Had a really bad flare up yesterday that is overflowing into today. After several really good weeks.
I don't know what triggered it.
I can't believe I used to feel like this, or worse, every day.
#recovery2026 #MECFS #DarkSojourn
I recently learned that you can relax your vagus nerve by massaging your ears. (This sounds like a setup for a joke, but this time, it is NOT.) It seems to work.
I stopped stimming my ears as a small child, when my mom would freak out that I had an ear infection. There are a lot of behaviors I […]
I know I've whined about this on here before, but ... I was on track to be somebody. I was a small-time somebody there for a minute. I was on panels at cons, being invited to other cons, speaking in front of crowds, invited to podcasts, invited to write for anthologies, people in certain small […]
Not being able to maintain a reading habit for a decade has been a huge blow to my sense of self. I made terms with it, but not satisfying terms. I still kept pushing and trying. Sometimes I'd finish a book but only through struggle, something I had to try, unsuccessfully, through intermittent […]
I've seen several playthroughs of Disco Elysium (one was over eighty hours), played it partway through twice myself, and seen several video essays about it (including one by Jeffiot that was *five* hours).
Since I usually don't like to repeat content, I wondered why I was so obsessed with it […]
I finally have a little excess energy to spend on fun work outside.
YES, the insulation needs to be (re)done, and YES that will be miserable to do once it freezes, and YES, there's laundry to do, etc. The backlog is still there, but it's finally getting smaller and manageable.
What's left to […]
Wow, this is the first time in YEARS I feel caught up.
Sure, there's stuff to do. But no pending emergencies, and no major looming deadlines (except a work one, but that manageable on its own). I'm in a safe place and not being actively abused. I can pace comfortably now.
Now the trick is to […]
Yes I have Björk on my shoegaze playlist. (Billie Eilish, too.)
#music #DarkSojourn #Recovery2025 #shoegaze #somafm
Also, SomaFM doesn't seem to have a shoegaze channel? What's with that?
#music #DarkSojourn #Recovery2025 #shoegaze #somafm
Shoegaze hits different when I'm not in deep pain.
It's still really good, just different. I feel guarded against being triggered.
This stuff was possibly my #2 coping mechanism for years, second only to plant medicine. A sound louder than my pain yet gentle in its cacophony. That's shoegaze […]
Now I just gotta get the reflectix cut into window shades, weatherize the seams, finish building the compost toilet properly, and move under the snowshed that's currently being built. Then I'll be set for winter.
(The French drain is not happening this year, so daily outside pee-bottle emptying […]
I went to bed early and slept twelve hours!!
#Recovery2025 #DarkSojourn
September is my favorite month and it always goes too quickly. I look back at my last several Septembers and sure did make a pillow out of a sow's ear each time. Best September in a long time. I wasn't in severe pain for most of the days!
#Recovery2025 #DarkSojourn
I know that part of my problem now is that when I get any spare energy, I tend to misuse it. I post long things here, which drains me faster than I realize. I obsessively play "harder" games on my iPad (they are not actually that hard), which is really fun because I've only been able to play […]
I got through the gauntlet of September better off than I was when I started the thing. It required pushing at the right times, and pacing at the right times, but never letting up. I finished yesterday in flow, with many thoughts and feelings about how living with a toxic person all that time […]
Then there's all the cognitive overhead of managing all that. That's a huge drain, too.
So I set that down, too.
I'm going to be letting a lot of things slide. Like, not just until I rest up enough to get back on the gauntlet. But for reals. As the new way of doing business.
If I've got food […]
I do this with "getting stuff done" as well. I go for the hardest thing I can stand to do. Lots of reasons, ADHD executive function reasons. But with constraints like chronic illness, that means I never, ever, ever get to spend energy on the fun things, or the easy things, or the things that […]
I've always been the kind of person who saves dessert for last. Even as a kid I noticed that meant I often didn't get dessert.
But I turn 50 this week and I still do it for some reason. It's like self-denial becomes a compulsion, a thing of its own. It has its perks and conveniences, safety […]
Recovery is still going well, but it can be discouraging.
I started today with quite a bit of energy – my mornings before work can be like that. It's the first day in a very, very long time where I've felt excited about work and confident about myself as a professional. Really feeling like yeah […]
If I can keep improving, I'll have lots of time and energy to myself.
I've been stuffing down the yearning to write for myself, especially creative writing, because that's been so far out of reach for so long. I can't remember the last time I worked on fiction. My mind is offering up ideas for […]
My major reset is a good 2+ weeks in the past.
My brain and body are working much better, though I find myself slipping back into old habits. I'm trying to be very aware of how much those habits may or may not be costing me, now that I've got a good baseline back.
Today as I start up a work […]
And also, in the spirit of the reset, it's probably ok to just let myself feel bad and process things.
🧵
#DarkSojourn #Recovery2025
I've got a lot more to say about the state of therapy culture in the US, about all the complicated ways we're taught to lie to ourselves telling ourselves that we're safe when we're not actually, how helping professions have been coopted by the machine to just get people to cope through the […]
So yeah, when I'm like hey, I should have gone on a data diet years ago, should have simply stopped compulsively thinking and ruminating about everything, should have paced harder, should have listened to my body and if I was feeling tired just laid down, should have forced myself to mediate […]
A couple of days into this energy reset, I was wondering why I hadn't done it sooner, and realized that in that moment, I felt safe for the first time since BEFORE I left my abuser. So well over a decade, but I couldn't remember just when.
I reviewed the last decade. My severe PTSD in 2015 had […]
Lots of potential trigger points for me this summer.
-Tenth anniversary of leaving my abuser was a couple of months ago.
-Bad DEFCON memories for some reason are coming up for me more this year (plenty of abuse happened there).
-I guess WorldCon is back in the PNW, and I was slated to go to […]
Alright, I managed to work another hour, and finished a chapter that had taken way too long. Not my 2.5-hour-per-day work goal, but much much better than last week.
Caffeine helped. I'd forgotten that I'd switched to green tea this week as part of the whole energy recovery thing, and that I'm […]
I had a good workday yesterday for the first time in weeks. Was able to focus and be clear about what needed to be done, and do it with confidence.
Today I've got some energy, but having trouble maintaining it in any focused sense. This is where, I think, I often bleed off energy and end up […]
LRT: re Plato's Cave, you haven't seen me around here much lately, but I read a novel for an hour last night.
#Recovery2025 #DarkSojourn
When I left my abuser (ten years ago!) most of these slower activities were impossible. Part of it was the usual tech craze dopamine cycles we were all caught up in. But part of it was the extreme anxiety-attack levels of anxiety I had *constantly*. These obsessive "always on" habits formed out […]
