Archives for category: Sleepless Nights
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No, Seriously

June 27, 2014 //
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Life will not be argued with on this point; change is. Seriously. lol.

I had plans for the evening, last night. Change, however, is. My experience had a lot more to do with being close to accessible plumbing than a night out, dinner, a show…Change is, and it isn’t always a change we’re happy about. Initially, I struggled to keep myself on track with the planned evening; I had been looking forward to seeing this show, having this night out, since we planned it.  By the end of my work day, I was beyond feeling guilty about ‘ruining the evening’, and just angry, disappointed, and more than a little hesitant to face a half an hour on public transportation and two one-mile walks with the gastrointestinal challenges I was having.  I was also really hungry, rather thirsty, and not comfortable with either eating or drinking water until I could be sure of having a toilet nearby.  It sucked.

The evening was blown. I spent it in solitary misery, my churning guts preventing any real sleep or rest – and oh hey, here’s something I did not know; it’s damned difficult to meditate your way out of nausea, or between bouts of other assorted human primate gastrointestinal nastiness.  Sometimes being human is incredibly gross.  I mostly just drifted in and out of awareness, sweating, and waiting for whatever it was to pass. (lol)

My world didn’t end. My disappointment didn’t destroy me. I didn’t wake to feel that the world hates me for not attending this event.  I’m not drowning in regret or punishing myself. Change is. Sometimes we choose it, sometimes we accept it. Sometimes it is ‘a little from column A, a little from column B’.  It feels pretty good to wake this morning, having taken care of me last night.  My partners still had a great time, and since I didn’t find it necessary to be ‘needy’ while they were out, they probably didn’t have to spend the evening immersed in my suffering – I don’t know all the details of their experience; they wisely kept their distance after returning home, avoiding possible contagion, and respecting my need to rest (if I could). Respect. Nice one.

I can be so child-like and insecure when I’m ill. I take things unbelievably personally, sometimes, and struggle to make sense of a bigger perspective. My partners checked-in on me, via email while they were out, and after they came home, one checked-in on me for real, keeping a responsible distance (passionate tongue-kissing would not have been appropriate. lol). I woke to a gentle email reminder that if I am not well, to stay home from work. Considerate. Compassionate. I like that.

Today is a good day to look beyond the obvious.

Today is a good day to look beyond the obvious.

This morning I woke feeling better, and not just because I’m over whatever the hell that was; I also feel good experiencing my partners delivering on The Big 5.  That’s a big deal.

Today is a good day to take care of me, to be compassionate with others, and to roll with changes. Today is a good day for celebrating simple things and connecting with friends. Today is a good day to smile. Today is a good day to change the world.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Love, Menopause, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5

You, Again?

June 13, 2014 //
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Oh, hello… Please excuse my lack of enthusiasm for your visit. I admit, I was hoping we were really over and done with, you and I. Admit it, it’s been a troubled and troubling experience for years, unhappy, unpredictable, messy… I’d have made plans for your visit, you know, even though – or perhaps especially because – I enjoy you so little.  You wear me out, and wear me down, almost as soon as you arrive on the scene. Headaches, confusion, the way you play with my emotions and lie to me – it’s not okay, and I resent the way you make me out a fool or worse, again and again, but I’ve found some small amount of relief in being prepared. Of course, now you take even that from me.

So often, just as I’m finding a way to get along with you more easily, you slip away. I’m left with cleaning up the mess and making all the apologies. I can only imagine how lame those sound after all these years.  Once you’re finally gone, I still find myself putting distance between me, and everyone, over lingering fears about whether you are really gone, and because the insecurity I feel after even a few hours with you hangs around screwing with my ability to feel emotionally safe long after you are gone.

You rarely move right in these days, and while I do appreciate that, I am still incredibly annoyed, and feeling imposed upon, each and every time you peak around a corner into my space unexpectedly.

Today I’m incredibly angry with you for being here, now. It’s just not right. You were not invited to my birthday and I don’t want you around.  I’m hurt and frustrated that I don’t have the choice of saying ‘just go and don’t come back’; you are an unreasonable and unreasoning pain in my ass (metaphorically speaking) and I’m also frankly bored with you.  Still, you return again and again with no ability to understand what you are doing to me, and clearly no concern or compassion.

344 days since I’ve had to live shoulder to shoulder with your bullshit, your mess, and your drama – and still you hassle me and mess with my good times.  You know what? You can fuck right off. I’m done with you – if not now, then very very soon, and eventually even you will not be able to deny me that.  Maybe for another little while more, but it won’t be long now; eventually I will reach your border, Hormone Hell, and I will walk on through to the other side.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Hormone Hell, Logic & Reason, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5, women

New and Improved

June 12, 2014 //
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Well, or something like that; it’s my birthday. I make rather a big deal of some of them, less so of others, this one has been a strange wobbly roller coaster ride of achievement, change and the passage of time.  51 isn’t generally one of the ‘milestone birthdays’.  51 isn’t even cool enough to be a prime number birthday. It’s just… a year older than 50. 🙂

To be fair, 50 kicked ass in so many ways, how could 51 really challenge it on the very first day? So, we’ll keep things simple; dinner after I get home from work, a restaurant I like and consider a bit of a treat, and near enough to home that it won’t be a ludicrously late night. Sleep matters to my well-being and good cognition; 50 taught me a lot. I reached greedily for change, and learned a lot about choice, will, and love. I spent much of the year deeply invested in study and growth, and standing on the doorstep of 51, I feel a sense of purpose, and find that I have goals of my own that matter enough to build my life around them, to make my choices consistent with those desires on a daily basis, and to be willing to lean on those goals a little bit now and then and say ‘hey, I missed the mark here, I’d like to do this one differently…’. The occasional ‘course correction’ or adjustment in everyday trajectory feels less disruptive than it once did, generally. I am, overall, less stressed out, generally less confused, mostly more chill, and rarely deeply unhappy – only briefly, now and then.  It’s been a good year for change.

So…here I am. 51. As with most birthdays, it really doesn’t feel any different than 50 did, yesterday.  I’m okay with that.  Every day is a new experience, and it isn’t about age. Age and aging just don’t seem to be the Very Big Deal people so often make them out to be.  Yesterday I enjoyed a video that proves that point.  I’ve started hiking again, myself. I still work in my garden. I manage about 5 miles a day on foot during the week and yoga every day.  I feel pretty good, in spite of pain.  I feel strong and capable. Hell, I feel more beautiful at 51 than I felt at 20, and the photographs support that, mostly because the pained and tense, vaguely angry look on my face at 20 was off-putting, to say the least. At 51, I am smiling, joyful, and generally delighted with life and love. 51 is a very nice place to be in life.

Here’s to life and love and 51! Today is a good day to celebrate life. Today is a good day to enjoy love and work and growth and the small delights that keep things fun. Today is a good day to enjoy the world.

Where will my path take me?

Where will my path take me?

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, gardening, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5, women, Words

My Writing Process Blog Tour

June 9, 2014 //
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I don’t do this sort of thing often, but when a dear friend, and a writer whose work I greatly enjoy, asks me to participate in something that could be fun, new, interesting, or just because they are dear to me and asked, I at least consider it… So here I am, at 4:00 am on a sleepless Monday morning, facing the questions put to me.  Many thanks for considering me, Oz. I am humbled to be thought interesting enough to share. 🙂

1. What am I working on?

Well, honestly, I’m ‘working on’ me. That’s really it. I write because the written word is a great way to communicate more slowly, more precisely, more poetically, and more lastingly than speaking aloud. The fundamentals of that idea don’t really hold up to much scrutiny these days, I suppose; there’s always video. Images, too, are lasting and rich with symbols and metaphors. I also take a lot of pictures.

2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I’m not sure what genre I’m in, and I don’t actually spend much time contemplating that, or related writer sorts of subjects, but I doubt my work differs significantly from the work of writers who are writing about similar things, aside from the details of who we each are, and the journey we are each on: mindfulness, meditation, healing, growth, compassion (and much, much more!). I doubt I’ve ever scratched the surface of ‘writers in my genre’ – there must be millions of people pouring their hearts into blog posts, doing their own best with growth, change and circumstances.  There must be differences to discuss, and commonalities, but they are beyond me without significant research.

One potential difference, is the lack of self-restraint regarding wordplay, I suppose. I often work oddball puns, references, weird humor, and bits of grammatical fun into my writing, and titles, and image captions tend to be a coherent and intentional part of the work, related to the body of the post very closely, although often tangentially, or from another perspective.  I have no particular concern that anyone else will ‘get it’… the bits of wordplay are more like easter eggs in code; a bit of fun for those that catch them.

3. Why do I write what I do?

Because I have to. Well, that sounds sort of dramatic, and I don’t mean it to… but what else would I write besides what I do write? That’s the not question, though, is it? Why do I write this blog from a positive perspective instead of drowning in bitterness and cynicism, perhaps? Or why don’t I write more graphically about sex, love, and romance than I do? Or even why am I so slim on pertinent details about people who may be mentioned in passing or by implication, but never quite allowed to develop as characters in a more full way?  It could be easier to break it down like that.  I write in the largely very positive way I do because it hurts to be foundering in a sea of pain, even emotional pain, and negativity is the last place I look for hope or solace; I don’t want to hurt anymore.  I don’t write more graphically about sex and love simply because I’ve used up all those words, there’s nothing more to say about the fun bits, the plumbing, the gymnastics, the heart and soul of it… this blog started at a different point in my life. There’s plenty to say about love and sex and romance in the world. My few words on that topic wouldn’t really be a value-add, and it could risk dragging the innocent reader through some of the worst of my chaos and damage. It seems unnecessary.  I also have a pretty firm personal mandate that this particular blog will remain as me-centric as it can be; my journey, my challenge, my life, my progress… it is, after all, ‘all about me’ – at least right here, for a few minutes, on a mostly daily basis, and I like to respect the privacy of friends and loved ones as much as possible. This blog is part of a healing process for me, a map of my journey, a log, and an ongoing reminder how human I am, and how commonplace my struggles are, it is not a place to lash out at others, or to be hurtful.  I’m still human; if I need to ‘just vent’ I save it for a private encrypted journal, a sort of practice range for words that are ‘like bullets’, and often find myself deleting the worst of who I am, which is a very nice feature of technology.

4. How does my writing process work?

It’s pretty simple; I’m having a conversation with myself, of sorts, contemplating what I am learning, what my understanding of the world is, and the meaning in my life and my choices.

I often start a blog post as a byproduct of other conversations, or reading and responding to something someone else wrote. When I am walking from one place to another, I write in my head, though generally poetry.  Those bits of internal dialogue often make it onto the page, here. My writing process is a tidied up look at the inner workings of my mind, and little more. I edit on the fly, and reliably fail to catch at least one significant spelling mistake when I hit ‘publish’. I have hungered to say just one particular thing in a particular way to the point of trashing thousands of written words that weren’t quite right, to try again. And again. Again. One more time, perhaps… and other mornings I sit down and bang out words that simply fall from brain to keyboard, thousands at a time without error or rewrite. Either way, it’s still that ‘conversation with myself’… or with a silent someone else, unstated, unidentified, and more important than mere identity. I write between 1000 and 5000 words a day, pretty easily. I’d write more, longer, more often…but people start noticing my lack of presence. lol

One of my daily challenges is around the simple practical missteps I struggle with because of my TBI.  As a result of that bit of baggage, I’m unsure who will be ‘up next’… I was not timely with my invitation. 😦 Having potentially let you down, I suggest that whether she chooses to participate in the My Writing Process Blog Tour, the blog of wisejourney is very worth exploring.  Certainly there have been many days when not one more step would be easily taken without her gentle words and lovely images to buoy my spirit on a difficult morning, and her blog was one of the first I began to read when I started down the path of real healing, self-compassion, and finding contentment in life.  I’m very hopeful that on June 16th, she’ll be ‘up next’.

It wouldn’t be a bad spot for a picture…

The beautiful thing about writers, is that although we are each on our own journey, and no one really has a map, sometimes the words of others function as a bit of pavement, a comfortable path for a portion of the journey.

The beautiful thing about writers, is that although we are each on our own journey, and no one really has a map, sometimes the words of others function as a bit of pavement, a comfortable path for a portion of the journey.

Today is a good day for honest words. Today is a good day to remember we are each having our own experience. Today is a good day for good choices. Today is a good day for love.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5, Words

More of an Edge Than a Line

June 8, 2014 //
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I slept in this morning, greedily immersing myself in more sleep after each moment of waking, until the morning light through the curtain, and the glow of the aquarium, had become too much to sleep through.  I crashed early last night, fatigued with hormones, hot flashes, emotional volatility and promise threat promise likelihood inevitability of largely unpredictable change future happenings. It’s been that sort of week.

It's still a journey. There's still no map.

It’s still a journey. There’s still no map.

Again, I find myself quite human. Indecisive. Fearful. Bolting from circumstances toward the unknown without patient and thorough consideration; traveling through life as a victim (again) instead of… well, whatever better options there are, and there are many (any of them would indeed be an improvement over panic).  Stress walks my PTSD down the aisle with my TBI and the resulting marriage, like many, is definitely not ‘made in heaven’.  In the middle of a terse conversation about entirely other matters, a partner observed in a frustrated tone that I could take a moment to show myself some compassion.

Well…yeah. Why wasn’t I?

This morning, over my coffee, contemplating recent events and conversations, thinking about needs, looking to understand ‘what matters most’ for me, looking to identify anything that could be tripping me up simply because it is unattended to… I read this in my newsfeed.  Purportedly an article about patience, it spoke to me on a deeper level, and although each and every numbered point is a reminder, rather than new information, the reminders were timely, and utterly relevant.  Meditation. Practice. Acceptance. Recognizing the infinitesimal line between the stories I tell myself, and what is – or may be.

There aren’t many things that calm me the way meditation can. How do I ever miss on that one? Still human.  I make choices, and in a brief moment on a sunny morning it can seem ‘no big deal’ to skip a few minutes of meditation… right? Free will… “I’m a grown up, after all”… “It’s such a beautiful day, and I’m in a great place…” “I just have to get this one thing done…” “It’s not like meditation is medication…”  My TBI already causes me a great deal of difficulty with building habits; not staying firmly committed is careless risk taking (for me) of the highest order.  My ability to show myself some kindness, some compassion, and to recognize my own needs and accept that meeting them is both critical and challenging, snuck off without my noticing and I dived into self-directed anger, resentment, disappointment with myself, berating myself for any decision that could have been hasty or in error, each moment of clouded judgment or poor reasoning… Yep. Still quite human. Still battling my demons, fighting my hormones, fighting the chaos and damage, fighting to go being enduring to achieve thriving. I sure don’t make it easy on me.

I do have ‘needs’, legitimate, non-negotiable, take-care-of-me, value-based, this-is-what-it-takes-to-thrive sorts of needs. Everyone does.  I have not always made it important to recognize and understand what those needs really are, beyond the survival basics, and it’s slow going learning what matters most to me.  I sometimes stumble on an issue, boundary, limitation, or need as an unexpected byproduct of some other event or decision-making; the undiscovered need becomes an unanticipated confound in reasoning that had seemed simple and clear, or becomes the thing that throws a beautiful plan completely off track. It’s inconvenient and inefficient to learn things in this haphazard fashion, and I rather pointlessly resent the crap out of it, wasting valuable time that could be spent understanding more that could be understood.

Patience is hard sometimes. Taking a step back and saying ‘this may not make as much sense as I thought it did’ can be very humbling. Looking into the face of an unmet need that has evolved over decades, as much because I have treated myself callously, and without regard for my own emotional wellness, hurts a lot. However much any one human being has ever hurt me, their efforts do not measure up to the pain and suffering I have inflicted on my own heart. That’s a hard thing to accept first thing on a lovely Sunday morning… but there it is.  How do I move on from the damage inflicted by others when I don’t allow myself to move on from the damage I inflict on myself?

For a few moments last night, I sat alone, still, bereft in my solitude, hurting, sad… frozen. I was immobilized by pain. The evening light began to fade… I sat quietly for uncounted long minutes, heart thumping evenly, breathing. Without planning it, I allowed my state of being to evolve from being emotionally paralyzed to a gentler place. Breathing. Aware. Letting the ‘weight of it all’ fall away.  I made room for my pain, for my confusion, for the simple basic needs of being human: resting when fatigued, comfort when emotional, healing when injured, sustenance, compassion.  I reached out to one partner, then another, open to healing, open to… being open.  Trusting and vulnerable.  They, too, are human.  We all understand the feelings of urgency, fear, need. We all make mistakes. We all struggle to make sense of out of our confusion.

Another perspective.

Another perspective.

I am standing on the edge of something…feeling a little as if the hike I took yesterday could have resulted in more clarity of thought than it did…wondering why it didn’t… feeling open, aware, trusting events to unfold as they will, for things to turn out in some fashion that allows for each of us to grow, to feel calm and secure, to discover and nurture ‘what matters most’ for our own hearts, to gently nurture and support what matter most for the hearts of others.

Today is a good day for calm, and  a good day for comfort.  Today is a good day to meditate, and show myself ‘a softer side’.  Today is a good day to be aware, content, and compassionate.  Today is a good day to change the world.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, grief, Logic & Reason, Love, Menopause, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Big 5, women, Words
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