It has been an incredibly gorgeous week. A week of no jackets and sunshine. Also a week of night walks and talks, conveyor-belt sushi dinners with soul sisters and curry dinners with co-workers, lots and lots and lots of thinking.

I think when you're an other-oriented person, you sometimes sacrifice your own integrity. Not because you're worried about what other people think, but because you devote yourself to their integrity, instead.

I am percolating in many ways. Creatively, yes. Also I am trying to figure out the self-care puzzle. What to do to ground myself. Who to talk to. How to adequately process.

I just read a piece about activism as self-harm, a part of a pattern of self-harm. I am coming to terms with my own relationship to self-harm and the way that my relationship to work, to social justice, to social service, fit into that. I have never cut my body with sharps, have never been addicted to an illegal substance, and that means I get to say I'm not self-harming. And it's a big lie, if you reach back into many of my other behavioral patterns. Self-harm could be the name of this game.

Social service is in many ways an exercise in erasing the self. I make that statement and I immediately want to have 47 arguments with myself, but I am also going to let it sit there for a second, because I think in certain ways it's true. You're not there for you, you're there for the population you're serving. You're there to have a net positive effect on them. Self-effacement, self-erasure, this is part of why self-care is so critical to those of us working in this field. And for those of us for whom it is part of a self-harm pattern, well...I don't know what to do with that yet. Percolating.

I'm also percolating about disclosure and trust, boundaries and professionalism. Teetering on the terrifying edge of the time when I decide it is necessary to disclose my mental health status to my coworkers, who are also becoming friends. As Zoe pointed out, it's illegal for them to fire me for this, so what am I worried about really? She also pointed out that I'm going to have to deal with this question, internally if not externally, in every job I have for the rest of my life. So get used to it. I'm worried that I'll be treated as erratic and incapable. That I will be constantly watched. That I will be mistrusted. I have deep trust in my coworkers, but I have learned from life experience that even the best people and the closest to you don't necessarily know how to handle mental illness. But I think they need to know. And if they're my friends, I want them to, anyway. It's not something I like to keep from people I'm close with for all that long.

Today had the quality of a sapling. I drank a lot of coffee. Too much. I wandered around SODO trying to get fingerprinted. SODO is weird because it's like postindustrial wasteland Buffalo, except the industry is current. There is the constant, noisy hum of machine and traffic. It felt good to walk a winding gravel path over train tracks.