It seems like some sort of update is in order, so this is a very quick one to explain where I've been, how I've "fallen off the rails" and where I'm going from here. My great intentions for November fell apart when around November 14th, I started experiencing severe back pain. Lower back pain is an incredibly common thing, and I have experienced it on and off since my very early 20s. Sometimes it's a creeping thing that leaves me slightly disabled all day, and sometimes it's a severe problem that happens suddenly and incapacitates me entirely for a day or two. This was, somehow, a combination of the two. It came on fairly slowly and some days the pain has been almost immobilizing, whereas others are merely twingey and sore.

This has made everything in my life much harder. Sewing, whether sitting at the machine or bending over the cutting table for hours, is unpleasant. Crouching or sitting on the floor at the library to help sort books is out of the question. I can barely change my two-year-old's diapers most days, as a matter of fact. Medication has been largely unhelpful, the doctor has given this a simple, "sometimes it do be like that" and referred me to PT, and as we near the end of 3 sold weeks in this, it starts to feel like this might be a more constant part of my life.

By the end of the month, we were able to donate mittens and gloves to a coat drive, serve meals to homeless people, contact two people in local politics to encourage better decisions that support people in my area, and $120 saved in grocery money to donate to the food shelter. It wasn't the whirlwind of generosity I'd planned, but writing it out like this helps me see that it wasn't a wash either.

Going into Advent (today is day 5), I am rethinking my perspective. Instead of reaching out, of seeking people, of creating opportunities, I am taking this month and possibly a longer period of time to be receptive to opportunities that are brought to me. The last few years have been years of pursuit. Pursuit of knowledge, of connections, of friends, of opportunities, of academia, etc. I have reached out to people constantly to form friendships and to be useful or helpful and to learn new things. It has been exciting and exhausting, and often very frustrating as well. There is no shortage of people who want my time an attention (though the four people who most want my time and attention are very short). Rather than seeking relationships and opportunities, I'm going to cultivate what I have and let things come to me for a little while. It means that instead of reaching up to people who are greater and wiser and cleverer than me, I will be spending more time with people who are needier and poorer and more helpless than me, and perhaps that will help me with my own perspective.

This update was supposed to be very short, but alas, I am wordy. Book review of Hank Green's first novel will be coming soon.