What’s True for Me This Week
The weekly column here that's a little chatty and personal so you can get to know me and my creative weird sometimes silly sometimes mundane little brain ...
I always invite you to come share what’s true for you in my chat where I make these little updates daily-ish. Sometimes just taking a moment to sit and say “what’s true for me” really makes a lot of things clearer. And I hope what people find there is a safe space for sharing their personal truths.
What’s been true for me in the past couple of weeks …
January 29, 2024
What’s true for me today is that it is my pup Bumi’s fourth gotcha day. I can’t believe it’s been four years. I had been waiting months for him to be ready to fly here from Korea where he had been rescued and was living with a foster family. Finally today was the day. I had been chatting separately with three other women about it who were all in the same Facebook group as me for dogs adopted from hsi rescues in Korea. I looped us all in on a chat for updates about bumi’s arrival. Since that day, we’ve been in a daily group chat, sharing every single up and down of life. It’s an amazing online friendship. Thanks Bumi!
January 30, 2024
What’s true for me today is that it is 3 am and I’ve been awake for two hours and I’m tired but restless and the usual tricks aren’t working. It’s okay ... there was a time when I couldn’t sleep at all and I would be in tears every 3 am because I just wanted to sleep. This isn’t that. I’m still up most nights but I have more patience with my own rhythms. But this is one of the major reasons I literally can’t hold a 9-5 job ... because I have so much difficulty sleeping through the night that I need daytime naps or just downtime to restore my energy and without that my functioning and mental health decline terribly. I promised myself as a teenager I would never wake up to an alarm and although that hasn’t always been true I’ve been able to make it usually true. There is privilege in this but there’s also been huge costs. I have struggled financially most of my adult life because trying to carve out a career from this erratic schedule is hard. And it’s hard being in class three days a week this semester. None are early mornings but it’s still a required place to be at a certain time and sometimes the anxiety of knowing that and not being able to sleep before is stressful. These are my 3 am thoughts.
January 31, 2024
What's true for me today is that yesterday was amazingly full of terrific things.
1. Class got canceled last minute which meant that my artist friend and I were able to spend five hours together depending our friendship and understanding of each other, laughing and chatting, and working on our plan for collaborative grants.
2. I am in charge of the Liberty Crochet Mural for Northern California and I had a call about the next place it will be displayed and was invited to do an artist talk or even plan a 2 hour event around it which is super exciting for me.
3. My partner and I are temporarily approved for our new rental house pending the new landlord's calls to our current landlords. I'm afraid to get too excited until a lease is signed or keys are in hand but it looks like it's moving forward and the place is perfect and this will improve/ease/add joy to soooo many different facets of my life. This is huge.
ALSO: I launched monthly digests so if you are someone who needs less noise in your inbox, that's an option now. The post shows you how you can choose just the monthly digest and also keep these chats on if you want them on.
February 1, 2024
What’s true for me today is that we are THIS CLOSE to getting approved for the rental house we want but the last step is they want to speak to my current landlord and she’s not returning calls which is not surprising to me but I’m so very much hoping we can resolve this today and sign a lease because not knowing if it will actually happen is stressing me out.
Also true is that I have class today and am completely unprepared because I made the decision yesterday to spend the day with my bestie having a whine-and-wine and that was definitely the right choice. Much needed and we couldn’t find an upcoming other time that would work. But now I’m debating if I try to prepare and then spend three hours in class and be totally drained or just don’t really prepare and do my best in class as is or I don’t go to class. I really would rather not go and utilize the time differently but also it’s early in the semester and I like to save my absences until later when I know my energy will have run out.
Also true is it is pouring down rain and I am loving listening to it tap the window while the dogs snore.
February 5, 2024
What's true for me today ... Things are so busy right now and life is full and active and vibrant and sometimes that makes my body feel like I'm anxious. I'm not really anxious (beyond within-range-of-normal anxiety) but having lived a lifetime with mental health challenges, my body gets signals confused sometimes, and when the energy ramps up, it thinks it's anxiety.
I have had asthma since I was a teenager and when I was in my twenties I went to the hospital several times for asthma attacks that I only really realized later were panic attacks. I do have asthma. I was also panicked. And there's this weird feedback loop because not being able to breathe makes you panic more and then makes you less able to breathe.
I understand my body better now. I'm not panicking. I'm not even particularly anxious. My body just has swirling energy. Which, in most moments, is energizing, enervating, beautiful, and welcome.
I spent the past several years living with very very low energy. Grief, depression, injury, illness ... I napped almost every day for years (no shame in that, I love naps) and sometimes twice a day but more than that I just said no to a lot of activity and opportunities and spent hours and hours and hours half-watching tv and repetitively listening to formulaic true crime podcasts. And that's okay. That's what was needed. But during that time I often found it impossible to believe that I would ever feel like I had energy again.
I knew that I would. I have enough lived experience of the ebbs and flows. But I didn't believe it most of the time. And now it's shifted. And I have energy. And there's a lot going on. And sometimes it's overwhelming but in the best possible way and mostly I'm grateful to be in this space right now.
February 6, 2024
What's true for me today, expanding on what I shared yesterday, is that I'm feeling a little unconfined. A little leaky. A little hypomanic (although I don't live with bipolar, this seems to describe the experience better than anything else, but it comes from anxiety/excitement mostly ...)
And there's a part of me that loves this feeling. I don't get it often. I live with persistent depressive disorder / double depression, so my body/mind basically has a base normal that's closer to depressed than the average person. I don't typically feel all wound up and active and go go go. So when it happens, there's a way it feels nice, a time it works for me, and I'm in that. But it's never only that. I feel scattered. I feel pulled in too many directions and not sure which ones I can rein back from yet. I feel a million ideas swirling and yet can't grasp any and sometimes that's frustrating.
I spent a chunk of this morning trying to do the tedious online/phone parts of moving - change of address, move my PGE service. Some of that went very smoothly. Some of that was annoying as heck. Some didn't go at all. This part of life stresses me and I'll be passing some of it off to my partner.
I have a busy full day ahead outside of the home - school and creative work with a collaborator. Great things but busy. Wild, I feel a little wild.
February 8, 2024
What’s true for me today … leaving class and so tired but was really good. I am inspired by my classmates and their areas of interest and their feedback. I really didn’t show up with a lot … I am super behind which I don’t like and I was tempted not to show up at all but I did show up as I am and brought what I could and that’s enough.
I spent almost all day yesterday sleeping. I thought i might be sick because my partner has covid and I was achy and tired. But I slept it off and tested negative and feel better today.
On the way to class though I suddenly thought of my dad and burst into tears and ugly cried for like ten minutes. Guess I needed to. It’s okay. But I am definitely drained.
And yet still have the swirling mind and almost manic energy. 🤷🏻♀️
What’s True For You This Week?
Published This Week:
START HERE: Building an online library/archive of resources around the complex relationship between art and mental health
Updated 2024 “About Page” … Welcome to Create Me Free where I share all of my deep research into and musings about the complex relationship between art and mental health. While I touch …
The other day I wrote:
"I just took a nap
under a pile of
my family’s laundry.
It’s a lot of laundry.
I was very tired."
I relate to a whole bunch of your feelings this week, Kathryn.
What’s true for me today is that my life is is changing and I’m not sure in which direction things will go. I feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz when she awakens in her bedroom, only to look out the bedroom window to see a vortex of good and bad flying past her as she gasps, or calls out names.
My life is on the tip of of making several changes. I’m not sure exactly how, what, or when. So I sit not quite ready to take action, but wanting to move forward in some areas, while taking a cautious move ahead in others.
It’s a time to prayer for clarity. What does my future hold.