Uffda Darling Ones,

How are your hearts holding up? Are your feet warm at least?

Things ain’t so good here. The US Government continues to occupy Minnesota, killing people and kidnapping anyone who is not white. Not good at all.

I only know this because I keep peeking at the screens that keep me connected to the world. It’s not helping and only makes me angrier.

There’s so much anger inside of me it keeps my feet warm. And when then anger starts to feel a little boring I switch to annoyance and utter uselessness. I tend to cycle through these three on an hourly basis.

Anger at the continued ICE occupation of my beloved state and city. On Instagram someone shared a screenshot of a Threads post where ICE were patting themselves on the back for helping someone in Shakopee, MN jump their car on a cold day. It makes my stomach hurt. The picture they posted was on Marschall & 4th, a few miles from Supergenius HQ, and about a block away from one of the Mexican grocery stores. Incidentally, I worked at that store in the 90s when it was a Tom Thumb.

Annoyance at smug city dwellers who like to lecture “white suburbanites” about how they should help by eating at immigrant-owned restaurants in Minneapolis (rather than the ones our own cities, I guess) or helpfully point out the nearest tourist trap from the last execution. These liberal, tolerant assholes believe the suburbs have not changed from the white-washed places portrayed in John Hughes movies. I thought city-dwellers were supposed to be smarter, more worldly, more open than us automaton, cookie-cutter suburbanites. I also have lots of annoyance for grifting influencers and shitty media.

Utter uselessness is directed at myself. I’m homebound until I get a new wheelchair. I haven’t left HQ since January 9th and probably won’t get a chance until March or Ruby Vroom arrives. The walker + my bad balance + ice & snow = a broken hip waiting to happen. Plus, my mom fell and broke her shoulder which means she can’t chauffeur me a round. And because I have $0.00 I can’t throw money at the problem like I did during the uprising after the murder of George Floyd. This all feels like meager excuses for sitting on my biscuit never having to risk it. Maybe they are. Maybe it’s okay to be quiet and afraid and try not to add anymore burden on anyone else.

I don’t know anymore.

Useless & helpless,
Jodi

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Forgive me, Darling Ones,

I’m about to whine. A lot. This has been a bummer summer and I am counting down the hours until it is over. Summer officially ends, according to the Jodiann calendar, the day after Labor Day.

How will I be celebrating? With injections in my both my eyes. Staving off complete blindness is fun! At least it means I get to go somewhere.

Oh, Darling Ones, I’m depressed as hell and I can’t seem to climb out of my foul mood.

It started last week when I couldn’t go to the State Fair as planned. I didn’t realize how much I was looking forward to it until it all slipped right through the fingers of my Floppy Scoop.

Thanks to being an actual giant and the rentable mobility scooters being for normal-sized people I couldn’t go. Sister #2 scoured the internet for information on the scooters. I was all, I checked the weight limit and they’ll carry me. But alas, I was much too tall. I always forget that my height is a thing. Weird, isn’t it? My waist to knee measurement is 11 inches longer than the scooter would accommodate. Fucking rude.

As my family trundled off to the Fair sans their favorite burden (me), I tried to console myself with the delivery of my “Hooray, you did the thing!” gift. Times is tight, but I wanted to celebrate the victory of submitting something to the creative arts competition. So I allowed myself $20 to blow on something pretty.

I decided to blow my money at Succulents Depot. Big mistake. Huge.

When you only have four figures worth of dollars to your name and no money coming in on the horizon, $20 is a lot!

If you look above you can see the sickly Tradescantia Zebrina & Tradescantia Nanouk they sent me. All I wanted was a tiny, pretty thing to gaze upon and find joy, but NNNNNnnnoooooOOOOOO.

So to my State Fair sadness I have added all the other bummers from this summer:

• Janky, not very helpful wheelchair
• Climate change limiting my time at Sister #4’s Blue Ox Oasis (70 degree highs in August? So much smoke in July? Wah!
• Social Security Disability rejection #3
• Procrastination and hubris-related State Fair blanket failure (they didn’t even display it!)
• And my garage door broke a few days ago meaning I’ve got a $500-$800 repair in my near future

And this is how I’ve worked myself right into a thick, depressed funk.

That’s how I’ve spent my summer, Darling Ones, how about you?

Feeling better now that I wrote about it,
Jodi, Queen of the Bummers

The post Cruel Summer appeared first on I Will Dare.

Hi Darling Ones,

How are you? I have not been well, hence the extended silence. The triple-whammy of Trump’s victory + my recovery plateau + the dying of the light (erm, time change) has left me. . .

sad?
grouchy?
angry?
nihilistic?
empty?

I can’t finish that sentence and thus I haven’t written in more than a fortnight.

Where do I even being to deal with everything? How do you come to terms with being disabled and even nice than that, how do you get comfortable using that term to refer to yourself? I don’t feel as if I’m “disabled enough” to claim it, which is probably more ableism in action.

How do I hold the uncertainty of what it will mean to be disabled in Trump’s America? Half the country voted to elect a man who very famously, and publicly made fun of people who have arm tremors similar to mind.

What about being poor and disabled in a country run by a president in the pocket of billionaires? I’ve only managed to make $5000 so far this year and my savings are rapidly dwindling. I’m still hoping to get on the dole, but social security has moved its decision timing from December to February. Then what?

And then when my brain can’t handle any of that, I think of bigger picture things outside of me. What will happen to my Jewish sister and her vocally-pro-Palestinian community of educators? What will happen to women and trans folks?

People like to label these fears hysteria (of course), but these are the same people who said Row would never be overturned.

Darling ones, I’ve got the mean reds and I could use some cheering up. What do you do to get on more stable emotional ground?

I’ve mostly been hiding from everything by making tiny toys while watching cartoons. So far that has changed nothing. Now I’m trying to write about it because sometimes that helps.

Lost,
Jodisa

The post Seeing if Writing About it Helps appeared first on I Will Dare.

Hi Darling Ones,

I lost my shit this morning and now I have guilt. And I’m super weepy on top of that. Today’s not so great.

My mornings have been starting later and later since the relapse. The time change doesn’t help. Neither does staying up past 1 a.m. most nights. I’m lucky if I’m downstairs making breakfast by noon.

Today was no exception. Getting such a late start to my day makes me a little anxious. It makes me feel like a teenage slacker. I have no reason to be downstairs before noon. There isn’t much work to be done. And, well, I’m tired.

So I was finally ready to get the day started. My coffee, yogurt, breakfast sandwich, and water precisely balanced in the basket of my walker. Since I can’t walk and carry things, I use the basket to haul stuff. It’s the medical equivalent of the wicker-basket little girls used to put on the handlebars of their banana-seated bikes.

I turned from the walker to weed out some dead stalks from my green onion garden. It feels like my way of sticking it to the man, re-growing the green onions I buy from the grocery store in a pot of dirt on the counter. Free(ish) onions! Because I can’t stand for more than 90-seconds I have a wheeled stool I use in the kitchen. I was wheeling to the garbage, my back to the walker when I heard the crash.

Mortimer, the little acrobat, had jumped on the walker basket upsetting my delicate balance. My sandwich flew under the Sadness Garden cart, coffee and water rolled under the dining room table, and in his attempt to flee the scene of the crime Mortimer knocked the adorable mushroom plate I won at Rock & Roll Bookclub to the ground, shattering it.

That’s when I lost it. I threw the spoon I had in my hand into the sink and screamed “Fuck” as loud as I could, scaring all three cats.

“I AM SO ANGRY,” I shouted as I began to clean up the mess. “I’m angry at you,” I said to Mortimer who had calmly folded himself into a loaf in the middle of the kitchen floor.

“STOP!” I yelled at Fergus as she tried to lick the remains of my breakfast sandwich. “I’m angry,” I said in a more normal tone of voice as the anger quickly dissipated.

Because they are cats they did not care one fig about my hissy fit. Because I am human I did care about yelling at them for acting like kittens. It’s not their fault.

Losing my shit had little to do with the ruined breakfast or the shattered plate. It was just the very last thing I could take. I exploded for reasons. Good reasons, I think.

Yesterday I had a follow-up appointment with my primary care doctor. My Physical Therapist had messaged her expressing concern about my relapse. My doctor was also concerned and asked if I would come in.

Of course I did because I’m a goody-goody even though I think the concern is misplaced.

While I was there I showed her my new “party trick” where my right arm shakes uncontrollably unless I really focus on it. Then I can get it down to a barely discernible twitch.

“I think you should see a neurologist,” she said.
“Really?” I asked. We had discussed this in a telehealth appointment and at the time we both agreed it was probably unnecessary.
“Yeah,” she said, nodding her head. “I really dug into your records for the last year after our last appointment, and while I feel less worried that you can control the tremor with focus, I want to make sure there’s not something we missed.”

So she’s referring me to a neurologist for further testing. AND that was the second to last thing I could take, and why the breakfast catastrophe broke me. There’s something about seeing a neurologist that feels big and scary, somehow more serious and dire than, you know, a stroke.

Emotionally, I’m a precariously balanced walker basket.

I’ve been handling the relapse pretty well. When I had my physical therapy evaluation last week we discovered I had backslid quite a bit from where I was in September, but I had not slid all the way to where I was at the beginning in July. I even improved on a couple of things.

But still, it’s SO ANNOYING. And you put that on top of the grief of losing the relationship with my best friend and the money woes and what’s going on in the world and being a human, and well, something has to give.

In most ways I’m better off now than I was in March 2023, but damn I could really use a good break.

Thanks for listening,
Jodi

P.S. If you have any spare money you’d like to share with me I’d gratefully take it. I only made $225 last month and that doesn’t even cover my ridiculously cheap mortgage.

The post The Breakfast Catastrophe Broke Me appeared first on I Will Dare.

Dear Darling Ones,

Sometimes I feel like a special guest star in an 80s sitcom. You know, the plucky, sassy character with some kind of health-related issue. The one with a positive, nothing’s gonna keep me down attitude. She’s always quick with a witty quip about her condition.

Think Cousin Geri from “Facts of Life” or Arnold’s friend Kathy on “Diff’ent Strokes.” She’s there to show you that everything can be overcome with a positive attitude. To teach everyone a lesson about how their problems aren’t that bad, so buck up buttercup.

I feel a kind of pressure to keep up a chipper sort of positivity since my stroke, even if it’s laced with sarcasm and some cynicism.

When anyone asks me how I am I reply, “Well, I had a stroke.” I try to leave it up to the asker to interpret what that means, but the Midwesterner in me usually follows it up with, “I’m good, all things considered.”

Honesty is not the best policy in this situation, because people want to immediately cheer you up. They want to tell you how strong you are and smother you with positivity and self-help aphorisms. They really want you to just be that special guest star.

We don’t sit well with things that make us uncomfortable. We want to get back to comfort as soon as we can.

The mere idea of me, what happened, what I’m going through has made people flee in discomfort. While this is disappointing, it is not surprising. I’ve read a lot of grief memoirs and know people cannot handle facing mortality upclose.

Even those who continually show up, struggle with my ineffable sadness.

When Sister #2 was here a few weeks ago, I tried to explain how I get a little sad when I look at Trevour, my lemon tree.

“Usually he spends the summer outside,” I told her. “And I couldn’t bring him out this year.”

“Do you want me to out him outside?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m sad because I can’t do it and I don’t if I ever can.”

I’ve been grappling a lot with sadness due to the fallout of the stroke this weekend.

The other night I cried during an episode of “Project Runway.” It was the Season 13 Finale. I’ve been mindlessly re-watching every season of PR, and this was the first time I cried.

Weird.

It’s not weird that I cried. I’m a crybaby. It’s weird that it took me so long.

Frankly, it’s a relief. I was convinced post-stroke Jodi wasn’t an ol’ softy. While I have shed many tears since March 6, a majority of them have been out of anger, annoyance, or frustration.

Not many of them were due to being moved to tears by a song, a tv show, or how cute my cat is. Very few of them were shed out of sadness.

I don’t think I really let myself feel sad for too long. It’s partially the Special Guest Star Syndrome and partially that sadness is hard. It makes you feel helpless and like a giant bummer.

When you struggle with low-self worth and low-self esteem, being a giant bummer is something you avoid at all costs.

Unless, of course, you’re typing in your blog you pretend nobody reads. Then you bummer away.

Sadly,
Jodi

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