Slowly, slowly

I feel like every inch of normalcy I get back is by fighting until I am exhausted. And lots of days I’m too tired to do even that.

I’m hoping June will be more on track. I’m signed up for lessons and shifts at the barn again, anyway. I baked for the first time in months last week. I’m trying hard to suck less at work. My spending and eating everything in sight are slowing down.

I’ve been slowly reclaiming my barn time, too. I’ve now ridden three times, and gone out and groomed and hand-grazed quite a lot more. It’s hard. On one level, I really want to, and our rides have been absolutely superb. He’s such a fun horse to ride when he has energy and willingness. When he stays put together he’s now doing some lovely first level work, and it’s finally feeling realistic that we could put together a whole first level test.

But I often get to the end of a workday feeling mentally bruised and just overall exhausted. So I convince myself I can’t go to the barn. Then I get home and the anxiety hits and starts to climb and I end up revving myself up all night anyway – spending hours cleaning, or working on Etsy stuff, or just puttering and trying to keep my brain from capsizing. Often unsuccessfully.

Which is a lot of words to say that today would have been my dad’s sixty-sixth birthday, he would have retired from work next week, and this fucking sucks.