A Bit of a Shift This Week

Bit of a shift this week. I’m experiencing SAD symptoms even though it’s no longer winter, which is making today’s writing difficult.

I did manage quite a bit after hearing from the radiologist that there is no recurrence of the cancer. Even so, it took me about a week to return to most of my usual routines. During that time, I spent a lot of it working with ChatGPT on pins for my Pinterest boards. I uploaded Awakening and Becoming Visible from Currents of Becoming a poetry book I’ve been planning and added a couple more lists to “Things I’m Learning.”

 

I also started a new board that I still can’t name in any coherent way. It began as Grandmacore (Grammacore), inspired by a set of pins that felt connected to the values I grew up with. An article called Grandma’s Rules really sparked things, and I spent time turning those ideas into pins and building the board around them.

When I stepped back, though, I could see it had drifted off brand. I tend to prefer soft watercolor and pastel tones, but these pins leaned heavily into sepia. It works for a vintage feel, just not the one I was aiming for.

I tried again using my May palette—cream, blush, and moss green. I liked the look, but I still couldn’t find a clear direction. The board seemed to want to be too many things at once. In the end, I hid it and stepped away. If I can’t find cohesion, I’ll likely take it apart and reuse what I can elsewhere.

One thing that did come out of it was experimenting with images. I tried recreating my living room setup and ran into trouble describing a wall hanging my daughter gave me. Uploading a photo instead made a big difference. The first result stayed very true to the space and surprised me. The ones after that were decent, just not as strong.

 

Yesterday I tried using photos from my trip to the Y. Those didn’t work as well, mostly because the photos themselves weren’t great. I’m planning to try again and be more intentional about what I take. I’m not even sure where I’d use them yet, but I’m curious to see what happens.

I walked to the Y yesterday morning for my swim class. I ran out of energy about halfway through but kept going. It was my own doing—I forgot to eat before I left. Even having a grilled cheese after class didn't help. I still needed a ride home and ended up taking a nap. A reminder that with diabetes, regular meals really aren’t optional.

I’ve also been thinking about the people I see around me. Living where I do, most of what I see is Caucasian, with some Indigenous presence. Being French Canadian, I’ve always thought of myself as mixed, though it’s a bit more layered than that. My mother was English with Black ancestry, and my father was White and Indigenous.

It’s an unusual mix, but it has its advantages. I’m 65 and don’t look much over 50—aside from the hair, which shifts between silver and white depending on the day. Slight side step there but matches the way my mind is working today.

It also leads into May, which brings Mother’s Day and a pull toward memory and nostalgia. I’ll likely write more about nostalgia. Memory tends to live in my poetry. Nostalgia, for me, is about continuity—the things I learned and valued growing up, especially the parts that lead back to my mother.

 

If this kind of reflection resonates with you, you’re welcome to follow along. I’ll be leaning into nostalgia and continuity as we move into May. For now, I’m taking this as a week of small returns—to routine, to energy, and maybe to a few things I thought I’d left behind.

Not the Kind of Adventure I Expected

Tests, quiet fear, and the small ways I kept going while I waited. 

The type of adventure I have been on this week is a little different than the others. It started with a pain in my left shoulder. I assumed it was just a simple rotator cuff issue and didn’t think much about it. I worked around it, took something for the pain, and carried on. I do regular self breast exams after my run-in with breast cancer a few years ago, and I noticed a strange texture along the skin that connects my underarm to my breast—on the left side, the side that was operated on. I noticed it, but I didn’t really notice it. I told myself it was probably just skin changing with age… but only on the left side.

I didn’t go to the doctor until I put on a bra and saw the swelling on the outside of my left breast. That was the moment it shifted from something I could ignore to something I couldn’t. The doctor didn’t seem too concerned, but he sent me for a mammogram. The next day, they called and said there was some thickening and that I needed to come back for an ultrasound. That was on Monday. 

There’s a space that opens up when you hear something like that. Everything keeps moving—appointments get booked, days go on—but underneath it, there’s this quiet thread of what if. I didn’t go to the Y this week. I needed the time to sit with it, to be quiet, to not have to be anywhere or do anything for anyone else.

Instead, I worked on my poems. I didn’t think of it that way at the time, but looking back, that’s how I was handling it. Sitting with words that didn’t quite fit, turning them over, letting them be messy, staying with something until it felt a little more true. It was something I could hold onto while everything else felt uncertain.

Yesterday was the ultrasound. When the doctor told me it was only a swollen sebaceous gland, the relief was immediate—physical. I remember making prayer hands on the bed without even thinking about it. Just… thank you. I don’t know much about sebaceous glands, but I do know they are not cancer, and right now, that’s enough. I’m nine months away from being five years cancer free.

 This week didn’t look like much from the outside, but it was. It was a week of waiting, of quiet fear, of trying not to get ahead of myself, of finding small ways to stay steady while I didn’t know. The poems, the pauses, even the decision not to go to the Y—those weren’t just small choices. They were how I got through it. I think this is what a small adventure looks like sometimes—not going somewhere new, just staying with yourself while you wait to find out.

I’m still here.
Still paying attention.
Still finding my way through, one small thing at a time. 

Learning Not to Fix Everything

This week didn’t go the way I expected. Not in any dramatic way—just small things. A thread stalled, a tool didn’t behave the way it used to, and I found myself sitting with a question I couldn’t quite answer about friendship. Nothing big, just enough friction to notice.

 

And that’s where this week seemed to settle. Not in fixing anything, but in paying attention to how I respond when things don’t go the way I expect. It turned out to be less about solving problems and more about noticing my habits around them.

I noticed how quickly I want things to work properly. The system should behave, the routine should hold, and the plan should still fit. When that didn’t happen, my first instinct was the same as always: figure it out, adjust it, fix it.

But this week offered something quieter. Sometimes the answer was to refresh, restart, or simply let it go. Not everything needs a workaround, and not everything needs my full attention.

At one point, I caught myself thinking I had lost momentum. It felt like I had somehow undone the progress I made earlier this year, like the routines I built in January and February had slipped out of my hands. But looking at it now, that’s not what actually happened.

My system didn’t fail—it shifted. My energy dropped, my focus narrowed, and the things that usually matter stopped feeling important. Not because I’m weak, but because something in me didn’t feel safe.

 

Fear has a way of settling in quietly. It doesn’t always show up as panic; sometimes it’s just a steady “what if” sitting in the background. Once that thought is there, everything else slows down whether I want it to or not.

There were different kinds of days this week, and they didn’t all feel the same. There were flare days, where the pain came back louder than I expected, and foggy days, where I couldn’t focus long enough to stay with anything. There were also what I’ve started thinking of as waiting days—where the best thing I could do was keep things gentle and let time pass.

None of those days looked productive in the usual sense. But they weren’t useless either, even if they didn’t give me anything I could point to at the end of the day.

I saw the same pattern showing up in other places too. I started looking at travel—what it might take to go somewhere a little farther from home. For a moment, it turned into something big, complicated, and expensive, something that didn’t fit my life at all.

So I stepped back and changed the shape of the idea. What I’m working toward now isn’t one big trip, but something smaller and more manageable. One simple trip, something close, something I can actually follow through on without it becoming overwhelming.

The same thing came up in how I help people. I’ve been offering water and a snack at my window, nothing formal, just something I can do. At first, I found myself thinking about how to make it better—what else I could add, what would make it more helpful.

But what I’m learning is that keeping it simple matters more than trying to improve it. Something to drink, something to eat, something steady. That’s enough, especially if it means I can keep doing it without wearing myself out.

Even in quieter moments, the same idea kept showing up. I found myself thinking about what a “friend” really is, not in a heavy way, just as a quiet check-in with myself. What I realized is that I might not be missing people as much as I’m missing a certain kind of connection.

Something steady, easy, and known. That’s different from having nothing at all—it just means what I have doesn’t quite match what I expected it to feel like.

There’s a pattern here I’m starting to recognize. When something doesn’t work, when something doesn’t fit, or when something feels off, my instinct is to fix it right away. I want to make it better, smoother, or more complete.

But this week offered a different option. Let the broken thread stay broken, let the unused thing stay unused, and let the question sit without a full answer. Not everything needs to be resolved to be okay.

 

By the end of the week, something small shifted. I don’t need everything to work perfectly to keep moving forward. Sometimes it’s enough to notice what’s happening, choose the simplest response, and leave the rest alone.

That might not feel like progress, but it is a kind of steadiness.

And right now, that’s enough.

Going Anyway

 Not what I planned. But I didn’t turn back.

I’ve been thinking about this whole “small adventures” idea, and I don’t think it looks the way people expect it to. It’s not big outings or full days planned out. Most of the time, it’s me standing in my kitchen trying to decide if I’m actually going to leave the house or not.

This week, I did.

The plan was to go to the Wednesday Farmers Market. Easy enough. Fifteen-minute walk, nothing complicated. I talked myself into it, got out the door, walked all the way down there… and it turns out there is no Wednesday market anymore. I just stood there for a minute thinking, well… now what.

 

That would have been a perfectly good excuse to turn around and go home, and I was tempted. But I’d already done the hard part—the getting out the door part—so I kept going. I crossed the bridge into East City, stopped at Tim’s for a few minutes to rest, and then carried on to the spa where GD#1 works to check out those shower steamers she mentioned.

From there I went into Foodland to pick up the groceries I’d meant to get at the market. Not what I planned, but it worked. After that I wandered a bit along Hunter Street, half-looking for a bus stop and half just seeing what was around me. I didn’t find the bus stop, but I did find a Vinnies, so I went in to warm up for a few minutes.

By then I could feel I was done. Not the good tired—the kind where you know you’re pushing it. So I listened to that and called a Y-Drive to get home. And honestly, I was pretty proud of that whole thing. Not because it was big, but because I didn’t quit when the first plan fell apart.

The only picture I took was from the bridge by Quaker Oats. I’d hoped to find a path along the water on our side, but it’s all fenced off now. Still, standing there for a minute, looking out over the river, it felt like I’d actually gone somewhere.

Good Friday was a quieter version of the same idea. I took a longer loop instead of going straight to Jeff Purvey’s—Park to Dalhousie, onto the bike path, around through Townsend and Rubidge. I got there, stood in line for a bit, and nothing was moving. I could feel my energy dropping, so I left and ordered fish and chips instead.

On the way back, though, I ran into Larry and stood there talking with him for a few minutes. Nothing big, just a bit of conversation, but it broke up the walk in a good way. He’s been moved somewhere better, which I’m glad about. He’s getting older now—not as old as me, but getting close.

 

Then Monday came around and I went to Aquafit. Before we even got into the pool, I ended up in a conversation in the change room while we were getting ready. Just a few minutes, nothing important, but those small bits of talking seem to matter more than you think they will.

After class, I went home, rested for a bit, and later in the afternoon I walked down to Brookside Plaza to check out the new Salvation Army. I didn’t need anything—I just wanted to see it. That’s kind of what all of this is, I think. Not big plans, not big energy, just a bit of curiosity and a willingness to go anyway.

When I look at the week, it doesn’t look like much. A couple of walks, a class, a few short conversations. But it doesn’t feel small. It feels like I’m not stuck in the same way.

And if you’re dealing with the same kind of stuff I am—low energy, pain that comes and goes, days where everything feels heavier than it should—you don’t need big adventures. You just need something. Something that gets you out the door and gives you a moment where you’re not just sitting in it. That’s enough.

This week, I’m thinking about trying the bus. I’ve got the pass, and I keep looking at it like I’m waiting for the “right” plan. I might just go to the terminal and get on whatever bus comes first. That idea makes me a little uncomfortable, which probably means it’s a good one.

Small Adventures: Moving Through April Slowly

 Doing what I can. Letting that be enough.

As this month begins, I am doing well.

I go to the YMCA once a week. I walk every day—no less than 2,000 steps—which, if you know me at all, you’ll understand is a big step forward. I’ve gone from 250 steps at the end of December to 2,000 now.

My weight is finally below the 200 lb mark, coming in as low as 196 lb, but mostly around 198 lb. By the end of April, I hope to bring that to a steady 190.

 

How I’m going to get there is fairly simple. My plan is threefold:

1. Continue my weekly Aquafit class and add some chair yoga at home
2. Take a daily walk—sometimes as an adventure, sometimes just to enjoy the sun
3. Prep and eat only what I prepare (no takeout), including a weekly trip to the local farmers’ market

I’ve created a system for food prep, a realistic budget, and a journaling structure that allows me to be both practical and artistic. That part feels steady now.

So this month, I’m turning my attention outward—mainly toward my environment.

The first is getting out in public more often. I’m exploring a couple of groups I can join for social exposure, and one of my small adventure tasks is to interact with people I meet along the way—even if it’s only a nod.

The second is putting procedures and simple checks in place for housework. I’m not looking for a white-glove routine, just something I can live with as I move through a version of spring cleaning.

Fifteen minutes a day is the goal.

 

I want to be as ruthless as possible using the keep, toss, give-away method. My intention is to reduce what I own by half. I don’t know if I’ll get there—but even 25–30% would help me feel less closed in by my things.

The last area I’m working on is self-care—but not in the usual way.

I want to get my hair cut every three months. I’m also considering a simple skincare routine—not because I feel I need it, but because I enjoy things like facemasks. That might be where I begin—one facemask a week.

I’m also rethinking my wardrobe. I recently discovered my colours were done incorrectly, so this feels like a good opportunity to build my first capsule wardrobe.

 

I know I can do most of this.

But if I learned anything from March, it’s this: pacing matters.

I need to go slowly instead of trying to do too much too quickly. So I’ll keep that lesson close—doing what I can, not everything I want.

If you’re also learning to go slower while still moving forward, you’re not alone.