Just testing to all of you as I’m trying out a new email subscriber campaign sender because MailerLite sucks.
If you see this, then I did everything right. Fingers crossed.
The Sugar Factory in Scottsbluff on the evening of January 11, 2024.
A few days ago, I woke up to find my computer had rebooted. When I went to recover my open files, LibreOffice went through the process, but, then, nothing. Untitled1, Untitled2, Untitled3, and so on were empty. I sat and stared at my screen. There was no anger, only sadness. I’d lost the all the posts I had been working on for the blog except one. That one is titled Book List 2024. I lost the last bit of the file, but it’s easily replaced.
I’ve been trying to keep this space as non-political as possible. Sometimes, however, you read the news with a smile. I was content to let the obituary notification for Henry Kissinger go, visit ishenrykissingerdead one last time, and move on with life. This morning, however, the first thing I read was about some shit South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem said.
Sometimes it’s hard to sit down to write and explain what is going on with me. There are always several different stories bouncing around in my head, so I’m never short of ideas. What I lack is providing a good description of things to people who have no experience in the realms I have been in.
It’s not the first time he’s come to visit me. Michael Myers has appeared to me in dreams before. He always scares me. I’m conditioned to be afraid of him. He is, after all, a multiple murderer. Last night, he appeared just outside my window at 15 Corwin Avenue, the house in which I grew up.
He gently tapped on the glass with the tip of his knife. He stood there, looming over all the shadows filtering in from the moonlight. I was terrified, of course. Who wouldn’t be. Was he there to kill me? To kill someone else? I didn’t know. I rolled over and faced the wall, trying to pretend he wasn’t there. In my little mind, that would mean he would go away.
My clock at an angle, which makes the moon phase look wrong.
I woke up at 11:30 p.m., panicked and sweating. It’s common occurrence. My right eye hurt – another frequent notation in my sleep log, which is usually connected to the entire right side of my face hurting.
Working with my therapist, I have an inkling of what some of these things are, but it’s going to take time to figure them out. I have to piece together what’s happening and why, while listening to what my body is telling me. Unlike my brain, my body can’t paint pictures or speak.
I don’t sleep well most nights, but I never get any rest on Fridays. It’s been this way most of my life and I never knew why.
I wanted to share one of my recent favorites again for this post because I find myself looking at it often and smiling.
Throughout 2023, I’ve been taking steps to spend more time outside and slowly get back into the world. I took a break from the world for a while for two reasons.
The first was that I worked the night shift and worked three 1-hour shifts on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. This doesn’t leave a lot of time to do anything else, especially when you stick to that time all week.
The second I haven’t really spoken much about until lately. I don’t know how much I’ll share, but therapy had become a detriment for me and I couldn’t really see it. It’s not that I didn’t want to go out and do things, I literally couldn’t. It wasn’t depression. It was the extreme fatigue that comes with constant flashbacks.
I think that’s all I will say for now as I wanted to share some neat photos I took. There isn’t really a long story for each one, just something cool I wanted to share and put out there.
A sunflower soaks up the rays of the sun at BE Farm in Bayard, Nebraska on August 3, 2023.
A few days ago, I read a column, which really hit home. The author, Lucia Osborne-Crowley, is a trauma expert. After reporting on the Ghislaine Maxwell trial devastated her own mental health, she checked herself in to one of the world’s leading residential trauma-treatment centers.
I would encourage everyone to go read the article, but I wanted to share some parts of the article that resonated with me.