A Lucid Moment

I was poking through Google docs today. There's my plan to reclaim the house, mostly completed. Oh, there's an old food diary. Hmmm.
I made a copy of the diary. It's a spreadsheet that lets me record what I eat and drink, mt weight each day, exercise I've done and how much sleep I get plus notes.
I made a me plan to complement the house plan. It currently just has habits I want to form:
Cook every Sunday to have lunch packs for work during the week.
Walk every day.
Clear couch, armchair and coffee table and keep them like that
That last one is really more part of the house plan, and I've included it there as well. These documents will evolve.
This evening I did clear the chair, which was piled high, mostly with laundry.
I filled the green waste bin and put it out because it's bin night and it's a green bin week.
When I got out the front, I decided to walk around the block. Not fast enough to be breathing heavily but I think I need to regain muscle tone first. That's still about 840m of walking (thank you Google maps)
The real question is whether I can maintain this. Let's see. The worst that could happen is that I wind up back where I was. Allons-y.

The enshittification of Facebook is continuing apace. I and a lot of my friends are settling into Bluesky (I'm gealbhan@bsky.social) and really the only things that make me reluctant to kill my entire account like I did Twitter is the large number of friends still on there and the fact that it amounts to 15 years worth of diary.

So I'm picking this account up again. The last entry was me trying to work out why my health was so poor and wondering what my capacity in the future might be. Turns out that I'm type 2 diabetic and so I was spending a lot of time being near hyperglycemic. I've also realised that while the acute symptoms of the haemolytic anaemia I had years ago were resolved, I've never been the same since. So I'm now wildly obese and the executive dysfunction has cranked up to potato. With the wonderful help of some very good friends, I cleared the squalid tip that was my home and rearranged my living space. That was well over three months ago and I seem to have formed some good habits although I do need to form some more.

My life has contracted. My capacity for everything has reduced. My 40s were the period of spectacular physical decline that I feared it might be and my 50s look like being the consolidation of that. This looks like the time to change what I can, and live with what I can't. I need to make my peace with that but I also need to be better at working out what I can and cannot actually change. A work in progress.

Nearly four years ago, I was sent home after gender reassignment surgery. I was given a small supply of Endone. Tonight I dug into that for the first time ever and it hasn't done a damn thing. One of the symptoms of this burgeoning chronic illness is horrible levels of discomfort when I stand and especially when I walk. Going from the front door to the car of the person picking me up yesterday left me feeling like I'd just sprinted a few blocks. A few people have suggested that this is POTS, or postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. The symptoms are a very close fit. So things like having a shower or getting dressed require rest stops where I pant and flop and feel like death. In a new and entertaining twist though, this has joined forces with another condition which isn't dangerous and usually doesn't cause me much discomfort at all but in conjunction with the POTS hurts more than recovering from surgery did, even in hospital. Given that this is likely to get worse if I do anything which aggravates the POTS, such as getting dressed or walking even tiny distances, I'm very much NOT looking forward to the appointment with the doctor I have later today. As it is, there are lots of involuntary spasms and high-pitched noises This is the least fun I've had in a very long time and I'm including things like coming off my bike and cracking my scapula in 2012. I would like this to stop now please.

Yes, I'm back with a vengeance. I have a lot of feelings to blog out and a whole new era of what the fuck even is this bullshit to negotiate. So there will be a bit of a wave of posts.

My mother came over to visit today. When she initially suggested that, I made dithering awkward noises and then decided to come clean and explain that I wasn't really home to visitors because of the frankly squalid state of my home. The upshot of all this was that my septuagenarian mother came over and cleaned my kitchen for me while I dithered around the edges. The extremely minor picking up and single load of laundry I did was enough to leave me shaky and vague with sheer fatigue. Just to re-iterate, minor housework and lunch with my mother destroyed me. So yeah, I'm not just a bit slow and tired, I'm at the stage of basically not being able to look after myself anymore and my elderly mother can run rings around me. I do not feel like a grownup anymore. This is apparently my new reality and I genuinely have no idea how I'm going to make it work.

No, I haven't posted for a while. Just over a year ago, I gleefully moved into my new unit and looked forward to the next chapter of my life. It's not been the best chapter. To cut to the chase, my health has deteriorated to a ridiculous degree. Work has become a horrific struggle to the point where even cutting back to four days a week has been useless. I took three months of long service leave and badgered doctors and other health professionals, hoping to find and answer, and maybe recover some health with rest. Two weeks after restarting work, I crashed so hard that I came home, fell into bed and slept for more than 20 of the following 30 hours. I saw my GP last Friday and she has referred me to a rheumatologist using terms like "fibromalgia", which, now I'm looking for it, fits horribly well.

People have told me that this isn't the end of the world. And no, it's not fatal. But I'm squinting at my finances, trying to work out how not to lose my unit while living on the DSP. (which provides no allowance for mortgages, unlike rent - apparently it's ok to pay off other people's mortgages while on a pension, but not your own.) This unit was effectively going to be my quality of life insurance for when I was expecting to retire in 20-30 years time. Now...this is going to require some epic juggling, and that in turn will require more juggling, just to find the personal resources to do the epic juggling. Walking more than a couple of hundred metres destroys me. I weigh nearly 120kg - 70kg me from 4-5 years ago would be beyond horrified. I am now morbidly obese, transfeminine, essentially disabled, middle aged and several flavours of queer. I am the living, complaining manifestation of the abject.

There are still good things in my life, but I am watching the latter half of my life dwindle to a tiny dessicated shadow of what I thought it might be. Having had the barest sniff of almost living in a body that fits me, that body has broken in several important ways. It's like opening a Christmas present only to find that someone has trodden on the exquisitely delicate contents before you got to them.

If you need me, just follow the sound of swearing.

It's been a while since I posted. Future me will be annoyed because although others read this and that fact is one of the things that makes this valuable, the primary reader of this journal is future me.

So where to begin?

I have a cat again. She was born on the 3rd of September and I picked her up on the 31st of October. She is wilful and talkative and a locus of chaos and beautiful and I love her. I spent some time trying to come up with a breathtakingly cool name for her before realising that she didn't need a clever name, just one that can easily be said with love. So I went with my first impulse which was Penelope. She will never be called that but is simply and always Penny. Also Pennycat, pretty one, scampercat, fluffmonster and when I'm feeling silly, Pfenig Hlepan Wollenbrek ForÞsdottir. (subject to me checking whether that's even remotely correct) She has an elegant sufficiency of fluff, beautiful markings and all the wonderful absurdity that any good kitten has. She is also probably the single best thing that happened to me in 2014.

A couple of weeks ago I got my second tattoo. It's an E H Shepherd illustration from Winnie the Pooh of Christopher Robin leaning back against Pooh pulling on his boots. The story behind it is that Pooh goes to visit Christopher Robin and finds him putting on his boots. He is excited because Big Boots mean Adventures. Christopher Robin had trouble getting his boots on and had to lean back quite hard on Pooh to manage it which made Pooh happy because he was already having a Useful Day. It turned out that Christopher Robin was preparing to head out to discover the North Pole. So it's a reminder that when setting out on a grand voyage of discovery, sometimes you need to lean quite hard on your friends. An acknowledgement and a reminder to pay it forwards. It's also a pretty thing and it makes me happy.

Mental health...lots there.

I started one lot of medication and found that while it took the edge off my anxiety, it also makes me tired and even less likely to be motivated to get things done than I used to be. It also didn't make me any more keen on socialising and if anything made that worse. So yesterday I got a new prescription and I'll see how that goes. Hermiting and disengagement remains an issue and I wound up deciding not to drink alcohol at all for the forseeable future as that was getting to the point of being distinctly unhealthy. I am resolved to try to get out of the house more. I really really ought to create things. It's become clear that body issue are a major part of my mental issues and this is not a single issue thing but rather a series of things that interrelate in a complex way that involve gender identity, sexuality, fitness, cultural expectations and myriad other things I haven't yet properly sorted through. I'm getting a clearer picture now though and starting to make plans to deal with this.

One of these will be exercise. Last week I went on a three day bike ride along a rail trail from Mansfield to Tallarook. It was a lovely ride and I did it in the company of several wonderful queer women who were mutually supportive and encouraging. This was a fortunate thing as it turned out that I had rather badly over-reached myself. On the dirt rail trails, my limit was about 30km before I essentially completely drained my body's reserves of energy and just had to stop. Given that we rode 60km on the first day and 40km on the third day, this presented difficulties. By the end of those days I had stopped thinking clearly by the time we got to where we needed to be, literally staggered thoughtlessly in circles, collapsed in the nearest convenient spot and cried, not because I was upset but just as a sheer physical reaction. Two days later I broke out in hives and I suspect I essentially crashed my immune system. If I had done this ride in early 2012, I would have romped through it easily. So my fitness is gone and I now weigh over 90kg. I've declared that I need to do something about this numerous times. Maybe I can make it stick this time. It really really hurt this time and I'm finding a host of reasons to hate what I've done to this body.

There are other things that I'll address another time but they involve work and a home and the process of reexamining those as well. Life is in flux. This is probably good.

It might be time to shake things up properly again.

To be honest, the very thing that's prompting this might be a very good reason why now is not the time to do it. I've been getting more and more hormonally out of whack pretty much since surgery, which is something I hadn't realised until I had a really good think about when this all started. I've had flat and off key patches which haven't really coincided with situational stuff and they've been getting worse until I'm now at the point of randomly fighting off context free tears and adrenal surges, especially at work. So I effectively got progressively escalating PMS that's been going on for months now. So this is the perfect time not to make life changing decisions because they may not be the most balanced ones. But I'm going to lay some groundwork and start thinking about it in earnest.

It mostly involves work. Even taking wobbly endocrine systems into account, work feeds me depressing stories every day and I'm increasingly starting to feel like I'm complicit in some appallingly bad management of people who need help far more than they need a sheriff's officer turning up on their doorstep. So the plan is to take some leave. I have a consultation on the 29th to get a referral to a trans friendly endocrinologist so hopefully this will resolve ongoing issues but in the meantime, if I take the time to re-evaluate how I want to live, talk with some good friends, assess alternatives and just have some relatively undemanding time then my life just might start shaking itself out in the way I've been waiting for it to do. It seems that I have to be the one who does the shaking. This is also very much about getting back to the process of moving out of my comfort zones. I'm not doing that anymore and it's a productive, empowering, transforming thing that I really ought to have as an ongoing part of my life.

So I will look and thing and talk and write and then once I've dealt with the body beating me about the emotional head and shoulders I can get serious about actually rejigging the parts of my life with which I'm dissatisfied. I have the ability to do this. I am surrounded by some of the most amazing people I can conceive of who support me and want me to achieve things. I've demonstrated to myself that when I have a purpose and lever myself out of ruts, I can actually make things happen. It's time to stop believing that I can't actually do anything significant or worthwhile because I realise that's actually what I do think now that I see it all set down in words.

I've given myself time to move on from surgery and now I'm going nothing. I should stop doing nothing.

Well that didn't work. Nearly three weeks ago I ended the relationship that I thought I was pleased with the last time I posted here. I won't go into details because it wouldn't just be my laundry that I'd be airing but it actually wasn't working on several levels. It was not a bad experience though. I've learned more about myself, about what I want in a relationship, what I *need* in a relationship and what relationships can look like. I have many lovely people in my life and I'm not feeling a lack of love, even if I'm not sleeping with anyone.

Sleeping with people is tricky too these days...I've learnt that as well. In some ways my body is a tricky awkward thing now and it doesn't quite work like anyone else's. This will be a thing that needs thought, patience and understanding.

So where from here? Nowhere in particular right now, actually. There are people I have crushed on, people I could very easily crush on and even one or two who are pressing some buttons right now but I'm not chasing anyone. There's a part of me that is inclined to let my relationships with people be whatever they are. There are myriad different ways to engage with people: intellectual, emotional, romantic, sexual, sensual, tactile (yes those last three are all different) and they don't have to operate at the same level. Clever communicative people can work this stuff out and I've had some fascinating and provoking conversations of late about this sort of thing. So I shall just enjoy people's company and see where that leads.

Well that was interesting. There's no photo of this, nor should there be. This was one of the single least photogenic and more long-winded things I've ever made but I don't think that'll put me off having another go.

I made stock the other day. It probably doesn't matter too much what sort of vegetables go into the stock but for the record, this one had a lot of pumpkin, celery and fennel through it as well as quite a bit of spring onion so although the flavour was fairly delicate, it still had a definite character. I have no idea how much liquid risotto takes so I always always underestimate it. I put a bit over a litre of the stock into a saucepan and wrapped a couple of hundred grams of almond meal in a cloth with some freshly grated nutmeg, tied that closed and put that in the pan with the stock over a gentle heat, mooshing it about with a wooden spoon every so often.

Into my cast iron pot went some olive oil, two leeks, four cloves of garlic more grated nutmeg and some ground sage because I spotted it in the cupboard and it seemed like a good idea. I cooked that down until it was soft and swimming a bit in its own juices and added four portobello caps chopped small, a generous pout of balsalmic vinegar and a fairly random amount of brown rice. By that time the stock was nicely creamy so I removed the clothful of meal, squeezed it out and put it aside (in a jug in this case) and started ladling the stock in. One ladleful at a time stirred through and allowed to cook in until to no longer runs freely across the bottom of the pot if I clear a space with the wooden spoon. Yes, this takes a while, especially with brown rice but I wasn't in a hurry. By the time I was close to emptying the saucepan it was clear that I was going to need that much again so I put about another litre of stock in and returned the cloth to the pan as well. More ladling, more stirring. Near the end I just crumbled the wedge of blue cheese in, added the rest of the stock, stirred it into a gooey mess and let it sit on a very low heat for a while. I like this one a lot. The cheese was a bit over the top but I didn't mind that myself. Less would have been more balanced.

I ate the lot.

Sometimes this mood hits me. Like a lot of things I cook, there's a basic mental template and then I dance around it according to how I feel. This is the coconut cream enriched curry template.



So, as usual, spices warmed into oil. In this case it was cardamom, cumin, turmuric, pepper, allspice, cinnamon, fresh coriander, garlic and chilli with an onion sauteed in it, I added a package of frozen spinach, some cauliflower, steamed pumpkin and a mango because they were in the supermarket and shouted at me - that's what inspired me to cook this in the first place. I stirred through a can of coconut cream and let it simmer for a while. Coconut cream has a way of absorbing and transferring flavours into other foods so letting it go for a while is a good thing. I served it over basmati rice and put more uncooked coriander and flaked almonds that I toasted while the rest was simmering on top.