Hi, everyone! It’s Dr. Liz coming back at you. This video is probably the first one that you’ve seen from me in a long while. And in this video, I wanted to talk about where I’ve been and why I haven’t been doing videos as much lately, and also talk about giving yourselves space to be imperfect and to struggle.
So, as some of you know, if you know me personally or if you’ve been following some of my stuff online, last year in March, I had a really hard breakup. It was a breakup that just really rocked me deeply for a whole bunch of reasons.
In addition last year, one of my two cats had to be put to sleep and there were just a lot of different losses, a lot of different hits to my system.
In early October of last year, so it’s like four and a half months now, I got diagnosed with a bulging disk and I developed this sinus issue that you can probably hear on this video that has been ongoing since then. So I’m at four and a half months of chronic sinus infection now.
In addition, I was moving into my place, getting settled in Portland, joining this amazing new community, The Perlene, which is where I’m recording today.
And with all of that, I just – I didn’t have it in me to record new content. It’s hard for me to talk about struggling. I’m someone who for most of my life has been the person who gets it done, who manages to do things, who is exceptional, who achieves, who is wonder woman, who everyone is like, “Oh my god! How can you do so much?”
And in 2019, I decided instead to take a year to just breathe and take space and heal and take care of myself. And one of the results of that is that I just, in listening to where I’ve been at, have not been in a place where I felt like I was ready to record new stuff.
Those of you who aren’t in this kind of field, who don’t put out content for people may not understand the amount of energy and time that can go into this. For me last year, I also finally got diagnosed with ADHD and started stimulant medication for that. And when you combine my health issues, the losses I was facing, and executive dysfunction, it makes sense that I just didn’t get to recording any content for a long time.
For me, I love the chance to have these videos where I get to talk to you about things that are important to me. At the same time, recording video is hard for me. Part of what I love about talking to people and doing education work and doing all of the work that I do is getting to see the people I’m talking to, see how it reads for them, feel their energy, interact with them, build on something in the room together.
And when I’m recording these videos, it’s just me and that camera and I’m just staring it down the whole time. And I try to imagine faces of people I care about. I can try to imagine what this will be like as a conversation. But it takes a lot out of me to get this stuff done. So I haven’t.
Now, could I have? Could I have forced myself through it? Maybe. I think a lot of what I’ve been wrestling with is the balance between fulfilling promises or things that I’ve said I do to my patrons on Patreon or to those of you who follow this channel with like listening to my body and my intuition and trying to peck apart like when am I just genuinely not up for a thing and when is this executive dysfunction or procrastination or something else that I can push through?
It is hard and there have been a lot of times over the last several months where I’ve asked myself if I’m like just fucking around or if I should be doing more or if I’m like letting myself off too easy?
And I think a big realization for me has been that the lesson capitalism teaches us is that our value is our productivity. What we do is what we’re worth. And that means that people with disabilities or with neurodiversity are often framed as less valuable because they can’t do as much as reliably. And that’s bullshit!
I love being able to talk to all of you. I love knowing that my videos helped people. I love being able to talk about sex and relationships and love and all of this fun stuff. And I don’t like feeling like if I’m not putting out a video every week, I’m somehow failing.
So this video is me coming back to say first of all, hey, I know it has been a while. I’ve missed you. I hope you’ve missed me too. And also to say that I’m going to try to put out a video a week and there are probably going to be periods of time where I just don’t have new content coming out. And that’s just going to have to be okay for all of us.
I want to be able to live in a world where folks understand that life is more complicated than something that can be scheduled out every week, and where we all work to give ourselves the grace and the care to do less and to take steps back when we need to. I love putting out content but I love myself more. I love being in a home now that I love. My place is so good. I promise I’ll shoot videos at my place so you can see it. But I love my new place. I moved there a year ago and I’m so happy there.
I love being a part of this community, at The Perlene. This is an amazing community of badass women and non-binary folks who are doing phenomenal things with their work and their personal lives and they’ve been so supportive and an amazing landing place for me here in Portland.
And I love a new relationship that I’m in that has been going me tons of joy and I love that I have spent the last year in change, really giving myself space to feel things, space to experience things, space to explore things, and space to do less.
And so, I’m hoping that all of you can find your space to be okay with doing less, to be okay with whatever it is you have to offer being enough, to be okay with your worth not being about your productivity or how many tweets or posts you put out, because I’m working on that too.
So, I’m happy to be back and I hope to be here more and I hope all of you will understand when I can’t be. Sending you all of my love and hoping for grace for all of you. And I’ll talk to you next time.
Bye!
