Be a goldfish.
on seeing the good in a hard week, still laughing.
Well! This week included:
a small, pointy elbow thwacking into my eyeball at 5:30 am
a 2-hour trip to a new urgent care near our apartment, in the late afternoon
a Lyft ride to downtown to Seattle for an ER visit
a Lyft ride back to West Seattle after an ER visit
an emergency ophthalmologist appointment in a new doctor’s office
a more manageable diagnosis than retinal detachment: vitreous detachment
a vicious headache on the left-side of my head since Tuesday morning + the distinctly unpleasant sensation of being able to feel the outline of my entire eyeball in pain
flashes of lightning-bolt light across my field of vision at random times
3 enormous black floaters blocking 1/4 of my vision in my left eyeball, which make me think I see either one of our dark grey cats scattering to my left or a flock of birds flying to the left of my nose or a giant black knotted Christmas-tree light strand, without any colorful bulbs.
3 rotten nights of not-enough sleep whenever my body involuntarily turns onto my left side, which is how I normally sleep, but my eyeball pain makes that impossible
2 dysregulated kids, since this holiday season is always too much for neurospicy kids + they’re worried about me + it’s the darkest time of the year + not one of us actually wants to get out of bed at 6 am to make it to work and school on time
an unexpected evening after watching an episode of Nailed It, Holiday Edition, watching the lights in the house surge down brown, then bright, and then listening to a giant smash crash boom near our apartment, then everything plunging into darkness. The power was out for 5000 people in West Seattle, it turns out, and it didn’t come back on until nearly 5 am this morning.
Did this help with the rotten night’s sleep, the dysregulated kids, the flashes and floaters, and the exhaustion? No, it did not.
Is this a post complaining about all of this? No, it is not.
Why not?
Life happens.
And, after spending the last nearly a decade writing my stories, mindfully, 15 minutes at a time, every day, I have come to drop the way I used to hang onto the hard stuff and prize the good that emerges from the hard.
Because there is always good stuff.
All of the above also yielded this:
We found a great new urgent care that takes everyone’s insurance and has a hot chocolate and coffee machine for free.
When we lived on an a rural island off Seattle, each of these visits would have taken a full day. Now, we drive somewhere close.
We found a good ER that was clean, sparsely populated, and filled with deeply caring people.
I had an incredible conversation on the way to the ER with a lovely man who grew up in the Punjab region of India. He told me about how he once drove a semi-truck across the country, with his wife, and he has been in 20 states in America. “Seattle is the kindest place out of all of them.” He told me that his favorite restaurants that taste like home are in Kent and Renton, which are suburb-cities south of Seattle filled with recent immigrants. But his favorite in downtown Seattle is Dawaat Grill and Bar, which I’ll be trying next week. We talked about the books we love. At first, he called himself lazy, since he doesn’t always remember to order the book he wants, until he has remembered and then forgotten 20 times. (Hello, ADHD.) I told him about a book I loved called Laziness Does Not Exist by Dr. Devon Price. It repositions the notion of laziness within the context of the false gods of productivity and work as worth in this world. And it also takes into account how different kinds of brains process and work in their own time. I could tell he was moved.
I had an incredible conversation on the way back from the ER with a young man from Taiwan, who picked me up in a meticulously kept white Tesla. Over the course of me asking him about his story, he told me that he moved to Seattle to study with a master Buddhist teacher from Taiwan. When I told him I am Buddhist as well, he seemed amazed. “I have not met an American white person who is Buddhist.” We shared a deep, special conversation, without interruption, about our mindfulness practices. I told him that we have made a dozen handwritten signs to put around the house, with our family’s 3 values: “Calm kindness connection.” He stopped talking for a moment, then said, “But those are the core values.” Yes, I told him. “Your children are lucky to have you,” he told me. I feel so lucky to know them, and to have that conversation.
The floaters and flashes will dissipate. They won’t disappear. Over the next 2 months, my brain will adjust and I will no longer notice them. Once again, the human brain AMAZES me.
Hey, I finally know how to spell ophthalmologist!
And I needed a new ophthalmologist, since I haven’t had a new pair of my gas-permeable contacts since before COVID. A few months from now, when my eyesight is settled, I can finally cross that off the list.
Looking at the computer is causing me so much eye strain and that lousy headache that I’ve realized I need to take the rest of 2024 off from Zooms and workshops and spending more than 15 minutes at a time on the computer. (This has taken me 4 15-minute sessions to write.) I will be sending a piece to paid subscribers on Sunday, another one to all of you next Wednesday, and the last piece of the year to paid subscribers on December 22nd. And then I’m taking the rest of 2024 off.
While that scares me a bit, it also reminds me that laziness does not exist. And after this difficult, sometimes terrifying, confusing, and starting-to-calm year of our life, I am actually taking the last 2 weeks of the year completely off from work. For the first time.
But I’m still writing, by hand, in my big blue sketchbook, every day. I never skip this now. This is how I have slowly, over time, learned to reimagine the story I told myself from 7 to 49 years old. This is how I have come to trust myself, to believe in myself, and to know that — no matter what happens — there’s always going to be a rainbow hanging over my head.
I made a little video about this for Instagram, where I’m showing up with a 90-second video every morning. That’s where I’m sharing the stories of who I am now. I want to model this for you.
Women who have hit perimenopause and beyond, and have ADHD — or maybe just felt like you couldn’t believe in yourself because you felt different from other women around you — I would love to guide you to reimagine your story.
Let’s begin in 2025.
With warmth and joy,
Shauna
you are remarkable