A Bomb Blooms
✨A few things✨
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Hi Dear Readers,
There is a big tree outside my bedroom window that I get to look at while I work. It makes me feel like I’m in a treehouse. As I’m writing this, the green leaves look like they’re dancing because of the storm brewing. I appreciate the water coming to cleanse, renew, and grow. I feel grateful.
I am still in the throes of breakup-land. I am still processing, both in body and mind. My Somatic Experiencing practitioner helped me label the experience as “disorienting.” This naming felt like a bomb blooming in my chest in the best possible way. “Yes, that’s it.” Everything about life is disorienting right now—for so many of us. I am trying to orient; re-orient myself. I am trying to find grounding. My Somatic Experiencing sessions have been helping me out with this; giving me much needed support. And dearest reader, just after I typed that, a glorious hummingbird visited my big tree looking for its daily sweetness. Perhaps reminding me that we’re all looking (and needing!) our daily sweetness.
I am also still in the throes of illness anxiety due to the two pandemics happening. If you would have told me that I, someone with illness anxiety disorder, would live during pandemic times, I would have laughed—anxiously.
I am trying to tend to my wounds—past and present. I am trying to water every little part of me so it can grow stronger. The good thing about being completely uprooted is that, if you survive it, you can plant yourself elsewhere—somewhere safer that has more light, more ease, more peace.
I appreciate all your love on this post, by the way. Clearly, we’re all in need of finding a felt-sense of safety in an ever-evolving unsafe world. We have to find safety somewhere—even if it’s in small fragments. We have to be willing to tend to our own soil. We have to be willing to tend to the collective soil as well.
I hope you are feeling a sense of peace wherever you are planted (or perhaps even blooming?) today.
xL<3
Reading List 🔖
How to Dismantle Systemic Ableism, According to Disabled People - Julia Métraux
Disability justice is an ongoing process because inaccessibility takes a long time to dismantle. As a society, we need to stop questioning whether or not tools that help disabled people are beneficial. For instance, it should not have taken a global pandemic for companies to realize that people can efficiently work from home.
Buying My Girlhood Is Putting Me In Debt - Riley Yaxley
Kathy Acker famously once told Rosemary Bailey, “I can’t afford to buy a painting so if I get some money I go buy a dress.” I couldn’t afford to make the changes that might make me feel more like a girl: fracturing and moving my cheekbones, shaving the cartilage of my Adam’s apple, or augmenting my newly developing breasts. But I could afford a $170 Eckhaus Latta dress.
Raging for the World That Is - Francesca Wade
Many of Rukeyser’s poems address real events, but they are never simply commentary: she is interested in how it feels to live in the world, to engage with disaster and emerge with hope. At the center of this new collection is “The Book of the Dead,” a long sequence which appeared in U.S. 1. and is printed here almost in entirety. It recounts the long battle for justice that followed the tragedy of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel construction project in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, in which hundreds of laborers died while working on a tunnel to divert water from the New River to a hydroelectric power plant (the official death toll of 476 is estimated to radically underestimate the actual casualties; a 1986 study suggested more than 760 died while 1,500 workers contracted inoperable lung cancer).
Pop Culture’s Problem with Middle-Aged Women - Lisa Whittington-Hill
They are still largely invisible and left out of the narrative or are depicted as wives and moms who are not worthy of their own story lines. Sometimes they are career women, but that also becomes their only identity, and their story line is focused on how they can’t have it all—whatever that all is. When middle-aged women are well represented, it also tends to be a particular type of woman: She is married or divorced and has kids. She is also typically white, straight, cisgender, and thin. All of these trends suggest there is a certain set of expectations of what women must have achieved by the time they reach middle age, and those who don’t conform are largely left out of our stories.
On Fabric - Alicia Kennedy
Food has been my gateway into so many avenues of care, and fabric is another one—one I couldn’t have anticipated. When I put on an apron, when I create a space of peace for myself out of the mundane acts of the kitchen—the cooking, the washing, the serving—I like knowing that the objects that are part of it were also made with care for the soil, the workers, the future.
The Solace, Despair, and Disinformation of Long Covid Internet Communities - Anne Helen Petersen
They’re turning to these online groups for advice, but because these groups are full of people that also don’t know what they’re doing, it is a hotbed for misinformation and the propagation of snake oil and sometimes risky behaviors. But these people have nowhere else to turn. So while long covid communities have much in common with other health communities and general online communities, there are few aspects that make them different.
Librarianship 🌻
10 Books To Introduce Readers to Disability Literature - Kendra Winchester
Books of Note 📚
Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender - Kit Heyam (nonfiction)
Agatha of Little Neon - Claire Luchette (fiction)
Beating Heart Baby - Lio Min (young adult)
Anita and the Dragons - Hannah Carmona (children’s book)
Prelude: Poems - Brynne Rebele-Henry (poetry)
Overcoming Anticipatory Anxiety: A CBT Guide for Moving Past Chronic Indecisiveness, Avoidance, and Catastrophic Thinking - Sally M. Winston, Martin N. Seif (self-help)
[If you order any of the books above or any listed on my Bookshop site, a percentage goes to local bookstores and I get a small commission. Thank you for not ordering from Amazon!]
Playlist 🎵
“Rockstar” - Momma
”Problem With It” - Plains
”Growing Up Pains (Unni’s Song)” - ALASKALASKA
”Trash” - Issy Wood
”Watermelon” - John + Jane Q. Public
Mood Board 💓
Self-Care + Good Things ☕
Hummingbird magic. Cozy Grove. Friend texts. Pictures of Joaquin’s messy face after eating blueberries. Journaling daily. Somatic Experiencing sessions. Weightlifting.
What has your joy and self-care looked like these days? Please share in the comments!
Reading "The Solace, Despair, and Disinformation of Long Covid Internet Communities", specifically the line "They’re turning to these online groups for advice, but because these groups are full of people that also don’t know what they’re doing, it is a hotbed for misinformation and the propagation of snake oil and sometimes risky behaviors. But these people have nowhere else to turn" reminded me of my mum.
She struggled for the better part of a decade and went through multiple misdiagnoses before finally being diagnosed with lupus. During this time she was so desperate for answers, and medical professionals were so uncaring and often flat-out negligent, that she turned to all sorts of alternative treatments that were just snake oils. The people selling them capitalised off her desperation, and nothing ever worked. I hate to think what would have happened if she'd had access to social media in those days, because the amount of bullshit she would have been exposed to would have been so much higher. These long Covid groups must be just swimming in bogus cures.
I used to watch my mum unable to cut her own dinner at night because her hands were so sore and scream in pain in the mornings while my 11-year-old self tried to get hold of my nana on the phone to come and take my 6-year-old brother and I to school, and then watch these snake oil salespeople tell her that shit like collodial silver would fix all her problems. It makes me rage to this day. Desperate people in pain, and all those "natural remedy" people would see were dollar signs. Disgusting. But what else could she do? She couldn't just sit in her pain and do nothing. Anything was better than nothing.
we have a hummingbird feeder right outside our kitchen window. i love to watch them as i’m tending to the mundane but magical tasks of caring for my self & family. i find the birds both beautiful and completely improbable! how can they even exist? they are magical beings. 💖