Some Life Updates
Subscriber bonus post: It's all about transition
These last few months have been all about transition for me. First, the good transitions: Not only was my gorgeous new grandbaby born in November, but my younger kiddo is in his senior year of high school and getting ready to leave for college (which is great for him even if I may cry for a few years).
This has also been a time of professional transition. Speaking work has dried up for most of us who do equity work, and Black women have been largely erased from media which has had a serious impact on how much attention is drawn to the work we do. It has had a serious impact on our family’s finances. So I’m in a new space in my work life - or, to be more accurate, I’m back in an old space in my work life. I’m starting a lot of things over.
On top of all that, I’ve been experiencing an increase in health issues that have had a major impact on my day-to-day quality of life.
And then also there’s the world. I feel like I don’t need to elaborate on that one.
It’s been a lot.
And honestly, for the last year or so, I’ve felt like I was drowning in it all, and spent a lot of time trying to keep my head above water. After what has felt like forever, I feel like my survival instincts are finally kicking in. I know I can get through this, and now I just have to do it. So I’ve made accepting and adjusting to these life transitions, and perhaps even finding a way to thrive within them, my full-time job.
In the words of the great Marshawn Lynch, I’ve been working hard to take care of my mentals, my body and my chicken.
So I thought I’d make a couple little posts talking about some of the changes I’ve been making, and how they’ve been going so far.
Today, let’s talk about the biggie: Health.
This is a big one and I’ve made it a priority, because everything else becomes much more difficult without addressing this one first. I have HeDS, which for a lot of my life was mostly just annoying in ways I couldn’t describe. Why are my knees always kinda backwards? No idea. Doesn’t everybody get dizzy every time they bend over? You mean your fingers aren’t double-jointed? I mean, I’m just a little “injury-prone.”
But when I entered perimenopause, shit went off the rails. Absolutely everything started hurting all the time. Then, what I thought was frozen shoulder turned into a spontaneous rotator cuff tear that has made most regular arm movements very painful for the last 2 years or so.
I was already struggling to sleep with the perimenopause and the pain made it even worse. Add chronic anemia and, well, I was basically a zombie. Everything felt very overwhelming and insurance felt too expensive when finances were already tight, so I decided to just ignore it all and keep trying to work like nothing was wrong. The problem got worse and worse until one day I was sitting at my vanity trying to put moisturizer on my face my partner walked in the room to find me staring at my reflection in tears because the thought of raising my arms to my face just seemed like to damn much.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“No,” I said, and that was honestly the first time I realized that I wasn’t okay and that I needed to do something about it.
