Category: self care

You Have What You Need

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There is so much shame around money, or I should say money, just like food is so fucking emotional. At least it is for me. So just for posterity I will bold all those “emotion” words.

When my wife died in 2012 I contributed equally to the household but I was not the breadwinner. See, lesbian, bisexual, gay, straight, in a partnership roles just need to be filled by a warm body. So many times she reminded me of this but I could somehow never feel equal because I was not bringing in anywhere close to the same income. I wrote for Pink Play Magazine, I had a private practice but it was grocery money, not her unionized job with the city. I had never secured a career that supported me which was disheartening and sometimes humiliating. So it goes when you are the kid who feels like they will always have to be supported, as if it were the only option.

When our son came along I was the primary care giver so I was suddenly slammed at work and Kara felt poor for time with him. This is the time honoured struggle for a two parent home with kids. When she died I suddenly found myself living on her pension and social assistance programs which I was very grateful to have!!!This is when the enormity of what we called reality hit. I have always been lucky, I had affluent parents that had saved for my University education. While everyone around me seemed to be obliged to be on OSAP (a students first source of debt) I did not. This was when I really had my eyes opened to just how damn lucky I am.

With me a widow and my house falling down around me it was then I, ironically, decided to buy a house with my first year university roommate Erin. The one who told me she was flabbergasted that I made long distance calls in the daytime. Like my wife who said the “no name is the same as the brand name.” Erin was suddenly on the task and that is when I secured my first job since 2005, when I learned just how important a source of income was for my self esteem and sense of value.

I was still in a pickle. I was never good at balancing my budget and any debts incurred either by necessity or habit were taken care of for me. I really started to get a handle on what a blissfully ignorant state I was still shaking off. The state known as upperclass white privilege. I am still very privileged to have two families who are ready to lend their support when they can. However I am continually filling the gap between the theory of budgeting and its practical application. Erin, who has a head for numbers has over the last five years been helping me get closer and closer to it, cutting through the shame and emotional pitfalls of feeling like I have failed somehow. She reminds me “how can I apply to life what I never learned to do? It’s a learning curve!”

I was never that successful with Mint, the first budgeting system I used that my cousin Wendy introduced me to even though I was so embarrassed that she was looking at my finances. Now I co-own a house and share the bills I have been obliged to change this, thank goodness. Credit cards are not the devil but they can be so unconsciously overused. Plus they are way too abstract a concept for me. And so we are trying the envelope system, or the digital version of the envelope system You Need a Budget (YNAB).

Basically you have bills to pay but you can’t spend what you don’t have, it does not manage your money it just shows you what you have to manage and how to allocate funds. When you get money you assign it jobs or envelopes so you can see what you have left over to work with instead of shockingly hitting the bottom of the barrel and thinking “oh shit I fucked up.”

I am starting not to panic. Lots of people live pay cheque to pay cheque. As a person I know starting with “ther” and ending with “apist” says, “no Kelly you are not up shit creek, you are resourceful.” This month I am proud to say my bills are paid, I have no debt and even though I don’t have much in the bank I can still go to the market to buy fruit, damn it. I went into my tip jar this morning and counted $40 in change. So I would respectfully like to say to my younger self,

You are strong, you are smart, you are resourceful, you are blessed, you are sure as hell getting there and you have nothing to be ashamed of! So failure can fuck off.

Man I love f-bombs.

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

Tiny Mouth

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It has always driven me bonkers but my mother has always maintained that I have small ears. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I was an earache kid and my first procedure was to have tubes put in them. I was then obliged to protect them. I remember then going to clinics for technicians to put a syringe of silicone into my ear canal (gross) to create custom made earplugs. I don’t know if I was old enough to be embarrassed but I’m sure they made me the talk of the swimming party. I was also the kid who got to wear those pink medical looking glasses before I was three. I was just that kid.

To extend the humiliation past the time of glasses or ear tubes my mother got into the habit of saying “you just have tiny ears Kelly, just little baby ears” etc and of course that also translated to “and you just have a tiny mouth Kelly, just a little baby mouth.” I’m sure I reacted so well that she couldn’t resist pushing that button.

Last Monday as my hygienist was trying to wrangle a new age device into my mouth the poor dear, and in between struggling and laughing said “your mouth is so tiny.” Of course I groaned and was forced to reply “my mother would agree with you.” I was having my x-rays done at my new dentists office Toothlife Studio and I must say I have never been treated to such an informative, amusing and high tech dental experience.

During my first cleaning a few weeks ago they painted my teeth a violent purple that turned my plaque into pink or blue depending on the age. I got a gold star for flossing. I always explainI that I have the fear of God put in me after it took 4 needles NOT to freeze me when they had to treat a cavity a few years back. The dentist at Tooth Life, upon seeing both of our kids who have been born bright ginger, said “that’s a thing you know, red heads not freezing.” Well, look at who must have the recessive gene, the things you don’t know until you have kids!

My latest appointment began with her taking my mug shots with a clear plastic device that looked like a double ended shoe horn to pull my mouth open. Thats when I started rolling out the jokes. Next there were other strange objects to make my teeth visible while she shot me with what looked like a new age hairdryer, and she couldn’t stop saying “you’re so funny!” I guess I got my X-rays done, another gold star for my teeth and an ego boost.

In this day and age I don’t know if my dentist appointment was so fun because it was like a social call, as I was home with two gingers that week, because my mouth is apparently tiny or just because they are well, just fun there. Really how could a dentist not be fun when they outfit a bathroom like this? Is it silly to say I can’t wait to go back? I have to floss now.

Going
Seriously thats fun.
Just this!

#Rejection100

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Rejection is just part of it. You cannot please everyone. Write for yourself first.

Not everyone has to like you.

All very true but slightly brutal platitudes that are a part of life as an artist. It is really hard to brush them aside and just create when you are so worried about assigning a value to your work, accepting money for your work or creating something that someone else will want to pay for. Better yet will it ever be enough to expect it to support you?

In Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert she said she never wanted to put the pressure on her creativity to be the breadwinner and I can completely respect her commitment to that ideal. She viewed her creative life to be a mystical, sacred thing, like the equivalent of a snail requiring protection and love to come out of its shell. However when you need to win some bread your sacred snail can become escargot. 

About a year ago I was preparing to abandon my search for a publisher and change gears to search for a Literary Agent. Changing from writing query letters and submissions for publishers to letters to agents was not so tough. It was trying to inspire the motivation to do something new and restart the whole process.

I can’t remember but I think #rejection100 was suggested to me by an author I had a coaching call with. The purpose behind it was to reframe rejection as a natural and desirable phase of creation. It is akin to not believing in failure because each attempt is a pathway to your goal. So, if this is true then in theory rejections are a good thing.

Not just for the feedback but because if getting more rejections naturally leads you to success then why not celebrate them along the way? What if you had a goal of collecting one hundred of them and being excited as to where it might lead? I subscribed to that theory in spades. After all I got some fantastic feedback from publishers so why not expect the same thing? So I started on my mission to collect rejection and I am so glad I did! 

I think at last count with all of my query letter writing I must have only been at around five! I may not have accomplished much failure but boy I had fun doing it, especially when it led to some amazing feedback and success! I need to get excited about rejection again. To play the game of knowing it is in the cards so I may as well have a good time with it. It means I have to be active, to create towards the purpose of just creating, even if it’s at a snail’s pace. 

 

Follow me here on Instagram at @brave.creative.me to see my creative journey.

Showing Up for Myself

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The irony here is that the title of this blog post and the original post itself is a draft I wrote a year ago, talk about falling down on the job! It has been a long time since the world changed utterly and I was left wondering what to do with myself other than feed, water and exercise the children. I hadn’t been back to the clinic all that long and I really loved being a working Reflexologist and Reiki Practitioner again. However working with the family I have fashioned (Erin my friend of 24 years whom I bought a house with, my son, her son and a black and white dog) made us an even closer knit team. It was a much better place to be than in a slowly disintegrating house with no real income and my six year old child.

We were really disappointed that we had to cancel our trip to Mexico in 2020 but circumstances could not be helped. Since then we have tried to make the best decisions for our family and by good fate we have made it through unscathed and un-Covid contracted. Last January Erin and I had started 2021 off with Adrian’s 30 Day Yoga Challenge. Her big thing was “Showing Up for Yourself.” It really became the cornerstone of all our good health initiatives and helped us make priorities, or if you will sorting out the shit I have to do and the shit I would really rather be doing. Both were equally helpful.

I made lists of things I had accomplished. One column had things like wills, taxes, balancing my budget, purging and remembering to floss and the other had find an online writing community, try to date during covid, use the fire pit, Star Wars Marathon, use the skating rink across the street and potty-training Junior.

Attacking the list we also made room for failure for as Erin always tells me this is a learning curve. Every success is usually preceded by a failure. The things on that list were not potty-training Junior, not drinking too much wine (we started ordering by the case), not dating during covid and not staying up and watching Outlander or Bridgerton. Yes they were glorious failings that we peppered our success with as sometimes things didn’t work out, and sometimes we just needed what we needed i.e. Jamie Fraser in a kilt.

So where are we now? I found an online writing community called Sapphic Online Writers which have selected me to be represented in three Zines from their Online Zine Collection, Issue #3 Closer, Issue #4 Out of the Wardrobe, to which I submitted an excerpt of my new fantasy novel and the Valentines Day edition so that’s great. We started January 2022 with another 30 Day Yoga Challenge and went for about 10 days, yeah it’s February I know. We have slowed down the wine and chocolate consumption but we have had some epic fails where dating is concerned and now watch The Discovery of Witches and burned our way through all three seasons of Sex Education. All we can do is keep plodding along succeeding and failing where we must and hope that the rest of 2022 will show us the best of ourselves, and the selves we can forgive!