Hello Every Body,

I moved into my house in August, so this is my first season with the fruit trees in my backyard. I have a plum, a cherry, a pear, and a little fig and little nectarine who aren't fruiting yet. The cherry tree already fruited and we harvested about 3 cups. The pear tree is still cooking away. But the plum tree! The plum tree is so loaded in fruit that during a windstorm a whole branch broke off with the weight. I learned a lesson about thinning that day. I went back out and took about half the green plums off the tree so the rest could grow big without so much competition and the poor little branches could hold the weight.

I spent two weeks this month happy as could be in a steaming hot kitchen processing green plums into jams and sauces and bottling them in a water bath canner. I took some of the jam and turned it into a dark chocolate ganache and put it inside a chocolate bon bon. I am pouring sour plum sauce on everything like it's ranch. 

This kind of "backyard to fork" domesticity was a dream of mine my whole life. We were even starting to look at buying farms when I got so sick I had to admit that I would never have the physical ability necessary to work it. I had to grieve the dream of the farm stand full of jams and jellies, fancy chocolates made from my own hand grown ingredients.

But as the years went by and I adjusted to the reality of my life, I realized, I didn't have to give anything up. I just needed to change the scale.

Through disability accommodations and changing the scale of my ambitions, I can still hang on to my identity. I will always be the person who loves to cook from scratch, preserve food so no one goes hungry, tackle ridiculous messy projects, dream and come up with schemes to make those dreams real. I'm still that person even when I need to lay down from overheating or use a stool while I'm working. I'm that person whether I can make a project happen every day or once a year.

It really helped me to sit with myself and ask, "What is enough? What will it take for me to feel satisfied?" I didn't have an answer to that question for a while. I spent a while shocked that I didn't have an answer. There was only a chase, never a destination.

Why did I want a giant farm? Part of it was to help others, but another part was so I could be seen as accomplished and successful in my work. Is it enough for me to enjoy a personal sized yard farm? Once I let go of the need to be seen as successful, it absolutely was enough. I grow plenty to keep me busy turning it into food and enjoying all the things I enjoy out of it. I don't need the giant farm to still participate in what I love.

Setting our own metrics for how we evaluate ourselves is so important, because if you go by what the dominant culture passes down there will never be a point where you are good enough. There's no way to work hard enough to have capitalism love you. If you decide that your metric for a 'good worker' is someone who reliably fulfills their job description, then you don't have to feel like a bad worker for turning down overtime or special projects. If you decide that your metric for "attractive" is someone who presents themselves authentically, then you don't ever have to feel like not complying to the latest trend makes you unattractive. 

Over the last few years a lot of people have acquired disabilities or acknowledged their need for support for the first time. That can be an incredibly fraught journey as you have to face the internalized ableism you might not have even known was there, and learn a whole new way of valuing yourself that is not tied to what you earn or how much people admire your work. There are a lot of questions about who you are now and grief over the person you were. That's a real process and a hard one. But I hope you remember that you are trying to evaluate those things without all the information. You can LEARN to be disabled. It won't be like your first day forever. You will figure stuff out, find ways to hang on to what you love, find new things you never appreciated before, and learn new ways of relating to people. 

It's never all or nothing. There are ways to get to enough.

Before we can figure out HOW to care for ourselves, we need to spend some time asking WHY we aren't doing it already. The reasons we aren't already practicing all the habits we know are good for us are not because we are lazy or failures. It's because it's HARD. And there are a LOT of barriers to these habits. The way we are taught to think about personal care habits is with so much shame and such high expectations for independence that no human being is capable of meeting them. It's a recipe for self neglect and shame. A vicious shame spiral as we neglect ourselves because we don't have time or tools or support and are taught to be ashamed of our needs, then we can feel shame over our self neglect, then feel shame again over feeling the shame because we can't seem to stop it. We need a way off the shame spiral, and for me, that was recognizing how little control I had in these systems and refusing to take the blame anymore. To solve the problems, you need to get to the root and quit trying to white knuckle temporary solutions. By finding the barriers, we can also find the work arounds.

It's time to get into the meat of the Body Loyalty Rubric, and in June we're going to start talking about The Marrows. The Marrows describe the purpose behind the choices we make, and keeping our actions anchored in that purpose will help us discern between the choices that are going to help us, and the choices that will just waste our time and faith and money. 

We'll dig in come June!