And shopping malls and knives

It was a pretty good day, after I rallied from my driveway date with Delight and Spark getting rained out. 

I had my med check yesterday and she asked how I was, and I was absolutely bewildered for  a moment.  I don't have a basis to answer that question on, even less than usual and I've never been very good at it.   And even in casual conversations, I trap myself coming and going, it feels like lying to say I'm fine, but lying to say I'm not and either way, I'm also failing a little bit at social conventions.  

I'm fine.  I have a house, Light took a new job, as far as I know the people I love are as safe and healthy as currently possible.  I still know how to read and can sometimes even bring myself to do it. 

I'm spinning out a little bit.  My social interactions are sparse enough that I really get to dig deep and fret about pretty much everything I say and am constantly trying to find the meanings I miss in everything, in presence, in absence, in the words used or not used.  

I'm doing basic self care, I still shower every day, brush my teeth twice a day, floss once, take all my pills.   I don't skip most meals, and at least 60% of the time I''m managing not to eat my feelings (though my disordered eating feelings are all up in arms in both directions right now).  (Abundance is probably going to go to the grocery store this weekend  and it feels ridiculous to say he just went last week, but he just went last week and I really wish we could space the visits out more).  

I'm not going outside to walk anywhere near enough, I've got a couple raw patches on my hands where I fidget-scrape when things feel too overwhelming.   I'm almost always under-hydrated, I'm not responding to email in a timely fashion, I let my phone run out of charge or leave it in the other room all the time and never listen to my voicemail.   The only way I managed to take a picture of myself to leave on slack is by hiding the bottom half of my face behind my "well the patriarchy isn't going to fuck itself" mug, which on the one hand, is exactly the message I want to be sending and on the other hand says some fucked up things about how I'm feeling about my face. 

I'm sometimes cooking. I'm staying on top of the dishes and other kitchen-cleaning things.  Hell, I even removed all the drawers in the fridge today to go find the things that had fallen down behind them.    

I'm sometimes not cooking.  I'm not staying on top of a lot of the rest of the cleaning. 

And then there's the things I can't put on either side of the equation. Sometimes my mind is busy, sometimes it's blank and both of those seem not-ideal and maybe like the best I can do right now. I gave up on sewing masks out of frustration and I don't know if that is a healthy being gentle with myself or just being emotionally lazy.  (maybe there's still no such thing as lazy, only counter-motivations, but new things make me anxious, being anxious turns me fumble-fingered, dropping and breaking things makes me anxious and eventually it's like I have ungainly birds instead of hands.)  (I try to joke about the stories and memories of kindergarten, how I almost had to repeat kindergarten because I was short-tempered and had almost no small motor skills, and how whateverhernamewas used to humiliate me and leave me in my raincoat if I couldn't get it off, and make me not have snack when I couldn't open my lunchbox, but sometimes I wonder why I couldn't and sometimes I wonder if the seeds of failure and the fear of failure got planted that early).  

I'm still here.  I'm still using too many parentheses.