Third Season: How’s That Working for You, Diane? (Part II)

Alright.

Dragon mode.

How’s it working to stop trying to let my wild wolf child win approval from the smart-cookie brain I inherited from my mother and grandparents — the brain that insists the only thing I control is how I experience life?

Because let’s be honest. I control very little else.

Today’s pre-getting-out-of-bed epiphanies:

Pay Rosie to teach me the practical mechanics of turning on and getting off on the whole system. Existential Kink is my latest fascination. Go EK.

Read the $5 online book I just bought called Untethered Empath. I don’t actually identify with the empath part. Just the untethered part. (From The Intuitive Forager. I love Ricky, my music teacher. He’s a forager too. Go foragers.)

Keep showing up at the watering holes that call to me — over and over — until they stop feeling foreign. Until someone recognizes me as a regular. Until belonging begins to feel less theoretical and more lived.

Listen to more Imogen Heap. She’s odd and innovative and makes me braver. Skip the children’s songs.

Buy a rubber ducky thermometer for cold plunging with Wild Water Dipping. Sing softly while acclimating to 37-degree mountain runoff. Maybe elementary school playground songs. Buy a giant towel poncho so I don’t have to get naked in a public park post-dip. (Yes, I just learned these exist.)

Show up tonight at open mic at the brewery. Drink non-alcoholic. Or one beer and one non-alcoholic. Or water. Just go. Bring the cards I printed — invitations to fascinating humans I want to know. Give out one card. That’s it.

Keep looking for one primary. One family-of-choice. One more village reciprocal — meaning someone I don’t have to manage. Mutual responsibility. Adult humans. Radical concept.

Lighten up.

Cry about how unsafe I feel right now.

Beautiful spring weather without my beloved partner of twenty-eight years — gone eight years now — still breaks my heart. Impermanence still stings. The absence of a primary bond still lands in the body.

Stop resisting contraction. Sorrow. Heavy. Dark. Uncomfortable.

This is a huge part of being human. I’m moving daily toward acceptance. Might as well join the human race in all its absurd joy and brutal tenderness. There was never a point in resisting. It just took me this long to evolve into that truth.

Is this how it’s working?

This is the best accounting I have today.

My goal for today:

Enjoy the juicy parts — the free ones and the paid ones — as fully as possible.

Priority number one: get my nervous system out of raw and over-activated and back into a workable window of tolerance.

Spell check wants to replace “ennervated” with “renovated.”

Honestly? I’ll take renovated.

Restore my beautiful wild child.

Let her hold hands with my wise elder.

Walk them both to the park of play.