Nancy's Musings

This morning as I sat on my bunk bed gazing blearily over my mess lit only by the morning light bouncing through the blue sheet over my basement window, I felt happy. But I also felt well, and I wondered briefly if there might be a difference. I mean, at that moment any difference was irrelevant, because I wanted to hug the world (and that's rare, because I'm touch-averse. Hugs can trigger panic). But is it possible to feel happy and unwell? Is there such a thing as feeling well while feeling negative emotions? We treat the quest for emotional wellness like the quest for hyperthymia , but what if that's not right? Even recently, I've had periods of mourning when things happened to me that hurt me deeply, that changed my future in unpleasant ways. But those feelings were often accompanied with the subtle reassurance that things would get better. Is it possible to be sad and emotionally well at the same time? At times of deep sadness, I think it is important to allo...

I'm getting older and I'm still single. I'm a body-positive fat woman, which means I sometimes have to do some creative guessing to figure out why people interact with me the way that they do - would they be doing/saying this if I were thin? Mostly I don't know. I like dating. I like meeting new people, and I meet a lot of nice people. Mostly women, really. Men seem to be a bit more bashful. But I do meet men, sometimes in person and sometimes in digital spaces. I'm equally as comfortable with either. Some men my age have grown impatient. I am also impatient, but about different things. Men crave emotional intimacy, and our cultures have starved them of it. They are so hungry for acceptance and validation that they become heat-seeking missiles for any woman who is warm or welcoming. Twice this week, men I barely know have shared things with me that our friendship does not warrant, and that I am not strong enough to carry. These men have given me knowledge that...

People are great, you know? I mean, not everybody, but everybody I know personally is just salt of the earth. Just yummy people. Once in a while, though, a great virtue becomes twisted into a vice. We're supposed to be involved with each other's lives. Elder Dallin H. Oaks describes this " interdependence " in an address given at a conference for mid-singles in Salt Lake City, and although it's very contextualized for people in a dating scene, the evidence exists that pure independence isn't actually the ideal: evidence from our understanding that we cannot be saved without our dead, to programs of ministering and humanitarian efforts locally and abroad. We're supposed to be concerned about others, and love our neighbors as we love ourselves (because in some abstract and metaphorical ways, they ARE us). Concern for others is a virtue. Until it is not. Contaminants can sour concern, can turn it into something not just hurtful, but harmful. And it'...

I have a new-ish friend who recently got access to his old LiveJournal blog, and while he's deciding how to translate those memories into something more current and usable, he sent me one to read. It's a list of "unanswerable" questions. And, as with all good writing, it makes me want to write back. Why? Why not? Why doesn't the toilet paper tear at the perforations? Why do you need it to? Does an uneven tear feel different? Is this a princess and the pea thing? Why do I always get two facial tissues when I only want one? Inferior tissue folding technology. This bug has been fixed. Why doesn't anybody drink the last 2 ounces of milk at the bottom of the carton? It would go perfectly with the last four bites of breakfast cereal that nobody seems to want. Not hungry enough. This is a good sign. Why is my belly-button lint always blue, and why does lint collect there anyway? Jeans and blue t-shirts, and insufficient showering. Q-tips are a thin...

This post is going to sound judgy, and in some ways that's unavoidable. Because I am still working through this, and that inherently puts me in a morally inferior position. So this is kind of vulnerable, and I really hope I don't hurt anyone's feelings. I am single, and I've more or less always been single. I have a lot of single friends, and ALL of them have stories of broken-off engagements, long-term relationships that didn't work out (fizzled or ended badly), and marriages that failed them. All of these events create "emotional baggage" as the cliche goes. It's just a more judgy way of saying that when you grow around a person the way a tree's trunk envelops anything left on it too long, and then you remove the thing, you damage the tree. Sometimes permanently. Sometimes the tree dies. For someone like me who has experienced life as largely (but not entirely) aro-ace, romantic love looks like a gauntlet to be run as quickly as possible ...

I told my most embarrassing moment once to a man on a train. I mean, I was with a group of colleagues, and he was one of those colleagues. We were young and having fun. So I told this story of the funniest, bright-red-facedest moment I've ever experienced. There really was just the one, I swear. But my friend looked at me with an expression of awe on his face and said, "I never want to marry someone like you." I mean, what a relief? I asked a man to dinner once. I made him lasagna. It was really terrible - much, much too salty. But I was again, very young and it was my first attempt to cook for company. Then we went for a walk in a nearby park and enjoyed some of the late spring weather. The trees were green and gorgeous. I remember the trees. I kept staring at them. And when we got back to the condo I was staying in, he stopped to chat for a moment and casually mentioned, "I'm not going to propose." Apparently my lasagna was THAT BAD. Many years lat...

For the last couple of days I have been struggling to keep my thoughts on point. They want to scatter, to remember, to sing stupid songs ("Hell No" by Ingrid Michaelson, at the moment, for no other reason than it popped up on Youtube when I went there to find a clip of Bela Tarr's The Werckmeister Harmonies, because who can watch the whole thing!? I did it once, and it was like trying to deadlift a postmodernist), or argue with people in my head. The only end to an argument in your own head is that you lose. So I've been losing a lot these last couple of days, and since I lost the arguments, I can't really say that it was unfair. I deserve to lose. This is a sample of my head. And last night, when I finally finished showering, after changing my mind about showering this morning and writing a sunday school lesson, and praying about writing a sunday school lesson because I'm the idiot who did not adequately prepare when I should have, because I forgot, althoug...