Month: August 2016

Momentum

/ Alyxander James / 2 Comments

Despite the fact that the entire rest of my work team was on vacation last week, making for a rather sleepy week at the office, it feels like my life is really picking up speed.

I’m less than 50 days out from chest masculinization surgery. There are a handful of details to finish nailing down between now and then, but for the most part, it looks like it really is going to happen. It’s starting to feel real. It still feels like it’s a long way off, but then I start looking at the actual numbers, and really…it’s coming up faster than I think I’m allowing myself to process.

I’m playing two different shows in the next couple of weeks. Sunday night I’ll be playing my longest on-stage set ever (a whopping 45 minutes). I was asked to do the show with one week’s notice, and in a moment of madness, I agreed. I’ll manage to get everything polished enough to play by then, but it’s definitely nerve-wracking. It might be my last big show of the year, depending on how recovery goes after surgery, so there’s also some self-inflicted pressure there, to go out with a bang.

In a few weeks, I’ll be participating in a show comprised entirely of covers of songs written by one of my dear songwriting friends. So that’s two additional songs I need to get cemented in my head within the next few weeks. I’m excited and honored to have been asked to participate, and I think it’ll be a really fun night. I never really do covers, because I generally feel like I can’t do another musician’s work justice. So it’s an exciting challenge.

I’m trying to cherish all the time I’m spending playing my guitar right now, since it’s going to be a major challenge (and for a while, an impossibility) post-op.

I’ve been a little down the past few days, for no real reason I can figure aside from the cyclical nature of my brain. But I’m aware that things are falling into place, and that’s a comforting thing to realize.

Happiness Is…

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

After being completely miserable with a cold last week, this week is shaping up to be truly fantastic. I am genuinely happy, and here a handful of reasons specific to this week:

  1. I’m mostly over my cold. I’m still a little sniffly and coughing a bit, but compared to last week, I feel great. I’m ready for it to be gone altogether, but I’m not forgetting to be grateful for simple things, like being able to breathe through my nose 90% of the time.
  2. Work is dull, but the rest of my week is not. I’m the only person from my team at work who isn’t on vacation this week. There are things I could be working on (and I am working on some of them), but mostly it’s just boring. Which is fine (it’s less stressful than the norm, for sure). The rest of my week, though, is full of friends and music and knitting and it’s just plain wonderful.
  3. I’m feeling inspired. This is largely due to the fact that my week has been full of people and events that inspire creativity. Last week I was invited to join a new D&D-type game that’s just getting off the ground, and I spent a substantial chunk of the beginning of the week digging into the character I came up with, writing up a back story. I haven’t written prose outside of the blog in a while, and it’s been ages since I’ve done much fiction writing, so that was a lot of fun! This week has been a lot of music (thanks, Joe!) and hanging out with other people who like to create, which generally does a good job of feeding my own creative impulses.
  4. I’m feeling connected. I am, at the core, an introvert. But my relationships with other people are incredibly important to me, and I feel like I’ve been able to foster new connections and strengthen old ones this week, and it’s helping me get out of my head.
  5. I’m feeling extraordinarily lucky. Things are, for the most part, going really well right now. And a lot of places this week has taken me have made me feel like I really do lead a very charmed life. Gratitude is not hard to find in weeks like this one.

Short and Sweet

/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

I realize I’m a little late posting this today. Sorry about that! The cold I thought I’d managed to kick last week came back with a vengeance, and I have spent the past few days feeling pretty miserable. I still sound horrible today, but at least I’m back at  work and feeling a little more human.

That said, I don’t actually have a whole lot to write about. So here’s a quick list of things I’m looking forward to in the near future:

  1. Top surgery is now officially less than two months away. I’m in the process of pulling together the documentation I need to bring to my next visit with the surgeon. I’m looking forward to getting it all over with, and I am looking forward to having three whole weeks off from work.
  2. One of our favorite folk musicians is playing a couple of places in town in the next couple of weeks. It’s always a pleasure to hear him play, and it looks like we’ll be able to catch a couple of his shows.
  3. More than anything, at the moment I am looking forward to a weekend spend hanging out with my partner (whose birthday is tomorrow!) as we both work on recovering from our respective colds.

Resisting Bitterness

/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

This week, I’ve been wrestling with bitterness.

There are things I want to be doing with my life that feel like they’re on hold until after surgery/recovery. Surgery is only a couple of months away, but with six weeks of recovery time tacked on to that, it’ll be nearly the end of the year before I’ll really be able to do anything to move things along. And that feels really distant, even if I know that really, it’s only a handful of months.

Feeling stuck has me feeling bitter, which adds to the general lack of motivation I’ve been struggling with in the past few weeks.

I don’t want to be a bitter person. For one thing, it’s a colossal waste of energy, and energy is not something I typically have a surplus of. And it’s just generally unpleasant. I try to be pretty happy and easy-going, and bitterness throws a wrench in that.

I’m not entirely sure what to do about it, though, aside from continually reminding myself that this, too, shall pass. I’m doing whatever research I can ahead of time, but I can’t tell if that’s actually helping or is just making me more stressed out about not being able to do anything with what I learn.

In the midst of feeling stuck, though, I’m also feeling extraordinarily grateful for friends who make me laugh and can take me out of my head for a while. Over the weekend we had the chance to cheer one of our friends on to victory at CLLAW, which was super fun. The next day, some other friends joined us for our second viewing of Ghostbusters, which was followed by bowling, which I hadn’t done in years. Bowling is one of those activities that I’m usually pretty terrible at, but it reminds me to laugh at myself and that it’s possible to have fun with something even if it’s not a thing I’m good at. (Case in point: my score of the last game almost doubled my score of the first game. I never broke 100.)

And that might be the secret to beating the bitterness: taking time out as often as I can to have a little fun with the people who remind me that there’s more to life than the parts that feel tedious.