Archives for category: Metaphors
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More and Less

July 25, 2013 //
4

It’s been an interesting week; more of some things (arthritis, affection, intimacy, discussions of the future, analytical workload, headaches, adulthood, vulnerability, satisfaction, contentment, excitement about the future being discussed, sunshine)  and less of other things (pointless conflict, frustration, tedium, nightmares, ‘extra’ bandwidth at work, whimsy, self-restraint, subtext, cool weather).  It is summer, and already the mornings grow light just a little later, and the workload gets just a little heavier. I’m not bitching. It’s the end of my work week, and I’m home, feet up, cold water to sip on, and the entire world at my finger tips. It is a quiet evening.

My head aches viciously. PMS and fatigue. My back torments me beyond wanting to casually call it something as simple as ‘pain’. I will take an Rx pain reliever tonight. 😦 I hurt. It isn’t any more than that, though – a physical experience of discomfort.  On other levels I feel serene, calm, balanced, emotionally comfortable, cherished, wrapped in love… nice world to live in. I think about other worlds, other pain, but the thoughts drift through my head space like clouds, casting a momentary shadow and moving on.

Therapy tomorrow. Shit’s getting real lately – I don’t look forward to it, although I know that even this is part of the journey, and that my therapist really knows some things, and that I am ready for this.  I’m struck again and again by how profound this experience is.  I’ve been in therapy before… it’s hasn’t been solidly effective or actually changed anything, in the past.  At best, I felt some relief for weeks or months, and been helped past some moment of crisis – and that has had to be enough to get by on.  This? This is an entirely different experience. I don’t talk much about therapy.  It’s incredibly personal, as experiences go, and extraordinarily intimate and naked and raw. It doesn’t translate well into spoken language, much of the time, because the things that strike me most are subtleties and…completed sentences, finished thoughts, provoked epiphanies, sudden connections…and something else. Something I feel about me, sense within myself, recognize as being changed…and I don’t know what to call it or how to describe it.  I know it is important.  BUT, I no longer look forward to it, at least for now.

….

…Huh… I just had one of those baggage dropping, altered-state creating, moments of weirdness… nothing went wrong. I think it went ok. Which feels weird. Now I don’t want to write … because I don’t know what just happened or what exactly is ok about it.  Being a grown up is hard sometimes and I don’t always understand it.  I’m just going to add some pictures, and finish the moment on a metaphorical note.

Close up...

Close up…

... or from a distance. Perspective matters.

… or from a distance. Perspective matters.

 

 

 

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Summer

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

Nothing to Say

July 15, 2013 //
2

Injustice, hate, simple rudeness and inconsiderate behavior… Today the world is not a pretty picture…until and unless I turn my camera’s eye toward the beauty of a summer day.

I don’t have the words to convince anyone, and for now I am satisfied to see for myself.

Every day is a new experience. Will your choices change your experience, and the experience of others, for the better? All others?

image

Choose wisely; the quality of your experience depends on it. 😉

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

Damage Fights Back

July 3, 2013 //
3

I woke to the alarm this morning, a rarity, and I woke with a sense of extreme relief to find myself awake and safe. Nightmares. More nightmares. They’ve already mostly faded from any hope of detailed recollection, although I rarely consider them in detail, once I have made my escape. I do remember a point during the night when I recognized that the strange heaving and shaking sensations that recurred in my dream world were my own unreserved sobbing in my sleep…I woke with swollen eyes and flushed cheeks, and that sensation like a desert wind had dried out my sinuses and my eyeballs. I must have cried for a long while. I dread facing days or weeks of my nightmares ramping up, eventually resulting in a deep reluctance to sleep at all, that over time becomes unsettled, disrupted sleep consisting mainly of unexpected naps interrupted by the panicked awareness that I have fallen asleep which rouses me abruptly, fearfully, and on the defensive – alert to the unseen enemy that may be lurking. I’ve been through it a few times before.  At its worst, I lived more than a decade of my life without ever having slept through a night, mostly only napping an hour at a time when I slept at all. (For now, it is not that bad.)

Sometimes all it takes to feel safe is opening my eyes to a new day.

So happy the night is over…

Do the details matter? The fear and anxiety are ugly enough without the details, aren’t they? There’s a frightened voice in my thoughts when I contemplate the ancient pain and damage in any detail…”Please don’t make me do this…” I avert my mind’s eye from my own experience far too often. I am torn apart by terror, old pain, old programming, the remnants of someone else’s will – and my own lingering rage.  Is it enough to acknowledge that my nightmares last night were populated with the faces of people who love me, whose love I recognize and accept – but the soundtrack was the voices of monsters dubbed in…and the message is clear. The damaged bits are making their own voices heard – “Don’t fuck with us!”  I know it is time, though…”time to turn and face the strange“… time to walk a path that takes me directly to the heart of who I am, and be ok with that... ok with me. It is time to slay some motherfucking demons*. It is time to fix the code, clean up the registry, uninstall the software creating the conflict in my OS…it is also, perhaps, time to find a more human metaphor for this experience. lol. (I can still laugh…even after a night of being screamed at in my sleep and assured that my life is not my own, that I have no will and no choice, that I do not deserve better, that everything – everything – is ‘all my fault’. Being able to laugh after a night like this is a nice improvement.)

I spent some quiet moments enjoying the serenity of my aquarium.  Deep breaths. Yoga. A shower than could have been leisurely, but ended up rousing my startle reflex after the difficult night. (Have you ever taken a moment to wonder what it might be like to have one or more PTSD triggers that are totally daily events? Like… being in the shower? 😦 ) More meditation.  A quiet latte using the last of an almost empty bottle of maple syrup. (I like maple syrup in my coffee…is that strange?) A few gentle minutes with myself in the greenhouse, and in the garden… it all felt so good, so serene… but my night is like a nasty bruise; I brush against it and it hurts again.  Well, hell…it’s a lovely sunny day…and there are flowers.

Tiny white flowers...

Tiny white flowers…

Untidy purple flowers...

Untidy purple flowers…

Clusters of daisy-like flowers...

Bunches of daisy-like flowers…

Flowers in the shade...

Flowers in the shade…

Flowers in the sun...

Flowers in the sun…

Flowers that may be blue...or possibly purple...

Flowers that may be blue…or possibly purple…

Flowers in clusters...

Flowers in clusters…

Flowers along the walk...

Flowers along the walk…

...and flowers on shrubs.

…and flowers on shrubs.

Flowers, gardens, sunshine, love… it all matters so much more right now; an anchor, a life raft, a safety net…hope.  Ahead of me a new day, the possibility of real healing…the night is far away for now, and perhaps sleep will treat me gently tonight…or perhaps I will bring genocide to my demons*. 🙂

*note: I do not believe in literal demonic possession, for the sake of clarity, my ‘demons’ are a metaphor for ancient pain and damage, inappropriate coping mechanisms, out of date programming, poor habitual behaviors that do not support my values, and hurtful internal messaging… you get it, right? lol 😉

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, gardening, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Sleepless Nights
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