Lisa Marie Blair

Statuses

  • 345 // Grey Day

    The weather has turned wintry again. I’d hoped to work outside a little or fit a walk in before the temperature dropped, but the morning warmth never arrived and the clouds carried too much gloom. The cold kept me inside, bored and irritable, and time slowed to a crawl and I grew more and more anxious to return home.

    I did try to keep a positive attitude through the grey day. I’m still feeling good physically and any way a boring day is better than a bad day, right? I tired, but I didn’t get far with that. There was just not enough excitement, laughter, progress or accomplishment to boost my mood.

    I think I’m just missing the warmth and sunshine from the first half of the week. More than that, I’m longing for the days when I could leave work and walk over to the coffee shop to read or write for a while before anyone even knew I was gone. I can’t wait until Spring, or the coronavirus vaccine, or whenever the world might open up again and those third spaces I hardly used and always took for granted can offer my that escape I need.

    I love my home, and work is never as bad as it could be or as bad as I think it is, but I need more than that routine. I need a place that puts me among other people, where I feel both part of the community and apart. A place that offers a new perspective.

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  • 344 // Rebuild Endurance

    This morning is off to a nice, smooth start. I got up on time and made it through my routine easily. I’ve started thinking of each day as beginning the night before and sticking to a bedtime routine that helps me prepare that included going over my to do list, getting my bags and clothes ready, and spending some time cleaning. This week my stress levels are notably lower, and I’m spending less time laying awake at night with worry.

    I think getting back into my daily meditation groove is helping too. I didn’t realize how much I had missed, or needed, those 10 to 15 minutes of focusing on body and breath every morning. It’s hard not to beat myself up over the months’ long lapse but I’m countering it with plenty of praise for taking up the practice again.

    Symptom-wise, I only continue to improve. Some side effect of the new meds is joint pain and headaches, but even those discomforts are getting better with time. Every day my energy and drive increase and so does my ability to find purpose and joy.

    The doctor mentioned that a big contributor to my fatigue may be a depletion serotonin levels. I had no idea that so much of the body’s supply of the “happy chemical” was made and utilized in and by the gut. I’ve been advised to manage my emotions and rebuild endurance through time, rest, and plenty of self-care and forgiveness. The journey so far is easier than expected. It helps to have so much to be grateful for.

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  • A Psychological Quark

    I write because…well, the best I can say for it is it’s a psychological quark of mine developed in response to whatever personal failings I have.”

    — Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays

  • 343 // Self-Care Is Medicine

    I was meant to be at work today but instead was forced to stay home in bed by a nasty neck pain/tension headache combo that no cream, sleeping position, or pain reliever would touch. I worried I’d be incapacitated all day, but a few extra hours spent resting in dark and silence did the trick, and by mind morning I felt a lot more like a human being again.

    I had hoped not to need to miss anymore work for a while since I’ve been feeling so much better, but medications, and coming off of medications, come with their own side effects. My body is only adjusting.

    There was some good news, too. For the first time in many, many months I had an appointment with my doctor that was all positivity and hope.

    One interesting things we talked about was the increasing effect my mental state is going to have on my symptoms from now on. It turns out that because of all the ongoing inflammation and scarring, my gut will never be the same. My system is going to be a little more sensitive than most, a little more at the mercy of outside influence.

    I will have to get used to a new normal, and that means listening and acknowledging not just my body, but my feelings too.

    Everyone’s gut is affected by emotion, but for someone like me who’s gut has sustained so much damage, every bad day and stressful situation is going to mean discomfort and distress. That means getting enough sleep, meditating, exercising, journaling, taking time for myself and doing the things I love are much more than necessities. They are now treatment.

    They are medicine that must be taken daily as prescribed, as scheduled, as needed.

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  • Big Snow

  • Hit Em Where It Hurts

    Sunshine, bathe me, lately life’s been crazy
    Your Eyes, tell all, we outside with it, your call
    Move me, Need Me, care about it, breath deep
    You see, what I miss, holdin on to ya with a tight grip
    Light Lit, no cap, heart spilled all over the Floor mat
    Tongue out, I don’t know how to hold that
    Nowadays I don’t really want to hold back

    So I hit em where it hurts
    So I hit em where it hurts, (Set sail, lighthouse, Search)

  • 339 // I Don’t Want to Go Back

    This morning is adhering a lot closer to plan than the last few have. I’m up before the sun, my favorite time of day as long as I get to spend it sipping coffee and reading in bed next to a sunny window rather than stumbling through the beginning of the workday routine, and from here things are only looking up. I have nowhere to be and nothing much at all I have to do.

    These days, these not quite work days but not quite weekends, are quickly becoming a large source of peace and fulfillment for me. I’m concerned about how hard it’s going to be to return to a full-time work schedule after the turn of the new year, and even more so after the corona virus vaccine becomes widely available and distributed.

    The pandemic has really put into focus what matters, and at the top of that list is time. It’s become clear how much of it I have been giving up, how much we’ve all been giving up. Forty hours—and often more!—a week spent doing what? I love my job, but it isn’t for me. I don’t do it because I love it; I do it to survive.

    I have to give up my life in order to live? It’s all so contradictory, depressing, and, the longer the pandemic wears on, infuriating.

    I want the pandemic to end, but I do hope life doesn’t just go back to normal after it’s safe to leave our homes and be within six feet of each other again. I don’t want to go back to working so many hours a week. I don’t want to go back to feeling guilty for staying home when I’m sick. I don’t want to go back to long meetings, and crowded offices, and impossible expectations.

    Sadly, I suspect everything in the workplace will go back to the way it was and faster than I can adjust physically or emotionally. People are just too happy with what is familiar even if a little change, uncomfortable adjustment, and imagination is all it takes to give a world with a little more balance, peace, and, most importantly, time.

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  • Sever the Sightlines

    [S]haming has social meaning. It characteristically results in a desire to sever the sightlines between the self and the other. We talk about wanting to hide our faces and the characteristic look of shame—the head bowed, the eyes lowered. But that’s not the only way of achieving such separation. Rather than hide, one can instead do away with the onlooker. ‘He who is ashamed would like to force the world not to look at him, not to notice his exposure. He would like to destroy the eyes of the world,’ as Erik Erikson famously put it (1963, 227).

    — Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

  • Civilization Is Relative

    The Invention of Race // Throughline Podcast

    “[Franz] Boaz introduced ideas into American life that shape how we think about the world to this day. Race is a construct, culture is relative, Western civilization is not inherently greater. History is not linear, and neither is human progress.”

  • 338 // A Minor Mistake

    Yesterday I was grateful for modern medicine, today I loath the entire American health care industry.

    Long story short, I made a minor mistake that resulted in needing my medication replaced, not refilled, but my insurance provider refused. They admitted that the mistake was both understandable and commonplace, but instead of having a simple and compassionate solution ready; I was directed back and forth from department to department and between them and the drug company again and again and again.

    The process was stressful and disappointing at every level. I was left feeling incompetent, completely alone, and terrified of what a missed dose might mean.

    The worst part of any illness isn’t the illness itself but dealing with pharmacies, drug companies, insurance providers, and all their bureaucratic roadblocks and the problem is infinitely worse that illness and consequently the bureaucratic roadblocks are chronic.

    The good news is that within this cruel and capitalist system there are a few good people and between my doctor and the nurse ambassador with the drug company I’ve been reassured I will probably be okay and that I am not, in fact, the world’s number one failure.

    So, so much for a day that belonged to me. I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening trying to destress and salvage some self-esteem. Ordering a pizza with my favorite toppings, watching old episodes of Veep, and knowing I still have tomorrow to myself helps a lot. Today wasn’t a good one, but it’s already in the past and soon it will join every other bad day I’ve ever had as a distant and dim memory, something to laugh about or repress forever.

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  • 337 // The Good News

    The only good thing about having to work during a pandemic is at least the schedule is light. The first half of the week was hard, but in order to minimize the number of people in the office, everyone’s time is split and Wednesday has become my new Friday. I only have to get through midday and the second half is all mine. Hours to fill as I please, or as my energy or anxieties will allow, though there is more hope for me this week than in many weeks past.

    To be honest, I’ve been reluctant to write here lately. For so long now there has been nothing but bad news and worse news. This year, my year, like the year many of you are having too, has turned out to be one of the worst in recent, if not complete, memory and for many more reasons than the collective COVID one.

    It’s no secret chronic illness has been kicking my ass and with nowhere to go and nothing to do but work and wallow, there hasn’t been much worth sharing or saying, until today. Today I feel good. I have been feeling good, and I want to share the good news with you now.

    Some weeks ago I started a new medication and treatment plan and for the first time in many, many months pain, fatigue, and distress are no longer defining every waking moment of my life. For the first time in many, many months, I recognize myself in the mirror.

    What’s funny is, this year has been so hard on me that even speaking that good news scares me. I’m worried I’m wrong or that the improvement was only temporary, a tease, another trick of 2020, but some time has passed now, enough to allow a sense of optimism to creep in.

    I can imagine a life that is more than work and sleep again. I’ve been reading constantly and thinking more and more of writing again. I’m excited at the prospect of making something of this last month, even if all I do is spend it preparing for the new year. My expectations aren’t high. Being able to do anything at all is progress. I’m happy and hopeful again, and that is everything.

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  • Controlling Experience

    Writing is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience—mystifying, overwhelming, conscious, subconscious—rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate, sometimes resisting, other times submitting to, whatever confronts us. But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance””

    — Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays

  • Little Snow

  • Writing is Rewriting

    Writing always reflects the previously written and read (from whatever source): Writing is rewriting. Other discourses are being transformed, integrated and dismissed. These processes of writing and reading can also be defined as mechanisms of invention and discovery.”

    — Andrea Sick, Reading & Writing: 25 Manifestos