M. Suzanne Terry

I subscribe to quite a few blogs/newsletters, and that’s where a lot of my daytime reading goes. Here are my musings on three that stuck out to me this week. There were a couple others from Substack, but just as it was getting interesting, the prompt to become a paid subscriber popped up, so I’ll spare you those. I may have more to say about that later (not all bad…just…more).

• Loving Your Inner Hobbit – Ask Polly (aka Heather Havrilesky). “The truth is, I think that most of us — even those of us who outwardly appear lazy or disorganized or prone to underachieving — hold ourselves to uncomfortably high standards. We’re plagued by guilt without consciously realizing it. We’re ashamed of our regular human urges. We feel like we’re letting ourselves down constantly, just by being human.” I have been feeling this a lot recently. I mean, I have overachiever tendencies all the time, but I’ve trained them to stay mostly dormant. Not right now, though. I have a lot of anxiety – mostly about work, but also about other things in my life that I feel like I’m missing the mark on. And as much as I would love to blame other people, the bulk of this stress really is just coming from inside the house. All the grace other people are extending to me seems to bounce right off this hard shell of expectations that I have for myself. I want to embrace my inner hobbit (that’s pretty much my whole personality, btw. Ultra homebody. I don’t know anyone who loves being at home as much as I do.); I just seem to have temporarily forgotten how.
• Coffee Table Books – Ginger Horton (MMD Book Club). “Gift books and coffee table books—you know the ones, usually hardcover with loads of glossy photos or illustrations, probably picked up in that impulse section of your local bookstore, or even in a boutique or on vacation—provide some of my favorite reading experiences. And yet when a friend asks, ‘What are you reading?’ I’m prone to forget to mention that gorgeous volume on the nightstand that’s been flipped through many times or the little book of essays that sits in the breakfast nook.” This rings so true for me. Some of my favorite reading experiences are not the things I talk about the most. They’re not the books I read cover to cover and then mark as read on my reading tracker apps. They’re the design books in my living room that I thumb through when I need to see something pretty or the short humor essays I read (or re-read) when I need a quick laugh. As I get more shelves and reorganize my collection, that’s becoming more of what’s on my TV shelf – books that are best enjoyed in increments.
• Bracing Yourself: How To Process Breast Cancer After Treatment Ends – Bezzy BC. “You won’t be told how to manage survivors’ guilt or how to respond to the continuous stream of messages that will no doubt flood every inbox you own. You won’t be prepared for the fake quick fixes your loved ones will tell you about because they heard it from a complete stranger in a grocery checkout line. You won’t be told how to feel when people you have contact with every single day drop off the face of the earth because your cancer diagnosis is too much for them.” Another thing I wasn’t told is that there’s this weird space between treatment and after treatment. I’ve rung the bell, signifying that the big three – chemo, surgery, radiation – are done. But I still have the port because I’m still getting immunotherapy treatments every three weeks, and I still have routine checkups and tests in the upcoming months to confirm that what we did actually worked. Is it really “after” if there are still appointments on the books? If I still feel the lingering symptoms from radiation and chemo (or maybe even surgery)? Part of processing involves knowing exactly where I stand, and I’m not really sure how to do that. The ground under me feels pretty shaky right now.

I am staring down the last few hours of work and then I am looking forward to a restful weekend.

Hope your weekend is everything you want it to be!

And I hope you’re enjoying my reading reflections this month.