Fly Away Home*

I’m trying hard to keep the right perspective – on my job, on leaving M, on picking up the parts of my life I’ve let hang for the past few months, on keeping up the parts I’ve added. On the way that incremental improvement doesn’t care what order changes come in and the way skipping pieces that might help can still be progress. But mostly on how I’m a real human with actual friends that – while sometimes quiet – do care about me. Even when my schedule and environment and anxiety tell me that once I leave for the train¹Sometimes I can be excited about using only public transportation to go thousands of miles. When I last went to San Francisco I discovered that you could stay inside buildings and tunnels and metal tubes all the way from Nordstroms in Seattle to Nordstroms in San Francisco, which seems a bit amazing to me. But it’s hard to enjoy things like … Continue reading it doesn’t matter where I end up and failing to pop out the other end might make people happier.

I’d love to have some perspective on traveling that didn’t make me want to hyperventilate, but that one still eludes me. I’m going to be sure my day job is squared away tonight so I can be satisfied with ignoring it tomorrow. And I’m off the queue, so I shouldn’t have anything that needs same-day responses. But that will just be the part of my anxiety I can stare into submission – the rest of it is still going to be tough.

And them I’m going to grit my teeth (literally – anxiety can make me grind my teeth at night) through the next few days as I recover from travel and try to hold my life in a new shape while it’s still wet. Hopefully Shanda can spare some more attention this week; I had too much alone time when I was last there. And then 3 days of waiting in public, and a couple more days of alone time here as I wait to leave a town where my only friends are busy.

But I did do something useful today while I waited: https://vodak.vodka/

I was thinking for eleventyith time that I should have someplace to find back episodes, so new folks can have some context. And also a system that doesn’t require me to copy and paste from the email I write into the various comms systems that people prefer. So now email gets published shortly after I send it and I can send links instead of raw text. Plus it’s searchable, which is useful at least to me. The archive goes back to the middle of October; eventually it will have everything that I sent to screed@i*h.com but I want to review earlier episodes to be sure they sufficiently protect your anonymity because when the group was smaller I wasn’t as careful. Might be good work for sitting in the airport, if that’s a thing I do a lot of tomorrow.

This was a long time coming — not to mention a great use for a domain I’ve been camping on — but I was inspired to action by adding E to The Screed. Welcome. E is here to remind me that this line I draw between people I can only hurt and people I can maybe help is A) a ridiculous line to imagine at all and B) even if it did exist certainly doesn’t fall where I feel like it does. Plus you actually talk about things that catch your interest, and my life could use more of that.

A got their package today, and seemed to genuinely like it. I’ve sort of gotten into the business of care packages and while it’s sometimes a little stressful to figure out what goes in them – and more stressful to deal with the fraking post office – I’m pretty happy about it. I started because I thought it would let me package some safety, and provide another avenue for communication. And it did. But it’s also a great way for me to have slightly longer-term projects that let think about other people individually on a scale where daily anxiety has less pull, and a way to consider physical composition in a way that isn’t merely about organization or emergency preparedness or embodied processes. It’s a thing that doesn’t get “done” and promoted into daily use, which is different from a lot of my projects that go from “fun times building cool things” to “used in production so working on it is a source of frustration”. And it’s a fun writing prompt, because I get to make up a narrative to go with whatever is in the box; it’s prop comedy for writers.

I noticed in transferring old episodes that I used to include more pictures. There are lots of reasons for that change; among others I haven’t personally taken any pictures of Dog for about 12 weeks. I started taking more pictures of myself since then, which is great in lots of ways but naturally varies in frequency based on how much time I have to do interesting things with my appearance. I also haven’t spent much time walking in daylight here for outdoor shots, and I’ve only built one care package (which I completely failed to photograph), so other typical sources are thin. I have pictures of other people in Cleveland but they’re largely of people that would be recognizably tied to The Screed and I’m favoring at least moderate anonymity for everyone but me and Shanda. And Dave — they get a real name for reasons that are not even slightly fair or consistent — but I haven’t been close enough to them to take a picture for a long time so it’s a moot point. Before I go though I should grab this [fig 1,2]. It’s not as compelling as Foreground Fork but it’s the little blue buddy that’s been staring at me while I sleep for the past month, and I’ll miss him.

I started the book Rainforest Mind on M’s recommendation. I was prepared to be annoyed with it based just on the concept, but the book spent most of the first chapter explaining that it knew I would and asking me not to be. I’m still skeptical of course — I’m always skeptical — but I appreciate the confidence scam. It’s a short book so I may well get through it tomorrow before I’m home. Which will give me something less internal to yell about in one of the 4 The Screeds I’ll draft while trying to manage my anxiety, and that should be good for everyone.

I’m also exited to start a new ongoing task with M. One that’s not nagging and errands and calls but that will be easy to enjoy directly in addition to me liking the long-term outcomes. One that I have been thinking about for a long time and am eager to start. And one that I think you’ll like doing with me instead of just tolerating that I’m technically helping you. I’m not sure how to share about it yet — I’m not exactly sure what it is yet – but I’m excited to figure it out.

I was thinking about things I don’t yet know how to share, and how that relates to the idea of holding something as precious. For much of my life it was simply not sensible to hold anything precious because doing so put me at risk not just of loss but of punishment. And so I learned to live a life where nothing was precious. More recently I’ve felt a little precious about some things, finally free of the fear I associate with that feeling, and in exploring it I see it’s got a lot of overlap with not knowing how to share something joyful. While the way I learned to not keep things as separate and precious was intolerable I think it’s also one of the reasons I take sharing so seriously. Rather than protecting my joy by keeping it isolated I want to ensure that it’s sustained by making backups in other people. I shouldn’t feel like I can’t be trusted with it, or that I have to give it away, but I can be proud of myself for learning to keep joy alive even when I had no place for it in my life, and I can keep doing that part even now that I do.

ZiB

*I wasn’t thinking of the 1996 movie at first but then I remembered it stared Jeff Daniels and Anna Paquin and I might have to watch it when I get home. But I’ll also have to try not to think about the movie industry that cast Daniels and Paquin as father and daughter in 1996 and as lovers in 2006.

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