hasn't gone off the rails plot wise. This is a relief because I was writing most of it while feverish. Who knows, maybe I'll even fire off a short story or something in the course of today.

In other news, Les Friction is AMAZING. It made me really happy to see that the other half of E.S. Posthumus didn't give up on music after his brother died. If you enjoy cinematic/orchestral music, check both of them out. Also, I think you'll really like Really Slow Motion. 

NaBloPoMo 11: Desk Whiskey.

 I need desk whiskey.

NaBloPoMo 10: Behind again.

 I'm not juggling too many things right now, really. I'm just processing life at about half speed and forgetting about the blogging portion of this challenge. That is because I'm still sick. Ugh, it took me three tries to write the word 'sick'. That's annoying. I am probably going to re-write the saga of the fall of Mysticwicks. I've written it out a few times now. It's ridiculous, tragic, and insane. It carried out like a tragedy in three acts. I've been considering how to write it down and I keep leaning to something in the style of the Eddas. There was a lot of flyting going on. I don't remember exactly what everyone said back and forth but it was brutal.

This was the time where Beloved came up with one of the worst insults I had ever heard: sand blasted vaginal train wreck. It was hilarious in a really dark way the way he said it before typing it down. People act all surprised by the pettiness in the pagan community at large, but, honestly, it's been there from the beginning. They want their power games and to feel important at the expense of others. It's part of the reason why I tend to avoid large groups.

I used to enjoy big online groups of pagans because I got to interact with a bunch of diverse people. Now ... Well, now I don't have the spoons for calling out bullshit on a daily basis like I did before. I have this bad habit of not recognizing authority that is self declared but not demonstrated. Just because you claim you have all the details on ancient history doesn't mean that you get to dictate to me how I'm doing everything wrong in my worship practices, for example. And when you post propaganda as 'historical fact' when all the evidence from the archeologists out in the field point otherwise, I'm going to be that person going 'citation needed'.

When you decide that someone else's relationship dynamic is 'abusive' because they don't share the same faith and begin slandering the 'abuser' with baseless claims of psychological abuse, you can bet your ass that I'm going to walk into that fight wielding a baseball bat. When you engage in harassment of people and attempt to black mail them, I'm going to be there for that fight too. It's just part of my sense of justice.

It's a Loki's person thing, it seems, to be the person who speaks truth to power and be willing to square off against them. I know other Loki's folk who do the same stuff. We are the speakers of the unwanted truth. We are the ones who will utterly destroy you with words because you broke frith with one of our own or because you broke frith and we're offended by it. I've been feeling the pull to re-engage the FB Lokean community. It's a lot like the pull I had back before I got sick and I waded in to the fray with people who were talking smack and harassing a Lokean who wasn't practicing like a 'proper heathen'. I don't know if I have the spoons to answer that call, but it feels like the call of the dead when my Grandfather was dying and they were telling me that the family needed me.

So, I may be swinging my proverbial baseball bat with a railroad spike in it again. People hate it when you sit there and go 'prove it' when they're trying to present UPG as actual history. People hate it when you refuse to bow down to them despite the fact that they're an authority on some given subject. I don't care about how big your name is in the community. We all sit down and take our britches off when we have to shit. It's how you act that I care about. If you can be decent with people, I don't care what you do. Start being and asshole and I get angry. Doesn't matter if it's a religious group or a political one. 

I've been booted out of them too. I just can't abide bullies. It makes me so angry that I could spit.

NaBloPoMo 9: Yet more Ramblings.

 I'm not feeling great. This sinus infection / head cold is still kicking me in the teeth. I've begun to get to where I am not dizzy when I'm upright and mobile. But I am in no condition to go visit anyone and I don't want to because I don't want to make them come down with this rotten thing. I'm on week two of this hellscape and I do not enjoy it.

Because I'm sick, I am having emotional flashbacks to being sick as a kid. It was a psychologically traumatic experience pretty much every time. As a result, I have massive guilt for not doing things like cleaning the apartment, being immaculately groomed, and doing the low impact stuff that doesn't suck up all my spoons (like writing this post). When I got sick as a kid, my parents kept telling me things like I wasn't really that sick and I was just trying to skip school. While school was a hellscape in its own way, it was my escape from the hellscape of home. I could do things like sit in study hall and play cards with a friend while being completely ignored by the study hall monitor. At home, if I wasn't doing school work then I had to be working on keeping the house clean. If I wasn't working on keeping the house clean, I was being lazy and that got verbal abuse heaped on me.

If I took medication for being sick, I was accused of abusing it to get high. Never mind the fact that I could have a sinus infection and be taking the minimal dose of Sudafed just so that I could breathe properly, my parents would still insist that I was trying to get high. That rhetoric as the constant background noise whenever I got sick instituted in me a deep sense of anxiety over my taking medications for any reason. When I was in college and I got put on birth control to keep me from developing ovarian cysts, my mother all but called me a slut and declared that I was going to be the most promiscuous woman on campus where I went to college. When I got put on antidepressants, my parents took it as a personal insult and told me to toughen up. 

When I got bronchitus so bad that it was nearly penumonia, my parents made a point of making a long distance call to the college to bitch at me about being so irresponsible with my health and not coughing properly.  Gods bless Stargazer, where ever she is now, she told them I was too sick to talk and hung up the phone. She convinced me that when I had a chance to get off my parents health insurance, I should do so as quickly as possible. She also convinced me to give my parents as little information about my health as necessary. Gods only know how my parents would have taken the information that I was in therapy through out college and for several years there after.

The only had a vague impression that I was seriously ill after college. I lost a job because I was having bad asthma attacks at work. They were so bad that I was taken by ambulance to the hospital at one point. I texted Beloved to let him know where I was going. The hospital still had my parents down as next of kin emergency contacts. So they called my parents. The three of them showed up at about the same time. My father looked distinctly annoyed. My mother was insisting that I had to will myself into breathing properly. Beloved was insisting that I focus on him instead of them and take my nebulizer treatment. Then a staff member of the hospital wheeled into the room with a mop and bucket of cleaner. 

The fumes of the cleaner set off another asthma attack, the cleaner retreated asap to get a nurse. Mom kept telling me to treat it like I was back at their house when she and Grandma were processing pickles. If I had the breath, I would have screamed at her to get out of the room as the nurse set me up with a second nebulizer treatment. When it was time for the hospital to release me, Beloved firmly insisted he was going to bring me home and said that my parents should get my car from work. There was something about him that kept my parents from arguing. I think it was because he was furious and was holding back by force of will the urge to tear my parents heads off for their treating my asthma as theatrics while I was in the hospital being treated for it.

Two months later, I was looking for work and trying to maintain my health. And my parents kicked me out of the house. I was still having bad asthma problems. The following year was hellish but not as bad as it could have been because I wasn't under my parents' roof getting harassed for going to so many doctors to get answers as to why I wasn't breathing properly. I was finally off their health insurance and seeing someone other than the family doctor whose secretary was the biggest gossip in town. I wasn't in a good place financially. But because of it, I had medicaid and access to specialists that my parents would have refused to pay for. And the multiple trips to the ER because of asthma attacks were covered by the insurance. And I started therapy again to cope with all of the garbage going on in my brain at that time.

By the time I was moved back into my parents house, my lungs were stronger because I was on a medicine regime that helped open up the bronchial passages and I had been singing as physical therapy for my lungs. My parents accused me of being irresponsible again when they saw this medication. They tried to come up with excuses to take control of it. I told them that if they took my medication, that I needed to function, away, I was going to walk out of that house and they'd never see me again. So, it was just verbal harassment.

Here I am, shy of 20 years after that last altercation over my use of medication, and I still get anxious and suffer from emotional flashbacks over taking medication and being sick. I take around 12 pills a day to be upright and functional between the vitamins and the medications. I get so upset over it that Beloved has taken over the task of filling the pill sorter at the end of the week. I was just about crying over the fact that I have so many pills to take. I felt subhuman for it. Some days I still do. I hate being sick. I hate having multiple chronic illnesses. Just looking at the pills, I can hear my parents accusations and threats at the back of my head echoing. Nothing like being sick with the flu and having your parents threatening to institutionalize you for taking Theraflu more than once per day and you're a minor, so they could possibly do it.

NaBloPoMo 8: Ramblings.

 So, I am wearing my reading glasses right now to type this. I'd be using my regular glasses but they're filthy and I misplaced my lens wipes that I had on the desk for just this reason. I'm currently listening to Delerium's album Karma. Specifically the track that has their rendition of Sarah McLachlan's song Silence is what I'm listening to. It's like a cross between Engima and Sarah McLachlan's music. It's pretty cool.

I had a conversation yesterday that left me angry. I get that the person was trying to emphasize their point that they wanted to do something special for my family and I for the holidays. But they came off as patronizing. It was the "what do you NEED" that kept getting hammered on that made me angry. The things I need you can't buy at a store. I need my brain chemistry not to be fucked up. I need my body to stop hating me. I need my trauma issues to be resolved. I need to not be depressed most of the time. But, for some reason, this person thinks that throwing money and stuff at a situation is going to fix it. At the same time, they don't have the money for it. At the same time, their approach is not focused on the person they are trying to do something for but on making themselves look virtuous when they talk about what they've done. I damn near ended the conversation with "I don't need your pity or your charity."

I didn't. They don't know me. They like to think they know me. They have a picture in their head of who and what I am like. It is just about the complete polar opposite of who I am. They do the same thing with Beloved and the kids. It's been making me angry. They talk down to the kids because they're on the autism spectrum. They ignore us when we tell us what the kids interests are and go off half cocked to get what they think would be 'cool'. Regardless if it is at their level of ability or not.

I'm furious. I'm trying not to be furious because it's like being angry with the weather when it's raining. They're just acting according to their nature. But I keep expecting better from them. Every so often, they show genuine compassion and do acts of genuine good. It raises my hopes and then they turn around and let me down. I just have to stop expecting this person to think about someone else and accept that they're focused on making themselves look good at the expense of people around them. 

NaBloPoMo 7: I made it through another year.

 Yesterday was my birthday. I'm officially 42. Beloved got me a lovely bouquet of flowers that matches the color of the autumn leaves. The kids were kinda bewildered but they didn't really know it was my birthday because we didn't really do anything special for it. I tried to spend some time writing but I didn't get that far just because I was tired. I did add more to my NaNoWriMo playlist for this year. It's disorganized but so is pretty much everything about my writing right now.

I spent about an hour this morning working on my planner. I still have more to do. Beloved was so kind as to design new planner pages for my notebook. It is like what I was originally using. Front side for bullet points and back side of the page for notes. He had the gal who runs Copy Town, the print shop a few towns over where he works, take a full ream of paper and print and cut to size pages for my day planner. It takes a big amount of the stress out of my planning for the week or the month. I'm not drawing tons of little boxes on pages. It helps a lot.

Apparently yesterday was national fountain pen day. I did not do any writing with any of my fountain pens. Now that my planner is done up in heavier paper stock, I might start using my beautiful steel fountain pen that Beloved gave me for yule last year.

NaBloPoMo 6: I am a zombie.

 Well, I just got off the phone with the doctor's office. They said that the antibiotics sound like they're working. It sure doesn't feel like it but I was told to be patient and give it until Monday. In the meantime, I have a killer headache and congestion that is making me miserable. I'm frustrated because I actually ate a real salad for dinner last night and my fasting blood sugar was 200. I felt rotten and debated skipping breakfast. I didn't. I forced myself to eat a meal bar (21 carbs) and a pot of diet yogurt (3 carbs). I drank water with it because I was too blurry headed to make coffee.

After I got the kids through their morning routine and off to school, I laid down. I planned to sleep for a half hour and then get up and start doing stuff. I did not. I slept for an hour and a half. What woke me up wasn't the alarm on my phone but the sound of my husband getting ready for work. Beloved all but ordered me to go lay back down. Apparently, I looked about as miserable as I felt. So, he headed out to work, I locked the door, and then I fell asleep for another hour or so. I guess it was about 11:30 when I was waking up. I had enough brainz to make coffee. Then I sat down and stared at my NaNoWriMo project too mentally toast to write anything. So, I played around on Spotify and started a playlist for this project. It's completely disorganized, but the tracks are great for various scenes and characters. Also, it's got the coolest version of Seven Nation Army on there from Skáld. 

Now I am trying to get caught up on my blogging and then I am going to work on my planner. Yesterday was sucked up by writing because I felt too woozy to do anything else. My fever has come down some today. I'm not quite as woozy but I don't feel great. I don't trust myself with stuff that's sharp because I'm operating with half a brain and I'd likely poke myself if I tried to do embroidery if not possibly sew myself to the project. I may do some crochet later. Either way, I am going to have to do something to keep me awake that isn't to taxing on my mental capacity. Stupid sinus infection and cold. I was hoping to be over this thing by now.

NaBloPoMo 5: Huzzah, the kids are at school!

 They're finally over this stupid cold. They tested negative for Covid-19 last week and I received the letter from the doctor giving them the ok to go back to school yesterday. Now, maybe, I can get some stuff done with out playing referee or constantly reminding them to be focusing on their school work instead of cat pictures. A part of me says I should lie down and take a nap, but that's because I've been up since 4 am. 

I forgot, somehow, to take my ton of bedtime medications. I was just feeling rotten last night. I think in my brain fog, I was sure I did take them. I woke up early this morning partly because of my lack of medications and partly because I coughed myself awake. I was practically choking on congestion at first, it was pretty awful. Fortunately, this sinus infection/head cold hasn't dropped into my chest like I was thinking was happening at first. This morning I realized that the ache in my ribs was right where I fell and landed on a shovel a few years back and fractured a rib. It was my arthritis complaining about the weather, not the beginnings of something nefarious.

Speaking of weather, the weather we've been having has been strange. It's been swinging between unseasonably mild and the seasonably cold and wet weather. The mild stretches, I am less achey but I am suspicious that we're going to get nailed with a blizzard or something when this breaks. I haven't been out walking or doing much outside. I still have that mess on the back deck to clean up from a few months ago. Being sick just has been taking the life right out of me for the last week. Meanwhile, the kids have bounced back and Beloved just has the sniffles. I don't know if that means their immune systems are better than mine or if I am just more susceptible to getting sick. I've kind always been that way. And the weather swinging back and forth is not helping. At least I haven't had a migraine in a little while. Of course, I probably just jinxed myself on that one.

NaBloPoMo 4: Where does the time go?

 I'm typing this during a stolen moment. The kids are playing math games on their chromebooks from school as they wait for their next Zoom class session (which is in a half hour). I feel rotten but I'm trying to persevere. My blood sugar keeps running high when I eat anything close to 30 carbs. It seems to be tied to my having this lovely cold and sinus infection. The doctor put me on an antibiotic that I can't spell, but it's fairly strong and should take care of the infection quickly.

I have been trying to find time to do things like type up blog posts, work on my manuscript, and fold laundry at the same time I have to ride herd on the kids to make sure they're not playing video games when they're supposed to be doing school work. It's been an exasperating morning on that front because Snuggle Bug desperately wants to show off the fire truck his big brother gave him yesterday. As such, he kept interrupting the other Zoom class sessions with requests to show everybody something cool. It got to the point where the teacher put his camera on mute and turned off the video feed. He could still hear what was going on and see what the teacher was presenting but he couldn't keep disrupting class like that.

He's been complaining all day about how he doesn't want people telling him what to do. I said to him that he had to get used to it because that was going to be at least the next six years of his life. He wasn't pleased. So, I have a grumpy pre-teen who is begrudgingly doing his school work right now. His big brother is focused on getting as much of his work done as possible. He's expressed that he really wants to go back to school. 

We were waiting on the letters from our family doctor stating that the boys were Covid-19 free and cleared to go back to school. They arrived today. The kids are mostly over their colds. So, I'm giving them a bit of OTC cold medicine that lasts 12 hours and shipping them off to school. I figure with the medicine cutting down on the slight cough that remains and them wearing their masks, everything should go ok. Tomorrow is going to be exhausting because I have things like laundry and dishes to catch up on. I'm still feeling pretty run down from being sick myself, so getting those done is going to be a bit of a challenge.

I swear, there is simply not enough time in the day.

NaBloPoMo 3: Welp, I'm doing NaNoWriMo.

 Last night, about a half hour before I went to bed, I was struck with an idea for a novella. I'm not sure what my word count is. I'm not going to worry about the word count. I'm just going to focus on getting the story down. If I am lucky, I won't run out of spoons half way through. I may post random snippets here or something.

NaBloPoMo 2: Can't decide if I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year.

 I want to do NaNoWriMo, but I feel like I don't have the time or the spoons to do it. I'm filled with dread that we're going to go to remote learning when the cold and flu season hits full time. Right now, I'm trying to get my writing this post in quick as the kids are doing their assigned journal entry for today. We've been having some glitches with the assignments posted today. So, I did the sensible thing and cycled the power on the chromebooks for fifteen minutes before having the boys get back on to do their work. As the chromebooks were powered down, they were doing some reading work. I currently am struggling to get writing in while the kids are on their breaks from classes, it's not working so great.

I don't know how I'm going to do this.

NaBloPoMo1: So, it's not Covid-19, but it still sucks.

I, well, we all in this household, have an upper respiratory virus. It's pretty nasty. Last week, our family doctor had the kids tested for Covid-19 (because they were the only ones sick at the time). The test came back negative. That was great. No, seriously, it was a huge relief. In the span of time from the test to when the results showed up, Beloved caught it and then I caught it.

Where the guys have had a wicked head cold, I have developed a sinus infection. I have a telemedicine appointment with the family doctor at 1:30pm. We tried having a Zoom appointment with the kids last week and Zoom did not get on well with my computer. We wound up discussing things over the phone. Because my computer is still having issues, I am not doing a Zoom appointment this afternoon. 

This virus has a wicked sore throat, lots of sinus drainage, and coughing. To say the least, the doctor was concerned, especially with the kids having a fever spike in the range of 101.7 (all hail ibuprofen that miracle drug that brought the fever down). Of course, because I am sick, my blood sugar has been stupid.

I am eating 'large snacks' for meals (approximately 20 carbs) and having one meal that is 30 carbs. After the 30 carb meal, I pass out about 30 minutes later. This has been messing with my brain. My latent eating disorder is beginning to make itself known again. Intense feelings of disgust towards eating and being seen eating have been rolling over me. I have been struggling with the urge to make it less carbs. I have been finding myself struggling with the urge to sneak eat, that's where I basically hide and eat a snack. It's distressing to find myself on one hand encouraged to reengage in the anorexic eating behaviors I had as a kid and on the other hand painfully aware that those eating habits are going to have disasterous long term consequences.

This business with my having issues with carbs seems to be coming from my being sick. But I've been struggling with elevated fasting carb levels since the switch from the metformin-algolpotin combo pill to two separate pills. It's just been a problem and I go to get my 3 month fasting A1C measured later this week (provided I am over this stupid cold). A part of me is hoping that it will be 7 this way they'll take my concerns seriously. Another part of me is hoping that it will remain at 6.9 because if it goes up to 7, they have to take other steps to medically intervene. I don't know what I'm going to do if this ends up with me on insulin. I'm not good with needles. I don't think the insurance company will spring for an insulin pump.

Anxiety brain is a jerk.

 My anxiety is ratcheted way up right now. Some of it is the fact that this election cycle feels like doomsday. Some of it is the fact that the number of Covid-19 cases in my county has started creeping up. And, some of this craptacular thinking is just my brain misfiring and saying things like "We aren't going to be able to pay our bills!" which is completely false and irrational.

I meditate. I drink herbal tea. I wear stuff that is supposed to ground me. All it does is keeps the volume down around 7 instead of being cranked up to 11 with the knob ripped off. It didn't help much that the neighbors were acting weird last night. It didn't help much that the other neighbors had a screaming match, again. It also doesn't help that we're coming up on the leading edge of the holiday season.

Anxiety brain vs. Depression brain is not a thing. They team up so I am practically vibrating with tension while at the same time filled with enough existential dread that I could turn into a character in a horror movie that is featured with the shaky camera work who is constantly running away from the viewer shrieking. It is literally that irritating and disheartening. 

I try not to let it seep into my writing. It happens anyways. I tried to use LARP as an escape and it seeped into there as well. It robs me of my inspiration when it comes to writing new material with even a smidgen of confidence. It leaves me staring at my handcraft projects with this sense of hopelessness that they're all just 'nothing' as my Mom once said about a project that I was working on to cope with my paternal grandfather's dying. I handed it to her as she sat at his bedside as a gesture to offer her comfort. She took it, began working on it and later told me it was nothing and that the yarn was poor quality, not knowing that every thread of it I had spun earlier in the year on a drop spindle.

To say the least, that comment haunts me. It was cruel and unsurprising during a moment when I was in deep pain. Anxiety brain drags it up with the worried questions if the people who are going to receive what I make are going to look at it and see something worthless. Depression brain tells me that there's no point to trying because it's going to be found lacking no matter what I do. This struggle is what keeps me from writing. This struggle is what keeps me from putting myself out there and promoting things that I am good at, like tarot reading.

So, like I said, Anxiety brain is a jerk because it keeps dragging up the verbal daggers that my parents put into my back at vulnerable moments.

Spoonie thoughts: I dislike Metformin.

 I may a well embrace the fact that I qualify as a spoonie. That's a person with a chronic illness. I have multiple chronic illnesses so I definitely qualify. No nifty jacket, however. Today, my stomach has been acting up. I know it is because of the high dose of metformin that I'm on to manage my diabetes. I am thankful this medication helps but I do not like it. It smells like feet and makes my guts severely unhappy.

I take approximately 13 pills every day. It's hard for me to keep track of, even with the nifty multi-compartment pill sorter. Beloved takes the time every weekend to fill it up for the week. He really is the best thing to ever happen to me. Taking medication is hard for me. The act itself is no big deal. But emotionally, it's really hard. I grew up in a household where I got shamed for taking Tylenol for headaches and when my seasonal allergies were bad, I was accused of abusing Benadryl to get high. So, just the act of taking medication that is necessary is emotionally really hard for me because it brings up memories of being humiliated for it. When I started taking birth control to manage my poly-cystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), my mother all but called me a whore.

For some reason, right now, it's the metformin that's on my "hate to take it" list today. I think it is because of the fact that it's got my guts in a knot all day. It's bad enough that stress will do it, but to have my medicine making it worse, that really sucks. I know tomorrow will be different somehow. This doesn't happen every day. But it makes going out to run errands difficult because you're not sure if you are going to have to know where the nearest restroom is. 

I tell myself every time I take my medication, "This is going to make me healthier and it is going to help me." I have to remind myself every evening that is the case. Because my parents gaslighted me so hard into thinking that taking more than one medication at a time meant that either you were a drug addict or they were going to kill you. The irony here is that my parents are smokers. They weren't completely 'straight edge' or whatever the term for it was. They were just controlling assholes who thought nothing of chain smoking and doing whatever they could to make my life miserable. 

They have a habit of denying that chronic illness exists in the family. I got my asthma diagnosis at 20 and my parents were like "Oh, yeah, we knew about that. But we didn't have the money for the inhalers so you just had to suck it up and deal with it. You turned out fine." It makes me wonder how many of my bad colds were actually untreated cases of bronchitis. It's funny, because they had health insurance. The cost of a rescue inhaler with insurance is around $10. In the late 80s and early 90s, it would have been less because inflation. But they could afford to go buy cartons of cigarettes and when I developed a cough, I was told "That's not a real cough, put some effort into it." regardless of the reason I was coughing. Even now, I know they'd say that. Every time I caught a cold, I got lectured that the reason I was sick was because I wasn't coughing hard enough to clear my lungs. Never mind the fact that it was hard to draw breath enough to get a "healthy" cough going. And I got scolded for coughing too much, taking too much cough medicine, and being a good for nothing lazy lay-about.

Yeah, me being sick as a kid sucked. I did my best to just push through being sick until I got to the point where I was too sick to go to school and the school nurse sent me home because of it. I'm rambling. I have a lot of emotional trauma around being sick. I feel a lot of guilt and like I am a morally bad person because I am chronically ill, especially because of the mental illness. My parents didn't believe in mental illness. They considered it a flaw in character. Unless it could be used as an excuse for my mother's monstrous behavior. When I got put on antidepressants for the first time in college, my parents threatened to throw them away. I told them that I would bring it up with the family doctor who had prescribed them. They backed down, but continually shamed me for needing them.

That stupid meme about how depressed people need a pair of running shoes, a goldfish, and fresh air was my parent's prescription for depression. They haven't changed. When it became apparent that I had post-traumatic stress disorder after the abusive relationship I was in in high school, my parents insisted that I was being dramatic. They insisted that I was in the wrong for trying to destroy my exboyfriend's career in the military. They said that I shouldn't talk about what happened or we were going to get sued for defamation of character. (Never mind that my ex got thrown out of the military because he tried to punch out his commanding officer when they told him to stop calling me after my parents got sick of the constant phone calls. That was when they changed the household phone number for a second time.) They said that I was being a bitch to my father and brothers because I didn't tolerate their sexist jokes as much as I did before. 

The narrative was that I was the problem child. Not my brother who has been an alcoholic since high school. Not my other brother who does nothing but play video games and can't keep steady employment. Nope, it was me. The one who got sick a lot as a kid. The one who had screaming nightmares for a few months after that exboyfriend raped me. The one who had legitimate health problems from birth that they just didn't feel like dealing with. They blamed me for the reason why they didn't have money. I was born preemie. They got grants and the hospital had programs that were in place to help people who are broke pay for their care. But, I was the reason why they had no money. 

I'm bitter. Every time I look at my pills, I hear the echoes of my parents decrying anyone who needed medicine on a daily basis as drug addicts. I hear the scorn they heaped on my disabled aunts. I hear the scorn they heaped on me whenever I inconvenienced them by daring to catch a cold.

Today, it's the metformin I dislike. Because it is another sign that my body has betrayed me again and my pancreas is apparently defective.

Pandemic Project 1: Dune Litany Against Fear

 I drafted this out in April. It's been busy around here. I haven't gotten as much time for stitching on this project as I'd like. Still, here's what I have done so far. Each petal of each blossom is done in a different stitch, as are the centers and the berries. I'm still deciding colors for the left side. My next 'update' on this, I hope to have the leaves and the buds finished on the right side. 

The right side represents life and growth. The left side represents death, decay, and rebirth (in the berries). All of this is hand drawn and hand stitched. It was just a random bit of cross stitching fabric I had on hand. It barely fits on the frame widthwise. I'm seriously considering getting it professionally framed when it is done.

(All of the blossoms are filled in, I used an ecru colored floss on the right hand blossoms. It's washed out in this pic because of lighting.)

Officially Gave Up On Keen

 So, I had been doing tarot readings via Keen since '07 on a sporadic basis. I made a little money, met a bunch of people, and had an opportunity to indulge in my hobby of doing tarot readings. Then Keen started bumping up their platform fees. At first I said, "Well, it's the cost of doing business, right?" and let it slide by. Life happened and I drifted away from Keen for a while.

Then I came back to Keen and tried to make it work in earnest. My kids were old enough to go to school. I had more time free and I was healthier, which meant I had more energy to invest in this hobby/business. Somewhere along the way, Keen had changed. They went from a fairly low key and easy to work with platform to pushy. I at first tried to ignore it. After all, I was charging the lowest rate per minute out of the group. Then it got to where they were taking 80 cents on each dollar I made. That is when I said, "I can't do this as a hobby. It's costing me money to go there and read."

I'm upset. I don't have much for social outlets. I can't just do like I did at college and whip out a pack of cards and do random readings for random people over coffee. I am good at tarot reading. I kinda pride myself on it. Even wrote a book on it (published under a pseudonym). Now, I feel like I have had my hobby ripped away by Keen's greed. It wasn't Covid-19 that made my business take a dirt nap. I had actually seen an uptick in business during the lockdown phase of things because people were lonely and wanted a friendly ear to listen. Nope, it was Keen deciding that they could screw the advisors.

Sure, their website looks pretty. Now they have a whole bank of numbers they can send calls out from. They even have it set up so that you can do readings via chat. But that doesn't make up for the fact that they've moved from ethically questionable to down right predatory in their business practices towards people like me, who are their 'product'. I don't know what it is like on the 'consumer' end of the transaction. If their treatment of the advisors is any indicator, the clients are getting screwed too.

I'm debating setting up a website and doing readings via email. That chat server process was nice and I found the interface mostly reliable. But, I don't know how to make that work via chat on something like Tumblr and still get paid. Because, I was seriously thinking about doing tarot reading part time while I worked on my writing. I was working to build up an account of seed money that I could invest into my books.

Then Keen screwed me. I sent an email out to my 200+ clients that I was leaving Keen. I explained that it was due to changes in the platform. I couldn't tack on something like my personal email address because I knew that Keen would have automatically deleted the email before it hit their inboxes. So, I don't know what I am going to do.

Just some ramblings.

 It's been a tradition for me to do NaNoWriMo just about every year for several years now. It started out as a thing  that I did with Stargazer along side NaBloPoMo. I have about two weeks to prepare for a potential NaNoWriMo project and right now I am editing one book as I am working furiously to finish another. I got something of a casual book contract offer from a good friend of mine. What he's offering is really good in the world of publishing. So, of course, as I flail about trying to pick a pen name, I started writing what was supposed to be back story for one of the fanfiction scenes I wrote.

At the same time, I have been really struggling with depression because it's that time of year for seasonal depression to team up with bipolar depression to create a bucket of suck. I feel awful and I'm exhausted all the time. I am filled with dread of everything from failure to this election going sideways and Covid-19 getting into my home and killing us. I keep plugging away and doing the bare minimum to keep the household going. My humor has been grim but its still there. My psychiatrist said that I am his 'rock' and that he really admires my stability and how well I have been about taking my medications. I was uncomfortable with the compliment but kept it to myself as I thanked him for it.

The kids are doing school "in person" with masks and all of the NYSDOH safety protocols in place. So far there has only been one isolated Covid-19 incident. It was cleaned up, people were sent home to get tested/treated/recover and it didn't impact the school as a whole. The only reason it really was a news story was because of the fact that our school district is the only one in the county (if not the entire region) doing 'in person' classes. Approximately a quarter of the students in the district are doing remote learning. The region is sill below the 1% infected threshold that would mandate all schools going to remote learning only. Gods willing, we'll stay like this because we're a very rural area. 

Downstate in the NYC region, they're experiencing a second wave of cases. I'm not surprised. I figured it was going to hit around now when people are indoors more because of the cooler weather. I can't say if the problem is that the state opened up too early because the numbers are skewed. A big percentage of the state population is concentrated in and around NYC. A big enough percentage that it swings everything from the numbers on how the state is doing with this pandemic business to state politics hard in the direction of NYC and environs. It's been a running joke that NYC should be divided off from the rest of the state and turned into its own state for decades.

Here in the Finger Lakes region, we're doing ok. There isn't much to report in a change in the Covid-19 case status of the region. We are both wine country and cow country. Most of the area here is made up of farms. I think the largest population center in the entire Finger Lakes region is the small city of Canadaguia. I don't think they count Rochester as part of the Finger Lakes region. If they did, the bump in population isn't a big deal because people from Rochester and Canadaguia tend to stay in their cities because there's nothing interesting outside of them. Drive 20 minutes in any direction and you're surrounded by farms. That fact insulated most of my county from the effects of the first wave back in March-April. If we're lucky, it'll remain that way for a bit longer.

Some of the parents who are doing distance learning are giving us parents who are doing 'face to face' instruction the side eye. If I had the spoons to keep doing distance learning, that's what we would have done. My disability is running smack into the needs of the kids and their learning disabilities. It made things hard up until school re-opened. Keeping a rigid schedule was helpful. Doing work at the appointed time every day except Saturdays and Sundays helped. The only way really that we could tell it was a week day was that Beloved was going to work (because he is in an essential industry). The kids did more or less fine through it all. It was me who was having the difficulties.

I just don't have the energy to rapid switch between two very different sets of educational needs anymore. I run out of energy faster because I'm juggling my anxiety and mental health issues even as I am struggling to keep up with the kids needs for stimulus and educational content. That doesn't even begin to get into the problem of how to I keep up with all of this distance learning stuff and still get time in for the things that are restorative and help me regain my personal equilibrium. I'm trying to prepare myself for the next round of distance learning. My intuition and my anxiety are telling me it is going to happen relatively soon.

The school has the distance learning stuff set up differently this time. The kids have a better grasp of how to navigate their digital classrooms. Now the problems are minor bugs like a website being glitchy (probably because everybody and their brother is on it to practice their language arts work). From what I hear of it, things are running more smoothly. The hangups shows up when there are technial problems with the internet access. The students who are in school are working off the same platform and with the same expectations as the students who are working remotely. The plan is for it to be a relatively seamless switch if they have to go to remote learning for the entire district. I am trying to be hopeful that it will work out well.

Every Sunday, Beloved and I go to check on his parents. The kids get to play a bit outside in a really big yard and we don't have to worry about traffic. His mother and I are both fiber arts geeks, so we spend time chatting and working on our respective projects. I have a massive version of the wingspan shawl that I am trying to finish. I have the final triangle one quarter of the way complete. It took a whole ball of yarn to do it (that would be 8 oz if you're keeping score). My mistake with this thing was thinking it would work up faster and lacier with a larger hook. It didn't but it increased the size of it by an order of magnitude. The thing acquired the nickname of the Monstrosity because of how big it has gotten. I've changed that to Mothra. It really was the only logical name because wingspan and Mothra has a GINORMOUS wingspan. It's functionally a really weirdly shaped blanket. I was going to make it in the full spectrum of colors from red to indigo. I'm stopping at green because that's four balls of yarn. Blue would be eight. Purple would be 16. And indigo would be 32. You can't pay me to do that much. NOPE. It's already big enough to cover the couch.

Friday Fiction: LotR scene rewrite (fanfiction)

 The shield was heavy on her arm as she marched forward. The sword felt equally heavy despite the fact it was lighter just because she had been hewing into limbs and bodies for what felt like forever. Eowyn saw a small body, perhaps almost the size of a child darting about her on the battlefield. She knew the hobbit was doing his best, despite he wasn't trained to fight. The horse had died some time back, she managed to leap clear and then all was chaos.

A great crashing came from before her. She raised her gaze and saw the Witch King wading into the fray. As she watched, he crushed a kinsman's skull beneath his mace. It was an enormous, terrifying thing. For a moment, Eowyn felt fear. Then she heard the ghost of her mother whispering in her ear, "It's now or never, we've come to far to die." 

Another man died as she made her way forward. The Witch King had cleared a space about himself with his deadly mace. As she stepped into it, he laughed. "No man can kill me," he spat at her. He swung his mace. Eowyn brought up her shield. The mace hit it with a glancing blow, splintering it and knocking her back several paces. She cast it aside. The helm was ill fitting and obscured her view of the enormous Witch King before her.

She pulled it off her head as the hobbit stared in horror. "I am no man," Eowyn said before charging forward. She moved inside the range of the mace and thrust her sword into the one place where there was no armor, the face area of the Witch King's helm. 

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

I'm not pleased with how it came out, but whatever. It was one of my favorite parts of the story.

Exhausted and not at the same time.

 I'm not sure what to write at the moment. I have spent the majority of my day doing line edits on a revision/version of a holy book for Filianism/Déanism. Even as I am working on this, I see the community that I've been writing stuff for getting very quiet. I don't know if it is burn out from the anxiety of Covid-19 plus this election cycle. I don't know if I'm just grinding away on something that is ultimately going to gather dust and be useless. I'm tired of editing and I'm only at the beginning of the process.

Even as I am doing this, one of the largest non-Aristasian aligned sects is being orphaned by their leadership who is taking their site and going LOLWERCHRISTIANNOW!1! They struggled under the influx of new members. Their staff were struggling to balance their lives outside of being clergy. They turned the site back to the founder, who had ghosted them once things started moving in a forward direction. After a month of silence, the founder says "yeah, we're leaving this up for 2 weeks and then we're taking the site down" followed a few days later by a post saying that they're converting the entire site to esoteric Christianity. 

Look, I get that Filianism has a lot of similarities with Christianity with that whole triune godhead thing and angelic orders. But, you built a cultus of worship, an entire tradition that people are still interested in following. And that is getting thrown out the window because Jesus. I'm sorry, but that sticks in my craw. I'm angry. I'm angry at the bait and switch this person pulled. I'm angry on the behalf of the people of this tradition who want to follow it as it was initiated and had been running up until Covid-19 hit. You don't build a religion or a sect of a religion and then throw it away because you decide its too much work or it isn't as shiny as you wanted it to be or because not enough people are kissing your ass.

You don't do that when you've got a following. You have a responsibility to those people. You set yourself up as a leadership figure, then you have to lead. If you can't lead, you have to find someone who can within the tradition do so. You don't fake dying (like one person did), you don't just vanish, and you sure as hell don't pull this bait and switch crap.

I had respect for this person. I watched them build this system and do a fair amount of good work in the community. If they had a spiritual revelation that they were on the wrong path, that's fine. You don't force your change in direction onto the people who were looking to you to continue to lead them on the path you started. You say "I'm sorry, but I can't do this anymore. I appoint so-and-so as my successor. I leave you in their care and with my blessing."

Keep Calm and Carry Weapons.

 

Looking at the news, the meme above about covers it. That's about all I can brain up for today.

Staring down the barrel.

 It seems like everything is going wrong all around us. It's almost enough to make you wonder if its Ragnarok or something. (Loki tells me that Ragnarok happens every night and everything resets again in the morning, he's been telling me that for years.) I am looking at turning fourty-two in this mess and realizing that I have no idea what the hell I'm doing. I'm realizing that I never expected to live past thirty. I was that brainwashed into thinking I was going to have a short lifespan.

Now ... now it seems like the disaster that I was raised to believe was going to destroy the country is happening. It just doesn't happen to involve nuclear weapons yet. I have been running smack into all of the damn conditioning I was raised with all the time of late. I find myself afraid that my parents are going to come kidnap me and force me to work the farm. I find myself afraid that they're going to punish me for walking away from them and the rest of the family (in some especially brutal and ghoulish fashion, because that is the only way they're creative it seems). I haven't been sleeping well because once my anti-nightmare pill wears off, I start reliving my childhood through my nightmares.

I find myself trapped in this apartment because I'm afraid to leave. I'm afraid that some rando neighbor is going to sneeze or cough on me while I'm getting the mail and I'll catch Covid-19, or something somehow worse. I'm afraid that my parents are going to show up. I'm afraid that if I go for a walk, I'll miss the bus dropping the kids off from school and then I'll have CPS called on me. I'm afraid to go to the store even though I need to buy some clothes because there's so many people there that could possibly get me sick. It's all irrational but no one said fear was rational.

At the same time, I feel this conditioned sense of guilt for leaving "the family". Some evil part of my brain, where the conditioning lives, tells me that my family isn't really my family. That my life isn't real. It tells me that this is all fantasy and that I'm still a kid. That's on the really bad days. On the moderately bad days, it tells me that Beloved and I are "playing house" and I actually should be "responsible" and be back at the farm.

In the midst of this dumpster fire of a year, up until I blocked them on FB, I heard nothing from my parents. I have gotten stuff about a wedding for a cousin of mine. It's funny, his sister didn't invite me to her wedding. Must have gotten lost in the mail, right? I don't even know if his brother is married or if that child I was introduced to is his. I have lost touch with all of them. Why? Because I didn't matter enough to them to pick up the phone and call once in a while. Because I wasn't servile enough for my parents to be consider a 'good' daughter, despite the fact that I graduated college from a good college with good marks. Because I married a man my mother despised because he wasn't rich enough for her tastes, so she did everything she could to sabotage my wedding by undermining what I wanted and then showed up wearing a tacky black wannabe evening gown and a horrible dye job. 

Nope, I don't matter to my family of birth. The people that I mattered to were my paternal grandparents. Their dead now. The rest of them don't care much for me because I had the misfortune of being a daughter. My brothers can do no wrong. Despite one of them having no job and living in squalor (in my parents house, which they abandoned for my late grandparents house) and the other being a deadbeat dad and a drunk. Nope, they can do no wrong. But I had to have an "intervention" because they assumed I was an alcoholic because I could hold my own in a conversation with my  alcoholic brother regarding hard liquor. 

I'm bitter. They told me as I was growing up that family was everything. They told me that we had a moral obligation to our ancestors and our descendants to be "more than right" and honorable. It looks like I'm the only one living up to that obligation. I'm bitter because they said that the family would stick together and take care of each other. What they really meant was that I was supposed to drop everything and take care of them. What they really meant was that I was supposed to be their meal ticket.That's why my Dad called me a failed investment. That's why my Mom kept telling me to leave Beloved and go marry some supposedly rich guy she knew off in gods only knows where. Because they wanted money and thought that the only way to get it was by marrying me off to some wealthy person, since I didn't land a "good" job right out of college, I haven't made a ton of money off my writing, and my brothers have proven unreliable.

Oh boy, life's going to get interesting.

 The major leadership figures of the Filianic and Déanic faith traditions are going dark on the internet. It is happening just as there is a new wave of people who seek to learn about Filianism and Déanism. This would not be a big deal except for one thing. I'm one of the few public ordained priestesses still blogging and writing about Filianism (and my specific weird sect of it). I have a feeling that the pressures of dealing with the influx of new devotees caught people off guard and left them reeling. Rather an leaning into the situation, they chose to step back.

All of this comes on the heels of my realizing that my version of Filiansim really does qualify as its own sect. As such, I've been writing and working to bring my writings into alignment with the holy scriptures of this faith (known as the Clear Recital). I don't know what's going to become of this. I wonder if the universe had a reason for making the tarot business I was running tank on the same day that a major Déanic tradition announced that they were closing down their site and completely revamping it. 

There is a part of me that is annoyed. It wonders if these people were cosplaying being worshippers of Déa because they wanted to be unique. It wonders if the leadership figures were in it for power games and if they lacked the moral fortitude to step up and lead. I strive to put aside these cynical thoughts, but they keep creeping up when I recall how one of them faked their own death on social media much to the distress of many of the younger members of the faith.

I was going to try to focus on tarot reading while the kids were doing homework and such after school. I was going to write during the day while they were at school. Now... Now I feel like I need to schedule office hours for devotees of Déa to have consultation when they need it. Now I really feel the pressure to finish writing my version of the Clear Recital. I have no idea what's going to become of this. I didn't walk into this looking to be a leadership figure. 

I oathed myself to Déa a long time ago and figured that I'd spend my time in prayer and writing. Things kept happening that put me in a position where I was offering spiritual guidance after I finished my training in Wicca. Now, I don't know where this goes next. I have an uneasy feeling that I am going to be leading people and I'm not that great at public speaking. Gods help me, I don't know if this is going to go the way I suspect it will be or not.

And I have other writing commitments popping up. I've stumbled into the river of fate and I'm not sure if I'm about to hit the rapids or not. Wyrd goes where she will. I'll do my best to trust in the gods and stay out of my own way. I have this bad habit of getting nervous and then getting in my own way. Not so great if you're trying to do work or much of anything else.

It is done.

 I managed to work up the emotional fortitude to put down the fish last night. Cuddle Bear was disappointed but not distraught because he was confident that the fish's soul would migrate into the next fish we will get. Snuggle Bug was very upset and it took me about 40 minutes to calm him down. He's afraid of death. Once the reality of the fish's death fully hit him, he had a bit of a meltdown. It was a lot of work to convince him that the death was a better thing than the fish continuing to suffer. Once we got past that, he was still upset over the idea that at somepoint everybody dies. 

I feel like a total heel for putting the fish down in the light of how distraught my son was to have his Lego buddy gone. We're going to recycle the fishtank and get a new one for the next fish. I am just tired. I've been depressed since sometime in March. Now we're hitting the "beginning" of my sesonal affective disorder, which I swear started the day after the Summer Solstice. So, I have to dig out my "happy" light and set it up. I don't know how I'm going to make that work. The time I spent last year using it with out distractions pulling me away is now the time the kids are up and we're working on getting them out the door to school.

My fish is sick and I can't bring myself to euthanize it.

 My fancy crowntail betta is very ill. I know that he is suffering. He is bloated and it's clear that he's struggling. At the same time, when ever I am at the tank, he swims right up to the surface to greet me and try to get food. (I haven't been over feeding him, he has some kind of parasite.) I have the clove oil. I was all set to put a few drops in to drop him into permanent sleep. Then he swam up to the surface and around in a circle. He's fighting so hard to live. I just don't have the heart to put him down right now.

There's little hope that he is going to recover. I feel like I'm a bad person for not putting him down right now. But, he's still kicking. He hasn't given up and just lays on the bottom of the tank except for food. I feel like it would be cruel to put him down when he's struggling to get over this illness. I don't know how he got this parasite. The tank was clean. The water was properly treated. He just got sick about a week ago and is now very bloated and struggles to swim. 

I had medicine to treat him but it expired in '09, the last time I had a betta that was sick like this. A part of me says "It's just a fish. Why are you so upset over this?" as another part of me says, "It's wrong to kill him when he's trying so desperately to live." Arose (his name is from old Norse and means 'from the river') has been with us for several years. He's reaching about the end of his life expectancy if he was healthy. Which I think made him more prone to catching this parasite.  But I just can't kill him right now. I know he's suffering, but he's fighting to live. I can't bring myself to crush that spark of light.

Freyr says that euthanization is the most humane way to end his suffering because he's past the point where medication would help. I'm sure he's right given how bloated Arose is and how quickly he reached this state. He says that it wouldn't be cruelty to put him down. Fortunately, he is not telling me it is cruelty to let him try to heal on his own. I don't have the fish medicine and I don't know where to get it. But I have the clove oil that will anesthetize him and then kill him on an over dose.

A part of me says that I'm too attached to this fish. I knew it wasn't going to live as long as a cat or a dog. Another part of me says that this fish is, in a way, part of our family and the kids are going to be very upset if I put him down. Over the last several days, they've noticed how sick Arose is and have questioned if he is going to die. They're more prepared for the fish to die than I am to put him down.

Something not quite right about that.

My spiritual life is weird. And getting weirder.

 I keep a separate blog for my spiritual writings and such. It's not really a full reflection of the weirdness of my spiritual life but there are elements that I don't share there because I am trying to cultivate a professional life through that blog. As I am dealing with perimenopause, my emotions are all over the place. I'm upset because I was promised something like a rite of passage when I hit this stage of my life and there's nothing because that promise was a lie. I was promised rites of passage as I hit the ages where they'd happen and they didn't happen. Or at least, they weren't treated as special days.

When I turned sixteen, my parents humiliated me when my aunts attempted to make the rather pathetic 'celebration' more special by brigning out a cake that looked like a woman in an evening gown. My engagement party was rolled together in with my college graduation party and my parents tried to down play the engagement because they wanted to bask in the prestiege that I graduated college from Notre Dame of Maryland. They tried to sabotage my wedding and repeatedly told me that it wasn't about me but them. They were forced to put on their company manners and act like they wanted to be there because about half the guest list showed up. Mom still managed to humiliate me by wearing black. The only reason why there was a baby shower for my first child was because Beloved's mother arranged it. There was no baby shower for my second child. And I could go on with the list of things promised and either executed deliberately badly or not at all from my parents.

Now, one may wonder what in hell this has to do with my spiritual life. Well, at sixteen, the aunt who was high priestess of the coven I was in gave me a sickle. This indicated that I had completed my spiritual education and I was ready to lead a coven of my own. At college, I began to act as an unofficial Wiccian liason to the campus ministry in the wake of the terrorist attacks September of 2001. I was a spiritual advisor to other students who were not affiliated with Christianity. I continued this manner of work on a sporadic basis after college.

At the same time, from age fourteen on, I began experiencing mystical things. I didn't talk about them because of my parents repeated threats to have me insitutionalized for being a normal teen. There were times, however, that I'd come into the houe after having sat outside on the hill meditating and my mother bitched about how I stank of roses (I wasn't wearing perfume that day). I would spend time with one foot in the 'real' world and one foot in the spirit world on a regular basis. It was a safe place that I could retreat to when the abuse I was livign with got to be too much. I could "zone out" and be where I had allies who comforted me and reassured me that the gaslighting wasn't the truth and I was going to eventually be out of that house.

The mystical experiences were potent and helped to keep me sane. They have continued up until this day. Precognitive dreams happened more before I developed bipolar. I can still read a tarot deck like nobody's business. I have the infamous 'godphone' going on which allows me to communicate more clearly with the deities in my life. It is like stepping sideways of 'reality' and interacting with them. It is pretty much the same skill that I taught myself but focused on deities. About in 2014, I was told that Freyr wanted me to be a godspouse by someone who was in a deep devotional relationship with him. I was intimidated at first and basically did everything I could to avoid him.

He made a point of being present and doing his best to court me. I suddenly went from having plants dying on me (with the exception of the unkillable snake plant my paternal grandmother gave me and the spiderplant she gave me) to having a thriving indoor garden. He came to me in dreams and visions. He was always kind and, at the same time, hesitant. At one point, Freyja spoke to me through one of her priestesses and chastised me for stringing her brother along. I confessed my fear that all of this was madness. Freyja told me that it was my upbringing talking, my experiences were real, and I should just embrace Freyr. I discussed things with Freyr and basically treated it like arraning ground rules for how a poly relationship in meat space was going to work. He agreed. And then Loki ... well, Loki decided that my attraction to him was mutual after years of going "Yer cute" and said that the arrangement I worked out with Freyr sounded fine to him. So, I went to Beloved and dicussed this whole business of being a pagan nun (which is basically what godspousery is).

After some serious discussion, I took up Freyr and Loki on their proposals. That was when life became more interesting. Things that I had been working on in the past began accelerating forward. We avoided sure disasters in odd ways. Storms of trouble just went around us. I made huge strides in my efforts to heal from the trauma of the past. To the point that I can write about it with out being completely terrified (most of the time). It was also at this time that the Goddess who I oathed myself to as a priestess when I was fourteen and had my first vision of her fully revealed herself. 

Now that I've told most of my story, I am going to begin posting things on here that pertain to my spiritual life as well as my 'regular' life. I know it is going to look weird. It is weird. Beloved and I don't talk about it alot because we tend to take the approach that our relationships with metamours is our relationships. We may discuss details on occasion but we tend to keep the relationships separate and when we interact with the metamours of our partner be as friendly as possible, because they're someone that our partner cares about deeply.

The spiritual relationships doesn't make a big impact on the relationship I have with Beloved. That's for two reasons. It's been made clear in the spiritual relationships that Beloved is my primary partner. That makes my relationship with him take precedence over my relationships with them. I told them this was a hard limit. I don't have too many hard limits, but that's one of them. They were shocked by the implication that either Freyr or Loki would demand that I give up my marriage to Beloved for them. Freyr was especially scandalized by this. Loki wanted to know whose knees he needed to take out that dared to say that I would have had to give up such an obviously healthy and beneficial relationship. 

The second reason the spiritual relationships don't make a big impact on the relationship I have with Beloved is because both Freyr and Loki would drop the spiritual relationship if it came close to causing problems in the marriage I have or my relationship with my children. They have made a point of giving me advice on how to improve my communication with Beloved when I'm in a bad headspace. They've made a point of doing their best to support us. At one point, Loki and Freyr both said, "What kind of gods would we be if we didn't help you and your family?" That help shows up in odd ways at times, like disasters being narrowly averted by the quirk of luck. But they make a point of doing their best to help us. Part of that help is respecting the dynamic that Beloved and I have on the polyamoury front. While Loki and Freyr discuss things and such, they focus on me and my relationship with them.

This is a long, rambling post. It wasn't entirely what I intended it to be. At the same time, it covers most of the bases. I had a point and just lost it as I was writing. Sorry if it makes so little sense.

♥

The emotional fall out might be worse.

 The lack of distractions means I am alone with my thoughts. This is not pleasant. I have been feeling terrified that my parents are going to show up and make my life a living hell for daring to 'abandon' them and 'the family'. I have been having a lot of traumatic stuff coming up over the last few days and some weird nightmares (despite my medication to make it where the nightmares don't happen). I should probably be writing more about this in my therapy journal but I'm afraid to write it down in there because the kid part of me insists that my writings are going to be found and used against me. Because that was a thing that Mom did. She'd rifle through my room and go through my journal. When I had a locking journal, she picked the lock to read it. As such, I didn't use it very much. I hid my notebooks among my school stuff, in weird places around the room, and literally between the mattress and box spring of my bed.

I got beaten for writing 'lies' when I initially started keeping a journal in third grade. I was writing down things that happened in my daily life. Including stuff about the beatings and the psychological abuse. Mom took that journal and threw it on the burn pile, telling me that she was going to burn everything I've ever written or was going to write if I wrote 'lies' again. I stopped writing and focused on sketching from third grade to fifth grade. My parents mocked me about my dream of being an author or they would tell me what kind of author I should be. It became apparent that I had some talent for writing in middle school when I made the honor roll. Suddenly, they backed off on mocking me and started talking about what I should publish.

High school came along and I wrote my first novel. My parents told me to pitch it to a predatory press that required a fee for submission and such. It was the first thing they saw and they seized on it as an opportunity to make money. They saw my prodigious writing as a chance to make some easy money. After all, they weren't doing the work. Mom planned on managing my writing career, giving me a line of bullshit about how I needed a buisness degree to make it anywhere in writing. She tried to push me to write children's lit, which is not my strong suit. At one point she threatened to revoke my access to the computer if I didn't write what she wanted me to. In a rare show of boldness against her, I said, "Fine, I'll get a typewriter from Grandma and do it the old fashioned way." And Mom knew that my grandmother would happily loan me a typewriter.

Mom still rifled through my stuff in high school. She successfully found one of my journals in the midst of a pile of poetry notebooks. She screamed at me but didn't burn it. By then, they didn't have a burn pile going and the physical abuse had stopped. All she really had was psychological torture to use on me and in that particular instance, I just spaced out and the screaming was just noise at a distance. Being able to dissociate at will was a survival mechanism. 

I was raised in a household with a weird cult like organization. My place was always at the bottom of the social ladder. At the same time, if my parents were fighting, I had to ferry messages between them and get in trouble for meddling at the same time. I was taught that I was essentially subhuman and a blight upon the family line because I was born female. And yet, I was expected to uphold the 'honor' of the family where as no such expectations were placed on my brothers. I was expected to be silent until spoken to. I was expected to keep my opinions on anything to myself until I was asked them (which rarely happened). I was expected to keep the house clean and do the lion's share of the chores whereas my brothers were assigned chores and could slack off. I was frequently doing my brothers' work. Mom would give the room a white glove test to make sure there wasn't a speck of dust anywhere. If she didn't approve of the job done, I had to clean everything all over again.

I was regularly told that I wasn't going to find a husband because I was a "poor housekeeper and a bad cook." I was regularly told that "they" didn't actually care about me and that the only people who cared and loved me was my family. They didn't love-bomb me as much as they treated me like a person from time to time instead of like a bit of unwanted furniature. For the formative years of my life, this was what I got. When I started dating N- my parents decided that he was a good prospect for me because he was going right from high school into the military. They were indifferent when I broke things off with him, deciding that I was going to be marrying someone else that they could count on having enough surplus funds to take care of them. I was their retirement plan. I didn't realize that until Beloved came into the picture and they hated him. Mom regularly was telling me about wealthy men she had contact with via her job in phone sales who were looking for a wife who could cook. She was shopping around for a husband for me. She kept telling me that Beloved wasn't good enough for me and that he didn't really care for me.

I knew the truth. Beloved and I had loved each other for a long time before we started dating. I knew he wasn't going to cheat on me or abandon me. I knew that if by some happenstance I wound up pregnant, he'd step up and be a father for our children. My mother all but called me a whore when Beloved and I began to have a physically intimate relationship. She threatened to throw me out of the house but my father, in a rare moment of sanity, stopped her. All through out the time I was in contact with my parents, my mother had hyper-critical things about my marriage, how I was raising my children, and that I "settled". The evening before my wedding, she said that I would have been better off marrying N- because she was sure that he had, by then, secured an officer's position and we'd have a fancy military wedding. I had an immediate gibbering panic attack over the mere thought of N-. Mom called Beloved over with the statement, "I've never seen her like this before."

I think the only reason why she didn't smack me across the face to make me 'snap out of it' was because the wedding was the next day and the handprint would still be obvious despite the makeup. That was her approach to mental health issues. My father called them weakness of character and that they were all made up because the person wanted attention. Beloved had seen me have panic attacks, he had talked me out of them plenty of times. He had me calmed down in about 5 minutes. Mom realized then that there was no way for her to talk me out of marrying him.

She denied the prospect that the marriage was the union of two families into one with the comment "This isn't a marrying of clans." She wore black to my wedding and tried to upstage me with her form fitting rhinestone off the rack evening gown. And even after the wedding, she mentioned these wealthy men she knew were looking for wives. Basically telling me to divorce Beloved and marry for the money so that they could be taken care of in their 'golden years'. It was part of the reason why I stopped talking to her.

Now, I have the stuff from my early childhood and the cult like mentality that "family is everything" going through my head. And the implication that the family that I was born into was my real family and the family that I have with my husband is just "playing house" keeps troubling me. I find myself afraid that they're going to show up and physically force me to leave with them and make me stay at the farm. I find myself afraid, again, that my days are full of delusion and that I am actually still living on the farm as a kid. And I have the massive guilt rolling over me for cutting ties that I have broken frith with my ancestors and my descendants by walking away from them. I know logically that they wouldn't want me to go back to someone who hurts me deliberately and would be a danger for my children. Emoitonally, I am petrified that they're going to rip me out of my life and make me their chattle again.

People read stories and are titilated by the details of things like a submissive person getting a funishment of kneeling on rice for a while until it gets uncomfortable. I have an indifferent reaction to it because I lived that. My mother dumped part of a jar of rice on the floor and had me pick it up by hand, whilst kneeling in it. I was seven and it was in the middle of the summer. When I got done, my knees were killing me and I had imprints of rice on them. I wasn't allowed to use a broom and a dust pan and for some reason, my mother decided that it was my fault that she spilled the rice because I 'surprised her' by walking into the room. They read stories and get titilated by the details of a switching but I've experienced that and am indifferent. Almost all of the 'torture' scenes from Kushiel's Dart, I experienced. There was no titilation for me. Just, a mental commentary on how well written it was and how close to reality it came. The joke about drill sergeants making recruits scrub things with their own toothbrush wasn't a joke in my case. My mother decided that I hadn't adequately cleaned the bathroom and made me scrub the toilet with my toothbrush and a paste of baking soda. My father found me sobbing and had me stop, got me a new toothbrush to use for myself and threw the old one away. It had only been about two hours.

Sorry for the rambling here. I'm just typing things out as they go through my head. I should really be writing this in my therapy journal. Gods help me, I'm terrified right now. I've projects to work on that I'm afraid to because of the lies that my parents told me about what the results of said projects would be for me. They said that if I wrote anything about the occult that people would come and assault my family and lynch me. They said that if I wrote about anything religious, the same thing would happen. I've the beginnings of a career writing about religious and occult topics. Nothing horrible has happened to me. At the same time, however, the stories they told me to scare me off of those topics are ringing in my head. And I'm somewhat paralysed from my emotions to be working on my housework because I'm afraid that it's not going to be good enough and Beloved is going to leave me for it.

I'm a bit of a mess right now.