Jan
5
Omi-nous
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Things are getting weird again with Omicron but there’s little consistency from state to state or person to person so everything feels even more nebulous and worrying than back when we mainly shared the same dismay.
Here in Oregon we’ve been under a state indoor mask mandate pretty much all along. There was a brief hopeful period last summer but the requirement came back in August. I know smaller towns can be pretty lax about it but in Eugene (where I live) it seems either fairly well enforced and/or people are willing to adhere to the rules.
On the one hand, I cannot believe we’re still dealing with all of this and I strongly empathize with the negative effects the mandate has on businesses (especially gyms) and I’m so disappointed that getting vaccinated (and now boosted!) isn’t enough and blah blah blah. On the other hand, I’m glad that the majority of the masking issue here is limited to the ass-painery of enforcement, as opposed to people getting upset with each other in stores and so on.
This mandate obviously extends to the schools, so that is our situation there as well: everyone is masked, whether they like it or not.
In other requirements and relaxations, nothing makes a whole lot of sense. I have to go to the hospital tomorrow and get fitted for an N95 mask in order to keep volunteering with hospice. (I have no idea what that means, to get fitted: I am sort of assuming they will eyeball me and hand me a small, medium, or large mask?) All volunteers were put on hold right before the holiday break, and I don’t fully understand their criteria for moving forward but I believe it’s by assumed risk. I qualify for “phase 1,” which means instead of being kept on hold I can re-assume my visiting duties once I get the hospital-provided masks.
Meanwhile, I learned on one of my home visits maybe a month ago that my patient had just gotten vaccinated. She’s so fragile, maybe there was a reason she couldn’t endure it before, I don’t know. (But YIKES, not on her danger to me but vice versa.)
All school volunteering has been on hold since the start of COVID, but our middle school appears to be re-starting it as of right now. I can’t tell you how much I missed helping out in the school and being around the kids and how eagerly I have looked forward to being able to do so again — but also it kind of feels like, are we SURE right NOW is the best time??
Of course not, right? No one is sure about a single goddamned thing, especially not me.
Dec
30
Like many people I really went into 2021 with the hope that things were going to be better than 2020, they had to be, in what nightmare turn of events could things possibly be worse, and then it was like the universe set out to school us all in the startling variety in ways things could be worsened.
Now that we’re about to collectively put 2021: THE WORSENING in the calendar rearview, I am for sure not jinxing a single goddamned thing by announcing any big self-improvement plans for the new year. If you even see me twist my mouth to start to say the words “manifest” or “vision board” or “wellness journey” I’m giving you full permission to slap me across the face with a printed-out and spiral-bound copy of every single media mention about Will Smith and Jada Pinkett’s marriage.
I’m not sure I’m ready to look back on 2021 in any sort of meaningful self-reflective way, at least not yet. This was mostly a year of getting through it, not getting on top of it. On the personal good news front, I quit a toxic habit in mid-December of 2020 and I have stayed clear since. I found a new counselor who I adore and trust. I believe I’ve been nicer to myself this year than I have in years past, but I also have the sense I’ve been mostly frozen in place. Trapped in the amber of things that no longer are.
Well. Life continues, if we’re lucky, and things keep changing. Christ, do they ever.
One of my most cherished coping mechanisms is devouring both streaming TV content and a steady influx of highly processed carbohydrates, but aside from that I can also recommend the following:
Reading The Work. I love what she says about there being three kinds of business: mine, yours, and God’s (God can mean outside events or nature or the universe or whatever resonates), and the grounding effect of bringing yourself back to your own business. There’s a whole (worksheet-based, I have not graduated to this and probably won’t) system she advocates for working through your shit but the simple act of stopping to question certain thoughts (“Can you absolutely know it’s true?”) has been enormously beneficial to me, because my brain is always trying to sabotage me with my own custom blend of fake news. (e.g. “This just in from the You’re A Piece of Shit Gazette: WHY EVEN TRY YOU’RE JUST GOING TO FAIL!!!”)
Of course my website editor is currently borked and I can’t add links or format worth a damn: https://thework.com/instruction-the-work-byron-katie/
Re-reading Untamed. I’ve read the other Glennon Doyle books but this is the one I think every woman should read. Her personal life anecdotes in this don’t always land perfectly for me (I view them more as … well-crafted vehicles for messaging, rather than accurate portrayals of things that happened exactly as described) but overall I find this to be a great source of female-centric inspiration.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52129515-untamed
Yoga. I started doing yoga as a 30-day challenge last January and I never stopped. I can’t say I legitimately got in a full yoga session every single day in 2021 but it was pretty damn close, and I cannot possibly recommend this enough. Not the every day part, exactly, but any kind of regular yoga routine is almost certainly going to improve your lif—okay I realize I have gone skidding right by “This is what works for ME” and into “…And therefore YOU should do it TOO,” but I have Very Strong Yoga Feelings now and I cannot help myself. In short, yoga has helped me:
• Feel better physically, and
• Feel better emotionally
I could go on and on about how good it feels to have full mobility and increased strength and flexibility and how dedicating that time to myself feels so important and how breathing is kind of fucking magical and how my tricky lower back is no longer a lurking enemy waiting to strike when I bend over to pick up someone’s motherfucking sock, but enough already. Yoga is awesome, Yoga with Adriene is particularly awesome, and she has a brand-new 30 day series (free, on YouTube) starting on January 1st.
Maybe this is calling you? You never know, I sure wasn’t a yoga person before, but something changed in those 30 days and now I can’t imagine my life without it.
https://do.yogawithadriene.com/move
Joyful Movement. I don’t know how else to categorize this, but I get it nearly every day and I know it makes a difference. For me it’s via the Oculus Quest 2 — excuse me, the Meta Quest — headset, I play a lot of Beat Saber and Synth Riders. These are VR games that involve music and rhythm, and a whole lot of moving around trying to strike/avoid things.
Basically playing these games is like dancing, because of how you’re moving with the music. I dance all the time now, and I realize from the outside it looks like a middle-aged lady in a clunky helmet swatting wildly at a cloud of gnats, but who fucking cares, it feels like dancing. It is so fun and exhilarating and as a person who never had natural rhythm or was a born athlete, it’s honestly the first time I’ve felt the physical intuitiveness and reflexes I always assumed were outside of my capacities.
Anyway, I guess just really recommend moving to music, in any way you can, as often as you can. It feels like a love letter to being alive.
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