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When they ask, I keep telling people “I’m underwater right now” and I’m not exactly sure why that is the phrase I’ve been reaching for. I know what it means, that I’m not super available for my friends or very adept at keeping my place clean or totally killing it at work or grocery shopping as much as I should. I haven’t picked up a book to read in over a week I think and I’m subsisting mostly on whatever highly processed carbs I have on hand. None of this is a moral failing, but it definitely feels bad and leaves me sitting in some kind of a guilty, icky morass. That’s probably why my go to when asked how I’m doing is to say “I’m underwater.”
So I was going to skip this week’s newsletter, deprive the world of my blogging voice another week, when I remembered that I’ve been here before, have often found myself wanting to crawl into the dusty space beneath my IKEA Uppland couch and stay there for six to eighteen weeks. I know that there is a very simple protocol for this that works probably 90% of the time.
Throw out any weed or alcohol products in my home. I rarely have alcohol at home and only slightly less rarely have weed at home, but when the floor of my mental state is low there’s just no room for playing around with the substances. So into the trash my weed cartridge goes. THC will still exist when I’m out of the pit, probably.
I drink lots of water. More than I think I need to. Cook a meal without looking at my phone. I don’t care what kind of meal, just anything that is food and has a couple kinds of macronutrients. I turn to my friend Margaret Eby’s book You Gotta Eat here, because it’s true. You really do gotta eat.
I brush my teeth, sweep something, do some pushups, fold my quilts, spend exactly 4 minutes tidying each room, shower. Basically do the things that I’d tell a Sim to do if it needed to collect some positive moodlets. At the end of the day, I’m just a Sim.
Do the easier version. This is the main thing, probably. When I’m feeling like this, I get behind on every single task that matters to me, which makes me feel worse which makes me get farther and farther behind. That space beneath my couch becomes more and more enticing. So instead of trying to write the essay about how bad people my age have gotten at friendship that I wanted to write, I go ahead and blog a list of thoughts and hit send.1
Spend 20 minutes reading, then spend 10 minutes reading, then spend 5 minutes reading. I am allowed to give up after the timer goes off each time, but I almost never do. Those blocks of time are small enough that I’ll do them and inevitably I’ll read longer than I planned and I’ll feel a lot more sane after.
Go to sleep at 8pm. If I can’t fall asleep then I get to read in bed. If I can fall asleep then clearly I needed it!
All that to say, if I’ve been flaky with you lately, apologies! I’ll be back and part of the world soon I think. I’ll leave y’all this week with a favorite meme, one that has been hitting soooo hard this week 😌
I haven’t written much about astrology on here lately because it has been challenging to figure out exactly what amount of detail is interesting and also what amount of depersonalized star talk is useful, but since I’ve started rambling and this post is pushing hard on the boundary of “useful” already, I thought I’d talk about THIS little arrangement, conjunct and retrograde Saturn and Neptune in Aries with an exact sextile to Uranus in Gemini.
Metaphorically, this dynamic is like if you were painting every wall in your entire house without removing furniture or covering anything with a tarp and then a horde of cats just started pouring into your house from every door and window, more and more cats walking through paint pans and tracking Sherwin-Williams #7029 “Agreeable Gray” on everything you own. These planets come together to give you a comically ineffectual attempt at structure, but the comedy isn’t apparent to you until at least a full Saturn cycle later.
As with all outer planet transits, this is the kind of thing that isn’t an acute drama in the sky so much as its an atmospheric tone that we’ll be dancing in and out of for quite some time. A good time to accept a certain degree of chaos as normal and to limit our expectations of what we can accomplish by ourselves and under strain. We all need help and that’s okay.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.
Not my friends! I promise!! Y’all are above average!! The best!
Do what you gotta do to keep that sim moodlet green