Another Tuesday Night In April

Content warnings: hospitals/medical stuff (including needle mention), asthma/lung stuff, death, near-death experience. 

 

I spent most of Tuesday night/Wednesday morning in the hospital.

 

There's a lot to unpack here, and I'm mostly writing this to sort things out in my brain.

 

On Easter Sunday, we went to the in-laws' place for an Easter meal. This had been planned for a couple of weeks, so we dutifully woke up early to make the drive out. When we arrived, we found that 90% of the family had either had a cold within that past 48 hours or were actively in the throes of one. My husband's sister sounded like she'd been chain-smoking for centuries. If it wasn't for that, we may never have known. Nobody said a single word about being sick. Even the sister said at first that she'd just lost her voice yelling during a hectic card game the night before. Less than five minutes later, she was saying she caught it from her son.

 

Within hours, my husband was showing symptoms. He took it upon himself to sleep in the spare room to spare me. He had a very sore throat and complained of headache and joint pain -- just a regular, annoying cold.

 

Tuesday night, April 7th.

 

I was sitting at the kitchen table playing Core Keeper (I LOVE THIS GAME) and my husband was beside me at his desk, playing Valheim/Helldivers, depending which of our friends on the Discord call needed more help at the moment.

 

I started coughing more than usual around 7:30 or so and my immediate thought was 'oh no, I'm getting that cold too.' But the cough felt different than both my usual chronic cough and the cough I get when I have a cold. It was an abnormally dry, persistent cough that moved absolutely nothing, and it was happening after every. single. breath I took. Not intermittently, not every other breath, every single breath.

 

I noted that that was weird, but kept drinking my tea and kept playing the game. I took shallower breaths to try to avoid triggering the cough, and while that sort of helped, that also meant I was not getting as much oxygen. Focusing on the game became harder and harder, even though I tried to switch to more mindless in-game tasks like gardening. Finally I quit the game and rested my head on the table. Breathing was taking every ounce of my focus and I no longer had enough spare brainpower to hold up my head.

 

I slid to the floor and literally crawled to get my blue inhaler (maybe ten feet away, if that?). I laid on the ground for ten minutes trying to gather enough energy just to shake it. I managed one dose, at 9:30pm. My lungs were burning, like a chemical burn, like there was acid in my chest. I was trying to breathe slowly and calmly to avoid triggering a panic response on top of whatever was already happening.

 

The entire time I lay on that floor with the inhaler in my hand, I kept thinking of the girl who lived in the room next to mine in my freshman year of college. She was a bit of a writer too, energetic and empathetic, with that determined zest for life that many depression survivors have. I remembered reading the news stories that ran after she died of influenza in January 2020. Healthy to dead in eight hours. She had only been married for a few months. She had been so happy for those few months.

 

Was this what influenza felt like? Or was I just overreacting again?

 

My husband asked if I should go to the hospital. I said 'maybe,' and started packing a bag. Phone charger, extra sweaters, extra pair of warm socks, water bottle, my daily meds in case I wasn't home by morning.

 

Around this point, my chest muscles were becoming fatigued. After every exhalation my muscles were so exhausted that I didn't have the physical energy to trigger an inhalation. I would sit there in a fully exhaled state for a full 5-8 seconds before my automatic nervous system would kick in and force an inhalation. This was happening every breath. I considered calling an ambulance to transport me due to the fatigue, but tho hospital was less than ten minutes away, and the decision to go to the hospital had given me enough adrenaline to stand. I drove myself.

 

By then it was 10:15. There were exactly three other cars in the entire parking lot. The place looked abandoned. I parked as close to the entrance as I legally could, shuffled very slowly to the door (wondering the entire time if I was overreacting by coming here), pressed the 'night call' button, and lurched through the automatic doors into a dark and completely deserted emergency room. A nurse appeared at a door to the side.

 

"Are you here as a patient?" she asked. I had no breath left to respond, so I just nodded. She beckoned me into the room behind her and got me registered and triaged, then led me straight into a room.

 

I fully expected them to do bloodwork and 'diagnose' me with anemia, the way every other doctor in the country has for sixteen years. But no needle appeared. The nurse listened to my chest in several places with a stethoscope, then the doctor came in and did the same thing. He quickly formed the opinion that I had a virus, and I feared I was going to be sent home to struggle, but I was not officially released. The doctor swabbed my nose for a COVID test, then left. After some interval of time (I was so focused on breathing that I didn't track how long), the nurse returned and deposited a pile of inhalers and a cup of water on my little side table.

 

It was then that I learned I was having a legitimate asthma attack.

 

She gave me a spacer and careful instructions on how many doses to take of each inhaler, then brought me a cup of applesauce with a Reactine and a Prednisone crushed and stirred into it (because I can't swallow pills). She returned yet again with a needle -- not for bloodwork, but to inject Toradol. I tried to argue that the pain wasn't that bad and probably a standard Advil would suffice, but I did not officially refuse so she went ahead and gave it to me.

I took all the inhalers as instructed, then got the medication slurry down (Prednisone tastes awful, even in applesauce).

 

Then... nothing, for a very long time. I drifted in and out of sleep, wrapped in all the sweaters I'd brought with me. The pain in my joints and my chest did ease up, a little.

 

Sometime around 1:00am, the nurse poked her head in to ask how I was feeling. I asked what exactly we were waiting for, and she said the doctor wanted to keep me for observation for a few hours.

 

That felt strangely validating. It meant they were actually worried about my condition and didn't feel safe just handing me a prescription and sending me back home. Content with their level of concern, I texted my husband an update and drifted back to sleep... no easy feat on such a hard bed.

 

Around 2am the nurse went off shift and was replaced. Shortly after, the doctor came in and gave me the option to stay the night or go home and rest there. As much as I wanted to ask to stay the night, the bed was so hard and the burning in my lungs had indeed gone away. He asked how far of a drive it was. I told him not even ten minutes. He asked if I felt safe to drive that far. I said yes (after all, I had driven to the hospital in far worse shape). He then gave me a run-down.

 

The COVID swab would not get back for testing until late the next day (there are no testing facilities in this region; all specimens are picked up daily and trucked in to the capital city some 3-4 hours away for actual testing). His educated guess was that I had a viral infection, so he prescribed three more days of Prednisone. This as-yet-unnamed infection had triggered an asthma attack, so he directed me to keep the inhalers I had already taken -- two puffs of one twice per day and two puffs of the other one every 4-6 hours as needed. They would contact me with the results of the test once they had it, if it was COVID or influenza, I might be asked to return for further treatment. (Personal aside: I don't think it's COVID, as I've had it twice already and both times it presented like strep throat. This does not line up at ALL with my experience this week. But maybe a different version would cause different symptoms?)

I packed my colourful collection of new inhalers and went home.

 

The next day (yesterday) I was tired but feeling surprisingly good, considering. I took all the inhalers as directed and filled my prescription. My boss had already found someone to cover all my shifts for the week and told me to focus on resting.

 

I thought a lot yesterday about my cousin. Playing with her siblings at the playground across the street one Tuesday evening at 7:30, dead in an ER bed by 10pm. Tuesday nights were tainted for years following that one. Tuesdays nights in April were the worst of all. And here I was fighting the same monster that killed her eleven years less three weeks before.

 

The losses echo in my head. Eight hours to dead. Three hours to dead. Healthy to ER in three hours. It seems hours aren't really that long, and yet within each one hangs an entire life in suspension. When lungs hit a wall, they hit it hard and fast. Somehow Brittney lived like this every day for 22 whole years.

Today I feel measurably worse than yesterday. I've set a timer for the 4-hour inhaler and am taking it EXACTLY every four hours (not seeing if I can stretch it to five or six hours), but I'm not sure it's helping as much anymore. I am considering going back to the ER. The burning has not returned, and the cough is not quite every single breath yet, but my chest muscles are getting fatigued again and there is a distinct sense of pressure. At what point do you go to the hospital? How close was I to death on Tuesday night, really? Should I have gone sooner? How bad is too bad?

 

I don't feel that this will be my last post on here, however life is only dealt out to us in hourly doses and none of us really knows how many doses we have left.

 

If it is, thank you for being here. Remember me as a quiet courageous person who felt whole while writing and dancing, who loved her husband, her friends, and her family dearly, who could do nothing but rely on the scandalous grace of God (as she was not capable of earning His favour). Play some Daniel Amos or White Heart and dance for me. Maybe learn some choruses from the Nachmo Alphabet project.

 

If it is not, then I look forward to writing in this composition window again soon.

In the meantime:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMgFRTfeGYI

 

 

 

 

(Don't think I wasn't tempted to do a Rick Roll there.) 

Day 1

Silence all, nobody breathe

How in the world could You just leave?

You promised You would

Silence that evil with good...

 

- Elle G, Newsboys, 1994

Day 1 without Jesus.

 

Remember the day after that good friend or close relative died?

 

Remember how you had to navigate the world without getting to bounce ideas off of them, tell them stories, vent to them without judgment? Remember how you kept counting them in place settings? Remember finding little gifts or cards that you couldn't buy for them? Remember having to correct yourself when you talked about them in present tense? Remember how every single atom of your being protested having to make those changes?

Remember the day after the end of the world?

 

That's what today was for the first followers of Jesus.

Crossroads

I don't know how to preamble this post.

 

I've been thinking lately about officially giving up dance. Possibly both dance and choreography.

 

I tell myself it's a time thing. While I like my job, it still takes away from my creative endeavours. I anticipate staying with this company for a long time (with construction and fast food, I always knew those were stopgaps and not a career). But I'm not fully convinced that's the real reason.

 

Maybe it's fear. Even though my two most recent performances were very well received, the memory of having an entire cast and assistant choreographer turn against me no matter how hard I tried to accommodate their self-professed 'lack of ability' (which was really a lack of commitment and/or self-confidence) still burns deep into my brain.

 

I know I don't really like making the videos. Shooting practice footage is fun, but I feel the need to make 'real' dance videos, with visual themes and costumes and stuff. I don't even mind editing, but I hate trying to scout viable locations and trying to motivate myself to practice enough and trying to put together a costume that isn't either stupid expensive or the same as literally every other dance video ever.

 

And I've 'locked' myself into making a dance video that's supposed to premiere in May.

 

I have the dance memorised and relatively clean (other than the ending -- which is probably also a contributing factor for the resistance I'm encountering). I love this song and I've been wanting to do a video to it since the song was released. I've already test-driven it in front of a live audience and heard nothing but positive feedback. There is absolutely no reason for me NOT to do this.

 

Am I just letting the fear and the bad experiences win, or am I finally being rational about my time and energy for once in my life? Is the distance in my soul a call from God or a siren song from Satan?

 

Despite all the pain and discouragement I've gone through in my career, this is the first time I have legitimately, peaceably, rationally considered quitting. (I had decided to quit performing once before, in 2019, but that was mostly for attention/as a way of self-harm. It was not, by any possible stretch, a rational decision.) I'm really not sure what to make of this. Even when dancing was difficult due to health, lack of motivation, busy schedule, emotional trauma... I never considered quitting, not truly. I still saw the dancers in my head. I still danced to music when doing housework. I still do.

 

What I loved about it was the feeling of flying. The air rushing between my fingers, my muscles firing, the elation of 'solving' a difficult passage and being able to perform it automatically. Performing in front of people or cameras was cool, but those weren't my driving force. I just loved the act of dancing. I love the way my body and mind felt when I danced. It cleared my head like nothing else. Maybe this is the same high people get from meditating?

 

As far as I know, I still love the act of dancing. The alphabet superset I did for Nachmo this year was a lot of fun. I've lost relatively little from the extended pandemic/apartment life drought, and what I had lost seemed to come back with little difficulty. I came out of Nachmo with one full piece that I really love, and some great starts to quite a few others.

 

And yet... I'm still sitting here, wondering if I should officially walk away.

 

It wouldn't be hard, really. I stopped posting the rehearsal videos years ago, when my in-laws banned me from posting on social media. As far as most people are aware, I've already stopped. If we're perfectly honest, the only person acting under the delusion that I'm still actively choreographing (let alone actually dancing) is me.

 

Would life be simpler without dance? Absolutely. Without a doubt. No question.

 

I would have free time. The imposter syndrome would have far less fodder. There would be less paper cluttering the house and annoying my husband (I find it easier to choreograph longhand). It would be so much simpler to just stop even thinking of myself as a choreographer and focus on my day job, or marriage, or housework, or entertaining, or writing.

But twelve years ago, I was on this very blog saying that I felt called to walk this path, no matter how difficult or lonely it got. I believed it then -- in many ways I still do believe that. I believed God had called me to dance, to choreograph, to somehow bring hope to people through it.

I don't think I've done that. If anything, I'm farther away from that now than I was when I started.

Is the work done? Is my work done? Is it time to pass the torch? If so, to whom? Both my sisters have also stopped dancing. M is dead. Most of my surviving dance friends have already moved on to 'real life.'

And if my work is not done, than what work is it, and why can't I see the way forward?

 

And if I can't answer those, there's always the question I would have asked twelve years ago on this very blog -- which option gives God more glory?

 

As usual, I don't know. I never know. I'm always paralysed by fear and uncertainty and indecision and it characterizes me as a person and the way I live my life. 

2026 Goal Update

We're two months into 2026 already. Time to check if I've even started on any of my goals.

 

Financial: I did get a little bit of Christmas money. It has not been invested, however it has made it as far as the 'we forget this money exists' savings account (which is better than usual). There have been several opportunities to spend it, but so far I have stayed strong. I'm not sure it's enough to actually invest. I haven't set up the autotransfer yet because my unemployment benefits didn't kick in until literally last week, and the plan was to schedule the autotransfer for the days that I'll be receiving the payments. I applied for a job opportunity that someone mentioned to me that I'm actually really excited about and would be a great side hustle (and then I could dump most or even all of that income into savings/investments), but I haven't heard anything back yet. That makes me nervous.

 

Dance: The Nachmo alphabet project went well overall. I have gotten very little feedback from the hand-picked group that I emailed, which is disappointing. But I did get my 50th YouTube subscriber! I guess it's not a lot by most people's standards, but considering how little I actually advertise my YouTube channel (and by that I mean I literally never mention it at all), that's not bad.

In February, I switched to working on actually memorising the dance I want to film in the spring as well as developing another longer show (similar to Sottovoce). I'm already one piece deep into the longer show (already memorised and everything!), and I'm intentionally taking a lot of time to really slow down the dance I'm planning to film in the spring and nail down the exact footwork and dynamics. This piece has the potential to be incredible, but it will take a ton of work to get there. While it is possible to shoot from the hip on this piece (that's exactly what I did when I performed it live last year), familiarity will make it really shine.

I'm still planning the Project Board, however the corkboard in the size I want is over $45. This is a significant amount of money considering we lived on $50 total (for gas, groceries, meds, etc) for the entire past two months. For now, I'm testing out smaller-scale versions in journals with post-it notes and colourful pens. I have also made a schedule for the videos I want to create in 2026. I have written down dates to start memorising, filming, editing, AND uploading (not just an 'upload' date). Hopefully having multiple milestone deadlines will help the ADHD spend some sustained amount of time on it rather than trying to cram the ENTIRE thing into two days and then inevitably getting angry when it's decidedly sub-par. (That being said, I have put myself in a position where that's exactly what I'm doing for my next YouTube post.)

 

Kyrie: This is actually the area where I've made the most progress. That one-sentence-minimum has been MAGIC for this thing. I finished the 'date' scene that I'd been stuck on for two years, and the next day I did over half of the following scene. I have, like, actual momentum for the first time since I did the first rewrite in 2022.

 

The WIP pile is still much larger than I had hoped it would be at this point. I only just finished the Christmas gifts at the beginning of February. The sewing projects are on an indefinite hiatus again as my sewing machine has broken in a way that renders it completely useless. It will cost over $120 just to diagnose the issue. So it's on ice until money grows on trees.

Sleep: I spent January marking down, with colour-coded pens, what time I 'go to bed' (with my pile of music and books and other assorted crap) and what time I actually turn off the light and go to sleep. The 'go to bed' time hovers anywhere from 12:15 to 1:30. The 'go to actual sleep' time is consistently after 2:45am. I think it's been before 2:45 ONE time in the entire month of January. I was very close to despairing over this goal. I honestly didn't think it's attainable in any universe, and it's been made very clear to me that the goal is not just 'better/less bad,' the goal is ABSOLUTE PERFECTION. I don't even know where or how to start with this.
In February, my goal was to at least brush my teeth before 1:30am. Brushing my teeth seems to be the sticking point that prevents my brain's programming from jumping to the 'initiate actually going to bed' sequence. It actually sort of worked, I managed the goal 2-3 times most weeks, and probably 2-3 times outside of that I was less than half an hour late. This is progress. For March, I want to walk back the time to 1:00am, and I'm much more worried about that.

Community: can't invite people over if we don't have money for ingredients to feed them... I'm perfectly okay living on soup and sandwiches for weeks on end, however I feel that guests should get something with a little more thought put into it. Since our financial situation had us living on rice and whatever was in the freezer, we have not invited any guests over other than my sister.

That being said, I did make some connections at the local church (yes, I'm going to church even after everything that's happened over the past decade or so), and will be attending a Bible study on Tuesday and see how that goes.

Something I've been trying is picking one major month-long project to focus on, with two other main projects to touch on daily. January's project was the Nachmo alphabet project (with the secondary ones being Kyrie and one of the crochet WIPs). For February I chose to focus on a writing opportunity with an early March deadline as my major project for the month, with Kyrie as a co-focus (I work on both during my writing session). The secondary projects are usually dance/choreography related, and so far the third has been continued work on the WIP pile.
The project for March is kind of two-fold: the writing opportunity will be the main one until the deadline at the beginning of next week, and I might shift to a dance-related primary goal after that.

Grief, Ten Years Later

The Year From Hell (2015, for any new readers) is now ten full years ago.

 

In retrospect, this was probably the time when we should have started to suspect my brain wasn't quite up to par. I was sending college update emails trying, trying, trying yet again to explain the depths of the pain I was in. I was writing five and six thousand word emails to everyone back home, trying to make sense of everything that was happening to me. And to be fair, it was a lot. How many other 21-year-olds are mourning three deaths in two months, two family-destroying divorces, and a late-stage aggressive cancer diagnosis (for one of the very few not-dramatic members of the family) while also trying to graduate from an extremely demanding program from a very tough college?

 

By all rights I should have been making friends and going on dates to find the guy to build a family with and starting a career. Instead I was losing friends, losing family and watching money divide what little family survived all the deaths.

 

I was such a baby adult, and instead of getting 'real life' drip-fed to me over the course of 30-40 years like everyone else does, I got a full lifetime (maybe more) of pain and betrayal in one three-month wallop. And I could not understand how everybody thought I should just pop right back up and continue on with life as if nothing at all happened. I still sometimes think if none of those things had happened and the only bad thing that happened to me in 2015 was some kind of romantic break-up, I would have gotten ten times the love and concern from home compared to the amount of love and concern I did get during the Angel Of Death rampage that actually happened.

As the anger from the readers back home mounted about my (rightful?) despair, my emails grew longer and longer as I tried to make them see just how bad things really were. But of course they never saw. I was still in that naive autistic phase of 'if I just explain better/more then they'll understand.' I know now that some people have absolutely zero intention of understanding and that explanation in general is essentially worthless. That's a big part of why I don't really talk to people at all anymore. I'm so completely done with the wilful misunderstanding.

 

I can't even tell you how many times people just sent a terse email saying 'you need counselling,' only for me to fire back that I was, in fact, in counselling twice a week. Two hours a week was not even close to enough time to process everything. I would sit in the counsellor's office, talking non-stop for the full hour (and sometimes a little bit longer if his next person wasn't there yet), and leave without any appreciable difference in my soul other than the tiniest modicum of relief that I didn't get scolded for simply acknowledging all the bad things that were happening to me, in real life, in real time.

 

If I wasn't neurodivergent, would my grief have been smaller, easier to manage? Would it have been easier for all the email recipients back home to relate to me and show a little kindness? Would the pain have gone away at some point instead of still lingering in the shadows even today? Would the angry replies from back home have added less hurt to the already-insurmountable mountain range of pain? Would I have a slight hope of ever being happy again... without looking over my shoulder, still fully expecting to see the Angel Of Death leering over me, scythe raised?

I dreamed last night about a child drowning and I woke up crying, with the ever-familiar ache of loss in my chest. I didn't actually know or recognise this child, but in the dream, in the story my brain spun, it was my brother. He didn't look like either of my real-life brothers, but when he died the pain was the same.

 

Ten full years and I still dream of death when I sleep.

2026 Goals

It's that time of year again.

 

Usually I'm really excited for these goal-setting posts, but this year I feel I've lost quite a bit of momentum. That's crazy to say... I added six shows to my résumé this year alone, including a 15-minute solo tap dance set for a fairly well-known theatre company and two theatre-musical choreography gigs. I made enough crocheted shawls to place them in a brick-and-mortar shop for sale. I learned how to draw half-decent human eyes (in colour).

 

But I feel like I'm stuck in quicksand.

 

This is probably understandable. We just made a fairly major out of town move less than two months ago. Work has been absolute madness for the past two months and I'm thisclose to burning out. My body feels weary. My brain feels like a car that won't start. I have $3 to my name, winter tires balder than Peter Furler, and less than a quarter tank of gas with which to get to work for an entire week before my next paycheque. I am so tired of worrying about finances, of asking for help, of having to put off legitimate needs (like safe tires for my vehicle) with more pressing legitimate needs (like gas for said vehicle). I think this year's goals may be more about getting my immediate 'boring' surroundings in order than creative projects that will probably never be seen by human eyes anyway. Maybe the fact that the small boring details of my day-to-day life are in chaos is the reason I'm struggling to work on my choreography and writing projects.

 

I've recently discovered Struthless on YouTube. This channel has been a Godsend, and a lot of what's in the rest of this post is probably going to be adapted (if not directly lifted) from his videos.

 

2026 Goals:

 

FINANCES.

I absolutely need to get some finances in order. I am so freaking done with not being able to go anywhere or do anything because I didn't set aside enough gas money for the van. I'm tired of knowing I'm driving on extremely unsafe tires, and the catastrophic electrical failure that took the van off the road for so long that the registration on it lapsed is still fresh in my mind. If something like that happens again, how are we going to pay for it?

I'm not trying to become a millionaire, I just want an emergency fund. Something we can fall back on if another $3,000 part on the van drops dead or if I get sick and have to miss a week of work. I want to be able to go to the grocery store and not have to prioritize some food needs over others because we don't have enough money for the whole list.

I'm guessing that the financial chaos we have lived in for so long is a big part of why I can't get my act together enough to work on anything creative. 

 

So how am I going to do that?

First, any and all Christmas gift money is going to open up an investment. It's something I have been talking about doing since I was 18 years old and never did. Not doing it is one of the biggest regrets of my life, and the longer I wait to open one, the bigger that regret will be. I don't even know what I'm saving for, I just want that money out of my easy-to-access chequing account where it WILL get spent on fancy snacks because that's exactly where it has been going for at least five years.

Second, I want to set up autotransfer so that every time a paycheque comes in, a certain dollar amount will immediately get siphoned off to a savings account of some kind. This may honestly just go toward buying Christmas gifts next year or something, as that has been a huge sticking point for me every year since we got married. Clearly I'm not doing this manually, so I need to automate it or it just is not going to happen.

 

Third (and we've already started to do this a bit since we moved), I want to meal plan at least a week in advance so we can buy groceries accordingly and cut back on eating out (last time we went on a dinner date it was over $80... just for the two of us! This wasn't even a high-end, fine dining restaurant, this was the culinary equivalent of a decent sports bar).

 

 

DANCE.

This is a tricky one. My confidence in my abilities took a huge hit on the second-most-recent show I choreographed, and now I feel like I need to prove something. Again. I was only just getting out from the 'I have to prove myself' mindset from college and then this. I've been asked to be a choreography consultant (not even the actual choreographer) for a local show and even that feels like I'll mess it up somehow.

I'm also fairly out of shape. Our new place has two levels, and even climbing the stairs twice in a row knocks the wind out of me.

 

I've been offered a really great teaching opportunity, and while I really want to take it, I'm also VERY aware of how easy it is for a teacher to absolutely destroy a student. My biggest fear is that in my inexperience, I will do the same to all my students and they will come away hating dance and hating themselves, the same way I often have. 

 

How am I going to do this?

First, I am NOT starting by posting on Instagram, where all the people who have tried to break me will see them. Instead, I have drafted an email to those who have supported me over the years asking if they would like daily video clips of me performing choreography for the month of January. I have learned that if I don't have any specific people waiting for a video, I will not make one... so I need to get people invested and waiting.

Over Nachmo, I would like to do an Alphabet superset -- 26 dance clips to songs starting with each letter of the alphabet. After 26 days, I'll run a poll and see which piece my accountability group thinks I should develop further and run out the run of the month working on that. I want to start putting those clips on my Ko-fi account and after January will start actually promoting that (because then it will have actual dance content on there -- wild, right?).

 

Second, I want to make a Project Board with a clear timeline of the dance thing I'm working on and focus only on that ONE dance project. The thing that has always hamstrung me with making dance films is trying to have eight of them on burners at once. This is impossible to do, and I absolutely know this. But I keep freaking doing it. I need to start with one (1) film, and not even think about any others until that one is legitimately done.

Also on this project board, I want to lay out a memorization schedule. The other MASSIVE difficulty I have with making dance films is simply not learning the choreography and then trying to cram it all in the week (or even the day) before. I want to schedule one section of memorization per week, so that by the time I want to film these upcoming projects, I will already know them well enough to feel comfortable performing them.

 

 

WRITING.

Kyrie has stalled out. The older I get, the less confident I feel writing about interpersonal relationships, and unfortunately that's exactly what Act I of this novel is. I've been stuck on/avoiding this one dinner date scene for probably almost a year at this point. I love this story, and even if I don't bring any of my other novels to fruition, I want to see this one published. I have had a handful of friends publish their own books, so I know it can be done by people like me. I just need to do it.

 

How am I going to do this?

Small, daily goals. One sentence a day. On good days, maybe shoot for 100 words per day. Just get something, anything, on the page. I'm going to set myself a goal to get this draft done and out to beta readers by the end of April. Most of that period is my layoff time from work, so I have PLENTY of time to write 100 words a day (especially since I'm pretty experienced at cranking out 3k+ words an hour from my NaNoWriMo days). Plus, Act II is already is pretty decent shape and really just needs some light editing before it's beta-reader ready.

Or, if 'one sentence' is too much, I might try for half an hour per day (setting a timer). 

I may also need to implement some kind of reward system until I can get Act I to be more fun. 

 

 

WIP CLEARING.

I have a pile of (mostly crochet) works-in-progress that I need to either finish or officially abandon and rip out. I think these are taking up a lot of brain space and slowing me down from doing other things because I keep thinking 'I really should work on this...' Two weeks ago I knocked out two crochet projects that literally took less than two hours each and already I'm starting to feel a little more like I can breathe again. I wrote a list of all the WIPs that exist so I can think about which one to tackle next (and which ones I need to seriously consider ripping out so I can use that yarn for other things).

 

How am I going to do this?

I used to crochet while watching YouTube videos, no I need to get back into the habit of doing things while watching YouTube again. Adrian's Digital Basement is a great channel for this, as Adrian is really good at explaining what he's doing as he's going along so you don't actually need to look at what's happening every single second. Plus, if you're watching one of his repair videos, you can tap into the body-doubling effect, as he's working on a project too. I also learn a lot about patience, troubleshooting, and computers in general from his videos.

 

 

 

SLEEP.

My mother often tells of when I was a two-month old baby and she would have to sit up with me at night because I was awake and wanted to play. (She's still bitter about this, by the way.) I wasn't crying or upset, I was just ready to explore and hang out and had zero interest in going to sleep.

That has set the tone of my entire life. I can sleep just fine. As soon as my head hits the pillow, I'm down for the count. The actual sleep is not the problem. The getting-to-bed part is. There's just too much to work on, and learn, and do, and explore. Life is short, and to spend a third of it sleeping, a third of it working, and half of it dealing with feeding myself seems absolutely ludicrous. When exactly am I supposed to, you know, live?

But my husband has given me an ultimatum: be consistently in bed by midnight before May 2026 or he'll leave me. And if it means that much to him, I do really want to try. But I've never done this before.

 

How am I going to do this?

I've come up with a physical tracker idea and I know I want to implement a reward system (which, of course, will require me to stay on track with the financial goals). A reward system helped me a LOT with getting my wake-up times solid (still going strong after six months!), so I'm hoping it will help with this too.

Being on ADHD meds has already helped a lot because now I can actually get the chores done before midnight (most of the time), which was definitely a big part of what kept me from going to bed. But now I'm using that time to putz around on other projects. I have a feeling clearing out the 'should do projects' (the WIPs, see above), might help a lot here.

 

 

COMMUNITY.

Part of why we moved was for a community. We had some friends in this town already, and for YEARS my husband and I have dreamed of hosting people for dinner... which is tricky when all your friends live(d) 90 minutes away or more.

I'd like to set a goal of hosting two dinners per month. That feels manageable, and that will be a great day to strengthen the connections we have (which is turn will hopefully help our mental health).

 

How are we going to do this?

Meal plan. Schedule. Text people until somebody's available for that date.

 

So what are my first steps?

 

- Buy a corkboard and some brad fasteners (to make the project board, as at least three of these goals will be tracked on these).

- Make a list of people to send the accountability email to.

 

- Keep referencing the WIP list and work off the momentum I've already built.

 

- Write one sentence in Kyrie.

 

- Wear the tap shoes. 

Hand-Me-Downs

This summer I started researching hoarding disorder, and it illuminated a lot of things.

 

I have been accused of hoarding (at least half-jokingly) since I was a child. I have always been a 'pack rat.' I have always carried either a backpack or a very large bag everywhere I go. I go through it and clean stuff out regularly for the sake of my back, but I have just always carried around a lot of stuff. You never know when you're going to need a pair of scissors, or spare AA batteries, or a protein bar, or sunglasses.

 

My room was always in a state of (somewhat) organized chaos. All the papers were loose, but they were all in one pile. Half the clothes weren't on hangers, but they were all piled on the same chair. I could still see the floor, and I vacuumed the ever-shrinking patch fairly regularly.  I had a trash can, and I emptied it whenever it was full. I took dirty dishes up to the dishwasher within 24 hours at least (but usually the same day). My parents and siblings knew not to touch anything in that room lest I spiral into a full-blown panic attack about the 'missing' (usually just moved) object. I could find everything I needed.

 

A few months ago, during some argument, my husband accused me of being a hoarder. I fired back that I wasn't half as messy as I used to be (which is true), but the words lodged in my brain.

What if I really am a hoarder?

I started Googling.

My fear was quickly put to rest as I saw the pictures of what true hoarding looked like. Our house was messy, but it was nothing like those photos. We still had surfaces on which to sit, and cook, and do projects. We still had clean, usable floor space.

 

But some of those photos did look familiar. The cardboard boxes stacked high, the empty margarine containers on every available surface, the newspapers piled in corners. That -- that was my grandparents' house.

 

My paternal grandparents' house had always felt small and cramped. I was well into my teens before I realised that their 'tiny' basement was supposed to have a fireplace on one wall -- that's why I could see brick at the top, behind all the cardboard boxes that slowly encroached on the discoloured patch of shag carpet, the old once-blue exercise bike, and the ragged and very out-of-tune piano. I watched, in real time, as the old spare room in the basement that we played in as kids became so full of boxes and old clothes that we couldn't play there anymore. Then the upstairs spare room that we played in after that suffered the same fate. There was apparently a second spare room in the basement that I have never seen because there were so many boxes piled in front of it from before the time I was old enough to climb down the stairs. I distinctly remember the moment I realised that one of the piles in the basement was actually on a large wooden workbench, and I only realised this because I suddenly recognised a wooden table leg amid the visual chaos. The surface was completely gone. Among the clutter, there was a used, vintage KFC chicken bucket. I know it was used because there were grease stains on it. I examined it once and saw a copyright date of 1973.

 

I remember at some point in my childhood asking my parents why my grandparents had so much stuff. My parents explained that they had grown up during the Great Depression and World War II and were so used to having to save everything, just in case, that they hadn't learned how to turn off the instinct. That was enough explanation for me. I didn't connect the dots between my grandparents' house and the phenomenon of 'hoarding' until this year, despite years of their children (my parents, aunts, and uncles) trying to intervene and often congregating to clean out the garage or the basement or the backyard. My grandmother would 'give things away' to the kids, knowing full well the things would get thrown out, but unable to placate my grandfather about it any other way.

 

The more I think about that house, the more I realise how mid-century glamourous it really was. It has a HUGE kitchen (literally bigger than the entire apartment my husband and I just moved from), at least four, maybe five bedrooms, a large basement with a massive storage room and (presumably?) a faux fireplace, a basement exit, 2.5 bathrooms, a large walkout balcony from the master bedroom (which itself took up over half the upstairs), with a sunroom underneath and a huge backyard. If you were to build and sell a house today with that exact floor plan, it would be worth well over half a million dollars. They were sitting on an absolute jewel of a house, but my memories of it are that everything was tainted. I always felt somehow contaminated every time I set foot in there and I never really thought about why. I just knew I didn't like going there. Something about their house always made my skin crawl.

 

Then I remembered the one time I was in my one aunt's house, how stuffed bears and craft supplies covered every available surface. I mean every surface. There weren't even any chairs to sit on because they were all covered in stuffed animals. How when my oldest uncle died of cancer, it took weeks for the entire neighbourhood to help his wife clean up the yard. How my youngest uncle and his then-wife were constantly at odds about all the engine parts in their yard. How my own dad only has goat paths through his huge workshop, despite my (more motivated) siblings cleaning it out at least once a year since I moved out.

 

Then I began to understand my husband's fear. I am nowhere near that level yet, but all the genetics are there, he knows I grew up poor, he knows I have a significant variety of trauma in my personal history, he knows I struggle a lot with boring things like organization and cleaning.

 

Meds have helped me with motivation and I also notice meds make it easier to get rid of things. But I don't know if there's a way to get rid of the genetic fear of going without that has been built into my soul one cardboard box at a time for three decades. 

One Month Of Vacation

Today marks one month since the day we drove away from our decrepit old apartment in the desert and did not come back.

 

I drove past it a few days ago. There were no Christmas lights on the balcony, for the first time in five years... I have always made sure to put up at least one strand of Christmas lights. And they are up... just not at the blue apartment.

 

It still feels like we're on vacation in a beautiful little guest house, with our Christmas tree and my husband's streaming setup and my grandma's rocking chair and my husband's mead-making station and all my plants on their stand. It still feels like one day we'll wake up and we'll have to leave and go back 'home' to the desert apartment with the spiders and the mice and the four-storey hike one-way to the laundry room and the cinderblock walls with no storage that pressed in around us.

I cried when we left... I was shocked at that. While there were memories in that apartment, most of them were bad ones... ones of my husband so sick that he was quite a different person, one who screamed and threw things and allowed his relatives to dictate my life without standing up for me. Those are all memories that dominated that place and dominated our first three years of marriage, before we were finally able to diagnose and cut out a food allergen that was wrecking absolute havoc on his brain.

I am so grateful for this new place, for the storage space and the natural light and the general livability and lack of lead pipes and the quiet streets. We have heard one (1) vehicle the entire time we've lived here. At the old place we were both routinely woken at night (sometimes multiple times) by people street-racing in souped-up Fords at 3am. I sleep like the dead (I have had roommates consider calling 911 because I sleep so deeply) and even I was sleeping poorly.

I'm not sure whether I should treasure those troubled memories of early marriage or if I should be happy to turn my back on them. I don't want to forget how much better things are now. Both my husband and I are coughing less. We can drink the water straight out of the tap and it tastes delicious. We get curbside recycling pickup... there wasn't even a recycling depot in the town where we used to live (let alone pickup) until mere months before we moved. We have more of a social life already than we ever could have dreamed of in the old town. This is an upgrade in every way.

 

I am struggling to set up my dance studio. I have the flooring pieces (although I do want my larger one from my parents' house), and the room is almost cleaned up (it's been a disaster for most of the time we've lived here because it was one of the lower priorities for unpacking and organization). I'm struggling to want to. I don't know if the stress of moving (and work -- currently in the middle of a show that breaking ticket sales records for the theatre as well as launching ticket sales for next season) is zapping my motivation, or just thinking of all the times I've tried and failed to get dance going again since I've gotten married. I have an opportunity to teach in the new year, and I think I might take it... although last time I tried to teach choreography, I was raked over the coals for being 'unrealistic' and my co-worker actively sabotaged my work so I'm very nervous how it will go. I don't know if the flame of dance has died, necessarily, but it has certainly had a large amount of dirt shovelled onto it.

 

I also want to write again. NaNoWriMo 2023 was the last time I wrote anything longer than a blog post. I don't have any ideas, but I'm finding myself poking absentmindedly around for one. I mentioned wanting to write again to my husband the other day and for the first time in our entire marriage, he said something supportive instead of telling me how I'm wasting my time writing. It might be a while before I actually write something, but I'm open to an idea.

 

I don't know if I should post practice videos on Instagram again when I do start dancing. The world of social media changed significantly during the pandemic, right at the time my in-laws banned me from posting on it. It's an alien landscape to me now, all ads and fake positivity, both of which I have always avoided. There's a definite allure now to the thought of not posting a single thing about dance until I create my next major work... maybe during Nachmo? I do have the space for working out choreography now, so maybe I can do an honest-to-goodness Nachmo for once instead of just a thought experiment (I say that as if I didn't choreograph an entire one-woman show during Nachmo 2023 that got screened in their online festival and is now one of my highest-viewed videos on YouTube).

 

So far, both my husband and I are healthier and happier. I had hoped that this move would give us a place of peace where we can heal from the old wounds and grow into a life instead of just an existence.

 

So far... I think it just might be working. 

Nouns & Adjectives

One of my in-laws recently complained how they don't know me. This elicited two responses in me.

 

The first and most overwhelming was 'maybe if you hadn't spent the last six years criticizing every single word that comes out of my mouth we'd have some semblance of a relationship.'

 

The second response was: 'that makes two of us.'

 

I have never known 'who I am.' I have some nouns, most of which encompass verbs I partake in. I'm a dancer. I'm a choreographer. I'm an artist. I'm a writer. I'm a daughter. I'm a Canadian with German heritage and German bluntness. I'm a hockey fan. I'm married. I'm a sister.

 

This disconnect is apparently a fairly common experience for neurodivergent people, but if anything that makes me wonder even more 'who I am.'

 

I have likes and dislikes. I like the colour pink. I like '80s music. I like salt and vinegar chips and Coffee Crisps. I like sunsets and sweet peas. I dislike 'dance' that is mostly acrobatic tricks. I dislike hot weather. I dislike coffee. I strongly dislike hypocrites and people who weaponise the Christian faith as a tool for manipulating the people around them.

 

There are lines I physically cannot cross. I absolutely can not drink dairy because every single aspect of the experience repulses me (however, I can and do eat my body weight in cheese several times a year).

 

There are things that have happened to me in the past that have informed who I am today. There has been death, divorce, abandonment, loss, poverty, and bullying. There have been moments of kindness, love, warmth, and comfort.

 

There are clinical definitions to describe me. I have ADHD. I have anemia. I have asthma. I am autistic.

 

Over time I have been called smart, stubborn, stupid, courageous, lazy, strong, out-of-touch, too negative, good with words, a bad writer, funny, a failure, cute, unloved, annoying, unremarkable, inflexible.

But who am I, really?

These are all facts about me, but I'm not sure they capture the essence. Or maybe I don't have an essence to capture.

 

Maybe this really is all there is to me. Just a couple of nouns and adjectives, only half of which can be conclusively proven.

Gearing Up For A Boss Fight

Several years ago, I choreographed a piece to White Heart's Desert Rose, arguably one of their biggest hits.

 

The song didn't 'take' for me, at first. It was 'too slow' for my high-octane brain, and there were so many other good danceable White Heart songs available to choreograph to.

 

Then I moved to the desert.

 

The desert is, quite literally, the place where dreams go to die. You are surrounded by nothing but brown, all year long. The grass never turns green. The trees... what trees? Those aren't a thing. Rain? Yeah, right. Cloud cover? Never met her. Cool weather? HAHAHAHAHAHA yeah that only happens in fairytales.

The desert is also home to the most formidable naysayer I have ever encountered. The church, the college professors, my extended family and multiple visits from the literal Angel Of Death combined could not do what this woman did: stop me from creating.

 

She stopped me from writing, from having opinions, from dancing, from choreographing, from talking, from thinking, from living. 

She dug me a grave and kicked me into it, then forcibly held me her hands on my throat till I lost consciousness. I have been trapped in that grave for five years. And I'm tired of wasting the breath of my one precious life being silenced by somebody who, by her own admission, knows nothing about me. For the past few months, I have been excavating the ruins of my life, trying to find the faith and courage that was once my sole focus. I'm starting to find the jagged shards and piece them together, like a cosmic jigsaw puzzle. If I can solve it, I'll find my soul again.

For my return back to the stage and the screen, I want to make two dance films: Desert Rose and Hope.

 

Hope has seen a test audience, who seemed to enjoy it. What's more, that means it's already memorised. My idea for that video is pretty simple... probably just a studio video, no fancy sets or costumes.

 

Desert Rose, however, is a lot more complicated.

 

I want to film it in the desert that tried to strangle me and God's purpose for me. I have deliberately curated a bright costume to stand out against the scat brown. Because like it or not, that's what I do. That's what I have always done. I do not and will not fit in. I do not and will not hamstring myself to impress somebody else's imaginary social circle.

Desert Rose has been 'in production' (read: sidelined by my fear of her violent, vindictive oppression) since the summer of 2022. That's over three years now. Every single year, when the weather finally cools enough to even consider being outdoors for any length of time, I look at all my plans for Desert Rose. I think about what it means and how much I want to dance again. I think about how long it's been since I did anything close to fulfilling my dream.

 

Yesterday I was watching a YouTube video about the importance of backing yourself. Most of the points the presenter made were very similar to things I said on this very blog, years ago, that this woman forced me to stop believing. One of the points was 'compare the consequences of doing the thing with the consequences of not doing the thing.'

 

I went to my oft-viewed Desert Rose planning document and wrote the following:

 

'What happens if I DON’T do this?

You will regret it. You already are. You will have no self-respect. You will be disappointed in yourself for not making a way, not trying harder... That $45 you spent on that pink bodysuit will be a waste. This will become just another brick on the road away from your dream. You will never have more time than you do now. 18-year-old you would be angry and disappointed to find out about the fearful pansy you’ve become. She would be so angry that you didn’t fulfill her dream. That you didn’t push through, didn’t follow God, that you have become what she hated and swore she’d never be. You will have crushed her dreams — the only thing she had to live for for so long. You only live once.

 

If you don’t do this, then none of her pain was worth it.'

 

I owe it to teen Kate to get back up, to put on the gloves, to train until I'm untouchable again.

 

I am about to face what I hope is the final boss: the two-headed hydra of the desert environment and the violent, manipulative woman who tried to bury me alive.

 

I will win. And I will win on their turf.