Greenstorm's Journal

Today is the first day in a bit I've felt like there could be any good in the world ever again. I can't quite put my finger on it yet, but it seems like it could be possible? This morning was well above freezing, misty out, and Solly came up to me when she saw I was outside. She's grown up so much in the last year and a half, picking up that maremma solemnity and stoicism I never would have imagined from her as a puppy.

I make a point of giving her some pets and ear scritches whenever I see her, so she knows she doesn't have to do anything fancy for attention, and she's stopped jumping. Today she was being good and I had enough self-awareness to notice and get down there with her and give her a ton of love and we just sort of leaned into each other and snuggled for a good long time.

The garden club is having their seed swap March 15, and I think they asked me to start a bunch of seeds for them so I can do a demonstration on separating seedling tomatoes again this year. I should double check that. People realyly like getting to go home with free baby plants, and it's a nice trick to know you can start them all close together and then split them apart a little later, to save space under lights in the beginning.

I still feel like I'm carrying around a huge weight. I hate that the way to reject a dynamic I don't like is to-- ugh, I don't know. Enough about that sort of thing right now.

This weekend Josh comes up. I don't even remember what we were going to do, maybe smoke salmon and something about changing the outside light bulbs that need a ladder? The last few days I haven't been able to keep food in my body or move much so I haven't got the house ready for a visitor. I think the cats peed on something, I have a trial cat litter that was supposed to be natural but smells like porta potty fluid that I need to empty entirely and replace, there are garbage bags of cat litter and cat cans waiting to go to the dump (I wish there was a way to do these cats with less waste but also not too much actual weight, the wet food that keeps them healthy is truly awful for garbage), sheets need to be cleaned, vacuum broke and floors blah blah blah, need to bring more wood in, I don't even know.

It's been a long time since my body was this bad and it's had me thinking about what I really would need to live here, assuming that I can't always pace things (relationship thing and disability police requiring a ton more documentation happened both in the same few days). I probably need a non-wood-burning way of heating the house even in winter, whether that's some sort of electric furnace/heat pump or a gas fireplace downstairs or whatever. Something that doesn't require a couple armloads of wood a day anyhow. Ideally something that if my head is fuzzy I can walk away from and it doesn't damage it. Today I forgot to close the catalyst bypass and the chimney got a lot of flame up it -- it's kept clean enough that it didn't catch fire, and it was nowhere near the heat the catalyst pumps out, but it was a lot of oxygen and flame in a way that would have caught anything that was in there. I smelled the heat and went and closed it up and checked the chimney from the outside, no harm done, but still.

Josh is here for a couple days, which contains a doctor's appointment where I need to get a ton of paperwork done (imagine being able to actually talk about medical stuff with the doctor!) and then next weekend I'm assisting with the wheel throwing class at the pottery studio.

Body aside, which it never is, I'm glad I have committed to more in-studio people-type clay stuff. I need to keep bits of community going. You know where you see people do cool stuff and they think stuff you're doing is cool and you exist in the same space? I'll maybe need to find a place in the building to set up a cot and rest between bits.

My cat was just sleeping beside me and woke up with a cry. He looked around sharply and it took a minute for him to relax and accept pets. It seemed pretty clear he'd woken from a bad dream. I wonder how he processes that?

My poem-a-day is going well. I want energy to plan my garden, but I don't have it. My enthusiasm is admittedly a little dim right now too, though I imagine it'll come back with time. I still haven't done my one-week internet-free pottery retreat I'd planned to do this winter.

Those are things I can look forward to. There are things.

I put fava beans in to soak yesterday so I need to plant them today. Not sure where, soil is too wet to till, so I'll be doing a classic digging-stick planting. I think I'll be doing that tonight.

Massage that was scheduled for last week was rescheduled to today since the massage therapist was sick last week. I've been working to try and fix my right elbow, which has been pretty painful for the last couple months. Fortuitously though I had a pretty bad night last night handling some breakup/relationship related stuff and ended up crying a bunch and clenching my teeth hard for 20 hours or so and a massage would really help loosen up my shoulders and headache from that. So the rescheduled massage feels sort of like a little gift. I've been stretching my elbow consistently and it doesn't feel as sharply painful anymore, though it still hurts quite a bit (I wish there was a physio close enough that I wouldn't hurt my elbow more driving the round trip to and from).

My potatoes have some of their first true leaves. The tomatoes are happy. My Hardin's mini x Sweet baby jade F1 is covered in green tomatoes full of F2 seeds. My apple seeds are coming up.

Today is sunny and though I haven't managed to change my sheets, I did manage to wash and line dry some to put on.

And.

I still don't know where the line is with Tucker. Some stuff came up last night. The attenuated thing we've been doing was fine but he is now in intense NRE with a new person, he had a longstanding connection with her, and it's stirring up all the stuff I wanted to be able to do with him and gave up on to enter into our current relationship (maybe more acquaintance/sorta friends with benefits?). It hurts because I miss being that sort of focus. I miss conversations where we talked about our perspectives and feelings; there's some irony that he's better at listening now and he's shown some ability to share his feelings with me but it's not something either of us feel safe doing now and I think he just doesn't want that dynamic with me. I miss looking forward to the future as a shared activity with him. I'm apprehensive of the pattern he has of creating distance, then when I create distance on my own he suddenly comes closer, and on my ability to stand firm on my distance when he offers closeness since I don't want to continue to swing that pendulum back and forth. I don't know that I can trust his offers. So the attenuated relationship, where when we're together it's great and I don't consider him a part of my life when he's not physically present-- that solves those issues. But it's hard right now, as is not surprising, that someone else is filling those spaces.

I spent a bunch of time yesterday doing PDA advocacy and education. There are a ton of groups with lots of parents of younger PDAers and I did a bunch of explaining how my life fits together, how I feel and experience things, how I relate to my family, etc. It takes work but also it puts a lot of my self-knowledge to use and hopefully helps both those parents and their young PDAers in the world.

There was also a PDA spat where a non-PDA I guess pretty well-known person suggested-- well, here's the thing. PDA is formally "pathological demand avoidance" but the difference between PDA and other kinds of nonconforming demand avoidance is significant, and telling a bunch of PDAers what to call themselves is a losing game anyhow. So PDAers keep bringing up nicer-sounding names like "pervasive drive for autonomy" to fit the acronym. It's important to them, personally I think it's bullshit (I'm not more autonomous, I'm just constrained to be non-normative in particular ways which NT folks can't imagine because they're all constrained by their neurotype to be normative, so they think this is autonomy). So anyhow, this more-than-PDA-circles well known person suggested renaming PDA "protective demand avoidance" and made a big post about it, which a bunch of PDAers didn't like because she didn't bother to talk to any PDAers first, and by the time anyone who wasn't just a PDA parent got there you had to scroll through and read a couple hundred or thousand "yes this is so much less stigmatizing" posts before even being able to comment, and then she tried to say that post actually was an attempt at getting comments. Unsurprisingly a bunch of PDA folks were upset, a bunch liked it, and a ton of people (me included) couldn't be bothered to read several thousand posts before chiming in. Seems like she had conflated all demand avoidance (which she said she saw "across neurotypes") with PDA demand avoidance. So that's a couple thousand commenters plus however many readers that have yet another additional name for PDA plus more misinformation about what it is. Figures.

And my cats and I spend the days saying "I love you" in cat to each other all day, the geese are on nests, I put down clover seed the other day, and there's basketmaking and more pottery in my future. I even have a friend to go for walks with sometimes again. I can feel happiness flowing from my life.

But I still also am tired, shaky, and have trouble getting out of bed and my vision is doing weird things and I should probably follow up with doctors and medication changes but I do not have the bandwidth but I do need to come up with an action plan for it.

Plus an action plan for selling the piglets.

My counseling was rescheduled for Wednesday (PDA counselor) and I honestly don't even know how to narrow a focus for this upcoming session.

Tucker left town this spring. I've been up here on my own for several months now, long enough to begin setting patterns in my mind and behaviour.

My social footprint is spread out. I talk to people, some I know well, some I don't, some over the phone, some in person. I still watch shows with Tucker online, and we talk about those shows and analyze them and relate them to things sometimes, but I don't have much in the way of life conversations with him. He is certainly not in on everything that happens in my life. I talk to Josh a bunch on the phone, as I did before, though more erratically. It'll be good to see him up here. But basically now I don't have one person I talk to about most of the things that happen in my life, and a great number of the things I experience and think never get noted with another human at all.

There is no one who knows me except myself.

Recently my mind took a couple months off thinking. I did things, but I didn't perceive myself doing them or think beyond what was necessary to accomplish the tasks at hand. I was inside my experiences in a way that I consider to be my summer self.

Now I seem be to conceptualizing again. The experience of thoughts in my mind catches my attention and I linger on them for a little while. The patterns around me are perceived intellectually rather than through my behaviours. I consider this to be my winter self, and it's interesting to watch it line up with the seasons again. It's been a number of years, maybe even a decade, since these shifts aligned.

In many ways I'm losing my ability to be purely embodied in favour of being caught up in thinking. I also have a great deal of time and my focus seems to be coming back in little bits.

This is not co-thinking, as in a conversation, and it isn't externally-presented thinking. It's just there, as an inquiry or exploration of my surroundings and linkages. My mind might linger on the extremely weird accretion of policy, rules, and behaviours around our work bathroom post-covid, for example, or grope along the constellation of uses, history, and social impacts of synthetic fabric. It's like looking for the spiderwebs spun between all things, the way you might run into a single strand on a path and step back to see where the rest of the web is.

It's a very private feeling.

There's a luxury to having things foreground themselves, to forsaking the mental discipline required to shift the world into important focus objects and into background that is thought of mostly through logistics. Any conversation with humans needs this shift, since words are such a narrow conduit and connections are too wide to fit through except dismantled, piece by piece.

I do seem to be losing stamina in externally presenting things to other people, and other people aren't much in the business of drawing things out from me right now. Just writing this I feel done, my mind wanting to go back into some physical tasks to rest, perhaps like seeding some tomatoes and setting them to ferment or walking the south edge of the property and imagining where the daffodils will go.

And there isn't much reason not to let it, though perhaps I'll find something work-adjacent to guide it into.

With Tucker gone and work back to the office all my socializing is occurring off of Threshold in public spaces. There's a very real shift in how I feel and behave in private already; I'm more pushy, more contrarian; my thinking is more nimble but has more momentum: it's harder to stop or turn a thought. I'm starting to think internally using my own mind again, if that makes any sense, rather than the hybrid thinking/socializing tool my mind had become. I have more patience and time for some of my inner workings and so they subside into mystery and I can allow them to do so: I can sit and wait out something that's occurring in the back of my mind even when I have no knowledge of what it is and I can follow instincts without first identifying and then analyzing them.

I'm going more wordless now for awhile and my mind feels like a shape moving through pondweeds in murky water. I can feel the stirring of its motion but who really knows what's in there?

I think that's ok for now. It's the thing I was worried about, losing touch with humanity. Not long ago I wrote that I have a foot in both worlds, plant and human, and that's one of the reasons I feel so inhuman. Now I have maybe just a toe in the human world and the concept of inhuman, well, that's outside my current frame. Maybe the marker of a human is wondering if they're human enough.

Meanwhile my cat loves me more. He's been climbing onto the back of the sofa, hugging my shoulder, and purring for hours. From this I learn that I'm deeply conflicted about one of my strongest recieving love languages, which is demonstrations of joy in my presence. On the one hand making someone happy is such a joy; on the other it's a demand where I feel that if I fail I'm deeply impacting someone else's happiness. Of course that's not how it works but it's interesting to see it so clearly laid out; Whiskey is a great teacher that way because my interactions with him show up my reactions more clearly than the complications of reactions to humans. I know that what's going on is, in fact, all me.

Yesterday was a very social day. The landrace gardening zoom call was in the morning and I was a bit of a focal point of that. Over noon was the local seed swap at the library; the last seed swap I attended there was my last pre-covid social event years ago. I chatted with one of the big gardeners from a gardener family, with one of local herbalist friends, and with a person doing the local CSA (which sold out in 11 hours). It was nice, I got some tomato seeds out there, I got some locally grown seeds and some seeds to put in the garden here even if I don't stay, and we're going to have another one closer to the last frost in late May. I'm going to plant a couple more tomatoes to give away there.

I also reconnected with my neighbour, the one the dog bit, and gave them some eggs. Apparently he likes duck eggs so I gave him a bunch of those. He's seen the fox that lives at his place and there's also a big mink that I don't think has eaten many of my animals but it's something to keep an eye on.

Despite so many contacts and so many events yesterday it felt more spacious than expected. Probably not making time to socialize closely or intimately with anyone helped there. When I woke up the light was strange so I looked out and it had snowed: the sun was rising in a clear bright sky and reflecting off the fresh coat of white everywhere. It was nice to be able to go back to bed and ignore it for a couple hours.

Now I have today for cooking, for thinking, for petting my cat, for planting tomatoes and peppers, and maybe for setting up the pig fence.

Maybe the activities sound the same as normal but they don't quite feel the same. I'm doing them while I float, submerged, beneath my surface. We will see what comes next.

Tucker is gone. Airports are done, driving is done, watering plants that had gone dry is done. I'm here, home.

I'm alone in this space: unconnected. I'd predicted imperfectly what that meant. Now I remember. I'm back in my own world.

It's like being underwater: not drowning, but like slipping into a warm lake on a warm evening as the sun sets. The laws of physics are different. My body is supported. Everything is a different colour, more golden, more green. Everything seems more possible but slower. The evidence of humans is distant and distorted.

Already I barely remember what people are or why I would care.

Instead my peppers are ripening and I should make a vinegar or vodka sauce with them, there aren't enough to ferment. Tomatoes are blooming and I should make crosses. There are peppers to pot up inside and the ground is moslty snow-free outside; I should fence off the berry patch and seed clover into it. I need to sort out the geese. My home is become my mind once again.

While I was gone the ravens broke open boxes of ziploc bags the grocery store gave me along with their spent produce and they scattered the bags across my entire yard, thousands of them. The store had also discarded some foil baking pans and they brought those into the far back and punctured them. I'd thought the non-edibles would be safe but they were not. Also there are hundreds of styrofoam ramen bowls and the little plastic packets from inside them, and milk cartons everywhere.

The pigs need to be moved to drier land.

More shelves need to be set up for plants.

And I need to exist here for a little while, just exist.

The ditch steamers came by yesterday, unfreezing the ditches where culverts went under the road and such. It rained. Now there's a rivulet the thickness of my wrist flowing down through the pond area over the ice; it leaps onto the grass across the path and then dives under the snow again and is busily filling up the back dip behind the gate. The dogs spent the night indoors because ugh.

The winter pig field, on a south slope, has thawed. It's become a transmitting slope for the wood field, which is flat and just uphill and thus is still melting and sending its flow down through the pigpen to join the pond. So far the pigpen isn't deep mud; I need to open up the fence to the wood field so they can go lighter on it. also I will toss down my cardboard to stabilize the soil a bit and get mechanically broken down by their feet so it composts quickly.

I can see soil on the steepest of my southern slopes around the haskaps.

A vast host of swans has flown overhead, stopping to rest on the fields one town over and then on the open corner of the lake where it outflows into the river.

The road bans are on.

Spring is nigh.