a normal day.

5/28/25

I felt like an entirely normal person today. No headache. Glimmers, tiny almost-breakthroughs, but no headache. I had PT in the pool. I went to Publix. I came home and ate. Then I actually, drum-roll, went back out to mail some letters and got up the gumption to go to Wal-Mart to buy containers for recycling. YAY ME!

I had no cigs and no alcohol yesterday, but today I was too hungry after swimming and did buy a slice of cake to eat the icing off of, and an apple turnover. So sugar, yes. And I did overeat.

I see Food Coach tomorrow, for the first time since….a long time. If I pay too much attention to how I’m eating, I will binge. I have tried and tried to explain this to food coach, but….oh it doesn’t matter. I am going to steer this ship myself. I want help, but I don’t need to “confess” a bunch of food sins. I don’t need to feel bad about myself. I am going to talk about all the progress I’ve made since I last spoke with her. That will be the focus.

One thing I must consider as a possible trigger for the migraines is the salivary gland in front of my ear. It’s puffy on the migraine side, the left side. (hello goats!) This could be why my teeth are bothering me, but I must call my dentist again to see if I can get in soon for a cleaning. Pain in my teeth is very often a precursor to migraine.

When I was in the pool today, The PT had me face away from the windows. I think it helped. And I had my goggles on much of the time.

Earlier I was reading some fiction on substack, of various writers, and some of it was truly dreadful. It makes me, not really sad exactly, but kind of frustrated because all many of these writers need is a little bit of instruction to improve their writing exponentially. I know that I could help a lot of them but at this point it does not look like I’m going to get enough paid subscribers to even do the workshop that I was planning on doing, which would be primarily poetry.

And it’s funny how some poets who are just excellent cannot write fiction and vice versa. I will often encounter a writer whose prose is amazing only to stumble upon a poem they wrote that is unreadable. And true, we all have our blind spots and someone could very well dismiss my writing because of taste, and maybe mechanics, but not because I post something unreadable. I do write unreadable things, but I turn them into readable things before they go public.

And it’s interesting to think about because, since I’ve started writing seriously again over these past nine months, I have realized how little I knew before about issues with my own writing, the chief of which was my tenacity and being unwilling to let go of pieces that either aren’t working because I’m so married to a concept or an idea, or I’m married to some kind of language that isn’t working at all. I can let go now. At least I think I can.

I also understand that writing poems is not magic, and… Drawing taught me this. Just because I see something, a piece of art I made or someone else’s piece of art or a telephone pole that looks like a bunch of girls talking to each other in my case, that does not mean that other people will see it the way that I do. The same thing is true with writing. I mean I’ve known this, it’s not like something new that I’m learning, but it is…

it’s like I’ve learned it in this new way that I am more aware of many, many things now. Meditation. Turning 60. Everything goes into the new me that pops out every couple of months or so. Seriously. I am constantly being reinvited.

I have a poetry group in a few minutes. I am very tired and if I find myself nodding off, I will beg off.

~r.