Tag Archives: running

Body data

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My first tracked 3 mile run with this watch was mid December and it took 49:09 for an average of 16:24/mile.

Today I ran 8 miles in 1:50:10 for an average of 13:46/mile. That’s a pretty awesome improvement.

In January I did a bunch of measurements of my body so that I’d be able to see the changes as they happen. I measured myself this morning.

Since then I have lost .5″ off my upper arm, 1″ off my upper chest, 1″ off my bust, 5″ off my waist, 5″ off my hips, 2.5″ off my thigh, and 1″ off my calf for a grand total of 16″ inches taken away. That seems like a lot.

I have dropped 20.5 lbs in 7 months. Even though I do not follow Weight Watchers anymore I keep in mind that they would not encourage losing weight much faster than that.

I have just under 7 weeks to go. I plan to be the laziest git ever in October. I can do as little as humanly possible. Ugh I’m tired.

Another Day In I Am Too Tired For This Shit

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My bed is 7’x7′. How in the hell does a child turn sideways then fall off the bottom?

Yesterday MC had their first visit for assessment to see what sort of neurological testing will help find the correct diagnostic labels so that I can narrow down my research on how to support them better.

It was a good visit but, I think, not what the lady had planned. She had a sheet of questions to ask. Instead of going through those questions MC went through a prepared list of the things they have a hard time with. She flipped her paper over and scribbled like her life depended on it. She scheduled an appointment for me to come back alone and fill out those questions about developmental history. 😂

I had talked MC through how I handle appointments as an adult who does not have anyone to report on childhood milestones/attainment. I forgot that MC is not having my life. Whoops. It’ll be fine.

MC is automatically getting 3 separate assessments based on clinical presentation in this appointment and the intake lady hinted about others that might be relevant after we can actually go through developmental history with a fine toothed comb.

This is how seriously Stanford took EC. I was deeply worried I would not find a way to access similar granularity of help for MC/YC. Stanford did *not* take MC seriously. Stanford asked MC 20 yes/no questions and told me I had a perfect little boy I didn’t need to fix. That was really frustrating. This time the lady watched MC almost vibrate off the chair and noticed “Do you find that you are ever able to sit still?” Only if the kid is in a severe dissociated state because they are imploding under the weight of their own anxiety and it is combined with mutism. No. They can’t just hold their body still like a “normal person”. It is not possible for them.

I am feeling a lot less nervous about this process now. The lady also took it very seriously when I said I have two other children who are also clearly neurodivergent. I don’t know what will come of her making notes about my other kids as well. YC isn’t even on a waiting list at this point.

YC’s flavour of neurodiversity is pretty easy to accommodate within our already heavily modified for neurodiversity lifestyle. EC is doing really well with the structure we maintain. MC needs… something I’m not doing and I don’t know what. I am grateful that the NHS is trying so hard to help me figure out what I should do.

The lady looked really pained when I talked about my own history of being beaten up in school after school and how I was not even a tiny bit surprised when people beat up my children in school. Autistic people are magnets for bullying behaviour.

Human beings often want to hurt people who are different. It’s a thing. A really sucky and terrible thing. I was glad that she showed absolutely no sign of believing that it would be best for my children to be in school. *phew*

Stanford Child and Adolescent Development was quite adamant that there is not a better learning environment for EC than what I provide. They had tiny tweaks to suggest, but nothing major. I hope that the NHS can help me find the tweaks that will give MC also the best learning environment for them. Right now there are a couple of areas that concern me and I don’t know how to fix them. I do need outside guidance.

It’s kind of funny that EC doesn’t mostly overlap with my learning difficulties. His troubles are out in front of me and I can study them without feeling emotionally connected. I just need to support. MC and I share some of the same struggles. The ways in which I have never managed to overcome some of my own challenges inhibit my ability to figure out how to help them make progress. I need a more objective view.

But first I need to go run 4 miles. I’d rather eat glue.

I hit the wall this week. I think I was lowkey sick over the weekend when the kids were all very sick. I kept exercising and working the whole time. I don’t feel like I’m still dealing with a fever but my body wants to tell me to go take a long walk off a short pier. I can’t even tell how much this overreach is about physical load and how much is emotional load.

I feel like my soul is hurting. I miss the physicality of all of my California friendships.

It is already getting much colder and I am not feeling great about the change. My body is hurting a lot. I felt like the tiny increase of warmth of spring was a huge massive welcome change and I was going around outside in skimpy clothing because I was overheating. Now the same temperature range is making my bones ache.

I am not sleeping enough. I am rarely laughing and that can’t be good for me. I feel somber and like I have a flat affect. I feel numb. How can you feel numb and pain at the same time?

I really need to go run. I feel like that is an absolutely outrageous ask just now. Oh well. What I want is not important. What matters is what I do.

Lay out the plan then follow it.

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Today I ran 2 miles to start the day. Noah came with me even though he has been having a gout attack over the past week. So far it seems like he is doing better and he’s not in extra pain from the run and that’s fabulous. I tore open an adhesion between my butt and my thigh and it’s absolutely marvelous. It only hurt for a short time and now I can lift my leg higher and I’m thrilled. This will make it easier to get on and off my bike; it’s been a struggle to raise my leg high enough for quite a while.

I took a shower and washed my hair and did all the greasing for my body head to toe. I fixed my pocket/belt doohickey because it wasn’t done perfectly on the first go-round. That’s going to be ok.

I need to tidy up my room some, do some processing of food that is in deep storage out into the glass jars for usage. It’s important. I might even unload and reload the dishwasher because MC didn’t do it before taking off on their walk and I don’t want them staying up super late to finish dishes later.

I need to catch up on budget stuff. I’ve been not getting that done. I have a whole stack of books I want to get through. I have a lot of seeds that need to be started in the next day or two because it is *time*. This is hilarious because I am running out of floor in my bedroom and bathroom.

I have a meeting at 2 with a construction dude who is going to help with the rotting deck outside the apartment. That’s a good thing. Shorty has badminton at 4 and I have to ride her over there. If I have time I probably should go get some slate tiles before we do badminton so I can bring them home with me. I are tired. Then I eat dinner quickly and head right back out to a yoga class in town. All told I am going to be riding at least 11 miles today but it might be more. I get a little fuzzy on some of the exact distances.

It’s a good day.

I did a lot of seed planting yesterday, my bathroom floor is almost entirely covered in plants and the heat is high. I have about three more weeks of needing that room to be super warm and I am deeply ready for the temperature to go down. I think that next year I am going to try harder to figure out how to have a small enclosed space that I heat without heating that whole room. This is oppressive. Also I could really use a place to start plants where the cats don’t try to sleep on them. The cats are unhappy about their current ban from my room.

I continue to have struggles in many ways as a parent. Figuring out how to teach things, how to model healthy behavior, and how to get a kid to give a shit about something that I find important is… hard. Very hard. I am not feeling good at this. I will keep trying though.

Shorty is spending a lot of time on learn-to-read apps and she’s made a fairly shocking amount of progress. I told her she couldn’t have Roblox till she was 10 because that’s about when my older kids were able to read/write well enough to be safe on the platform. She is absolutely determined to get there sooner. We’ll see!

I am by no measure a perfect person. I will keep reaching for the light even though I am stunted.

Every day is a school day

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Today I learned that while 3C feels brisk and chilly but nice for a run 2C feels like my lips are going to fall off and I was in pain at first. I am also noticing the inherent challenge in the location of my house. In Fremont I had to be going well over 5 miles in the day before I went up a big hill. I always had over a mile and a half to warm up before I started the uphill slog. That big hill had ~305′ of elevation in a bit over a mile. BUT AFTER CLOSE TO 2 MILES OF WARM UP.

Now I walk out of my front door and start climbing because even my damn driveway is sunk compared to the road. Just to get to the top of my road before doing anything else it’s a mile and the elevation climb is ~375′. That’s my fucking warm up.

Oh my goodness. My road is harder than running up Washington Blvd to get to Mission. I’m going to cry and feel sorry for myself for a minute here.

Ok, now I’m over it. I am actually feeling absolutely elated about how quickly my legs are picking up muscle. I tried to start running when we moved here, not long after the surgery on my back that healed very poorly. I did not do well. I felt empty. I fell and got hurt a couple of times and I just went limp and quit trying. Then I got busy with my million other projects and I just went about my life using my bike and having to walk places.

I feel strong again. I feel like I am clearly increasing muscle mass. My calves are already pretty rock hard and I have missed that so much. I love that if I grab at my thighs there is some padding on them, but mostly they are getting solid too. I suspect next month is when I will start seeing change in fat location on my body. Not that I expect things to shift massively. I suspect that this round of marathon training will not have my body shift as drastically as the previous round. I’d be surprised if I ever see 150lbs again. I’m currently hovering around 200. I need to lose about 6″ around my waist if I want to get my corsets on. Rats. I feel like I am racing the clock before menopause kicks my ass.

This is kinda my last chance to get to a different baseline before the next time my body heads into a whole new stage of loving belly fat. Sigh.

Part of wanting to train for a marathon again is that I won’t maintain an exercise regime for shorter distances. I just won’t. They aren’t hard enough. I could walk a half marathon tomorrow and be ok. I wouldn’t force myself to run for that distance and the running is where I can feel my body shift.

I keep feeling surprised that every time I hit a flat space I drop into a steady 12 minute mile pace. I feel like a metronome sometimes. My body likes the passage of time very much. I expected to have my overall average time for the runs be closer to 17 minutes because of the hill and instead it is under 16 minutes. I’m gaining good speed on the flat bits to make up for how challenging the incline is. I am looking forward very much to when my entire 3 mile run can be done in under 40 minutes. That’s a fantastic feeling when I get there. The last two days were 47/48 minutes. I feel absolutely no worry about my ability to gain back those 8-9ish minutes. Even the hill is going to get easier.

I can do this.

Commit, then follow through.

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I have my eye on the Loch Ness Marathon; it’s the first weekend of October. I’ve been starting to improve fitness on the treadmill during the icy spells but today was a balmy 3C so I went outside for my 3 miles. Only 15 min/mile which isn’t fast yet but I have 35 weeks to go. I can work on fast over the next few months. It’s the uphill start that is really killing me.

This time I downloaded the Hal Higdon app since I have used his training plans for years but I did it with pen/paper and this time I don’t want to spend the time organising. Also the app gives feedback on your training and recommends workouts that will help with trying to meet intermediate goals. This is a good thing. I am going to work towards actually having a race pace this time: I want 13 minute miles. I am aware that barely qualifies as “running” and I don’t give a shit. I am going for faster than “I barely made it before they closed the finish line” this time.

I like that the app asks me to rate my effort and how tired I feel afterwards. I was really pleased that I wasn’t exhausted at the end today. I have that lovely rush of adrenaline and endorphins. I feel great.

I love my body.

Finding a new normal is hard

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Ok my morning hour and a half before breakfast now includes blogging, medicating, and walking on the treadmill. Hoo it takes some balance to do this. That’s only for days when it is too icy for us to go walk on the road, not every day. Mostly I want MC training outside. We are both noticing how it is much much much easier going really fast on a treadmill compared to outside. It’s not just about incline, we increase that on the treadmill.

I think it is kind of funny how hard it is to convince my kids that maintaining enough fitness to be able to suddenly go off on an adventure is easy compared to “Oh shit we have to start training really hard RIGHT NOW and then we will still be less fit and have less fun than we would if we didn’t slack off in between.” But then again… I haven’t been forcing time to do it on my own either. I have allowed the kids refusing to go with me to stop me. I shouldn’t have. I am sorry.

Yesterday I was super keen to get off the treadmill quickly so I did more than a mile at 6mph. That’s really fast for me. It felt so good. It’s funny in that part of what feels good about it is the way my back and side fat waddle really hard. My experience as a fat runner turned slightly less fat by running and starting up again as a fat runner is that wherever it is the most jiggly is going to reduce first. It’s not that I stop having pudge there it’s that the edge of it is what is eaten first by increased need for eating fat in exercise and then the bottom layers plump into muscle. I still look fat, but it’s less jiggly and wiggly and bouncy.

That feeling means that soon I will be able to put on my fucking shoes again without panting. I really hate panting while I’m tying my shoes because I have gotten that fat. I need more exercise than I have been getting. Riding my bike isn’t enough. I need to run. I also need the fucking yoga and I should probably be doing more strength training because I am old enough I have to worry about bone loss soon. My bones aren’t starting out fantastically strong as it is.

I have done this for the past few decades. Early in my 20’s I decided to get fit because I was on the hunt for new social groups and people to fuck and someone to marry. I started dancing a lot and I ran to get in/keep in shape for that. Early 30’s I wanted to run a marathon with my brother and then that went sideways and beautiful, wonderful Blacksheep saved my ass and proved she is better than my brother in every way. (I mean, duh?) Now I am early in my 40’s and realising that I want more than I am right now.

I want to run a marathon in less than 6 hours. I want 30 mile bike rides to not feel punishing. I want to be able to run faster and longer than my fucking kids because ha ha just because you are taller than me that doesn’t mean you are stronger or fitter. 😛

I want the strength to be basically running a small-holding through my 50’s, 60’s, and maybe even my 70’s.

The neighbor in the giant fancy house decided to stay. I reopened the negotiation for me buying the acre next to mine. I told him “Wouldn’t it be nicer if instead of yet another house being constructed that close to us between us and the 150 home housing estate that is coming up in the field on the other side we had a food forest? I would plant walnut trees cause I can’t have them on my property. I would put so so so much food and you would be welcome to come share any and all of it. I would increase the plant and animal ecosystem around here and give them a place to hide as the city is moving outward. But I can’t pay what you want me to pay for a house-plot. My spouse says my limit is £50k and I can’t pay that much just for the part with the septic system.”

It is really useful being able to blame your spouse for things.

This winter I am doing a self-study course on permaculture design. I ordered all of the course books recommended by the top permaculture education organisations. I am going to increase bio-diversity, damnit.

And let me tell you: if I had an extra acre of land I could definitely feed my family in hard times. Probably a lot more people than that.

I would build a root cellar for storing food outside in the winter for preservation. The ground will keep it stable.

Paused for breakfast. Discovered major flaw in combining treadmill and blogging. I get no count for steps. This suuuuuuucks. Now I am flapping my arm like I’m trying to take flight; I feel stupid. Fixed that. Never came back. Oh well. Time to read those books.

Big goals

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I feel bad sometimes when I read other people with EDS/chronic pain talk about their experiences. There are places on my body where if you came up and poked me fairly gently I would drop to my knees from how overwhelmingly it hurt. If I take even the most casual inventory of how my body feels I am always in pain. I just keep doing shit anyway. I show up feeling half dead from exhaustion and I move through sheer force of will. I feel bad because I do not believe that it is healthy that I can do this, exactly, it just hasn’t been very optional for me. I have been in pain since I was a small child and I had shit to do and I had to just get on with it. I don’t know why I feel like I am fueled by rocket fuel.

I am clearly a bad example for my little zebra. Some days he is clearly in intense pain and he gingerly forces himself to keep doing his chores. I ask him why he doesn’t rest when he is in pain. “Well you don’t.”

They do as you do, not as you say.

There are some big goals this year. My big kids asked if we could go on one-on-one fun trips this year. If I am very very very lucky these will be the only big trips of the year. I’m crossing my fingers. One is soon and one is at the end of the year. Both involve me needing to ramp up my fitness in order to manage them while having any kind of a good experience. I am happy that the trip with middle kid is first because they are not starting off with lots more fitness than I have. Phew. I get to pull them along through training work rather than running and feeling half dead and like I can’t keep up. Eldest walks like his dad–they both walk like they are a half breath away from falling into a full sprint. That’s it: they walk like they are doing a run/walk paced run. I don’t walk like that.

MC and I are heading down to London in late February. They want to shop and see some historical sites and pretty parks and maybe a museum. My expectation is that we have to be Disneyland fit in order to have a good time (expect to walk 10 miles a day). I am trying to pull them in the direction of 4mph but frankly 3mph will be plenty fine for actually doing the time in London. When I walk as slow as they prefer my hips get really stiff and I feel like crud so we do have to pick up the pace a little. Luckily they are super motivated and excited. We have drawn up a slowly progressive plan for increasing our mileage and our speed. I am gratefully referencing the book Blacksheep gave me for running training.

I am thrilled about this experience with them, specifically the training, because we are getting to talk a lot about how what we eat and how we sleep dramatically impacts our ability to manage the long walks. I am introducing tracking and talking about evaluating how we feel on different days after different kinds of choices. I’m not controlling all the choices–just requiring reflection on them. They are starting from a place where 5 miles a day is not a lot or extreme so it’s not as much of a moon shot as it seems. Realistically if I asked MC to walk 10 miles today they could; it would just take almost 5 hours. 5 miles is a 2-ish hour walk right now.

Oh hey, it’s snowing again. This year has been so intense for snow–by far the most snow of any of our years here so far. That’s funny because this is our fourth winter and the snow is getting more common and hanging out longer with every passing year. Jenny said it barely ever snowed here! (In her defense the 10 years before we arrived had fairly low historical snow falls.)

As we are training for these… of course we had a big bike wipe out yesterday and MC got a bruise on their backside they are going to be feeling for a very long time. I rubbed them down 3 different kinds of topical analgesics and said we will be doing a lot more on the treadmill until it heals because they will walk awkwardly on the ice and that’s dangerous. Also: no more bike rides unless it is over 5. That sucked.

I love this whole winter hibernation thing. I feel constitutionally suited to having things just shut down for months out of the year so I can work on stuff internally and in my house.

Have I mentioned that I stopped taking the ADHD medication and I feel like my brain is hopping around like a grasshopper on speed?

So MC and I are going to London for a long weekend in February and EC and I are going to Paris, with probable stops in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and probably some city in Germany but I’m not sure which yet. We will be gone around two weeks. Yes I know that these trips seem unfair in terms of size and balance, but EC and I are going to be spending the entire day every single day going from museum to museum (although I suspect the Louvre will be a whole day on its own). He wants to take pictures and notes on as many kinds of art as possible in that time period. To be fair: he knows a fantastic amount about art history and already knows all the periods and most of the masters and who they worked with. He is going because he can already rattle off the names of hundreds of paintings and he wants to see them in person. This is school.

You can see why the kids do not enjoy traveling together very much. After the trip to Texas last year EC vehemently announced, “Remind me never to take a family vacation with any of you people again.” That hurt my feelings. Dude! IT WASN’T A VACATION!!! It was a trip to see a dying relative in a place that our entire family finds overwhelmingly stressful and difficult. There was no way for that trip to go better than it did and realistically it went about 300% better than I expected even with luggage that didn’t arrive for five days. My mother in law was nice for the whole trip. That was outstanding and I can just express gratitude.

Nevertheless there was no part of that journey that was a vacation. Just no.

Between the trip to London and the trip to Paris I am going to be ramping up speed. I will already be in better shape for distance. I’m going to whisper it here first. I want to run the 2023 Loch Ness Marathon. It’s the 1st of October, over 6 weeks before the trip to Paris so I will be nicely recovered after the race. I’ve been working on the treadmill for a few weeks so far in addition to the outside time with MC. I am doing shorter speed work in a controlled environment because I like my knees very much and walking on ice and snow is one thing, running is another.

It’s January now! I am allowed to pull my garden planning information out and plan out my work for the year. I told myself I had to wait out December and just focus on getting through the days. Woo!

I’ve been saying since I got here give me five years before you judge my garden. This is winter number four. I suspect that this coming year’s work is the last of the bones. Of course the deck around the apartment and the balcony off the lounge are both rotting and getting close to dangerous. This house is nonstop. Now I need to leave enough travel space around the house for whoever eventually replaces our windows (many are broken and in bad shape) in the next few years and I can fill in from the edges. In my head I see Noah’s aunt’s property up in Oregon. She has a gorgeous homestead that could probably feed her year round if she didn’t think preserving food was boring and a waste of time. Ha. Instead she feeds the local wildlife. Ok.

My goal in the long run is to be able to walk out of my house and find something to eat every day of the year. Sure a lot of that will be in the polytunnel during the winter but I’m ok with that!

I’ve already added one hazel this year (two other sub-types of hazel are coming but they haven’t arrived yet), two grapes, and a Cherry Silverberry that I am ridiculously excited about. That on top of scores of canes in previous years, a bunch of rhubarb, strawberries, cherries (5 different kinds!)… It’s going to be absolutely amazing. In 4-ish more years I will be able to tell people what kind of produce from my yard will be in season when so they can pick their visit around what they want to eat. That makes my heart soar. I’m doing this.

I may be creaky, in pain, grouchy, and difficult but I am also lucky, hard working, ambitious, determined, and incredibly successful at reaching my goals. I am the luckiest bitch.

Movement is good for you; I hear.

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I posted most of this on the book of faces. But I should start using this space more.

Neurotic tracking is neurotic.

I wasn’t great about tracking my bike miles for the first few months of 2021 so I am pretty sure my year total is lower than it actually was. Then in 2022 we went to Texas and did way more walking than usual… but I didn’t bring my watch charging cable so I didn’t track any of it and then the watch strap completely broke and took a bit to replace in late July/early August. So numbers are fudged a bit.

That said: in 2021 by Sep 1st I had taken 1,653,242 steps and ridden 883 miles. (By the end of the year 2,300,012 steps and 1,165 bike miles.) In 2022 by Sep 1st I have taken 1,438,755 steps and ridden 908 miles.

If I don’t want to be behind last year’s final totals I’d better get my butt moving. Last year I was under my goals for myself in terms of movement by a fair bit. I don’t shoot for 10,000 steps a day. Personally I try for 7,000 and I have not been hitting it. In a year that adds up to 2,555,000 steps. I missed it by 254,988 last year. That’s over a month of missing steps. Ugh.

This year I am so far waaaaay lower. This is not good. I am already 262,245 down this year. That’s super sucky not good. Ugh. My bike odometer says I have ridden 920 since I got it the week of Christmas, so there wasn’t a lot at the end of December on this bike due to all of the ice on the roads.

I feel like I am very much not close to where I want to be in terms of being able to run (I have not regained fast-twitch muscle activity *at all* since the youngest was born. Ugh.) I know I need to sit down with the training book Blacksheep gave me and make a plan.

I think that the work I get done in the garden this September is going to mean that next year I will not have any big structural jobs and I may even have time to go work in the volunteer gardens in town. I haven’t managed much this year because I’ve been drowning in house/garden work.

My birthday is coming up so of course I am going deep into that funk of “What the hell am I actually doing with my life?” Well this year my hide-from-life birthday retreat will involve a 90 mile round-trip bike ride before camping in the rain. No weekend long binge of The Witcher this year.

In order to catch up on steps I need 9,150 each day between now and the end of the year. *sigh* I don’t have any specific goals about bike miles between now and the end of the year… but I feel better when I ride more and my kids have never regained their full fitness after covid. So. Ugh. Fudge.

I watch this shit like a hawk because if I get too sedentary then I lose strength and then I injure myself then I am stuck in a chair for months and the recovery period is slow and nightmarish. I haven’t had a big injury… in a long time. I can’t remember the last one. I am dancing on the edge of overwork issues with my arms and back right now with all the gardening/painting. Oofta.

Ok. Now that I have reflected it’s time to get off my butt. Daylight is no longer endless and apparently I have a lot of miles to cover. It doesn’t help my sense of impending doom that my birthday is coming. Stupid birthday. I hate you. It’s not that I mind getting older. It’s just that it is usually such a very terrible day. I feel bad that I can’t be present with my kids on my birthdays. But I can’t. That’s just the reality. No sense in denying a thing that is just true. Thanks, mom, for this gift that just keeps on giving. I mean… I know it isn’t her fault at this point. She hasn’t ruined a birthday in over 20 years. But there is a broken piece there. I have tried to fix it and failed. I am putting all of my try into other places; I have none left for something as stupid as my birthday.

Alright. Time to work.

Clickbait trash

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I was foolish last night. I was procrastinating on sleep and I gave in to clickbait. Habits of highly productive people. Ugh. I have this constant internal tug of war over productivity. You might have noticed that I don’t write much anymore. There are so many reasons. One of them is that I use my hands a lot and if I want to reduce pain something has to go. Another reason is that I have largely been able to write over the last 12 years by giving up sleep.

One of the neat things about tracking lots of data about my body is I can tell you fairly conclusively that Scotland has been fucking fantastic for my sleep habits. In California I went years getting 4-7 hours of sleep. 7 hours was somewhat rare and I would pat myself on the back for doing it. When I was deep in project mode 4 hours for weeks or months was not unusual.

I’ve had 4 weeks of project mode since I arrived here: painting the dining room. Otherwise I have been getting 8-10 hours of sleep. I’m certain the Amitriptyline helps. It doesn’t make me pass out in a drugged stupor instantly anymore but it keeps me asleep longer. I like that.

I don’t need to read bullshit about how if I went back to waking up at 4 am I could be a much more productive person as if productivity is the same thing as measuring how moral I am.

Every so often I will talk to another immigrant here and they will almost inevitably complain about how hard it is to deal with the less intense work ethic of Scottish people. I always say that I am trying as hard as I can to move in that direction. I don’t want to maintain my California work ethic. I don’t think it is healthy to believe that 60 hours a week is a minimum amount of acceptable work or you deserve to be fired. I don’t think it is healthy that everyone believes you must monetize every hobby and interest you have or you are wasting your time.

I find it really interesting just how happy I am to be out of California and the US as a whole. It’s not that Scotland is perfect–there is no such thing as perfect. But I don’t worry about having to find a tactful way to play 20 questions with new parents-of-friends to find out how they handle gun safety in their house because the expectation is that people might/probably have guns. I think the US has lost the plot when it comes to gun ownership. Gun ownership in the US is not about keeping the gun owner safe. It is about letting people who own guns feel powerful and mostly they put themselves and their families at greater risk for the charade of being powerful. It’s gross. I know that I know a lot of people who own guns. As much as I love you I am glad I no longer have to navigate the emotional/anxiety minefield of ever walking through your front door again. Your desire to feel powerful makes me feel sick.

When I talk to my older kids about what they want from the future: where would they like to school, where do they think they want to live? They say that even if they don’t stay in the Highlands for the rest of their lives there is no chance they want to go back to the US. I can’t say I blame them. I mean, feelings might change. That happens.

I have been reading books on gardening in this climate about as fast as I can get them. Sure, a lot of them are more England centric and don’t perfectly answer my needs for Northern Scotland but it is teaching me more relevant information than my background education in California gardening. The UK is so hilariously on the nose about naming: Flowerdew (the jokes write themselves), Cox (a kind of apple), Titmarsh (I think of little birds in the marshes telling me the ancient lore).

An immigrant buddy told me that it takes a good 7 years to settle into a place. With the pandemic I feel like that process is frozen in time in a bizarre way. I think of 80’s tv “magic” moments where someone froze time so that someone could get something done without it impacting anyone else. I am setting up my garden. I am working on the house. I’m about to start painting again: maybe that’s why I feel the need to write something down again. I feel like I am being given this weird slice of time where I am here but I am not here. I learned how to paint by doing set design. I learned about creating a setting so that things could be perceived a way, so the characters could be perceived a way, so the plot could be advanced with as little acting effort as possible.

By the time anyone is allowed into my house and I’m actually working hard on making a social place, the backdrop will be pretty much finished. Some folks are making noise about it being fine to come visit this autumn. I have serious doubts.

I want to paint soon in large part because apparently UK paint doesn’t store the way that US paint does. I need to use it up before it isn’t good anymore. I bought too much volume. Next time I will only buy 1 liter cans. Life lesson.

I have been out in the yard a lot over the past week. The kids had an academic break and the effort I normally put into schoolwork we put into yard work. It was nice. Things are coming along. I am most of the way through making the raised mount beds. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCgelkultur) I have been taking it very slowly because it is a lot of shoveling and lifting and carrying. Mostly what I am doing is cleaning up all the debris all over my yard and putting it in long-term compost-in-place mounds on top of felled trees. How long they will be functional is difficult to fully determine. Opinions vary between 5 and 20 years. I will find out! It’s an experiment.

I am doing quite well with my current pass at increasing fitness. In the past I have set strenuous goals and reached them (by sacrificing sleep, other healthy activities, giving up almost all other hobbies) and I’m just not in a place to do that emotionally. So I have been very gradually increasing my personal step count goals and I’m ignoring the watch’s direction for how much I “should” be doing. I am consistently reaching my personal/lower goals and I’ve managed to bump them up very slowly over many months and that’s going well. I haven’t injured myself in months and at this stage of decrepitude I am treating that as a major victory.

I don’t enjoy how much “don’t injure myself extra” is a huge sticking point at this stage of my life. But it is.

I am making forward progress on fitness. I am moving the garden along. I am homes educating my kids. I am keeping a household running (thanks Noah for doing most of the cooking). I am keeping us on a budget. I am maintaining a low and slow drip of getting to know home education folk here through online meetings and randomly meeting people out on the trail (that’s pretty darn thrilling, I’ll tell you). I’m going to be painting again in a week or so.

I don’t need to be told that if I just gave up all my rest time I could be more productive as if higher productivity level is the measure of a life. I have worked really hard on increasing how much rest I get. I take weekend time to sit in my room and do nothing as a conscious choice. Yeah I am watching shit on Netflix. I am also reading books. I am also planning for the future. I’m sketching out ideas for how to solve future problems we don’t have yet but will appear like magic over the next 10 years or so.

I don’t need to give up sleep. I don’t need to give up all recreation on the altar of “Work is all that is moral”. Fuck your clickbait in the ear with a pointy stick.

Hey, hi there, hello

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I am running again. It’s a slow process. I was getting into a good rhythm for a while there then I fell down the stairs and jacked up my foot and took two weeks off. In the last seven days I covered 25.7 miles (that includes my daily walking around the house–separating the distance is hard). Given that in the past four weeks I’ve only covered 78.9, a fair amount of that was this week with the return to running. I’m having trouble with my tech so separating out just the “runs” isn’t working that well. I’m not too worried about speed at this stage so just increasing my mileage is where I am.

Meh. But last night’s run felt great. Until I stepped into a slick of mud and fell down a little hill. Luckily I landed in a lot of mud so it didn’t hurt. Sigh. Maybe I will have to run in the neighborhood during rain periods instead of the trail even though the trail is more fun.

Paint arrives today. I should walk around and take before pictures. I have not followed Noah’s request to avoid big projects for a year at all. I would feel really bad only a lot of the construction is not my fault and I was being a total dick when all I was allowed to do was clean and stare at the kids not doing their chores as fast as I would like. I have more hope for the second year of living here being a bit restful? Ugh. It’s not my fault that the plumbing in the whole house was fucked up. I am not good at looking at bare drywall. Hell, we still aren’t done with the basic repairs. This house has been a giant pain.

I am grateful that Eldest Child wants to go to secondary school when things open up. Homeschooling three levels is utterly exhausting. EC is very much at a higher academic level these days. Middle Child is still cruising through the elementary level work. And now I have a budding preschooler. These are very different types of curriculums and they all take full attention. I told EC that once she goes back to school she is in it until she graduates because I’m not taking her out again no matter how rough it is. You get to finish.

It’s time.

I absolutely will not force a kid to start if they don’t feel ready. It’s a principle. But by golly I am not withdrawing you again.

I think it will be good for MC to get a lot of extra academic attention. She is running into that thing where she has been smart enough to “just know the answer” for her whole life and I am starting to not accept it from her. She has to show me the work. She’s not thrilled but she’s coping. We talk a lot about why the work needs to be done, not just arriving at the answer. It’s a process. In particular her emotional growth lately has been truly astounding. She’s like a new kid. She has so much more self control than she has had in the past. When she’s frustrated she huffs a little then gets on with it. That’s massive. She hasn’t thrown a screaming fit in months. I’m having a much easier time with her and I’m grateful because everything else still feels annoyingly rough.

Emotionally I’m… mixed. On one hand I am clearly very depressed. My energy levels are low and I feel very little motivation. I have a lot of discipline. I have almost zero motivation. I’m holding it together with the kids very well all things considered. I am cranky and a bit snippy but I’m not yelling and I’m not being nasty. I have been known to be a bit hostile as I say, “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

Generally speaking running a much larger house is going ok. I am delegating so much stuff. *pat self on back*

I’m writing because when I run I compose long blog posts in my head. But today I don’t actually have the courage to write about what I was thinking. I feel vulnerable and raw and like I can’t handle backlash.

So I can write about things that don’t matter very much. I am slow and I am sad but I am working hard and I am getting through intense amounts of work. I have more work coming and I will plow through it.

Now I need to go dress a two year old.

It’s a lot

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In lieu of proper emails to the people who have expressed concern, here’s a blog entry.

I’m not doing so hot. It’s a whole bunch of things. This PMDD cycle is ridiculously brutal. I’m on day fucking 35 and I wish I would just god damn bleed already. I think I would be doing poorly even if everything else was going well. But everything else is not going well.

The pandemic is not hitting my area hard at all–there haven’t been new cases in a while and we’ve gone a few days without a death in the whole country. There will be a few more deaths as this trickles to an end, but Scotland as a whole has managed this pretty darn well. I am terrified of when tourism opens up again. That’s going to fuck us. But I also recognize that an awful lot of the industry exists around supporting tourism so it’s a double edged sword.

All the stuff in the US. I feel ashamed for not being there to participate. I feel grateful that I am not part of it. I feel fear for all of the people on the ground doing the work. I feel scared for the future. I am watching the revolution on tv because I was a coward and I got out.

Things in my house. Stuff with Noah is at a weird/hard point. We are having some troubles. I don’t know how to fix them and I don’t know what the way forward looks like and I’m really scared. I am really really scared. I feel so hurt. I feel wounded. I feel sad.

My oldest child is truly into puberty now. Woo! In the process of trying to celebrate her having a big milestone (in a way we have been discussing for three god damn years) she told me that I am the most embarrassing thing ever and there was a whole lot of “you are gross” face and body language. I’m totally butt hurt. I know it is normal. I know it is to be expected. I know I shouldn’t let it get to me. But I’ve already been crying for a few days so that was just not something I could shrug off in that moment.

Middle child is… she’s having a hard time with everyone taking care of their own needs right now. She is angry and being difficult because she still wants to be catered to like a little kid and no one has that to give her right now. We are all tired and doing stuff to deal with our own shit. I’m trying to talk her through how to meet her own needs a bit more and it’s just hard. So she’s getting in trouble a lot because bad attention is better than no attention.

Youngest child is an adorable little shit head. She has taken to yelling at us all because she wants to be top dog. YOU. WILL. NOT. SAY. THAT. TO. ME. (When we say something like, please don’t kick me.) She’s starting to get more consequences and she’s learning that when mama says something it fucking stays true. If you get into the fridge and steal multiple pieces of fruit and take one bite and leave them to rot, no you don’t get a slice of cake when the rest of us do. We don’t do that with food in this house. If you take the fruit you eat it before you move on. Sorrynotsorry.

Well, I’m writing behind this password because Jenny promised me that I could write what I needed to write and I didn’t need to password protect it–she would choose not to read it. Then she read it and yelled at me. So awesome. Jenny is trying to rewrite history. “I’ve said one wrong thing.” Oh fuck that. You started out our relationship 26 years ago calling me a stupid slut. There have been incidents like this for over two decades. You don’t get to say that calling my kids retarded was saying one wrong thing. She also clarified that she didn’t spank her daughter for a panic attack she spanked her because she was being defiant and screaming in Jenny’s face. Hello? You have rewarded her for bad behavior and defiance all her life and now all of a sudden it is not ok to the level you have to hit her for it? Yeah I don’t find that more excusable.

I don’t want to end the relationship. But I don’t know how close I want to be either.

I am not doing well at responding to anyone’s emails. I feel trapped inside my head. I feel unable to reach out because I feel wrong and bad and stupid and unwanted all over the place.

There was drama in some online forums. A couple pieces in a couple of places. In one of the womens-support groups there was this one woman who was really fucking antagonistic and when I got sick of being bullied I left. The one person from the group who has remained my friend then wanted me to spend weeks helping her process her feelings about being bullied by the one problematic woman. I’m like, this is not good for me. So she left the group too. Some of the other members came to her and asked about forming a new group without the problematic woman and I feel rejected, unworthy of defense, and really unimportant. I feel fucking bad. I provided a lot of emotional support to those people for over a year and me being chased off was fine but once it is this other gal all of a sudden the bully is a problem. I feel like shit.

I’ve been chatting with some of the bay area kinky folk. Some dude was making “jokes” that weren’t funny about covid at at ime when one of the members had a mom who was doing quite poorly and she was terrified. A few of us called him out for not being funny and told him he should apologize. He then proceeded to go on this extensive tirade about how pointless it is to apologize to mentally ill fuck ups. He said that the request for an apology was tantamount to him being falsely accused of rape. WTF? Now one of my friends is his new submissive. I’m like, “well. That’s fucking awesome.” I’m trying to just set boundaries with her about how I don’t want to hear about him and it’s only so successful. I may end up having to stop talking to her and that will be sad.

I don’t know why emails feel harder.

House stuff continues……..s…..l…..o…..w…..l….y….. which means I can’t just be done. I am in this constant state of waiting for the next step and it feels awful. This house will be great when everything works. And I just want to cry.

Sleep is not going well. I do get a fair bit sometimes but mostly I don’t get enough sleep and I feel poorly. I’ve had more than a few days lately where I got almost nothing done because I feel so awful. I’m depressed and I’m definitely getting the full-body malaise.

That said, I have been completing my miles. If I feed the kids, get my miles in… that’s enough to count for a day right now. I’m only up to 16 miles/week right now. I’m adding 1 or 2 miles every other week (mostly 1 but there are a couple of jumps) until September of 2021. My birthday week next year will be my peak week: 54 miles in a week. Then I start ramping down again (hopefully for a marathon the first weekend of October, we’ll see) the week of the marathon I only do 35 miles. It’s more in a day than I did during training, but the hope is that my body will be so accustomed to just going and going that it will be fine. Knock on wood for no injuries. I am a little worried about how often I will need to use the treadmill over the winter because it just isn’t the same as running outside, but it’s a lot better than injuring myself on ice or not running.

I am 10lbs below the peak weight I hit a bit ago. I have done pretty well about cutting sugar from my tea (only had one teaspoon one time) and I’ve not 100% eliminated alcohol (it’s not a great coping method and I get that but I don’t *have* a great one) but I’ve gone from drinking 5-6 days a week to having some 3 times in the past two weeks. I am also running out of stuff and I think I will be good about not buying more for a while. I mean, I have a whole bottle of whiskey sitting there I haven’t touched yet so I won’t be out out for a while.

We have some tenants and they are super sweet. I found them through the mosque. A bit ago my heart was moved to reach out to the mosque and tell them that if one of their members ends up in a tough spot because of job-loss in the pandemic and they need emergency housing, I have an empty apartment. The kind doctor who talked to me at first said he didn’t know of anyone at the moment but he’d keep me in mind. Almost a month later I got a call. They are a really sweet couple, she’s pregnant and her cooking is mind bendingly good. They are not paying rent yet (that’s the whole out of work + being an immigrant means you can’t get government support thing) but they are giving us stuff they make and offering help around the yard and being super gracious. The long-term goal is they will pay rent once jobs happen again. I am willing to extend some faith here. These are rough times all over the place. We are having really fun conversations and they love playing with youngest child when she’s outside. The young lady moved here just over three months ago and basically doesn’t know anyone. We are talking as best we can with her emerging English and my bad Hindi which is close enough to Urdu that we can communicate some.

Seriously, just having those smells wafting through my house from her cooking is worth the price of admission. Oh golly. It smells like home.

The yard has come along quite a bit and I feel like I am ready for the growing season. I still have a long way to go before I figure out all of what I need to do and what I need to prune and when. It’s a process. The yard is feeling overgrown and more jungle-like and I love it.

I mean, I’ve been feeling pretty crappy. But instead of feeling suicidal I have self mutilation ideation. It’s still not great (and I’m not doing it) but after so many years of “I should die” being my first impulse it is in fact an improvement. I’m sad. I feel bad about myself. But I have work to do and I need to wait for this wave of sadness to pass so I can get back to it.

I have approximately five minutes…

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Then I need to go take the bread out of the oven and start soup for supper.

I’m thinking really a lot about how I want to structure my goals over the next few years. Because I won’t talk about this in front of my kids, here I will admit: I want to lose weight. I will not, however, go on a diet. I don’t want to lose weight because I think I look better I want to lose weight because I can’t wear my best clothes and that is pissing me off. I don’t want to spend the money on larger replacements. To that end I want to set the goal: run another marathon when I turn 40. That gives me 18 months of training time. I need to do this independent of the kids running with me. If I do it based on everyone feeling healthy enough I won’t do it.

Fuck diets. Yay running. I think running around this town will be a proper treat. I should figure out a realistic schedule for that, but I don’t have time this entry.

I want to paint the interior of the house starting in September. I have six months to plan. I think the interior paint job is going to take over a year. Each room will take a minimum of a month. That’s pretty fucking daunting, yo. I need to start sketching on that.

I have a perty new polytunnel. I want to grow tomatoes even if I’m not supposed to plant in the ground. Home grown tomatoes taste so much better it isn’t funny. Also I am allowed to work on hard scaping….

Shit. I had less time than I thought. Toodles.

PS: I can’t wait to turn 40.

18 miles

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I packed my water bag with food and blister pads already. My clothes are lying out so that I can get up, take some Exedrin Migraine (that shit's amazing first thing in the morning before a run) and go. I bet it will still be dark when I leave. 

If I am very lucky this will be the third longest run I ever do in my life. The second longest will be in two weeks. The very longest is in five weeks. Time just keeps slipping away. 37 days. 176.2 miles left till I'm done with this goal. It doesn't sound that bad since I know I had to do like 450 miles this year.

I'm hoping for under five hours because I am not going to rush. We'll see how it goes. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee. Bill's Cafe in Willow Glen. I will have hollandaise sauce. Mmmmmm hollandaise.

Thank you!

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The text messages while I was running made me very happy. Thank you everyone. I can't go back through and respond because I don't have time. I feel like I have been either extremely busy or asleep since I stopped running. And my computer won't get on the internet consistently. I have stuff I want to write but I have to finish painting today because the washer/dryer are being delivered between 4:45 and 6:45. Must finish! Then the painting will be done in the garage. That will be a euphoric moment of "holy shit I finished a project".

long day.

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Well that is the last time I'm going out with that baby carrier. Calli is too fucking heavy. I hurt. Today I woke up and did my three miles (actually 3.26 because I didn't judge the loop perfectly) then we walked to Fairyland and went around Lake Merritt. We do public transit to Oakland so there is a fair bit of walking involved. My off the cuff whine says that I moved my body through at least eight, probably nine, possibly ten miles today. And I carried Calli for at least three miles of it. I carried both kids for about 3/4 of a mile. That was all I could manage. I hurt. Together they weigh ~64 pounds. And I had a bag that was probably almost five pounds.

I think I should stop thinking of myself as not very strong. It's an interesting part of my self identity. On Saturday I am going to go run my second half marathon this life time. And then I will take a shower and go to San Francisco and work a shift in a coffee shop.

I think I should stop thinking of myself as not very capable. I'm starting to think that if I am still not competent then the bar is too high. Give me a fucking break. I've done a lot of manual labor this week. I did a bunch of yard work. I have run 24 miles in the last seven days. And on Saturday I will go run a half marathon.

I'm having a little trouble with this explanation being me. I'm not athletic! I'm a shitty runner! I'm in terrible shape! See, I still have a big belly. (Whatever. I have an ass. I have a very very very nice ass. With shelf. And definition. And LIFT. It's god damn awesome.)

Ok. This is weird. My body has changed a lot. I don't feel like I recognize me very well. I look more intense and feral by the month. Getting through this much exercise is something I can only do through brute will. I hate exercising. This is a nightmare. Only it's not always. It is at the end of a lot of walking in a poorly fitting carrier.

I had a span of intense joy while running today. I had been fucking around with going a little faster then a little slower and I was just going through a corner right at the end of a get-my-breath-back slow jog session when Lady Gaga's "Hair" came on. I could feel the first few beats of the song make my body start lengthening. I consciously checked in with my lungs–my biggest downfall as a runner is I have very low lung capacity. Running has been amazing for this. I had a very slow breath rate and my heart was nice and low and slow. I saw the nice long straight block with decent sidewalk come straight into my line of vision. I lined up on the center line. It felt like giving a horse its head. I felt pulled forward by the fierceness of my energetic response. All of a sudden I just had to run. I sprinted down the block for all I was worth.

It felt so good. I felt so free. I felt so strong. I felt like a god damn bad ass. I probably flailed and looked kind of funny, but not really. I carefully felt every muscle group in my body. I felt like I was moving in tandem. I felt balanced. I felt really good. At the end of the quarter mile stretch I reached down fast and pulled my phone out of my pocket and turned it on to see what it said. The phone has a bit of a lag. By the time it registered I know I had slowed down from my maximum speed. It said I was running at 8.64 mph.

When I first started running I googled "What is the difference between running and jogging?" Some asshole on the internet said, "Nine minute miles. That's the difference."

I'm not there yet. But all of a sudden I feel the ghost of a chance. Some day I might be able to run one nine minute mile.

I cried a lot today. I come from a very athletic family. They sneered at me for my fatness. My sedentary life. It's all so complicated.

Dinner time.

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I've had a few people ask me for a running update. Sure. I love requests. My attitude has been better while running. I am past the hump of it feeling "too hard" to do what I am doing. This week I am running sixteen miles. Next week is twenty. I'm not up to ten miles on Saturdays yet. Next month. Most days and most runs I've been maintaining 5.10-5.30 mph. Occasionally I crawl for a bit and come in just under 5mph but that is rare lately.

One of the things that I am disliking the most is my changing perception of my body.I've mostly been on the chubby side but I've never been all that big. My lifetime maximum weight was 212 while pregnant. Not-pregnant it was 208. I spend a lot of time hanging out in the 180's with occasional dips down into the 160's when my activity level goes up. That seems to be my "active" weight range. Occasionally in times of great mental/emotional distress I drop down into the 150's. I have usually had a lot of mixed feelings about these periods. On one hand they are by far the most psychologically unhealthy periods of my life on the other hand random people in public no longer stop me to tell me I should lose weight.

Lately I feel like I am bordering on body dysmorphia. I have always had an hour glass figure. That's just how my body looks. I have hundreds of pictures to prove it. I don't any more. Right now I'm doing the apple thing. I don't tend to feel hostility about other people having that basic body shape but right now I feel intensely bad about being shaped that way. I think about it a lot. I'm having to deal with the fact that my clothes don't fit at all the way I am used to them fitting and I feel angry and ashamed and bad because my body isn't looking like me. It's weird. I'm used to my waist being a size smaller than my thighs. Now my waist is at least a size bigger. I feel fat in a way I haven't ever felt before. I feel repulsed by the way I look. I think about it a lot. A really lot. 

I watched the Harry Potter movies recently. At the very end there is this long panoramic pull back shot of Harry, Hermione and Ron. I was fixated on the fact that it looked like I could put my hand between her thighs and be able to hold my hand horizontally and barely touch skin on either side. Holy moly she has skinny thighs. It felt really dramatic. It looked very childlike to me. I'm used to women having thighs that touch. This isn't to say that all women have heavy thighs. There are lots of grown up women with thing legs. I know this–I still had this visceral reaction to Hermione in that shot. For the past few days I keep standing in front of mirrors and feeling very perplexed because if I stand with my feet directly below my shoulders and look in a mirror my thighs barely touch. Mine have touched full on down to the knees for most of my adult life. Now the top inch touches. I don't think my thighs will rub by the time I get to the marathon.

I feel weird in my body. I feel like I am borrowing a body. I am pretending to be an athletic person. I feel disconnected from my legs–like they represent someone else. They just don't fit the rest of me. I feel weird and bad about the baby belly. Like all of a sudden it is magically a problem. My body has always been proportional! I liked being proportional! Fuck you belly! Everything else is getting smaller what is your fucking problem? But I this attachment in my mind to not trying to lose weight. So I eat a lot trying to keep weight on. My belly is not getting smaller. Ahem.

Especially with my hair this short. Especially with how dark of a tan I have now. I no longer look pale and goth-like. I savored that pallor for many years. Now I garden and run and spend the whole f'in day in the park. I don't wear sunscreen. I don't burn so I don't see the point in putting cancer causing agents on my skin. Noah needs to wear sunblock. Oh man.

I feel very uncomfortable about my body. I don't recognize it. I don't know it. I have a lot of time understanding its pleasure sensors and food needs. I feel very disconnected. I'm not sure if I have always been this disconnected or if it is a recent change. But all of a sudden I feel loathing for my body I am not used to. I was fairly cheerful about being fat. I knew how to dress to look good. I was "friendly fat" so to speak. I had some size 18 clothing, but not much. Mostly I was in the no-womans-land between Misses 14 and Womens 14. I certainly was encouraged by society to feel bad about my size. I was told by the media that I was disgusting. I didn't feel disgusting. I liked my body. I thought I looked quite good naked and that was what I cared about.

I don't like how I look naked right now. I feel lumpy and floppy and disproportionate. I feel like my breasts and my hips look sad and deflated next to my belly. I don't like looking at my belly and yet I do it compulsively. I think this is just my lizard-brain looking for another way to self-harm. If I decide that my belly is my enemy and disgusting and I should do something about it while I am simultaneously training for a marathon I am going to hurt myself quite badly. 

I'm afraid of a lot of the process of training for running. If I want to meet my goals I have to treat my body gently. I have to meet its needs. I'm not sure I even know what its needs are. I'm struggling with finding balance between needing to "work on my diet," because I do need to work towards more nutritious food, and not wanting to obsess and punish myself for being bad. It's hard when I realize that my approach to myself in my head is entirely punitive. If I breathe too loudly I should be punished. I'm taking up space in this world that wasn't meant for me. I am struggling with the size of the box in my head I am allowed to fill. 

Right now my weight is hanging out in the upper 150's/lower 160's. My legs are thinner than they have ever been in my life. My arms thinned out in pregnancy. My face thinned out in pregnancy. My upper back thinned out in pregnancy. Now my upper body really wants to hang out in a size 8. My hips would probably be happiest in a size 10 or 12. My waist is quite firmly still in size 14. With muffin top. I feel like my body is taking up the wrong space. I am wrong. I am out of place. I am out of order. I tell the kids my belly is awesome. Shanna is very affectionate with my belly and I encourage and support that. But I feel distant from this body. I want her to have only positive associations with her mothers body. I talk to her about fat redistributing on your body at different stages and sometimes you have more and sometimes you have less. I keep it very value neutral. I am extremely verbally positive about heavy people being attractive.

And I look in the mirror and I see not my body. I feel gross. I feel like I am not right. I am bad. I am too big and I am too small. I am not me. I'm trying not to show any actual panic. I really am a good actor.

It's interesting and useful for me to think about this current set of obsessive thoughts just as this week's version of self-harm. I'm really enjoying Over the Influence. It's the book on Harm Reduction Therapy. If the goal is just to be always moving towards less harm then I can give myself a little bit of a break. I know how much less harmful this thought process is than most of what I've done. I can see that I'm trying to justify feeling bad. I know that really I just feel bad and I don't need a why. If I can talk to my Lizard brain about it a bit I can see where the need to feel bad lives. 

I've been spending a fair bit of time in front of mirrors. I try to close the door so folks can't hear me. I look at myself. I say all of the things I wish that other people would say. I need to stop looking outside myself for validation. I can't have it. So I'm trying to give it to myself. I feel silly. I cry. But I say it. 

You are good. You are kind. You are patient. You are generous. You are honest. You are trustworthy. You work very hard. You have come a long way. Your body is perfect. Your body made two of the most delightful creatures in the world. What could possibly be wrong with it? You are strong. You will get stronger. Keep working. You will be able to do all of the things you say you will. You keep your fucking word. You are gentle. You are smart. You are resourceful. If you do not find a way you will make a way. Keep going. There is a lot left to do and not a whole lot of time.

 I am no longer defined by my sex appeal. I no longer need to worry about attracting attention the way I once did. I no longer particularly need to worry if my hip to waist ratio is appealing. It feels like I am getting a divorce from my body. I no longer live in it. I'm doing other things. I want to come back but I don't know this person. This person is invisible in different ways and visible for different reasons. I don't know how to handle it. I feel scared of this person. Not because this person will hurt me but because this person is vulnerable in ways I don't fully understand. I can't see the scope of it properly. I don't have much experience being this person out in the world. I have only been this person a short time. I'm still adjusting. I hear it takes four years to be properly past the postpartum period. My organs don't even know where they are going to live forever yet. What kind of home do I want them to live in? How much control do I have?

It's all quite terrifying, really.

Apparently I don’t want to track.

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I got busy. Then we decided to use a lot less electricity for a while (no artificial lights and no computers during darkness) and my computer time went down. I'm cheating today because I am in a bad mood. 

I went and saw my therapist on Thursday and that was a good thing because I was having a lot of intrusive suicidal ideation all week before that. Over the weekend I just didn't have the thoughts and that was restful. But this morning Calli had a hard time sleeping and I wasn't very patient with her and I feel quite guilty about it and here I am. Noah tapped me out because I wasn't being very patient. Shanna didn't have this many sleep interruptions. This is hard. I don't handle many of them–Noah does 90% of them. Once in a while I try to tap him out around four so that he can get a little sleep before work. I did that last night and I shouldn't have. Turns out she had just barely woken up and he had slept most of the night. Dang it. That's what I get for trying to be nice. He came back at five and told me I could be done. He's very nice. It's going to be a long day and I will be nicer to the kids all day if I have some time when I am not being kicked or having someone scream in my ear. 

Running continues. I have missed a couple of days of training due to tripping. I feel mixed about that. It just means I need to be more careful, right? I don't think that long term it will be a problem that I lost a total of three and a half miles more than five months before the marathon. I will still get enough miles logged. It will be fine. I'm struggling with my attitude about running. Some where in tracking I stopped thinking about it as "just get there" and started thinking "I am a loser for being this slow." I am not a loser. I am not an athlete. I do not have a history of running. I'm doing fucking great. My attitude isn't great and I'm trying to work on it. I wish I could just feel happy with myself for what I have done so far. I don't know why I feel so little pride in the half marathon. I suppose because I was bitching and moaning in my head the whole time. I cried through a lot of the race and felt self-pitying. Why should I feel pride in spending three hours feeling that way? Running is extremely emotional for me. I think about my siblings a lot. I think about my brothers and how they used to run. I think about being told all my life that I was not athletic and never being given space to try. If I wasn't going to go out and be the fastest person on a track team tomorrow I shouldn't bother to get off the couch. 

I think about how I want my kids to perceive exercise. And I think it sucks that my experience of running is that it triggers a lot of crying and very sad thinking. I wish to God that I had memories of my family that made me happy. I want to be able to think of something that has happened to me and not cry or feel bitter. How do I turn things like a half marathon into something to feel kind of lame about? I know I didn't "enjoy" running it. So it doesn't count. I sure as heck wasn't that fast. I feel like there is no point in me doing things. I think that at least part of me believes that because no one will be there at the finish line whether I am the first person or the last who gives a shit about me so why bother? It doesn't matter what I go do when I am alone in a room by myself. I don't really exist.

I go see a therapist because I need to have an "authority" who I can come back to time and time again who I can come back to and get continual reassurance that I am doing the right thing. I need to be seen. I need to have someone I can trust witnessing my life who isn't going to allow me to be invisible. I have had a few good therapists in my life. They have all been able to present a neutral facade no matter what I am telling them about until I ask them for feedback. Then they react a great deal. I can't handle working with a therapist who flinches and pulls away from me when I talk about the things that are going on in my head. I can't expect neutrality from Noah or my friends. I have gotten to the point in my therapy career where I talk about that on the first visit with a new person. "I need a blank wall. I will project all of my shit onto you if you give me any reaction." My current therapist has a wonderful presence. She radiates comforting. I like her.

Last week we talked a lot about what it means that having panic attacks and feeling suicidal is my normal. What do I do about that? How do I go about living my life knowing that it is true? I have yet to have a stage of life where I have gone more than a year without thinking about suicide. I didn't think about it for the first year of Shanna's life. Then I had a miscarriage and a bunch of issues with my mother. 

If I wasn't someone with a panic disorder what would my life look like? How would I interact with people? What would would I do with my time? I have to construct this story out of whole cloth. I try to guess. I switch social groups so often because I don't feel like I guess well and then I am afraid to see people again. I won't be able to duplicate the same "character" I was trying for the last time I saw them. A lot of how this is manifesting is I just don't talk as much any more. I feel like I only have bad things to say so I shouldn't say anything at all. Sometimes I get into a blurty stage because I have so many words in my head and I don't have very many appropriate places to put them. 

I want my kids to have a different relationship with exercise than I have. So I pretend that running is awesome and I do a lot of it. I like that my kid thinks nothing of the mile walk to the park. She would much rather walk to the park than drive because she thinks car seats are annoying. We have a different sense of time than most people. We have long days to fill. We don't do much and we don't have very many obligations at specific times. Well, we do a lot. It's just all decided at the last minute and most of it is in or near our house.

How would I live if I didn't have panic attacks and suicidal ideation? I'm not really sure what would be different. I wonder what my life would be like if I didn't waste so much physical energy on being afraid. Terror is hard on the body. My body feels terror a great deal of the time while I am doing common every day things. I wish I understood how much it was taking away from me, although I'm not sure I need more reasons to be resentful. I don't like my body for being maladapted in this way. I wish my body understood that it is ok to be safe here. I kind of feel like part of it was being mailed the letter. People who are mad at me aren't even going to limit telling me that I'm bad to the internet. They are going to mail shit to my house so that I can't avoid knowing that I'm bad even if I avoid the internet. Well, fuck. 

I want the voices inside my head to be kind to me. I want to know how to change those tapes. I'm tired of feeling like I loathe myself. I'm tired of feeling critical of my accomplishments. I really and truly am safe. I feel like I need to get to the place where I can really trust that Noah and Shanna and Calli are probably always going to like me. They will get mad at me as well. Other people need to be not my problem. I need to stop caring if other people think I am bad. I need to stop rehearsing these tapes that confirm that people think I am bad. I need to not care that what I am doing is not good enough for other people. That isn't my job. I don't need to be good enough for them. Three people. What would my body feel like if I really understood that I only need to expend energy worrying about three people instead of untold numbers? I think I should make up that story in my head. That should probably be my story all the time. Then I won't have to worry about remembering a new one. This is my family. I care for them and they care for me.

Instead of hearing my brother criticize me I need to hear Shanna telling me that I'm the best mom in the world. Shanna has already declared that she is running in a race with me as soon as she is big enough. I guess I will have to keep running. I need to get the wheels fixed on her bike so she can ride while I run. 

I had to have kids or I probably wouldn't have made it to thirty. I have been suicidal for a very long time. My will power needs rejuvenation. Right now my job is to teach my kids how to be functional, happy adults. That means I have to figure out how such a person behaves and act like that in front of them all the time. So I cry when I run. Maybe I should stop feeling bad about that. Maybe it's really awesome that I have space in my life where I am alone and I get to vent those horrible overwhelming emotions. Maybe a skinned knee isn't the worst thing in the world. I do need to pay more attention when I am running. I want to show Shanna how to be competent and that means being at least minimally attentive. Injuries suck, yo. 

so tired.

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12.89 miles in 2:49:04.  The average speed is officially 4.58 mph.  But I did the first ten miles in under two hours and I had to wait at 10 or so stoplights.

I practically crawled the last mile and a half.  My foot started feeling a bit funky and I had abdominal cramps.  I have run more than a marathon in the past seven days.  I'm going to sit very still now.