Spring is Coming!

Spring must be coming because today I woke up feeling fantastic. I haven’t felt this good for months. It’s been a looooong hard winter for me. Every year, around September, things start getting a little harder for me to do. I get a little slower, a little more tired, a little harder to keep up and do everything I want to do. What follows is three months with three major holidays that I scramble to get everything done for (and yes, if you saw how I celebrate Halloween you’d consider it a major holiday too!) By January I am usually toast and fall into a winter torpor that consists mostly of sleeping and ignoring increasing aches and pains. This gets worse as the months go by. For years I had physicians tell me this was clinical depression and like a fucking idiot I beat myself up and believed them. This year I realize it has nothing to do with depression. I still wake up every day excited and eager to see what it can give me. That is not depression. Still, even though I may wake up perky, this usually only lasts an hour or so and after four hours I am usually having such a hard time cognitively functioning I am back to sleep. This schedule is hell if you want to get anything done..

These past couple months I have made exceedingly few trips out of the house, mostly to the grocery store, and each time it has set me back days. One day I decided to help a friend and that resulted in me being up for 48 hours or so. I haven’t done that since I was in my early twenties and I got sooooo sick. I was dizzy and would have been puking if I had anything in my stomach but I had long since stopped being able to eat. It took me a week and a half to recover from the hangover that ensued afterwards. I’ve been out a few more times, sleeping over wherever I was going because the idea of driving home on the same day was too much.

The worst part of all this is I am a Type A personality and want to keep achieving things every day. I made a ton of plans this winter. Very few have come to fruition as I just did not have the energy… but the few that I did have been monumental in allowing me to start having a somewhat normal life again.

For one I managed to get myself my own room again – which has an actual mattress, up off the floor, and a working space to do my art. This is HUGE. When I moved back in with my mother I slept on the couch or the floor of a room so filled with her hoarded up shit it was literally to the ceiling. I had a small walking isle to get to the bed and that was it. I moved into a different bedroom but it had to be 100% hauled out first and cleaned because she had kept her pet cage birds in there and it was so dusty I couldn’t enter it without getting a massive migraine every time. Relying on others to do something for me has never been easy for me. Mostly because I almost never ask for help and when I do I rarely receive it in any meaningful way. You learn self sufficiency to the extreme in this way but it’s not always possible in these situations… And this process took about eight months which would have tested anyone’s patience.

I was so happy with having my own room and bed I splurged some of my very meager earnings on two super fluffy blankets and another body pillow. It is so soft and warm and I can spread out like I am making a snow angel! It’s awesome! And the second body pillow has made my bed into a couch-like set up if I chose it to be. Finally I am comfortable and can RELAX in my own environment and sleep at ease. It’s been a looong time coming…

From here I have gotten up for fifteen minutes at a time to sort some of my own belongings, most of which are still in boxes and storage and scattered everywhere. I had to wash all my clothes again as they got too dusty for me to handle and I now have a wardrobe set up for their proper storage and ease of use like a normal person. My art supplies are mostly in a closet in my bedroom, I have almost everything sorted there for easy access and use. Now I have to go through my kitchen whose cupboards were used as temporary holding places for literally everything I owned when I moved back in. It’s time to haul that out and leave only kitchen things in there. Then I can start cooking for myself again! No more frozen pizzas and Ramon!!

FINALLY I am almost able to keep up with normal ordinary tasks in this place without it piling up and getting overwhelming. Now I can actually have people over and only be embarrassed about the fact everything’s falling apart and not because it’s too filthy or cluttered for human beings to live here. This is only going to do good things for my social life as well as my artistic and writing life.  I can finally relax, breathe a sigh of relief, and enjoy being here. My mother would like to see me making this space my own with decorations and whatnot but after I get done making everything efficient I have many months of work repairing everything that’s broken before I can do that. As it stands one linoleum floor has been ruined by flooding and needs to be pulled up, the rest of the linoleum floors were put in so shittily that they now have one inch gaps between boards and I will eventually be ripping those up as well and likely replacing it all with tile – easy-to-fucking-clean, hard-to-kill tile! The door handle on the bathroom busted off, as did the knob in the shower, obviously that needs to be fixed. The drop down ceiling is… well dropping down. The grids have succumbed to gravity and many of the foam panels are fallen out or missing. The ones that remain are soaked in a shit ton of dust and mouse pee (from an infestation I dealt with after moving in.) They need to be trashed just to give my sinuses a fucking break. A drawer in the kitchen no longer functions – actually it never did if I am to be honest. The kitchen tile needs grouting still – four years after being put down – and the bathroom also needs tiles put down and furniture built for it. I don’t actually have the money to fix these things… so I will likely just live with a lot of it. Granted a new paint job could really liven the place up and I sort of look forward to that. Fuck normal unoffensive colors – I’m going all out metallic on this place!

But back to the present! The other things I accomplished this winter were migrating two blogs – my travel blog Catching Marbles (where all my photos are from today), and my homesteading blog Tales from the Birdello. I did this by myself without any help and it took me months because everything that could have gone wrong did and I had absolutely no technical training. Still the move allowed me to put AdSense up on them and I am now the proud new owner of two shiny pennies! I know, doesn’t seem worth it, but I am hoping in the future it’ll earn more than a penny a week… I also added Donate buttons in case anyone enjoys my stories enough to give me gas money to keep on adventuring in the warmer months. Now I am focusing on a third big website which instead of migrating I am just completely redoing. It’ll be a website for my future farm – a place to share a vlog (maybe blog as well?) of my philosophies and a place to encourage people to join in my message of community, peace, and education. I’ll attach a store to it to sell my sculptures and art which seem to be peeking a lot of curiosity lately. My mother can sell her hand made soap there as well and I may have guest artists sell their stuff off it too just to bring people in. Who knows. It’ll either go somewhere great or nowhere at all and I will try something else.

I am overjoyed to be on an up swing because I can now spend a little more time and energy doing these things in the hopes someday I will be able to provide a service useful enough to be financially independent despite my disabilities and difficulties. My dream will always be to get the hell out of my mother’s house and on my own – on a nice homestead with a lot of land I can use for growing crops, raising livestock, and teaching others all my hard earned lessons from a lifetime ago. Although I am not anywhere I can have livestock I have kept my homesteading skills sharp by ordering seeds for the spring. I’m also contemplating bees… because I don’t think they’re considered livestock. I know in my heart a proper homestead is where I am meant to be and why literally everything that happened in my life, including my terrible health, happened. Because it all brought me here – to this goal, this life, and I’ll continue to fight for it until I can’t move any more.

TO SPRING!!!