Planning for my escape to the mountains

Get yourself a cocktail and settle in, because this one is LONG. However, unlike 99.99% of what I write here, it's not going to be depressing, so at least there's that.

The sleeping and eating situation has not improved; I had every intention of going to sleep shortly after work yesterday (after walking the dog and feeding him and the cats, of course), but I needed to talk to my sister and brother-and-law about something (more on that later) first. But then, before I could talk to Peggy and Dan, my son called and wanted to chat. Then, while I was on the phone with him, my bestie called, so I had to queue him up after Peggy, and... by the time I got done talking to everyone, I was wide awake again, and ended up awake until about 2:00 AM. Again. (Funny that I can go days on end without hearing from anyone, and then three people want to talk to me at the same damn time, right?)

The moral of the story: the phrase "strike while the iron is hot" applies to sleepiness as well; as long as I'm dealing with this (please, let it be temporary) insomnia, I have to let myself sleep whenever the mood strikes.

To that end, I worked until 11 this morning, then signed off for the day. During my "lunch" hour, I went through some training for my plans tomorrow, working a phone bank for getting Florida seniors to vote for Biden-Harris; thanks to Covid, I can't be as active politically as I'd like, but getting folks in a swing state to get out and vote by talking on the phone? I can do that.

Then, I opened all the windows (because the weather is perfection today), stretched out on the recliner, and immediately fell asleep - for about an hour, until Kellogg started barking at someone across the street. Because of course he did. New plan is to walk the dog and feed him and the cats in half an hour, then turn off my phone and go to sleep. Cross your fingers, y'all. Moving on...

My original plan for my trip to the Blue Ridge Mountains was not to make it a full-on vacation; I planned to work at least part of the time there. I've since decided that's a foolish idea: I've been working hard - harder than I think I even realized - and I need to use this time as a genuine break. More than a break, I need to use it for some dedicated Kathleen time.

No healing has happened in this house, and I don't think any healing can happen in this house - certainly not with the routines in which I'm stuck.

So my trip to north Georgia is going to be Kathleen's Extreme Self-Care Adventure, focusing on several areas:

Physical health

• Eating well - that means eating breakfast, and lunch, and dinner, every day. Since I'm going to do one trip to the grocery store on my way to the cabin, this is going to require careful planning to make sure I can have a variety of tasty meals with a minimum of wasting food. Fortunately, I'm not too bad at meal planning, so this is kind of like a puzzle/game: maximum variety out of minimum cooking. 
• Exercise - Yoga every morning, and hiking as much as the weather will allow. I'm aiming for three to five miles each day, but I've been pretty damn sedentary since Doug died, so I may have to modify that a bit. As for the bears, I'll have to talk to the local park Rangers to find out where bears have been active and avoid those areas. Still carrying two cans of bear spray in a holster on my hip, though.

Mental health

• Meditation first thing every morning and last thing every night.
• Writing every day, whether it ends up in the blog or not.
• Recreational reading for an hour every day.
• Continuing my sessions with Brooke and with Grace the grief counselor, as well as my weekly book club (currently reading Disloyal by Michael Cohen) and meetings with my grief group.
• Adult coloring books - I'm bringing these for bad weather days, but coloring can be very therapeutic. Early on, I couldn't handle it; too much intricacy for my damaged brain. I'm hoping that won't be the case now.
• Limited media consumption: I may put some pictures on Instagram, or post on Facebook and Twitter now and then, but I will absolutely not watch or read the news for those two weeks. And I'll probably spend minimal time scrolling through Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Let's face it: the news these days is almost never good, and avoiding it while I'm in the middle of nowhere seems like the smart thing to do.
• Limited communication: Other than my scheduled therapy, book club, and grief group meetings, I'm not talking to anybody. I need to focus on me during this time; phone calls or zoom meetings would be a lovely way to pass some time, but they would be counterproductive. This time is for me to focus on getting me right - or, at least, getting me to a point where I don't spend every idle minute wishing I were dead. I don't know if this trip will do that or not, but I do know that it definitely won't do that if I do the same things I do here. It's about breaking patterns. Yes, if I'm going on a long hike, I'll make sure that one person knows where I'm gonna be and when I'm expected to be back, and I'll check in accordingly. But that's what texts are for - and other than checking in before and after hikes, I probably won't do much texting, either. We're talking near-monastic solitude here, folks.

Emotional and spiritual health

• Stargazing: I'm going to be in a place with limited light pollution, and I'll be at the cabin during the Orionids meteor shower. So I've got my pretty good binoculars, and hope to see some beautiful skies.
• Relaxing in the hot tub. This needs no explanation, but I'll be in that damn tub every night that there's no lightning around.
• Music: I finally got around to setting up a Spotify account - I like to keep up with current music, and since I rarely leave the house anymore, I don't really have many opportunities to roam the radio dial. But but BUT: my first song recommendation from Spotify was Lewis Capaldi's Someone You Loved, which was not good for me. And when I say it was not good for me, I mean that song fucking destroyed me. But since then, I'm spending at least an hour a day on the app, finding new music I enjoy (and that doesn't make me want to jump off a cliff). I've been assembling playlists of songs that make me want to get up and dance, and my plan is to have that shit going whenever I'm cooking, or eating a meal, or anytime I'm not otherwise involved in something that requires quiet.
• The hiking, yoga, and meditation count toward this as well, so let's throw 'em in here.

Creative health

This is a Big Deal for me: I may be a computer geek by trade, but I'm a creative at heart. When I was young, that was all about music and musical theatre. More recently, it's been all about theatre, but since that's not really on the table, it's time to explore other avenues. It's true that writing is creative, but let's be honest here: the vast majority of what I write is about my grief - and while that is creating, it's not so much creative as it is cathartic. Although, full disclosure, writing doesn't feel very cathartic anymore, because the thoughts aren't pouring out of me like water from a fire hose these days. So I'm going to explore some other areas of creativity:

• Creative writing, whether that's short stories or poetry or fiction or the makings of a play: I don't know how it'll go, but The Artist's Way assures me that, if I put in the focused effort, the creative juices will flow.
• Drawing and painting: I've never been a visual artist; it's just not my thing. My mother could draw beautifully, and while I inherited her lovely blue eyes, I did not inherit her eye for visual arts. That said, drawing and painting are fun - even if the result is actually shit. And who knows? Maybe I'll surprise myself.
• Music: I play a bunch of instruments (all woodwinds and brass), although I own only a flute, piccolo, and Native American flute. Over the years, I've had ideas for songs, but really didn't have any way to make them a reality. I mean, I can write lyrics, and come up with a melody, but you can't play chords on a trumpet or oboe, y'know? I thought maybe I'd buy a cheap guitar and start learning that while I'm away. So I called my sister and brother-in-law, because he's a guitar player; I figured he'd be able to give me advice.
  
  Well, it turns out guitar is not for me. You see, I have long nails. They're not freakishly long, but they're long enough. And these aren't acrylics: they're all mine. I give myself a manicure every two weeks, and having pretty nails - shallow though it may be - is important to me. And I'm not cutting them just to play an instrument. I'd done some research, and discovered that Dolly Parton plays using open tuning, which allows her to play chords without the contortions that require short nails. Dan, bless him, suggested that Dolly is a national treasure who can do no wrong, but playing guitar with long nails is simply not reasonable for anyone who isn't her.
  
  But then, he suggested the Autoharp. Being a Damn Yankee, I'd never heard of the Autoharp; it's a type of chorded zither:
  
  
  
  See those buttons? You press a button, and strum the strings to play the associated chord. In other words, it's super easy to play for a newbie (of course, challenging to master, but I'm just looking to be able to play chord progressions here). So, I bought one. Maybe the songwriting muse will hit, but even if it doesn't, I can think of worse ways to end the day than sitting on the deck, sipping on a nice bourbon and strumming some chords.

Honoring and connecting to Doug

• Being in a cabin in the mountains, even if I don't do anything else specifically dedicated to Doug, will make me feel connected to him, just as being at the ocean would: he and I both love the mountains and the ocean (we often said that if we ever came into a shit ton of money, we'd buy a cabin and the mountains and a cottage on the beach), even if he couldn't be as active as we would have liked. I know I'll feel close to him there.
• Our first wedding anniversary is October 17. Weather permitting, I hope to find a lovely spot in the Blue Ridge Mountains to scatter some of Doug's ashes: the thing we most wanted to do together - aside from the simple pleasure of living our lives together - was travel. Obviously, we can't do that now. But I can leave a little bit of him wherever I travel, and that will have to be enough.
• I have some things I want to say to Doug, and I think our anniversary would be a good day to start a tradition of writing to him - maybe not every day, but certainly on days with special meaning to us. I've bought a lovely journal just for that purpose.

My sister, God love her, said she's proud of me for taking this trip and taking a big chunk of time away from work and committing that time to trying to heal. I understand and appreciate that, but I kinda feel like it's misplaced: these are desperation moves, truly. I'm grasping at straws to see if spending two weeks doing nothing but taking care of me will help me get to a mental and emotional place where I can see some hope. Not gonna lie, though: I am pretty excited about getting my hands on that Autoharp (scheduled to be delivered September 25).

I'll be super busy the next three weeks, pulling together everything I need to take with me (really glad to have that SUV now), planning, and getting the house in decent enough shape for my son, who is kindly house sitting for me so the cats will be taken care of. I can't say I'm super excited about the trip (beyond the excitement about the new instrument), and I can't say I'm hopeful that it will make a difference. But I am looking forward to the change in scenery, and I'm at least open to the possibility that the trip will prove helpful.