finding words in Each Day

I’m so tired, haha. I said I was going to write more often, so here I am.

I don’t know if anyone else is feeling this, but I really want to start Christmas early. And now that I’ve typed that, I wonder if I can get M on board to stop calling it Christmas and start calling it Yule. It annoys me how so much Christian language has taken over my vocabulary. I really enjoy the sentiment of Dear Lord as an exclamation, but I hate the underlying meaning, even if it’s recognized as not being exclusively religious anymore. Whenever I have said this to people (because I’ve shopped the idea around a bit), they tell me they know I don’t mean it in a religious way, but that’s because they know me, here I am again, feeling the need to be understood by strangers. I could rant about this, but like I said, I’m tired and I don’t want to waste my remaining brain cells on this.

On Monday morning I took M to the airport, he flew back to Ontario for a couple of days of testing for his new trade. I guess it’s not really that new anymore, even though he’s still so early in the training process. Once I dropped him off I drove out to the bike park and rode around a bit. I did have to wait for the sun to come up, because I totally forgot how late the sun rises this time of year. The week was a lot of playing video games and getting little projects done around the house. M’s struggles really peaked in the last couple weeks, no doubt partially because of the stress of preparing for these tests and the associated travel. So I wanted to do some nice things for him while he was gone to try to lighten his load when he got back. On Friday night I picked him up from the airport, and because I was on duty this weekend, I basically had to go straight to bed because I worked first thing in the morning.

This weekends duty shit was wild. It was supposed to be a fairly straightforward day, but there was a medical situation that arose, and because all the players weren’t talking to each other, I had to be the intermediary between many departments. It was actually a bit of a thrill, navigating all of that, but as soon as everything was done and I got home, I was exhausted.

That didn’t stop M and I from banging though. Can’t take that away from us, haha.

Today was a lovely chill day, watching racing, the Rugby World Cup Finals (yeah I know it happened like 2 weeks ago, we also had the results spoiled when the South African MotoGP rider Brad Binder wore a helmet celebrating the Springboks and the commentators shared that they’d won their match against the All Blacks the night before.
I played Rugby years ago, and the Springbok’s 1995 Cup win was partly why. It’s been fun getting back into the mindset, remembering the rules, remembering that experience. M and I talk about team sports vs individual sports a fair bit, because of our lack of interest in most team sports, so this has been kinda fun for both of us. Over the last couple of weeks we watched SA v France, SA v England, and then SA v All Blacks. There’s clearly a theme. It was the All Blacks that introduced me to the Haka years ago, the first time I saw it I cried, it was so powerful.

This is something I’ve been thinking about, and that is a perfect segue: I’m trying to stop stifling my emotions. I feel things so intensely that I can’t handle how it feels and it makes me want to cry (tell me again why I couldn’t possibly be autistic), but since I’m so conditioned to squash down the intensity, to not cry in front of people (hahahah fat chance, but still), I don’t know how to actually just feel things. Take the Haka for example: I watch it, but my whole body feels it. It is beauty and passion and electricity and it surges from my limbs into my core and tries to come up my throat and out my eyes (in the form of tears). My impulse forever has been to cap it off, shove it back down, deny it.
But what actually happens if I let it come up, let it out of my eyes? So I cry. So what?

On Thursday night I watched Women Talking (jesus fucking christ (SEE?) WATCH THIS MOVIE. It will KILL you. It’s worth it). I swear Sarah Polley (lovely Canadian woman) has never made a movie that didn’t bore directly into my soul (Years ago I wrote about Take This Waltz, it has a scene where the wife tries to gently seduce her husband, and he shuts her down. It was such a validating moment for me, as M and I struggled with connection. It’s an impossible place to be, a wife being rejected by her husband. It always seems that when I talk about it with my friends the men get jealous that their wives aren’t initiating more and the women can’t relate because their husbands are constantly “pestering” them for sex.
This was not my point. I watched Women Talking, and I was so sad and angry through the whole thing, but at the end, I bawled. It wasn’t that the ending was sad, there was a sad element, when I think about it now the best word I have is relief, and now I’m not sure if that’s because of how it ended, or because I didn’t try to shove that intensity back down into its bottle, I let it flow. It’s not so hard to do when I am alone, but I did say casually to M since he’s been home that I’m “trying to cry more”. Which I clarified as, “Actually more like, trying to stifle myself less”.

I’m really curious what will happen when I allow myself to let go. Part of me is afraid of this unknown. And part of me knows I need it. Can I do it. We shall see.

Since Prosebox sucks and won’t let me just leave a link to the video and forces me to embed it, here it is, the kitchen scene from Take This Waltz:

Last updated December 06, 2023