Thinklings

[the-le-ax]

Return? Maybe?

I don’t post anymore, but I’d like to. I’m not sure if I want to track something or regularly reflect, or what. 

For today, I was just marveling at the state of my mental health, how I haven’t been seriously suicidal for more an a couple of weeks at a time since moving to CO over a year ago. Then Monday, yesterday, I had an enormous wave of it, of this feeling that my person and my values are fundamentally incompatible with life and especially work. Actually, I think one of my values is probably that life isn’t the most important thing, that we maybe place too much importance on life, on insisting on life. That feels arbitrary to me even now, even as am no longer rationalizing how my deadness would solve all of the problems of my aliveness.

I miss talking reasonable about suicide with friends who get it, who are into health and survival and who don’t become unnecessarily nervous about ideation.

It is FASCINATING to be a student of mental health, to have assignments that require a level of “vulnerability” (ie. personal disclosure) around mental health, and how political that makes the classroom feel to me. Like I could be disqualified for setting the bar too low for myself.

[the-le-ax]

You Never Write Anymore

The other day I was listening to my person, E, talk about their messed up relationship with their boss/friend and a series of other relationships with weird boundaries. I wanted to ask him, “Who convinced you it was your job to look out for other people’s interests before your own? Who told you it was your job to always take one for the team? Where does this existential debt to others come from?” It is 1. endearing, 2. an obvious red flag, 3. within my partner pay grade to manage.

I’ve been feeling really down about my job search, feeling all the feels about having irregular job history, and irregular life trajectory, and a generally nonconformist self and self presentation. Yesterday I identified that I’ve been feeling invisible. I could be missing friends in Seattle, but I think part of this feeling is also just not having a job/vocation where I get to be valuable everyday. Part of it is not having a queer family here, not having sought one out, and feeling the wear of regular misgendering, even by people who know better. Part of it is having submitting my application to a Counseling MA on December 1st and still not having heard back. 

I throw stones that make no ripples in the world.

And that not making a ripple part triggers all of my desires to isolate and to slowly (or rapidly) starve myself into a dry, empty, nothingness of a person. At least then it would make sense that I leave no imprints. My invisibility would be blameless or at least of my own doing. 

This evening I thought to myself, “Who convinced you that you were invisible? Who told you that you have nothing to offer this world, that there is no empty space in this world that will fit the shape of you?” It is, I fear, a very long and rational list. So I’m glad I didn’t ask E such a question, even though it’s a valid one. How we be in the world in our 30s didn’t come from nothing. As Fred Moton says, “nothing comes from nothing.” Our early work is, it seems, to begin to assemble an exegesis of whatever kiln fired the early contours and glaze of our vessels.  

[the-le-ax]

December

Since last I wrote, I traveled to Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, and back again. I loved my sister’s family, reconnected with a dear old friend, broke a heart, and renewed the sense that my father, however shitty at that role, is a friend I want for life. I applied for a second graduate program and slowly escalated the crazies of waiting to hear back, of trying to predict a future unknown so that I can make any kinds of plans for myself. 

I’ve begun to grow a friendship with an endearing human that looks like some old fashioned courtship and with them have begun to learn the ways of D&D and world and character building. How fantastical. How more lifelike than my life has felt. In this friendship/courtship I am encountering all of the residual emotional demons that have crept quietly in the enclaves of my psyche since the end of my near-decade partnership. There isn’t enough counseling for those demons, only wearing them down like river stones, over-firing them in the kiln of my resilience. 

[the-le-ax]

I take my damn time

I began Thinklings with all kinds of intentions. Don’t we always? And then the world unleashes its lesser gods, the atmosphere its impenetrable fog, the forest its obliterating fire. Intentions then are constituted by a hope unencumbered by the unforeseen material and psychic fallout of the everyday. They make for the best kind of aspirational living, if the least bound to reality. They allow us to project ourselves into the possible, into imaginings greater than what our current constraints would dictate. 

I love that.

So I get to begin again, eh? Don’t mind if I do. 

[the-le-ax]

Looks like we have the mountain to ourselves

I got up at 4:30am today to go run the Bear Creek loop before sunrise. I slept shittily, given that my uncle is in the hospital with likely lung cancer and this provides me with opportunities to both help out with the family and to sort out what reasonable boundaries for my commitment with be. I spent the night mentally whirring and physically thrashing with restless shoulders, my personal version of restless legs. 

It was misting so heavily my cowardly dog, Asa, wouldn’t go out to pee before we left. He’s too prettty for that. It graduated to rain as I neared the trailhead, so I traded my down vest for the rain jacket tucked in the back of my car. It was cold and drizzly, the kind of Seattle weather I’ve hit the trails in for years; the kind of weather I apparently brought back with me. I had an outdoors friend who died in a snow field accident a few years ago, an early 70′s South Carolinian who was known for his tech startup and philanthropy, but made legendary by the stories of dragging friends out in miserable conditions to execute feats of mental and physical endurance no one could rightfully call “fun.” We’d try to go rock climbing in the rain and show up to the deserted wall where he would chime, “Looks like we’ve got the crag to ourselves!” And so it was on Section 16 this morning. 

The up was hard, but easier seeming. At some point I didn’t feel like I was running, just moving in whatever way it was that my legs seemed to be doing independently. I suppressed the exuberance that comes from having this sensation despite being a once a month runner. I hammered the downhill, trying to open up my hip, get some leg speed, fix the footfall of my arthritic foot. There was no rain after the first 500ft of gain, just the eerie fading out of oak and ponderosa. Asa stopped chasing phantoms in the forest and loped behind me for the last three miles. 

This is what I did instead of what I planned, which was to have a belated birthday SufferFest in which I perform an off the couch slog through as many loops of this trail as I can. It is what I did so that I would be available and energetic while caring for my uncle’s dog afterward, coordinating her care, and trying to relieve my mother enough that she might have some time to herself today. Just having showed up felt like enough for me. I keep needing to proving that I can show up and run. I can get out of bed early. I can prioritize my own well-being.

I felt sorted out until I returned to normal life, because normal life is full of all the trappings of my disintegrating wellness. I feel hopeful. I’m not falling apart. Everything that has to happen this week will happen. I just need more time to hide in the hills.

[the-le-ax]

First timer

i’m not really trying here, but a post is a post. i’d like to do this shit every day-ish. i’m aiming to keep track of my (new) post-Seattle life, which starts here in Colorado Springs but, dear god, hopefully does not end there. i’m tracking mental health and some athletic goals, should i get my shit together. i’m tracking time with my Oma, who’s cooler than you by a lot. i aim to make a goals post soon and pin it (does tumblr do that?). oh, and i don’t understand tumblr and want to just use it like a blog and not like social media/eternal consumables. 

xo,

lx