Susurration

Early morning at work and I'm listening to the sound of the rain as it falls on my van ... I, not being a fan of getting wet, stay cozy and dry if not exactly warm in the driver's seat while I wait for my shift to be over. 

A sudden shift to hail makes me grateful that I am so ensconced. 

Welp, I survived another FeBlueAry and made it almost all the way through March without too many mental hiccoughs on my part. Jys' mother passed away a few days before Llethander's birthday. A blessing for her but rough on J who has never lost anyone near to her before. Jys is doing ok ... as well as can be expected considering and is making decent progress assimilating and really processing the fact that her mom is really gone. 

We have the cremation tomorrow morning and the memorial on Friday at 4pm at the same funeral home that handled the kids' father. So at least I don't have to worry about their professionalism and respect for the remains.

Medication is my friend. It pays to recognize and understand that I'm broken and not care about the supposed stigma of pharmaceutical neurotransmitter replacement. I saw a cross-stitch picture the other day that read: 

If you can't make your own neurotransmitters and endorphins, store bought work just fine. 

I love that saying so much for its simple truth.

My crafting mojo is MIA, has been for well over a month now. Just can't seem to bring myself to pick up hooks, needless, spindle or wheel. I want to, have a couple of WIP that is really like to see moved to the finished stack but they sit in their project bag or on the seat beside me while they wait for ??? 

No clue what I need to get past this but I really need to get making again.

Have an idea for a marionette that I'm trying to get designed, but it's just not coming easy. Hope to have something to show sooner than later. 

FeBlueAry

Sigh ...

I _really_ HATE February.

28 (+1 every 4) of the darkest, greyest, numbest days in my year. 

At this time I'm at my lowest ebb ... the thoughts that batter me are loudest and most insistent, shredding me, and I feel _nothing_. 

It's a time to simply endure ... to cling tightly to the knowledge that this is the 50th February I have witnessed and, as with all 49 previous, this soul sucking grey will pass and the inside of my skull will become easier to manage (relatively speaking). 

I don't think it's so much that this month is in any way worse than the 11 others in the calendar, although the lack of sunlight and SAD could account for some of it. It's more like, during this month, I just can't maintain the facade of functionality that I seem to the rest of the year. This is when I isolate the most, drawing away from as much of the world and the people in it as I can ... the agoraphobia demands that I maintain a tight control upon my responses so that I do not lose control and draw attention to me and this is when I'm least able to do it.

A current catch-phrase going around is "invisible disabilities are real" and, while true, mine aren't nearly as invisible as I'd like to pretend they are right now. 

Erasure ...

So, here I am once again with a blank space that I've a mind to try to fill up with ...

What?

That's the question and I really have no good answer. 

I'm only half aware of what exactly prompted me, with the coming of the new year, to delete all of my posts and leave myself this blank slate. On some level, I guess, I'm just unwilling to delete this little space ... even when I have no expectation that anyone might be interested reading whatever makes it up in here. 

I just knew that the old needed to be left behind in favour of the new me that I'm crafting.

A holding pattern is all I seem to have known for years ... but my time of waiting is past. It began with the breast reduction ... as traumatic as that turned out to be, what with the infection and all. It really stuck me hard, once I was actually on the mend and done with the twice daily antibiotic infusions, that I had not credited my situation realistically. I had been of the mental perspective that it was all 'no big deal' instead of the invasive surgery and major infection that followed. 

It wasn't till nine weeks had passed and I found myself healthy but weak as the proverbial kitten that I started taking apart my own thought processes concerning the whole situation and, by extension, my attitude towards myself. 

I have come to the conclusion that I need work ... from the ground up and on all levels.

So I'm beginning with my physical self ... Not being to climb a flight of stairs in my own home without needing to stop for a breather fails to please me in a pretty major way. Knowing that a majority of the weakness is a result of nine weeks flat on my back as antibiotics help me fight of a pretty aggressive infection that could have been avoided if the surgeon had trusted me to know my own body doesn't really help ... while truth, it just frustrates me all the more. 

So ... I'm tackling the Éowyn Challenge ... by which I mean that I'm using their data to associate my daily walking as tracked with my fitbit to the distance covered in the journey taken by Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. Just a wee bit of geeky incentive for me to help get myself moving. It'll be interesting at least to see how far I might go.