I had absolutely stellar recovery scores last week even as I pushed my strain significantly. I was “in the green” which meant I was getting enough rest to recover from all my activity. But I’ve had a few days of yellow “warning” recovery scores that suggest I may need extra sleep and less activity strain.
I felt it this morning when I had some anxiety hit me hard as made a run to the grocery store. If I am feeling particularly tired I can easily let myself get anxious and overwhelmed if I don’t feel I’ve got the space and time to recover myself physically. I was racing against the clock to get lunch for everyone (both Alex and our house guest) hoping I’d be home within enough time for making meal and taking shower before my usual Monday therapy power hours.
I was thus quite relieved to find that therapy was canceled. A little end of summer reprieve. All the rushing to get things done went poof as did any remaining anxiety. I didn’t need to push. I could pay attention to my recovery. I was now free to heed the edicts of the Whoop. I hope this bit of good luck puts me into the green tomorrow.
I’ve been procrastinating on two core projects for the fall. Both of which involve making a modest investment between $100 and $250 depending on how fancy I want to get. So it’s not a throwaway amount of money but it’s also not money I should be hesitating on.
I’ve been in my head about it for two or three weeks even though I regularly need to make decisions about much larger sums of money for projects with much longer time horizons. I finally got myself over the hump on clicking order after going over my plans with my husband Alex for an hour. Which we’d definitely bill at more than we spent.
PROJECT ONE: TEST APPLE ORCHARD
The first project is getting in a few apple saplings in a fall planting to test out where we want an orchard. It’s not a full orchard with a big wiz-bang multi-year permaculture plan. We literally just want to get in four to six dwarf trees in the soil as soon as possible as we’ve been told it’s feasible to do fall plantings of heartier Zone 4 varietals.
We did a soil sample and the results came back with very encouraging results. Our back pasture has excellent quality soil despite being compacted by horses.
A soil health assessment from Ward Laboratories.
And yet I struggled to make a purchase. I made a trip to the nursery. I fucked around on a bunch of websites. I ordered catalogs for next year’s spring plantings. Finally this afternoon we threw caution to the wind and bought six dwarfs from Stark Brothers. The total came to about $250 and if it all fails well I’m glad I spent the money on fruit trees instead of a disposable consumer good.
PROJECT 2: SEED STARTS
The second purchase was seed starter supplies for our winter hydroponic crops which we plan to cultivate in the barn. We got a LettuceGrow system early in the pandemic and absolutely loved the quality of greens we got out of it. We’d been able to buy starts (aka seeds that have sprouted and begun to grow) for it in Colorado but this winter I wanted to do my own growing from seeds up into starts.
The goal was to have constant rotation of red and green leaf lettuce along with romaine and kale by staggering seed tray starts. It would be easier and have fewer failure points if we did a new batch of seed starts once every couple of weeks for consistency and move them from one grow light seed tray to the LettuceGrow once it fully sprouted.
Here were all of my friends and colleagues just out there doing the work. And I was too scared to experiment myself. Finally today we bought everything we needed from Amazon and purchased six or seven seed types from Johnny’s hydroponic collection. All told for everything it was $86 for a set up that should work for many seasons.
THE LESSON
While I’d never tell anyone to just go nuts putting shit in the ground without some research, I do think it’s possible to be too in your head about growing. I’ve been reading so much about fancy techniques like permaculture that I had neglected the most basic lesson of both startups and gardening. Execution is exponential. Just start doing something. Make it small. But you have to just start. Just plant. Just make things.
A bell curve with a smooth brain, a midwit and a Jedi. The midwit explains Sepp Holzer’s permaculture. The Jedi & the brain just plant.
The past couple of days have been super intense. Heck, the past month has been a lot. I passed out last night with my phone in my hand a bit after 9pm and woke up well after 8am this morning. My Whoop indicated I had high strain for the past two days and needed more recovery.
Still I went about my usual routines but soon found myself yawning and struggling to keep my eyes open after eating lunch. I felt lucky I hadn’t scheduled much today. I got back into bed figuring I would read a little bit. I kept drifting off. So much for being productive this afternoon.
One of my biggest fears is doing too much. Because I’ve been a workaholic in the past, I have a lingering sense of unease anytime I can tell I’ve been pushing myself for a few days. It used to be that my body would simply crash if I applied too much pressure, but as my health is at about 80% improved from my initial diagnosis I can no longer rely on such direct feedback.
I say that like it’s a bad thing but it’s a huge relief that I can modestly over do things and not immediately find my body crashing into a rest period. But it also means I have to be much more conscious of my own needs for rest and recovery as it’s no longer quite so obvious when I’ve done too much. This represents both a huge achievement for me and also a transitional moment in which I must find new boundaries.
A lot of folks seem to be coming through Montana over the next two weeks. Maybe it’s the nature of high season that people flock to Montana at the end of the summer?
But it’s been quite fun to have all kinds of friends, mutuals and acquaintances reach out to make plans. Visibility on Twitter has played a large role in this, as anyone passing through Montana might be inclined to grab a meal or a drink if they scroll their local mutuals. I like to think I am top of mind because I am a good hang but it’s probably because I’m just quite visible.
All these tourists has got a bit of a “center of the universe” feel to it. It’s like a mountain summer town version of Manhattan during fashion week. Or Los Angeles during the Oscars. I’ve got to say it feels like I’m Monaco and it’s F1 racing season. Every city of note has an event that brings all of the jet set to their hometown.
I’m usually mixed on doing too much social activity but I’ve been feeling like socializing more. I’ve even been eating out with much more frequency. And what’s amazing about it is that in the past I didn’t want to do more than a couple events a month. But this end of summer in Montana thing has me looking forward to more deck cocktails, eating cold cherries on the marble kitchen slab, going to pubs and ale houses, and maybe even a few steak houses too.
Having a modest disability like chronic pain (I have a form of arthritis in my spine) means I can’t always be physically active for an entire day. I need to lay down flat sometimes to relieve pressure on my spine and I can be fatigued from the persistent pain. It’s something I have to work around even if it’s not completely debilitating.
I’ve worked hard to control the disease. But it has meant a lot of days where normal activity had a poor return on the energy invested. If had a day where I was on my feet for hours at a time I’d probably pay for it the next day with extra time laying down. So I try to limit unnecessary activities.
I’m giving a lot of context that might not be necessary for regular readers of this daily chronicle that know me. But it’s not always easy for me to do what normal people take for granted. Imagine a day where you wake up, shower, cook and clean up after yourself, you go to work, you run some errands, you exercise, you come home to cook and clean some more, you care for your family and maybe you enjoy a hobby. A regular day.
I named ten activities you do without thinking. If I want to avoid hurting myself or using too much energy in one day, I have to pick two or three of those things. You might not be surprised to learn I pick showering, work and my health routines.
If I’m having a good day, I can add on additional activity or two. But it’s probably something I can do laying flat on my back. That’s how Twitter became a central nexus for socializing if you are curious.
So having given paragraphs of context I hope it allows you to understand my excitement about having an absolutely normal Sunday. This morning got up. I made food for myself. I went for a forty minute walk. I did my entire biohacking routine. I went to a nursery to see about some options for the orchard. Then I went to the grocery store with my husband and we did the shopping for the week. Then we did some chores on the new homestead. A truly astonishing about of activities for someone like me.
And even after all activity that I felt well enough for a long shower (often a painful activity as hot water swells my joints). It’s 5pm and I’ve been up and about since 8am and only laid down just now to write this post. And someone I feel totally fine.
Shortly I’ll be cooking mushroom risotto for Sunday dinner. My husband is the cook of the family but for some reason Arborio rice is his nemesis. He’s never made a decent risotto in all the time I’ve known him. Typically after a day with this much activity I’d never even consider cooking. But I’m having a normal Sunday and doesn’t it sound nice to make something a little more involved to eat?
I had a scare this morning. Someone I love is going through some stuff. I didn’t know if they were safe for a short period and I found myself frightened by the prospect of losing them.
When I learned they were safe I was relieved but also angry because how dare they scare all of us like that? I scrambled to cope with my own feelings and a desire to engage in codependent behaviors. I called my therapist and pulled myself together.
While I don’t suffer from depression it’s not an entirely foreign concept to me. It has felt closer over the pandemic as I’ve seen others struggle. I have family members and friends who live with varying degrees of chronic depression and I have witnessed first hand how much strength it takes live with it. I have chronic pain and I don’t think it is even in the same ballpark of debilitating as depression.
I’m not any kind of expert and my advice is mostly me talking into the wind so please only take what serves you. But what I’ve learned is that people genuinely do care about mental health if you want to seek a connection. We want to help. We want to help those that want to help themselves. Your people do love you and you may have more of them than you realize.
Sometimes it feels impossible to ask for help. Maybe you cannot ask friends or family because of any number of reasons. But that doesn’t mean you are alone or no one is here to help. There are hotlines. There are 12 step meetings. There are apps and services. As one internet friendly to another you are not alone. If you need mental health care please take whatever step feels feasible even if it’s just a text message into the either. You can do it.
I hope I can capture even a fragment of my emotions as I am on the other side of several hours of post-moving therapy. And I am drained but also armed with more wisdom than when I started the effort.
Moving is obviously a traumatic experience for most people. Anyone who moved as a child has some memories of how the change revealed new aspects of who they are and what makes them feel safe. Parents worry about it a lot about moving and for good reason. I know my mother certainly did and she did her best to protect me.
But we know that life is chaotic. Any type of change is already in a dance with accelerating entropy. Expect your unfinished shit to get drawn into the accretion belt surrounding the event horizon of your fears. Black holes are scary because we know they will kill us unless we commit enough energy to the fight to escape.
Sometimes some parts of us don’t make it. They become lost to the nothing. The dark impenetrable inversion point where we are forced to face the powers of destruction within us. Of course, it’s natural to sacrifice some part of yourself to banish the demon we know to be who we are.
It’s actually shocking to realize that inside of you might be some kind of personal Kali ready to rend the apocalypse at your weak side. But then you try not to think of it too much right? You’d rather ignore your demons right. Don’t feed the wolf right? Feed the good they say.
I am here to tell you that the shadow exist even if it scares you. It’s pulling you in just like that black whole. You can fight it your whole life. And maybe you win. Maybe you have that kind of fuel.
But if you ignore that shadow you will be pulled in it no matter what. Wouldn’t you rather run the calculation on how to achieve escape velocity? It’s going to be expensive. But it’s better to know the costs of living.
I still can’t locate a few basics that are part of my every day routine. My razor is AWOL, the box with my night time cosmetics routine hasn’t been located, and I’m not entirely sure where most of my tee-shirts are located. I don’t think they are lost but they sure aren’t found yet.
I keep making amazing progress on adjusting to the new house and unpacking, only to find that I’ve actually got no idea where something crucial might be located. My ambition to get into a routine? It’s bumping up against the reality that I’m still basically lost.
And in my case I got literally lost on the drive back from the airport. I had full on meltdown as my phone wouldn’t connect to the CarPlay and some urgently late California driver cut me off which forced me onto a right turn only lane. This ended up putting me on a highway for an additional 20 miles of transportation. I found myself lost and hollering into the phone “I have no idea where I am” as I couldn’t get myself turned around or in roads I recognized.
I had quite a case of insomnia last night. Eventually around 1am I caved and took a sleeping pill. I am so glad I did as I slept straight through till noon today. And I woke up feeling, dare I say it, almost normal. I felt better than normal. I actually felt good. Clearly I needed a long, comfortable, and uninterrupted night of sleep.
My Whoop has logged a lot of sleep disturbances since we arrived in Montana which has dragged down my recovery score. It always takes a few nights before I acclimate to a place’s natural sounds. The creaky stairs or the shifting of a building becomes something your unconscious mind recognizes over time. I think I’m finally starting to adjust and feel safe in our new house.
I’d been struggling to keep my routines and rhythms through the moving and unpacking. I had horrible digestive struggles from the excess amounts of processed we ate on the road. Then I found myself overheated and itchy as a heatwave smacked into a lack of air conditioning with a side of dusty boxes. I was physically a bit of a wreck.
Naturally I am relieved to feel like my body is adjusting positively. One of the many reasons we were excited to move to Montana is the cooler weather and ample space to be outdoors. My body is in less pain when I keep it cool and active. The optimism that wilted under the heatwave is now back.
Starting over a routine is a harder than I remembered. I did my very best to be on my rhythms yesterday on the first Monday after our move to the new homestead in Montana. Which turned out to be a modestly stupid idea when we still haven’t unpacked fully.
Routines rely on being settled and we are not yet settled. Which to be fair is normal when we only arrived 72 hours ago. I still haven’t located basic items like the Dr Bromners or the box with all my tee-shirts and tank tops.
I could barely rouse myself today to eat and groom and attempt to say goodbye to my family this morning as everyone headed out. I absolutely ate some crappy processed food English Muffins for breakfast and then promptly threw it up as my body was like bitch eat a real meal. I don’t know how the average American eats a steady diet of hyper processed foods as I can barely tolerate something with dough softener after five days.
It’s early evening and I just showered. The lack of climate control is a subtle reminder that sweat stinks but showering feels pointless if you are just going to be getting gross again within the hour. Taking care of yourself is a fight against entropy. And I don’t like being reminded that it’s a losing battle some days. But I’m alive and my brain is only parboiled which is a victory.
