Parallel Pain.

A friend of mine just lost her mother. They weren't especially close, but she was her mother nonetheless.  I am having trouble thinking of anything else today. I am working from home, thinking about how in another part of the city, a friend just lost her mother. 

We're living parallel lives, and she is living tremendous grief and is experiencing one of the most profound losses a person can experience. The loss of a parent. And in this case, the loss of a mother. 

One day, I will lose my mother. The most significant relationship of my lifetime. A woman I live in the same building as. My mother. A neighbor. Our lives are very intertwined. My dogs visit her daily. I cook for her. We run errands together. I borrow her car. Our relationship is both practical and deeply comforting. Two single women, one elderly, one disabled. Both fragile in our own ways. 

I try not to think about the loss of my mother too often. I don't want to grieve a loss that hasn't yet happened. Why take on that pain before it's inevitable? But when a friend loses their mother, it is hard not to think about what that loss will look like for me.

For friends, they have partners and children. I don't. My mother is my most lasting relationship, and it's with someone who is biologically, fundamentally, programmed to love me. And I feel that. Nobody will ever love you like your mother. And I have trouble with attachment, and she's the only person I know who truly loves me. 

I feel that my mother had me because she wanted me. I've never felt like my mother didn't want her children (which is the case with some of my friends). I've never felt anything but love from my mother. We have our soft spots, our histories, but I've always felt I had a mother who loved me and wanted me, and who loved being a mother and grandmother.

I try and stay present and grateful for my time with her. Who knows, I could die first. I wouldn't wish that on her, though. I would rather take the loss, though it will be terribly lonely for me.

What a deeply sad reality - all the loss of the loves in our lives. 

Medical Assistance in Dying for the Mentally Ill.

There is an article up on the Toronto Star right now about MAiD (Medical Assistance in Dying) and whether it's appropriate for the mentally ill.

From the introduction:

Dr. Ellen Wiebe, one of the country’s most experienced MAID providers, argues it’s about equality and autonomy: that people with psychiatric illness deserve the same right to choose as anyone else. Dr. John Maher, a psychiatrist and ethicist, calls it a moral failure: a system offering death instead of care. Both see Canada’s underfunded mental-health system as the real crisis. Wiebe hopes MAID will force politicians to finally fix it; Maher fears it lets them off the hook. What divides them is whether compassion means giving people control over how they die — or fighting harder to help them live.

 This is something I've been thinking about since MAiD was announced years ago. 

As someone who is mentally ill, I've often felt that being able to plan your death, would be less traumatizing for the people around you. You could plan your affairs, and be open and honest about wanting to end your suffering. 

I understand both sides of the argument here, but ultimately I believe someone has the ultimate right to their body and life, and that they have a right to suicide. MAiD would allow for that suicide to be planned and painless, as opposed to frightening and potentially violent or horrifying

Dr Mayer's point that "we have a system that doesn’t provide adequate care," is correct. He goes on to say:

Many people suffering from mental illness are pushed to the fringes of society, facing both stigma and poverty. Many people I work with survive on food banks and live in bedbug- and cockroach-infested rooms. You walk into these places and think, this cannot be Canada. To then offer them death deepens their vulnerability.

Though I understand the pull to call out the vulnerability faced by many here, that ciriticism should be of the state, and not of the mentally ill. Ultimately that vulnerability, that poverty and lack of access is part of the condition. Not of the condition of being mentally ill itself, but the condition of being mentally ill, in Canada, in 2025. In this economy. With this access. With no resources, what do we actually have access to? Waitlists? 

I have a decent job. I have healthcare coverage. I still live paycheque to paycheque. I don't have an easy access to doctor's. I don't have a therapist or counselor. I can't afford bi-weekly appointments. It is a struggle, every day. I try and make the time to go to the gym 2-3 times a week, for my mental health and to prep for surgery, but I go to a community gym because I can't afford otherwise. I can't afford my life right now, I buy groceries on a credit card. I feel like every day is a struggle. And that's mental ilness with the "new" addition of physical disability since 2022. 

I can say with absolute certainty that if I were to live with the amount of pain I had when I was hosopitalized with necrotic pancreatitis, gastroperesis and the other compounding pains and illnesses (surgery pain, being bed ridden, pneomonia) I would opt for MAiD. It wasn't living a life. It was variations of discomfort to extreme pain over extended periods of time. 

I hope this piece and articles like it make their way into the public sphere so we can keep discussing MAiD. I want it to be destgimatized, and I want our relationship to our inevitable death to be something we can have more control over, especially when in unbelieveable pain. 

"I started to accept my limitations, more than the possibilities."

Andy Richter had a short interview on Day 6 on CBC, and something he said really stuck with me. He was asked about his experience on Dancing with the Stars, as a comedian, and as an older guy (59), and about being a fan favourite. He talked about the transformation of his mindset and of his reality. Specifically, before accepting to join DWTS he says something along the lines of:

I had started to accept my limitations, more than the possibilities.

I think that's a quote that speaks a lot to me these days. The last few weeks, I've been thinking about what's been holding me back, and these days it feels like waiting for my incisional hernia surgery has been a big wall for me. I'm worried when exercising. I'm worried about hurting myself more or making it worse. I'm worried about how long I'm going to have to wait. I'm worried if it gets too bad, they won't operate. I'm anxious about it. I want a date. I want to know it's going to happen. 

Then, in talking with a friend bout 2026 and how it feels like it's going to be a big year, I thought about how nice it would be to have the surgery over and done with and how I'll then be able to focus on healing. I won't be in this purgatory or waiting to be cut open again. 

It is now relatively certain that I will have a new job in January 2026. It will either be a promotion I interviewed for this past week, or it will be an at-level change to a Project Management team since my current role and team are being dissolved. 

This friend, energized by changes in her own life, and with a focus on human design, astrology, and various other woo-woo adjacent lenses, got me thinking about what positive changes could come in 2026.

I am so seldom positive. Feeling hope or excitement is so rare for me; it felt both unusual and novel. Thinking of my life in terms of what's possible is just alien to me. I feel so blocked from it. 

But sometimes I have to remind myself that things are possible.

Yes, I almost died in 2022. But I didn't. I have been healing and just surviving, and just trying to figure out what my life and limitations are, but I am, in fact, still alive. 

And as someone who is still alive, I can have goals and desires. 

I did not die in 2022. I have to keep reminding myself of that.

Alone in the Fat Fort: Body Positivity was a Hallucination.

It's over. Body Positivity was a nice hallucination in the pop-culture zeitgeist. A temporary anomaly, around long enough to be counted and seen, but not genuine enough to really take root with the culture makers. 

My algorithm used to show me all kinds of bodies, working out, and trying on cute outfits. I'd see bigger bodies not apologising for existing in the world. What a revelation. Big girls living their lives without shame-forward apologies for taking up space. 

Ironically, I noticed a change when the Wicked promotion started. I'm melting! - indeed. The leads look shockingly thin in most photos. All collar bones and sinew. It happens; they'd been working hard. I can't blame them; my initial reaction was one of concern. Their weight loss is significant and unmistakable. But maybe it's just them. 

But then, the standard "regular girls" started melting away: Amy Schumer, Mindy Kaling, Megan Trainor. All unrecognisable. Again, I can't blame them; they're doing it for their health. 

It's said GLP-1s have folks feeling nauseous to the point where they don't think about food or being hungry. It silences "food noise." Something I suffer from, which is akin to OCD. Folks say it's freeing. Including Oprah. A woman whose body has been a topic of conversation my entire life.

I lived without food noise once, when I was hospitalised for four months and developed gastroperesis. I was on a lot of opioids, and just slept. I had a tube down my throat giving me liquid nutrition, and I didn't eat for months. I never thought about eating. It was indeed freeing. I wasn't hungry. I wasn't thinking about food at all. Ever. Compare this to what I'm usually like, which is thinking about food when I'm not even hungry, and often thinking about my next meal, or the opportunity to eat. I can hide food out of shame, and often have a scarcity mentality, as if any meal could be my last meal. If there's "bad food" in my house, I think about it. I know it's there. I know I could eat it. It's exhausting and compulsive. 

I didn't think the turn back to the cult of thin would affect me so much. I grew up in the 90s, Kate Moss was it, she taunted, "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." This was a mantra. 

When I was in high school, Kate Winslet was written about at nauseum when she was in Titanic. Just shat on. 

I grew up with my grandmother's Star magazines, newspaper-quality photos of size 8 women being called elephants and cows. It's not old. 

I don't know that body positivity, or even body neutrality, ever really took root. So I'm not surprised that we swung back around to worshipping thinness, but I'm disappointed. It was a nice change for a minute.

I didn't realise seeing Oprah, and other pop-culture "chubby" or over-size-10 women, melt away, would feel so personal. It feels like a mixture of an erasure and an abandonment. 

Will there be no bigger women left? Melissa McCarthy is losing weight. As is Lizzo. Everyone is melting away. There's also Rebel Wilson, Adele and Kelly Clarkson. The list is long. 

And these women, these people, have every right. And part of me feels gross even discussing people's bodies. But they are also public figures, and they also represent the norm of women's bodies, and seeing them disappear is uncomfortable. It feels like being disappointed in someone you looked to for comfort. It's not their role, it's not their responsibility, but it is a loss. It's an errasure. 

Maybe it's jealousy. I can't take a GLP-1 because I don't have a pancreas. My endochronologist told me early on, a GLP-1 could kill me. 

I would love to cancel the food noise. I would love help. I would love to be able to silence the incessant voice in my head. To remove the compulsion, to regain the space and energy it takes, to not have the constant shame be ever-present.

Early studies show that folks who lose weight on a GLP-1 have to keep taking it. The medicine targets obesity biology, and thus, if you stop taking it, the "disease" comes back. 

It feels as though we are at the peak of GLP-1 popularity, so maybe more studies and more criticism will come with time, but for now, it feels like a "cure" that, unfortunately, I cannot access. So I'll stand here, fat, watching everyone else melt away. I'll man the fort. The fat fort.

"Is she hot?"

When I think about new friendships with men, I often start by looking back at the most formative ones I've had. My high school friends. 

When I think of them with fondness, I think about laughing until I think I might throw up. I think about silliness. I think about the way guys will do ridiculous, sometimes reckless, or disgusting things for a laugh from their buddies. I think about frantic nights inventing ridiculous games or staying up until the sun comes up, talking. 

We started as a big group of friends. But eventually puberty gets involved, and things change. We're not just buddies. I'm now someone with tits. For some, the twinkle in their eye became something more sinister.

Some remained good guys. Some did not.

When someone talked about a sister, a new friend, or a new co-worker, the first question they would ask is "Is she hot?"

And that's what we were, we were first and foremost something to be fucked. Even though we were all sitting around as friends, the girls had a role to play, and we were always reminded of it.

Drinking alcohol around these types of guys is always a risk. No matter how friend-zoned you think you are, or how well established your "sibling-like" friendship is, they'll make a move. They'll chalk it up to the alcohol, but you can tell it's a question of opportunity. You're a specific category. Like a pet that will be eaten if things get desperate enough, or you know, if they get mildly horny.

When I was in college, I was in a new class, and I sat at a table with two guys having a conversation. They were talking about a comedy show. They talked about their families. Music. They talked about where they came from, their families, and their sisters. Nobody asked, "Is she hot?"

I remember standing on a subway platform with one of them and his inching towards me with an awkward twitch. When I looked at him inquisitively, he explained, "Can you take a step away from the subway ledge? It's making me nervous." How alien. Care. Concern. He was from a small town in New Brunswick, and he was kind and polite. He was a revelation. Every day, he showed me ways in which a man could be non-threatening. Every day we met as friends. 

My other new friend was similar. He had a sister he was close with and a long-term girlfriend. He was friends with several girls. When he talked about them, he talked about fully realized people. People outside of their gender. He didn't put girls on a pedestal; he told stories of his sister shitting her pants and puking out car windows. A man who knows that women have bodies just as feral as a man's knows women. 

We became good friends over my three-year degree. They became an antidote to years of poisoned memories. They were the antithesis of toxic masculinity. Decades later, one of them has two daughters, and I think often about what a gift he is to those girls. 

For years, I would look back at high school memories and wonder what would have happened had I been a little drunker or if I'd not been careful. I was always careful. 

My first relationship was with one of these guys, and it wasn't good. It soon became sordid and unhealthy. I became a dirty secret and was put aside when it suited him. I was convenient and easily controlled. I wasn't hot hot. But I was hot enough. 

I woke up one day hating myself. All I had was shame. And when I turned to some of those guy friends, they laughed at me, because girls are silly. And if this one guy was being shitty, then they were all shitty, right?

My 20s were spent just hating myself. I have so much shame around how I was treated and what I was worth. I'm middle-aged now, and I look back at my youth and hate how much of it was spent just trying to survive. Their opinions cut me so deeply, but they were just such dicks. I wish I had just shaken it off and lived the life of a young person, meeting new people and trying things. But I didn't. I was scared of new people because it took so much energy to just survive the rejection and losses of the ones I'd met so far. Everything seemed like a risk. And when it takes so much time and energy to survive a period of your life, unnecessary risk is to be avoided. 

So I avoided a lot of things. I only made friends slowly, in school or at work. For a while, it was only girls and queer folk. Slowly, my friendships grew or were pruned as adulthood and work laid claim to most of my time and energy.

But I can't quite shake memories of that time in my life. Randomly, one will pop into my brain, and I'll wish I could claw it out. 

When RuPaul says, "If you can't love yourself, then how in the hell can you love somebody else?" I think about it. I love people. Surely, I must love myself? And I do, but only parts of myself. I'm kind, and I'm funny, and I'm organized, and I'm helpful. But the part that could be fuckable, I don't love. I still have a lot of shame and pain around her. I resent her, and I'm sad she never really existed. Not happily. Not standing on her own two feet. 

How can decades of shame be healed? That's what I'm faced with now, now that I'm looking at it. 

The Chronology of Water | Official Trailer

This book was a revelation when I first read it in my early 20s. 

I highly recommend the book and have high hopes for Stewart's vision. 

Now what?

It's been a slog lately. Things at work aren't great (budget cuts, re-orgs, and layoffs,) and it's an ongoing purgatory of "we don't know yet" and "we'll have answers soon." When this goes on for months, it. gets hard to be patient. I was told I would have a new job at the start of November, and we're now a weekend away from December. 

Combine that with November dark, short days, and my stress about my upcoming surgery (which also has no set date,) and I'm not the best. I can feel the tension in my neck and shoulders. I'm always exhausted, and I just feel perpetually stuck and frustrated. 

Work has been a focus on delivering a specific project by a recent date, and now that that's behind me, there's little to no work or clarity. 

The upside of this is that I did bite the bullet last year and get myself a laptop, hence my ability to write on blogger. . .  Hi, hello. 

I have been able to design my holiday card for the year and do a few little things for myself, all because I now have a laptop. 

I've written some essays, and occasionally send them to some writing magazines and stuff, so the laptop has allowed me to work on personal stuff when work work is slow, or I'm waiting for X Y Z. 

I'm going to try and start writing more here and get the juices going. 

Over the last year, I've started going to the gym 2-3 times a week in preparation for surgery and to just get my body moving. My goal was to create the habit.

Over the next year, I'd like to get back into reading. I used to read 1-2 books a month, and I've been on the same book for a year now, All Fours by Miranda July. 

I just spend entirely too much time doomscrolling on my phone - something I'll have to make an effort about. It's just a massive waste of time and mental energy. 

Link Dump.

 As recently mentioned, I was without a laptop for a number of years, so here is a massive link dump. 

This is your brain on pandemic: What chronic stress is doing to us

The Occupation of a Woman Writer

Our inherited biases about who should write what live deeper than most of us realize or want to acknowledge.

This Is The Scientific Reason Depression Can Cause You Physical Pain

I’m Living With Depression, Not Fighting It
My depression has evolved as I've gotten older, and I've realized that the way I live with it needs to evolve too.

My Depression Is Like Having A Bad Dog - this is illustrated!

Nineteen Metaphors for Your Depression

I mean, it's not news now, but Pete Davidson discussed being Borderline.

The Original Natural Remedy for Burnout: Nature

On Being Fat

Why Am I So Fat?

In defense of fat sadness.

Turns out a bunch of the stuff I was going to share are now dead links . . .

That's it for now!

How Do I Make Up For My Lost Years?

How Do I Make Up For My Lost Years? by Ayesha A. Siddiqi

A 30-year-old feels like they started their life ten years too late. But their grief is the natural byproduct of growth.

Read on Substack

The new-new.

Hi there, I have a new laptop. 

My PowerBook died 2 years ago, I'd had it since 2008 I think. . . .

I got a decent tax return this year, and bit the bullet and got a new laptop, it cost more than I would have liked, and it's fancy as hell. My PowerBook lasted so long. Solid little brick. 

I can now start working on computer projects, design work, and some writing. It'll be much easier. Over the last few years, I worked on my "office job" computer on breaks and after hours, meaning I was using free web-based design apps and I used some DIY hodge-podge methods.

It sucked!

So you might see a barrage of posts over the next few weeks as I work through old links.

If you're still around - I'm not dead! I was just broke and without a laptop! 

I'm trying to get back into creative methods and practice. 

We'll see how it goes!