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The Power in Saying It

August 2, 2015 //
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Yesterday was awesome. Sure, I woke feeling cross – I shared those feelings, and made a point of really just saying what I had to say about it. I find that trying to just squash down my feelings and ‘get over it’ is a somewhat callous way to treat myself, and not especially effective. Once shared, the feelings passed. Once expressed, the anger diminished. Once revealed, the resentment subsided. Regardless how it may be received, openness about my experience and how it feels to me, keeps me on a path that is genuine, authentic, vulnerable – and more likely to connect me with people who understand me as I am, and enjoy me.

Headed for adventure, letting the day take me where it might is an opportunity to learn to distinguish more clearly between anxiety and excitement.

Letting the day take me where it might is an opportunity to learn to distinguish more clearly between anxiety and excitement.

I went on with my day with great enthusiasm, minimally planned. I embraced unexpected opportunities to do more, live well, and thrive by being present in my experience without struggling with baggage and leftover work bullshit. It was quite lovely. I went out, in spite of expected high temperatures, and enjoyed the morning downtown. I took 5 hours just to buy coffee beans, have a bite of brunch, and visit an antique gallery that specializes in some of the rarities of life that I adore – generally entirely out of reach of any reasonable hope I’ll own any of it, but I enjoy seeing the exotic rugs from far away, the pre-war European porcelains that I love so, and discussing those things with the devoted connoisseur who owns the gallery.

I value things crafted to last a lifetime and grew up around antiques of all sorts; my various break ups over the years have cost me most of the things I acquired during my life. But… my taste has changed in some cases, and I have discovered that the shopping is the better part of experiencing many goods. There’s something of much greater value than having things; talking about something with a person who has both knowledge and passion for the subject. It’s the learning process, and the connection, that I value. These days, I tend to defer to the ‘wealth of selection’ rather than ‘the wealth of quantity’. I choose with care, buy only what I can afford – and only what I have room to use, and to display beautifully. More than that is waste and greed – both in very poor taste, and not sustainable. (The hoarders I have met, whether of things or of money, don’t value what they have – they value the having of it, and in so many cases with no care at all for whether it lasts, is cared for, or used.)

I returned home happy, before the day got too hot, with coffee beans, photographs, memories, anecdotes, experiences – and a lovely rug in colors I favor, that sparks some vague recollection of childhood, as well as reminding me how wonderful it is to treat myself well, and to live my own values and aesthetic day-to-day. I made a point of giving myself a pedicure, so that my toenails would complement the new rug. (Yeah, I totally did. 🙂 )

Beautiful things, selected with care, cherished, and used with great joy are an element of living beautifully, and thriving.

For me, beautiful things, selected with care, cherished, and used with great joy are an element of living beautifully, and thriving.

This morning I relax over my coffee, made with the freshest ground beans, recently roasted, enjoying the chill morning air filling the apartment through the open patio door. A feline neighbor stops by to press her nose to the screen and ask ‘mrow?’, but doesn’t linger for my reply, or stay long enough to be photographed. Song birds share the details of their morning, and I eavesdrop smiling. This particular moment is well beyond ‘contentment’ and I am savoring it without anxiety about whether it might slip away unexpectedly  – of course it will, at some point, because even “this too shall pass”, but it is no cause for concern, right now.

Today is a good day to be. Today is a good day for ‘now’. Today is a good day for smiles, and self-acceptance, and contentment – and if some moment fails me, well, today is also a good day to begin again. 😀

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Summer, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words

Some Days the Nightmares Win

March 27, 2015 //
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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

Another Day, Another Chance

January 22, 2015 //
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Another chance…? Another chance to what, exactly? This morning I woke feeling decently well. Pain…manageable. Mood…serene. Yesterday started well, but most of the day itself was a test of emotional endurance, with physical pain supervising every effort. It was all small stuff, too. I’d just start pulling free of the dense sludge of negative emotion, and get slapped with some new small test of my patience, or balance. I spent the day struggling. Oddly, the day ended relatively well with 90 or so minutes of calm, quietly spent with the family, ending with a couple of episodes of South Park, and the company of my traveling partner. If I could have smushed the opening hour and the closing hour together, the day would have been quite brief, but quite wonderful.

Living isn’t about ‘could have’, is it? Life isn’t about ‘ought to’. Life isn’t about ‘didn’t’. Life is a very real-time experience, however often I bamboozle myself with yearning for something past (or regretting it), or however often I am stalled by an attachment to a future outcome. ‘Now’ is what I’ve really got to work with.

I actually don’t know what turned me around last night. I got home still feeling blue, unbalanced, reactive, and stressed out. I struggled through a shower, through some chores, and even taking care of me basics, and feeding my fish. I politely retired to a solo space, certain at that point that I just wasn’t ‘fit company’ and not wishing to spread it around. I lit some candles (mostly to take off the chill of the room, but I do enjoy the ambiance). I spent the next hour (maybe longer) meditating. That’s all, just still, and quiet, and focused on that simplest point of life, my breath. When I finished, I still had a few tears to go, and they drifted lazily down my cheeks while I took out the trash for tomorrow’s pick up, and made a bite to eat. From that point, it was as if it was an entirely different day. It was…odd.

When I called it a night, I didn’t read or do yoga, or linger awake in the night. I did spend more time meditating, no clock, and once finished with that, contentedly rearranged myself for sleep. This morning I woke feeling fairly good. Correlation does not prove causation, but I do find it noteworthy that many of the improvements in my experience, overall, and bad-days-turned-good experiences, seem to be associated very specifically with meditation. Before it sounds like an endorsement, I’ll also point out I could just as easily say they are associated with tears, but it would be a misleading statement, since I’ve been crying far longer than I’ve been meditating. LOL

I recognize from yesterday’s moods, and from things said during appointments, that I need to slow things down a bit, at work and at home. I’m pushing myself harder than I mean to, and compromising more of my own needs than is healthy for me. Spending more time meditating benefits me directly, but also improves outcomes and experiences for people alongside me, interacting with me. Somehow my ‘to do list’ has grown to pages, and when I take a closer look, it’s unnecessary to push myself so hard; organizing one’s time need not result in self-abuse (no, no, not that kind of ‘self-abuse’! lol).

One winter moment, still, and calm. If I could just get the hang of this one - 'each time for the first time, each moment the only moment'.

One winter moment, still, and calm. If I could just get the hang of this one – ‘each time for the first time, each moment the only moment’…I keep practicing.

Today is a good day to slow it down and enjoy the journey. Today is a good day to treat myself with kindness and respect my own time, my own limits, my own boundaries. Today is a good day to change the world.

 

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Categories Brain Injury, Healthy Living, Hormone Hell, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships

This is Why…

January 8, 2015 //
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I didn’t get far with my day yesterday before the news was filled with murder, and soon thereafter #JeSuisCharlie – and with good reason. It’s criminal to murder. It’s unacceptable to take lives over a difference in aesthetic, opinion, lifestyle – I mean, let’s face it, murder just isn’t okay.  How do people ever get the idea that there is adequate justification to murder? That’s a level of righteous entitlement that frustrates and angers me, and I feel helpless. That’s perhaps the point; to render voices silent. I am moved by the outpouring of support as artists of all sorts stand, come forward, and make statements of their own – because we are all Charlie Hebdo; artists take risks with words, images, and songs. Every one with a voice, everyone with something to share, everyone with a message, everyone with an experience outside the ordinary, everyone moved to create art, compose music, or put words in a row, is Charlie Hebdo. Charlie Hebdo isn’t an individual anymore than The Onion is an individual – and the more powerful for having distilled the voices of many into one; this terrorist attack resulted in real human lives lost, real murder, and it’s really not okay.

This is why we can’t have nice things. How many times do we have sit back in shock and horror because some lunatic jackass(es) thinks they have the right to take a life to make a statement or prove a point? It’s horrific, and fairly stupid, that this goes on… but we live in a world where whole nations commit to acts of genocide, slaughter, land-grabbing, and warfare, over opinions, over resources, and over ideology. I defy you to find justification for any of it that is ‘rational’, reasonable, or truly necessary…but we all grow up in a world where our own leaders set an example that says to us all that we are not safe, and that our lives lack value, and that for some there is justification for murder.

I, too, am Charlie Hebdo. Aren’t you? What will you do to make the world safer for the artists who amuse, who enlighten, who delight, who move you to a different understanding than you had before? We need your help, your support, and the power of your convictions. Each of us, all of us, are Charlie Hebdo; don’t let your voice be silenced.

Tiny worlds exist between one perspective and another along my way.

Tiny worlds exist between one perspective and another along my way.

My own day was much less eventful than Wednesday in Paris. I went to my medical appointment, arrived on time, had my procedure. No amount of comforting medically dismissive preparatory dialogue is adequate to describe how much this procedure hurt…but the acute moment was very brief. “You may feel some cramping…” was definitely not accurate, relative to my own experience. It was vile. Invasive. Painful. I spent the remainder of the day gently, taking care of me in the company of my traveling partner. I called it a night early. Today I feel okay, although a little achy in an area I usually don’t feel much moment-to-moment. In the context of global terrorism, murder, and the viciousness of free-range human primates it seems a small thing. I can’t help but wonder…what would the perspective be of the wee life forms living in the moss growing in the crack on a brick wall, on our madness?

Today is a good day for perspective. Today is a good day to treat myself gently – and to treat the world gently, too; we’ve been through a lot, haven’t we? Today is a good day to be kind, out in the world.

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Categories Anxiety, art and the artist, grief, Healthy Living, Menopause, Metaphors, Mindfulness, pain, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, women

What’s That Far Off Jingling?

December 16, 2014 //
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This morning is a nice one. I rested well, woke most pleasantly and just a bit ahead of the alarm. No nightmares. My just-waking-up headache quickly dissipated, leaving only my tinnitus behind, and it, too, doesn’t seem that bad, today. My coffee is hot, and tasty, and a bold reminder of drinking my coffee straight up, dark, and robust in other lives, on other mornings. I’m not shivering in the cold. I’m not sweltering in heat. I am comfortable and content.

For some moments this morning, I was troubled by a strange far off sounding jingling – a holiday jingling that was sort of cute and fun at first, and quickly started causing me some stress; I couldn’t place the source of the sound, and it seemed… everywhere. Thankfully, I realized – before that had gone on very long – I’d chosen it. Oh, not mindfully, nope; it’s very early in the morning and I’m not quite entirely awake. I put on colorful holiday earrings this morning…a cascade of tiny… wait for it… jingle bells. LOL Yep. I chased myself slowly through the house listening for the source of a noise that was immediately next to my ear, small, delicate, ceaseless. (I’ll resume wearing them when I get to the office. The background noise is sufficient that the earrings won’t seem so loud.)

Use your words.

Holiday cheer, and the power of words; speechless is not voiceless.

So far, this morning is as light and pleasant as yesterday’s was difficult. Yesterday ended well, and the day itself was productive and worthwhile – it’s certainly not one that I find myself moved to regret on any noteworthy level; it lingers in my memory in a largely pleasant way, after-the-fact. I enjoy the malleable qualities of the mind, having learned more about making them work for me.

It’s the small course corrections, over time, that have made the most difference for me. I’m saying that because some day I, myself, may need to read those words again… There is a lot of ugliness in the news, and it is so easy to drown in the despair that comes of trying to consume too much bad news too quickly. Those small course corrections happen every day, all around us, and even those entities of great evil that appall and terrify us aren’t static, and change is; it exists whether we embrace it or not. Change isn’t always easy to see, and those small course corrections, and small changes, are not always enough to ease our suffering in the moment – it’s ‘not enough’, somehow, to see some change in the face of great evil. Still, change is, and I had an odd moment yesterday that drove that message home for me.

The value of incremental positive changes over time is huge…but it is easy to lose sight of the improvements, because things can still seem so… status quo.  Two recent South Park episodes were illustrative for me: Season 18, episodes 9 #Rehash and 10 #HappyHolograms. I had never actually been exposed to the popular internet commentator, PewDiePie, or even the phenomenon he represents. I’m not his target audience, so I’m not super surprised. Why does it matter? Incremental changes over time do matter…he became relevant for me when I read this quote:

25 October 2012, Kjellberg posted a Tumblr message, stating “I just wanted to make clear that I’m no longer making rape jokes, as I mentioned before I’m not looking to hurt anyone and I apologize if it ever did.”

That’s actually a pretty big deal. The quote is linked and cited in the Wikipedia article, which tends to support its value as potentially true. A valuable, very real, relevant small course correction. Incremental change over time. It’s powerful – he has a voice, he uses it. Rape humor is controversial, and it’s dangerous territory to be casual and insensitive about; it’s very easy to hurt someone who has been traumatized by rape by carelessly joking about the topic. As a survivor, I still struggle to find the balance between handling the horror, and the healthy healing power of humor and laughter. Most of the comedy I favor doesn’t stray into rape humor territory – but some of it does. It matters how it is handled, and it was those clear simple words assembled by PewDiePie that pointed out what makes the difference [for me]: respect and consideration. When the humor targets the victims as yet another attack on their credibility, or their suffering, it isn’t funny, not at all, not even a little bit. When the humor points the laser beam of comedy at the heinousness of the crime, itself, at the perpetrators, at the culture that ‘doesn’t get it’ – that’s where the laughter is for me. South Park gets it right, seating Bill Cosby on a couch next to Taylor Swift, holiday music playing, a glass of wine the focus of the scene…but we can’t hear what is being said, the voice-over is deliberately louder, distracting…social commentary, comedy genius. Funny enough that it didn’t really warrant a trigger warning. Subtle enough to avoid liability, and unlikely to frighten children. I laughed and laughed. I watched it again. I laughed more. I watched it yet again, and began find the details and references I’d missed the first two times. I’d send Matt Stone and Trey Parker holiday cards and well wishes this year, if I knew them. I’ll probably watch it again, soon. 🙂

Change is. Small changes matter – over time they become larger. I see hints of change in our culture. I see more people finding their voice – and using it. I see more human beings reaching across the details that divide them to recognize we’re all in this together. This morning, I feel encouraged and alive…I’m not sure why. It’s a lovely feeling to start the day on.

Today is a good day to pause and appreciate the change that is.

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Categories Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Rape, The Big 5, winter, women, Words
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