Be the change you want to see.

To begin with, my big tabby Otter has now manifested with Diabetes. we're having to control his food portions, no more free feeding, and on top of doing sub-q fluids to support his potassium levels we started four days ago giving him twice daily insulin injections.

I'm okay with needles, I've had enough of them in my life even aside from the tattoos.
Jeff is surprisingly okay with them considering he hasn't had to do needle stuff to himself ever.

But Tribble, my calico. She's peeing and pooping outside of the box. Tonight was the second time in a week that ONE of them peed the guest bed.

Jeff's convinced that it's her who's doing all the peeing. but I think that now we know Otter has Diabetes that he might have had occasions of muscle weakness and maybe some of the puddles have been his. The only reason that's important is that he, Jeff, has said now on three occasions that if we (or I) can't solve the cats peeing and pooping outside the box and in various places around the house that she'll have to go, or be sequestered, or something.

That would be intolerable to me, and if I wasn't trying to write this and get it out of my head to where I can problemsolve, I feel like I would be frozen from some combination of all the feelings that thinking about that wants me to feel.

If I'm writing, I can hold on to the feelings and keep myself cerebral instead of what? exploding? imploding? borrowing trouble anyway.

Problemsolving can do some damn thing to help.

my current theory that something makes her feel unsafe in the litterbox which is why she poops in corners of the room. the peeing i do not know.

* one thing I'm going to do to collect information is get with my Facebook cat owners/peeps and ask to have conversation with any who have experience with cats doing this.

* another thing I'm doing is getting with a cat behaviorist who I think will have a variety of things of advice to say. I fuckin hope so, it's going to be expensive, but at least she's local and won't charge me to travel.

* a third thing I'm going to do is some yoga. my body is tense and hurts. And get in the hot tub too, because my therapist had to cancel our massages this time.

It would be real easy to spiral about how lucky I am how privileged and stuff. I'm trying to not. Obviously... but yeah. This is overwhelming and I'm not good at this kind of project-management, where I'm emotionally involved.

okay. that;s all i have for right now.

writing is going okay just it's interrupted tonight. which, dammit, I almost had a handle on the current chapter.

This weekend Jeff is travelling with our gf Jenn. So not to feel lonely, I set myself up with a lot of social things, in multiple cases things I'd never done before.

Friday night I went to Renee's birthday party.
Saturday I went to a Halloween party that Amy and Bill and Kimberly were invited to, and they included me.
Sunday I went with Luisa to a Sikh temple for what I thought at the start was a Diwali celebration but upon reflection, may have been a regular Sunday service.

I could unpack and tell stories about each of those days, but this morning when I woke up I realized there were two specific things I wanted to write about.

one is: three straight days with extroverting.
two is: two straight days with going out around new people while dressing high femme. Even did makeup and hair. wow

yeaaaaaah. that was kind of a lot of effort, you know? Both those things.

I have tried to convince myself for literally YEARS that I'm an extrovert. I'm actually coming to realize that I'm almost certainly an introvert EXCEPT FOR THE FACT that my default mode when I "introvert" is to HERMIT.
and then I don't see people, I don't touch or get touched, I get depressed, and it sucks.

maybe I just suck at the introverting. Today's a kinda gross brainweasel kinda day already, I'm working on managing my pain and getting some food so I can brain better, and I still have to take my morning meds.

maybe I don't suck at the introverting, but there's something else going on there.
but I'm pretty sure I do suck at the introverting.

also, though, i seem to have hard anxiety at the extroverting. GAH
or maybe it's just that I did three days of being around People I Don't Know and that's stressful.
*sigh*

okay, now it's time to take a moment about the femme thing.
I've been tending to dress butch for several years now. Jeff never expressed that he cared about how I dressed except to say that he didn't really like women wearing makeup and that he didn't do well with lots of perfume. So for several years I dressed practically. I didn't have any kind of expected or cultural dress code to meet, not since graduating waldorf in 2011, so I've been wearing a lot of jeans, cargo shorts, nerdy tee shirts, sandals, and or boots.

this year I decided I was going to try and reclaim some of the femme I used to *think* I knew how to do.

yeaaaaaah.

Briefly, dressing butch /feels/ like blending in, dressing femme /feels/ like "look at me, look at me!" and I have anxiety over being seen. I don't feel like I know how to handle it when I am /seen/.

when i was a kid i was humongous levels of anxious (I was going to say "ridiculous levels of anxious" but this shit ain't ridiculous it's fuckin' SAD because I didn't have any safe place or people growing up. I couldn't even trust my parents). I used to pretend I had some means of being invisible. Because if I couldn't be safe with people, maybe I could make them leave me alone.

I can trust and relax around small groups of people. five or six seems to be the maximum.

Eye contact is hard except when either I don't care or it's low emotional stakes, like with a waiter or a clerk in a store, or when I really trust someone.

I don't know if that makes me odd, "normal" or just me.

I feel a little better just introducing this topic here (these topics? is flavors of anxiety a single topic or a multiple topic?) and also incidentally finally getting my breakfast and caffeine an hour or more after waking.

self care yay!

body still hurts, going to see what I can do about that. I feel like a tightly wound spring, if a tightly wound spring could still have healing soft tissue damage post RSI and post broken bones. UGH

i'm fuckin ridiculous.

Feelings are just feelings. They aren't the same as reality, and they will change.

Fear will blow past you, through you, let it go.
Sadness will drain down and out, let it go.
Worry, you can move forward and leave behind, let it go.

The best solution is occupation: DO SOMETHING. The feelings will do what they do, and then they will go away.

And then you will be there, having done something useful, and feeling better.

This too shall pass, and you will be okay again.

Breathe.

I'm consuming too much media.
It interferes with my capacity for independent thought, interrupts ideas-in-progress.

YMMV, of course, but it's notable in my case.

Was thinking earlier today about what does it really mean to be grown up?
Adult?
A "Woman"?
A "Man"?

To put a different spin on it, when exactly do us Walking Wounded finally come to own our own souls?
Our bodies, our health, our own opinions and reality?


I had no concept of myself as lovable for the first 18 years of my life. I had no idea of myself as attractive, gorgeous, loved, until I was 20 (thanks, gorgeous and loved Irishman...) I had no idea of myself as a dancer till I joined Travellers' Union at age 22 and started to learn English Country Dance and Ballroom (Thanks, all you former Travellers!) I had no idea I could be athletic until I started taking TaeKwonDo (thanks, Master Rankins!) at age 26.

Of course, I didn't realize I could be broken, either. I challenged myself to try new things, always proceeding with caution, hesitantly. But I could feel my self stretching, growing, filling out, and dimly sensing that the possibility of *flowering* was there, even if I wasn't robust and juicy enough yet.

Then I backslid. I married the wrong guy (or, the right guy, because I did need the "another opportunity for growth" because I was STUCK and needed to be jarred loose). I fucked up my knee from trusting that my teachers knew my body and abilities better than I did (dumb, dumb, blind, thoughtless and dumb), and I coped with the first disease/problem that was the brush with death. That's when I discovered that doctors are not omniscient, they are human, and make mistakes. I worked on healing myself and in the time I thought I was face-to-face with my own ceasing-to-be, I looked at my blind spots and my dead spots and my not-broken-but-grew-crooked spots. And I started trying to remove the dead spots and enlivening the dead spots and retraining the grew-crooked spots.

Then I made progress. I worked with the Thiasos, a group of Hellenic Pagans based in Sacramento and the Bay area, and I started to learn what mattered. That *I* mattered. That *I* was a child of god, same as the trees and the stars (thanks, Desiderata!) That I was worthy. That I could be strong, but that I would have to work on it, since I had a habit of thinking of myself as weak. I learned that I was *beautiful* (Thanks, Adelphai! *wipes tears from eyes*) though it had to come to me as a surprise and after a lot of time working on my headspace. After that, I joined a learning coven, a Wicca 101 group, and started to work on becoming strong and principled.

Still I referred to myself as a "girl". A "girl" of thirty-something, because "woman" was ... fraught. Being "a woman" felt like more than I could claim for myself. I mostly referred to myself as a "person". "Woman" still is complicated (political, and with lots of connotations), but at 41 with the life experience I have? I'm finally referring to myself as a woman, because somewhere between 30 and 40 I actually DID "grow up:"

I did start taking responsibility for my own health and my own happiness.
I did start taking responsibility for my own life and my part in building or destroying my own relationships.
I did start making the conscious decision to strive to be kind and compassionate and truthful. To live my sense of what is right and true and ethical.

Whenever I start to feel like I'm treading water instead of making forward progress, I look at what I'm saying, and what I'm doing, and what I'm thinking. I look at where my relationships are, and if there is any place I have enough resources to help someone else - time, attention, energy, and sometimes money or goods.

One of the Christian philosophical systems has a saying: Lord, let me be an instrument of your peace. I add:
Lord, let me be an instrument of joy.
Lord, let me be an instrument of healing,
Lord, let me be an instrument of hope and compassion.

I am a grown up now. In my way of thinking, that entails a number of responsibilities.

If you have strengths, you use them in the service of weakness, and helping others become stronger.
If you have learning, you use it in the service of educating ignorance into knowledge.
If you have passion, you work to fan the flames of passion in the world: passion for justice, for truth, for beauty, for fairness.
If you have health, you use it to help others heal themselves.
If you have traveled from brokenness to wholeness? You work on helping others see and fix the broken wherever it is to be found.

And you know what? None of this is *easy*.
None of this Living on Planet Earth is easy. We get sick, we suffer. We hurt each other, intentionally and un.
We lose possessions we value. Maybe we learn something.
People we love die. We suffer. Maybe we learn something.
People around us suffer. Maybe today we have enough to share, a hand to stretch out in comfort. Maybe we are the ones suffering, and hoping to have the comfort of another's hand. And maybe we learn something.

and maybe? maybe what we learn? is that's what Love is.
maybe once we stop being afraid, we can put Love to work in our lives.
For real.
And maybe that is all the Change we need.



If Love drives out Fear, how do we make sure everyone has enough Love? How do we help people Not be Afraid?

It starts with me. It starts with one word, one hug, one (dumb) little post on the internet.



And the courage to make it public.

It's easy to write for people I've chosen, people I know I can trust. I'm going to stretch my trusting muscle farther today.


Remember. Love. Learn. Hope.

Last night I got, as a friend of mine used to say, Thwacked With The Salmon Of Wisdom... cos some of us don't get to eat the salmon, and that's just how it goes.

I have to find a Professional Fisherman who can supply me with Salmon-Thwacks until I learn better how to fish for my own Learned Fish.

...am a bit discouraged. Have a lot of stuff to work on: need to raise the bar from Calendaring to Logistics (which is more complicated, of course); need to Time Manage so I get all my homework done before class (I'm wayyyy behind now), and I need to seriously re-engage in the Job Search.

I want to crawl into a cave, or go do EVERYthing else other than what I need to do. But I can't afford to get distracted, somehow I just lost 2 hours (though I did finish my project for Saturday's class).

Would I "manage my time" better if I had a job? A regular routine? You bet your bippy I would.

(GODS I hate jobhunting.)

Gonna go eat lunch and get done what I need to.

Here is me testing a new-for-me technique of blogging. Of communicating, and of political activism.



I believe Naomi Wolf is right.
I believe that the window of opportunity is closing, and that we, ALL OF US, will have to push to keep it open.
I believe that we have to ratchet up our efforts to protect our democracy and our own safety.

I believe that this country's Founders meant for all of us to stand up and protect government for the people, BY the people, if it is ever threatened.

Am I scared to speak out like this?

Hell yes.

but I remember the quote by Martin Niemoller:

"In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up."

this is me, worried.

Watch the video. Thank you, Cherilyn, for pointing me in this direction, and for helping me wake up.

Elections are coming up.
Please pay attention. I will be trying to, also.

I heard an echo from childhood today, a memory with repercussions:

"No, not YOU!"
"It's not ABOUT you!"
"As if YOU know anything aBOUT it!"

And this is why I fell a little in love with Jeff; I said "Evanescence is a cool band, I recently heard an album of theirs..." and he downloaded everything he could find by them by the time we had our next date next week.

*jaw dropped*
You did this because _I_ said they were good?
he sort of smiled, with that one eyebrow raised and said,

"Your words have an impact, you know."






Everyday I struggle between feeling invisible versus trying to influence people's thinking.
I realized during tonight's concert that the echoes of childhood can go away now.
I will feed the wolf of kindness and consideration and of trying to do the right thing.
I will work to believe that people find my company and my time valuable and worthwhile.

And I will work toward treating myself as if I am "a keeper", worth the maintenance costs and upkeep.

A little bit every day.
A little bit every day.
A little bit more every day.

I will.

I've decided that from now on, April is my Month-o-Self-Care-n-Checkups.

it just makes sense.

No more putting it all off.





which reminds me, I have to book a flight and get a substitute again for Friday's Southern Cal memorial for Scotty. And make sure it's ok with my boss. (I'm pretty sure it will be.)