Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear

You cannot really see the person in front of you.  Not in the world we live in now you can't.  They are an elaborately constructed edifice designed to protect them from the harsh realities of life and from nasty people.  You can't see the real them.  Not until you know them for a million years and then maybe not even then.  You would do better trying to feel your way.

The person in front of you cannot really see you.  Not in the world we live in now they can't.  You are an elaborately constructed edifice designed to ...

Pic by Vinoth Chandar

Penis

Kidicarus222

Penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis


~ Penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis ~


Penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis


~ Penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis ~


Penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis


~ Penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis ~ penis ~

Comedy Nose

Thanks to Sam Craft for the idea and the permission to post a post that I want to post.  The fact that she suggested that if we want to post about penises we should be entirely able to was more than enough encouragement for me to rush into my room and post this here penis post.

James Cubed Design

I must say though, to be brutally honest with you, a part of me feels like I don't have the right to post this penis post about penises because ... well, I've been in the realm of the virginal lately.  I would imagine that if I was my partner's penis reading this, I might feel a bit like there's a feast on my blog while in reality there's a bit of a famine in his pants.

Jack Two

See, now, this is my version of a penis post, one where I go way too far, just too far, and post rather too much information for your comfort levels (especially my partner, who doesn't like to be talked about at the best of times, let alone a discussion about his penis to be occurring on my blog, on the internet, in the public eye).

Okay, I think that's everything I have to say about penises right now.   If I think of anything more, I'll let you know.  Do feel free to make any comments you would like to make about penises in the comments section below.  Because it's not like it's really an area that's open for conversation in general, is it?  People don't sit at the restaurant table and casually remark about the state, good or bad, of their penises or their vaginas, do they?  I wonder why.  I mean, everyone's got one, just like everyone poos.  And nobody talks about that either.  Except for annoying people on the British version of Come Dine With Me and ... well, me, I guess.

Sugar Cubes and Lemons

So this, right:

For the sake of the populace, this song should carry a warning for your pancreas.  Like a truckload of cane sugar dumped right down your gullet and into your Diabetes Startup Centre, it is cloyingly sweet.  Even - dare I say it and risk the wrath of the females who adore these sorts of songs - evil.  Like aspartame.

I guess that makes me a not-girly-girl.  I just simply can't help it.  This sort of song to me is fluffery and frou frou and it has always madeth my toes to curl under.

I honestly didn't think this song could get any worse, ever.  That's until I saw a Family Guy episode a few nights ago.  Ever since then, Chris and that horrid pervert man singing it duet have been crowding my head in true earworm fashion and disturbing my peace.  I didn't think that song could ever get any worse.  But then it did.

I cannot insert the Family Guy video directly into this post because it makes me feel ill.  I have a love/hate relationship with that show.  When I'm feeling cold and fragile, it feels even more evil than Both for Each Other (Friends & Lovers).  And that's saying a lot, right?

And yet, on other days, when the beauty of life surrounds me and my body's current health level has climbed me a couple of flights up the stairwell, Family Guy can be damn funny.  Sure, it's acerbic and sorta (dare I say it?) male in its humour.  It regularly goes way overboard, far past the horizon of the bounds of convention.  But that's what it's there for, right?  That's the fun of it.  I get that.  Even though my getting is sometimes in small doses, and some days I could throw a brick through the TV when it feels nasty.  (But then really, everything feels nasty on those days and where I really need to be is in bed, or in the bathroom with a hose full of coffee enema up my bum.  But I guess you really didn't want to know that, right?)

Humour and music are both personal and come in lots of shapes and sizes, and have enough flavours to suit everyone's taste.  For some, what they do not like feels evil.  But most of the time it's not.  It's just not your bag.

But for me, if I have to choose, I would have to take Family Guy acidity over Both For Each Other AOR saccharine schmaltz.   The former is maybe not as officially sanctioned as the latter.  You're never going to be subjected to Family Guy-type humour at a public event as much as you will be harassed by Both For Each Other ear-torment.  Because it's romantic, right?

I don't see anything romantic about it at all.  If I had a choice, I would rather watch the entire history of Family Guy one episode after the other than listen to that song even once.

And even though that Family Guy clip seems so wrong in one way, it's one of the strange convolutions of life that this song in its wrongness feels more right to me than the original song in its horrid, sickening awful schmaltzyness.  Designed to appeal straight to the wallet of meringued-up brides, schmaltz is the unthinking woman's romance.  Straight from the bowels of the third ring of hell, there's very little about it that is romantic, as far as I'm concerned.

Speak to me reams of poetry, and I'll swoon.  I do have a romantic side.  But I do not wish to mistake schmaltz for romance.  In my heart, they are two rather different beats.

Sugar cube pic by Uwe Hermann under CC 2.5 licence (attribution and share-alike)

Writer's Block

Public domain pic

My body has gone backwards.  I'm really tired of this.  I can't tell you how many thousands of dollars I have spent on supplements and tests over the years.  Thousands.  I am struggling to work enough to crack 200 bucks a week.  So going on sickness benefits will mean that my income will effectively double.  Woohoo!

Health going backwards and fatigue flaring at the time when my partner could do with me contributing my financial share, cracks open the guilt vault (and I could drown in there), makes me feel more stressed, and then my adrenals have to deal with more, and so the snowball rolls.  This has been a snowfield I'm used to playing in in one way or the other.  Being back here though in the midst is the closest thing to hell I can think of.

What do the Buddhists say?  There are four different sorts of suffering?  I can't remember what the other three are but the fourth one is "Not being able to get what you desire."  That's me, that's my life, that's the roadblock (which granted I didn't put there.  But it's my responsibility to move it).

How do you say internalised oppression?  That's me.  I think The Secret has a lot to answer for but I do think there is several glimmers in there that are relevant.  I do think that in a certain way the reality we have is the one we've created.  And I have created, against my own wishes, roadblocks to being able to live the way I choose.  Nobody stopping me.  Just me.  And so it's a couple of rounds of EFT tapping every day, homework from the therapist:  "Even though I believe someone or something will always stop me living the life I choose, I deeply and completely accept myself."  EFT rocks.  It moves and shakes things.  I don't really believe it's going to move or shake this issue or others.  Hence the other round of EFT tapping about "Even though I don't believe anything will change ..."

Learned helplessness, anybody?

I need to get my website up and running.   A digital container to put the work in, you know?  I have the idea for a logo.  Her name's Speedy Snail.  Lots of swirls around her.  Lots speeding on in her head, the body snailing along behind.  I went back to bed today and spent several hours reading.  Nice.  It's what I need to do.  But I fight it.  Because I feel totally useless.  I don't know how to not be well after 14 years.  I don't know how to do it gracefully.  I just don't.

I can feel this same sort of self-sabotage going on in my writing career.  Two different arenas have published two of my essays in the last six months.  Have I resubmitted anything to either of them?  No.  I feel a reticence to do so.  I even queried The Big Issue about whether they'd be interested in another My Word piece about roosters.  Yep, send it on through, Lorraine says.  Have I?  No.  Granted, I haven't written it yet and though I haven't done so, I've been writing a fair bit of other stuff, which is heartily inspiring.  I remember once, years ago, I wondered if I ever would clear the river.  I had writer's block - a desire to write but I didn't know what to write about.  These days, while I still have those times where I don't know what to write about, I know what fixes it - writing.  Anything.  And then within a day the river's rushing again and it's not so much not knowing what to write, it's choosing what I want to write most, and having the energy and time to do it.  Nice, eh?

But that self-sabotaging thing about not wanting to submit stuff to places I've published in before?  I don't know what that is.  It's in one of the deep caves of my unconscious where I see it's effects without knowing it's there.  Those unconscious beliefs are funny little things when they start to become conscious.  There's a part of you that is looking in disbelief at this thing you've just realised you think.  That you've thunk maybe for years.  And while part of you know that this is true, and that bringing it up to your conscious mind is the first step in clearing it away, another part of you sits numb disbelieving it all.   This being human is not only a guest house, it's a weird one.  A Tim Burton guesthouse with creaky bits and doors that open onto black holes and awesome oak staircases and coolness.  Sort of like that teddy bear video I posted on here yesterday - a little gross, a little creepy, but really, in one way, rather sweet (I mean, who doesn't want a bon bon layer?  Yeah, I know, I know, there can be problems with the bon bon layer, as teddy's operation so amply demonstrated, but that's what teddy doctors are for.  And good teddy nutrition).

That self-sabotaging thing about not wanting to submit stuff to places I've published in before is a known unknown.  It's one of the things I say to myself so fast and so deeply in the undergrowth that I don't feel it or see it or feel its swish as it goes by.  But I see the effects of it.  In this post, in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Erika Dreifus reviews the sorta recently released book by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.  Titled Lean In:  Women, Work, and the Will to Lead Erika has this to say in response to it:

In this chapter, the overall message is that women suffer from underestimating their abilities more than men do. “[F]eeling confident–or pretending that you feel confident—is necessary to reach for opportunities. It’s a cliché, but opportunities are rarely offered; they’re seized.” From refraining from raising their hands in the audience to sitting on the sidelines rather than taking seats at the conference table, Sandberg shares examples of women holding themselves back.

For writers of fiction, poetry, and essays, one of the ways to “sit at the table” can begin, quite literally, with sitting at a table of fellow students and an instructor for a writing workshop. I won’t comment here on the ways that gender dynamics and stereotypes crop up in these situations, because I’ll digress to a point of no return (besides, you’ll get a glimmer of this in the next section, “Success and Likeability”).

But the VIDA count reminds us of other tables and other seats. Where are women “sitting” in those venues? Where do they show up at in the tables of contents and bylines and within prominent literary magazines and book reviews? VIDA and its proponents seek institutional change, but what if that isn’t enough? Some female writers who may not habitually submit their work may realize that—like the woman whose tweet is cited above—they need to take some steps themselves.

But as Sandberg observes, even when offered opportunities, women don’t always accept them. One of the most eye-catching accompaniments to this year’s VIDA count was Amy King’s interview with Tin House editor Rob Spillman, who described that earlier VIDA statistics had prompted Tin House “to take a deep look at our submissions.” One of Spillman’s most attention-grabbing revelations was grounded beyond the slush pile: “Although we solicited equal numbers of men and women, men were more than twice as likely to submit after being solicited. This even applies to writers I’ve previously published.”

 Yep.  I sure get that.  

Teddy Has an Operation

I love the kind of comedy that has you squirming your toes.  It's the combo of discomfort combined with funniness that makes it even funnier, I think.  This, this is gross.  And awesome.  And really, in the end, sorta sweet :)

Waiting Room

I’m sitting on the fourth floor of a hospital, in the waiting room with Andrea.  Not quite what Australian Crawl had in mind, though whenever someone opens the stairwell door at the end of the hallway a flood of sunlight pours in.  Outside is a golden May day of blue skies and autumnal-turning trees.  Inside, this waiting room is filling with women, most of whom are carrying large envelopes with x-rays inside of them.

“Don’t mind me if I go quiet,” Andrea says.  “I feel like talking at times, but then I drift off.”  It’s okay;  I understand.  I’m a bit of a drifter myself after all, even without sitting here waiting for a doctor to look at the lump I’ve discovered only two weeks prior.  And anyway, it’s before 9 am and neither of us have been morning people for a long time.  Not like when we were kids, and we got out of bed one hot summer morning and jumped into the swimming pool in our nighties.  I am still harbouring the hope that her lump is as benign as the sun coming through the stairwell door.  

One by one they are called – Anita, Barbara, Li.  I know Barbara’s name is Barbara because it is written on the side of her white envelope.  She has pink streaks in her hair to match her pink top.  When they call Andrea’s name the surreality goes up a couple of notches to 11.  What on earth is my cousin’s name doing, being called to go into that room?  She doesn’t have cancer, for fuck’s sake.  She can’t have.  It’s not fair.  But then when is it ever fair?  But both of her parents were claimed by it, and she has two kids and a husband and I don’t want her going anywhere for a very long time.  

She disappears into one of the doctor’s rooms, and is being told as we speak that yes, she does have cancer (she knew from the start), that it hasn’t spread, that she will need to go for a biopsy next week to determine what sort of cancer it is – slow-growing or aggressive.  We’ve known each other all our lives.  Our friendship has been solid since we were eight – the same age as her youngest son is now.  Her name just does not compute with people who have cancer. 

Across from me in the waiting room is a nervous lady with grey hair speckled with brown and sadness spilling out her eyes.  When she opens her wallet I see a picture of two cats.  She has a scarf round her neck and a nice shade of plummy lipstick on.  She looks scared.  She has frown lines and a big blue bag that she keeps shuffling through.  I wonder if her bag is as chaotic and disgusting as mine, with its bits of raggedy paper and random empty packets of things and crumbs lining the bottom.  She too gets out pen and paper from her bag and begins writing notes.  We are a couple of old-fashioned writers in a sea of smart phones.  Later, she examines the pictures on her hankie.  It is the same hankie I had as a child, with Australian flowers and their botanical names on it.  She looks so scared that I try to catch her eye to smile at her, but then I lose heart when she doesn’t look at me straightaway and I take to examining people’s shoes instead.

There is a plethora of coloured shoes going on at the moment.  Ballet flats that were last fashionable to wear back in the 80’s.  Still black predominates.  I count a tan pair, an orange pair, a pink pair, a yellow pair.

There is a TV on the wall which is broadcasting the usual muck and slime of morning commercial television – either fearmongering or saccharine sweet but little that has any relevancy for any day I ever live.  The Pick A Part ad comes on.  I was wondering where it had gone.  I know every word to that ad but I can’t remember what I walked into the room for three seconds ago.  It would be very nice to be able to take some parts of your brain that are holding useless information and transfer those bytes over into the short-term memory compartment.

An older woman comes in, accompanied by a couple steering a pram.  The older woman carries a bag that has a reproduction of Bieres de la Meuse, a print from the late 1800’s.  It is Art Nouveau and all curves and flowers and pretty women, and I wonder if her x-ray envelope is hidden inside that bag, or if she is a pro, who has been initiated already into the clan and doesn’t need to bring her x-rays along anymore.  

The couple with their baby take centre stage.  I look at the worried woman across from me.  Her face has softened and she smiles, like many other people, at this squalling little thing, who we were all like once.  Somewhere around four to six weeks old, I’d guess, she is wearing pink mittens to stop her scratching her face and matching pink booties.  She’s making snuffly mewling noises.  “Shhh,” her dad says.  “Shhh.”

I wonder whether the woman who is here for her appointment is the mother of the woman or of the man.  I take a guess and say the man.   The baby cries.  The mother of the baby, who is wearing red and black, moves into the most inconspicuous corner of the waiting room to feed her baby.  The woman, the mother and the father all watch.  This small little creature has them all tired and captivated.  “She’s on there.  She just doesn’t want to feed,” I hear the mother say, and she takes her baby out when she keeps crying.  Such a little thing, so dependent on them for her every need.

Everyone is on their phones.  I feel sick.  Different people get up and go into different rooms when their names are called.  Nadia, Anastasia, Marjorie.  The woman next to me is looking at pants on her mobile.  Row after row of disembodied legs sporting red, yellow, teal, black pants.

A woman in a mustard top receives a visit in the chair next to me from one of the hospital workers.  “Agnes is in Korea for four weeks, so I’ll be looking after you today,” the worker says.  “Yep, I’m still here!  How long’s it been since you were last here?  Three years?”

I was wrong.  The woman is related to the baby’s mother, not the father.  The mother and the woman speak to each other in a Eastern European dialect.  The woman hands the baby to her husband.  “Shhh,” he says to his baby, multitasking on his phone while she sleeps in his arms.  “Shhh.”

Out in the hallway there is a woman on a gurney, swaddled in white sheets and blankets and black straps, whether to restrain her or stop her falling off I’m not quite sure.  But she doesn’t look like she’s capable of doing much fighting to me.  The straps aside, she looks very cosy and comfy in her bed.

Most of the other women here probably have breast cancer.  They’ve been sent as a matter of urgency by their doctors – well, as urgently as the public hospital system allows for, anyway.  

It’s the waiting that does your head in, Andrea says, when we are out of the hospital and in the car on the way home, out again in the sun and under the sky.  When you know what you’re up against, at least you can do something about it.  She’s been reading online, accounts of fellow sufferers who found the experience of treatment easier, when there was something they were doing about it.  Once you have beaten the cancer, sometimes the depression can set in because you’re back again, waiting.

That’s understandable to me.  We need to frame our journeys, make a story of what is going on in our lives.  It’s why I’ve sat in this waiting room writing about the people in it.  When you are actively fight against something, like any captivating story it’s one that’s sharp, with contrasts, with heightened emotion.  When you’ve come down on the other side (if you’re lucky enough to have an other side), and you’re waiting for something to not return, that makes it a little bit more difficult.  Many people who have beaten cancer are surprised at the emotions that come out the other end.  How do you frame waiting in a captivating narrative?

It’s a problem I wish upon her, a waiting that is hopefully one of the extremely long variety.

Tantony - Ananda Braxton-Smith

I could only think about my brother from a distance.  From a distance he could be an idiot or a son-of-the-moon;  from a distance but a different angle he could be a prophet and a Venerable.  Right up close to him, though, he was just a mess of whittering and birdshit - and with my face, too.

He'd taken our face to town, into the market and the harbour, and he'd done and said such things as made folk stare at me slip-eyed and mutter.  I'd learned to sit dumb as rock and deaf as bugs.

After a while longer I'd learned to hurl my mind-eye away.

Faraway.  Into the clouds and out to where the sea and sky meet.  Out there I could snug into the skytowers, see only my feet dangling, hear only the winds rushing.  Faraway, there was only the blue water spreading far below, my legs swinging above, between them just clouds and seabirds.

Tantony by Ananda Braxton-Smith makes me yearn for somewhere I've never been and which doesn't exist, but whose scent nevertheless comes in on the occasional breeze.  Her writing is so densely layered, like a decades-old compost heap, rich and earthy.  I read books too greedily, consuming them like a Westerner, eager for the next sentence so that while my racing mind thinks, "I didn't quite get all of the gristle out of that last para; I should go back and read it again,"  by then I'm already halfway through the next, swallowed by the too-small seconds of life, eating the words whole without chewing.  Ananda's writing is so lush that I actually want to go back again, just to roll the words round in my mouth one more time, to be a little startled by what I see upon second chewing.  No mean feat.

Characters feel defined and at the same time mysterious and shifting.  Boson Quirk is half in this world and half in the next.  His increasingly bizarre behaviour (bipolar psychosis we would probably call it today) put them on the outside with the townsfolk, and now his twin sister Fermion has begun hearing the voices that haunted her brother before the bog swallowed him whole.  Dreams and visions versus mental illness;  a desire to understand the real beyond the superstition, to find that which she can stand on through the harshness of the world, swirl around Fermion as she sets out on a journey of her own to try to find some answers about her brother, herself, her family, and how to keep them from falling apart.  The setting is dreamy, where everything blends into one so that your footing in the story feels sometimes as precarious as the bog upon which the fictional Carrick stands.  Ananda's writing shines different lights from different angles so that I suspect she would achieve fresh-seeing and poetry and otherworldliness via a novel set in contemporary times.  I would really love to read that.

Though I didn't want to leave here.  This is the second book in the Secrets of Carrick series.  The protagonist of Merrow, the first book in the series, Neen, lives in the village of the island of Carrick while in Tantony the Quirks live on the outskirts in the bog.  All three books in the series are stand-alone stories, occurring over one summer in the fictional Middle Ages island of Carrick.

Fermion's poetic tongue that gives an otherworldly feel to the prose.  Braxton-Smith's sentences drip beauty and dreamy, and have that "once upon a time" feel of the fairytale where time is both nowhere and somewhere, inside and outside.  Not everybody's cup of tea I'm sure, but it's what makes this book so beautiful to me, a meditative slow-down. 

Having said all of that, it always amazes me how it has to be the right time for you and a story to come together and alchemise.  When I first read Merrow last year something fell flat for me in its reading.  Whether digestive, hormonal, seasonal or mental I can't rightly say.  But with Tantony, I was there.

This book is categorised for ages 13-19 years but it defies that categorisation.  I'm 42 and I can't wait for the next installment. It doesn't feel just like a book for young adults.  It feels ageless.  If there are any adults who are resisting reading fiction that is categorised as young adult, there are a lot of wonderful books you are missing out on.   This is one of them.

Part of the Australian Women
Writers Challenge 2013

At the expense of digression I must say that I knew Ananda in another life.  But still I would praise this book even if her, Peggy Hailstone and I were not fellow students together at Deakin Uni in the late 1990's, a triumvirate of mature-aged Creative Writing students in a mass of young 'uns.  I live in the same area now as she did when I sat in her kitchen eating homemade basil pesto and pasta, and I have a horrid, horrid feeling swirling in the pit of my guts that the person I saw smiling at me outside the supermarket one day a year or so ago was Ananda.  But (a) I was having a bad, bad day and (b) I am awful with memory, faces and names and (c) I'm vague as to be almost useless.  On that day I was feeling weird and depressed and paranoid, and I made the snap assumption that the woman smiling at me was either (i) mad or (ii) mistaking me for someone else and so (rather strange behaviour for me) I put my head down and walked into the supermarket.  It took two weeks for me to link the face with my bog-crap memory so that one day, driving down the road, Ananda's name swirled to me out of the mists of the late 90's.  Now, looking at her photo in this interview, I am rather perturbed that it was in fact her.  And so I just want to take the opportunity to say that if that was you, Ananda, I apologise, from the midsts of my premenopause and pyroluria to say sorry for being such a weird, rude ole cow :)

I Don't Want to Want You to Like Me

I had a dream the other night.  It was a pastiche of (mostly) male figures telling me no, or in some way or the other to shut up.  I have that person living inside of me.  I am smoking him out piece by piece.  In one part of the dream, I stood bare-breasted before someone I'd known as a teenager and didn't even realise while I was speaking that I was exposed, naked and vulnerable.

Women still hold themselves back in ways that men do not.  I don't want to want you to like me.  I want to devolve myself of that mass entity I've taken on through my childhood and through the culture that makes me worry about what you think of me.  I want to be me and to remember that what you think of me is none of my business.  I want to be me so that if you don't like me or who I am, then you can pretty much lump it, go away, learn to like it, learn to bear with it, or just plain fuck off.

I don't want to want you to like me.   I want you to either like me or not like me, and if you do that's great, and if you don't that's great too.  Because you are fickle with tastes that may or may not include me.  And I'm me.  Not to everybody's taste.  But being me is what I am trying to be, and I suspect it will take my entire life to learn to do it right.  There were some pretty big setbacks from the start.

But it's my birthright.

Kim-e-sens

Eight Months into the Pyroluria Journey

I've been taking pyroluria supplements for about eight months now.  For a few months before that I was taking B6/zinc in pyroluria-sized doses.  So have I noticed an improvement in my health in that time?

Well, I wish it was that simple.  When it comes to health issues, sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards.  And I think that's what's going on with me.

If pyroluria existed in one compartment of my body and affected no other parts, and if taking supplements meant that I simply fast-tracked from point P to point A, then I would be able to have a much clearer indication of where I'm at and what's going on.  But sometimes getting your body to do what it needs to do can create some extra problems along the way.

I know from hair mineral analysis and by my doctor's assessment respectively that I am a slow oxidiser and an undermethylator.  This means that my body has accumulated a whole lot of gunk in its travels that it's been unable to get rid of through the proper detoxification channels.  This is why I need to do extra things like have saunas and coffee enemas to help it along.  It's why my body has sequestered away in its tissues certain things like copper because it didn't know what else to do with them.  Better to shove them away in a room wherer you can close the door than let them float around in your system doing constant damage.

The problem with the process of taking stuff that my body needs to function better is that it begins opening up all those doors where it shunted things away in years gone by and it begins doing some spring cleaning.  But the spring cleaning can happen too fast, and if your body struggles to get rid of it of all of this vacuumed-up stuff, like mine does, then it can tend to recirculate in your body.  Not nice.  All of this spring cleaning has put extra pressure on my kidneys, my adrenal glands, and suddenly I find myself back in the land of adrenal fatigue and pending sickness benefits.  So I am suspecting that maybe I got too excited about spring cleaning and went too fast.  But you sometimes don't know these things except in hindsight.

When my doctor told me that it can take undermethylators up to two years to get right, I didn't really want to hear that news.  But it turns out that I think she may just well be right.  Time to climb up onto that Zen ledge, the one that sits above the raging waters of loss and frustration, and watch my emotions and frustrations pass.  Things are as they are.  There are ways of finding peace no matter what situation you are in.  You just have to stop believing that commonly-held idea that a bad situation means no peace to be found.  It's not true.  It's just hard to get there.  Impossible if you don't believe you can.

Adrenal fatigue is a true shocker ~ you can't really know how unsafe and vulnerable a body can feel until you're stuck in one that's lost its muffler a few corners back.  Makes it harder ~ but not impossible - to lean into the curves and ride it out.

Knowing why this is happening is helpful.  Doing what I need to help my adrenal glands heal again is a long process ~ a full-time job all its own.  And knowing that I am on the right track is comforting, even while it feels like it's flung me backwards into the saltbush. 

Messing about with clay - one of the things I need to return to
to help my body heal itself.