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Hello!

I took a little vacation with my dad and his girlfriend a bit ago. They paid for airplane tickets and lodging in California!!!! I’ve never been out West in the United States. We went to Sequoia National Park for two days, and Yosemite National Park for two days. I wasn’t expecting the desert conditions surrounding the parks, it was wild. I only saw one tiny lizard, though.

We went to Moro Rock Trail and hiked to the top. It was very foggy, so much so that we couldn’t see it, which I think was both a blessing and a curse. It was pretty slippery and the guardrails were not very reassuring, so climbing up the rock made me nervous. It would have made me even more nervous if I could have seen how far we had to fall. It was cool to know I was so high up.

I saw the General Sherman sequoia tree. There were people from all over the world there. I’m used to that being from a large metropolitan area, but it was more concentrated I think because it is such a well-known and visited tourist spot. I took pictures for an older Danish couple, and the group before them was a family with a recently married pair from Brazil. There were people from the UK, China, Australia, Bolivia, Japan, and that’s just the people I talked to.

The California quails were so silly and cute. I saw maybe 4 distinct groups of them at one of our lodgings in the field/forest around us. They typically gather in flocks and run together in lines like school children. They have a loud call with the sound of a rubber chicken. It’s like bee beeBEE bee, bee beeBEE bee.

In each biome we visited while we there, I kept thinking about how it kinda felt like playing Breath of the Wild or Whatever The Other One is Called, since the direct impact of humans on the landscape was visibly minimal (despite all the work that goes into “maintaining” it through prescribed burns and other practices). I wanted to be a bird, to look at it all from different angles. I found the quantity and size of it all quite overwhelming. I’m used to flat, Midwest farmland, terraformed to hell and back for cash crops, livestock grazing, and long distressingly windowless poultry buildings.

It was hard to breath the further up we went into the mountainous areas. I think the highest point we hiked to had an elevation of 7500 feet above sea level (about 2200 meters)? I know I have asthma, but with my current fitness level and lack of illness, the slight inclines we were on shouldn’t have winded me so much, especially as I used an inhaler to help. It wasn’t just me, my dad and his girlfriend had the same experience (just less wheezy lol). I know it’s maybe silly or weird, but I like little reminders like that of how lucky we are to have such a wide range that we can survive at as organisms, but there are limits.

I really like the wooden architecture of the park buildings in California. To me, they seem both elegant and humble at the same time. There were many details that the people that built them included, like ornamental buttressing, carvings in railings and fence posts, detailing on columns. We also looked at but didn’t go into a couple of the hotels in the park. I didn’t know there were hotels in the parks. The cost of one night to stay at one of them was more than the cost of one month of rent I pay in the major city I live in. One of them reminded me very much of the (fictional) Grand Budapest Hotel, from the movie of the same name. I was waiting for Ralph Fiennes to pop out and flirt with my dad’s girlfriend.

We also toured “Curry Village”, which was a little community of people living in the park, learning how to mountaineer. I never figured out if it was an accreditation sort of thing or a “for the fun of it” kind of thing. There were ravens that had complex begging behavior, and squirrels with a different fur pattern than I’m used to. There were also Stellar Jays—to me, being from the biome I’m from, they look likes slightly larger Cardinals that are blue instead of red, with black caps. We watched one engage in burying and hiding behavior—it was taking acorns and pushing them into the ground using its beak like a hammer, and then carefully covering the spot with leaves.

Overall, it was lovely and I feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to go and see/experience what I did. I think it has re-enforced my desire to travel cheaply and to meet people in different places to make connections and grow. It’s always easier for me away from home. Being outgoing outside my Midwest bubble is easy. People from fancier places seem to get a kick out of the way I talk. I think of the particular Midwest area I am from as speaking with our mouths full of air, trying to keep it in by only opening our mouths so far and using our throats more to make the sound carry further. The vowels are full and long, the consonants not particularly strong, and sometimes they’re dropped in more rural areas. I’ve also been told in general we seem cryptic, or like we don’t let on what we are thinking as much.

So anyway, starting on Monday, all the HR stuff finally cleared, and I will officially start my new role, which I am both very excited about and very nervous about. I can tell that one of the new people that was on the same level with me before I took the offer does not believe I should be moving into the role, and may believe that it should have gone to them first? There were some responsibilities that I volunteered for at the beginning of the year that they were visibly frustrated that I was chosen for, even though I worked it out with them that we could share despite me being the primary title-holder.

I understand the feeling, having been that person trying to find footing in new work environments, but also having that sense of entitlement to getting things based on my capacity, even though my capacity had not been demonstrated to that team yet. I am increasingly seeing that if you are in the right setting, building relationships still benefits you perhaps more than competence even if a workplace technically has a union or unions in place.

I dunno. It’s an uncomfortable feeling. I am confident and able to carry out what I need to do while this person is not in my presence, but there are a handful of overlaps throughout the day where they are present and they find socially sneaky ways to voice criticism and doubt about my capacity to fill the role. I think I just need to work on having a thicker skin, because everyone else I am going to be working with are outwardly, warmly enthusiastic about it being me in this role. I feel like this is what it feels like to have family that care about you moving up in the world, and this other person is how my mother reacts to anything I do—comparison, devaluation, undercutting, sabotaging.

It’s odd to me because I think they were relying on their connections to get them something quickly (their father is a high-level person at another branch nearby), and I have been in this place building slowly and organically where people have felt my authenticity and work ethic. To be clear, it’s not that they aren’t qualified, it’s more that they seemed to think they could jump the line in a way that the working-class-background-uppers here aren’t about? It’s kind of satisfying in that class-based way… I think it’s ok for me to feel that way privately, and I won’t say this to anyone else I’m working with.

Anyway, the added pressure seems to be restarting old patterns of excessive stress: I’m getting lightheaded, heart pounding in my ears, “hot flashes” not related to hormones, sleep disruptions, and unfortunately the return of morning-time nausea that keeps me from eating breakfast (I worked so hard on that, it used to be my daily reality and now it’s been years, it’s hard to have it back). I know that I need to start exercising more actively and intentionally to have a place to direct all of that energy and let it out. I should be able to get a proper gym membership or something where there are classes to get that social pressure of going to things on a regular schedule.

I’ve gotten into the routine of doing my schoolwork a little bit better, too. I still have some late nights, but it’s not as bad. I think I need to schedule that time more, too. And, I need better treats or more presence when I do give myself my treats to feel like I am actually getting some time to myself in these busy days. Ahh. It’ll all be worth it somehow, right? As long as I can keep accessing the present moment and I don’t forget that skill while I bog myself down with more and more responsibilities and titles and things to do.

Have I fallen into the capitalist trap? More more more? I don’t want to lose sight of my values, or more frighteningly, lose them altogether. Change is change, it doesn’t need to have judgments attached to it. Stupid nuance and fighting the black/white thinking that arises from my neurotype and cptsd: I need the nuance to keep growing and adapting, but developing nuance feels like I am losing my way morally. But concern for and the ability to live by strict morality is for people that can afford to be strictly moral in their lives. Or that’s what I keep telling myself, anyway.

The ability to publicly live rigidly to me is a sign of privilege, either by way of excessive access to resources, or access to a robust and caring support system. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with being supported; but I end up privately resenting people that have access to these types of choices. Does that make sense? I think if I keep reminding myself that I don’t know a person’s whole story, and that life isn’t fair, maybe it gets easier to simply accept that I have to work harder to fight my propensity towards rigidity and some people seemingly are allowed to lean into theirs. Probably, also, I am bumping up against internalized ableism within myself as I am starting to stretch past my executive functioning ability with what I have heaped onto my plate in order to secure a “better” and “safer” material life for myself in the near future. I am probably seeking, subconsciously, to be a neurodivergent “pick me” as I always seem to have done. I don’t like that.

Wow that’s a lot of words, I should put some of this energy into doing my homework! Thank you for reading, I hope you are doing well. I’ll perhaps write again more on a light-load weekend! Cheers.