This is my winter swan song
It. Must. End.
I’m over winter. I’m over winter in a profound, really-need-to-see-the-snow-melt-to-feel-alive-again kind of way. These days I open the weather app more often than I open Instagram.
Speaking of Instagram, I haven’t been on there as much these past months. It has nothing to do with me taking a social media break for my *mental health* and everything to do with starting a full-time desk job in January. It’s 100% the new job’s fault. And that’s okay of course, because instead of mindless evening scrolling and short-lived dopamine hits, I’ve been going to bed at 8:30 PM and reading books by candlelight. It’s all I’ve been able to manage. I’ve barely been able to write. All my energy has been allocated to adapting to working mom life after being home for years.
The job has been going well. I like making money.
Do you know who dislikes my new job?
My body. It hates the new routine. I never realized how physically active being a stay-at-home parent was. Let me break down for you all the ways my body has reacted since our monumental life change:
Week 1: Intense headaches and jaw clenching.
Week 2: A shoulder blade spasm that woke me up in the middle of the night and prevented me from sleeping well several nights in a row.
Week 3: I came down with a cold. Probably from inhaling someone’s infected droplets in the crowded metro.
Week 4: Woke up with a thumping headache, face and body pain. Thought I was having anxiety. Decided I was a weak woman who couldn’t work a full-time desk job. Took a Tylenol. It did nothing. Went to work, couldn’t focus. My body pain kept me from sitting, that’s how uncomfortable I was. My hips were killing me. Left work early. Took my temperature when I got home. Ah. This is what a fever feels like. I’d forgotten. Spent the rest of the week in bed with influenza.
Week 5: Weak and exhausted. Stared blankly at my computer screen all week.
Week 6: Guess who came back? Shoulder blade spasm!
Week 7: That turned into trap, neck and pec spasms.
Week 8: A tickle in my nose woke me up on Wednesday, 4:45 AM. I’ve been sneezing since. Could it be? Could it really be? Spring allergies????
The new job has been rough on my immune and musculoskeletal systems. Plus, I started work in the middle of winter, which isn’t an easy feat (we had the biggest snowstorm in a century a couple of weeks ago, i.e. 74 cm of snow). And that’s why I really, really want spring to spring. I miss chirping birds and tulips. I miss puddles. My jean jacket. My platform sneakers. Feeling like anything is possible because I survived the darkest season of the year.
Speaking of dark seasons, it was around this time last year that I reconnected with poetry. I was feeling lost and unmotivated by my writing projects at the time, and an evening of collage crafts with my kid turned into harvesting words from magazines and making collage poems. The collage poems turned into starting a Word document and typing down poems every other day. That document is now almost 100 pages long. It has everything: bad poems, extremely bad poems, fun poems, embarrassing poems, experimental poems and poems that I love.
I want to put a little poetry collection together. I have no clue how to do that or how long it will take. I don’t have the bandwidth to work on that now, but I want to make it happen in the next year. Spring energy will give me a little boost and help me figure things out. I’ll keep you posted.
Come on spring, do your thing. Please?
Poet gets headache and writes about it
Ah...Michelle...je comprends et je sympathise avec tout ce que tu écris. Je souhaite que "ton" printemps se pointe le plus tôt possible.
Quant à moi, (et inversement), les hauts et les bas du mercure mais surtout la fluctuation de la pression atmosphérique et la lumière éclatante du soleil de février et de mars me donnent des maux de tête. Les migraines de fin d'hiver sont une réelle menace pour moi ! Malgré l'accumulation de neige, je suis heureuse qu'il n'y ait pas eu de pluie verglaçante--encore.
Bon courage ma belle. Je suis sûre que ton corps va finir par s'adapter aux grands changements dans ta vie. Le temps fait bien les choses...et, le printemps approche ! (Des encouragements venant d'une adepte de l'hiver et de la neige, comme tu sais !)
Merci pour ton beau poème ma belle.
I deal with the shoulder blade issue regularly to the point that I wish I could pop it out of the socket and pop it back in. Very Mel Gibsonesque in Lethal Weapon 😆