sad morning.

really terrible dreams last night, as usual.

been pretty depressed for a while. i'm so tired of hurting. the podiatrist was such a miserable disappointment.

i need functional feet. it's messing with my health and causing weight gain and depression to not be able to run or skate. to hurt after even a short day of work. to hurt every time i dance. this sucks.

need to reach out to my doctor today about progesterone. turns out the "low dose" he gave me, that was half of what he originally wanted to try, that made me feel like i was hit by a truck, can be a lot lower. there is something for me in fullscript to try 20mg instead of 50, but i don't know how to access it. my hot flashes and night disturbances have suddenly gotten a lot worse, along with brain fog, mood swings, and swelling/joint pain, and i'm getting desperate for estrogen, which he refuses to give me without progesterone, which so far i hate and can't tolerate. but it's a necessary evil apparently, so i want to give it another try.

i'm still upset that i spent $70 on a bottle of 50mg stuff that i can't use.

same with the wasted foot appointment. she kept me in the office for an hour, to spend less than ten minutes with me telling me my foot isn't broken and that she could just give me a shot or pills for the pain. i don't want to resolve the pain, I WANT TO RESOLVE WHAT'S CAUSING IT.

anyway. health care in this country is just so stressful and painful and difficult. it always makes me cry, trying to negotiate with doctors to just treat me, when i am suffering.

...

Avalanche just sat in my lap. She always knows when I'm upset. She woke me up from a nightmare this morning, too. She was chirping at moths in the middle of the night and woke me up, I don't know what to do about them. I need to check my cashmere and get it somewhere safe. the wool I've given up on. I got a bunch of cedar that worked for a couple of months but then they came back with a vengeance. I should just burn everything in my closet and start over, i keep thinking.

I really should probably do so with half of it. I have too many clothes and I hate most of them anyway. I just.... have never been able to afford quality clothing, and now that i can, i don't know how to select it. So i just keep thrifting. the only nice pieces i have are gifts. or things i bought for work, but those are just cheap cotton. the outdoor gear is the other good stuff, at least, the stuff the moths haven't gotten to. grateful for that stuff. not sure what i would do without trips into nature. maybe go back to drinking.

sobriety sucks rn.

delicate flower.

was a tearful painful day, but punctuated with sweetness here and there.

feeling profoundly lonely and unseen, lately.

Josh is reading Duhigg's new book, Supercommunicators, which is on my recommended list and I might put it in my queue.

So when I was venting to him a little bit after circus, when we were sitting and having a bite and a warm beverage at our local cafe, he paused and asked, looking at me intently and primed by his new reading, "Is this a practical conversation, or an emotional conversation, or an identity conversation?" so that he would understand better how to listen and proceed.

At his sudden attempt to really understand me carefully (instead of just tolerating the sound of my voice), I, of course, started weeping.

sigh.

once I recovered, we also had some fun analyzing the pitfalls of some of the conversational fails I have experienced at work lately. "Are they not very good communicators?" Josh asks, with a faintly mirthful expression.

...

Today was nice overall, regardless of tearfulness and physical pain in my foot and shoulders. it rained but only softly, and later it was just breezy and thickly overcast and not wet. silks with josh in the morning, cooked and cleaned a bit, got my orders all finished and shipped, picked up some groceries, took a gentle nap while listening to how chronic pain can be a manifestation of emotional pain (SOMEtimes), played with and walked avalanche, washed my sheets and changed my bedding, skipped dinner, listened to two ursula k leguin stories. i'm starting to get a feel for her style and while i don't dislike it, there are distasteful moments that i wish i could erase, and moments where i wish i could add more sweetness. she loves androgyny and shameless sex (the binary gendered people are the shamelessly slutty ones - the androgyns are sexless so far) and it's kind of fun but also weirdly empty. she is searching for ways to fill the emptiness and i think there are more opportunities that i wish she would pounce on. in this last story, there were empaths in the sense that they could literally feel the emotions of other sentient beings, but instead of this emotional connection being beautiful, it was painful and isolating and terrifying and infuriating and sad. that's... not where i would have taken it.

it was like... when i was at circus, this morning, all these people there, doing their creative things, with downcast eyes, saying only the briefest of required social greetings, when all i wanted to do was snuggle into all of them and tell them how beautiful and wonderful i think they all are. (okay not all of them, but at least dave and amira and a little bit rose, and i feel affection or ashlyn and jodie, too - not emily but only because i don't know her at all and don't remember ever meeting her or seeing her before). but instead i have to follow their cues and stay looking away and downcast and pretend i don't see them or don't think of them or don't care at all.

sigh.

it's just... hard to find genuine connection, and i am constantly starved for it, and starting to wonder if i will always and forever just be starving.

i am also hungry from skipping dinner. this is the first time i've managed to skip an entire meal since i started to try to think about working on this ten pounds of weight gain - i used to be able to fast for an entire 24 hours, that feels impossible right now. to get to my regular weight by my birthday i would have to skip a meal like this pretty much every day for the next two weeks, and i just don't see that happening. so, chubby 49th birthday, whatevs. that's fine.

josh told me about a fitness guy he watched on youtube who calls his belly that showed up when he turned 70 "mister jiggles" and explains that he can't eat after 7pm because that's when mister jiggles starts talking to him, saying, "feeeed meeeeee" lol. this is a helpful image for some reason. i am now calling my belly mister jiggles, also.

took a long walk tonight. really needed it. i am a simple creature. i think i just need to treat myself like a daisy.