Dancing with the Universe

My head is full of ants and sandpaper.

( Just let me back into the cage and everything will be fine )

Most of the time I'm doing pretty well; I'm content, I'm pleasantly busy, I have what I need and life goes pretty smoothly. Every so often the facade slips, though, and it's like I'm waking up out of a pleasant dream, like the illusion falters for a second. It's not depression, or not primarily depression, though I do tend to get a sense of despair and hopelessness when I look at it. This is me emerging out of my safe little burrow and having a look around.

My increased pain levels, the exhaustion which is far worse than two years ago, my joint issues, the fight with Social Security, the lack of any viable treatments for my condition, reading through my medical charts and realizing how many medical professionals have basically noted down that I'm mentally unstable even as they smile to my face and say they believe me, my growing host of food sensitivities, the solvent I can't tolerate showing up in a growing number of cleaning products, reacting to my own body's estrogen production, the difficulty of procuring what I need to deal with that even when the doctor *does* believe me, the garbage fire that is my finances, all the projects I started and now can't work on because I have no energy anymore, the state of decay of the yard and the house, the horror of a Trump presidency for a poor disabled trans person...



Thank god for Ingress.

I decided that I was going to get on the bike today if at all possible.

( Adventures and gaming )

So yesterday was a good-bad kind of day. Lots of amplitude.

( The good, the bad, and the iunno )

I'm living in the wrong era, clearly.

We know just enough about the health issues I have to know that we don't know enough. At least the providers I see don't think I'm delusional, but they don't even have any way to quantify what's wrong, let alone solve it.

( Groping in the dark )

I'm going to be applying for SSI in pretty short order.

( Elucidation )

It's the end of the year again, and what a wild and woolly year it's been.

Usually I spend the Season of Ashes in reflection and consideration of how I want my life to go in the next year, but it feels like that's all I've done for the last ten months. I'm ready for a retrospective, and then rest.

A major stage of my life has come to a close, as Akien steps back to let me find my own footing. Another major stage of my life may also be coming to an end; I haven't had a real period in about four months. If I follow in my mom's footsteps, I'll be officially menopausal by next summer. I've also severed a lot of ties to people I used to consider friends, mostly by letting them drift away, and left the pain of adolescence behind.

In some ways I'm in my own version of Hades now, quiet and mostly alone, letting the pain of life seep into the ground. It feels fitting to have it coincide with the death of the year, and its own journey through the underworld. Perhaps the new year will bring a quickening in my own life too, or at least sow the seeds of regrowth.

Dear CCCFM,

( It's not me. It's you. )

I think I've figured it out: I'm actually 1.5 people.

I weigh as much as one and a half average female humans. I eat about half-again as much as most people. I've had at least half-again the amount of life experience for someone of my age and background. And I'm somewhere around half woman, half man, and half neither. :)

I've heard the cliche about secret lives and someone really being two people, but I've never heard of anyone being 1.5 people. It puts a whole new spin on "You're too much."

Leonard Nimoy is gone.

I'm sad, but not shattered. He had a very full and satisfying life, and his death wasn't unexpected. I'm actually most affected by the fans' grief; I know this is quite a blow to many people.

Not to me, though. Leonard Nimoy, and to a much greater degree Spock, was a tremendous role model for me over the years. I'm glad I wrote fan mail to him saying so, though I don't think he ever laid eyes on it personally. I found him inspiring and comforting, particularly as the character matured over the years into someone with great wisdom, compassion, and serenity. Spock would never have been who he was without Nimoy, and Nimoy himself came to admit that Spock shaped him a great deal.

In some ways, I feel like many of the lessons I took from Spock are ones that I have only just managed to grasp in the last month. Be true to yourself, no matter what everyone else thinks. Control comes through acceptance, not repression. Find peace within yourself by embracing all your parts without judgment. Analysis only takes us so far, and emotion must take us the rest of the way.

Before that, however, I had already ascribed to the philosophy that rationality and logic do not exclude compassion, they lead to it. I had seen the inner calm that the older Spock found in the years since ST:TOS, and decided that I wanted to get there. Only now do I really feel like I have found some of that, and curiously enough, it's that peace that has allowed me to accept Nimoy's death without more than a little heaviness. After all, he wouldn't want the world to stop for his passing; he'd want us to live well and work toward our own bright futures.

Thank you for everything, Mr. Nimoy. The world became, and remains, a brighter place for your having been in it.