Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I don’t know if it’s that the time change is still throwing me off, if it’s general seasonal stuff, or if it’s just getting to be that point in the semester, but I have been so tired the past couple of weeks. Getting out of bed (and then staying out of bed) is taking Herculean levels of willpower. Work and school both feel overwhelming and like I’ve possibly bitten off more than I can chew. I’m just exhausted, and I’m not really sure what to do about it.
There have been some bright spots, though. For one thing, I’m taking tomorrow off as my quarterly “wellness day,” which my department intends as a day, planned in advance, dedicated to doing something to care for your mental health. I intend to spend mine sleeping and reading something for fun, although I’m also not holding onto any plans too tightly at this point.
Also, yesterday some dear chosen family members asked me if I’d officiate their wedding next summer! So, after a little Googling and a quick chat with a fellow non-religious seminarian who’s also done this, I went and got myself ordained by the Universal Life Church. I’ll need to get registered with the county once that paperwork comes in the mail, but I’m pleased and amused by how straightforward that was. I’m excited to get to help our dear ones craft a simple wedding ceremony that fits them and honors the life they’re building together.
Anyway, that’s about it for this week. Nova’s also been sleepy:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I hope you’re all hanging in there. It’s felt like a rather long week here – I’ve been fighting the beginnings of a cold that seems both unwilling to vacate the premises and also not bad enough to make me seriously sick, so I’m just vaguely congested and fatigued and annoyed about it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about neurodivergence this week. The past couple of years have been an adventure of discovery around the various ways in which we are a neurodivergent household, and learning how to let down the neurotypical masks we’ve built up over the years. One of the interesting things that has happened for me with this gradual unmasking is that I’m increasingly aware of my own sensory sensitivities, and finding it harder to pretend they’re not an issue. Temperature regulation is part of it – I have always been someone who runs warm and overheats pretty easily, but my tolerance for being hot seems to be decreasing with time.
The big one for me, though, is sound. I’ve never liked loud noises (with the exception, as a teen and young adult, of sometimes enjoying loud concerts), but lately I’ve been noticing just how much noise can overload my system. Hearing trucks in the alley while I’m working (on the opposite end of our apartment from where I work, through a door) can be anywhere from mildly distracting to terribly grating. When listening to music, I find I’m often putting my headphones or speakers at the lowest possible setting (and if I’m wearing my over-ear headphones, I often have earplugs in under them). When the dogs start crying, I’m much quicker to get overwhelmed and find I need to remove myself from the room more often.
I have had a sort of parallel experience with queerness and transness that is helping me to make sense of this, somewhat. When I was first beginning to understand my own queerness, I still spent a lot of time mostly closeted. But the more I came to understand and appreciate that this was part of who I was, and the more I connected with other people who had similar experiences, the less energy I seemed to have to pretend to be someone I wasn’t. I want to be able to celebrate my queerness, not hide it, and my tolerance for pretending to be someone other than who I am has decreased dramatically over the years. This journey with neurodivergence feels similar – the more I come to understand how much of my energy has been devoted to maintaining a relatively neurotypical mask, and the more I let that mask drop (and sometimes even find I have energy to devote to other things), the less interested I am in trying to maintain the appearance of being neurotypical.
I’m grateful that I have a lot of tools to keep myself regulated when sensory stuff gets to be too much. I’m grateful for a whole bunch of loved ones who are also neurodivergent and the support we give each other. And I’m grateful for an increasing societal awareness of neurodivergence and the people who are pushing to destigmatize and depathologize our awareness of it.
Anyway, I don’t know if I have a point I’m trying to get to with this post, but this is what’s been on my mind this week. I think I’m going to end it here, but I’ll leave you, as always, with some quality doggo content:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! It’s been a long week already. Work continues to be bananas and we’re short several people this week, which feels particularly rough. I’ve also been fighting some sniffles and a headache all week.
In the midst of all of this, I’m trying to look for the bright spots. Here are some of the things that have brought me joy this week:
A potential new D&D game! After realizing a couple of weeks ago how much I miss having a local queer gaming community, I saw a Facebook post in a local queer D&D group that’s not usually very active. Someone was willing to DM a game but didn’t want to do the logistical side of coordinating schedules/food/etc. I realized I don’t have the bandwidth to run a game, but I can manage scheduling just fine, so I stepped in, and now we’re chatting on a Discord server and hopefully will start playing in a couple of weeks! I’m very excited about this.
I had a great therapy session this morning where my therapist and I talked about ways I could show my body more care, and I came up with a plan around food that I can make more of. This felt like a big deal, because I’ve been in a weird place lately where the foods that had been “safe foods” for a while suddenly lost their appeal, and I’ve been having a really hard time figuring out what to replace them with that will feel good. I was able to work with my therapist to think of things more in terms of texture, and that really helped. Learning how to navigate around my increasing awareness of my own neurodivergence is an adventure.
Tonight The New Standards are playing at the park across the street from our apartment (there’s a Thursday night concert series all summer), and we’re going to try to make it over there for that. I’m looking forward to it!
I think I’m going to wrap things up there for this week, but I’ll leave you as always with some doggos:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I am all sorts of confused about what day of the week it is – the long weekend was lovely, but it really threw me for a loop.
Speaking of the long weekend…I had an absolutely lovely time in Chicago! I flew out Friday night and flew back Monday morning, so it was a whirlwind of a weekend. However, I was really intentional about not over-scheduling myself on this trip, and so it ended up being really relaxing, for the most part. Saturday started with breakfast at Smack Dab, my favorite spot in Rogers Park, which was incredible as always. Then I went back to the hotel and napped a bit, because I didn’t sleep all that well the first night I was there. In the afternoon I wandered around Andersonville a bit and visited a new, queer-owned stationery shop as well as a gluten-free bakery that never disappoints. After that, I needed to go back to the hotel to dry off – it was quite hot and humid. I didn’t have any concrete plans with friends made for Saturday, in part because I knew several of the people I wanted to see were going to be pretty busy over the weekend. However, I decided to let folks in my queer games group know where I was planning to grab dinner that night, just in case anyone was available. (I am perfectly content to go out to eat by myself, but pizza with friends is even better than pizza alone.) This turned out to be the correct decision, as two dear friends (who I’d absolutely thought would be too busy) were able to join me for pizza on Saturday night. It was wonderful getting to catch up at eat good food together.
Sunday arrived and was quite rainy (seriously, Chicago got something like 7-8″ of rain on Sunday). I ended up ordering more Smack Dab treats for delivery to the hotel, because I didn’t have an umbrella and didn’t feel like walking over in the rain. When the food arrived, I got an extra treat in the form of a note on the bag:
Turned out the owner of Smack Dab (who we got to be friends with in the time that we were living in Rogers Park) was working that morning, saw my order come in, and decided to share a little extra love. It made my day!
After I checked out of my hotel, I dropped stuff off at the friend’s apartment where I was planning to crash Sunday night, and got to hang out with her for a bit before heading out to meet a couple of other friends for lunch. Thankfully, she convinced me to take her umbrella with me as I was leaving. I had a great time at lunch, and then realized I hadn’t decided what I was going to do until I met up with friends for dinner that evening. I reached back out to the friend I was staying with and decided to go back to her place for a while. I ended up waiting in the pouring rain for about 25 minutes for the bus – had I not had that umbrella, I would’ve been absolutely drenched and miserable.
When I got back to my friend’s place, another friend was also there with their kiddo while they waited for a gas leak to get fixed at their new house (everything ended up getting resolved there, thankfully). We spent a lovely couple of hours each doing our own thing in our own separate corners of the same room, in comfortable silence. I texted my husband part of the way through, saying how much I love having queer, neurodivergent friends. We were able to just be together, which was exactly what I needed. That evening, we went over to our friends’ new house for dinner and watched Dungeons & Drag Queens on Dimension 20. It was delightful!
It was a truly lovely, restorative weekend. I felt so cared for, and so grateful for the community I have in Chicago. I love living in St. Paul, and I have great friends here…and I don’t have the same sort of community group here that I have in Chicago, and it felt really good to be in a space like that again. The time with those friends was exactly what my heart needed.
I am also eternally grateful to my husband, who managed both dogs while I was gone (which involved a lot of cleaning up after Mouse, who sometimes tends toward submissive/outside-avoidant peeing) and did a great job of that. They even managed to get a few scattered moments of peaceful coexistence. Both dogs (and my husband) were very happy to have me back.
I will leave you, as always, with some doggo content!
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. I took Monday and Tuesday off this week, but I still keep thinking today is Friday. Such is life.
Monday afternoon I drove up to Duluth for a quick solo retreat to try to reset my brain a bit. I skipped class Monday night in favor of journaling and introspective time, which was lovely. I came away from that with some insights I’m still wrestling with and will be bringing with me to therapy later today.
Tuesday morning I checked out of the hotel, parked near the lake, and went for a walk. Lake Superior was the calmest I’ve seen her in awhile, and it was just what my soul needed.
I popped into the mall at Fitgers for a quick stop at the bookstore (a tradition whenever I’m in Duluth) and at the pet supply store (to get a souvenir for Nova), and then decided I had done what I set out to do, and wanted to head home earlier than I’d originally planned to allow me some relaxed time in my own space before starting back into work on Wednesday. It was a very quick trip, but it was a fruitful one, I think.
Yesterday was a pretty normal Wednesday; today is already feeling a bit scrambled, because I have a medical appointment in the middle of the day that meant I had to shift some other appointments around to tomorrow. But it’ll all work out.
Please enjoy these photos of Nova, and I hope you all find something in this week that brings you joy!
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I kept thinking Tuesday should have been Thursday this week, so I’m glad we’re finally here.
I’ve been struggling to focus this week. There’s a lot that needs to get done for school and work has been busy and I’m continuing to figure out new routines in the rest of my life and everything just feels like a lot. I’m wrestling with some anxiety and have just generally felt down.
There are good things happening, too, though. Sunday I played D&D with a new group for the first time, and it was a lot of fun. And last night an old friend gave us four tickets to the final St. Paul Saints game of the season, so we got to enjoy a baseball game with my husband’s dad and godmother:
There’s a lot that I’m grateful for right now, but also I can feel myself hurtling toward some level of burnout. So, I decided to take Monday and Tuesday off next week and take myself on a little solo retreat up north. I’m hoping it gives my brain a bit of a reset.
I hope you’re all hanging in there. As always, I leave you with some recent Nova photos:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! (I initially wrote that as “welcome to Thursday?” which actually feels pretty accurate right now.) It’s been a decent week so far – we’ve managed to maintain our newly-cleaned kitchen pretty well, we’ve cooked a few more times (I’m making tacos again tonight), and things are generally good.
We’re leaving in a couple of weeks for Song School, and I’m so excited. I’m also so anxious. We’re boarding Nova for the first time for this trip, and that’s a stressful thought – she has separation anxiety, but I know I do, too. (We took her to the vet yesterday to get her up-to-date on all her booster shots, and they gave us some trazodone for her to help with the anxiety of boarding and of going to the groomer.) It’s the longest trip my husband and I will have taken together since the last time we went in 2019. Instead of camping this year (since I didn’t want to figure out camping with a PAP machine), we’re staying at a tiny house resort across the street from the festival grounds where Song School happens, which is exciting but also unfamiliar. On top of the trip itself, I have a big final paper due for my one remaining summer class the Friday after we get back, so I need to start on that (thankfully I know what I’m writing about and got that approved by my professor, just waiting for the books I need to arrive so I can get going on it). And at work I’ve just kicked off the process of hiring a new person, and I know I have at least a couple more people I’ll be hiring in the next couple of months. It’s all just adding up to a lot – I have a tendency toward travel anxiety anyway, and all of these layers of stress are compounding into what feels like an unreasonable amount of nerves for something that is ultimately a thing I’m really looking forward to.
I’ve been thinking a lot about neurodivergence lately, and how that part of myself intersects with the other parts of me. I’m learning how to be gentler with myself, to acknowledge when I need accommodations in some situations, and to work out how to make those accommodations happen. Since I’m in a particularly stressful time (and a time that is going to continue to be stressful after I get back from Song School, as I’ll be taking 3 classes this fall on top of working full time), I’m really trying to focus on what my body needs and how to keep my nervous system a little more regulated amidst the stress. I am trying to lean into my self care and soul care practices that help keep me steady.
Thankfully, I have therapy this afternoon and can brainstorm additional regulatory tactics with my therapist. I’m grateful that, despite the stress, I’m feeling capable of handling everything. I know I have the capacity to do the things I need to do; I’m just learning how to honor that capacity without trying to power through things I don’t need to power through.
Anyway, I’ve rambled enough and I’m late in getting this posted, so I shall leave you with your weekly Nova photodump:
Not a morning doggoSleeping on dad’s pillowAnxious at the vet, but glad she’s not alone
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I’m slightly late getting this posted today, but here we are. I don’t have a lot of stuff to share by way of news this week, so I think I’m going to do something I haven’t done on here in a while and share a few things I’m grateful for lately:
Queer community care. Last week, my husband and I decided to put out a call to our local queer exchange on Facebook to see if someone would be willing to come over and give us some judgment-free help unearthing our kitchen, which has been some level of disaster basically since we moved in a year ago and hadn’t really been functional for at least a few months. We hoped if we could get some help cleaning and organizing that we could set it up more functionally for our neurodivergent brains to make food prep and cooking a lot more approachable. The response was overwhelming – so many people offered to help. We ended up hiring a fellow neurodivergent human who was an absolute delight to have over; they worked with us for four hours on Saturday and another three on Monday, and last night I finally got to cook in our kitchen for the first time in months. (We had tacos; they were delicious.) I am grateful that care for community is such a strong characteristic of the queer spaces I’ve been fortunate to be in.
D&D. About a month ago I connected with a new, in-person game with a group of folks I’d never met before. I wasn’t sure how it was going to go initially, but we’re 5 sessions in and I’m having a blast (even though my first character died after two sessions of play; I think the character I’m playing now is a better fit for this table anyway). I was a little worried that adding an additional recurring thing to my schedule (on top of work and school and regular life stuff) would be too much, but that chance to just play and escape into a story for a few hours every week is so important to me. I’m grateful that I landed in such a good group for my first in-person game in a long time.
Connection. On Sunday I was able to get lunch with a friend from undergrad who was in town. We hadn’t seen each other in years and we didn’t have a ton of time, but it was SO GOOD to get to catch up a little bit and celebrate how far we’ve both come. I also got to participate in a “queer writing party” that a friend hosted Sunday afternoon, and it was inspiring to share that space with folks and hear what other people were working on. I am grateful for these opportunities for connection in the midst of everything going on globally.
I will leave you, as ever, with your weekly dose of Nova:
Refusing to head inside from the parkHelping with the kitchen cleaning by cleaning out old peanut butter jarsSilly naps
Hello, dear readers! We’ve made it to another Thursday.
It’s been a decent week here, for the most part. The weekend was lovely. On Saturday, my husband and I attended a Zoom workshop that two of our beloved Song School teachers put on about tips and tricks for managing a neurodivergent brain. There was a lot of useful information and we’ve been working on starting to implement some of the tips this week. One of the big things we’re working on is having a quick check-in every morning to run through the major schedule items and tasks for the day, so that we are on the same page and can better support each other in getting things done. We also got some great reminders and tips about the difference between projects and tasks, and help in breaking down projects into tasks. Did I use what I learned in the workshop as an excuse to buy a new planner? …maybe. But all in all I’m excited to work a little more gentle structure into my day and have a broader toolset for the two of us to support each other.
I’m really enjoying the in-person D&D game I joined a few weeks ago. It’s been a bit of a tumultuous start – I was really excited about the character I created, but halfway through the second session, she died. It wasn’t malicious on the part of the DM – I got unlucky with my dice rolls. Thankfully, I had a backup character rolled up and ready to go. I was sad about the loss of the original character, but I actually think this new character will be a better fit for the group.
I only have two class sessions left of my four week intensive! I can’t believe it’s almost over already. It’s been a really good class, and while I’m overwhelmed by getting the last of the work done while having the first bigger paper of my longer class due right as this class ends, I’m confident I’ll be able to do it.
I’ll leave you with a photo of Nova from yesterday – there was a pigeon on a windowsill across the alley and she was absolutely TRANSFIXED:
Accidental Fudge 