Dear Soul, do you wake up during this infernal pandemic and wonder which way is up?
You’re not alone. While I’ve learned to keep my challenges offline, this season is maddening for every soul. We endure this pandemic of ten million paper cuts, lives forever altered in ways we don’t yet comprehend. And that’s if we survive.
Those prone to depression are depressed. If you drink, you’re drinking like a champ. Sleeping too much. Crushing insomnia. Losing it a hundred times a day over jobs and kids and lost opportunities and sick loved ones and money. You’re not weak simply because you can’t grow another set of shoulders. You’re HUMAN.
Go easy on yourself. You know that list of “shoulds” you keep? Things like I should eat less and I should move more and I should and I should and I should.
Tear up your shoulds.
Ferry your dear soul through this season however you must. Don’t apologize for giving yourself every single thing you need. You matter, dear soul. You do.
What’s the last movie you saw in a theater?
24 January 2020. Knives Out. I found these tickets in a random coat pocket. I managed to squeeze in one more theatrical release – Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. – before the world shut down.
I’ve tried to replicate the theater experience at home, but it’s not the same. I pop a jumbo batch of popcorn and slather it with butter and salt. A book club gave me a wine glass that holds almost a full bottle of wine. I bed down with these comforts and try to escape into a film, but it’s not the same.
I miss hearing other people laugh. The concerto crunch of popcorn and stupid pre-show games. Even stepping in spilled Coca-Cola, because it means a stranger was in the room with me. We escaped the world together.
Do you miss seeing movies at the theater? Or are you fine streaming them at home?
Recent Reads Friday: Calling Bullshit The Art of Skepticism in the Data Driven World by Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West
Where do I even start? Our world is engulfed in a holocaust of bullshit. Online. In interviews and chatrooms and publications, people from every stripe say ANYTHING, share ANYTHING without caring whether it’s true.
Having lived through the horrific lies of 2016 and forward, I read this book to determine what I can do to stay informed without sifting through literal truckloads of bullshit.
What did I learn?
Staying ahead of bullshit is HARD. Lying is easy. Debunking lies takes 1000 times the effort. I keep to a few trusted sources for information. I don’t trust links on social media. And I check everything.
In fact, MTM and I made some decisions about how we support journalism as a result of this read. We both support The Guardian with individual subscriptions and added gifts for climate coverage. We subscribe to The Atlantic to benefit from longer-form stories crafted with nuance. And we subscribe to Dwell to coat our eyes with modern design. On weekends, we purchase paper editions of The New York Times to peruse with our coffee. For a right-leaning check on our content bubble, we rely on The Hill.
➡️ I purchase every new book featured with my own funds. I do not offer endorsements in exchange for a feature. My opinions are honest assessments of books I read, enjoy, and believe worthy of your time. Creators cannot create if people fail to support their work with actual money. I am doing my part to support worthy writers in many genres and career stages.
Meditation isn’t for everyone. For too long, it wasn’t for me.
I couldn’t sit still, shut down my brain, or breathe without a hundred noisy thoughts accosting me per second. Which makes my decision to take up daily meditation during lockdown more baffling even now, almost a year into my practice. If any effort was doomed to fail, it was me plus a meditation cushion plus five or ten minutes of stillness.
At first, meditation was like running: miserable agonizing interminable boring torture. But a switch flipped, much like what happens to crazy runners when training for a marathon or double marathon or other extreme forms of awfulness I will never, ever attempt. Those ten minutes of silence became vital, like air, a central part of who I am.
It doesn’t always keep me from obsessing. I’m still needy and sometimes grope to use my tools. No one can fill my holes but me. Meditation is caulk. A plug. The gold that glues cracked porcelain back together. Weatherstripping for the soul.
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY!
Here’s to you! Thank you for choosing to spend time in my microscopic corner of the web. I raise a glass to you on Valentine’s Day and every day. I’m more grateful for you than I can say.
How are you spending this Valentine’s Day holiday?
Narcissists don’t respect boundaries.
I grew up in a narcissistic household. I’m still trying to unpack whether it turned me into a narcissist or fed my intense desire to please and process externally. For much of my life, my tolerance for toxic behavior has been off-the-charts, because I was never good enough, too sensitive, selfish. Gaslighting was an Olympic sport. In my family, apologies are always I’m sorry you feel that way. I don’t know why you have to be so sensitive selfish pitiful. And besides, you did X to me.
I started questioning my own narcissism in 2019. Why did I expect people to be there for me in unreasonable ways? Why did I turn to people who set the same boundary, and then get upset all over again because the boundary was still there? And why did I blame them for failing me when I really failed myself?
I still don’t know whether I’m a narcissist. Maybe that’s a good thing. Most narcissists adamantly insist they aren’t. I’m trying to be a better soul, both in setting my own boundaries and in respecting the boundaries of others. I have several dear friends who talk me through what it means to be normal, not by listening to me obsess about myself but by showing me what normal is. I watch and listen. Take notes. And am beyond grateful for having the courage to set my own boundaries and nurture truly meaningful relationships.
12 Comments
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Hope you have just the right amount of snow, Beth. ❤️❤️
So far , so good
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All we can do is listen to our little internal voices…the ones we know are true. They are torches in the darkness we must all navigate.
Some people are better at that than others. The most insidious part of gaslighting is the attack on one’s inner voice. I’ve lived much of my life not really knowing what’s true, questioning my inner voice at every turn. My mistake has been leaning on others to help me sift through the piles when it’s up to me to do it myself. Well, my mistakes are legion, but that’s one of my biggest. ?
I think the key to hearing those voices, or THAT voice, depending, is learning to be still. That is much easier said than done.
For me, it’s become more a case of acceptance. I can’t change what I survived; I don’t always respond the proper way or make the right choices; but I keep untangling the knots to try to get to THAT voice. I grow from the effort, however imperfect, and I move on. It’s hard to explain, and anyway, I stopped trying to explain myself and my feelings to others in 2019. Putting that confusion here (or anywhere) never gives me what I need. I found ways to give myself what I need, and when I can’t, I basically stay away from everyone. Ha.
I think Knives Out may have also been the last movie I saw at the theater, but I can’t say for sure. I wasn’t keeping track. I don’t miss the popcorn because I’m not a popcorn eater, but as with you, I miss being around people and hearing others laugh or gasp. My friend/roommate and I have been watching a lot of Marvel movies and series lately and in the past year have watched some excellent shows on Hulu and Netflix. The money we would have spent at the theater may have gone to streaming subscriptions.
My meditation is in the morning when I wake up and refuse to get out from under the warm blankets right away. It feeds my soul to lay there and not have a reason to be in a rush.
Have a wonderful Valentine’s Day, Andra. Enjoy with MTM! I will be at home with my roommate and the cat, probably watching more Marvel adventures.
How much snow do you have? I think about you every time we talk to MTM’s mom.
I haven’t pulled the trigger on streaming. What are some of your favorite shows/series? (If you have time to come back and say.) I’m actually reading more than I ever have as an adult. I do “Recent Reads Friday,” but I actually read Calling Bullshit while I was on residency in Iceland (August/September 2020). I’ve already filled out the balance of 2021’s Fridays with books read. I may have to rethink how I present those. Ha. And I’m proud that I buy them all.
Meditation can happen anywhere. I often practice in bed, especially with longer classes. I don’t blame you for burrowing under the covers. It’s cold up there!
Thanks for the Valentine wishes. We started a tradition of stay-tioning in a local hotel to break up the monotony of being home all the time. We’re spending a night around Valentine’s at the hotel. It helps the local economy, and they do a great job making us feel safe. MTM is vaccinated, so he does all our errands (though he did them before because he worried about my issue and how it might react to covid.) I basically never leave the house. So this helps me deal with my burgeoning agoraphobia, too. Ha. I’m kidding. But I’m surprised how content I am to stay home for weeks at a time after years on the road. I could just as easily be on the road once this is over. I miss it. But I’m not unhappy one way or the other. Maybe that’s what growth looks and feels like.
Appleton had its first named snowfall of the winter last week with about 8″ of snow. That was on top of a couple of inches that were already on the ground. We’ve been lucky here as most of the snow has veered south, but I would take it over the deep freeze we are currently in.
Are you okay with blood and guts and sex on TV? A little historical fiction? The shows we got “into” have all of that. Hell on Wheels was on Netflix, but now it moved to AMC+. Story centers around a man working for the transcontinental railroad and it contains a villain that makes you want to throw something at the TV. “Turn” is the story of an actual spy ring that existed during the Revolutionary War. Another villain to hate, on Netflix. Vikings is on Hulu except for the last season, which is on Amazon Prime. Pretty bloody, but there is some history here. We also watched Last Kingdom on Netflix, which has Vikings fighting the English for control and shares some of the history of the show Vikings. Netflix has four seasons of Outlander, but the 5th is only on Starz. That is a time travel love story that starts in Scotland in the 1700’s and ends up in America by the end of the 3rd season. Nudity, sex, and some violence, based on a series of books by Diana Gabaldon. And, finally, A Discovery of Witches on AMC+, Shudder or Sundance, it is a captivating love story of a vampire and witch searching for a book and its meaning.
My favorite book of 2020 was “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson, which recounts the story of the Great Migration (African Americans moving from the south to the north during Jim Crow laws) from around 1900 to 1960. Isabel tells the stories of three separate people that are both fascinating and heart-breaking and opened my eyes to the horrors that existed in this country with racism.
Have a wonderful Valentine stay-cation. I miss being with my friends, hugs, stopping for coffee, being able to travel, etc., but I’m willing to wait until it’s safe again, for all of us.
I’ll watch anything. Ha. Thanks for these recs. I’m going to make a list for my upcoming quarantine. ❤️
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