The In Between Time

Hello loves.

Writing from the strange in between time in which I find myself, where my semester is over but not totally over and I'm getting better after being really sick but not totally better and my nervous system is calming after being really activated a lot recently but not totally calm.

I'm also going to get my period any day now, and I'm feeling the flux of hormones in my body, the extra sensitivity and irritation and difficulty sleeping and mood swings and deep sadness and anger processing through me. I'm thinking about how in tune fenix is with the rhythms of their bleeding cycle and how much permission they give themself to be with what they know they need in different parts of their cycle...I don't feel as much awareness around my cycle, except in the week leading up to it, when it announces itself with sore breasts and sore pelvic bowl and extra irritation and migraines and mood swings and trouble sleeping. And sometimes, like this time, with getting really sick.

I had been going non stop for a while, though trying to pace myself, motivated both by self-care and love and by fear of getting really sick if I overdid it. It was going alright, but then the workshop that was supposed to happen in March and had to be rescheduled (for obvious reasons) snuck up and jumped on me. Workshops in my program are intensive all-day things that happen on two consecutive Saturdays, and this one had been rescheduled for the last two Saturdays in the semester.

So my careful rationing of energy, fitting everything I needed to do into the time I had available with enough time around it for me to take care of myself, fell through the floor. I started trying to readjust things and postpone things that could be postponed to make room for it, but in the end there was no getting around the enormous drain on my energy.

The workshop itself was actually really wonderful, it was on Facilitation and Dialogue, and run by my adviser, a very cool person. It was his class that Tessa and I sat in on when we came to visit the school in 2018, and that was the main reason I felt really good and excited about actually enrolling (because the weird tour and everything else was so unimpressive lol). But I hadn't actually had a class with him until this, so I was excited about it. It was really lovely...he always makes time for everyone to free write while listening to beautiful music, and he uses storytelling to teach, and he arranged the structure of the day really well, trying to take into consideration that a workshop via zoom is a different kind of thing (he didn't actually have us be on zoom from 9-5 for instance, just from 9-2:30, which was really helpful).

But in between the two Saturdays, I ended up having to spend hours and hours prepping for the final assignment in my Media and Conflict class, which honestly I had been struggling with and dreading all semester. It was about monitoring and analyzing mass media, and everyone had picked topics at the beginning of the semester to monitor. I had, unfortunately, picked the primaries, because I wanted a topic I really cared about, and at the time I very much thought things would go differently. And because our professor wanted us to do this with partners, one of my class mates signed on as well.

Even when things with the primaries weren't total shit, though, I was having trouble engaging with the three news sources we were supposed to be monitoring - CNN, NBC/MSNBC, and Fox. Ugh. I honestly hate all of them with a passion, and find looking at them physically toxic. So I hadn't really been keeping up with them all semester, and my partner hadn't really either, what with all the disruption, and also because we hadn't really narrowed down our specific focus until the very end.

We decided to focus on the media's treatment of Bernie before and after he dropped out / before and after coronavirus. So I ended up going on each of the three media sights and searching Bernie Sanders and going through months of articles, copying and pasting the ones that seemed relevant.

God, it was exhausting, disheartening, depressing, anger-inducing...and I did this for hours and hours over several days...I hate mass media so much, wow. I mean, it was certainly interesting to see the extreme machinations of the corporate media glamour machine, but it was also really hard on my subtle bodies.

And then I had class and then I had another workshop and then my partner and I met to try to get somewhere with all of this and she had started putting together a power point but hadn't been able to narrow down which articles we should focus on so we ended up spending the whole time figuring that out, and drawing some preliminary conclusions. I was trying not to feel frustrated with her, because she's super super busy in her last semester of grad school and trying to help her sister keep her restaurant afloat, I honestly have no idea how she's doing all of that. But at this point I did kind of feel like I had done a lot more work on this project than she had. And we only had one more day before we had to present it.

Aaaaand....the next day, the day before our presentation, when we were going to try to finish analyzing all these articles and putting it all together and everything, I woke up so sick I could barely move. I could barely open my eyes or get out of bed. And I still tried to start doing the work. But after awhile I had to recognize that there was no way I could do all of that and probably no way I could even show up to class to present.

My partner and my professor were very understanding, at least in their texts/emails. At the time I didn't even feel conflicted about it at all, because it was so clear that I really had no choice in the matter. I took it very easy that day and the next day I slept through almost the whole time that I would have been in class.

I realized at some point that what was going on was this virus thing that I've been dealing with off and on for a year. It starts with a rash, and then I feel a little extra tired, and then it hits me like a freight train. And I think it almost always gets me right around that week before my period. And it definitely gets triggered by stress, so the stress of the end of the semester and the workshop and not sleeping enough and really, the stress of those fucking news articles...the grief and pain of what the fucking mass media did to Bernie's campaign, the lengths they went to to stop him and then to turn around and flat out deny that they were trying to stop him...the gaslighting, the baldfaced corruption hiding behind layers and layers of intricately recursive glamour...god, it was evil, and it was awful to go through that in depth tour of it. It made me so, so physically sick, and I'm still dealing with the ways that it effected me.

And I'm also dealing with my feelings about having to miss that last class, the last class of the semester, and feeling guilty about my partner having to present half-prepared by herself, and feeling like I have no closure, and still not being sure if we're going to have to redo the presentation and send in a recording of it...which I really, really don't want to do, because this fucking assignment made me sick to my soul. But another part of me really wanted to do it, wanted to fucking officially analyze how shitty and screwed up the media is in their treatment of Bernie. But I don't think I actually can do it. It hurts too much.

But this whole thing is also bringing up all this stuff about having to miss so many things in my life because of being sick, and all of the misunderstanding I've gotten about it, and I have all of this fear come up that my partner hates me now and thinks I really let her down...and then I feel angry because I did so much hard work on this assignment that it actually made me sick....and part of me feels like my contribution is meaningless now because I couldn't do the final part...but I don't think any of that is really true. My partners texts to me were really understanding and she thanked me for doing so much work on the articles. This whole situation just brings SO MUCH SHIT UP from so many different angles, so many different times in my life...

And now I have one final assignment from that class before I can be done with it (unless we have to redo out presentation, which I really hope not), and that's to write a one to two page paper just reflecting on the class and my experience and what I got out of it. He changed that from having to write out a more in depth analysis of our mass media project, which I am grateful for, because again - I don't think I can touch that subject anymore. But even this reflection paper was feeling really hard, because I had all of this stuff in the way, all of these intense feelings about how this final assignment went and how I got so sick at the very end of it, and couldn't even finish out the class with everyone. I wanted to be there at that final class, get to discuss and debrief the semester with everyone, get to say goodbye. Now it feels so strange for it to just have ended....no more waking up at eight AM and rolling out of bed and onto zoom....haha. But I'll miss it, as strange as that was.

Talking it out with Tessa really helped though, and writing it out here. It's been a really overwhelming couple of weeks. It's been a weird fucking semester. I started it out feeling so crappy, and I was having such a hard time for the first half of it, because I just felt so physically awful and I didn't feel like I could get my momentum going and I couldn't keep up with the mountains of reading and was struggling emotionally with feeling like I could do any of it. Then the pandemic hit and campus shut down and sent everybody reeling, but weirdly that actually really helped me, because suddenly I had permission to be struggling, there was so much understanding, because everybody was now struggling. That was actually really healing for me. And I no longer needed to actually get myself out of the house and drive myself to school and struggle to find parking and walk up a giant hill to get to class, I just had to get on zoom. And partially with the help of these things, and partially because of the natural cycling of things in my body and in my being, I started to feel way better than I had in quite a while.

And I spent most of the second half of the semester feeling really good, navigating lockdown really well, feeling really close to Tessa, feeling really hopeful and happy about school. Before these last couple weeks that really overloaded me, I had been feeling consistently better than I have probably since I was a child. And that's really amazing. I'm trying to remind myself of that, and remind myself that it will come back, even as these last few days have been really hard, since I got sick and am going up and down a lot as I heal. But even with that, I'm healing faster than ever from one of these virus episodes. And a lot of the physical pain and discomfort I've been having I think is really related to all of the deep emotions I'm processing...

I want to feel good. I want to dance. I want to be in my body. I want to play music, I want to sing, I want to create tools and spaces of healing for people. When I'm not feeling good I have so much stuff come up, from all of the years that all of those things felt so out of reach. But I know they're actually closer than ever. I know I'm getting ready to actually move into my power and my flow.

I miss you, Isabella. I loved your last post, by the way. I haven't been able to comment because things have been so crazy and I've been finding it hard to communicate. But I loved it, and I read it at a time when I really needed to hear about the things you were talking about <3 <3 <3 and the story that you shared about the belly and the head and the heart was sooooo nourishing and real and good and part of what I'm going through too.

I'm reminding myself that it's okay not to feel good. It's okay for things to feel hard. It's okay not to know how things are going to turn out. It's okay to slow down and rest. It's okay to just breathe and enjoy the moment. It's okay to feel weird and sad. And things are healing at a deep level within me. It's been a weird semester, but I have done a lot of amazing things with it, and there are more amazing things to come. It feels weird to feel so hopeful and positive in the middle of global crisis, but in some ways it's the global crisis itself that's making me feel so hopeful and positive. I've lived so long in a constant state of personal disruption, to have that disruption mirrored on a global scale gives me hope that things are cracking open, that things are getting ready to change in big ways, that there will actually be room for change and possibility for change in places where there wasn't before. For sure, nothing will be the same after this. And I'm glad.

Love you both so much.

<3 <3 <3

Alia