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Well, I did not avoid the worst of it, I got a headache sat afternoon and all day Sunday. Finally eased off early monday morning, and then I was exhausted, took naps to catch up on sleep. Felt like I got hit by a truck the next day. What day is today? Oh good it's wednesday and not thursday. Without spouse around it's easy to lose track.

I'm pretty demoralized. I'm demoralized about my demoralization. I'm 3 days behind on inktober, which normally would be certain failure, and it barely started. I don't know how I have such amazing timing but it truly stinks to get really excited about accomplishing some things and then get clobbered so all you can do is lay around in pain, frustrated and stressed out about all the things you want to do, should be doing. I have been near perfect with vitamins, but slacking on the low carb front. I'd hoped the vitamins would offer a more robust defense so a little naughty eating wouldn't matter - guess that's a no. I've figured out that potassium works better if I do smaller, more frequent doses. But still, the relief wasn't stable enough to allow me to draw. I can sit upright looking straight ahead, or lay down flat, and with constant effort to relax the muscles the pain is not that bad. But if I lower my head to look at something in my lap and my attention wanders, everything tenses up and becomes so much worse. I can't do tasks with focused mental processing and fine motor control. By the time I get in the groove to work, I have used up the available stamina. I took a bunch of different things in frustration and the combination just made me nauseous and gave me bathroom issues. I think I'm not going to bother with ibuprofen or caffeine anymore as I suspect they only drag out the pain. I was just so desperate to be rid of it. It's the insane game of maybe this will help, maybe this will help, maybe this will help. Perpetually 30 minutes from relief that never comes. Can't sleep, lay in bed with a pillow over my eyes, trapped with my own stupid monologue for hours. Sunday was miserable.

I'm trying to rally some sense of optimism in that with spouse gone, I have the best possible control over my diet and in another 3 weeks I will see what difference stricter low carb makes. But god, I am so sick of feeling like I am living in a minefield. Seems like by the time I get my hopes and energy back on track I just set myself up to get clobbered again. I mean, what if I'm never going to be perfect enough with my eating habits, always getting tripped up by the one donut hole I had 2 weeks earlier? I don't want to be terrified of food. I'm pretty discouraged right now. There are so many variables.

I was laying in bed with the headache and I was trying to flip the script and think about what positive lesson the pain could teach me. If there is a grand universal plan (and I'd prefer to think there is, even if it makes me a dummy), the headaches must have some silver lining. What can I learn from them to compensate for the wasted time. Patience, perseverance, humility, compassion, resilience. Can I forgive myself for being worthless for a couple days now and then and learn to bounce back quickly? What the headaches really damage is my working reliability, and that's only a major deal because we have an insane, cruel work culture that punishes and persecutes normal human shortcomings such as injuries or illness. Because product and profits are god and our worth is measured by what we generate, right? The absolute worst thing about the headaches is freaking out about the impact to my future employment. I've worked jobs where a low productivity day now and then is no biggie, but it's a huge deal for tattooing when you're marking someone's skin permanently. My bad day is someone else's permanent lifetime reminder. Do I just accept that there's a day or two I can't perform my job and try to work my schedule to black out appointments on the bad days?

And part of it is just anxiety over being a woman as well. I want to make sure that my work quality is just as good and reliable as any non-ovary owner, and there's no allowance there for "PS, two days a month I can't work, sorry." It looks terrible. Nobody likes that one coworker who seems to habitually call out sick for no reason. Oh you had a "headache", sure, malingerer. I don't want to be that guy. But I basically am that guy.

Forgive my clumsy stereotyping, but our traditional work culture venerates the masculine archetype of the "hard worker", the provider, the perpetually available 24/7/365. He never needs mental health days. He never takes time for doctor's appointments. He eats red meat and potatoes and drinks beer and never gets sick (except for that sudden heart attack). This is our golden ideal, steeped in nostalgia. Remember when men were Real Men and the world ran like clockwork? Now we got all these WIMMEN with their BATHROOM BREAKS and their THERAPY and they've got people thinking it's okay to take sick days, robbing valuable productivity straight from hardworking business owner's pockets!! THE NERVE. (I firmly believe the descriptor "hardworking" is a red flag for pandering and condescension. It's a dumb gatekeeping nonsense word.)

I feel measured up against that traditional male worker ideal, for sure. I may feel like hot garbage and I need an advil for the cramps and definitely a bathroom break every hour to make sure I'm not bleeding through (and I hope I have remembered enough spare tampons), but I'll show up and smile and pretend it's just another day because the worker mold doesn't have space for my reproductive system. I've seen my female coworkers and I know they suffer the same or worse. We all have that one day that is hell, but we show up. You'd think we'd get credit for being extra tough, but ovaries will only ever be a negative, never a positive. So I have to work harder and hit a higher standard to make up for it. I'll always be making up for it.

What do we do with the workers who come down with cancer, or the workers who have a seriously sick kid, or the workers who start feeling their age? Do we all just back away, cross our fingers and hope we aren't unlucky like them when they get shown the door? Do we only have value when we are capable of adding value to the system without interruption, and otherwise rightfully should be discarded? Because that's what the Real Man worker ideal means. What do we do with the people who fall short? Fire them and cut off their health insurance? Sounds humane and sustainable. Like, why am I being mean to myself for not measuring up to that standard when 1) it's crap anyway and 2) I don't even have a job right now and 3) I'm an independent contractor and theoretically I have the power to set my own working expectations ...?

The point being that just because I have a couple of dogshit days in a month doesn't mean that I, as a person, am dogshit by extension. Because that's what makes it feel personal and especially discouraging. Bless me father for I have sinned, I'm not capable of 100% uptime like a robot. I'm possessed by a demon who makes my head hurt so I cannot serve righteous capitalism with maximum efficiency. I was weak and ate a donut hole two weeks ago and now the precious profits are suffering. Oh lord, please forgive my sin, I have to call in sick.

The emotional demoralization is what lingers and festers and does the damage. The headache itself was only a day and a half (which honestly is an improvement over the normal 3 days, so the vitamins are helping). I didn't think the vitamins were a silver bullet, but I had hopes that the headache would be lessened enough so I could work through it. It always feels like a moral failing on my part, when I can't meet the goals that seemed so achievable a few days earlier when I set them. But it is what it is, and I've tried pretty hard, and I guess I have to accept that the headaches may crash my party no matter how careful I am. I have to figure out how to live around/with them.

I'm still going to do my best with vitamins and low carb - not giving up. But the new strategy is I track the timing and I just clear my schedule and take it very easy on myself on those danger days. If there are no plans, then I won't be a failure for messing up what doesn't exist, right? *taps forehead* Genius. I'm declaring a lunar holiday for myself when I need it. I'm my own boss right now, I can be nice. Lunar holiday. No work, no expectations. Faff off, world.

Frankly, it's the only civilized thing to do.

New strategy: track my cycle like an astronomer tracks planets, give myself freebie days for lunar holiday. Headaches gonna headache, I just need to roll over it and work on my recovery.

When I went for walkies I noticed there are these weird fruits in the trees that look like limes. I suspected they might be walnuts, so I took a picture. Turns out, there are BLACK WALNUT trees around the lake. Black walnuts are super cool because you can make a dark brown ink from them. Apparently it is not very difficult at all. They also make a remarkable natural dye that works on protein and cellulose without a mordant (fixative). So today I went on my walk and it was pretty easy to glove up and find 8-10 freshly fallen nuts. The green outer husk has the dye. I got a rock from around the lake and used it to smash the husks open on some concrete. I saved the chunks of husk in a plastic bag and threw the nuts into the brush for the squirrels. The fruits were fairly soft and juicier than expected. My skin is stained golden brown where some juice spattered - def wear gloves. Some were colonized by bugs, but I'm not too fussed by that. They're in the freezer now so those bugs are dead.

That one bag should make a good amount of ink. I might get another bag or two of husks for dyeing fun. I have a couple things that might dye nicely. I'll need to purchase a cheap stockpot for making the ink/dye. I'm not using my good stockpot for nasty walnut dye.

Inktober is ... well, it's going, sort of. Day 1 the prompt was "crystal" so I drew the chamberlain skeksis from the Dark Crystal ("Please, gelfling, stay? Friend? Please?"). Day 2 the prompt was "suit" so I thought suit as in a suit of cards. This is where I dicked up. I opted to draw all 4 suits, but I did tarot card suits instead of common playing cards, mostly because of spades. I couldn't figure out how to make the composition work with spades. So I did sword, coin, wand, cup. Easy enough. And then I'm like, let's put a connection to the associated element, so swords have a puff of wind for air and coins have a skeleton hand holding it for earth and the wand is on fire for fire and the cup has liquid and a crescent moon for water. And then I'm like, let's do multiple ink colors. Anyway, I made it complicated and it was more work and time than the initial (simple) concept. The red ink smeared a little bit when I erased the pencil sketch. Always annoying and a waste of time to fix. Now I'm supposed to be finishing day 3, "vessel" which is half done. I have a small priestess figure in the foreground in black ink with an old testament angel creature hovering behind her in white ink. You know, a monster with seven scary eyes and multiple wings and a lion mane. I'm working on a toned paper for all these so white ink is quite nice.

I'm super glad I limited myself to 5x5" because I am still going overboard. I have these 10x10 MDF panels lying around so I'm hoping I can mount the inktober drawings 4 to a panel and have a nice large art display. Assuming I finish the challenge. I'm supposed to be on day 6 right now, ha ha ha ha ha. But it's whatever at this point. I have the free time to catch up if I don't hamstring myself.

Fingers crossed I finish "vessel" and #4 "knot" tonight.