Archives for category: Spring
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Filters and Lenses

March 31, 2015 //
0
Do I see what I see through honest eyes, or is it filtered through my experience, and my own limited awareness and understanding?

Do I see what I see through honest eyes, or is it filtered through my experience, and my own limited awareness and understanding?

I woke this morning to the sound of an audible ‘click’. I often do, but don’t know what the sound is caused by. Perhaps a door elsewhere, or the timer on my aquarium, or some other commonplace occurrence that I simply haven’t placed or clearly identified – because I am asleep when I hear it. This particular morning, when I woke, my emotional world careened around within myself in an almost dizzying way; residual emotions from dreams colliding with in-the-moment reactions to sensations and awaking, leftover random moments of emotion from earlier hours – or days – left piled up in the unswept corners of my consciousness, stirred together, mixed and shaken, as I wake up. It is far too easy to take this bit of ’emotional seasickness’ personally, first thing in the morning, and more than one otherwise lovely morning has been wrecked by emotions that got the best of me – even though I had no idea why I actually felt the way I did.

This morning I am playing a quiet game of ‘being my own best friend’ and sipping my coffee and hanging out with me, unconcerned that my emotions feel unsettled, uninterested in exploring them further, and choosing instead to relax with me for a while, and enjoy some of the very cool things about this woman who I am.

I find myself thinking about a very fancy camera I had once had – long before the age of the digital camera, and back when analog film drove the decisions about how many pictures I could reasonably afford to take, and to get interesting effects, or special shots, I lugged around a camera bag full of filters and lenses. It’s an interesting metaphor. Even in our thinking, we use ‘filters’ and ‘lenses’ to sort through what we see, and to determine how we understand it. More than once I’ve messed with my own head, and caused myself a lot of needless suffering, because my perspective (a filter, right?) or awareness (a lens?) were not well-suited to the experience of the moment.

I don’t really know where it takes this metaphor, but when I take pictures these days, they are most often available light shots, free of effects or ‘fun’ filters; I want most to capture the quality of light – of life – in a moment, just as it is. This, I find, is also a very nice way to treat my own heart – although less simple, once I have stepped from metaphor to action, sometimes. This morning the time taken to get my balance, and my bearings, and secure emotional footing before rushing off to face the day seems like a nice way to start a new day.

Today is a good day to view things through a different filter, and through a cleaner lens. Today is a good day to enjoy who I already am, in this moment right now, and see where the day takes me. Today is a good day for love and lovers – and a bigger picture.

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Categories Brain Injury, Logic & Reason, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Spring, The Big 5, Words

Today Is Unlike Any Other

March 30, 2015 //
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Moments lack permanence.

Moments lack permanence.

Today is unlike any other day, because it is uniquely always ‘now’; it is today. Yesterday is among so many other past days.  They queue up in an orderly fashion, following rules of time and the passage of time; yesterday has become memory, lacking in substance. Tomorrow, too, is without substance, stretching infinitely ahead with the rest of future events, lacking even the ‘reality’ of memory, of having once been… Tomorrow is only a thought of things to come, and perhaps a bit of planning built on what isn’t yet happening at all, and may not, ever.

Really, we’ve only got ‘now’, ‘today’, to work with in any practical way. We can apologize for past events – there’s a lot of that going on, day-to-day, among well-meaning people. We can make promises or plans for the future – some of us crave more of that than others. Some of us see-saw between past hurts and a future more distant from those. Some of us balance delicately between past joys and a future that feels more uncertain. Perhaps we all do some of both?

I find it easy to look past today without intending to. The outcome is generally that I have less ability to affect my future willfully, and less perspective on a past I can’t change.

Today tends always to have the potential for action, for change, for the moment to bring will and choice together with a verb or two…neither yesterday nor tomorrow afford us that chance. I guess the puzzle is how best to learn from all those yesterdays, to plan a tomorrow in which I thrive – and to do so in a way that provides me an opportunity to take action today to bring me closer to where I most want to be…but to also do so without striving, or attachment.

Life’s lessons about attachment, specifically, are brutally difficult – at least for me, at least today. Oh, there are easy moments of clear vision and contentment, confident that the path ahead of me is paved, mapped, and free of obstacles. That, too, is an illusion. It is as illusory as the more difficult moments when it feels like I am wading knee deep in chaos and damage, in the darkness, with my eyes closed, banging my shins and stubbing my toes on a real life that is only to happy to keep moving the fucking furniture around or changing the rules.

This too will pass. Change, unavoidably, is. What will become of me? Whatever I make of me. And what of love? Well…love will attend to its own affairs if I attend skillfully to mine. Love, too, simply is. The challenge there is holding love’s flame within, trusting that the heart’s pilot light can’t really be blown out so easily. A friend recently wrote some beautiful words about love I am still finding relevant in this moment.

Today is a good day for perspective. Today is a good day to practice good practices, and good processes, and to trust incremental change over time. Today is a good day to take care of my heart with the same tenderness I would give to anyone else. Change is. Change always is – and it is always ‘today’. Today I’ll make the most of that.

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Love, Mindfulness, Perspective, Relationships, Spring, The Big 5, Words

Biscuits

March 29, 2015 //
0

This morning biscuits are a metaphor. I haven’t made any, I’m just thinking about them. Fresh hot homemade biscuits right from the oven on a lazy spring Sunday morning, served with sweet cream butter, homemade fruit preserves of some kind or another – or several – maybe some lemon curd, and Devonshire cream – and plenty of coffee, or tea, sounds like just about the perfect morning munch, or lovely bite of brunch a bit later, or excellent accompaniment to a good lunch salad… I’m just saying; I like biscuits. (American biscuits… so… scones.)

Home made scones.

Home made scones.

How are biscuits a metaphor? Simply that there is nothing fancy about a biscuit, even the recipe itself is easy. Flour, shortening, liquid, mixed in the correct ratio, spooned onto a pan if you’re not up for rolling and cutting, and then baked – but the results are extraordinary when the ingredients are in the correct ratio, the steps followed in order, and the progress of the baking attended to mindfully.

Sometimes we take what is easy and make it harder. I’m not sure why, but I know I do, and have, and likely will again in the future.

I’ve got stacks of cookbooks, and a lot of biscuit recipes. Some of the recipes start things off by taking those simple ingredients and directing me toward very complicated steps. Some of the recipes are a simple tweak of the basic concept, but result in something very different at the end.

A biscuit done well can be the foundation of something amazing - like a grown up take on a breakfast 'ice cream sandwich'.

A biscuit done well can be the foundation of something amazing – like a grown up take on a breakfast ‘ice cream sandwich’.

The poorest pantry likely has the ingredients for biscuits; flour of some kind, water or milk, some sort of shortening, a leavening ingredient. Biscuits can be made simply, or with far fancier ingredients – they’re still biscuits, and the sort of thing that tends to be very available. Affordable luxury? A small investment in effort, a commitment to a good recipe, and having simple staple ingredients on hand can result in luxury, comfort, and contentment in the hardest times.

Everyone has tough times. In the toughest times, I’ve still been able to make biscuits. I’m trying to say something… about life, about love, about hard times…about the simple basics that we can get by on, when we make the choice to do so. Still choices, still verbs involved – but the list of ingredients may be quite simple indeed. (Check your pantry – are you well stocked on emotional staples?)

Today is a good day to do well on what is at hand. Today is a good day to follow a good recipe. Today is a good day to enjoy the simple pleasures that I know I can count on. Today is a good day to change my world.

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

Some Days the Nightmares Win

March 27, 2015 //
1

Disclaimer: This post is about emotions. I sometimes work through them more easily with words, in text, that I can see reflecting the experience back at me. It is a way of getting perspective. This post, though, may be a downer – I say that before I even write it, because I am having my own experience, and I feel what I feel in this moment. I am so very human. So…do yourself a huge favor, take a moment for ‘informed consent’; if you are in a place emotionally where someone else’s pain and struggling may wound you, throw off a good vibe you are enjoying, or change your experience for the worse, I recommend skipping this one. Hey, if nothing else, the writing is likely to be of poor quality, and angst-y, and rife with spelling errors and weird grammar fails – who needs that on a Friday morning? I’ll understand, I promise.

Still here? Okay…

Some other morning, a coffee.

Some other morning, a coffee.

I woke crying this morning. I fell asleep crying last night. In between, I found myself ambushed by Demons in The Nightmare City. This is not an emotional space I want to occupy. I am frustrated by my lack of resilience, my lack of emotional regulation, and my lack of perspective. I feel sad. I feel angry. I feel resentful and let down. I feel. Yeah. I definitely feel. I feel mistreated, and mislead. I feel set up and I feel sabotaged. I feel hurt.

“That’s a whole lot of feelings there, lady, what gives?” I’m a human primate. I am an emotional being more than a rational one – it’s a balance. Today it isn’t balancing as well as I’d like. Stress kicks my ass, being hurt kicks my ass, abrupt change kicks my ass – and it takes me a little time to recover, even with some support. Emotions are not criminal actions. Assaulting people with them is, I hear, avoidable. That sounds like fine thing to me, and I turned the little sign on my door this morning to ‘do not disturb’, meditated a while, had a shower, meditated some more… I still don’t want to be as disturbed as I feel, right now. The sign didn’t do much to help with the feelings, but by design it may prevent anyone else from walking through the mess I woke to, within, this morning.

Meditation, mindfulness practices, good basic self-care are all going a long way to improve my experience of me, very nicely. I feel a momentary hurt, recalling with sadness how quickly encouragement turned to criticism, a few months after I began this journey. I was taking a moment to feel proud of my progress, and I was feeling pretty impressed with new tools and practices being effective at helping me on a level nothing else ever had… I got called ‘smug’. I was incredibly hurt. Admittedly, I had been foolishly trying to explain or share the experience with someone else… maybe they hadn’t asked? (I suck at that – put a person in front of me and I will probably just start talking. Are you aware that your executive function manages that for you?) It hurt, nonetheless, and since then I am self-conscious about feeling encouraged by progress, and reluctant to share positive feelings about it in conversations. (Sticks and stones? Fuck right off; words matter.)

I feel confused. “Emptied out”. I feel overburdened by unmet emotional needs piling up over time. I feel like I am not making the progress I could be, right now. It’ll be okay, I think – I hold on to that tightly. I’ve got the hotline number in my pocket, just in case it gets too hard.  I lost a beautiful niece to suicide this year, and I see how it hurts my cousin every day she is without her daughter; I won’t put my traveling partner through that, and I can take the steps to avoid it. Despair is a motherfucker – it is part of our human experience.

...and another...

…and another…

I can’t be certain that the intensity of my emotions this morning reflects something ‘real’ or necessary; they are only emotions. For all I know, this is a 100% bio-chemical experience with no grounding in events or experience. Does that matter in the moment? Well, sure. It matters the way anything true ‘matters’. One true thing is that my emotions are this intense, and unpredictably so. Another true thing is that my emotions, and lack of top-down control, are incredibly uncomfortable for some people to live with. (I don’t get a choice, myself; this is my experience and I live it.) Unfortunately, in a live and unscripted real-life environment, I also don’t get much compassion specific to the ‘invisible’ issues associated with my TBI or PTSD. I rarely fight for it; if it isn’t there to be offered, begging for it, pleading for it or wishing it were there will not make it appear. Compassion can be taught – but that phenomenon also requires an active learner. Change is, but forcing it on someone isn’t appropriate – and generally isn’t effective.

My traveling partner encourages and supports me – he frankly provides a level of emotional support that I can only describe as ‘super human’ – but the environment in the household, generally, is unhealthy for me. I feel aggravated and moody about looking for a place of my own, because I’d honestly prefer to continue living with my traveling partner – he’s wonderful to live with [for me]. I am painfully aware, though, that living with me can be hard on him. Right now so much of what I am working through touches on sexuality, gender, individual identity, boundary setting/management, and relationships with others that it’s harder to treat each other gently in moments when we need it most from each other. So…yeah. I need to be on my own a while – not a break up, not even a separation, just a different living arrangement. It still sucks to hurt over it. I hope by day’s end I am embracing it in good spirits.

I leave other household members out of this, generally; I am writing about my own experience and the other people in it are entitled to be free of public scrutiny of their values and choices filtered through my chaos and damage. But…I am not willing to continue to over-compromise my needs, or undercut my values to keep peace, and the time I spend in the arms of my loves is too precious to taint it with OPD, or games. As a population of individuals, we don’t want or need the same things, and at 52 I have no time to waste on fighting to get the most basic emotional needs met; we are not all equally committed to that endeavor. I don’t yet have the emotional resilience to hold enough in reserve to continue to take care of me when common place bullshit goes sideways, and often find myself without any emotional reserves left to care for me, myself, by the time I have a moment to do so. I feel positive about the choice to get my own place…and for the moment, sad that it is necessary at all.

You know what I don’t feel? I don’t feel guilt or shame over the choice to move out, it needs to happen; I don’t thrive in an environment in which my emotional quality of life is poor. Hell, right now in this moment… I’m okay. (Thanks, Dearheart!) My tears have dried. I’m not feeling social, but I’m not enthralled by Demons in The Nightmare City.  (If I knew that I would have the kind of nightmares that I had last night, in nights to come, I’d never sleep again.) I don’t have the headache that followed me around all day yesterday, which is a huge improvement.  My coffee tastes good – I feel a pang of sadness sweep over me when I realize I won’t have an espresso machine in my kitchen for some time to come after I move; it will be a frugal lifestyle, focused on painting, meditation, and love. Wow. Suddenly that sounds fucking amazing – and all over again I wonder why this hurts at all. I enjoy solitude. I dislike drama. I have musical and culinary tastes that are not shared in the household at large… and I miss a good French press in the morning; it’s a lovely ritual to prepare coffee that way, time it carefully, enjoy the outcome at leisure… I miss living a gentle life. (The most humorous thing about that is how little time I have ever spent living that kind of exceptional quality of life – across years and relationships, I can’t really pin down more than a total of about 18 months that qualify as ‘gentle living’ in 52 years!

I’ve already found my way to a better place. It’s nice. No rushing, either; I’ve made changes to my schedule, effective this week, intended to dial down some of the fatigue-related stress, and don’t have to rush off so soon on Friday mornings. Have you actually read this far? Are you okay? Thank you for being interested, curious, or concerned enough to come all this way with me – whether just this morning, or over these past couple years. I appreciate it. You help me feel heard.

Yeah. Some days, the nightmares win. Today they didn’t. 🙂

Because love matters more. "Emotion and Reason" 24″ x 36″ acrylic on canvas w/ceramic details and glow 2012

Because love matters more.
“Emotion and Reason” 24″ x 36″ acrylic on canvas w/ceramic details and glow 2012

Today is a good day to put down some baggage. Today is a good day to practice good self-care. Today is a good day for self-compassion – first, not last. Today is a good day to enjoy this amazing woman I am becoming without competition, dread, or games. Today is a good day to treat others well, and understand that they are walking their own path; their story, and experience, are not mine to endure, to manage, or to criticize – and participation is a choice.

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Categories Anxiety, art and the artist, Brain Injury, Free Will, grief, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Rape, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, Spring, The Big 5, women, Words

In Accordance With the Customs of My Tribe

March 26, 2015 //
2

Have you ever taken a moment to consider ‘polite’ versus ‘rude’, courtesy, manners in general, and what ‘consideration’ means in a detailed and nuanced way? Have you similarly considered how relative to our individual culture, clan, tribe, family, community, ‘scene’, or region these things all are? It’s these subtleties – and mismatches in practices and expectations – that result in fairly predictable ‘incompatibility’ issues that occur in my own experience. I think about these a lot.

Surely, if we all wish to treat each other well, and we all go forward ‘doing our best’ to treat others well moment-to-moment, and we are all similarly aware that people around us also hold the intent to treat others well, and are doing their best…surely the outcome is that we all feel well-treated? (Are you giggling? Are you frowning? Do you see where I am going with this?) Even if those things are simple truths – that we each wish to treat each other well, and are all doing our best to do so moment-to-moment – we likely won’t see the outcome of ‘everyone feels well treated’; as defined, the premises do not lead directly to the proposed outcome, at all. Good treatment is relative to cultural practices, our own expectations, and how we experience our experience. The understanding that we have treated others well, is similarly biased – and biased in our own favor, generally, because we believe we have ‘done our best’ – whatever that may have been.

That’s a hell of a gap. How do I bridge the gap? How do I treat others – all others – well, with consideration, with courtesy – universally recognized, no fail, always a win, courtesy is what I’m looking for here – and get the result that each person thus treated by me also feels well-treated? I am pondering this because of a longer-term association I have in which I feel fairly chronically mis-treated in willful and overt ways, lacking in any shred of courtesy or consideration – a circumstance in which I am also quite certain that this associate has no understanding at all that the day-to-day interactions are experienced by me as ‘mis-treatment’ in the first place. In some cases, explicit statements by me indicating that some specific behavior/action/language is unacceptable or inappropriate have been disregarded, in others they have been actively dismissed and argued with, but in most instances it is not clear that the conduct is intended to be abusive, lacking in courtesy, or intentionally hostile.

Sometimes well-meaning people are clueless asshats… But… sadly… sometimes they are not actually well-meaning people, based on their practices, choices, and actions. Practicing good self-care means building healthy relationships; abusive or unhealthy relationships do not support my emotional needs.

Words have definitions, and we are each having our own experience. What I consider ‘courteous’, ‘respectful’, or ‘considerate’ may not be quite the same as what another person finds defining about those concepts. Still… I think there are some cross-cultural behaviors that spell out universal ‘good treatment’ – or, I do until I try really looking at practices in other cultures. It’s complicated. “They mean well” is a phrase that matters; the intention of someone’s behavior is what let’s us ‘let it go’ more easily when customs clash. “They mean well” is a band-aid, though, a temporary fix; we build relationships. Choices and compromises over time, clear expectation setting and boundary observing conversations adjust our shared understanding of ‘good treatment’, ‘consideration’ and ‘courtesy’ – but only if we have those conversations.

So…I sit here considering all manner of things to do with manners, and where I got which idea that what notion amounts to ‘polite’, ‘considerate’, ‘supportive’…and how can I best express to others who matter most to me what I want and need – and what counts with me as ‘considerate’, and whether that is reasonable. Eventually, if words are said, ideas are shared, boundaries expressed, terms defined… and I still feel mis-treated… then what? Learning those boundary setting practices, the firmly drawn line in the sand, the opportunity not to compromise and instead politely decline additional mistreatment are similarly guided by custom, ‘manners’, and expectations of consideration… How do I treat others well who do not treat me well? It’s an important question for me to approach, and I approach it with great care. (Let’s get “why would I want to treat such people well?” out of the way; because it matters to me to be someone who treats others well. It’s not about them, it is who I am.)

Sometimes I can see where the path leads, but the way is not easy.

Sometimes I can see where the path leads, but the way is not easy.

Today is a good day for hard questions. Today is a good day for the very best self-care. Today is a good day to skillfully treat others well. Today is a good day to continue to honor and respect my values, in the face of mistreatment, without anger; we are each having our own experience. Today is a good day to change the world.

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