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This ‘Happy’ Thing I Hear So Much About…

February 16, 2013 //
2

This morning I’m enjoying some time spent on me doing my own thing. It feels good. It’s a slow morning over leisurely lattes and personal projects. I don’t feel ‘elated’ or ‘joyous’… but I feel satisfied with the day so far, and calm. I feel serene and comfortable. I feel relaxed. It’s nice to feel this combination of feelings, and I think I am inclined to call it ‘happy’… or at least ‘contented’.

There’s no room to paint right now, as much as I need to;  the one decent spot for doing that currently lacks a convenient water supply for urgent clean ups, and is also quite surrounded by stacks of existing paintings waiting to be hung in their new locations; a fragile state of being for some of my heavier 3D mixed-media pieces.  So. No painting just yet. I’m excited to begin work today, though, because I will still be surrounded by art, color, texture, emotion… and I think it will satisfy my needs for a time. I will use checking each piece for damage, and whether it is labeled, photographed for my archive, and correctly filed and cross-referenced, and uploaded, as an opportunity to also really enjoy and contemplate them; remember what inspired them, how I felt when they were completed, what they mean to me now… I can definitely make a day of it, just looking around I see at least 100 canvases, and a stack of work on paper more than a foot tall! I know some of them are not on my web page, I suspect some of them are not even in my photo archives, or on my Facebook fan page. I like to think I’m very organized, in general, but I gotta admit I can be pretty half-assed about maintaining it long term.

I’m learning things about me. Yesterday was good. Intense. Productive. I felt challenged to take my best a bit further than I knew I could go, grow, be a little more vulnerable, face myself a lot more honestly, a little more fearlessly. Self-acceptance doesn’t sound difficult… I find it harder than I want to, harder than seems ‘fair’… especially difficult is how readily I think I have accepted myself –  only to find that I’ve tricked myself into averting my eyes again rather than understanding who I am and treating myself with compassion.  So, today a project to satisfy my need to express myself artistically, and create some quiet headspace to contemplate things I’m learning about having a brain injury, and building good relationships, and taking care of me. I expect by day’s end I’ll still be quite human…perhaps a bit kinder to myself.

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Categories Anxiety, Art, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Turning 50, Words

Be My Valentine? How about I be my own Valentine?

February 14, 2013 //
8

Valentine’s Day is a strange sort of holiday in the US. Really the only holiday on our calendar that can be viewed as a fairly frank celebration of carnal and romantic love, it just isn’t about children, cherubs, deities, saints, religion – or even cards, flowers, or candy. It’s not. It’s about romance. It’s about sex. It’s about the erotic and sensuous in life and the things that excite us about Love. Oh, I’m sure there are pre-school children everywhere happily giving and receiving lovely red paper cards with cartoon characters, cherubs, or hearts on them, and no doubt people will give friends and parents, or even colleagues, cute cards of one sort or another with some sap-tastic message of affection, and in some years it seems history books and the internet all but eliminate any discussion of sex, let alone holidays that might be sexual… but seriously? Look again at that stylized heart, please? That’s pretty representative of female genitalia. That arrow? Huh. Don’t you think it is curiously suspect, and perhaps more than a little phallic? Sure, sure, hetero-centric obviously. If you’re willing to move past that with me, can we at least acknowledge that the messaging is predominantly sexual – and admit that’s totally ok? Why not have a holiday to celebrate how awesome sex is? My sexual identity, the meaning and value of my sexual experiences, are a large part of ‘who I am’. It would be nice, what with all the conservative right-wing anti-sex messaging, to have a more honest holiday celebrating sex… but as a culture we are clearly not there yet. (No doubt part of the price we pay for allowing Puritans to ‘found a nation’!)

I actually do ‘celebrate’ Valentine’s Day every year. It’s not about religion, or rituals, or necessity, or obligation. It’s not about Hallmark, spending money, or competitive gift giving. For me it is simply a day set aside on which I take a moment to express to my partners, individually, that they are precious to me as romantic sexual beings in my life, and that I value those qualities about them that make them sexy and exciting to me, qualities that feel good – qualities of emotion and elements of our sensuous experience together. This year, when I was writing the wee notes on the hand-sketched cards, I found myself in the midst of an eye-opening moment of self-appreciation… I was about to write ‘Be My Valentine’ on a card… it rang in my thoughts ‘Be Mine’… and although my consciousness quickly flashed through all the iterations of semantic weirdness that develop around that turn of phrase in a poly-amorous relationship, the thing that hit me hardest was… ‘what about me?’ (It wasn’t as hideously narcissistic as it may sound in the telling, now.)

I’ve been struggling a lot recently with some deeply meaningful personal challenges that are intertwined with deeply personal events in my life, troubling elements of my history, feelings of loss, anxiety, and fear, and trying to build healthy relationships while I destroy unhealthy bits and pieces of who I am, myself. Complicated self work and it drives a lot of difficult emotional experiences. A thought hit me last night, and I woke with something less half-baked and more of an epiphany this morning. On some levels, my life and experience really are entirely ‘all about me’ – and can’t be anything else.  It does matter to me when one of my partners is hurting through my actions, words, or choices – perhaps it has mattered too much. Their opinions, their evaluations, their judgements are still their own. I can’t own that, even if it causes me pain, and even if they are factually correct and reasonable in their view.  It’s my own opinion, evaluation, and judgement of myself and my actions, and choices, that must count most with me… or I face my life in constant pain, frustration, and disappointment, while lacking the potential joy in the good things about me that may go unnoticed by others. I’m the only one on the inside of my experience. I’m the only one who hears my words from within my thoughts, and the only one who truly knows my heart. I am the only person in my life who has been along for the entire journey.  I have been letting hurt – my own and my lovers’, come between my existence and my experience (that probably doesn’t convey what I’m trying to say…).  I love my partners.  Their hurts matter to me enormously.  Their insights into my strengths and weaknesses are valuable to me.  I have a great respect for what they share with me about their perspective on who I am, and what their experience with me is like for them… and this morning I actually understand that this doesn’t change that their perspective, and their experience, are not mine.  How very liberating this feels!

I’m 49. I am living an amazing life, filled with tragedies, triumphs, pain, fun, confusion, trauma, learning, joy, opportunities, chances, choices – both good and less so – and this wild ride is far from over.  I have an amazing – if slightly damaged – brain, and a creative drive that is astonishing to live with. I have a compassionate nature at this point in my life that causes me great joy, now, and great shame for the way I treated people when I was younger. I have some measure of wisdom, largely gained through profound errors in judgement and poor decision-making. I know how to cry, and I am also a woman of proven strength, will, and candor. I’m funny. I’m wordy. I enjoy the things that give me pleasure with a will to surrender to those moments that most people don’t seem willing to explore. I grieve the things that hurt me most with a frightening level of abandon, and a clear lack of control, that scares me. I am a reasoning, free-will adult with decades of experience. I am sometimes a child, still too eager to please.  I am sexy… stronger than I know, and always when I need it most… prepared for more things that I can list, and well able to plan for anything.  I love a lot of who I am.  How did I lose sight of that? Because someone I love got mad at me? Because I disappointed someone? Made some bad choices? I think this year, I will be my own Valentine – and love me for all the wonderful things I do for me, how well I have survived thus far, and the amazing potential I have in my future.

Happy Valentine’s Day. I don’t belong to someone else (neither do you!) – I think I will ‘be mine’.

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Categories Anxiety, Art, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Turning 50, Words

Welcome to Hormone Hell, We Have Your Padded Room Ready…

February 11, 2013 //
1

As I walked in to the office this morning I tossed today back and forth like a very inexperienced juggler…’make the best of things?’…’vent?’…’find the silver lining?’…’be real’…’focus on the positive?’…’find greater understanding in my experience?’… Yeah. What the hell? Can’t life and love be simple, and easy once in a while? I guess that’s not something to count on, on the bumpy road to menopause.

Friday morning was pretty great, then a couple random-but-predictable-if-I’d-thought-to-predict-them events ground my emotional balance to a fine powder then mixed it with a sudden shit storm of hormones. I believe the household remodel now includes a padded room… My very supportive, loving partners did the best they could, and frankly an effort well beyond the ordinary on their parts, but any real lasting peace for the weekend was laid waste by my moody outbursts, volatility, and despair. Despair. Fuck, what an ugly emotion. The overall outcome of the weekend seems to be, on one hand, my increased respect for my partners’ ability to provide any measure of emotional support to me, at all, under such trying circumstances…and on the other hand…the ever widening gulf that is my own inability to feel connected to either of them. Wow. Bummer. I’d rather not dwell on that.

The weekend was also nicely productive. We all got a lot of things on our individual to-do lists done. I worked on getting more moved in, myself, hoping that increased order in my space will result in increased order in my thinking. I started a ‘time-based art’ project for myself, too, something as much as tool to reflect on perspective in my life as it is art.   It’ll be a busy week ahead, too… time for a physical. The VA knows more about making a person feel diminished and valueless than any other agency I know of… preparing for that is like putting on emotional armor.  Then Friday… a more important appointment, and I’m bravely pretending I am not afraid, that life isn’t overwhelming me with the intensity of my experience, and that ‘everything will be ok’.

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Categories Anxiety, Art, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Metaphors, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Turning 50, Words

Icy Morning, Sunny Day

February 8, 2013 //
1

Wow. Three good days in a row, I mean really first rate good days from end to end… well… today is no where near ‘end’ yet, but the day is good and it is actually hard to imagine the downfall of a day like this one. Even a moment of rather less-than-bliss that I’d have expected to be damned blissful hasn’t been enough to sour the day overall. That’s probably pretty reasonable, since it is not yet noon, and I like to hope that it takes more than a moment to blow a day…although, there are certainly some moments that could, this was not one of those.

It isn’t a work day for me, and my loose agenda of ‘things I’d probably like to do at some point, why not now?’ doesn’t seem to be spurring me to any sort of obvious action so far. Hell, I’ve already managed a nap – after 8 shots of espresso!

It’s a lovely sunny day and there is music in my heart.  It’s important not to underestimate Love.  Right now, today, I feel good…and I feel like I am…getting somewhere with me. There’s work to do, but there’s also time to do it.  I feel inspired…

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Categories Anxiety, Art, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Turning 50, Words

So, Let Me Say This, About That…

February 4, 2013 //
2

I had an eventful weekend.

My Friday was pretty emotionally intense, and wonderfully promising. It was also a sort of ‘pampering me’ day, as it turned out; I got a great haircut and style from a new stylist at a cool shop, and a little more ‘me time’ on the personal aesthetic front later in the day. I wish I could also say that those elements of my weekend nurtured and restored my soul, but that’s not what it was.

My Saturday was strange, moody and productive, sort of detached. I worked at this and that to ease my anxiety and my emotional fatigue; pruned the roses, baked some shortbread. It was a decent day – it had, in fact, all the elements of an actually good day, but I felt like I was ‘going through the motions’ most of the day, and the challenges offered by every day life and the ebb and flow of other people’s experiences and emotions pulled at my heart. Evening was good in spite of the effort the day itself required, and the day ended well, really well. So… ‘no complaints’?

Sunday was hard to call, initially… was it a good day? A bad day? A difficult day? I was moody, tense, anxious, and working my ass off to shrug it off and avoid negatively coloring the weekend for my partners; it was their anniversary. I could not allow myself to blow that, and I probably put a lot of extra pressure on myself over it that I could have done without. This ‘human being’ thing is a more difficult puzzle than it appears from the vantage point of youthful daydreams.  As it turned out, though, Sunday was… amazing.  I did a few chores and ran some errands in the morning, kissed my partners and headed out into the world, and… wow. The World was right there waiting for me.

I had a pretty powerful moment in the Portland Art Museum, which has quite a good modern art collection for a relatively small city museum. I added the museum to my agenda as an afterthought, actually, and arrived only a couple hours before they closed. None of that matters.  What matters is running into old friends, and what matters is this.  Right? Maybe that’s not obvious… It’s “Untitled”, 1987, Peter Schuyff.  Seeing it yesterday was an experience. I saw a lot of paintings, and sculpture, and glass work that I enjoyed a lot. “Untitled” really got me on a different level. I sat in front of it, just looking and feeling it – letting my body feel how I would position the canvas, set up the layout, work the piece to get those effects – and as I relaxed into the moment and felt that painting ‘become’ part of my thinking and understanding, it became more real and more whole and I saw more and more of it. I felt – taken beyond myself, somehow revealing an inner core ‘strength of being’ I have been unable to feel for a while. I understood what I saw, and I experienced a feeling of confidence and certainty and a secure sense of self that couldn’t be shaken by some moment of pain, however ancient, however evil. No harm could come to me through the strength I had revealed to myself, from within my own being. I am still pretty wowed. It was quite…  something, and I needed it. Like slaking a days old thirst in the heat of the desert with cold clear spring water, like the ‘a-ha!’ moment at the front of the classroom, like the last punctuation mark on a moment of literary wonder… that moment in time, with that painting, meant more to me than words can capture here. I hope to keep it, as safe and precious as a lover’s photo in a locket, and look at it often and feel my soul restored again and again. Art has power so far beyond mere words.

My elation lasted much of the evening, and lingered in my thoughts when I dropped off to sleep, satisfied with the day, and the weekend.  I was still smiling and thinking thoughts of Art and feeling inspired to paint, and more than just pain and woe, too… and the smile deepened and remained my companion throughout the morning, after spending a few minutes on Love, and coffee. The things that matter don’t have to be things other people find valuable or important, I guess I just have to know what they are, for myself, to keep them high on my list of priorities.  So far a good week.

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Categories Anxiety, Art, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Turning 50, Words
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