• Who is this chick anyway?

Nova Terra

~ Just another way of stalling on my other writing

Nova Terra

Tag Archives: work

On Arting

26 Saturday Feb 2022

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art, creativity, health, life, mental health, mental illness, spirituality, work, writing

Art is inherently scary. What the sheep does it mean, all those countless people falling prey to what is really a neurological illness—being compelled to endlessly create, whether it be Moby Dick or a hand-knitted scarf? Art makes no sense, really. Never has; I think that’s part of what the resistance to abstract painting and sculpture was all about: It swept aside the screens and forced us to seriously consider the implications of the saying, “Art for art’s sake.”

Art is the result of the universe reaching out for eternal fruition; we artists are the very tiniest tips of the Creator’s fractal. Sounds great on your resume, but actually it’s kind of a pain in the sheep. Forget all the high-minded words over What Art Means and stop agonizing over the weight of your content, you precious flower, you. Instead, create—endlessly create. Let it flow out of the parts of your body which you use as your art tools—because if you don’t, you will get sick.

Let me repeat that: You. WILL. Get sick. Physically, spiritually, psychologically. You are already fragile—a receptor made from conception to tune into the highest frequencies—and you will spend a higher amount of time than Average Joe on bodily maintenance. Sorry about that. And that’s if you are a good bunny and create, create, create.

If you don’t, you get what I will call spiritually constipated. All that untold, unsung, and unbeaded Stuff just piles up on itself, like the chocolates in Lucy Ricardo’s assembly line. Moreover, your poor little Universe Antenna is straining itself to the utmost to reconnect. This results in all sorts of nonsense. For me, it worsens my mood, causing a spiral in which it becomes harder and harder to function. It also turns up my fibromyalgia, and my ADHD batters itself against its physical cage like a frantic bird. Yuck.

Don’t spend too much time erasing and editing—that’s all very well and necessary, but unless you have a slot open for an endless slew of new art, the revision process can devolve into a comforting nanny who shields you from the nasty Universe.

Create, create, create.

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Off My Meds

18 Friday Feb 2022

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Abilify, art, bipolar disorder, life, medication, mental health, mental illness, work

Just when you think you’re jogging along in your OK-enough-I-guess rut, Sheep Happens.

I am an N and a J (the other letters flip-flop on me depending on my mood when I’m taking the test), so I make sense of the Universe by logic and deduction to the best of my ability. So I *think* this all started when I got kidney stone surgery last year.

My urologist put her foot down, having seen me many times for this, and I ended up with an endocrinology workup which showed that all I needed was a huge mucking dose of Vitamin D. So I took it (am taking it still), and as a result. . . my mild but chronic depression gradually faded away.

As many before me have likened it, it was like some cobwebs got swept away. And gradually I noticed that my years-old anxiety seemed to be ratcheting up. We raised my mood stabilizer—and it actually got worse.

In a phone session, my prescriber and I had a simultaneous epiphany: It wasn’t anxiety, it was an extra-pyramidal effect called akathisia. Bad news. I needed to come off the drug.

We tapered me off relatively quickly because the akathisia is really hellish (think of having had too much coffee and wanting to shake out your entire body, all the while some brain chemical or other is saying “Danger, Will Robinson!”), and here I am.

At first, the “anxiety” morphed at first into plain old fear: What will happen? I’m off my meds! Aieeee!! Visions of my manic episodes flashed, coupled with terror of their depressive partners. Would I go back on the rollercoaster?

Well, not necessarily. My life is really stable right at the moment, and while I was on the drug, I did a decade’s worth of work on the trauma that pushed me onto the ride to begin with. I figured, there are other stabilizers out there we can try if we need them, so let’s poke our nose out and see what the world is like.

And the answer is, really intense! It’s sort of like being on an epistemological acid trip. I feel a little naïve. All those years the drug was keeping me stable, it was doing other things as well—and it turns out that those things meant it was buffering me from my emotions. And both my PTSD and my ADHD are like kids on a holiday right now: Whooo hypervigilance! Focus? What’s that?

Yet despite all, it feels like a normal and healthy process. My brain is Doing Stuff as it readjusts to life without the drug, and I kinda need to stay out of the way.

The first thing I noticed was that I am experiencing pleasant sensations more intensely: Washing my face was its own mini-epiphany of the joys of warmth and friction. Of course, there’s a flip side: I have become what a co-worker charitably called “irritable,” partly due to my getting a lot less sleep, I suspect.

(I am still on a fistful of pills, what with the heart disease and fibro and all, as well as the possibly-not-as-needed-now anxiolytics. But in the recovery world, they’re just the backup singers.)

So in short, I am having a neuro sheepstorm. I took advantage of my accrued leave, and bugged out of work for two weeks, almost before I said anything I really shouldn’t have. My plan is to just catch up with who I am now and what my dealio is: I’ve lost 100 pounds; I turn 60 this year; my creative process has been on a slow but persistent uptick. And now I’m off my meds.

Salad Forks and Knitting Needles

21 Thursday Oct 2021

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knitting, life, mental health, mental illness, word salad, work

Today I was a very little dismayed when a guy I’ll call Troy came in to the place I work. (I’m a certified peer specialist, and I help run a small group of recovery learning centers, where people who’ve experienced mental health diagnoses come to hang out. We peers also have lived experience, and we’re trained . . . differently than your average Mental Health Professional.)

Troy has something called word salad, in which his language gets garbled. People with this are in a way sort of like having killer mega ADD, in which they distract themselves second by second: Sentences merge into other sentences, words interweave with their cousins and their sisters and their aunts, and the result is that the simplest attempt at conversation is about as linear as a plate of spaghetti. It’s Ulysses in a blender.  

I have a really beautiful verbal processor for my native tongue, and so I find talking with Troy to be fascinating. But I just realized that the dismay came from old memories of what talking to Troy felt like. See, it makes my processor work very hard, and it’s not used to that as a rule! Not since grad school, in fact. I’m a weekend jogger who just ran a half-marathon. So the net result is that I’m exhausted now and my brain feels sorry for itself, unsure of any logical connection and unwilling to make decisions.

(“Ooh, I know! Let’s attempt to write something now and put it up on the Interwebs!”)

Troy hadn’t seen me for several years, and approved of my weight loss in the most straightforward fashion, approaching me with hopeful hands outstretched and asking if he could embrace my thigh so as to appreciate how much was just loose flesh. I told him that wasn’t happening, and he then offered me the same privilege, so I could tell him what the difference was. No dice there, either, but it did occur to me that it was just as well my co-workers were just a holler down the hall—just in case.

But Troy was just testing boundaries, which I’m used to from our community members, and we went out with his coffee and my knitting. (I don’t go anywhere without my knitting if I think I’ll have to sit still for more than five minutes.) So Troy talked to me, and I tried to follow along, with him having me repeat back verbatim what had come out of his mouth, and both of us laughing: Whatever I had heard had not been the impulse of Troy’s brain; it’s unsurprising that sometimes he talks of himself as only borrowing Troy’s body.

Luckily, I had my knitting, in which I make things out of sheep fur, imposing order onto the chaotic universe. It calms me down and centers me—some people smoke, but I knit. No great shakes—we’re talking an average of a sock a month—but it anchors me, and lets me focus on things like talking to Troy, and sometimes the much harder task of talking to myself.

“It’s OK,” I said fairly early on. But he transfixed me with a sharp-nailed fingershake.

“It’s not OK,” he declared. And I felt like an ass: How would I feel if my brain pulled that sheep on me? Not OK, that’s how. But Troy carries it with an abundant sense of humor, and what I must call grace, meaning both a rough sort of etiquette and what some would call a gift from God.

Troy called my attention to the embarrassing fact that I say, “It’s OK” a lot. I hadn’t ever thought about it before, but I seem to have a pattern of needing to reassure people, possibly because my trauma survivor brain sees the world as a dark and scary place.

Hmm. That’s not OK.

It’s Not Over Yet

20 Saturday Feb 2021

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COVID-19, life, vaccine, work

Friday afternoon: That’s the most important piece of info. Vaccines are all very well, but the biggest tool in humanity’s cupboard has always been cooperation, which we’re running low on, it seems. That said, I got Shot #2 (Moderna) this morning.

And . . . I feel weird. Not physically (yet), but it’s in that bailiwick: I am dreading the vaunted occasional side-effects. Not because I’m a wuss about discomfort (I had food poisoning yesterday morning, as a matter of fact) but because I hate the unknown and having something hanging over my head. This shot has been hanging over my head for a solid month now, and I’m glad at least that part is done and over with.

But part of the weird is that I feel like a small part of History now: I have joined the Herd.

For those who are wondering: No, the injection itself doesn’t hurt, but then my nurse mentioned she more usually works with neonatals, so YMMV. And I got vaccinated a stage “ahead” of my particular class because I work in health care. And, no, nobody gets to pick Pfizer vs. Moderna.

Saturday morning: I feel a little more tired than usual, but if I hadn’t had the shot yesterday, I’d put it down to the fibro. Tempest in a teapot. Not even sleepy, but then I don’t do sleepy unless it’s past my bedtime.

Now that all my co-workers are vaccinated, we’re hoping we can open up our RLC as soon as Baker gives the OK. (We are in a building run by the Department of Mental Health.)

Bottom line: Go get the damned shots, as soon as you can. I’m tired of not schmoozing in restaurants, not going to the movies, and other such human-animal filled niceties. We can beat this, Homo sapiens. We just have to work together from a distance.

Greetings from Gaia

10 Sunday May 2020

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computers, life, work

To save you from having to read the preceding post (although feel free): I opted to use part of my stimulus $$ to replace my old computer Merlin with new baby Gaia, and had to clone his hard drive in preparation. And cue diabolical laughter . . . now!

Merlin died. As in before Gaia arrived. As in the day after I did the clone. Those of us who don’t believe in coincidence are all nodding our heads.

It took Gaia a week to traverse 45 minutes worth of Colorado, which I spent trying really hard not to curse at Amazon and the USPS. Meanwhile, I was propped up in my tiny studio on my tablet, which has 2/3 the memory of my phone. (Literally. 2GB. I don’t know how the little darlin’ crosses the street by itself.) Had to Zoom through my phone for audio. It was . . . stressful, and I credit Insight Timer with teaching me that I could meditate on my own terms, because this week, already in quarantine, could have been Really Bad.

But she came! At last! Made in Germany, according to the sticker–am I alone in thinking this a bit odd? I must be; Lord knows das Deutsch have mastered engineering from cars to pencil sharpeners. She wasn’t *quite* the computer I thought I bought–lots of space for an additional couple of drives. If I’d known this, I wouldn’t have bothered with the cloning or the hasty cloud backup I’d also done . . . right before Merlin dropped deader than Jacob Marley. Let’s hear it for paranoia and ignorance!

Her HDMI port isn’t connected to anything (what the sheep??) so the monitor is on VGA, but these are first-world problems. Gaia is fast and silent, a veritable ninja compared to the lumbering Merlin. Of course, all my cookies are gone, but seeing as I also had my debit card expire last month, I have to re-enter a lot of data everywhere as it is. Moving on.

So I plugged in the external drive and . . . nothing. Downloaded the software. Nothing. My son tried, and discovered that a-a-a-all the data was gone. Poof. We still don’t know what happened. If I hadn’t been a canny old person with no trust in technology, having known technology when it was still teething, and thus backed up my essential data onto Google Drive, all my writing would be GONE. I would probably be in the hospital if that had happened, because I’ve been loosey-goosey about backups.

Currently I am still moving into Gaia, and enjoying such fluff as being able to greenscreen in Zoom at last. Merlin’s hard drive is plugged into my son’s machine because we want to troubleshoot a bit, but it’s not talking to anybody right now. We’re waiting for the geek to advise us as to the next step.

Oh yeah, the casual games: Had to re-download and restart them. Not so bad; I guess the journey is worth more than I had credited.

That Time When the Weeks Disappeared

28 Saturday Mar 2020

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ADHD, coronavirus, COVID-19, INTJ, Lent, life, time, work, workaholism, working, Zoom

“One day here is just like the others,” I wrote to my daughter, whom I was trying to invite for dinner. And truly, I feel as if I have fallen into an early agricultural sort of rhythm here: I have a task list, for which I am grateful, and a good bit of almost entirely unstructured time, for which I’m trying to be grateful. The temporal pillars of my life have crumbled, and I admit to sometimes feeling as if I am now drowning in the unchecked sands of Time.

I’m something of a worker bee, getting my strongest pieces of validation from job activities, and I can have little spasms of workaholism. My daughter has ordered me to take time off when I have it, but somehow things are different now.

I’m having the hardest time remembering the day of the week. I spent part of Tuesday morning prepping for a Zoom group I was facilitating–on Wednesday. Moreover, I have realized that the days of the week came with feelings, feelings I no longer have.

For example, I was supposed to be happy it’s Friday, because it’s my break from my challenging Wednesday–Thursday bloc. But Wednesday didn’t happen (no work, no daughter, no actual physical choir with all that deep breathing), so the only fallout from the resulting Thursday fatigue (still got to bed late, thanks to a Zoom meetup) was getting a sleep hygiene lecture from my therapist.

I made my own appointment calendar this year. I drew careful lines separating the days, and now all that ink is being erased in realtime, as one day fades into the next. I’m all about going with the flow, but something about that feels scary: What would happen if I just did what I felt like whenever I felt like it? For a lot of people, I daresay that would be a healthy and stress-free option, but I don’t work that way. It probably has something to do with being INTJ.

Something inside me says enough is enough, and I need to put myself on another schedule, one which embraces the home time and the weirdness and the whole schmeer that we’re floating in right now. (I have ADHD, and we do much better on a schedule, which helps fill in for our vacationing executive functions.) Right now I need to try to focus on intentionality, it being Lent, which is for me a time to do that anyway. A Lent with a very different sort of Easter at the end! I just hope I remember it’s Sunday when it gets here.

In Which Our Highly Trained and Educated Heroine Uses Her Mad Skills

25 Thursday Apr 2019

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day jobs, jobs, motherhood, motivational interviewing, recovery, women, work

I’ve been noticing over the past several months that the helping profession is disproportionately filled with women. If I thought about it at all, I figured that it was connected with our socialization as nurturers—and that it was probably also spurred by the low pay/hard work equation which keeps women trapped as sub-par wage earners, despite our often heading single-income households.


I recently attended a training on motivational interviewing (where there were 13 women and two men), and my fellow students voiced my own tendency to want to FIX IT. (This in MI is bad.) I joked that MI was going to be a hard sell, because everybody in that room got there because they were fixers. On the job, we’re so often—possibly even usually—faced with a crisis, small or large, that demands immediate action: fixing.

However, this very morning I was given a small—a very small—crisis, and instead of getting all Socratic with my recoveree as I should probably have done, I . . . fixed it. And then after a few moments, I had to stop myself from further inserting myself into my recoveree’s issues. “Stop being a mommy,” I scolded myself. And then it hit me: Women—fixers—helping professionals—mommies.

How many of us still carry things like emergency bandaids?


In fact, I suspect that helping profess—ah, hell, call us what we are: fixers. I suspect that fixers are in a way uber-Moms, regardless of our gender. We’re the people other moms call for a consult, or would if we were better able to listen and less willing to roll up our sleeves with a savage grin and fix the hell out of the thing. This is obviously a social problem, which is counter-productive to our own self-care. Fixers (and for this I mean women) are probably short on friends of the galpal, chillaxing with the homeys variety. And that can only add to our stress, which ironically makes us poorer at what we do.


It’s all very well to tell us to listen more than we speak. That just makes most of us give ourselves a smug little pat on the back, because we do listen—it’s just that at the end we tend to give out a well-reasoned solution to the issue. Fixed! Check! Pleased to be of service, ma’am!


I’ve gotten to the point of keeping silence because once you take my fixing away, I don’t know what to say half the time. I just crack out one of my large supply of listening noises (got ‘em for every occasion) and hope my conversational partner will comply by continuing her flow of words. I’m glad to be learning techniques for what can be thought of as stealth fixing fu: I need them for me.

Please Nominate Tribe of Tiger!

28 Wednesday Feb 2018

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fantasy, Internet, Kindle, kitty books, life, NaNoWriMo, novels, publishing, science fiction, work, writing

If you like me, my writing, or even the abstract cause of Good Writing in general, please consider this!

Because I won NaNoWriMo last year, I got the chance to have an actual human being at Kindle look at my book and give me editorial feedback. To get this, I had to enter Tribe of Tiger (the most recent kitty book) in their Kindle Scout reader nomination program, and that’s why I’m pestering you today: PLEASE, go to this link and nominate my book. It’s just a few clicks. All told, it took my sister less than three minutes, and that was with me on the phone as she did it, which slowed things down.

Here’s the link. It includes the first two and a half chapters of the story–enjoy! (Story reading optional; you can download it onto your Kindle.)

There is a chance that this may actually get me professionally e-published, with an advance ($$$!) and everything. I’m crossing my crossable digits.

 

Looking for a Word

03 Saturday Feb 2018

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art, creativity, ecstasy, fun, gansai tambi, Japanese watercolor, life, music, religion, sex, watercolor, work, writing

(Just skim the two paragraphs of techie art neep if you’re not interested in paint. The essay proper begins below them.)

I just participated in a month-long journal challenge with a group of women artists, and Got Religion–I discovered a new medium! It’s Japanese watercolor, often called “gansai tambi” as that’s the ad blurb used by the manufacturer to describe them.  (It literally means something like “vibrant aesthetic.”) I majored in what I suppose I must now call Western watercolor in college, making full sheet (22×30″) color field paintings (think Rothko, only busier) and thinking I was having the time of my life. Then fast forward thirty years and here’s this stuff that made me squee when I unpacked it. (Disclosure: I had a $50 gift card from doing a survey, and went on Amazon. The 36 pan set, three water brushes, and another six-pan set of metallics left a buck and change on the card; YMMV.)

Part of my honeymoon joy is being forced once again to learn what stuff does–the great thing about the big abstracts I did as a kid is that it showed me pretty much every trick Western watercolor and its French cousin, gouache have up their sleeves. It’s a little like gouache, a little like either sort of tempera in consistency, and behaves on paper like nothing else I’ve found. The pigment is crazy thick and you need a lot of water to make it behave like . . . watercolor. Sigh . . .

Anyway, I whacked out a basic image to use as the Tribe of Tiger cover and came back to the computer because the sun was in my eyes. I noticed, almost as a by-the-way, that I was ecstatic. It was very much a body feeling–a combination of terrific sex, a filling breakfast, and a satisfactory trip to the loo. Oh, and the best coffee. I feel this way every time I make art I’m pleased with, and even when I’m depressed, it makes me feel at least some better, at the very least while I’m making something.

I thought to myself, “Weird. I guess sex is the closest many people get to ecstasy.” Maybe joy too. I don’t know how that makes me feel. Am I right? If so, am I being kind of snobby to feel a bit sorry for them? Or is this more about me being abnormally unimpressed with sex?

Don’t get me wrong–I’ve had some great sex. It just doesn’t hit the same spots as, say, the smell of oil paint, which makes me tremble and moan. I have similar reactions to music I like, which is to say, much of it, but maybe particularly early music (think Byrd and Tallis).

As for writing, the feeling is more subdued, possibly because I’m not getting as much sensory input, and it’s more draining. But I still come away from good sessions feeling like this is why I’ve been put on earth.

So what do y’all think? Especially other creatives–is it better than sex? Is it ecstasy? Or do we need a new word?

Journalish Entry

27 Saturday Jan 2018

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ADHD, art, art journal, depression, fun, life, mental health, work, writing

inky hand

Who’s procrastinating? I am! I am!

My still foggy brain figured out how to add the photo and still have text next to it; faithful readers with sharp memories will notice this as a new skill. Yay me!

I’ve been depressed for most of the past two months–Christmas cheered me up, which makes me feel shallow and trite, but there it is. (Can a person be trite? Sure they can. We’ve all been trapped at that business dinner.) It’s not that I spend hours gloomily musing on Being and Nothingness, it’s more that I don’t know what to do. (As in, read a book or play a game. As far as Being and Nothingness goes . . . ) Worse, once I figure it out (if I do), I spend seemingly hours getting it done because I am far more easily distracted than usual. This is a common symptom of depression, but I have ADHD, so who can tell?

I am open to suggestions. I can’t take meds, because I either have a weird reaction to them, or they might make me manic. (Trust me–or trust those who’ve been close to me–you don’t want to see me manic. I don’t do anything amusing like start new religious movements, but I do end up in the hospital. Pity. Being manic feels great! Which is why it’s so hard to treat.) I am working my WRAP plan. But here’s the hell of it: If I am trying my best, if I am doing something borderline productive (like blogging), it means I’m having a good day. If I’m having a bad day, I can’t even focus on a video game. Arrghh.

In other news: Although I have been faithful to my protein shake breakfast, to the point where it now feels normal, I’ve only lost about five pounds. I had it pushed a little lower, but the holidays snuck two pounds back on. Sigh. (This matters because I am due for bariatric surgery this spring, and I must lose 16 pounds so they can maneuver around my massive fatty liver, cuddled around my stomach like a protective bloat of tick.) However, I have dropped my application off at the Y, and the guy who Does That will come back from vacation any day now. Sigh. Seeing as I don’t get a surgery date until I see their shrink (March) I have some time. It’s only 11 pounds, right?

Tribe of Tiger (this year’s NaNo and the third in the kitty series–Eureka, published here, is in the same world but is not strictly canon) is SO close to being finished it’s a bit scary. I’m at the point where the next two or three paragraphs will wrap up the main action. There must be a name for this feeling that I should kill somebody off for it to be good art!

I’ve been doing more visual art lately–got involved with an art journal challenge. Seeing as I wimped out on Inktober, I would have been more reluctant, but, golly mo, my daughter makes those blank books! So I begged one that had some invisible flaw, and have been having a great time. Sure, I’m behind, but it’s an improvement over Inktober’s 12-day performance. (To be fair, what slowed me down then was lack of scanner access; I learned from this mistake and have been doing just fine snapping pix from my phone.)

OKCupid (deliberately not linked because drive-bys) used to do this thing where they made you pick three words to describe yourself. So I guess right now they’re fat, depressed, and creative. I could do worse.

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Nova Terra

just another way of stalling on my other writing

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