“Tell us about a guiding star inside your grief. Are there people – whether real, mythological, or fictional – who live their own grief in a way that gives you encouragement, inspiration, or direction?”

A few people come to mind. Most of them are musicians: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Tori Amos, and the UK band James. They all write/sing about their own personal grief, which is something I deeply admire. As somebody who is not sure what to do with my own witnessing, hearing, seeing bands/musicians I love taking theirs on directly through their art is powerful. It says “eff you” to the stigma around grief, and it says, “I am making my own space. Unabashedly.” In October, we went to our old Oregon hometown to spread my Dad’s ashes. One foggy morning I was up and ready before everyone else. I went walking. We were staying in our old neighborhood, the hill where we lived until I was 5, and soon I found myself, almost by auto-pilot, walking down a main road. I didn’t realize it, but my body automatically took me past the base of the hill where our house is on, straight to the main road, the vein of the town, and the pulse of so many of my childhood memories. I had Nick Cave’s song “Ghosteen Speaks” in my ears and I began to softly cry happy/sad tears as I heard his words, his words of his grief, and knew they were about mine, too: “Look for me, look for me, Well, I think they’ve gathered here for me. I am within you, you are within me, I am beside you, You are beside me.”

His pain, his words, his honesty. To me, in that moment, they were my father speaking to me, comforting me, readying me for our task that morning. Saying, “Hi there, Little. I am here. Feel the cool fog fill your lungs in the town where I nurtured you as a child. Feel the comforting cool Oregon air on your cheeks, turning them red as when you were a little girl. I am not gone. I am here. We are forever entwined.”

From a local newspaper article from the town my parents grew up/met in:

During our wet cool, winter flourish

In shady areas 

Is a non-vascular, flowerless tissue

A phloem tissue that covers the surface

And make other parts move

Why you don’t see

Move metabolites between cells and within cells

By osmosis and diffusion

That spreads from the surfaces back to the roots

That is partly why you don’t see

Large, freestanding

Understanding this will help you realize

This difficult invader 

Will help us to understand

Will not spread well in sunny, dry houses

A dry spell so persistent

That the iron in combination 

With the after-burning is softer

Our rainy season

This keeps harmful control

Moist following a rain,

So be careful.

Today’s prompt: “Touching into your grief can be brutal. Even when the pain never actually leaves you, sometimes purposely turning to face it can be exceptionally hard. What would it mean to offer kindness to yourself in your grief?”

First, a note: It HAS been brutal facing my grief. I have two prompts half-finished that speak to this. So, here we go, out of the slump! This was a very well-timed prompt and I thank Megan and team for the respite:

Kindness would look like not fussing over the fact that this post will likely not be as eloquent as the others. It would be not beating myself up for not finishing/sharing the previous two prompts. It would be not putting pressure to do either one of those things, either—though knowing that I’d really like to finish them, pushing a little to get that done, at least, seems like a kindness. It looks like not feeling guilty for sleeping for three days straight. It definitely looked like the personal day I took today! And it probably means, again, not being down on myself for doing nothing BUT sleeping during my extra day.

Kindness is the doctor’s appointment I finally set to get myself set up with a therapist, because I know therapy is a useful tool for me—and a psychiatrist to adjust my meds for depression and chronic fatigue.

But kindness is also gently luring myself onto the yoga mat when I can, and being ok if “when I can” doesn’t happen as often as I would like or I feel like it “should” or as often as it seems to with others. And kindness is for sure only getting to the yoga mat because I genuinely know it makes me feel better. Ditto with going outside. Kindness is remembering that, despite the blanket of snow, I LIKE being outside. So maybe push myself to get out there more than once a week to check the mail. On that note, kindness is definitely not comparing my grief journey with anybody else’s.

Kindness is realizing how tired I am in this moment, and letting what’s on the page now be enough.

Hey. Yeah, it’s really me! Real quick explanation for my return after 2.3 yrs: To help me “process” my parents’ deaths 34 days apart, on October 22 (Dad, from a fall) and November 25 (Mom, from a heart attack/imo, Broken Heart Syndrome/”eff this, I’m outta here”), I’m taking a course called “Writing Your Grief,” where I’ll receive daily writing prompts and then…uh, write about them. I needed a piece of Internet to save my posts, and just remembered this one, so here I am. And here I will be for at least 30 days. Feel free to unsubscribe, because “chronic fatigue” to “crushing grief” is one hell of a bait and switch. Remember my German phase, though? That was fun. I still dabble. OK, anyway, I’m stalling because the words aren’t knocking at my brain-door with this prompt as much as they were the previous two. Here we go. Today’s prompt: “How Do You Live in a Landscape so Vastly Changed?”

I think I was/am blocked on this one for a couple of reasons. For one, I’m interpreting the question funkily. I’m reading it as if it’s predicated on the idea that I am thriving. I know this isn’t true, because the whole premise of this course is that, you know, we’re struggling. I think it’s the word “live.” Lols. I seriously do, though. How sad is that. So let’s just get that out of the way: I am not thriving, and the word “living” feels like a stretch at the moment.

The second thing that is possibly blocking me is that I didn’t live in the same state as my parents, and due to some crap I’m too sad to get into right now, they hadn’t had a phone for a while. So it’s not like I was talking to them regularly. So sometimes it almost feels like nothing has changed. Almost. I can sometimes inadvertently (?) trick myself into thinking they’re still out there, we just haven’t spoken in a while. But even though the day-to-day mechanics of my life might look the same, it’s not. Nothing is the same. I am not the same. I’m an iceberg or a duck in water. Up top, normal-looking lady with a normal-looking lady life. Under the surface: broken, confused, missing pieces of my heart, probably wearing dirty clothes, etc. etc. I know they’re gone. My entire body, soul, heart and greater celestial zip code know they’re gone. And I am not the same.

For one thing, I am now a self-taught expert on grief. Not just because I’m living it, but because, after experiencing some surprising reactions from people in my world, I felt so misunderstood when Mom and Dad first died, that I did a lot of Googling. I’ve learned that, guess what, we don’t handle grief very well in this culture. I’d never thought about it because I’d never had to think about it, and that made me complicit in many ways. Because of my own lack of experience with grief and discomfort talking about it, I would do the exact things to people going through loss that have made/do make my head spin now, after my losses.

So, I guess, typical me, one way I’m navigating my new world is from the top of a my newfound soapbox, from where I tell everyone how misunderstood I feel. Anybody who knows me knows I love an underdog and I love a cause to be obnoxious on social media about. But at the same time, I have to own how I’ve failed to show up for people in my life when they’ve experienced loss.

Anyway, I don’t know. To sum up: I’m tired, sad, empty, and perhaps a little more emotionally intelligent in this newer, worse world. However, I’d trade that new emotional intelligence in for Mom and Dad in the snap of a finger. Bring me ignorance, I want my parents.

I’m teaching myself German. This is the type of thing people resort to when they can’t be physically active anymore, I guess! Anyway, I have pages of scattered handwritten notes around my house and office, so I figured I would use my long-abandoned slice of the Internet to try and keep things at least somewhat organized.

Sorry this isn’t a real update, but the good/bad news is that I will probably update way more regularly now! The bad/bad news is that it will mostly be boring German notes. But maybe I’ll try to fold in some actual “hard-hitting life/blog/fatigue/anxiety content,” too, for you, my fan. Heh. We’ll see. Anyway, time to dump some German vocab. Apologies in advance.

Also, is anyone out there learning German? Or another language? Any tips? I have a few. Maybe I’ll write a thing about it if anybody is interested. For now, I will just say this: German grammar is fuckin’ schwierig. It vexed me as a high schooler and it vexes me now. I seriously think it’s what made me stop trying back then. That and just being an angsty moron. But, unlike back then, I am determined to master it and make progress. And also unlike back then, I have YouTube now. Anyway. Los geht’s, shall we?

German verbs in sentences, plus English translations:

Auf Deutsch:

Aber der Wind scheint so stark zu sein.

In English:

But the wind seems to be so strong.

Auf Deutsch:

Ihr seid bei Klaus.

In English:

You are all with Klaus.

Auf Deutsch:

Wir trinken etwas.

In English:

We drink something.

Auf Deutsch:

Man muss Pfand in den Einkaufswagen stecken, um ihn zu bekommen.

In English:

You have to put a deposit in your cart in order to get it.

Auf Deutsch:

Isi schläft an der Wand.

In English:

Isi sleeps on the wall.

_______________________________________________________

Ok, das reicht für heute!

Bis zum nächstes Post.

Tschüss!

A few weeks ago, I deleted my Facebook account. I’ve had it for roughly 10 years and have flirted with deactivating it many times in the past, but this time–after doing my best to mute FOMA’s* persistent siren’s call–I plan to let it lapse for good. (In true “nothing is really free” fashion, Facebook doesn’t take kindly to you leaving it behind and taking all of your sweet, succulent consumer data along with it, so it makes you wait a few months before your account is past the point of no return, to up the chances you’ll come crawling back. Or, I’m sorry, to “help you stay connected to what matters most.”

Anyway, it’s been a few weeks without Facebook, and I haven’t missed it. But I still spend a LOT of time on social networks. Sometimes, I feel like my entire day is spent cycling from Instagram to Twitter to even LinkedIn for God’s sake, just waiting for something to happen. It’s the first thing I do in the morning. It’s the last thing I do at night. It distracts me when I should be working. So, today I cut the cord on all of them.

What am I hoping will happen? Well, hopefully, I will parlay some of that anxious energy into filling my time with more meaningful things. What am I expecting will happen? Hm. Perhaps a mild existential crisis brought on by realizing/accepting(?!) that my life has absolutely zero meaning or purpose as it stands. (And then hopefully building from there.)

Either option feels more constructive in the long run, honestly. And I’m mostly excited to see what happens. (I’m also terrified, but we’ll focus on “excited.”)

*FOMA: Fear Of Missing Out

It’s taken me 11 days to post again. Here are a few contributing factors to my lack of productivity:

• Fear (what if it’s not interesting?)
• Anxiety (what if I can’t fully articulate my thoughts perfectly?)
• Good old-fashioned writer’s block
  • But a more personalized version, fully informed by both items above
• Fatigue
• Dread
• Depression
• Anticipation
• Over-inflated expectations (my own)
• Topic block (WHAT SHOULD I WRITE ABOUUUUT?!!)
• Et al.

Ironically, this list also serves as fairly decent topic-fodder. So, expect deeper dives into some or all of those at some point. However, I already have my next topic. Stay tuned. I won’t wait 11 more days this time.

I have been tired for a  year. That’s not hyperbole. Since around this time last year, I have been exhausted most of the time. The kind of tired that makes you go to the doctor. Several times over. For blood tests and referrals to other doctors. For more blood tests. To rule out lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, the elusive Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Lyme Disease and other afflictions that, for a few days, I’d convinced myself I most definitely had. Until the blood tests came back negative. It was an endless cycle. And what started out as paranoia (“Oh god, what if I have Lupus? If I have Lupus, it’s gonna suck. Oh shit. I DEFINITELY have Lupus. I can feel it!“) morphed into a misguided kind of hopefulness (“You know what? I hope it IS Lyme Disease. At least I’ll know what’s going on.”). So, that’s been my year. I’ve had to stop doing things I enjoy: horseback riding, walking the dog…uh, existing on this earth like a normal human person. And stop doing things I don’t enjoy but actually kind of miss at this point, like housework. Working a normal 40-hr-a-week job is a struggle. On weekends it has long been the new normal to sleep 16-22 hours a DAY. Essentially, sleeping my entire weekend away. That’s time I would normally be spending with my husband, my dog, my cat, friends. But instead, I’m in bed. Sleeping. Only to wake up exhausted every time. It’s not a very fulfilling way to live.

But today I saw a neurologist to discuss the results of my recent “last ditch effort to be diagnosed with something” at-home sleep study. And he told me I have sleep apnea. So yeah, that’s right. I do not have Lupus or RA or CFA or Lyme Disease or myeloencephalitis* or whatever but I HAVE SLEEP APNEA, motherfuckers!!! You have no idea how happy this makes me. Or, I guess you might now, after reading the last few sentences. But I just mean, I know it’s not normal to be over the moon about a potentially deadly affliction. But, honestly, I am just happy to HAVE SOMETHING SOLVABLE. My doctor ordered me a CPAP machine. Not known for its stylishness, but YES known for its helping-you-not-suffocate-during-the-night-ness and its ability to improve sleep quality. In other words, to stop me from waking up 6 times an hour. I will take it. I pick it up in a week or so. I will let you know how it goes. I just hope I can get some real rest now.

*Just joshing, only horses get that. I know because I used to study horse science. Maybe one day I’ll tell ya about it.