Archives for category: pain

Just Beneath the Surface

June 22, 2016 //

Today might be too much, I feel it already. Rare these days, so the feelings really stand out – helpful, more than aggravating, and I could use more of it. I can’t put my finger on something specific right now, or be certain things will go sideways at some point, but the potential for it exists as a distinct recognizable set of physical sensations that add up to an experience I recognize. It’s been a difficult day or two, and although I’ve adulted through it with considerable skill, generally, I’m quite human and there’s simply the possibility – leaning toward likelihood – that today it may all catch up with me. Can I make use of this awareness to treat myself well and gently, still get the day done, and perhaps dodge a meltdown, too? I guess I’ll find out as the day unfolds.

Well, sure. This.

“Too much” is sometimes a thing to deal with. It’s not any more real than a lot of what I find myself mired in. “Too much” often reflects an unhealthy attachment to an outcome, or expectations that are unreasonable, or assumptions that are incorrect, piling up with circumstances that don’t bear that sort of emotional weight well. It’s that way today. A date with an acquaintance became a disappointment. The new job felt like a certainty, but fell through. A routine visit to a doctor becomes a referral to a specialist to rule out cancer – first. Disappointment adds to insecurity, which adds to worry, which adds to fear, which slowly becomes a soup of darker emotions, and a high risk of an emotional moment…or two…or some sort of meltdown. All very real. All very human. I could cash in my ticket for “a good cry” – haven’t done that, yet. As is so often said, it would probably do me good to just let go…once I can. Making a clear distinction between ‘balance’ (and treating myself well) and ‘repression’ (just sort of squashing everything down into a manageable presentation that seems appropriate to others) has huge value; hiding from my hurts doesn’t really work for me. “The way out is through” is real and meaningful today.

I have my ‘to do list’ for the day. I have events on my calendar. Purpose. A plan. I’ve also got this fragile vessel of flesh and bone to tend, and that’s rather non-negotiable for general wellness. I reconsider my list, move some things around, ensure that I keep a compassionate eye on myself today. I decide to trust my judgement – who knows me better than I do? – a meltdown today, you say? I think I have an opening on my calendar for that… if I must. lol Maybe later? Sometime after lunch? (Maybe not – that would be quite nice.) Either way, it won’t be necessary or useful to take it personally; I’m here for me.

Storms pass.

Looking my concerns in the face eases them somewhat, at least for now. I sip my coffee, and start going down the list of things to do today. Today is a good day to be, and to do. 🙂

Tags begin again, breathe, destination unknown, it's a journey, mindfulness still matters, practicing the practices, taking care of me, the map is not the world, walk on, walking my own path, where are you going?, who's in charge here?

Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Epsom salts, Free Will, health, Healthy Living, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Summer, The Art of Being, The Big 5

Here I Am

June 21, 2016 //

It’s morning. A Tuesday. The day is planned, and I’ll shower, dress, and head out shortly. The dawn was slow and gray, the sky heavy with fat rolling clouds, streaked with light as the sun attempts to break through here and there. My traveling partner sleeps in the other room. I am content and filled with joy, a pleasant start to the day.

A neighbor’s cat patrols the edge of the tall meadow grass just beyond the lawn. There’s generally one cat or another doing so at this time of morning. Red-wing blackbirds and jays mock them from the nearby trees, and as stealthy as the cats seem to be, I’ve never seen one of them catch anything. I’m okay with that – they’re clearly well-fed. 🙂

I sip my coffee, and think about the day to come. There’s paperwork to gather, and I check my list to ensure I don’t miss a detail. Today is a good one for rolling with changes, taking things as they come, and living the moment I am in – it doesn’t hurt to prepare for it. 🙂

Tags being and becoming, doing the thing, Don't take things personally, dotting the i's and crossing the t's, I have a list, one task at a time, practical details, practicing the practices, taking care of me

Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, health, Healthy Living, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Summer, The Art of Being

Like a Page from a Book

June 15, 2016 //

Today is singular. I woke early, from a less-than-ideally-sound sleep. I went back to sleep. I repeated this a couple times. My traveling partner was also not sleeping deeply. I sometimes snore, and I know I woke myself a couple times with it in the wee hours. This morning I am conscious of his need for sleep, and I quietly go about my gentle morning: yoga, meditation, study, a few minutes to pause and reflect on things I am grateful for and to appreciate my circumstances, a cup of coffee. I feel tender and sweet toward that human being in the other room, and enjoy treating him very well. I continue to treat myself well, too.

It is an unexpected (and unplanned) delight to have my traveling partner staying over, possibly for a couple days. I smile when I think about the delights of his day-to-day companionship, which I cherish. I frown briefly as I remind myself to continue to ‘handle business’, maintain my quality of life, and take care of myself well; it’s easy to lose track of everything but the warmth of his smile when he is staying with me. I’m very human. 🙂

Love matters most.

Today is simple, my calendar is empty – that’s harder for me some days, rather than easier; there is still much to do with this precious finite lifetime and, since it isn’t on the calendar already, I’ll have to make it up as I go along. 😀 I’m okay with living life unscripted, actually. It’s taken some time to get here, but the conversations are profoundly more interesting when I don’t practice them in my head beforehand…and I hear more of what is being said. 🙂

Today I will do some things. Basic self-care will be among the things I do. I’ll prepare and consume calories. I will no doubt read something. Perhaps I’ll paint. The housekeeping is handled. The garden needs care. I find it rare to run out of things to do, and generally make a point of adding ‘sit still’ to my ‘to do list’ – not because I wouldn’t sit down for a moment, ever, if I didn’t – more because it reminds me that when I do, it matters to be in the moment, actually sitting, actually still, actually at rest, awake, aware, and committed to stillness. That moment of stillness is a big deal for me – and it can’t typically be had with the television on, sometimes even music in the background interferes with that needed moment of stillness, sitting, content, aware, not bored, not restless – calm and content.

What will I do with the day?

It’s a good day to chill. A good day for bird watching. A good day to walk in the sunshine, and to breathe fresh air.

Where does the path I choose lead?

Today I am in more pain than I’ve been in for a while. The cooler weather? It doesn’t matter too much why, the pain simply is, today. It’s just my arthritis, and it eases some with walking, and with yoga. The sense of being nauseous with pain is hard to shake, and unpleasant. It will pass. The pain isn’t terribly severe, just present, and I’ve been enjoying being in less pain with the hotter summer weather, recently (the contrast probably makes the pain seem worse than it is). This cooler more-like-spring weather returns and brings the pain with it. Today is a good one for seeking distractions. I’m okay with that. I find myself appreciating the luxury of not having to be at a desk for 8-10 hours while I am in pain; more freedom of movement results in less (and more manageable) pain.

Isn’t this enough?

Today isn’t fancy, or busy, or well-planned, or filled with events or workload. It’s a day. It could be any day. This is the beginning and there’s so much more to come. If today were a shit day full of challenges and emotion, it would still be only a day, different from yesterday, different from tomorrow. Each one a new opportunity to do, or be, or go, or discover – or not – all at the ready to convert what I anticipated, expected or yearned for into what I recall. The stopover in this moment now, living, breathing, and being is all too brief. Today is a very good day to live now. I think I’ll go do that. 🙂

Tags a grain of sand, a moment in time, a page of a book, a single star, basic mindfulness, be aware, be love, be the change, feed yourself, it still takes practice, life is a banquet, life is precious, live live live!, mindfulness for beginners, mindfulness matters, one day of many, one step at a time, perspective, stillness

Categories art and the artist, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Summer, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words

Some Days More Than Others

June 9, 2016 //

This morning I woke wanting very much to write, while also feeling quite… directionless. Uninspired. I considered that awhile, and spent some time thinking over the events of the previous day. It’s still quite early. I slept well, deeply, and dreamlessly. I woke with a smile. Since then, anxiety has come and gone, and also a bit of queasiness, a headache, and restlessness. I’m not ill, and there’s nothing actually wrong; this is often what I put myself through when I am excited about something, and yesterday’s interview went that well. A couple years ago, the end result would have been the complete destruction of a lovely day, more than likely, fueled by excitement I didn’t realize was excitement, and carried forward on the back of raw – if misinterpreted – emotion. I’d have been on edge, unaware of why, and prone to over-reacting and taking things personally. This morning, I am grateful for the improvement in emotional resilience and the reduction in volatility that I have experienced since I began practicing meditation, and practicing more mindfulness, more often.

It’s a cool gray morning, as if the sky would like to just ignore all the recent hot weather and pretend summer has not yet arrived. In this part of the country, at this time in Earth’s life, this is what summer is like. I am smiling, enjoying the cool morning, cloudy sky and all. I pay for the pleasure in a small way; the cooler weather aggravates my arthritis, which hasn’t been bothering me while the weather was quite summery and hot. I think about Fresno, and other hot places – life is very different in hot places, and I pause to really understand for a moment that in choosing this lovely climate as a full-time resident, I am also choosing to endure more pain. Choice is a funny thing, isn’t it? I think I am making one sort of choice, but often the choice I am making is also other sorts of choices bundled together… there is benefit in being more aware of that, more of the time. 🙂

Change is a verb – and also an outcome. Where does the path lead?

My thoughts take a new direction. I’m okay with that. I’ve the day ahead of me to explore my thoughts, to meditate, to study, to paint. I may be back to work fairly soon – these days of leisure are incredibly precious, and this morning I am appreciating their value greatly. Today is a good day to take care of me, to invest in the well-being of this fragile vessel and the creature of light residing within. 🙂

Tags are you going my way?, be the change, being and becoming, choose wisely, I am my own cartographer, meditation, perspective, practicing the practices, retirement planning, taking care of me, The Art of Being, the map is not the world, time is precious, walking my own path, what matters most?, where does this path lead?

Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Summer, The Art of Being

Oh, Today.

May 28, 2016 //

I woke early, comfortably, and well-rested, with very little pain. I smiled, rose for the day, content with the early hour. The dawn begins to unfold beyond the window, and the day looks to be lovely.

The spider in the kitchen, that ran out of the coffee cup I pulled from the cabinet was not a welcome sight, nor a pleasant moment. One broken coffee cup… morning in progress. I start water for coffee.

The much larger spider in the bathroom, that began crossing the room while I was in no position to do anything about it, was also an unwelcome sight – and I enduring its presence uncomfortably only as long as I had to. I realize I’ve gotten distracted from making coffee…

The smoke detector chirped at me. (What the hell is up with all the detectors going mad after the annual maintenance inspections and tests of detectors?? That was less than two weeks ago!) I find myself glad my traveling partner is not being abruptly wakened from a sound sleep in the other room this morning; two mornings in a row would just be so completely annoying for anyone! I’m already quite annoyed myself, and I was awake when it started. I change the battery. Reset the detector. Shit – I’ve forgotten my coffee again! I get back to the kitchen just in time to hear 3 chirps from the detector. It continues periodically (frequently) while I look the fucking thing up on the internet to see what the owner’s manual says. I carefully re-do the process of replacing the battery and resetting the detector according to make/model quite precisely. That’ll do it.

45 seconds later – 3 chirps. 😦 These are fairly loud. My neighbors are awakened. How do I know? They’re outside frowning and smoking their first cigarettes.

45 seconds later – 3 chirps. I’m frustrated, and the sound itself, and specific frequency (both timing, and sound wave) are really working on my vulnerabilities. My noise sensitivity surges, and there are tears waiting to fall… my head begins to ache, and I feel angry. I’m also confused. Frustrated. Escalating. I call the ’emergency only’ maintenance hotline for the community – the landlady picks up right away, sounding as anyone does at 6:08 am, out-of-town on vacation, getting a call from work. She patiently advises there is a ’15 minute hush cycle’ (calling it something like that is just… inaccurate; there is nothing hushed about this experience). She is aware of my injury, and some of my issues. She softens her tone and directs me to ‘unplug it and take it down’ if the chirping doesn’t stop (something may be wrong with the detector, and this one is ‘old enough’ to replace). So… yeah. I’ll be worried about fire safety this weekend instead of dealing with the chirping, and I’m managing to feel angry about both and/or either just at the moment. I don’t lash out at the landlady – this isn’t in any way about or to do with her; it’s just a very irritating noise on what started as a lovely quiet morning, and the sound itself has got me crying at this point. I could also do without the ‘strange frightened-seeming trembling’ that so often goes with particular sort of overload. What the ever-loving-fuck?

Coffee. I got distracted from making it – again. It’s well past 15 minutes of this now, and I contemplate taking down the smoke detector, and wonder why I have this weird embedded feeling of certainty that if I do, the alarm will actually ‘go off’ and not be silenced – or silence-able – at all? Probably television. Fuck television, too. Damn, I really need some coffee… and I need this noise to stop.

I take down the alarm. I go back to the kitchen to make coffee. Again.

The alarm keeps chirping. Every 45 seconds. I’ve timed it. Alarm is taken down, unplugged… and it seems pretty pointless to have bothered. I go back to the owner’s manual. I try yet another new battery. I step through the troubleshooting steps again. This is not working. I still don’t have coffee, either. My morning is now entirely centered on this fucking chirping alarm, and I’m struggling with agitation, frustration, and impatient anger. I feel ‘trampled on’ by businesses that have no fucking clue that once the product is outside the ‘this is how we save your life’ emergency scenario window that some consumers have other very different needs. I just let the tears fall. I make coffee. The alarm continues to chirp. I can get 8 minutes of silence any time – by hitting the hush button. I can’t exactly enjoy my day easily if I am returning to the alarm every 8 minutes to hush it.

The chirping is working on my mind. I feel responsible and obligated to ‘fix it’ somehow – so that no one else is similarly effected, making it harder to just walk away – or move out. Or hit it with an axe. (I’m rather glad I don’t have an axe…) I don’t even know if it is audible beyond the apartment next door. People would like to sleep. It’s Saturday. Weeping overcomes me. At least I have a cup of coffee… grim laughter at the relief I feel just for that small pleasure shakes my shoulders, tears become sobs as I spill the precious (hot) black liquid down my top, into my lap, and onto the carpet, soaking into everything, turning everything… dark. Memorial Day Weekend!! Oh yay! I will be listening to this cursed chirping for the next three days until the landlady’s return… what a holiday! And I get to clean the carpet and do laundry! (note: I rarely use sarcasm, it’s not easily read by all readers, and I apologize if my reactive unhappy use of it now makes it hard to be sure what I am saying.)

I really don’t know what to do from here… I want to be here, enjoying my space, my time, my life… and there’s this fucking chirping, and it isn’t stopping, and there’s just nothing more I know to do myself from here. As if to mock me, the detector manufacturer has a customer support help line – open 8a-5p EST, Monday through Thursday, except holidays. So. Yeah. Now what?

My head hurts now. My eyes are read and puffy from crying – and the tears aren’t stopping; the chirping continues. I made another cup of coffee, hands shaking, trembling, and crying. I drink it quite carefully feeling disorganized, confused, and overwhelmed. I hadn’t even had time to wake up before all this; my day got a firm reset almost immediately on waking. It completely sucks and feels brutally unfair. For the moment I am stuck here; each gentle attempt to sooth myself is interrupted – every. 45. seconds. – with three piercing chirps. Will the awareness of it eventually fade into the background as sometimes happens with irritating noises? It doesn’t seem so, yet.

I’m in no good shape to manage my issues out in the world so soon after waking… but I can’t comfortably endure this indefinitely, and need some real relief from it… somewhere. I resign myself to having to face the world… ‘what I want’ no longer counts, I am faced with what I need. I need to escape this noise… I try not to think about what becomes of me when I must return home, later. No… I do think about it. I cry. I push the awareness into the darkness, dry my tears, sip my coffee, check my spelling, think about my clothes… I keep trying. The chirping continues. I want very badly to scream into the void “How will you make this right with me??!!”… but there is no point, no ‘right’, no one to answer, and nothing much, for the moment, to be done. I wonder how often a partner or lover has ‘taken the blame’ in some such moment in the past, becoming the entity to whom I direct my fear, my anger, my frustration – over some circumstance in life that just isn’t something they control? Fuck. I feel myself swamped by regrets, sorrow, sadness, too. I don’t know what I’ll do later… for now, I put in earplugs, wrap myself in blankets, pull pillows over my head, and cry. I’ll figure something else out later.

…

This one deserves some follow up sooner than later, just to be courteous. I’m okay right now. The apartment is quiet now. Someone dear to me pointed out that perhaps the fire department non-emergency number would be helpful… it was frustrating to discover that this service is mostly unavailable outside ‘normal business hours’ these days, but it got me thinking in a more productive direction, and I walked up to the nearby fire station, hoping to get some more helpful advance than I was getting from the owner’s guide, the entirely unavailable advertised customer support for the product, or my vacationing landlady. I not only got some better instruction, I was provided a back up smoke detector to use, and got my vitals checked (I was apparently sufficiently stressed out, however polite and careful my words, to cause concern when I mentioned the noise was hard on my PTSD), and a few minutes of conversation over coffee with a very pleasant EMT, who had been washing his car in the sunshine when I walked up.

I got home, followed the provided troubleshooting instructions (the order in which things are done really matters for some things, and confirmably fresh batteries matter). Huh. The chirping continued… I unplugged it as directed. While I installed the back up… the disconnected detector chirped. 😦 No. Wait… that’s the carbon monoxide detector that went off yesterday – and in which I put new batteries, yesterday. Shit. I take that down, too, and remove the batteries. Both detectors are quite old and likely due for replacement, and that can be handled Tuesday. In the meantime, it’s a lovely weekend to have windows open to breezes – and there is no longer any beeping, chirping, repetitive, unavoidably, strident, aggravating nuisance alarms going off and undermining my emotional and mental wellness. I’ll even be able to sleep through the night (I really wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to do that with the chirping going on).

Now… troubleshooting my experience behind me… I take care of me. My results may vary…but I’ve rarely been so grateful for silence. 🙂

Tags 3 chirps every 45 seconds, design flaws, frustrated to tears, Frustration, smoke detectors, this hurts me more than it hurts you, troubleshooting basics

Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Post Traumatic Stress

Just Beneath the Surface

Share this:

Here I Am

Share this:

Like a Page from a Book

Share this:

Some Days More Than Others

Share this:

Oh, Today.

Share this:

Archives