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2024 in Review

Posted in Alive, Books, Getting It Together, Health, Mental Health, Quiet, Reading Challenges, Resolutions, Writing, tagged , , on December 30, 2024| Leave a Comment »

[Prime reviewing/contemplating/reflecting space – a blanket and a cup of tea in front of twinkly lights]

How many times can I say this year has been a doozy without it becoming redundant? Welp, here’s one more time.

This year was a doozy.

I’ve tried reflecting and looking back for the past week, as is my custom. Most years – but particularly this year – I resonate with Kate Bowler’s feelings on reflection. I get stuck on certain things and forget so many others, even with the aid of my journal and planner (which in many ways is even more telling than my journal). The older I get, the more I realize that maybe the end of a year is too soon to reflect on it. I am usually still too close to it to ponder it with any real clarity.

But what I can do is look at the goals I set and see how I fared in measurable ways. So let’s dive in.

2024 Theme – Quiet

In many ways this year was very loud. But that especially drove home my need for carving out quiet time, and I had a small amount of success with that.

The intentional pursuit of quiet helped me to find space to heal both mentally and physically.

It also revealed how much work I still have to do in those areas. I didn’t always succeed at finding space, and my medical challenges this year made sure that it was really obvious when I didn’t. Getting quiet time is a lot of work, but it’s necessary and worth it.

Even when I’m “quiet,” I’m still anxious. It takes a lot of time I don’t always have to calm my brain enough to get the needed benefit from quiet moments.

Another challenge is that I don’t really have physical places to find quiet. My upstairs neighbors are loud and active, so even when I’m quiet, my environment still isn’t. And to go anywhere else is to inevitably have to socialize or be perceived or get distracted. Going forward, I need to find a way to really be at rest. I would prefer it to be an actual physical space, but earplugs have been a little helpful in the meantime.

I’m not quite done with quiet, nor do I think I’ll ever be. I have goals for the upcoming year that will help me continue to explore it.

Read 180 Books

I’m so close. I have read 175 so far. It’s possible to reach 180 by midnight tomorrow, but I don’t see myself forcing it just to meet my goal. I am enjoying looking at my Storygraph charts, and I may share one or two tomorrow when I talk about reading goals for 2025.

Even if I don’t finish any more books this year, aiming for this lofty goal still helped me read 20 more books than last year. I consider that a success!

Creative Education

All things creative pretty much tanked for me this year. I did have a few performances with beloved friends, and I have been able to be more active in choir this fall. But with the exception of a few brief inspired frenzies, my writing has been at a standstill.

I am not any further on The Artist’s Way than I was last year at this time, and I haven’t really cared about creative education at all. Looking back, I can admit this goal was a little unreasonable.

What has changed is that I would have felt really dejected about this pause in the past. But I don’t feel that way today. I am satisfied with how I’ve spent my time this year, even if that meant I didn’t heavily pursue a lot of the things I love. My attention was simply needed elsewhere, and I honored that. I am proud of myself for doing so.

Health Goals

I’m alive! I did it!

I survived cancer and cancer treatments, both of which tried to take me out.

As part of that survival, I also built some stronger, healthier skills that I hope to take into the new year. Also, I’ve learned to call them skills instead of habits, because apparently habit isn’t a thing my brain does. This was one of the helpful revelations that came out of therapy this year. For me, there’s no doing things without thinking about it. Even if I do something every day for a year, the moment I don’t remind myself (that is, actually set reminders or leave lists in a place I know I’ll see them), I drop it like I’ve never even heard about it. Everything has to be a conscious choice every time.

Which sounds exhausting (and it can be). But it’s also liberating. It frees me from trying to make progress the way other people do. Instead, I can focus on my goals in a way that actually works for me.

And it’s working beautifully so far.

So that’s the year. That’s 2024. Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with it.

I hope you are satisfied with your year, too. Feel free to brag on yourself a little in the comments.

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One Year Ago

Posted in Alive, Church, Health, Mental Health, Quiet on December 23, 2024| Leave a Comment »

December 22 last year was a Friday. I was talking about books (of course). I had just wrapped up work and parties and performances for the month and was looking forward to traveling to see my family. This day last year was one of my favorite moments of the holiday season – that little transition between work and rest where I get to take a breath.

It was also a little over a week before I got my diagnosis.

So on December 22 last year, the appointment for the follow-up scan that eventually revealed the cancer had been made, and I was anxious. The first reference I see to news about health issues in the blog is on December 30 in my year-end review. This quote is…something. 

“I was ahead of schedule for most of the year, until work and health issues exploded. I don’t know how much those things will actually settle down, but I’ll keep the same goal for next year and see how it goes.”

Yeah, it did not settle down. At all, in any way. If November/December 2023 was an explosion, 2024 was a supernova.

What I enjoy about re-reading this post, though, is how well my 2023 goals had prepared me for what was to come. As challenging as this year has been, it would have been so much harder if I hadn’t already learned some practical ways to take care of myself – not just physically but also mentally and financially. I’m not sure I would have made it without those skills. Good job, past me!

Out of necessity, I’ve sharpened those skills this year. I know I’ve made some progress, because otherwise, today would not have gone the way that it did, and I would be in worse shape for it.

Yesterday was a good day, but it was also a loud day. A very social day. I woke up this morning still feeling the sensory overload. I got up and started getting ready to leave home. I noticed it was not easy.

I paused to check in with what I was feeling:

  • Irritation, almost to the point of panic
  • Itchy skin, particularly anywhere it touched fabric or whenever the breeze from the fan blew over it
  • Dull, throbbing headache
  • Strong aversion to the smell of my lotion (which is “unscented”)
  • Nausea due to all of the above

Yep. That’s still overload. Probably not a great time to go sit in a room with an organ. Or people.

A year ago today, I might have forged ahead and gone to church. After all, the choir was singing and I love being part of that. I’ve missed out on it so much this year.

But nowadays I am more likely to choose getting well over doing almost any other thing. I choose slowing down. I don’t like it. I still want to do all the fun things and dislike that I can’t. But I know that taking a break when I need it is the better choice.

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Friday Five – Biggest Lesson

Posted in Alive, Friday Five, Getting It Together, Health on December 13, 2024| Leave a Comment »

Today is officially the end of the semester. All the students are moving out (well, all who are not staying for winter housing, which is a whole thing). I’m working tomorrow just to supplement the office/make sure my people are sane and fed. 

The prompt for Susannah Conway’s December Reflections challenge today is “Biggest lesson in 2024.” Always the overachiever, I’m listing five things I’ve learned this year. Some even have links. Enjoy!

  • Taking care of myself is not selfish. Or, even when it is, it’s the good kind of selfish – the kind that helps me be a whole person who isn’t constantly stressed out and mad at everything I’m doing for everyone else instead of taking care of my own needs and/or sanity. This lesson can be for you, too. Take care of yourself. Decadently, even. If you don’t know where to start, here are some ideas on romanticizing your life, some of which may seem extravagant (gentle pushback on that – is it actually extravagant, or are you a people pleaser?) but some of which are also just “remember to drink water.”
  • An important subset of taking care of myself – keep up with your health screenings. It literally saved my life this year. Here are some basics but you may need others depending on your personal health risks. That’s a good question to ask during your annual physical.
  • I can’t care enough for everyone. Still working on this lesson, particularly at work. My toxic trait is that if I feel like someone is not invested or caring enough about something, I try to care on their behalf. Turns out, caring does not work like that. It just makes me tired and stressed, and I do not need that in my life. “Find out whose business you’re in,” and get out of it.
  • Ask for help when I need it, and expect that it will come. My people showed up this year in multiple big ways, and I’m so grateful. I was afraid to ask for help, particularly financial assistance. I could have saved myself so much worry just by having more realistic expectations of my friends and family. This has turned out to be my greatest joy of the year.
  • It’s OK to feel multiple things at a time. I can be grateful and angry and resentful and hopeful and grieving and curious and awestruck at the exact same moment. This has pretty much been my mood since October, and I don’t see it going anywhere any time soon. Side note: people do not know how to handle this. Side-of-the-side-note: people can learn how to handle this, or they can go away.

What has been your biggest lesson(s) this year?

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Friday Five – ‘Tis the Season

Posted in Alive, Books, Church, Friday Five, Health, Mental Health, Seasons, tagged , , on December 6, 2024| 2 Comments »

The season of Advent, that is. It’s (probably) my favorite season of the church year and one of the reasons I tend to say “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas” during most of December (you know, other than the usual reason of wanting my well wishes to others to be as unconditional, as free of strings and assumptions, as possible). I am especially glad today that the weather seems to understand it’s December and is behaving accordingly.

Here are five things I’ve read in the last few weeks that I thought you might enjoy, too.

  • How To Have Cancer by Cory Doctorow – I resonate with so much here. The hoops you have to jump through. The inevitable “I wish I’d done it this way to make it a little less stressful/more effective.” I’m glad Doctorow is OK. I’m glad we’re both (generally) OK.
  • A Brief What, Why, & How of Advent by Tsh Oxenreider – I was recently asked what Advent was about and I rambled a lot. Enthusiastically, but still so much rambling. Here is a much more succinct version. I don’t do everything on this list (and my tradition uses blue candles – for hope/peace/healing – rather than purple – for royalty/penance – during Advent), but this is a lovely explanation.
  • But How Do You Read So Much? by Pandora Sykes – “I will find ways, as I always do, to not do the other stuff, so that I can find time to read.” Yes, that’s it. That’s the big secret. I read so much because I really, really want to read so much. I thoroughly enjoy it. When I’m not reading, I’m usually thinking about what I have read recently and counting the minutes until I can get back to it. But if you only want to read as much as I want to do Pilates every day (i.e., only a little – usually more of an “I should” than an “I want” situation, unless I’m feeling particularly tight or sore in an area I know it will help), then maybe give yourself a break about how infrequently you read and focus on all the wonderful and life-giving things you do instead.
  • Why Walking Helps Us Think by Ferris Jabr – This piece was a fantastic motivation to take more walks. If you only get one free New Yorker article a month, this would be a good one to use it for!
  • “Comfort in, dump out.” This is a clear, easy lesson in How Not To Say the Wrong Thing by Susan Silk and Barry Goldman.

And a bonus bullet point this week – I joined Bluesky  – Roxane Gay said it best – “Some people don’t get exposed to other points of view in their day-to-day lives so they need social media for that. Some of us have friends and colleagues and family. And it shows.”

I hope you have a good weekend, friends!

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Friday Five – It’s Friday

Posted in Alive, Denton, Friday Five, Getting It Together, Health, Lament, Mental Health, Revolution, tagged , , on November 8, 2024| Leave a Comment »

It’s Friday, everyone. We made it. 

I am anxious about my health, my job, my friends (especially those of us whom the prevailing culture seems to want to annihilate), my country, and the world in general. I am not ok.

This week has been a lot, and it’s Friday.

It’s Friday, and I love you, and here are some things I want you to remember to do.

I hope your weekend is restful, and I hope you get to spend it with people who have your best interests at heart.

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Day 31 – Hope’s Beautiful Guises

Posted in 31 Days, Books, Food, Health, Hope, Mental Health on November 1, 2024| Leave a Comment »

“An open bakery in the morning is one of hope’s most beautiful guises.”

Nina George, The Little Village of Book Lovers

Today, I enjoyed this lovely pastry from The Market by Clark Bakery, our very own on-campus bakery. It was flaky and messy and awesome.

Just like life is sometimes.

This year, there have been good days and bad days, but very few days have been all one or the other. Days I remember fondly were still usually hard. Most days this year have been meh overall.

But even days that were super traumatic had a little spark of hope in them. Sometimes, that’s all that saw me through.

The comfort of a friend.

Actually being able to taste a cup of coffee (which was a rare treat during chemo).

A cool breeze.

Sharing cat pictures.

Coming home to a care package in the mail.

A flaky, messy pastry.

Likewise, every book I’ve read this year has played some role in helping me push through to the other side of whatever was going on while I was reading it. No matter how hard something was, the stories were always there. When I didn’t have the energy to do anything else, I could still read. When I got tired of repeating updates about my health, books gave me something else to talk about.

I’ve enjoyed sharing a small portion of that with you this month, and there are many more quotes I had lined up that I hope to write about in the future. I encourage you to keep a quote journal, whether it’s to jot down things that inspire you in the books you read, in articles from your favorite cultural icons, or even in memes that catch your eye as you’re scrolling through your social media feeds.

Look for hope. In all its beautiful guises.

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Day 30 – Readathons Gone Awry

Posted in 31 Days, Books, Getting It Together, Health, Home, Joy, Quiet, Seasons, tagged , , , , on October 30, 2024| Leave a Comment »

“One doesn’t need magic if one knows enough stories.”

“I was delighted to sit in the corner with my food and a book and speak to no one.”

Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries

This past weekend, I participated (loosely) in Dewey’s 24-hour Readathon. The official time was 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Sunday (EST). But I (and various others in the Discord and in the Facebook group) rarely actually stick to the time of the event. My goal, for example, was to simply read a collective 24 hours. I think the Dewey’s team is on to us – instead of hourly challenges, they just listed a handful of challenges to complete “at any time during the readathon.”

I completed no challenges.

I didn’t read a full 24 hours.

I barely remembered to post the picture of the stack I was choosing from (see above) on the group’s social media pages.

I carried on with plans to attend my favorite yearly Halloween party and Spiderdead, brazenly cutting into the hours I would usually set aside on readathon weekends to read.

I finished three books, but only one of them is actually in this stack (Fang Fiction – pretty cute!).

What I got out of the readathon was still pretty magical.

I got to tuck into stories about found families and books and several other favorite themes. I ate good, simple food, so I rested better (weird how that happens) and thus felt more refreshed when the weekend was over (despite it being a “busy” one). I embraced my full homebody self without the usual twinge of guilt about what a person who lives alone should want to do on the weekend.

These twinges are getting smaller and less frequent as I age. One reason for this is that I’m accepting who I am more and becoming less apologetic about it with each passing month. Another reason is that I get so much joy and restoration out of my alone time that there is little to no room left for feeling bad about it.

At any rate, I had a great weekend, and I look forward to many more like it as the season changes.

Reading more makes me want to write more. I’m reflecting on my reading this year.

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Day 21 – Thunderstorms and Fairy Tales

Posted in 31 Days, Alive, Books, Church, Health, Hope, Resolutions on October 21, 2024| Leave a Comment »

(This is a little aggressive for a Monday morning, Dove. Calm it down.)

“There’s a thunderstorm brewing inside me and I think it will break soon.”
Stephen King, Fairy Tale

On Saturday, I walked the survivors’ lap at the Celebrate Life 5K. It turns out, the survivors’ lap was a short jaunt around the grass near the starting point for the race, for which I was grateful. I was already up early; I’m not sure I could have done much more.

And we didn’t. We walked our circle to many, many cheers and then just kept walking out to our cars to go get breakfast.

Recently, I haven’t felt like doing a lot of things. This is not to say that I haven’t wanted to, though. I very much wanted to run the full race on Saturday but I am just not up to it yet. I wanted to clean my apartment on Sunday but barely managed to finish the laundry before I was worn out and needed to rest.

I noticed this morning that I am now in the practice of going through my calendar at the beginning of every week to see what I can remove from it, just in case. I have question marks beside things I printed in bold, assured letters just a month ago. It’s a little disappointing. I had hoped to be feeling a lot better by now, but more extended rest is needed.

This may be the calm before the storm, though. I feel it brewing.

To be fair, I always feel a surge of expectation in October. The end of the year is in sight, and the beginning of the new church year is a little over a month away. I hold off on posting hopes and plans for the upcoming calendar year until the end of December, but I’ve already started musing to myself about what those will be.

(It’s gonna be good. I’m pretty excited about it.)

(Assuming all my test results in the next couple of months are what I want them to be.)

For one thing, I turn 50 next March, and I plan to be extra…everything…about it. Several friends have reached/are reaching this milestone before then, and I’m excited to celebrate with them, too.

The main thing, though, is that I want to live in ways that make me feel better – feel alive and vibrant – no matter what happens. Storms come whether you are prepared for them or not. I want to be more prepared.

And as for the thunderstorm building inside me…let it come. It’s time.

I’m reflecting on the books I’ve read this year. Click to see the list!

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Day 14 – Correct vs. Fun

Posted in 31 Days, Health, Mental Health, Music, Work, Writing, tagged , , on October 14, 2024| Leave a Comment »

“…because she didn’t know if it was better to be correct or fun, and why did it feel like she always had to choose between the two?”
Alison Espach, The Wedding People

Almost halfway through the month, and this is the quote that is resonating with me most this morning. I feel this way in several areas of my life.

It comes through in my art. There is a tension between my training and my enjoyment. I outline and then write a rough draft and then edit…except that is more focus and work than I can commit to right now. So I keep writing but in ways that are more fun. I blog, I write bad poetry (and let it stay bad…for now), and I experiment with stream-of-consciousness journaling. I am a classically trained pianist, but I have found so much freedom in just sitting at the keyboard and playing around with whatever sounds, chords, and melodies come forth. I stick to just enough of my dance basics to be safe (turns out, the basics of dance are mostly about avoiding injury) when I fling myself about in a haphazard way in my living room. I love the foundation that my training has given me but I also love breaking out of it when I need to.

It comes through at my job. I don’t think I’m a good manager. I want the job to be fun for my team, but I spend so much of my day harping on corrections – mostly about basic stuff they should already know – that I feel more like a nag. A nice nag, but a nag nonetheless. I also find it exhausting and dehumanizing to be held responsible for the actions (or lack thereof) of other people with precarious levels of give-a-damn. I know it’s not a unique problem – this is just management in a nutshell – but it’s still gross. I’m still waiting for the big bucks that are supposed to make it worthwhile to hit the bank account. I need to learn how to be inspiring, but I just don’t know that I’m that person.

It’s coming through in my life in general right now. Life isn’t super fun these days. Or, it can be, but there is a high price for anything that lasts longer than an hour or uses a lot of energy. The “correct” thing is to rest and not overdo it, but it takes so little to overdo it that I’m not sure that’s even a reasonable expectation. Overdoing it and the ridiculously over-the-top physical consequences of doing so seem inevitable. This would be a great time to be independently wealthy so that I could spend my precious energy only on fun things.

One of the ways I’m slowing my roll this month is not being super picky about writing a post every single day. It will happen most days – just not every day. It’s especially nice to take a break on the weekends.

Where do you get caught up in the struggle between being correct and being fun? Or do you? Is it just me?

Reflecting on my reading this month…

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Day 11 – Friday (Not) Five – My Inner Hobbit

Posted in 31 Days, Alive, Books, Friday Five, Getting It Together, Health, Mental Health, Quiet, Work, tagged , , on October 11, 2024| Leave a Comment »

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.

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