unexpected colour schemes

I woke up this morning and didn't want to go to work because I was scared. My body was scared, after yesterday.

I am so used to this feeling from previous jobs and stuff: the physical way the anxiety settles into my arms and legs and chest and head, my skin and muscles and eyes and everywhere, it gets everywhere. But I don't remember if I'd ever felt it in this job -- or if I have, it's been in recognition of a high-stakes day (an important person I need to impress, a big deadline) or something unpleasant (a meeting I don't want to chair).

Today looked perfectly innocuous according to my calendar and my to-do list. But then so did yesterday, and that didn't protect me.

When I finally got out of bed, I would've been late for the usual morning meeting, and we were supposed to have a team meeting today too, but luckily my manager was working elsewhere all morning so neither happened. It was such a gift, this nice gentle start to the day and a few hours that were free of the possibility of such scariness.

And I did have a meeting that included my manager this afternoon so we interacted normally. That helped my body and brain a little too.

I had counseling after work, and of course I had lots to talk about. Sometimes I feel like I just talk too much and don't get enough of my counselor's perspective that I'm paying so much for: I am happy to pay for some thoughts that aren't already in my own head, and then I hardly let her get a word in edgewise while I babble about how the struggles in politics, my workplace and even my baseball fandom are all leaving me struggling under hypernormalization.

Anyway, at the end she was able to make the point that my nervous system has been activated a lot, and it shuts down the frontal lobe where stuff like communication happens, leaving you only with fight-or-flight type shit (or freeze or fawn, my usual two). She wasn't surprised that I was unable to speak a few times yesterday. So that was reassuring, because as the world's most talkative person, who doesn't know what I'm thinking/feeling if I can't talk (or write here) about it, it's so rare and uncomfortable to end up unable to speak! It does feel like a goddam Racacoonie situation so I'm also soothed by the fact that the internet seems to call this "amygdala hijack." Hijack is the exactly right word for it!

Anyway my counselor also told me that connection with other people is a great way to address this. I had told her about listening to the old friend telling me about life in one of the cities where Trump has sent the National Guard, the Jewish guy we made friends with on Sunday... She said this is great, and that was a perspective that I wouldn't have otherwise that's useful and good for me now. But of course it's not just about such worthy connections: spending Saturday with some of my favorite people was also good for me, catching them up on the goofy details of my almost-accidental hookup since I hadn't seen them since it happened a couple of months ago -- even reminding myself of that day enough to tell them about how it came about left me in a noticeably better mood for a couple hours after.

These are long-term mitigations of course; in the short term she talked about breathing and how exhaling for longer than you inhale can help. This amused the hell out of me just because it was only last night that D was talking about recognizing the breathing count (one or two beats longer on the exhale than the inhale) from our yoga instructor being present in what he was doing at the time, which was the Guided Meditation event in Fallout 76, of all things.

The next time some well-meaning person asks "Have you tried yoga?" you should ask them "Have you tried the Mothman Cult?"

I enjoyed the sunset function last night -- after some faffing I managed to get the right amount of light to start from (fairly bright?) and a sound I like (crickets! I really miss crickets, they sound like summer to me and remind me of being a kid).

I fell asleep before the thing went totally dark, which to be fair could be because of the melatonin I treated myself to last night...but I haven't had great success with them lately.

Maybe it was just how tired I was, after a busy day at work, straight in to counseling, then eating dinner, then off to the local queer club where I'd agreed to turn up early and help set up, and by the time we left, about half past 9, I was so tired that I was yawning uncontrollably on the short ride home (and very glad that D had driven me, so that I didn't have to walk or try to get the bus home.

Today felt similarly intense: work, then an important and positive but also exhausting and anxiety-inducing conversation about U.S. politics, then I made dinner, and by the time I'd eaten my parents were ready to talk. I've missed them like three Sundays in a row so couldn't dodge it too much longer.

And that was a mental and emotional marathon of a conversation too: my grandma's house will be sold in two weeks, the upshot of which is my mom's horrible sister was saying horrible things about my mom at an extended-family event and when my mom asked if I wanted my share of the money from the house sale I said "Absolutely not," and she said "I knew you'd say that, but you're going to have some anyway, and I want you to use some of it to get yourself something nice..." Well okay then, I'll be a tax haven or whatever for my parents this one time.

And they talked about politics at me a bit (which again we don't disagree on but I'm so spoiled by my little bubble where people seek consent and check in during these heavy conversations that this drives me up a wall now).

And then we got on to their computer needing to be replaced because support for Windows 10 is ending and they thought they could just take their PC to Best Buy and get the Quicken transferred to a new laptop... I was trying to disabuse them of this notion gently when their iPad battery died because they believe you must always let it discharge completely and they never use the iPad while it's plugged in.

I'd wanted to go to the gym this evening, and suddenly it was bedtime. And my head was too full of things.

And actually I had to rearrange my bedroom a little for the alarm clock. I don't have a bedside table next to the bed; my room has a lot of fitted closets and drawers so there's only really one place for the bed to go and it means the door -- which is at a weird angle to the rest of the room because of the way the whole upstairs is, and the fact that almost every door up here opens the opposite way to the way that'd make the best use of space -- leaves no room on this side of the bed.

Mostly I've gotten around this by using a floor lamp as a bedside lamp, and shoving a piece of wood between the mattress and the bed frame which I use for bedside stuff: glasses, water, phone. But the piece-of-wood shelf is too low for the alarm clock: not much of the light would actually end up in my line of sight which would defeat the whole purpose of the thing. Also it wasn't easy to get plugged in.

Last night I balanced the clock on some good thick books, and I don't know if the light would have woken me up so I set it to make a normal sound. Then I woke up 45 minutes before my alarm went off this morning and leaned over to look at the clock to see when it would start lighting up, like a little kid. So I don't know any more yet about how or if that will work.

So tonight I've bodged a slightly better solution for clock placement next to my bed (and just as I'm writing this do I realize there's a better way to rearrange the things that need to be plugged in because the lamp has a long cord...always so much to think about!). And I hope the nice cricket sounds and dimming orange light do their magic!

I do wonder how well this supplementary daylight works on someone whose eyes are as bad as mine.

But I really should put my phone down now.

I did a photoshoot for the local LGBT charity a few years ago when they were looking for disabled people to photograph. And the other day, while I was in the car somewhere between Ullapool and Avimore, I got an e-mail with what looks like a similar photoshoot, this time for LGBT+ men (and non-binary people "and their allies"). And it's today and I forgot about it, but Thursday night I did try to look at the form they asked us to fill in. I could do the page of demographics stuff: age, gender, sexuality, disability, etc. But I stopped at the next page which asks

What does being a man (or being seen as a man) mean to you, and how do you express that in your own way?

What changes would you like to see in how society understands masculinity, and how do you think men can better support each other and their communities?

I had no idea what to do with these. I wandered away from the computer and promptly forgot about it until now. The photoshoot is today, it's going on now, so obviously that's not happening. And I never thought it was likely because of that timing; we're all about as exhausted and low on spoons as I thought we'd be. And that's a shame; with a cis man, a trans man, and a non-binary person who had femininity forced upon them and has only recently been able to reject that, I feel like my little family potentially is a great example of different relationships to manhood/masculinity.

Reminded of it now when I opened Firefox to look at something else, I see there's a couple more questions on the page that I didn't even get as far as reading the other day:

What message would you give to someone exploring their gender or identity — at any age — who might be looking for a role model?

What do you see as the biggest challenges or issues facing men in 2025, and what support or resources do you think men — and their loved ones — need to navigate these challenges and thrive?

Interesting questions. On the way home from the gym, D gave our local pal, another D, home and we got talking about driving and the behavior of strangers in their own cars. We talked about how toxic masculinity extends its tentacles even there, with young men on a speed awareness course talking about being overtaken as a personal insult, and me sharing a couple of quotes I've seen from blind people talking about the appeal of self-driving cars for them being about feeling like a man because they can be the family taxi again.

Last night I brushed my teeth, flossed and had another try at trimming my beard. I felt so good, clean and ready for bed.

In one way I'm like man I've added another body-maintenance chore?! but it's totally worth it because the feeling of my neck being smooth because I just shaved it is so so much nicer than it being smooth because hair never grew there in the first place. Somehow this is about being a man (even though facial hair is not necessary or sufficient to be one).

I laid awake a long time after I went to bed, but I spent some of that time smelling the remnant of shaving cream my brain still associates with D, and grinning. As I lay there and thought about it more, about how negatively I'm used to hearing shaving being talked about because almost everyone I know who talks about it is transfem, has skin or other attributes which are particularly sensitive to the physical necessities of shaving, or both. And just the sentence that society expects men not to care/try/whatever when it comes to appearance or grooming (that's why a whole word had to be invented for metrosexuals!) But it only now occurs to me that I was actually much more likely to be scruffy/smelly/whatever as a girl or woman, because I was so uncomfortable in my body, mentally detaching myself from it as much as possible, and extremely put off by all of the options for appearance or grooming that were available to me in that gender role. Now I feel like I'm more successful at being well-groomed just because it's more fun or appealing, more satisfying or soothing. Somehow this is about being a man too.