I am not ok and it is perseverating in my head and if I don’t set it down somewhere I am going to continue to freak out in my house with my kids and that’s not cool. So let’s start there, shall we?

My kids are acting appropriate for their varying ages. All of these stages are hard at this moment in that awesome way that sometimes cycles pop up. My oldest is a fucking teenager with a fucking rude teenager mouth. I feel like he just has to tell me I’m wrong or express exasperation at my stupidity over and over all day long. Often at times when I am not actually wrong or being stupid. I mean… when I am wrong I tolerate a fair bit of sass but it drives me insane when I’m not wrong. Middle child is not wanting to accept responsibility for some areas of forward progress and I’m struggling with that. Youngest is pushing every button and boundary like it is her job… because it is.

So that’s all fun and the background noise of every single day.

I went back and checked my logs (hi, yes I am incredibly obsessive about tracking all kinds of stupid details) and starting in June I went from sleeping 8 hours a night on average over the course of the month to sleeping 6 hours a night on average. The months since then have hovered around 7 hours a night on average. That’s pretty certainly part of why I have been doing much worse. Why did I start sleeping so much less?

Ah, fucking lockdowns are over and I feel incredibly pressured (mostly internally) to get out and Meet People and Volunteer and Be Part of the Community. Also this summer has been quite energetic with gardening tasks as I’m moving towards the permaculture/low key food forest direction. I’m super tired. Also eldest said, “Let’s go ahead and finish the lounge” and I said, “Oh uhhh ok.” I was kinda hoping to procrastinate the work long enough for the paint to go bad. Then I found out my old buddy was coming and I have some projects I said he could help me with. So I started sprinting to get stuff done before he arrived.

Reader, I fucking failed.

I’ve been very much working beyond what I should be. Oh, and late May was my first trip down to England to see A & P then in June I went back down to England to bring Noah and the kids to see A & P. That is seeming like the best decision I made all year.

Oh, and I averaged 6 hours a sleep a night the month I had fucking covid and I slept through 4 days entirely. THAT’S REALLY FUCKING BAD.

I’m not ok, y’all.

July was a sprint of work I was not physically prepared for. I have never taken time to really fully recover from covid, not really. I certainly haven’t carefully increased exercise over time to get back to the fitness I had.

August was a super sprint of work and it was exhausting. September was a lot of work sprinting plus my birthday which was absolutely fucking exhausting to the extreme and I probably made some foolish choices. I was not physically fit enough to do what I did comfortably and I have paid for it. October has been more and more work and then Noah and EC went off to Helsinki then the morning after they got home I ran off to San Francisco in a last ditch effort to say goodbye to A.

In a way there are shadows of my uncle passing. I was too late. I feel like I failed and I am upset with myself. I did get to help P with one of the thornier parts of handling A’s belongings and I am deeply grateful I could perform this service.

Being in San Francisco involved a ton of driving (ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow) and many hours of work and many different social interactions one right after another and very little sleep. I just couldn’t except for a few times when I passed out in awkward scenarios. Three people said they wanted to make plans then cancelled at the very last minute. Woo. That’s always fantastic.

My buddy is a challenge in many ways. I don’t want to say too much about that but I will say that he is very emotionally needy and he wants me to help him process and understand his entire life and that’s a fucking tall order. I am not a therapist. I feel like I am drowning in his feelings. He also can’t remember a lot of our conversations because of how much he drinks so each conversation has to be repeated a few times and that is really frustrating. I don’t begrudge him the needs but my bucket is so fucking empty.

I feel empty. I feel like I can’t take more shit being dumped on me. I feel like I want to scream and scream and scream until I have destroyed my voice from screaming. I want to sleep for several weeks in a row. I want to stop speaking to people at all and I want to go back to lockdown. I am so far into burn out I feel like a pile of ash.

I know that I am a good person to help people process grief but right now I can’t handle the flood of it. It’s not just the one buddy. I feel absolutely surrounded by loss this year. Grandmother in law, A, my buddy’s parents, other friends have lost family members, a different buddy is dealing with her kid self-harming, a somewhat surprising number of pets have passed recently and folks want to talk to me because I give them comfort. Right now it feels so hard.

Oh, yeah, and it’s been an incredibly stressful year on the money front. I think things have settled down now and while we are not fully “on track” we are in a very reasonable place and I’m no longer worried about bouncing payments. But it’s been a fucking lot.

Err, also my roof just got replaced and the scaffolding and construction fuss have been irritating and challenging because to a large degree it has meant that YC has not been able to play outside unsupervised for over a month. That’s not a great situation.

I’m not exercising enough. I stopped my yoga classes because we need to be contributing more to savings. I’m not eating well enough–I am actually not enjoying the kids cooking 4 nights a week because rarely do they put more than 1 vegetable serving in a meal and it’s not doing great things to my body. I’m sleeping for shit.

It goes on and on and on. I’m sure I’m not remembering all the fuss. My head hurts. I am tired of being tired.