Hello Gentle Readers.  I haven’t blogged in a while, since July it appears, and those posts were actually written about a year prior to publishing.  I didn’t just fall away from blogging, I also slowly stopped journaling, over about a year.  I think that everything that has gone on in my life in recent years, in conjunction with life in the United States, generated a deep need to retreat, even from myself.

Ever since my awakening nearly 8 years ago, I have written nearly non-stop in an effort to understand exactly what happened to me.  After doing that for so many years, I found that not only did I not want to do it anymore, I did not need to do it anymore.  All of that writing for the purpose of analysis taught me how to do it in my head, and I no longer require the process of writing in order to process something internally.  Besides, the constant analysis was fucking exhausting, and I’m glad to be mostly done with it.  For now anyway.

At first I felt a twinge of guilt about not doing more to actively resist the fascist tide that has swept across our nation.  Then I realized that I’m a bit like immunocompromised people who cannot get vaccinations but are still protected from diseases by herd immunity: by the majority that can get vaccinations.  I do not have the mental fortitude to fight this battle, or even to subject myself to the daily news reports of the continued atrocities of ICE.  Not and preserve my sanity.  I will leave all of that to those with more energy and strength than I have, and it pleases me to no end when I do see resistance, such as the recent Frog Revolution in Portland, OR and what’s happening in Minneapolis.  The twin lights of my hope and faith were guttering out in the winds of injustice, but they’re burning brightly once again.  Still, I must root from a distance.

It’s not that I don’t care.  In fact, if there is such a thing, perhaps I care too much?  All I know is that every news report about the latest act of deliberate cruelty is far too damaging to those senses of hope and faith for me to expose myself to that kind of information.  It’s like being stabbed in the heart with an ice pick.  If I’m going to retain and sustain any sense of optimism amidst this chaotic mixture of absurdity and cruelty, I just can’t watch or listen.

What have I been doing instead?  A lot!  Turns out one can accomplish a great deal when one isn’t constantly doomscrolling and wringing one’s hands in high anxiety.  In fact, a great deal has changed over the last year, in both my outer life as well as my inner life.

Something that has undoubtedly made a huge difference since last year are some medication tweaks my psychiatrist and I have made.  I’m no longer taking a medication that was extremely sedating, to the point of shutting off emotional capability.  It took months to fully leave my system, like all drugs of its class, but once it was gone, I felt human again.

However, I was still spending too much time in a depressed state, and very little at a healthy baseline, let alone elevated often enough to actually be happy or even content.  The addition of an antidepressant fixed that problem.  Now my baseline is much closer to what a neurotypical person would call “normal”, and my mood stabilizer prevents my mood from going too low or too high without going “flat”.  Win-win.

This boost in mood and energy allowed me to finally finish unpacking and moving into our house, which we moved into just over a year ago.  The triple-whammy of moving on one day, the Presidential Election the next day, and coming down with a 3-week virus the day after that was a knockout punch that took me quite some time to recover from, so there was an entire room filled with boxes upstairs, and they were also scattered throughout the house in towers 4-5 boxes high.  The sight of brown cardboard began to traumatize me because we had moved 3 times in 8 years, one of those moves more than 2200 miles long.

And so because I was sick to death of all those fucking boxes, and also because I needed something to do to keep me busy and off nitrous oxide, which had become a problem for me again, I started tackling the giant stacks of boxes, which really did literally fill an entire room (thankfully a relatively small one).  It took a month-and-a-half to simply sort the boxes into related piles and relocate them to the parts of the house where they belonged.

Then the fun began.  *cracks knuckles*  We had already unpacked our basic necessities long ago, including our books and games, which meant that everything left in boxes was essentially decorative, spiritual, or containing other hobbies.  There were more than a few boxes I could tell had been through multiple moves by the number of layers of tape on the top, as well as by how badly collapsed the top of the box was.  Some of the boxes hadn’t been unpacked in 9 years: 3 houses, 5 states, and more than 2200 miles ago.

So it was with great verve that I threw myself into opening the boxes, putting the contents away when possible and repacking them into plastic crates when not, and breaking down the accursed cardboard boxes.  I got a nice jolt of dopamine every time I fully emptied and broke down a box with the cutter.  I began to think of it as my tiny sword in the Battle Against the Boxes.

I did this for 6 solid weeks, somehow managing to actually put away most of what I unpacked despite fearing there wouldn’t be enough room for everything (our current house is smaller than previous ones and has no garage), and storing the rest in a surprisingly small number of plastic crates while donating the rest by putting boxes on the curb.  95% of everything would be gone within 3 days.  I found a number of things we had been missing for years, such as our cat bowls, which were in a box marked “Grandma Things”. 😆  Obviously packed at the very last minute.  I also found some things I didn’t even recognize but had clearly acquired since they were the exact sort of thing I like.  Bonus!

I slowly and carefully made grouped piles of my favorite decorative objects, which were somehow scattered in different boxes, and when everything was finally unpacked and put away or repacked in a plastic bin, I began to decorate the house with the colored vases, suncatchers, crystals, and glass globes I had been missing for so long.  I also hung at least 90% or more of the art and mirrors that had been gathering dust in piles, including my own framed paintings.  I put photos of ancestors on an altar and more family photos in the stairwell.  The house slowly transformed into a Home.

While I was doing all of this, I was once again struggling with using nitrous oxide.  As with all addictions, I had long ago passed the point of diminishing returns but was in denial about that, and was instead engaged in a desperate pursuit of something I knew deep down I would never have again, aka “chasing the dragon”.  My last attempt to engage in that chase was Thanksgiving night, after dinner was over and we had cleaned up.  I was just wanting to chill out and relax.  Nothing bad happened.  In fact, nothing happened at all.  I just fell into a numb, black hole for about an hour or so, with absolutely zero memory afterwards.  I was pissed, and that was it for me.  Inside I just said, “man, fuck this stupid bullshit”.  I threw away the empty canisters and I haven’t even wanted any since then.

March 27 marked 4 months free of what I’ve come to refer to as the Demon Gas.  When it takes hold of you, it’s Psychedelic Laughing Gas and it’s an absolute ball.  Then it goes to just Fun Gas for a while, which is also great, but quickly descends to Asshole Gas, then sadly for some people, Dangerous Psychosis Gas.  People die, something I didn’t know when I boarded the Nitrous Train.  I managed to skip that last part somehow, thankfully.  I’m just glad I’m done with that shit and pray I never forget why I stopped.  It started innocently enough, but if I had known how dangerous nitrous oxide can be in large amounts, I would never have tried it in that form.  In large amounts, nitrous oxide lives up to its nickname “Hippie Crack”: it’s an instant overnight addiction.  Thankfully I escaped relatively unharmed, compared to some people.  My Buddhist learnings have allowed me not to judge myself for the experience, and fuck anyone who does.  Moving on.

Something I’ve added to the Dharma of Buddhism last year is the Tao of Lao Tzu.  Both words basically translate as “The Way”, but each approaches that concept differently, yet still equally important.  In actuality, both of those words are untranslatable to anything we would recognize in English.  The best that can be managed is a lengthy list of words that allude to the meanings without saying them outright.  Not because the meaning is being deliberately hidden, but because it literally cannot be spoken.  As the saying goes, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.”  That’s because the Tao and the Dharma are both ineffable: so vast and Universal in their encompassment that they defy description, and if you try, that isn’t It anymore.

A crucial concept in Taoism, if not the crucial concept, is called wuwei: ‘the way of water’.  The idea is to think of yourself as flowing water in all aspects of your life.  Think about how water behaves in its various forms and at various speeds.  In Nature, water is perhaps the most transformative substance on the face of the planet, given enough time.  I once visited the Black Canyon in the state of Colorado that had formed over around 2 billion years, slowly carved out of pure granite by the Gunnison River that continued to flow nearly half a mile below my feet.  Water is unstoppably patient.  If something is in its way, it simply goes around it.  Does the water get angry at the boulder in the river?  No, it goes around, and if it can’t, it waits until the boulder either moves or splits.  In the end, the water always wins.

I employed this mindset while doing the final unpacking of my house, and it worked marvelously.  Paired with Buddhism’s practice of suspending judgment, which allowed me to work at a reasonable pace, I did a stunning amount of work in a relatively short amount of time with virtually no planning.  I borrowed a concept from Buddhist author Pema Chodron called “start where you are”, which kept me from thinking too hard about what I “should” do.  “Should” is a word of judgment, so I try not to use it.

I instead tried to go with what both needed doing and what I wanted to do.  Each day I would just start digging into the boxes and go from there until dinnertime.  It’s rare that I impress myself, and I was impressed with how quickly and efficiently I was able to get everything done.  This tactic worked amazingly well with my ADHD, which gives me a tendency to ping-pong from one task to another.  I no longer judge myself for that tendency and just flow from one thing to the next, knowing I will eventually return to unfinished tasks until they are completed.

By Thanksgiving, I was basically done, with only 3 major piles of boxes left: my husband’s electronics and hobbies (not my problem, lol), the sewing and crafts, and what turned out to be a massive family archive of photographs, slides, videotapes, cards, letters, documents, and miscellaneous memorabilia.  It currently occupies an entire corner of my living room.  I’m really looking forward to going through it, if for no other reason than to get my living room back. 😆

So that’s where I am right now.  I’m not sure if I’ve ever felt as settled as I feel right now, and I’m 54 years old.  I recently made a timeline consisting of major life events along with every time I had ever moved, and I was somewhat stunned to discover that I have moved 25 times in my life, not including a summer of travel in my 20s during which I stayed at 13 places in 5 months.  All total, I have called nearly 40 places “home”, some of them for mere weeks.  The vast majority of those moves happened before I turned 24, when I met my now-husband and my life dramatically improved.

Life is much better now.  I love my house, I love my neighborhood, I love my city, I love my state, and I love the region we live in.  It’s everything that the place we left is not and never could be, not entirely.  Even my health is doing pretty well.  All of that box shuffling and shifting meant a lot of bending, lifting, and carrying things up and down the stairs.  That actually cured a back problem I’d been having.  It was bad enough I was worried about my mobility (already!), but it turns out I was just out of shape.  It hasn’t bothered me since October.

I also procured a CGM last September: a continuous glucose meter, which allows me to monitor my blood sugar without stabbing myself in the fingers multiple times a day.  It is worth every penny I pay for 2 sensors a month to not have to do that anymore AND get data that is so much more accurate and therefore useful, it’s not even funny.  Finger pokes only happen every few hours and they’re very painful: the CGM takes a reading once a minute, lasts for 2 weeks, and is painless to put on.  All I have to do is look at my phone to see my blood sugar.  I now have a much better idea of how different foods affect me and for how long, so I’m able to eat healthier.

I think two more important things happened to me last year.

Sometime in June, I felt a marked slowdown in my…internal velocity, for lack of a better phrase.  It happened around the same time I stopped journaling and blogging.  I think all of that writing was somehow the mental equivalent of running, although I’m still not quite clear how.  That energy slump was either me deciding to stop running, or more likely, no longer being able to run, either because I was finally out of fuel (which I was), or perhaps because it was no longer necessary, like the writing.  I often assign songs to significant periods in my life, and the one that goes with this period is U2’s “Running to Stand Still” from The Joshua Tree.

So I spent much of the summer not doing much of anything.  It was all I could do to keep my potted herbs alive.  It was after stopping the sedating drug but before starting the antidepressant, so I was in a sort of mental limbo for a few months.  But once I started it, wow.  It coincided with getting the motivation to start working on the boxes.  I slowly increased the dose over 2 months to avoid problems, and whenever I increased it, I got a boost of energy about a week later.

It also had the effect of removing the “black lenses” I feel I have worn on my eyes for nearly my entire life.  This has enabled me to successfully engage in a gratitude practice for the first time ever.  I’ve used various apps over the years to try to record things that I am grateful for, but I never felt any happier as promised no matter how long I pursued the practice.  I began to think something was wrong with me, that I was immune to happiness or even contentment.  Now I’ve abandoned the apps and have taken up an internal practice of simply thinking the words “thank you” whenever I’m feeling appreciative or something good happens to me, even tiny things.  Especially tiny things.

Consequently, the world appears more balanced, rather than appearing mostly negative.  It was a bit like I had been seeing everything in inverse, the way a photographic negative looks.  My younger readers may not know what one of those look like (fuck I’m old 😂), but they’re kind of creepy looking because the balance between black-and-white is opposite to what the actual picture looks like.

I’m not precisely sure to what I should attribute this major life shift.  As usual when such things happen, there seems to have been a perfect storm of internal alchemy, achieved by unknowingly reaching a kind of psychological critical mass requiring multiple ingredients.  That resulted in a sudden and rapid chain reaction of events that themselves culminated in what equated to nuclear fusion, when new compounds are created in what is essentially a tiny supernova that generates an immense amount of transformative energy.  In this case, a few things contributed to the shift: med tweaks, spending over 4 months fully assembling my Home for the first time in nearly a decade, moving to an area that really suits us, and finally getting off the Demon Gas.  Those are just the things that have happened in the last year or so.

Last year was also incredibly busy.  My calendar was filled with constant doctor and dentist appointments, multiple visits per month for the whole family.  Our HSA card was drained by the end of June, straining the budget.  However, I am pleased to report that, for now anyway, my calendar is relatively quiet.  It may fill up later, but I’m going to keep a tight rein on that.

In the meantime, I’m going to keep enjoying the stillness and quiet, mostly only disturbed by the sound of birds.  I like this time of year.  The gray blanket of clouds interspersed with springtime sunshine is somehow comforting rather than depressing, yet another indicator I’m in the right place.  I have a number of enjoyable projects to work on this year, rather than clawing my way through each day with nothing to do, praying for bedtime to come and with it, unconsciousness.  I actually have quite a bit to look forward to despite the chaos in my country, and I hope this is the year I finally remember how to really live.

Om Sri Mahalakshmiye Namaha