/now
Spring Equinox 2025
My first priority over the past few months and for the foreseeable future is to keep my nervous system as regulated as I can. That means staying away from things that I know tend to provoke anxiety or depression, cultivating as much self-compassion as possible, keeping my body as healthy as I can, and drawing on nourishing hobbies, relationships, and communities. I'm refusing to participate in the destruction of my sleep, health, relationships, or creativity. As the situation gets worse and worse in the US, I need to draw upon all of these.
I was happy to find that Amelia and Emily Nagoski, authors of Burnout, have started up their podcast again, with the intent of helping people do exactly this. Be warned that both of them take a, let's say, upbeat pessimistic view of where life for folks in the US and beyond is headed right now. They do not sugar-coat it, but they encourage us to meet the fire with kindness and compassion toward ourselves that can buoy us to take action.
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One hobby that I've particularly gravitated towards with all this in mind is embroidery--or really, just stitching by hand. I'm not sure why. For a long time, my two main hobbies were knitting and bookbinding, but both of those fell away over the past year or so as I began to spend more time writing. I have started a ridiculously large embroidery sampler that I spent a ridiculously large amount of money on. Like, happy to support a woman-owned small business, but this thing is definitely something rich ladies buy themselves. I've been working on it steadily for about three weeks now and I'm probably not even halfway finished. I think I find something comforting about the feeling of the thread moving through fabric. I also love to pet embroidery--it's really both a visual and a tactile delight. I have accepted that I am essentially making myself one of those soft baby books and I am OK with that.
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Penpals! I put up my call for penpals a couple of months ago and I have been enjoying correspondence! I am most interested in exchanging snail mail with folks in the US. See my penpal page if that sounds interesting to you. Even if you can only write to me every great once in a while, that is OK.
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I am continuing to write--I'm not sure what is next, but I've been drafting some ideas. A lot of my writing over the past year has been about writing, the creative process, and my ethos of sharing writing. I think it's been necessary for me to articulate these things to myself and I'm glad to find that they have resonated with some folks. However, those topics are not my main topics of interest. The stuff that I really want to write about is big, scary, confusing stuff: ethics, violence, community, knowledge. Things that are going to take some time to chew on.
I have, however, I'm happy to say, come up with an imperfect writing system that works well for me: time blocking. I got this idea from Bec Evan and Chris Smith's book Written. They bust the myth that only real or good writers write every day, and if you don't write every day you're doing it wrong. They point out that there are several strategies that successful writers use, of which writing every day is only one. I have never, ever been able to sustain a daily writing habit—even in academia, which is designed for it. But if I simply look at my calendar at the beginning of the week, block in some writing time where I think it makes sense, and do my best to stay loose and change plans if needed--wow, I actually get some writing done!
I got the idea of the /now page from Derek Sivers, which I found through 32-Bit Cafe.