needs a warm beverage kind of day.

I have this beautiful blessed day off.

Instead of feeling elated and excited, I feel this sickening overwhelm of all the things I feel like I need to accomplish or tackle while having any free time.

My office is still a disaster and not set up or organized at all.

One corner of my room is still a pile and not usable space.

My closet still is a storage area with bins and overflowing clothes and laundry and bags all over the place, I can barely get in and out to retrieve clothing to get dressed each day.

The house could use a general clean and dusting and decluttering.

I also need some cardio - a swim or a bike ride. But it is FRIGID with sleet in the forecast. The pool only has two lap lanes open on Wednesdays.

This is what I was talking about, with feeling guilty and stressed whenever I have free time, instead of actually being able to relax, like I could when I was healing right after surgery.

I got on silks yesterday and it went surprisingly well. I had no idea I would be able to return to it this quickly. I am weak from 3 weeks of inactivity, and my shoulder and entire left side feels very tight and angry, the side that is trying to protect the surgery site. I tweaked my back a tiny bit, pushing a little too hard because I was just so happy to be able to do stuff.

But mostly I feel fine and now it seems like I have no excuse to go back to work full time, go back to PT full time, go back to my regular workout routine (with some time to build back up to where I was), to go back to eating less comfort food and more nourishing vegetables.

So now I just feel all of this immense pressure.

Not only from the house stuff, but also, it's time to renew my loan payment certification (this requires extensive documentation and paperwork every year), and to start prepping all of my documentation for taxes, which will be extra daunting this year with the mortgage thrown into the mix.

I also want to try to finish my grandmother's book, I need to update my websites and clean up my online shop (or build a new one altogether), I have one older customer who is blaming me for getting a Faery Hair spam email but it's pretty clear her facebook is hacked so I am guessing that's where the spam is coming from? ugh. It's impossible for me to figure out from not inside her gmail how they associated her email address with my social media. When I tried to ask some followup questions, she said, "I don't follow social media" which made zero sense because the email specifically referenced that, and her facebook page is following mine, BUT, she quit using it last year. That doesn't mean it stopped existing, though, and her gmail address is still associated with it, and now there is a random post on it that doesn't look like anything she would normally repost. But I don't know how to explain all this to a boomer.

I also want to do art, and work on my paper journal, and and and.

I am just riddled with stress and pressure. Instead of feeling grateful and excited, I feel doom and dread.

Suuuuuuuuux.

I am seeing my PT guy at noon, and then a friend for coffee at 1:30, I am hoping this will help. I will bring my journal and set aside some time for doodling.

But to relieve the anxiety, I do need to also figure out what kind of work to get done today, also.

I'm thinking gathering documents for the loan recert. But that requires the laptop, which I am reluctant to leave in the hospital parking garage. hmmmmmmmmmm.

Maybe it's a grandma's book kinda day.

I also want to shuffle through a decluttering youtube channel I found that I'm hoping can help me chip away at my clutter. I would so so love that. Even though it often feels empty, without family, I'm not sure what is the point, other than personal comfort and an easier life for Josh and Avalanche. That should be enough, but. It feels lonely.

It hurts that I reached out to several friends yesterday and only one responded. I will focus on the one who values me, and go from there.

Sigh.

Sending hugs and love and a warm beverage to whomever might have bothered to get this far. I love you.

Listening to geese fly by in the grey sky makes everything feel so much better.

Going to try a hot shower, make some food for my husband before I head out, and go from there.

unhealthy relationships with money and stuff.

eerrrrf, gotta be careful with the essentialism/minimalism stuff. The decluttering channel I found has some nice aspects, but when videos go into great details about "frugal living" that are just my everyday habits, it's a bit of a let-down. "Here's how to save 10,000 per year!" uuhhh, I have done all of those things my entire life, because I've never had an extra ten grand to blow.

Like, I haven't gotten a haircut since 2018 (didn't even enjoy it, really).

There were maybe two professional haircuts I got that I ever liked.

Oh oh, and the "buy 5" rule. Oh! Novel idea! Commit to only buying 5 new pieces of clothing per year!

Ummmm. lol.

I thrift all my clothes, it is very rare I buy new things, I might get 5 per year, sometimes. If you count socks.

I mean, honestly, sure, I could make a spreadsheet and make totally sure to hit this mark, that might be worth trying, maybe I'm wrong and I forgot the purchases.

But still.

It's not going to save me ten grand.

heh.

Anyway. Working through it. I do need to find some decluttering help, but this lady's videos are bait and switch. I might need to find another channel. For example, she posted one that had an intro of, "I finally unbox the few things I saved after cleaning out 30 years of stuff from being an emotional hoarder." And then she talked on and on about how fun it is not to own anything, and never even mentioned or showed anything that she saved.

This is the thing. I have made drastic errors when trying to unload my stuff, and gotten rid of priceless, irreplaceable family heirlooms, not realizing what I was doing, just unloading dead parents' and dead grandparents' and dead other relatives' things in a panic of overwhelm, and I had many many months of sobbing tears and heartbreak over losing those things. (Some of this I realized only recently came from guilt-trips from my brother, who was just as responsible for these losses as I was, but pinned them all on me and never let me forget what I did.)

So, this makes it even harder to go through things with emotionally heavy loads. Any time I start to cry and lose my ability to think clearly, I have to stop. I freeze, panic, and cannot trust myself to make the right choice, in that state. So, nothing gets released.

It's a terrible trap.

SO. I thought it would be really helpful to see what this lady kept. But there was none of that in the video that was literally titled as a reveal of what was kept.

I am also keenly interested in minimalist/essentialist admitting making mistakes, so that it can help me avoid them.

So far I have not found this. Just some general, "photos are small and can be digitized" tips.

What do I do with, for example, the fact that I am the only one who cares about my grandmother's silver set, even though it has some missing pieces, but I am not interested in learning how to polish silver, so it never gets used.

(Part of the reason I want to finish my grandma's book is that within it she expressly states that the purple candlesticks are bequeathed to me, but my brother has the last remaining unbroken one and he will not relinquish it. I don't necessarily want to take it away from him, but I want to not be the only one in the world who knows that it is supposed to be mine and was meant to be passed down to me from my great great grandmother.)

(Part of me feels like part of the reason mom broke one of them was because she didn't want them to go to me, either, but that's a conjecture not worth entertaining, there is no proof of it, just, a feeling I have, that is unfounded. Other than the fact that she often accused me of being selfish and ungrateful, something my brother also does.)

It's part of the reason I love that movie, American Beauty. The mother in that film, at one point, slaps her daughter across the face, and calls her an ungrateful little brat. "Just look at everything you have. When I was growing up we lived in a duplex, we didn't even have our own house!" she screams at her stunned sixteen year old.

THAT. That dissolution of working so hard on appearances that one forgets the whole reason that they are trying to provide for their family. It should be done out of love. And care. And a wish for a better life. Not out of ego. If you hate and resent your child for what you provide to them, something has gone terribly wrong. Wrong in the way things are prioritized financially, and wrong within the heart.

What is the word. Contempt. My mother regularly treated me with contempt. I never knew when this was coming. The person I depended on the most, suddenly turning on me as if I were the enemy. Such a sickening feeling, as a kid, to deal with, on a regular basis.

Kids of course have unkind feelings toward their parents, at times, too. I guess I just thought, at the time, it was only fair for it to go both ways. But I never lost that sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach, especially after she totally disowned me.

Maybe I deserved it.

I'm not sure how to release all of these regrets, now.

Sometimes I feel like I don't deserve to be alive, while she is not, after everything she went through, to try to give me a better life than she had.

She succeeded. But maybe I don't deserve it.