one of the hardest things about this last year of being a single lady and hard working and creatively inclined has been trying to find anyone that relates to this path and can support it and help me understand it for myself.

my extended san francisco family, the friends that i have had since i moved here 12 years ago, is always here for me, but, like with any family, my and their values have changed some over time. i find myself rather a lone wolf as far as my life's current challenges and questions go. there's some marrying, a lot of having babies, and not a lot of "i'm trying to understand how to be my true self, my true freak, artistically and professionally, on my own" amongst my oldest crew. so, i am left to meander through my confusion, but this weekend i was blessed to have tea with tamera and various awesome ladies who have similar challenges and concerns.

not only am i trying to make my life make sense and seem meaningful without a partner for the first time in 12 years, (and even that is confusing, because there is a partner esque entity known as jarett who is somehow somewhere in this picture sometimes mostly between the hours of 8pm-5am and on the internet), but i'm trying to craft for myself the right balance of security and bohemianism. money safety but freedom to roam.

i could have made things easier for myself by keeping a full time job, or by just generally being a sort of more usual person. you know, the sort of person who could be easily fulfilled by something basic, some normal standard of accomplishment. and who can accept a status quo of waking up at a certain hour and toeing a certain line. i've been confused enough at times during the past year or so to edge in that direction, and to try for (or long for) some consistent and large obvious version of Accomplishment, such as starting a company, or creating a tangible formal art piece like a book or such.

I realized rather suddenly at tamera's tea party, finally amongst a group of women who have made headway along similar paths as the one i'm working on now, whilst in the midst of conversation with holly, that it has not felt true or right to me to strive for a formal version of success.

in fact, i think i've been making myself crazy with pressure over it.

see, somehow, in the middle of this year of freelancing, i really did lose the plot. i may have never had the plot totally down in the first place, but, somehow i started down this path of believing that no matter what i do in this next decade of my life, it should be done in a very formal context. this belief has totally paralyzed me. i felt that if i worked doing drupal consulting, i should be the number one drupaller EVAR and that it should be my full time business and that i should be really interacting with it in a totally traditional business context, start a corporation, get a few employees, really do it. rather than just, you know, do a great job building the sites i was contracted to do, so as not to go totally crazy. doing a great job on my freelance sites was not enough, it could never be good enough this year, it would always be a failure to me unless i had achieved some sort of Perfect Small Business setup. i think this pressure is a vestige of dating oliver for so long and being so impressed and comforted by his abilities in this area, and so trying to recreate that same sort of situation in my life without him.

at the same time as i have been putting pressure on myself to do that, i have also felt the longing and the rumblings of desire to be making substantial art and to be living the free and open life of an artistic person. (you may be thinking the two goals, business/bohemian, are not really compatible, and you are right, which only further illustrates the crazy pressure of my ideas about what i should be doing).

i have always written. this is something i have always always done. this year, i have done it almost entirely in private, in the form of private journals, though in the past 10 i have done a lot of it in public, but always in the form of journals and personal writing. it's never been formal, never been structured. it's always been just epic archival journaling, much of it bad or at least boring, with surprise chunks of work that i am truly proud of hidden amongst the endless output.

but this year, perhaps because of saturn, perhaps because of my constant conversation and connection with jarett, who is truly a Writer in a formal and dedicated sense, i became paralyzed by this idea that should i begin really 'writing' i should do so in a very formal context. i should structure myself, i should do short stories or essays, and work toward a novel. i had an inkling that might not be totally right but it seemed like the only way to have Accomplishment.

so, i realized the trap i'd made for myself with my own expectation rather suddenly, whilst in the midst of conversation with holly at the tea party. specifically we were discussing why she makes her art and what it means to her, and we were talking about how different our own goals and habits and meanings are from the men in our lives. and we were also discussing the possibility of me just getting a random part time retail job because i'd been feeling so strangely isolated after working from home for 8 months. and i realized that just getting a random fun retail job appealed to me about a million times more than starting a business. and i realized that the reason i write is not for accomplishment or success but for something else, maybe because i can't not. it would be great to formalize it in some way that makes it more rigorous, meaningful, and accessible, but commercial success or formality for formality's sake is pointless.

it just very swiftly occured to me that i'd been putting all the wrong kinds of pressure on myself. and that the pressure i had been putting on myself was largely brought about by echoes of relationships and my own tendency to give authority to the goals of who i love. and it occurred to me that this was a dangerous way of undermining myself. these realizations felt like SUCH a major shift. i attribute them to somewhat to the mystical state brought about by epic amounts of black tea followed by a lot of champagne, but mostly to the hours of supportive company of a few incredibly intelligent creative independent women who don't take shit from nobody.

so, yeah. now i understand. now i can see the way, moreso.

this isn't to say i won't build up a huge edifice of self expectation and anxiety again, but i think it would be impossible for it to get as confused as it was. BUT I HAVE SAID THAT BEFORE. but now i have this to refer to.

also, i had never had crumpets before and they are yeasty and delicious.

i intended to go to santacon today, but i woke feeling too peaceful for it, and with the knowledge that writers with drinks is tonight. AND that tomorrow i've got a ridiculous plan to move a clawfoot tub across town and into my cavern, with two old friends helping me, an endeavor that will hopefully turn into hangouts and drinks. i'm laying in the daybed with the happy realization that i may have finally come to terms with my own reality as far as social things are concerned. i want to be at everything, and i feel pressure to be at everything, and i would have fun at everything, but my true self needs an incredible amount of solitude to accomplish the projects and journaling and thinking that i consider to be my (however isolated and inconsquential) life's work and joy. so, instead of feeling annoyed with myself for not doing every social thing this weekend, and putting myself into every possible event, i simply admit that i would rather be here, alone, working on some private projects and listening to the stag hare EP that i've been meaning to pay some attention to. and this is totally okay.

it is especially cold in san francisco today. it's been raining and hailing all day with intermittent rainbows and pink clouds. sometimes i look up from the mission at the yellow lights sparkling across twin peaks and it seems like san francisco is momentarily masquerading as a true pacific northwest place, chilly and overcast but with a strange clear air. and sometimes, especially when it is truly cold like this, i have an intense understanding of the nature that this city burst forth from - how close we are to the ocean, how many redwoods are sprinkled around the city and redwood forests are not far. it's almost like i can feel santa cruz, marin, and the coastline from the sidewalk in the mission.

more depressing than grouphug.us.
more depressing than the ask metafilter 'human relations' category.
more depressing than post secret.

it's badmothersanonymous.com.

you may not know it, but there's a cluster of islands off the coast of san francisco called the farallon islands or more often just "the farallons." they're closed to the public, are a national wildlife refuge, and, sadly, are surrounded by enormous numbers of barrels of radioactive waste that were discarded undersea.

since you'll probably never get to go to them, why don't you read the blog written by the field researchers stuck out there? it's well written and has a lot of cute pictures of birds and fat seals and sea lions.

called my parents today. dad got on the phone, asked me if i had enough to eat, and if i had enough "pocket money". i said yes, but he asked a few more times. he told me he's been collecting five dollar bills for a few weeks and he'd send me the stack he's got so far. priority. he let me talk to my mom for a while and later came back to the phone to tell me that one of the 5 dollar bills had fallen while he was putting them in an envelope, and that he'd use it to start his new collection.

my parents have been incredibly comforting lately.