self-care

Ten Years of Accidental Fudge

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! It’s been a pretty lackluster week for me so far – I’ve been struggling to stay focused and am feeling pretty burned out on a lot of things. But I’m still here, and this is the penultimate week of my fall semester, so that end, at least, is in sight.

Unbelievably, today marks 10 years since the beginning of this blog! What started as a weekly blog about my medical transition has morphed into a weekly update on my life. I think I’m still in single digits for the number of weeks I’ve forgotten to blog, although I’ve skipped some weeks intentionally when traveling. I’m pretty sure this is the longest I’ve consistently stuck with any one creative project in my life.

Earlier this year, I had sort of thought that I would make it to the 10 year anniversary of the blog, and then maybe retire it. After all, 10 years is a nice round number, it’s been an impressive run, and I feel good about what I’ve put into it, but I also feel like I’m often struggling to find something to talk about when I sit down to write.

Now that it’s actually here, though, I’m a little more torn. On the one hand, I do feel like I’m ready to move onto other projects, and maybe it is time to let this one go. On the other hand, this is a time of year where I just have less energy, where I feel a desire to hibernate, and I’m more likely to give up on things in general, so I am wrestling with the decision more than I expected to. Do I want to put this blog to bed because I actually think that it’s served its purpose and it’s time to move on, or do I just want to not have to think of something to write about every week because I’m tired?

Here’s what I’m going to do. For now, I’m going to put this blog on an indefinite hiatus. The site will stay up, and I might still post from time to time, but I’m going to give myself a break from the expectation of a weekly post. Once I’ve made an official decision about what’s next (either for this blog or for future projects), I’ll post an update here.

Thank you to the friends and family who’ve been tuning in here every week. Until I figure out exactly what the next thing is, I’ll leave you, as usual, with some Nova photos:

Tired

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

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:

Home Again

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I had a lovely time in Chicago; somehow, miraculously, I didn’t end up with covid. I got to spend some really wonderful time with some of my queer gaming community while I was there, who I miss dearly. While the work part of the trip was pretty exhausting (it was productive and good, but just required a lot more being “on” socially than I’m used to), the social part was life-giving.

I got home Sunday afternoon, and made the mistake of not giving myself a recovery day, so this week at work has been rough. I ended up calling in sick today after waking up with a massive headache; today I’m going to try to focus on resting a bit and also catching up on the last of the homework that’s due before class tonight. We adjusted the dose of one of my meds this week, and one of the side effects has been random waves of nausea, which has not helped anything on this week when I’m already feeling pretty low on mental cutlery.

Tomorrow I have some fun plans as well as a meeting with the person who’s in charge of practicum stuff at my seminary to talk through when I can start that officially. I’m hoping this weekend can be restful and that I can start next week with a bit more energy than I had this week.

Nova was very excited to have me home, and also very upset on Monday when the end of Daylight Savings Time meant that I was working an hour later than she thought I should be. She’s adjusted pretty well the past couple of days, but on Monday she had Opinions. Please enjoy the Nova photos for this week:

Song School 2023

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! We are back from Colorado, and while re-entry into work and everyday life has been a little rough, I’d rather focus on the lovely time we had at Song School this. year.

We dropped Nova off at the boarding facility early in the morning the Friday before Song School, so that she wouldn’t need to be around for the packing and pre-trip chaos. It was really weird coming back to the house without her, but it did make it easier to get everything pulled together. Saturday we did the entire drive to Colorado in one day! It took almost exactly 16 hours, including breaks. It was a relatively uneventful trip, except that at some point in Iowa, the car started making some knocking sounds. None of the dashboard lights were coming on, and nothing felt off as we were driving, so we kept going until partway through Nebraska, when it was clearly getting progressively worse. My husband finally ended up looking up a video on YouTube that confirmed my suspicion that we might be low on oil. We pulled off at a gas station in Nebraska, added a couple of quarts, and hit the road again – adding the oil immediately silenced the knocking sounds and it was smooth sailing after that. Shortly after arriving in Colorado we hit a brief but intense cloudburst – all I could do was follow the taillights in front of us. I ended up doing most of the driving, by my own choice – there was something meditative and freeing about the drive that allowed me to let go of everything at home, everything work and school related that I was stressed about, and just be present. It meant that when we finally got to Song School, I was able to feel like I really landed there.

We stayed in a hotel Saturday night, and then Sunday afternoon we got to check into the tiny house where we stayed for the duration of Song School!

It was slightly smaller than the tiny house we stayed in last year, but still sufficiently roomy for us and our guitars for the week. We ran into other Song Schoolers at check-in, which was fun. Later that afternoon we were able to check in to Song School itself. We scoped out the campgrounds there to see how many friends we could find before turning in early in an effort to set ourselves up for success for the rest of the week.

Song School itself was really lovely! I really tried to listen to my body, and I took a few class periods off throughout the week to just sit by the river and write. I ended up getting the first draft of a new song written. On Tuesday night I got to perform at the open stage; I brought my husband and a couple of dear friends up on stage with me for harmony and we got the audience singing along by the end:

The week was, for the most part, exactly what I needed it to be.

We ended up breaking the drive back into two days – We did the first 13-ish hours to Ames, IA on Friday, and the final 3 hours or so home on Saturday. I’m glad we picked the safer choice rather than trying to push through.

I feel like I learned a lot, as always, but this year the lessons were more subtle, and more about rest than about action. I’m still figuring out how to integrate that sense of presence and being in the moment into my everyday life. I’m so grateful to my Song School friends and family for a beautiful and much needed week away.

And before I go, here are some Nova photos from her adventures at doggo camp and the last few days back at home:

Happy News

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! It’s a bit of an off week here – I’m on PTO all week in order to be able to wrap up my summer class before also being on PTO all of next week for Song School. But before I get into any of that, some happy news:

Mouse got adopted on Saturday! We were down to the wire for finding her a new home, but Friday afternoon the adoption coordinator called to let us know she’d gotten an application from someone who was very excited to meet Mouse. We went in on Saturday and it was really a perfect fit – Mouse’s new mom lives out in the suburbs in a house with a good-sized yard and a 15 year old beagle. She’s been sending us occasional updates and Mouse looks so much more relaxed already. So while it’s a little sad and weird to not have her here anymore, overall it’s a good thing and the fact that she landed in such a perfect spot has made this a lot easier emotionally than we expected.

This week has been busy, but good. Monday we got to connect with our kid, a young trans chosen family member who calls us their trans dads – they were up on the north shore of Minnesota with their parter and their partner’s family. We had a lovely time hanging out and catching up – I hadn’t gotten to see them in person in four years, so it was extra wonderful to be able to hug them and hear how they were doing face-to-face.

Tuesday was mostly a rest and recovery day. Yesterday I wrote all seven pages of the first draft of my final paper for my summer class before running all over town doing pre-trip errands. This morning I had therapy, we had virtual breakfast with a dear friend, and now Nova and I are hanging out at home while my husband heads over to their parents’ house to help their family out today. I’m hoping to finish my paper today.

Tomorrow we’re taking Nova to the boarding facility early in the morning before coming home to pack – we figured we’d wait to start the packing until she was out of the house, since this week has been stressful enough for her already. And then we leave on Saturday and Song School starts on Sunday! I can’t wait to be back in that place with those people.

There will be no blog next week because I’ll be at Song School trying to stay off-grid as much as possible. In the meantime, please enjoy these Nova photos!

Winding Down

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I spent most of yesterday half-convinced it was already Thursday, so I’m glad it’s finally here.

We’re winding down our last week with Miss Mouse, and I’m having lots of feelings about it. I’m also trying to wrap up a bunch of stuff at work before I take two weeks of PTO. Next week I’m going to mostly be working on wrapping up my summer class and getting my final paper done for that, and the following week is Song School! So there’s a lot to look forward to amidst the big feelings about saying goodbye to our little Mouse.

I’m very ready to wrap up school for the summer. I’m really enjoying my Buddhist Scriptures class…and I’m really starting to feel the fact that I didn’t get any time off between spring and summer term. Thankfully, after this class wraps up I’ll have about a month before fall classes start.

Last weekend I did a fun project – I built a mechanical keyboard with a case made out of (generic) Lego! I bought the kit online after seeing several social media ads for it. I had a lot of fun putting it together, and I’m really enjoying typing with it! Here are some photos of the process:

Other than that, I’m just trying to keep my head above water at work for the next couple of days. I really need this PTO. Thankfully I didn’t feel like I really needed it until this week, but if I wasn’t taking this time off, I’d be on the fast track to burnout right now.

I will leave you, as always, with some doggo content:

Learning and Adapting

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

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:

Looking for Bright Spots

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

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:

Grateful for Community

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

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!

Short Week, Long Week

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday! I’ve been all discombobulated about what day it is this week – we had Monday off for Juneteenth, and I think not a single day so far this week has felt like what it actually is.

Despite it being a four day work week, it’s been a long one so far. Work has been fairly hectic, and I had to do a presentation for my class on Tuesday night (which went well, despite Mouse insisting on making an appearance in the middle of it). It’s also going to be a somewhat busier-than-usual weekend – Twin Cities Pride is this weekend, and I’m going to be volunteering at my seminary’s booth for a couple hours on Saturday (after I take Nova to the groomer for a much-needed brushing out).

Mouse got another adoption application yesterday; they sound like a good potential fit, so we’re waiting to hear back from the rescue about scheduling a meet and greet. The person showed interest in a few different dogs, so definitely no guarantees, but fingers crossed. As much as I don’t want to say goodbye to Mouse, it’s breaking my heart to see how panicked she gets every time we go outside, no matter what we do. Once she does find her forever home, we’ve decided we’re going to pause on looking for a second dog at least until I’m done with school. This has been a wonderful experience in a lot of ways, but it’s also been a lot of added stress, and I think I need to be more realistic about my capacity right now.

I think that’s where I’ll end it this week. As always, I’ll leave you with some doggo content: