Heat, Bridgerton, and putting myself in time out with myself

warm smoky vibes in my cabin

My phone thinks I have sleep apnea. I get constant instagram adds for at-home apnea tests, treatments, cpap machines you can take backpacking! We may not have healthcare, but we do have this. Our omniscient tech overlords creep ever closer. I do have this reoccurring dream where I’m choking. Is my phone listening to my breathing at night? But I put it in airplane mode? If it turns out that I do have sleep apnea and my phone knew it first, I swear to god…

The mosquitos are gone already, mysteriously. I returned from the Brooks Range to a heat wave in Fairbanks- it was like 88 F one day! I love summers in the interior, this (relatively) flat land between the Alaska range and the Brooks range. So great to get warm all the way down to my bones, to have a proper break from the cold before it sinks its teeth back in. Nights were warm in the sleeping loft in my cabin, I trained two separate fans on the bed and made myself a mason jar of iced sleepytime, slept fitfully, no blankets, my dogs a little ways away, too hot to cuddle. I woke too early, groggy, tearing my dreams away like cobwebs, my skin irritated from sleeping naked in sheets that always have dog hair (even though I do wash them). Then the rain came, brought the temperature down and washed the smoke from the sky, and my sleep improved. There is some almost-dark now, at 3 a.m. when my elder chihuahua sometimes wakes me when she needs to take a surprise middle-of-the-night shit, and I stand on the porch in this encroaching dim, feeling spooked by the shadows in the spruce woods until she finishes her business and trots happily back inside. I always feel spooked by the dark when it first returns, until I get used to it again, and it becomes cozy.

I’ve been talking with line editors and book interior formatters on Reedsy, trying to find the perfect fit for my novel. There are some truly wonderful professionals on that platform. I rented the house for my February Arizona trips, and the minivan. (Just a few spots left, if you’re interested.) I like to get a minivan that has seats that fold all the way flat, so that I can spend a few days sleeping in it before my trips, watching the sun set pink over the rocky desert, no sound but the wind whipping the creosote. It continues to be strange to me that I own a guiding business now. How did this happen? It’s a microscopic business- I am the only guide, and I have no intention of scaling, want to keep it part time, want it always to be fun, never stressful- but still. Life is full of weird and wonderful surprises.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with my dogs, and getting immersed in sewing projects. I bought a bag I liked online just so I could try and make a pattern from it and copy it- at first I tried just tracing the bag, and the bag I ended up making was cute, but the proportions are off- now I’m thinking about deconstructing the original bag and using its pieces to make a more exact pattern- that feels like destroying it, but by the time you buy a PDF pattern and print it you end up paying nearly as much, so maybe it’s worth it? And having an accurate pattern would be really cool. Nothing soothes my brain more than sewing for hours while a good audiobook plays and my chihuahuas snooze happily on the couch. I listened to What My Bones Know this way, over the course of two days. It’s the best book I’ve ever read on childhood trauma. Devastating, but I appreciate, more than I can say, the hopeful way the author ends the book. I have a feeling the author knows how important that is, to give people hope. And how rare. I imagine that’s why she did it. Even if it’s total bullshit. Even if we never heal from trauma brain, if this pain returns, again and again, until we die. Go ahead, blow smoke up my ass. It makes being alive more bearable.

I’ve been spending a lot of time alone. Not in a depressed, self-isolating way, but in a determined way- who was that artist that sat at a table and you could sit at the table across from her, and she would just stare at you? I am the artist and I am also the other person, and we are sitting at opposite ends of the table, staring at each other. I have put myself in time out with myself. It is time I resolved, once and for all, these conflicts that I have with my own being, this intolerance I have for myself, my inability to accept myself the way that I am. I am like two siblings who torment each other mercilessly, and I am also their parent. I have tied the siblings’ wrists together and now they must do everything, yoked in this way, until they stop bickering. I talk to myself like the parent, with patience. When I am frustrated I say what I am feeling, to myself, like the siblings. It is sometimes uncomfortable but it is not unpleasant.

I’ve been watching Bridgerton- the first season was pretty good, although I didn’t believe the chemistry. The second season was incredible, and tricked me into thinking I wanted to be in a relationship again. The third season, so far, is boring, and makes me once again happy to be single. Although I am starting to feel like one day I might be in a relationship again- I don’t know when, or how, or what it will look like. And when it happens it’ll feel different than all of my other relationships. Even when I was dating someone wonderful, my romantic relationships have always been fraught- either I was incapable of receiving love, recoiling and pushing away when people tried to connect with me, or I was chasing after people who don’t want me at all- the safer option, because I knew that no matter how hard I tried, nothing would ever come of it. The roller coaster of all of that was exhausting, and left a bitter taste in my mouth in regards to romance. What even is the point! Life as a single person is so calm and peaceful, my mental health is so much better. There are moments when I feel sad about it but these are only moments, vs. the 24/7 torment of being in a relationship. And yet, I am on some weird healing journey (as many of us are), so who knows what the future holds. Global collapse? Climate catastrophe? Romance?!

The dark is just barely creeping back now, in late July, but soon it will unhinge its jaw and swallow the day whole, and sparkly winter will return. Winter, the stable season in Alaska, the one that goes on and on. I love winter but winter is long, and I need to break it up- so in addition to my February trips I just organized, on impulse, one!! intermediate guided backpacking trip in Utah in October. Two nights at a rental house in Escalante, five days/four nights backpacking. There are only five spots! We’ll hike through canyons, sandy washes, across creeks and slickrock. About 10 miles/day, lots of chances to practice cross-country navigation. For women, trans and non-binary people. Details and the link to apply are here! I loved the trips I did in southern Utah in April, and I’m excited to go back in fall, when the aspen trees are flame-yellow, the days still warm but the nights cool.

this could be us

That’s all for now,

Carrot