Archives for category: grief
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Strange Quiet Morning

April 7, 2014 //
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I woke early, feeling rested and unconcerned. It’s a nice frame of mind to start off in. Still human, though, and within seconds self-doubt, hurt feelings, vague disappointments, and miscellaneous baggage dredged from my waking consciousness was launched at me as a barrage of discontented feelings. Seriously, Brain, was that at all necessary? First thing? Couldn’t wait until after meditation, yoga, a shower, a coffee? A bit less than two years ago, it would have been all that was required to kick-start a shitty morning, filled with misunderstandings, miscommunication, and moodiness. This morning wasn’t that.

Each attempt on my waking mind that my demons made was met, this morning, with the gentle observation “that’s not about me”. One by one the momentary feelings showed how momentary they are, by dissipating and leaving nothing behind as I reminded myself that first this bit of weirdness and suffering, then that one, were simply ‘not about me’. Turns out this is also a nice frame of mind with which to face the earliest bit of morning; taking care of me, comfortably.

The three biggest take-aways in my year+ of studying, so far, have been 1. Mindfulness, 2. Perspective, and now 3. Sufficiency.  Having all three tends to find me feeling contented, balanced, and enjoying my experience. Lacking any one of them and I find myself suffering, volatile, reactive, and often ‘unable to figure things out’.  It’s a pleasant change.  I’m grateful to have stayed around to experience it. 🙂

From this perspective it's all blue skies and spring time...

From this perspective it’s all blue skies and spring time…

It is, however, still a journey, and I still have a long one ahead of me. A lifetime, actually. As beautiful as my experience can be these days…

...looking beneath the surface is revealing.

…looking beneath the surface is revealing.

Even my generally-very-pleasant-mostly-pretty-balanced experience these days isn’t ‘everything there is’ to who I am. There’s more work to do. I am at long last perhaps well enough, whole enough, to face doing it. I am a trauma survivor. I am a domestic violence survivor. I am a rape survivor. I am a war veteran.  These are part of who I am. There was a time when enduring these experiences seemed an endless feature of my emotional landscape, continuously playing out again and again in my emotional background, coloring my here and now whether I was sleeping or awake. I suffered. I endured. I cried. I survived.

That’s an important detail. I’ll say it again. I survived.

So, I’m not without damage. I have some scars, both emotional and physical. Still, here I am. Life, generally, in my here and now is pleasant and comfortable. I find myself on the edge of wellness and faced with a decision… do I stand fast, in this pretty comfortable place – or do I continue to grow, develop, work on me, sort things out, and… do I follow through? That last isn’t so obvious and transparent.  It’s this – although crimes perpetrated against me in the past are likely beyond prosecution now, there’s the matter of military compensation. Do I submit paperwork on my military sexual trauma?  That’s the hard question. A yes answer means committing to telling the tale, on paper, with as much documentation as I can track down. It means being intimate with some very painful moments in my life and learning to be able to discuss them without tears, hysteria, or losing myself in the unpredictable outcome of real rage. I could just sooth myself and look away, couldn’t I? Enjoy where I am now, and let the past go… wherever the past goes. Couldn’t I?

Could I?

I often think the safer choice – emotionally safer – is to let it all go, let it somehow simply cease to be… but as soon as my body begins to relax into the awareness and comfort that I am safe here, now, I feel the awareness of those others, those younger versions of me, still crying in their sleep, still hurting, still so sad. Who takes up their cause? Who seeks redress for them? Who ‘makes it right’, if it can be made right at all, ever? There is no one to advocate for them, but me.  This, then, is ‘about me’, and more about telling the tale, respecting myself, and healing those hurt little girls still lurking in my ‘baggage claim area’, than the paperwork, itself, but it appears the paperwork may be how I get there.

I enjoy how far I have come. I know I have further to go. Today is a good day for a journey. Today is a good day to change the world.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, grief, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Rape, Relationships, Spring, women, Words

Please, Thank you, I’m sorry

March 13, 2014 //
2

Words are powerful. What we say can change our experience. What we hear can change our understanding of the world.  Sometimes words seem insufficient. Sometimes words are so visceral as to become unspeakable. Sometimes sharing the words that describe our pain, our trauma, our suffering, or the horrors we fear in our darkest nights, is more than we can bear to do, however badly we need to hear those words aloud.

A lens, a mirror, a metaphor.

A lens, a mirror, a metaphor.

I went to my appointment yesterday. Words were spoken that I didn’t expect to hear in my own voice, maybe never in my lifetime. I did not know I had the will to speak them. The journey ahead of me is still a long one. I have come so far… there is so much farther to go.

Maybe words are just too much, even now. Letters are enough, more than enough: PTSD, MST, TBI. It’s still not ‘easy’ to talk about some things. It’s getting easier to accept the unspeakable, to give myself compassion, to take a moment to treat myself well.

I do have words for those along the journey who have offered directions, a light in the darkness, a moment of rest, or comfort; “thank you”.  If I’ve hurt you along the way, lashing out in fear and rage and grief without thought, I have words for you, too; “I’m sorry”.

If you are suffering, now, treading water in your unfathomable icy sea of pain and regret and hurt, or considering your own ‘final solution’ to the chaos and damage, just wanting a moment to rest, beyond caring about beginnings and ends, I have words for you, too. “Please.” (That’s the first of them.) “Please, be a survivor, not a victim; don’t let pride, shame or fear make you a statistic. Don’t let trauma win. Ask for help. Talk about it. Use your words. If you’ve got to go down, go down fighting – you matter.”

Ask for the help you need. If you can, you may find the healing you seek.

Dawn.

Dawn.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, grief, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Rape, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Turning 50, Words

Slug Life

February 23, 2014 //
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My work in the garden continues. It’s mostly ‘winter work’; tasks that get the garden started in spring, like pruning, getting beds ready for bulbs, cleaning up this and that, making room for my hopes and dreams, and seeing my vision of the garden come alive as the weather warms and the days grow long. I spend so many gray winter hours leafing through garden catalogs, scribbling on graph paper, asking partners odd questions about colors, forms, scents, and placement. I garden all year long.

Gardening has a lot in common with self-growth. This year I explore so much more of this with my eyes wide open, aware, observing, learning. I’m not going after some illusive standard of perfection; I love having my hands in the soil, connecting with living things, and simply enjoying the timeless wonder and delight of the garden. I have roses, herbs, bulbs, vines, trees, things for sun, things for shade, things that bear fruit, things that fill the air with wonderful fragrance…and two little chairs and a small table. On pleasant days I love to sit with my morning latte as the day unfolds, listening to peeping little frogs, chattering squirrels, the strident cry of the neighborhood hawk, and the songs of assorted little birds. It’s all very ordinary, I suppose, certainly the words don’t tell the tale with any power to really connect to the experience.

There have been years of my life when my garden was the entirety of my fragile hold on sanity. It isn’t fair to make a small plot of earth and a few vegetables and flowers do the heavy lifting involved in keeping me connected to what is good in life, but my garden has been there for me when I needed it, and never failed me. The garden connects me to my Granny, a woman of incredible will, wisdom, and humanity. It connects me to my Dad, too. I have no idea how old I was the first time I pulled weeds in the garden, but the first summer I did so for my Dad was early in 1973, I think. I remember sitting on the recently tilled ground, fretfully crushing clumps of dirt, instead of weeding, when I thought no one was watching – and mumbling about indentured servitude. I wasn’t exactly a fan of manual labor, and preferred the quiet of my room, and the excitement of a good book.  When adulthood hit me with tsunami-force after I joined the Army, it was the gardening that I yearned for, it was the gardening that I sought out for solace, and time and again even my life overseas found me with my hands in soil – potted plants on apartment balconies, tiny window box gardens, or a tree in a pot on a patio.

Seeds, like ideas, begin so small. They sit quietly, without evidence of their future size or usefulness, and wait. They wait for their moment. They wait for conditions to be right. Timeless and impersonal, they are still and small, all potential.  I love planting by seed.

The front garden is nice. Trim and pretty tidy, with a bit of brick path, another bit of slate path curving around the side, some shade, a lot of sun, and the small patch of lawn that is the suburban hallmark of home ownership. I brought in more (and different) roses, colorful wildflowers, pots of herbs, more roses, and feeders for hummingbirds and songbirds.  I love taking a garden space, and seeing it change over time as plants, and ideas, are added.  This spring I started big. Along the brick walk has been a low evergreen hedge of heather, and I like it ‘well enough’ I guess… perhaps not in that location, or maybe not so much of it, or…

Heather. Lovely, evergreen, not what I want in that space.

Heather. Lovely, evergreen, not what I want in that space.

As pretty as it is, it’s rather taking over that space, and just isn’t what I’m looking for in that spot. So… it’s out. I had a plan, before I got going…

Change presents so many opportunities.

Change presents so many opportunities.

In the dim light of dawn, early yesterday, I looked at the bare earth where the heather had been, and I felt just a bit sad for a moment, thinking of the experience of choosing to cull some living thing from a less than ideal circumstance, for lack of aesthetic, usefulness, or quality of character. I thought, too, of the experience of being culled…laid off from a job, fired, divorced, or any number of similar unexpected changes of life that I’ve faced. How easy it can be to take it very personally.

I considered my plan for that garden bed, clearly no longer ‘a hedge’ of any sort at all. I selected flower seeds with care; a variety of colorful California poppies, hybrids and fancy ones, and I chose some dark leafed kale for dense green vegetation – pretty and useful – and planned groupings of gladiolus with their bold colors and ‘reach for the sky’ approach to life. I’m hoping the new plantings are light-hearted and fun, a playful foreground for my Graham Thomas rose in the background. This year he will begin to stretch out in the front bed, reaching for his full size. I enjoyed putting down the earliest seeds in the afternoon…and like a little kid, I’ll check every day for seedlings, even though I know it will be days. 🙂

There is always more to do in the garden. Each year I get started at the end of February, thinking for just a moment “am I starting too soon”? It seems to work out just fine, though, and surely the slugs are already busy… they know spring when they feel it. lol.

Slug life... there's probably a metaphor here.

Slug life… there’s probably a metaphor here.

 

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, gardening, grief, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Parables, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Spring, Words

Life Needs a Caution Sign

January 30, 2014 //
4

Or two, or three, or hell – let’s just pave it into something comfortable, predictable, and mapped, settle into easy contentment, and call it a day?

I had a great day at work, yesterday. Sometimes I have the strange sensation that ‘work life balance’ may actually mean that when things at work suck, things at home are lovely, and of course…the inverse of that would then be true as well. That, thankfully, is fanciful bitterness with struggle, and with the simple ups and downs of life.  We’re each having our own experience. The experiences we have are not all uniformly pleasant, or comfortable. I guess I’ll keep practicing the practices that seem to build a life that is more up than down, more content than not, easier than hard, more pleasant than unpleasant, and see where all that goes.

This morning isn’t my best morning. I woke crying from dreams that contained content ripped from the most difficult moments of the prior evening. It was nearly an hour before my brain would even acknowledge that the evening had ended on a relatively positive note – or at least finished somewhat supportively. My heart feels heavy, and tears are queued up waiting for a reason to spill over. This is one of my least favorite emotional states.

The bottom-line is that I want more than I have in life, in love, emotionally, sexually, even financially (although that one is very low on my list, and exists more to bolster the likelihood of other things I value being attainable).  I think wanting is probably pretty commonplace.  It takes wanting to reach a sense of being without, after all.  I even understand the connection between craving and discontent, and how difficult life can become when we desire only those things that are out of reach, or when we lose sight of the wonders we already have in our life.  I started 2014 knowing that ‘sufficiency’ is a big deal for me, and that ‘contentment’ is an emotional experience I enjoy, and a quality I would like to develop and support.  What I don’t know is where the subtle distinction between genuine contentment and ‘settling’ for something is, and how to recognize it. Is there a difference?

I struggle to communicate with the people nearest to me. Setting boundaries, sharing needs, speaking calmly and explicitly about what I want, what supports my needs over time, being honest about how I feel in the moment, or in general, these are all very difficult for me to begin with. Doing them well is something I find myself working so hard at, and still not succeeding with any reliability. At least, if I am succeeding, the outcome is incredibly unpleasant much of the time. This morning I woke wishing I could just stop talking at all. No more words. No speaking. No writing. No.More.Words.  I seem to have a gift for saying too much, or phrasing something in the worst possible way.  I rarely feel actually understood, or even heard. (It makes it so much ‘worse’ that there was a time and a relationship in which I did feel understood and heard, making it something possible in life that I just don’t have now.)

This morning I have a lingering feeling that the things that matter most to me are simply things I can’t have, or will experience only very rarely. I want very much for that to just be okay, if it is true. If it isn’t true, I’d like that emotional cocktail to just go away. I would like to have a better understanding of ‘sufficiency’. Enough. What is ‘enough’. How to I get that? I have the nagging suspicion that even intimacy is easier/better when approached mindfully… but I’m not sure I ‘get’ how to approach it at all. I suspect I may not have correctly labeled whatever the hell I think the experience of intimacy feels like, and am chasing an unknown experience, or ‘shooting at the wrong target’.

I am grouchy and things suck this morning. I am very human, and even though my intellect politely reminds me that ‘this is a construct of your own thinking and you can choose differently’ and my recently-more-mindful-and-learning-more-all-the-time heart tells me ‘this too shall pass’, I’m hurting now, and it is hard to stop picking at it. Soon I’ll head to work, and the process of getting there will distract me for a time, and maybe it will be forgotten when I head home tonight?

Right now is right now. Right now I feel like giving up. I’m frustrated, hormonal, and cross. I spent the night with my fears and nightmares and woke feeling sad, tired, and crying. Right now is harder than it has to be, and right now I’m struggling. This too – quite inevitably – shall pass. Time runs out, moves on, and brings change. So. Yeah. (I hear myself laugh out loud, it sounds a little worn down and bitter, and I think about how lovely yesterday was – that passed, didn’t it? Yep. So…this will as well.)

Some lovely pictures from yesterday…

We can build serenity.

We can build serenity.

No matter how much I am hurting in the moment, there is more to life and the world than my pain.

No matter how much I am hurting in the moment, there is more to life and the world than my pain.

Things can seem so complicated and overwhelming...

Things can seem so complicated and overwhelming…

Getting right up close doesn't always simplify our view of things.

Getting right up close doesn’t always simplify our view of things.

I am grateful that my experience this morning is largely subjective and a construct of my brain. I can find my way to something different. Compassion first, then, this morning? I pause with a certain surprise to realize that as I typed those words, my internal critic was hurling invective at me, launching emotional weaponry, and rallying my demons… I’m not always fully aware of the nasty bits and pieces of old hurts and old programming ‘going live’ to defend themselves in the background. Grim. Definitely compassion first…well… sort of first. Okay, not even a little bit first – that would have been a more positive start. Still human. I tested me. lol

Compassion, then, this morning – now that I see how much I need it.

Today, I am human. Today I face my hurts with self-compassion, and my certainty that emotional states rely on choices, too, however inevitable or permanent they feel in the moment. Today I change the world.

 

 

 

 

 

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, grief, Love, Menopause, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, women, Words

3:00 a.m.

January 7, 2014 //
2

Yesterday was a weird and difficult day that followed on the heels of a strangely drawn out night. Drama. Grief. Stress. Turmoil. Doubt. Anger. Pain. Hurt. Insecurity. Sorrow. Words. Moments.

Somewhere else, in the distance.

Somewhere near, in the distance. 3:00 a.m.

Sometime minutes after 3:00 a.m. I found myself walking (again), just trying to breathe. I’m nursing an injured knee; I didn’t care, or feel it. My arthritis is giving me major grief; I didn’t notice or attend to it. Life, in general, is quite good; I could not feel it or connect with what feels good in my experience. My PTSD was in the driver’s seat. I had been pwnd by the chaos and damage within. I walked until past 4:00 a.m.  I was up at 1:00 am, and I never slept again that night, until after dawn’s terse reminder that the day had begun in earnest, and even then the short disturbed hours of sleep I snatched from the day were dark and troubled and hardly worth the bother – certainly not ‘restful’.

I saw it coming early the evening before. That’s pretty new, but falling short of useful. I ‘fired a warning shot’ by verbally alerting my loved ones that I was at risk, but my effort was insufficient to halt the emotional freight train. In the moment, everyone having their own experience, each fully invested in their own needs-of-the-moment, my warning was both disregarded, and just not important to anyone but me. It was one of those “I hear you, but” moments. (Note to the reader, my own perspective built on experience, is that when someone I am in an emotional dialogue with says “I hear you, but…” they are not only not actively listening, they did not actually hear what they said they just heard, because the entirety of their focus is on what they are about to say.)

My OPD (Other People’s Drama) flared up ahead of my PTSD.  A wiser woman would have shaken her head in dismay, given hugs all around, perhaps said something wise about self-restraint, open dialogue, compassion, disappointment, and regrets – then walked the fuck away! I am not yet that wiser woman. I failed to take care of myself by making an attempt to ‘be in the moment’ to ‘be supportive’ to people who matter to me. It was a choice that resulted, for me, in a loss of emotional balance, the exhaustion of my own emotional reserves, disruption of good sleep practices, terrible nightmares, a lot of time spent soaking in powerful emotions like despair, sorrow, anger, resentment, fear… (and much, much more! Call now!)

When my symptoms did finally flare up beyond what I could manage through force of will, I was in familiar, bleak, territory. I walked. A lot. I cried. A lot. I shook quietly trying to force myself to go through the motions of simple conversations. I made notes on pieces of paper to remind myself to attend to simple tasks like brushing my hair, my teeth, showering…(I wrote the same reminders on my calendar, on my gadgets, devices, apps…but as is often the case, I avoided handling delicate devices (and power tools!) because my unsteady hands, and uncertain temperament, can be unexpectedly disabling.) Habits built over a life time to cope with the emotional wreckage. I went through the motions of every day things. Meals. Chores. Taking down holiday decor. I got through the day. Day became evening, and evening became night. I forced the shadow of myself through the motions of a mostly ordinary day hoping to avoid having the experience linger into the next and dropped into an exhausted surrendered sleep at a pretty routine time. It doesn’t always work, but I find myself more hopeful more often these days, open to successes, and less likely to count on failures.

Yesterday. Not pretty. Shall we move right along, then?

Here it is today. I woke at 6:00 a.m. drenched in sweat, but just hormones, not nightmares, and I felt rested and calm. When I realized I was awake, anxiety began to surge with memories of yesterday. Then I remembered; that was yesterday. Today is an entirely new experience. The feeling of relief that washed over me was motivation to rise and do my morning yoga sequence, and the stiffness and pain in my back eased as I moved through the poses. Each breath brought me closer to a real smile.  The anxiety receded. The new day begins.

I spent unmeasured time meditating after my yoga, before my coffee, and on the tail end of that I took a moment to focus my awareness on my loves, each as individuals, the beings they are rather than who I would like them to be.  I took a  moment to appreciate their best qualities, to feel fondness and gratitude for the joys we share, to feel compassion for their struggles with their own unique challenges as beings, as well as those challenges we share as humans and as lovers, a few moments to breath, to love, to recognize and be whole and well with myself as an individual being on my own terms.

Will today ‘be different’? How can it not? It’s a different day. Still, there are choices to be made – and some of them are mine, even when the struggle of the moment isn’t. Understanding there are choices to be made is a good step. Making better choices in the moment is an entirely other challenge of its own and one I expect to work on as a lifelong endeavor.

So…here it is a new day, and I’m starting it with a good night’s sleep behind me, a great coffee on the side table, a smile, and a few choice words. A nice start. I hope to make good choices today, that meet my needs over time. Today, I will spend the day building. Today, I will change the world.

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