Weird day. I woke up feeling rested and merry. Seemed like a good start to the day, and mostly I suppose the day has been fine. Okay, not fantastic, but I’ve no expectation that each day will be 100% pure awesome from the moment I wake, until the moment I later close my eyes to sleep. My results – and my experiences – vary. My Traveling Partner woke from a restless unrestful night of sleep and made it clear he was not enjoying the morning. I did what I could to be chill and supportive. My efforts were not immediately (or reliably) successful, so I got my shit together, grabbed my list of errands, and headed out before I’d even taken more than a sip of my coffee. Seemed the like sort of morning to enjoy my own company for awhile, and let him have time to wake up and get sorted out.
I’m in a massive amount of pain this morning, and although it has done nothing to dull my good mood, I’m having to manage it. It’s there in the background and amounts to a bit of a distraction, and a thing that slows me down (without stopping me). I’ve taken the medication I can, and I’ve stayed on top of all the other self-care details pretty well, too. I still hurt. It is what it is. I don’t expect this to change; it comes and goes (in severity) with the weather, and with stress. I can’t do much about the weather, but I sure can do things to manage my stress. So, I do those things. lol
Today has been mostly about staying ahead of my pain, staying out of my partner’s way, and getting a few things done. Laundry, some kitchen re-organization (seems a good day to tidy up cabinets and cupboards and toss out stale spices), and the sort of routine housekeeping I commonly do on a quiet Sunday. My partner is mostly out in his shop, making things. I smile when I think about it.
“Easy” isn’t always about “perfect” – sometimes it’s just about not making shit harder than it has to be, and not taking the things that go wrong personally. I mean, seriously? How often are they ever “personal”?? Circumstances are just circumstances. Moods come and go like weather. I can’t “fix” someone else, or live their experience, but I can sure avoid making it all about me. I can sure focus on self-care, and kindness, and just doing my best to treat everyone around me well. If I’ve legitimately done my best, that’s pretty much what I’ve got to offer, right? 🙂
I like a good to-do list. I enjoy checking off the tasks and feeling that sense of accomplishment and “getting shit done”. I even, straight up, no kidding, add things to the list as I go along in my day doing things I hadn’t thought to plan on the list in the first place, just so I can also check that one off the list. lol Here’s a thing I have to keep in mind, though; the list is not the achievement. The list is not “getting shit done”. The list isn’t even any one of – or all of – the tasks listed thereon. Not at all. It’s just a list. There are still verbs involved, real work, real task processing, real effort. Sometimes items on a list are easily done. Sometimes it’s trickier than that. An item on a to-do list that I really don’t want to deal with can potentially throw me off course for days or even weeks, as I work around it – and sometimes something like that can stall me completely, when I know it really must be done, and I’m really just not doing it.
Today I got a couple things done that have been on and off one list or another for months now. Both were sort of “housekeeping”, sort of “work”, both required some commitment of my time and energy. One required my time, and also my Traveling Partner’s time – so needed to be coordinated across our shared availability, and account for our individual will and interest in any given moment. One required me to learn quite a few new skills, and enhance skills I had that were a bit “rusty” or “behind the times”. Both were useful, needful, and potentially profitable, if only I could find both the will and the time for every detail, and do so in the order such things were required to go forward. So complicated!
Interestingly, as I built my skills, or completed smaller elements of each project on my list, it wasn’t those details that felt like accomplishments at all (even though that’s truly where the accomplishments seemed to be) – it was when I checked off the projects from my to-do list, this morning. Wild. Human primates are such odd creatures. I didn’t give myself any shred of credit for the small achievements like learning a new application, or building on my HTML skills, or improving how my art images are archived – in spite of the work involved in each one of those things. I didn’t celebrate those moments, they just sort of went by largely unnoticed, glasses riding down my nose as I frowned at my monitor, studying. Bringing a web page to life? Cool, cool, sure… but I felt the joy when I checked it off my list. That seems strange and potentially misplaced. Something to think about.
What have you gotten done lately that you didn’t pause to appreciate? What small moments of joy have slipped by without a chance to enjoy them properly? Are you looking at the world through the lens of maximum productivity, as if you are little more than machinery? Are you pushing yourself along based on programming and implicit expectations you’ve absorbed from elsewhere? Are you letting work define your life?
…I breathe, exhale, and relax. It’s a good day for it. I’ve gotten a few things done – but more than that, I’ve remembered to enjoy the moments.
I think about the Spring garden. Spring is weeks away yet, and it’s already time to plan. The earliest spring bulbs, hyacinths, crocuses, and such are already beginning to break through the soil. I think it might be nice to enjoy a hot cup of drinking chocolate and flip through seed catalogs.
Here we are, a new year. Today is my first day back to work after the New Year’s holiday. I sip my coffee and wonder what sort of year this one might be…
The weekend was filled with year-end sorts of things, including the massive journal-disposal project that I’ve been mulling over for a long time, and honestly didn’t expect to sit down, start, and finish so… “soon” isn’t the right word. “Unexpectedly” also missed the mark. I just… I guess I’m glad it is behind me. Surprised I pulled it off, perhaps. 🙂 After wandering through many hundreds of thousands of words across something like 15,000 pages, I’m glad to be done with it and free from the storage and “document security” headaches that went along with keeping those journals all these years. There were some worthy observations of life in those pages, for sure, and some beautiful, poignant, or insightful turns of phrase, and I’m glad I took a look back. Those details were sparse compared to the tedium, the tantrums, the madness, and the committing-to-paper of details that generally do best lived-in-the-moment and not written down for later review. I mean… damn I was angry a lot. Bitter. Disappointed. Frustrated. Lusty. Struggling. Did I mention the lustiness? Yeah… I could have made a career writing pornography, I’m sure. LOL
…In some sense the hardest part about letting go of these journals and the years of writing was discovering that I already had…
It was interesting to see the change in my writing at the point at which my Traveling Partner and I had gotten together. Before we were lovers we were friends, and it was at that point I also began tapering off the various psych meds I was on at that time, (in part due to his encouragement and fueled by his astonishment at what I was taking and at what dosages). I really couldn’t write easily (or paint) on those meds; my creativity was severely impaired. To get that back, I had to go off the meds I was on (and it would be until very recently that I stayed wholly off all those medications, generally). My partner was very supportive of my painting and writing and my wellness.
At my most heavily medicated, I wrote very little.
My Traveling Partner and I had met many many years earlier – we resumed our friendship when we reconnected, working for the same employer in 2009, but didn’t start hanging out until early in 2010. By March that year we were nearly inseparable friends, jovially sharing our commute on public transit each day.
I was tapering off the psych meds, and both my writing and my painting were becoming a bigger part of my experience.
In October, after we each/both broke things off with other relationships, we moved in together. By May 2011 we’d gotten married. My writing exploded in an environment in which I felt emotionally safe to just write, to just fucking be. It wasn’t always comfortable; there were times when my Traveling Partner would actually choose to leave rather than be around me while I was writing or painting. There was so much “bottled up inside me” that finally “had a voice”. It was an intensely creative period.
2011 used a lot of pages!
When I think back on that time, and I think specifically about how much my current partnership has both inspired and supported me creatively… I’m astonished, and filled with love and gratitude. My Traveling Partner, as much as any one person ever could claim to be, has been my muse. My inspiration. My day-to-day “driving force” – for change, for momentum, for growth and progress, for continuing to begin again. Love makes it all matter so very much. He is also more uniquely capable than any one other human being of hurting my feelings in an instant, moving my heart, pissing me off, and being part of my journey. Fuck I love this guy. I could say more… but I think I’ve said it all at some point… I mean, just based on the amount I’d already written down since we got together…
My partner’s presence felt in every volume. Inspired by love.
I’m not sure…, but it could be that this post is sort of a love letter to a human being who played an important part in freeing me to truly work on becoming the woman I most want to be… finally. That can’t be an easy part to play in this messy life of mine.
If I could have easily done just one additional thing with all those journals it would have been to run the entirety of the content through some sort of algorithm that could reduce it down to just the unique observations – removing the duplicates, the mad spirals, and the redundancy, leaving behind only the things I said, wrote, and observed, each just the once. I wonder how much would actually be left? What wisdom have I gained (and lost) over time? I sip my coffee and think about that… and the way redirecting my writing to this space, this practice, has improved the quality of my writing. (It’s easy to see, having taken the opportunity to compare those volumes to these posts more or less “side by side”.)
I actually “write more” these days. It’s not always obvious; no clutter to measure by. lol I’m also much happier – and it was clear flipping through those pages that the deeply conflicted, traumatized, chronically unhappy woman I once was has been transformed over time. I still have challenges. I still have work to do. I’ve still got an eye on my mental health – and probably always will. I’m also doing pretty splendidly most of the time, by most measures. It’s a good place to be, and I’m grateful to my partner for sharing this journey with me. He’s a hell of a good “traveling companion” for a trip like this. lol I gotta remember to say thank you. 😀
In the meantime, I suppose I’ll just begin again… again. 😀 I wonder where this path leads…
Is it worthwhile to “be nice”? Is it useful to “be approachable”? Is it possible to be kind and agreeable and still authentically the person I am “at heart”? Short answer; yes. I mean, that’s my opinion, and I’ve had good results making the effort to pivot from chronic sarcasm, day-to-day cynicism, and bitterness-as-humor, to something… “nicer”. That’s really it. The entire point. You can go have coffee or move on with your day. The rest is just more words. 😉
The tl;dr is that I see value in being pleasant in interactions with others. You may feel differently, or even be inclined to argue the point (but I won’t be taking the bait – I said what I said).
It can be damned difficult to maintain a façade of pleasantness or to force a smile, and a “customer service approach” doesn’t feel “authentic”, generally. The thing is, though, when I was a bit less kind, less pleasant, less approachable… I was also less fun to be around, less likely to be supportive, and more inclined toward being argumentative. Making a change in favor of being more “agreeable”, generally, and more pleasant has not stopped anyone else from continuing to be whoever they choose to be (and thus has not prevent some argumentative interactions with folks inclined to that behavior, though I do endeavor to avoid such interactions – and relationships). Sometimes it is difficult to be nice, kind, compassionate, understanding, and present. Sometimes it is effortless. If I am in pain it can be especially challenging to be my “best self”. Still worth the effort most of the time.
…And it is possible to learn to be nicer, kinder, more agreeable, more pleasant… it just takes a fuck-ton of practice…
My Traveling Partner pops in for a moment and reads the first sentence over my shoulder. “It’s better to be kind than to be right,” he says, “but you can be both.” He looks thoughtful and adds “…be kind first” as he moves on to other things.
Some people are unpleasant, disagreeable, or unkind. That’s not about me, and I don’t have to “drink the poison“, or “take the bait” – although I may need to exert an effort to walk away from bullshit now and then. Look, let’s just take “helping them change” or “fixing their issue” off the table right now – I know it’s tempting, but it’s not actually a thing (even within our relationships). They have to do their own verbs to become the person they most want to be, and maybe they think they’re just fine as they are? If who they are is giving you grief, that’s a mismatch in social values, not a troubleshooting scenario for you (or me) to fix – even if we find ourselves in a relationship with someone who “isn’t easy to be around”.
Similarly… maybe it’s you? Maybe you’re the asshole? (I know it has been me, more than once…) Are you really the person you most want to be? Do you actually want a reputation for being short-tempered, unkind, disagreeable, contrary, cranky, unapproachable, arrogant, terse, argumentative, or unpleasant? Does any of that actually sound good? (I bet it doesn’t.) We usually get around such things in our definitions of self by pointing our finger at someone else (or circumstances) and saying “they made me…”. (Provocation doesn’t excuse bad behavior. Just an fyi on that.) Making excuses for our short-comings doesn’t make our short-comings more acceptable – they just slow our progress toward being a better human being, as an individual, based on those things we can choose to do (or change) to be the best version of ourselves we can imagine from the perspective we’ve got. Another common “out” we reach for too often is that we were not “understood”. Were we not? Truly? Or are we just hoping to be off the hook for a moment of nastiness we really ought to sincerely regret, and move on from committed to doing better? The worst of the excuses is using straight up justification of our worst behavior, as in “I am taking this approach because it is necessary [to get a desired outcome].” (Is it, though? Really? Or are you just being an asshole because that’s less work for you, personally? Couldn’t you do better?)
Anyway. I am sipping my coffee and thinking about how to feel cranky without “being” cranky, and how to express frustration or anger without becoming the embodiment of my worst self, or taking a frustrated or angry tone with someone I love. Seems likely it can be done… I probably won’t solve that over a single cup of coffee but it sure seems worth considering. 🙂 It’s along the same line of thinking as “how do I survive trauma without becoming a monster?”, but that’s a very large puzzle and pretty much 100% of all of the words in this blog touch that one in some way, you know? Breaking down the big challenges into smaller challenges, and finding the small practical details that can become the loose threads that unravel this tangled mess is kind of the point of sitting here at this keyboard. 😀
It’s a whole new year opening up ahead of me. How will I use this mortal time to live my best life, and to be my best self? Where will this journey take me?
Here it is. New Year’s Day. Another year wrapped up and a new year beginning.
…the new year is a blank page…
I’m still working through disposing of my old journals. It’s an interesting project, although it has tended to be a bit more emotionally engaging that I’d ideally like it to be. There are a lot of opportunities to make a willful point of letting some small bullshit detail go. Choices to be made to put down some baggage. I shred page after page, poignant moments, moments of rage and disappointment, moments of frustration and doubt, moments of discontent and disillusionment, moments of profound insight and great delight…memories of love and anger, and bearing witness to the passage of time.
Sometimes it’s necessary to let something go before I can truly begin again.
I’m glad I found so many little sketches. Saving those matters to me more than the words I’d written about whatever events they captured (or were inspired by). Some of these, though, were done on the reverse side of a page I don’t care to preserve… those I photograph, before shredding the page. They’ll live on as a digital image, now, and nothing more.
“Glow Opera Ballerina”, 5″ x 7″ ink on paper, 1999 – shredded.
I’d inserted various bookmarks and objects as placeholders between the pages of some volumes. Photographs. Notes. Love letters. A CD-R. Wait…what? A CD-R? (I wasn’t even certain we had a media reader that could read that, after all this time.) The name on the disk was not particularly revealing… almost as if intended to obfuscate the contents from casual view. I asked my Traveling Partner if we had a means of reading a CD-R? We did. Taking a look at the contents without opening any individual item, it was pretty clear this was a disk that would do best to join the various journals on the path to destruction. I thought to shred it, but… the shredder wasn’t happy about that choice. My partner suggested microwaving it for a couple seconds.
Unreadable by intention.
There were quite a few other interesting items in the bin with the journals. Old manuscripts, never finished. Individual pages of poetry that had been scribbled on napkins, note paper, or legal pads. Correspondence I have saved over the years – letters from my Dad, from my Granny, from old friends, and a largish manila envelope of the letters exchanged with my first husband while I was away at war, both his to me and mine to him. Some of this I’ll no doubt keep, but I’m starting to view some of this old stuff – explicitly anything to do with my first husband – as a sort of malicious “horcrux” (if I may borrow that notion) that has the potential to continue to be toxic for my day-to-day experience of myself, just through existing. Maybe it is time to destroy all of that, too. (I kept it for years because I was fearful I might someday need to prove what I’d been through.)
Old manuscripts and correspondence will need attention, too, another day.
It’s a lot to process. I think the commitment to getting it done as part of my individual new year’s celebration keeps me from getting overly involved in the raw emotions poured out onto these pages, at least a little. So many pages. So much rage and hurt and sorrow. Yeah, I definitely don’t need to drown myself in the hurts of the past – quite the contrary. It’s time to let it go. Page by page, volume by volume – this project has been overdue for a very long time, and it feels like quite a relief to finish it.
What about you? Are you ready for a new year? A new beginning? New practices, or resuming useful practices you’d let fall by the wayside as time went by? Will you be making a big change?
…Are you ready to begin again? I know I am. 🙂 Happy New Year!
Evening Light 