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Tag: mental health

Not So SAD

It’s March, friends! Not only that, the first Tuesday of the month (my blogging day) went sailing by when I wasn’t looking…whoops. Somehow, somewhen, we’re already into the third month of the year and almost up to the time change (except for those lucky folks who live in places like Arizona…ahem). I’m generally surprised by how fast Time is going these days. It doesn’t help that Toronto has been experiencing our warmest winter on record, which also bodes poorly for the planet. But…I kind of hate our “normal” winters, all grey and slush and cutting, damp winds. Without those last two, the grey is much easier to bear. I tend to struggle with SAD at this time of year, between January and March. This year…I’ve been waiting for it, and for the most part, it just hasn’t turned up. Why? Well, the weather could be a major contributing factor, of course. Or the Vitamin D that I’ve been mostly remembering to take for a change. It could be the ongoing culinary experiments — I’ve been making a point of trying new recipes and ingredients. Most recently, I’ve done ratatouille, stir-fry with broccolini, butternut squash & white bean chili, and tonight, Spanish lima bean stew (I’m on a bean kick). It could even be the (shhh) writing — I spent February doing writing prompts, a few hundred words a day, and rereading one of my favourite writing craft books, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. (Bird by Bird by Anne…

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Email Inbox Woes

So, why is this post being written at 2:15am on Wednesday instead of on Tuesday like it’s supposed to be? Well, I could tell you about a few things: a work emergency, a dental emergency that’s caused me to have an even more erratic sleep schedule for the past few days, but…actually, I just spent the past hour going through my email inbox. Trying to get things cleared out and ready for my night. Because anxiety. Because it’s the first (or second) thing I do. Because I have toooooo many things coming through, and it’s just getting out of hand. A Facebook post in a group I’m in actually inspired this post. People were comparing notes on how many unread emails were in their email inboxes and giving and receiving advice on how to clear them out…if at all. I saw some pretty huge numbers there, which honestly gave me heart palpitations, so I felt just a tiny bit better. But only a bit. See, I just went through a massive unsubscribe purge recently, which helped the situation a lot. But…there’s still a lot of business emails, and emails coming from people that I follow and want to read, but when these emails pour in, I just want to hide. Seriously. An hour a day, folks. I’ve joked that I need an assistant just to manage my email. I also routinely get those all-important business emails in spam despite whitelisting numerous times, so there’s always a spam email sweep added…

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Journaling for Self-Love

So, one of my goals for 2024 was to cultivate more self-love/self-care for myself. And I had a brilliant idea one day in the shower (as one does). I decided to pull a Tarot card each day and think about what good quality I had that matched it — and journal a bit about it. For example, if I got The Chariot…the Chariot is about victory, attaining your goals, taking steps to move forward…I’d write about how I’m driven to succeed, I’m a go-getter, and how I’ve accomplished many of my goals because of this. And so on. And then I thought, hey, it’d be cool to decorate this journal a bit, kinda like a scrapbook, make it kinda fun and pretty. I’m not the best scrapbooker, to be honest. I used to scrap back in the day, with my sister and a mutual friend (we even did those 12-hour events which were a blast) and I did okay, but my pages were never gorgeous. But they were decent. My sister brought me supplies in boxes for this project and one of them was mine. I saw some of my old stuff, and I was a bit taken aback because…wow…twenty-some-odd years ago…I didn’t even remember creating those pages…and they were of things I’d done with my ex-husband…but they weren’t bad. Not at all. The journal is for me only, so I am not about making it perfect. Just fun and pretty. I want to add pictures and poetry and collage-type…

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2024 is Coming

To piggyback off Kit’s post (because I have no creativity whatsoever this week), I’ve been doing some noodling about 2024 and what I want to accomplish. This year has been a bit of a mixed bag writing-wise, some good, some not-so-good, and I’d like to ramp it up a bit, assuming there are no horrific crises or emergencies or general ongoing unpleasantness that makes things, well, unpleasant. So let’s talk about how things went this year first, shall we? I had a few goals. They were: To publish an erotic contemporary romance novella on Radish (similar to Kindle Vella), which was a pivot/experiment to see how readers would respond to my writing in a different genre. Result: The novella, BAV, as I am calling it, is about 1/3rd done. It’s on hold a bit while I figure some stuff out. It ended up being a bit deeper than I’d intended, delving into subjects like parental control, religious cults, and BDSM. Sooo I am deciding if I want to go all in, or if I want to rein it in some. To finish my anthology story. Result: I rewrote it twice, and started yet another rewrite which I believe will be the last. It just wasn’t working the first two times. It’s about 5,000 words now. Again, on hold, but I have full intentions of finishing. This antho has had a floating deadline, so I’ve been sort of waiting for the muse to get back on board with this one. To…

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Chronic Stress

Hello, friends, how are you? I’m actually pretty decent, today at least. We’re taking a few days to just rest. Nothing planned, nothing in particular, just chilling and not worrying about anything. Well, in theory. In practice, my spouse has had two work meetings he hasn’t been able to get out of, the kids have whined about being bored, we had a miscommunication about how long to spend on an art project versus making dinner, and I’ve spent about four hours at the pool, which is a lot of pool but I suppose isn’t too bad. (May also have gotten sunburned. Whoops.) I’ve used the non-family time to read 75% of a novel and 60 pages of a nonfiction book, finish revising a chapter and start another, and take a nap (which was not terribly successful because everyone kept coming in to bother me, oh well). And I am purposefully not thinking about anything that’s been giving me anxiety lately–nothing related to school or volunteer commitments, nothing related to the basement flood or the tornado, nothing related to my furnace failing, nothing related to upcoming conventions. Will I have to think about all those things tomorrow? Oh, absolutely. Dance classes, a book study, an email to the other volunteers, choir practice, the furnace people and the landscapers, my neighbor whose wife just died. But those are for tomorrow. Today, we let ourselves relax. Today, we find joy and comfort where we can. I can’t imagine the chronic stress that we…

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Emerging

So I’ve been pretty open about how my mental health has been undergoing a beating, mostly from the pandemic but also other factors. Every once in a while, though, I catch a glimpse, a shift, something unfurling just a little bit. August has been like that. In July, work finally settled down, and I had two weeks off in a row and one of them involved unplugging at a camp on a lake. That was the reset I needed. I still haven’t been writing. But I’m reading more/faster again — I’ve zoomed through my last four books — and more deeply — I almost missed my subway stop a few weeks ago. Can’t remember the last time that happened. Last week we finished Good Omens 2 and I developed a brief obsession. I talked my spouse’s ear off about it. I thought about doing a couple’s cosplay, even though that takes waaay too much executive function. (I am so much like TV Aziraphale it isn’t even funny, though my spouse isn’t particularly like TV Crowley, thank goodness.) The song that weaves through Season 2, “Everyday” by Buddy Holly, got stuck in my head for a full week. It finally cleared out when I fell down another rabbit hole, thanks to KD — a cappella folk/trad groups. First there was VoicePlay. (That’s their YT channel. I’m not going to pick just one video to share, because I can’t choose!) Then there was Geoff Castellucci, the lead singer of VoicePlay, who also…

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Re-entry, Part 5

[CW: pandemic, mental health] It turns out there’s no clean way to exit a pandemic. Not for the world at large, and especially not for individuals who have been deeply affected for one reason or another, like me. So I’m still edging back into a new kind of normal life, still taking steps and hesitating to take other steps. I’m still wearing a mask on public transit and sometimes other places indoors, gradually getting looser (and going out to restaurants more). I have some travel coming up later this month and don’t want to do anything that might jeopardize it, but after that I plan to push myself gently to drop the mask more often. Though I have to say I don’t miss the constant colds and occasional flus…so I intend to keep wearing it on public transit. The travel I have planned will be my first contra dance trip, first non-family trip, and first cross-border travel since February 2020 (let’s just say we were very very lucky that time). It’s a road trip and then a week-long dance camp (!!!) at a summer camp venue in MA. The pandemic precautions for the camp are pretty robust, and people mostly stay on-site all week, so I felt safer going there than to a typical urban dance weekend with everyone eating in restaurants and such. Plus, it will satisfy my annual craving to get out of the city once summer hits. In the meantime, though, I’ve been gradually increasing my in-office…

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Comfort Everything, Take 3

A little bit of everything that’s been giving me comfort lately, because why not. Reading I’ve blogged about comfort reading before (one, two), but here are a few I didn’t mention… Becky Chambers: To be honest, I bounced off her space opera series, but I gave her a second chance with her solarpunk novella A Psalm for the Wild-Built and her writing worked much better for me in a shorter format. Hopeful, inclusive futures that don’t have giant stakes, just quiet travels and conversations and tea. Will definitely be picking up the sequel (A Prayer for the Crown-Shy). Angel Martinez: Another author of hopeful, inclusive futures, with a good dose of humour and adventure. My favourite of the three I’ve read so far is Safety Protocols for Human Holidays, a sweet and funny queer romance novella. Elizabeth Peters: I don’t know why I didn’t devour her entire Amelia Peabody series long ago, because it’s right up my alley, but I finally read the first one this year. British lady adventurer! Ancient Egypt! Archaeology! Banter! Unreliable narrator! (Not that she’s lying, but she misses things, especially things to do with emotions. Not unlike Murderbot — another comfort read.) I grew up on a steady diet of E. Nesbit, Arthur Ransome, Enid Blyton, and the like, along with an Egypt obsession, so it would have been a natural progression. Oh well, I’m hooked now… And I still go back to England for comfort reads like To Say Nothing of the Dog by…

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Writer’s Block Sucks

Man, I haven’t been this blocked in years. Usually, it’s when I’ve taken a bad turn in the plot somewhere, and I need to start over from that point and figure out what happened and how to fix it. Usually, I’ll use a few different methods such as Tarot cards, freewriting, brainstorming, and even playing various writerly “games” to get at my subconscious and the answer—or, at least the beginning of the answer and over the hump so I can start writing again and in the right direction. (The writerly “games” are courtesy of Holly Lisle’s Create a Plot Clinic – an amazing book that I highly recommend — and I do not make any money from this; I am just a huge fan of her fiction and nonfiction). However, I’ve had a fair amount of upheaval in the past few years. We’ve got the pandemic, of course. My ongoing sleep issues, which are getting better, but aren’t perfect yet. We’ve got my usual chronic illness stuff. My business, which is thriving, but also takes a lot of time and energy. I’m still working on that part. I think a lot of this is effecting my creativity. I wrote 6,000 words in 2021. Abysmal, but things were crap that year. Last year was much better at 20,000 words. Yay! I’d said at least double 6,000, and I’d made that and a bit more. This year? I’m at about 2,000. Granted, we’re only into April, so there’s time. And I’ve been…

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KD Boldly Ran Away, Away

For various reasons, the last few years have been a bit rough for me. To make things even better, my haven for so much of my life, my writing, has not come easily. It’s a problem endemic in writing books– if you want your characters to resonate, then even sci fi and fantasy must reflect reality, and reality has really not been something I wanted to think about. I like to write hopeful, I mean. And hope has been hard to find. Anyway. So there have been various crises. There’s been All The News You Need to Hide From. And then… I’ve heard there are people out there who just use Word to write books. I am not one of them. I remember the day I gave up on Word. I’d been typing up something for work, and three times in a row I typed “7th” and Word made the “th” superscript and then crashed because it couldn’t handle its own autocorrection. When I got done swearing the third time, I went and found and downloaded OpenOffice. OpenOffice was great! I was devoted for years–but then came the siren call of dedicated fiction writing software. I wanted. But I was poor, and it was expensive, and OpenOffice worked fine… Winners of NaNoWriMo 2011 received a code for (IIRC) 50% off a Scrivener license. People on the NaNo boards loved Scrivener. I think I downloaded the trial version halfway through, and then bought a license when I got my discount. Since…

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