Greenstorm's Journal

I planted more seeds last night. Herbs: chervil, fennel grex, summer savory, sage, thyme, that sort of thing. Also some sunflowers. One flat of seeds, with another of melons and another of cucumbers to go, I think.

It's amazing not to be able to remember all the seeds I planted only last night. I have no ability to inhabit that space and time, to access what happened. I used to always remember plants.

I don't know why I'm planting them in some ways. It's a habit of hope over the years but I can't look into the future and see planting or using them like I used to. It's a habit of hope that creates a feedback loop, though, pulling me forward into the world where the seeds sprout and where I'm picking leaves for salads and scrambled eggs.

There's no hope in me right now. I don't have the energy.

I'm used to running out of energy and letting everything release, relaxing back and knowing I did my best and savouring the emptiness of impulse and mind that comes after a push. That's not happening much right now.

( Med update and sui )

I can definitely deal with my body doing all sorts of stuff. I can handle working lying down sometimes, cutting back on animals and improving my systems, working towards a more accessible house and lifestyle. I could craft a life around afternoon naps and even not operating machinery in the afternoons and evenings. I could probably set things up so occasional semi-paralysis is manageable. Even things like the photosensitivity/headache and less screen tolerance is manageable with shifts to routine. And I'm already doing so many workarounds for the memory thing that many folks likely don't notice.

It's really hard to have this loudspeaker in my head telling me I shouldn't live, though. My first priority is that. And I'm not sure whether I'm relieved or not think there might be a long covid aspect to it.

So I'm planting seeds, which I can do on autopilot, pushing back.

I scavenged a bunch of sliding doors from the dump the other day for a greenhouse. I'm not sure if I'll split the double panes apart or keep them together, but it's a ton of glass.

I'm continuing the hunt for a housesitter since the one I had fell through, for May and for pagany stuff in August.

I'm making that doctor's appointment to get time off so I can do all of that without wheels constantly falling off my responsibilities in all directions.

Once I've done that maybe I'll even be able to start planning the garden.

It feels good to know I have more seeds in the ground.

Taught the new pottery tech to take the specific gravity of glazes yesterday. I had figured it out by reading about it. She had been given a handout and didn't understand it, by someone who had never done it and I suspect didn't care to understand it. I also gave the tech the link to the "for flux sake" podcast which goes into a bunch of nuts-and-bolts stuff around the practical parts of glaze chemistry and running a studio. I wish there were more pottery podcasts like that and fewer "meet this potter artist in an interview and learn about their inspiration, how they started, and how they use art words". Like, I'm not opposed to having those, but there are roughly one to two hundred hours of that kind of podcast for every hour of practical stuff around how to make clay or glazes do things.

We also did a bunch of glazing with the new pottery glazes, and I introduced one of the members to websites where people layer and posts pictures of premade glazes. I don't think she knew that premade non-underglaze things existed. It's fun, I'm pretty sure she's also on the special interest train because she says this stuff lives in her head.

Apparently the new tech can't mix glazes because of her asthma, and she doesn't yet know how to run the kiln, so I'm coming in this Wednesday to run the kiln and... well, they'd likely like me to come in the next weekend to mix glazes but 1) I've been busy too many days in a row and it's causing my body to malfunction and 2) Tucker will be here and I want to spend time with him. So, I'll trust that the folks I mixed glazes with before, volunteers, can do it again if they want glazes.

Workshop last weekend went well, people got to take home plants and craft plant markers and folks chatted and had a good time. No one mentioned my mask -- I was the only person masking in the building -- so we'll call that ok too. Next workshop is kratky lettuces, I should get some started as a demo.

cw sui
( Read more... )

I also continue to lose capacity, especially if I don't spend a couple days a week lying down. I think it might be time to talk more about this with my doctor. I mean, I don't know how or what, but I don't think we've found the solution. Same questions as always, is it "just" autistic burnout, is it some sort of post-covid post-exertional malaise thing, is it some random autoimmune thing that all have the same vague symptoms, who would even know to rule these things out? I'm starting to get a ton of ads from everything from psychiatrists to physios to whatever else to "help navigate the medical system and bring back functionality" and I hate the idea that our system is built so folks who are least able need to pay to navigate this. I'm very lucky to have a job where I can functionally slack a bunch if I need to but I can't do nothing.

This last thought brought to you by trying to type this morning with arms that felt like noodles. Kind of ironic that I finally have community in this town, both a garden club and a pottery club, imagine that! but that my body is just kind of not having any of it.

They say this stuff is not supposed to be addictive, however, when I take it and for the day after (sometimes a day and a half after) I can generally do things like walk up stairs without randomly feeling like I might die (say 3/7 times or something like that), I can breathe without it feeling like too much work, I can often think clearly and remember things (these are linked; it's hard to think about something when you can't remember the whole thought) and even do chores regularly.

Downside is that after that time I return to not having energy to do anything and spend a day in bed unable to think. Also my period and PMDD starts to kick in.

This is my first time trying two days in a row, three days off, and now one day on again. I think some of the PMDD lability is easier to control, I guess it is an energy-draining skill like anything else, but we'll see. I've been working from home and avoiding social stuff so many of the tests are easier.

Oof.

Okay, something which cancels out the PMDD moderation is not going to work.

Dammit.

Just took the first pill of my narcolepsy/hypersomnia med this morning. I've been sitting on them a couple months because I haven't had the space to take a pill and then wait it out if there are bad side effects. Today allows for that.

Enjoyably, this med interferes with the birth control pills I have been taking as part of the package to manage my PMDD and my gynecologist has not been returning my calls, so if it works then we move on to the next thing there with, I guess, my GP.

Will update.

So it seems like if I'm not in bed 12-14 hours a day, my pain gets worse. If I am in bed more than 12 hours, my pain gets better. I basically slept all weekend (freezer lasagne, soylent, chores, and planted 14 tomatoes into pots is pretty much all that happened) and my pain is substantially reduced. Then last night it was more like 7 hours and I hurt more than I did yesterday. So I guess the pain was the result of pushing through. Bah.

I've gone off the birth control pill, had a little bit of a bleed, and now I'm staying off it, so I'm only on the sertraline now. My emotions are wobblier but I am having fewer vision etc issues so far. Pretty sure I need to lose these ovaries.

Ended up with something hundred western larch trees, some of the northernmost redcedar, a little ponderosa pine and some western white pine as extras/trash from work. Can't really bring myself to kill them all. So I have something like 500 - 600 trees this year to plant. Some of the larches are being distributed, but I think they'd be great to replace my aspens -- deciduous trees are so good for shading/sunning habitable areas in the appropriate season. I'm thinking a mix of aspens and apples along the south where the aspens came out. I'm starting to think of my work as adorning Threshold, as a way to make her beautiful. Larch and apple in the fall would be beautiful, and they might help compete with the aspens which I'll be cutting back suckers from for the next ten years.

My family is made to make babies. Birth control that's close to 100% will be somewhat less reliable for us; our hip structure tends to lead to easy pregnancies, easy births, and lots of kids. I know mom had really heavy periods, and I did for a long time. My cycle was always blessedly regular and came with obvious communication from my body. It only started to wobble by a couple days in the the last several years.

So with the PMDD thing I went on birth control pills. I started them about 100 days ago.

I bled for the first 40 days or so. That backed off for a couple weeks, then I had a very light period for a normal amount of time, 4-5 days. I stopped bleeding. Now I'm bleeding again, lightly, and I seem to have had some of the accompanying emotional stuff right before the bleed started.

So I'm still cycling even though I'm on pills specifically designed to stop that. I don't even know if this is supposed to be possible? On birth control pills one "normally" goes off them to cause a pseudo-period every month (there aren't the same hormonal and ovulation things going on, so I think medically it's not the same thing, but it does get rid of the accumulated endometrial lining). Lots of people take them back to back to prevent periods and medically it seems there's little evidence to suggest that's a problem. I know some people can spot/bleed lightly kind of continuously on the pill, but I don't know if that's normally in a cycle pattern.

It's notable that, like endometriosis, one of the things older-school doctors prescribe for PMDD if they acknowledge it exists is "get pregnant, that will give you nine months where it doesn't bother you".

Meanwhile on the lower dose of sertraline I'm obviously back to being able to enjoy my hobbies but I'm having progressively longer bouts of dissociation of various kinds. I'm also still ultra tired and some of the weird stuff around heartbeat, dizziness etc that I got occasionally will hang around for several hours in the morning. Vision is also still weird. So I'm still way, way better than I was without it but still just super not functional.

It's definitely possible that this is autistic burnout (a lot of these are pretty classic symptoms) and that the sertraline is erasing most of the hormonal stuff and letting me keep powering through, which just makes the burnout worse and clearer.

But anyhow, this is mostly an administrative note about renewed bleeding.

It begins.

The first trickle of running water down my driveway showed up yesterday. Four feet of snow has sunk to three. Somehow, I never know how, the earth under the snow is warming: my house is staying much warmer in the basement even when the thermometer temperature is low, and streamlets are running down the sides of roads and puddles and small floods are gathering in the inner elbows of the highway.

It's not yet slippery, there's still enough snow for grip.

At solar noon the sun is finally reaching a height within the bottom range of what scientists argue may allow skin to produce vitamin D, though it needs to be a little higher to reach the consensus level.

Geese are squabbling and pairing off and there are eggs starting. The dogs are working hard at night over the whole perimeter.

It's almost time to put seeds in pots.

Against this backdrop I'm sleeping a lot. When I'm not working, and sometimes when I am, I'm lying on the couch with 2 - 3 cats and sometimes a dog or two right there in front. The woodstove is on, light comes in through one window and the other is entirely buried under snow. I'm still wanting to sleep a long night and 3 - 4 naps during the day so I think the medication I'm on needs to be adjusted. With all this sleep and quiet animal companionship I feel like I'm slowly healing in some ways. For most of the winter I was on birth control drugs that put me in the worst part of my cycle. For some time before that my natural hormone response was drifting more and more towards that state. I had no skin. Every thing that happened, every tiny interaction with living things or with the environment, raised crescendos of usually negative, corrosive, painful sensations in my head.

Sitting there quietly, kept loving and concerned watch over by the five house animals, occasionally venturing out and responding to the geese with old instinctive goose chatter: it's giving me practice at the world not hurting me. Cats acting like cats, dogs acting like dogs, geese acting like geese, ravens acting like ravens, and pigs acting like pigs: it's ok. It's becoming ok for the world to exist. It's a small world and it's going from a refuge to a womb. After a couple weeks I started experiencing love again in little flickers while looking at a sleeping animal that has been seeking me out and caring about me this whole time.

It's healing, yes, but my capacity is almost zero. I am incredibly tired all the time, I think from the sertraline. I barely manage to stay awake on my office days; on work-from-home days I nap at lunch, on breaks, before work, and after work. On weekends I sleep. My home is suffering since I can barely drag out the trash, let alone tidy things. I'm eating sandwiches and freezer meals.

And... I still don't have my passions, my enthusiasms, back. I feel indifferent towards my hobbies: cooking, butchery, pottery, even gardening just hold no interest for me. I'd be fine watching shows with the animals and going to work and coming home and watching shows and going to work and coming home for the rest of my life. Talking to Josh or Tucker is nice in the moment but not something to seek out. People aren't something to seek out. I just don't really care. Things are fine. I'm going to do my best to start seeds because I think future me will appreciate it, but it seems unnecessary.

Of course, that's not fine. I'm reasonably sure it's the medication, and obviously that needs to be tweaked. Luckily I set up doctor's appointments for next week before I started on the meds, because between sleeping all the time and not caring I wouldn't have done it while on them.

These are significant issues, of course, but I am at least safe and healing and the first whispers of spring are here.