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Be Present, Time Is Short

February 20, 2024 //
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I’m sipping the last of my iced coffee and finishing a bowl of oatmeal. Healthier choices are on my mind a lot lately. I look out the window at the stormy looking gray sky and wonder whether the sun will come out, or the day will be rainy. It makes no particular difference, I just wonder.

The hint of blue in the morning sky reflects my mood back at me.

I’m not weeping, nor feeling bereft or despairing. I’m just a tiny bit blue, and contemplating the potential that I may be saying a final good-bye to someone dear to me, if not “soon” for sure sooner than I want to have to face it (which would frankly be not at all). We are mortal creatures. Fucking hell, doesn’t that suck all the damned ballz?? I sigh out loud and think about dear friends, far away family, and peculiarly close others that I feel, sometimes, in my day-to-day experience as “ghosts” of times past. Yes, even in spite of my fondness for solitude, I too am a social creature, and I miss those dear to me whose geographical distance keeps them from being with me “in real life” (isn’t it all “real life” though? email, text messages, phone calls… all real). I make a note to myself to reach out to more of them, more often; time is short and the clock never ever stops ticking.

…Let’s not make that a grim thought, it’s just one of many truths upon which to build our perspective…

I woke once during the night from unpleasant dreams of loss and loneliness and disconnection and mourning. I didn’t stay sad, once I woke. I had reminders of love right there, welcoming me back to the safety and comfort of home. I said a silent thank you to my Traveling Partner for the glow objects he’s added to my space alongside the art I’ve wrought over the years that also helps ground me in my “now” when I wake from a bad dream.

A lotus votive holder and a reminder that I am loved, greet my wakefulness in the night.

I take a breath, exhale, and relax, letting the lingering recollection of my dreams fall away as I watch the sky turn from moody shades of morning blue to shades of gray that threaten more rain. It’s a new day, a new week, and it’s time to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, breathe, Free Will, gratitude, grief, Healthy Living, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Moments, Perspective, Practices, Relationships, winter, women

The Emotional Rug-pull

February 12, 2024 //
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The day got off to a challenging start. Lab work needing to be done had already thrown my routine off more than a little bit, and that seemed fine and accounted for, but real life is not exclusively dependent on my own lived experience of it. Ever. An absolutely reasonable request by my Traveling Partner (more of a wish or hope than a request, actually) that we find somewhere closer to do this sort of thing added a layer of complexity and an opportunity for miscommunication. That didn’t have to be “a thing”, but eventually became one, simply by being one of many details weighing on me.

I rolled with the changes best I could, and even found myself feeling a moment of real satisfaction and delight with a work call that went exceptionally smoothly with great positive outcomes (happy boss, happy customer, happy me)… then… the “rug pull”.

Look, this is a thing probably everyone experiences now and then, I was riding high on a great feeling, and then, suddenly, that was gone in a moment of… something else much less pleasant or satisfying; my partner’s discontent. It happens. There I was feeling good, and then there he was, not feeling so good himself at all. He shared that experience with me, because as it happened, I was the driver of his poor experience (loud conference calls are annoying to have to overhear, successful or not). My mood was immediately wrecked, not because he did anything “wrong” and not because the moment required it, but just because – no bullshit – I’ve got mental health issues, and one of those is that I struggle to maintain perspective, to refrain from fusing with my partner’s emotional experience, and I take shit personally far far too often. Bouncing back is hard for me (the biochemistry of my emotional experience doesn’t resolve quickly) – thus my rather constant harping on resilience and practices associated with it. I need that practice, badly, and even with all the practicing? My results vary.

After the lab work, and getting my Traveling Partner back home, and doing what I could to set him up for comfort for the day, and getting on the road to head to the office to finish work (because rather stupidly I’d also managed to schedule an afternoon doctor’s appointment on this very same f*ing day, with limited room to maneuver or adapt and basically had to go into the city just to get to that appointment later on) – I finally had a chance to get a cup of coffee. It was almost 11:00 by that point, and I was developing a splitting (caffeine) headache, on top of my usual headache. Fuuuuuuuck. Still, 4 shots of espresso shaken with ice goes a long way toward dealing with a caffeine headache. My blood sugar was dipping by the time I reached the office, and I was a seething mess of vague fury and aggravation that extended well beyond any association with the day’s events thus far. I mostly managed to avoid snarling at any hapless humans to cross my path, and got logged in and head-down in the spreadsheets with a quickness. Maybe that’ll be enough?

…It wasn’t, really…

Breathe. Exhale. Relax. Try to remember this shit isn’t personal, it’s just random human bullshit and temper. Let it go. Let it go. Let. It. Go. It’s hard sometimes. I wanted to enjoy that feeling of pride in my work and that sense of accomplishment, and savor a job well done. I didn’t get to do that, even a little bit, and it was less because my Traveling Partner was irked over my loud talking so much as how much it stung to hear about it right then. Like it or not, generally the things my partner has to say just “hit my consciousness harder” – regardless how meaningful, significant, trivial, urgent, heartfelt, or true (or the opposites of any of those things) they may happen to be. The smallest moment of irritation from him is enough to sadden me for at least a moment, and even more so (and for longer) when it’s legit something I’ve done or not done, or something I’ve fucked up for him. That’s a fucking mess right there, I get it. Not super healthy – but refusing to acknowledge my baggage on this doesn’t let me unpack that baggage. The way out is through. So I put myself through the exercise of reflecting on it, asking some hard questions of myself, and weeding out my bullshit from what matters most.

Once I had a minute to think about things more clearly (after some coffee, after some calories), I realized I could not realistically work efficiently and complete the tasks I had in front of me, and also go to that afternoon appointment that was scheduled for a in-office visit (could have maybe made it work for a virtual appointment). So I canceled and requested a reschedule. I tried like hell to pick a date that wasn’t already scheduled for some other appointment (mine or my Traveling Partner’s), and tried to pick a week that wasn’t so overloaded with obvious meetings and calendared workload that it would be a poor fit in general. Once I’d done so, a lot of the stress was gone (although I also miss doing this appointment, which is already overdue).

…You know what wasn’t gone? My shitty mood. I keep finding myself on the edge of tears, and it’s 100% fragility and bullshit and I’m as annoyed with myself over that as over any other detail of the day so far. I think what gets me most about the “emotional rug-pull” as an experience, is how poorly I’m able to bounce back from one of these, and how fucking common they are for me personally. Like… my implicit sense of things is that “the better I am feeling in a given moment, the more likely an emotional rug-pull from some source will be”. The common factor isn’t at all where that might come from, and 100% is simply “me”. I feel relatively confident that both the high likelihood of an emotional rug-pull developing, and how hard it is to bounce back, are “me things”. This stings. Like, a lot. I mean, on the one hand, if it’s me – surely I can work on that, yeah? …My results vary. I keep practicing practices. I keep working on building emotional resilience – and counting on it. I keep failing in this very specific peculiar way (that is not at all unique to me). Frustrating. I stay angry because I’m angry at myself as much as anything else. Angry that it matters enough to fuck with me like this. Angry that “my results vary” as I work to sort this out, over time. Angry, even, that “people” don’t bother to just reality check the likely outcome of sharing negative feedback with others to maybe, just maybe, avoid wrecking a lovely moment. (Note: that’s definitely too much to ask of human beings generally; we are centered in our own experience much of the time, and how the hell would a person even determine reliably how someone else is feeling without asking first, which would become a completely different conversation?)

A lot of people with trauma histories struggle with the “emotional rug-pull” and with a sense of “waiting for the other shoe to drop” any time things seem to be going well. That’s a thing to work on… it’s not easy, and it takes a ton of practice (and many practices). It gets better. It’s not as bad as it once was (for me), I just still deal with it, and when I do it still reliably sucks, and I definitely don’t like the experience at all, nor do I find any value in it. It’s just a shard of chaos and damage – a metaphorical splinter in my paw that I’d like to figure out how to remove.

I take another breath and refrain from having still more coffee (there’d be comfort in that, but also caffeine, and I’ve had mine for the day). I open a bottle of water. I make an effort to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, anger, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, Despair, forgiveness, Free Will, Frustration, grief, health, Healthy Living, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, winter, women

Long-Term Consequences

January 15, 2024 //
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Many many years ago, in what now feels like an altogether different life, lived as if by an entirely different person, I made a choice to “save my own life” through extreme means (in that moment). My ex-husband was coming after me with a very large knife, in a small apartment in Germany. The front door was locked from the inside, and I could not open that door to escape down the stairwell. I dashed to the patio, barely ahead of him, and rolled over the balcony rail. He reached me as I dangled there in that moment between actions, and his face wore a look of astonishment and alarm, “Don’t!” he demanded urgently. “I have to,” I said quietly, and then I let go.

I hit the slick paved patio below quite hard. My ears rang, I felt something snap. I “saw” an explosion of lights behind closed eyes. I felt nauseatingly dizzy. I saw him looking down, then retreating from the balcony rail quickly – I knew he was on his way and I panicked. I jumped up from the pavement, disregarding all sensations, and climbed a fence and a hedge to get to the nearest neighbor whose lights were on. I couldn’t remember a word of German in that moment other than “polizei”, and so that’s who they called. The police arrived, locked and loaded, and told the neighbors (whose English was better than my German) that an ambulance from the American hospital had been called. The police went after my ex husband, and once they found him he was arrested.

When the ambulance arrived, the medics quickly determined I’d likely broken my back (and there I was sitting upright in a lawn chair, flexing my spine uncomfortably and commenting that I could not figure out why I was so “uncomfortable” – I didn’t understand that I was in shock). They insisted I be still. They put me on a back board, and on a stretcher, and rushed me to the ER. I wasn’t there long, barely long enough for X-rays, and for the Military Police investigators to arrive to interview me, while the doctor reminded them that I was heavily medicated and badly injured, and to keep their questions to a minimum. A helicopter arrived, and I was medevacked to the big regional Army hospital to the north, where there was a larger team more capable of treating spinal injuries. That was when I realized I was actually badly injured. The flight was short, and the strange air mattress they had me on was more comfortable than the back board or the hospital bed. When we arrived at the big hospital ER, they went to take me off that air mattress (I guess it belonged with the helicopter) and I cried and pleaded that they please let me stay on it. I still didn’t know “how bad it was” (or wasn’t) and I was starting to feel pain, again.

…It was pretty bad. My back was broken in two places, a spinous process from one smashed vertebrae had gotten shoved into my spinal canal, and I had a concussion and a broken wrist. I’d be in that hospital for a couple of months after 16+ continuous hours of surgery to fuse the damaged vertebrae and install bizarre and uncomfortable hardware to hold those surgical sites still while healing happened. (A year later, that hardware would all come out… except for a ferrous surgical wire that to this day prevents me having an MRI; the wire was woven through the fusion to hold things together.) I’ve got a long scar down my spine, a visible reminder, and an uglier, shorter one on my left hip where the bone grafts were taken to build my fusion. I don’t care about the scars; I lived. I’m still walking.

Funny thing about all of this; the longer term consequences were not within view. I had no idea that I would struggle to form healthy attachments or build trust with lovers, possibly ever again. I didn’t know that the nightmares would plague me for decades to come – some to do with the domestic violence, some to do with the medical terror of the surgery itself, during which the medical team had to wake me up to verify that I was responding to stimuli. There have been few things more openly terrifying in my life than being awake during spinal surgery, intubated, on life support, surgical incisions open, and being asked questions that required answers. There have been other consequences… the pain of my arthritis reminds me regularly of the choice I made. A choice to live, sure, but also… a choice that came with profound consequences. I paid a high price for this life of mine.

I pause for a moment to reflect on the value of a life. This life. My life. The choice I made to keep it, to trudge on, to try again, reaches so far back beyond that despairing moment in 2013 when I thought to abandon it. It has been a worthy journey, consequences and all. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it’s easy.

…Some nights I still have nightmares. Some mornings I still wake up in pain. When I look back, though, I don’t regret that terrible lonely desperate choice to let go of a balcony rail and fall to my… freedom. Some choices just extract a big price. It’s a question I think few of us ask or answer before we choose; will the price be worth it? It’s hard to know, isn’t it? It’s probably worth wondering, for at least a moment… but there’s no map on this journey. We’re each walking our own hard mile.

Choose your adventure. Pay your price. Begin again. The journey is the destination.

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Categories Allegories, anger, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, Despair, forgiveness, Free Will, gratitude, health, Healthy Living, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Sleepless Nights, The Art of Being, winter, women

Dream a Little Dream

November 18, 2023 //
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It’s a new day. A Saturday. I woke from peculiarly surreal and also vaguely sexual dreams with a sense of being “interrupted” and also having slept in quite a bit (which is a pleasant luxury, for me). I dressed and quietly let myself out of the house to watch the sun rise from a local trail. It was a lovely morning for it.

Daybreak on a favorite trail.

…I walk on…

Later, as the morning develops along the way.

I followed that with routine errands, arriving home sufficiently early to enjoy my morning coffee with my Traveling Partner while he enjoyed his. We spoke of 3D printers and projects, and things of that sort, until we’d both finished our coffee and it was time to move on with the day.

…My dream(s) still linger in my thoughts, which is a bit unusual these days. I dreamt of kissing a dark-eyed youth in a collegiate stage of early adulthood, who captivated me with his quiet confidence and led me by the hand to some less-than-ideally private place to take things further, only, that turned out to be a local business (?!) that opened quite unexpectedly, filling with customers – young women dressed only in towels, giggling as they passed us. We left, and attempted to find a happy haven “at my place” – only it wasn’t my place at all, it was… the first floor of some bizarre high-rise condo, where the current owners politely explained that they had purchased my abode, and upon breaking through the ceiling discovered 3 further floors above, lavish, luxuriously appointed, and clearly out of my price-range. They were courteously apologetic about how obviously I did not belong there. We sat at their vast kitchen counter in an expansive kitchen that was never mine, sipping deliciously well-crafted espresso (even in my dreams, there is coffee). My dream ended in contemplation of “where to go next”, when I realized I was alone where I stood. No dark-eyed youth. No giggling young women. No urbane well-spoken householders. Just me, standing on a rainy street in the twilight of my dreams. I woke, ready for a new day, simultaneously amused and puzzled by my strange dream(s). I’ve been dreaming a lot lately. Thankfully, few nightmares, just strange surreal dreams.

I’m in enough pain today to feel quite distracted and disinclined to do much, but there is much to do, and I feel creatively inspired… I may spend some portion of the day in the studio, painting, if I solve some of the puzzles involved in the two pieces I am presently working on. Individual paintings take longer these days. They are… more “involved”, and have greater depth of meaning. I think this has been an outcome of going through menopause, strangely enough. My thoughts and my emotions seem to take longer to process fully, but I get more out of them when I “get there”. Emotions have more breadth and depth – and more recognizable significance, with less chaos. Thoughts travel along more tangents and down more rabbit holes, but once every thread is pulled, and every depth explored, I find I have a greater understanding of where I was headed in the first place, and what to do with my thoughts when I get there.

…I sip my coffee and think about how useful all that would have been when I was much younger, stronger, and faster. LOL Life is weird.

My Traveling Partner interrupts my writing to ask me what I’m doing (which I guess I should expect, since I chose to be writing in the living room; a space we routinely share). I answer. Then I manage to interrupt him when he shares a thought, and he sternly tells me he’ll “try not to be annoyed” by that. I manage to refrain from pointing out the interruption to my writing that started the conversation in the first place, which for me is no doubt similarly annoying. I chuckle to myself; we both find a flow state difficult to find or maintain if the other is in the same shared space. It is evident we enjoy each other’s company greatly. I do struggle to set boundaries when I am reading or writing, though, and he rarely seems to recognize that both those activities (for me) require my full attention and focus to enjoy properly, or understand that I sometimes want the full measure of my own attention for myself. I don’t bother to say anything about it (again). Then I wonder if that’s a mistake…

I sip my coffee and move on. Letting small things stay small has real value in life and love, and I’m not inclined to “start shit” on such a lovely Saturday.

I continue to fuss about a particular “how to” challenge with a painting I keep coming back to – it is a self-portrait, so perhaps I am “too close to the subject” in some way. I find myself stalled because it really wants a different technical approach than I typically prefer, and the requirement to slow down, take my time, and work on the practical details with consideration and discipline vexes me. There are no suitable shortcuts! Shit. This one is going to be “do it right, or don’t do it at all”, and this confounds me. There’s something to learn here, and I sip my coffee grateful for the lesson. I don’t suppose learning will slow the inevitable result of being mortal, but I hear it may keep me young(er)… sounds worthwhile.

I sigh outloud and sip my coffee. Age, aging, human life, human mortality… so much more obvious as concerns these days than they were in my 20s. I look at my pillbox… double-checking that I’ve taken everything up to this point in the day that I’m expected (required to). “Fuck aging” I mutter to myself, nonetheless grateful for medical care, and the prescriptions that help me maintain my health acceptably well.

I resign myself to being distracted from my writing; if I want to write utterly without distractions, I definitely need to be alone, and in an unshared space. That’s just real. I chose this location – and I did so because I want to enjoy my partner’s company, and also write. Not sure how I thought that would work. LOL

Well, shit. There are paintings to paint, and dishes to do… I suppose it’s time to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, art and the artist, autumn, breathe, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, inspiration, Love, Moments, Oregon Trails, pain, Perspective, Practices, Relationships, solo hiking, The Art of Being, turning 60, women

Whose Side Are You On?

November 12, 2023 //
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We’re more divided than ever. More diverse in the specificity of our intersecting identities. More willing than ever to set boundaries and make it a fight. We do more out grouping, in spite of being more aware that out grouping is a thing – and that it causes harm. We’re very inefficient creatures as far as making social progress that benefits us all, are we not?

So… What do you really stand for? Whose side are you really on? In life? In love? When you “take a side”, are your eyes on a shared win for humanity – or are you hoping to “win an argument”, based on individual values, special interests, or some particular selected weird bit of dogma that you’ve become fixated on, or perhaps adopted when you were so young you mistake it for “natural law”? I mean, we’re all human, our biases are very real, and our cognition has legitimate limitations and… quirks. We aren’t even all reliably decent people (still people, though). It’s not just about global conflict – it gets right down to individual relationships. We’re human.

…What do human beings mean when we say “equal”, or “fair”, or “morally right”? How do we define the value of a human life – and what does it take for any one of us to turn on another human being and decide that their life lacks value? I don’t have answers to any of these questions, aside from my own answers that I trust with a certain amount of skepticism (being wholly aware how human I am, and how prone to error). I do think these are questions we should be asking, and discussing in an honest and vulnerable way, open to changing our thinking for the betterment of human kind. For the betterment of the planet, and of life itself. Yeah, and as individuals, too.

I was reading an article recently, about healthy relationships (I have to work at mine, in spite of our deep love for each other; love doesn’t come naturally to me, I think). The article identifies some things that I hadn’t thought about in quite the way they suggest – I won’t break it all down, because you’ll no doubt have your own thoughts, but these things seem worth considering necessary in a healthy relationship – and I suspect this applies to how we relate to “people” more broadly, too:

  1. You’re actively interested in each other’s lives.
  2. You’re aware of your “attachment style” – and what other attachment styles exist, and how those function – and you’re working to develop a healthier attachment style, yourself.
  3. You don’t avoid conflict, but you don’t “fight” – you work as a team to solve problems, and achieve suitable compromise when necessary.
  4. When you address conflict, you’re open to discussing, facing, and resolving big fears and issues, not just small ones.
  5. You support each other without scorekeeping.
  6. You have your own identity and understand that other’s do, too.
  7. You create emotional safe space for each other and hold space for growth and change over time.
Incomplete work-in-progress. “Toxicity”, 11″x14″ acrylic mixed-media on canvas

Hmm. I sit with my afternoon tea and a half-finished painting in progress (a mixed-media trauma portrait), long overdue to be completed. It’s been holding me back now for… almost 8 years. Has it been so long? Wow. Too long to let pain fester. She smirks back me as I work, but her gaze is less commanding as I work out my hurt, my anger, my aggression, my doubt, my sorrow… a brush stroke here, a small bit of story-telling debris inserted into gel medium over there, another touch of glow… I smile to myself. This feels good. I don’t have words for this – but I have paint and canvas, and time to begin again.

I sip my tea and reflect. I watch the paint dry and consider the next step – like spell-casting or prayer, this is heart-felt work, and my heart feels it. I feel heard. I feel inspired.

…I’m out of small canvases. LOL

I think about my most important relationships over the years, and how I fit into those. Where I got something right. Where I clearly got it wrong. Where my nature and my character put things right… where they contributed to how wrong things were. Where wanting things to be “easy” made it so much harder to build a healthy relationship. Where my chaos and damage broke things down. Where it wasn’t that at all, but I still got it so very wrong. It’s a lot to take in, but… isn’t love worth the work?

I don’t need to take sides, I’m not arguing. I sip my tea, breathe, and begin again.

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Categories Allegories, Art, art and the artist, autumn, Brain Injury, breathe, forgiveness, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, inspiration, Love, meditation, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, Uncategorized, women
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