Archives for category: Frustration
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Walking My Own Mile Over Here

May 11, 2018 //
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It’s too early in the morning. I woke up about an hour ago, at 2:30 am. I feel rested. It makes sense, I went to bed around 7:00 pm, too tired and sleepy to stay up any longer. Is it the consequence of wholly disrupting my routine(s) with a near-continuous-party weekend – or am I still getting over the last bit of contagion that smacked me down some weeks ago? The lingering dry cough suggests it might be that… or maybe seasonal allergies.

I smirk at myself for a moment to contemplate that I spend a great deal of time, these days, in the one part of the country I fully know causes me to have Spring allergy symptoms, of all the places I have ever lived or traveled – southern Oregon. LOL Hell, I’m contemplating retiring there. The thought has me straight up laughing literally out loud… and coughing… but I’m not there right now, so… it’s probably not allergies. Sick again? Still?

Does any of that matter beyond making sure I am able to skillfully care for myself?

This is poison oak. An important part of self-care is recognizing common hazards. Just saying; know poison oak when you see it.

Symptoms of OPD (Other People’s Drama) swirl around my experience without becoming directly part of it. I dislike drama enough to create a very nearly entirely drama-free lifestyle, somewhat at odds with the approach many people take, which is to bitch about drama without doing anything much to stop it, minimize it, or to set boundaries about it. I don’t really understand that. I’ll just be over here, doing my thing, my way.

I sip my coffee and contemplate the weekend to come. I’ll be here at my place, working on feeling more at home in my own space, and being committed more willfully to the path in front of me, myself, and this journey I am on. Does that sound “selfish”? I guess it could be called that; I am living my life. This one. The one I live myself. It is, unavoidably, my own. I’ll get some housework done. Spend some time in the studio, painting. Maybe get a nice hike in – the weather looks like it will be good for it.

I think about my Traveling Partner. I wonder how he is doing. I think about the upheaval in his day-to-day experience, and wonder at his ability to roll with so much change, so regularly. I doubt that I would be able to easily accommodate that amount of chaos in my own experience (these days), and chuckle to recall that I was once the most chaotic element of his experience. Tons of people in my social network live with far more chaos and turmoil than I choose for myself. I don’t really understand the choice to do so, but I’ve only understood it as a matter of choice, myself, for a relatively short while (a handful of years, during which I have been choosing differently, most of the time). It’s a challenging change of thinking to accept that we choose our experience. It is a change that requires practice. Much of the time, a great deal of what we endure, of what we suffer, of what we experience daily is entirely self-selected; we not only chose it for ourselves, we set that shit up with great care. We worked at it.

…Or… We did not specifically work at creating something different. There’s that. Either way; there are verbs involved.

We become what we practice. We live the life we choose (and build) for ourselves. There is so much power in that awareness, so much opportunity to change, and grow, and become the person we most want to be… but. We are each walking our own mile. It’s a very individual experience we’re all having, alone, together. Can you do a better job of it? I can’t answer that for you; I only know I can. It just takes practice(s).

Who do you most want to be? What are you doing to become that person, authentically? Where will your journey take you? I don’t have answers to those questions; I’m over here walking my own mile. 😉

It’s time to begin again.

 

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Categories Allegories, Brain Injury, Free Will, Frustration, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Roses, Sleepless Nights, Spring, The Art of Being

It’s a Daunting List

May 9, 2018 //
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I am sipping my coffee, feeling well-rested, and contemplating the weeks ahead. I’ve got a couple weekends here at home, and a rather lengthy list of “shit to get done” – mostly stuff that’s fallen a bit behind because I spend so many weekends away, these days. It’s basic housekeeping stuff: a handful of “still haven’t finished moving in” sorts of things, some common enough household repairs I can easily handle myself, and some overdue errands… real life, in list form. The list has grown long.

I’ve been enjoying life, without regret, and without allowing the list to get in the way. It’s all stuff that does need to get done, though. I’ve got a couple weekends ahead with which to do it (I am clearly not getting much of it done in the evenings after work). I find myself thinking sternly that it is time to find a proper balance between relaxing and finding chill space, contentment, and a drama free zone… and getting shit done. lol

I listen to the birds singing as day begins to break on the slim slice of horizon I see beyond my studio window. Physical limitations are hard to argue with. Cognitive limitations are hard to argue with. Shit still needs to get done. Every. Damned. Day. It’s only Wednesday morning, but since I returned home Sunday afternoon, I’ve managed to use every glass in the place – and I know this, because they are all neatly lined up on the kitchen counter, above the dishwasher, which is full of clean dishes that need to be put away (from Thursday morning)… except glasses, which I have removed from the dishwasher one by one, to use, then placed neatly on the counter. Omg – am I fucking kidding me??? Not okay. lol

I breathe. Relax. Feel my shoulders drop back down where they belong, after having crept upwards with tension, as I considered the dishes that desperately want doing. I dislike dirty dishes on this whole other “I will have a motherfucking breakdown if this shit does not change!!” sort of level – it’s been an issue for many years. Doesn’t matter that it’s me leaving the mess behind (that may make it matter more, actually) – it just needs to be handled. So human. I don’t think that is really going to change.

I smile and turn the page on my lengthy list of things to get done; it’s grown quite long over weeks and months, and it has become a source of frustration more than a list. So. I turn the page, and I begin again. A literal new list, a list for right now, and that lists some low-hanging fruit, and things that matter most. A list for evenings after work, leading up to this next, one, weekend. Only that. This is a less daunting list, already, and I find myself rather strangely already more motivated to get started.

…I can do the dishes before I head to the office this morning.

It’s time to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Frustration, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, Parables, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Spring, The Art of Being

It’s Not a “Cure”

May 8, 2018 //
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Yesterday was rough. Well… no. Sort of. Not really. Well… not entirely. Just there at the end.

It was a great Monday in most respects, actually, and I was looking forward to my afternoon appointment with my therapist (really just a “check-in & catch up” sort of thing, and very much worth looking forward to). Hell, I even got there without any real inconvenience, and found a great parking spot, right away, (in a terrible neighborhood for parking). So far so good.

We sat down together and I started talking. I talked until I was hoarse. The words just kept coming. The clock ran out on our time. (Those hours always seem so much shorter than any other hours on the clock. lol) I left my therapist’s office, and stepped out into the pleasant warmth of a sunny spring afternoon… and into a wall of anxiety. Fuuuuuuuuck. Breeeeathe. Breathe-breathe-breathe-breathe-breathe. Shit. Damn it. I sit for a moment in the car, but this doesn’t much help my anxiety, roasting myself in the heat of the sun-baked car interior, with cars turning the block at regular intervals, seeing me sitting there, and waiting for a moment, hopefully, then driving on looking aggravated. Nope. Not helpful.

I set my GPS to take me home. It wants me to take the freeway – it’s 2 minutes faster than not taking the fucking freeway. I don’t want to deal with rush hour traffic on the freeway, and I’m pretty certain my GPS is being rather optimistic about the drive-ability of that route. I attempt to set my GPS for “no highways” – and can’t find the options. Damn it. I’m started to feel frustrated and rage-y. I’m also already driving. I half follow/half fight my GPS, which is generally a poor choice. Being aware of this frustrates me further, and I finally just shut it off and begin following side streets in the general direction of “east” based on the compass display on the rear view mirror (true thing, works okay-ish-ly), until I reach a fairly direct, more or less major thoroughfare that isn’t a highway, that will also get me home. In fact, after about 20 minutes of struggling with the GPS, I am, actually, on my regular route, some distance down the road from my typical starting point. lol Because my GPS has a human voice, I lecture it sternly about how dissatisfied I am with the experience of the day, crossly noting “I can do a better job of finding my way, generally, without your fucking “help” you bullshit piece of machinery”. I even feel a moment of awkward disappointment with myself to find myself willing to be so callous and cruel-of-tone; it was probably doing its best, more or less.

I am irritated with devices and technology when I finally arrive home, a bit later than usual. I dither awhile, still awash in anxiety and frustration, and feeling also… incredibly tired.

“Baby Love”, a favorite rose in my garden, and a moment of contentment and joy.

Meditation doesn’t ease my anxiety much. Still tired, too. Some dinner? Still anxious. A pleasant, cooling shower? Still anxious. I start going down the list of good basic self-care practices… finally noticing it is 7:00 pm, or a little after. Fuck it. I decide to yield to fatigue and just go to bed, after spending a few minutes in the evening sunlight. Oregon’s winters are sort of long and drizzly and gray. So is Spring. So, too, is Autumn. Vitamin D, precious warming healthy sunlight is a treat in this climate; I linger on the deck, appreciating the first roses blooming, and enjoying the sun. It feels nice. I begin to really relax. My thoughts begin to untangle themselves from the anxiety. Anxiety is a liar. It teases and irritates my consciousness with a very hostile, fearful, view of what may be, and generally with no real basis in fact. It is a poor framework for thought. As the anxiety recedes, my thoughts become more ordered, more useful, and begin to the take the form of plans to get things done that were nagging at me in the background. There are dishes in my sink. Enough to stoke my anxiety by itself, easily remedied on the way to bed, so I am not bothered by them in the morning.

All these practices help. Therapy helps. Taking better care of myself helps. I still have a brain injury – and no amount of meditation changes that. My c-PTSD is still a very real thing – all the practicing of practices I can think to practice doesn’t change a traumatic, haunting, past. There is no “cure” – there is improvement over time. A lot of that. Enough of that to almost feel like… yeah. Hopeful. Positive. Whole. Strong. Contented. All of that and more. Still not a “cure”, and I still have to deal with some shit sometimes… but don’t we all? Incremental change over time is still a thing, and I can still count on it, and it’s still so much better now than it ever was before. Resilience is about bouncing back.

I knew this morning I could so easily begin again. 🙂 I think I’ll do that. It feels good to be so sure I can. 🙂

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Frustration, Healthy Living, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Spring, The Art of Being

Every Damned One of All the Things

May 3, 2018 //
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Which matters more, skillful self-care or following through on plans? Or, how about this one, is keeping regular hours more important than “being there” for a friend? Or, what about “work life balance” – is the work more important than the life? Is the income more important than the quality of the experience? Is it more necessary to be a skillful emotionally self-sufficient adult, or to hold on to a child-like sense of wonder, whimsy, and joy?

Here’s a thought; maybe stop trying to divide every damned thing neatly into two clear choices? Life does not actually exist in that form in any common way. We have immense power over our own experience, through our choices, and life’s menu is far more vast than any one false dichotomy.

Yes – good self-care really matters. When I don’t care for myself skillfully (nutrition meals, appropriate caloric intake, good sleep hygiene, getting enough exercise, taking prescribed medication on time as directed, following a strict meditation practice, and generally treating myself as someone who matters to me), my world and my experience of life slowly begins to degrade over time, until my quality of life overall suffers, and I am not the person I most want to be.

Yes – following through on commitments matter. We count on each other as a community. Our shared strength far exceeds our individual strengths. Planning and following through allows us all to level up based on shared strengths.

Yes – work/life balance matters; when we work for pay, what we “earn” is a direct conversion of our life force into spendable currency that we need to meet other obligations and care for ourselves, but it also comes at the cost of giving up precious limited life time, life force, and individual resources. Clearly, there needs to be a balance, and most likely that balance should favor us as individuals, rather than our employers, generally. Or so it seems to me. We are not machinery.

Yes – learning to adult skillfully takes a lot of the strain out of adulting at all. If we can’t adult for ourselves, more than likely we’ve pushed that burden off onto someone else, who is now having to be the grown up in the room for more than one person. Be your own boss. Be your own grown up. Be the person you most want to be.

Yes – child-like wonder, a sense of whimsy and fun, a playful nature, and the willingness to let go a little, and to enjoy life, are delicious additions to a generally adult experience of life. I highly recommend it – but perhaps not the expense of the adulting basics necessary to keep one’s shit together appropriately day-to-day. <shrugs> I don’t know. Do you.

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not a choice between two things. That’s a gross over-simplification of how real life works for real people in a real world; it’s so much more complicated than that, so much richer. Choices. Subtlety. Nuance. All the things.

I know. It sounds like a lot to deal with, and it is so easy to become overwhelmed. Narrowing things down to two clear choices seems so much easier – but that’s an illusion. It’s a game we made up that doesn’t really work very well, due to overlooking all the many other choices beyond just whatever to we’ve decided to admit exist in the moment. Mix and match. Choose your adventure. Allow yourself the freedom to look at the whole menu, don’t just sit down to life’s table and fall back on some shortcut for efficiency’s sake – this is your fucking life!! Live it.

Should I go to the store for windshield washer fluid at the end of a long work day – because I do need it – or should I “just skip it” because I am tired? Well, come on now, there are clearly more choices, right? I could… pick it up on the morning from the gas station down the street on my way. I could order it online and have it delivered, and hope that I don’t really need it sooner than that. I could make some homemade from ingredients on hand. So… yeah. More than two choices, by far. This is true of most experiences. Give yourself a chance to consider more than two choices. Yes, and even consider choices that you, perhaps, see as “not really an option”; you may be filtering out more than you realize.

False dichotomies are everywhere in our thinking. Advertising is practically built on them. Politics, too. It’s a lot of bullshit, frankly, and we can do better. That is also a choice. Are you ready to choose differently? Are you ready to begin again?

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Frustration, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Spring, The Art of Being

Awake for No Reason

April 30, 2018 //
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I’m awake. I don’t mean to be. I woke at 1:10 a.m. A great many of my friends would call 1:10 a.m. “evening”, and be unsurprised to be awake at all, and possibly working. For me, 1:10 a.m. on a Monday morning, before the Monday work day, is a less than ideal time to be awake.

I’m not stressing about being awake. This matters. I used to. I’d be awake, worried about getting enough rest, determined to go back to sleep, frustrated to fail to do so… I’d toss and turn, punch pillows into new dimensions of pillow-ness, get up for a drink of water, pace restlessly, sometime even reaching a point of being frustrated to tears about not sleeping as the minutes ticked away. It was fairly horrible. Then, I’d let being aware of having gone without sleep nag at me in the back of my thoughts all day, and yield to being cross about that in all my interactions with other people, too, until I finally went home at the end of a predictably shitty day. Yep. Thoroughly horrible. What a vile way to treat myself.

Why would I make those choices?? It took awhile to learn I was making choices, and that I had other choices available to make, if I cared to explore them.

It’s rare to find myself writing in the wee hours, these days. I woke and just wasn’t returning to sleep, and being disinclined to stress about that, at some point I got up for some meditation. Still not finding myself at all sleepy, and not interested in putting any effort into troubleshooting that, I chose between reading for a little while and checking to see if my Traveling Partner was awake. It was a nice opportunity to exchange a few words pleasantly. 🙂 Then… I was sitting here… so…

The nicest part of this nocturnal adventure has been that as I’ve gotten nearer to this end bit here (you knew it would come eventually), I’ve become quite sleepy, and will head back to bed soon to finish the night. Convenient, and no stress. (I’d have been fine with it, if I hadn’t been able to return to sleep; I’d have started painting. No bad outcome.)

…Oh, wait, did I not say? This one’s about non-attachment, actually. Choices too, but one of those is the choice to let go of being stuck on whether or not sleep is attainable. I mean. Yeah – it’s that. Stop having it be so much the thing. If I can’t sleep, I let myself be okay with that as just … real. I find that once I’m not so attached to the outcome, I can act willfully – and in this particular case, that’ll mean going back to sleep. Sometimes it doesn’t. (My results vary.) By being okay with that too, I don’t endure the further stress of frustration. Not surprisingly, this resulted in being, generally, sleepless less often, for less time.

…I think I’ll try that sleeping thing again. 🙂

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Frustration, Healthy Living, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Spring, The Art of Being
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