Stupid walks my dog makes me go on for my stupid mental health, and the dogs of The Ultimatum: Queer Love
plus the usual dog dopamine hits from around the web
It’s been a wild couple of weeks around here. Pride started in a cloud of rainbow glitter and Target controversy, but overall it’s been nice to see some love for my people when there is often just so, so little to go around. Meanwhile, the Canada wildfire smoke drifted down, affecting NYC and other points Northeastern much worse than the DC area, but we had some code red days this week that kept us at least partially inside.
Finally, I came off the worst round of anxiety I’ve experienced in a long, long time.
Once I realized it was happening, I did what I usually do when the monster comes out from under the bed, and when I finally realize it, since there can be some lag time there. I struggled to keep up with my daily schedule. I ate poorly, and at weird intervals. I talked to people close to me and accepted help — something I haven’t been able or willing to do for most of my life, but I know I need to now. I walked my dog whether I felt like it or not. And finally, and most importantly, I saw my therapist, my gynecologist (where my perimenopause friends at?), and, finally, my psychiatrist, because the gyno said I could maybe use a med adjustment to help with my hormonal mood shifts. My psych PA, who is amazing, had me sorted out in half an hour with a trial regimen, I filled them, and I’m taking them.
Note to those who do not struggle thus, and a reminder to my people who do: It is often so hard to follow through on even one step of this process when our brains are working against us. Mental illness is, among many other things, exhausting. But I have learned to take it one tiny step — one phone call, one appointment, one email or text, one drive to a pharmacy, one med reminder — at a time.
My initial emotional dip was three weeks ago, and things are way better today. I’m holding my breath a bit just in case this is a pink cloud/placebo effect, but whether it is or not, I’m having more good days than bad days right now.
And speaking of dog walks
My puggle Hoover keeps me walking, every single day.
When I got my dog in 2014, I was one-and-one-quarter years sober, and I lived alone. I was also staring down the barrel of another sober winter, the first one after my first year of sobriety. The first sober year felt super-charged; I was a newcomer to the process, and every activity, holiday and season sober felt brand new. In year two, for me, things felt a little less exciting after hitting the big one year anniversary, while still a lot anxiety-producing. I looked around for the adult to come and take over my regenerating life, and it turned out that the adult was still me.
I’ve also never dealt well with the onset of fall. I start to get flashes of melancholy when the light starts shifting in late August, and it doesn’t get much better across the gray expanse of winter. I really didn’t look forward to doing it alone that year, in a townhouse in the suburbs.
So I got on Petfinder, just to look, which any Petfinder “browsing” veteran knows is dangerous at best, futile at worst. I’d had two Boston Terriers until 2009 and grew up with the breed, so I assumed I’d just scan through available Bostons and click out quickly, still dogless. Fast forward two hours later, when I found myself drafting an email to a rescue organization near me, low-key begging to meet a year-and-a-half old Puggle in their listings named Hoover.
I went to a PetSmart adoption event the day after to meet him, and a week later, after a detailed form, a phone call and a home visit, I had a feral, skinny, super-pissed off dog somehow living in my house, who refused to sit down, ever. Oh and also, he needed to be walked twice a day, because he had problems peeing in the yard.
Let’s get up and get out there, human
My Bostons were indoorsy. They walked reluctantly, early in their lives, when we lived in an apartment and didn’t have a yard. After we moved into a townhouse, they embraced their leisurely lives, condescending to go out in the yard thrice or so a day to relieve themselves. In rainy and snowy times, they refused to go out until their tiny bladders were on code red, staring at the door I opened for them like it was a portal to hell.
Hoover was not, and is still not, like those homebodies. He is on high alert and ready to hit the streets as soon as the sun hits his eyes in the morning. How rude I tell him this is, or how little concern it shows for my need for, always, just 10 more minutes, doesn’t impress him whatsoever. If I open the sliding door and beg him to go in the yard, and sometimes, when I’ve been sick or just really, really tired, I’ve tried this, he walk to the other door, the door to OUTSIDE.
I don’t know enough about dogs — and if you do, please let me know — to know if this is because he was forced by his abusive prior owners to live outside full-time for the first one-and-a-half years of his life, or if he wouldn’t want to mark his yard first thing, no matter his history. My best guess, based on nine years of inexpert observation, is that his beagle nose overrides the pug preference for leisure, and simply needs to get out and inspect the neighborhood — sniffing the grounds within a mile radius of our house in what a woman leaving our vet office once described as “checking his pee-mail.”
I do know that whatever this requirement is, he can’t fulfill it without me. And I halfway hate and am halfway happy to acknowledge just what a difference this twice-daily walk — in rain, snow, or other vile weather — has made in my life.
What my nurse practitioner suggested, my dog made me do
Several years ago, when I had no organized support for anything to do with my mental health, the nurse practitioner I saw as a GP at the time asked me if I was “feeling as good as I’d like to feel”. And when I gave her a weak “no” for an answer, because she could clearly see that I did not feel anywhere near good at all, she realized she had a tough client on her hands, and suggested that I start small, on my way to getting the “more support” she gently insisted I get.
“When you feel stuck, and like you just…can’t…whatever you can’t do or tolerate, try to walk,” she said. “Walk ten minutes in one direction, or five minutes out and five back. Change your scenery, change your mind. It can help get you started.”
I wish I could say that I followed that advice immediately and walked all the miles it took to obtain joy and a low resting heart rate. However, the real story is that while I didn’t do what she suggested sometimes, sometimes I did, and I still do, in addition to the rest of the treatment I access. And when I move more, gently or more vigorously, I generally feel better.
Stuck writing? (Like when am I not stuck writing?) Walk to the living room and back, or to the bathroom, or to the sink for a glass of water.
Going to quit my job, move cross-country without a plan or say something mean to someone who loves me? This code yellow situation requires a trip outside — a walk to, in my case, the park at the end of the street, or the coffee shop in the shopping center a mile away. I should also at this point put my phone in my bag, and a zip on my lip.
Convinced life is trash and will never ever be better? Hate everyone and everything? Code red! This is the big one that requires a trip around the block several times, at least, or a two-hour hike, ending with a drive to my therapists’s office, a recovery meeting, or both.
Every day Hoover lives in my life and my home, he forces me to go on two essential (to him), stupid (to me) walks for his very important biological needs, and to clock in for his species-specific job to monitor his surroundings, and the other animals who dare to infiltrate what he clearly believes is very much his neighborhood.
This is a like it or not situation for me. He doesn’t care if I have a headache, or a Zoom meeting in half an hour (the only thing he knows about Zoom is that it brings unfortunate strangers into our house, and that when I’m on it, it’s his prime time to make a lot of noise, or crawl into my lap, right in front of the camera.) His walks aren’t connected to human emotions, but to basic canine needs. And in making these needs my responsibility nine years ago, I signed on for disconnecting his walks from my feelings too, also and entirely.
His walks are my most consistent routine in any day. I get up in the morning to take him out, and I stop work around 3 to do it, too. Every time his tiny body clock informs him that it’s time, he starts his usual routine of huffing at me or twirling in circles. I ask him to go get his leash and take himself around the block, because it makes me laugh. I then say “Want to go for a walk?” And he freaks out completely. I help him step his front feet into the front of his harness, snap it shut, and out we go.
And even on the days I think I hate this, when it’s hard to shut the laptop or to get out of bed as early as he likes, I know that this ritual sets my internal physical, mental and emotional clocks in the best way. My feet move and my eyes see different things. I’ve taken hundreds of pictures of him, and many, many minutes of video, on walks in our neighborhood over seasons and years. Critically, he got me out into the world during COVID lockdown, when I worked crisis communications for months solid in those first years, when I lived with no other people and saw few others. Those walks were my lifeline to the outdoors, to a surreal world of no schedules and empty roads on our twice-daily routes. And when I had a pulmonary embolism in December, 2020, six months after having COVID, he had to go live with my best friend for a bit because I couldn’t breathe well enough to walk myself, much less him. And when he did come home, and I started to get better, hitting the sidewalk with him in increasingly longer distances was a critical part of my daily physical therapy and mental wellness at a terrifying time.
I can complain, or resist, or — as I’m embarrassed to admit I have on some occasions when getting out of bed just felt too damned hard —made him wait longer than he should have to go out. But ultimately, because I have the physical ability, the real desire to bond with my dog, and the awareness that the movement is good for me in all ways no matter how I feel, they have become very stupid and entirely crucial walks that I go on every day for my stupid mental health. My brain might — and I often initially do — resent them, but my soul knows it needs them, and that I wouldn’t trade them for the life of complete inertia that my mind would have me have, not for anything.
And because dogs are better than people, all Hoover knows is that he can count on me to go with him. And also there are treats.
The Ultimatum dogs slay
My friend group, like many in the LGBTQ+ community, took a short break from fighting bigots to dive headfirst into The Ultimatum: Queer Love, a Netflix reality show involving five queer couples — one in each wanted to get married and one absolutely did not — who got together in San Diego in a nightmarish game of mix and match, to see who finally went home with whom after a couple months of filmed daily life.
This show is an utter disaster, and call it an oasis of representation in an often-questionable reality tv landscape, but it’s spawned enough queer DMs to keep every social media platform afloat until at least one more despotic billionaire buys it. (What? I said what I said.)
Here’s my favorite character, of course:
Forget Xander. Margaux, Yoly’s French Bulldog, steals my entire show. Sorry, other Ultimatum dogs. Contestant (Participant? Sufferer?) Tiff, who starts what amounts to an argument between herself and her…self over the necessity to allow her dog Shylo to sleep on the bed, is a fierce dog parent, and Shylo woofed (haha) be in the running, but overall I wish Shylo got more airtime than the argument, especially because they later showed Tiff’s dog sleeping on the bed while she was having sex in it.
Let’s just say this dog lady could never.
Anyway, team Margaux forever. Her cutaway shots were some of the best in reality television, ever. More Dogs on Reality Shows for President 2024.
Dog dopamine hits from around the web
New York always does Pride big, and the Manattan West neighborhood hosts Woof Fest: Paws for Pride today. Paw-mazing. Pride-mazing. Something-mazing.
BARCS is a high-need shelter in Baltimore, and the Baltimore Orioles recently helped them adopt out 22 animals. Good stuff!
Brenda and Linda are a bonded pair in a Minneapolis animal shelter who could not spend even one night apart before Brenda found a brave solution. (They were adopted together, yay!)
Dudes. I found another person with feelings about Arizona birds. This one is way more positive. (PS Why couldn’t I have met a lovebird in Scottsdale?)
The occasional deal, because I like deals:
Do you Rakuten? I’m new to this site for some bizarre reason, and it’s awesome. They offer cash back on pretty regular purchasess for pet people at Petsmart, Petco, Chewy, Only Natural Pet, and a ton of other places you might need to buy pet supplies. Join here. It’s really easy and so worth it to me already.
Finally, this jumpsuit is human-sized, but is straight up the most comfortable thing I own; I have four colors now, and the pockets hold everything I need for dog walks.
Also essential for summer dog walks: the cutest partially reader sunglasses I’ve come across. IYKYK.
Dog GIF of the week
Pool’s open! Be safe everybody!
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