A New Lynnette? Lynnette Strikes Back? The Return of Lynnette? Regardless, I’m Back!

I didn’t actually mean to stop blogging and disappear, and leave my faithful brother Ziff to keep ZD going all alone. The last time I posted, I see, was at the very beginning of the pandemic. And then I lost my energy to say much of anything. I was in the hospital, yet again, in July of 2020, which was an unusually weird experience because of covid. If you know my history, you know that I’ve weathered a lot of depression storms, but that year I really lost my momentum, and somehow I never made it back to blogging.

However, it’s occurred to me this spring that I evidently still have a lot to say, which currently is often showing up in ridiculously long Facebook posts, and I started thinking that maybe I needed to find more outlets for that. But my religious world is somewhat different these days, and I felt a need to find a platform that addresses a wider audience. At the same time, I miss being part of ZD, and the community we spent so much time building here. So my plan is this. I’m starting my own blog, using substack, which publishes an email newsletter to subscribers but also lets you read posts on the web. This will be focused on my favorite topics of religion and mental health (and of course, the ways they interact!) You are definitely welcome to have a look and sign up if you’re interested. I’m still getting that going; I’ll start putting up things there regularly on June 22. But to keep my connection to ZD alive, I’ll be cross-posting here some of what I write there, especially if it seems like it might be of particular interest to a bloggernacle audience.

And just for fun, here’s a quick update on my life in the last two years. I imagine that everyone reading this can tell their own story of how the pandemic upended things for them. I feel like my own experience wasn’t nearly as hard as that of many others, but as someone who lives alone and relies on social gatherings to keep me from turning into a hermit, the social distancing requirement was extremely challenging. Like everyone I know, I learned to use Zoom. I don’t hate it, exactly; in fact, a silver lining has been that my scattered family has become more in touch, as regular Zoom meetings have become part of our life. But I am weary of seeing people in that fashion. I don’t think I really appreciated the luxury of in-person interaction before I lost it. On a more positive note, while I already enjoyed hiking, at the beginning of the pandemic I turned into an absolute hiking maniac, and I’ve never really quit. I even get up ridiculously early on a regular basis to see the sunrise. I also have gotten more and more interested in nature photography, and I actually took an intro to photography class last fall to learn some basics. I’m still very new at it, but it’s been lots of fun, and I plan to upload a bunch of new pictures for our header.

Religiously, I am still a wildly enthusiastic Episcopalian. If anything, that is more true than it was when I was officially confirmed in June of 2018. A particularly hard challenge for me during the pandemic was having in-person church knocked out for nearly a year; I found that I missed it so badly that sometimes it made me cry to think about it. But I also developed increased appreciation for the liturgy of morning and evening prayer, and the way that those allowed me to feel connected to the tradition even when church wasn’t happening (or later, was only happening virtually). I am maybe a little less starry-eyed about the whole thing, as I have had to deal more with the realities of any community, with disagreements and endless committee meetings. But I still love both the tradition and my local parish in a way that even I find over-the-top. And I am still profoundly grateful and a little bewildered that I stumbled into a religious home that has been what I desperately needed.

I also continue to struggle, a lot, with mental health. My most recent hospitalization was at the end of January of this year, and it’s been a tough spring. I just started a new med, though, that might be helping (I am crossing my fingers to even write those words); I have at least found the energy to get back to blogging. Sometimes I think, or at least hope, that I have learned things from what has now been decades of navigating this path. On bad days, I suspect that I am simply repeating the same patterns in a neverending loop, and I am inclined to despair. I have, however, found myself writing more and more about my experiences, and felt more willing to share that writing.

So here I am again! At some point, we decided to refer to inactive ZD bloggers as being on “Heavenly Mother status,” obviously referring to the (apparent) silence of Heavenly Mother. But with apologies to Elder Renlund, I am coming back from Heavenly Mother status. I suspect that she has things to say. And in my own much smaller sphere, so do I.