[353/365] tiring day
Dec. 19th, 2021 08:48 pmStuart's out of the hospital! Thanks for your good wishes there. They still don't know what's wrong but they can do the tests he needs as an outpatient, and I'm sure they needed the bed.
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diffrentcolours went to pick him up while mother_bones and I were sneakily cleaning his bathroom and making his bed so he'd have someplace nice and restful to come back to. We made sure he had groceries and stuff and I made him a cup of tea before we left; all three of us were pretty tired by that point. Four counting diffrentcolours who'd had to brave B&M between dropping Stuart off and coming back to pick up the two of us. I was so grateful to have both of their help.
We had a sleepy afternoon and got takeaway from Tokyo Noodle again and are watching the second half of a movie thatdiffrentcolours was too migrainey to finish the other night. It has been a hell of a week.
I'm so glad that I've got tomorrow off though. There's no point me having a long Christmas break when I can't go anywhere and when I'm uncomfortably aware that people aren't getting help with showers and other essentials if I'm not there to do it, so for the next two weeks I'll only be working two days, Tuesday and Friday. I've got a volunteering meeting on Wednesday too (I told them it'll be my 40th birthday and no one there believes I'm about to turn 40; I maintain that I'm just immature for my age) but I'm looking forward to a chill week. My parents are going to try skyping from my grandma's house on Friday night, since I was very keen on that when my mom offered.
Christmas Eve is the real Christmas for me, it's always what I thought about and what I missed during the rest of the year, even as a kid. It's not the same now, without my grandpa around to be the patriarch who loved his family and loved Christmas, it's not the same without my brother, but I'm still not going to be in the only place I feel I should be on that day of the year.
I was awfully depressed last weekend and I thought it'd gotten better as we got into this week but it turns out I was just incredibly busy, from Monday morning onwards. And as soon as calmed down, as soon as we got home from getting Stuart back into his flat, the depression came back. The busy hadn't driven it off, just masked it I guess. Somewhere I have a photo I stole from the internet, of a person vacuuming sand in the desert and it says something like "If you work hard enough, you can replace depression with exhaustion" and I hate how true that is.
I tried to nap but I couldn't. Sometimes when I can't sleep I get a weird kind of thought in my head and this is one of those times: I'll think of something completely random (one I remember even years later is "the way the kitchen chairs at my grandparents' house looked," which I have not seen in twenty years and about which I have no emotional attachment whatsoever) and get so fixated on it that I can't relax and I can't think of anything else. It's such a weird, uncomfortable thing to have happen and I can find it pretty upsetting. Today's image was of my dad going to sit down in the living room with a drink of something on Christmas Day. I know it's Christmas Day because we're in our house, the tree is up, he's wearing a nice sweater over a nice shirt, Christmas music is playing. I know where I'm watching from and where he's going to sit down but it doesn't feel like a memory, just a composite my brain has put together. I know exactly how this would go because I've seen things so similar to it happen so many times. Until last year I had always (well okay excepting my first Christmas when I was two or three days old I guess!) been in the same places, with the same people give or take, doing the same things. It feels so unsettling not to be there, not to be doing those things. And I couldn't nap because I couldn't stop thinking of this. Is his sweater burgundy? I think it is.
I was doing okay about this until now but I guess by today, by the 19th of December, I would be there already or deep in pre-flight stress mode at the very least. Even as omicron has absolutely justified my parents' and my uneasiness with me traveling, even as I could not be more certain that I'm doing the right thing, it's hard.
diffrentcolours went to pick him up while mother_bones and I were sneakily cleaning his bathroom and making his bed so he'd have someplace nice and restful to come back to. We made sure he had groceries and stuff and I made him a cup of tea before we left; all three of us were pretty tired by that point. Four counting diffrentcolours who'd had to brave B&M between dropping Stuart off and coming back to pick up the two of us. I was so grateful to have both of their help. We had a sleepy afternoon and got takeaway from Tokyo Noodle again and are watching the second half of a movie that
diffrentcolours was too migrainey to finish the other night. It has been a hell of a week.I'm so glad that I've got tomorrow off though. There's no point me having a long Christmas break when I can't go anywhere and when I'm uncomfortably aware that people aren't getting help with showers and other essentials if I'm not there to do it, so for the next two weeks I'll only be working two days, Tuesday and Friday. I've got a volunteering meeting on Wednesday too (I told them it'll be my 40th birthday and no one there believes I'm about to turn 40; I maintain that I'm just immature for my age) but I'm looking forward to a chill week. My parents are going to try skyping from my grandma's house on Friday night, since I was very keen on that when my mom offered.
Christmas Eve is the real Christmas for me, it's always what I thought about and what I missed during the rest of the year, even as a kid. It's not the same now, without my grandpa around to be the patriarch who loved his family and loved Christmas, it's not the same without my brother, but I'm still not going to be in the only place I feel I should be on that day of the year.
I was awfully depressed last weekend and I thought it'd gotten better as we got into this week but it turns out I was just incredibly busy, from Monday morning onwards. And as soon as calmed down, as soon as we got home from getting Stuart back into his flat, the depression came back. The busy hadn't driven it off, just masked it I guess. Somewhere I have a photo I stole from the internet, of a person vacuuming sand in the desert and it says something like "If you work hard enough, you can replace depression with exhaustion" and I hate how true that is.
I tried to nap but I couldn't. Sometimes when I can't sleep I get a weird kind of thought in my head and this is one of those times: I'll think of something completely random (one I remember even years later is "the way the kitchen chairs at my grandparents' house looked," which I have not seen in twenty years and about which I have no emotional attachment whatsoever) and get so fixated on it that I can't relax and I can't think of anything else. It's such a weird, uncomfortable thing to have happen and I can find it pretty upsetting. Today's image was of my dad going to sit down in the living room with a drink of something on Christmas Day. I know it's Christmas Day because we're in our house, the tree is up, he's wearing a nice sweater over a nice shirt, Christmas music is playing. I know where I'm watching from and where he's going to sit down but it doesn't feel like a memory, just a composite my brain has put together. I know exactly how this would go because I've seen things so similar to it happen so many times. Until last year I had always (well okay excepting my first Christmas when I was two or three days old I guess!) been in the same places, with the same people give or take, doing the same things. It feels so unsettling not to be there, not to be doing those things. And I couldn't nap because I couldn't stop thinking of this. Is his sweater burgundy? I think it is.
I was doing okay about this until now but I guess by today, by the 19th of December, I would be there already or deep in pre-flight stress mode at the very least. Even as omicron has absolutely justified my parents' and my uneasiness with me traveling, even as I could not be more certain that I'm doing the right thing, it's hard.