Days of Gratitude - Desolation, The Sunday Assembly, And A Touch of Skulduggery

I am typing this on August 1st.

It's been a rubbish day in my head.  I've done my best.  A Blob Thing post got written.  A Clare post got written.  Something got read.  Puzzles got solved.  Furniture was rearranged.  But it's been very difficult indeed.  Some days are like that.  Leaving the house was not an option today and for a while I was physically shaking.  Yeah, it's been bad.

And that's one of the reasons I keep this gratitude diary going.  It's one of the reasons why I have posted in it one 204 out of the first 213 days of the year.

Because on the crap days, on the days when it hurts even to budge off my bed, I can look back.  And see how good the good days can be.

Maybe today was so bad in in my head because of yesterday.  For Clare, I did amazingly well at the Sunday Assembly.  By Clare standards I was bloody brilliant at social and at dealing with it all.  Hey, I rocked!  But even on that good day it was hard and tiring and maybe it wiped me out more than I realised last night.  Or maybe today was just one of those things and the crap isn't related to yesterday at all.  Maybe.

And that's another reason why keeping this gratitude diary has been good for me.  Quite a number of the days have been difficult.  It's sodding hard to live them.  The best days are hard, but the difficult ones are sodding hard!  But the diary is a discipline.  I want to post things I am grateful for on every day if I can.  I've missed nine days.  But not because they were all bad.  Some of them were very good indeed.  To find the gratitude on the tough days is worthwhile.  Because then a day that I could just mark down as bad can be shown to not be all bad - and often can be shown to be pretty good apart from the sodding hard bits.

When the idea of a gratitude group was suggested by someone from the Sunday Assembly Newcastle I readily joined.  It's become important to me.  Even if I was described yesterday as the person who keeps the group going.  Sometimes it does rather feel like the Clare show with a few guest stars popping up.  I wonder, if the group ended, whether I would manage to keep up the diary on my own.  I hope so.

So here we are, it's August.  I have much to look forward to this month.  But it's got off to a very rocky psychological start.  Never mind.  The final three days of July contained a heck of a lot of awesomeness.

29^th July

Grateful to get out and have lunch with someone today.

Grateful for sunsets, this from my front door tonight.

Grateful to have finally started to read Desolation, by Derek Landy.

And grateful for what I coincidentally read on Facebook just before getting on a Metro and starting that book. Derek Landy announced that Skullduggery Pleasant and Valkyrie Cain will return. Isn't that exciting? A whole year of waiting, of anticipation. So awesome.

(Everyone should read Skulduggery. Everyone. Except the strong evangelical Christian I know who found the first book to be so evil that it became the only book she ever burned. Yes, it's THAT good. It's worthy of burning!)

30^th July

Grateful for the surprises on today's walk:

A deserted play area.

A graveyard. And a found accidental poem on a gravestone that may one day become a writing prompt.

Stepping stones. I got a bit happy flappy. Okay, a lot happy flappy.

Free strawberries, cream, shortbread and tea. And a quiz and some music too.

Also for trees.

And for the way a river changes so much in just a few miles.

And for this phone and its camera, bus routes, bus passes, and the book of stories bought in a charity shop.

Yes. It was a good day. The list of positives could get very long.

31^st July

Well this is an obvious one.

I am grateful for the Sunday Assembly.

Guess what Blob Thing will be blogging about in the near future.

I wrote this on my Facebook wall:

The Sunday Assembly was great today.

I wasn't overwhelmed. I could deal with it and actually talk with people and not rush off quite quickly afterwards. That's so much better than I've been in a long long time.

A wonderful talk about science and art.

A person talking about writing and that was an encouragement to plough on and get enthusiastic about writing for myself.

A person in amazingly cool clothes complimented me on my clothes.

 

A conversation about names and I said I had dreamed my own and they hadn't had a clue that I would ever have changed my name.

One of these days I'll get properly involved with the Sunday Assembly and do something useful rather than just drinking tea, eating cake, and occupying a chair. Perhaps it should be soon.

It is what it is. I think enthusiastic people will build it into something better. A true community rather than just a group of people meeting for an event sometimes - something most churches don't manage to become.

Maybe the Sunday Assembly in Newcastle can do church better than the church. I hope so.

Days of Gratitude - Finding Interesting People Across The Stepping Stones

It's time for another blog post.  As the days pass without posting I get further behind with it all.  I do my best to keep going out, to keep experiencing the world around me and taking photos of it all.  And there are things I want to be writing about too.

But between having days on which my head doesn't allow me to do much at all, keeping busy on the other days, and co-writing a blog with Blob Thing, I run out of time to write my own blog.  It's a problem, at least for me.  Blob's blog is taking more time than expected.  The plan was to post a photo of him each day and maybe add a short explanation.  It hasn't worked.  On every day in the last week we've written over 1000 words together about some or other adventure he had.

So here, at last, after a gap of ten days is a blog post of my own.  Another one of the gratitude posts.  There have been some pretty tough days this month with my head.  Some of them have been a major struggle and on quite a few I haven't had the mental energy to be able to leave the house.  Slowly I am learning to accept that I will always have difficulties.  Before accepting myself as autistic there was always some hope that a therapy or a self-help practice would offer a full solution, a cure all to my head.  While there were things that had helped me a lot - and most especially accepting myself as Clare - there were still lots of problems and I hoped to find a way for them to vanish.  But autism isn't curable.  It's for life.  And that's okay.  Coming to terms with it has been tough but I think I'm getting there now.  It is difficult to live with and it always will be.  But for various reasons I don't want to be cured, to be not-autistic.

That's something to write about another day.  Yes, another unwritten post that might become written eventually.  Here instead are five days of gratitude.

1^st July

Grateful for a little wander in Morpeth before visiting the local charity shops.

Grateful to have found Carlisle Park and walked by the river and seen the stepping stones.

Grateful not to have got very wet in the rain.

Isn't Blob Thing stunning?!

He was so brave on the stepping stones and jumped across them all.

Another day for Blob to blog about.  And another day for me to blog about too.  In all honesty my time in Morpeth was far better than I had expected it to be.

2^nd July

Really, really hard day mentally. And my knee (which managed over 12 1/2 miles walking today) hurt so much I was close to tears.

So. A quiet day at home.

Grateful for the game Fez. I played quite a bit of it a while ago and just started it again. I must have gone another way because I pretty much don't recognise anything in the game so far! It's nicely relaxing. Not much running about and avoiding things that kill you!

 And grateful for these guys in the picture. I sat and binge watched the last episodes of the final series. They have given me much enjoyment over the past few years. And now it's over. What began as a not that interesting good/bad guy of the week drama evolved into one of the best things on TV. Rest in Peace Person of Interest. Thanks for the wild ride.

3^rd July

Grateful for dry weather and a knee coping surprisingly well.

I started my Wear to Tees walk having been distracted by refugees when I tried to start it a fortnight ago.

It was meant to be a short walk but somehow became longer. From St. Peter's Metro to Easington Colliery. Next time, Easington to Hartlepool maybe.

Grateful that, though it's my longest walk in a LONG while, I am not aching much.

4^th July

Grateful to have got through a tough head day and to have managed to attempt at least one positive step in it.

Grateful to have Amanda in my life even though we have to be so far apart most of the time.

Grateful for photos and the memories they bring. The last year is full of good memories and having the pictures helps greatly on the most difficult days.

[I didn't include a photo in the Sunday Assembly Gratitude Group that day.  But here is one, a card I received from Amanda exactly one month earlier in celebration of my re-birthday, a day that means a lot more to me than my legal birthday.]

5^th July

Grateful to have gone out for lunch with Beth. Even though plans went very wrong.

Grateful for how quiet the cathedral cafe was when I later sat there with a drink and a book. I haven't been there in ages.

Blob enjoyed it too and went exploring afterwards.