Settling In Gently by R.A.Davis

 So I've been struggling lately.  I knew my anxiety was getting bad when the corners of the internet that are my escape from anxiety? They are causing me more anxiety. Yes, I love going to Twitter or discord to find other people who love the same shows that I do, but what if what I have to say about them is stupid, irrelevant, off topic, too obvious, or too obscure... I should shut up, I should delete my post. Or, I should engage more, be more lively, create original content-- ugh, no! I should do more, I should stop trying so hard, ugh, or try harder or etc etc etc I exhaust myself! I swear I could have imposter syndrome at an imposter symposium. But having my escape get colored with my anxiety was unpleasant enough that it forced me to pay attention. Realizing that there was no corner of my mind that was free from screeching, nails-on-chalkboard anxiety and distress sort of forced me to stop and observe. I swear to god, nearly five years of therapy and I am still often so sh...

The tempation to reflect as the calendar year flips over is too great for me to resist. I've ordered my 2021 calendar ( a pinup calendar, yes. Of Norse goddesses. Yep. I'm an adult, I can do what I want.) So I think that means I can, gingerly, gently, with much deference and genuflection, put this cluster of a year to rest.  But it eludes examination. It slithers out of my awarenss. What was this year, even? I have to consult outside sources. My memory is just a gray haze of heat, cold, panic, and immobility.  So I go to instagram. This is why I have it, by the way. It is a net to catch memories that my sieve-brain just lets dissolve.  Last January 1st, 2020, we got up before dawn, parked at the closed gate of the parking lot on Spencer's Butte, and scrambled up the bitter cold stairs. I had just pulled the kids out of bed, as is, so they were draped in blankets instead of coats, with thick fuzzy socks stuffed into slippers (aka flipflops). We looked around for the rising...

When I was 10, I got my period. A black smeary embarrassing surprise in my panties, discovered after the long walk back from the Takoma Park Folk Festival. I hid the soiled panties, threw them away.  What did this onset mean? What kind of person did this determine I would be? I had some alarming ideas about immaculate conception. Perhaps God, someone who seemed terrifyingly real and literally potent, would want me to be the special chosen vessel for the next of his sacred seed. In my room, amid the hoarded little boxes of shells and peach pits and candy wrappers and coins and stickers and fruity smelling erasers, a pile of ruined underwear grew, ignored, a testament to a kind of hostile takeover of my body, over my life. * When my daughter Rosie Jo was 9, her dad died. With her stunned big hazel eyes in her round white face, she told me seriously that she was scared she had to be the man of the family now. I said, no honey. We don't replace the people we've lost. They...