Going easy on myself
I'm still writing here, don't worry. Also, have some random Lyon pics
A warning that this post may be something of a litany.
Sometimes all you have to talk about is how you haven’t had time or energy to talk about anything, because of, well, everything. So please bear with me.
I last wrote here at the end of May, detailing just a touch of the lovely time I had in France. And then I vanished again! Why, you may ask?
Well, the Friday after I posted, I went to a local event in an attempt to further connect with community here. I had a fun night! But for our pains, my partner got Covid again, and then I got it a couple days later. (In a reversal of our experience two years ago, when I was the one to get it first.)
I spent the past year watching folks I knew go to Europe or other places on planes and coming home with Covid, and was kind of prepared for that risk? But no — I got it here in my own backyard, as it were.
At least, I thought at first, my case wasn’t nearly as bad as the first time. (I’m very vaccinated, and have a decent immune system.) But of course because of that, I couldn’t stop pushing myself around the house and trying to do things. It’s summer! We have a yard now! So before my positive test I managed to cut my finger on my new huge trimming shears. A week after my positive test, I decided to use our spiffy kit to sharpen our new-to-us reel mower, and while I completed the task, I collapsed afterward into a 48-hour Covid migraine.
By the time I really started to come out of it it was Father’s Day. Then the Solstice snuck up on me. I saw my sweetheart sing outdoors, tried to get back into exercise, tried to reorient my brain to work and writing, and then traveled to Vermont and Montreal for a lovely wedding and afters in that splendid city. Had a weekend to finally relax and not do much after that…and then it was now. The summer is eating itself, and me.
Oh, and of course my home country continues to gently collapse like a cake out in the rain.
A different direction?
One of the things that the past few months have clarified for me is that I truly need to commit to putting my energies toward things and people that feed me, and not fritter it on things that have become a chore but which I merely believe I must do. What I’ve been trying to figure out for a while is where this space fits in that calculus.
It’s not a chore to write here; quite the contrary. Yet I can’t help but notice that keeping it up at a cadence that keeps readership up and invites new subscriptions is not something I manage to do consistently. That said, I’ve struggled most of my life with consistency — even with things that bring me great joy.
Writing in general is one of those things I need to do regularly and deeply, or I languish. It’s how I process my experience of the world, it’s often how I figure out how I feel about things at all. It’s how I keep track of my life. It’s how I express some of the things in my mind and heart that are so poignant and painful and beautiful and rare that I cannot say them aloud, only try my best to get them to the page, and hope that in doing so, I can make others see.
The question becomes: if it’s hard for me to consistently write, then in what modes and spaces is it most important that I place my focus when the urge is there?
…Or a shift in focus
I think that once again the answer might be that I allow, for now, that this is a space I update perhaps once a month, or when I have an experience that makes the mood strike me. I would like to do another series, about attachment theory, trauma bonding, and attachment repair. I still have ideas and drafts in the hopper about recognizing one’s own neurodivergence as an adult, about family estrangement, about thwarted athleticism, about sensory sensitivity, about “wellness culture” and toxic spirituality, about Outrage On Behalf Of, about the things trauma doesn’t excuse. So much stuff, and yet these topics always end up being somewhat sprawling and hard to manage to produce on top of everything else in my life.
So I’m going to give myself a bit of a break about it, and hope that in doing so, I wind up producing some of them because it feels good to do, not because I need to feed the content beast or keep my numbers up.
In the meantime: I appreciate all of you. Thanks for reading, thanks for subscribing, thanks for telling your friends about it.
Where else can we find you…?
I’m glad you asked, me.
If you’re interested in what I’m doing in fiction, please take a gander at my Patreon. It is little, and broken, but still good. There are lots of things on there that you can read without paying, and I’m hoping to bring it further back to life soon.
If you’re interested in seeing me as a somatic therapist, please go here.
And please, stick around here, because I’m not going away. I’m just gonna try and pressure myself a bit less to Bring the Substack Hustle, because the hustle? It is not, and has never been, my style.
Essentially, this is to say: I’ll see you when I’m next ready to talk here. And that I hope you’ll still like it. I hope you’re all well and loving what you’re reading online, and I hope that from time to time, I can add to that joy.