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Temps De Fugue

Temps De Fugue

Apr 1

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Don’t worry, as far as I know “temps de fugue” isn’t a real ballet step. It’s just a half-baked play on “tempus fugit.”

~

Yesterday, at a show in which I probably knew 60% of the dancers and 90% of the choreographers, I ran into Killer B in the audience.

This season, Killer B made the leap back into life as a company dancer. We were talking about our respective seasons, and she said something like, “Can you believe it’s almost over? It went by so fast!”

And it hit me (again, because it had already hit me, but harder, because it wasn’t just me thinking idly about it) that all at once I’m basically a week from the end of my first full season in Actual Ballet Company.

The past year has been one of vast, wild changes.

In a way, it’s been like a graduation.

BW matriculated to Nashville Ballet. BG matriculated to a directorship at a youth ballet. Killer B matriculated back into the folds of Louisville Ballet, where she has, predictably, been killing it. K has jetted off to California. I fumbled my way into an Apprenticeship at Actual Ballet Company, which I still refuse to name in this blog for some reason[1] even though I’m forever posting links to our shows ^-^’

  1. In case you hadn’t noticed: dancers be superstitious, y’all.

My friends from Pilobolus’ intensive, meanwhile, are literally all over the map. Several have toured the globe with Pilobolus. One is out there dancing with Momix. Two created an amazing project of their own that’s taken off and is selling like, well, muffins (that’s kind of an in-joke; I’ll try to post a link at some point). Some have graduated from undergrad dance programs. Others have matriculated into graduate dance programs.

Friends that I’ve worked with locally outside the ballet, too, have begun building bigger, better things: like the show that I attended yesterday, where I ran into Killer B and we agreed about how much we miss everyone and also about how happy we are for everyone. Like the show that I saw on Valentine’s Day, where my friend Dot (a total sister-from-another-mister, if every I met one) and a nascent company in Frankfort knocked my socks off (I auditioned for their summer show on Saturday, and it was both fun and awesome; more on that in a few).

Improbably, perhaps even implausibly, we’re all out here working our booties off (both literally and metaphorically) and actually doing it. Some of us are doing it with greater financial rewards than others, but we’re all out here moving and shaking and making dance happen with a dedication that even the Puritans would’ve had to appreciate.

And it’s so very,  very weird to be part of that: but also so very, very good.

~

For me, also, this season has been all over the map.

There have been some really, really hard things. I struggled socially, which I should’ve expected but didn’t. I also struggled technically, at times, which I kind of expected but not necessarily in the right areas. I managed to stick it out anyway, and because of that I’ve learned an enormous, enormous amount, and not just in terms of technique.

I feel like things are beginning to gel, now. My balances are so much better, most of the time, than they were back in September (they’re not so great when I have a sinus infection that messes with my inner ear, but that’s to be expected). I know how to use my body in ways that I didn’t before. When I drop in on classes at home, I pick up the choreography so much faster than I used to.

Épaulement—never my greatest strength—is becoming more thoroughly integrated into my technique. My arms mostly know what to do with themselves, though not always, in ways they didn’t before. My hands do not constantly insist that the only ballet is Don Quixote.

At Saturday’s audition, I felt comfortable with my strengths and my weaknesses. The company in question is deeply eclectic, which is really cool, so we all tried a bit of everything: jazz, contemporary, ballet, and tap.

I was completely fine with the fact that I have basically no idea what I’m doing where tap is concerned; I muddled through anyway, following as best I could with very little idea as to what I was doing, and enjoyed the heck out of it. As I prepared to run the tap combo, I said to K (the resident tap maven—really, she’s amazing), “I’m just going to desperately follow along and hope everything works out,” and she replied, “That’s fine! I’ll just borrow your extensions for the ballet parts!”

What I enjoyed most, though, where the moments when A, who gave us our barre at the beginning of the audition, would say, “…And let go of the barre,” and I was generally able to just let go of the barre and balance (except for the attitude balance on the right side, when I put my foot into a little warbly spot in the floor and it took me a bit longer to set up as a result).

I enjoyed that, of course, because static balances have long been a white whale for me, and here I was at an audition just, like, balancing.

To make up for it, of course, I blanked on the beginning of the ballet combination when it came time to run it … but so did basically everybody else for some reason. Now that it’s over, I will never, ever forget the beginning of that combination ^-^’

When I drop in on classes at LBS, where I rebooted my ballet life five years ago, I’ve begun to be able to see how far I’ve come (I never, of course, lose sight of how far I have left to go … those goalposts just keep receding).

That’s a good feeling: like, yes, time continues to fly, but in one sense I’m flying with it for once in my life. I’m making progress in something that means a great deal to me.

Five years ago, I don’t think I could have begun to imagine the life I’m living now. It makes me wonder where I’ll be in another five years, and another.

I’m in no hurry, don’t get me wrong: but I think it’ll be something to see.

Posted in #dancerlife, adulting, adventures, auditions, balllet

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Pas De Probleme

Pas De Probleme

May 30

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Si vous parlez français, mes chers lecteurs, and/or if you speak Ballet, you know that “pas de problème” can mean either “no problem” or “problem step.” It’s one of of those puns that never gets old, as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, class this morning began as an ongoing pas de problème in the latter sense, since I was still semi-disoriented (I probably should have skipped the sleeping pill last night) and oddly stiff.

Eventually, my body decided to bring itself online, although my brain lagged behind and kept asking stupid questions like, “Are you sure this Sissone travels right?!”

(Yes, Brain. It begins left foot back and travels sideways. Which way do you think it’s going to go? I mean, it could be a Sissone under … BUT IT’S NOT.)

Regardless, it wound up being a semi-acceptable class, which was good, because it was packed and a significant portion of the company came today. I wasn’t at my best—my body never quite finished organizing itself—but I wasn’t at my worst, either.

I’m debating whether HRT means I should actually devote some time to intentionally stretching on the daily. I’ve felt tighter the past week or so than I’m used to feeling, but I’ve also just returned to serious aerial training and done some serious sitting down in the car (we drove to Saint Louis again, this time for a fantastic dance festival).

I suppose it couldn’t hurt to be more intentional about mobility, anyway—especially going forward, with more partnering and so forth on the agenda.

After the Jessica Lang show, D mentioned to me that he thinks I should start strength training with an athletic or personal trainer who understands dance precisely for the purpose of partnering—especially lifting other guys. He rarely makes suggestions about how I should approach my life as a dancer, but when he does he’s usually right, so I’m contemplating how to move forward in that regard. Señor BeastMode is an obvious choice, if he has time in his completely crazy schedule to take on a client right now.

On a broader level, I’m experience the weird cognitive landscape specific to once again having to acclimate my mind to changes in my body. Obviously, I’m trying to work to avoid hypertrophy as much as possible, since I don’t need to be bigger, but at the same time the influence of hormone therapy is changing the overall shape of my body.

Sometimes I’m okay with that, sometimes I’m not. I’m trying to really internalize the idea that it’s okay to be someone who is a dancer, a bottom, and also rather athletically built.

Obviously, this is a refinement of my ongoing body-image weirdness … but it’s such an oddly-specific refinement, I guess. The dancers in Jessica Lang’s company (Jessica Lang Dance, ou JLD) made me feel a little less alien, since there are several guys in JLD who are small, rather pretty, and built like the proverbial brick …. houuussse (da-na-naaa-na … they’re mighty, mighty).


I felt that this occasion called for some Commodores. You’re welcome.

Given that JLD’s choreography skews strongly towards ballet (albeit contemporary ballet[1]), and that ballet is my preferred idiom, it was nice to see boys whose bodies resemble mine (only better trained, I am forced to admit) working in a major professional company.

  1. …Which is fine, because it turns out that I lurve contemporary ballet.

I realize that, as far as work is concerned, this continues to amount to First World Ballet Problems. Several people who know me have pointed out that my body is not out of line with the standard for male ballet dancers; I’m on the small end and rather powerfully built, but not to such a degree that you don’t see similar guys in ballet in general. Mine is, K suggests, a Bolshoi body rather than a Balanchine body. I’m down with that. I like the Bolshoi better anyway 😉

On a different level, though, the way my body has changed, is changing, is forcing me to redefine my understanding of myself in accordance with my sexuality. I’m not a waifish little twink anymore, but evidently the kind of guys I find interesting (including my husband) are not interested only in waifish little twinks.

I don’t write a great deal about my sexuality, in part because this blog is really more or less about dancing at this point, and in part because my difficulties with it are sort of, like, Queer 452 difficulties instead of Queer 101 difficulties. This may not be true for any of you who read this on the regular or who are reading it right at this very moment, but I suspect that a lot of people who are less familiar with queer issues might not quite grok the source of my internal conflict (well, a significant portion of men might not: female aerialists, who sometimes wrestle with essentially the same problem of the disconnect between their outer Aerial Beast and their inner Dainty Girl, are likely to get it in one, so to speak).

At the same time, I get that it’s aggressively First World Problems-y to be like, “O, woe is me, I have grown up to be this ripped little mesomorph instead of a dainty little ectomorph.” Like, yeah, I get that there are bigger, more problematic problems by far.

And yet, we live with what we live with.

I should note that this isn’t a question of consciously hanging on to some kind of ideal that I know isn’t going to work with me. It’s a question of some really outdated conditioning disrupting what might otherwise be a very natural process of being like, “Oh, okay, this is where my body is going, and this is the stuff I like to do with my body, here’s where I fit. Cool.”

I feel like ultimately it will take a while and a kind of re-conditioning … maybe even some very conscious de-conditioning. That’s going to be a challenge, since the source of the conditioning in question remains my life’s most significant trauma and one that I’m still working to address.

Either way, I should stipulate that I’m grateful for my body and what I can do with it.

I should also stipulate that I’m encountering some of the typical, boring adolescent problems: acne and, um, errr, ahh, wow, there are an awful lot of very freaking hot guys in the world, did you know that? (Actually, just, like, hot people in general.) Seriously. HOW DO PEOPLE ACTUALLY LEARN ANYTHING IN SCHOOL between the ages of 13 and 18, or what have you???? Thank goodness ballet requires so much focus it’s like wearing blinkers (except sometimes, between exercises, when you’re standing there watching and your brain drifts off and is like DAMN HE LOOK GOOD, WHERE YOU GET THOSE CUTE TIGHTS BOY, oh crap was that piqué-piqué-rond or what?).

I’m not sure how to address the latter problem, and today I was really disappointed when I went to the ONLY STORE IN TOWN that reliably stocks Queen Helene’s Mint Julep Mask, which is what I use to address the former problem (acne), and discovered that they were fresh out. I got some other mask that is reasonably acceptable, but it turns out that Amazon carries Queen Helene, and it comes in a tub. The tube version is fine, but a little hard to manage one-handed when you’re languishing in the bath with a good book, so since the price is right and so forth I think I’m just going to order it from Amazon from now on.

On the upside of the whole acne thing, my skin has decided to be way oilier than it used to be, and not to be as ridiculously dry as it has been for basically my entire life. That is a welcome change, to say the least.

Posted in #dancerlife, adulting, balllet, class notes, healing, life, mental health

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…You Stop When The Gorilla Gets Tired

…You Stop When The Gorilla Gets Tired

Aug 10

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(File under: Every Aphorism I Know I Learned In Bike Racing)

I’ve been having a tough time with re-entry following this summer’s intensives.

Not that I’m, like, pining for the fjords. Just…

Hmm. How do I explain it?

Going to a dance intensive is, in a way, very much like going to summer camp. You’re essentially excused from most of the responsibilities of adulting. Your daily activities are heavily programmed for you. You don’t have to juggle variables, interruptions, or random transportation disasters.

If you forget your ADHD meds, you make it through the day pretty well because all you’re doing, really, is dancing, and your brain works best when you’re in motion. You don’t have to remember a bunch of discrete, unrelated tasks and somehow accomplish them.

If you stay up really late bonding with your new dance family, it’s no big deal. You get up the next day, pour some strong coffee into your face, hit the studio, dance your butt off, and sleep like the dead when you get back to the dorms or your AirBnB.

And then you come home, and your body is adapted to an 8-hours-per-day-plus physical workload that you’re unlikely to match except during the most intense periods of rehearsal or performance, and you have to get back to Adulting (with or without ADHD).

For me, this illuminates one of the central challenges in living with ADHD: it never goes away.

To borrow a quote from Kiwi bike racer Greg Henderson [1]:

Greg Henderson quote:

Swap “ADHD” for “training” and you’re good. (Shamelessly stolen from Pinterest, of course.)

  1. or a quote about success from Robert Strauss, who presumably doesn’t race bikes but could feasibly be a Kiwi; can’t be arsed to look him up right now.

You don’t stop when you’re tired. You stop when the gorilla is tired.

ADHD is, in some ways, a gorilla that never gets tired. Instead, you have to learn to manage your gorilla—and managing is largely a question of automation.

When I’m doing it right, I manage my ADHD by making it as hard as possible for myself to screw up the basics.

I lay out each day’s clothes the night before, so I never have to fumble around looking for clothes before my brain is working.

My morning and afternoon doses of Adderall are right there in my 7-day pillbox, so I don’t find myself thinking, “Feck, did I take my meds?”

My keys, wallet, sunglasses, and other important small things live on a shelf by the door, so I will always put them there when I walk in and never have to wonder where they are.

My phone lives next to the bed, where it acts as an alarm clock. Once I get out of bed, I either leave it tethered to one of its chargers or keep it nearby. That way, I never have to look for it.

My class and rehearsal schedules get written out on the whiteboard on the refrigerator door. Writing them down helps me remember what’s coming up; it also gives me a hard-copy reference when I’m not sure and lets D know where I am, when.

While I cook, I clean as I go and streamline general dishwashing into those moments when there’s nothing that requires attention.

I run errands before, after, or between classes so I won’t have to take extra trips out of the house. I maintain shopping lists on Google Keep so I don’t have to remember anything, including the shopping list.

I burn a ton of energy, knowing that it’s the only way I’m going to be able to sleep on anything resembling a normal, diurnal schedule. I run Twilight on my phone and f.lux on my PCs to cut out blue rays (this really does make a huge difference, for me). I don’t play video games or peruse social media in bed, because those get my brain ticking over too fast.

I pay really close attention to things like caffeine intake: and if I’m having a rough time sleeping, I avoid any caffeine at all after about 2 PM.

These are all fairly small things, but they add right the heck up.

The problem is, they’re all routine-driven, and once I get out of a routine, it can be really hard getting back in.

This week, I’m struggling really hard with insomnia. After being sick for most of last week (during which all I actually did was sleep), I’m left with a surplus of energy, but not enough on the schedule to burn it off.

Since it only takes one sleepless night to torpedo weeks of careful sleep programming, I’m currently in the midst of a really unpleasant cycle of sleeping two hours one night, then nine the next.

Last night was one of those two hour nights. I missed class today because of it: I finally got to sleep around 8 AM. Turned off the alarm at 9 AM, when I realized it would be foolish to try to do modern on one hour of sleep. Woke up at 10, when I should’ve been starting class, anyway.

I’ve realized I need to get back to negotiating with my gorilla. I’m home for one more week, then off to That Thing In The Desert[2] after all, then back for a week, then off for a medical thing[3], then possibly starting rehearsals for a thing, depending[4].

  1. In addition to the usual Open Barre sessions with mimosas, I’ll be leading some contact improv playshops at our camp this year.
  2. I’m going to apply my “to know, to will, to dare, to keep silent” clause here. This is a minor medical procedure but a huge freaking deal for me, so I’m trying not to  feck it up.
  3. Here, too. I’m actually okay with waiting and auditioning for the next thing this company does, but it’s sort of up in the air right now whether we can work around my temporary restrictions after The Secret Medical Thing.

None of this makes it easier to figure out where to start rebuilding my Life Management Protocols, so I’m just going to do what I normally do: fumble forward and hope for the best.

In other words, just pick something and start where you are.

In that vein, I’m hoping to get a class in tomorrow to make up for missing today’s (though tomorrow’s class will be ballet, not modern).

I’ve got a doctor’s appointment at 8-o-freaking-clock in the morning for which I have to check in at 7-goshdarn-30, which means getting up at 6-what-even-is-sixthirty-30 because I kind of need D with me for this one and he needs more than 20 minutes to get out the door 😛

As such, I need to actually get my tuchas in bed at a reasonable hour tonight and, if necessary, hit myself with a whacking great dose of doxylamine succinate to make sure I don’t stay awake all night.

Those are some easy start-where-I-am steps that I can actually do (along with getting audition video links to the AD for the Secret Dance Thing and signing some documents for The Secret Medical Thing and emailing them back to the practice in question).

So, there you have it. I think I really wanted this post to be more of a thought-piece about managing ADHD than me scrabbling on about how I’ve managed to hose everything up for myself (though I did plan to mention that), so I suppose I’ll add that to my queueueueueueue of posts to actually write sooner or later as well.

Until then, I’ll be here, negotiating with my gorilla.

~

Oh: in other news, I successfully gave a bit of advice to a new guy in class last night, which felt really good.

Posted in adhd, adulting, balllet, ID-10T errors, improv, life, life management, meds, mental health, mistakes, WTF

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On Learning To Be Serious

Apr 3

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Sometimes, in the process of navigating your life, you look up and realize you’ve passed a bunch of waypoints without even really noticing.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: I realized that I needed to update my dance resumé, which pretty much made me laugh out loud, because I’ve come a really long way in less than one year, and I totally failed to notice.

In short: this year, my life has suddenly taken off.

Or … well. It feels sudden, but when I think about it, it really isn’t.

(moar behind the cut; it’s long)

Read the rest of this entry →

Posted in ballet lessons, balllet, goals, healing, life, work

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Onward and Upward, By Fits, Starts, and Degrees

Jul 8

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Sometimes, recovering from a bad episode of this depressive bipolar crap seems a bit like doing the hokey-pokey.

You put your left foot in, you put your left foot out, you put your left foot in, and then you go back to bed because frankly you’ve had enough for today and you’d really rather try again tomorrow, thank you very much.

I tend to make optimistic prognostications about my ability in moments that I’m feeling a bit more “up” than I have been (read: moments when I’ve taken my meds and downed something with a bit of caffeine in it, of late).

Later, when things shift back towards really deep end of the spectrum, I tend to sit there kicking myself about making said optimistic prognostications (which I tend to do publicly, because, in short, I never freaking learn, I guess?).

Right now, I’m somewhere between those two states: not at that point where I’m like, “I am going to do All This Stuff soon,” but not at that point where I’m like, “Yeah, I’m a waste of oxygen and I should really stop thinking I’m ever going to do anything.”

Instead, I’m in this spot where I’m able to see that the optimistic part of me that makes bold plans is okay, and the horribly depressed part of me that gets really angry when I fail to complete those plans is also okay, and that can be what they are, and it is, in its own way, okay.

Not always happy, not always fun, not always even remotely anything like pleasant: but valid, allowed. The human experience is rich with contradictions; with complications.

Today I did not even remotely attempt to get out of bed early enough to get to morning class. A part of me is really pissed about that — the same part that’s forever saying things like This is why you never amount to anything; you’re better than that; this is what makes the difference between people who succeed in ballet and people like you.

Another part of me recognizes that you have to work with what you’ve got. What I’ve got right now is hard to work with (though, on the other hand, I’m writing a fair bit, so there’s that).

I did begin my Great Office Rehab Project — or at least some of it (some of it will have to wait ’til I can buy some paint and some fabric). Denis brought in the replacement desk, so I set it up, installed the office air conditioner, and then became insanely, furiously frustrated because there are still Too Many Things In This Room.

The difficulty is that some of the things need to stay, but they need to live in or on other things that aren’t in here yet, and I don’t want to bring those other things in until the things on or in which the first set of things resides are out of the way, but I can’t get them out of the way without bringing in the things to put the things in…

Yeah.

My brain makes everything a thousand times harder than it has to be when I’m depressed (not like ADHD helps any of this, but depression makes it worse; when I’m manic, OTOH, I can organize anything to within an inch of its life, as long as something else doesn’t distr— SQUIRREL!).

So today I went to see my therapist (and rode my bike a lot, because I figured actually getting some exercise would solve one of the problems contributing to the severity of this depression — lack of exercise).

Tomorrow, maybe I’ll bring in the things into which I need to transfer the other things, so the things in which the things now reside can go wherever it is they’re going.

Maybe I won’t.

I’m not making any bold statements right now. We’ll see.

Perhaps that should be my motto for the time being: “We’ll see.”

Ultimately, it’s not like we can ever say for certainty what we’ll be doing at any given moment, anyway. Control is an illusion, and it seems especially illusory when you live with a mental illness that really rather prevents you being able to make long-term forecasts about your emotional weather.

If I have my head together well enough, my foot should hold up to at very least Essentials on Friday. I might give Intermediate class a try.

I do feel like I need to get back on top of ballet. I have missed so much. I don’t suppose I can do anything about that (water under the bridge, etc.), but I can work on putting the pieces in place to prevent it from becoming an established pattern.

Just going to class is one of those pieces — ballet is such an effective preventative and remedy; it seems to take the teeth out of my depressions when I can keep dancing.

This particular depression, though, has been a perfect storm of ballet-interrupting foot injury, stress, hormonal disruptions (blargh), lack of externally-imposed structure in my life, general lack of exercise, and the destabilizing effect of summer itself.

Anyway, that’s it for now.

More soon, maybe?

We’ll see.

Posted in adhd, balllet, bipolar, life

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Back … ish.

Jul 2

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(That wasn’t actually intended to be a play on the title of the TV series Black-ish, though that seems to be a fairly thoughtful sitcom, as sitcoms go, from the tiny bits I’ve seen of it.)

So I’m back on my meds (huzzah!) as of this afternoon and, as such, improving in terms of overall function … which is good, because the drain in our kitchen sink chose tonight to explode, and I would have had a flat-out meltdown about that if it had happened yesterday. Fortunately, I married McGayver, who can fix that kind of thing.

I’m doing the job applications thing and it’s going well — had an interview this morning for a position that sounds like pretty much a lock (unless I’ve been convicted in absentia for some kind of crime I committed in my sleep?), though it turns out there are no seasonal positions open ’til September. I could have started next weekish as a permanent employee, but it wouldn’t be terribly convenient for the company, as I’d have to run off for two solid weeks for Burning Man.

Unless I find something that’s really relevant to my studies and/or sounds really compelling, I’ll probably take that job in the fall. It sounds like a good fit for what I want right now — an active, rather than a sedentary, workplace; decent pay; hours that mesh nicely with ballet. Shouldn’t hurt the fitness bit, either.

I’ll need to finally get an actual driver’s license, since the job in question may potentially involve actually driving, but that’s in the plans anyway.

I’m still working for Denis’ Burning Man project and feeling ever-more-useful in that regard. Tonight I set us up with a G+ page, even though I still feel kind of iffy about social media as a marketing platform. For this project, though, since it’s primarily a do-gooder collectivist kind of gig, I don’t really mind 🙂

On Glassdoor this morning, I spotted a listing for a web developer with some knowledge of WordPress and Drupal, as well as some command of your general web languages (HTML, PHP, CSS). I’m kind of kicking around the idea of applying for that. The upside is that the pay would very likely be pretty nice; the downside, of course, is that most development jobs are desk jobs, and I’m not really super into that whole idea. Been there, done that, decided it wasn’t for me.

Our finances are on the mend. Since it took about two solid years of complete and utter miscommunication to blow them up, it’ll probably take a few months to get them 100% back on track. Until then, we’ll be wearing our dance belts a little tighter* 😉

*Actually, mine keeps getting looser, but that’s a different kettle of worms.

My toe is healing. I’m still on the fence about Saturday class. Tomorrow’s out; it’s definitely not ready for Intermediate, and Essentials is cancelled tomorrow. I was able to ride the bike a bit today without driving the toe crazy, but I’d rather let it really heal before I try to push it.

I’ve noticed that Fusion Fitness Dance is back on the calendar, so maybe I’ll give that a whirl at some point, too. That depends on the finances, though. If we’re going to be tight enough that I can only do class two or three times per week for the next while, I don’t want to add a non-technique class.

I guess I’m also going to try not to spring back too quickly from this depression. I tend to decide that “feeling somewhat better = feeling 100% better,” then overtax myself and crash even harder. I hope maybe I’ve learned that lesson by now.

I’ve also learned that, while I now know that there is not, in fact, a famous band called Holland Oats, Harlan Oats, or Haulin’ Oats, I still don’t really know from 80s music. Did you know that “Danger Zone” was a Kenny Loggins song? I sure didn’t until just now. Thanks, Amazon Prime Music.

So that’s it for tonight.

Stay out of the Danger Zone.

You know, unless that’s where you want to be, in which case, carry on.

Posted in balllet, Burning Man, life, work

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Life: Yet Another Momentary Lapse of Reason

Jun 30

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As a whole, I’m doing better the past few months than I have in, like, ever.

The past four days have been an exception: I had been waking up a bit down in the dumps, but as a general rule it was wearing off once I got going; on Friday, however, the feeling kind of stuck with me.

Yesterday seems to have been the zenith — perhaps it would make more sense to say nadir — of this particular depression. I suppose the fact that I just plain wasn’t feeling well complicated things.

Today, I’m feeling a bit better on both the physical and mental fronts. Still not all there, but at least more or less functional. Apparently, the sleeping-for-fourteen-hours bit and the wheezing bit were only tangentially related: one was the result of depressolepsy; the other of my asthma deciding that it hadn’t said “hi” in a while and should probably remind me it’s around, or something like that.

A lot of this is complicated by the fact that I’m out of medication and currently unable to refill my prescription for stupid and ridiculous reasons (read: our finances remain complicated, for the moment). The medication I take doesn’t treat depression, nor is it properly a mood stabilizer (sidebar: I almost typed “mood sanitizer,” FFS, though come to think of it that might be rather apropos) but it does go a long way towards keeping my mood on a fairly even keel.

Today I am back to the strategy of basically distracting myself by doing things that I don’t find horribly onerous, like making bread and maybe washing the sheets (thanks to the cat’s decision to sleep right next to my face; apparently, he thought I needed cuddles: to be fair, he was correct, but I like cat cuddles better when the cat in question keeps his dander at waist level or below).

I am feeling depressed in part, by the way, because of our financial straits. Situational depression is definitely a thing, and it’s a thing that is very much a problem for me, since my brain likes to perseverate on emotional states. Way to go, brain.

Coming up with a plan to get out of our current straits is hampered by the fact that being depressed makes me much, much less rational, which also makes me do things like weigh myself three times in one day (and discover that my assumptions about the relationship between time of day and weight were, if not baseless, at least a bit off-base: I weighed less at 12:00 than I did at 8:45, go figure).

In other news, I am biting my lip and letting my stupid toe heal, so doing Brienne’s class tomorrow is a non-option. I dreamed about going to aerials class, but that will have to wait ’til we get ourselves unmired, financially speaking.

I missed Claire’s final class because my toe was really quite seriously painful on Saturday morning; apparently, I was still supposed to be wrapping it before walking around on it all week. Le sigh. I may be able to go back to class on Saturday; I may not. We’ll see.

So that’s that for now. Nothing philosophical or balletic to contribute to the Internets today.

Be well.

PS: Derp, half the point of posting at all right now was to link a recipe that I tried last night.

So, without further ado, here’s a link to last night’s really delightfully-easy fried rice:

http://rachelschultz.com/2012/07/14/better-than-takeout-chicken-fried-rice/

Posted in bipolar, food, life

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Sorry This Is a Bit Cryptic

Maybe at some point, it’s actually okay to face the world and learn to Adult (even when I was little, I never aspired to grow up; the adults in my life generally seemed to have an ocean of trouble and little time for creative stuff).  
Takes realizing, first, how much you need to learn, and then realizing that again.  And again.   Life is an iterative process; test-driven development writ large.

And then, you have to take those first tentative steps onto the high wire.

Slowly, weirdly, I’m kind of turning into someone I can respect.  

It kind of sneaks up on you, though, doesn’t it?

Posted on | Aside

Bravery != Fearlessness

Jun 21

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Not terribly infrequently, someone in my life will take note of some or another new physical adventure I’m trying and say something like, “Wow, you’re brave!”

Truth is, I’m really not particularly brave, when it comes to physical feats of derring-do. I’m just wired for adventure. Temperamentally, I’m pretty fearless (which is both good and bad, all things considered) in that particular way.

If you do things that look scary to other people because you’re not afraid to do them, that’s not the same thing as being brave. Intrepid, I’ll give you, but bravery is a different kind of thing.

Bravery is being afraid to do something and doing it anyway.

So while I may be bold about physical challenges, I’m a complete coward about emotional ones.

Well, maybe not a complete coward, but not what you’d call “brave” by any normal definition of the word.

Or, well, I haven’t been.

So I’ve decided that I’m going to try it.

It’s weird how apparently-unrelated life experiences can suddenly coalesce into the beginnings of new adventures: graduation, ballet, PlayThink, goodness only knows what else. It’s hard to identify the streams of influence that lead to now.

But, anyway, those and a lot of things have made me think that it’s really time to try being brave in a way that I haven’t before.

I want to learn how to be brave emotionally — I may never be fearless, where my heart is concerned, in the way I am where my body is concerned, but I can learn to be brave. We can all learn how to be brave.

A caveat: I write a fair bit about myself, about some struggles that a lot of people would consider deeply personal, here.

That might look brave, too, but it isn’t, because it isn’t hard for me.

The truth is that here, in the blogosphere, in my very own blog, I hold the reins. I’ve got my finger on the button. I can shut the whole freaking thing down if things get hairy.

There are other bloggers to whom I feel a kind of tentative connection (in a “Wow, I really admire your blog/your comments/your thoughts, and you seem like a thoughtful person who actually cares about stuff” kind of way) — but I can always suck all my tentacles back into my shell and jet off into the abyss* if I feel threatened.

*I’m sure there’s some deep, abiding significance to the fact that I always use ocean-dwelling invertebrates in these analogies.

In short, I’m completely in control of what I share here, of how much other people sort of bleed over into my being.

Out there, in the big scary world of actually making connections and building friendships, things are completely different.

I don’t trust people — and while it’s true that my wariness about my fellow humans evolved for some very real reasons, it’s a tool which has, in its current form, outlived its usefulness.

I don’t make new friends in part because, for me, friendship is a deep connection, and the process of making that connection involves leaving doors open that, frankly, it scares the crap out of me to leave open. It means leaving my heart out there on the counter where anyone can just pick it up and stick it in the Vitamix**.

**I don’t actually own a Vitamix.

It means coping with the fact that maybe sometimes I will think someone is really interesting and hope they will be my friend, and they won’t.

It will mean that some of those interesting people will want to be my friends, but will also turn out to be human beings with complicated, messy lives (because we pretty much all have complicated, messy lives), and that I will love them anyway, and hurt when they hurt, and struggle when they struggle, and maybe I will sometimes even be overwhelmed by their struggles, just like they, G-d forbid, might sometimes be overwhelmed by mine.

It means negotiating all of the glorious, abstract mess that is the human heart.

The same goes for just being with people in the moment. I keep thinking back to some of the moments at PlayThink this year, those moments that overpowered my preconceptions about interacting with strangers and became, in and of themselves, transformative. In the past, I haven’t been very open to those moments. I want to change that.

I know that being open to those moments in a more conscious way involves risk. That’s fine (or, at least, I’m trying to convince myself that it is: work with me, here).

Living involves risk.

By way of a favorite analogy: every time you get get out of bed, you’re taking a risk. You could trip over your duvet and break your neck. However, if you just stay in bed, you’ll almost certainly die much sooner than you otherwise would — the medical complications of just lying in bed will kill you. Worse, you’ll miss so much of the amazing spectacle of life while you’re ensconced in your bed, staring at the same four walls.

Also, eventually, you’ll have to pee.

So it’s worth getting out of bed, even though you could trip over your duvet and die.

The weird part is that you have to have a reason to want to get out of bed. Telling yourself you should get out of bed to avoid the risk of dying from inactivity doesn’t really work. You have to want to experience the amazing spectacle of life (or at least, you have to not want to pee in your bed).

Until very recently, I have bemoaned the minuscule scale of my social circle, but apparently that alone hasn’t been enough to overcome inertia.

What has overcome that inertia, instead, is experience: the experience of being unexpectedly swept out of my frame and discovering that, hey, this connecting-with-people thing is pretty great, actually!

So I’m going to try to do more of it. I’m going to try to do less of the thing where I decide that interacting with a group of strangers sounds, frankly, terrifying (an emotion that my brain recasts as “stupid,” it sounds stupid, this activity is ridiculous, etc.).

I am going to get out there and try new things, emotionally speaking.

Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. Who knows?

Regardless, I think I’ll be better off for having tried.

And maybe I’ll finally be able to say, “Yeah, you know what? Actually, I am pretty brave.”

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On Reading The Comments*

May 26

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*Except on WordPress. WordPress rolls by its own rules: the ‘Pressers I follow seem to be good at attracting sane, intelligent discussions in their comment sections, and at moderating appropriately, and at knowing when to put up the “Comments Closed” sign.)

Once upon a time, back in the day, etc., I was an avid reader of and participant in The Comments. I’m not sure whether I was braver, dumber, or just a lot more bored (probably some of each?), but I sort of had this notion that Someone Has To Speak Reasonably (yeah, yeah, typical Angry Young Man stuff).

Let’s not even get started about the privileged assumptions behind that kind of thing — I know, I know. Not that I ever really strolled around the internet swinging my electronic gold watch chain and telling people that they were half-witted imbeciles, old boy, and that their backgrounds deprived them of the ability to respond rationally, but part of me almost certainly kind of felt like that on some level.

I tried to write rationally and logically and politely and sanely, but I also believed that a lot of people were Wrong On The Internet and that I should Lead By Example (how embarrassing).

I think some benighted part of me seriously (but unconsciously, or at any rate no more than hemi-semi-demi-consciously) believed that if I just kept calm and demonstrated what civil discourse “should” look like, I could somehow save either the internet or civilization or something.

Barf.

Anyway.

At some point, I realized that A) I was actually, in my own way, kind of being an ass (to whit: a lot of the people who say stupid crap in the comments are just having bad days; the ones that are actually jerks, meanwhile, are just going to go on being jerks, no matter what) and B) you can’t take the wind from the maelstrom, or whatever. Comments gonna … um … com?

I figured out that even to read the comments was basically a form of swimming upstream, that you can’t reason with irrational people or even with rational people who are having irrational moments (who, of course, are the ones who I was, for a long time, most likely to attempt to engage with my reason and coolness and politesse, &c.).

In short, The Comments became a giant energy sink, and I said to myself, “Wait, I don’t even have to read these! I can just pretend they’re not there! And if I really, really feel the need to comment on a particular newsworthy item, that’s part of why I have a blog.”

Since then, I’m happy to report, I’ve been largely unflustered by The Comments (and the world has not, as far as I know, ended — except perhaps in an Alternate Timeline). The Comments and I now have a great relationship: I leave them alone, and they leave me alone.

Every now and then, though, I venture back into the fray (though, outside of WordPress, I pretty much never say anything).

Sometimes it happens on purpose — I guess when I’m really, really bored and all the dishes are clean and I have done the day’s thousand tendus or what have you and I’m also feeling a bit masochistic.

Usually, though, it happens by accident: I’m idly scrolling through the aggregations of links related to the article I’ve just finished, looking for another way to avoid doing work and occupy myself, and then suddenly, Boom! I’m in The Comments, and I don’t even realize it ’til it’s too late.

The problem is that I’m an auto-reader: put text in front of my face, and I will read it (or, if it’s in a language and/or alphabet and/or syllabary and/or pictographic system I don’t know, I’ll attempt to read it). I suppose we all have our weaknesses.

So by the time that I really grasp the fact that I’m in The Comments!!!!111oneone, it’s too late, because I’m already reading them.

Usually, I pull myself out before any damage occurs.

Once in a while, I start reading, am filled with horror, revulsion, and/or frustration, and yet I find myself fascinated, and must apply all of my fearsome might to tear myself away before I become lost.

Once in a great while, something different happens: I read the comments, get sucked in, and swiftly receive a reminder that the human race is, in fact, actually kind of doing all right — that there are good people, that we can be reasonable, and that the world probably isn’t going to end today.

Probably.

It’s weird how bracing that feels: to see two people disagree, and to expect Fighting On Teh Intarwebz, only to be startled by a breakout of humane, civil discourse that leads not to an escalating firestorm of trollery, but to a really admirable agreement to disagree or — better still — the serendipitous discovery of unexpected common ground.

Once in a great while, I’ll even discover that someone out there disagrees with my own cherished beliefs in a way that makes me realize that they’re just that — beliefs — and that they’re full of holes and flaws like everybody else’s.

So, anyway. That happened today: I was reading The Comments on, of all things, an article on Queerty, and a little conversation happened between two people who disagreed, and then talked about it like civilized beings, and I was impressed and led to think, “Hmm. Have I really been looking at this situation as objectively as I can?**”

**Knowing full well, of course, that human beings are actual total crap at being objective, myself included.

So, there we have it. Out of the depths, a moment of light and clarity. A happy surprise from the universe, found in an unlikely place.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that I intend to start regularly reading The Comments. Oh, helllllll, no.

I may be inspired, I may even be a little bit crazy — but I’m not an idiot.

…But maybe just a peek, now and then.

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