354 - In Between

I was running around before Christmas trying to get it all done, going to work each morning at 5am to try to kick-start my day, trying to exercise, trying to keep up our rickety old cabin to Airbnb standards, trying to keep up my own house to my own standards, trying to join causes and aid with my voice, trying to sell a product I love with a method people hate, trying to help my family with their variety of needs, trying to create, trying to relax... try try try...

After New Years, I took the cabin off Airbnb, stopped cleaning my house, stopped cooking and baking, stopped exercising, was turned down as a local leader in a political organization, stopped selling the product I love, I started playing a simple video game every day for hours just to stop myself from getting up and doing laundry or dishes. I napped instead of relaxed... and then got sick. 

I haven't been sick for about 4 years. We think it was Covid, though with a negative rapid test, I kept to myself and slept for days, self-isolating, garbage bags full of tissues, and had an excuse not to go into the kitchen, or go to work, or do anything at all... 

I also told the family I was depressed and needed time for it to work itself out. I gave myself 5 months, they understood. Depression is not necessarily about circumstances, the more we do things to try to squash or change it, the worse it gets. So, I sit with it, with space and silence, without judgement or fix-it mentalities or can-do attitudes. 

I sat around doing the bare minimum of things for a couple of weeks until slowly starting to feel better. One day, I cleaned the kitchen and did 5 loads of laundry, "looks like you're feeling better." A few days ago I scrubbed the bathrooms with the extra energy I had, "thanks, mum." I made some lovely dinners and played some board games with anyone who wanted to play. It is a bit better now. I still have 4.5 months to figure it out, or not, or perhaps I'll up that to more time as required, or maybe there's nothing to figure out.

As this has been going on, my social feed is full of division - I'm smack in the middle of people's anger over vaccine mandates and in between the polarized views of what's right and what's wrong, and I just don't care anymore, about any of it - it's just angry people mad about fill-in-the-blank, that's the real disease. Actually, it's not that I don't care, it's that I don't care to argue anymore, or convince anyone of anything, or even talk much about what I think about whatever it is. Thank goodness for journals disguised as blogs that no one reads. It's how a lot of us work through things.

I am in between things. I don't know what those things are. 

Last year, I made the decision to better my health because I was physically falling apart, and it worked. My health is generally better because I made the changes I needed to. But health for me is an overall sense of well-being, and though I made the physical effort, the surrounding mental/emotional effort about it didn't fit. It doesn't fit because I don't care about that either - I do care about not physically falling apart - I don't care about striving for other people's ideals. 

In between all and nothing, this and that, past and future, stop and go, here and there... It's an okay place to be and it's starting to feel like that's where I should stay.