Waiting Time or Wasting Time?
That is the million dollar question.
As I sit here typing this to you, behind me is a mountain of clean, yet to be folded laundry that I cannot bring myself to deal with. My excuse for being behind on household responsibilities has now passed and I am just wasting WAITING until I feel called to it…
I realize that is what I have been telling myself a lot lately, that “I am just waiting until…” and I usually am finishing that sentence with the energy. In previous times throughout my life the end of that sentence has included something more material like “I have *blank* job” or “someone asks me to” or “I weigh under 200 lbs”, for the first time I am realizing I am ending it with nothing other than I am simply tired and I want to do the things but I have zero to put into it. So usually I take a nap or go to bed.
A nap, the thing that has before been thought of in my life as the “biggest” waster of time, the thing that could never be justified. Only the weakest and laziest nap. Thus leading to every nap I have pretty much ever taken being followed by hours of shaming myself and guilt. Usually the only way to cope was to just keep sleeping, wasting time. Allowing it to compound and build.
Did I just basically define depression?
Well then I guess I am saying I am…coming out of it? The clouds are clearing up and I am coming out.
If I am being honest with myself, and you, it has been clearing up a bit the last few weeks, since the end of May. Now maybe I could just attribute it to the SAD finally leaving me now that the sun is a part of my normal days again, but to blame it all on SAD feels like cheapening my experience. It was a “real” spout of depression. I know it, I have been doing it my whole life, transitioning through these phases. Honestly, I am just glad this one was so short, a few months vs years like it has been. I think that means I am making progress, yay therapy!
It always amazes me how when I start feeling better I never really can see that until it has been a bit of time passed between the depression and the clarity. When I first “broke” through it was so profound. I found color after living in black and white for years. Now it’s much more subtle. The change of the end of a sentence perhaps.
First Time: Check
I am going to share something and before I do I want to make it very clear that I am telling you this in pure excitement for having finally having done something amazing, BUT I also want to be clear, I am not full of myself in actuality and I was just a cog in a much larger machine that did this!
I can add organizer to my resume. And not the kind that comes in and puts your dry goods into clear containers that let it stale in half the time. A like, political (?) organizer? I was a part of a team that made a “No Kings” protest happen in my little red town in Ohio. I am not trying to boast again, I promise, but it may have been the most important thing I’ve done in my life.
Some may say that 50 people at an intersection hardly constitutes a protest. Those same people would scoff when I shared that I co-led a march from the park where the democrats held their rally the mile and a half to our *slightly* more socialist-ish gathering at the town center. They also would have zero patience or care about the differences between those two events and why it felt so important that we hold space for both.
Luckily, those people are not my people.
You are and so you will want to hear about how good this felt, how it was a full circle moment almost a decade in the making.
The first protest I participated in was January 21, 2017, it was also a protest against Donald Trump. The Woman’s March. It was at the time a historic march, it felt like it too. I don’t want to belittle it as an experience, because it is a part of why I am here today, but it is interesting to look back and see the ways I no longer align with who I was eight years ago. I think I would still be there and I was beginning to enter into socialistic exploration because of my love for Bernie in 2016, however I was still drinking the capitalism kool-aid and living far more in the matrix than I am now, if I may use those idioms.
Regardless, it was a radicalizing day, a life changing day. When I got home after 22 hours of being awake I could not fall asleep until I wrote down all I could, so I wrote myself a letter to try to encapsulate all I was feeling (remember that includes delirium I was exhausted).
More on that another day, today we are talking about June 14, 2025. Another day that changed my life and in a way, completed a cycle.
I’ve mentioned my community group here, but in case this is our first glance at my brain, earlier this year I was fortunate enough to find a rough and tumble gang of local hoodlums to hang out with. No, we’re just a bunch of people here in my corner of the world, and we all want to survive and would love to pass the world on. So we’ve come together to start to make that fucking happen.
While I think a lot of us would love to focus on the education side of a group like this, or fundraising, volunteer project; the current state of the world has made it so that a lot of what we are doing right now is protesting and supporting those around us. Again, we do what the community needs. Back in April someone came to the group and wanted to help us to organize a protest here, before we mostly traveled to bigger places around. This person, I’ll call them B, saw the importance of the small town voice in this fight. Something I had forgotten until very recently to be honest.
I may have grown up small town, but I never really felt “small town”…I suppose that could be its own essay someday.
Any way, B got us together and somehow I got put into the group of organizers and then it is almost like I blinked and now it’s done. We pulled it off. I can actually process all the work we did, and I cannot be more clear when I say I simply took orders. Took orders and inspiration. So much fucking inspiration.
It’s weird, maybe it’s because my parents, nor my friends parents, really had a community. They had…groups, obligations, but not community. I don’t really think I’ve ever felt community like this. In a way that feels like home. I’m finding myself in these spaces with these people that in a world without this group, I would never have met. That I for sure wouldn’t have gotten to get to know in the ways that I have in being able to collaborate with them. Maybe it’s just the passion we all have, or its a cosmic event that brought us all together…Pluto did just enter Aquarius…whatever it is, something powerful is cultivated when we all come together. And on Saturday we showed that power to the world.
It wasn’t giant and the opposition around would probably call it a failure, but it was far from that. For one we donated a bunch of food and clothing to a local shelter. We also provided a hot meal to the local houseless who usually hang out where we held our event. A council person came and spoke and connected to us, but also connected us more to each other. We all laughed together, cried, yelled, and shared all that we had.
And it’s incredibly humbling to know that I played a part in making that happen. Even if it was just making a couple silly posters.
Sunny Days, Chasin’ the Clouds Away
The child is in her Sesame Street era, but I also find this line profound…or it’s just stuck in my head.
Motherhood is perplexing. It is raw and exhausting, but also the greatest feeling in the world. Like the ultimate love/hate relationship. I mean, yes, it is all love for the child of course, but for the actual job itself…it’s more complicated.
Here’s something, a truth I am processing:
Motherhood is the loneliest thing in the world.
I say that with a loving and supportive spouse, to the mother’s who do it with less, or no one…my awe for you and your strength, resilience? My awe for YOU is immense.
I think that this may be a truth for us regardless of our situation, I think maybe entering into motherhood is taking a step into loneliness. Part of me writing this is screaming but you have your kid…yeah, but I feel like…in a way…all I have is her, and she me? And that responsibility for being her only voice is incredibly isolating. Maybe it’s because, like for myself, I cannot always verbalize what it is she needs; leaving me to be the only one who can shoulder it all. I can hear my therapist saying that there’s no weight that falls squarely on my shoulders—shut up Steph.
Maybe I am victimizing myself, but verbalizing it is helping so I am just going to continue.
It isn’t that I am alone, I know I have my child, my partner, hell even my brother in law, fuck I even have a therapist. It’s just…it’s not a complaint, just a share. A share of a feeling, maybe an ask if anyone else feels it to?
Being a part of this group has been really helpful, having a purpose beyond being a mother. Which is a beautiful purpose. I needed this…fulfillment of being a contributing person in society. So that void is filled.
And lots of people recommended returning to work, so I am…just in my way. Which means I started an LLC and my own healing work officially. Another check in a box!
There it is though, that still lingering feeling of a missing of the before, the life before I was Kelsey, Junebug’s mom. When I was just Kels. Maybe it’s simply just because that is just someone I can never be again, so it feels distant and scary. Like I’ll lose her.
Release, Remember, It’s a New Day
So in a lot of the above I shared insecurities and fears of mine, now I am committing to letting it the fuck go. I had this moment of clarity, before the No King’s protests. I was pulling tarot for guidance and of-fucking-course the first card to come flying out was Death. Luckily, I am well versed enough to know that the card does not have anything to do with mine, or anyones, mortality. Instead, when she flew out I felt an immediately clarity of it being time to get up, to move on, and to leave it in the past.
So…here’s to the future, and beyond.
"Abortion Everyday" by Jessica Valenti
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