Sunday Candy Issue #11

Gray Skies Turn Blue

Welcome to Sunday Candy! This is a biweekly newsletter sprinkled with whatever I feel like sharing with you.

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Gray Skies Turn Blue

When I left my home the other morning, I was greeted with a chill and looming gray skies.

Immediately, I felt both wistful and tense.

For weeks, I’ve been grieving the end of summer even though it’s still here. Even though it just started.

Yet, I’m already preoccupied with thoughts about the upcoming  fall and winter. 

I’m reminded of the cold and enveloping darkness that I want nothing to do with, but will eventually come for me.

I’m reminded that it’s officially been a year since I left my job, and that I’m still unemployed and swimming in an ocean of uncertainty whose waves may eventually swallow me with a merciless gulp.

I’m reminded of my dormant vigilance, a hum-drum of flickering dread inside me that’s awakened when the gray skies gift me vignettes of the bleakness that came tethered to the smoke-filled skies during California’s largest wildfire season back in 2020.

When I was at my most depressed and anxious. 

When I felt broken and hopeless.

I’m worried that things will get bad again.

I’m scared of feeling that bad again.

And that I’ll never really escape that.

Even though I know I’m much more equipped these days to handle that kind of bad, I feel stirred by the possibility of it because I’m familiar with the depths of its depletion and darkness.

And I don’t want to have to claw my way out of that again.

There are moments where I notice myself ascending into gloom. Some mornings if I linger even a second too long in bed I can feel my mind flirting with it and before I know it, I’m curled into a ball overflowing with tears.

Lately, I feel like I’m bracing for impact.

It feels like I’m taking steps back. It leaves me disappointed in myself.

As if I should have transcended everything by now. I forget things don’t work that way. Timelines, journeys, and healing. It’s all endless patchwork.

I try to remind myself that there will always be peaks and valleys. 

I cling to the notion that I’ll always find my way back home to myself when I stray. That my more idyllic and playful self is always here with me even when it doesn’t feel like it. That in my own time and in my own way, I’ll figure things out. 

And even if I am taking steps back, I keep trying. I keep going.

This too, is progress, I think.

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Expert In A Dying Field

On this Sunday night, I’ll leave you with a song by a New Zealand band I really love called The Beths.

A meditation on navigating how to let go when the contours of someone you’ve become an expert on still lingers on the edges of your memory. It’s off a soon to be released album by the same name.

I adore how it’s stunningly sentimental and ripe with honesty.

Hours of phrases I've memorized
Thousands of lines on the page
All of my notes in a desolate pile
I haven't touched in an age
And I can burn the evidence
But I can't burn the pain
And I can't forget it

And it carries a bittersweet reminder:

Love is learned over time
'Till you're an expert in a dying field

As a bonus, here’s a fun video of them doing “Trash Recital” for their song I’m Not Getting Excited off a previous album, Jump Rope Gazers.

The song starts at 3:38. It’s short, but watching them mess around and perform with random trash makes me smile. It’s playful and a joy to watch.

Enjoy.

That’s all for issue #11 of Sunday Candy!

Thanks for reading, friends.

Until next time,

Sandra

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