Gaslit By Every Clock In the House 🕒
Content Note: mentions chronic illness, fatigue, and a mildly irritated cryptid rant about Daylight Savings Time.
Welcome Back to the Den
The lights are low, the rules are flexible, and nobody here expects you to be brave on command.
This is The Crippled Cryptid.
A soft-lit corner of the internet where disability, chronic illness, service dogs, and everyday survival exist without apology.
If you’re new here, hi. I’m Sky.
Professional cryptid.
Unwilling amateur cyborg.
Occasional chronic illness and disability advocate.
Medically interesting enough to make half my providers sigh when they open my chart.
I sigh too. Loudly. Then I ask for coffee.
Especially today. The stronger the better. Daylight Savings is killing me.
I live in a haunted meat suit with a deeply suspicious warranty, spend a lot of time in Bed Jail™, and am almost never alone thanks to my medical alert service dog, Luna.
Part guardian.
Part shadow.
Part “excuse me, Mama. Sit your ass down, right now.”
When I choose to ignore her.
Ahem. Scratch that.
When I’ve accidentally misheard her, she amps it up to,
“Mumther, we are not debating your poor decision-making skills today.”
Because apparently, I go from Mama to Mumther like it is my full government name.
Then there’s M&M.
My constant. My Player 2. The one who gives the 90% when I only have 10.
Garden gremlin. Best friend. All of the things, you know how this one goes.
This space is about showing up for ourselves even when our bodies refuse to cooperate.
Chronic illness without inspiration porn.
Disability without apologies.
Love without pretending it’s always easy.
(But always comes with at least a little dog fur.)
Returning cryptids, welcome home.
New cryptids, pull up a chair.
I promise you’ll find your place here. We don’t bite.
The Lunatic Café is open. The Den is big enough for all of us.
Today’s Menu: Daylight Savings Time
Have you ever rolled over on a Monday morning and felt like the entire universe shifted slightly to the left?
That weird moment where everything feels off?
Then you realize it’s because all the clocks are wrong.
That’s how I feel today.
Yesterday, Sunday, the clocks changed for Daylight Savings Time. Technically I know we’ve “gained” an hour of daylight.
But does it really feel that way?
Or does it just feel like bullshit?
Because my body knows the truth.
I lost an hour of sleep, and my nervous system has filed a formal complaint.
Hello, Susan at HR? Yes. I would like to file a formal complaint.
For people with relatively cooperative bodies, it’s an inconvenience.
For those of us running on faulty wiring, unstable joints, and whatever else my autonomic nervous system thinks it’s doing today…
It hits a little harder.
And that’s after the joy that was my Friday cardiology appointment.
And by joy…
Well, you read the post.
And if you didn’t, I’ll leave that one linked right here. Because if I get into that right now, I will start screaming, and I might not stop.
My Body Is Not A Fan Of Time Travel
Usually, I try not to let a bad week drag itself into the next one.
But this one?
This one grabbed the doorframe and is refusing to leave.
I’m hoping today is the only day it keeps its claws in me, because tomorrow is MAR10 Day, and M&M and I actually have plans.
Simple ones.
Silly video games all day.
A bunch of snacks.
Hot dogs on the grill.
Nothing fancy. No complicated prep. Which means more time for games and hanging out together.
Originally, I was going to make burgers.
But honestly?
Hot dogs are easier and I’m not even a little mad about it.
I love the small things we don’t get to do often.
But I’m still making the Yard Yeti make tater tots.
Because why not?
First of all, he makes them better.
How?
We still don’t know.
You’d think it wouldn’t take that many people to follow directions on air fryer tater tots and get them right, but what do I know?
Meanwhile, Every Clock in the House Is Gaslighting Me
What I don’t love is walking into a room and suddenly questioning my grip on reality.
One minute I check my Apple Watch.
I know what time it is.
Then I look at the microwave and it’s an hour earlier and suddenly I’m wondering if I:
• dreamed the time
• accidentally time-traveled
• or have simply lost the plot entirely
Some of the clocks in our house are not smart clocks.
Which means we have to fix them manually.
Which means they sit there, smugly lying to me until someone remembers to change them.
Luna, meanwhile, remains deeply unconcerned with the politics of human timekeeping.
As far as she’s concerned, breakfast still exists and I am late.
The same thing goes for tinkle time.
Illinois and the Theater of False Spring
Now technically the time change means spring is creeping closer.
But the weather here is not exactly cooperating with that narrative.
And by not exactly, I do mean not at all. Because it’s Illinois, so why the hell would it?
One minute it’s warm.
Next minute it’s cold.
Then just to keep things interesting, it starts raining. Or storming.
And now the weather app says we might get snow this weekend.
Snow.
Again.
Absolutely the fuck not.
I thought we were done with that nonsense.
But before anyone says it, yes.
I know.
This is Illinois.
This is False Spring: Act One.
I keep reminding everyone (and myself) of this.
Act Two is coming.
Possibly with snow.
Possibly with betrayal.
If you were wondering, Luna is 100% against this nonsense.
The worse the weather gets, the less playtime she gets outside.
If it’s raining she doesn’t want to be out there because she doesn’t like when her feet are wet and muddy.
If it’s snowing?
She doesn’t want to be out there either.
Sweater or jacket, doesn’t matter.
Because Luna doesn’t like the cold.
Even if we are playing with her ball.
She wants it to be warm outside so she can maximize playtime hours.
Honestly?
Same.
Garden Brain Is Already Activated
So, before I get too deep into garden planning, I know I need to slow my roll.
But my heart?
My heart is already set on tomatoes.
And I’ve even let myself get a little delusional here and there.
The plans are made.
The garden lines are drawn.
I am emotionally prepared to get back out there in the dirt.
You know what I mean?
And if you want to know more, go check out The Garden of Whimsy tab.
You can see all of this year’s garden plans. Or the garden-so-far plans.
Who knows.
I may even sneak in a few other things.
That’s how garden season is in the Cryptid Household.
You think that I know what I want to put in the garden.
Then I take a trip up to Harm’s Farm.
Then I come home with a handful of new plants and suddenly I need to find somewhere to put them.
And from the looks of things, I’ll need to add a big pot to the Wishlist because the roses M&M got from the food bank on Valentine’s Day are trying to grow new roses. So, we may end up growing roses this year too.
Time Is Fake Anyway
January felt like it lasted six months.
February somehow lasted even longer.
We are less than two weeks into March and part of me feels like it’s been eighty-four years.
But maybe that’s just the chronic illness time distortion kicking in.
Or maybe it’s the stolen hour.
Hard to say.
Time is fake.
My body clock is feral.
And somewhere in this house the microwave still thinks it’s yesterday.
I should really get the Yard Yeti to change the time on the microwave.
A Small Teaser Before Thursday
Before I go, I’ll leave you with one small piece of news.
I finally got my DNA test results back.
And after digging through the matches, comparing family trees, and doing the kind of late-night internet sleuthing that would make a genealogist proud…
I think I found who my biological father is.
And it is not who anyone thought.
Not even a little.
Not the name anyone expected.
Not the story I grew up with.
And definitely not the ending I thought that question would have.
That story deserves its own post, because there’s a lot to unpack there.
But I will say this, so far… I am not disappointed.
So, if you’re curious how that rabbit hole turned into a full-blown cryptid investigation… keep an eye on the Den.
We’ll talk about it later this week.
Love you. Now say it back.
-Sky
© The Crippled Cryptid
Disability, honesty, and a little chaos.
🔗 https://linktr.ee/skylanarissa
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If you’d like to support the long, slow work of staying alive, stable, and mobile:
💜 https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-skys-journey-to-health-and-mobility
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