xmas 2023 nervous breakdown: let’s try this again

I’ve been working on a post that details my xmas 2023 nervous breakdown but it’s too long and depressing. Going over it isn’t helping me to feel any better about it, it’s actually making me feel worse. So instead I’m just gonna sum up what happened:

• I was excited for the 2023 xmas season.
• By about halfway through December, I was starting to feel stressed and overwhelmed even though I didn’t have any good reasons to feel like that.
• The closer we got to Festivus, the more on edge I became.
• Festivus arrived, and for the first half of it I largely enjoyed myself but also worried about how certain guests were enjoying themselves — there were some guests who didn’t know many other people and I felt like I was failing them by not introducing them to people and helping them connect. So I spent a fair amount of time with those guests, instead of doing what I wanted to do which was say hi to people I don’t get to see very often. That wasn’t terrible but I felt conflicted about it.
• By about 1 am, I felt like the party was a flop, and I was disappointed in myself for not being a better host. That’s how I continued to feel till the end of the night, around 5 am.

That was the last Festivus Jenn and I are hosting before we move away, so it really bothered me. Xmas eve and xmas day, I continued to spiral, second guessing our plan to move north, questioning the person I’ve become and the lack of solid family connection I have, worrying I will be lonely and sad in our new home. I started taking down the xmas decorations on xmas day because looking at them was too sad — they just made me think about how I spent so much time collecting all these gaudy vintage decorations when no one besides Jenn and I will see them once we move. I knew I was being melodramatic but I couldn’t stop it. On top of that, my cold that I had prior to the holidays had come roaring back with a vengeance. Maybe that played a role in my weird headspace, I’m still sick now so I can’t say for sure yet.

Anyway, Boxing Day I didn’t want to do shit but we had plans to go to Sointula and I knew that I needed to get moving and back to real life to kickstart getting out of my funk, so I put my big boy pants on and did that. Since then it’s been slow but steady improvement, with less crying each day, yayyyy.

The point of this post is that I had been feeling pretty prepared for moving to Sointula and saying goodbye to various routines and rituals I have had for years, but the mess of feelings that came out over the 2023 holidays have revealed to me that I actually have some serious sadness and trepidation about the upcoming changes. Which is nuts! How can such powerful emotions hide inside me without me knowing it? It’s been a real kick in the teeth. But on the other hand, this is a good learning experience, even if the lesson is “you have no idea how you actually feel about anything, and you may have a breakdown at any time.”

Tomorrow is new year’s eve. We’re going to Kate’s for a bonfire and I’m looking forward to seeing people and making up for the good feelings I didn’t get at Festivus. I still might well cry in front of everyone but that’s ok, if it’s to be, it’s to be. Everyone loves to see a person break down into a sobbing mess at a party, don’t they?

Happy 2024, everyone.

Liz’s big karaoke comeback — my thoughts on restorative exercises and the lack of them throughout the pandemic

Last night, Liz hosted a joint birthday party for Jenn, Julia and I. It was a fantastic time. It was great to not have any pandemic restrictions in place, to see so many friends in one place, to be able to sing karaoke again, to see people cut loose again. There were too many lovely, heart-warming moments for me to list them but one moment in particular stood out: Liz was dying to fire up the karaoke and kicked it off with Cher’s If I Could Turn Back Time. I’ve heard Liz sing that song many times, and I’ve probably heard Liz sing literally hundreds of karaoke songs overall, so in the past this wouldn’t have been a standout moment. But last night, when she started belted it out in her inimitable voice — deep and full yet simultaneously adorably squeaky, and always full of passion and dramatics — I felt a real, “whoah, it’s been a long time, and I’ve missed this” moment. There were actually a lot of similar moments throughout the party but that was the most potent one for me.

It got me thinking about shit we do that is restorative. I don’t even like using that word because to me, it smacks of annoying kumbaya “let’s sit in a circle and talk about our feelings” bullshit, but I also do believe it is a legit thing. Several years ago, I took a workplace course about how to deal with stress and traumatic events, and my big takeaway from that course was there are things we do to relax, and things we do to restore ourselves mentally and emotionally. Both of those things are necessary for us to keep our heads above water, to not go crazy from the stress of dealing with heavy shit.

But throughout the pandemic, I — just like everyone else — have dealt with a lot of added stress, and while I’ve still been able to do things that help me relax, I have not been able to do a lot of the things that I find restorative, due to pandemic restrictions. Now, I’ve obviously been aware that I’ve been feeling even more grim than usual over the last year and I knew that was probably due to pandemic stuff but I wasn’t aware of this specific lack, and now that I see it, it seems really fucking obvious why I and everyone else in the world has been struggling lately — what could the powers that be expect from two years of restrictions, of not allowing people to do things that are necessary to help keep them sane? I took that course just a year or two before the pandemic and at that time everyone was like “mental health is so important and this is what we need to do to keep it up,” but as soon as covid hit, that was all forgotten. How fucking stupid. It’s comical in an absolutely unfunny way how short memories are.

At this point I don’t believe pandemic restrictions will ever go away. I bet that in two months, they will be back in full force (although I think there will be a lot more push back at that time) — this shit has gone back and forth too many times already for me to believe otherwise — so I’m going to squeeze as much restorative shit into my life while I can. I need all the good vibes I can get right now so that I don’t completely unravel during the next lockdowns. Time for maximum fun, full throttle. I need a lot more Liz karaoke in my life, stat.

Jeez, I thought this was going to be a warm, happy afterglow-type of post, but it sure went in the other direction. I guess that really speaks to how fucked up I am. Just another illustration of how many more Sambuca snorkel nights I need to get back to normal. To be clear, I do feel really good this morning. Last night was fantastic, I loved it. So many great friends and wonderful moments.

Ghost towns 2

WordPress just alerted me that today is my blog’s 7th birthday. Well, yippee skippee.

Anyway, I think a lot about what various inanimate objects have seen in their time. For example, I LOVE spending time in auto wrecking yards, investigating each car and trying to figure out how many owners they had, how long each one owned them for, how well they looked after the car, why certain pieces of trash were left in the car when it went to the wrecker, what caused it to end up in there — was the frame rusted out, did a lousy mechanic tell the 80-yr old owner it just wasn’t worth fixing the brakes, was the car written off in an accident? I also wonder about the fun stuff too, like how many people fucked in the car? How many drugs were done in it? How about road trips, and to where? Was the owner sad when the car went to the wrecker?

The auto wrecker usually gets me thinking about this kind of stuff but the other day, I brought home a vintage bed frame and started wondering the same things about it. How many bedrooms has it been in? How much sex has it seen? How many shag carpets has it lived on? That kind of thing.

Then I started thinking about my house. We had a big party last Festivus, and I wondered when our house will see a similarly sized party again. I wonder which party is the biggest that the house has ever accommodated — was it one of mine and Jenn’s, or did the previous owners have bigger ones? I bet it was one of ours. We had some big parties in our early 30s.

I wish I had some kind of telepathic ability, like Christopher Walken does in The Dead Zone. I wish I could just touch an object and know all this kind of stuff about that things past. I wonder why I’m so fascinated by the past lives of objects. I don’t know. I guess I like knowing people’s stories too. I’ve learned that one of my fave things to do with people is get them talking about their lives — their childhood, teenage years, young adulthood…hell, even fairly recent times. The oldest stories are the most romantic but even moderately contemporary stuff is interesting.

Huh. I still don’t know what this means. Am I some kind of life voyeur? I’m not sure. I don’t like reading biographies. That’s colder, too careful and edited, curated. I want the genuine vibe. I like prefer talking with people, off the cuff, and getting a real sense of how they feel about whatever it is they’re talking about. But yeah, not sure why.

Incidentally, Walken is just fucking unreal in this scene from The Dead Zone. It’s short so do watch it.