kaberett | Entries tagged with recovery is a spiral

Last night I went to bed late, in a way that involved walking across a dark field. This was the first time in, I think, over a year, that I'd been outside during the Actual Night -- we have very long evenings at the moment -- without sunglasses.

I could see the stars.

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Amused by resonance with Significant Arboriculture in Demonology and the Tri-Phasic Model of Trauma: I have been getting increasingly anxious about how unhappy my lemon tree has been looking. It taps into a bunch of my insecurity about being Bad At Plants and, also, Not Allowed Nice Things, so the temptation is always to just... try my best to stubbornly ignore it and Assume It Will Get Better Or There's Probably Not Really Anything Wrong Anyway And I'm Just Making A Fuss.

It is therefore a medium-big deal to me that earlier this week I actually looked up possible causes for the symptoms and have ordered treatment, instead of desperately ignoring the problem until it's definitely too late and has blown up in my face.

Fingers crossed. Here goes attempting to take care of my tree, and also, myself, for which the tree is a metaphor.

I've been noticing, working my way through Brené Brown's books, that many of the ways in which she defines or exemplifies vulnerability are just... not intuitive to me. They don't stick; they're an active effort to think my way through every single time I try to engage with the concepts involved. "To be vulnerable is to be capable of being hurt; to be weak is to be unable to withstand injury" is a definition she suggests that sort of works for me on an abstract level -- I at least don't have to work to remember it -- but I don't experience any emotional resonance with it.

Here's an alternative I've been turning over: vulnerability is offering people more complete data so as to enable them to better model me.

On the one hand, I can sort of see that it might sound more impersonal, more abstracted, than the explanation proposed in the previous paragraph -- and on the other it's one that I am viscerally attuned to, to the point that typing it out leaves me hyper-aware of my belly and my throat, of my physical softness, of my -- yes -- vulnerability made manifest. ("The delicacy of my skin" might need to feature in a poem, hmm.)

It seems to be a succinct and internally intuitive way for me to encode the thought-shape of hope-and-fear inherent in letting people see me by showing them how to hurt me (by telling them how I work), with its mirror terror that even if I try I won't be understood.

I have been missing my grandmother a lot, the last week or so, as I've been working through a bag of plums from the allotment. We've had cobbler and crumble (and indeed at the moment I've got a bag of apples from my mother's garden stewing on the hob, to go into jars tomorrow), but apparently I associate "baked plum desserts" with Mama, and consequently I've been wisting after plums halved, stones left in for flavour, across the bottom of a rectangular Pyrex dish, with some lemon juice and spices, and a single layer of pastry over the top.

I've just also been too tired and worn thin to make the pastry.

I find myself trapped in something of an exhaustion spiral. I'm resenting how much I need to sleep, and how little it means I get done, so I'm arranging my days around not napping, which gives me more time but less energy such that I'm not really actually getting much more done (well, except for the things that want to sit and wait for a while once they've started), so then I stay up "late" to Just Do One More Thing because I can't face 8 o'clock bedtimes and the insomnia would probably interfere anyway, and then I'm too tired to do much, so...

... I did at least take a nap this afternoon, for an hour or so, and I am at least spotting what's going on; in a spirit of accountability, I note here that I am not going to go into work tomorrow: I'm going to stay at home, and sleep, and maybe go rummage around in some plants, and read a novel, and try to rest.

The link, such as it is, is that my mother has been remarking with some degree of envy or intimidation about the number of Fo-ish -- Mama-ish -- things I do: the bread the gardening the marmalade the cakes. On the one hand, I'm bleakly aware that I'm not doing half so much of it as I'd like, or indeed as Mama did, and it's still more, really, than I can manage; on the other, I am trying to remind myself that Mama also routinely took siestas in her latter years.

Round and round we go. I'm being somewhat difficult to live with at the moment. Here's hoping that the sleep helps.

I am still a little surprised every time I remember that, these days, I don't wake up every two hours like clockwork, every night, for the first two weeks I'm sleeping in a new place. Like: I went to the house convention in August and in spite of a Wide Variety Of Stressors, including sharing a room with two strangers, I actually slept through the night, rather than waking up fully at every microarousal. Sure, some of that is having A there, but the part where I trust him enough to interpret even that kind of environment as safe is... still substantial progress.

Though, mild amusement: even as I am talking about my reduced hypervigilance, it turns out it's still occasionally a superpower. Super-bonus-packing-question, said B, where did [Item] end up? "Pretty sure it's in such-and-such a box," I said. Came the response: ... any idea where that box is in the car?

A, who'd actually loaded it up (it was down stairs, I was Not Doing Stairs), had no idea. But I knew it had gone in late, and that it was relatively small, and not terribly flat on top, and therefore knew that it was near the top of the stack in the car, possibly at the back but probably at the side underneath the parcel shelf that'd been put in last. Three minutes later (and approximately fifty miles away), [Item] was in hand.

I'm a little baffled by how impressive this apparently was, but then I suppose that's the nature of superpowers.

Please tell me lovingly but firmly to book a damn' GP appointment?

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ETA poked at NHS 111 online; GP appointment now booked for 17:10 i.e. about five hours' time. Thank you. <3

1. I've been complaining a fair old bit, over the past few months, that I've been feeling very resistant to writing up therapy notes but I couldn't tell whyyyyyyy and it didn't make any seeeeeeeeeense. It turns out that, as ever, brains are sneaky little buggers, particularly in self-defence, and the reason I was so reluctant to engage with therapy notes is in fact exactly the reason I go to therapy. Which is: I want to have a responsible adult around to spot me while I do a bunch of emotional heavy lifting, and as it happens part of why I find writing up therapy notes so useful is that it makes more stuff cohere, i.e., it's more emotional heavy lifting. Only I try to do it all in one chunk without a spotter. And over the past few months, when the reluctance has really set in, I've by-and-large been stable enough that I've actually been digging into long-term change, which is much more intimidiating than short-term fire-fighting when it comes to looking at it solo. Well done, that brain, but it's okay, I promise, we got this.

( They get less ambivalently positive! )

A couple of weeks ago, The Indelicates' latest project: Paradise Lost, reimagined as a rock musical set in a racist 1950s US holiday resort. I was lucky enough to be part of one of the initial readthroughs several years ago now, in the top room of a Brighton pub, and was absolutely delighted to see how it had changed and developed. It contains the Indelicates' first (I think) proper love-song-to-rock-music, which is a subgenre I have a very deep fondness for.
Yesterday I went to see Fun Home at the Young Vic, with the usual suspects (i.e. me_and, shortcipher, and sebastienne), having booked it when its run was first announced sometime... last year; it's been something in the far far future that I've been vaguely looking forward to for a long time. (P got me the book while I was living in the Coniston Coppermines youth hostel lo these many years ago for my third-year mapping project; I read Are You My Mother? earlier this year, from the library.) I started crying when Baby Alison stood up on stage and sang a song about Seeing Her First Butch: here, here is this kid, who can stand on stage and sing that song and it's okay and it gets better and, yeah, I... did not stop crying until sometime after the end. I loved loved loved so many of the things they did with it. I... might try to write a proper review? But I loved it, and I'm so glad I went, and it's not just because the way Bechdel draws herself looks eerily similar to my therapist so I've mentally amalgamated the two of them into Queer Elder Who Gets It And Wants Me To Be Okay.
Following that we wandered along the Thames a little and I ended up being approached by an older Irish woman and asked for mobility aid recommendations on the strength of being out and about with power-assist wheels. I eventually persuaded her to try them. She is a convert, she is the latest person to insist that I should be getting commission on them, and she has my phone number so she can text me if she has questions.
This morning I actually froze the probably-jostaberry sorbet made up with allotment fruit according to the Ruby Violet recipe (give or take my intense suspicion that 15g of lemon zest was a good idea). It is beautifully coloured and a bit more cronch than intended because we went off for board games in the middle, but basically AAAAAAH SKILL ACQUISITION. (It took me an embarrassingly long time, on Friday, to realise that given that it was for blackcurrant sorbet it really didn't matter if I couldn't find glucose powder without added vitamin C.)
When jack posted about the boardgame Photosynthesis earlier this week I looked at his review, thought "ooh that maybe sounds like me_and's kind of thing? maybe I should get it for him?", and then dithered a lot over how thoroughly to check with him before buying it as, potentially, a Surprise Present. So I was mightily amused when we rocked up at a boardgame social organised by a friend this afternoon that... it was out on the table waiting to be played as our host's first pick. I screwed up the final two moves through misunderstanding and vagueness (and, frankly, the pineapple/raspberry margharita) so lost instead of winning, but, like, I played a new game? Without reading the rules through thoroughly and obsessively first? In semi-public? So I continue deeply impressed with myself, and A is in fact interested in getting a present of Trees Are Mean And Also Bullies. I, meanwile, was just very amused by Growing A Plant. (Also played Dixit for the first time, with people I don't know terribly well, and didn't lose abjectly and did mostly enjoy myself! So that's a thing.)
Pottered off to the allotment this evening, confirmed that the gooseberry is spiky and a gooseberry, checked on the squash that didn't really need watering and watered them anyway, constructed a scaffold for the grape (which has actual proto-grapes on, what even is this), and picked A Lot of blackberries.

A cone of bamboo tied together with grass, with a grape enthusiastically attaching itself with great haste.

Hi, I'm Alex, my pronouns are they, I have hilarious boardgame-related trauma; I'm going to want five minutes to read the rules in silence before we start; and if I ask a question about gameplay that isn't addressed to you by name and you're not me_and, please pretend I didn't say anything.

As I periodically mention, mostly whenever I make notable progress of any kind, for a variety of hilarious reasons I find the vast majority of boardgames intensely stressful, and this gets worse the less I know the people I'm playing with. Like I said in my previous post, over the past two years I've gone from "cannot even start to play a game I've had long-term interest in, in my own home, with my partner, who I trust, with no-one else present, without bursting into tears twice just reading the rules" to "getting a bit of an adrenaline kick when I start my second new game of an afternoon with strangers, in a pub, when I was already primed for social anxiety for reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture".

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Cut for social anxiety.

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who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

[gratitude] recovery, or something like it

[embodiment] strongly worded letter to follow

[academia] ... a welcome development

Important metaphorical trees

[working definitions] vulnerability

dis/continuity

moments of perspective

in which embodiment is a terrible hobby

some things make a post

Tiny adventures

Variations on a theme (the Great Board Games Desensitisation Process post)

[mental health] I wish to note for the record...

A thing about which I am Pleased

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June 2025

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