Archives for posts with tag: taking care of me
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Easy There

January 8, 2023 //
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Weird day. I woke up feeling rested and merry. Seemed like a good start to the day, and mostly I suppose the day has been fine. Okay, not fantastic, but I’ve no expectation that each day will be 100% pure awesome from the moment I wake, until the moment I later close my eyes to sleep. My results – and my experiences – vary. My Traveling Partner woke from a restless unrestful night of sleep and made it clear he was not enjoying the morning. I did what I could to be chill and supportive. My efforts were not immediately (or reliably) successful, so I got my shit together, grabbed my list of errands, and headed out before I’d even taken more than a sip of my coffee. Seemed the like sort of morning to enjoy my own company for awhile, and let him have time to wake up and get sorted out.

I’m in a massive amount of pain this morning, and although it has done nothing to dull my good mood, I’m having to manage it. It’s there in the background and amounts to a bit of a distraction, and a thing that slows me down (without stopping me). I’ve taken the medication I can, and I’ve stayed on top of all the other self-care details pretty well, too. I still hurt. It is what it is. I don’t expect this to change; it comes and goes (in severity) with the weather, and with stress. I can’t do much about the weather, but I sure can do things to manage my stress. So, I do those things. lol

Today has been mostly about staying ahead of my pain, staying out of my partner’s way, and getting a few things done. Laundry, some kitchen re-organization (seems a good day to tidy up cabinets and cupboards and toss out stale spices), and the sort of routine housekeeping I commonly do on a quiet Sunday. My partner is mostly out in his shop, making things. I smile when I think about it.

“Easy” isn’t always about “perfect” – sometimes it’s just about not making shit harder than it has to be, and not taking the things that go wrong personally. I mean, seriously? How often are they ever “personal”?? Circumstances are just circumstances. Moods come and go like weather. I can’t “fix” someone else, or live their experience, but I can sure avoid making it all about me. I can sure focus on self-care, and kindness, and just doing my best to treat everyone around me well. If I’ve legitimately done my best, that’s pretty much what I’ve got to offer, right? 🙂

I keep practicing.

It’s time to begin again.

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Categories Allegories, breathe, forgiveness, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships

The List is not The Achievement

January 7, 2023 //
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I like a good to-do list. I enjoy checking off the tasks and feeling that sense of accomplishment and “getting shit done”. I even, straight up, no kidding, add things to the list as I go along in my day doing things I hadn’t thought to plan on the list in the first place, just so I can also check that one off the list. lol Here’s a thing I have to keep in mind, though; the list is not the achievement. The list is not “getting shit done”. The list isn’t even any one of – or all of – the tasks listed thereon. Not at all. It’s just a list. There are still verbs involved, real work, real task processing, real effort. Sometimes items on a list are easily done. Sometimes it’s trickier than that. An item on a to-do list that I really don’t want to deal with can potentially throw me off course for days or even weeks, as I work around it – and sometimes something like that can stall me completely, when I know it really must be done, and I’m really just not doing it.

Today I got a couple things done that have been on and off one list or another for months now. Both were sort of “housekeeping”, sort of “work”, both required some commitment of my time and energy. One required my time, and also my Traveling Partner’s time – so needed to be coordinated across our shared availability, and account for our individual will and interest in any given moment. One required me to learn quite a few new skills, and enhance skills I had that were a bit “rusty” or “behind the times”. Both were useful, needful, and potentially profitable, if only I could find both the will and the time for every detail, and do so in the order such things were required to go forward. So complicated!

Interestingly, as I built my skills, or completed smaller elements of each project on my list, it wasn’t those details that felt like accomplishments at all (even though that’s truly where the accomplishments seemed to be) – it was when I checked off the projects from my to-do list, this morning. Wild. Human primates are such odd creatures. I didn’t give myself any shred of credit for the small achievements like learning a new application, or building on my HTML skills, or improving how my art images are archived – in spite of the work involved in each one of those things. I didn’t celebrate those moments, they just sort of went by largely unnoticed, glasses riding down my nose as I frowned at my monitor, studying. Bringing a web page to life? Cool, cool, sure… but I felt the joy when I checked it off my list. That seems strange and potentially misplaced. Something to think about.

…I sit quietly with some “thinking about things music“…

What have you gotten done lately that you didn’t pause to appreciate? What small moments of joy have slipped by without a chance to enjoy them properly? Are you looking at the world through the lens of maximum productivity, as if you are little more than machinery? Are you pushing yourself along based on programming and implicit expectations you’ve absorbed from elsewhere? Are you letting work define your life?

…I breathe, exhale, and relax. It’s a good day for it. I’ve gotten a few things done – but more than that, I’ve remembered to enjoy the moments.

I think about the Spring garden. Spring is weeks away yet, and it’s already time to plan. The earliest spring bulbs, hyacinths, crocuses, and such are already beginning to break through the soil. I think it might be nice to enjoy a hot cup of drinking chocolate and flip through seed catalogs.

Already time to begin again?

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Categories Allegories, breathe, Free Will, gardening, gratitude, Healthy Living, inspiration, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Practices, Relationships, The Art of Being, winter

What Really Matters Most?

January 5, 2023 //
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Sipping my coffee and feeling a tad sluggish and disengaged this morning. I am contemplating all the many things I think want to do, experience, or change. From this vantage point of “feeling disengaged”, it suddenly seems quite overwhelming to want to both “be very good at my work” and also “improve my fitness and emotional wellness”. Fuuuuuck… there are a lot of verbs wrapped up in those two things, and my list is longer than those! Suddenly I just want to walk on a beach somewhere – hot or cold – and just be. I feel… exhausted. Makes no sense. I’m resting, aren’t I? My sleep is okay, isn’t it? I sigh out loud in this quiet place where my day has started.

…I check my fitness tracker for data, instead of relying on impressions and emotions…

Over the past month I’ve averaged 7 hours or so of sleep per night, and the change in medication has resulted in the sleep I get being much more restful. That’s good news. Looking closer I also see that there are a couple noteworthy outliers – nights that I slept more than 9 hours. When I eliminate those (3 nights), the average amount of sleep I’m actually getting is only 6 hours. Endurable but not ideal (for me personally). Okay, so maybe I really am tired. No point taking fatigue personally.

I find myself imagining driving some great distance and parking alongside a sunny meadow on a quiet lane and napping in my car. lol To be “nowhere doing nothing” sounds incredibly enticing right now.

…I find myself “in this place” kind of a lot…

I take a breath. I grab a bottle of water. I stretch. I think about fitness and emotional wellness – maintaining my health sort of allows everything else to fall into place more easily, and keeps challenges feeling quite manageable, generally. The changes to my medication have done a lot of reduce my anxiety and improve my energy and the quality of my rest. What am I missing? Exercise? I’m getting more of that too – and it feels good. A healthy diet? Definitely eating a more healthy diet, and it shows. I’m even drinking more water. So… what’s missing?

Cognitive rest matters more than I sometimes think about. Not just sleep, but actually giving my brain sufficient “down time” to process buffered information, and to rest/recharge/rebuild – and I’m pretty bad about making sure I get enough of that sort of rest. The new medications help, but I go from the cognitive busy-ness of a work day to the cognitive busy-ness of hearing about everything going on in the shop for my Traveling Partner, and then pump additional information into my head through my eye balls on top of that. Day after day, night after night – and I’m doing it without quite enough sleep. It’s too much, and it’s that simple. This need for (and lack of) cognitive rest is the primary driver of most of my trips out to the coast, my camping trips, and my time out on some trail with my camera. I’m just seeking internal quiet.

Giving myself a few minutes in the morning to really think about what I need to thrive, and listen to the woman in the mirror, goes a long way to meet the need for stillness… but it’s not “a cure”. This morning, I get to the end of my “me time” with a yawn, and a third cup of coffee.

It’s time to begin again.

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Categories anhedonia, Anxiety, Brain Injury, breathe, health, Healthy Living, Mindfulness, Moments, Oregon Trails, Perspective, Practices, Sleepless Nights, solo hiking, The Art of Being, winter

Good Times

January 4, 2023 //
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This too shall pass? I know it’s real – I sometimes wish it weren’t.

I’m sipping coffee on a pleasant Wednesday. No stress. Just a “regular work day”… only, like I said, no stress. It’s nice. I’m in the office today, mostly because I’ve got an afternoon appointment at the VA, and it’s more convenient this way. Partly because it’s Wednesday… which has turned out to be a first rate day to come in to the office, then run errands on the way home that would be out of the way under other circumstances (but are quite convenient driving back from this location). The morning unfolds gently. I’m first into the office. I catch up on things, make a pot of coffee for colleagues who will arrive shortly, and pour a cup for myself. The cityscape beyond the window by my desk is just beginning to show hints of daylight – the sky is gray and overcast. One day of many, so far a good one.

…This too shall pass… it sounds ominous on a good day. LOL It’s just as real as pointing it out on a difficult day, though. I let the aphorism remind me to slow down and really savor this pleasant morning. Enjoy the journey. Take time to take time. Breathe, exhale, relax – and let the smile on my face reflect the contentment and joy in my heart.

What the hell, though? What’s with the merriment ‘n shit this morning? No idea. I just feel pretty good. Pain? Sure. Managed. Headache? Yeah, that too, and it was what woke me shortly before my alarm would have gone off. Rough. Still a good morning. Appointment anxiety about the CT scan later? Not much, no, it’s just an appointment to get an image done. There’s nothing much to fuss over, and work is comfortably planned and organized in front of me. That appointment, from this vantage point, is a fairly distant concern of little consequence. So, I sip my coffee with a smile. It’s enough.

Don’t forget to pause and really take note of the good times. Small joys matter, too. Maybe more than our biggest fears and stressful moments. “Filling my tank” on these pleasant experiences allows me to become more resilient in the face of less ideal circumstances. (This has always been true, although there was a time when I did not know it, and missed the opportunity to nurture and support myself from within.)

I load a playlist and begin again.

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Categories Allegories, breathe, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, inspiration, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Practices, The Art of Being

New Day, New Year, New Chance – New Choices

January 1, 2023 //
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Here it is. New Year’s Day. Another year wrapped up and a new year beginning.

…the new year is a blank page…

I’m still working through disposing of my old journals. It’s an interesting project, although it has tended to be a bit more emotionally engaging that I’d ideally like it to be. There are a lot of opportunities to make a willful point of letting some small bullshit detail go. Choices to be made to put down some baggage. I shred page after page, poignant moments, moments of rage and disappointment, moments of frustration and doubt, moments of discontent and disillusionment, moments of profound insight and great delight…memories of love and anger, and bearing witness to the passage of time.

Sometimes it’s necessary to let something go before I can truly begin again.

I’m glad I found so many little sketches. Saving those matters to me more than the words I’d written about whatever events they captured (or were inspired by). Some of these, though, were done on the reverse side of a page I don’t care to preserve… those I photograph, before shredding the page. They’ll live on as a digital image, now, and nothing more.

“Glow Opera Ballerina”, 5″ x 7″ ink on paper, 1999 – shredded.

I’d inserted various bookmarks and objects as placeholders between the pages of some volumes. Photographs. Notes. Love letters. A CD-R. Wait…what? A CD-R? (I wasn’t even certain we had a media reader that could read that, after all this time.) The name on the disk was not particularly revealing… almost as if intended to obfuscate the contents from casual view. I asked my Traveling Partner if we had a means of reading a CD-R? We did. Taking a look at the contents without opening any individual item, it was pretty clear this was a disk that would do best to join the various journals on the path to destruction. I thought to shred it, but… the shredder wasn’t happy about that choice. My partner suggested microwaving it for a couple seconds.

Unreadable by intention.

There were quite a few other interesting items in the bin with the journals. Old manuscripts, never finished. Individual pages of poetry that had been scribbled on napkins, note paper, or legal pads. Correspondence I have saved over the years – letters from my Dad, from my Granny, from old friends, and a largish manila envelope of the letters exchanged with my first husband while I was away at war, both his to me and mine to him. Some of this I’ll no doubt keep, but I’m starting to view some of this old stuff – explicitly anything to do with my first husband – as a sort of malicious “horcrux” (if I may borrow that notion) that has the potential to continue to be toxic for my day-to-day experience of myself, just through existing. Maybe it is time to destroy all of that, too. (I kept it for years because I was fearful I might someday need to prove what I’d been through.)

Old manuscripts and correspondence will need attention, too, another day.

It’s a lot to process. I think the commitment to getting it done as part of my individual new year’s celebration keeps me from getting overly involved in the raw emotions poured out onto these pages, at least a little. So many pages. So much rage and hurt and sorrow. Yeah, I definitely don’t need to drown myself in the hurts of the past – quite the contrary. It’s time to let it go. Page by page, volume by volume – this project has been overdue for a very long time, and it feels like quite a relief to finish it.

What about you? Are you ready for a new year? A new beginning? New practices, or resuming useful practices you’d let fall by the wayside as time went by? Will you be making a big change?

…Are you ready to begin again? I know I am. 🙂 Happy New Year!

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Categories Allegories, Anxiety, Art, art and the artist, Brain Injury, breathe, forgiveness, Free Will, gratitude, Healthy Living, inspiration, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Practices, Relationships, War and News of War, winter, Words
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