Everything is temporary; nearly everything is reversible – CityFrugal
I’m (finally) coming around to the idea that taking calculated risks is the only way to learn and grow. Missteps are a natural part of that process and don’t mean anything about me personally. The biggest failure is someone who 1) risks nothing or 2) foolishly bets the farm on an ill-conceived idea.
Because of my risk-averse starting point, I’m not likely to end up in situation #2, so systematically taking calculated risks is my inoculation against actual failure.
I struggle with posting here regularly in part because talking about stuff that's important to me feels risky. Periodically I am able to overload that feeling and post anyway, but usually in ways that are very safe, like posting links. I used to talk about ongoing projects and what was going on in my life.
Part of the problem is that projects have gotten bigger and more complicated, but I've always been worried I would jinx things by talking about them widely.
Most of my friends aren't parents, so I worry people don't want to read updates about my kid doing five year old stuff. Raising Bug is a nineteen year project that takes a lot of my time and brain and energy every day, and yet I don't feel like I can talk about it - a mixture of paranoia and not wanting to interrupt Bug's privacy and not wanting to "bore" my friends and readers. Even the fact that I have friends who talk about their kids and I enjoy hearing about them doesn't quite overcome this in my head. Probably it's some leftover Sidekick Syndrome; everyone else is more interesting than me, even if I've mostly gotten out from under the feeling that everyone else is more important than me.
Aside from Project Raising Bug, though, my projects are still longer and less interesting. I joke in otherkin circles that I'm spiritually retired. (The thing in the Young Wizards books where by the time you're out of your early twenties you're basically retired and managing paperwork? I feel that SO HARD.) This year's magical projects are mostly about relationships with local spirits and mostly consist of regular offerings and trying to keep the house clean and cook some.
Oh, but I didn't mention what that project is for. Because it's easier not to go out on a limb, and also because I don't like talking about good things, even potential good things, even good things that might not happen and will require a lot of work if they do, because some of my friends/readers might not want to read about that, or might not be able to have that and it will make them sad, or some people might judge me and think I don't deserve good things.
And, I dunno, deserving is such a fucked up concept when you think about it? Once you get beyond the most basic level of deserving life-sustaining needs, and let's be honest, if we can't master "people deserve not to be murdered, and to have shelter and food and education and to be paid a fucking living wage for their time" as a society, who the fuck do we think we're kidding arguing that anyone deserves, I dunno, a billion dollars or to go viral-famous or, alternately, cancer or whatever?
ANYWAY.
All that is to say that thinking about buying a house before we're priced out of Oregon entirely is taking up a stupid amount of my energy lately with nothing to show for it. I've moved on from the angst with my mom to just the frustration of the current market, and we're going to look at one more place and then take a break because I just can't and apparently the market should be slowing down into spring.
Instead I'm doing that thing where I throw all my systems out the window when I'm feeling unbalanced. I still really like my Metaphysician's Day Planner but at the moment I need more room to braindump so that's living on my altar instead. I wanted another 8.5x5.5-ish one, so I had P pick up a sketchbook in that size for me, and while it's great for big layouts and mapping I've discovered that apparently I just Cannot Even with sketchbook paper texture right now? That's... new. And frustrating. But anyway, now I'm in a Muji pocket notebook and can I just say that having a Muji in town is the best worst thing. So many pens, y'all. Once the Kinokuniya opens downtown too all we'll need is a Daiso and I'll be bankrupt and drowning in pens.
I was feeling crafty so I glued the notebook into a hard cover to give it a little more stability, because I need more stability in my life right now and I don't have anything ELSE I can glue down. So now I am back to bullet journaling because of the housing market.
Rather than enchant for any particular house, what I've been trying to do is a sort of time magic. I've seen the argument made that time doesn't apply to spirits in the same way it does to us, so instead of just making offerings on the regular and hoping for luck, some people do retroactive enchantment, where when some magical stroke of luck falls in your lap, you AFTERWARDS do the enchantment for it, which is functionally the same as doing it first except you don't have to know what you're enchanting for before it happens.
And in my head this makes sense, so I was like, well the next logical step is to reach out not just to random nature spirits but literally reach out to the land wights who will share land with us in the future, right? So that's what I'm trying to do. I'm not sure how well it's working and I'm not sure there's a way to know it's working until it does? So I'm just kinda flailing around.
Which to be fair is par for the course for me, magically.
What's next? One more house showing tomorrow. Divination, maybe? And then we'll see from there.