I went to my first protest since before leaving for Tobago. We returned from our trip July 25, and I fully planned to jump right into my pre-vacation schedule of protests, zoom calls, and writing to powerful people’s minions hoping for someone to listen (a.k.a. emailing my representatives).
I didn’t take into consideration that three weeks of international travel (including that giant hill that I joyfully marched up and down multiple times a day, every day), followed by three nights of camping the next weekend, was going to crank up my body’s inflammation level to an 11/10.
I’m still flaring, but I’ve been able to divert a few spoons away from my joints being on fire all the time back to activism.
We’re back in the U.S. after three weeks in Tobago, our first trip there since covid.
It was tough going to the same places over four years later, and seeing how big the kids had gotten. They were no longer aging an hour or a day at a time, but four years all at once. Our oldest wasn’t able to join us for the first time. Our youngest doesn’t remember our other trips. Two kids are now young adults. Two more are about to be. More than that, *I* felt older.
We’d completed a colossal temporal leap forward in between this trip and our last, and all the things that had happened in between were on my mind, which meant I cried kind of a lot.
Today was the Jane Austen tea. My first time costuming since the Victorian Stroll. First time blogging in three months.
That doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing, but it’s taken the form of a firehouse of grief and anger at my representatives. I haven’t had anything left for this space. But I’ve been thinking about when and how to drop back in, and here I am today, for better or worse.
This week was terrible. This past six months have been difficult, but this week before Easter felt like the climax of all that, and not in a good way.
Part of the reason it was bad is because it was bad, and part of it is because instead of letting all the feelings and experiences flow through, I let them take residence in my body.
A long time ago, I wrote a post about death. Then I wrote one about Swedish death cleaning. And surely you’ve noticed in recent days a lot of talk about death in my writing about Palestine. Today we’re going to kind of veer in a different direction, but like everything in life, it’s still all connected.
