'That girl is poi-son....'

...and a few 'soapy' confessions

Photo: Mick Haupt on Unsplash

So I started a Substack, promoted it, encouraged you subscribe, and hey while you’re at it, why not support me by becoming a paid subscriber?

Graciously, generously, several of you did. It felt amazing. Such votes of support!

And then I fell in a deep hole and couldn’t get out.

(Not really.)

(But kind of.)

I stopped writing.

I’m sorry.

(And worse, I didn’t get on Substack to figure out that I could PAUSE paid subs while I wasn’t posting regularly. I just now learned that’s a thing.)

But: back to that hole I fell into.

Related, But Not (But Also: Kind of Related)

I’ve thinking about how funny it would be if I sent out an honest Christmas letter. What if instead of going over the happier highlights of my year (of which there were plenty!), I let everyone in on my current state?

I could start off with how I drove home from work last night—in the complete darkness—wearing my prescription SUNglasses, because I can’t find my backup pair of eyeglasses.

And why would I need a backup pair, you ask?

Well, my current pair is currently at Target sitting on a shelf somewhere in the back of the eye-care section. I took them in over a month ago to ask that the broken-off side piece be screwed back on. But when I’d opened the case, where was the side piece? I told the assistant that I’d “just run out to my car and be right back with it”… And have never been back.)

Also, that “good” pair currently in hock at Target is the second prescription pair I had to pay for this year, because I ran over the first pair with my car.

broken eyeglasses AI image

In a recent Zoom that I’d set up to attend, I discovered that I had the timezone set to “American Samoa.”

And recently I got so behind on laundry, I had to break into my suitcase in the closet for the “emergency” pair of underwear. Keeping a pair in there is a neat trick I’ve learned to do because I always inevitably forget something important whenever I travel. Last year, at Christmas—with the plan of staying a week with my family—I arrived without the suitcase.

I never used to be like this.

Or, okay, I’ve actually always been a little like this.

But this year I took on a new professional venture that has turned out to be fast-paced and demanding. As such, I’m fairly rattled from the minute I start the day to the time I arrive home in the evening—at which point I’m often so depleted, I find myself flopping down, eating garbage for “supper,” then passing out in a carbohydrate coma until I’m rousted out by the alarm to do it all again the next day.

And that’s on top of a really fun physiological change going on! One that has made me go from being “a little bit” “that way” to “totally and utterly that way, at all times.”

And you know what’s really sad and awful to realize, let alone admit?

It’s that when I was young and I’d hear about women going through “the change,” or just being stressed), I thought they were having a hard time as they faced menopause because they were sad they could no longer have babies.

Oh.

My.

God!!

I! actually! Thought ! That!

Wtf.

I had no idea there was such a thing as brain fog—or other nice euphemisms for the fact that something related to your reproductive organs impacts your freaking cognition!

And of course, I didn’t know or understand that women’s bodies haven’t been researched—and that even female doctors (in modern times!) discourage women from considering hormone replacement theory. If you see any of mention of meno symptoms in the media, the only “real” one of concern seems to be belly fat.

Anyway. I’ve been a’strugglin!

….aaaaand I shit you not, two minutes after typing that last line above, I had to call the Poison Control Center for the first time in my entire life, because—as I’d been trying to hastily eat and clean up my work lunch all at the same time—I accidentally licked a spoon that I’d just a moment before squirted with a dollop of dish soap.

While I also happened to be having an unrelated nosebleed.

(I’m ok—and all I ended up having to do was gargle. But I literally washed my own mouth out with soap.)

That’s my deal!

Happy holidays!

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