ceelove | Entries tagged with state of the cee

I get that the status quo is “overwhelmed” with a side order of “existential dread.” I really do. I appreciate that I am in an unusually good place, shielded from most of the effects of The Horrorshow and with sufficient resources to bear witness even if I feel helpless. I hope that writing this doesn’t come across as judgy or guilting; it’s not my intent, but it might anyway.

I’ve heard a number of people lately talking of having to pull away or shut down now, that they are out of cope. And I can simultaneously know that that is legit, and feel like maybe they aren’t taking advantage of an opportunity both to address their feelings of helplessness and have an impact on the situation.

So in case you aren’t already aware and taking action, I suggest SwingLeft.org and its scion site, thelastweekend.org. SwingLeft materialized after the 2016 election, for voters in districts too blue or red for their votes to make a difference to influence their nearest House swing district. It has scads of information on how to get involved at whatever level.

I’m hammering out the details of my volunteering now. I think I’ll be driving to NH district 1 on November 5 to canvas for Chris Pappas, staying over with another volunteer, then canvassing and getting voters to the polls on November 6. I waffled on this for weeks, but Swing Left’s webinar really did wonders to allay my anxieties about being to do it, both physically and emotionally.

Between now and the election, there’s phone banking and the last 50 of the 250 postcards to voters that I’ll be writing. It might be a bit late to get started on the latter if you haven’t already, as it takes a bit to get going; but if, like me, you really quite dislike talking to strangers and feel like you could hammer out a whole bunch of postcards in a week or so, postcardstovoters.org is your site. As to phone banking, it’s pretty much ongoing from now through the election, can be done from your own home, and again, Swing Left has a ton of info on how to get started.

If you seriously don’t know where to start, crushthemidterms.org will help you make a plan on how to best allocate your money, time, and cope.

We are in the fight of our lives, my friends. If you can hold the depression off for three weeks to put your resources towards the midterms, you’ll be more likely to have less reason to be depressed afterwards.

Time for more of the protracted deep-dive catch-up! I had a request for body talk, so I’ll start there.

So, I’m in pain much of the time, and have been for many years. I used to watch other people with extremely chronic pain and think I wouldn’t be able to function, or I’d just be cranky and bitch about it all the time. And yeah, it compromises my functionality, and it does make me cranky, and I do bitch sometimes, but not to the extent that I feared. What I wouldn’t have anticipated is how much of my life is about managing pain: how many hours a day I’m massaging myself, or days a month I’m at appointments for it; how much of my life gets arranged around dealing with it.

Underlying it all has been a gigantic, frustrating, baffling question: WHY? And at age 44, I finally have an answer. I deduced it via work from a visceral manipulator, Joanna Welch, who has been following patterns of compression, adhesion, and dysfunction through various systems intersecting in my torso. It has impacted everything from my breathing (like being unable to get a full breath while biking across the nation) to digestion (pain from eating has become the default) to the swarm of easily-irritated trigger points in my body - and I wonder, perhaps to my lack of breast development, including failure to lactate enough for my baby. Joanna has been creating slack in my connective tissue and freeing adhesions for many months, which begs the question of why there is a need for so much work. Why am I all squished into a non-optimal shape, if not by some traumatic incident early in life?

Huh. Like, say, a car accident at age three, in which I impacted the car so hard it left glass in my forehead?

That is literally all I know of the accident, all I was ever told. I was strapped into a car seat in the front passenger seat, but it was not strapped into the car and so went flying when my dad braked to avoid someone running a red light. My parents picked glass out of my forehead rather than take me to the hospital, and they gave me a yellow lollipop for being so good about it. That was the end of the matter.

No one ever made a connection to the fact that, according to my parents, they took me to multiple doctors when I was in preschool, to find out what was wrong with my wheezy, restricted breathing. “Not asthma” was as far as anyone got. No one wondered for me at my chest muscles randomly going into spasm, which felt like being stabbed with an ice-pick for no particular reason. No one thought it unusual that a teenage girl would have a neck so tight that no one could ever make a dent in the tension; so tight, in fact, that it would send her to massage school and into an entire career, trying to understand the mystery.

So now, forty-plus years later, it is - to wildly paraphrase Churchill - an insight wrapped in a revelation wrapped in an epiphany, to deduce the cause of so much pain and dysfunction. If my forehead hit the windshield hard enough to leave glass embedded in me, the restraining straps of the carseat slammed my torso with that impact. My body was distorted, my rib cage compressed, organs shoved into non-optimal positions.

It is very slow going, undoing patterns of a lifetime, but we are getting there. I can take the deep breath that my pathetically-hindered bike-tripping self longed to. I have more and more days without painkillers, and even with little arnica. I still spend hours massaging myself most days, but I am able to make incremental progress with the tension, instead of just keeping myself from sliding into utter misery.

There are weeks it still feels like I’m playing whack-a-mole with the pain. There are times when I feel internally incoherent, terribly fragile while my tissues are re-ordering themselves. I get frustrated and anxious about whether the trajectory of improvement is enough to counter the natural aging process. I worry that I’m setting myself up for big difficulties in planning to move to WA to spend my later years in physically laborious homesteading work.

But then there are times I’m in so much less pain, that I know it’s slowly coming together and that I’m reclaiming the use of my body that is my birthright. I wake so much less often to discover that tension has pulled my ribs out of place during a few hours of sleep. It is scary to hope, after a lifetime of being knocked askew and baffled, that I could truly come into my own in my mid-forties, but I’m giving it a whirl. Here’s to spending the rest of my life glorying in the freedom and internal coherence that I missed out on for decades and will always appreciate hereafter.

I am so sorry. For almost 20 years, I called you "boring." I was so wrong. You are a tireless and unsung workhorse of the body. The tide that washes us of detritus. The silent mystery underpinning the functionality of all those big obvious clodhopper systems like (bah) muscles and skin.

It is so very hard to know you. You can be detected mostly through your lack of absence: when we are made turgid by too much of you pooling within. Subtly, quiescently, patiently clogging up the gaps we didn't even know we had (let alone needed) until they are gone and something is just, indescribably, not right.

For twenty years, I've practiced massage with little more than an occasional roll of the eyes in your direction. Worse, even, I lauded love and attention on your sister system, the network of fascia that undergirds our every cell and organ. I even ignored the evidence of your importance in the times when myofascial work falls short. Voiceless, you proclaimed all along that when lymph ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

So I will endeavor to make you happy henceforth. Along with myofascial work and Thai massage, you will guide me in correcting dysfunction in the body. I will learn deeper listening than I knew possible, and be the lymph whisperer in return, holding conversations with you like atomic sighs. And sometimes, it seems, those will reverberate within you and come back to me like fireworks and voices of thunder shaking the body awake. I have seen; I know.

Oh, lymph, how glorious you are, how deserving of my fascination and amazement. Nevermore shall I neglect the wonder that is you.

Love, Me

I just got the last arrangement done of Fire and Ice, two and a half years after I first set out to make-there-be-music such that other people could hear how it's supposed to go.

Seventeen songs, people. And in a couple of weeks, the contests open (and one closes again after three weeks): the big-name contests of the music theatre world, with money and prestige and recognition attached, almost always won by men (and teams of men at that). To coin a phrase, if I can make it there, I can make it anywhere. The best-known contest requires 45 minutes of music submitted with an entry - and I have 56 minutes.

There's everything-else happening in the last few weeks, with high drama, huge emotions from Sylvana, a resumption of the land search, and all the late-spring grubbing a girl could ask for. But I can't begin to get a handle on it, so I'll leave it at this: I shared The Princess Bride with Sylvana, and it was awesome.

Current Mood: everything at once

So remember that extra fun bleeding I was doing for a while there? It did not resolve quickly. Finally, when I was 26-for-42 days on, I saw a Chinese herbalist. She prescribed a bunch of herbs that I made into a truly vile tea and drank twelve times while holding my nose. It was worth it. As of today, I've gone through a full normal cycle.

So I went back to get another round of tea prescribed, this time for the excess of phlegm that's been plaguing me for four years. Thank the gustatory gods, the tea this time is palatable. Oh, not to be hacking phlegm out of my lungs and snorking it out of my face many times a day!

However much I want phlegm out of my face, though, I want my teeth to remain in my face. So I really really hope the moderately spectacular faceplant I did this morning doesn't result in permanent damage to a tooth, which is currently unable to take the tiniest bit of pressure without making me jump. Eating is going to be...difficult for a while.

Current Mood: puny (as my grandma would say)

Thank you for all the well-wishes. It was indeed awful, and is still quite weird now. Kind of like walking on a trampoline, except not in a fun way; or like my head is a big bag of water, sloshing around.

But meds and exercises have indeed been helping rapidly. Once again, ye gods but I'm grateful for the resources of my life. When I woke, I had only to text my housemates to ask for help, to know that my daughter would be cared for as necessary. Within five hours, I had a diagnosis and prescription. That afternoon, already feeling markedly better, I got energy work to calm my jangled self. By the evening, I felt up to working. Granted, this is because sitting to do massage is easier than, say, walking up stairs. But yeah, my life: pretty astounding. This was not a first-world problem, but I had both first-world resources and a world-class community to help, and I take neither lightly.

I was ruminating on some kind of gardeny updatey thing, while I harvested this morning.

Like, there are tomato hornworm cemetaries, their innards becoming the stuff of parasitic wasp larvae instead of my plants becoming the stuff of hornworm innards. I encouraged the wasps with plants that lure beneficial insects. Permaculture: it works, bitches!

Or, ye gods, when I plotted this garden in the winter and planted in the spring, I expected it to be feeding, y'know, plenty of people. Now and for many weeks this summer, I'm the only one in the house eating measurable amounts of it. You can imagine the plotting I do to prepare and share my surplus, which is both great and surreal. I was going to take pictures of today's ridiculous bounty and mock-lament my fate of how to deal with it.

But with my hands full of harvested cucumbers, I met an old homeless Asian man on the sidewalk. I see him around, harvesting recyclables for the return fees. We found enough English and gestures between us to transfer several pints of cukes and tomatoes to his keeping. He was clearly very pleased, and I was very glad to give them to him, and yet the whole thing left me with an overall feeling of pensiveness and melancholy. I share so much food, but it goes to my friends, who are not undernourished. It was pure chance that I could give my fresh veggies this one time to someone who really needs them, and pure chance will not feed him well tomorrow, nor the hundreds of millions who spend much of their lives hungry.

So. Lots of happy ruminations on gardening going gloriously well. Rapture at the plants bejeweled with tomatoes, harmony with the pollinators so busy alongside me, a fair sense of awe at what my hands and some soil and the sun have wrought...all somewhat muffled by sorrow at how very rare it is for people to have this kind of luck and magic at hand.

When I started doing massage, I often worked crazy hours, often over 20 and once 30 hours of massage in a week. That rather boggles my mind, given that my hands and arms would generally be happy with 10, nowadays. And they often get more than that. And they keep telling me about it.

Ow.

So I'm no longer accepting new clients. I hate to do it, to tell someone, sorry, your pain didn't make the cutoff, but my own pain necessitates it. I'll spread the word if that changes, but for the forseeable future, my massage client load is all full up.