net positive

predictably, it's been two(ish) weeks of having this forced solo time and i haven't written/painted a single thing. no schedule was followed, desires left hanging in the air. they mingled with vapour escaping from my huffing and puffing up the mountain behind our home. i felt i looked fat in the mirror and ate up my time with hiking to counter all the carbs i literally ate.

started watching shows like big love and work in progress to supplement my catfish addiction and wrap myself in the familiar comfort of self-loathing. on wip season 2, abby cycles through therapists and one of them keeps telling her "net positive". she ends up dumping him because he said "for all intensive purposes", but i sat up straighter when he said the first phrase. my mood and self-love has been on a rollercoaster ride since october and i don't even know what to tell people anymore, but "net positive" seemed like a lifevest worth swimming to.

my life is net positive. i am all right: healthy (barring a suspicion of hormonal imbalance i use to excuse my weight gain), loved, living in a peaceful environment, happy even. but i am also depressed and needing connection. i'm grieving, but i don't know who for exactly, because our baby wasn't born. i don't know her, but somehow i feel her cells in my body give me licence to feel. many women have felt this way, but my words seem to join a vast ocean of lament that loses meaning in its enormity.

how do i begin to be me again? this has been my question since moving to new zealand, and the answer eluded me up until my pregnancy but now it seems further away than ever.

we did a show recently. since slow hello is split in two countries, we recorded our performance in october. in the video, i still have her in me. i remember feeling the proverbial glow, and i see it in my face when the gig happens in december. i remember being that happy woman, nervous but excited at the changes happening to her body. she almost looked like PH me.

... or is all this confusion about identity just me aging? haha!

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very good. something came out. something true, my real emotions that so far i've only been able to share with r and some friends who can imagine what it's like. i can never express these when someone asks me, "how are you?" lately. i want to.

i recently unfollowed a miscarriage support fb group. though i was grateful for the realisation that i wasn't alone (or unique) from the women who shared their stories, i started becoming sad that so many women needed help like i did. maybe it's because i don't have the depth yet of the friendships i used to have in the PH, in AKL, that makes the isolation so overwhelming. at this moment, i feel forced to reckon with this on my own, and maybe the lesson is to manage my emotions.

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here's something i painted just to have something to share. i haven't been able to post this online yet. i started this earlier in the year and finished it in august, a few days before we visited our wonderful friends in christchurch. l is holding jiji the cat, and when we visited them i felt like i had met jiji, totoro, the curtain and the monsterra before. 

jiji unfortunately met an accident a few months later. she was so sweet. i've been holding morty closer, more tenderly since. 

Gosh 2021 was harsh

What an insane year. I thought I could have gone on longer to ignore this blog, but I feel I don't have any other solution available to me at this point than to write.

The crazy thing this year was Q3, when I found out I was pregnant just as a national lockdown had started. It was a surprise that was ultimately welcomed and cherished, up until we discovered I had miscarried. It happened just as we were far along enough that we thought we could share it with everyone.

Even though you know the true statistics of miscarriage and have long stopped believing that a woman's worth was her reproductive capability, you feel incompetent. It's hard to peel the layers earned growing up under the patriarchy, harder at least after experiencing a loss like this.

But each day just comes, relentless, and you're still alive. You can go back to the things that made you happy on a daily basis: hiking, episodes of Catfish, sometimes painting. They keep you on a low hum of agreeable acceptance, with support from your unflappable and kind husband.

Every now and then, you let your face crumple and some grief escapes your grasp. Some days you feel baby envy, a pinch in the chest. In those moments it feels impossible. But then in a few minutes, you're okay again. Very weird.

Last night (and the whole of yesterday, actually) I got the best sleep I've had in months. So a bit of the clutter has been pushed aside and there's room to make a plan:

1. Make stuff.
2. Make a schedule to make stuff.
3. Make a three-pronged attack: write words, write music, paint
4. Try to express how things that make you feel make you feel, as closely as possible to the truth.