Self care

 

Ahoy.

Time for our little chat again. This is working up to be a nice little routine.

I like routine. The self-care type anyway. I've been working towards reclaiming my blissful monk princess of the backwoods of the Universe lifestyle I effectively achieved back in 2016. That is arranged around long soft mornings, little walks, pondering, cuddles, creating and playing. Just a little bug in the sun.

I don't think I'll ever get an actual meaningful job at an organization or a company, as I thought I might after getting my masters on cultural management. The only thing this little primate can manage is balancing her own sanity and an occasional naive painting thanks to ample sleep and solitude.

To be fair, I was a part time art teacher back in the happiest of days but I didn't have a kid then. That one is a job on it's own, I have little juice left to give to an employer. 

I am the opposite of a powerhouse and I actually am a bit proud of that. Fuck relentless productivity and hustle culture. 

Success is the ability to sleep as long as you need, enrobe yourself in a comfortable  kimono, selfsewn out of reclaimed fabric, like a little scarabeus who has grown herself a beautiful chitin shell. Paint cartoonish summer clouds behind tall dark spruce forest before a dandelion glade on a large canvas and have a hot mug of spiced coffee in your perpetually messy but cozy, cheap but roomy apartment in a wooden house near Tartu train station on a snowy December noon.

That's a long sentence. Also my Tuesday morning.

It's like I'm simultaneously very low and high maintenance. I stumbld on a post in tumblr called depression tips™, which listed 12 simple little daily self-care things a person can do to help them feel consistently better about living. Seeing this is basically my daily routine or at least a conscious goal,  I realized how much of my life is just spent on taking care of myself in order to feel okay about existing. I'm a delicate flower. 

There is a downside to this that makes me feel guilty at times, since Urmet has to be the one who pretty much keeps our household afloat monetarily (among other things) and if we had two regular and taxable incomes our dream of moving to our own little farmhouse in the countryside would be a lot more achievable.. 

But then I remember what happens when I am unable to live by my own schedule. That was made awfully clear during the time when our baby was small. I was so burnt out, the sleeplessness and over-stimulation made me literally crazy. A very very unhappy mess. It has been very gradually getting better, like everyone said it would and I can really appreciate it. There are at least three days in every week when I sigh in relief about the fact that I firmly decided to keep the number of kids down to 1. A prime decision for everyone's well-being in this little family unit. A second kid would have destroyed me completely. I know Urmet wanted more, and well, I would've too, if we had means for a surrogate and a live-in nanny and housekeeper, honestly, two kids would be really nice in such a case.

But right now, we are happy. Life is predictable and rolling nicely down it's track. We have each other and adulting with one kid is largely manageable day to day, with reasonably low standards. I can afford to take it as slow as I need most of the time and the more balanced and content I am, the happier everyone else around me seem to be.

And that's nice.