Heads up: this is the opening piece of a series about my experience starting GLP-1 medication. If that's a triggering topic, please feel free to skip. I'm not telling anyone what to do with their body. I just need to process this, and I figure someone out there is more scared than I am and … Continue reading mutant notes 01: did I mention I’m afraid of needles…
A retroactive translation The 8th of April, in this year of our discontent Dear Reader, Today I have begun to be weaned from my tonic by order of Dr. S—. The reduction is significant — by a third, she has said, "to keep the worst of it manageable." I had not known the tonic was … Continue reading letters from the rest cure…
I struggle to exist in space with other people. I understand what’s happening around me. The shape of the room. The dynamics. The unspoken tensions. I can observe a situation with almost clinical clarity. As long as I’m not part of it. The moment I factor into the equation, my grip loosens. It’s like I … Continue reading blending…
Earlier this week I stopped my partner mid-whatever-he-was-doing to talk. Despite comfortably shouting about all that’s wrong with me here on the internet, in my real life I don’t really like to talk about the hard stuff. Write? Absolutely. I will excavate my own rib cage in prose. But speak? Have a conversation… No thank … Continue reading on sitting in the shower…
There’s a space between underdoing it and overdoing it that other people call Tuesday. I seem to have misplaced mine. It feels ridiculous to me that I, an intelligent 48-year-old woman, still don’t have the sense to stop and rest when I need to. I haven’t ever really known how to. Not consistently. But it’s … Continue reading finding Tuesday…
I've always had itchy skin. Sensitive skin. Problem skin. Whatever polite term the adults around me used, the reality was simple: I reacted to everything. Dryer sheets. Scented detergent. Some makeup made my eyes puff up. Perfumes that smelled terrible and made my arms and neck itch. The solution was also simple. Just avoid ever … Continue reading Was it Strawberries or Was it Stress?
Monday is therapy day for me. It maybe doesn’t seem like a good idea to stack lifelong trauma work and mental health check-ins at the start of a new week in the hellscape we’re all living through… but somehow it works. I get just enough distance from the last week to reflect and reset before … Continue reading Masking Monday: The Illness I Pretend Isn’t There
I started the morning with a video a friend sent me. In it, a guy was talking about his workout attitude. He had been all-or-nothing. If he couldn’t do it perfectly, he wouldn’t do it at all. That hit me. Hard. I’ve been circling around this idea for years: literal thinking, binary thinking, the trap … Continue reading No One Sees the Dial
Thyroid meds, dread, hope, and lotion on the skin. I am fragile like a bomb… carving out space for joy while my body recalibrates.
When I was a kid, all the way through the end of my school career, I was frequently absent. I was accused regularly of playing sick to achieve this level of absence. The amount of guilt I have carried with me over the years for faking sick is... a lot. It's a lot to carry. … Continue reading cami is absent today…
CamiKaos 