Hello, dear readers, and welcome to the first Thursday of 2023! We made it. I hope you’re all hanging in there and that your new years are starting off gently.
I’m having a decent start to my new year so far. I found out yesterday that I somehow managed to swing A’s in both of my classes last semester – I was not expecting an A in the one class I was really struggling with, so that was a pleasant surprise. I also started a new morning routine a few days before the new year, and I’m now 8 days into meditating and journaling in the mornings before I get into my day. I’m not particularly a morning person, but I do tend to function better if I can ease into my day and have extra time in the morning, rather than rolling out of bed, brushing my teeth, and logging into work. So that all feels really good.
It’s been snowing for the past few days here – I think we’ve gotten a bit over a foot here in St. Paul. Nova is over the moon about it. It’s made me want to be extra cozy, so I made a big batch of soup a few days ago, and that’s been great to be able to have on these snowy days.
I don’t have a whole heck of a lot to write about this week – things are going okay and also I feel like I’m still in the liminal space between holidays since my first spring semester class doesn’t start until next week. I’ll leave you with some photos of Nova enjoying the weather:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to the last Thursday of 2022! What a year it’s been. 2022 brought a bunch of changes, challenges, and revelations. To highlight just some of what happened:
I did a sleep study and found out I’m really bad at breathing when I sleep. I consequently ended up getting an APAP machine, and it has been life-changing.
In April I made a last-minute trip to Chicago to see a friend in a play, and got to catch up with some of my favorite people.
I went on my first big company trip to New York City in May and got to meet a bunch of the people I’d only known through screens for the past two years.
I got my Carrie Fisher tribute tattoo.
We made it back to Song School after a couple of years away; I took a performance class with Amy Speace that was also life-changing.
The end of August marked a whole year with Nova, and we had a party to celebrate her 3rd birthday.
I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes in September, and that’s brought a whole bunch of new medications and routines into my life.
We talked my best friend into moving into our building, and we live in a sitcom now, and it’s wonderful.
I passed all of my first year of seminary classes.
In addition to all that, we helped several members of our chosen family navigate a variety of crises, and I started making some new friends at school and through D&D.
My big, overarching goal for 2022 was to learn to approach life with more curiosity and compassion and less of a need for control. I think I made pretty good progress, although there’s definitely still room for growth. It’s leading me straight into the goal for 2023, which is to lean into vulnerability and unapologetically ask for what I need. As my therapist reminded me a couple of weeks ago – “you don’t need to be perfect to ask for your needs to be met.”
I think I’m going to wrap it up there for the year. I hope your holiday season has been reasonably gentle and that you’re able to go into the new year feeling refreshed. I’ll send you off with these holiday photos of Nova:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! Yesterday was the Winter Solstice, so every day from here until June is going to get a little bit longer. And today it is very wintery indeed here in Minnesota.
I’m going to need to take Nova out soon, and I’m not especially looking forward to it.
Happy Hanukkah to my friends who celebrate! And a Merry almost Christmas to those to whom it applies. It’s going to be a busy weekend despite the cold as we celebrate with family. I am hoping to guard tomorrow as a mostly free day where I can relax, do some intention-setting for the new year, and catch up on sleep, because the rest of the weekend is pretty packed.
I don’t have too much else to talk about today, so I’ll leave you with your weekly dose of Nova:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! It’s been a long week for not particularly concrete reasons, and I spent a lot of yesterday feeling like it should be Friday, but here we are. It’s snowing in the Twin Cities today – last I looked they’re predicting we’ll get 5-8 inches. Part of me wants to be grinchy about it, but Nova is so happy that it’s hard to be upset. And it is pretty, and it’s covering all the gross, grey, dirty snow that was mostly melted, which is nice.
One of the more concrete things that has made this week feel very long is that I’ve been dealing with a lot of auditory sensitivity. This has been one of the most persistent clues in my life that I fall somewhere on the neurodivergent spectrum of existence – perfectly ordinary sounds suddenly feel unbearably loud, not in a way that gives me a headache or would be a sign of a migraine or something, but they’re just…too much, and if I can’t mitigate the sounds somehow, suddenly everything feels too loud, from lights to texture, etc., and I’m stuck fighting a meltdown. In a fit of overwhelm earlier in the week I ordered some fancy ear plugs that Facebook and Instagram have been advertising to me for forever. They arrived yesterday, and…holy shit, y’all. These are a game-changer. I could tell they were sort of helping when I was wearing them while I was working and felt a little better able to focus, but then as I was wrapping up work, my best friend (who lives upstairs) asked if she could come down to play our piano for a bit. Now, I love our piano, but in our old industrial apartment with its 12 foot corrugated cement ceilings, it is VERY bright, and I often find that it’s too much for my system to handle. In the back of my head I was trying to think of polite ways to excuse myself from the apartment if I got overwhelmed, but it turned out I didn’t need to worry. These ear plugs cut the bright frequencies that I find really hard to cope with, and what was left was a perfectly pleasant experience of listening to a friend make music. I’m blown away. So for my fellow neuro-spicy types out there, if you’ve also been receiving targeted ads for Loop ear plugs, I can say they get two thumbs up from me. I got the Engage Plus variety for myself, and while they weren’t cheap, so far I’m confident they’re going to be worth it for my (relative) sanity.
I’ve mostly managed to convince my brain at this point that I don’t need to worry that I’ve forgotten a homework assignment, which is great. I’m still waiting on final grades, but I’m not too worried about that – I know that I passed both classes and that was my goal. (I think I probably broke my straight-A streak, but that’s also okay, even if the perfectionist part of my brain is fighting me on that.) I’m happy to have a break between semesters, and am also really looking forward to next semester’s classes!
I think that’s where I’ll wrap this up this week. As always here’s your weekly Nova spam:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! It’s been one of those weeks where I’m never quite sure what day it is, for one reason or another. It’s been an ordinary week in some ways and a big week in others.
First big item: I’m done with my semester, which means I’m done with my first year of grad school! It’s wild to me that it’s already been a year. I’m so grateful for what I’ve learned so far and the connections I’m making with classmates and instructors. I’m continuing to have a deep sense of rightness in pursuing this degree, even if I’m still not 100% certain what life after I graduate will look like and how I’ll be using it. The vision of the future is slowly gaining some clarity, and I’ve got time to figure out the details.
The other big news is that the surgery scheduler called and I have a date for my hysterectomy! And…it’s not until March. But at least it’s scheduled, and three months isn’t all that long to wait when I’ve already been waiting basically half my life. It’ll be happening in the middle of the semester, so I’m going to end up taking about a month of medical leave from work to recover, but I’ve gotten that process kicked off and I think everything is going to work out.
I think I’m going to leave it there for this week. As always, here’s your weekly dose of Nova:
Yesterday marks NINE YEARS since I started this blog. I have posted something almost every Thursday for nine entire years. This is the longest I’ve ever stuck with one particular creative project, and I’m proud and also a bit dismayed that I’ve managed to keep it up.
This blog started out nine years ago primarily to record thoughts, feelings, and experiences around gender transition. For the last many years it’s been more of a general story-of-my-life sort of blog, but today, seeing as we’ve hit a major blogging anniversary, I feel like it’s appropriate to circle back to that original purpose.
Early last week, I had a consultation with an ob-gyn to discuss getting a hysterectomy. I’ve known I wanted to do this since before I knew I was trans. I was nervous going into the appointment, but it went really well.
Since then, I’ve gotten the requisite letters of justification for insurance purposes from my therapist and my primary care doctor, and the surgical orders have been put in; now, I’m just waiting on their scheduler to call me. In a perfect world, I’ll have this done by the end of the year!
It’s wild to think that this thing I’ve wanted to do for well over a decade is immanent to the point that it could be just weeks away. I’m not super looking forward to the recovery, but thankfully I have a great support network here. Mostly, I’m just very excited by the prospect of being done.
In non-transition news, we got almost 6 inches of snow on Tuesday, and Nova is over the moon about it. I’ll leave you with this video of her in her happy place:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday. Today here in the US, many people are celebrating Thanksgiving. As I know I’ve mentioned in past years, I have a lot of complicated feelings about the holiday. On the one hand, gratitude is lovely; on the other hand, the white-washing of history and the continued threats on Native American sovereignty in this country are really troubling.
This year, my husband and I are laying low today; tomorrow we are doing a meal with my best friend who recently moved in upstairs. We’re holding space for our gratitude and our complicated feelings. I’m on-call for work for tomorrow, so today I’m trying to focus on the rest that my body is asking for.
I’m going to keep things short this week, but I do want to leave you with an idea: if you’re celebrating Thanksgiving today (or even if you’re not), consider taking a look at https://native-land.ca to see whose land you are on, and find space to acknowledge that amidst your celebrations. Here in St. Paul, MN, I’m on Očhéthi Šakówiŋ and Wahpekute land.
As always, I’ll end with a few Nova photos from this week:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I’m feeling a bit scatterbrained today and I have a full day of meetings, so it’s going to be…interesting. It also means this blog is going to be on the short side this week.
It’s been a decent week. The weekend was lovely – Sunday morning we went to a drag brunch for a friend’s birthday, and then that evening went to see Semler in concert, which was amazing – Mayyadda opened, and she was incredible, and then when Semler came on the whole venue spent the rest of the show scream-singing along to every. single. song. I don’t think they quite knew what to do with the level of energy the crowd brought. It was a cathartic experience and I’m really glad we went. Monday, though, I woke up with almost no voice and felt absolutely exhausted after doing two outside-the-house things that involved a lot of peopling the day before, and so I ended up having to call in sick to work to recover. Extra sleep helped a lot.
I’ll leave you with some Nova photos – it’s been snowing here, and she is absolutely over the moon about it:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday. I started my day off nearly forgetting I had a 7:30am meeting scheduled (I usually start working at 8), but I managed to be almost on time, so that was a win.
I have been struggling this week to find focus. I’m still behind on the project for my Monday class, although I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll be able to get caught up tomorrow since I have work off for Veterans Day. I at least got the parts rewritten that I needed to rewrite, and if I can get this next piece taken care of tomorrow, I’ll be in a good place to be on time with the rest of the pieces. Even at work, though, I’m feeling scatterbrained and stretched thin, even though it objectively hasn’t been a particularly wild week for me. Some of it might be the weather – it’s been overcast and rainy here the past few days, and that always makes me want to just curl up with a book and ignore all responsibilities. Moving off of DST last weekend also threw me for a bit of a loop, I think.
Tonight is the penultimate session of my Intro to Spiritual Direction class, and I’m kind of sad that it’s winding down. I mean, on the one hand, it’s exciting to be moving forward with it. But on the other…it’s just a really lovely group of people, and while I know I’ll still be in class with many of them next semester, each class creates and holds a unique sort of space, and this one has been particularly lovely and supportive.
This weekend should be fun – Sunday we’re going to a drag brunch for my cousin’s roommate’s birthday, and then that evening we’re going to see Semler in concert. It should be a good time. Fingers crossed that Nova behaves for her babysitters.
Speaking of Nova, I’ll leave you with some sleepy puppy pictures this week:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! Although I have had a bit of a struggle keeping track of my days this week, it’s been a good week overall:
I seem to be over the worst of the queasiness I was dealing with last week.
My husband is home again, so Nova has been much less anxious (and therefore less vocal).
On Monday, my best friend moved into our building! I’m so excited to have her as a neighbor.
I managed to get a song done for my songwriting class this week, and I’m actually reasonably pleased with it.
I had a really affirming appointment with my doctor yesterday.
Also, this weekend it looks like I’m going to get to play D&D, hopefully, so that’s exciting.
I don’t actually have a lot of thoughts this week. I will leave you with two things:
First, an admonition to please VOTE if you’re in the US – election day is next Tuesday, early voting is available in many places right now, and while voting won’t fix everything, it’s one of the tools we have to try to get things back on the rails.
And finally, here are photos of Nova in her Halloween costumes (which, as you can see, she was *thrilled* to wear, lol):
Accidental Fudge 