It's Only A Paper Rose

I've been ruminating lately, both on my own and in conversations with friends, on the definition of "thriving". In one conversation, a friend and I compared the idea of "thriving" to "being successful"; they had felt a little weird about saying that they had thrived in their life, considering that they were only a little over the poverty line and (like most people in America) are usually one disaster away from destitution. But they had worked hard to get out of the toxic environment where they'd grown up, and to build a sense of identity for themselves based on their own experiences and values, and cultivate relationships with people that reinforced those values and helped them feel more themselves. And that, to them, felt like thriving, even if their life wasn't particularly successful. I suggested that perhaps it was an internal/external divide; "success" is something measured against an arbitrary external yardstick, whereas "thriving" (is there a non-gerund noun form?) is based more on your mental image of who you want to be, how far that is from who you are now, and how consistently you're moving towards that ideal. It was a little weird to realize, in the course of the conversation, that this has been a huge part of my self-identity throughout the years; the one thing that consistently makes me happy is feeling like I'm taking steps towards being the person I want to be. Obviously that ideal changes, over the years, but most of those changes have been refinements and additions rather than wholesale replacements.

I wonder if this isn't why I've felt so lost, these past several months. I was already in something of an identity crisis last year, what with disconnecting from the yoga community and trying to decide where to go next, career-wise. I'd been taking steps on forging a new path (joining a regular music group, building a clientele at a new company), and starting to feel like I was getting my feet under me...and then the pandemic came along and wiped out all of that. So in addition to all the grieving over massive change in the world, I also had to deal with the loss of what little sense of forward progress I'd been making. My career has never been my sole identity, but it's difficult, when you live in a capitalist culture, for it not to be one of the larger chunks.

But! The past six weeks or so, I've been doing much better. I couldn't even really say what presaged the change; just, I've felt much more stable and in an improved frame of mind. I've been writing regularly—I finished a Lost Boys story that I'd begun some months ago, wrote another story (for Supernatural, which Brian and I have been watching over quarantine) and have since been working hard on the novel-length Stranger Things Harringrove story I started last year and then gave up on when life got too hectic. I'm honestly pretty surprised about that last; I had thought I'd given up on it altogether, but, well, I started having Ideas a month or so ago. I've been trying my whole life to write a novel, and now (when I have a little more time and apparently a lot more inspiration than usual) seems like as good a time as any to take the next crack at it. I've also joined a Zoom-based writing group that meets three times a week, and have found that remarkably helpful in keeping productive.

In other news, the condo board work, while slow, continues; I feel like I now have a pretty solid grasp of what's going on with the roof, and in theory the basement work's going to be starting sometime soon. (I made the deposit with the masonry company some weeks ago but haven't heard back from them about scheduling yet, which I'm mildly grumpy about, especially as they haven't answered my follow-up email. Still, it's their busy season and a particularly topsy-turvy one at that, so I'm willing to cut them some slack.) Still need to get estimates for the deck work and the paint/carpet for the common areas, and send out the big "your HOA assessments are going up" email, sigh. And one of the other units is starting to have water intrusion through the masonry during the big rainstorms we've been having...so there's probably some tuckpointing in our future, double sigh. It never ends...

Speaking of which, I also recently saw The Old Guard, which is excellent and timely and has some amazing fight choreography. Unsurprisingly, I was particularly inspired by Charlize Theron's portrayal of Andromache of Scythia. She's been around for millennia, she's seen all this shit before, she feels increasingly like her efforts to try to improve the world are pointless...it's hard not to relate, even if I've never been anywhere near that good with a labrys. So when I went in for my (masked!) hair appointment yesterday, I basically showed JB a bunch of Tumblr posts and went, "That." I think she really knocked it out of the park.

( Pictures! )

In JB's words, "Now you just need to live for 6,000 years, become a badass fighter, get a little grumpy, and work on your vodka-pounding skills!" Well, I've got a good head start on the grumpiness and the vodka-pounding. The rest should be easy enough.

In all seriousness, it's nice to feel like I'm thriving again. Even though "intimidating immortal guardian/fighter who's just sick of all this shit" wasn't quite the direction I anticipated...I could probably be doing a lot worse.

I've been really getting into vinyl lately. (Me and all the other music enthusiasts I know, haha.) For my birthday I went to a local audio shop and got their recommendation for a high-quality turntable...and wouldn't you know it, it came in purple. Clearly this was meant to be!

As it happened, ordering it was only the first step; once it came in and Brian started putting it together, he quickly discovered that the needle it came with was borked, and that the receiver we were connecting it to didn't have a preamp...a couple more Amazon purchases and quite a few magic hi-fi-fixing words later, however, it sounds every bit as good as digital, and arguably better than the streaming music I use for everyday listening. (Not really surprising, since the latter is compressed and then usually sent wirelessly from my phone or computer to the receiving station before being routed through the receiver...) It's set up in the second bedroom, which is where I do most of my writing as well as just hanging out in the mornings with my coffee; it's nicely soothing to put a record on while I do. And having to get up to flip the vinyl helps keep me from getting so lost that I don't get up for hours, heh.

I'm actually kind of pleased (and, in retrospect, unsurprised) at the vinyl renaissance that's going on right now. Streaming services are difficult to beat for sheer convenience, with their huge catalogs available anywhere you have an internet connection (which, if you have a smartphone, is nearly anywhere, especially in the city), but quality issues aside, there's no sense of tangible ownership in them. Which for lots of people is fine! But I've always enjoyed the self-expression inherent in building a visible media collection, whether books or music or movies...the fact that they take up physical space means that you have a limited amount of space for them, which makes each selection relevant, as well as the collective space they take up. How important are books to me? Movies? Music? How much space in my home am I willing to dedicate to them?

Related, I've been working my way through a collection of vinyl records that Brian's mother gifted us when we first moved in together (and have been lugging around ever since). In truth, if it'd been up to me, I would've donated them a decade ago, but they were his parents' collection and Brian wanted to keep them, so they've been sitting in a box in the closet until recently...and now that I have a decent player, I've been sifting through them. There's a lot of good albums in there, much of it (Jimi Hendrix, Simon & Garfunkel, Billy Joel, Fleetwood Mac) exactly what you'd expect from a couple of college students in the 70s, but some more obscure stuff as well. But even more, I've found a strange sense of satisfaction in that aforementioned tangibility; these are the literal physical records his parents listened to when they were younger than I am now, and something about putting them on my bright-purple player creates a strangely comforting sense of continuity. I've never been a big one for family heirlooms, never having been close to my extended family, but I think I'm beginning to understand why other people cherish them. I'm heading up to Anchorage for my yearly family visit at the end of this month, and my grandmother's promised to let me look through her box of vinyl as well. I'll have to ask her for her stories about it...hurrah for family!

It sounds like a humblebrag, but really it's not - I haven't been doing reflective New Year's posts the past few years, in large part because my life is going pretty darn well. It's not that overall-positive years aren't worth reflecting on, but it feels a little like tempting fate - if I outline all the ways my life has gone well and how fortunate I've been, perhaps the deities of misfortune will see it and remember that they haven't got round to me yet. Silly, yes, but a very real feeling nonetheless. And that's not even taking into account the fact that many of my friends haven't been half so lucky, and probably aren't super into the idea of listening to me go on about my awesome life.

But I want to state, for the record, that - a couple of smaller-scale failures and misfortunes aside - I have been happy, and I'm well aware of how fortunate I am. I'm lucky enough to have two jobs that provide ample opportunities for both growth and rewarding moments. I'm lucky enough to have the kind of fiscal support that makes self-employment enjoyably challenging rather than stressful. I'm lucky enough to have a community of people who generally like me - as osprey_archer was mentioning, when you've never been a particularly popular person, it's surprising how great it is to walk into a place and have people be genuinely happy to see you. I'm lucky enough to have a supportive spouse I adore and live in a city I love in a country that remains a great experiment - inconclusive as yet, but worth fighting for nonetheless. I'm lucky enough to be in excellent physical health, in easily the best shape of my life. Most of all, perhaps, I'm lucky enough to have many interests and the time, opportunities, and supportive environment to explore them. And for all of this, I'm grateful.

I've never really been a big one for resolutions, but a post someone made on Facebook caught my eye, suggesting that, rather than make a general goal like "lose weight" or "read more", your resolutions be in the form of nine specific things: three things to read, three things to learn, and three things to do. So I think I'll break with my (non)tradition and set those goals.

To read:
--Yoga Sequencing. I don't feel I'm doing too badly just winging it, but I know I have so much room for improvement on this front.
--The Master & Margarita. I've heard from several people how excellent this book is, and I've been putting it off largely because I haven't felt I'd have the context for it. So I may need to brush up on Russian history first, but I will get to it this year. (It's not even that long a book!)
--Gentleman Jole & The Red Queen. I've been putting this one off because I know I'm going to love it and I know I can only read it for the first time once - but really, that's kind of a silly reason to not read it. Life is uncertain!

To learn:
--Some new massage techniques. This is rather vague, but it's going to happen regardless - I need to do some continuing education in preparation for my license renewal this year, so what I learn is probably going to depend on what opportunities I can find that fit into my schedule.
--To play "Same Old Lang Syne" on the piano. Simplistic? Maybe, but it'll take me a good amount of study to get there, so there's a fair amount of work implied here.
--More Swedish - specifically, more spoken Swedish. I'd like to get my spoken understanding up to where my written understanding currently is: enough that I can follow the gist of most conversations.

To do:
--Recruit some friends for karaoke. I've missed singing, and would like to do it more. Bonus if we can make it a semi-regular thing.
--Buy a house. Brian and I have been dip-toe-squealing about this for two years now, but this spring we're going to get pre-approved and start looking in earnest.
--Take guitar lessons at the Old Town School of Folk Music. I've been saying I want to do this since before we moved to Chicago. And I hear one of my friends is interested in doing the same, so I think I'll coordinate with her and see if we can't do it together.

--It's taken me about six weeks, but I feel like I'm finally on a more even keel, emotionally. I want to say "I feel more like myself again", but I think that perpetrates an unhealthy tendency to reject our darker and more unpredictable emotional selves; the fact is, bad things happen sometimes, and who we are while we're processing that is no less a part of our self than who we are when things are better. Regardless, I'm glad to feel more upbeat and optimistic, and especially grateful to my friends who've supported me while I dealt with a couple of profound social disconnections. I'm much more used to being the supporter rather than the person in need of support, and I can't even articulate how good to feels to know people are there for me too. I guess that's always the silver lining to Bad Things when they happen.

--Last Monday I taught my third C2 class, and it was the first one where everything really clicked. A good chunk of that, I think, was precisely that sense of connection; a few of the students were ones I'd had for my CoreRestore or C1 classes, and I could tell they were really rooting for me to succeed. It also helped that it was a big group that flowed well together; people listened to the cues and the sequence, everyone worked hard, the timing with the music worked out damn near perfectly, and I got a round of applause (!) after I finished. Best feeling.

--I've got a trip to Alaska coming up at the end of the month. It's not long - just a week, or really five days after flying - but I'll get to see my mother and my hometown and the mountains and maybe Leilani if I'm lucky. My mother's also bought a massage table and supplies and booked a couple of her friends to work with me, so I'll have a bit of extra income, which is nice.

--Speaking of massage (and yoga), I've finally set up a Facebook page for my massage/yoga business. There's not a whole lot there yet, but I'm planning to post my weekly yoga-teaching schedule, as well as links to interesting body-related stuff I find online and maybe the occasional special. And at the very least, it's a link I can point people to when they ask about my services.

--CorePower is doing one of their take-20-classes-in-a-month challenges for September. I completely missed the first five days and I'm going to be leaving on the 27th, so that puts me at a week's handicap already - but for the past week I've been killing it. I'm very tired, but pleased - hamstring strain aside, I can feel how much better my body's doing for regular practice. Definitely time for a rest day, though.

I was reflecting just now that lately I've been both hyper-aware of what day of the week it is, and completely unaware of how the days are passing. The former because it's the basis for my entire schedule, and the latter because my commitments vary so much week to week that it's hard to get any sense of cycle or rhythm. I'm not overextended, precisely; I've been doing better about keeping my pace sustainable, and taking days off when I need them. But I feel like lately all I've written about here is either the books I'm reading or how tired I am; this seems to be an indicator of the thoughts that occupy my downtime.

Which is not to say I haven't been doing fun things - this summer has been full of them! I went to a storytelling event with my friend Andrea just before leaving for Washington; Brian and I went to the Welcome to Night Vale live show; we took Jamila to see Aladdin and Jamila and her mother to see Hamilton on Broadway, we went to see a local production of Three Days of Rain solely on the strength of the company's previous performances (a gamble that paid off; it was an excellent show), we've been rock climbing with our friend Erin a couple of times, as well as the various just-hanging-out events like movie nights and festivals that summer here is full of. To paraphrase Alice Isn't Dead, Chicago in the summer is happy in a way few other cities seem to be. So it's not that I've been doing nothing other than work. It's just...I don't have a lot of downtime, and a lot of days I fall into bed exhausted. Maybe that's why we all curl up into our hermit-shells come fall and winter - we're so tired from running around so manically for months.

Still. Perhaps I'll block tomorrow off for a rest - no plans to go out, just take a yoga class and some much-needed downtime. (Now that I've said this, I'm almost guaranteed to get a text from someone hoping for a last-minute massage booking, haha.) Saturday is my birthday; Brian and I are getting massages and then going to check out some open houses for a couple of condos in the neighborhood that look promising. Onward and forward.

...I wonder if that isn't actually the fundamental source of my difficulty achieving balance - that need, a la Miles Vorkosigan, to keep the forward momentum going, lest I fall into another rut, leading to a depressive episode. That might explain a little about that sense of almost-fear that feels like it's driving me sometimes.

Happy Day After Loud Patriotic Noises day! On Monday I taught two classes at Sauganash, my usual 1:30 and the 6:15. What with the long holiday weekend, I had a huge crowd for the 1:30 class - 20 people (my usual count is between two and five) crammed into a relatively small studio. It turned out to be an awesome class, though; despite the fact that there was a whole range of skill levels, everyone meshed well and flowed together, and I felt like I had a good rapport with people. I got lots of positive feedback from folks afterward, too, which is always gratifying, and a teacher who took my class gave me a good tip on dealing with crowds. I was curious if the evening class was going to be similarly crowded, or if everyone was going to be drinking by then...as it happened, it was closer to the latter, with all of four people, one of them Breanne (the studio manager), taking my class so she could give me my internship evaluation. (As hinted at in the headline, it was almost completely positive; she said I was clearly already an excellent instructor, and she couldn't wait to see what I started doing with the more advanced classes. She also particularly mentioned my music and gave me possibly the best compliment I've ever had - "The choice of songs at the beginning and the way they fit with the timing made me feel like I was in a musical!" So many warm fuzzies.)

It's been a busy week, but luckily I managed to get some reading done, albeit mostly yesterday at the park. So on to the meme:


What I've just finished reading:

The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories, by A.C. Wise. A collection of short stories, many of them with some kind of queer romance theme. A lot of them feel like they could have been fleshed out a little more; the title story especially seemed incomplete, like it was really a novella rather than a short story. Still, there's a distinct sense of atmosphere throughout most of the stories; I found "The Final Girl Theory", about an archetypal 70s-esque slasher/mondo/gore horror film and the cult following that had sprung up around it, particularly chilling.

The Wicked + The Divine vol. 5: Imperial Phase pt. 1, by Kieron Gillen. The gods are in the second year of their supposed two-year lifespan. And, as an academic dryly notes in this volume, "There are very few stories of gods bathing in blood in the first year of their return." There's a lot to unpack here, about the effects of power on ungrounded human minds, about the ways in which various personalities deal with the stress caused by a sense of disempowerment, and about exactly how dangerous a powerful person who feels disempowered and victimized can be. (That last feels especially cogent for our times, on an individual and a group level.) Given all of that, the subplot about The Darkness - an as-yet-unexplained threat that the gods are so far the only ones equipped to deal with - feels almost like a red herring; far more interesting has been seeing how the embattled deities try to aggregate their own fecal matter, or (in the case of Sakhmet) don't even try.


What I'm currently reading:

The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue, by Mackenzi Lee. A complete impulse buy, and I'm all of one chapter in (in truth, I burned through the last of The Kissing Booth Girl almost solely so I could get to this one - I was that charmed by the description), but this is shaping up to be a new favorite. Henry Montague, a brash and self-centered young 18th-century British lord, is off on a Grand Tour of Europe with his (sigh) younger sister and his best friend/confidante/longtime secret crush. Swashbuckling action, perhaps-requited pining, and encounters with historical figures have all been promised, and given the strength of the main character's voice in the first chapter, I'm already sold. I fully intend to savor every chapter.

Future Sex, by Emily Witt. Despite being almost three-quarters done (and not a long book), this one's feeling more and more like a slog. I've been reading the chapter on polyamory, which I have something of a personal stake in, and find so many problematic aspects with her analysis, stemming in large part from the fact that her case studies come almost entirely from a single demographic (rich white Silicon Valley workers in San Francisco). While I realize most practitioners of poly come from a background with a certain level of privilege (it's hard to juggle multiple relationships when you're working three jobs just to survive), there's all sorts of unexamined assumptions here, especially in the couple privilege and unicorn-hunting fields. The entire tone is faux-supportive-while-actually-being-condescending - "Look at these adorably earnest young people and how dedicated they are to their alternate lifestyle that their parents already tried and failed at in the 70s! But they really think they can make it work!" It reminds me a lot of the New York Times article on polyamory that generated a lot of justifiable resentment from the community - it's at least a more nuanced perspective than the usual "blog post illustrated by stock photo of three pairs of feet sticking out from under the covers", but nonetheless feels written to reinforce the couple-centric monogamous norm rather than challenge it.

Now that I think about it, that's probably my biggest issue with the entire book; supposedly the author's writing about possible roadmaps to future ways humans might engage with each other sexually, thanks to technology and changing social mores, and yet the whole book is written with a sense of exoticism - "Look at this! Isn't it strange/disgusting/fascinating/novel?" - that's very much at odds with its purported mission, and only serves to reinforce the "othering" of those particular lifestyle choices. Bleh.
I'll probably finish it, if only because I'm pretty close to the end already, but for a book I had such high hopes for initially, it's been awfully disappointing.


What I plan to read next

I'm beginning to feel like my reading style is downright Heisenbergian, or perhaps Schrödingeresque - there are possibilities, and maybe even probabilities, but the fact is I just can't know until I'm there. So as usual...stay tuned!

Massage work is picking up. I have a beautiful new tattoo. And I just accepted an intern position teaching at CorePower.

Spring has sprung.

I've been trying to write a life-update sort of post, but I'm recovering from a cold right now and my brain doesn't feel up to the herculean task of narrative coherence. Suffice it to say: I've finished Extensions, I'm working on getting my CPR certification and applying to teach. Auditions are likely to be around the end of March, which should be interesting, as I'm booked for my first tattoo right around that time. I miss writing letters to people and am trying to pick it back up, however, see above re: narrative coherence. Brian and Jamila have been making numerous batches of macaroons, and they come out perfectly puffed and chewy-crispy each time; I'm having to be careful not to overindulge and make my blood sugar grumpy at me.

There, life update done. Meantime, inspired by osprey_archer, I'm trying out a weekly book meme thing. I haven't been as consistent with book reviews as I'd like, lately; I'm hoping that this will help me get my thoughts out in the moment and thus reduce the time investment involved. Plus it'll mean my LJ gets updated more consistently...assuming I prioritize the time to actually do it every week, heh. Still, it's worth a shot!

What I've Just Finished Reading

--Temptations of a Wallflower, by Eva Leigh. I have an interesting relationship with the (hetero) romance genre; I like how their heroines have just as much agency as their heroes, and for reasons I've never quite grasped I'm a sucker for period romance. However, the formula is strict enough that the storytelling often feels stifled or shoehorned in, with conflicts and resolutions arising from plot necessity rather than organically from the characters. This one's in the middle of the spectrum on that point; not the most egregious example, as the characters are strongly drawn, but motivations do get a little muddy in places. I did like the hook of a heroine who secretly writes erotic fiction; the samples in the text were a trifle threadbare in their writing to convincingly be all-of-London bestseller material, but then, look at the 50 Shades series.

--Wanted, A Gentleman, by K.J. Charles. Now, when it comes to gay romance, I am all about it - especially Charles' work. Her story craft has been uneven in the past, but she's clearly coming into her own on that front - and, as always, her characters are beautifully drawn and have seriously smoking chemistry. I particularly like how her latest stories have included men of color; she's clearly researched what life was like for men of African descent in Victorian London, and convincingly portrays their even-more-fraught tangle of emotions hidden beneath strict social mores.

--Season of Wonder, edited by Pauly Guran. A collection of Christmas-themed short stories with a genre bent. As with most collections, this was hit-or-miss for me, but (as with most collections) I appreciated the chance to sample some authors I'd never heard of, whose work I might not otherwise have picked up. Particular standouts for me were Robert Charles Wilson's "Julian: A Christmas Story", which transcended its shopworn genre tropes through strong worldbuilding and its narrator's strength of character, and Connie Willis' "Newsletters", a humorous take on the alien-abduction story. And Janet Kagan's "The Nutcracker Coup" entertained me to no end; I'm always a sucker for a story about engineering social change through refusing shame.

--"The Isthmus Variation", by Kris Millering. My personal elevator pitch for this story, which I'm rather proud of, is "a virtuoso burlesque of intrigue and guile". I love the pacing, the way the narrator slowly reveals the Game, and the game within the Game, and the game within that. If the story has one weakness, it's a certain emotional remove from the characters; what could have been a gut-wrenching tragedy is instead a series of saddening events observed from a distance. Still, as a narrative tableau and a demonstration in worldbuilding, it's beautifully executed.

What I'm Reading Now

--Bara roligt i Bullerbyn, by Astrid Lindgren. This is the first non-English book I've ever seriously tried to read, and whoa, is it a humbling experience. It's a good one for me to start with, though: it's just a little above my current fluency level, so I only have to hit Google Translate a few times per page; also, being aimed at kids, it uses a lot of simple, repetitive language, and has occasional pictures. (That was part of the humbling - I was a precocious reader as a kid, and I literally can't remember ever needing the pictures to help me understand an English language book. But I need Google something like half as often when there's a picture of what's going on. Context helps!) Additionally, I read this book in an English translation as a kid, so it's entertaining to me to be working my way through one of the stories, suddenly remember something about it, and then find it in Swedish a page or two later.

--Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. Having listened to the musical a slightly embarrassing number of times, I'm now listening to the audiobook of its source, and aside from my brain wanting to occasionally go off on lyric tangents (many lines from the musical are taken directly from this book), it's a pretty cracking read - Lin-Manuel Miranda did not have to exaggerate when it came to the drama in Hamilton's life. It's good to get the less-streamlined, more nuanced telling of many of the events, as well as context for some of the big historical moments, but I have to admit I'm curious how much of this I'll retain in ten years - as opposed to the musical, where the lyrics are probably permanently imprinted on my brain.

--Meditations From the Mat: Daily Reflections From The Path of Yoga, by Rolf Gates. This is one of the more popular selections among the teachers at CPY, and I can see why - it's a series of reflections on various yogic philosophies and their applicability to this person's life, and thus to life in general. I think it's the second part of that that's not quite sitting right with me; there's a lot of presumed universality that just kind of puts my hackles up. I'm a big fan of letting everyone find their own path, and for a practice that supposedly touts just that philosophy, yoga has an awful lot of evangelists. (My friend Kat to me, in response to my "yoga's done a lot of good things for me but it's not for everyone and if you don't jive to it that's okay" speech - "I think you're the only person who practices yoga who feels that way.") Still, it's pretty clearly written for the audience I'm likely to be teaching, so I suspect it'll be useful, and there's definitely some good stuff in there. Plus the gourmet-jelly-bean format (read one or two reflections at once) helps keep it from feeling overwhelmingly smug. I'll probably be working my way through this one for a while; further updates as my feelings warrant.

What I Plan to Read Next

--All About Love, by bell hooks. This is actually more of a "plan to finish" - I read half of it and promptly lost my copy, only to find it again...right after a friend loaned me her copy. >< (Where do you hide a book? In a library...or in my case, a bedroom overflowing with books stacked two-deep on far too many shelves.) There's some really excellent stuff here, on defining and reclaiming the term "love" from its watered-down and eroded cultural niche, and on recognizing the many forms of relationships referred to as "love" but based instead on codependency, social expectation, or habit. I'm looking forward to seeing where hooks takes it.

I've been saying to people lately that I wish I had one of those "It has been XX days since our last workplace accident" signs, modified to fit my mental health. For the record, it has been 09 days since my last full-blown anxiety episode, and only one of those days started with the quick-trigger adrenaline response that heralds a bad day. Luckily it was a workday, so I was able to breathe through it until I got to the spa and got into the swing of things. Hurrah for working in a field that requires mindfulness and focus. (My friend the yoga teacher/Instagram happiness guru was telling me that she enjoys teaching yoga for much the same reason, and we compared notes on the similarity of the experience. When you have to hold that space for someone else, somehow the effort seems much less than when you're trying to do it for your self. I wonder if some of that is our brains' well-known ability to downplay their own problems, or if it's yet another example of how it's so much easier to go the extra mile for others than for ourselves. Maybe both.)

It's hard not to feel like a little bit of a drama queen for saying "I feel better" - it's not like I've been nonfunctional. Life has been fine, what with work and hanging out with friends, and even enjoying myself here and there. There's just been a cyclically encroaching-and-receding-and-reencroaching cloud of dread hanging over a lot of it, which makes it hard to find that deep-seated gratitude and joy in life that marks the really good days. But despite the relative lack of difference from an outward perspective, I do feel deeply and fundamentally better of late, so I'm going to own that. It's good to be feeling better! Even this insane election hasn't managed to cast a pall; I'm not sure if that's the effects of the changing seasons (hurrah for fall!), or me getting better at accepting things, or what. But I'll take it.

Another potential contributor has been my latest project. To wit: after seeing this post on Facebook, I decided on a whim to gather supplies to make 100 bags to take down to the local homeless encampments. (Aside: I find the term "blessing bag" to be a little twee and condescending, but I haven't been able to think of anything to replace it with. Does anyone have suggestions? End of aside.) My gut told me that having something positive to focus on would help me regain some sense of control and contribution, and I was willing to trust that feeling, even if it wasn't likely to effect any real change in the grand scheme of things.

Unfortunately, my gut does not understand finances well, and initially I was worried that my plans had been far too over ambitious. Toothpaste, deodorant, toothbrushes, maxi pads, and even condoms are all relatively cheap in bulk, but stuff like high-quality granola bars and wool socks (winter is coming, after all) add up fast, and while I don't begrudge the money for the needy, there's only so much I can justify shelling out while still sticking to our saving-for-a-house budget. To my surprise, though, when I started spreading the word in hopes people would come over Sunday and help me assemble the bags, I got lots of offers of financial help as well. One friend found a great deal on the socks, another sent me a contribution that ended up almost perfectly covering the granola bars, and other folks have been sending smaller-but-cumulatively-helpful amounts as well, or ordering things off our Amazon list. All that, plus several folks have offered to come help assemble the bags, when originally I had expected maybe one or two. I feel a little bit like my life has turned into the Stone Soup parable; one of the contributors even thanked me for having the idea and putting things together so she could do something to help. I'm more than a little humbled by the experience. And I think Sunday's going to be a lot of fun.

It's 6:30 AM on Christmas Eve, and rather than sleeping like a normal person (or a normal person without children), my brain is apparently wide awake. Not unpleasantly so, oddly; I think knowing that I have plenty of time to catch up on sleep is helpful in keeping the "must get back to sleep/can't sleep, going to be short on sleep/must get back to sleep" stress cycle at bay. But enough that coming out to the living room and making tea and sitting and admiring the Christmas tree felt like an attractive option.

I've been writing letters to, and gradually getting to know, a friend-of-a-friend who's going through a tough transitionary period in her life. We've been Facebook acquaintances for years but (as transitions often are) she's pretty lonely right now, with a lot of difficult issues and contradictory beliefs and unhelpful coping mechanisms to sort through. And at one point, she said something along the lines of this: "Tell me about your life. Because I read your posts and I wonder if you're really that happy."

This hit a bit of a nerve, and has resulted in quite a bit of rumination. Not because I'm unhappy, but because of the context. See, one of the issues I've struggled with most, both in person and on social media, is the desire to always appear happy and content, no matter my actual emotional state. It's both a way of defending myself and my life choices - if I'm happy, no one can question whether I've done the 'right' things in life, can they? - and, in a way, a form of revenge. All those people who've wished me ill over the course of my life can just eat it.

Obviously there are a lot of problems with this; for one thing, as I've discovered over the past decade or so, vulnerability is a powerful social tool, and studiously refusing to use it hamstrings your interpersonal interactions. But the more pertinent issue here, I think, is that it's just not possible for anyone to be happy all the time. We talk about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" in this country as if the first two will naturally lead to the third, and perhaps they do: the key word being pursuit. Even "hap", the root word of "happy", literally means "luck" or "chance"; hence why we also see it in "happenstance", "haphazard", and "hapless". For all that our culture is poised to sell you happiness at a moment's notice, guaranteed, we completely ignore that most of our moments of happiness are more like a cat in a sunbeam. Even if we don't change, the sunbeam moves on; our mental balancing point reasserts itself. (The flipside, of course, is that people who go through horrible experiences also eventually get back to that balancing point. It just doesn't make sense, from a survival standpoint, for us to be constantly on one end of the scale or the other.)

And then there's the question of whether we're talking about short- or long-term. When I woke up and opened my computer, I had about two-thirds of a blog post written, complaining about a bunch of miscellaneous stuff - petty things like waking up and being out of coffee, or forgetting my work clothes and having to block off the first half-hour of my schedule so I could get new ones; all the way up to more overarching things like being exhausted from a six-hour shift at the chiropractor's and my crazy schedule making it feel like I'd practically missed Christmas this year. But before I could finish it and click "post", Brian and I had dinner and watched some Star Trek, and the food and relaxation time helped recharge my cope - enough that I decided not to post my whining, since none of it was really all that important; I simply had been losing perspective thanks to exhaustion and low blood sugar.

Long-term, though, could take us all the way back to the beginnings of this blog, almost exactly twelve years ago, which was the first time someone asked me if I was happy with my life. I would say I'm much happier now than I was then, in large part due to figuring out a set of goals, and how to achieve them in a way that fits with my strengths and weaknesses. Clearly, that doesn't mean that I don't get frustrated or upset at times. But I think the better life circumstances, combined with learning and practicing better self-love and self-care, have helped to move my usual balance point up the happiness scale. And because I like myself much better, it's much easier to genuinely care for others, too.

So yes, ultimately, I think I am that happy. I know it's partly due to several spectacular runs of luck, and that it's an ongoing project (once again, the key word is pursuit); I also know that it's probable that I'll have less happy periods in the future, whether due to loss or environmental change or just the pain that comes as an inevitable part of living with and caring for other people. Which is partly why I try to spend less time complaining about petty things, and more time being grateful for what I have now, and the people I get to share it with. <3