the format of these monthly updates are directly inspired by how my family and I stay connected with each other. you can expect some main points, some tangential stories, some vulnerable reflections on things that feel uncertain, and an invitation to share what’s up with you too.

here’s some snapshots of what january looked like:

🎴 I start new habits around a familiar tarot practice.

♑ I continue my personal astrology practice.

📔 I finally get to use my new CHANI planner.

🌨️ BIG SNOW days (well, big for the NL, and definitely big for someone who has only ever lived in southern california).

🎮 I play A BUNCH of video games to keep myself resting on the couch, here are a few: Grimshire, The King Is Watching, Vampire Survivors, Trash Goblin, Diner Bros 2.

📙 I explore a new community / affinity group. They happen to be reading Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey. Impeccable timing.

🥣 Some of our friends visit me while I’m recovering and cook syrniki for us. Doubly sweet of them.

🎲 Another deeply satisfying board game night with friends. As someone accustomed to being the planner, it feels so good to be in the hands of another fantastic planner 💖

🥼 Allan and I finally register with a GP.

🎂 I turn 34!

🚲 I ride on the back of a bike for the first time, with Allan pedaling me to my KvK appointment.

🏦 My business, ritual as:, is finally registered with the KvK (the Dutch chamber of commerce). The appointment was shorter than the bike ride there.

🧾 It was a bit confusing to get a final answer, but at least 2 employees have looked at our DAFT visa application submissions and told us that our supplementary documentation is complete!

🩸 I get my first period after surgery. There is both grief and relief.

👾 My friend and I finish up a game from their childhood after meeting for a couple hours a week to stream together over the past 5 months. We start a new weekly lunchtime meet-up and have invited another mutual friend.

🌐 I start meeting with other covid-conscious/covid-cautious embodiment facilitators to explore hosting free & sliding scale offerings for other CC folks. Inspiration abound.

❤️‍🩹 January 28th marked the end of my 6-week recovery period. I consider getting a tattoo to commemorate.

🌉 We do our first trip to Rotterdam, lovingly planned with group of our friends.

Card pulls and personal reflections

(CW: mention of miscarriage, with no attempts or desire to be pregnant; mentions of historic practices of sterilization without consent)

🌱⚔️ Page of Swords reflections:

I can connect with people from a grounded place. I can let go of having to overextend myself to be ‘charming’ (aka masked). If I can let go of that pregnancy, I can let go of this. I can be myself, and I can believe people when they show me who they are. How am I making my words tangible?

8️⃣🍵 8 of Cups reflections:

Be adaptive. Remember your freedom and the freedom you work towards. Put your imagination to work. Get. Some. Goals. Get focused, you can do it, ask for help.
What unique pollinators/pollinations are available to you? It's okay to hope.

⚜️🪙🙃 Ace of Pentacles, reversed

Give yourself permission to get better at nourishing yourself. What seeds of nourishment/nourishing habits have you been hoarding? What will it take for you to plant them? How can you share more? more of yourself, your talents. How are you hoarding your talents? What balance can you bring to your pleasure sources/practices? FOCUS ON HEALING YOUR BODY.

conversations with community

These themes showed up this month in my recovery, and in what it has looked like to keep in touch with friends and family abroad during the ongoing pandemic.

I haven’t always been the best (or even just good) at keeping in touch with folks. Between AuDHD, PMDD, and just a genuine lack of practice, I’ve dropped the ball often—or rather, watched it bounce off of me, hit the floor, and roll away. Before the pandemic, I was out and about enough that I saw my friends enough in person to skate by without having to really think about this as much. This changed when the pandemic hit, and became even more magnified when I left the U.S.

Over the past 6 months I’ve been working on being more intentional about reaching out. I’m learning that I was overextending my capacity in so many ways before the pandemic, and since then it’s been a process of learning what my actual capacity is. As I continue to get a more accurate gauge of this, it’s getting easier and easier to recognize what I need in order to reliably connect my friends while still taking care of myself. Most of these supports are mundane and unglamorous—which is not a bad or disappointing thing. Recurring alarms and recurring calendar events. A daily reminder to message a friend. Setting aside limited, dedicated time in the week to just respond to messages. Not done with perfect consistency, just some consistency.

It’s still very much in flux; the less I pressure myself to do it, the easier it is to notice the natural rhythm of the impulses I have to connect. They’re very few and far between. But knowing more about it helps me better plan support mechanisms to bridge the gaps.

In significant ways, much of my recovery has looked like this. The first half of January was very much allowing myself to be fluid, and noticing which pathways emerged in my timescapes with repeated flow. It felt a bit like dumping a glass of water over a mound of dirt each day and seeing which rivulets were carved over time. From there, I started to add things in—either along the banks knowing I would pass them, or directly on the waterways, moving them along with me through the day. There are flood days and drought days, and storms that sometimes change the waterways altogether.

The scariest part of committing to this process was deconstructing the structures I already had in place. Many of them weren’t working already, and they definitely wouldn’t work for this recovery that was already happening here and now. I had no capacity to build on top of what was already stalling. Some things had to come down first.

So with the support of my friends, my family, and winter, I waited, and I rested. A privilege that many people are kept from. I followed my impulses, and only deviated when necessary. I observed the impacts this had on me. I experimented with reinforcing the habits that energized me, I slowed or diverted flow from habits that didn’t, and I shored up the banks of all the things I don’t like doing but have to. More easily said than done. But also, I’ve done this so many times before over the years—adjusting to my menstrual cycle and everything that comes with that, adjusting to the ebbs and flows between one hyperfocus and the next. I’ve done this before.

What I hadn’t done before was pregnancy, miscarriage, and the grief that comes with that, even knowing that I didn’t and still don’t wish to get pregnant. Much of this I’m still parsing for myself; I was likely only pregnant for 4-6 weeks but there was grief for the cells in my body that were, against odds of 1 in 10,000, simply in an inhospitable place at a time that was always going to be wrong—all the while I had been told it was kidney stones. I won’t recount the details of getting to the hospital and the subsequent surgery, but this seemed inaccurate at the time and I’m glad I listened to my body as things started to get worse. There is also the grief of surviving and recovering while knowing that this could have gone terribly different in the United States—and has for many folks.
When I got my first period since surgery, I found grief around returning to a cycle in which PMDD will also return. I also found relief that I still had my uterus to bleed from. I hadn’t realized I’d been harboring worries that been there for a long time: that I might be covertly sterilized against my will—like many Black and Brown birthing folks have been and still are today. I still wonder today if my remaining tube wasn’t just tied up without my consent. I found rage that this was something anyone would ever have to worry about at all.
During this time, I looked to the related experiences of my ancestors—containing outliers of both fertility and miscarriage. How they survived, how they grieved (or didn’t), how they shared (or didn’t) and what their lives still looked like afterwards. I was (re)assured: I will still live, life will not stop, and love will still be here. This doesn’t mean it will be easy, but you will not be stuck here.

So yes, I’d reinvented my habits and rituals before, but never with these feelings in the space. What’s emerged (and continues to emerge) is a loose daily routine that both me and my inner little feel nourished by. It still needs adjustments, but between navigating PMDD, AuDHD, and ongoing grief, I don’t think there will ever be a time when it doesn’t. Accepting this has released a lot of energy for me to be curious, observant, and experimental. Divesting my sense of self and how I’m doing from old ways of evaluating how ‘well’ I’m ‘sticking to my habits’ is a tender thing to deconstruct, and a subtle thing to notice in the first place. I was very apprehensive at first, and some days I still am.

I ended up feeling so energized by week 4 of my recovery that, beyond my baseline joy and desire to play video games, I started doing so even more often just to keep myself sat on the couch.

So I can’t argue with how much clearer things feel in continuing this flowing approach, even if the future feels uncertain.

Thanks for reading, wishing you moments of ritual, rest, and restoration.

misha

p.s. You can now read about February here!