A little newsletter

Trying out more of a "newsletter" aka secretly several essays + some other stuff

For most of my blogging life, I’ve written persuasive think-pieces or just shared how I’m thinking about a topic with a pretty clear persuasive goal. In my last piece, I really enjoyed just writing about my experience. It was nice to have a point but not one that I felt any desire to pull anyone towards. That is more who I want to be in this moment — reflecting, sharing, offering.

So here is some more of that; let me know if you like it! I will probably send longer versions of some of these thoughts too, so if you enjoy them, look out for the full-blog version in the coming weeks. If it gets too heavy, the fun stuff is at the end!

Things I’ve been thinking about:

• Living with people, literally and figuratively

• Navigating grief about world events and having no energy to be angry at anything

• Therapy for rabbits

• Local news blogs and how much I love them

Living with people, literally and figuratively

I just moved in with my partner! Yay! We got a new place together. Before this, I was living alone in a studio, and before that, I lived with a few of my closest friends.

Moving from living alone to living with my partner, and watching them move from having roommates to living with me, has brought up so many thoughts and feelings about the idea of living with people.

I have lived with close friends, partners, roommates, and family (my parents and chosen family). Each experience is so different from the last and the next. Each taught me different lessons; I don’t know that I needed to learn all of them, I’m very grateful for so many of those lessons.

Living with my closest friends taught me a lot about chosen family, about commitment to people when you really don’t have to. It was the first time I was really building a home with people. They were also people who had different upbringings and different expectations about life than me. Sometimes that was hard or weird, but often it was inspiring and important. Being around people who expect things to work out was so helpful to me. They supported me when I didn’t have a lot of resources, and by the end of that time I was able to support myself so much better. I was able to believe things could get better because I was around people who expected more out of life than the limits I assumed.

One of the most important things I learned was that I could trust people to love me. That is a really hard lesson for me. I always feel on the edge of losing people for unclear reasons; and I think that feeling is so much fainter now because I have lived with people I could trust to love me.

It was a really good and complex time, living with close friends. Eventually it was time to part ways domestically; it just felt like time. I didn’t have other friends in between living situations, and it was too early on with my partner, so the options were living alone or living with people I didn’t know.

I am so deeply terrified of living with strangers and their expectations (and this was 2021, which came with a special array of virus-related complexities with living with people) so I chose to live alone. Which was financially draining, but doable.

I am really glad I did, but oh my god was it emotionally draining too. I often thought about how I wouldn’t have been able to do it without a pet. It was so important to have someone else to communicate with and be at least a little accountable to.

I expected that living alone I would learn what I like, how I would decorate without anyone’s input, and how to create systems of homemaking that work for me and my disabilities. I was honestly really disappointed that I was still messy; I never really figured it out.

I do feel like in the last three weeks I have learned more about what makes me functional at home. It’s funny, because it reminds me of all the advice to work on yourself alone, when sometimes you can only grow in relationships. There’s obviously some things that are better learned alone or in therapy, but so much of our relational wounds get healed with other people, and it’s about finding people with whom that isn’t so hard. At least it’s been like that for me. I feel like a lot of the things I didn’t like about myself in dating relationships just didn’t show up with my current partner. Or when they have, it’s been fainter and resolvable without intense chaos. So much healing was just relating to the right person while also learning to relate to myself better.

Living alone really did teach me about living with myself, and I do enjoy being alone now more than I did before. I had to learn what I am like alone, and I think that was good. When I first moved, one of my friends misunderstood my explanation of why – I said I wanted to grow by living alone, and that it wasn’t time yet with my partner. She said that seemed like maybe an unnecessary trial for myself. At the time, I did really want to experience that independence and autonomy, but there was an element of truth to what she noticed – I did think I might learn something important the “hard” way. I didn’t think it would be terribly hard, but it was. I was just not happy living alone. And that wasn’t because I don’t like living with myself, I am just a mega extrovert. I did learn about the ways I feared being alone. I have spent a lot of my life isolated, and so when I am alone, sometimes I think I’ll never see anyone again, in a definitely mentally ill type of way. That has shrunk since living alone over the last two years. I had to sit through that feeling, and get so burnt out on trying to connect through passive social media and all my bad habits, that I just couldn’t do them anymore, and had to learn to enjoy my own company. And now I do. But I also hate living alone.

As soon as me and my partner started looking for an apartment I was able to feel joy again. My work problems felt less bad, my financial worries were less scary, all the things causing my depression didn’t matter so much anymore, because actually I just hated living alone, and hated how hard it was to see them, even living like 10 minutes away.

I am so excited to learn what living with a partner in a good and equal relationship feels like. So far, it’s delightful.

I’m thinking back on all of my housemates, all of my lovers, all of my close friends, my time with my family. What is it, to live with someone? To live with who they are, to accept that you may want to live differently than them? Where are the lines where you can’t live with someone, as a housemate? Where you can’t live with them, as a person in your life? I’m thinking about all the people I don’t talk to anymore, all the people I talk to despite having broken up with each other in various ways, all the people I hope to meet and learn to live with.

I don’t feel like I have to change to live with my partner, I feel like we are comfortable with the way we each want to live, and we are readily willing to “live with” the pieces in each other that we want to be different (about ourselves).  We can live with each other’s struggles, and that feels really safe.

Proximity to people in my life feels dependent on how joyful we feel together and how un-painful it is to live with each other’s struggles. I have people where our baggage is really activating to each other’s, and we need a little distance to not have to “live with” that, but we can “live with it” much easier at that distance. I have people who I could live with besides my partner, and we can spend a lot of time really close together because of that.

I think one day, my partner and I would both like to physically live with more people. We are both huge extroverts – part of what is always exciting about our relationship is that we are both so excited that someone we like so much actually wants to talk to us for 10 hours a day, because our level of social energy is a bit rare. We have both wanted roommates to hang out with more; it’s so energizing to hear about a bunch of people’s days, hear what’s going on with their lives, build multiple relationships. It’s also exhausting sometimes—reconciling different people’s expectations of home.

I think I have concluded that it’s too hard for me to live with people who don’t love me. As I mentioned, it was hard enough to learn that I could trust people to love me; let alone trust strangers to behave in loving ways or trust myself to behave lovingly towards them. I hope that that changes one day - that I am confident enough in talking about my needs, being adaptable, trusting people, and protecting myself without harshness, that I could try that. It’s also easier imagining that after spending time in this safety of just us at home.

I have so many more thoughts, but for now I’m going to let them simmer while I enjoy that living with this one wonderful person is soothing my heart.

Navigating grief about world events and having no energy to be angry at anything

CW: Thoughts about death, war, power.

I have been pretty checked out of The News for many months now. I downloaded a few reliable news apps, like the Associated Press app, in hopes of really keeping tabs on what is happening in the world without clickbait.

It’s still too much. But obviously, lately the news is coming to me, more than usual. I am reading very little, I am not able to process anger about all the injustice happening to Palestinians. I am not able to process protest. I did one of those “send to your representatives” letters, but that’s where I am in terms of action. I wasn’t even angry when I sent it.

I am just incredibly sad. I am so sad to remember people are dying all the time everywhere, at the hands of other people. How is this possible?

Sometimes my brain feels like it’s vibrating. War seems out of date. How can there still be war? There is enough space for everyone. How have there been wars for the last many centuries, when we could just stay where we are, and respect people?

When there is scarcity, I understand the human need for conflict. I see the animal need for conflict.

But for greed? How?

That’s all I can feel at this point - grief, sadness, confusion. It doesn’t have to be New Thoughts to still be shocking — and that’s something I want more people to remember. I have had people be rude and mean to me and others for being “surprised” or emotional about awful things, like we’re naive and sheltered. Nah, I just used up my body’s ability to be constantly angry. I am letting the squishy underneath feeling seep out.

Sometimes I just have to be sad. I can cry and still be aware and do what I can.

I heard someone recently say “it’s unbelievable” about something I found pretty believable, but I was so glad she said it that way. It should always be unbelievable. I always want to believe people are good, and that it is unbelievable the way some people behave, how some systems are set up. I can find it unbelievable and still know it is true.

So I’m going to cry, and eventually read more, because every time so far I’ve tried, my brain becomes fuzzy and the page ends up closed. I am aware, I’m just sad. One day I’ll be angry again, probably, but for now, I am just sitting in really numb grief. I would really like to talk about that, so please feel free to email back about that, if you’d like to talk about it too.

Therapy for rabbits

I really wish I could get therapy for my rabbit. He acts out of a sense of scarcity about every possible thing. He gets angry, jealous, disappointed, anxious, and reactive so often. I know he has been through some things, but I don’t know what they are. Maybe he would benefit from just talking to me, if I could listen, but I think he needs someone who can help him learn to cope better.

He was found in a park, and brought into a shelter. That’s how I got him; he was adoptable a few years back. He is very friendly and likes affection. He seemed like a pet that had been treated well, but for some reason wasn’t with whoever had him before. I am never sure if his peculiarities and anxieties are from his time outside or before. I wish I could ask. I wish he could talk to a professional.

Alas.

Local updates and blogs and how much I love them

I love local traffic reports and neighborhood blogs. I just moved to a neighborhood in Seattle that has it’s own little local paper but they call it a blog. It’s incredibly cute. It seems like it’s run by a retired journalist, because it all sounds like news but it’s just local events and drama and it’s delicious.

I also love following the local transit agency on social media. I love traffic reports, weather reports, updates on what is going on nearby. I joke that I follow weather like people follow sports, and sometimes my partner asks me what the current score is.

The local blog has a section where they highlight individuals with amazing Halloween or Christmas decorations. Do you know how much I love that?

Music & Being Carly Rae Jepson’s biggest fan or something

I learned this week through my Spotify Wrapped that I am in the top 0.05% of Carly Rae Jepson’s listeners on Spotify. That is five percent of ONE PERCENT.

That is WILD. I think I was in the top 10% for my top artist last year and that was shocking.

I am…proud? Proud, yes. That’s real Dedication.

I am usually very (and kind of weirdly) secretive about my musical interests, but I have to tell everyone about this.

Also, if you haven’t listened to Carly Rae Jepson since “Call Me Maybe” and you like pop at all, PLEASE go listen to her. She has several albums and they are all really good. When I first went to actually listen through all her music, I realized there had been several songs I absolutely loved already and just didn’t realize were her.

Rabbit Update

The boys are adjusting to the new home really well. We have carpet, so their little fluffy feet are nice and secure hopping around. They got to start over in a new space, so the territory angst has stopped.

Love my desserts <3 [Tiramisu and (Chan)Tilly!]

Tilly!

Tiramisu!

If you want to write back any thoughts it will make my day!

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