I know it looks like not a lot is happening here; my last update was in April of this year.
What can I say — life has been life-ing.
It’s a hot hot summer in New York. My family has been going through health challenges. A few weeks ago I got into a car accident on Highway 1 while visiting my parents in California which is the scariest thing that has happened to me in my adult life.
Overall I am fine, and clinically unimpressed by my own case: I sustained an acute nondisplaced fracture to the right-sided transverse process of my L2 vertebra, which means both that I broke my back and there’s nothing to do (other than physical therapy). I’m kind of still processing what happened and am having a lot of thoughts and feelings about it, but one unexpected and mostly positive outcome is that it’s been something of a reset that has helped me reprioritize and ignore some of the noise that I feel has been building up in my life. That is a pleasant surprise.
When I was lying in the trauma bay being worked up as a patient, it struck me (not unlike the car that crashed into ours1) that it was the first time in a long time, maybe that I could even remember, that I felt truly present. Honestly, it was just nice to have my phone taken away from me and to have nothing to focus on other than wondering if I was dying or not. (I wasn’t.) It’s both depressing and illuminating that it took a motor vehicle collision for me to feel present, but since then, I’ve noticed that it’s much easier for me to focus on one thing at a time which is something I didn’t fully realize I had been struggling with.
My midlife crisis / perimenopause / possibly-just-normal-aging also continues. Every time I have a random mood disturbance (e.g. one day I was awoken by loud birds outside the bedroom window and was irrationally irritated by it, even though intellectually I knew it shouldn’t have been a big deal) I get to play a fun game of “is this midlife crisis, perimenopause, normal aging, or any/all of the above?” The aforementioned reset from the accident has helped me deal with some of it a little more effectively, but it’s still there and is just becoming something I live with. I guess it just takes a lot more energy, effort, and intention just to keep this train moving and on the tracks in midlife.
I’ve been looking for books about perimenopause specifically since reading other people’s perspectives on something I’m going through usually helps, but it seems like all the menopause-related books have pink covers and are written by straight white women complaining about hot flashes and husbands (no shade2 but it’s just not really my experience or relatable for me). My friend Max recommended a Miranda July book which sounds promising and is on my list.
This past weekend was a long holiday weekend in the US and I didn’t accomplish much other than rest which was glorious. I’m also becoming more okay with doing nothing but relaxing, instead of trying to fill weekends and free time with social plans. My only intention/promise to myself was to chill and my only plan was to re-watch the movie 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later and then go to a movie theatre on the hottest afternoon day and watch 28 Years Later. I successfully completed the task which felt good.
For fun I also dug up an old .csv file that I keep on my computer containing all the content from my old website and found reviews I wrote for the first two films: the 28 Days Later one is dated 2003-07-19 with an addendum dated 2003-09-12 reviewing the alternate ending (presumably when the DVD was released), and the 28 Weeks Later one is dated 2007-08-31. I was going to share them here but honestly my writing was kind of embarrassing; I would have been 19 years old in 2003 and believe me, it shows, so it will just continue to stay hidden in that .csv file for now3.