Mail, backs, and music
Life is a series of rolling through the bad so you can appreciate the good. I opened the mystery mail and sure enough it was harassment mail. So I bagged the package and the letter that came with it, put a date on it, and replied to the last email I'd sent last year where I kindly stated that I had no desire for any kind of relationship. This time I said I got the package and then I very clearly stated that if I received any more contact in any format I would be filing a police report. Then I contacted my EAP and spoke with a counselor about the whole thing. She referred me to a short term problem solving service so I can double check my judgment. I don't want to escalate legally because that will be difficult given the person's job and connections, but I want to be sure that if I have to, I've done the reasonable steps first so that it's very clear that this contact is a nuisance and is causing harm. So I have to make an appointment this week with the service to go over it all again and ask if there are any other suggestions to handle this either procedurally or emotionally. I'm suspecting I won't be the first client with this issue and I know that being so close to it might be clouding some of my judgment. But I can't control him or what he does - I can only control my response to it and I want to make sure my responses are equal to the situation.
Anyway, because of that I was annoyed that it was going to cast a pall on my weekend but almost because of it the weekend turned out great. I had a great time and felt really good about my response to his letter, and it was so nice to play music outside in public again that he couldn't drag it down. I stayed on the edges of the event and only went on the dance floor when there weren't crowds, and I wore my mask when I was getting near clusters. I'm so grateful for that booster shot. I've rescinded my rules about not double booking gigs on the weekends for this year because my section shrank, and turns out working from home for my work life balance meant that I didn't totally resent being busy all weekend because I'm not running all over town during the week. It was a really nice coming together of last year's plans.
And then yesterday I had my first physical therapy for my back injury. Turns out I was exercising in a way that was making it worse, so now I have to undo those months of forward bending and rolling from Pilates. She gave me a really simple plan with an exercise I have to do every two hours to nudge the disk back in place. It was weird how quickly my range of motion improved after just a set or two when she measured it. Bodies are weird, they have so many little moving parts and it's so easy for one little thing to go wrong. I'm glad I went to the doctor instead of trying to power through it, because I would have permanently damaged myself if I'd kept it up on my own. A bonus upside to this exercise therapy, aside from the healing, is that my arms are feeling it and I'm going to have some sweet triceps muscles, which is good because those are the muscles I use to hold my instrument for 3-4 hour long gigs twice a weekend now.
I feel like I've hit the self care health trifecta this week - body care through physical therapy, mental care through seeking outside counseling, and creativity through music.