And Five More Years Make Ten

(See the post from five years ago for context/backstory.)

In some ways it feels like a lot has changed in the last five years (they have indeed been…a lot…and the plot twists keep coming), and in others it feels like hardly anything has. I’ve been feeling pretty burned out for a while, on top of everything else, and honestly a lot of the feelings are the same, so I don’t have as much to say this time, but these milestones make me feel reflective so I still wrote down some thoughts and updates…

The world is a mess, to put it far too lightly, and it weighs heavy on my heart. COVID, so new five years ago, is still here, still hurting people, but most folks have moved on, and those of us still trying to avoid catching and spreading it have largely been left to fend for ourselves. This weighs on me, too. I continue to have a body that feels so different from the one I had for so much of my life, but after ten years it is pretty familiar. I’m still working on managing POTS, but that wasn’t the whole story, and I have since added vestibular migraine as another piece of the puzzle of understanding this body. (Did you know migraine can be weird and cause symptoms between attacks and not hurt and still be really unpleasant?) Like POTS, it is something that I actually might have shown signs of long before the disabling symptoms began, and also like POTS it has responded well in some ways to treatment while still being a struggle. I’ve tried various medications, and have some that are definitely helpful even if not miraculous, and I continue to try to balance the search for answers with piecing a life together with what I have now. And that life is a bit different than it was five years ago.

Beyond the physical, lots of therapy and introspection and conversations and breakdowns from stressors and traumas, ranging in scale from interpersonal to global, have cracked and peeled back layers of myself (or who I thought was “myself”) and revealed previously unknown or forgotten pieces of who I am underneath it all. Remember how I learned a while ago that my hair that I always thought was straight actually isn’t? Well, as it turns out, neither am I! “Some flavor of queer” is more or less where I’ve landed for now, and I am also increasingly suspecting I am some flavor(s) of neurodivergent. (TBD. Maybe. It’s complicated.) I’m rediscovering and reconnecting with past interests, like math and science (any other Ologies fans?), exploring my sense of style and wearing lots of skirts and dresses, and enjoying a newer interest in dragons (especially cute ones), going ahead and embracing the parts that feel a bit childlike. I don’t know how much of this self-discovery is a result of my now ten years of disabling symptoms and the loss of so much of what I thought made me who I was, and/or if this is simply what it is to be in your thirties, and maybe these were always waiting for me here.