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.
The past several years, seasonal affective disorder (SAD) has been slamming me to the mat pretty hard.
Why mention that when we are closing in on the longest day of the year? Maybe it’s that the days’ scandalous length are a constant reminder of the contrast come winter. Having a doomsday attitude about life helps me prepare for the rougher bits, and part of that is Summer Laura making gifts for Winter Laura.
We have just a few days left of homeschool. The past eighteen months long ago bled out any desire anyone has to do schoolwork (or in my case, enforce it – see, I’m not even calling it teaching anymore). We still plod on, but I feel like I spend the vast majority of my waking hours doing things I’d rather not.
New York State requires us to finish 80% of our curriculum, and at this point in the year, we’ve certainly achieved that. It would be completely reasonable to call it quits. But to a fault, I am not a quitter. I can see how close we are to the end of the books we’re reading, and I’m determined to finish. I want to get my money’s worth from our online math curriculum. I don’t want my kids’ brains to turn to sludge until at least July.
A while back I told you about starting low dose naltrexone (LDN) to see if I could get some relief from rheumatoid arthritis pain (Ok, I said psoriatic arthritis, but that was a false alarm). It’s been two months since I started taking LDN, so I wanted to check in on what has changed (and what hasn’t).
This past weekend, I did the same 2.6 mile hike three times in two days, with three sets of people. I hiked the same loop in the same direction, and each time it was like a new trail.
The first time, I walked with a friend who I’ve hiked with regularly throughout the pandemic.The reason I kept going back was because that first hike was magical. The only other people on the trail seemed to be serious birders with big binoculars.
We stopped to speak with one couple. They told us the preserve where we hiked was in the midst of a two week migration period, when tiny birds flying north from the Caribbean rest on their way to their nesting grounds.
Since we can’t travel to the Caribbean right now, it seemed like the next best thing was to go see birds who have just spent the winter there.
