This year is my Year of Healing™. That healing includes letting go of stuff, of baggage, of behaviors that are no longer useful or desired, of emotions that I don't want, of the person I don't want to be. Lots of internal things, but that first one I could use help with. I don't. want to have to move all this unwanted stuff again. I'm four months into the year, and haven't made a lot of progress.

So, I hired a personal assistant to help me out with my purging of stuff.

She started today.

I'm pretty excited about the help. I'm a bit nervous about the new Covid vector, especially so close to my upcoming trip, but I need the help, and now seemed good, both for my motivation and her availability.

I started her off with a list of 40 or so tasks, some gauged to determine skill level, some made intentially vague to understand how much she'll ask before running with the task. Some of the tasks are ones that I would really like to do and haven't done, and some were quick tasks for easy wins.

In handing the list to her, I recalled the summer a friend of Mom's hired me to help him around his place. One of the first tasks he gave me was to go buy lottery tickets. He handed me twenty dollars, and asked me to go pick numbers, bring them back to him. Off I went to the store, bought 20 quick picks and came back with the tickets. He looked at the tickets, and asked what the significance of the numbers meant. When I said they had no meaning to me, I had chosen the quick pick option, he looked disappointed. I asked him what was wrong with the tickets. "I asked you to pick numbers. This tells me you don't listen very well." It was my own personal brown m&ms moment.

The vague tasks were exactly that sort of moment. Would she ask for clarification (she did)? Would she run with tasks without checking in (she did not)? Was a good knowledge gathering exercise for me.

The big task she completed today was hanging the wall shelf in the kitchen, on which I placed an unfinished piece by Helen Tossavainen. The work is of a vase of daisies. The painting is unfinished. It has many do-overs in it. The canvas and paint are a little beat up, and yet the whole painting is beautiful. The painting is a metaphor for my life. I love it.

We'll continue next week, when we dive into a couple boxes. Most of the boxes that I haven't gone through yet are ones that are hard to go through.

This will be interesting. And fun.

As I was sitting at my desk this morning, I heard a sudden FLUP FLUP FLUP FLUP FLUP FLUP FLUP, which startled me. The sound stopped as quickly as it started. Puzzled, I walked over to the fan, just in time to see two moths flung from the insides of the fan.

How crappy that moment was: two moths, fluttering around each other, zoom this way, zoom that way, and hey, what is this neat air flow, BOOM, dead, bodies flung out of the blades.

I stood looking at them for longer than I should have, pondering what consciousness or awareness a moth may have, what this thing we call life is, and what connections my consciousness might have to these dying bodies. Of course, death and dying and the fraility of all of this has been weighing on my mind recently. Too much death in the last couple years, too much all this in the last couple days. Why does something have to die so that I can live?

The moment passed. The object that caused their deaths became the mechanism by which I removed them from my place, the whole thing making me not happy.

As one does after a really hard workout: one goes for sugar (or in my case, even more sugar).

In my birthday tradition, I went to Sprinkles for cupcakes after my hike. In not my yearly tradition, I ordered only six.

As my intimate circle of friends continues to shrink, I have fewer people to feed cupcakes to on my birthday. I mean, fewer people to celebrate with. Wait, no, that doesn't sound much better. I adore that Martha messages me every birthday. I look forward to outdoors things with her some day.

Anyway, birthday number gosh what the heck is it now, something something prime it is. Time to walk across the park, singing at the top of my lungs, "IT'S MY BIRTHDAY, HAPPY BIRTHDAY! HAPPY HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME. LET'S GO!" while waving a box of cupcakes around.

Again, tradition. You can't break from a tradition this good.

Shame is a heavy burden. It can lighten only when brought to the light.

The worst shame is the one you carry alone, even when your friends and those who support you already know what you are going to say. The worst shame is the one you never needed to carry in the first place.

Tonight, Kris and I had a very similar talk that Andy and I had had on Sunday night. I told him what I had been doing for the last eight years. I filled in gaps when he asked questions, which wasn't often but also wasn't zero. He told me that, yeah, he knew much of what I told him. He asked what was going to happen going forward.

The irony of the timing was not lost on me, but I told him the best I could predict and commit to. I let him know that unless he tells me otherwise, our plans after Vinson are the plans as I understand them.

In not wanting to hurt anyone, I hurt a lot of people. I made a lot of mistakes. In many of the 12 step programs you hear about, admitting what you did to those you harmed, and then making the amends you can, are two of the biggest, hardest steps you can do. Well, I'm not in a 12 step program, but I see the benefit, beauty, release, and betterment of those two steps, so I did them. I'm working hard to be more upfront and honest with people, and to keep my boundaries. That seems to be a thing these last 2-3 years: boundaries, and people learning to set and keep them.

This upcoming year, this training, this mountain, all of it is part of my year of healing. The Year of Healing™ was supposed to be 2022.

It starts tomorrow instead.