It has been a long time since I updated my website or my blog.
Apologies.
I’ve been busy. Busy with work, busy with my Mum’s recovery, busy with my parents’ move to the East Coast, busy with ongoing mental health struggles, busy with sleeping at all the wrong times and staying awake—also at the wrong times. It’s a whole thing.
On the family side, good news. My mother is much more comfortable than she was before, and adjusting fairly well to a new body, brain, life, city, city, house. Every day still brings her challenges, but the family has long passed the point where we feel alright with leaving her alone at home without our childish supervision. The new house still has stairs, which will remain an item of concern, probably forever. And Mum has already broken her hip since her coma broke, from a fall over absolutely nothing in a very soft and padded spot. There’s some bone loss, complete loss of balance, and the occasional bout of what I would call unusual thinking. Given what she has come back from, the fact that she still has a better memory than I do and can now reason logically about almost any given thing … is incredible. I really treasured my last few months living in the same city as her and Dad. We don’t always … get on? But my mid-thirties and some intensive work on our relationship has put us in a much better place. A place where I really miss being around them. And my siblings. After a six-year drought of contact, to be in the same room as both of my siblings over the last year or so has been pretty damn neat. Again with the whole seeing eye-to-eye thing, especially as relates to identity and faith and etc ….
Truthfully the last four months have been incredibly difficult. Before the move, I couldn’t hit the OFF switch. I was going full-speed at work and trying to help us hang in there while our store went through some serious changes—in all the ways. And I was going full-speed at home, too, with organizing and packing up my parents’ house. They’d been in that house for over ten years, which is the longest we’ve lived in any house, any of us, ever. So some stuff built up that took manual labor over a long period to tidy up. I will never move without a moving company doing the heavy lifting on and off of a truck ever again. I’ve learned my “oh my achy breaky whole damn body” lesson. In any case, I feel like I didn’t have a day off for roughly four months (although technically I had a few sprinkled around those months).
And of course, since then it’s been coming up Chinese historical dramas all over the place. More on that another time. I might even do some reviews? Again, nobody asked for this. But it might be a good way to process some of my other life things. THINGS. I’m so good at being specific when it comes to talking about myself on the interwebs, aren’t I? Anyway I like them a lot, and have thoughts. You will be forced to read some of those thoughts, eventually.
I wish I had more things to talk about, honestly. I haven’t really expanded my horizons or activities since the Big Move was completed. Except when it comes to boba, which I have finally re-incorporated into my life. There was no boba in rural-ish Montana. My town, anyway. Not since my time in Tucson have I had boba or gelato. I have now had four boba teas at three different boba … locations? Providers? Restaurants? in three weeks, no less. As concerns my mental health, it will be pretty … vital … to my surviving the next couple of years … or even months … or even days … or even—well. Let’s just say the intrusive self-loathing moments have been increasing in frequency and duration. It has affected my work. And my treatment of other people. I hate everything about the situation because I hate everything about myself most of the time.
I’m sure other folks who’ve faced MDD with a side serving of GAD know exactly the feeling.
Because I know all the things. I’m not a suicidal teenager (any more). I’m a thirty-something with a now-substantial run of treatments explored and adopted. I know the darkness for what it is, at all times. I know what I should or should not do in every moment. Does that stop the sudden anxiety attacks over having to deal with humans in normal situations? Nope. Does that stop the recurrent desire to disassociate the molecules of my body for the betterment of humankind? Not a bit. I am a great poster queer for those of us who hold mutually exclusive feelings at the same time. I am, indeed, a dozen squirrels in a trench coat, and all of those squirrels are on meds.
Anyway.
That’s a summary of what’s been bopping along in my life lately. If ya’all have any recommendations for both wildly impossible bucket list ideas (examples include: working at an Antarctic research station or moving back to Australia to live in a desert) and, very specifically, things to do in the Denver area that would appeal to a weird, hypervigilant, physically weak, and bookish scifi and fantasy fan (examples include: a boba restaurant within easy driving distance from southwest Denver that I don’t yet know about, or that cool park that nobody else seems to have discovered) … please give me some suggestions. And maybe some thoughts and prayers.
Next time, on the kendoftheworld blog … CHINESE HISTORICAL DRAMAS!! Why? What the hell? Who gave me the right? Who AM I anymore? And how do they differ from all the Western historical dramas produced by a tiny segment of the English-speaking world population? What cultural commentary do I think they provide? Who do I ship?
Stay tuned.