I am done with my Christmas shopping. Gifts for family were wrapped and left with them in Portland after Thanksgiving.
This is not like me. I’m not, in this or any other universe, that organized… in a normal year. I don’t wait until the last minute, but I generally don’t get everything sent away until around mid-December.
This bout of organization has nothing to do with planning or goal setting, though. I simply do not have the bandwidth to manage chaos at the moment, and so I shopped early because my goal for the end of this year is not to create avoidable chaos. (I’ll have to leave space for the unavoidable… nothing I can do about that.)
2022 has been hard… after a couple of hard years. I had a six week long non-Covid respiratory situation that required a ton of meds to mitigate (some of which made things worse), lots of volunteering at the OLC (then less, then more, and now less), some drawing classes and the master naturalist course, applying to grad school. The hardest bit — that lasted almost the whole year: our sweet elderly dog Lilo got really sick in mid-January, and early February, and early April, then struggled with progressive disease — with attending vet and vet tech appointments — until she passed in early October.
I am not generally a high energy person. Over several years, I’ve learned that I’ve never really had the capacity to manage being busy all the time — even in the best of times. But I have always been able to push through, far beyond my limits, until I get sick or burn out. Whether my chronic health conditions (thankfully manageable with medication) are a result of a lifetime of cycling like that or not, that way of living is no longer on the table for me.
Something has to give.
This month, I’m doing what my brother calls “turtling.” I’m curling up in my house, taking it easy (shoveling snow as necessary), volunteering a little bit, drawing and painting and cooking… and taking care.
Carmen Yount 