I am...

Many of you who have followed me here have expressed some sort of concern about how I am, some hope that I am "well."  I understand the genesis of that concern and uncertainty.  The last number of years have been challenging to say the least.

We tend to ask that "how are you?" question as a social nicety, and I am aware that the polite question may not actually be a request for whatever the whole story amounts to these days.  There is a reason that we most often answer the inquiry with something innocuous:  I'm great.  Fine as frog fur!  Upright and taking nourishment.  Sometimes we even deflect with a question of our own:  "How are YOU?"  So, I want to be sensitive to the social niceties around this type of question.

The truth is that I am well enough.  I sometimes torment myself with the habituated wishing for something different in my life, but mostly I am clear that that is pretty silly nonsense.  I am not getting any younger, and there is no prince charming waiting in the wings for me.  I'd wish for that perfect dominant that would make my BDSM world complete, but I am 99% sure that there is no such person.  I tried to live that dream and I am convinced that it is really just a dream wherein we try to force ourselves and our partners into scripts that are not our own or theirs either for that matter.  So, apart from the occasional spanking when Tom is in the mood (and for a number of months that has meant about once a month), my adventures with BDSM are ended.  I could mourn that but it seems to me that I only have so many days ahead of me.  I don't want to waste them grieving for something that quite possibly never existed at all except in my fevered imaginings.

I am in pretty good health.  I weigh more than I should, and I am working to try and address that, but it is my choice and my plan and the results will be for me.  If it turns out that I am "more desirable as a woman" when I weigh 30 pounds less, then I'm good with that, but it isn't my motivator.  Not this time.  I am inclined to be sad.  Perhaps I have always tended to the depressive side of the scale.  I have no intention of doing anything about that.  Somedays I am sad, and somedays not.  It is what it is.  I'm done with the whole therapy and medications gambit.  This is me.  I still fight the battle with migraine headaches.  I have fired one headache specialist, and am awaiting an appointment with the only other one in town at the end of this month.  I am, as usual ahead of seeing a new doctor, a bit hopeful, but also clear that there are no magic pills for these things.  So.  We will see.

I still teach, and almost always I still love doing it.  This year, for the first time in all of my career, I have only science classes, and it is wonderful.  I love the discipline, and I enjoy opening the world up for young minds to know and appreciate.  It is a ton of logistical management with three different lab classes going simultaneously, but it is a lot of fun.  I still think that I fell , by accident, into one of the greatest schools anywhere, and I am thrilled to be a part of what happens there.  So work is my joy.

Our family is intact.  Changed.  No doubt.  I don't believe anymore, however, that the change is fundamental.  What we tried to build was not a valid reflection of who we all were.  We kidded ourselves and misled one another.  There was plenty of blame to go around, and we all indulged whatever taste we had for that nasty dish.  No more.  I'm neither blaming nor accepting blame.  Each of us have learned what there was to learn from this passage, I suspect.  Now, each one of us loves in the way we are able. Our life together is quiet and relatively peaceful.

So.  I am good.  Fine.  Thank you all for caring.