Welcome to The Morning Grumble by Grumble Farm, a community-supported newsletter that chronicles the journey of my life with pugs, dogs, and other animals through stories of hope & healing that are inspired by nature & the transformative and immortal power of unconditional love 🕊️🌈🐾
I’m Brandy (@grittygracious), the founder of Grumble Farm (you can learn more about me here). Between e-mails, you can find me hangin’ out on Notes here on Substack, posting to my IG stories from time to time, and sharing longer-form videos & vlogs of my travels and adventures on Grumble Farm’s YouTube channel.
I’m about to hit the road full-time with my two senior pug sisters, Fern & Ivy, to care for and continue learning from other pugs, dogs, kitties, horses, pigs, chickens, ducks, donkeys, and a whole variety of other magnificent creatures everywhere from big cities to rural farms across Western Canada as a nomadic sitter-of-sorts. If you’re going away and looking for a longer-term pet, pug, dog, animal, house, or farm sitter, you can find more information about my services & specialties here.
Thank you for being a part of our story 💙
Hello, friends 💙
This is the sixth issue of the Morning Grumble that I’ve sent out since migrating over to the Substack platform, and writing them has become a weekly ritual. Every Sunday is blocked off in my calendar to write it, and I don’t give too much thought to what I’m going to say until I wake up, percolate a cup of fresh Kootenay coffee, and sit down to reflect on the week that’s just passed. Trying to write anything that’s not on my heart in the moment is basically impossible for me, and what’s been really heavy on my heart for the past several months - and especially this morning - is my love for and attachment to the cabin as we prepare for our big move this week.
I’m so self conscious that I’ve been talking about it too much, or that people are starting to get annoyed listening to me complain. But I’ve been moving through a process of deep grief over the past several months that is only intensifying as the end draws nearer, and today officially marks the 7-day countdown to the moment I’ll be driving away from the cabin and down our long, winding driveway for the very last time.
I couldn’t sleep last night thinking about it. And almost 100% of the time, if I can’t sleep because of something the night before I wake up to write, that’s the thing I inevitably end up writing about.
As much as I talk and write about trusting the process, accepting what’s out of my control, keeping the faith, and knowing there’s a light at the end of the tunnel somewhere… I’m still in a state of disbelief that it feels like I was backed into a corner where I had no choice but to willingly walk away from something I love this much. I’ve been thinking a lot about the underlying reasons why I’m having such a hard time letting it go, and there are plenty that have come to the surface over this past week.
So today, I’m going to get really raw & vulnerable with you guys as I share a little bit about my story, to hopefully shine some light on why exactly this move away from the cabin is breaking my heart so much. Putting it together is just as much for me as sharing it is for you, and I think a lot of you guys will already know some of the stories I’m about to tell.
I also talked about a lot of what I share below in regards to the cabin specifically in my recent vlog on YouTube (along with additional details about where we’re moving and what our exit strategy from the cabin is over the next few weeks). Here it is if you want to set aside the time to watch it after you’re done reading this newsletter:
Since this is our final week at the cabin, you won’t be hearing from me next Monday as I’m going to be taking a short break from writing while we navigate and undertake this heart-wrenching move.
I’ll be back with the next Morning Grumble newsletter on June 3rd to let you know how we’re doing - happy watching/reading ❤️
For my whole adult life, I’ve basically lived in poverty.
The only time I can remember briefly rising above the poverty line was between 2014-2016 when I was working full-time as a freelance body piercer at a studio called Ghost Town that offered cheap piercings and shitty costume jewelry to a town full of high school kids.
For eight hours straight, there was a never-ending lineup down the hallway to my little studio room full of angsty small-town teenagers wanting to get their navels and eyebrows pierced.
When I look back, this was actually the first and the very last time I remember what actually having money…. felt like. I had been working as a body piercer for more than a decade at this point, finding my way around various tattoo and body piercing studios across Western Canada. However, Ghost Town was the first and only studio where I was earning over $100K a year in cold, hard cash, even though the basic materials I was given to work with were a far cry from my professional standard of quality.
While I had more money than I knew what to do with, I had also never been more fucking miserable in my life. I was at complete and total rock bottom, and my mental health was in a near-constant state of suicidal ideation. I was also suffering from an undiagnosed emotional binge eating disorder where I would slap a “Back in 15 Minutes” sign on my studio door so I could drive to the nearest grocery store, park somewhere private, and inhale an entire bag of chewy Chips Ahoy in my car before throwing the bag away in a nearby public garbage bin and furiously wiping away the crumb-ridden driver’s side seat to destroy all evidence, especially from myself. Then, I would sit there enduring a full-blown panic attack about driving back to the studio where a new lineup of teenaged kids would be spilling out the studio door waiting for my return.
I had been trying to escape the tattoo and body piercing industry for about five years at that point, but I had absolutely no sense of self-worth and believed deep down to my core that I wasn’t capable or worthy of doing anything else in the world - that sliding lubricated needles through people’s various body parts and clotting the blood of those who had recently fainted was the only skill I had to offer the world.
Prior to hitting rock bottom at Ghost Town, I had been piercing in a dank, windowless basement studio called Divine Decadence, located at the very back of a vintage clothing store in the middle of Calgary’s Red Mile. Divine was yet another studio compromising quality for quantity and offering cheap piercings using poor quality, mass-produced costume jewellery that was made in China, and rarely ever resulted in a healthy, healed piercing.1
Divine was also the studio I was piercing at when Jonas came into my life as a little one-year-old puppy 💙
My time spent body piercing at Divine was the beginning of the downfall of my mental health. I had started my body piercing apprenticeship way back in 2005 - by the time I was piercing at Divine, I had been working in the industry full-time for about 6 years and had just begun my descent into an existential crisis about my life, my worth, and my purpose in the world.
I had recently come out of a phase in my life where I was addicted to shoplifting and blackout drunk most of the time, chasing pop rock boy bands around the country trying to win the affection of the lead singer (it’s easier than you’d think). I had just met someone who was to become my first long-term partner over the next eight years, and had moved into my very own small, dog-friendly apartment (which allowed me to adopt Jonas). I began living a pretty intense vegan lifestyle as I became more and more aware of just how corrupt our industrial food supply system was, and I had also excitedly discovered yoga for the first time, which I practised at a beautiful studio right across the street from my apartment twice a day.
The environment that I was spending the large majority of my days in as a body piercer at Divine quickly started to fall deeply out of resonance with the environment I was becoming increasingly interested in immersing myself in. That basement no longer reflected the person I wanted to become, the life I wanted to live, or the type of people I wanted to surround myself with. I sat between dark, graffiti-covered concrete walls, underneath artificial fluorescent lighting without a single window to crack for either ventilation or a breath of fresh air, which is insane considering I was using near lethal amounts of Cavicide, bleach, and other highly toxic chemicals to disinfect my piercing bed and run the ultrasonics and autoclaves that sterilized my blood-splattered body piercing tools. I was also completely deprived of natural light for the majority of the day.
The conversations I began having with both my coworkers and my clients began boring me to tears, and I realized that I no longer had any desire to pierce the navel of a 14-year old who had nervously forged her Dad’s signature on a body piercing waiver to fake parental consent, or have a hungover and drug-riddled addict’s flaccid weiner in my hands at nine o-clock in the morning as I gingerly held a 10-gauge tri-beveled piercing needle to line up with the stainless steel receiving tube I had just lubed up and gingerly inserted into his urethra.
These stark realizations marked the the beginning of my external reality fracturing apart from my evolving inner reality, and although there’s no way I could have known it at the time, it was also the beginning of a decade-long struggle fraught with multiple undiagnosed mental health issues that almost ended my life. I had the awareness that something needed to change, but that was only one part of a very complicated and multi-faceted obstacle in my life that took me another six long, dark years to overcome.
My first strategic attempt at escaping the tattoo and body piercing industry and building a better life & more resonant environment for myself was upgrading my high school courses as an adult learner through Bow Valley College in Calgary. I spent a year or two working my way through the same English and Social Studies curriculum that I barely remembered from my own high school days in the early 2000’s, and I ended up increasing my final grades exponentially. Shortly after, I applied for and was accepted into a Bachelor of Arts program majoring in Communication and Media studies at the University of Calgary (and very quickly saddled with the student loan debt to make it possible).
Little did I realize how brilliantly I would excel in the world of academia. I quickly became a Professor’s Pet and was writing A-graded research papers at the speed of lightening, several of which my prof’s asked if they could use as examples for future students. I loved University so much that I chose to enroll in both spring and summer classes, studying straight through the year.
Through my chosen electives, I eventually discovered my passion for Primatology - the study of our non-human ancestors (monkeys) - which led me to pursuing a double major in both Communication and Media Studies and Evolutionary Anthropology so that I could study animals and their environments without having to further upgrade my highschool science and math courses to be accepted into U of C’s Zoology program.
Studying monkeys helped me shine a light on and uncover a forgotten part of myself that, as a child, thrived amongst animals and within the natural world, while studying Communication and Media helped me make sense of my coming-of-age years as I navigated the internet’s transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0 and how it affected me as an adult.
I was truly thriving as I spent so much time learning, studying, and writing on U of C’s beautiful campus environment, and it made showing up to pierce navels and penises in Divine’s airless basement far less consequential to my mental health. In-between piercing clients, I had textbooks to read and research papers to write (all while Jonie lay at my feet in his little glass jewelry cabinet). Since I was working on something far more important and promising during my downtime at the studio, “being a body piercer” didn’t affect me as much anymore because I knew I was taking active steps to create a brighter future for myself. I was also the first and only person in my family to ever pursue a University education, which made me feel a deep sense of pride and self-worth - I was really doing it!
Yet still, there was a rising sense of conflict growing within me. Even though externally I was succeeding in University, internally I was riddled with guilt and anxiety in the pursuit of constant perfectionism. I had already accumulated an insane amount of student debt that I couldn’t quite figure out how I was supposed to ever pay off in my lifetime after graduating and getting some kind of entry-level corporate job somewhere, which didn’t resonate with me AT ALL. I was also a mature student amongst a sea of care-free high school kids, which never got any easier - when I didn’t know something they knew, I felt like an idiot. I had never, ever been harder on myself than when I was an adult learner attending University. And while body piercing to pay my bills became easier for me to mentally accept, the physical environment I was working in was continuing to take it’s toll on my physical and mental health.
In my personal life, my parents were navigating a less-than-friendly divorce and I was worried sick for my Mom, who eventually ended up moving in with my partner and I in our old, decrepit two-bedroom basement suite infested with mice when she had lost everything and had nowhere else to go during her own rock bottom. I started secretly binge-eating to cope with the stress, and as my University studies progressed, my coursework got harder and more complicated to understand while simultaneously demanding more of my time, focus, and energy.
I was sitting in a massive lecture theatre listening to my Geography prof drone on about something I couldn’t understand while hyperventilating into my scarf when I suddenly stood up and hurried out the door. I was inconsolable as I walked across campus and passed the sprawling Foothills hospital towards my old basement suite apartment, which was located just down the hill from the University (and the hospital) itself.
Once I got there, I hopped in my car and drove to a walk-in clinic where I was, for the third or fourth time in my life, prescribed both anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication. The doctor then wrote a medical withdrawal letter to advise the University that due to the condition of my mental health, I was required to withdraw from my semester of classes to undergo treatment and recovery. Before I left, he told me to never, ever go off of medication again.
On December 9, 2015 - just a few weeks following this day - I was diagnosed with stage 3A colorectal cancer. I was 29 years old.
It would be impossible for me to (re)share the details of everything that transpired throughout the next four-to-five years in this newsletter, but my diagnoses was the catalyst for finally figuring out who I was, what I was capable of, and what I truly wanted and deserved to get out of this life.
My healing was not linear, however, and finally finding the courage to quit and walk away from body piercing for good took several absolutely terrifying dark nights of the soul where most of what I knew disintegrated around me and disappeared as if it had never existed in the first place.
My second pug Chloe, who I had adopted as a companion for Jonas in my second year of University, died a violent and tragic death after getting hit by a car on a camping trip in the summer of 2017. My relationship with my siblings completely fell apart and eventually became estranged as they got married and went on honeymoons while I spent most of my time wreathing in pain on a hospital bed. And on New Years Eve, 2018, my long-term partner up and left the dogs and I in the middle of the night several short weeks after I had undergone yet another abdominal resection surgery meant to prepare my body for a very long-awaited ileostomy reversal procedure, never to return.
I had been receiving CPP disability payments that didn’t even come close to covering the basic cost of living for several years when my relationship suddenly ended, and re-building my independence from the ground up with my own three pugs little pugs (Jonas, and Fern and Ivy - who arrived shortly after Chloe’s death) and an ileostomy bag attached to my stomach seemed like an absolutely fucking insurmountable mountain to climb.
Through unbridled resilience and the Grace of God, I somehow managed to figure it out, though. I moved out from the home I had shared with my partner at the time, and into a low-income apartment in downtown Calgary located just across the street from the very same apartment I had lived in 8 years prior when Jonas had first come into my life.
I found a part-time job as a breakfast server at a douchey poolside bar located inside of a hotel called Hotel Arts (ironically enough, this hotel is where I ended up more than once during my groupie days).
While it was a beautiful, clean, and peaceful outdoor work environment (before all of the juice monkeys and douchebags arrived anyway), this job will forever haunt me. Being there quickly triggered me back into an existential state of panic and existential dread about what the flying fuck I was supposed to do with my life and why the flying fuck I was expected to give away my precious time scraping toast crumbs from restaurant seats, much the same way I wiped off chewy Chips Ahoy crumbs from my vehicle’s drivers seat several years prior.
I spent most of my shifts riddled with abdominal cramps from minor bowel obstructions as a result of multiple surgeries, dry-heaving in the staff bathroom stall and - once again - binge eating multiple plates of food from the staff cafeteria while I freaked out about having to make myself presentable enough to walk back into the restaurant, just to get yelled at for disappearing off the floor for too long.
The apartment I had moved into was okay, but the building was shit. The people who lived in it were transient and more mentally unstable than I was, mostly addicts. I remember once, after walking all three pugs around the block at 4:00 in the morning before leaving for one of my breakfast serving shifts, I came back through the main entrance to realize the building had been pepper-sprayed by an angry tenant who had just been evicted for not paying his rent. Not able to go back inside for hours, and not wanting to leave the dogs alone in the building after that anyway, I called into work with an excuse my manager didn’t believe (and probably still doesn’t believe to this day).
Outside of my apartment building, over time, a homeless encampment began to establish itself and grow around a vent heater located in the alley to the left of the entrance, a short little strip of concrete that separated my apartment building from the one beside it. Seeing these humans simultaneously broke my heart into a million little pieces and made me want to scream at the top of my lungs for being subjected to having to carry the pugs over used needles and condoms and human diarrhea and chicken wing bones and discarded pizza crusts just to take them out for a little pee break each day.
This little alley, eventually filled with tents and sleeping bags and old mattresses and tarps and shopping carts and ripped up cardboard, led directly to a neon-green dumpster behind the building that served as a long-standing and invaluable resource to the homeless community located in downtown Calgary. There were often late-night disputes and physical altercations over items placed in and around that dumpster; every single morning when I took the pugs out the back exit for a quick potty break, it seemed as if a bomb had been thrown into the dumpster itself, pulverizing all of it’s random contents into oblivion before raining down all around it. It was also a hot spot to deal drugs and shoot them up, which I would watch from my living room window.
I can’t tell you the number of early mornings I spent sitting on the cold cement ground near the door, clutching my cup of coffee while Jonas, Fern, and Ivy sniffed around the wreckage for somewhere to relieve themselves. I couldn’t help but wonder why - after all I’d been through - I still, for some reason, wasn’t capable (or worthy) of having a physical, outward environment around me that mirrored the physical, inner environment I had worked so hard on tending to and nurturing inside of my body as I healed and recovered from cancer. Was it the other way around? Was I really still that fucked up and chaotic on the inside, and that’s why my physical reality was being projected back at me this way?
Wasn’t everything I had been through and fought for over the past several years as I navigated an advanced-stage cancer diagnoses and had somehow beat all odds of survival enough to prove that I was worthy of living a beautiful and happy life? And why couldn’t I seem to find and offer an environment that was better, healthier, and safer for Jonas, Fern, and Ivy, too? More than once, staring at that fucking dumpster made me feel like a failure not only to myself, but as their caregiver and guardian, too.
The abdominal re-section I had been recovering from when my ex left at the end of 2018 was meant to prepare me for an ileostomy reversal procedure just a few months later, but I had to postpone the surgery when my relationship ended unexpectedly. Instead of having the poop bag attached to my stomach finally removed after several long years of ongoing complications, I had to instead use what little resources I had to find a new place to live with the dogs, and somehow secure some kind of job to supplement my disability payments to help me afford to live there. To further complicate things, without the support of my partner, I actually had no fucking idea how I was going to afford to take the time off to undergo the surgery and recover from the procedure in the first place, and the ultimate question was always,
Was I going to have to poop out of a hole in my stomach while staring at these neon green dumpsters for the rest of my life?
and
If the work environments I had subjected myself to for so long as a body piercer at Divine and Ghost town had resulted in the physical manifestation of my dis-ease, wouldn’t subjecting myself to an environment ruled by the wrath of these neon-green dumpsters surely do the same in time?
I needed to get the fuck out, but I simply couldn’t see a way.
Six months after moving into this apartment building and starting that dreadful job at Hotel Arts, I miraculously qualified for a short-term disability insurance payout by banking just enough hours crying in the staff bathroom stall while shoving stale pizza down my throat. And in October of 2019, I was finally admitted for my final (of many) surgeries at Calgary’s Foothills hospital.
My surgery was extremely successful. My disability insurance payouts allowed me to stay put in my little apartment while my body recovered, and got me through until March of 2020 when I was expected to pick up my boot straps and head back to work as if nothing had ever happened.
This time marked the beginning of my pandemic story, however, when Jesse came into my life and proposed that we run away to the West Kootenays to start a new life together creating “content” with the pugs for Grumble Farm so that I never had to serve sunny-side-up eggs a day in my life ever again.
In April of 2020, Jesse took me on a sneaky pandemic trip over to the Kootenays of British Columbia to show me around and see if there was a particular village that I could picture myself living in.
On this trip, my eyeballs had a difficult time taking in the 360 degree beauty that surrounded me, and I was perpetually awe-struck that living somewhere like this might actually become a reality in my life. It was everything I had ever dreamed of through the many years I had spent in the basement at Divine and at Ghost Town, the many months I had spent in a hospital bed recovering from multiple surgeries, and the many, many mornings I had spent staring at those neon green fucking dumpsters.
Once we got back to Calgary, Jesse and I both got to work packing our things and preparing for the move. And on May 31, 2020, I packed up the three most important items - Jonas, Fern, and Ivy - nice and tight in the back of Jesses bright orange Jeep to head towards what I perceived as the better life I had envisioned for the pugs and I all along.
Driving away from the neon green dumpsters for the last time was one one of the most thrilling and cathartic experiences of my life, and Jesse mounted one of his GoPros to the back of his Jeep to document the experience of watching them fade away in the rear and side-view mirrors.
I was so excited, in fact, that I convinced Jesse to set up his tripod so we could do a neon-green-dumpster “family” photoshoot before we rolled out…
We ended up moving into a dumpy little apartment in a tiny little lakeside village called Kaslo, for an outrageous and unheard of rental rate of $750 a month. The apartment was functional, but the building itself had been constructed in 1896 and it kind of felt like we were squatting there sometimes. If you’re at all interested, I made an entire video sharing the story of our experience of moving to and living in the 1896 apartment here.
While the apartment in the 1896 building wasn’t the greatest, and I constantly balked at the kitchen to the point where I made an active effort to NEVER, EVER show it on my IG stories, it was located directly on the Northern shores of Kootenay Lake. Every evening before bed the summer we moved in, Jesse and I would run across the street in our bathing suits and jump straight into the lake, gazing up at the stars from the water. I had never seen them shine so brightly in my life.
The dizzying natural beauty that suddenly surrounded me somehow made up for the fact that the apartment itself wasn’t exactly something I was very proud of, and I remained deeply grateful for it for all three and a half years that we ended up living there. Never before did I think I would ever have the opportunity to live directly on sparkling blue a lake - how lucky was I when places like the neon green dumpsters existed?!
Ironically enough, however, the side yard of the apartment was full of random crap that didn’t belong to us. In it lived an old, stained couch, miscellaneous tarps and rusty old building supplies, buckets full of cigarette butts and rain water, and at one point, an old, broken-down farm truck that apparently had nowhere else to go.
Still, every morning when I took Jonas, Fern, and Ivy outside for their peepees, coffee-in-hand, it seemed like I was living in the middle of a junkyard. Every very little bit of it was giving NEON-GREEN DUMPSTERS, and Jesse would playfully joke that the state of the yard was nothing but neon-green-dumpster energy following me from my incredibly chaotic and ugly past in Calgary.
I never once disagreed with him.
At the end of April of last year (2023), I had to say goodbye to my sweet boy Jonas after his little body began shutting down due to a rare degenerative neurological condition. Thankfully, I was able to arrange a beautiful at-home euthanasia in our apartment where I had the honour of helping him transition gently and peacefully back to spirit from within the warmth and comfort of my arms, which was his very favourite place to be. Just a few short weeks later, we received an eviction notice when the 1896 building sold to new owners who planned to completely gut and renovate the entire thing.
Not long after being evicted, Jesse was contacted by a friend who had a lead about a little log cabin sitting vacant high up on a mountain in a nearby village. We were both intrigued, and once we got the address, we took a little drive to go and check it out.
Once we slowly started pulling up the long, meandering gravel driveway, my eyes instantly flooded with tears,. The more the cabin property revealed itself to me through the trees, the more I fell into a state of complete and total disbelief.
How could this possibly be real? You’re telling me I could actually… live here?
There wasn’t another person, home, or building in sight. The cabin sat high up on 18 acres of wild forest land, tucked back into a mountain with a clear shot of Kootenay Lake to the East and thick with bracken ferns, apple trees, and wildflowers. Hummingbirds buzzed about as the sun shone brilliantly in the sky, illuminating every beautiful, strong auburn log stacked together to form this magnificent log home in the forest.
Without skipping a beat, I immediately started pleading with Jesse to get on the phone with the property owners to tell them we would do whatever it took to become their tenants, simply for the experience of living there. This was it - it was as if every struggle I had overcome had all been for this exact moment.
After an absolutely insane month of industrial demolition and construction on the 1896 as we packed up all of our things, I moved into the cabin with Jesse and the girls on September 1st, 2023 to begin our beautiful new life together.
I never really fully woke up from the dream of being there. I convinced myself that it was a gift from Jonas and Chloe - a heavenly token of their love for me, knowing better than anyone else on planet earth what I had endured in this lifetime up until that point. I even went so far as booking multiple sessions with my therapist to process the fact that I was living somewhere so fucking beautiful, because I found myself not really being able to truley enjoy it from within the surreal dream state I was in - it was like I thought the whole thing would burst if I took the slightest misstep.
Together, my therapist and I began working through some uncomfortable lingering fears of mine - mainly that I had set the bar too high for myself, and was already experiencing anticipatory grief symptoms thinking about having to move out eventually and never, ever having an opportunity like this again.
Things quickly took a turn for the worse at the beginning of 2024 when Jesse first started experiencing symptoms of what was eventually diagnosed as a pituitary macroadenoma (a non-cancerous brain tumour). He slowly began losing his ability to work after partially losing his vision, and by mid-March, he had been put on welfare disability with the support of his medical team. At this point, we knew we were running out of time to find some sort of solution to be able to afford to stay.
Last month, I started having panic attacks again for the first time in years as I came closer and closer to accepting the reality that I was going to have walk away from it all and let it all go. Reluctantly, we started to put the word out to see if there was anything at all available out there for us to move into as two very low-income disabled tenants with two senior pugs, and shockingly enough, a handful of options presented themselves to us (none which soothed my own dread and panic to any degree).
A few short weeks ago, I finally surrendered to signing the lease on a tiny, ~350 square foot guest home on a multi-family farm located in a brand new village, in a brand new mountain valley, next to a brand new lake - Upper Arrow, a widening of the Columbia River between the Selkirk Mountains to the east, and the Monashee Mountains to the west. Committing to this change was not only an attempt to survive myself, but a personal compromise to better support Jesse’s healing and recovery from transsphenoidal pituitary resection surgery later this summer.
In last week’s Morning Grumble newsletter, I talked about how our days lately have been filled-to-the-brim with packing, purging, cleaning, driving around to deliver things we’ve managed to sell on Facebook Marketplace, and making multiple trips to-and-from our new storage unit as we prepare to move out of the cabin on May 27th. We’ve been getting rid of everything we’ve bought and collected over the last four years out here in the Kootenays (including my car, which I shared about in my latest vlog). As I watch everything disappear from my conscious reality, it hasn’t stopped feeling as if this life I’ve somehow finally managed to find for myself is crumbling right underneath my feet again, just as it did at the end of 2019 when my partner abandoned our relationship and I found myself starting over with nothing but a poop bag attached to my belly.
I’ve been wondering if maybe the cabin property was just an illusion that I’ve been desperately hanging onto as a result of a residual lack of self-worth. It’s as if, beneath the surface, I still feel like I don’t truly deserve to actually ever escape poverty, and possibly one day feel what it’s like to own something I love and that I can afford to keep, and that I’m deeply, deeply proud of.
It’s like I’ve succumbed to the limiting belief that my lot in life is to perpetually keep giving what little money I do have to someone wealthy enough to own the thing I can only wish I had for myself - because the market sucks, because I can’t earn enough money online to make a sustainable living sharing my stories and doing what I love, because I’m poor and deeply in debt and have an invisible disability that stops me from getting a “real job” to try and get ahead, even just a little bit.
I’ve been working overtime trying to flip the script so that I can begin to perceive everything I’m “loosing” right now as an opportunity for positive change, rather than a series of devastating and unfortunate events. I want to embrace that idea, because it takes me out of a victim mentality and puts me back into a position of power where I feel like I have some small degree of control over the steering wheel that’s navigating me to my destiny.
In reflecting on the work & living experiences over the course of my young adult life leading up to this exact moment, my emotional response to moving out of and away from the cabin property starts to make a little more sense.
Of course I’m upset, but I also know there are always, always lessons and opportunities available for our growth and evolution when everything we were clinging to inevitably falls apart, because whenever we let go of the old, we create the space for something to begin anew.
So cheers, my sweet little cabin.
Thank-you for showing me that a better, more beautiful environment and home that reflects the love in my heart is, in fact, possible.
And thank you for showing me exactly what it felt like to love something as much as I loved you!
Forever & ever,
P.S. I forgot to tell you that once upon a time, on my very first visit back to Calgary over a year after our great escape to the Kootenays, I paid a special visit to those neon green dumpsters.
Thank you for reading issue #006 of The Morning Grumble by Grumble Farm.
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The body piercing industry & my experience within it over 15+ years is a complex thing to 🪡 flesh out 🪡 that I’ve never taken the time to write about before, but if you like body piercings, always seek out a studio with an APP Certified Piercer that uses only internally threaded jewelry from an APP-affiliated body jewelry brand.
Jesse helped save you from the green dumpsters and now you’ll help save him from going through his procedure alone. You’re there for each other during the worst times of your lives to help support and lift each other up.
Down deep in your soul, you knew you deserved more in this life, even in your darkest hours, and your fierce intelligence and sense of self wouldn’t tolerate it. The cabin came along just when you needed it. The little farmhouse came along just when you needed it. The universe provides, even if she is a nasty bitch… and after the car issues, I’m like, seriously?!?! Love you guys and here to support you however we can. 🩷
Can’t not mention all the wonderful Jonie photos!!! 💙💙💙 seeing all his puppy photos brought all the feels!! He was a little Puggy savior for you when you needed him most. 💙💙
And also… I am sad too. The cabin is and was a dream that you’re so blessed to have had as a part of in your life! I will miss the sunrises you shared and of course the birds. The wildlife and the snow content (always the snow content). Bye, beautiful little cabin in the woods. I loved you too, even if from a distance. 🌲👋