The Goldenrod Chronicles, Healing Curve

I got a therapy dog.

Hi!
I did it. I made the switch. This note is being sent via Substack! Welcome to The (new & improved) Goldenrod Chronicles. We’ll see if I’ve had a panic attack between when I send this and when you read it. First - a question - how did this show up for you and were there any problems and is there anything I should know about?

About that therapy dog.

It’s true. I did get a therapy dog.

Therapy Pup

She doesn’t have a name yet, but I downloaded her from the internet and she lives in a file on my desktop and I (not kidding you at all) open her little face multiple times a day because looking at her tiny precious mug 110% lowers my cortisol levels immediately. Immediately. I am happy to share my therapy dog with you, please download her and look at her whenever you want. I also must have a lot of fingerprints on my screen because I pet her nose with the tip of my pointer finger regularly.

She is part of my healing.

As to the body healing -

As I first drafted this earlier today, things feel good. Real good. After the freak out last weekend with the tweak of pain, followed by a LOT of improvement - I feel like I am now in (what I have named) The Danger Zone. I call it this because things feel SO GOOD & HEALED and my hip feels like (granted, pre-surgery dysfunctional normal) when I am just sitting around that I am likely to overdo it or walk outside like everything is normal and then slip on the ice or get up too fast and bend it too much or _____________________. Maybe something like - it’s now easy to forget I am trying to heal. And when we forget we are trying to heal it’s so much easier to (accidentally or not) overdue it.

Also, now that it’s later in the day it turns out a regular visit to the tiny co-op is enough to send me back to the sofa with ice packs in the middle of making dinner (aka, unwrapping these delicious cheeses). Even though I was going very slow and being very deliberate and being very careful, it still felt ouchie upon arrival. This isn’t all bad, it just offers another chance to recognize and pause and accept (instead of pushing forward and through) and also ask for help. (In this case, asking M to chop the apple and salami and toast the bread and put out the cheese. Dinner is a loose term here now.) So, healing means way more than just fixing what surgery broke, but also re-learning how to be in my body and re-establishing boundaries (even with myself) and whatever you want to call adapting it all to work toward better and stronger foundation in the future. (P.S. My kick ass Godsister shared some SPOT-ON thoughts about this that I’ll share next time around.

The other part of healing is also about trust. Trusting that the ups and downs average out in the right direction (the healing direction). Trusting that each little ping and pull and pain is not all the little stitches inside my body coming undone, just readjusting. Believing that there will be improvement, but some times that might mean zooming out to look at the seven day average and not the right now (but let me tell you not-freaking-out about the right now is hard for me. HARD.)

As for my actual body -

All the stitches are out and the steri strips fallen off. The scars are healing well and (it’s so weird) there are places on my upper thigh where I don’t have feeling back yet. And I realize at no point (until they arrived) did I even think about (nonetheless worry about) the fact that I’d be adding three new big scars to my body with this fix. Maybe it’s because lately I am more focused with living in my body, or maybe it’s because it’s 2020 and I forget that people ever see my body (except the parts of my face that show on a tiny screen), or because that’s the upside of 40+ (fewer fucks given).

Wow, we made it! That’s it! I have successfully proven to myself that I can type words into many different white boxes on growing computer screens. Thanks for helping me break this one in. See you again soon.

vanessa

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Today’s List

• M had a new housemate, of the small, fuzzy, and mouse-variety and two nights ago I caught wriggle up under the basement door and into the kitchen and 1) it made me think of Brenna’s Kitchen Mice, 2) the mice living in the stove of my Boston apartment, and 3) LET THE GAMES BEGIN for basement clean-out and mouse wars in M’s basement. (Hey, I am just excited to have something to look forward to, even if it’s an epic battle to the death in a basement.)

• Yesterday’s note about Nikki Giovanni’s fried chicken reminded me of the last friend chicken I ate, at a small and not at all fancy hipster joint in New Orleans in March. I swear I walked four miles from my hotel, but it was delightful to sit at a small tall table and read and eat and be wary of this new disease which was just starting to cause an outbreak of infections in New Orleans just that day. I still can’t pinpoint when exactly on that trip I picked it up: airport, hotel, conference, restaurants, random people passing on the street? No matter, that was a good last week to have before a COVID-life - wandering the streets of a new-to-me-city and eating delicious local food every night and sleeping in a nice hotel and being a person in the world. Like, really, in the world. We’ll all get there again. (I guess that’s acceptable ‘one day’ thinking.

• What is in ‘edible glitter’ made of?

• Did you know, TinyLetter doesn’t do spell check for me? It would just underline the misspelled world, but I couldn’t auto-correct them. That was six years of really really seeing which words I don’t know how to spell. BUT NOW I CAN! (Not spell, I’m still a terrible speller, but now I can easily correct on Substack!)

• Anything I need to know after you read this?

• Anything you need to know? You can like (heart), share (arrow) and comment using the little icons below! I don’t know how it works, let’s figure it out together!

• A sweet thanks to S who sends the best encouragement, especially to my fear of not being able to write in a new white space. Let’s all consider that we’re flying:

  “Your practice is your practice wherever you take it, wherever you do it, in whichever white box sits under your fingers and in front of your face…Change is a leap and sometimes it feels like falling face-first but you also have to consider that you're flying.“