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.