It’s been a while since I posted. First I got hit with a fatigue flare. Then I was out of town for 9 days for work+family (with the fatigue flare still going). Then the election happened and we all went into collective shock and horror. We’ve spent the last three weeks alternately figuring out how to respond and disconnecting because the stress of it was exacerbating all of our various issues.

Any one of those things would have blown things up for us; all three has meant that we’re in “just do the absolute basics” mode, and the “absolute basics” are basic, indeed: everyone eats three meals a day at reasonable times, everyone has their meds, everyone goes to bed at a reasonable hour, the cats are fed and loved and have their litter boxes cleaned.

It means the house hasn’t been fully cleaned in two months, some meals have been questionable and too many others have involved ordering in, there have been some decidedly strange outfits because we’ve run out of clean laundry, and the plants may or may not make it. The chaos is stressful, but that stress is still smaller than the energy it would take to make things not-chaotic, and right now our available energy is not enough to make much of a difference.

I want to write about the trip — how we handle them, how this one went — and all of the ways the election is threatening to fuck up our lives. I want to write about how situations like this reveal, again, just how fragile we are, which is easy to lose sight of in a day to day that is, while not normal by other people’s standards, normal and functional by ours. I want to write about how awesome Dr. Mr. Rogers (Catharine’s psychiatrist) is and how grateful I am that we’ve got him on Team Her. I want to write about how difficult I’m finding this holiday season, even more so than usual.

I will write about those things. But right now I’m also just giving 2016 the finger, because it’s been a brutal year. And then I’m going to watch the Gilmore Girls revival for the third time, because we’ve got to find our self-care where we can, these days.