Laurustina

The last six months have been overwhelming, both good and bad, and it feels clumsy to try and recap them here in just a few sentences, but I’ll try. This month, Mr. J. and I celebrated our seven-year anniversary, having wondered at times if we would even make it here. Last month we moved into a house I kind of love. Two weeks later, Mr. J.’s long-awaited transfer came through (he’d been commuting four hours a day for more than a year) and I left my job of 11 months, immediately cutting my stress-level in half. Some of you already know that six months ago we effectively lost a son and gained a daughter. I’ll say more on that in time, but for now it’ll have to be enough to note that we still have Micachu at home, at nearly nineteen, and Ashlieanna is exhaustingly and terrifyingly sixteen. There are of course the pups, Iggy and Chloie and my dearest little Bob and though I can go full days without seeing her, I’m reasonably sure that our shy little Porch Cat still resides among us.

Any first semester Psych student would recognize the symptoms of depression in my social withdrawl, my newfound ability to sleep 14 hours a day, a pervasive listleness and lack of interest in pretty much anything. Oh, except politics. As far as I can figure, politics is my current drug of choice. I can literally exist for days on politics and bagels alone (homemade bagels, you understand, because you can’t get a boiled bagel in this damnable valley unless you boil it yourself). And I know enough to know its not healthy, this immersion in the political circus (bagels too, but i’m still in some kind of denial over that one) still, when the only reason you have good enough to wake up on Sunday morning is catching the talking heads on the Sunday morning circuit, well you kinda just go with it, ’cause at least you’re out of bed now, ya know?

Ok, so to recap; some things are the same. Other things are vastly different. And this is, I suspect/hope, is one of my baby-steps back into the world at large.

The simplest explanation for why I am here now and not there, where I once was, is this: Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.*  

Back in March, I tiptoed into another space, a waiting room of sorts, and wrote; Coming here wasn’t easy, just so you know. It’s like walking through the door of some community center, having arrived just in time for a support group you’re not sure you want to join. There’s a pride thing to it, like “i don’t need this, i’m not really like these people.” And yet you are. or i am, anyway.

Not blogging has felt strange to me, has felt like a disability, some disconnect, which divorces me from an important part of who i have become. Yet the old spaces are less safe than ever before. And so here i am, and you, seeing as how you’re reading this, here you are as well. Thank you for that. No, really.

And I knew when I wrote those things in that fly-by space, that it was temporary, that at some point, I would want/need a real space of my own again. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think it would be this soon. I was still in the toying-with-it stages when I chatted up a certain guru, and I was actually terrified at the thought of setting out to set it all up when said guru e-mailed me early this morning, having prepared all the necessary preparations, having made it ridiculously simple to…well, to do this.

Anyway, that’s it for now. Maybe tomorrow, I’ll figure out if uploading archives from the old space and the in-limbo space will do more harm than good. For tonight though, I’m going to revel in the taste and texture of a tongue untied. It’s funny, what a silly happy kind of thing that is.

j.

*Mark Twain