happy spring equinox everyone!
i've been using the past year or so to make changes to my life that i've wanted to for a long time, some of which i didn't feel "allowed" to, and one of those things being switching what holidays i actually celebrate. it's been... honestly, decades since i felt genuinely excited for any of the holidays i've been celebrating, and looking back on when i actually was excited for them was when i was still a kid and had very little control over anything besides requesting presents, so holidays were days i got to request presents and eat a lot of nice food. but the holidays themselves i never felt any kind of real spiritual or emotional connection for what they are. i've tried many times to connect with them, and had to deal with some people trying to "convert" me to christianity and having a spiritual connection to the culturally christian holidays the western world generally observes, but even as a teen i've always only cared about nature and the natural cycle.
all this to say i'm completely done with pretending to observe all holidays i used to observe, including and especially any of them with christian ties, and am observing only the days i have true reverence for: the spring and autumn equinox, and summer and winter solstices.
i'm genuinely excited! i can only barely remember being excited like this for a holiday, and never with this kind of reverence and respect. time kind of caught up with me so i didn't get to take this equinox off, but i'll definitely be planning to take off the summer solstice and get some nice food to celebrate with its passing the beginning of the shorter, cooler days i thoroughly enjoy.
(because: the summer solstice is the longest day of the year! winter solstice is shortest, and the equinoxes are roughly equal length of day and night and also when the sun is directly overhead at the equator. which i'm explaining because one of my coworkers genuinely had no idea what the equinoxes or solstices even were until i explained, and then he thought they were really cool. if you didn't know that, that's okay! congrats! you're one of today's lucky 10,000!)
in the less fortunate news my thanatophobia (fear of death) has apparently returned, which is distressing. (warning that i will talk more in depth about this, so skip this paragraph if you need to!) i can't seem to figure out a cause, and it may not have one, as the times in the past i've dealt with had no real trigger i could discern. past occurrences eventually went away on their own so i'm hoping it will again, but in the meantime sleeping is. so much harder. and i'm already a very light sleeper with intense sensitivity to light and sound, so lying in bed with my brain on repeat going "this is what it will feel like to die. you will lie here with your eyes closed as your senses slowly fade. you'll fall asleep but never wake up again, the entirety of who you are will cease to exist. forever. :)" is really not something i need! fuck!
one of the members of my WoW raid group has also mentioned having severe thanatophobia in the past, so i talked to her a little about it. i don't think her mentioning it was a trigger at all, it was just nice to have someone to commiserate with, heh. she also mentioned to me she has to take Xanax to fall asleep sometimes it gets so bad... i really felt for her. idk if that would help me but it sure sounds nice, not gonna lie... makes me wish melatonin pills actually worked on me, but alas it is useless and nonfunctional for me. ah well.
death is just a part of the natural cycle, so i hope i can make peace with it at some point. i don't feel spiritual about anything and am not even sure i believe in any kind of afterlife... i don't feel like an afterlife exists but i would kind of like for there to be one. but i feel strongly about exalting the natural cycles of life and the universe and our places in these things. we are not separate from nature but exist in it, and share the universe with everything in it. i don't know if there's any god or gods and if i'm being frank i don't really care if there are or not. i am just thankful for this universe and nature.