A Ramble on My Mental Health and Such

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

I put my altar in time out today.

Much like this blog I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with it for a long time. The answer to the former was to do a bit of a redesign and try again; the answer to the latter seems to be “get it out of my face.”

This is not to say I’ve stopped believing or practicing for good or any of that. I’ve stripped it down naked so I can give it a good cleaning but then I plan to only put back a half dozen or so things. Everything is so complicated, so fraught, in life anymore that I want something to be simple. I’m not getting rid of anything, just putting it in a box for a while.

I admit my practice, and my spiritual/magical life in general, has suffered lately. Aside from (and possibly also due to) what’s going on in the world, watching completely incompetent, cruel children destroy the lives of people in my country and try to erase those I care for while the planet broils and bird flu spreads, well, my brain has decided to try and kill me again. I tumbled into the Shit Pit a couple of weeks ago and though I keep trying to climb out I end up seeing too many news posts, or thinking too hard about my current life circumstances, and rolling right back in.

My depression follows a fairly predictable cycle that is at least loosely tied to my hormones. (This doesn’t seem to interest gynecologists or regular doctors, according to them I should just take birth control about it and go on a diet.) I tend to get a wave of badness about 10-14 days before I bleed and usually once my actual period starts I’m able to slowly climb out, then get a couple of days of feeling really well before I do it all again. This has been my life for as long as I’ve had a period, although I’m pretty sure I had some level of depression long before that. But sometimes things are bad enough that I don’t get the climb. I stay in the Pit for weeks. Those are the scary ones where dark thoughts gain traction and I have, in the past, ended up in crisis.

Is that happening this time? I don’t know. I know that when there are actual exacerbating circumstances it’s a lot harder than when it’s “just” my brain full of faulty wiring. Random Shit Pit episodes are easier because they aren’t based on events; I can look at how I feel and say “This is temporary, it’ll be better in a few days.” When actual bad things are happening the intensity of whole thing doubles.

My mind is the sky; my moods are just the weather. They move across the sky and change and sometimes they’re fierce and terrifying, but they always change. There is no static state of the self. And yet…

In times like this I always start to question: Is this the one I won’t come back from? Is there something underneath the Shit Pit that’s trying to stretch its claws up into my soul? Am I ever going to actually be happy, or even okay, for more than 3-4 days at a time? Is there any point in even asking?

One thing is certain: I need to see a real brain doctor. I’m fond of my GP but her knowledge of my issues is limited by necessity. I need someone whose entire job is brain wiring. Someone who can confirm I have ADHD and help me figure out where the depression fits into it. That’s one of my intentions for the next month – find a shrink, female, who takes my insurance. But my executive dysfunction makes that kind of adulting very very difficult. I’m still fighting with myself to call my former 401k people and get them to change my account information so I can actually log in again.

I’m going to have to show up for myself, though, or whatever happens out there in the world, in here, it will never get any better.

You may notice…

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

If you’ve been here lately, you may have noticed that things have changed a bit. I’m trying some new themes and graphics to freshen things up. I’m hoping to get back to why I loved blogging when I was younger and how I can bring that energy and fearlessness back as well.

Stay tuned!

Honesty

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

You may have noticed that January is half over and no Book 8 has emerged.

I promise I’m not trying to be coy, or build suspense, and I’m not going to be that Thrones fella who never finishes his series. The final Shadow World book is coming, but I cannot at this time give you a firm release date. Again I apologize. I fully intended to finish the book in the last months of 2023. That was the plan and I believed I could do it, but it turns out I couldn’t.

I’m going to level with you here, and I am not in any way trying to draw sympathy. I just want you to know what’s been going on so hopefully you can forgive my flakiness and continue to humor me.

Honestly I feel like I’ve forgotten how to write. The last few years have been hell on my creativity and confidence. I am working to regain those things. To write like I do, I really have to be deeply involved in my characters and feel the hot flush of my work. I need to cry when something sad happens and feel the prickles up and down my arms that I feel when I’ve “caught” a scene. It’s a feeling of rightness; it’s not always pleasant, but it’s right. When I feel that I know I’m doing what I’m made to do.

Let me tell you, disillusionment and unremitting major depressive disorder were not in my plan when I was young and knew, just KNEW, I’d be a “famous author” one day. (Whatever that even means.) I’m good at what I do. I know that. But being a good writer is meaningless if you don’t, well, WRITE.

I finished Shadow Rising by the skin of my teeth in terms of the emotional energy I had to work with. The last few years have wrung me out.

I have put so much of myself into these novels–I poured my heart into Queen of Shadows, and throughout the series I have fed my despair, sadness, hope, and belief into the characters. Nothing that Miranda feels is something I have not felt. I hope that it shows! I’ve always believed emotional honesty is key to characters that feel “alive.” The problem is, I only have so much fuel. I have had very little to give my beloved world in the last few years. It’s all been devoted to, and this is not an exaggeration, staying alive, and to some extent functional.

It’s also possible that I’m afraid. Once the last book is written, the Shadow World series is over. Not to say that I’d never revisit it, especially in short story form like Met by Midnight, but a whole era of my life would be concluded, for better or for worse. It may turn out to be the end of me as a writer.

I know that’s not true, or at least it doesn’t have to be. Neither does my fear that having given so much to the SW series I won’t ever be able to do it again. How do you invest so much in a world and the people in it and just…move on? I have no idea. I don’t know how other authors do it. Think of any fictional world that you’ve truly loved and think about what the author did next. I bet it wasn’t all that great, and if they came up with something else just as immersive that affected people as strongly as the first one…how the hell did they do it? I have no idea. I’m scared to find out. I’m sure part of my psyche was like, “well…let’s just never finish!”

Like I said, I’m working on all of this. My Word of the Year for 2024 is “rekindle,” specifically bringing life back to those parts of me that seem to have died out. Wish me luck. More than that, wish me a spark.

Mmmm, Fall…

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

October and November are my months.  I spend them wanting to start a coven, start a new book, or start a bar fight.  There’s just so much electricity in the air, and it’s glorious! The catch is for about two months I feel alive, magical, and often…well…I tend to vacillate between mystical exuberance and dick-in-the-dirt depression.  

Autumn is the season of harvest, and I find myself introspecting even harder than usual – even ruminating, which is not exactly healthy.   The year is shifting from light to dark, from a time of growth to one of decrease, and it begs the question:  How’s my own harvest going?  What all did I try to grow in the light seasons, and what was the result?   It’s both a literal and figurative harvest – fruits and vegetables, hopes and dreams, plans and schemes.

As you likely know, Texas does not adhere to the traditional Western European Wheel of the Year.  I don’t consider Autumn a time of slowing down – growth slows down, yes, but the heat just broke.  The lightness in the air calls for celebration, socialization, and fun, however you define it.   My birthday being in November just adds to that call.  Also, though, I find myself wanting to start new things because with the Summer finally over it feels like I can move again.  If you’ve never lived in oppressive heat (you probably will eventually, let’s be real) you may not know how hard it is to accomplish anything – even things that don’t require being outdoors!  The energy of Texas Summer is so heavy and still that until the Autumn thunderstorms start up it’s like the sky is your own personal weighted blanket…or shroud.  

So if you find yourself feeling a strange mix of excitement and sadness, don’t worry – it’s totally natural.   Autumn is in many ways the out-breath of the year – just look at the trees.  After the heat of Summer they seem to sigh and just let go in that way that nature makes look so easy but humans always manage to complicate.  Nature urges us gently to release the months that have passed and be open to whatever is next, but you and I both know how hard that can be for us two-legged meaning-making animals.  Hence the introspection and evaluation of Autumn – before we can release the light part of the year we have to go into our memories, our lists and plans, and stand looking out over the fields for a while.

A Little Magic

Mix together some cinnamon and sugar into their own little container; add a crystal of some sort to the bottom of the container if you like and charge the mixture with feelings of comfort, strength, and discernment.  Add a pinch to your tea, coffee, or other hot beverages in the morning, and as you stir and sip, feel yourself taking in that energy.  If you remember and/or want to, think to yourself:  “May I be like the Autumn trees, who know how to let things go with ease.”

(Whoa, I actually rhymed something, has hell frozen over?)

A Few Influences

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

Just to give you an idea of what I mean when I say spiritual inspiration can come from anywhere, here are some examples from my own practice.  

1.  I use prayer beads, which of course are common to many cultures; I designed my own system, however, so it’s not a mala or a rosary.

2.  I light a flaming chalice on my altar to honor my UUism, which was one of the first ways I altered my way of doing things when I joined the church.  The chalice is a traditional Pagan symbol, but to me the church’s flaming chalice is the light of reason in the embrace of spirit–a flame in a chalice.  That’s just how I view it, though, everyone thinks of it a little differently as a symbol.

3.  I smoke cleanse my space, but usually with stick incense for practical reasons.  I have been known to use white sage but I’m not buying any more now that I understand how threatened the plant is becoming.  I’d rather the tribes who use it in their own traditions have it. There are a couple of Native-made stick incenses that I’m willing to buy but no more bundles for this Witch.

4.   The goddess that I interact with looks almost exactly like a celebrity (Sara Bareilles, please don’t tell her, lol).  I have no idea why!  I am a fan of her music but if we were going on fandom levels alone she’d be Taylor Swift. That would be truly weird.

5.   When I envison magical energy I use a modified version of a concept I found in a fantasy novel (Gael Baudino’s Strands of Starlight, which calls it the Dance; I just call it the Web of Life).  When “hooking up” to the Web (you can’t be disconnected from it but your awareness can be) I experience and imagine how, in the movie Pacific Rim, the Jager operators snap into their robots and enter the Drift (see gif below).

6.  Not long ago I was doing a meditative journey and found myself in the Forest of Spirits, which is where I sometimes meet with Persephone, but instead someone else showed up, and we’ve met a few times since.  I don’t think he’s a god, just a teacher-type entity–and at least in these meditations, he’s Dream of the Endless from The Sandman TV series on Netflix.  We talk about working magic through the visualization of the Web of Life, and I’ve learned quite a bit about, as he calls it, dreamweaving.

Full disclosure, this may just be because I want to bang Morpheus like a Tibetan temple gong, but even so, the imagery works surprisingly well for me.  

7.   Over the years I’ve used imagery from witchy and ritual moments of Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Vampire Diaries, The Secret Circle, The Craft, Practical Magic, and Frozen 2 when casting circle or doing energy work.  When I see something neat that looks like what I’m planning to do, I try it!  If it moves me, I keep doing it.  If not, I go back to my usual methods.

8. The images of Deity on my altar include a Funko Pop! of Te’Fiti from Moana.

Okay, so I couldn’t find the Pacific Rim gif I was looking for but I think you’ll agree this one is way better than anything I could have shown you related to the post. 

Build Your Own Gods?

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

Here’s a thought that immediately gets sneered at by a great many people in a surprising number of religions:  You are under no obligation to devote yourself to “ancient” gods or archetypes.   You are free to take inspiration from your own world, here and now, and your spiritual practices can come from new sources and even…*gasp* pop culture.  

The fact is a lot of “old” deities can come with a lot of baggage and not really make sense in today’s world.  As with many things it’s a matter of perspective.

Let’s say you’re drawn to the Greek goddess Hera.  Hera comes from a patriarchal culture that frequently portrays her as a bitter, vengeful, and jealous wife, the embodiment of a dozen icky stereotypes about married (and all) women.  But when you meditate on her, or contact her in some other way, you feel her strength and power, her refusal to let her husband’s flagrant infidelity and general rapey-ness go unchallenged.  You find in her a modern feminist goddess, not a shrieking shrew.  

So which Hera is “right?”  If you find something in a deity or archetype that was not part of their ancient cultural makeup, are you still revering that same deity, or something new you’ve made up?  

Many, many women perceive Persephone as a Queen and a woman who undergoes the descent into Hades willingly, not a kidnapped little girl being traded between male gods.  Many argue that the myth existed in a more powerful form before the Greeks took it and turned her into a passive victim, but at what point does a deity stop being Greek and start being modern?  At what point are we projecting our modern values onto something born from a completely different time?  Is a sovereign Persephone valid?  

If you are not a mythological purist or a historian my answer for you is, “Sure, why not?”

It is my opinion and experience that sometimes Deity comes to you in an inconvenient or weird form.   In a lot of ways you can’t control it.  If the Goddess is reaching out to you and looks suspiciously like Scarlet Witch from the MCU, and you vibe with that, well, why not work with her in that guise?  If the way you envision magical energy is as the Force, why deny it?  If the warrior traditions and mythos of the DS-9 Klingons gets your bat’leth buzzing, who am I to say you’re just “making stuff up?”

Psst…we’re all making stuff up to one degree or another.  That’s beside the point.  The point is that the sacred will come to you in ways that make sense to both of you – even if it takes you a while to figure out why exactly, or what that particular vision means to you.  It may be meant to combat a stereotype or help a particular part of yourself evolve. 

Not every deity or teacher is going to stay with you for life.  Some come to us to show us something particular, to help us through trauma or processing an event, and then fade out so Someone Else can come in.  We’re not all dedicated to a single face of Deity or even to a single pantheon.  You may end up with a Goddess for every day of the week, or you may adore one your whole religious career.  

That said, if you find yourself drawn to the spirits or deities of an existing culture (especially a historically oppressed culture, like most Indigenous tribes the world over), PLEASE do your homework, and consider very strongly whether “borrowing” one of those concepts or beings is okay for you.  If you are a white person and you decide you just can’t bond with any deity except White Buffalo Woman you need to be prepared for the fact that you will be challenged on it – and rightly so.  

There are thousands of faces of divinity and rituals to celebrate that divinity.  There is no need to take from oppressed and closed cultures.  Even those that aren’t necessarily closed, like Hinduism, should require you to respect that culture, the history of the deity, and the way They are revered by actual living people.   There is a difference between appreciation and appropriation, but that difference relies on respect and education, which is YOUR responsibility.  Other cultures don’t owe you a pass because you “have a Native friend.”  

The cool thing is we don’t have to do any of that!  Really consider what it is you’re trying to accomplish and how you could get that same result using tools that aren’t the spiritual property of people who have been victims of genocide, those very traditions ground beneath a colonizer’s boot.  I bet you can find a way.  It doesn’t have to have come from another existing tradition to work.  It doesn’t have to be ancient to be valid.  

The benefit of our form of cheerful syncretism is that we have an opportunity to create all new practices, traditions, and even gods rather than clinging to the old.  But even if you are working with ancient deities from well-documented cultures like Greece, research and study are still paramount. 

You may have gotten the idea that I believe gods are just archetypes, but that’s definitely not true.  They are archetypes to a degree, but archetypes with centuries of history, myth, worship, and power behind them.   After all, you were inspired to connect with that deity – that inspiration came from somewhere, right?

 My experience has been that Deity is reaching back to us through those archetypes, and in that sense they are very real and often behave differently than they would if we just made them up out of nothing.  We’re tapping into something very old and often very opinionated.  Even when working with adaptations of modern and popular culture keep in mind that there is energy behind them, and often they hook into ancient archetypes and energies because that’s what humans are spiritually drawn to.  

The gods are not just faces and names and a list of correspondences.  Deity as a universal force is alive; it changes and dances like any other living thing.  

So when you reach out to the universe and she reaches back, whatever she looks or sounds like, take some time and find out everything you can about that aspect of Deity, then proceed with both mirth and reverence.  And be sure and ask her name; it’s only polite. 

August Bullet Journal Setup: Folklore

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

Recently I went on a Temu bender (I know, they’re evil, don’t lecture me, it was just a summer thing) and I ended up with a mountain of stickers. It was so hard to resist all these pretties for a dollar a pack! And I ended up with not one but two sets of Taylor Swift lyric stickers, primarily focused on her Folklore album (that and Evermore are my favorites of hers). I looked at them and thought, what on EARTH am I going to do with all of these?

Then I was trying to decide how to do up my bullet journal for the new month, and had a wonderful idea.

Even better: One of the songs on Folklore is called “August.” It’s fate!

I give you August, decorated primarily with stickers but also with hand lettering and doodles by myself. I’ll probably do that a lot the rest of the year since I have SO MANY stickers: Tarot cards, coffee, book themed, cats, more cats, pigs, moths and butterflies, more cats…oy vey.

If you’re new to my bujo style, I always include a spread called Good Things where I write in or draw something good about each day – a person, a food, an event, whatever.
I hadn’t been doing mood trackers since I got back into my bujo, but I felt the need to do one for this theme for some reason.
Yep, I’m at less than 20k words on Shadowsong. Expect to see me grow crazier and crazier between now and October 31. (The time between that and release day are for final edits and coding.)
So the weekly spreads are partly blank so I can fill in my hydration checker and a to-do list. I went ahead and made all the weeks ahead of time and decorated them so I wouldn’t have to worry about it all month – I tried doing week by week in July and half the weeks ended up looking like hot chickenscratch garbage. This way I can still move things around but it’s not just a big blank page.
Please to not notice the fact that I was off by a day on every weekly page and had to patch over the dates to fix them. 😀
One of my favorite lines from the whole album is from “The Last Great American Dynasty.”
“I had a marvelous time ruining everything.”

31 Days of Smallish Bloggery, Day 31

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

So how was July?

Warning: This is not a smallish post. I have a lot on my mind.

It’s been a long month. The weather has been brutally, life-drainingly hot. I’ve spent this last week in what I call the Shit Pit – a deep and nasty depressive episode, usually lasting 7-10 days before the slow climb back out.

Before that, my mental health for July was actually very good! I was enjoying how I felt, which I try to do as much as I can because I know it will end eventually. I am always trying to learn better ways to cope with my time in the Shit Pit, and understanding that it’s always temporary has been soooo helpful.

I don’t function well in the heat; never have. Realizing that this is probably the coolest summer we’ll have from now on makes it so much worse. I think part of my tumble into the Pit was a sorrowful sense of ending. It seems like everything is just getting worse and worse – not just the climate. Normally I am able to hang on to a little hope – there are still people fighting, still victories. Maybe there’s still time. But this month I wasn’t able to maintain even that. Down we go!

A favorite local business, Rabbit Food Grocery, shut down this month; Sinead O’Connor, a lifelong heroine and inspiration, died this week. My mother had some serious health issues in July as well (she’s doing much better). America expected us to come to its birthday party after it’s been acting like an asshole all year. Ugh. What a month.

Good things did happen this month though! I got to go to my first miniatures show with a dear friend, the first trip out of town I’d had in…um…a long time. We even tried a vegan Mexican restaurant and oohhhhhhh it was good. Because of that trip I discovered the marvel that is peach butter (so good on toast, OMG). And I built two miniature kits and am almost, almost done with the dollhouse. So it wasn’t all Shit Pit all the time.

But all I can do is do better! July is over, time to move forward. We can’t undo bad decisions or un-fuck what we’ve fucked up. We can only blunder onward with better intentions and maybe better plans in place. I can think back over July and find ways to support my mental health more effectively. I can seek out more ways to contribute to the world within my means and abilities. I can dig into the reasons why I spend so much on deliveries and work on better meal management.

(How is it no one told me that feeding myself would be one of the hardest parts of adulthood?)

So, to summarize the blog challenge…

Well, I’ve kind of blown it, in terms of posting every day. The fact is, I’m a shit blogger. I post a bunch for a while then nothing. I write loooooong posts with no pictures! God forbid! I feel like there has to be a way I can use my blog that will work for my writing style and my life, but in all these years I haven’t sussed it out. I’m a good writer but not much of a blogger, and that’s always struck me as weird – it’s a built in platform to talk about whatever I want! Seems like I’d never run out of stuff to go on about!

Look, a picture!

In our weird modern social media world if you don’t post every day, advertise yourself, get sponsors, cover your site with ads, optimize the doohickey, plan your Instagram ahead of time, use like 3x more pictures than words, never go past like 200 words in a post, and fondle the algorithms, no one will ever find you. Success is views and likes and revenue. Content quality? Eh, whatever, as long as you “build your brand.”

That’s never going to be me.

I’ve let that intimidate me more than I care to admit, as well as my lack of youth and beauty, especially when it comes to posting YouTube videos. All these young, pretty women with tons of tattoos (where are they getting the money?) filming gorgeous cinematic videos of themselves walking through the woods in long skirts and shit…I live in a city and it’s too hot to go outside. I also don’t wear skirts and my wardrobe is, well, dowdy on a good day.

I think that’s a lot of my problem when it comes to social media and blogging, not to mention writing books on spirituality – the media are so saturated with lovely things to look at, but I’m a terrible photographer and I don’t even wear makeup.

Notice however that this is my problem, not something wrong with the folks out there doing the work. I admire them so much! Back when I was 23 and thought I knew shit about shit would have been the perfect time for me to create a media presence – I was fearless enough to write about a religion I’d practiced for six years! That kind of crazy bravery/hubris is awesome fuel. Life and major depressive disorder have ground that out of me, and I’m not sure where it leaves me. I feel just as compelled to contribute to my spiritual community as I always have, I’m just not sure how to approach it. How can I be myself out there and still be heard?

You don’t have to answer that question, don’t worry. It’s just where I’m at after this month on the blog and my time in the Shit Pit. I feel like I’m on the cusp of at least part of an answer, though, so that’s good! Like I said 500 words ago…all I can do is do better!

Smallish Bloggery Day 29: I dip my French fries in…

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

Up until this year I would have just said “ketchup,” but I’ve discovered a new combo: Half ketchup and half Sweet Chili Sauce. It’s kind of a revolutionary change for me since I can’t handle spicy food (I honestly ask the Indian restaurant for “white girl spicy” and they know what I mean), but having discovered Sweet Chili Garlic hummus earlier this year I decided to try the sauce on things.

My favorite brand so far has been Thai Kitchen, but I know that both Sprouts and Whole Foods have a house brand, and I’d like to try them. But mixing it with ketchup makes a fantastic dipping sauce for fries as well as faux chicken nuggets and strips.