June 29, 2023

Tis the Damn Season

Blogging will be intermittent for the next two months as I get busy going outside and doing stuff. I am wishing you much of the same!

June 19, 2023

Invincible

You can’t go chasing summer, is the thing I keep thinking, but instead you just have to wait, and it comes on like a wave, a wave of green overtaking the garden, and of heat, and crowds, and traffic, and too-muchness, extremes. In summer I get to head out of town and reset my equilibrium, days away from city and noise and the online world, when everything I read is printed on paper, and I’m longing for that peace right now, but not the way I was a year ago, when I felt like I’d come so far, but I still was so broken. Like I’d never be able to withstand too-muchness again. Six months of recovery after my brain broke, and I thought it would always be like that, struggle and hard. So it was especially a relief to ease into summer in 2022, to find peace and stillness after so many months (and years) of tumult. Though, of course, as an anxious person, I was worried about that, asking my therapist what she thought of the fact that I was doing so well, almost like riding a bike with no hands, like, wasn’t this reckless. “I’m not using any of my tools,” I told her. “I haven’t picked up Pema Chodran in weeks. Like, what if I forget everything that I’ve learned?”

And in response she told me the very best thing, which was just to steep myself in this moment, to close my eyes and breathe it in deep and absorb everything about it, imagine myself wholly immersed, which wasn’t so hard, because I spent so much of the summer immersed anyway, literally, which meant something really profound to me, to be deep in the water, at eye level, and a part of the world in such a fundamental way. There was something about pickles, preserves, about bottling summer, and I decided to lean in and do that. The photo accompanying this post like talisman of all that, and I had it printed as an 8’11 and framed up on the wall, and it’s my phone’s wallpaper too, summer summer, deep summer. And it worked—in the fall I was still marvelling at how I was carrying summer with me, that ease, that inner warmth—maybe this was what Camus was talking about? I was carrying it still through the winter, and then the spring, that peace, a sense of being steady, okay. Even as the seasons were shifting all around me, as seasons do, and the ground was moving too, and there were floods and fires and earthquakes and plagues, not to mention school fun fairs and silent auctions and elections and travel and my health card and drivers’ license were about to expire, and everyone kept getting pinkeye, and it lasted for weeks, I was still steady. I’ve never known anything like it.

And now here we are again on the cusp of another summer, which has arrived almost like pinkeye, “You again?”. And I keep tracing the distance from there to here, which hasn’t been an uphill climb at all, just a gorgeous, steady walk, so much easier than those first six months, which felt impossible. You can’t go chasing summer is what I mean, but you can live in it, and let it carry you and give you faith, and help you float. It is possible to float.

May 9, 2023

Reading Good

I’ve been trying to solve the mystery of why my reading life has been especially rich and fruitful in 2023. Like, rich and fruitful beyond my own usual very high standards of what constitutes a rich and fruitful reading life. Partly it’s quantitative—I’m currently reading my 75th book of the year, which is the most books I’ve ever read by this time of year since I started keeping track in 2018. And this is partly because I got my first iPhone in November, which charges from my laptop downstairs, which means that my phone is far from bed and almost never the first thing I reach for in the morning. On many days, I read instead, and those half-hours definitely add up to something. But part of the quantity is qualitative too, because it’s the release of wonderful absorbing novels that have kept me going, big releases from Eleanor Catton and Rebecca Makkai that more than lived up to the hype, and books I only picked up because of all the hype (Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and Lessons in Chemistry) and I was so glad I did. But it’s not all been hype—I’ve loved rereading Elizabeth Strout’s back catalogue on the coattails of Lucy Barton, and picking up a 1990 short story collection by Joan Clark, and continuing to discover William Maxwell. Part of it is that I’ve found my own personal influencers, readers like Lindsay Hobbes and Lauren LeBlanc whose recommendations tend to satisfy. I’ve also been using the library more than I have in years, partly to keep up with the influencers I just mentioned without going bankrupt, taking months to finally get a book into my hands…but then I have to read it right away once I do because there’s more holds behind me and it can’t be renewed (this is the situation with Aleksandar Hemon’s The World and All That It Holds, which I’m reading right now upon the recommendation of my friend Julia). I don’t feel overwhelmed by all that I still need to read, or all I’m never going to read, or all the books that other people are reading, because I feel confident in my own personal reading trajectory (and glad too that it’s not just made up of all the things that I’m being told to read, or that everybody else is reading so I’ve got to do it too.) I think part of the richness and fruitfulness is also that I, for the first time in a really, really long time—like maybe even a decade?—am feeling relatively steady on the ever-shifting ground of reality, and I’m not even afraid to say that for fear that reality is going to come now and knock me over, tempting fate. I’m feeling good, and so I’m reading good, which is a sentence I’m going to leave right there, never mind the grammatical atrocities being committed. But then, as I always wonder, could it be instead that I’m reading good so I’m feeling good? (Certainly, for me, a poor reading streak and feeling terribly have often coincided.) Which comes first? How does one ever know, or begin to untangle it all? This is one of those existential questions that, it’s likely, I will never understand.

April 14, 2023

It’s All Happening

It’s all happening! Not just spring even (though spring is happening too—there is forsythia in bloom in my front garden!) but everything else, the weekends filling up like in old times. And I’m running two community events in the next three weeks, as well as supporting another one in June, and while I may have reached the “crying because I’m frustrated and no one will help me” and having periodical hissy fits stage in the organization process, in general I am doing okay, which is a big deal, because when I was having a really hard time with my mental health last year, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to take on these sorts of responsibilities again. I have a much harder time with stress these days, sometimes my anxiety turns on out of nowhere, and a year ago I was still was suffering so much, but since then I’ve rebuilt so much of my mental strength, and it feels really good. I’m proud of just how far I’ve come.

And something else good that happened to me last week was sitting down to write a little piece for our neighbourhood’s community gardeners e-newsletter. I’m at a moment in-between with my new novel nearly ready to go to print, and another novel that’s still in progress but I’m not stressing out too much about getting that next draft done, and I’ve taken a break from doing manuscript evaluations (though I’m returning to that delightful work next month!), which means that I’m temporarily between deadlines, as they say, and finally had a moment to devote to writing something for the Harbord Village Gardeners, which I’d been meaning to do for months now.

And it felt so great! To write and write and to get to the end, so richly satisfying. I’ve been writing my novel since 2015 and while getting it out there finally will be incredible, it’s still a long and complicated road to take, but this was different, and it had been so long since I sat down to write something like an essay (or a story). A creation I can (metaphorically) hold in my hand, and I was so pleased with myself, and pleased with the result. Looking forward to sharing it soon.

March 20, 2023

March Break

I loved our March Break holiday this year, a March Break so normal that I even forgot to find “normal” remarkable. Our kids brought their indoor shoes home, but not because we weren’t sure they might ever go to school again, and that Friday was a blizzard, and if I’m talking about it like it was 187 years ago, it’s because it feels like it, because our holiday was relaxing, a proper reset, but also because a week after that blizzard (which we weathered while eating pizza and watching Newsies [omg, so good, first time I’ve seen it in 30 years!]) there were crocuses in bloom, and it feels like spring. No doubt winter still has a few wallops in store, but spring feels possible now, and getting here feels like an achievement.

I handed in edits for my book just before the holiday and so I had the luxury of working half days in the mornings (after 8 am swims!) and spending the afternoons with my children on local adventures. They loved it too because it was just the right balance of lazing around playing video games until their eyes glazed over, and fun being out in the world (with friends!). And I liked that I genuinely had less to do, so it wasn’t me scrambling to fit everything into a smaller time-frame (which would make me very grumpy). It was a holiday for all of us, even Stuart, who still had to work while we were gadding about, but having no weekday activities in the evening was a break for everybody.

We went swimming at the community centre; went to see Winter Stations at Woodbine beach and went out to lunch with friends; our kids had friends over to help us eat our chocolate pie; we went to Leslieville to meet our pals and for cookies, book buying, and thrifting; our kids got awesome new haircuts; on Friday we went to see The Parent Trap at Paradise Theatre; more community centre swimming; and then we closed off the holiday yesterday with the T. rex Exhibit at the ROM, where I learned why it’s T. rex and not T-Rex, ie why T. rex isn’t J-Lo.

We had lots of time to laze, to rest, to read, to sleep, to visit, to sing, to whiz across town on transit, to snack, to wonder, to climb, to dance, to build, to spin, to dream, to be. I even got my taxes done! It was a very good week.

March 15, 2023

Mitzi Bytes Turns 6!

It’s March Break this week (low key staycation edition) and yesterday we celebrated Pi Day AND the sixth birthday of my very first novel with a chocolate pudding cake. It’s especially exciting to be celebrating this milestone as I’m hatching plans to bring my THIRD novel into the world on September 5. (Cover reveal is coming next week!! Stay tuned!).

March 9, 2023

Ordinary

A year ago, my mental health was terrible—a sentence that will be evergreen for me until the end of June—but early March was a particular low point, my anxiety ramped up again and me still so far from understanding how it played such a dominant role in my mindset and how much of my worldview was informed by a catastrophic thinking I’d just accepted as normal. I remember one of our first dinners out in a restaurant and not being able to enjoy it at all, because I spent the entire meal quite sure that we were all going to die quite shortly, and it was almost a little bit fascinating to look around me and see how everybody else was just taking it on the chin.

It was not a good time. And yet, there was sweetness. We were moving through March and the first one in three years that didn’t come with absolute dread. When my children brought their indoor shoes home for March Break, it wasn’t because I wasn’t sure they wouldn’t see the inside of a school again until September. We were eagerly anticipating our long awaiting trip to England, but Covid was also still surging, the idea of travelling was stressing me out, and I wasn’t sure that every March until the end of time would not take the shape of a spiral toward doom. I was incredibly moved last year to have our first ordinary March Break in such a long time, and so have my kids return to class as normal afterwards—but it also still felt precarious. Those convoy people had broken my soul. It felt so good for things to finally be okay again, but I still felt so far from okay.

And then this morning, 365 days from then. Another day of sunshine and blue skies, and there is this way the sunbeams appear in my kitchen around 8:30 in the morning from the southeast, making their way around my neighbour’s house and onto the counter, my cupboards, so golden, and my children were happy. We were putting lunches in their backpacks. They’ve stopped wearing masks to school. Iris had a school trip to the art gallery yesterday. Harriet’s school had an open house today so we could visit and see the zoo exhibits she and her classmates had built. Yesterday I had a meeting with my publishing team to hatch plans for my upcoming book. I spent the afternoon in a cafe finishing edits and eavesdropping on idiots, and then attended an event for International Women’s Day with wine and cheese, the first event held in the PRH office since March 4, 2020, back when everyone was wiping down surfaces out of an abundance of caution.

And this. The sun. This week. Today. In the deepest pit of pandemic despair, this ordinariness was everything I longed for, everything I missed to my very marrow. Backpacks, and laughter, and learning, and growing, and walking the route to school that I’ve been walking now for a decade. Things to look forward to. Moments to steep in. I am so so grateful, and so very happy, and tomorrow’s the last day of school before March Break and it feels like, instead of being stuck or in a spiral, we’re marching forward, forging new paths. Finally, finally. What a long, long road it’s been.

February 14, 2023

Swimming in Pee

We had the kind of weekend this weekend that hasn’t been possible in such a long time, the kind of weekend that we were wondering if we’d ever have again, even just a year ago, and it felt really good, to be so full of joy, our time full of fun, everything carefree. And something I can write on my blog that I would be less comfortable posting to social media, which is so much more amplified and devoid of context, is that we thoroughly forgot about Covid this weekend. 24 hours in Niagara Falls, staying in a hotel, visiting an indoor water park, and eating in restaurants—the object was enjoying ourselves and beyond packing hand sanitizer, we were going to not worry so much, leave our masks in our pocket for once.

Which I know is something we’re very lucky to be able to experience, but anyone who reads here often also knows what a terrible time I’ve had with anxiety over the last few years and how Covid absolutely fucked with my brain, made me think that keeping our health system functioning was my personal responsibility, and that every single one of my actions was so gravely consequential that I eventually was unable to do anything except walk around weeping at the sadness of it all, crumbling under the weight of this imagined burden of personal responsibility and my own catastrophic thinking. It was really bad, and terribly debilitating, and also really freaking hard for my family, and no doubt my kids will be talking about this in therapy for decades to come.

(I really really hate the way that bad actors hijacked the conversation around the pandemic and mental health right out of the gate so that it became impossible to have good faith conversations about any of this, to acknowledge that Covid is real and threatening, but also that there are dire consequences of having an entire society living under a perpetual emergency for literally years.)

And so it was actually really important, and even healthy, to have this little holiday away from it all, a bit like tearing off a band aid, pushing myself out of a strange uncomfortable comfort zone. If we got sick this weekend, we reasoned, so be it. Which is the kind of gamble that’s always been necessary for a trip to an indoor water park anyway, right? We were pretending that there was no circulating respiratory viruses, just as we were pretending that the wave pool wasn’t populated by people (hopefully mostly just the small ones, which is somehow less disgusting!) who were freely urinating without compunction.

So naturally, my youngest child woke up this morning puking—an inevitable water park aftermath. (She has been well since mid-morning, however, and will likely be returning to school tomorrow.) And then I headed to the hospital for my annual thyroid check, where it was found that one of my nodules had grown larger and so I had to have a biopsy (which I have had fairly often, and they’ve always been benign, thankfully), cystic liquid being sucked out through a needle in my neck.

And in the lab where I was sent for routine bloodwork, the technician was dressed in red for Valentines Day, just like I was, and we remarked on how we matched my blood, which filled four small vials for testing, and it somehow seemed fitting on Valentines Day, it being about hearts and all, my heart and your heart doing the amazing work of keeping our remarkable blood pumping through our gross and awesome bodies, and how all of us are connected, for better or for worse, most irrevocably.

I took the subway to the hospital for my appointment this morning, the first time I can recall riding transit at rush hour in such a long time, and the subway cars were packed, and more people than not with masks on, including me, and far more people with masks on than I ever see at off-peak hours (which makes a lot of sense!), and the subway was also so audibly quiet, people possibly on alert and good behaviour due to recent acts of violence on transit, and maybe that calm and quiet was what made it a little extra easy to feel in love with everybody today. All these people who’d woken up and had their breakfast and gotten dressed, and maybe nursed sick kids, or walked their dogs, or watched the sunrise with a cup of coffee, and now they’re out in the world, surrounded by strangers, following the rules, going through the motions, minding the gap.

It isn’t necessarily how badly our society functions that is remarkable, all of its faults and flaws, as I’ve written many times before, but instead that it functions at all. That most days in this city hundreds of trains take people places, and those people make room for each other, and move over on the stairs to let others pass, and help somebody up who has stumbled and fallen. That lab techs who dress up in red to make someone’s day a little brighter, going to work to poke needles, drawing blood, performing work that just might mean the difference between life or death. The miracle of socialized medicine and that I get the care I need to stay healthy. The miracle of ultrasound. The mask I continue to wear, when it makes sense, in my day-to-day life, and the knowledge that all of us, always, are swimming in pee.

And somehow, this is love.

This is life.

Happy Valentines Day.

January 20, 2023

Fifteen Minutes

I have fifteen minutes before I head to the pool, but I wanted to check in here and write something, to write something without even knowing what I’m going to write, which is the advice I give to anyone who wants to blog but doesn’t know where to start. Start where you are and see where it takes you, and so here I am at the end of a busy week, but not too busy, because I don’t do too busy anymore. I used to go swimming before breakfast so my workday would not be interrupted but now I interrupt my workday all the day (I don’t have a full time job! Let’s act like it!) and it’s the precious hours outside it that are untouchable, time for decompressing, for relaxing, for reading. I got a new phone in November, my first iPhone and I really like it but the way in which it’s most improved my quality of life is that it didn’t come with an electrical plug so I charge it through my computer downstairs, instead of at the plug in my bedroom where it was still accessible even though I mostly never looked at it after 9pm. Now I never look at my phone in the evening, and in the morning where I’d once spend the first twenty or thirty minutes of my day scrolling Instagram and checking my email (time that went by in a flash) I now pick up the book on my bedside and start reading, and I’ve been reading so much more since this shift. My mind is also in a better place, and I think that’s no coincidence.

Along those lines, I finished a big project today (actually the first quarter of an even bigger project) which I feel really good about because last spring’s edition came out so much later because I’d struggling so much from November 2021 onward. Getting it finally finished today is a sign of what a much better place I’m in that I was a year ago, a fact I’m still marvelling at, how much better something can be that once felt absolutely impossible. And I’m wondering about this, about gauging my well-being by my productivity, but I don’t think that’s actually it. My productivity is a symptom of my well-being, rather than the opposite. And it’s such a relief.

This week I also achieved a professional goal I’ve been working toward for a really long time, and I’m taking the time to really steep in this moment. As much as I’ve come to understand the way I’ve avoided feeling difficult feelings (an act from which my anxiety has stemmed), I think I’m also not very good at feeling good ones either. And so I’m trying to do that, which is harder than you’d think, but also really such a pleasure, and I’m looking forward to sharing my news with you as soon as I am able.

November 23, 2022

Postcards to the Future

A few weeks ago, we received a postcard from our friends Paul and Kate who live in Vancouver. I will admit that I did not read the note on it very carefully (the image on the front was a diagram of the respiratory system?), but it read something along the lines of that they’d written the card at a street festival “where they mail postcards to the future.”

Which was kind of remarkable, I guess, but then aren’t all postcards letters to the future after all?

The salient part for me, however, was the way the postcard concluded: “…and we will eventually be there, in the future with you!” Because we haven’t seen Kate and Paul since 2019, but this month they’ve finally returned to Ontario for a whirlwind visit, and we’ve been lucky enough to be part of it, which is what I’d so been looking forward to when I received this postcard at the beginning of November.

Tonight we all sat together in my living room eating Thai food, celebrating Stuart’s birthday, Kate and Paul, and our friend Erin, and 3 year-old Clara whom we last saw as a baby, and her little brother Gabriel, who has just learned to climb stairs, and who we’ve been overjoyed to be meeting for the very first time.

“Oh, I got your postcard!” I exclaimed suddenly, remembering. Kate and Paul were both confused. They hadn’t sent us a postcard. “No, you know. The one from the street festival? Where you were sending a message into the future.” They had no idea what I was talking about. “It’s on my fridge!” I insisted. “Here, I’ll show you.”

I went to get it…and realized the most important thing I’d missed when looking at it before. The date at the top: June 23, 2018. The people at the street festival really weren’t kidding about the future thing. I realized too that the note was only signed from Kate and Paul, because Clara and Gabriel didn’t exist then. We hadn’t had a pandemic then. None of us had had any idea of what was coming. And yet.

“…and we will eventually be there in the future with you.” A line that might have hit very differently if this letter had arrived at any other moment during the last few years. But it was a promise.

What are the odds of this very postcard to the future arriving on the cusp of the first time we’ve all been together in so long?

But here we are. I feel so lucky. And looking forward to what other wondrous things the future has in store.