I am *so* back (to talking about the same things again, over and over)

Before I begin: It’s slowly becoming clear to me that Substack is less of a personal blogging platform and more of a place for writers/creators to get exposure, possibly even earn an income.

So even though I’m starting to feel sheepish about moving my silly little personal blog here and carrying on as if I’m on LiveJournal or Tumblr or whatever, I’m also incredibly lazy, which means I’m unlikely to migrate anywhere else anytime soon.

Alright! On with the rambling!

I’ve written before about how our marriage is blessed by our shared embrace of change. We don’t want our partner to stay the same person we married. We want to witness and celebrate each others’ growth and expansion. We enjoy being surprised, like, oh! Who is this new person in front of me today?

Resistance to change hurts, physically and emotionally. We all resist sometimes. Unpleasant change throws you off balance, and it takes energy to adapt to new paradigms – but sometimes it takes even more energy to fight them.

Figuring out what to fight and what to accept takes work, but it’s worth the effort.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

Serenity Prayer

We start as a couple of cells, grow into complicated and chaotic mammals, and eventually disintegrate into dust. Existence itself is unrelenting change. Embracing it feels like the only way to stay sane.

There’s no real point to this. (I told you this would be a ramble.)

Confession: In December and January I started doomscrolling again.

We’re almost done settling into our new house, which means listing unwanted stuff on Facebook Marketplace, so I reluctantly downloaded Facebook’s iPhone app.

Facebook now has infinite scroll reels. It also has an algorithm that knows what I like, so: I’d see an interesting reel, tap it (I’ll just watch this one thing), and the next thing I knew it’d been 30 minutes and I was still swiping. Fuck!

Of all the platforms, I can’t believe it’s Facebook that sucked me back in. It’s cringe, I hate everything about it, and I hate admitting that it got me. But it felt exactly the same as any other doomscrolling video platform.

(Not-fun fact: the inventor of infinite scrolling feels really bad about what he did.)

I could feel what it was doing to my brain in realtime, and it felt like trash.

I’m faced with choices at the end of every workday: couch-and-doomscroll, watch a TV show, read a book, draw on my iPad, do a journal prompt, practice banjo, or just fucking sit quietly and look at birds or trees. I’m disgusted and embarrassed to announce that the last month or so has seen me choosing the Small Bad Screen more often than any of the other options.

Last week I started feeling especially gross about it, and couldn’t make any more excuses (I’m stressed, just let me have this one easy dopamine hit, blah blah blah). Even while I was doing other tasks, I’d have my phone open nearby, sound on, playing some random shit, instead of just mindfully leaning into the task at hand like I used to.

So now I’m noticing when I’m doing it, saying to myself “stop! one thing at a time!”, and putting it away. Thankfully, I’ve used this muscle before, so it’s not as hard as it was the first time I had to break the doomscrolling addition.

(We are so back, etc. etc.)

It might be because I’m back at work, but I’m navigating a resurgence of background grief around how different things could have been for us (humans) re: capitalism, wealth disparity, failed globalization (e.g. horribly inefficient distribution of resources), and so on.

I was really hoping for a Star Trek future, not an Idiocracy or Mad Max future.

Perhaps selfishly, I’m grateful that I don’t have to think about what kind of future my kids are inheriting. I can’t imagine living with that flavor of existential horror, unless I was, like, filthy rich and didn’t have to worry about it – but even then, I’d still worry about everyone else’s kids like I do now, so… I guess I’ll be worried no matter what.

Huge props to all the parents out there forging ahead like it’s all gonna be fine. I really hope it is, and I swear I’m trying not to make things worse.

Our previous home sat perched in the middle of flat farmland, swimming in endless sky.

Reduced light pollution and open volcanic plains made for peak stargazing at night, but the sky was my friend no matter what time it was. I’d walk outside and be presented with vast, open space – suddenly, acutely aware of how small I was. I was perpetually ruminating on incomprehensible distances and extraterrestrial concepts: clouds, stratospheres, satellites, stars, and galaxies.

Now, enveloped in dry Australian bushland, my world has condensed. I walk outside and I’m oppressed by nature; consumed with plants, birds, bugs, and mammals, close enough to touch. Blue is obscured by green and brown. I can go days without thinking about cloud formations because I’m too busy watching trees billowing in the breeze. Galaxies have been replaced by galahs.

Here, I feel like I’m part of an ecosystem, instead of alone in a vast universe.

Both ways of being are beautiful, but I sometimes miss the intimate relationship I had with our infinite, humbling sky.

I’m back at work, and the personal issues I’m dealing with continue to escalate. Balancing everything feels harder every day, but I’m grateful that both Jesse and I have gotten pretty good at prioritizing our physical health (and rest) in a way that allow us to show up for the people that need us the most right now.

I don’t have much else that I can say about any of that, except: I wish there were more hours in the day so that I could catch up and spend more time with friends, and reply to messages, emails. (If you’re waiting on a reply from me, I’m sorry. I’ll get there eventually.)

We’re blessed to have such wonderful people in our lives, but I wish I had the time and emotional energy to be a better, more present friend.

Okay, that’s enough rambling.

Here are a few more favorites from the recently developed roll of film. I didn’t expect to love the black and white so much, but I do, and now I want to shoot more of it.

If you’re reading this: sorry, thank you, and I love you.