May is a month for anxious anticipation, a time of preparation for the season to come. It exists in a space to warm to be called true spring, but too unpredictable to be summer, yet.
Throughout the month we packed up our winter wear, broke out the shorts, and got out to work in the yard. We watched pools be cleaned and waited for the parks to open. We cleaned up our grills and stocked up on meat and beer. And then, all of a sudden, it was here. School is out. The pools are open. Grills are being fired up nightly, and we’re all looking forward to the freedom of the next few months. It’s finally summertime!
Personally, this May has been hard on me. Last month, I was getting sicker, but things were still good, and I felt happy. I was celebrating my birthday, seeing friends and family, and enjoying being the very center of my known universe. By the start of May, my health took a sharp dive downward, and I fell into bouts of moodiness and depression waiting to find answers. I felt lost.
In this last week though, I’ve seen a shift. I started a new medication, and almost immediately, I felt like myself again. I’m watching myself improve with cautious optimism, but deep down I am daring to dream that I’ll get to enjoy this summer without pain, fear, or shame.
But first, here is what I am currently:
Writing my remaining Blogging A to Z Challenge posts, still. I’m hoping you’ll cut me a little slack here, I’ve been having a hard time. I’m taking some time to myself this week to catch up or at least get back into a daily writing habit, even if I don’t always post here. IT’s going well, but I’ll be honest, this series of posts weighs heavy on me. I’m beginning to overthink it and starting to get bored. I think I’ll start changing things up a little bit. I miss doing my book reviews and my Monday motivational things. I’m also very ready to begin a new series, something about love, or poetry, or maybe a series of dialogues?
Making some very bad cut out poetry. I love blackout poetry but I recently found the work of Kelsey Landsgaard on Instagram, and I immediately wanted to make my own sad girl cut and paste poems too. It’s easier and certainly more satisfying, but I still suck so I haven’t shared much yet. Just because you can paste a few found lines together doesn’t make you a poet. You have to find the right lines that say the right thing in a new way. Landsgaard is very good at what she does, and I need a lot of practice.
Planning a vacation or two in the next few to six months. We want to camp for a few nights before school starts again, then we’ll spend a long weekend around Labor Day somewhere where I can smell the sea and fill up on crab and oysters cheap. Before Halloween, I want to head to the West Coast and see my nephews-in-law that are growing up there. I want to start seeing the world while I still can, and this year we’re getting our traveling feet wet.
Anticipating my summer work schedule and the next school year’s bid. The end of this one hit me a little hard. My route was easy. I got to know some wonderful kids, and I had a driver I really got along with. I’m hoping to do the same next year, but there are people higher than me in seniority looking for the same. In the meantime, I am lucky to have a summer schedule that is as flexible as a job can get. I can come and go as I please with no attendance policy to adhere to as long as the work gets done. It might sound great but it also means I have to be self-motivated and self-starting and I’ve never been very good at that
Reading The Odyssey, still. It’s a pain, but I have passed the halfway point by promising myself I only have to read two chapters a day. The limit helps me stay focused on what is happening in the story without getting too bored or discouraged by all the repetition and description. I think next month I will tackle The Iliad. It sounds like a more exciting read than this.
I also read The Girl with all the Gifts by M.R. Carey, (A heartbreaking, thought-provoking, and eerie read well worth your time!, proper review coming soon!), and I started The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn yesterday. I plan to finish it, The Odyssey, and at least one Shakespeare play, probably Romeo and Juliet, by the end of the June.
Watching Westworld on HBO, but it’s confusing the crap out of me, it’s still the coolest thing on TV right now though. I finished season 2 of Atlanta on FX, and no words I could cobble together here could adequately convey how unique and groundbreaking this show is. I’ve also been keeping up with Vox’s new Netflix show, Explained, and binge-watching old episodes of The Office with my girlfriend. As for movies, I saw A Quiet Place, which was amazing, and watched an HBO original called The Tale, an unflinching look at the reality of coming to terms with childhood sexual abuse. A must watch.
Feeling a little lost, but that isn’t anything new. I’ve suddenly got so much time and energy on my hands, and I’m not sure how to spend it. I do things that feel like they mean something but at the end of the day my hands are empty, and I have nothing useful to show for the privilege. I feel guilty wasting what I have this way, but I’m not sure how to do better. How do you mix time, plus energy, and all that you have in you, and form it into something beautiful and comprehensible to the world? The artists and writers I follow make it seem so easy, and the secrets they share don’t seem to be the real secret at all. Or maybe I’m just being a coward and doing everything but what I need to be doing because doing everything else feels a lot easier and a lot less humiliating than creating.
Fearing, for the first time, what the future will bring for someone else entirely. My fiance is in a strange position with a big opportunity that she may not be ready for, and that she may not even want. I’m doing my best to hear out her fears and her own wants, but I’m wary of offering advice or steering her in one direction or another. It’s her life after all. The choice isn’t easy to make though, and it’s causing her a lot of stress. On the one hand, this opportunity may not come around again, but on the other, if she decides to move forward and finds she isn’t happy she won’t be allowed to move back again. I just hope the choice is made soon and whatever she decides she can live with.
Reflecting on the loss of The Daily Post as a source of inspiration and motivation for what I have always tried to do here. It was because of The Daily Post, and their Blogging University courses that I first began to experiment and work out what kind of blogger I am. It was where many of you first found me after my post Growing Up and Kissing Girls, a response to a Blogging University assignment on vignettes, was featured on the old Freshly Pressed. It was shocking to hear they were shutting down but it was quite the wake-up call too. I have fallen far from those first days of blogging, and things have not turned out the way I first imagined them, and I realize that I want to get back a little of what I got out of The Daily Post, permission to get personal. To be more than just a creator of content, but to be a human being. I’m grateful for the lesson, and the reminder, and hope that future bloggers will find something, somewhere, a little like what The Daily Post was for me.
Needing a clearer head and a clearer path. I need to know what I want, and I need the courage and the focus to just do it without worry. I need passion. I need a project to sweat about, worry over, to obsess over in the most unhealthy way. I need something to do that doesn’t necessarily make me happy, but satisfies some very specific, and possibly quite dark, need in me, and then I need it to be made into a tangible, relatable, and marketable product. Is that too much to ask?
Learning how to be active again. I’ve actually started running! I used to tell people I hated running, that I hated any kind of exercise, but that isn’t true. I just never know how to start or what I should do, and it’s hard to keep the habit up if it isn’t your thing. Now that I am feeling better I want to start doing better by my body, and that means waking up an hour early every morning to get out and sweat it out around the neighborhood. Next month I might break out one of the Pennyboards that fell into my possession and start learning how to skateboard too.
Loving waking up to warmth, birds chirping, and the scent of cut grass and flowers wafting through my open windows every morning. I love knowing there will be long hours of sunshine and warmth well into the night. That heat can be exhausting during the day though, but most afternoons, and more and more regularly as the summer wears on, we’ll get severe thunderstorm like clockwork. They can be scary, but a little exciting too. A drama to live through every afternoon.
Hating the revelations over what ICE has been doing down at the US-Mexico border. I’ve been hearing about children being separated from their parents, and being forced to appear in court alone even as young as 3 and 4! The US has a long and ugly history of threatening the families of brown people as a tool to subdue them, and this country should be very sensitive to that histroy. We have to think long and hard about what kind of people we are and start sooner rather than generations from now, out of shame, to rectify this evil.
Hoping that what happened in Ireland is a sign and a motivation for nations and their people around the world to consider access to abortion not just good health care policy, but a fundamental right of women everywhere. Here in the US, the laws surrounding abortion access have quietly become stricter and stricter, and many states have made it so difficult to keep clinics open that they have effectively banned abortion within their borders. I hope to see a reversal on the trend soon. Restricting access to abortions doesn’t prevent abortions, it only prevents safe abortions. These laws kill women. We need to write fair abortion access rules into our federal law and get rid of this cruel “gag rule” that keeps women from making safe choices about their bodies abroad.
So yeah, all in all, May was a crazy emotional rollercoaster. I can’t believe the change I’ve gone through in just these 31 days. I really felt like a shell of myself, and now I’m feeling better than ever. Spring is all about rebirth, and this is the closest I’ve ever felt to that for sure. I won’t say it happened for a reason, but it was meaningful to me.
But enough about me, how about you? How did May treat you? How the weather where you are and have you made any traveling plans for the summer? Do you think this country is losing its place as the moral authority of the world? Did we ever deserve such a title anyway? Let me know in the comments!
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The inspiration for these posts comes from Andrea at Create.Share.Love.
Photo by Cédric Dhaenens on Unsplash
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the many used books I’ve picked up over the past few weekends. I finally finished 
by Daniel C. Dennett and Douglas R. Hofstadter. This is my second attempt. It was still hard to get through, but this time I really tried, and it was so worth it. I’ll still need a third read through though.
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