Ginger.

I meant to write about my experience with adopting my rescue “we have a border terrier at home” chihuahua/poodle/everything-mix Ginger back in September, but we both kept changing so much. I was honestly still learning about my new best friend, still am! Healing journeys for both animals and humans are nonlinear, and giving her the best opportunities to heal and reset her nervous system has had incredible payoff. I’ve been observing how she problem-solves, what her favorite foods are, what gets her hyped, and what makes her tremble with terror or decide to charge and bark her little head off. To be transparent as well, I had been avoiding my studio where I tend to write and paint, a stupid side-effect of dealing with severe professional burnout. However, I’ve been plucking at this newsletter every so often, finally making its way to your inbox.

Ginger was rescued from an animal-hoarding situation in Modesto, CA in late March 2024, and other than knowing there were about ten other dogs with her, I don’t know anything about her origins. The rescue guessed she was 2 years old originally, but informed me when we picked her up that when the vet put her under for her spay surgery, they removed some of her baby teeth. I didn’t think much of it at the time, and we brought her home mid-April. The cats were mostly unbothered by the new addition to the family. We did a DNA test to see what makes her up and look for possible genetic issues. Upon adopting, the rescue guessed mostly small terrier breeds, and I knew she had those huge Chihuahua ears. Hilariously, the only terrier marker she had was for pit bull. Supermutt indeed.

Growing up, my family always had both cats and dogs, and it’s taken having both again to remind me how complete that makes me feel. As I moved out of my spacious childhood home into tiny Bay Area apartments with roommates, I only had room for cats. I told my then-boyfriend-now-husband Schuyler that I would be having both in my future, and he could be fine with that, or leave. He started sublingual allergen therapy, and it was huge. Before if a dog licked him, he would break out in hives. He can now let a dog love on him and wash his hands, and be fine. It helped with the cats, too. Maybe my point is IF HE WANTED TO HE WOULD! Anyway, When we moved into our current home almost two years ago, we finally had a small yard, and I committed to fulfilling my dream of having both cats and a dog, Schuyler supporting me wholeheartedly.

The problem: I was severely depressed upon moving in summer 2023, and I could barely take care of myself when we moved here, despite the genuinely good changes moving brought with it. I let some time pass, started feeling better with therapy and medication, and I allowed myself to fall in love with a photo of a little ten pound mutt already named Ginger. She was described as “happy”, “dignified”, “quiet”, “friendly with all other dogs”, “likes cats”, “good for families”, “good with kids”. I thought, wow, perfect! I know she’s going to be terrified of the wind or something, but she sounds great. We went to meet her, and while she was a little nervous, I had already fallen in love with her electrocuted hyena aura.

Ginger bonded with me instantly. For contrast, it took months for her to warm up to Schuyler, and she still occasionally growls or barks at him if she thinks he’s looming too much (which…fair. He’s 6’2”, she’s 13” tall). We discovered that those baby teeth that came out meant that she was probably only seven or so months old when we adopted her, when we thought she was over two, at least. We changed her schedule to that of a puppy, and immediately had success. It turns out of the list of descriptors from above, the only thing true was that she likes cats, which indeed was my number one priority.

Her biggest roadblock: Ginger is terrified of strangers. This is especially true of people approaching her with an outstretched hand to sniff, normally a gesture of peace toward canines and felines alike. I suspect she was grabbed a lot, but obviously I have no crystal ball in which to peer into her past. As I mentioned about her being a puppy, we adopted her in the “critical fear period” timeline for adolescent dogs. She is terrified of large dogs on walks, as one of her first times walking on the street where we live, she was dominated by a large off-leash doodle-something, undoing the work from her previous foster owner. She jumps at loud noises (but not fireworks?) and has a strong sleep startle reflex, which breaks my heart every time as she yelps and looks around with wild eyes, heart beating furiously.

Her bark is in that terrible range of extremely loud and extremely shrill, though thankfully she only barks in short bursts. She has unfortunately learned that when a stranger approaches, barking can get them to back up because it’s so unexpected and disproportionate to her size. She is frustrated by the erratic movements of children. She has only recently been able to handle eye-contact from visitors at our house. She matches energy with the dogs she meets and has dog pals, but because so many dogs in my neighborhood are ill-trained or ill-managed by their humans (yeah, I’ll say it!), we generally try to avoid most other dogs, and that works for us just fine. She is medicated, which helps immensely. We call her twice-daily miniscule-dose of trazodone “vitamin T”, which makes us laugh, but we know it has made immense impact, getting her to relax enough to accept the slow socialization she desperately needs.

In the meantime as her threshold for stress has grown larger and larger, I have been working on training her to be as nonreactive to anyone or dog or thing as possible, which the command “leave it” is incredibly useful, meaning disengage, or ignore it, move on. An overbearing human trying to get her attention? “Leave it.” A friendly-reactive leash-puller labrador barking at her from across the street? “Leave it.” In most cases, it works exceptionally well, Ginger knowing that command means she’s safe to move on, hypervigilance unnecessary. Sometimes this isn’t enough to shield her from an outburst caused by a well-intentioned but dog-language clueless human.

I recently got a bright red sleeve for her leash that says “DO NOT PET”, a sign to avoid interacting with her too closely. She is generally ok standing next to someone while on a walk at an intersection or passing by, but as soon as someone bends down to greet her, she barks. While the sleeve has been mostly successful, it’s another demonstration on how little people actually read. I was told by two people on separate instances who were barked at that they “thought it was a service dog patch”. A service dog patch. Service dogs, famous for being at work where they should not be pet or distracted while providing a necessary service to their human, as essential as a wheelchair. While I am the service companion for my neurotic-ass dog, I am still amazed at this assumption that because they thought she was a service dog, she could be pet. For those unaware, the proper reaction to this assumption: No! Bad! Not only do people not read bright red signage, they make terrible assumptions. This is the state of literacy! These are the people sharing our roads! Anyway, I digress.

Turns out the key to improving your mental health is adopting a dog even more mentally-ill than you currently are!

We have done a lot together. When I adopted her, she wanted to immediately eat all of the grass in our unkempt late-winter garden and puke it up, so I was encouraged to start weeding and gardening. Living in the forgiving climate of Oakland means that I harvested my last tomatoes on the vine last month and am still getting peppers. I rediscovered how much I love getting my hands in the soil, remembering helping my mom as a kid, and how satisfying it is to eat something you have grown yourself. I also had an excuse to teach Ginger the “dig” command, and she helped me plant most of my garden last spring while discouraging digging elsewhere.

Going for daily walks is an obvious mood-improver. Inspired by something I saw online, I made an album of photos on my phone that is titled “Things I Only Saw Because I Went On A Walk”, and have attempted to take as many photos of Ginger next to flowers as possible. Not only this, Ginger is a fun dog, and loves to play. She lives for her ball, but will fetch and chase just about anything you throw, and she learns new tricks and commands easily. She loves hiking as much as snuggly days on the couch and lets us know vehemently when she is ready to be put to bed. She has gone beyond tolerating attention from my husband to absolutely loving him. She and my 4 year old cat Cricket like to roughhouse and recreate WWE together in our living room, sparing the 15 year old cat from Cricket’s unwanted wrestling, and they both love it. That being said, I am sure as unrecognizable to the trembling mess we brought home last spring to who she is now, she will be as unrecognizable three years from now. It all adds up slowly.

I’m not all better because of this dog, unfortunately. While she has brought endless joy and delight and much needed direction and discipline for myself, I still have moments of deep sadness and currently profound burnout. My medications are still working, but burnout is different than depression. I’m crawling out of it again, though. I have had moments like this in my life before, and I’ve gotten out, too. Bay-Made, while an incredible blessing, has been killing me in the current economy. Back in early December 2024 I truly believed I would close the store because I just couldn’t do it anymore, feeling like I’d rather pull out my fingernails than spend a single day more in the shop, the reality that I’ve been working mostly in customer service since I was twelve years old. This was difficult because Bay-Made wasn’t failing; I was. I could have closed—I thought I might do so by Valentine’s—but my love for community and having a place for art to thrive is more important. It was all going to be work, anyway, so I may as well do the most good. Also, what a big “fuck you” to all these giant businesses out there that don’t care about their customers, to this administration that would stifle creativity, queerness, and radical community love.

I’ve decided to change the business model from mostly wholesale to more of a collective/co-op model, so I can take a step or two back and be a participant, but not look to this being my main source of income, which has caused much personal stress. I have had to turn down work that I would have loved to do because I couldn’t take weeks off at the shop to work a full-time contract, the shop coverage being too demanding. I haven’t had a regular Saturday off since 2014, and the winter holidays are my personal hell: balancing a business whose bread-and-butter is made in the last three weeks of the year and family that lives out of state. I let myself make the decision that something had to change, and that it was delusional to think I could get different results doing the same things.

I’m looking forward to this new chapter, new opportunities. I have been stuck in limbo for months, and finally feel progress moving forward, a strange juxtaposition to what is happening in the world around us. I believe the collective and community are the only way which we can survive this administration with health and clarity.

My little wiry dog has helped me feel more…me than I have in years. More decisive. Driven. She was the jumpstart to this chapter of life that I needed so desperately after recovering from the traumas and what-could-have-beens leftover from March of 2020 and the early moments of the COVID-19 pandemic. I am more in the moment, I have better boundaries, a better sleep regimen and daily schedule, and the delight of a lifetime companion by my side. Thanks, Ginger.

I had written this back in December, but as this newsletter took me a little longer than most, here it is now. I read a total of 79 books in 2024, most of which I thoroughly enjoyed! Here are my favorites and a little bit about them:

1. A Darker Shade of Magic by VE Schwab - with parallel worlds that all share the city of London, swashbucklers, well-fleshed characters, and magic-as-contraband, I adored this series and positively ripped through all three books.

2. The City of Brass by SA Chakraborty - Palace intrigue! Family grudges lasting millennia! Hospital drama! Charming and deadly djinn! Loved this trilogy and its Islamic and Arabic influences.

3. Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller - I have loved Greek myths since I was a child. I knew what happens in the famous tragic-love myth about Achilles and Patroclus before reading this book, and it still made me cry at the ending. Her other book Circe was a top contender for this list, as well. Really tied in nicely with the visuals I imagined that were influenced by the game Hades, one of my favorite games.

4. Fairy Tale by Stephen King - Hadn’t read a Stephen King book in over a decade, and I loved this one. A slow build involving a young man’s friendship with an ailing older man and his elderly German shepherd named Radar, that descends into eldritch horror, prison breaks, and several Wizard of Oz nods in order to keep the old man’s secrets and save a hidden world. I read this the week I adopted Ginger and it made me love dogs and the people who understand them even more.

5. The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune - This book! It was an absolute delight. Unusual children ✅ queer yearning ✅ beautiful setting ✅ rejection of corporate ideals and standing up for those that need it ✅ the antichrist, a boy named Lucifer, Lucy for short ✅ “Don’t you wish you were here?”

6. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern - I have been recommended this novel for two decades, and finally got around to it when it was available at my local library. This book is an absolute vibe. Reminds me a bit of The Prestige, and I love how the mystery of the circus is slowly unwound as the stakes raise higher.

7. Babel by RF Kuang - Oh this book. A critique of colonialism and control via languages and in an alternate-Oxford fantasy world where silver can be imbued with the magic of translation and is largely responsible for the success of the British Empire, it asks uncomfortable questions as to what a revolution looks like.

8. A Sorceress Comes to Call by T Kingfisher - a murder mystery, a demon horse, Pride and Prejudice could be happening next door, salt, water, ghosts, and wine: A+ book. Ursula Vernon is my newest favorite author, her writing reminding me of the sometimes absurdism tempered by deep understanding of human nature that Terry Pratchett did so well.

9. Wind and Truth by Brandon Sanderson - Released in early December, this is the highly anticipated fifth and final book in the first arc of a ten book series…wooooooof. I loved it. A great ending to the first five, and leaves me looking forward to the next five. I had to read all 1300+ pages a bit slower than I like to (ha) because I was at my busiest before the holidays and most burnt out, but I loved it and slammed through the last quarter of the book on Christmas day, finally relaxing at home after holiday retail madness. I’m even more excited about BrandoSando’s other projects with the implications from this book. Nerd alert 🔔

10. Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett - My last book of 2024, I started and finished this on New Year’s Eve whenI couldn’t put it down. I love true-to-myth fairy tales, and this hit the notes perfectly of weird little guys, ethereal tricksters, ancient evils, changelings, time dilation, and more as written in the notes and journal of Cambridge professor of Dryadology Dr. Emily Wilde, PhD.

• During my burnout, I’ve been playing a lot of both Skyrim and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I finally have the reflexes and stress-inoculation where I can actually play adventurous video games without feeling like I am terrified of every battle interaction, and have been enjoying both so much. They are both sort of similar open-world games though: so much so that I threw myself off a mountain in Skyrim, forgetting that I do not have Link’s hang-glider. I promptly died.

• I am hoping to continue to migrate off of the Meta apps, so I have joined bluesky and would love to see you over there, too. So far the only thing really keeping me on Meta are the neighborhood Buy Nothing and similar good neighbor groups that exist there. Ok and also a few shaming groups, ha.

• I recently watched The Wizard of Oz properly for the first time since I was a kid (and without cannabis and Pink Floyd), and genuinely enjoyed it! I kept comparing Toto to Ginger. I’d fight a witch for her, too, though Ginger does like cats more than Dorothy’s pup. Immediately after, we watched the 2005 made-for-TV The Muppet’s Wizard of Oz, starring Ashanti. I can’t say I recommend it, haha. Just go watch Muppet Treasure Island again, if you want a great Muppet’s movie. Back to the original 1939 film, Technicolor was an incredible advancement for art and film and has such a legacy, so I was hurt to hear about Technicolor itself closing down, leaving thousands of VFX artists and animators without work around the world.

• For those of you unaware, I love space and astronomy, and hard science. So much. I also have a woowoo-ghost-and-astrology-loving ass that knows we can’t know everything and can’t help but make comparisons with how I have been feeling to Mars finally stationing direct in Cancer, my 10th house, my house of career and public-facing roles. My drive and progress literally stalling when it comes to my workplace. In the real-time sky, I can look up and see Mars seemingly oozing through the stars, making angles with stars Castor and Pollux for months, its apparent retrograde cycle making its usual 6-week or so journey through each sign along the ecliptic instead take far longer as its orbit apparently wobbles as we spin along with it.

• Yes, I love ghosts. My family has always loved the creepy and unknown, gathering together to watch The X-Files every Sunday night, reading Stephen King novels, Halloween being a favorite holiday, and many of us having had at least one unexplainable something happen to us. I have had a few, but one has inspired a recent idea for a story about a little ghost cat, and how even the incorporeal can make huge waves.

To conclude, I want to say thank you for subscribing, reading, skimming, whatever. I appreciate you!

-Sarahjane