by Sandy Bassie

Something Borrowed

May is halfway gone, the long weekend just ended, a short note to Facebook on the anniversary of my mother’s passing four years ago got posted rather than a paragraph or two intended for here. I worked this weekend – normally given to a trip north for mother’s day and two birthdays, but I called in sick one day and saw the doctor instead; blood pressure and pain again that is actually fibromyalgia overextended, and perhaps lingering trauma to trying too hard and what that represents in body memory.

I’ve been through several courses this year in poetry, memoir, and lyric essay (a repeat of the one last fall). I’ve had conversations on these and on ways my love of words engage the many things that come to mind as I lean into learning more on the technical aspects of how  to write, and how I naturally write, in different genres. I love learning new things. I get aggravated with myself not retaining them in ways I want through in the moment recall. I write so much down, and then struggle to research what I’ve written, each year trying to improve my filing system for easier access to a topic, idea, notes I’ve saved for later use in any genre. There is no point being angry with myself for what I lack, and yet I am all too often. Angry. Frustrated. Easily distracted into grabbing hold of any interesting words I find and letting them play, only to file them again and hope they won’t be lost.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons I write here, sharing some of the simple to significant things I think about and live through in the day to day, workday and general life places. Something about a memory shared, an opportunity to rehash it at some later point, even being able to point to what I write and let others recall it with me, or to me, in different ways. It helps.

So, it’s 11pm and I am no closer to hitting send on homework for a Thursday review of lyric essay in one of the studied forms. We are to share our work and critique others. It won’t happen if I don’t submit, and I’m still wallowing in indecision on what to send. Too many words, too little form. And the air wafting in smells from open window reminding me of summer visits to cottages long gone with the family who lived there. What is it about a smell I have not yet written down in words trying to capture the memory? Instead, I head back to notes from three other days that may become essay before morning, pointing at family, inheritance, cups and saucers, and ways memory forms.

Something will come of the words, and I will acknowledge they are borrowed and shared from within other things I intend to write, but for this week, they can be homework exploring things together.

by Sandy Bassie

patterns and gaps

Reading back, more than twelve days since my last post. Why? What have I been doing that didn’t include writing, or maybe didn’t include sharing things here?

I know I’ve been tired; several appointments (physio and a B12 shot) confirm this, as do too long sleep hours a few running nights. I’m practicing taking naps when I feel my body shutting down. You’d think that would be logical, but it’s had a hard time negotiating with my system and life patterns to get a place. I don’t understand all of the signals my body gives, but at the same time, I have a terrible habit of pushing through because being sick was a judgement place for so long. That shows up at times in writing that’s going into the memoir I started a few years back. In courses and among writing friends with whom I’ve shared, my ability to describe the moods, feelings, emotions, sensations are described as well written, able to give a picture of the experience. The compliment is nice, but what is needed at the moment is a better grip on the message the sensations are trying to convey. Do I need water, food, sleep? Am I getting too little exercise? Am I tracking basic needs or have I suppressed them? It’s not always easy for me to tell. One counselor told me I am far too good at dissociating. It’s a short-term coping skill our bodies have for emergencies. It’s not meant to be a way of life.

I know all these things. Knowledge and application need a better conversation.

Journal notes suggest I’ve been busy. Besides work, I have sat in on several discord conversations around semiotics, signs, memes, historic poetry and Latin. Where does my brain find time for this – it’s not like any of these are personal areas of study or expertise. Several conversations with local friends, laughter and nonsense. Volunteering at a community brunch that happens twice a month. Yes, I’m beginning to weave in the tangible health where slowing work has opened spaces. I am learning healthy choices.

The essay I started on January 9th has seen some attention. I’ve read it through several times and played with editing suggestions I got from my writing group. Layout as well as word choices. It’s time to write another or go back to the first, the one I did during my course last fall and add to a list written there.

Poetry is still my go-to writing, but I am beginning to also love lyric essay.

Learning patterns I follow now forming retirement is interesting. I’ve always been curious about things I could learn. When Jacob was small: ASL, Deaf Culture, elements of learning, and how to teach reading. My filing cabinets were full of different things then. Words and language are still of interest, but the context shifts. I still encourage my son with reading English, I have apps to practice French and Spanish, and recently Hebrew. One of the YouTube channels I follow teach biblical Hebrew and Greek, and now the discord group have added Latin. There is no way I am going to learn all of the things I’ve put on my plate.

Hopefully, I’m doing better tracking my interests and learning to balance it all against health.

This will be a good year.

by Sandy Bassie

Identity expressed in names

I hope I’m not wrong messing with my identity by writing under my maiden name from this point forward. I don’t dislike my everyday name, but the majority of things I have written with it come from connections with a lot of trauma growing up, married, divorced, losing the love of my life I met late and had only a short while. I’m still Sandy to a few thousand people I love and see regularly. Inside, there is still a part of me that never quite was the person who hid below the chaos and didn’t follow an art degree, or a writing degree. She’s still in there. How do I let her take a role in what I do?

My question, today, do I leave my current blog under this name and just write certain thoughts here. Do I move it with the shift to ‘writer’s name’? A lot of what has been here the last five years is me processing grief losing Jack. I am 90% done the poetry chapbook I did the last two years on our relationship; grief, but also joy. I’m 40-50 thousand words into the memoir written around marriage and divorce I left in 2016 and start writing 2019. I can’t escape the sensitive places my children flinch over things written there, but one wanted me to go back to my maiden name at the time, and the other tenses over his part in some of the trauma. It’s complicated. But life is complicated and I never quite leaned hard enough into the name given me at birth. I’m curious.

So the question is what does a smooth transition look like? I have a few things written years back in allpoetry.com and have played with my name off and on there. It’s an easy first step. What next? Is it better to make a new email and website? I’ve been doing the blog here in WordPress since 2008 without letting myself get too deep in the weeds of writing beyond just whatever is on my mind. I have been checking the bottom of websites of people I know here and few other writing groups (as I follow WP in YouTube and learned you can use the program but host it elsewhere).

I don’t want to pay much yet to build a site. As I lean into retirement, I have several books and some art that I want to tie to a central location from the other apps. I am suffering quite a bit from oversleep and pain the last year. I don’t feel very productive. I write about and work within categories coming from abuse, trauma, mental health places in life that have me seeking identity and joy through a sensitive register. Will this shift or is this my field?

I’m asking others’ advice. Other than that, it’s take tiny steps and discover.

by Sandy Bassie

The Long Road

Two days ago, the decision, yes, I’m going. Weather has been distraction, playing over in my mind, pushing the word logic to the forefront, making me question it’s purpose and use. Of course there is logic to safety concerns, changes in plans during weather events. I followed online news and updates, official and off the cuff, called on friends and family to report back what they saw, but even so, weather shifts.

Is there really a way to align potential and definite? In the moment, maybe so, but time and distance give a lot of leeway. As much potential for error as success, and travel allows opportunity for distant factors. Life was like that so many years. One day’s promise becoming another’s remorse. If only there was a little remorse on the other’s part; or so I wished. Being the only one carrying the weight of decision and remorse is wearying. Those days are longer than the promise days, so much longer.

I learned this the hard way, through years of days given to promises often ignored, left unfulfilled.

Driving is much like any other relationship. There is promise, fulfillment, communication too fuzzy to be clear, silence turned into action, swift changes you didn’t see coming. Of the two, marital or vehicle, I tend to find the second more relaxing, more predictable, more defined. Even with similar flaws in communication, patterns are navigated on visual evidence for the most part. There is ability to see and predict, plan how to react, and given the worst, a certainty you will react in most situations. By the time marriage gets to needing to react to the visible dangers (because that is what I think of saying reaction to certainty) too much has been internalized as complaint, an excess of words we are told don’t do damage, knowing full-well that they do. Reaction becomes harder. Back bite, not movement. Questioning self as much as other, assuming fault will be assigned, and I’ll get the short end of the stick.

On the road, I had enough early practice to create certainty around my skill. The tests were designed to show comprehension and application, not tricks to undefine and unmake who you are. Driving, even with a punch to head or gut, gave me focus outside of the rage. Eyes still on the grey line ahead, defining space and purpose, a sense of composure I managed to maintain.

So deciding to go on an actual trip, with defined designation, stated purpose and plan, against this and the weather; I knew my skill and really only had weather and other drivers to anticipate. Taking a break, slowing the journey, having needed necessities and contact list, were all calm outcomes for issues that could come up. Snow, freezing rain, slushy roads, these things I knew and had navigated before. That left only the extra attention given to how others navigated the same conditions and whether anything I saw changed any of my own decisions.

Eight hours, two stops, an hour given to body recovery and basic needs. I was good. In a few days I repeat it all in reverse and hope it goes as well as the drive up. I know the road, the length of time, the conditions of this season, and my skills.

I wish I’d been as well prepared for the journey long ago I began and then ended abruptly when danger hit an indefensible state and divorce finally framed the outcome. Winter. Travel. It expresses itself in many ways.

by Sandy Bassie

5 X 5 and see it goes

I have the link to the photo prompt I mentioned in the last post. I meant to write on it yesterday after work, but somehow the hours between 12 noon and supper ceased to exist, at least from conscious memory. I’m learning that energy and its connection to both health and activity runs on automatic or maybe just autonomic. Every nerve has weight to it, pitches into things, like the keys on a piano. Low feels heavier than higher tone, and sound moves sleep and wake patterns like my foot on the pedal. I’m yawning again already when I’ve only been active since 9am today.

I wrote a poem to a group conversation around a YouTube stream. Playing with each other as we watched for patterns and expectations, all the usual happenings the group enjoys. The video was a discussion on Trinity; doctrine, not movie character. People of different viewpoints agreeing to disagree. I had fun watching for key words and opinions while playing my own game with words in poetry. The draft is done and shared with the friends in question. I may also read it to my writer’s group this coming weekend. I’ve promised them something to read.

Between listening and typing, I vacuumed two spaces, sorted clothes for keep or give away. And all that remains now is find art supplies and ask if I can trust myself to nap 10 minutes only before I log into the virtual class. It’s that or face down into pencil sketch. Even telling myself do things in 5 minute increments, I have a suspicion I’m taking on too much somehow. More than fibromyalgia and pain are coping with while trying to stay awake.

Better set two alarms and turn them up. Two peaceful hours of art, and see if I need more rest, or can continue the 5 by 5 minute game.

by Sandy Bassie

Yesterday, today

A note to a post in Canada Writes, the writers group in Facebook that I joined the one or two times I submitted to CBC. A photo prompt of a girl in a tree, laying along a branch. Time and timing of a thing that they did.

I didn’t participate in your contest during Covid. To me, Covid was a 30×60 foot fence made of self-check-out terminals, a wall of gum and chocolate, random interest items forming a laneway in, and the trapped emotions of rules and loss. It still sits like a snapshot of all that’s hard in my life. Wonder at how losing something good threw me back into trying to leave what came before, and how I dangle between the sanity provided playing in writing prompts and all the trauma that fills the broken frames that litter my memoir attempts. I’m copying this and adding it to my January blog days where I hope to put enough words to soothe the flow. The little things along the way that prod me along, working hard to convince me that sharing is not the end of the world. I’ve been telling myself a story my whole life and I’m still here. Yes, I need pills for my thyroid, where I held too many emotions, and my blood pressure that peaked 200 too many times, fibromyalgia and anxiety that hold hands with PTSD, coaxing it to try one more day. So I cry when I write. big deal. I cry when I don’t write too. And days like today, which are many, give me reasons to add words to a page, and like something that happened in the night that had me putting notes in my current journal, questions that pull reasons and thoughts already written in places in my memoir notes, one more approach to the stories I tell myself about what and when and how, the too many words and fractured lenses through which I see my life. The layers that get me in trouble with family who cope in different ways. It’s probably stupid writing all these things. It’s ok. People who want me to write have convinced me it’s good to share the things I share. It’s brave, not stupid, and it has opened me up to a lot of the brave things that keep me going. Talking about it gives reasons for others to look at their lives and challenges in hopeful ways, or at least to know they are not alone. So here I am, a photo prompt that isn’t what I wrote, but did contribute to what will go to my blog, and lets me one number past where I started on the clock the day, and one breathe past what went into my journal about head, gut and shakes. Hello day.

by Sandy Bassie

Another year, another start.

First day of January 2026. The morning is half done and that’s about all that is done. Time.

By afternoon, I did accomplish a few things. I visited the neighbours and when home, I dug deep into clearing out my bedroom. It’s been story boxes of papers, books and other things, but I’ve been saying for a few months that I need to clear them out and make it possible to remove the queen bed. In November I bought a twin frame and mattress knowing the smaller bed would allow me to use the space better for some of the art things I want to do. I need a place to set up an easel and be more consistent in creative pursuits.

I’m still struggling with exhaustion, whether from injuries that are not quite done healing, fibromyalgia symptoms, or winter patterns with plows in the night, this has been a difficult year for energy. The rotator injury I picked up in the summer, and the cut that had two stitches removed last Friday, are improving. I decided I will only work in five minute increments, resting as needed, and approaching the bedroom that way is seeing more movement than just trying to tell myself, push through all at once. I’m also allowing naps when I start to yawn; setting the alarm for 20 – 30 minutes. Just enough to let energy reset. It doesn’t feel like I’m achieving enough, but I am too hard on myself and if I’m going to survive retirement, I need to pace myself and be kind.

So, I’ll try notes the same way. Short and medium writing bursts. Let myself use prompts. Allow myself to stop and lay out as I feel my body start to swirl, circle the drain. Energy drains quickly now, and the challenge for the last third of life will be to learn new ways to navigate it. That being the case, I’m circling now and leg muscles are twitching. These signs have told me sleep since I was 30, and they say the same now.

I’ll be back with another note soon. If do well practicing this, maybe each day with the short ones. And see how I do with longer projects as I go.

by Sandy Bassie

October 2, 2025

Placeholder title. Write in my journal. Let my mind drift, hover over the things I did this morning. I did exercises for my neck, worked through a Drops lesson on Hebrew (boy am I slow), watched a video on how to learn, watched another. While listening, I took a shower, thought back to childhood and the I brought to adulthood. I miss the cat picture I made from torn magazines. Greys, blacks, I think I think I used more light greys than whites. I wish I had a photo. I have no idea where it went, who threw it out and when. This has bothered me for decades. It comes up frequently in thoughts about other things. How I taught Jacob. How I took and dropped out of university half way through Teacher’s College, right after getting married. That bothers me too.

It shows up in a variety of ways in the memoir that’s half finished on divorce and leaving. Why does it have a place here, where I’m thinking about skills I have and grew? It usually makes me think back to my first Teacher’s College placement, a grade 2-3 split where my primary assignment was to work with the lowest reading group: what I learned was how much I already knew, and the importance of observation and instinct. Following my gut. Jacob.

In the shower I thought back to the birth of my children: with Joshua, waking in the night, telling the nurses that he needed to see me, knowing that it didn’t match their schedule, but understanding how it connected to what we had been through during his birth. It was rough, and this night visit mattered to whether and how we started our connection. With Jacob separation was by necessity, a week in controlled oxygen, things inserted between us, incubator, gloves and gowns. Doctors and surgeries, calendar dates filled with tests for him and us, so much to learn and do; I learned to watch intently.

Jacob’s first day home, I noticed his anxiety, withdrawal, overwhelmed. We went to upstairs to rest and as I placed him in the yellow bassinette we’d been given as a gift, I took one of the baby blankets, tiny layette thing, smaller even than a crib. I draped it over the top of the bassinette and pulled it open just a few inches. Placing my hand down gently on his back, I stroked him, just my thumb. I felt words flow between us, tiny bursts of air. I let our eyes meet, opened and closed mine, like my thumb across his back. “It’s okay. You don’t need to be afraid. We can go slow. Let’s start with the bassinette, one room, one place at a time. We’ll get there.”

Why did I do that? Why did I even think he’s understand? Like the girl in grade 2, it was something I saw and couldn’t place, a look, a movement; a difference from the boys. Explaining reading and language, I could see she was lost in a different way. Jacob was the same. Something too many, too much, I felt it in his look. And like with the students, I started with smiles, with reassurance. I’d seen how it worked and applied it again. I knew what it was to be afraid, I too withdrew in school, at home, and for a long time, hid in silence. “I can do this”, I thought, “This is our place, we can do this”, and gradually, we did.

*** *** *** ***

I write short pieces. I’m patient.

Reading through long works is hard.

I did well in school, but it was effort.

Even art scared me, essays too.

I learned to be afraid at home.

Mixed messages, abuse, subtle meanings,

misunderstood. I learned that right answers

had nothing to do with being correct,

though I was corrected often.

I learned to hide.

*** *** *** ***

Jacob woke me from this place. He walked me through a thousand fears. My mother said my life was over the second I had him, and I knew that though her words were right in many respects, in much bigger ways, Jacob saved me from hiding and taught me to become myself. Writing his story is writing my story. I’ve been asked many questions about what I did, what it was like raising him, what I learned and could teach others; his teachers, 1:1 workers, his and my friends. I’ve told and retold those things many ways through the years; stories into the moment where a need arose. This may be different, though the stories are the same. Writing and telling have their own rhythm, they bubble like springs, but they move in different ways. I want to enjoy this, I want to learn as I go, like I did in living it.

One day, this may be a book with a title and cover. I hope my fingers on the keys and things I say while typing tell me what they are and how I will know when find the right ones.

by Sandy Bassie

Slowing down is hard

Lately, I talk more of retirement, exhaustion, pain. I can laugh at myself writing these words, knowing how many decades I’ve talked about pain in different forms and situations; mental, emotional, physical. In ways the physical is worse because it inserts itself so tangibly into every moment of every day. But that doesn’t negate the other types of pain. They cause their own distractions, and have become far too good at it over years. The one thing I appreciate is that I’m learning to distinguish between them and the ways they speak of themselves and among themselves.

This change of paragraph is an example. I look at the last sentence above and realize I sensed a change of topic or pace. But when I landed in the empty space here below, it was very empty. Inside and out. Too present in it’s form to express what the form is, or was, or felt like; and so I sat. My body tangible and aware of the couch on which I sit, the places that touch with various points of pressure, the shape of my body on the couch, not upright, but stretched out, one heel one and the other hanging over. More distressing is the internal awareness, almost a form of pain, where food in the gut, but emptiness in my chest and a slight wobble of head where I can’t tell if there is actual weight or simply a pause in thought staring at what’s going on below.

I’m not a fan. Not of the tightness in my shoulders, the burbling in my gut the clench in my lower abdomen or the way my brain or thoughts have begun flipping through pages; topic, last night’s dream. I’ve had a series of dreams this week. They share a similarity, some form of danger, shared venue for work or accommodations, and a call to determine what they mean. On waking, I am very certain I am supposed to know what they mean. They aren’t quite like the ones I had back in Acton, pre-divorce. But they do involves houses and backyards, people hiding or needing to hide. I’ve started to yawn, to float just above falling back asleep. I can’t. I have no time for more sleep. I start work in an hour. My body would choose to ignore that and push me back under the covers of dreams, make me take another look, another run at understand, at knowing the something I am to decide. Yesterday, I wrote long notes. Today, none.

Whether this is important or not, I do not know. I just need to finish this note, to dress for work, and to walk out the day, and let things wind down how they will. I’m looking into retirement, and a bit afraid that I’m going too slowly for the realities at work. Will I find myself without work soon than I’m ready? My system is humming, not with anticipation, but nerves, fear, disjointedness. I waste more energy on navigating this place. I’m fighting the fail, the fall into sleep, perhaps late again to work, and struggling against this all day.

I put water in the sink, dishes in the water. I came and sat down, just for moment, half an hour ago. I’m swimming in the thought, in the yawn, in the dream. Why do my dreams not go away when I wake? Why do they linger the next hour or so, hovering?

Tonight I will finish the dishes. I will make the same meal I’ve eaten all week. Two bowls of salad (cereal bowls) and three strips of chicken. A cup tea, coffee, or milk. Poke at some words, watch a YouTube, and allow myself to drift away. I’m sorry words, it’s time to get up. Put my feet on the ground, hold onto the wall if I need it, get out the door and into the air. Slow walk across the street and into the building where work waits for me. How brave am I this week? Will I make it official? Shift to part time? Next step on the journey? I don’t know, but again, I don’tr know what I want, when I want and how. I wish I had time to think out more words, but I really am almost falling asleep. I’ll stop for coffee on the way, and come back later and maybe get this done.

For now, slow steps. Repeat after me, I must retire. Slowly ease my way out, and ease my way into art and other things. Take the pencils to work. Draw.

by Sandy Bassie

life … and the kitchen sink

Good advice is easy to come by, and simple to apply, if you don’t overthink. This week again, I got good advice at physio. I spend enough time there for old and ongoing injuries; ones so familiar, they really shouldn’t be called injuries anymore. I got stretched, asked about a few exercises, launched into ways I thought I could remember them and again went home with a chuckle hearing, “Sandy, don’t think so much.”

I do over think, but my days off this weekend offer opportunities to enjoy. After a walk and signing up for a few writing events this weekend through Eden Mills Writers’ Festival, I decided I also needed to see local art friends I’ve missed working through our weekly get together. I had an early shift and nap, but made myself resist falling back asleep. By 7 pm I arrived at my friend’s house, pencil and paper in hand. Good call. Laughter, tea, a home-made chicken pie and deep reduction in the stress I’ve been carrying for months. They each worked on watercolour projects they have underway. I drew lines and circles I left incomplete in my sketchbook while I admired their work, took in words of wisdom, and remembered what it is to relax. I’ve missed them.

I don’t have a great excuse for not working on poetry, memoir, or art the way I wanted this year; a foot injury, flare up of neck and shoulder issues, overabundance of pain as distraction and cause for too much sleeping between work shifts. But I don’t count that as justifiable cause for too little writing, drawing or painting. My friends do. Their words refine my brief shrug at the issues of pain and frustration. I couldn’t find the bag of art supplies I brought a few months ago. I only have my sketchbook. That’s enough. My friends help me see the reality is a functional barrier, not just an excuse. They are happy to see me, and encourage me to come back next week again. Drawing circles is just fine as long as I am there. They too point at ways I overthink, ways I remonstrate myself for imperfections. Why I think I don’t deserve the good I find in words and smiles and moments shared.

They are good friends to have, and I am grateful.

I think back to last weekend’s visit from my son. How many times he made food, did dishes, suggested ideas for easy meals I can follow until he comes again. He’s patient with me. We had one emotional scuffle, the first day, but shifted more easily than we have into acknowledging it and moving on to things we appreciate in each other. I’ve promised to keep my fridge clean(er) and do dishes at least every second day. I’m poking through the excess of things I own. Things he may not need or want if life is shorter than I’ve been told. For some reason, family and friends see me thriving another thirty years. It’s a long haul to a steep age and may come about, but if not, steep better not represent the pile of things I leave for my son to sort. He’s been quite clear this is my mess and mine to solve. Knowing how kind he is in the day to day helps, I have to chuckle and agree I am working at it and will up my game if I must.

So today, as I finish this post, the kitchen sink awaits and a very small pile of dishes to fill it.

Wishing you smiles shared and a clean sink. 😉