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...

I'm thinking about stories and grief. Stories, where we lose ourselves, see ourselves reflected, ponder alternatives, take warning or find inspiration... And grief. Well. Grief.  Wow. This is the year for it.  For me, for my little family, sure. Grief is where we live. But not just me, not at all.  Not with Coronavirus, the horseman of plague. How many dead in the US? In the World? I have to pause to look it up.  560,000 in the US, and 3 million worldwide. This is a global grief. The numbers are too big to even make sense of. What does that number look like, what is the scale? I remember the sinking dread I felt when I heard the predicted numbers. 300,000 people will be dead in the US? Unimaginable. I taped a poem to my mirror-- when despair for the world grows in me... Now the dire predications have all come true and been exceeded. At a certain point, a few months into quarantine, I stopped watching the daily numbers climb. I'm ashamed to say that the deaths became ...

There's a particular sensation of falling in love with a work of fiction. It's giddy. It hurts. I remember being a little kid in my attic room, reading as far as Frodo poisoned and lifeless in Shelob's lair, and crying myself to sleep. It wasn't until the next day that I realized, with Sam, that Frodo was still alive.  I wandered through my day at Piney Branch Elementary in a haze, just wanting to go back to my characters-- to Middle Earth, to Earthsea, to the Magic Kingdom (for Sale--SOLD!). My mom and I read The Lymond Chronicles together-- and we'd steal the books and get ahead of each other, and yell and weep about Lymond's self-sacrifice and brilliance, and Philippa's goodness and bravery. That world of 16th century high romance adventure overlay the dull and growing pain of real life. And we finished the last book together right before my mom died.  I reread them all again, in a fugue of escapism, love, and grief.  Harry Potter was the next thing to sn...

Anybody who has spoken to me in the last five years or so knows that I have a bit of a Sherlock Holmes obsession. I want to try and explain why these fictional characters are so important to me, especially in their incarnation by Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman on BBC Sherlock.  I first watched the show in about 2012, when the first two seasons are on Netflix. Matt had already watched it, and I had slept through it. He was in the habit of staying up all night with Netflix going while I slept. He watched it and he thought I should watch it. I was Luke warm. My only experience with  Sherlock Holmes  was Laurie King's wonderful feminist reimagining about Mary Russell. The rest of it seemed sort of, I dunno. Stodgy. Ridiculously masculine. But I agreed, and watched it all in one sitting more or less. As we often do now in this age of Netflix binge-watching, over two or three days I got to the end of the Reichenbach fall, the sixth episode and final episode. It ...