Kimberly Hirsh

I have a friend who is due to have a baby in January. I offered to write up a bunch of notes for her and realized it would make a pretty good blog post, so here we are.

Make a list ahead of time of ways to help. You won’t want to think about it once the baby’s born. Share the list with people who you think will want to help. (I just put out a call on Facebook asking for who wanted this information.) If someone offers to make a meal train or whatever for you, take them up on it, but you don’t have to wait for an offer. You can do it for yourself.

If you’ve got the money and a place nearby that makes prepared meals, do this for the first couple weeks. It’s amazing.

Stock up on easy snacks. If you’re nursing, you will need to eat all the time. Get a giant straw cup to drink water from. My doulas recommend a giant Bubba Bottle.

Populate your streaming services with queues of everything you’ve been meaning to watch. Again, if you’re nursing, there will be cluster feeding nights when streaming this stuff will save your sanity, and you don’t want to pick which thing to watch in the moment.

Read these books:

• Before baby is born - The Happiest Baby on the Block
• When baby is born - The Wonder Weeks (also has an excellent companion app)

Get the latest edition of Baby Bargains and use it as reference material.

If swaddling seems like a real challenge, try a Miracle Blanket. They don’t work for everybody but if they work for you, they are the best thing ever.

If you’re nursing, get a My Brest Friend pillow. So much better than a Boppy or whatever.

If you have the energy, try to assert your needs to family that wants to hang out with the baby. You might find it a huge relief to have the baby taken away for a while but you might find it really upsetting. Communicate with people about what you’re feeling. I was not good about this. I wish I had been. The first few weeks would have been happier if I had.

Remember that Boppy that isn’t super helpful for breastfeeding? It’s actually a great pillow for keeping your genitals and butt from having to touch real furniture. If you have a vaginal delivery, those parts of you will hurt. Not putting them on real furniture and instead having them propped up with a pillow with a hole in the middle will spare you a lot of crying in pain. Sit on the Boppy.

Learn to use a baby carrier ASAP. YouTube is your friend for this. In fact, YouTube is now your co-parent. Go to it whenever you can’t figure out what instructions are telling you to do. Including for the Miracle Blanket.

Don’t go to YouTube for hand expressing milk advice, though, because it will show you things that are more designed to turn people on than to educate them, and that’s not helpful. (Unless that’s what you’re into, in which case it might be helpful. But I found medical information about this much more helpful.)

Seriously, though, learn to use that carrier because then you will be able to use your hands for things like feeding yourself.

Your baby will hate tummy time. (Learn what tummy time is if you don’t know yet.) If your baby cannot handle it without misery, try rolling up a little receiving blanket and propping it under baby’s armpits. This turned tummy time from hated time to happy time in our house.

Try to remember that this is a temporary time. You are becoming a new version of yourself. You don’t know what this version of yourself will like or care about. You will probably have an identity crisis. Becoming a parent is a lifestage not unlike adolescence, especially if you’re the birthing parent with all the hormones that come with that. (People use the term “matrescence” to refer to becoming a mother. I don’t think there is a similar gender-neutral or non-binary term, and I suppose maybe somebody uses “patrescence” to refer to becoming a father, but I haven’t heard it.) It’s okay if you don’t know who you are right now but I promise you are other things as well as a caregiver. Caregiver is just taking priority right now.

When you feel like you’re doing it all wrong and you’re the worst parent ever, get quiet and check in with your intuition. If you’re like me, it will tell you what to do.

Many thanks to my friend Monica, everybody at Emerald Doulas, and Victoria Facelli for all the things they taught me that contributed to my ability to write this post.

I read Ravynn K. Stringfield’s How I Became a Scholar of Black Girl Fantasy and felt energized. I felt energized specifically by how she found role models who were doing the work she wanted to do, how she came to terms with being able to be a scholar AND a writer of other genres.

I attended her class The Scholar’s Guide to Writing & Publishing Creative Nonfiction and she talked about pursuing questions. She talked about that in her essay, too.

And I thought, what questions motivate me?

I went back to my PhD personal statement. The question motivating me there was broad. It was basically “How do Connected Learning in school libraries?” Meme style.

I drafted it in 2014. I have changed a lot in the last 7 years. Connected Learning has changed a lot in the last 7 years.

And I’m still delighted by people loving things and all the amazing learning that comes from that, but… I don’t know. I don’t feel like I’m interested in that set of questions right now.

I love reading about affinity spaces.

I really loved my dissertation topic.

But now? What now? I wrote my proposal before COVID-19 was well-known.

I defended my dissertation when there seemed to be hope on the horizon: I was freshly fully vaccinated and things were looking up.

I’m despairing about a lot now.

I’m also jazzed about the possibility of taking some time to be a writer.

But a writer of what?

I don’t know.

I’ve been banging my head against WHAT NOW?! as if it’s a puzzle I can solve if I just look at or play with it long enough but I think I’m not there. Doing all the parachute-color-style exercises isn’t what I need right now; it just leads to frustration and exhaustion.

I did a couple Self-Employed PhD sessions with Jennifer Polk back when I was still working on the dissertation. I knew that I could go a lot of possible directions with either traditional or self-employment. I said so. People said “So what’s the problem?” I said “Well I have limited time and energy so I need to pick one to try first.” People said “Well what do you want to do?”

I said:

I WANT TO REST.

I want. To. Rest.

My dissertation has been fully submitted since mid-May. I officially graduated on May 16, I think.

I have been “resting” for 3 months.

But “resting” has meant caring for my son and drumming up client work. It’s meant applying for jobs. It’s meant presenting for both professional and personal endeavors. It’s meant figuring out how to safely get my kid into preschool so I can work. It’s meant agonizing over the fact that while I am incredibly lucky and privileged to be in a position to take time to figure out what’s next, I hate the idea of my husband paying my student loans. Partly because I fear his resentment.

Partly because like… what do I have all these degrees for if all I do is sleep?

Some of what I’ve been doing has been home ownership management. Lots of logistics.

I do not feel rested.

A lot of things happened over the course of my PhD in my family and personal life, in addition to the world being what it has been since 2015. Listing it really bums me out so just trust me that it’s been A LOT and it has taken a toll. And when I look at it all written out, as I did privately for myself last night, I think:

NO WONDER I AM SO TIRED.

So the questions that are driving me, for the foreseeable future, honestly, are:

• What do I HAVE to do to care for myself, my family, and my home?
• What feels good?
• What heals me?
• What energizes me?

Those are all the questions I can handle right now.

I learned a lot from recording my Micro Camp 2021 talk. If you watch it, you’ll notice a pretty big sync problem starting a bit before the 6-minute mark.

Most of the stuff I learned is related to that.

I recorded the video last minute, which I will try not to do in the future. It doesn’t leave time for fixing problems.

I was trying out new recording software, Loom. I don’t know if it was because my computer is old, my wifi was slow during recording, or a combination of the two, but as I understand it, Loom records to the cloud and the lag getting the recording from my computer to their server is probably responsible for the sync error. From now on, I’ll do my recordings locally and back up to the cloud after the recording is done. I don’t think I’ll use Loom with my current computer anymore.

I didn’t watch the video to make sure it worked. I was tired of my own voice (this almost never happens!). If I’d watched it, I’d have noticed the sync problem right away and could have re-recorded with different software. I’ll watch right away next time.

I thought I had submitted the video correctly. I had not. I don’t know if I didn’t click a button, if I closed a window too soon, or what. Next time I’ll watch carefully for confirmation.

I don’t have any very good video editing software on my computer so if I wanted to fix the sync error without re-recording, I couldn’t have. I’ll investigate different recording options before I make another video.

Also, as soon as I can, I’ll get a new laptop because a six-year-old low-end Acer isn’t going to cut it for creating much besides words.

What have you learned recently?

And some stuff I already knew but needed the reminder sewing napkins gave me.

1. If you want things to be the same size, cut them at the same time. Corollary: This is easier if you have a rotary cutter and cutting mat.

I made 4 napkins. Three of them are slightly different sizes and one is much smaller than the rest. This is fine. But my next project is a pillow, and I’d really like the two pieces of fabric I need to be nearly identical in size.

I knew this already because as I watched my mom sew garments I would see her cut both sleeves at once. The way you do this is fold the fabric in half with the side you don’t want to show in the finished item out. You pin or draw your pattern on, and then cut around it.

The easiest way to do this is with a rotary cutter, which has a round blade and a handle and you can essentially trace the pattern with it and it will cut through multiple layers of fabric. I don’t have one right now but I’m probably going to bump the one on my wishlist up in priority. But I think for only doing two layers, my fabric shears will do just fine.

(Do not use fabric shears to cut anything else ever.)

You need a mat to put under the project if you’re using a rotary cutter so it doesn’t cut into the surface you’re using to hold your fabric as you cut.

2. I really need help to sew a straight seam.

At first I thought I needed to practice this but my friend Casey gave me some magnetic seam guides for my birthday. I had forgotten those existed. These are little magnetic bits of metal you attach to a piece of the sewing machine called the throat plate. The throat plate is the thing the fabric scoots across as you’re sewing. Keep the fabric right up against the seam guide and you don’t have to remember where it should be. Which was my problem, I couldn’t remember how much fabric I wanted to the right of the seam.

3. If your pressing doesn’t get the fabric flat enough, you can help it with your fingers.

Most of this project involved sewing through three layers of fabric. The fabric was folded under itself to hide the edge because people can see both sides of a napkin (as opposed to a garment, where people can’t see the edge unless you pull the garment up or take it off). Sewing the edge of the fabric so it’s folded and doesn’t have a raw edge is called hemming the fabric.

On the corners, though, I had two sides’ worth of folds to sew through, so I was sewing through six layers and I hadn’t been able to press it with my iron fully flat.

But guess what? I have fingers! And I could just barely put a little pressure on the fabric to get it flat enough, so that’s what I did.

4. Sewing is super satisfying.

I crocheted myself a cardigan last fall and it took months. I could probably sew a cardigan in an afternoon. It’s really nice to see the results of your work so quickly.

What have you learned lately?

I’ve written before about how matrescence is like kintsugi: having a baby shatters you and the living you do after you have the baby puts you back together with shiny gold holding you together. But I haven’t articulated how putting yourself together is a long process.

Meg at Sew Liberated writes today about the twelve year project of making a skirt that she started when she was a new mom and only finished recently. Her oldest is 12.

Part of the kintsugi of matrescence is finding the pieces. I misplaced a lot of mine in the time after my son was born. He’ll be 5 in October. I’m gathering the pieces but a lot of them are still in a pile waiting to be stuck to the me that’s here now.

I find them in moments when I’m doing something and suddenly feel more me than I have in a very long time. When I stay up late coding. When I watched the Stephen Sondheim 90th birthday concert. When I talk through a research design with colleagues.

Putting yourself together is an ongoing project; we’re each a big Katamari ball of experiences and interests. (How’s that for a dated reference? Have I mentioned I’m 40?) In my case, at least, that ball got blown apart. It’s encouraging to find all its bits are still within reach.

Are you familiar with the poem/book/animated short film WE’RE GOING ON A BEAR HUNT?

I highly recommend it. Kids wander through all types of terrain trying to find a bear. They come across many obstacles: long, wavy grass; thick, oozy mud; and others. The refrain is this:

We can’t go over it, we can’t go over it, oh no, we have to go through it.

Katy Peplin’s recent newsletter about being in the middle and getting discouraged made me think of the bear hunt.

Everything in life is a bear hunt, isn’t it?

But of course, while the kids are in the middle of each obstacle, they’re having fun. The mud goes squelch squorch. The grass goes swishy swashy.

It’s just another variation on the journey being more important than the destination.

What are we rushing toward? Can we find joy in the hard parts?

I promise I’m going to write about what I learned from sewing napkins soon. But first: my personal history with sewing!

I’ve known how to machine sew for a long time (and how to hand sew for even longer). My mom is an accomplished sewist and made a lot of clothes and costumes for my siblings and I as we were growing up. She even made my prom dress. I didn’t sew with her, but I learned a lot of techniques just from being around while she sewed. Mainly how to be a perfectionist about your sewing, which has both benefits and drawbacks. (She never presses seams open or leaves a pinked edge. All her seams are French seams. Gorgeous, but intimidating to a less experienced sewist.)

I didn’t actually use any of what I’d learned from watching her until I took a required tech class as part of my dramatic art major; I chose costuming (this is where W. shakes his fist because in his day you had to do both cost shop AND set but by the time I got there 3 years later, you got to choose). One of the assignments was to design and construct a garment. I made a dress to fit me, lightly inspired by this Drusilla costume from Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

The process involved making a paper pattern on a dressmaker’s dummy (heavily padded in my case), then a muslin, and then finally the real thing. I finished the edges with a zig-zag stitch and pressed the seams open, because that was what I had time for. I wished I’d been up to French seams but it just wasn’t going to happen.

The dress had darts out the wazoo: bust darts at both the sides and bottom of the bodice, back darts, darts at the back of the waist. I made sure it fit me just right and I wouldn’t settle for anything baggy or saggy. (Maybe that’s why I didn’t have time left for French seams.) The director of the costume shop saw it and said I could do haute couture with that level of fitting.

I loved making it. I was very proud of it. I also learned that you really need to include a slit in the skirt if you’re going to make a long sheath dress, or your stride will be limited to teeny tiny steps. (I did not include a slit. In spite of it’s excellent fit, the dress didn’t get a lot of wear because of this.)

I wanted to sew more but I was saving all my money for traveling to *BtVS* fan parties (that’s an account written by a journalist of the first Posting Board Party I went to) so I didn’t grab a machine until my mom noticed one at a yard sale down the street from her. The machine and its cabinet were going for around $70, so I bought them.

I sewed exactly one thing on that machine, a costume for me to wear to go to the movie Troy. (Remember when Legolas and The Hulk were brothers?) It was actually a costume that, if historically accurate, would have been no-sew, but I was afraid a no-sew version would fall off. So I made myself a chiton with some success.

And the next time I used that sewing machine, the needle got stuck in the bobbin. And so I did not use it. I kept moving around with it; I think that machine moved with me five times.

At the North Carolina Maker Faire in, I don’t know, maybe 2014? I sewed a quilt square for a big communal quilt somebody was building there. I loved it. It reminded me that I actually loved sewing, and I wanted to do more. So I promised myself I would.

But I didn’t.

When I finally got the machine out for the first time recently to try again, after great success winding the bobbin and threading the needle, the same thing happened. I tried cleaning and oiling the machine, but that didn’t fix the problem. I decided to give up on that machine, for which I could not find a manual online and which was lacking many features of modern machines, such as numbering on the thread guides to tell you what order to thread it in.

So I asked for a new machine for my birthday, and I got one!

And I decided to use Craftsy’s Sewing 101 class to help me get back into it, since I hadn’t really sewed in 17 years.

Which is how I ended up making those napkins.

And I’ll tell you what I learned from making them soon, I promise!

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Hello, everyone! How are you doing?

Over here, I’m on Day 6 of being In My 40s and it’s going just fine. I had an amazing birthday party: I rented a big gazebo area at the neighborhood pool (which is a fancy pool with an expensive membership fee but that membership fee is cheaper than a summer’s worth of camp, so…). I invited a lot of people and some of them came. I got to see some friends for the first time since before the pandemic, as well as invite family out to a place they hadn’t been before (i.e. the pool). We weren’t worried too much about COVID because of being outdoors and it was just really delightful. And it also felt a little like a celebration of me finishing the PhD, too. Also, I swam for a while in my mermaid tail and got to talk to some kids who really liked it and wanted me to go underwater so they could go down and watch what my swimming looked like under there. 🧜‍‍♀️

I also sewed those napkins! Remember? And for my birthday my friend Casey introduced me to pre-filled bobbins, which I’m very excited about. Next up, I’m going to sew a pillow to put on my desk chair. The fabric is MANATEE fabric and I’m psyched.

I did some important businesslady things today. Most importantly, though, I made a to-do list for the businesslady things I need to do tomorrow. Here’s where I stand right now:

1. I’m doing consulting for Quirkos, a company that provides qualitative data analysis software. I have had a bit of a crush on qual since Day 1 of my Field Techniques in Educational Research class and it’s the primary kind of research I’ve done, so I’m excited to work with an organization that is dedicated to supporting it.
2. I’m developing The Quiet Space, a project to provide structure for scholars and other knowledge creators so that they are free to focus on creative work.

In September, once my kid is settled into preschool, I hope to get in touch with some other potential consulting clients.

I talked with my doctor on Friday. My thyroid numbers are moving in the right direction, but still not where I want them to be. I worried that a change in my prescription dosage would be too extreme, so we agreed that I would up my intake of l-tyrosine. My glucose and hemoglobin A1C are high, meaning I’m pre-diabetic. I also have a lot of intense PCOS symptoms like acne, hirsutism, and oligoovulation. My primary focus right now, aside from caring for my kid, is working on healing this so that my PCOS is well-managed. I’m using Amy Medling’s book Healing PCOS to help me with that.

Aside from that, I’m reading Harrow the Ninth, which is super fun.

What’s new with you?

Austin Kleon writes about his desire to be a pirate-gardener,

I’d like to stay happily at home, in the studio, planting my seeds and cultivating my garden, and when I get bored, like Ishmael, and “I find myself growing grim about the mouth,” then it’s time to take to the seas and do some pirating, steal a few seeds from foreign lands to bring back to my own garden, where I’ll stay happily until I get bored again.

I think the gardening affords you the opportunity to pirate.

Three makes a pattern, so this is the year that blogging about who I want to be in this year of my life becomes a tradition. Shout out to my friend Little Willow, who inspired the idea by making her New Year’s resolutions on her birthday.

Part of the tradition is looking at who I wanted to be last year and seeing how close I got. The big one, being a Doctor of Philosophy, happened in April/May. The rest were, fittingly, not so much in focus.

But the microbusiness. The microbusiness! I’ve been taking strong steps in that direction, lining up my first consulting client, creating a little trickle of passive income with my Notion templates, and dreaming big about what the future holds for The Quiet Space.

Hard as it was with the pandemic and my grandmother’s death, 39 was still on the balance a good year. (This is the moment where I acknowledge that the year I was age 39 was actually the 40th year of my life, since we live a full year before our birthday. Yes, Daddy, I know we use zero-based indexing for ages.)

So what’s next?

I think I want to be a little less ambitious about 40, to set fewer goals.

I want to be a loving and mostly gentle mother.

I want to take care of my own body, including making clothes built to fit it.

I want to keep trying new things and growing as a self-employed person.

I want to be aware of my impact on the earth and do what I can to make it gentler. I recognize, however, that this is a systemic problem that requires more than individual action, which is why I joined the Alliance for Climate Education mailing list and will start donating to them monthly as soon as I have something resembling a steady income.

I think four is a good number, so I’ll stop there.

Who will you be this year?

Tonight is the New Moon in Cancer. Next Wednesday is my birthday. My Sun, Ascendant, and Mercury are all in Cancer. I don’t believe the stars determine our destiny but as with all magical tools, I do believe they can help us set and live up to our intentions.

Cancer, the Crab, is a watery sign and ruled by the moon. I’ve always felt a connection to water, from when I was a tiny toddler fighting the undertow on Florida beaches, still now as I bob about with my kid in the pool after his swim lessons most days.

The moon is connected to water through the tides.

At Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida, they do mermaid shows, in which performers wearing fabric mermaid tails do water ballet. They also have a mermaid camp for grown-ups led by retired performers. Going is one of my dreams.

In one of the earliest episodes of The Mermaid Podcast, host Laura von Holt attends mermaid camp and interviews the retired perforners. One of them tells her, “The water is a teacher.” I have held this idea in my heart since I first heard it a couple years ago.

The water is my teacher. It can take the shape of any container. It can grow hard and expand when it’s cold. It can boil and evaporate when it’s hot. With persistence, it shapes land over time. It can be still. It can move rapidly. It can nurture life. It can reflect light. It can provide shade. The water teaches me to be flexible and persistent, to move how I need to.

The moon is my teacher. It never truly disappears. Sometimes it is in Earth’s shadow. Sometimes it shines the sun’s light down on us. It appears to change in cycles; it is both never the same and always the same. The moon teaches me to accept change as a constant and to retreat and shine as the time is right.

The water and the moon are my teachers.

Back in May, I had some bloodwork done. I discovered that my thyroid hormone levels were in the normal reference range but were, in my opinion, suboptimal. Combining those numbers with a slew of symptoms that had snuck up on me a little at a time (as they always do), I talked with my doctor about upping my thyroid support supplement dosages (iodine & l-tyrosine). We agreed that I would increase those and we would follow up in July. If I was still symptomatic and my numbers were suboptimal, we would talk about increasing my thyroid prescription dosages.

My bloodwork appointment for that is next Tuesday. The doctor sent in the lab order today and emailed me a copy. It didn’t have the thyroid tests on it. I asked her to please add them. She did, but warned me that when people have normal results on these tests, insurance plans often only cover them once or twice a year, so I might have to pay out of pocket.

I’m lucky and privileged to be able to take that risk without worrying it will cause my family hardship.

But I’m also angry on principle. Because if I already felt so terrible when my levels were normal-but-suboptimal, how miserable would I feel if we waited to modify my treatment until my levels were below normal? How sick does a person have to be to “deserve” treatment?

Wikipedia tells me:

In case of medical tests whose results are of continuous values, reference ranges can be used in the interpretation of an individual test result. This is primarily used for diagnostic tests and screening tests, while monitoring tests may optimally be interpreted from previous tests of the same individual instead

I wish that had a citation, but I’m going to take the point anyway. I’ve been diagnosed with this condition for 10 years. We always use these ranges for monitoring because I’m already diagnosed. I’ve noticed a correlation between symptoms and the test results but because it’s easy to swing too wide in a dosage switch I like to pair symptoms and results to help determine my next move. I am frustrated and exhausted by the fact that being chronically ill is a constant fight, that so many things can stand between me and wellness no matter what actions I take.

I’m glad my doctor will order the test; I’ve had doctors who wouldn’t. I’m glad my family can afford to pay out of pocket; we haven’t always been able to. But I am livid for myself and others that we have to work so hard to get what we need to merely function, never mind thrive.

(I’m aware that there are many different things that prevent people from thriving. This is the one I’m feeling hardest today.)

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I’m re-reading Unf*ck Your Habitat and wanted to keep some notes in a place I’d be able to find them later. I decided my website was that place. So here we go!

UfYH author Rachel Hoffman points out that small habit changes will be more effective at keeping your home pleasant than a big life overhaul. Here are some of the habits she mentions:

1. Do a little bit every day.
2. Use your leisure time wisely.
3. Use your waiting time efficiently.
4. Put it away, not down.
5. Make your bed.
6. Keep your flat surfaces clear.
7. Unf*ck tomorrow morning.
8. Trash goes in the trash can.
9. Do the dishes every day.
10. Wash, dry, and put it away, gddmit.
11. Deal with your invisible corners.

Back when I started the dissertation process, I had this whole plan to dissertate in the open. I did this successfully up through the proposal process. I shared some process memos and wrote a little after that about things like reconsidering my research design in light of COVID and my data collection workflow. As the pandemic went on, I focused all my writing energy and time on the dissertation itself and didn’t get to do the writing I’d hoped about data analysis or writing.

Obviously I’m not in the process anymore so I can’t provide that in-the-moment reflection I’d hoped to, but I can provide some retrospective thoughts on it. I’m going to do that soon.

Lately some of the things that have been lifelines for me during the pandemic have started to feel less lifeliney. The crafting group I meet with on Thursdays is always full of lovely people but I keep feeling too tired to attend even though attending consists of sitting on my butt in front of my computer. (I’m attending in 7 minutes. Today I’m attending even though I don’t feel like it, to see if it pushes me through the blergh.)

I don’t know what after is for me. We’ve started taking my kid to the local children’s museum and that’s been HUGE. We only go in the outdoor portions, we stay away from other families, and we’re masked any time we’re within 6 feet of anybody else. But having a different place to take him from the few parks we ventured to for the past year and a half has made a real difference.

And I actually let my sister in my house last week, which was great.

But I haven’t hung out with friends really aside from a little bit of post-defense celebration. W and I haven’t gone out just us yet. I’m still really worn out from this thing and I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon.

We’re in the yellow here on the Global Epidemics risk map. I probably won’t feel like doing a lot of that stuff until we’re in the green.

We’re all so tired, aren’t we?

Hello again!

My right hip has been hurting the past couple of days. Or almost a week, I guess - it started last Wednesday and has been off-and-on since then. This isn’t super unusual for me. I have sacralization on that side - my fifth lumbar vertebra is fused to my pelvis (specifically, the ilium, and now the Classicist in me is trying to come up with a bunch of Trojan war jokes related to this congenital deformity). This can be painless but it can also cause lower back pain and bursitis, which is what this probably is. If it doesn’t go away in the next week, I’ll check in with my doctor about it. I’m of an age where these things might need to be resolved by injected steroids rather than careful application of over-the-counter pain relievers.

This pain is constant and so far no motion or position has really alleviated it. Distraction helps some, as I discussed yesterday, but only for a little while. The pain returns and I really don’t know how to work/live through it. I’ve gotten to the point where as long as a migraine isn’t demanding I go to bed and ensconce myself in darkness, I can kind of work through it, but this kind of musculoskeletal/joint pain is newer to me than migraines (I had my first one of those at 7) and I just don’t know how to get around it yet. It’s not the kind of pain that I can breathe through and I guess I could try some gate theory and hold ice in my bare hand or something but that’s not really conducive to tidying, writing, or applying for jobs.

I might need to get a new chair to work in. It’s possible these little folding dining chair things aren’t doing me any favors.

It surprises me how much pain can be a constant, how even if I think I’m not in pain, if anyone asks me about it I notice I am. But this pain, this I notice no matter what.

The goal for treatment of hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (which I may or may not have) is not to eliminate pain, but to reduce pain to a tolerable level. I don’t think the amount of pain I’m in right now could be reasonably described as tolerable.

This looks like a big pile of whining to me but I’m going to post it anyway. I don’t think people talk about pain enough.

Now I’m going to eat and have some of those OTC pain relievers I mentioned.

I’m working to get into the flow of daily blogging, so this post will be rather stream of consciousness.

I work best in two-hour chunks. Today, I helped W. revise a project statement for a fellowship application and applied to two jobs. I’m right around the two-hour mark and can feel myself flagging. It’s also time for that 3 pm snack most people need, so I’ll have that when I’m done blogging this.

I’m in the middle of a bit of a grace period for myself, not unlike Kelly J. Baker’s. I’m figuring out how I want to spend my time and what people will pay me for. Yes, I have plans for consulting, but I would also love a little bit of stability and to not pay out of pocket for health insurance. (Blessedly I’m on W’s but it increased his insurance cost by about $400/mo to add me. This was more expensive than any plan I could get on the market, I checked.) So I’m applying for jobs that look especially good, but not applying scattershot. I’m focusing on research and editorial jobs. Today’s jobs were editorial. I’ve got a couple research lined up to apply for tomorrow.

I’m physically very tired much of the time, which is partly because my thyroid levels are off. I don’t know if I’ve written about this recently, but I’ll doubt it. So a refresher in case you’re new here: I have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, which manifests primarily as hypothyroidism. That means my body attacks my thyroid gland, which then doesn’t work well. I take two synthetic hormone medications to help, plus a couple of supplements to boost the natural production and conversion of thyroid hormones. The thyroid controls metabolism, literally how your body has energy, and my primary symptom is intense fatigue. I also expereince brain fog and joint pain. (I also have polycystic ovary syndrome so basically my whole endocrine system doesn’t know what it’s doing.)

Flares of hypothyroidism sneak up on me because it’s so easy to explain away the symptoms - I’m tired because I go to bed too late, I’m sore because I ate something that probably had corn in it (corn makes me achey), the brain fog is from the tiredness… But when I get lab tests, it’s easier to see the pattern: my thyroid levels, while “normal,” are suboptimal, which is why I feel low-grade misery rather than abject despair.

So in May, I found out those levels were suboptimal and increased the dosage on my supplements to see if, if I provide it with extra building blocks, my thyroid will produce more hormones. And if that’s not enough, we’ll increase the prescription synthetic hormone dosages. We’ll check on that in July.

I’m trying to take care of my body but honestly I don’t really know how to BE embodied. I’m a floating head, a cyborg lady who lives mostly on the web. Being attentive to my body usually means attending to pain and in my experience, distraction is more helpful than mindfulness. But I want to do better by my body, to feed it well and clean it enough and get it moving. But I think I have to do it very gently until this thyroid thing gets sorted out.

What is super weird is that sometimes even when my body is completely worn out, my mind is really active. This leads to a few different things happening. First, I notice all the things I’m not doing because my body is too tired: cleaning out the fridge, putting away the laundry, helping my kid pick up his room, etc. I notice these things and then, because it’s my default, I berate myself for not doing them. But I’m conserving all my energy for mothering so house stuff just has to wait until I have more energy. Sorry, house. Sorry, brain.

The other thing is that my brain wants something to chew on. At first, it was nice being done with my dissertation. But then recently W. was talking about how he was having to think through and write this appication and I thought, “Oh wow, it must be so nice to have something to have to think about and work on.”

But I also feel deeply unready for client work.

Which is part of why I’m here blogging. I’m going to spend at least a week blogging daily to get some activity in for my restless brain without wearing out my body or take on new stress.

So that’s where I’m at. I’m off to have a snack and rest more. How are things with you?