I haven’t blogged since the beginning of October with my posts Preaching About the Stoics and Back to School.  At that time, I was fully prepared to be focused solely on the philosophy class I had signed up for, followed by the holidays.  Regrettably, within days of making that post, the rug was yanked out from beneath my feet with the unexpected news that we had to vacate our house within three months due to the owners wanting to move back in.  I tried for about a week or so to focus on both my class as well as searching for a new home, but it quickly became apparent that I would have to abandon my studies for the time being.

Life turned into a whirlwind very quickly.  I immediately threw myself into the task of searching for a new place to live that would allow all four of our cats, which miraculously happened in less than a week thanks to the keen eye of a fellow congregant from church.  However, the move-in date was only three weeks away, which left us with very little time to pack up our house and make other moving-related arrangements.  Because I am a master at dealing with crises, I somehow managed to pull this off, with help from my husband and nephew.

Over those three weeks, my mood and energy levels swung wildly between being hyper-productive, and depressed to the point of near uselessness.  I was buoyed by having found a new home so quickly, one that was in a much more convenient area for us, as well as by the news that I had been accepted to the local university for the winter term.  I cried for ten solid minutes upon receiving that news, silently whispering to myself “I’m not stupid” over and over again.  I was always a very intelligent person, but my faith in that knowledge was eroded over the last 20 or so years by various life factors.  It was nice to receive a mark of approval, not just from the university, but also from a professor friend from our church spiritual book club who wrote the most wonderful letter of recommendation for me.

Moving day finally arrived, taking place the day before the Presidential Election. I had carefully organized all of the boxes at the old house in such a way that they would hopefully be easily moved into the right areas of the new house, but that’s not quite how it worked out, and by the time everything was moved in, all was in a jumbled, chaotic mess.  Nothing was in the right room or even on the right floor of the 2-story house due to the landlord not wanting the movers to use their dollies on the carpeted stairs.  Our bedroom downstairs was barely big enough to hold the king-size bed, and we had to sidle into and out of bed.

The next day, I was filled with confidence about the Election, sure that we would be celebrating that evening.  As we all know, that is not how things turned out, and I was in literal shock for weeks afterward.  The rug had been pulled out from under me for the second time in less than a month.  I was numb.  The following day, I became physically ill with a bad cold for the first time in more years than I could remember.  I knew perfectly well this was my body’s way of letting me know that I had been through too much stress and it was now forcing me to rest whether I wanted to or not.

Within a week, I developed laryngitis from overnight coughing fits that reduced my voice to a whisper.  I could not speak for over two weeks and was hoarse for at least two more after that.  I stayed in bed watching shows on my tablet, only getting up to go outside to vape.  The house stayed in a state of chaos because we were too busy, tired, or sick to do any rearranging or unpacking.  In fact, we had to hire the movers for another two hours to help us get things into the right parts of the house and free up access to the furniture so that the boxes could actually be unpacked.  Our bed was folded in half so it could be moved upstairs to a bigger room.

It took a long time for me to recover from the triple-knockout punch of moving, the election, and getting sick, so much so that I was completely unable to do anything for Thanksgiving, much to the consternation of my kids.  I was flattered that they enjoy my cooking and consider it an emotionally necessary part of the holiday season, but I was energetically drained and had absolutely nothing left to give.  I felt terrible about letting them down, but there was nothing I could do about it.  My son and his partner wound up having their own little holiday feast, and our nephew went to his mother’s house.

I was feeling better by the time December rolled around, but I had been so focused on moving and healing, not to mention the shock of the election, that I had barely given Christmas a passing thought.  As I ventured back out of the house for errands and meals, I was surprised by the appearance of the standard array of holiday lights and decorations around town.  “Oh yeah, it’s Christmastime,” I said to myself.

Unfortunately, this did not fill me with the usual happiness that it did.  In fact, it did the opposite, and I found myself filled with borderline hatred for a normally happy time of year.  Perhaps it was because I felt like there was nothing to celebrate given the political reality of our country.  I also found myself strangely disgusted by the display of consumerism Christmas now represents here, as though I were truly seeing it for the first time.  I felt like no one cared about what had happened on Election Day and had just gone back to business as usual.

Still, I managed to get the shopping for the kids done, something only made possible by the fact that we got a significant chunk of our deposit back from the previous house, something I had been anxious about due to some pet damage to the carpet.  Otherwise, I couldn’t have cared less about Christmas.  I didn’t even have any interest in getting a tree and decorating like I usually do.  Something about the entire holiday just filled me with rage.

My mood was not improved by the fact that, in order to cope with all of the stress, I experienced a slip with my substance use disorder and spent about a month basically checked out from reality.  This did bad things to my neurochemistry and therefore my mental health, making me very difficult to deal with for a time.  I was finally able to get back on the wagon, as it were, just in time to re-engage with life and the family and make a limited menu of food for the holiday.

Christmas Day was actually fairly pleasant.  We spent the morning with our nephew, and after we took him to his mother’s, we picked up our son and his partner and brought them back to the new house, which they had not seen yet.  We had a lovely time visiting and eating and opening presents.  Then we took them home and picked up our nephew.

Since then, I’ve tried to rest.  Part of me is exhausted to the marrow of my bones, but it’s not just a physical exhaustion.  My spirit is weary with worry about the future, but I try hard not to let myself fall down a hole of speculation about what might happen.  Nor am I doing what a lot of people do and allowing myself to engage in doomscrolling.  I do not read the news, nor do I use social media anymore.  It has been just over a year since I left Facebook, and I rarely miss it.  My mental health is far better without it.

Regrettably, I have had to delay my plans to go back to school at the university: moving ate our entire savings, so I had no way to pay tuition.  I hope to attend for the spring term, and if that doesn’t work out, I will delay my admission until the fall.  Until then, I have decided to spend this year focusing on myself.  Specifically, I am trying to establish good and healthy habits for the purpose of pushing out bad habits.  I spend an inordinate amount of time sitting and becoming lost in my own head ruminating about the past, catastrophizing the future, and demonizing people in the present.  It’s a form of self-protection, a kind of mental sparring practice intended to prepare me for potential conflicts.

Unfortunately, all it really does is paint the world in darkness, leaving me with false impressions about reality, myself, and the people in  my life.  The vast majority of what I fear never comes to pass.  It is a largely fruitless waste of time and energy that I could be using in much more productive ways.  Instead, I am trying to remember the words of the Buddha:

What we think, we become.
What we feel, we attract.
What we imagine, we create.

To that end, I have created a year-long plan to instill new healthy habits according to the cycles of the Moon and the Wheel of the Year, one that includes positive affirmations to counteract my constant negativity and the creation of more art inspired by each month’s new habit.  I have spent most of the years of my life focused on other people instead of myself.  This year, I’m turning that attention towards myself in a good kind of selfishness.  Simultaneously, I am ignoring any and all input from the outside world that might distract me from my goals, especially if they are things that I cannot control or change or will cause me mental distress.  For perhaps the first time in my life, I’m putting myself first.

This includes focusing on my marriage, which has taken a bit of a beating over the last several years due to my mental health, a life-threatening health scare for my husband, my children’s mental health, and making a cross-country move, not to mention my entering menopause.  There’s something about the shift in hormones that makes it impossible for most women at mid-life to stay submissive and quiet about the things that bother them like we’re conditioned to in this culture.  Things we tolerated for decades suddenly fill us with an exquisite rage that we can no longer be silent about.  This is why so many men married to menopausal women perceive their wives to have completely lost their minds at mid-life.

Fortunately for me, I do not have one of these husbands, although he has certainly been bewildered at times and dismayed by the intensity of my emotions.  I try to keep the anger dialed back to a reasonable level and not direct it at him unnecessarily, and always keep an apology ready in my back pocket for the times when the inner volcano erupts.  There are so many things for women to feel enraged about in this culture that sometimes it’s difficult to keep the burning fury in check.  I am grateful not to be living 100 years ago when it was common (and legal) for husbands to drag their wives to the asylum and commit them for the crime of standing up for themselves.

Other than all of that, I am trying to live in the moment one day at a time and stop being so obsessed with why human beings can be so awful to one another.  It is one of the oldest questions in existence, a very complex question with many, many contributing factors.  Instead of focusing on how horrible we can be as a species, I need to focus on how good we can be when the conditions are right.  It is a historical truism that it is often during difficult times of despair that we display our noblest qualities, qualities that often wind up coming to our rescue, even though it sometimes takes a long time.  While I am beyond disappointed at the state of affairs in my country, I know that it is not permanent.  Nothing is.  “Everything that has a beginning has an end,” in the words of The Oracle from The Matrix movies.  I may not live to see it, but justice will once again prevail someday.

In the meantime, I will consider myself part of the resistance, however loud or quiet it is.  As an Indian proverb supposedly states, “blessed is he who plants trees under whose shade he knows he will never sit.”  I may or may not have the opportunity to sit beneath those proverbial trees, but hopefully my children will.