I want the rain to wash away the dirt and grime of my soul the way it washes the leaf in my garden. I want to stand and sway in the rain, letting the earth cleanse me of all that weighs me down, letting each drip drip drop fall away from me and puddle at my feet. Let my broken and dead branches be pruned in the wind, allowing the weight of those things I have held onto for too long be finally set down so that I might grow and bloom in new ways. I want to raise my arms to that gray stormy sky and be free. Free…

I can’t remember a time when I haven’t suffered from some form of depression and anxiety. I’ve always felt everything intensely. My highs are really high, and my lows are dangerously low. I love and give of myself intensely. I feel everything so intensely that sometimes my husband jokes that I have no feelings when we watch a sad movie and I’m not crying, because I’ve spent years trying to not be intense. Elementary school was rough. Middle school was even worse. High school is when the self-harm thoughts began. That stone wall I built into my personality was my attempt to cope and protect myself from the world. I’ve…

Apparently, it has been since 2019 that I’ve really and truly blogged. Oops. I don’t need to tell you that a lot has happened since 2019… we’ve all lived with the ‘rona and *waves hand* all of this. I did something super crazy during it all, I’ll admit. Maybe it was just the whole pandemic gave me a fresh perspective on what’s really important in my life, or maybe it was the burnout of working in public health as part of the response team combined with the constant turnover in my department (not to mention feeling completely unappreciated and certainly underpaid)… but I made a leap and opened my own…

This season I am working on slowing down. Simplifying. Buying less, baking less, and just – on the whole – putting far less pressure on myself to create the “perfect” holiday season. Most days I am ok with it. Other days, like today, I find myself jumping in and going overboard again. So far, today, I have baked a gingerbread house for decorating later, baked gingerbread cakelets, made birdseed ornaments for the birds for Solstice, and am currently working on baking through a batch of my great grandma’s chocolate chip cookies. I still have decorating of this gingerbread house to do, and some mint Oreos to dip in chocolate. This…

The semester is FINALLY over, which means I can now go back to a somewhat normal life for the holidays. I’m still awaiting the grade for my final project for the class, but I nailed my final exam with a 98/100 score, so I’m just going to put school out of my mind for a good while and take some time to get caught up on housework, my non-education-related reading, knitting, etc. I am… struggling with the holidays this season. I love the glitter and the lights and the cozy nights with family and friends and the food… and I have found myself outright hating the commercial aspect with gift-giving…

November is the pearl-grey month, the changeling between warm crimson October and cold white December, the month when the leaves fall in slow drifting whirls, and the shapes of the trees are revealed, when the earth imperceptibly wakes, and stretches her bare limbs and displays her stubborn unconquerable strength before she settles uneasily into winter. November is secret and silent. Alison Uttley Daylight savings today, and thus begins the slow decline into seasonal depression on top of my regular anxiety and depression. It’s somewhat hard to believe that November is already here – it feels like October was such a blur and, yet, dragged on. This was, in part, because…

Hey look, I finally finished a thing. It only sat for over a month simply needing the seed stitch on the sleeves. Took hardly any time at all, which I knew but just… kept putting off. Now to search for the perfect black skirt or dress to layer this over. Pattern is My Boy Lollipop, knit in Ritual Dyes Priestess in the Cancer zodiac colorway.