It's me, hi, I'm not the problem go fuck yourself :) in Each Day

Why yes, I am listening to Taylor Swift on repeat these days, why do you ask?
Also I don’t necessarily feel the sentiment of the title, when I thought it, it made me laugh. I get frustrated with myself when I identify too heartily with things that highlight what I feel are my shortcomings. I’m trying to fight 39 years of conditioning that I am wrong and too much and all the other things I internalized as an undiagnosed neuro-divergent.

I’ve been meaning to write an entry for literal weeks. I’m 5 days shy of a month since my last proper entry, which is too long for my brain. I’ve lost things in there haha.

After I got home from Hamilton, I had Thursday to get myself in order before returning to work on Friday. Friday, as it turns out, was the military equivalent of a Christmas brunch. One of my pet peeves with my section is that, since we do shift work, our schedule is very fragmented. But there’s a lot of flexibility as long as there’s one person around. I was told I was on mornings upon my return, so I showed up for 6:30am. A normal morning shift in my world. The next person didn’t show until 8am, and seemed genuinely surprised that I was already there. Apparently the morning shift wasn’t supposed to come in until 8, but no one passed that on to me. Communication, not their forte.
That annoyance aside, a bunch of us hitched a ride over to the firehall, who were hosting our little fete, and we ate brunch together. It wasn’t anything fancy, but I know the people who did the planning busted their butts to make it good, but people suck and didn’t RSVP (myself included, because compassionate leave) so there wasn’t enough food for everyone. So it was nice, but anticlimactic, but still a better way to spend the morning than surfing Apartment Therapy for hours.

That weekend both M and I started feeling cold symptoms.

We’d both been testing since we got back from Ontario, but neither of us tested positive. On Monday when M got to work they immediately sent him home, saying there’s a new rule that if you have any cold symptoms you are to stay home. I’d seen the email containing this rule, so I called my work and asked what I should do. They were less than helpful, and I ended up telling them that I’d stay home. I felt uneasy about it, though. The next morning I went in wearing a mask because what asshole gets everyone sick days before Christmas leave.
The guy I was sharing a shift with came in about 30 minutes after me, took a look at our 2 trainees and me wearing a mask and was like GTFO, nicely, to all of us.

And thus, my Christmas holiday began!!!

Christmas was lovely. CK came home, I picked her up from the airport, we had brunch a bunch of times, and she even slept over one night. We played dominoes and did karaoke and made M watch Frozen (his verdict, it’s too princessy). OH!! When I went to pick her up from her sister’s place, her nephew was in the front hall and when he saw me he whispered, loudly the way kids do, “She’s so beautiful!” and everyone got really giggly over how cute it was. He liked my red hair.

I saw Red a bunch, too, which was nice. She got married on the 28th, hilariously she got her dress less than 18 hours before her wedding. It was so nice to be able to be there for/with her on this day. I signed her guestbook “To my life wife and wife-in-law” hehehe. I went out with her and her folks a few times, too. They’re so different from my family they’re always entertaining. We even managed a little yarn road trip, one of my favourite bougie dyers was having a sale.

Mostly M and I stayed home, though. We partook in weeds a whole bunch, and banged as much as bodies would allow (his, not mine. I’m still DTF every second of every day). Instead of a big Christmas dinner we got Turkey Dinner Pies from a local bakery. Before December M had bought a Lindt chocolate advent calendar and I bought a Sephora one and I had already put it in my cart when M sent me a link to a David’s Tea Advent Calendar. We got three of them (Caffeine Free 2022, 2022 and 2021), so we had five calendars to open over the holidays. We didn’t do presents, but honestly this was way more enjoyable. Since we missed almost the entire first 2 weeks, we were enjoying our calendars right through New Year, and managed to time it that most of the things were opened/consumed before we returned to work, today.
At one point we did take a little jaunt to a local town with a specialty knife store, which we’d been talking about patronizing for literal years. M had never been to the town, but I’d gone there a bunch for work. We ended up with beautiful rosewood handled knives, a santoku, a bread knife and a paring knife. Then we drove around the residential part of town and looked at the sad state of the houses. This town is a lot like another, much more popular with tourists, town in the opposite direction of the province, but the local industry has been gutted and it looks like it. So sad, these beautiful stately century homes, some gothic, some more like Queen Anne style. I love this little town though, it has so much character. I find its touristy sister town to be too snooty, unaccessible, and despite its warmth to tourists, cold.

On New Years, despite our best efforts to Fuck In The New Year, our hours-long spree ended before midnight, so we watched a movie as the clock flipped over. Which was perfect-for-us, too.

I was dreading coming back to work because for some reason I felt like I was going to be in trouble (for going on a compassionate leave? For sending an email sharing the other email with the sick day rule in it? For existing?). This is a pretty standard anxiety for me. But most of the time I’m good at stopping those kinds of thoughts.

Instead I went to work today and immediately called for a doctors appointment. Back when I was freaking out about the Force Test (still am, let’s not dwell), I started doing push ups. Well suddenly my shoulder started to hurt. It bothered me during the trip to ON, it bothered me throughout the holiday, M kept telling me to get it checked. It got to the point where the pain was so persistent that I was even talking to Bird Guy about it and he was like, “go to a frigging doctor already”. I agreed, but I also didn’t want to end up in a civilian walk in clinic, nor go to the nearest MIR (medical inspection room) that was actually open, because ours was not. So I waited until I was back to work, and immediately called this morning. I got in to see the triage nurse, and he referred me to the physio guy for a diagnosis. He suspects it’s my rotator cuff, but he said the physio guy would now for sure.
So I see him tomorrow at 8:30.

Things have been good. I felt more or less fine, except for nagging phantom anxieties. It kind of makes me wonder if I should just stop working so hard on improving myself and just be for a while. But then I haven’t had the BS of the military front of mind for several weeks, so obviously I’ve been feeling more chill. M and I did our best to not talk about work over the holiday, and we succeeded for the most part, but I did air an uncomfortable feeling out loud, that I don’t know how much longer I can do this… It’s clear that despite the amount of “effort” (lip service? media attention?) they are putting into changing/modernizing/”improving” the military the senior command keeps going on about, nothing is actually changing, except now I can have bright red hair in uniform. Whoopdefuckingdooo, when my MAIN stressor right now is having to sell my very low priced house and having to buy an equivalent house for MUCH MUCH more money (we’re talking 3x+ the price), and potentially having to do that every 2 years for the next 20. No thank you.

M leaves on the 27th for 5 or so months. Part of me is looking forward to having that time to myself. I plan on getting my social life back. I plan on working on the house, and doing other projects. I’m still formulating my Resolutions (yeah yeah, I’m late, whatever), and I’m going to have a ton of time to do things for myself. I enjoy my time with M so much but I do defer to him for our activities quite a lot and I would like to get back into my own patterns. Hopefully we can find some sort of balance when he returns.