Archives for the month of: December, 2014
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Home for the Holidays

December 23, 2014 //
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It’s the holiday break from work, and I’ve got a couple of weeks at the end of the year to get some needed down time, celebrate the holidays, and invest my time in my own needs and agenda for a few precious days. Time to share with loved ones. Time to meditate. Time to explore the world within – or the world beyond these walls and windows. Time for me. Time for love. It’s a great idea…isn’t it?

Being home for the holidays holds so much promise, so much potential…so much risk. Yep. Risk, too. Risk of drama, risk of disappointment, risk of ‘failure’…and all of that self-selected and self-imposed. It’s easy to get attached to a particular idea, a particular dream of holiday magic, and find myself disappointed, not in the moment, but overall – having invested too much in a pretty daydream, and failing to enjoy the precious moment that is.  I sometimes also get hung up on what was, and what wasn’t; that’s just the chaos and damage, leaking through to now.

I sing holiday carols – I love most of them, the heartfelt yearning, the love, the wonder, the sentiment. I sing along with them and feel.  There are a few that always make me weep; I am grieving, in some cases, feelings I don’t have for myself, or crying because what is real can sometimes hurt so much. One of my favorite emotional holiday carols is “I’ll Be Home for Christmas“, an old WWII era carol. The homesick sorrow of soldiers on the battlefield, missing their loved ones and the safety of a holiday at home…it’s not why I cry. I cry when I hear/sing that carol because I don’t have that home to go back to; it’s an empty promise. It’s spelled out in the song, too… “I’ll be home for Christmas…if only in my dreams…” Yes. I will also be home for Christmas, every year, no matter what…if only in my dreams. What do you feel when you think of ‘home’? Where is that place for you? Is it a geographical location, or the companionship of a specific other person? Is it a place, or a place in your heart?

I do have a very clear idea of what these holidays feel like, and I’ve been ‘home for the holidays’ on a level that amounted to ‘proof of concept’ more than once. It remains an experience of rare heart and beauty, and great sentiment. The price of admission is feeling the feelings, and being with others who share them. It’s called ‘the magic of Christmas’ because the experience of it is not a given, and it is an experience worth cherishing, nurturing, and savoring.

This morning is an ordinary enough Tuesday morning, I guess. I was wakened earlier than I wanted to be awake by the sounds of doors, voices, laundry… I looked at the clock, stunned to see all that going on at such an early hour, on a day I expected the house to be rather quiet. Morning appointments trump sleeping in.  This morning I find myself recognizing that this particular desire to ‘sleep until I wake’ isn’t so easily fulfilled, the logistics are complicated, and require a shared commitment that is lacking, and the frustration and disappointment of failing to find my way to the quality of sleep and rest I am seeking is becoming its own thing. Time to let it go, I guess; it’s not worth being irritated about not achieving it. “Enough sleep” will have to be enough.

I’m in pain, again today. I’m in enough pain that Rx pain relief doesn’t do much to relieve the pain, just dulls it somewhat and renders it manageable. I’m in enough pain to be uncomfortable to be around, for people sensitive to that sort of thing; it’s just too obvious that I am uncomfortable. I’m in enough pain to struggle to manage my mood, and my temper. Yoga doesn’t take away the pain, but it does make movement easier, and a bit less uncomfortable moment to moment. Everyday pain has become so every day at this point it is now a challenge to remember a time when I didn’t hurt like this, although wisdom and intellect tell me that such a point of view is flawed and inaccurate. I have hurt like this, in winter, for years now. It always sucks just this much.

home for the holidays...

home for the holidays…

Home for the holidays – the adult version; I know what I want, I know that it is ‘real’, and I know I can’t have it. What I can have is still a wonderful holiday, still worthy, still filled with joy; there are verbs involved, and a certain level of adult acceptance – and self-acceptance – are required, and perhaps ‘some assembly’. We can’t always get what we want… Today is a good day to celebrate the holidays that are, with the people who are here.

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Turning 50, winter, Words

Time, Space, and Distance

December 21, 2014 //
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Learned helplessness sucks. It’s a common enough byproduct of surviving certain sorts of trauma. The frustration that can surge to the forefront of my experience due to complications of struggling with learned helplessness is akin to the nuclear blast of emotional weaponry; sudden, unreasonably forceful, and laying waste to the pleasant now that might have been. When I am simply doing my best to manage, day-to-day, and doing so with some measure of success, other things that need to be attended to may fall by the wayside; I can only do so much, moment to moment. My will falls short in the struggling, you see. I give up. Learned helplessness is a very real thing.

I wrote some days ago about my environment degrading, and that being a sign of ongoing stress, and a need to take care of me, more skillfully. I spent yesterday restoring order to the chaos of my environment. It feels very nice to handle that bit of business, and my surroundings are orderly, clean, tidy, and quite to my taste, generally. What I need is at hand. What I don’t need, has been put away. The effort to restore order in my environment results in renewed enthusiasm to keep it so, as well as ‘clearing my head’ for a whole host of other things that would benefit from being handled sooner than later.

I woke later than usual this morning, and took my medication later as a result. I am now taking care of me – and my loved ones – by taking sufficient time solo for my medication to kick in, and to wake up, and find my voice before I impose myself on their experience. Yes, that level of consideration matters to me; some women don’t leave the house before they ‘put their face on’, I avoid interacting with people before my brain has entirely come back online, and my level of pain is as addressed by medication as it will be, for the day. Taking the time I need really matters to me, and failing to do so changes my experience in a reliably unpleasant way.

The only snowflake I'm likely to see this holiday season.

Let it snow…

I recently got an email from an ex. A large measure of my PTSD is related to relationship trauma, and domestic violence, and I don’t have a comfortable experience of exes reaching out from the past, generally. I felt very anxious reading the email, and feel anxious considering it after the fact, too. This ex, this time, reached out to inquire – 4 years after the break up – whether I have any of her antique holiday ornaments. I was filled with complicated emotions that began with irritation and anger; when we divided our property I had specifically asked what holiday ornaments she wanted and was firmly and specifically told that the holidays would no longer have any meaning, and that she wanted no part of them. The anger became mixed with some measure of humor, and bewilderment; we’d never owned any antique ornaments together, at all. She had a few small handmade figurines, made by her Mother, and those were so clearly hers that taking them with me wasn’t even something I considered. I had a small number of handcrafted ornaments my own Mother made, and had given to me. The rest of our ornaments were common enough glass ornaments, some traditional sorts that I purchased my first holiday alone after I left my first husband, few of which actually remain, and some interestingly non-traditional sorts that continue to delight and amuse me with their whimsy. Still, I carefully checked the tree, decked out for the holidays, to see if ornaments dear to her had remained with me. I didn’t find any, and my journal entries of the time indicate that I had taken pains to carefully box the ornaments that were peculiarly ‘hers’ and left them behind for her when I moved out. I replied kindly that I didn’t have the ornaments she was looking for, and reminded her that we hadn’t had any antiques that I could recall. I made an effort not to read subtext into her reply, and have since tried to let it go. You can see the effort to do so has been only marginally successful; I feel angry that she even asked, and helpless to act on that in a way that is appropriate, effective, and needful. My logical brain tells me that I already have – so let it go, already. My heart says ‘this was so not cool!!’ and wants to do/say more. That was probably the point in the first place, making it even more wise to just let it drop without another word.

My level of physical pain the past couple of days has been very high. I hurt enough to affect my experience moment to moment, and although the effort to be compassionate and kind to others nonetheless is entirely worth it, I also find myself struggling not to resent how clueless people around me seem to be about the fact that I am indeed in that much pain. Sometimes I just want to lay down and weep, I hurt that much. It doesn’t help, though. I sometimes want to plead with people around me “please just be patient with me, please be kind to me – I just hurt, is all!”, but it hasn’t been my experience that it makes much difference; they are having their own experience.

Time to get the day started…laundry, putting away things that were relocated out of my personal space during yesterday’s cleaning, writing holiday letters…all the makings of a fulfilling quiet day. Today is a good day to take care of me, on my own terms. Today is a good day to change how I feel in the world.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Big 5, winter, women, Words

Real, and…Really?

December 18, 2014 //
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The morning is quiet. I sit here content, quiet, calm, and aware of the small knot of distant anxiety nestled just below my diaphragm. The last couple pleasant mornings have skidded sideways like a luxury car speeding down an icy highway; feeling good right until it was out of control, leaving me shaking and confused although things turned out well enough in the end. I’m not wishing the anxiety away, or fighting it; it simply is, there in the background, and I am aware of the potential it holds. Still, I am content now, and I feel still and calm now, and now is okay with me. I am enjoying the moment.

Between the cold weather, the rainy weather, and being bundled up and warm in the face of either or both, I haven’t taken many new pictures lately. I’m not sure whether that choice is about taking care with my camera (phone) or that I just don’t want to be colder or wetter. There’s a nice byproduct to that choice, though. I see so much as I walk, undistracted by the eagerness to capture some one thing I am seeing. I see more. Walking meditation suits me well, too, and is more difficult if constantly interrupted with photography. There’s something to think about buried in these observations…something about mindfully enjoying what I enjoy and being fully present…and the power of interruptions, that are also things I enjoy. I’m not sure where to take it, but I bet I would do well to consider this one further…

The lack of predictable, lasting calm in my experience concerns me. I have come so far that I can fairly easily see an Achilles heel I missed before; I am easily provoked by someone else’s intense emotional experience, however calm and content I am in the moment. It’s problematic for me – I’m human, and I live with other human beings. Intense emotions are part of that experience. However calmly I may be enjoying the day, the potential remains for someone to provoke me into reacting to their experience with such immediacy, and emotional force, that I lose my way, lose my moment, lose my joy… and suffer.  This seems like something worth addressing… I would like to reach a point where the irritation experienced by someone else does not put me on the defensive, frighten me, or cause me to try to ‘fix things’. I’d like to reach a point where another person’s anger isn’t terrifying, or able to override my own decision-making about what is good for me, or what action I take. I would like to reach a point where I can comfortably provide emotional support to someone in the face of their rage, hysteria, irritability, sorrow, or despair, without feeling sucked in, blamed, or thrown off course, myself. I’m not there, yet. This is not a journey that reaches a resting point with a sign ‘You Are Here’ to conveniently identify that I have reached my destination. It’s more like a walk in a strange wood – beautiful, sometimes, and other times feeling peculiarly endless, and a bit scary. I walk on.

Taking my journey on my own terms, making my own way.

Taking my journey on my own terms, making my own way.

Today is a good day to blaze a trail through the unknown. Today is a good day to fearlessly explore the world within – a world that is largely of my own making, under my own control (where’s that damn manual…map…user’s guide…?). Today is a good day to be kind to myself, and to others, however little appreciation there is for the effort – not because anyone ‘deserves’ it, not because it is their ‘due’, and not because I am obligated to do so, but because this is who I am. (How do I know that? Because I choose to be.) Today is a good day to choose to change the world.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Big 5, winter, Words

What’s That Far Off Jingling?

December 16, 2014 //
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This morning is a nice one. I rested well, woke most pleasantly and just a bit ahead of the alarm. No nightmares. My just-waking-up headache quickly dissipated, leaving only my tinnitus behind, and it, too, doesn’t seem that bad, today. My coffee is hot, and tasty, and a bold reminder of drinking my coffee straight up, dark, and robust in other lives, on other mornings. I’m not shivering in the cold. I’m not sweltering in heat. I am comfortable and content.

For some moments this morning, I was troubled by a strange far off sounding jingling – a holiday jingling that was sort of cute and fun at first, and quickly started causing me some stress; I couldn’t place the source of the sound, and it seemed… everywhere. Thankfully, I realized – before that had gone on very long – I’d chosen it. Oh, not mindfully, nope; it’s very early in the morning and I’m not quite entirely awake. I put on colorful holiday earrings this morning…a cascade of tiny… wait for it… jingle bells. LOL Yep. I chased myself slowly through the house listening for the source of a noise that was immediately next to my ear, small, delicate, ceaseless. (I’ll resume wearing them when I get to the office. The background noise is sufficient that the earrings won’t seem so loud.)

Use your words.

Holiday cheer, and the power of words; speechless is not voiceless.

So far, this morning is as light and pleasant as yesterday’s was difficult. Yesterday ended well, and the day itself was productive and worthwhile – it’s certainly not one that I find myself moved to regret on any noteworthy level; it lingers in my memory in a largely pleasant way, after-the-fact. I enjoy the malleable qualities of the mind, having learned more about making them work for me.

It’s the small course corrections, over time, that have made the most difference for me. I’m saying that because some day I, myself, may need to read those words again… There is a lot of ugliness in the news, and it is so easy to drown in the despair that comes of trying to consume too much bad news too quickly. Those small course corrections happen every day, all around us, and even those entities of great evil that appall and terrify us aren’t static, and change is; it exists whether we embrace it or not. Change isn’t always easy to see, and those small course corrections, and small changes, are not always enough to ease our suffering in the moment – it’s ‘not enough’, somehow, to see some change in the face of great evil. Still, change is, and I had an odd moment yesterday that drove that message home for me.

The value of incremental positive changes over time is huge…but it is easy to lose sight of the improvements, because things can still seem so… status quo.  Two recent South Park episodes were illustrative for me: Season 18, episodes 9 #Rehash and 10 #HappyHolograms. I had never actually been exposed to the popular internet commentator, PewDiePie, or even the phenomenon he represents. I’m not his target audience, so I’m not super surprised. Why does it matter? Incremental changes over time do matter…he became relevant for me when I read this quote:

25 October 2012, Kjellberg posted a Tumblr message, stating “I just wanted to make clear that I’m no longer making rape jokes, as I mentioned before I’m not looking to hurt anyone and I apologize if it ever did.”

That’s actually a pretty big deal. The quote is linked and cited in the Wikipedia article, which tends to support its value as potentially true. A valuable, very real, relevant small course correction. Incremental change over time. It’s powerful – he has a voice, he uses it. Rape humor is controversial, and it’s dangerous territory to be casual and insensitive about; it’s very easy to hurt someone who has been traumatized by rape by carelessly joking about the topic. As a survivor, I still struggle to find the balance between handling the horror, and the healthy healing power of humor and laughter. Most of the comedy I favor doesn’t stray into rape humor territory – but some of it does. It matters how it is handled, and it was those clear simple words assembled by PewDiePie that pointed out what makes the difference [for me]: respect and consideration. When the humor targets the victims as yet another attack on their credibility, or their suffering, it isn’t funny, not at all, not even a little bit. When the humor points the laser beam of comedy at the heinousness of the crime, itself, at the perpetrators, at the culture that ‘doesn’t get it’ – that’s where the laughter is for me. South Park gets it right, seating Bill Cosby on a couch next to Taylor Swift, holiday music playing, a glass of wine the focus of the scene…but we can’t hear what is being said, the voice-over is deliberately louder, distracting…social commentary, comedy genius. Funny enough that it didn’t really warrant a trigger warning. Subtle enough to avoid liability, and unlikely to frighten children. I laughed and laughed. I watched it again. I laughed more. I watched it yet again, and began find the details and references I’d missed the first two times. I’d send Matt Stone and Trey Parker holiday cards and well wishes this year, if I knew them. I’ll probably watch it again, soon. 🙂

Change is. Small changes matter – over time they become larger. I see hints of change in our culture. I see more people finding their voice – and using it. I see more human beings reaching across the details that divide them to recognize we’re all in this together. This morning, I feel encouraged and alive…I’m not sure why. It’s a lovely feeling to start the day on.

Today is a good day to pause and appreciate the change that is.

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Categories Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Rape, The Big 5, winter, women, Words

Incoming!

December 15, 2014 //
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Wow. What a shitty morning. I woke too early because other members of the household manhandle doors without giving people sleeping much thought. My first association with anyone else in the house went awry very quickly. I feel mistreated. I feel disrespected and hurt. I’m angry. The time I made to enjoy the company of someone dear to me – by choice – was treated as without value. I haven’t been awake even two hours and I’m in tears, feeling hurt, feeling pissed off, boundaries violated, explicitly stated needs utterly disregarded, and reeling from the powerful emotional punch that is having ones security threatened, emotional security that is. There was a time in my life when I did not understand that these experiences are not ‘love’ – they don’t define the wonder and joy of Love and loving – these kinds of experiences suck, and hold no pleasure, no value, no joy. I find them unpleasant, and unworthy of being called ‘love’.  Experiences like these still happen in the context of relationships I have with people I love…which doesn’t stop the experiences from sucking, actually, I think it makes them suck that much more. Love, in its wonder and joy and delight, isn’t defined by our challenges – that’s just human beings, being human. Hopefully, when I cool off, there will be a lesson to learn.

I feel sad. I feel pissed off. I feel blamed. I feel cheated of a quiet pleasant morning in the good company of someone dear to me. I feel ashamed that I let someone else’s shitty mood provoke me, too. No one needed that.

Searching for the positive, finding stickers and thorns.

Searching for the positive, finding stickers and thorns.

We’re all so very human, aren’t we? Each with our own baggage, our own experience, our own perspective…the context of our unique perspective, that is so ‘us’, can so easily find us out of step with those who matter most to us… assumptions… expectations… the narrative we accept as ‘true’ or ‘real’… the stories we tell ourselves… Right this very moment, more than anything, I would like to be laughing and sipping coffee with this fantastic guy I love… right now, I can’t stand the thought of being in the presence of his right-now experience; as much as it appears to suck from my perspective, I imagine it must feel pretty awful from within, too. Certainly, it’s not what I expect from love.

I don’t know why I’m bothering to write about this… we all have these experiences, though, don’t we? Moments of anger. Moments of hurt. Moments of frustration. Moments that suck. They are, however, just moments.

Today is a good day for perspective…I hope to find some, soon. Today is a good day to treat people well – myself, included. Today is a good day to change the world… I’d be content to change the moment. Today is a good day to remember to dress for the weather, and to remember that this too shall pass*.

*Indeed, it did pass…with some practicing of practices that work to move my heart in a more positive direction, like ‘taking in the good’ and savoring small pleasures as I walked to the light rail station, and taking on a healthy challenge that distracted my focus, in general, and also had the benefit of giving me some needed exercise – I walked to a much more distant light rail station than I usually do, and enjoyed the bracing winter air, the feel of taking on a challenge and meeting a goal. More pleasant, nurturing, words were exchanged along the way, and I took a moment to be grateful for the technology that makes it so easy to do so, without stewing in my own emotional bullshit all day long before getting to that opportunity. Kind words were shared. Encouragement and apology were offered, and accepted… the day moves on. Humans, being human. Lovers, loving. Today? Yeah, as human as I am, today is a good day.

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Categories Love, Mindfulness, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5, women, Words
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