Greenstorm's Journal

I want to write but I'm really not well enough.

With my ovary/tube removal surgery coming right up now, I had my first dip into real PMDD-land the other night, for the first time in a long time. You know, I'm going to miss it. It's pure pain for the emotions, for the whole mind, and it comes in the same way you feel the anaesthetic injected into the little vein thingy and then you're asleep. You feel it coming and then the only experience can be pain for awhile.

It means I always had time to grieve things that needed grief. It meant a pure oneness with some kinds of music, of writing, of parts of my self.

And it's different from the rage/anger/missing love. I'm not fully sure it's not part of the all-encompassign love I so often felt.

I was getting my covid/flu vax yesterday and there was a customer that kept the pharmacist late. He said that he's been working as a pharmacist for fifteen years and there were always people who were mean/bad customers, but since covid it was "everyone", you never knew who it would come from.

I do know part of what's going on with my emotional self is PEM related. It's weird because having emotions takes energy, it's counterintuitive that an energy-limiting condition would lead to some of those big emotions like group-contempt. On the other hand, maybe empathy is a complex enough process that only a very very little bit of brain fog can annihilate it. I would really like to see, I dunno, glucose consumption of the brain per time or something while feeling different emotions.

I would be a billion percent unsurprised if some part of the emotional mess the world is in right now is related to post-covid body changes. I would be... very slightly surprised if that had nothing to do with it at all.

Having said that, I discovered a singer called Adam Lambert recently. He I guess sang with Queen for awhile, in general is really good, but also is my age. And so I had some time, watching him sing on youtube, thinking, "yeah, I know these feelings he's expressing through this art. I know what this feels like, and here's another human performing having those same feelings".

I don't know if that's my ovaries liberated from lupron and doing their up and down swing. I don't know if it's having some level of brain fog lowering with all these antihistamines (fistfuls, I tell you!) or having baby's first real group chat with some other ME/CFS people on my phone (curated by someone else, yay). But it's the first time in quite a while I've been confident I could feel an emotion that's the same as other humans. So often, recently, there's been no hint of anything remotely like that while talking to people.

And so I'm a bit worried about the salpingo-oophorectomy. What if it's the wrong thing to be doing? I do remember when I first went to get help for PMDD because it was like the pain button was stuck full on, all the time. I don't want to romanticise the days I didn't drive to town specifically because, although I love my body too much to kill it through something personal in my home, letting my willpower waver in the couple seconds driving up to each bridge was more than I could be sure of. It's only 10k to town, but there are two bridges.

But messing with the meds the second time, that was mostly because I was out of energy and none of the things we tried worked without knocking the meds out. The hope was that I could find meds that controlled the PMDD reliably even with stimulants, which tend to fade the effect of hormones (to the best and sketchiest of my knowledge). Everything I tried/wanted to try came with a warning that you could get pregnant on it even if you were on birth control.

And then there was the threat of loss of monetary support if I didn't get off the SSRI, and that whole mess. Gosh is it ever true that "fatigue" being a part of the condition's name does no one any favours except the gaslighters.

So I landed on lupron, which is kinda reliable but so expensive, and the attendant hormones which are, in the case of estrogen, unreliable to buy for any price. And every time I went to get the lupron shot the medical practitioner was pissed because it's a complex device that needs to be clicked and then shook for a minute, and appointments are hard to get here so going to all that work just to have someone pissed at you sucks. So just not sustainable.

And surgery is the obvious thing to do to avoid getting lupron shots for the next how many years. It's one thing leading to another.

And yet I have not ended up on the stimulants because I instead got ME/long covid and while they may be helpful for that eventually I have gotta be extra cautious they don't just trigger the feeling of having energy, then land me in muscles-don't-work land. The antihistamines are perilously close to doing that as is.

And I have not gone back to the SSRI/birth control combo, which is reliably available in the current supply chain. It doesn't escape me that the estrogen I'm saddling myself to with this surgery is not. And my gynecologist says (bless her) not to be surprised if my reactions to things change after the surgery, bodies are like that, she says. She understands.

I'll get to meet her in person, face to face, right before the surgery for the first time. I'm looking forward to it.

I don't know what will happen next. I don't know if this is the right choice. It seems to be the choice I'm making, and I think it will be the choice I make when it comes to it. I'm going to be sad about it. I don't consider my ovaries to be part of my faked-femininity, there's no gender dysphoria there. I consider them to be part of my mind, of my emotionally-experiencing-and-thinking self, and I like myself, and this is a bigger part of myself than I've ever voluntarily severed permanently before.

I wrote this instead of dinner. I wrote this instead of being able to get up and turn the lights off and brush my teeth before sleep. I wrote this instead of anything.

Will I still want to write, after? Please I hope so. There is no one else who understands as well as myself when I write. There's nowhere else I can raise my voice and not hurt anyone.

"Live your life so you have the death you want"

It was an important think to recieve then, and an important part of everything now.

Though I guess I now get that most people don't plan their lives to meet goals, with checkpoints and assessments along the way, and think that any plans which include death or relationship changes or health changes (or even acknowledge real health changes that have happened) are somehow going to make their lives awful.

I need to step out of being aware what people, in general, think. It does not do me good.

So the estrogen supply chain is fucked, has been since somewhere in the covid shutdowns in the beginning, and will likely continue to be as long as we have an industrial pharmeceutical thinger. That means that administration method (pills, patch, or increasingly gel) is sometimes take-what-you-can-get, and now dose is too since patches can't be cut in half to make smaller doses because of their fancy time release system.

I had been on the smallest possible but my pharmacist hasn't been able to get that so my dose has been doubled. The pharmacist had to call a couple of my doctors to get them to ok the prescription since he's not allowed to double my prescription just because he was out of the lower dose. He did a couple calls, had a long conversation with my gp "why aren't you calling the gyne, are you sure this is safe?" and made it happen.

The bigger dose of estrogen is good so far, I feel really grounded by the same kind of force that makes a rock sink or a cork pop to the surface of the water. We'll see if that continues through actual human contact. Definitely no desire to fb scroll beyond comfort or anything.

The smaller dose was a bit flippier, like a balloon held by a string.

The problem is with the metaphors in both cases is we consider "up" to be a specific set of emotions, and I'm referring more to returning towards center rather than moving towards an "up" or a high.

It's interesting to think I could choose aspects of my personality by what dose of meds I chose to take, and interesting too that since these meds aren't consistently or readily available that my personality will henceforth be determined by the industrial supply chain. It's harder to fit that into a comfortable worldview than having my personality cyclically determined by a natural process, which was most of my adult life.

I had three years of a mind that wasn't intensely influenced by my reaction to my body's hormones, from the time I first got put on the birth control/sertraline combo until it stopped working as well/maybe because of long covid either as direct action or as a lowering of my exercise and time outside and time with people which all help me remain a bit more steady. That three years felt honestly felt like being a kid again.

Anyhow it's a relief that this dose is workable. Hard on my body (every muscle fibre hurts more than it normally would in the crash after taking Thea to the vet) but I'm at the point in my pharmaceutical journey where "be grateful to be alive" is kinda what I get.

Not totally fair, since my couple handfuls of antihistamines per day leave me clearer than I used to be, by far. Thank you, MCAS treatment. And maybe I'll be able to sort out something to handle dizziness or pain next.

Holy. The estrogen patch wearing off is the exact reverse of the start of my period from beforetimes, except slightly worse at interrelational stuff and slightly more ok at iinternal stuff. It's astonishing how things can change so significantly in the course of a couple hours. You'd think if you had some sort of feeling or state you might be able to hold onto it or feel the ghost of it in that time, but no. It's just a total state change.

It really does figure that there are worldwide shortages of anything related to this drug that started with covid and shutdowns probably continue in part because of the virus, though of course no one is connecting any skilled or physical labour shortages to long covid and there are lots more things going on. My pharmacist chats about it whenever I go in.

Taking Thea in to the vet for some tooth extractions tomorrow. Cross your fingers, it's gonna be a marathon day and today was kinda long.

It is a *little* bit funny that I've been taking like, 6-12x the OTC dose of famotidine, something like 2-4x the usual dose of ketitofen (for asthma), plus a normal antihistamine at normal or double dose. My doctor always gives me a side-eye when I take anything that might have "fatigue" or "drowsiness" as a side effect, but these absolutely have improved my energy and brain fog (which kind of comes across as drowsiness) and when I miss a dose I tend to just stare at a wall till it's time for the next one with my brain flowing by like curdled yoghurt.

You know, sometimes it's being sick that causes the bad stuff, and if you treat the underlying sick instead of just the symptoms you can get good results. :P :P :P

Anyhow, thank goodness for specialists who can define and prescribe for issues.

Well, it's set up. 228 items, of which 96 are tiny bowls and the rest have been made mostly since 2024. Probably 55 are mugs, some with very silly handles. The rest are an assortment of cups, candle holders, oil lamps, fairy houses, plant pots, bell beakers, demonstrations of experiments, tea canisters, plates, and all sorts of things.

It's distributed amongst 7 tables, 1 hanging rack, and 1 piano. Each table has a write-up on it, the couple pages total of description took three months.

Much is for sale, though some is literally just "my kitchen" with the stuff I use everyday, the prototypes which is mostly stuff that's gone wrong, and my plant pots and stakes.

The nicest display is probably the oldtimey one with medieval and bell beaker shapes. It has some pottery identification keys just for folks to get the atmosphere of things and a bunch of fake fur. I'm always gonna like bell beaker shapes though. The hundred bowls display (actually 96 small and something like 105 total) is also pretty nice, with things in a gradient across the table and some birchbark splits holding up carved/rough faceted white/brown swirled bowls which match the birchbark.

The least nice is maybe the prototypes (I wish I'd been able to write a little about each one and why it's good or bad) or the garden display which feels a little sparse.

There are three interactive spots, two asking folks to write in what they'd use a particular thing for (people ask me this all the time so I wanted to turn the tables) and one "which handle is your favourite, write the number" draw for a mug because I'm so curious. Wendy who runs it printed everything up on bright paper and pretty big, she says people won't read it anyhow but I feel better with it there.

I'm really really proud of myself. Even with a box of my nicest fancy stuff breaking before bisque awhile ago, even with cutting my thumb open and not being able to make things for awhile, even having to haul things up and down those stairs, I got it done and it's pretty.

The local photographer turned news person is going to interview me, take photographs, and give me some nice pictures of my stuff in exchange for some pottery. I have also traded some pottery for some of the really nice bread from the baker in town.

After finishing setup this morning I came home and have been in bed several hours. Bed will definitely be my thing for awhile, though the weather is turning and I both want to be outside and I want to start prototyping my TS Eliot pottery. I guess this whole illness is pretty much about not being able to do what I want though.

I'm still proud of myself.

Each stroke of Wendell Berry's words hone me as they go by, and as he died yesterday many are going by.

Thorough and connected moral thinkers are lodestones.

My body is full of the grief of loss and the simultaneous enormous presence of his lifetime of words. My control over my body dims like brownout lights, mind flickering, everything goes to this thought/feeling of being realigned, a compass needle on a planet finally and again with a magnetic field.

When people win a hard contest they often cry in gratitude and with the feeling, finally, of having enough for awhile, and of being good enough.

My feeling is gratitude and, with Wendell Berry having lived to think deeply for so long, of having enough for awhile. We had him: he lived, and so the world has more meaning.

I continue to wrestle with the Robs decision. I've walked him on my own a bunch and he's very well behaved around me for the most part. I don't know how to transfer that to when I'm not around. I don't know if it can be. I don't know if I just wait. I could very well ruin him if he's mostly just locked in a small area with no company for a year while I wait. I could well ruin him by just being angry half the time when I'm around him and he's just being a dog. He's good with the cats while I'm in radius, but really not good when I'm not. He's a friendly happy playful dog who likes doing dog things like running around with a stick in his mouth. Ugh.

When I'm stressed I make bad decisions like going to the pottery studio and entering a glaze fugue until I've filled the kiln (there were a lot of plates and already-glazed tiny bowls so it's not as much as it sounds). Now I'm exhausted and everything hurts and I still don't know what to do about Robs but at least I'm distracted waiting to see what comes out of the kiln? About a year ago I'd ordered some dry versions of my two favourite mayco glazes (muddy waters and cenote) and they finally came, so this kiln has the first tests of those to see if they need more or less water, plus tests of some glazes AND those pottery supply house/Tucker's red clays.

I already know the pottery supply house clay does hella "S" cracks, and the Tuckers does none. I hope the tuckers looks good. It's less strong to work with but I'm getting tired of trashing pieces for the S cracks.

It was hot for the week Josh was here but took up raining again as soon as he left. I ran the woodstove for something like 18 hours, the house got too hot, I let it go out, the house is cooling, in the morning it will be too cold. There may be a disability subsidy/cash back thing for a heat pump, not sure if it's aimed at the hot or the cold part of it, and I really want a heat pump for the shoulder seasons. It really only makes sense to run the woodstove below -10C.

What am I going to do with Robs? He can't really be in an enclosure where he the things in it will hurt him to eat, so teaching him to be ok with the cats in the downstairs livingroom isn't great, and they need to go through that space anyhow. And when it gets cold I'm not going to leave him alone in the small run, besides, that run is where the dogs come in and out of the carport when the main door is closed against snow for the winter.

Full circle.

I'm feeling a little bitter right now, likely because regulation is basically yet another thing that requires energy which my body can't do when ...I need a better phrase than "when I've overdone it" and "when my battery is low" is stupid.

"When the veil is thin" maybe. Lady Amalthea said "I can feel this body dying around me" and that can mean so many different things from moment to moment, emotionally, but maybe that's the core of it. The system fails in many ways at once.

The disturbance isn't that I feel close to death, can come closer than I ever could to imagining what it would be like, but that my expectations from life are so changed. In those moments my hopes for the latter half of my life (hopefully) recede, or maybe expand, to breathing, to supporting the clamour of a heartbeat, to maybe moving my legs and arms to drag myself to the toilet, to hope a furry creature will come and offer me a little love as my solace.

All those other things I've done and may yet do more of aren't my life. They would have been, had things continued: garden, animals, pottery, maybe meeting a person or more and entwining a bit with them, drinking knowledge like dunking my whole head in a bucket and gulping it down all at once. For other people those are their life, solid, like aggregate is part of the concrete, inseperable without grinding the whole thing down.

My whole thing is ground down. It's exposed my dependency on so many systems that are populated with people, some of whom care and some who do not, but which themselves are built to take me down to nothing with enough deniability it can't be said the people who allow them have destroyed me. I don't like to be dependent, just as I don't like others to be dependent upon me.

I don't like to make the choice between staying continuously upstairs in the heat where there's phone signal or going to the cooler basement and missing a medical call: three strikes and they kick me off the list.

I don't like not having some time to assign as mine, beyond--

Oh, I give up. I can't write. I want to make an oil lamp in clay, light it, create a light that brightens things a bit and that may outlive me by centuries. I want to talk to someone who hasn't drunk deep from the propaganda mills their whole lives and thus doesn't just regurgitate the anxieties they've been spoon-fed. I want to sit in a room with someone who's excited about something that they have contributed to in part but not on the whole.

I want the tiles not to be falling off my floor ("I'm amazed they held on ten years" the tile guy said when he looked at my kitchen floor) so I can wash it. I want a shower I can sit in downstairs. I want to be able to sew clothes again so I can make myself something that lives properly on my skin.

I want, I want.

That's what's alive in me again, not the ability to do things but the ability to want them, to care. And at the same time I can't spend my energy feeling things, I need to get up and make food and walk the dog and, just these last few days ideally water the garden.

Eep!

I have my first pottery show coming up in September. I'll set up the space from the 2nd to 4th, and there'll be a soft opening some days after that, a formal evening reception if I want (I do want! And I will find a way to recline with my feet up, dammit, maybe with my C-shaped cushion and some blankets on the stage). There'll be a small pottery workshop mid Sept, then on the 25th I'll take everything home that didn't sell.

It's at the local lovely little art studio, so nothing huge and fancy and it'll be very comfortable.

Setup will need to include pricing and I'd like to write about groups of things and the iterative process, we'll see if that happens. I'd also like to ask the town photographer if she can photograph everything for me so I have a record. Between what I've given away, sold, and broken I'm losing a lot even from memory, like my favourite red-clay ash-and-turquoise mug full of tea I left on the back of my truck when I drove away from the garden club meeting a couple years ago. Sigh.

I'm also trying to make lots of stuff. I'd hoped to work through July and Aug on it but then cut my thumb too badly to go near mud and water. And unlike my past life I can't just push and then rest; I pushed too hard yesterday and couldn't sleep last night until the second dose of painkillers kicked in and that was only four cups, albeit with fairly dry clay.

This is the perfect opportunity to test some more clays.

The company I've generally bought clay from, Plainsman, is relatively local; that is it's from Western Canada and the only place that mines and makes clay here. They've always had an abysmal website, hard to navigate and without live inventory numbers or anything, though they had descriptions of their clays and pricing, and they had a ton of side information on a related site.

Recently they fired the guy who ran the related site and took down their site "to update and make a better site". Now, this means that no pricing info, clay characteristics, nor even a list of what they make is up, just am under construction sign saying they're making some wonderful site that will be out in some months.

This is the absolute stupidest thing. It's not like they need to take down their basic prices-and-characteristics site in order to make their fancy one. They can make their other one and just not link it in. And they're taking over six months on this project, assuming they finish it in the early fall; it could be much longer, who knows? But if I want absorption or particle size on their clays or even the name of a clay I'm SOL. Between that and some weird stuff with the guy they fired, and the fact that their red clays absorb more water when fired than I really like, I'm feeling very done with them.

So there are two other companies in Canada who do clay. I don't believe they mine their own materials but they do what is more commonly done, buy and mix to make specific clays. They're far east-er than I and clay does not ship cheaply since it's 40-50lbs per block (which here adds $25 per block-ish, and over half a dozen blocks you want to ship pallet freight with a loading dock thinger) but there IS a place in Vancouver area that carries them and Josh is coming up in a bit. AND the new place lets me order online instead of by email, and then pay easily and Josh just goes and picks it up.

Last time he came up he brought two kinds of red clay because Plainsman's red clay is their most porous (which is bad, it harbours mold) and because it's my most favourite type of clay to work with.

So I need to do a throw test on those quick, being mindful of which is which instead of just tossing them on the wheel, and that will help me decide between the two brands. Then he can bring up some more to test, and also some of whichever of the reds I like most.

And I can see how the glazes do on them.

In reality I probably will not end up writing much but will hopefully at least be able to use fabric and branches and whatnot to make a nice setup. I need to get some price stickers (?) because selling some would be nice, and label things as mine and decide on some prices.

I also need a sign which says "PLEASE TOUCH THE ART" and I'd like to number each piece and have a draw box: write down your favourite piece and you enter to win a prize. What people like and how they handle things is as fascinating to me as the physics and chemistry of throwing a piece and glazing it. People's bodies and aesthetic senses are all different and it makes me happy.

Anyhow, even though I have random pottery sitting on most surfaces in my house, including in my kitchen and in boxes in the carport, I feel the need to make a bunch more stuff. So I will be trying to do that for the next two weeks. I want to do little things easy to take home, and a couple big neat pieces that possibly have no actual purpose (!).

Whoah I jhave been writing a lot an just felt the room sway significantly, so instead og putting this away to do pottery I will lie down. But there you have it.