p i x e l s c r i b b l e s – the thoughts and experiences of Heather Meadows

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I had planned to visit Atlanta over the long weekend. I booked a hotel for last Friday through this coming Wednesday. I was going to do “Atlanta things”—all the things I used to do when I lived there.

Friday arrived, the day I was supposed to pack and drive down, and…I didn’t want to go. After waffling about it a little, writing out some thoughts, and talking with Sean, I canceled the trip.

It’s taken me a little while to really understand why I didn’t want to go, but I think I’ve got it now. At the time, when I was listing out pros and cons of canceling, one of the pros was that I wouldn’t have to lug so much stuff and drive so far just to do things that I used to do regularly. After all, this wasn’t really a vacation. I wouldn’t be seeing anything new or exciting.

And that, I realized, is the crux of it. I wanted to go on this trip originally because I was unhappy, because I was away from my home and I wanted to go back and “live” there again. This is also why my post announcing our move is titled “We moved.” and not “We moved!” Even though moving was the right choice, and I am very glad we are here, for months I felt disconnected and sad because everything was different. I don’t like this apartment layout as much as our old one. I miss our old complex’s trees. I miss all the places I used to go. I miss the routine I had slowly established over 12 years.

But time passed, and we started making this apartment ours. I’ve spent a ton of time with my family, which has been amazing. I stopped feeling uncomfortable in my own home and started feeling normal.

The appeal of hauling a bunch of junk down to Atlanta and pretending I still lived there is gone.

I’m still not completely adjusted to life here, but I don’t feel bad about that anymore. I feel kind of excited. There are new things to discover, things I didn’t get to experience because I moved away 20 years ago. Now I’m back and I can relearn my home state.

And I cannot emphasize enough how much being close to my family means to me. Starting from almost the day I moved to Georgia in 2003 I wanted to move back. Family is just so important to me, and I love being able to spend so much time with the people I love.

I loved my life in Augusta, and I loved my life in Atlanta. I grew and changed in ways I wouldn’t have if I’d stayed in Kentucky. I’m thankful for that. And I do still miss Augusta, and I will continue missing Atlanta too.

But it’s time for a new adventure.

We moved.

A lot has happened since the last time I posted here, but probably the most important thing is that Sean and I moved from Atlanta to Lexington, Kentucky. I’m living in my home state again for the first time in 20 years!

hahaha.

I ended up going back to Twitter to microblog on a private account, because it’s just so easy to post pictures there, and also I have friends who actually read that account, whereas I don’t think anyone is reading this blog anymore. I mean why would they when I kind of stopped updating…

I did download an archive, and I am aware of some scripts to convert Twitter archives to WordPress posts, but I don’t have the mental energy to figure that out right now. There is a lot going on that I need to focus on. But maybe in March or April I will have the headspace for it.

I went back to Pinterest the other day, because Mom told me she had an account (turns out she only browses and doesn’t pin anything, though). I hadn’t logged in for five years. Scrolling through my following there was so nostalgic; there are so many people in that list who I lost touch with after leaving Facebook. I wish I was better at keeping up with people. The people I stay in touch with now are people I know on Twitter. If I leave Twitter, or if Twitter goes under, I’ll probably lose some of them, too. :/

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I don’t know if not having my usual Twitter outlet is good or bad. There have been so many times I wanted to complain, but also so many times I wanted to share nice things. I’m not sure if I wanted to talk about positive things more than I wanted to talk about negative things, though. Of course, I’m also not sure if not talking about negative things constitutes “bottling it up” or if talking about negative things constantly is bad for people. I kind of feel like the latter is true, or that it’s a mix of the two.

I’m still working on cards. The first batch was non-fandom friends and family. The second batch, fandom friends, is all ready except I need to add postage to some of them because I put too much stuff in and made the weight go over an ounce. Why did I buy huge, heavy cards this year? Because they’re pretty :P Fortunately, for some of the second batch and all of the third batch, the fandom exchange, I am using smaller cards that weigh 0.4 oz on their own, so I don’t need to add postage to those.

All that’s left is to put a few stickers in the exchange cards, write notes in them, seal them up, and apply postage; put the exchange cards and the other cards that don’t need extra postage in the mail; and go to the post office to get extra postage for the ones that need it, put that additional postage on those cards, and drop them in the mail slot. I may just take all the cards to the post office, so they go out at the same time. (I love that my local post office is so close, that it has a self-service machine, AND that when you print Forever stamps this time of year they are holiday themed automatically. I used to fret so much each year about buying holiday stamps!)

I’m off today and the rest of the week, and I’m hoping to get the cards done today and get a lot more done on another project I haven’t mentioned here yet. It’s a big ‘un. Way bigger than the cards. More to come as I decide when and how I want to post about it.

Christmas stuff

Christmas is a little wonky this year…we can’t see Sean’s parents due to Covid, and we’re not going to Kentucky until January, so the only celebration on Christmas Day will probably be Sean and me getting sushi. (We do have one small gift each to exchange, at least.)

I’m sending 110 cards this year, maybe a couple more if I get last-minute addresses, and you should see how much room it takes up to lay them all out. Actually, 51 of them have already been mailed, but I still have cards all over my dining table and floor. This may be the most cards I’ve ever sent, but I can’t be sure; my spreadsheet has incomplete data for all years before 2020, and in 2021 I only sent cards as part of a fandom exchange, which didn’t end up logged in my spreadsheet either. In 2020 I sent 104 cards, which is pretty impressive, but I’ve beaten that record now.

My tree is up but only partially decorated. That’s better than last year, when I didn’t decorate it at all. In 2020 I went all out. I decorated everything before it was even Thanksgiving, and I left it all up through January. I was trying to keep my spirits up in that first year of the pandemic, and it actually worked pretty well. In 2021, though, I was not nearly as motivated, and I found working on decorating to be kind of a chore. This year I started decorating after Thanksgiving (Cheryl and Reid came here for the Thanksgiving meal, so I left my fall decor up for that), and I got everything but the tree (and my little trees) done fairly quickly, but the tree itself took me a minute. It’s a big job: first you assemble all the parts, then you fluff each and every individual branch, and then you have to put ornaments on! I guess if the tree was the only thing I did, it wouldn’t be as big a deal, but I also hang lighted and regular garland, set out a Christmas village, and put display pieces in my china cabinet and around the apartment. It’s a lot. I do love the results, though.

In any case, I will finish up these cards tomorrow (Wednesday at the latest), take them to get extra postage (unfortunately these remaining cards have turned out to be heavier than an ounce apiece because I put some fandom goodies in them), and be done. The international ones will be late, but hopefully a lot of the domestic ones will make it in time.

I’m not doing cookies this year, unless I happen to bake some when we go to Kentucky. I baked a bunch of cookies in the fall and that was enough cookies for a while. Besides, I have a ton of stuff to do; I don’t need to add any more projects!

Connor already got and opened his Christmas present; he lives in Florida, so I had to send him his gift directly instead of taking it with me to Kentucky (he’s going up for Christmas, but I won’t be there yet). We’re taking all the rest of the gifts with us in January, so I didn’t have to rush to ship them or anything when I realized it was too dangerous Covid-wise to travel over the holiday.

I really hope the pandemic actually ends someday.

In any case, that’s Christmas! I’m enjoying it a lot more this year than I did last year, and I’m excited for Kentucky. :)

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Boy I sure do have the urge to post my every thought on the internet…not having a place to do that makes it super obvious

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Really fucking annoyed at this Twitter bullshit tbh.

Right about now I would be tweeting this on my private account, but I have announced I am not going to do that anymore, so here I am again already.

I’m just.

It’s so stupid.

I want to be able to talk to my friends and share my life with them without forcing them to come to a separate website and enter a password.

But that’s all I can do now.

Anyway, I have too much to do to spend any more time sitting here fuming. I’ll post about what all that stuff is later, when I’ve figured out how I want to approach it (publicly? Privately? Both?).

Ugh.

Protected: My social media accounts

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Everything happens so much

For years now, I have used Twitter as a microblog. I started on a public account in February of 2007 under my real name. During GamerGate, circa 2012, my Twitter usage dropped dramatically and I spent more time on Tumblr and Facebook. But in the late 2010s I split off a couple other Twitter accounts: one public, not under my real name, for engaging in fandom stuff after Tumblr banned explicit content; and one private, also not under my real name, for sharing personal stuff after Facebook’s lack of ethics spurred me to close my account.

Basically, I used that third Twitter account as my journal, as the place where I connected with people I cared about. That’s where my photos and quick blurbs about my life went. I shared thoughts and feelings and big decisions. I didn’t have everyone there, but I had a lot of people. It was private, and it was comfortable.

That’s all changed now that Twitter is run by a thin-skinned fascist. I no longer feel safe sharing personal life details, even on a private account.

In considering what I want to do about this, I have finally accepted that I can’t trust third-party sites with my personal information. It’s taken me a long time to embrace this truth, because it’s so easy to use social media, and social media is where most people are. But this kind of thing is just going to keep happening.

So what I’m going to do instead is start using this blog again. Whenever I feel like rambling about something or sharing something, I’m going to post here.

WordPress doesn’t have robust user permissions, so I can’t simply set up roles for user accounts and then limit certain posts to certain roles. My only option that isn’t installing a plugin is to password-protect any posts I don’t want the general public to see. I’m not keen on installing a plugin to manage security, so for now I’m going to use the password method.

If you see a password-protected post you’d like to read, and you’re a friend of mine, reach out to me directly and I’ll share the password.

It’s me being depressed again

Yay.

I don’t know what else to say. There’s a lot I can’t talk about publicly. And I feel like the personal stuff will just be a rehash. Sheltering in place due to delta etc., terrified about climate change, horrified by cruelty, doing practically nothing all day, not seeing much of a point to anything.

I guess that covers it.

Good things

I seem to forget this site exists when things are going well.

Things have been pretty decent recently, at least in terms of my own life. The world is still terrible and horrifying, there’s still a virus raging everywhere and being willfully ignored by both regular people and government people, so many people are dying (and it’s not just the virus; people are killing each other too), it’s looking more and more like the postmaster general will be successful in sabotaging and closing the post office, billionaires are pretending they are cool instead of actually helping people, Biden is not the savior many people thought he was, etc. But at least in my personal life things are okay? haha.

There were a few weeks in there before the Delta variant locked me back down where it seemed like things were almost normal again. Connor stopped by on his way to his internship at the beginning of the summer. I went home to Kentucky and stayed with Mom as soon as everyone in the family was vaccinated. I went out to dinner a couple times. I went to the movies once. I went horseback riding. I started to think I could have people come visit me, and even that I might travel somewhere.

Even though that didn’t last, I think it was a needed break from over a year of staying mostly sequestered. Seeing people I love and doing fun things I enjoy again, even for such a brief time, has kind of tided me over, at least for now.

Being vaccinated has helped me a lot mentally as well. I still mask when I go out, but I don’t feel as afraid. I feel like with the vaccine and the mask, I am pretty safe, and I’m far less likely to pass the virus to anyone else. This is a much better feeling than before.

I’ve had a lot of nice things happen recently as well. I was promoted at work, and the work I’m doing is having a real, positive impact on my coworkers; I got figs from my friend Jessica again; Connor spent the night on his way home from his internship; I baked two types of cookie last week; and after months and months of banging our heads against the proverbial wall of overloaded online shopping carts, Sean and I were finally able to buy a PS5. I’ve only gone on one bike ride since I had the bike tuned up, but in my defense, it has been super hot outside. I’ve started walking on the treadmill here and there to at least get myself moving more, and that has made me feel good too.

So basically, things are pretty decent in my tiny corner of the world, and I figured that instead of continued radio silence I’d actually post about it.

Deep Thoughts

I had one of those moments where it feels like you’ve thought of something really profound, but it’s also something completely obvious. Here is the thing I thought of:

Everything in life is preparing for doing, doing, and cleaning up after doing. Doing is all we do.

This miraculous epiphany came to me as I was tidying up after baking cookies. I’d been thinking about how people spend a lot of time and effort preparing to do things like go kayaking and then doing those things and then putting everything away after, and how I used to spend a lot of time and effort this way for hiking and photography, and how after roughly a year and a half of rarely doing anything outside the home, going to all that effort just to do something outside can seem so pointless. Over the long weekend I put together a TV stand (with a fireplace in it!). I also made blueberry muffins from fresh blueberries I picked at a friend’s house, but I didn’t hear the timer for some reason and they got a little burnt. This is why the next day I made cookies. All of these things involved a lot of preparation, time for the actual doing, and cleanup. And I thought, this is all there is. This is life.

We do some things because we must in order to survive. We do some things to help others. And we do some things, like the kayaking and hiking and photography, because we enjoy them. We expend effort on them because they are worth it to us.

Depression is not wanting to do things because you don’t see the point. Or at least, it is for me. Depression is not finding that enjoyment in anything.

I have paid attention to my depression for long enough that I can tell when I am in danger of slipping into it, and that has been very useful for managing it. My depression is not caused by not doing things, but not doing things can exacerbate it.

Thinking that “all there is to life is doing” felt like a depressive thought yesterday, but pragmatically, it’s just a general description of activity. There are so many variations possible within those loose guardrails.

I had my bike tuned up the other day. It’s a pain in the ass to get it up to street level from our apartment, and it’s a pain to get it out of the apartment complex too—I either have to half-carry it down a cliff, push it up a hill that is a struggle just to walk up, or shove it into the back of my car and take it somewhere else. But cycling is something I used to do all the time, regardless of the effort involved, because I loved it. Hopefully, I can recapture that feeling. Hopefully, I can start wanting to expend effort on doing things outside the home again.

Okay, I’m mostly over myself

The catastrophizing and black-and-white thinking are finally starting to subside. I am no longer interpreting a single mistake in a single relationship to mean that I have failed utterly in all relationships. It’s taken a full week, but I’m finally being rational: accepting that I have these feelings of hurt and loss and confusion, but not giving in to those feelings.

I think it was wise for me to pull back and focus on some of my closest friends during this time. It’s probably wise for me to focus on my closest friends all the time, honestly. But I think it will be okay in the future for me to also interact with other people.

I need to learn from this, and not in a self-deprecating or self-blaming way. I need to recognize that I am going to misinterpret things and that that is normal and okay. I need to remember that I did not respond to this situation by telling everyone that somebody hurt me, and I did not even tell anyone who my unhappy feelings were about. I started to try and write explanations for why I was on hiatus a few times, but each time I recognized that I was making myself sound like some kind of victim, and I deleted without posting. I think I did the right thing here. I should remember this.

I’m not perfect, but I’m not a horrible human being who doesn’t deserve to exist either.

It’s still going to be awkward existing in a space where I feel like I don’t quite fit, but I’m starting to think I will be able to handle it. I’m starting to think I can still interact and enjoy the good parts of fandom, so long as I temper my expectations about the relationships there.

I may take the approach of only logging in at certain times instead of leaving myself logged in, because being logged in makes it easy to check Twitter constantly throughout the day. If I turn it into a purposeful action, one that I have to take additional steps for, maybe that will help reinforce the boundary between that space and the space where real relationships exist.

Yet another theme

When I last updated WordPress, there was a new theme, Twenty Twenty One. So I installed it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to do all the things I want on my blog and used to have. For example, it doesn’t come with a sidebar natively—I had to add a plugin for that—and it doesn’t display the number of comments per post on the home and archive pages. I haven’t found a fix for that second one.

I like the concept of blocks. Theoretically, they sound like they provide more options. But paired with limiting themes, I really don’t feel like my blog is very customizable at all.

In any case, here’s what my blog looks like now, for posterity:

Screenshot of a blog with a cherry blossom header and a sidebar on the right, with a light pink background

And here it is in dark mode, a new feature that I do appreciate:

Screenshot of a blog with a cherry blossom header and a sidebar on the right, with a dark background and light text