Archives for category: grief
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Learning to Suck More Skillfully

July 28, 2013 //
1

Oh, I know, hugely misleading subject line, if I got your attention and you think I’m going to talk about sex. 😦  Cuz…um…I’m not. Nope. Different sort of sucking.

i suck at making my needs understood. Even when I think I have expressed myself simply, clearly – and even in the face of seeming to have understanding and affirmation from others, I regularly find myself facing a complete disconnect from what I thought I had expressed and what others later recall or seem to have taken from the conversation. There’s no point being mad at them.  My friends and partners and loved ones are pretty rational people who communicate well with others. I, on the other hand, have a lifetime of struggling to have my needs understood (sometimes by me) or to communicate them clearly… so it has to be me.  If past partners are to be understood, maybe it really ‘always’ is.

It’s not ‘self pity’ – let’s be clear. I’m disappointed. I’m sad. I’m angry – mostly with myself, because I tried so hard to get this fucking ‘taking care of me’ thing right and failed with the sort of unarguable failure that I’ll let myself ‘enjoy’ all day.   I’m still not heard, not understood. Everyone involved simply walked away with their own assumptions. My own efforts at clarifying questions or re-setting expectations, or ‘working it out’ equitably just got me a hearty helping of isolation and being disconnected. Peachy.

I feel sad and frustrated. I thought I had today set to go – a lovely day of mindfulness and domesticity in support of my own needs and the needs of my family. I wasn’t understood. Now I still have a lengthy to-do list – and no joy facing it.  I put so much into this – into communicating my own needs, in communicating what I wanted to provide to support our family… and I completely failed. I failed with real skill, considering I went into it thinking what I had to offer was desirable and advantageous to everyone else. I guess I didn’t understand their needs either. 😦

Well, just fucking delightful. When I suck – I do so with real skill, and by way of overcoming all obvious advantages – like everyone seeming to want the same thing. Bravo, me!

Shit. Happy Sunday. Now what?

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, grief, Menopause, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships

Walls, Mirrors, and Words

July 23, 2013 //
1

It’s been a long day. I’m ending it with a backache, a headache, and quite content to see this one reach its conclusion.  It’s ending well; I don’t want to give a different impression. It’s just been a day that began well, is ending well, and in between…it wasn’t horrible, wasn’t tears or trauma, wasn’t even noteworthy in a way worth noting. It was effort well-spent, small stresses well-managed, tasks completed, begun, and otherwise dispensed with. Satisfying, overall, more or less…I’m just…done. So very done for today.

...finally...evening light.

…finally…evening light.

Funny thing, I suspect the fatigue, perhaps even the pain, stem more from what I’m not doing, than the things I am – or have been – doing today. That ‘conversation with myself’ isn’t going to go away. Taking care of me, and healing, and growing and learning to nurture myself and invest in my own experience, my own needs and giving myself the support and respect I need from myself isn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever undertaken. I’m a handful – the wreckage, the chaos and damage, the ancient pain – it all adds up. Walls built over years keep me out, too.  Introspection easily becomes a sort of mental geodesic dome of fun-house mirrors, reflecting my poor assumptions and bad programming back onto myself again and again, splintering, fracturing, breaking up a momentary understanding into confusion and incoherent half-baked wishful thinking, or worse still, fears and insecurities built on enough of what is real to mislead me into self-loathing, or frustrated rage. I’ve had to find another way.  It’s a journey, not a destination – I’m pretty sure of that, now.

There is still so very little ‘knowing’, and so many questions. I am a student…of life, of love, of truth, of what is…of what is not…of what may be…what isn’t so likely…and bit by bit my firm certainty in the world reveals itself as an illusion, a defense, a sort of camouflage to protect me from the one person I can never ever be saved from. Yep. Me. Her.  Me-at-18, me-at-20, me-at-30… me…then. Let’s not talk about then, shall we?

Mindfulness isn’t about pretending something isn’t. Healing isn’t a score card, and no amount of pretense can will me whole of heart and mind. So…I have to make room in my experience for her.  For me.  That earlier iteration of chaos and damage that is who I have been. So much chaos. So much damage.  It’s on my mind, and it is a distraction from my every day experience, this need to face myself, in a way so honest and so direct that she can not evade my questions with her answers, presses on my consciousness with such force.  So now what? I have to find the words…the time…the place…

I’m glad the day ends, and ends well. I need my strength. I am here, now, and having survived and endured her ‘then’, along with her, I know her strength well.  I don’t know the outcome…I know she won’t take a dive. I know I can’t afford to lose, or forfeit. 

Night falls and I am glad to rest.

 

 

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, grief, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Rape, Turning 50, women, Words

Conversations with Myself

July 21, 2013 //
1

It’s been a week since my last post. It’s been a rather long, strange week since my last post. Sometimes simply terrifically serene, other times stressful and anxiety-filled on a level that became some sort of unpleasant emotional dessert. That’s ‘dessert’ with two of the letter ‘s’, not ‘desert’ with only one, meaning to say that at some points the stress and anxiety rose to a level of elaborate internal torment so subtle, well-crafted, and painful as to be extraordinary to the point of transcending what it was and becoming almost iconic and representational of something far more archetypical – ‘fancy’, as it were. (Not pleasant or tasty, however, not in the least. ) This has been a week of peculiarly personal time with myself, endlessly interrupted and repeatedly derailed by the incessant demands of real life.  I’ve felt on the edge of some sort of really important epiphany or understanding of …something… that I can’t quite ever achieve because the trash needs to go out, or the plants need water, or ‘please pick up milk on your way back…?’, or answering just one quick question, or to take a look at something (it’ll only take a second), or what was that thing I meant to do… I very much want to blame everything outside of myself for it… It wouldn’t be quite ‘fair’ to do that, though, it seems to me, since it is the predictable byproduct of wanting to please, wanting to meet the needs of loved ones, and not really much wanting to deal with the chaos and wreckage at all… so, the anger directed outward, unreasonable, directed inward, damaging.  I drift; lost, and frustrated, and feeling ‘unable to finish a thought’.

...finding time to finish a thought isn't always easy...

…finding time to finish a thought isn’t always easy…

I woke this morning … feeling disgruntled and discontent. Aggravated ahead of any aggravating stimulus, and wishing to be in a different place, time, and headspace.  I’m fortunate to have a real ‘force of nature’ in the department of emotional support and perspective, in the person of my dear partner…up with me at dawn more often than I expect, and equipped with the will to ensure his love for me is felt and not merely imagined, and the experience not to get sucked into my personal hell; with his help and affection the morning is not wasted, not a loss, not even bad, actually. I feel my challenges, but today they are not calling the shots.  🙂

I feel like I have ‘too much to do’ and that I am struggling to keep track of it all.  It is an illusion brought on by a desire to complete something else entirely – that unfinished thought I am trying so very hard to avoid thinking, I suppose. Hormones?  Could be. I feel angry in the background.

Words...failing me.

Words…failing me.

Today the thought of ‘mindfulness’, or at least the feel of the word in my consciousness, has me feeling testy and cross. The demons have taken up arms and the fight is now to the finish. Success for me may mean their doom…we all know it. Now, our uneasy truce is open warfare, and I am fighting for my life. I will use guerrilla warfare, if I must – and attack them with mindful actions, if blocking mindful meditation is their current strategy.  So, today: gardening, laundry, the small tasks of modern domesticity that build a chill experience for the week to come.

Still…I want so much to solve the current puzzle, learn the lesson, complete the thought… I am at a place where it is becoming necessary to have a conversation with myself.  That 20-something woman I once was, and the woman of 50 I am now don’t exactly see eye to eye on a number of issues. Somehow, she has taken the side of my demon forces, and she’s making it damned difficult to sift through the wreckage and heal, and build order from chaos. We clearly need to talk. She screams at me in my nightmares that there is no forgiveness possible, that there is no honor in healing, that I have no right to be happy, to become whole…to abandon her…and the pain.  She is trapped in another time, and has only her limited perspective, and her pain – she does not heal, or grow. She wants vengeance, she wants a voice… I can not give her vengeance, and I do not know how to give her a voice; we do not agree about a number of things.

My voice...if I choose to use it.

My voice…if I choose to use it.

Well. Sunday quietly beckons, offering respite from the chaos and warfare within through labor and service to life and love. Is it enough?

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Categories Anxiety, Art, Brain Injury, Free Will, gardening, grief, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Turning 50, women, Words

A Tear or Two

May 8, 2013 //
0

Impermanence

Like a soap-bubble frozen in glass
deep blue in the sun
sometimes a shimmer or a shadow
a change in perspective
suddenly silver like a child’s drawing of the moon
on white paper
a simple blue glass gazing ball
old-fashioned novelty
garden accent
a fragile blue glass bead big enough
for a grown up.

Is it the way of things
to leave?
to be broken?
to be cast aside no longer valued?
no longer remembered?
The best things in life seem so fragile.

I will not see this blue ball again in my garden.
A replacement for another broken ball.
Tears falling.
Each one a precious something
or other
remembered for a fleeting moment of sorrow
to be replaced by another.
Or forgotten.

Another tear.
Another glass gazing ball.
Another sorrow.
Another “I’m sorry”.
Another moment.
Another celebration.
Another memorial.
Another love.
Another life.
Another garden.
…If only my memory were not also impermanent.

The gazing ball, a gift of love, that was broken today.

The gazing ball, a gift of love, that was broken today.

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Categories Brain Injury, gardening, grief, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Relationships, Roses, Spring, Words

Life and Love and an Old Black Sweater

April 25, 2013 //
0

The first rose of spring has opened in my garden. It is just 48 days until my 50th birthday, and for some unclear reason 50 feels rather like ‘the middle of life’ – although I am hopeful about living well past the century mark. A beginning, a middle…and an end; I am wearing a long-favored, old black sweater, and I am considering today to be it’s ‘last day’…

'Baby Love' is the first rose to bloom in my garden this spring.

‘Baby Love’ is the first rose to bloom in my garden this spring.

My old black sweater is an ordinary enough black sweater, of mixed synthetic fibers, soft and worn and comfy, with rather mundane cable stitch down the front, and quite large.  I bought it some 15 years ago, during a career change, and a point in my life when I was heavier than I am now. A lot heavier. This is a size ‘3X’ sweater.  It’s huge on me now, mostly pretty shapeless, and not particularly flattering. I’ve never cared about that – it has also been reliably comfortable, effortless to care for, and predictably rather invisible, in the sense that wearing it allowed me to fade into the background at a point in my life where anxiety and unpredictable temperament so ruled my experience that I appreciated having a way to hide from the world in plain sight.  Now, though, life feels very different and I am less inclined to hide. I also feel…healthy, beautiful, and alive – and I’m ready to say good-bye to being so wounded and afraid of the world that only being wrapped in a comfy old black sweater feels safe and warm.  Hugs are better. lol.

 
A sweater is only a sweater, after all… it isn’t a time capsule of memories and events associated with the wearing of the sweater, it isn’t the embodiment of who I am, or who I was, and it isn’t a cherished object of sentimental value clasped relentlessly by possessive withered hands frightened to let go for fear of losing beloved memories to the passage of time. (I may have once thought it was…)  It’s just a sweater: too old, too worn, too big.  It doesn’t fit me anymore.

 
I still like sweaters. I still like black sweaters. I even still like this sweater… but it is time to move on. Time to let go of some things that are not helpful to hang on to. Time to let go of things that get in the way of better things.  Time to accept and encourage and nurture change.  It is time for a new black sweater; sexy, fun, soft…and perhaps in a ‘slightly darker black’?

 
…Or perhaps not black at all.  In 48 days I shall be 50, and I’m clearly not a little girl, anymore. Some of it has been rough, but I think it will be fine if I stop wearing black…beginnings, middles, ends…this is what 50 looks like through my eyes, reflected in my mirror, considered in the context of my experience.

...on the other hand... approaching 50: my right hand, my right mind.

…on the other hand… approaching 50: my right hand, my right mind.

 

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, gardening, grief, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Parables, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Roses, Spring, Turning 50, women, Words
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