I know I am not alone in struggling to give myself credit for progress. I spent 7 hours making furniture yesterday and on one hand that’s a lot and my hands hurt and on the other hand… that’s a reasonable work day and then I stopped. I really struggle with giving myself credit for taking breaks and resting. But that’s important and I need to do it.

I am trying to figure out what I want from the vast network of people I love. Many of them love me back… but some of them don’t and I have carried a relationship with them to my detriment. I’m deleting chat programs from my phone because once I go to a top-up sim card I don’t want to be using data when I am out and about to chit chat. I want my phone as a utilitarian device, partially because it does a fuck ton of damage to my thumbs. Typing on a real keyboard is just different and better for me even though it isn’t perfect.

But I’m leaving Marco Polo because I can use it in the house on wifi. It’s a fabulous little app where you make videos back and forth at different times so you can have a conversation even though it isn’t real time. It’s great. I have a couple of friends who use it and I’m excited to keep talking to them this way. Very low stress. No coordination of calendars!

I continue to struggle with appropriate enthusiasm for setting my boundaries. There are things I need and things I need to stop doing and I tend to… either not set the boundary or set it overly forcefully in a way that creates problems. I still struggle with this happy medium. It is not wrong or bad for me to have different needs and preferences than my friends… but I feel like it is and then I get harsh. I am frequently harsh with other people when I am upset with myself for setting a boundary. Which is shitty and terrible and totally unfair.

I am absolutely a shitty friend if someone wants to stay in a situation that hurts them and complain about it and never change anything. For the same reason I am brutally harsh with myself for not making progress fast enough, if someone else wants to slowly shift things over years or decades… I am not the best support for that.

“If you can’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say ‘Wow I really sucked’ you aren’t trying hard enough.”

I am now living in a place where the scale of progress is totally different and I don’t know how I will adapt. Part of it has to be focusing inwards because I can only really change myself. But how do I balance creating relationships with people here?

I had shows on in the background yesterday while I was working (bless you, Noah for getting internet turned on so I can have Netflix back) and I keep hearing the line “I like my own company” go through my head a lot.

I like myself. I like spending time with me. I like how I choose to spend my time. I like what I do and create and think and feel when I don’t have to censor myself for anyone else. The past 25+ years of my life I have tried as hard as I could to avoid me and to always be looking for more contact, more people, more of other people’s interests.

Why?

I don’t want to get out of the house every day. I don’t want to talk to friends every day. Even if I do talk to people every day I kind of need it to be a rotating cast of people so I don’t eat myself alive with anxiety trying to conform to my broken mental picture of what a given person wants from me.

I think I do want to get out of the house every day but I want to go as far as a walk and not really talk to anyone. I am absolutely elated that one mile up my road is the start of a gorgeous trail through the woods. I can walk for hours and only pass an occasional person and we just smile and nod at each other. I want that.

I have hurt a lot of people forcing frequent contact because I felt like I “should” even though neither of us truly enjoyed it. When am I going to learn? When am I going to stop insisting on constantly seeing/talking to people even though it creates friction?

I don’t know. I’m getting better about it?

Noah is being super proactive this year and he asked me how I want to handle Christmas cards. It’s going to be complicated with international stuff. I think… our list is going to shrink a lot. If someone has not bothered to reach out to me to initiate contact or conversation in some way in two years… they are falling off the list. That seems fair and reasonable. Someone being willing to grudgingly talk to me when I initiate contact isn’t the same thing. Our Christmas card list is huge and I have put a ton of time, labor, and even money into the project. I think I am done.

If our whole relationship is me reaching out to you then I am going to drop the rope.

And for some strange reason thinking that makes me miss Jill so much. She’s been dead for years. But that woman and I alternated who contacted the other every six months for so long. We both valued the relationship. Letting go of people hurts.

I keep having fantasies about saying goodbye to my family before I cut off my California number. I won’t. You don’t say goodbye to cut off people. It’s cruel.

Today I will do my PT exercises (that don’t require the TRX…. which is on the dang boat) before I start working. I could use the time spent on my body.

EC is reading To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and she keeps interrupting her reading to yell at the book and I love it so much. I like that we spend a lot of time at home doing this kind of thing.

And I have a bunch more I want to write but the day is starting and I’m off like a shot.