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Letting It Rain

March 15, 2017 //
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It’s getting easier. Morning, I mean. The alarm went off, and seemed more just a sound than an affront to my sleeping consciousness. I turned it off. I continued to just lay there quietly, and sure enough, I nearly went back to sleep, confused about the day, the time, and the purpose of my wakefulness. I teetered on the edge of that moment when dreams become more real than awareness, and sleep returns, not quite waking. With an audible groan that seemed unnecessarily loud in the room, the human body I am wrapped in, threw back the covers and sat up. It felt disorienting and strange, but I was no longer at risk of falling back to sleep.

A recent rainy morning. It has been raining for days.

I stood in the shower for some long many minutes, just standing, letting the water fall on and around me. Still not quite awake. Thinking about the rain falling outside, whimsically wondering how different it would feel to simply step out on to the patio, into the rain, naked, before dawn?

Coffee is welcome this morning. I savor it. I think about other coffees, other mornings, other moments on rainy days. I am, at least, awake. The rain falls. It is loud on the roof, the eaves, and the flue cover. The rain falls. I let it. I mean, it’s not like I could legitimately do anything to stop it falling. I waste a few more words, delete them. Listen to the rain fall.

I swallow the last of my coffee, while hastily deciding to spend what is left of the morning meditating, and listening to the rain fall. This morning, it’s enough.

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Parables, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Spring, The Art of Being

Setbacks, Shenanigans, and a Day Filled With Promise

March 14, 2017 //
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I woke up with some effort. It’s going to feel like I’m getting up an hour early (because I am) for some time to come. With some irritation, I notice I have online paperwork to do for a new physical therapist, and sit down with my coffee to handle it before I leave for work. I start the morning already annoyed.

I sip my coffee, finish up the medical history questions, and find myself thinking back to yesterday’s fairly crushing disappointments. I breathe through the recollection, reminding myself I’ve already taken this journey, found a satisfying end to that, and moved on. Commonplace setbacks on the adult portion of life’s journey. My Traveling Partner was having his own version of that experience, yesterday as well. It was pretty cool we could be there for each other, however remotely, through the wonders of modern technology. I take time to appreciate that; I was never really “in it alone”, yesterday. He was there for me. I was there for him. Maybe it was worth the momentary setbacks and disappointments to have that experience? Utterly commonplace resolvable challenges, too – for him, the challenges of starting a business, for me, the challenges of finding a house to call home. Adulthood comes with a lot of things… challenges are among them. 🙂

Am I making things sound easy? “Easy” doesn’t accurately describe the experience of juggling the disappointment of seeing a house I foolishly (and quickly) got a bit over-invested in, emotionally, go pending before I could actually see it (totally foolish, totally too quickly, entirely over-invested emotionally). It was a hard moment. It was just a moment. It stung with frustration and internalized fear that I would never… something. Learned helplessness didn’t quite takeover, though it threatened to. I worked for some moments with tears in my eyes. I got past it.

It was harder to be supportive, encouraging, and soothing when my partner had his own moment – not because I don’t feel the feelings, but because it is frustrating to be apart when he needs me, and also… this injury. My TBI results in me being pretty vulnerable to reactivity, and I earnestly, urgently, wanted to help in some more substantial way! It was hard to stay focused on work, and remain in the moment, at my desk, doing what I am paid to do, when all I wanted was to go to my Traveling Partner, and be by his side in his moment of hurt and frustration and doubt. I am learning not to “multi-task”; it’s a lie that only results in a lack of focus, and lack of committed attention. Instead, I take a measured amount of time, and fully give it over to listening to my partner, between tasks, between meetings. When I work, I am fully attentive to the work – the single task – with which I am engaged. This works for me. My Traveling Partner experienced being supported. My work stayed on track. I didn’t feel distracted, consciousness fractured, or frustrated by mistakes. A win all around.

Yesterday, gray, rainy, still a good point to begin again.

When I look at yesterday after-the-fact, and consider how things really went, as an entire day, it was actually an excellent day – of work, of life, of living, of loving… nothing to see here. No bitching required. How odd that if I were to attempt to categorize or define the day, I’d say it was pretty crappy… because… well, it wasn’t, actually. I endured a couple of difficult moments, a measure of which was in no way directly my own experience, at all. Yesterday? Well, okay, I didn’t walk across the threshold of my future home… but how often does a person have that experience on a given day? Generally speaking, yesterday was a good day. I take a moment to redefine it in my thoughts quite deliberately, amused by the strange feeling of discomfort involved in doing so. (Some part of me really wants to hang on to that sense of misery and sorrow.) Yesterday, in nearly all other respects, was a good day; one moment of disappointment or doubt ought not be permitted to define an entire day.

So, here’s another day in front of me, filled with promise and mystery. I see a new physical therapist. I’ll review an updated list of houses seeking homeowners. I’ll continue to enjoy the love and enduring affection of my Traveling Partner. Later in the day, I’ll find the spelling errors in this blog post that I missed this morning (even using spellcheck), and maybe even remember to fix them. I’ll get a bunch more work done than even seems possible, and have maybe go to lunch with a friend. I’ll listen. I’ll talk. I’ll connect. There’s no knowing where the day will take me. Will a mysterious stranger approach me with keys to a cute turn of the century bungalow that needs some fixing up and say “please, take this house, I only want someone to love it as I have…”? (I know, I know, it’s not even at all likely, but… it’s a big crazy universe, and strange things have been known to happen – shouldn’t our daydreams allow for the possibilities that life itself is unlikely to afford us?)

I find myself smiling. It’s time to begin again. 🙂

 

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Categories Anxiety, Brain Injury, Free Will, grief, Logic & Reason, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, Spring, The Art of Being, Words

Sometimes There’s Bitter

March 11, 2017 //
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Sometimes life seems to have a bitter aftertaste, a hint of hurt, an edge to it – too much work, not enough rest, too much future, not enough in the way of resources; the challenges pile up faster than the solutions. Still… however fast the challenges pile up, life has its sweetness, too. It’s those sweet moments, those small pleasures, those brief interludes of delight that hold the power to wrap me in smiles even while I wade through knee-deep difficulties in one moment or another.

Sometimes even though the world appears to be on fire, it’s really just the sunrise.

We’re each having our own experience. We’re each walking our own mile, each focused on some short bit of the path ahead of us. We’re each telling our own tale, living inside our own narrative and barely able to fully consider what anyone else is going through. Our logarithmically curated personal internet bubbles suggest to each of us that the world is more of whatever we assume we think it is than it was the day before. Unless we try really really hard to find out what is going on elsewhere, we may never know another world, or any other “truth”. Awkward or angry conversations become more common as we are further separated from each other by the tools that purport to connect us. We end up divided and feeling powerless. It’s a very human experience.

A young neighbor, hearing me beyond the words when I described my irritation with anger about my bird feeder pole being wrecked, offered to try to fix it. He succeeded. It’s oriented quite differently now, and just behind my happy smile, I find myself wondering if the birds noticed that, too, and if that would matter to them…? A stranger on the train, on crutches, had difficulty getting a seat in the morning; I asked the person seated next to me to give up their seat for her. That same evening, I got on the crowded train heading home and she returned the favor, asking the young person sitting next to her to give up their seat for me; I felt relieved that I wouldn’t be awkwardly off-balance and standing precariously gripping my cane for the trip home.  I’m just saying; sometimes the world is scary, sometimes the world is human beings taking a moment to be kind to each other.

When the world feels unkind, I practice kindness, myself.

I’ve been making a point to savor life’s sweetness, too, not just lingering over the bitterness of the occasional unpleasant bite. I find it a bit odd, when I think about it, how much more practice it takes to remain aware of what works, what feels good, what supports me well… and how effortless it seems to become mired in sorrow, disappointment, resentment, or anger. Negativity bias is a deep lingering bit of woe that requires pretty continuous practice to mitigate. I meditate. I practice “taking in the good“. I practice being aware and present in the moment, I practice being kind, I practice feeling gratitude – it all matters, it all helps… and I’m still human. 🙂

It’s a journey. The destination is along the way, the way out is through, and the map is not the world. We each walk our own mile.

Today I head out into the world looking for “home”. Later, I’ll enjoy some time with my Traveling Partner, and hear a traveler’s tales. Today, I’ll wrap myself in smiles, and taste life’s sweetness. 🙂

Each sunrise is a moment to begin again, and a moment to pause for now.

 

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Categories Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Love, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, Words

Anger

March 9, 2017 //
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I start feeling complacent, every now and then, after things seem easy for a while, after very little drama over a longer time, after a few days or weeks or even – no kidding – months without a significant reminder of the chaos and damage. Things “in here” are generally fairly tidied up these days, in the sense that I am more resilient, more balanced, less prone to storms and outbursts, less easily rocked from a place of calm. Day-to-day, things are… just days. Moments. Experiences of a life well-lived.

Not what I expected to see.

Tuesday night I came home while daylight lingered. Needing a moment of emotional rest and calm after a somewhat difficult day in the office, I went to the patio door. My cushion was waiting for me, left right there from the morning. I opened the blinds expecting my tidy patio and potted garden, and beyond that, lawn, meadow, marsh… and between the patio and the view, my bird feeders on their pole. Which is mostly sort of what I saw, only… the pole was bent low, laid flat to the ground, which… is not at all the expected functioning position of poles, generally, nor this one specifically, ever, at all. It’s not a bit peculiar that I was taken by surprise, or angry – but I was unprepared for the shit storm of emotions that hit me almost instantly. Rage. Real fury. Resentment. As the anger built to an unmanageable level, the frustration, the learned helplessness, the disappointment, all capitalized on the suddenly volatile moment to pile on. Breaking shit is not an option. Lashing out physically is not an option. I took a photograph of the wrecked pole, mostly because I didn’t really know what else to do. Then I cried. I cried and cried like a child who realizes they’ve misplaced their very most favorite toy. I cried like a grieving lover. It was all quite excessive and somehow inappropriate to the moment. I didn’t care about that, and wouldn’t recognize it for some time, much later in the evening.

All of the tears that I haven’t cried over all of the shitty things going on in the world lately finally found their way out of my eye holes. I wept. I let myself have the moment. I indulged the momentary falsehood that it was truly only about a pole. Tears I can handle. I’ve cried a river of them. I’ve wiped them dry with a million miles of tissues. Tears fall. Tears dry. Moments pass.

The rage was harder to handle. Anger terrifies me, even my own.  Even to allow it for a moment, felt like it teetered on the edge of criminal to feel it at all. Anger is such a human emotion. We teach ourselves so little about it. Isn’t that strange? I was unprepared, in spite of putting in so much practice and work, generally, on emotion, and emotional intelligence. Experiencing rage still feels terrifying, and part of what is frightening about it (for me), is how powerful it feels. In that moment, I really wanted to lash out, I really wanted to take action – action has power. I wanted to destroy everything within reach, to “make a mark” on the world, to punish whoever had wronged me, to assign blame, and force “rightness” on my circumstances. I live a life in which I have surrounded myself with precious things, delicate breakables, art, porcelain, glass – and because these things are precious to me, I have learned to stop when I am raging. Just stop. No action. Self-inflicted, self-enforced inaction. Inaction that gives me a moment to recognize that beneath the rage is… the hurt. The sadness. The disappointment. The loss. The tears. I can cope fairly easily with tears. I have so little sense of having tools to deal with rage… but I know this about me; I will not break my beautiful precious trinkets of material life. They hold my memories. The preciousness of breakable things stalls my rage. It has been tool, system, and practice enough to be adequate for a long time…

It’s time to learn and grow. Is life’s next lesson about anger? Is it time? I admit to having avoided it so far, by creating circumstances in which it can rarely surface – some seriously masterful avoidance. I live in my own place, alone, so my relationships rarely cause me anger; there is no opportunity. I live fairly simply in a space carefully managed to limit “incidental anger” from stubbed toes, or wacked shins. I limit my exposure to sensationalized media reporting. I end social relationships with people who seem inclined to provoke me deliberately. I avoid being out in the world if my PTSD is flaring up. I refrain from becoming emotionally invested in the workplace to the point that passion could erupt over points of disagreement. When anger, or issues to do with it, come up in therapy, I carefully back away and don’t bring it up next time. Avoidance, however, is a short-term coping skill, not a long-term growth strategy.

I’ve set this one aside twice now, when I got to the chapter on anger. I haven’t been ready.

I guess it’s time to take another step down an unlit path. It’s been an extraordinary journey, these last 4 years or so. There’s more to learn. More opportunity to grow. More work to be done to become the woman I most want to be. I dislike the experience of being surrounded by precious irreplaceable breakable objects, trembling with barely restrained rage, until fury finally finds its release as tears because no action is “safe”. There’s probably a better way. 🙂 It’s time to face the woman in the mirror, anger and all, and give her a hand with this one.

The commute is usually standing room only. Plenty of seats on the morning of a Day Without Women.

Apropos of anger, yesterday was “Day Without a Woman” on International Woman’s Day. A lot of women stepped away from their roles in the workplace, at home, just generally. Allies and supporters and feminists of all sorts, too. It was a powerful demonstration, probably more meaningful to those of us demonstrating, than those who obstruct us, or who fail to recognize the fundamental humanity of women. Still powerful. That’s an anger thing, I guess, that feeling of power. How can I best harness the power of my anger – without truly understanding it? I don’t think I can. So. It is, perhaps, long overdue to deal with the rage.

At this point, the anger is academic, it is a quiet calm morning and it’s time to consider the here, the now, and the day ahead of me. It’s time to begin again. 🙂

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Categories anger, Brain Injury, Free Will, Healthy Living, Mindfulness, Moments, more than a little bit of bitching, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, Relationships, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words

A Practicing Non-Believer

March 5, 2017 //
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A good day of house-hunting, yesterday, reminded me that the world is not what I expect, nor does it adhere to my plans, or limit itself to my beliefs or whimsical notions. It is what it is. I can change. I can, perhaps, change the world. The world itself can (will) change – may even choose change – but at all points, in all moments, it (the world) and I (myself) remain entirely precisely what we each actually are (in that moment) without regard to belief.

I am  a practicing non-believer, generally. I prefer my understanding of myself and knowledge of the world be closely tied to what is, and not at all dependent on what I assume, expect, want, pretend, or make up in my head – or what I’m told. It just simplifies things. My only requirements at that point become awareness of the world around me, and acceptance of reality. No “believing” required. (Reality, like science, does not care what I believe.) I see, lately, a rather sad surplus of human primates mis-using the words “think” and “know” as synonymous with “believe”, but I’m on to those verbal shenanigans, and I’m watching for it. Believe what you like. I’ll seek knowledge, and accept that I do not know what I do not know. (Your beliefs can’t really substitute effectively for my knowledge, nor mine for yours. I’ll do my homework.)

The wisest among us know to refrain from supporting decision-making with untested assumptions, magical thinking, and “believing” things without checking them out thoroughly. Strangely, in spite of the modern surplus of data, there is a clear shortage of wisdom in the world. lol

I sip my coffee, watching signs of spring coming, just beyond my studio window. Small brown birds gathering up soft bits of this and that for nests. A large flock of Canada geese strutting and posing on the lawn between the patio and the meadow beyond. Blue sky streaked with indecisive clouds of several sorts, as though the weather for the day is simply not yet decided. Rain spatters the window, but only for a moment. I notice that my coffee has, at some point, gone cold. I’m smiling, nonetheless. Why not?

I think about the houses that I saw yesterday. The one that I “liked” the best was also in pretty bad shape. No… I mean… like, seriously, not good. As in, not fully habitable. At all. The cost to make it a home would be prohibitively high (obvious structural repairs were needed to interior floors, and the roof, every scrap of carpet was so badly damaged and soaked in cat urine that the entire building reeked of it… and so much more!), but I did like the floor plan, very much. I made notes when I got home. I’d almost talked myself out of being mindful of the quantity of obvious deal-breakers, by the time I sat down to consider the day. lol I marked the address in my favorites on a listing website I use, to keep an eye on it… maybe a radical drop in price…? I was stunned to see it updated to a pending offer before I finished dinner. That change didn’t realistically do anything to change that it wasn’t a good choice for me, personally, so it was interesting to observe my emotional landscape shift and change with the new knowledge. I had already formed the belief that “no one would want to undertake all that, even at that price” and already developed an expectation in my thinking that it “might still be available months from now, at a reduced price”. LOL Silly primate. No means no.

I looked at a house that was well-kept, clean, cosmetically very pleasant, in a nice seeming neighborhood, a reasonable commute to work, and move-in ready… It was also at the top of my price range, and on the small side of what I am looking for – and didn’t actually meet most of my significant needs, carefully listed and carried with me. It was just the only house I looked at that I could envision living in, myself, fairly contentedly… and that was the case primarily because it was clean, well-cared for, and vacant. Those characteristics aren’t really the ones that meet long-term needs for quality of life, and being at the top of my price range just as it was, it would have been unaffordable to improve it. Another set of pitfalls avoided. I remember thinking “this is hard!”

I looked at a house that had many of the characteristics that would meet my needs over time – and even those of my Traveling Partner at any point he might choose to be staying with me. It was occupied, which for me complicates looking at it; I struggle to filter out the experience of the resident, and their use of the space. I do my best, and it is a learning process, and there is a lot going for this one, I think to myself… and begin to observe the process of my brain working to talk me into or out of it. The house is on the corner of a very busy major street, across from a brightly lit car dealership, next door to a very large multi-family complex that is noisy, and littered. Could I “make it work”? Probably, but the location is both less-than-ideal and also manages to be inconvenient to shopping and services I would, myself, need. How long would it take before my PTSD and noise-sensitivity resulted in feeling unsafe, or uncomfortable? It’s not the one, either.

There was a very cute older place, well-cared for, and fairly fancy for its time – lots of well-crafted built-ins. It was an “open house” and there was a lot of interest in the wee charming move-in ready house. The rooms were small to the point of feeling claustrophobic, and the basement stairs were the deal breaker for me, with tread so narrow it was necessary to turn sort of sideways to safely go down into the finished basement. The ceiling in the basement was so low I had to stoop in places – and I’m only 5’5″-ish. Uncomfortable, and the safety hazards revealed themselves quite quickly; my realtor hit his head going back upstairs, and I stumbled on the narrow tread, causing me to also notice the utter lack of bannister or rail. A bannister or safety rail is an easy addition… but the concrete stairs with narrow tread? No way. Shivers ran up and down my spine when I considered the risk of falling down those stairs and hitting my head.

I could have tried to talk myself into any one of them, I suppose. I choose, instead, patience and learning. Instead of investing in the belief that I must choose one as soon as possible and settle for all of the compromises on all of the characteristics I would want to build a home upon, I continue to study what matters most to me, building by building. Belief is pretty easy; someone says something with conviction, and I then accept the words as true, and build on that. No homework required. Learning requires more effort, more cognitive strain, more moments confronting the human being in the mirror and demanding a reality check; it’s uncomfortable. I’m okay with that. Non-belief is also a practice. 😉

I didn’t find a house I would want to call my own yesterday. I’m okay with that. I’ll begin again. This too is part of the journey.  🙂

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Categories Brain Injury, Fiction, Free Will, Healthy Living, Logic & Reason, Metaphors, Mindfulness, Moments, Parables, Perspective, Post Traumatic Stress, solo hiking, The Art of Being, The Big 5, Words
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