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I am currently writing from a small Air BnB apartment¹ we are renting in Langley, BC until we have the keys to our new home (tomorrow, April 3rd!). This is a one-bedroom, we are four people plus a dog. Let me tell you: this is an everyday challenge to stay sane. And to study/attend my college Zoom classes while my husband is having meeting after meeting in the same room. We are both still working in Montreal’s timezone. It means we get up almost every morning around 5 am. Days seem to last longer than they actually do.

I am however very grateful to be back in British Columbia. For years now, I have been pondering the notion of “home”. I’ve always had this deep gut sense of being inadequate everywhere I have lived. But this is a story for another day.

Exhaustion is real…

Last year, I decided to finally take the plunge and I found a great therapist. I uncovered a lot about myself during these 9 months. I don’t regret it, even though facing some stuff I probably would have been okay with keeping buried. Our main goal was to work on my anxiety, finding its root to find the best coping mechanism-s possible for me. She then advised me to take one day at a time, one breath at a time and to “just survive today, tomorrow is not there yet“. So this is where I am right now, surviving one day at a time; accepting that nothing can/has to be perfect (at least not on the first try anyway).
My body and my soul are exhausted but I keep moving.

I have a series of questions due tomorrow regarding the movie Kinsey, by Bill Condon. This is for my philosophy class in which we focus on the concept of the Human Being. This movie is our link to the Freud concept of the human being. Days of reading about Kinsey and his sexual researches get me thinking too much… Good thing I find this fascinating. This second half of the winter semester is filled with huge group projects, exams and studies. If you can keep me in your thoughts tomorrow (Thursday, April 8th), I have another big exam in art history, regarding the Renaissance period, at 5 am my time. It’s way too early for my system to function properly on writing an essay about Renaissance art…

I know my body is yelling because I am pushing but I do feel like I do not have the luxury to slow anything down at the moment. My teenage daughters are adjusting to this comeback. My husband and I are still moving our stuff from the storage unit we are renting. The goal is: this home will be 300% a representation of who we are, for once; both individually and as a family.

1. I started this about ten days ago. I am now in our home 🙂

Heyo!

Thank you for staying around when my life went downhill for a while. I was expecting it to happen, but maybe not as much as it did.

Today is April 1st and the lovely Effy is inviting us to dust off our blogs in doing another round of Blog Along with Effy.

Today is also the day my lesson is up in her year-long class Book Of Days. It’s not too late to join us! The community and love are absolutely fantastic, everyone cheers everyone and in the current times, it feels like honey on my heart.
I strayed a bit from my usual Nixies and went a completely different road in my journal for this. This is both scary and exciting at the same time 🙂

It’s almost 8 am here in BC and my brain is foggy. So to start this month-long project, I will just unload my brain a little, maybe it will help (you can read my previous Brain Dumps right here if you’d like). In no particular order..:

• Waking up around 5 am every morning makes the days seem way longer than they actually are. Good thing I AM a morning person…
• This college semester is nothing like the first one. I wake up, study, attend Zoom classes, study, think about the exams and projects, try to rally my different teams, study…….. It is overwhelming, to say the least.
• Moving across the country SUCKS.
• I can not wait to be in our home in two days. However, the idea of emptying the storage room where our entire life resides at the moment is not something I am looking forward to (note: my husband and I will have to do it all…).
• I am excited to set up my new creative space. We have not seen our new home in person yet so we are not sure about the actual room sizes. I hope to be pleasantly surprised and no the other way around.
• Huge relief: our daughters love their new school so far (they are in grade 8 and in grade 10).
• My Mom gets her vaccine in two weeks (she lives in France).
• Exhaustion and anxiety are deep today.
• Music and books keep me sane. This is the good side of not having a TV in our bedroom where we are temporarily staying.

We are back to school. Three out of the four of us have actually started school back at the end of August. This is disorienting, a little scary and a lot confusing. Communication in our school system is not always the best. We knew last minute that our eldest, now in grade 10, was going back to school in person (note that as I write this, she is now in hybrid mode for the month of October, meaning she has a specific calendar this month to know when she goes to school and when classes are remote). Her sister’s school has almost no changes except they have to wear their mask 100% of the time and some lunches are in class, others they can move around (cafeteria or outside). I attend a local Cégep (=college) and only have 1.5hrs/week on site, sometimes another 3 hours are added for another class. Everything else is online.
And if there is something that throws me off, it’s incertitude. Big time..!

What’s in my brain?

1. I hate moving. Because it forces me to stay in the present moment and it is not something I am used to. But especially because it confronts me with the reality that we own way too many physical items. With the pandemic, garage sales are forbidden by our city but it’s mentally difficult to be realistic: dump everything; it would be way better to sell some of it because they could still be useful to somebody. What to do?
2. I should be a fucking hairstylist… been colouring my daughters’ hair and it’s always a nerve-racking process for me (I know this is just hair but still).
3. I can be a fucking amazing friend and a fucking great teammate. But talking to people brings a lot of anxiety.
4. Some classes I have already bring a lot of excitement. I am talking about photography, cinema, P.E. (which was an option I had between lots of different sorts of training and I picked the right one for me).
5. I am learning to let go of the fears I hold around my 13 yo daughter not doing her schoolwork, not knowing at least a little about what she wants to do with her life later on. It is not my job to push her again and again but to listen and guide.
6. Therapy kicks my ass.
7. Code-switching is a real thing! I noticed how I switch to speaking teenagers-from-Québec-slang when talking to my classmates, which I don’t do normally. WTF.
8. Quitting my job brings a lot of shame but it is the right decision right this moment.

Some videos are harder to create and even harder to share than others. For me, this is one of them. Sharing about me, about bits and pieces of my stories as a bi-racial woman of colour is not something I talk about easily or often. But with what’s currently going on in the World, I felt awful not to address it at all. Because… sometimes, silence is compliance, right?

Here’s the video:

I have been working on this for quite a long time. It took more than a month from the moment I knew I had to do something to the moment I completed the page. Yup… I had to make my voice heart. Even just for me, because crying every day helps, but not for long.

If you follow me on Instagram, you might remember me posting a sketch of the drawing at the beginning of June. Then, it took me two weeks to actually stop avoiding going further in the project and paint it… Because when your heart is aching so bad, it does not matter if you know what you need to do. It just seems impossible. And I accept that today: the need for time to process emotions and thoughts.

I am bi-racial and am myself in a bi-racial marriage. I am a woman of colour and my husband is White, which resulted in a funny blend when it comes to our daughters’ skin tones (I have shared pictures of them in the video). All my life, I have been told stuff that left me without a sense of belonging, without that deep knowledge of being enough. Too white, too black, not enough of anything. This leaves scars and wounds I am now tending as an almost 35 years old.
Before you speak, always wonder “could this hurtful?” because words can destroy more than a punch in the guts…

I should not really be on the computer because my arm fucking hurts from the position to type. However, I am fed up with myself throwing pity parties because I am in physical pain, in emotional distress. I can’t seem to shake it off from my system.
Coming here, putting words on it, is one of my usual coping mechanisms…

I learned not so long ago that when I was a teen, some of my family members were complaining to my Mom that I was always hurting somewhere. I took this very hard and thought “well, suckers, I guess it was probably just Fibromyalgia already building inside of me somehow…”. It truly sucks to know that people you were close to were actually talking shit behind your back. I am pretty sure they did not intend to be mean, but it still stings…

It’s been months of hurting now (I started to think it was not fibro pain around August 2019 and it took a turn for the worse in September, around my birthday). My arm started to act up about a month after I began working as a sushi prep cook. But because I hate stopping or slowing down (it comes down to admitting that something is wrong), I suffered in silence and kept at it. Until it was too late. It was impossible to move my arm without my shoulder and my elbow feeling like they were on fire. Or like someone was stabbing me and other kinds of joyful pain. I consulted in an emergency clinic and got the diagnosis that it is a double tendinitis/capsulitis (frozen shoulder). I had to quit my job (which I now go back to for about two-three days a week).

It’s gonna be okay, isn’t it?

My body makes me feel worthless. I envy people who are living their lives unaware of their flesh envelope. There is not a second I am not reminded something is wrong with mine. But you know what? I am making peace with it. To accept that this is my new normal and that it does not define me 100%.
I hate it when my boss tells me “if you’re not capable, then you’re not capable” even though the meaning behind it is different in québecois than it is in french… It hurts, every day. I had two cortisone infiltration in my shoulder and none of them really helped. All the doctors I have seen about it are clear: the only way to make it better is to quit my job, because it’s the reason why my arm keeps doing the same hurtful movements, again and again. But I am not a quitter.

I have learned to suck it up. I feel betrayed by my body, again. However, I am the one living with it and the one making the decisions: I don’t want it to have even more control over my life…
Adjusting to this new pain is fucking hard and frustrating but life must go on anyway.