if i've already done it myself

There are ways in which social anxiety seems to have prepared me for social distancing, and then there are ways in which I feel like it is making all this so much more toxic.    And I know none of this is new, none of this is unique to me, but somehow once again, doing Primrose conference calls and only really wanting to talk to a couple of the involved just made me super-lonely.  Though fucked if I remember who I talked to or what I did when I left the house back in February.  I think mostly I just cried about surgery and tried to adjust to changing medication, and freaked out about not seeing Delight or Spark for at least a month.  

 

I'm semi-used to not being able to go out when I want to, in the sense that I often can't summon what I refer to as the oomph to get out of the house.  I'm fucking terrified of other people, shy, can't drive in the dark and generally a homebody.  And sure, I think I used to force myself to do it as much as I could because I thought that it was the sort of muscle that would atrophy if I didn't use it multiple times a week.  And some days I failed, but some days I didn't.   And I'm sure on the other side of this, whatever that other side looks like, I'll have new and different problems, but definitely some of the old ones too.  

 

It probably goes without saying that Delight and Spark are the people I'm crying about missing, but they're certainly not the only people I miss.  And seeing people is not the only thing i miss.  I miss porter square books, I miss grocery shopping, I miss the option.  And someone very smart posted something about trauma and triggers, and I've been stuck in a place a few times before, when we moved to somerville by crippling anxiety, and then those three months post-mastectomy i lived on our couch and neither of those were exactly my best times.  And at least some of the summer we don't talk about.  And my therapist keeps trying to get me to think about grief and things that aren't deaths that I get to grieve and maybe should and she'd never do something as crass as warn me about anything, but she reminds me that things undealt with sometimes lie in ambush.  

 

And I have no idea how to find things to participate in, the various online ways of reaching out, and maybe I'm not trying hard enough, or maybe this is the logical conclusion of the way I am in the world, but I'm having a really hard time reaching out to people multiple times and I think that's probably what these times call for.   And I'm in seventeen discord channels as a result of patreon rewards, and a slack channel for Primrose, and another for a different patreon reward, and mostly I just talk in the shitpost sampler discord and it's nice, but it's not feeding whatever it is I need fed.  

 

But on top of all of that, I also made a huge grocery list and Light went to the store with it, and I watched a recorded Grace Petrie concert (and that felt like a shared thing, and grateful isn't exactly the thing I am, but it's definitely part of it) and a live Mary Lambert concert and I started to grid out the next cross stitch project and maybe I'm going to set myself free from trying to make some masks and tomorrow I'll do one of those things that if I believed I had better angels, I'd think I was doing it on their advice and then I'll try to make a mole sauce, or sort some of the things in the attic to make them slightly more findable.   And I still want to write about that mountain goats song.