Hello Darling Ones,

I’m dictating this letter into my cellular device because it’s eye day and my garbage vision is extra garbagey.

WARNING. There are going to be 77 layers of irony to this letter, but I’m gonna go ahead and say it anyway cause I it’s on my mind. This blog is nothing if not crap that’s on my mind.

As I approach my strokeaversary on Wednesday I’m thinking about how self-centered I’ve been this year.

This is where the irony comes in, how someone with a 24-year-old blog where she writes about her life and crap on her mind now thinks she’s too self-centered.

Despite my fucking 52 years of self-centeredness, I always stayed pretty abreast of the news, even claiming newsjunkie status until 2020 when I had to stop for my own mental health.

But damn things are bad right now. Every morning I shout at Angrboda, my laptop, “LEAVE TRANS PEOPLE ALONE.” And there’s the nightmare that is the holocaust in Palestine. Then Supreme Court’s shenanigans and Turnip‘s resurgence and things are bad every where, except maybe France where they constitutionalized (not sure that’s a word) abortion. Viva la France.

That’s about as much thought as I give things, because then I get distracted by what’s going on in my own head. Mostly, checking on all the weirdness in my body.

Since the stroke I’ve been a bad friend, a bad citizen, a bad human.

I wish I could go back and apologize to all the people I silently judged for seeming to have their head up their ass, too focused on themselves to care about what’s going on in the world and the people around them. I didn’t know what they were dealing with.

This year has been difficult. I’ve never thought so much about my body and how it feels. As I’ve said before, I treated my body like the trashcan around Oscar the Grouch. It wasn’t like a real place I ever respected, thought about or talked about. Now it’s what I think about the most. I spend so much time checking in with myself. Is my leg still twitchy? Is the right side of my head still hazy? And because I started a new med that’s not agreeing with me yet, does my stomach hurt? And because I think about it so much, I talk about it a lot.

Here’s an example. This morning, my mom and Sister #4 were taking me to the retina doctor. It’s a three person affair. Don’t ask why.

As we were driving there, I was talking about how the tremor in my right arm and hand has gone off the charts since the recrudescence. Before this relapse, the tremor was only noticeable at certain times. Now it’s constant.

So, I’m sitting in the backseat because the back is easier for me to get in and out of and I kept shoving my right hand clenched in a fist in between my mom in the passenger seat and my sister who is driving. My fist shakes uncontrollably when I do this.

I was literally like a three-year-old kid. “Look. Look, Mom. Can you see? Look at my tremor. See, Mom? Isn’t it so weird? In the moment, I didn’t even think about how obnoxious I was being, but upon reflection I feel gross.

I’m so ashamed to admit it, but I’ve lost some people in my life because of my self-centeredness this year. It breaks my heart to have lost one of my very best friends who I love dearly over what I thought was a misunderstanding. It thought this was something I could clear up when I had the mental, physical, and emotional energy to have a taxing conversation. I waited too long and they blocked me on all social media.

Add this 22-year relationship to the L column along with my independence, my ability to drive, walking “normally,” and once beautiful handwriting.

It’s rough. I feel like since I had the stroke some people see me as only a drain, someone easy to dismiss. I mean, I still have value, right? RIGHT?

So that’w what I wanted to talk about today because it’s been on my mind.

Love from the center of the universe,
Jodi