The Mandelbear's Musings

Apparently the last time I wrote a post with the title "State of the Bear" was in early 2009, over a decade ago. If you're looking for any sort of continuity, you won't find it here. I was doing a lot more introspection back then -- or at least writing about it more. It may be time to get back to it.

You also won't find much of a review. Not here, anyway; I may do year and decade summaries later. (Don't hold your breath -- I have a bad track record for that kind of thing. And a lousy memory.) It's been a rough decade. Colleen's had the worst of it, by far -- 18 stays in five different hospitals, seven times in rehab, nearly dying at least three times, ... She started the decade losing most of the use of her legs. I blame myself for some of her later problems -- I was very stupid a couple of times.

Also in the last decade I've been laid off twice, burned out, retired, had four different therapists; we've moved four times; our kids have both moved out, ... Perhaps the biggest change was joining up with N and her family, in 2012, to form a multi-generational family/household called the Rainbow Caravan.

Someday maybe I'll write up the whole story -- it'll probably take a book. (Mom's memoir comes to nearly 40 pages, and I write more than she does.) Meanwhile, you could look in the Archive -- but there are a little under 3,000 posts in the last 10 years. I've been doing a little looking myself, lately. Kind of amazing how much I've forgotten. (I'm getting the stats mostly by grepping the archive and piping the results through wc -- see Data-mining the Dog, which I posted a little over a month ago.)

But all that's process, and I was supposed to be writing about state. Wasn't I? Right.

Physically, apart from not having done nearly enough walking and not having been to the dentist for the last year (Colleen and I had appointments scheduled for last December -- just after she went into the hospital), I think I'm in pretty decent shape. The usual problems with my knees (I've been using a brace for the right, occasionally, to keep it stable) and back (mostly the QL muscles, which seem to respond well to heat and Naproxen), but those have been going on for the last 48 years or so, and they've been a lot worse from time to time. No major injuries, thank goodness, unless you count a bad fall a couple of years ago (resulting in a slightly broken nose) and a couple of torn muscles. BP and cholesterol under control with comparatively mild drugs.

Mentally -- better than this time last year, I think; probably better than the average of the previous five. (That's not saying much, considering that half of that time was spent burning out at Amazon. Often it feels as though I'm still not recovered.) I'm not sure how much of the improvement can be accounted for by the five months I spent with an online therapist on 7cups -- it didn't feel as though I was getting anywhere. Probably more of the improvement can be credited to my singing teacher.

So... one insight that I got from 7cups is that my main problem hasn't been depression or anxiety, but stress. (Several people have told me since then that they thought I knew that. Maybe I did at some point.) I haven't been all that successful at reducing stress, beyond passing off a lot of the cooking to the housemates. Colleen's care is stressful.

I've gotten very little done over the last couple of years. Some combination of inertia, depression, and laziness. Mostly the latter, I think (assuming procrastination is a form of laziness, anyway; I think it is). Right now I'm having a lot of trouble just finishing this post. I should post it now, otherwise it'll probably sit around for months and not get finished at all. Which has happened with more than one draft post.