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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

“Tell Me of Your Home World, Usul”

April 13, 2014 //
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We have language. It’s one of the interesting features of the creatures that we are, and of our experience. Words have extraordinary power; our understanding of the world, and of our lives and who we are, rest heavily on the words we choose to express that understanding.

We even understand how limiting that can be, and our understanding is portrayed in a simple bon mot, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”  We love words, we use words, even knowing our words cannot tell the entire tale.

Atlas?

Atlas?

I probably use too many words. Even using so many, I sometimes find myself struggling for clarity, or to express myself accurately. Precision and poetry are two very different tools to tell a tale. I tend to be very frank, to the point of lacking common boundaries. I also tend to favor ‘pretty’ language, to the point of sacrificing clarity for something that ‘sounds better’ to me. My TBI has a thing or two to say about the way I use language and why, another tale for a different day. I bet it can be difficult for people to understand me, more often than I’m aware.

I’ve been more about questions than answers for a while now… how nice for me, I suppose, only… some questions function best immediately preceding an actual answer. lol I mean… “How do I get to the train station?” is likely to be most efficiently followed by actual directions, or a simple “I don’t know” than anything else.  I’m honestly not sure I’d do that well on it, if it were a test.  With me it might be something more like this:

Person “How do I get to the train station?”

Me “I rarely ride the train, these days, although I prefer it to flying. Well, unless you count the commuter trains…”

Person “How do I get there?”

Me “You’d have to get downtown. If you want Amtrak.  If you’re just using the light fail, you could grab it a lot of places. Where are you going?”

Person “To the train station. How do I get there?”

Me “To the train station? Or down town?”

Person “To the train station!”

Me “Oh, the same way as if you were going to go down town – you take the light rail.”

Person “Where do I catch the light rail to the train station?”

Me “Right here.”

Once upon a time at a train station...

Once upon a time at a train station…

Oh, yeah. So me. I do try to answer the questions I am asked as simply as possible, although it wasn’t something on my radar until a couple years ago. I often thought it was strange how jacked up people could get over ‘a simple conversation about a [train station]’.  Someone who loves me very much, enough to care that I be able to communication easily with other people, finally sat down with me and explained what he saw in our conversations – with actual sketches, diagramming of sentences, and propositional calculus; I got it.  Fixing it is an entirely different matter. Sometimes it is as basic as a preferred sentence structure, a syntactical detail, that confounds real understanding simply by being unexpected to the listener, or inexplicably uncommon in general speech. lol Sometimes ‘pretty’ gets in the way of conveying information. Pretty is distracting.

One of the bits of weirdness I am working on is a clear preference verbally for ‘phrasing things in the negative’. For example, if asked “How are you?”, I would be more likely to say “Not bad, thanks!” than “Good, thanks!”.  It’s pretty consistent with a variety of types/intentions of questions, too. I regularly reply to questions using negatively phrased replies, that seem to satisfy the question, mostly by way of dismissing it, rather than providing information. I don’t think I have a spare lifetime to study the phenomenon, instead I am simply working on changing how I reply to questions.

(Is it important whether the challenge I have with answering questions is a byproduct of a traumatic upbringing, or a brain injury? How many hours of my life have I wasted trying to source something solely because I wasn’t satisfied with it, instead of simply acknowledging my dissatisfaction and acting to change?)

The title? Oh, that – well, simply this: Dune would have been a very different movie, wouldn’t it, if, when Paul is asked “Tell me of your home world, Usul,”  he had replied “It’s not like here.”  I realized, upon considering it, that finding balance, contentment, satisfaction, and meaning is a different journey, and a different experience, when I am living what it is – rather than what it is not.

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Parables, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Words

A Critical Situation

April 12, 2014 //
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Words are funny things. The meaning of any given word may vary depending on context, or differences between world maps of speakers. Language has subtlety, and adaptability; it changes over time, based on common use.

Words.

Words.

Consider ‘critical thinking’. I found myself having a challenging conversation with someone about the nature of critical thinking, versus being ‘critical’. It took quite a bit of careful defining of terms, and semantic exploration to figure out where the core miscommunication could be found that resulted in such an adversarial dialogue about a word.

someone else's critical thinking word cloud.

someone else’s critical thinking word cloud.

I’ll probably be spending a lot of time on this one, there is certainly more to understand than I can offer up today with any coherence. When I study, I start with basics. So, this morning it is a refresher on critical thinking, in general, as well as reading up on criticism. Where the two share emotional territory seems to be the sticky bit for understanding and communicating.

Someone else's word cloud for criticism.

Someone else’s word cloud for criticism.

My superficial initial reading suggests that the heart of the matter may be that critical thinking is a process of self, directed inward, and largely ‘about’ developing clear, rational thinking practices that result in a usably correct understanding of the world.  Critical thinking seems less about what I communicate to the world, than about what I understand of the world, myself, and how I got to that understanding.  Criticism is generally directed outward, ideally with an intent of providing a possibility for an improved outcome, improving a process, simply reaching a meeting of the minds, or improving upon a future outcome through communication of observations of less-than-ideal current conditions. (In my less-than-ideal experience of life and the world, criticism is often used for less wholesome purposes: directed at individuals to cause pain, to control behavior, to denigrate, to reinforce ‘place’ in a hierarchy, to enforce one’s own sense of self, or to support one’s own ideas, understanding, or context in life by tearing down what someone else understands. These uses of criticism have nothing whatever to do with building, achieving, or growing. Criticism is a favorite emotional weapon of the callous, the cruel, and the controlling. Emotional weaponry has nothing to do with critical thinking.)

It could be as simple as this, critical thinking has never made me cry, not even once, not ever.

There are ways to adequately, rationally, communicate disagreement without making someone cry. There are certainly ways to share improvements on an idea with hurting someone’s feelings. Criticism isn’t my first choice for either of those communication needs.

This weekend I am balancing my own critical thinking, and my desire to improve on that, and the very different need to communicate if/when I disagree with a statement, an outcome, or see an opportunity to improve on a task in progress. I won’t be using criticism. Today is a good day to change the world.

 

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Categories Brain Injury, Logic & Reason, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Words

My Pounding Head

March 21, 2014 //
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I woke with a headache, still managing to be eager to face my journey – both metaphysical, and geographical; I’m headed to the coast.

Sky, sand, and a distant horizon.

Sky, sand, and a distant horizon.

There’s something about being on the shore of the ocean, either ocean really, but the one on the left side is easier to reach at the present. I’ll take a few days, celebrate the changing season, walk, meditate, write, do some yoga on the beach and not notice that I’m not a lean hard-bodied yogi under 30 all strong core, tan skin, and toned muscles; it’ll feel amazing. There is so much living that is not about appearances at all, however cool it looks in a photograph.

I will write; I am hoping to finish a manuscript. I will meditate – at this point that goes without saying (lol). I will take some pictures and enjoy capturing the world through a camera lens, while I contemplate the way I view it through the less well-defined lens of my own experience, through my all-to-human eyes.

The headache is nothing much to bother with, I think I am a tad dehydrated, and I’m alternating water and coffee this morning to get past it. It astounds me what a huge piece ‘taking care of me’ a simple drink of water is! I pause for a moment to reflect what an advancement clean drinking water is, and how many people in the world don’t have even that most basic of resources readily available in the 21st century.

Today is a good day to make a journey. Today is a good day to be kind. Today is a good day to treat myself well, and enjoy the moment. Today is a good day to change the world.

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Spring, Words

Wide Open Spaces

February 20, 2014 //
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As far as the eye can see...

As far as the eye can see…

This morning I am yearning for vast open spaces, big skies, broad horizons, and distance – distance to call ‘my own’. What I don’t ‘know’ is whether I am best served to look outwardly for what I need: real estate, vacation planning, walking a thousand miles for a cause… or am I best served to seek the space I think I need within myself?

What is it I am seeking? Certainly not answers…I am still more about questions than answers. As layers of self-imposed madness, and a life time of trauma and confusion fall away, I find myself still seeking…something. Quiet within which to be aware. ‘Room to breathe’. A moment of utter stillness, timeless, tranquil, pure… for… something.

Another work day begins with meditation, yoga, a beginner’s mind, a heart filled with love, and the ‘second half’ of my life ahead of me… where do I want this to take me? How do I get there? What is ‘my own’, and does that even matter? My map is incomplete; I am the cartographer on this journey.

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Turning 50, women, Words
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