This past year has been….yeah, well, you all know. Hard things have often been harder. Good things are often not as visible. I’m tired. Everyone is tired.
I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like, I do have a more topical less housekeeping type post I want to get to. But I have been working on other stuff that is related (because all my obsessions end up kind of related, anyway, it’s how my brain works). I finished a new personal trainer certification (having decided after nearly 30 years that it was time to leave the organization that had already abandoned its personal trainers). I am hoping to start taking a couple online clients once I have more reliable internet which may be sometime mid-April. I was supposed to be sometime mid-March, so….
I may also be including more fitness stuff on social media and/or here again, related to this project. One of the two reasons I picked the organization I did is that they do have a tactical fitness specialty which looks like it might be relevant and might be my next CEUs. The other is that while it allows for CEUs from an “Autism Exercise” organization that uses ABA (Applied Behavioral Analysis), it is not heavily invested in it with tons of blog posts about the “poor misunderstood children with the autism” stuff. ALL the others seem to be heavily invested and it’s …awful. And none are listening to autistic adults about what they are doing. If you want to understand the issue with ABA you can go to The Great Big ABA Opposition Resource List here.
For those who don’t know, I am undiagnosed but not only “self-realized” but also “community-recognized” autistic. Like many people raised as a girl (I am cis, but not all who are in this situations are), such a diagnosis was not even a thing. Getting diagnosed now is nearly impossible, I don’t have the resources. Adult diagnosis is a privilege, you need to have some way to fund the testing yourself, you need a good enough mental health infrastructure to get you qualified for testing. Depending on how things go as far as the pandemic, I might try. Largely because I feel that more autistic fitness professionals need to be advocates and being diagnosed will help me as it appears I may be becoming such an advocate. There’s a lot to this story, I’m not going into it here, not now. But as we head into April, please note that I support #RedInstead and listening to #ActualyAutistic folks.
The major news at the homestead is the the deaths of our 32 year-old Mini horses. We knew it was going to be soon and were making plans for them. But it happened unexpectedly soon and not at all as planned. In the very early morning of Jan. 22 Iceman died. Cimarron obviously panicked and managed to escape from the barn. He was hit by (or probably hit) a truck and was killed instantly. We knew that after 30 years together they’d need to go together, but this wasn’t how we’d thought it would happen. Iceman was declining, but he didn’t seem to have declined that much. Or so we thought, but were wrong.
This has left poor Saorsa alone, which isn’t good for a horse. I try and will continue to try to occupy her time and attention. But we do need to see about finding another horse soon. Of course, it’s not an easy time for that for many reasons.
So, here we are, at the start of the second year of the pandemic, still trying to sort out what it means. We now have our first vaccines, scheduled for our second and ….I’m still not likely to leave my swamp all that much.
I hope all reading this are managing to stay well, as are your loved ones. And I extend wishes for healing for those who have not been able to in this awful time.