Hi you,
First off: New Talismans are in the shop. Seven total: six moss agate ovals, one labradorite round. If you order a chain along with, they’ll ship sometime next week – I have the chains on order already, and am just waiting on them to ship and arrive. If you miss out this round, and didn’t catch my mentioning it on Twitter, I have around 50 cabochons coming in over the next month, including a LOT of labradorite. If you’re wanting moss agate, let me know, and I’ll keep an eye out for it when stone hunting.
This week has been a week of repairing things. I finally got started repairing my digital smoker, the one that’s been out of commission since… a while. If I don’t fix it, the odds of our family doing anything for Thanksgiving is slim to none, and that’s an important tradition for the kids and I. Knowing how un-celebratory this year has been for them, I took the loss of half a work day to get it figured out.
The fix should be easy enough, but confirming what needed doing? It required moving the 40” smoker, opening the back panels up, checking the wires, ordering parts, keeping track of where the parts I took off went… and that was just more than my brain could do. For months. Not because I didn’t care, mind you. I love that smoker – it’s up there with good knives and the sous vide my sister gifted to me for Christmas one year as cooking things I use all the time. Not having it meant chaos for meals, too – but I just couldn’t manage to go through those small handful of steps, not when there were so many other tasks placing a demand on my time and energy, important tasks crucial to surviving. No, I couldn’t do it because I was so drained by all the other decisions that I had to make daily, all the other tasks that needed me, the fires that needed putting out, the dozens of other things I was behind on that needed my attention. I didn’t have the mental executive capacity to keep myself on task for that many steps, no matter how easy they really were.
My smoker sitting unfixed when I knew it was a simple fix for me has seriously bothered me for months, and there’s dozens of tasks like this around the house. There’s things I want to do with every business and my art and social media that are like that too. So many ideas, so many needed tasks, and after the Must Get Dones, they’re just… overwhelming. They gnaw at the edges of my mind, reminders of the ways I feel like I’m failing because I’m not getting everything done.
On top of that, there’s self-care that often feels like it’s just more steps than I can manage, too.
It eats away at me pretty hard core.
You know how it goes.
People can tell you as many times as they want to just make time, but the thing is, we have a limited amount of mental focus available to us, and it’s much easier to tell someone what to do than it is to execute that task – and all the steps that make that task possible. You know what though?
Sometimes, y’all, it’s just not possible.
And that’s okay. It really is. The standards we’re sold aren’t realistic. Plenty of us are told that we don’t deserve care if we don’t do everything else first, too. I’ve spent a fair bit of time this week thinking about the ways my not taking care of my physical self (really basic things, like eating, drinking water, sleeping) were a reflection of the ways I was taught I didn’t deserve care unless I was performing a role for someone, that I was not qualified to administer care to myself, that only someone else could provide that care to me, and they’d only do it if I met all of their needs and wants first, and performed up to their standards first.
This is bullshit. This is giving away your power, yes, this is making you easy to manipulate, yes. It also just flat out sucks and, for me, is beyond unhealthy and rooted in some major abuse. I’m working through it, have been for a decade – but it’s layers upon layers that you gently peel away over time, like skin you shed and the healing is hard. Underneath each layer is a lot of new, sensitive skin, and I don’t know about you, but like anything that sheds a skin, I kinda want to hide away until that new skin dries and heals a bit, before I expose it to the elements, other people’s judgments, the sandpaper of day to day life. I don’t really want to put myself out there much, and definitely I don’t have the reserves to navigate the not-dishonest-but-not-quite-honest social interactions of the adult world when that raw. I don’t want to get hurt again, not when I’m so vulnerable. I’m proud of the work and healing I’m doing at times like that, but I just don’t quite trust people to be completely honest, to not use me, to not be eyeballs deep and unaware of their own protective behaviors and the impact that they have others. I don’t quite trust people to not hurt me inadvertently.
More importantly to me, I don’t have the reserves to hold space and be compassionate when I’m so raw. I’m sharper and quicker to bite back, like any vulnerable creature with claws and teeth that knows it’s at risk of being hurt. To knowingly overextend myself when like that – in a relationship of any kind – is simply not kind to everyone else who is struggling, trying, also hurting. I don’t want to take my rawness out on others – there is a base level of compassion in me that I can’t escape, even raw and overwhelmed – and so instead of risking unintentionally wounding and propagating the hurt I am trying to heal in myself, I get quiet. I pull away a bit, letting people show me who they are instead of actively seeking to discover who they are. I hold that distance until they close it. I hold my breath and it’s words back just a little bit, I wait… and I go fix my smoker.
Wishing you a lovely week – and the time to fix the things dear to you,
A. Markov
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