Indeed do many things come to pass

Today I skieved off from Highland in order to go to Wednesday bells! Yayyyy for Wednesday bells!

(Wednesday bells are not particularly different from Saturday bells in terms of culture, since it's largely the same batch of people, but they are technically in a different church. Of course, since we ring at both places on Sunday for services, it's not like I'm not getting rope time at Advent, but it is nice to get more general practice time there)

Specifically, I skieved off since my friend Leah was in town and coming ringing, and I wanted to get to see her. This is an acceptable (to me) reason to miss Highland --friends being at bells-- as is "being legitimately sick or injured". Still though, I try not to miss Highland *too* often since it is both physically and mentally good for me.

A couple weeks ago, I had a really bad bells weekend, and I had to sit my brain down and make some decisions about how I was going to be moving forward (helped along by both therapist and Austin and talking about "do you actually like this? it seems to stress you out like a lot".) I still find the hobby to be incurably stressful at some of the times, but I think I've also been able to be more mellow recently. One of the specific good things I've done for myself is not allow myself to write self-hating notes in my bells diary.

Yes, it does seem like a way lower level of self-care than I should be on to explicitly say "you're not allowed to call yourself a useless piece of shit in your diary", but that's how self-care works sometimes, I guess. Can't always be at the good levels all the time.

So I've been forcing not-negativity, and I've had a really good couple of weekends, and that's been nice. Tonight started out _really_ rough, but the nice thing about Leah is that she's crazy in damn near the same ways I am, and the two of us decided within like...an hour of having known each other that we are Definitely Friends and I was able to pull my brain back together in order to interact with her. Then once I had a social anchor, I was able to get things unbad and rang reasonably well for the rest of the evening.

Leah was not ringing (for her own "bells are complicated" reasons) so I was alternating trying to ring things sanely and well and hanging out and chatting with her. This included a Very Sneaky Adventure down to the kitchen to steal cookies¹, where we spent a bunch of time discussing books and boys, and also her accidentally finding a quiet out-of-the-way spot to be alone which happened to be exactly my usual out-of-the-way spot to be alone at Advent.

So it was a good night, and good social. Getting to ring Plain Bob Minor on two new stages² was really keen too, and yes, I did it with Danielle standing behind me to help keep me in the right place, but she wasn't constantly talking or anything, so like...I dunno. Maybe I am gradually learning a thing?

(There is a really significant point in bellringing where one can consistently handle well enough that they can stop focusing on the handling as the big difficulty and start seriously learning methods and compositions. Think of it like the point in Scottish dancing where you know the footwork well enough that you can trust it to just carry you through unfamiliar figures. Anyways, I think I'm close, and I think I might be a *lot* closer than I would've thought I was a month ago.)

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Talking about how she had been exploring the church and I made a dumb joke about had she found "the forbidden kitchen" and we were sorta riffing on that when choco_frosh was all "so did you find the cookies?" and then indicated that we could, in fact, go steal cookies from the church and that would not be tragic.

2: This is a piece of jargon I *constantly* forget and relearn, and someone used it tonight so I'm trying to get it into my brain. The stage is how many bells you're ringing for the method (which is a specific pattern or order you change the bells around). Some methods can only be rung on even stages, some only on odd, some (like Plain Bob, which is probably the easiest actual method) on both. So, I'd rung Plain Bob Doubles a bunch this past weekend (Doubles is five) but the was my first time ringing Plain Bob Minor (6) and Triples (7).

((Singles, Minimus, Doubles, Minor, Triples, Major, Caters, Royal, Cinques, Maximus, 15, 16, 17, 18...))