Archives for category: Sleepless Nights
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A Day, A Moment, A Mood

February 5, 2013 //
1

Did I mention I’m moody? I am. It’s true. I’m having a lot of sleep challenges since… well… I pretty nearly always have, at least as ‘always have’ as I can easily recollect.  Whole years have gone by without every getting an entire night’s sleep… now and then it’s nightmares, other times insomnia. Sleep and I have a difficult relationship. Lately it’s a terrible combination of restless, nightmare-filled sleep, and anxious sleepless nights interrupted by occasional longish naps that don’t restore my energy.  Annoying that mood management (both the relative ease of it, as well as the quality of the outcome) seems so closely tied to the quality and sufficiency of my sleep. I can’t really find a reason to be in a bad mood, but I can feel it lurking at the corners of my mouth, turning every effort at a smile into some grim suspicious visage that certainly isn’t bringing anyone any cheer around here. I feel… guarded. I hesitate to be open or vulnerable, or inadvertently be real enough, for just a moment, that the dike of my will power might give way to the tears crowding in line behind my eyes.  Fuck all these tears.  I angrily tell myself ‘I am so done with crying!’  Even though I know it is the angry bravado of fear, I lean on it like a cane for a moment, just to get past that feeling of teetering on a precipice.  There’s work to be done.

I do something nice for myself… I take a deep breath, ask a loved one for emotional support in a clear and simple way, uncluttered, unexplained – still trying to respect boundaries, and limits – feeling a bit like a tiny kitten seeking solace from a huge guard dog. Hoping for the best, trusting love, and finding that like so many things, the fear is far far scarier all by itself than any probable outcome.

What hurts me most on a day like this one, is that I can poke around in my experience and clearly recognize how loved I am, how much support I do have from my loved ones. I ache with shame and frustration that I feel so disconnected and wounded and alien.  I have a good life.  It’s rich with love, and Love, and beauty – we have a good home together, shared values and goals, and our necessities are covered… a good life. It’s only my own very subjective experience with myself that sucks so completely, right now.  It gets ugly in here sometimes.

Walking in to the office today, I watched the sullen moody clouds of the morning sky and mused for a time how many times in my life I’ve watch stormy clouds with a stormy heart, tears on the edge of falling like the rain I know is in the distance.  It’s a familiar feeling, they are familiar thoughts, and they have a song.  If I had a soundtrack to my life, this would definitely be on it.  Especially this bit (credit to Pete Townsend):

On the dry and dusty road
The nights we spend apart alone
I need to get back home to cool, cool rain

I can’t sleep, and I lay, and I think
The night is hot and black as ink
Oh God, I need a drink of cool, cool rain

I need a new playlist.  One that focuses me, moves me forward, and helps me ‘rebuild the lost city’ (and no I can’t really explain what I mean, they’re just words being used to attempt to describe a feeling I don’t have a word for).  What would be on it? That’s a list for another day.

Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Uncategorized, Words

So, Let Me Say This, About That…

February 4, 2013 //
2

I had an eventful weekend.

My Friday was pretty emotionally intense, and wonderfully promising. It was also a sort of ‘pampering me’ day, as it turned out; I got a great haircut and style from a new stylist at a cool shop, and a little more ‘me time’ on the personal aesthetic front later in the day. I wish I could also say that those elements of my weekend nurtured and restored my soul, but that’s not what it was.

My Saturday was strange, moody and productive, sort of detached. I worked at this and that to ease my anxiety and my emotional fatigue; pruned the roses, baked some shortbread. It was a decent day – it had, in fact, all the elements of an actually good day, but I felt like I was ‘going through the motions’ most of the day, and the challenges offered by every day life and the ebb and flow of other people’s experiences and emotions pulled at my heart. Evening was good in spite of the effort the day itself required, and the day ended well, really well. So… ‘no complaints’?

Sunday was hard to call, initially… was it a good day? A bad day? A difficult day? I was moody, tense, anxious, and working my ass off to shrug it off and avoid negatively coloring the weekend for my partners; it was their anniversary. I could not allow myself to blow that, and I probably put a lot of extra pressure on myself over it that I could have done without. This ‘human being’ thing is a more difficult puzzle than it appears from the vantage point of youthful daydreams.  As it turned out, though, Sunday was… amazing.  I did a few chores and ran some errands in the morning, kissed my partners and headed out into the world, and… wow. The World was right there waiting for me.

I had a pretty powerful moment in the Portland Art Museum, which has quite a good modern art collection for a relatively small city museum. I added the museum to my agenda as an afterthought, actually, and arrived only a couple hours before they closed. None of that matters.  What matters is running into old friends, and what matters is this.  Right? Maybe that’s not obvious… It’s “Untitled”, 1987, Peter Schuyff.  Seeing it yesterday was an experience. I saw a lot of paintings, and sculpture, and glass work that I enjoyed a lot. “Untitled” really got me on a different level. I sat in front of it, just looking and feeling it – letting my body feel how I would position the canvas, set up the layout, work the piece to get those effects – and as I relaxed into the moment and felt that painting ‘become’ part of my thinking and understanding, it became more real and more whole and I saw more and more of it. I felt – taken beyond myself, somehow revealing an inner core ‘strength of being’ I have been unable to feel for a while. I understood what I saw, and I experienced a feeling of confidence and certainty and a secure sense of self that couldn’t be shaken by some moment of pain, however ancient, however evil. No harm could come to me through the strength I had revealed to myself, from within my own being. I am still pretty wowed. It was quite…  something, and I needed it. Like slaking a days old thirst in the heat of the desert with cold clear spring water, like the ‘a-ha!’ moment at the front of the classroom, like the last punctuation mark on a moment of literary wonder… that moment in time, with that painting, meant more to me than words can capture here. I hope to keep it, as safe and precious as a lover’s photo in a locket, and look at it often and feel my soul restored again and again. Art has power so far beyond mere words.

My elation lasted much of the evening, and lingered in my thoughts when I dropped off to sleep, satisfied with the day, and the weekend.  I was still smiling and thinking thoughts of Art and feeling inspired to paint, and more than just pain and woe, too… and the smile deepened and remained my companion throughout the morning, after spending a few minutes on Love, and coffee. The things that matter don’t have to be things other people find valuable or important, I guess I just have to know what they are, for myself, to keep them high on my list of priorities.  So far a good week.

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Categories Anxiety, Art, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Turning 50, Words

Taking Chances, Pruning Roses

February 2, 2013 //
1

It’s a lovely sunny day, today, unexpectedly. It could be ‘expectedly’ but that would have required that I actually look at a weather forecast sometime in the recent past and I’ve barely looked at my phone. I’m not very involved with my phone the last couple weeks, and even the news nauseates rather than fascinates, and I’m avoiding it as much as possible. (Thanks, Delhi, you turned the entire world of news into the ’24-hour Rape Channel’) Still, expected or not, a lovely sunny day greeted me.  I was out and about pretty early for a Saturday, shopping, doing… then in the garden, pruning the roses, giving them a boost to prepare for Spring, re-arranging them in their new homes (many of them are potted, and I have the luxury of easily moving them about). Today should feel easy… but I had a tough night fighting invisible enemies in a hostile dreamscape and listening to my demons mock me. I woke crying several times, and although I think I ‘got enough rest’ to satisfy my body, my mind feels bruised and worn down, and I’m on the edge of tears most of the time, for no obvious reason. (Hormones? How can I tell anymore?)

Yesterday was special, and especially hard. Promising, but demanding… I ended the day fatigued beyond what seemed reasonable, but feeling more hopeful than has been typical for a long while. I want to say “I have a future…” but that sounds far more dramatic or potentially alarming by implication than I really mean it to. I already had a future… we all do, until the moment we don’t, whether it is chosen or forced upon us by circumstance.

I’m tired. My head hurts. The ‘harder I try’ the more my head seems to hurt, some days, like my brain doesn’t want to work so hard. There’s this very angry part of me that wants to drive harder, wants to scream ‘no pain, no gain – don’t you dare give up!!’, and make me do more-better-sooner… I fight myself constantly these days; questioning every assumption, every knee-jerk reaction, every bit of ‘programming’ and every task on ‘auto pilot’… one of my partners asked me very early this morning ‘When do you rest? When do you stop and take care of you?’. I could hear the concern, the frustration… but the simple failures, mistakes, don’t they cause frustration, too, aren’t they always a  huge disappointment? I’m not sure I know where my own priorities are, but I’m afraid to stop trying to do more-better-sooner, right now, as if I could somehow force myself to be well and whole and ‘okay’ – and if I don’t, well, somewhere inside myself it feels like a character flaw.

I’m too tired today to easily manage my emotions, prone to taking things personally. I want to do things well, treat myself and my partners well… I may have to be satisfied with not treating them badly. Maybe tonight there will be no nightmares, only sleep…and tomorrow another sunny day.

Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Rape, Relationships, Sleepless Nights

Too Real, and Too Much, and Too Bad

January 31, 2013 //
4

I’m crabby today. It’s a good day, I slept pretty well other than the nightmares, and I think I started the day in a pretty good place in spite of them. Still, I’m irritable. Hormones? Maybe. Too be fair, though, I have something ugly on my mind a lot since December and it hurts me to think about, but I am no longer allowing myself to ‘avert my eyes’ from the mess in my head.

Rape.

There. I said it. It’s a word. It has meaning, and frankly the meaning is not up for re-definition.  It should be easy to understand, easy to define – and easy to accept how common it actually is, and have the decency to be appalled and wonder why we allow it to go on.  I am angry about all the damned arguing about ‘the nature of rape’ by people trying to save a buck on legislation intended to curb it, or provide needed resources to victims, or worse still by rapists trying to rationalize or excuse their particular variety of sexual transgression. I’m so sorry (sarcasm) it’ll be expensive to help all those victims – how about fixing that? How about fewer victims? How about ‘rape is not ok‘?

Sure, I’m a rape victim, too. I’m sorry to sound so commonplace about it, but if you’re shocked by that, perhaps it would be a good idea to find out just how common it is – even in the U.S.  It’s probably easier on the heart to contemplate the overwhelming horror of rape used as a war strategy to terrify and weaken a population, rather than to consider the prevalence of military sexual trauma – rapes committed by soldiers against other soldiers, or marital rape (yes, it’s real, and no it isn’t ok), or child sexual abuse, or… yeah. All rape. None of it acceptable. Funny thing – in the abstract it’s pretty hard to find people to support and condone rape. Go ahead, ask around, I’ll wait…

I haven’t found a lot of people interested in going on the record as ‘pro rape’, myself… but as a rape victim, it gets weird really fast as soon as the reporting of a rape begins.  In my experience, it actually doesn’t matter how heinous the rape, or how violent, or how ‘obvious’ or how vigorously resisted… the hideous vicious questions come fast, questioning whether it happened, maybe it was a misunderstanding, was it consensual? Then the reminders that accusations could ruin the life of the rapist… Do rapists get anything but support?  Not very many rapists go to jail for it, or so it seems to me.

It’s on my mind because I am a victim of military sexual trauma, and I am being encouraged to submit documentation for disability compensation.  It is surprisingly difficult, and extremely painful, to have to put the mental energy into the paperwork, to have to consider it, event by event, in detail – names, places, timelines, details. The pain is enormous and I feel very alone, even though I know rape is so common I could likely just walk up to any woman I see and find myself in conversation with another victim.  I don’t want to share the pain.  I don’t want to taint my relationships with the details, or put poison into the consciousness of my loved ones.  But I have to think about it, and I have to write about it, and today it is making me very cross with the world…

I love sex, personally, and I’ve managed to remain very sex positive in spite of having a rape history, but balancing my libido, my every day sexual needs, with these feelings about this topic… I feel confused and vulnerable, and I don’t know with whom or how to talk about that.  There are a lot of people who suffer from the odd notion that women who love sex can’t be raped, or are somehow less entitled to be protected or offered support when it happens to them. There have been a lot of times in my life when it was made pretty clear to me that because I enjoy sex, value physical contact with my partners, take pleasure in pleasure, that I’m less deserving of consideration if I’m raped, or less trustworthy if I report it.  The message often seems to be ‘why didn’t you just like it’? As if there’s no difference, or as if my will and desire and consent don’t really matter. Or perhaps I should just cut the rapist some slack, since I’m ‘used equipment’ – after all, what did I lose?  I want to shout “my body is mine, I get to choose!”, but I know damned well no one is listening, and plenty of people making actual laws don’t even believe that my body should be my own to control. Read the news. I feel angry and powerless every time I think about being raped.  I hate admitting that; it feels like the rapists won.

Sometimes it just all feels like too much to bear.  I feel like I ‘just want to go home’ – like a child, going to a safe place in Daddy’s arms, during a scary storm… but there is no ‘home’ to go to that escapes this, and there are no ‘safe places’, and there is very little understanding in the world about this sort of crime, the effect it has, and the message we send to women when it is tolerated or excused.  So… I have something ugly on my mind, and it hurts, but I guess it is time to really deal with it, after all these years.  I teeter on the edge of just turning away from it, every day, and pretending it isn’t real, but that hasn’t worked so far, I’m still broken.

I need to paint… but I am terrified that any of this might hit canvas and make it somehow more visceral, more real. I actually don’t want to share this pain… it seems cruel. I am afraid, too, of what I reveal to myself… it shames me in some small way. Art should not be cowardly.

Categories Anxiety, Art, Logic & Reason, Post Traumatic Stress, Rape, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Words

Bliss, Confusion, Fatigue, and ‘Real Life’

January 29, 2013 //
5

I had a great evening, yesterday, but a poor night’s sleep last night. I woke restless and anxious in the wee hours, and couldn’t put it to rest with meditation, yoga, or having a quiet contemplative smoke in the dark. I knew what I was anxious about – I’m just about finished moving, but there’s just a thing or two more to do, and I feel a noticeable and probably appropriate ‘performance pressure’ to manage the remaining tasks well.  Even at 49, I sometimes find myself inappropriately ‘eager to please’, like the small girl ‘helping Daddy with projects’ that I once was.  Is that ‘something to fix’? I often wonder; I’m rarely certain.

I’m tired. Four hours or so of sleep isn’t enough for my best emotional balance or cognition. I already know this about me. I want to learn to deliver my very best in spite of limited sleep – because sleep disturbances, nightmares, and insomnia are all part of my experience on a pretty frequent basis. I want to master treating people well, even on bad days.

Now I have MC Frontalot ‘Your Friend Wil’ stuck in my head.  I’m not surprised. I find hope for the world in the existence of Wheaton’s Law, in general.  I find dismay in the number of news articles published every single day wherein the subject matter is really not much more, or less, than someone being a dick to someone else. Seriously. What’s up with people being mean, or inconsiderate, the most common definition of ‘being a dick’, and what makes any one of us think it is ok when we, ourselves, are being dicks? I had considered linking to some of those very articles… discovered so many exceptional examples that doing so quickly looked like some sort of thesis research and less a blog post.  I challenge you to go directly to your favorite news source of a current events type and not find at least one article on the ‘front page’ that details someone being inconsiderate, rude, abrasive, insensitive, or mean at the heart of it.

I’m tired, I haven’t had enough sleep – but I am resolved to get through today without being a dick to anyone, especially my loving partners. I mean – wow – how ungracious would it be of me to celebrate the wonderful evening we shared last night by being a dick today? So, ok… back to that ‘mindfulness’ thing, I’m guessing.

I’m rambling, and feeling vaguely that I ‘owe you an apology’ for it… my focus and cognition suffer when I’m fatigued. I guess that’s true for everyone, but I know that with my starting point today I will want to be extra cautious with my behavior later, when I’m more tired, or risk irrational mood swings or tantrums. I wish I understood more clearly which pieces of my puzzle are my brain injury, my hormones, or my PTSD…although…I don’t know that the information, if I had it, would change my experience.

I really want to get completely settled in to my new home and paint. I am struggling to express certain things – to myself, I suppose, more than to someone else, and I know I hear me so clearly in texture and color.

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Categories Anxiety, Art, Brain Injury, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Perspective, Relationships, Sleepless Nights
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