burnout

grounding oneself (double entendre'd)

First of all I wanted to say thank you to everyone that subscribes and scrolls my writing. I got an email this week from an ex beau telling me he “gagged in his mouth” reading some of my blog posts. And he advised me to remove them for my son’s peace of mind. I think if you have read just even one of my notes, you realize this was not welcome or appreciated. I responded back with my own version of the first amendment, f word inclusive. Which leads me to today, I almost didn’t want to sit down and write, because, I am struggling.

I am having a hard time right now understanding the world moving along as if nothing has really shifted. As if human rights and peace aren’t being up-ended everywhere. That folks, like my own brother, think that “overpaid federal workers” deserve this moment. That our president has demanded “a full throated apology” from the female Maine Governor that challenged his order with her own state law. And, that is just the news.

As someone still embracing the autism part of AuDHD, it’s hard to truly understand how to shift the narrative in my head and find new beings, more like myself to engage with on a daily basis. I have lost interest in the beings that keep me around because I am quirky, or funny. I have no interest in dating, and I don’t conflate that with no interest in sex because of menopause. No, I relate that more to my inability to compromise enough to have a relationship.

My birthday find…

After fifteen years of dating and living mostly alone, I have no desire or need for more casual sex, that remains simple to find by just lowering my standards, for a night or for some of my lucky fucks, a decade. Recognizing that, cutting off and being cut off, it is always a learning lesson but one I welcome. There is always vulnerability in connection, there is also a reason you don’t necessarily connect, entirely.

I turned 49, a little less than a week ago. It was not a big weekend of celebration, I was sick. My Meniere's started acting up on Saturday but I didn’t realize til Wednesday that it was Covid and by then I tested negative. I hate to admit that I didn’t realize I was sick and went to the grocery and hardware store as if nothing was wrong with me, when you get used to being dizzy and achey, you don’t always connect the dots, but I did take long naps and know to cancel a day hike and save a friend from getting covid too. My youngest, the one that needs no more excuses not to miss school, missed a full week.

The Birthday rounds; Pips free dougnuts, Banga Cauda, ME, You can buy yourself flowers!

So this is me forcing myself to sit down and just write. To share the things that felt closer to the surface. Like looking up at my mantle this week and smiling because I love my little collections of art. The painting on the left is by Tatyana Ostapenko, a Ukrainian-American painter, I gifted it to myself as a birthday gift six years ago, age 43. I still can’t explain what it stirs inside me, just that her, in the lead, exposed, continues to speak to me about the expectation placed on women, in all times, even war times.

The photos are taken on my Rollieflex, pre World War and on her last legs. I file down my own 120 to fit her these days and have to keep her closed with a piece of electrical tape; she still shoots brilliantly. On the bottom is Molly, my girl. The only female dog I’ve owned and that found me; not the other way around. Its blurry, but it was taken her last week with me, and that feel appropos, oh you, photography.

The peach wooden piece and the small self portrait, made of words, are from my sons. The “Men in Ties” is an homage from my kids school program, to an artist that had a huge piece I grew up around, Louise Nevelson’s Night Wave - Moon at the Kentucky Performing Arts Center. If I went to see something art and sound as a kid, I saw this huge piece of black layered everything, hanging largely as I walked in! I love now having my own “little nevelson” above the mantle. Along with the only thing I could love more than a portrait of my kid, a portrait of my kid made up of all the words he finds in himself, one of the more visible under his right eye, “nice”.

the painting of the Russian soldiers and Barbie has now been in our home six years

https://www.instagram.com/postsovietart/?utm_source=ig_web_button_share_sheet for more of Tatyana’s work.