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[senescenceandsensibility]

Creature Comforts

Ok, so just going to ramble a bit and hopefully something will come of it….I haven’t written anything since the last post in early January. Haven’t opened the manuscript. In fact, I am actively avoiding it. I feel rusty and I can’t remember how I used to do this. I don’t know why I bothered.

I had to look back a bit. Two posts ago was the beginning of September. In September, on the 11th, I got two wisdom teeth removed. That night, my elderly cat had a seizure (he had leukemia, heart disease and an unknown but serious kidney issue) and the day after that I took him to be put to sleep, bloody holes in my mouth, my swollen face hidden by the mask. The next day I went back to work and pretended everything was fine.

Everything was not fine! I was sad and the house was awful. I needed a creature. I am on most days grateful and happy about my solitude. It’s been so long since I had to share my space with a human, I’m not sure I could do it now. But I need another living being. So on October 1, I went and adopted a seven-year-old shelter cat, reasoning that I could grieve my old friend while making a new one.

It was amazing. It’s like he knew he was finally home, after a shitty, shitty life. Three years as a stray in a parking lot, two years in a shelter waiting to be adopted, two years with a family who then returned him to the shelter in terrible shape, and then months waiting for me to come along. So, so much love to give, it was maybe two or three days before he was curled up in my lap and firmly lodged in my heart. I don’t know how they do it in general, but I don’t know how he in particular managed to worm his way in.

You can probably see where this is going? He died at the end of February after two active months of increasingly alarming symptoms. You don’t need the details. I have regrets for sure, and would like to make a few different decisions, but I don’t think I could have changed the outcome. He was sick when I got him, doomed from the start.

It was just so unfair. He’d finally found the safety and love he’d been lacking for so long, the injustice is the hardest part to handle. I know he knew love in the end – I know I gave him that, and I would do it again. But he deserved more. We both did.

Still working through this next bit, but I've been crying a LOT and kind of glad for it. I can’t remember doing this in quite this way before. I've been shut down for a while, years, probably, and this grief is mixed with a lot of other stuff that is much better out than in. My heart works, which is good news even if pain is the only proof I have right now.

This sort of thing should hurt. I loved him so much and he loved me. It is really something to be someone’s everything. I needed it, that simple, wholehearted love. I was enough for him.

It is refreshing on the one hand to experience uncomplicated grief. We don’t get to do that very often. There was nothing unexpressed, nothing unfinished. Maybe that’s why I want a creature in the first place, why I find them so vital to my happiness.

On the other hand, of course, is anything uncomplicated? Isn’t some of this about everything we don’t get to cry about? Isn’t some of this about three years of unprocessed trauma and fear? Pets and people and politics and pandemics?

Ah, who cares, just let it out. I’ve long been a proponent of feeling one’s feelings. Right now, I’m perfectly happy to be sad. I am taking in the lessons he taught me, I am missing him in every moment. And I am looking for the next creature.

[senescenceandsensibility]

Rambling in the New Year

Here we are. Happy New Year.

The holidays were fine. I traveled for Thanksgiving but was home alone for Christmas. In the past, family might join me (or us, when my husband was alive) and that felt right. But now it feels weird to tack myself on to established traditions in other households, even my sisters’.

It is inevitably hard. There isn’t a single piece of media one can consume at this time of year that doesn’t hammer at you about family and togetherness and love, either how vital it is for human existence in general, or how tragic it is when all that isn’t present on this one day above all the days. I felt okay on Christmas, but I was a lot better the day after. I was white knuckling it. Just get behind me, please.

When I was about 14, I said I didn’t want a party for my birthday. My extreme teenage self-consciousness was on the rise, and I couldn’t conceive of a party at our house that I could enjoy. That was true and I didn’t change my mind even as I cried on the day. Sometimes being alone is the next best thing, and you take it. I had and have a lot to be grateful for. I’m incredibly lucky. Also, occasionally, lonely. It’s not a death sentence even if everything this time of year makes you feel like it is.

And now, the new year. Ahh. What will it be?

I just read some advice about making a list of 10 things you love to do, a reference for hard days or when you’ve been doing for others for too long and have forgotten what fills your well. But I can’t come up with 10 things. Read, knit, jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles….that’s it. That’s my list. All of them safe at home.

I suppose I should put writing on the list, but although I *do* feel better for having done it, it’s not something I turn to with any eagerness. Everything seems to take a bite out of me. And because I am perhaps a little too wary of things that might drain me (and to be fair, almost everything does), I’ve boxed myself in.

I have had memory issues lately, bad enough to have spun myself into thinking there’s Something Wrong, even though there are plenty of reasons for me to be distracted and forgetful, namely the 50+ hours per week I spend at the beck and call of 150 people. It’s not a mystery why I’m not particularly present when my mind is a hundred places at once. I’m taking some steps, implementing tools to help me. Trying to use my time more wisely, etc. Deleting apps, unsubscribing from emails. The usual new year stuff.

There’s so much we unconsciously buy into. You’re only really legitimate if you’re loved, you’re only really loved if you’re shapely and fit and fashionable, and so on. It’s a lot to carry around. I do feel like I’m unloading some of it but not really sure what’s on the other side. Also, I want to be loved. I was trained to want all of that stuff.

Not surprisingly, given my mother and my husband, I used to think a lot about dying from disease. But I seem to have reached an age where I’m more concerned about dying suddenly. About a car accident, the hail of gunfire. I don’t feel like I’ve started, let alone finished, what I’m here for. And that seems especially important now that I can see I’m not here for the Big Love. That’s not going to be my story, so then, what is? And can I manage it alone before I’m gone?

Ha, not a cheerful new year post, sorry.

Lots of people chafe under parental expectation, familial responsibilities, partner needs. I don’t have any of that. No one but me cares what I do or if I do anything but what I’m already doing, which at the moment is going to work and then coming home. That used to bother me a lot because I also had no money. I’m financially more secure than I was, and because that tremendous weight has been lifted, I failed to recognize what is almost certainly a low-level depression. One that would certainly explain my distractedness, my loss of spirit. One that is also a hundred percent to be expected. We’ve all been through some stuff lately! I’ve never been one for uncomplicated feelings. I can feel lucky and sad. I am both grateful and disappointed.

So, I am resolving. To write things down, even if I think I’ll remember. I will do puzzles and read and knit. I will maybe, just maybe, pick up my manuscript and finish that thing once and for all. I will try to recognize what restores me and do more of it.

Here’s to a year better than last. I hope you found the best notebook ever.

[senescenceandsensibility]

September

September is my favorite month, not least because it closes with my birthday. As a kid, it meant fall, beautiful colors and crunchy leaves. You could see the end of the year from there, the rolling holidays, the cold, the presents.

This year, it’s been chock-full of bad and good things. I got two wisdom teeth pulled, my ailing cat died, my sisters came for a visit, I adopted a new cat. And here we are, but through it all I have managed to completely ignore the manuscript I’m supposed to be editing for my book, and I am simultaneously relieved and anxious.

Amazing how quickly I can lose momentum. How easy it is to let family visits or new furry creatures provide an excuse to avoid the unignorable. I have done the same with physical exercise. I’m happy to let those things go because they (seem to) hurt more than they (seem to) help.

But I’m grumpy and short-tempered. Work is more burdensome and frustrating. I have to get over this hurdle that I erected myself and now resent heartily. At this point I can imagine never writing another word. Give it up like I’ve given up everything else. But then what’s left? So, so much wasted time. A job cleaning up other people’s messes. So peripheral a part of their success a rational observer would think my contributions could be done by anyone.

It feels so familiar. I can only work on something for so long before giving up, before convincing myself that I shouldn’t or that I’m not very good at it. I did it with improv and essays, an untold number of craft projects.

But the book is arguably close to the finish line. A few more hurdles and it’s done. Which is no doubt part of the problem. I lose faith on a regular basis. I think I may have wasted a lot of time and thousands of dollars. I’m not sure that I’ll be able to stand by it; that it will be worth anyone’s time.

These are all familiar feelings. I cycle through them all the time, and so far I’ve managed to get to the other side. But I’d love for someone to excuse me, please.

It occurs to me that I’ve been backing farther and farther away. I used to perform improv, then I read essays, then I wrote blog posts for almost no one to read. The book would put me squarely back on a stage of sorts, and I want no part of that. But of course, that supposes it would be a success and not just an unread drop in the ocean of self-published efforts. I can’t just now tell which scenario I’d prefer.

[senescenceandsensibility]

Spilled Milk

A follow-up post.

So, yeah, the deathaversary of my husband passed without incident. But hoo boy, has it been a week of ridiculous near misses with Extreme Feelings about Seemingly Small Stuff.

On Wednesday, I dumped most of my granola and milk breakfast all over my desk, under the sympathetic but amused eyes of three male coworkers. And there I was…struggling not to cry over spilled milk. Pretty sure I said “DON’T HELP ME, PLEASE,” to one of them.

Naturally the old adage lights up in your brain. Of course you are pre-judging yourself for being upset.

I could probably put together a decent pile of essays about crappy platitudes, but this one is really annoying. Fully, I believe, it’s “no use crying over spilled milk,” likely just a(nother) way to get kids to not feel feelings, which seems like it was really important for a long time. But why not?

We should be careful about obsessing about things we can’t change, I get that. But the fact that there’s so very much that we can’t change feels like a very good reason to cry.

Also, it was MILK. It’s all over EVERYTHING.

Have I mentioned my foray into intermittent fasting? Can I tell you that it’s a lie? I mean, maybe not. I wouldn’t be surprised at this point if I were the only person on earth it didn’t work on. What I do know is that I am more disciplined about this than I have been on any other food-related strategy. On at least 6 days a week, I eat everything between 10am and 5pm (or 5:30), which is pretty extreme compared to some. I eat three sad, tiny meals at my desk at work, the picture, if anyone was looking, of an extremely single person with food issues. I’ve been doing this for roughly two months or more. Granola for breakfast, some yogurt and a handful of nuts around 2pm (or he equivalent) and then a salad or other vegetable-forward dinner. I have lost no weight. There are no rewards in life, kids. My blood sugar levels might be improving but to know that for sure, I’d need an engaged healthcare provider, and that doesn’t exist if you’re not actively bleeding or unconscious.

NO SHIT I CAN’T CHANGE MY MENOPAUSAL METABOLISM, THANKS FOR THAT. I can’t change my body image disorder, I can’t change the fact that my husband died a hundred years ago, or that I’ve been alone since then. But I won’t cry, don’t worry!

Anyway, all that to say that the granola is my best meal. I make it myself, it’s important to me. But also, it breaks a 17 hour fast. “But I’m so hungry,” was my first thought. Impossible not to feel a lot of feelings.

Everything is heavier this week, but also, everything is heavier anyway. We’ve all been through it. Exhausted, at the end of our ropes. My younger self would have thought that hard times would get easier as you get older, but this is emphatically not the case. Nothing is the thing alone. It’s the thing plus all the other things that came before. That’s true even without a global plague, a crumbling democracy, and an imperiled earth.

I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules. I mean that – I’m truly sorry. I know I’d do better than this.

The bigger question is why aren’t more people crying? Why isn’t everyone? I’d love to say it’s fortitude or resolve, but I’m afraid they don’t even know it spilled, you know?

[senescenceandsensibility]

Fourteen

I haven’t cried in ages; everything is so locked down. I tear up from time to time, but I never manage to tip over. I can’t help but wonder what will finally do the trick, when nothing has for so long. There are so many good reasons, maybe I just can’t choose.

Not that you need a good reason. To be clear, you don’t.

I’m listening to sad songs and remembering this day 14 years ago, when my husband died. I was there with his family when it happened. And we all have to mark the day, there’s no way around it.

He had cancer, but in the end, his lungs filled up and he couldn’t breathe. It was the longest 15 minutes of my life. Part of the horror of Covid for me has been knowing how most of those people died.

I took off from work today, which I always do. This far out, it’s not as if I sit home crying all day (even if I wanted to, see above), but I like to give myself the space to do and feel whatever I like without an audience. Mostly, I just sit and wait for it to be over. To reset my year, which revolves around this day, no matter that it’s been so long or that I’m trying so hard to build something new.

Impossible not to wonder at 14 years going by, gone.

I told very few people why I was taking off so I got a lot of “have a great time!” and “lucky you!” type comments. I mentioned it to one coworker and to my surprise, she hadn’t known about him at all. Which seemed like a shift, if I’m looking for one. My widowhood feels like a defining fact about me. I mean, it is. It’s an immutable truth. But it feels strange that people can know me now and not know about it or him at all.

I used to drop it into conversations. If felt important that they know this thing. At least part of it was self-consciousness. Someone loved me once and for a long time. But now it’s a little embarrassing. Someone loved me once, a long time ago.

[senescenceandsensibility]

The Land of the Something

My reading choice is almost always romance – for a hundred reasons, but chiefly it’s the happy ending. The assurance of a bow at the end is the only way I seem able to enjoy anything. I’ve realized lately that I emotionally attach to fictional characters in big ways, so it’s self-preservation, really. I can’t invite more grief into my life. I’m afraid of what will happen if the floodgates open. I’m afraid I’ll never stop crying.

I’m reading a book now and I’ve been dithering and taking breaks and reading other things, because I was pretty sure something bad was going to happen. (In the book, I mean. I know bad things are going to happen in real life.) To be clear, it would be a bad thing on the way to a guaranteed happy ending. It would be only temporarily bad, that’s the sworn contract in romances. But I couldn’t go on, I was so anxious. Finally, I read the first page of each of the remaining chapters, to get a preview, just so I could move on. I’m this afraid of what’s coming, of what surprises might be in store for these people. Of how much bad there is.

I’m tired of surprises. I delight in almost nothing. This has been true for a while, but it gets worse all the time. I can’t see fireworks without thinking about all the dogs and birds and veterans. I can’t look at the ocean without thinking of that Texas-sized mass of floating plastic. I can’t think about Texas without thinking about women who will die now, women who wouldn’t have had to.

What to do? We answer that probably a hundred or more times a day. What is next? What needs doing? What am I capable of? Does any of it matter?

Right now, on this day, in the US, the answers are bleak. No idea, everything, nothing, no. It is uniquely destabilizing, and I say this as rather an expert on feeling overwhelmed and ineffectual.

Life just got so much worse for all of us. You, your family members, your friends. If you can get pregnant, or if you’ve ever had sex with a person who could get pregnant by you, you are in this fight. This will affect where you go and when, how you conduct yourself in public and online. You will lose people you care about. It’s all of us.

I’ve been plagued since childhood with the idea of the world ending. It’s becoming clear lately that I suffered from a dearth of imagination.

For a small and powerful group, this is all working exactly as intended. They want me to despair. They want us to fold. That’s what we’re up against.

I realize that there’s never been any such thing as a happy ending. We were always going to die alone. But there was a chance, at least, that at the start of a new chapter, things would be okay. We might even get some scenes of pure joy.

There are those that say it has to crumble; it was always built on a faulty foundation. I get that, I do. It’s looking like we’re going to have to pull it down ourselves. The moment calls for more, but I have no practice at this.

And I’ve been resisting the truth of it. I live right now in that disbelieving, slow motion, screeching, “oh, god, we’re going to crash” moment, and it’s exhausting. It feels like there’s no way to avoid the collision. I’m mourning what was (what maybe wasn’t). And soon, I hope, I’ll be able to take stock. Count heads, divvy up the chores. Begin again.

[senescenceandsensibility]

Erosion

Honestly, the words aren’t exactly flowing. Not sure if it’s [whispers] The Block, or if there’s just nothing to say about the state of the world. I’m officially speechless. We are spiraling, and we have the power to fix it and we won’t. It’s incredibly difficult to stare into this abyss.

I’m told people were always this awful, things were even worse than this, we were just protected by privilege and by the lack of reach that social media affords. But I don’t know.

There seems to be nothing a small and emboldened group of people won’t do to make other people’s lives miserable. And it feels like they are winning because none of the rest of us can understand it, let alone fight it. And because that minority can’t be shamed. We aren’t speaking the same language. They only understand violence.

I read a very clarifying thread recently about how this basically comes down to oppositional defiance. There are people who have decided that no one will tell them what to do, but that they themselves will do the telling. Then they proceed to make the rules for others to follow, and every last one of those rules hurts vastly more people than it helps.

I think that about sums it up.

I exist, uneasily, in a little bubble where everything is basically fine. Or, I should say, I have gotten used to all the ways it’s not so that it all doesn’t feel burdensome. I’m protected, by my comfortable living situation and a secure income. I’m more grateful than I can say about all of that, but I’m guilty and scared too.

You have to put away a lot to go through the motions, and I can feel an erosion of my patience at work. The story I tell myself is unraveling a bit. I haven’t had a good cry in ages, but one is on the horizon, I think.

My cat is dying, the last of the animals I’ve had the privilege to know. Until him, there was always an overlap, some other darling whose fur I could bury my nose in. But he’s the last one. (He’s also the last one who knew my husband. The anniversary of his death is a month away, and I can’t say that’s not a factor in my mood just now.)

There is a lot wrong inside the cat, but with luck and steroids, you (and more importantly, he) can’t tell. He’s over 17 and generally looks like a younger albeit skinny little man. This is incredibly stressful, this death watch. Almost everyone you try to talk to will tell you “you’ll know when it’s time,” but I’ve done this eight other times in my adult life and I know that that point when it’s time, that moment the scale tips, is a moment too late. I don’t want him to feel even a little pain or fear. But I don’t want to miss a minute of his purring, happy company. I don’t want him to miss it. He’s happy; I did and do that for him every day. In a world where nothing you do seems to matter, it’s nice to have this living reminder.

I rather famously adopted two senior dogs some time back, and when I tried to explain why to baffled onlookers, that’s the reason I came up with. Because I knew I could make their last chapter better than anything they had known before. It was doable, when so much of what we do doesn’t seem to matter much.

I will be creatureless for the first time in perhaps 30 years, and I dread it. I know I should take the opportunity to travel, I should relax and restore my vet-related financial losses. But I don’t know if I can take being in this space without another living thing.

As above, I’ve gotten used to being alone so that it doesn’t feel burdensome. I think about it a lot, I wish and I wonder, but at this point, I can’t imagine sharing my life with a human being. I can’t imagine not sharing this space with at least one animal. Part of me thinks I should do it as an exercise, to see what it feels like, but I would do better trying to figure out why I think I should self-administer a test like that. I think I’ll make it about 5 minutes. I may have already researched local rescue orgs.

[senescenceandsensibility]

Sunday

I am trying to be productive before a midday social commitment I am no longer interested in doing. This is thoroughly typical of me, and I will push through. I'll be happy to have done it, if only because it's a tick in the "I did it anyway" column. But it should be fine, fun, whatever.

I prefer to do my running around on Saturdays and leave today for resting and total solitude. And when there’s a midday thing, I tend to let the whole day be about that and nothing else gets done.

What happened to those slow summer days of my youth?

I get resentful, that’s all. Going to a new place, separated from the parking options by a steep hill, to gather in huge numbers for a foodie festival thing during a spike in subvariants and mass shootings. Ugh. How does anyone do anything?

This is all the usual introvert’s lament. But it’s more now. Everything has a layer of festering awfulness just underneath, doesn’t it? How do we go about the usual things when we know that? What can any of us do?

It’s been forever since I posted here. I’ve labored over what to even talk about. The main things are too big – the crumbling of the republic, death of the earth, war, what have you – but the small things feel even smaller when pitted against all that. I have nothing new to say. I’m baffled, saddened, furious, and ultimately ineffectual.

Personally, I’m doing fine, even great, and that feels so weird and unfair and surreal. Work is still fun, I recently got a great review and a raise. It’s not like every day is a pure joy, or like they’re not basically all variations on the same theme. But it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t rob me. After a lifetime of feeling drained and unhappy and trapped by work, I’m more grateful than I can say.

I have finished the manuscript for a book of essays, one I hope to self-publish within the next year. It’s slow going, but it is going. I’m determined.

That is pretty much everything. Things are basically good in a terrible time. I will go and find parking and make small talk and eat flaming cheese. I will be glad to have done it, and if not, I will be glad to get home again.

[senescenceandsensibility]

Crumbs

In a weird sort of time warp at the moment, preparing to perform my one-person show at the home of a friend, a coworker who is transferring to Europe. We’ll have a small, hotly contested, audience of other colleagues. As it always, always is, the prospect of doing the show feels vastly different from the reality. A good lesson, probably, but I haven’t learned it yet, so let’s not get our hopes up. I want to say I’m pulling open a door I’d shut, but let’s be honest. It will never shut completely.

From a distance, it sounds great. There’s something in me that wants to show these people – all so very good at what they do – that I too have something I’m pretty good at. Something more than creative meeting scheduling and a sunny workplace attitude. But my doubts rush in. I can tell you the precise moment in the script when my brain starts to send the message that I’ve been talking too long, they are bored, this is bad. The aftermath is a lot too, all the ways my various mental disorders make it impossible to hold on to what I know from a distance is good.

The planning has exposed some holes in the relationship with my coworker, too. Nothing I didn’t know before, but I think it’s finally come clear how uneven this is. How much I do for him, how little I get in return. He can be very charming, lots of people are drawn to him. And he’s used to it, he basks. He is my anchor at work, a fount of information and generous about sharing it. He has an easy laugh, which is probably a factor. Making people laugh can be a drug you chase, a false sign that you’re in favor, or whatever. It’s always my goal, so that people will be comfortable, so they’ll like me. My currency. But that doesn’t necessarily follow. I know he cares and considers me a friend, but I also think he’s arrogant and spoiled, and I just don’t mean as much to him as he does to me. Which is not his fault, but it’s always going to sting.

Intermittent reinforcement is a bitch. I should know. By now you’d think so, anyway.

I’m not devastated or anything, just sad about having fallen into this familiar trap. It's hard when you recognize patterns. When you’re drawn once again to that difficult personality, when your goal is winning favor rather than building bonds. It’s a knee-jerk thing for me, not my fault it happened in the first place, but it will be if I let it go on.

And nothing really has changed, I’m just a little more clear-eyed. I can still care about him in the same way, I just won’t show it the way I have been. It helps that he’s leaving. He’s already assured us, after all, that he’s terrible at keeping in touch. (“But if you reach out, I’ll respond.”)

I can talk myself into being okay with uneven relationships, and turn tiny little gestures into meaningful proof of a person’s regard for me. But it’s just crumbs. They don’t nourish or sustain anything, and I can do without them.

I’m part of a friend trio at work, and the third is a much better friend. She knows how to do all the friend stuff, and not just some of it. Sadly, she too is moving on, she already gave her notice. And honestly, there are no other prospects at work for bond building. I’m pretty picky about who I spend time with, a true introvert. I may have just gotten even pickier. Maybe it’s my age, but I can’t waste my time, and I’m fine alone. People can be so much work. (And then they leave.)

This show is a lot of work too. Funny how I can make parallels out of anything, but it takes so much out of me to do it, and for what? To make people laugh, to hear evidence of their regard, ephemeral though it is. It still feels like I’m gathering crumbs. Begging for favor. Hoping for a return I can’t possibly get. I can’t for the life of me tell if it’s worth it.

[senescenceandsensibility]

The Blank Slate

Ordinarily, I love a new leaf turning over. Love the symbolic reset. But we were so hopeful this time last year, so sure the worst was behind us, it’s a little hard to find that same level of hope right now. I don’t relish the idea of being kicked in the teeth again.

But that’s okay. If I’m more cautious about what this year will bring as far as the world goes, I’ll be very happy to be pleasantly surprised. That’s the upside to low expectations. And it’s here whether we’re ready or not.

I spent five days on the east coast with family and I’m resting up now before work starts again tomorrow. It was a good break and a great visit home, but goodness, I am not a good traveler. Just dehydrated and tired and constantly worried about home and the cat. (Both just fine.) I used an app to basically borrow a person’s car for the week, saving about $150 in cash and adding a $10,000 in anxiety. I managed to lose my phone – for the first time ever – in Newark Airport of all places, and that was an adventure I don’t need to repeat. Grateful for kindly airline luggage personnel who managed to offset literally everyone else I had to deal with for those 90 minutes. Not one part of that counted as hardship, however. I am safe, my family is healthy, and we were together in a house with a tree up for the first time in years. It’s been years since the last time I was with them at the holidays.

So now here is the new year. I am determined, as is my recent habit, to make this year look different from last. Some project, some something. I plan to self-publish my book of essays, so that will be the main thing. And I hope to travel to the UK in July/August, which will be the other big one. And I need to figure out my blood sugar, a perennial goal. I am about to renew the lease on my apartment, but I think that next year’s big thing might be a move to someplace I like more and that serves me better.

Feeling a bit low, considering how little I have to complain about. But that is likely more to do with the state of the world than anything specific to me. I want the things I mentioned to happen already, but that’s all for me to do. And I suppose there’s some survivor guilt in here. Life is so hard for so many right now. Trying to figure out how I might help make that better and feeling overwhelmed, as usual.

I am off to polish the manuscript a bit and maybe nap on the couch as I have the last few days since I got back. Tomorrow I’m back to work, and if I’m not looking forward to it, I’m not dreading it either, so that is a step up from virtually all the other jobs I’ve had.

Wishing you a surprisingly good new year. I hope it exceeds all our expectations.

[senescenceandsensibility]

Atmospheric Pressure

They are using big words to describe the 5-10 inches of rain we’re expecting here. Words like bombogenesis. And atmospheric river, that’s a fun phrase. All of it a bit…apocalyptic. But what isn’t these days?

I was looking forward to a rainy weekend. Such a rare pleasure to be indoors and have nowhere to be. To have a hot cup of tea while you watch nature do her thing. Of course, nature is awfully angry these days, and with good reason. You have to put so much away to enjoy anything.

I’m closing in on the editable draft of the book I’m…assembling, is the word I want to use. I say I’m just putting a collection together, but I’m doing a lot of new writing. I don’t know what I’m avoiding with the careful language I use to describe it, but probably the usual stuff. I’m not a writer, mind you, I just wrote a bunch of stuff. No big deal.

Work is very busy right now. I still enjoy it and I’m still surprised by how much. There are absolutely the usual, ubiquitous workplace irritations, but happily they can’t seem to tip my scales. I genuinely like and respect the people I report to, and I am happy to help my coworkers get their work done. I am most definitely on the bottom rung (again), but as I’ve said, they pay me better than I’ve ever been paid for that. It has dawned on me lately that at least one of the reasons I stayed so low at my various jobs – always settling at the bottom somehow – was to keep myself out of the line of fire. I am, simply, never in the crosshairs, never in danger. I can exist without any of the anxiety that virtually everyone else is to varying degrees affected by.

It was subconscious, but it makes perfect sense. There’s a trade, of course. I am not particularly challenged by what I do, for one. But I can still contribute, I can still show up, I can behave like a rational adult. Be consistent, funny, helpful, encouraging, open, and so on. I can, maybe, relieve some of that stress.

And I can also, you know, spend a weekend doing what I like. Brewing tea and waiting for rain, writing (or “assembling,” if I can’t quite get there) under no pressure at all, except for the challenges I’ve created for myself, on my terms. It’s an okay trade, honestly.

[senescenceandsensibility]

Repeating Myself

I’m writing a lot, just not here. This used to be almost the only place I wrote anything at all, and I’m very, very glad that I kept that habit up over the years. I’m in the process of compiling a bunch of writings into what I hope will be a book, and I’m grateful to my former self for starting this obscure blog project and keeping up with it.

It’s easy to think nothing gets done – and in my case, certainly, nothing big gets done in much of a hurry. But small, incremental movement does indeed add up. And it’s not just about having written things down occasionally, it’s about the careful, detailed chronicling of things that I almost certainly would have forgotten about. I’ve mentioned this before, but if I go back even five posts, I’ll learn something surprising about how I was feeling when I wrote that, something I wouldn’t have necessarily recalled ever again.

I do have disordered thinking, so maybe that’s part of it, ruminating obsessively for time and then moving on to something new. I would not have thought I could forget the ins and outs of how I was feeling, but retaining the nuances is probably hard no matter how your brain works.

So this is just more “magic of writing things down” talk, but there is magic there. It never fails to amaze me.

[senescenceandsensibility]

Mornin’

Up early-ish on a Saturday and staring down a big week, with things fun (old friend in town) and not-so-fun (colonoscopy) on the horizon.

Work is going well. The occasional down days remind me how good things generally are. Feeling settled in that part of my life bleeds over to others. Partly this is because of the paycheck, and partly (mostly) it’s not having to spend so much mental energy on work and job stuff.

I have been writing a great deal. I’ve never said that before in my life. But I am. Not like it’s a ton, but I’ve established a daily practice and that has done wonders for me. It sometimes backfires – I am writing every morning before work, and sometimes those are hard things to carry around all day. But the overall progress feels amazing. I can actually see a book coming together, however slowly.

The morning writing has also improved my evenings and weekends in ways I didn’t anticipate. I can treat them as the restorative time they are instead of beating myself up the whole time.

I guess this is all about how to talk to a weird brain.

Can’t say enough how glad I am that I moved. Obviously, it’s a lot of improvements and that wasn’t the sole thing, but with distance and time I can see just how depressed I was in LA. I mean, I knew I was, but a lot of the frustration I was feeling and the behavior I was reporting had more to do with that than I realized. I should be clear that I also didn’t know it was a solvable problem. It seemed to me that I would always have to fight the same-sized monster, and I’m finding that it’s much, much smaller and less scary. Maybe I just have a better arsenal. Anyhoo.

This doesn’t make for interesting posts, so it’s been a while. There’s plenty I could complain about (and I did in the last post) but that particular fire has died down, and I’m trying to be careful. There are ways that work and the people there disappoint and frustrate me, but a) I’m operating from slightly higher ground, moodwise, and 2) I don’t want to eff this up. I don’t want to let the usual office bullshit ruin what I know to be the best job I ever had. People always exhort you to be grateful. I am, more than I can say, and I’m not going to help poison the well. I watch people sabotage their own good fortune all the time – I am a wise old crone in a sea of young people who have never known job insecurity. I want to shake them, but we are not alike. Not at all.

That sometimes gives me pause. It’s hard to find like-minded people on a good day, and I am new in town and older than most of my coworkers and not – no surprise – all that inclined to be social in the ways those people like to be social. That has not changed. I need, in the end, very little from other people. And that’s fine, even if I wrestle with and mourn why that is. It’s at this point hard-wired. Moving wasn’t a miracle cure. Happy hour small talk still doesn’t interest me.

But it’s okay, more okay than it’s maybe ever been. The writing is shoring me up. I have joined a weekly writing group that is helping me in the same way the shows I used to do helped me – it keeps me accountable knowing I will need to share something, the reaction to my work encourages me to keep working, and the work of the other folks inspires me too.

For today, there are many errands awaiting. I do have a colonoscopy next Friday and so of course I’m dealing with anxiety around all the poop prep. I need to grocery shop with that in mind and get all the household stuff done before picking up my oldest friend in the world at the airport and delivering her to her brother’s house about an hour away, after which we’ll get our first sleepover in years. It will be a balm and help strengthen me for the coming week, and I am grateful.

[senescenceandsensibility]

Mean Girls

I think it’s a function of my general happiness that I have less to blog about these days. I’m also working on – well, “working on” – a compilation of writings that is taking up a lot of headspace if not time.

In any case, I’m happier than I can remember being. I was thinking just yesterday when I was walking in to work from the car just how….fine I was about heading into work. It just doesn’t hurt like it used to. It’s a combination of things, I’m sure, including my own mental shift, the move from LA, the increase in pay, and a great boss/team. I feel like the luckiest person in the world, given where I was two years ago and how little hope I had for a real improvement in my circumstances.

But, boy oh boy, some people are not only miserable at work, but they really do want to spread it around. I’ve been around too long to let it happen, but it’s an amazing thing to watch from the outside. There are office politics everywhere, of course, and everyone has their own shit to shovel, bad days happen. I get it. I can add “outside the fray” to my list of things that keep me happy – my team is largely existing and working as their own unit without too much contamination. And here’s a twist, having essentially no friends up here makes it easy to stay on the periphery.

I’ve said/complained about this before, but I pretty much am on the outside of every group I find myself in. Not sure when or if I will ever feel fully inside, if that’s even something I am capable of. But I spin it: I am an observer of human nature, after all.

And I’m observing some alarming shit. I mean, the fissures eventually show, at any company. Anywhere personalities are rubbing up against each other is going to have friction, and I work to defuse tension and keep people happy. It’s a coping mechanism turned life skill. The problem is when people not only don’t know how to calm the waters but live to churn them up. Who need chaos and discontent to feel normal. Who create friction where there doesn’t have to be any.

I am, as I say, on the outside of this. Feeling extra lucky for my normal boss, and for having landed right where I did. But it’s concerning to me that the world outside our team is being corrupted by malcontents. It seems a pivotal time for this young company, culture-wise. That anyone would want a world where their coworkers are their enemies…I want to shake them. Don’t you know that life is short? Don’t you know you have to spend most of your waking life working? Why would you choose this? Why on earth would you create it? Who do you want to be?

Not everyone has gotten here by the same path, though. Lots of people are perfectly happy to be unhappy. It’s what they know, and they can’t help throwing lit matches around. But I’m going to do my best to keep putting them out. If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to get along, even with people like this. I need them, after all, which sucks, but I also believe in healthy working relationships. And I’ll lead by example and push back in my way whenever I can. And I’ll be a friend to their perceived enemies and strengthen relationships and work like I always do on being helpful and beloved. Maybe it’s no healthier than their way, I don’t know. But this was too hard won to go down without a fight.

[senescenceandsensibility]

Sensitivity

My ongoing preventative healthcare is a struggle for me. There’s almost always a “call for appointment” on my list of things to do. I was the sole caregiver of a terminal cancer patient – so, you know, I have seen my share of doctors at work. A hundred? More, probably. In any case, between the sense memory and my own body disorder, doctor stuff is harder than it might be.

And I’m even further behind than usual. After more than 15 months in the area, I’m essentially brand new. I’ve had to find a new doctor for everything, and the list of healthcare professionals I need is getting longer the older I get. And of course, the virus made going that much harder, more risky, not worth it, a good excuse.

I have a terrible genetic legacy when it comes to my teeth and gums in particular, and I’d especially avoided the dentist prior to the vaccine, because mouths, why do you think.

I found a new dentist in the insurance company directory and was pleasantly surprised to see good Yelp reviews. This is practically unheard of, and maybe that should have been a flag. The office sent me through many, many virus-related hoops, but never asked “are you vaccinated.” So I was treated as though I have the plague, which, you know, fine. I don’t think they are even allowed to ask, and I can’t blame healthcare folks for being cautious.

My mistake, I now realize, was telling them how high a threshold I have for dental work. My childhood dentist never used Novocain when he drilled my cavities, so that’s no less than the truth. However, I was referring to scraping. Those pic things, the other analog tools. But they ended up using that ultrasonic torture device, and boy oh boy, she went to town. They murdered my mouth. And of course, I’d just bragged about my tolerance, so I just took it. That’s me in nutshell.

I guess after the ridiculous amount of pain I’d taken without a single peep, I thought I’d earned a little credibility. But I still had to put up with the vaguely accusatory commentary about the staining behind my front teeth (almost my whole life I’ve heard about this), and questions about my coffee/tea/red wine consumption (almost the entire world drinks coffee and or tea and or red wine). There’s a particularly difficult issue in the back on the right side and while I swore truthfully that I didn’t use toothpicks and never have, I still had to hear the whole speech as if I were lying. I have no doubt people lie to them all the time. But? I’ve made my stand. Shut the fuck up already about toothpicks.

I also have pockets. Pockets, pockets, pockets. This too is my fault, apparently, despite my family history of terrible teeth and gum problems and my personal history of religious flossing and brushing. And as with all my healthcare visits lately, it spawned another one. Periodontist, here I come. I will not tell them about my childhood sadist of a dentist. I will not. They will have to treat me with kid gloves.

The result of the aforementioned attack on my mouth is a tooth so sensitive to both heat and cold, I can no longer eat anything without pain. Room temperature is too cold. Sipping beverages has become an acrobatic exercise. I am miserable. There has been a slight improvement now, almost two weeks later, and it’s the only reason I haven’t burned the place down – via a strongly worded Yelp review, of course.

Man, did it push my buttons. Like, all of them. I have the body disorder that makes it especially hard to even call the doctor, let alone open my mouth, spread my legs, anything. But to feel punished for doing the thing I didn’t want to do in the first place, to essentially have done this to myself, and then to be  lectured at and doubted like I’m not 54 goddamn years old….it’s a lot. She’d probably say she was doing her job, that my mouth was that badly off, making all this my fault. And I can’t argue that, I’m just the patient. I just wish my caregivers were better at giving care. 

[senescenceandsensibility]

Give and Take

Things had been going well. Almost too well, am I right? It had to happen sometime. The brick wall. The spike strip. The nose dive.

It wasn’t one thing, it never is. It’s a confluence of things. And I was due, it must be said. This was perhaps the longest period of time I’ve gone without a significant depressive episode in memory. It was too much to hope that it would last forever. I’d begun to wonder what I was ignoring, so curious was I that I hadn’t dipped.

But dip I did. Likely catalyzed by a forced drop in caffeine intake, which comes with side effects that include irritability, my brain chemistry was in No Mood for bullshit.

A big part of it, too, is the fact that we’re almost to the end of this terrible time. And I can get to whatever line that’s been drawn. I can do that, call up reserves and just keep going. But I will need at some point to process everything it took to get there. To let it all out eventually. And you can’t always predict how that is going to shake out.

And once you’re sad or, you know, looking, you can usually find things that are wrong or fraying. I’ve said, and it’s true: If you’re basically unhappy, everything feels like a burden. If you’re basically happy, nothing does. I can take the odd disappointment. The small annoyance. It’s when they pile up. Last straw and all that.

At work, my job is to help people get their jobs done. I do that by handling the irritating and picayune day-to-day tasks. And this works for me, as it dovetails with my pathological need to sell my worth through helpfulness and putting others first. But I still end up as the official provider. I’m mostly fine with this, as I said, until I’m not, and when this happens, it only lasts a little while. Because it is a pathological need to be helpful. And I’m overpaid. So it’s pointless to complain about any of it.

But now that we’re closer to the end of our exile from normal life, I am a bit behind in terms of, you know, a normal life. I moved here, away from everyone I knew, and then went into quarantine. I am emerging from a bunker, as it were, and I’m going to be expected to build a life now. I truly like almost everyone I work with, but though we’re friendly, I’m not sure we are going to be friends. It’s hard to feel on even ground with people you ultimately have little in common with. Brilliant people, experts in their fields…people I (essentially) pick up after.

My first thought was to volunteer somewhere. It’s a good way to meet like-minded people, depending on the organization, but it’s also a good way to build yet another one-way street from me and my efforts to a new and different group of recipients. I was seriously considering hospice patient visiting (I still am) and even I, with no therapy degree or license, can see there are issues here. Who am I likely to meet who won’t break my heart? Hospice and social workers report a high level of job satisfaction, I know that. I was a caregiver to a terminal patient – I already know that it’s rewarding, not to mention valuable as all hell. But what will I get from that that won’t also hurt? What kind of person does that to themselves, volunteers for it?

I remember someone once telling me about someone he knew who’d died by suicide. And he said, “he was the most helpful guy.” And it stuck with me. Because he obviously needed help, right? I want, more than anything, to get what I give. Not at work, I understand that contract. But in general, cosmically, on balance, I’d like to know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of the kind of giving I like/need to provide. A reciprocal, mutual give and take.

Anyway, sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is a klieg light. Sometimes it’s a train.

[senescenceandsensibility]

Useful Tools

Things are good; still amazingly, surprisingly good. I hardly know what to do with that. Given this year and the world and all the relentlessly bad news, I can only be concerned about the inevitable fall from this high. But I am trying to enjoy it while it’s here. My mental health is, relatively speaking, so much better than it was, I’m consistently amazed and grateful, and I just don’t think I could have made this progress had I not traded my LA life for this Bay Area one.

I am not sure you could even reasonably consider me a depressive anymore, so rare are those episodes.

Now, a lot of this is just age and wisdom. Had I not had 30+ years in the workforce under my belt, I might find more fault with things at work. If I hadn’t moved from a rickety, unsafe house, the irritations of my apartment situation might seem bigger than they do. And if I hadn’t spent so much of the last 13 years alone, this isolation-within-isolation might have taken a greater toll. Things are, as always, relative.

But I was reminded forcibly of the not so old days the other night, crying in my car on the way home. It had to do with an exchange I had at work, and the feeling that perhaps (as these things go) I am wrong about everything and it’s all awful.

I work with go-getters. The pay is good, but the pressure is intense and the work demanding. They are good at their jobs but need to perform. And I recognize, even among people I really like, a tendency to roll over anyone and anything to get to their goals. That is at least one way to get things done. It’s not how I work, but because I’m eager to please, I can generally be helpful (and therefore beloved and appreciated) as they barrel toward the finish line. Their goals are also mine. It sucks to be rolled over, I truly hate it, but I can usually avoid that feeling by adopting your goals as my own.

As a (good) support person, I do just that. I provide support. I care about what you need just as much as you do. I treat all requests with the same level of urgency. Most people are paid to care about a narrow set of things. I am paid to care about all of the things you care about, and I take that seriously.

It’s too boring to spell out the exchange. Basically, someone acted like I’d provided only minimal support in the past and downplayed the (enormous amount of) work I’d done for him over the last year. Now, he’s either a poor historian (this is generous) or a gaslighting dickhead (more likely), and obviously I needed to incorporate this knowledge (he’s not to be trusted), but it gave me pause.

I always want information, even if it hurts, but this felt like a particularly painful slap. I tend to think that by providing outstanding service, by doing favors, by stepping in on projects or whatever it is, I am forging relationships. But that’s not the case, not always, and really not ever. That’s not how it works. I’m just begging for your favor.

I was pissed because this guy not only didn’t think highly of me, by his attitude you’d think he never thought of me at all. (Stepping in here to say, again, I have bent over backwards to fulfill his every request.) But he’s not required to. I am just doing my literal job, so he has no reason to even thank me, let alone appreciate it. It’s the minimum I should be doing and I shouldn’t expect anything for it. (Basic courtesy, it could be argued, is the minimum he could provide, but I digress.)

Ingratiating myself is what I do. I felt lied to and hurt, not because he means anything to me, but because I can’t help but worry that he’s not the only one who feels this way. That I’m wrong about it all, that no one sees me as anything but a useful tool. Which is how I know I’m not cured. I mean, honestly.

It’s true that none of these people are really friends. Just friendly coworkers. In truth, only one has become a friend and it is because she made the effort. And maybe it would be different if we weren’t so limited by the pandemic and forced separation. But maybe it would be exactly like this because I’m incapable of feeling like anyone really likes me for me, just because. Being useful is the only currency I trade in.

Seems there’s still work to be done on the happiness front. It is all relative, as I said. Relatively speaking, I’m happier than I’ve been at work, safer at home, more secure financially, and in decent health. That’s more than I lot of people can say and I’m not going to complain. But I will perhaps put some thought into what I can do to make more things good. And I’ll start by attaching less importance to manipulative assholes at work.