Mostly uncooked, totally alive

It turns out recovering from even minor outpatient surgery is really tiring! Also recovering from 5 hours of general anesthesia, because both of my two procedures ran long.

J's tweet that they needed a better flamethrower was an exaggeration but not a non sequitur; apparently the first tool they tried for setting my uterus on fire (endometrial ablation) didn't fit me right(???) and they had to switch from the electrical one to either hot or cold. I'll have to wait for my follow-up visit to find out which.

I don't know why taking Didi and relevant sentinel nodes walkies ran long. *shrug* Sometimes that is a thing.

Anyway, I closed out the recovery area and felt unnecessarily embarrassed about that, but all is now well. My armpit hurts and walking very far, even 6 days later, is dizzy-making, but I am reliably feeding myself and have plenty of groceries!

Thanks to everyone who kept me under constant 48 hour watch so I had enough food and water and Oxycodone. You were all great and very much appreciated. And I got a care package that included a Lisa Frank paint-by-water book and a little stuffed bear dressed like Robin (Bear Wonder)!

Emotional labor and building support networks

I ended up reading a lot of this thread about unpaid emotional labor (which has a wonderfully moderated comments section, this is a "do read the comments") and it's speaking to something I've been struggling with.

I'm bad at many kinds of emotional labor. (Good at other kinds, but bad at many kinds listed in this thread.) So are most of my friends. So are most of my family members.

We don't get together because almost no one organizes it. I'm having a horrific time managing support for my surgery aftercare because it means dealing with thinking about strategically contacting people, and actually knowing their contact information, and having some semblance of understanding of where our social currency stands so am I being a giant jerk.

Many people I know have trouble with this in phone or person, but do great with online social networking. For years I was one of those, but with the de-relevancing of LJ, I've been slipping from it. I'm just... disconnected.

Also relevant on that thread, my circuits on doing housework and opening mail and other personal unpaid labor tasks seem deeply, deeply broken.

This is an entire sphere of competency in which I feel deeply, deeply broken, and I can't tell how common it is to my friend group and how much it is that everyone I knew who did the good reciprocation thing has drifted away to other friends because I didn't.

ETA: I realized I didn't really give a discussion direction here, which is a piece of emotional work. I'd appreciate people sharing their perceptions of emotional labor in our mutual friend circles or their lives in general, and some kind of reality check on where I stand here.

It's okay if that assessment doesn't reflect too well on me, especially if it gives positive feedback on "here are some friends who are awesome at this," because I'm starting from a place where I'm pretty clueless about what's being done that I'm not aware of. I'm also curious about how this interacts with mental health issues.