Archives for category: Despair
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The Emotional Rug-pull

February 12, 2024 //
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The day got off to a challenging start. Lab work needing to be done had already thrown my routine off more than a little bit, and that seemed fine and accounted for, but real life is not exclusively dependent on my own lived experience of it. Ever. An absolutely reasonable request by my Traveling Partner (more of a wish or hope than a request, actually) that we find somewhere closer to do this sort of thing added a layer of complexity and an opportunity for miscommunication. That didn’t have to be “a thing”, but eventually became one, simply by being one of many details weighing on me.

I rolled with the changes best I could, and even found myself feeling a moment of real satisfaction and delight with a work call that went exceptionally smoothly with great positive outcomes (happy boss, happy customer, happy me)… then… the “rug pull”.

Look, this is a thing probably everyone experiences now and then, I was riding high on a great feeling, and then, suddenly, that was gone in a moment of… something else much less pleasant or satisfying; my partner’s discontent. It happens. There I was feeling good, and then there he was, not feeling so good himself at all. He shared that experience with me, because as it happened, I was the driver of his poor experience (loud conference calls are annoying to have to overhear, successful or not). My mood was immediately wrecked, not because he did anything “wrong” and not because the moment required it, but just because – no bullshit – I’ve got mental health issues, and one of those is that I struggle to maintain perspective, to refrain from fusing with my partner’s emotional experience, and I take shit personally far far too often. Bouncing back is hard for me (the biochemistry of my emotional experience doesn’t resolve quickly) – thus my rather constant harping on resilience and practices associated with it. I need that practice, badly, and even with all the practicing? My results vary.

After the lab work, and getting my Traveling Partner back home, and doing what I could to set him up for comfort for the day, and getting on the road to head to the office to finish work (because rather stupidly I’d also managed to schedule an afternoon doctor’s appointment on this very same f*ing day, with limited room to maneuver or adapt and basically had to go into the city just to get to that appointment later on) – I finally had a chance to get a cup of coffee. It was almost 11:00 by that point, and I was developing a splitting (caffeine) headache, on top of my usual headache. Fuuuuuuuck. Still, 4 shots of espresso shaken with ice goes a long way toward dealing with a caffeine headache. My blood sugar was dipping by the time I reached the office, and I was a seething mess of vague fury and aggravation that extended well beyond any association with the day’s events thus far. I mostly managed to avoid snarling at any hapless humans to cross my path, and got logged in and head-down in the spreadsheets with a quickness. Maybe that’ll be enough?

…It wasn’t, really…

Breathe. Exhale. Relax. Try to remember this shit isn’t personal, it’s just random human bullshit and temper. Let it go. Let it go. Let. It. Go. It’s hard sometimes. I wanted to enjoy that feeling of pride in my work and that sense of accomplishment, and savor a job well done. I didn’t get to do that, even a little bit, and it was less because my Traveling Partner was irked over my loud talking so much as how much it stung to hear about it right then. Like it or not, generally the things my partner has to say just “hit my consciousness harder” – regardless how meaningful, significant, trivial, urgent, heartfelt, or true (or the opposites of any of those things) they may happen to be. The smallest moment of irritation from him is enough to sadden me for at least a moment, and even more so (and for longer) when it’s legit something I’ve done or not done, or something I’ve fucked up for him. That’s a fucking mess right there, I get it. Not super healthy – but refusing to acknowledge my baggage on this doesn’t let me unpack that baggage. The way out is through. So I put myself through the exercise of reflecting on it, asking some hard questions of myself, and weeding out my bullshit from what matters most.

Once I had a minute to think about things more clearly (after some coffee, after some calories), I realized I could not realistically work efficiently and complete the tasks I had in front of me, and also go to that afternoon appointment that was scheduled for a in-office visit (could have maybe made it work for a virtual appointment). So I canceled and requested a reschedule. I tried like hell to pick a date that wasn’t already scheduled for some other appointment (mine or my Traveling Partner’s), and tried to pick a week that wasn’t so overloaded with obvious meetings and calendared workload that it would be a poor fit in general. Once I’d done so, a lot of the stress was gone (although I also miss doing this appointment, which is already overdue).

…You know what wasn’t gone? My shitty mood. I keep finding myself on the edge of tears, and it’s 100% fragility and bullshit and I’m as annoyed with myself over that as over any other detail of the day so far. I think what gets me most about the “emotional rug-pull” as an experience, is how poorly I’m able to bounce back from one of these, and how fucking common they are for me personally. Like… my implicit sense of things is that “the better I am feeling in a given moment, the more likely an emotional rug-pull from some source will be”. The common factor isn’t at all where that might come from, and 100% is simply “me”. I feel relatively confident that both the high likelihood of an emotional rug-pull developing, and how hard it is to bounce back, are “me things”. This stings. Like, a lot. I mean, on the one hand, if it’s me – surely I can work on that, yeah? …My results vary. I keep practicing practices. I keep working on building emotional resilience – and counting on it. I keep failing in this very specific peculiar way (that is not at all unique to me). Frustrating. I stay angry because I’m angry at myself as much as anything else. Angry that it matters enough to fuck with me like this. Angry that “my results vary” as I work to sort this out, over time. Angry, even, that “people” don’t bother to just reality check the likely outcome of sharing negative feedback with others to maybe, just maybe, avoid wrecking a lovely moment. (Note: that’s definitely too much to ask of human beings generally; we are centered in our own experience much of the time, and how the hell would a person even determine reliably how someone else is feeling without asking first, which would become a completely different conversation?)

A lot of people with trauma histories struggle with the “emotional rug-pull” and with a sense of “waiting for the other shoe to drop” any time things seem to be going well. That’s a thing to work on… it’s not easy, and it takes a ton of practice (and many practices). It gets better. It’s not as bad as it once was (for me), I just still deal with it, and when I do it still reliably sucks, and I definitely don’t like the experience at all, nor do I find any value in it. It’s just a shard of chaos and damage – a metaphorical splinter in my paw that I’d like to figure out how to remove.

I take another breath and refrain from having still more coffee (there’d be comfort in that, but also caffeine, and I’ve had mine for the day). I open a bottle of water. I make an effort to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, anger, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, Despair, forgiveness, Free Will, Frustration, grief, health, Healthy Living, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, winter, women

Savoring the Good Moments

January 21, 2024 //
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I’m sitting at a trailhead on a Sunday morning before daybreak, waiting for the sun and sipping an iced coffee. It’s a chilly morning but not freezing, and I am warmly dressed, suitable for the weather. There’s a steady misty drizzle falling, but not the sort of rain to keep me off the trail this morning. I feel satisfied, calm, and content. Perhaps even happy.

I sit with this feeling, sipping my coffee and listening to the traffic as the occasional car goes by. At least for now, there’s nothing more important to do than to savor this moment.

Yesterday began well, and was quite a lovely day throughout. I hung out with my Traveling Partner. We watched movies and shared the day gently. I didn’t really get much done and ended up completely forgetting about the laundry I had started. The thing is, though, the laundry is less important than the time we spend together, and I definitely needed the restful day. Win, all around, really, especially if I don’t punish myself for “slacking off”, which I have not.

…Maybe I’ve grown? 😁

I sit, relaxed and ready, contemplating the value in savoring the small pleasures in life, and the gentle moments of joy. It’s made a huge difference for me, this one simple practice.

“Additive” changes tend to be easier to make (for me). Learning to make a specific point of also “wallowing” in the good moments – even ridiculously small pleasant moments of no consequence – has done so much more, so much faster, to improve my sense of the quality and character of my very human life. It’s been one of the most profound (and positive) changes I have made to the way I face life. It’s hard to overstate how useful this has been.

It’s easy to the point of being default behavior to wallow in a moment of pain, misery, or aggravation, which tends to blow it out of proportion in my implicit memory of my experience, generally. Doing so, over time, creates a fairly profound sense that “life sucks” more commonly and deeply than it truly does. For years I struggled to “not do that” without understanding that a “subtractive” change of behavior like that can be incredibly difficult to make.

If you’re just generally feeling miserable and as if that is always the way of it, I definitely recommend savoring the smallest of pleasant moments as a regular practice; it can do a lot to open your eyes to how common those are. 😁 Over time, doing so has so much potential to thoroughly change how life feels, generally.

Daybreak has come and the trail is clear in the dim blue-gray early morning light. I smile and finish my iced coffee. It’s time to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, Despair, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, inspiration, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, The Art of Being, winter

Long-Term Consequences

January 15, 2024 //
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Many many years ago, in what now feels like an altogether different life, lived as if by an entirely different person, I made a choice to “save my own life” through extreme means (in that moment). My ex-husband was coming after me with a very large knife, in a small apartment in Germany. The front door was locked from the inside, and I could not open that door to escape down the stairwell. I dashed to the patio, barely ahead of him, and rolled over the balcony rail. He reached me as I dangled there in that moment between actions, and his face wore a look of astonishment and alarm, “Don’t!” he demanded urgently. “I have to,” I said quietly, and then I let go.

I hit the slick paved patio below quite hard. My ears rang, I felt something snap. I “saw” an explosion of lights behind closed eyes. I felt nauseatingly dizzy. I saw him looking down, then retreating from the balcony rail quickly – I knew he was on his way and I panicked. I jumped up from the pavement, disregarding all sensations, and climbed a fence and a hedge to get to the nearest neighbor whose lights were on. I couldn’t remember a word of German in that moment other than “polizei”, and so that’s who they called. The police arrived, locked and loaded, and told the neighbors (whose English was better than my German) that an ambulance from the American hospital had been called. The police went after my ex husband, and once they found him he was arrested.

When the ambulance arrived, the medics quickly determined I’d likely broken my back (and there I was sitting upright in a lawn chair, flexing my spine uncomfortably and commenting that I could not figure out why I was so “uncomfortable” – I didn’t understand that I was in shock). They insisted I be still. They put me on a back board, and on a stretcher, and rushed me to the ER. I wasn’t there long, barely long enough for X-rays, and for the Military Police investigators to arrive to interview me, while the doctor reminded them that I was heavily medicated and badly injured, and to keep their questions to a minimum. A helicopter arrived, and I was medevacked to the big regional Army hospital to the north, where there was a larger team more capable of treating spinal injuries. That was when I realized I was actually badly injured. The flight was short, and the strange air mattress they had me on was more comfortable than the back board or the hospital bed. When we arrived at the big hospital ER, they went to take me off that air mattress (I guess it belonged with the helicopter) and I cried and pleaded that they please let me stay on it. I still didn’t know “how bad it was” (or wasn’t) and I was starting to feel pain, again.

…It was pretty bad. My back was broken in two places, a spinous process from one smashed vertebrae had gotten shoved into my spinal canal, and I had a concussion and a broken wrist. I’d be in that hospital for a couple of months after 16+ continuous hours of surgery to fuse the damaged vertebrae and install bizarre and uncomfortable hardware to hold those surgical sites still while healing happened. (A year later, that hardware would all come out… except for a ferrous surgical wire that to this day prevents me having an MRI; the wire was woven through the fusion to hold things together.) I’ve got a long scar down my spine, a visible reminder, and an uglier, shorter one on my left hip where the bone grafts were taken to build my fusion. I don’t care about the scars; I lived. I’m still walking.

Funny thing about all of this; the longer term consequences were not within view. I had no idea that I would struggle to form healthy attachments or build trust with lovers, possibly ever again. I didn’t know that the nightmares would plague me for decades to come – some to do with the domestic violence, some to do with the medical terror of the surgery itself, during which the medical team had to wake me up to verify that I was responding to stimuli. There have been few things more openly terrifying in my life than being awake during spinal surgery, intubated, on life support, surgical incisions open, and being asked questions that required answers. There have been other consequences… the pain of my arthritis reminds me regularly of the choice I made. A choice to live, sure, but also… a choice that came with profound consequences. I paid a high price for this life of mine.

I pause for a moment to reflect on the value of a life. This life. My life. The choice I made to keep it, to trudge on, to try again, reaches so far back beyond that despairing moment in 2013 when I thought to abandon it. It has been a worthy journey, consequences and all. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it’s easy.

…Some nights I still have nightmares. Some mornings I still wake up in pain. When I look back, though, I don’t regret that terrible lonely desperate choice to let go of a balcony rail and fall to my… freedom. Some choices just extract a big price. It’s a question I think few of us ask or answer before we choose; will the price be worth it? It’s hard to know, isn’t it? It’s probably worth wondering, for at least a moment… but there’s no map on this journey. We’re each walking our own hard mile.

Choose your adventure. Pay your price. Begin again. The journey is the destination.

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Categories Allegories, anger, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, Despair, forgiveness, Free Will, gratitude, health, Healthy Living, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Art of Being, winter, women

Just Saying

January 12, 2024 //
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However bad it feels in some one moment… it’ll pass. If you let it pass. Give yourself that chance. Take care of that fragile vessel. Have a cup of coffee (or tea), or a drink of water. Take a shower. Breathe. Go for a walk. Listen to the wind. Get some fresh air. Listen to some music…

…This one hit me in a special way the other day, and it’s lingered since then… particularly this bit:

Oh no, love, you’re not alone
You’re watching yourself but you’re too unfair
You got your head all tangled up
But if I can only make you care
Oh no, love, you’re not alone
No matter what or who you’ve been
No matter when or where you’ve seen
All the knives seem to lacerate your brain
I’ve had my share, now I’ll help you with the pain
You’re not alone

“Rock-n-Roll Suicide”, David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust 1972

I must have worn that album out in half a dozen different formats over the years… lost it… come back to it. It lives on in my memory. I know the words by heart, but can’t sing the tune (human limitations being what they are, I’m no David Bowie! LOL).

Sure, sure, we’re each having our own experience. Fuck that can feel so lonely sometimes, right? But… we’re also “all in this together” – humans being human, stranded on this one mudball hurtling through space, together. So fragile. So… amazing.

I smile quietly to myself and reflect on that much younger woman in the mirror… so damaged and cynical and angry. There were still so many tears ahead, too… I’m not sure I could have endured that had I known what was to come, but the lived moments have passed pretty fucking quickly in all their complexity and beauty and sorrow and love. It’s been a complex and interesting journey so far… and I’m not alone. Here we all are, eh?

I sip my coffee and watch the clouds beyond the window as daybreak arrives and becomes dawn. There’s Winter weather in the forecast and perhaps I’ll be stuck at home for the weekend because of it, but… maybe not? Like anything else to do with the future, it’s an open question. There are a whole lot of possibilities that may – or may not – unfold. I’m feeling philosophical about that, and peculiarly, intensely, grateful that I stuck around to find out, and let the future unfold.

…You’re not alone. Give yourself a minute, and a bit of care. Let the tears fall. Begin again.

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Categories Allegories, breathe, Despair, forgiveness, Free Will, gratitude, grief, loneliness, Love, meditation, Moments, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, The Art of Being, War and News of War, winter, Words

Sour Milk

January 8, 2024 //
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I sat down with my coffee to write a few words, after a restless, interrupted night’s sleep (I woke several times, though I only got up twice, quite briefly), and a somewhat tense commute. Humans being human. I started with “No Good-Guys” as my working title, because I started my day already disappointed in humanity. Mine. Everyone else’s. Just… yeah. All kinds of annoyance with the fundamentals of people doing the things people do. I mean, ffs, even children don’t get a pass (a six year old shoots a teacher?! a 10-year old shoots a friend over a bicycle race?? what the hell?) – the world feels very messy, chaotic, and whether I view the world through the lens of the media reporting, or simply my own day-to-day experience of self and others… it’s not looking good. I’m disappointed and vexed by both the circumstances that find me feeling this way, and the feeling itself.

…Emotions are not reality, I remind myself, the map is not the world…

I breathe, exhale, relax – and sip my coffee. What can I do better, myself? Probably a fucking lot. I could do more to communicate more clearly and more gently. I could work harder/more attentively at being a good listener. Good places to start. Probably for 100% of everyone out there, it would at least be a worthy starting point.

I sigh out loud. It breaks the stillness in this quiet morning place. I haven’t lost my interest in living – that’s something, anyway. I sit with my thoughts awhile. I think mostly about love, and how irksome it is that loving well and deeply over time isn’t easier than it seems to be (at least for me, with my hearty helping of chaos and damage, and a lifetime of baggage to deal with). The work involved in being the human being I most want to be, reliably, consistently, skillfully… fucking hell, it’s a lot of work. Sisyphean just about covers it. Every step forward on this path seems followed by some irritating detour or setback, and I find myself harshly judgmental of my efforts and deeply critical of my failures. I could do better there, too.

In a moment of harsh words, my Traveling Partner asked me to “set a better example”, to “model the behavior” I’m asking for, and to “show what that looks like”… which, strangely, caught me by surprise with A) its utter reasonableness and B) how truly difficult that looked in my head when I gave it a moment of thought, later. Yeesh. Fucking human primates – we think we know what we want, but again and again we set ourselves up for failure. We’re not actually all that good at being wise, or being kind, or being consistent, or being nurturing, or being positive, or being supportive, or being open, or… I guess what I’m saying is that this is a difficult journey in spots.

…I find myself asking “am I the bad guy?”, and having to admit that at least sometimes, yeah, I totally am. Well, shit. Okay, then. I guess I’ve got to work on that…

My coffee manages to go cold between the start and end of this fairly brief bit of writing, today. It’s a reflection of how often I stopped to ponder some point at length, and how deeply I am thinking some of this over, although I don’t think I’m really “getting anywhere” – at least not yet. There are more thoughts to think, more practices to practice, more work to be done – the journey is long, and there is no map. I guess I’ve just got to begin again.

Again.

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Categories Allegories, anger, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, Despair, forgiveness, Frustration, gratitude, grief, Healthy Living, inspiration, loneliness, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5, War and News of War, winter, Words
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