Depression sometimes feels like it gets the best of me.
It leaves me crying in the shower. It leaves me feeling like no one loves me, like I dont matter.
I’m not sharing this because I want attention. I just want you to know that sometimes a kind word can go so far. I want you to know that, despite it all, sometimes our spirituality, a belief, can give us something to hold on to.
For me, what helped today was my birdies. It’s a small thing, and may seem so pointless to so many. Very few seem to care about my birds. Im far from a ground breaking pagan author. Yet they matter to me. They help me see, in some way, happiness again.
Thats all that matters with art, really. The joy and happiness it brings us.
Im sharing this picture, hoping it can bring you some happiness too. May you always have a cute mushroom to sit under, dry and happy, from the rain.
As I have written elsewhere, I think on Facebook, a very difficult situation is drawing to a close for me. As it comes to a happy end, paperwork and all, I have felt a ridiculously huge amount of stress lift off my shoulders. I felt a sudden ten percent jump (approximately) in functioning! So so much stress was suddenly gone, and now I feel a new shift in myself. I feel like I came to a turning point, was suddenly placed back in the driver’s wheel of my life, and some decisions were made. Namely, I’m going to be delving back into my spiritual practice and trying to recenter. I want to return to my roots as a pagan and Buddhist, and to feel myself grow.
So! I got myself a new sketchbook to make into a BOS, I made some concrete weight loss and spiritual practice goals (including taking a buddhist meditation class from a local Tibetan nun!) And I am trying to be gentler and more mindful of myself in my day to day experience. Oh, and yoga. I have been doing yoga twice a day now for a week, following short “yoga with Adrienne ” videos. I have to say I’m really enjoying her videos, and feel very pleased with myself for doing them!
And yet I find myself looking to my fresh new book of shadows and wondering… what shall I put in there? What would you counsel, friends and new readers? I am thinking of revisiting the elder futhark, but beyond that and buddhist meditations, I feel a little lost as to what to do with my shiny new notebook. Any advice or words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated!
As always, I wish you all the best! Have you recently had any spiritual turn around? Let me know what you did, or what you’d advise to do!
It’s terrifying, really, how quickly we can go downhill. How one seemingly tolerable incident can *boom* send you spiraling down. And it’s so hard to stop the spiral.
I wish I had some wisdom to impart today, but I’m not sure I do.
I managed to take a shower, which almost set me in tears. I am more functional than I was earlier on. Napping helped. But really, what do you do when you feel like you’re just slipping downwards?
Well, what I’ve learned with my social worker, is to focus on what you can grab on to stop the sliding, even if just a little.
Don’t focus on how shitty you feel. Focus on what might make you feel a little better, even just a little.
For me, it’s music and colors. So I forced myself to listen to music and color and draw in a cute birdie. Yay!
Altogether, I am sorry to be pitching so much moodiness out here into the void, so to speak. And yet, I really enjoy being able to be honest with people like this. It’s freeing to just expose the wound to others and say ‘here, I’m hurt’.
Maybe that’s something we need to do more of within paganism, speak our truths and pains. We do seem to be a vocal bunch, but I don’t know. Do we really talk about our nitty and gritty? I don’t know. To be fair, I’m not entirely in the loop as to who’s talking about what.
Oh, and one last thing. Where are the discussions on the fallibility of deity? I’m researching it for a course I’ll be teaching… and all I found was Christian crap. Anyone out there talking about the limits of the deities and spirits? I’d love some links if anyone has any.
In the meantime, I’m really reconsidering what to do with my birdies. Not that I want to stop doing them, but I’m wondering if making them a pagan project was too narrow for them. Maybe I should just leave them a non-pagan thing, and leave them as a cute little project.
What’s spawning this consideration is that I have a link that may be able to get my children’s activity book into a schoolboard, but the books would have to be a little less religious. A thing I’m not sure would be bad. Maybe just nature-centric would be enough for them. I don’t know. Thoughts?
Here is the picture I drew this afternoon. I hope it makes you smile and brings you some joy. Thank you to all of you for your support ❤
I just noticed that there is, indeed, more people on this blog thanks to a shoutout I did to the trans community. That warms my little heart. I love meeting members of the trans community, and I really love sharing my stories with everyone. It makes me smile like a goof whenever I get a comment, like, or a post share. I’ve spent most of my life being very lonely, and writing is my great passion, and so when you smack meeting people and sharing about my novels together, I get super happy! My writing is so close to my heart, it’s hard to put into words. I put a ridiculous amount of thought and meaning into every detail (except for maybe curtains haha) and even when I ‘wing it’, the story bears a lot of meaning for me. So feel free to chat! I’m dropping a summary of where and how to find me online here, for anyone who is curious/interested and wants to get to know me more.
Really, feel free to talk to me, I don’t bite and again, love to discuss my writing. Also, I’m on the lookout for beta readers, so if that interests you, let me know (preferably on facebook so that I don’t lose your message)! Finally, if you like my writing but are too broke to buy the novels I’ve put up on smashwords for sale (and those I will eventually put for sale on amazon), I can send them to you ~ on condition. The condition is that I really would like something in return, like a fanart, an interpretive essay, or something. I like seeing how others see my work, and knowing how much they liked it. Also, I’ve always dreamed of getting fanart so it would be a check on my bucket list! If this does happen, unless you really don’t want it shared, I’ll be posting it to my blog for all to see, which brings me to my final point -> if you are a trans artist of any kind and want to collab, hit me up! Even if you don’t want to collab and just want a shoutout of some kind, I’m glad to help out a fellow trans sibling.
Unhinged and unenlightened 