Posts from — November 2007

This evening I’ve felt a little cranky and like I’ve got a lot of internal frustration bound up inside.  Continuing to take the perspective of watching myself on a big stage in front of me, I can see myself with more compassion than I otherwise would.  It does make me less interested in changing or trying to manage how I feel.

I see this woman (me) up there ready to move on but not being ready or able to.  She’s dazed a bit by the pain.  It’s returned to the back of her skull.  She knows what relief feels like yet she’s all tied up inside.  She’s lost the feeling of relief right now.  It’s like she’s fighting something inside of her.  It’s hard to let whatever she’s fighting just be.

Now she could scream and yell but when she does nothing changes.  She’s still fighting something within her.  It’s all she knows how to do right now.  She’s very much alone right now.

It’s an interesting exercise because I was going to go to the video store and get some ice cream with chocolate in it but it feels right now like I would be trying to fight off whatever is in me bugging me.  Trying to push it to the side.

I seriously doubt that I could possibly know what’s bugging me.  I guess I don’t even really care about knowing right now.  But what I do know is that I hate the feeling of trying to get rid of feeling awful.

Ooh.  I just got chills.  The tension in my head is releasing a bit.  Oh, and then some pain in my head surged.  Now I feel a little more relaxed…Well, I don’t feel like I’m fighting things as much.  More chills.

I do feel kind of lonely.  Could help for me to remember that Andrea can sit right beside me watching from the audience if I like.  I can tap into her presence and her caring for me.  I can “flop” on her as we say.

I’ve been thinking about what coming through this journey/ordeal looks like and I was remembering today that my goal is not to get rid of the stuff that makes me feel bad but to be able to be with the emotions of my life.  I never had a safe enough feeling inside that made it possible to feel the awful stuff.  Developing this capacity is what I’m aiming for.

More chills.

Andrea also catches me sometimes wanting to know what’s coming next.  It is really tough for me at times when I feel as awful as I have tonight to not know.  My mind starts to wonder, will I feel this way permanently for another year?  And more stuff like that that makes me crazy.

Just after I typed that sentence I could feel myself finding within me the loving, mothering part of Andrea that’s gotten instilled within me and that is becoming my own nurturing parent.  Gosh, more chills.  It is cold tonight but I get them even under the covers.  The presence of Andrea within me and my own nurturing parent helps me not to have to know what’s coming next.

Hmm.  What I notice now within me is how I feel so alone, like I’ve purposely isolated myself and I’m wondering how much I really need that.  It feels like a relic from my days as a kid. Hmm.  Just noticing.

Well, enough for now.

One of the authors who has made it possible for me to get through this journey of mine is Clarissa Pinkola Estes and she wrote this today on Veteran’s Day in The Moderate Voice.  It’s mostly a collection of prayers veterans have asked her to pray and given her permission to share with others.  Here are a few:

Please comfort my mother over losing my brother. He’s in a better place, but we aren’t yet.

Pleas stiff the sumbatch captain who cheated me out of a 20 after poker game. No serious, keep him safe. I take it out of his hide when he gets home.

Please pray for better painkillers, big scissors to cut all the red tape.

I’ve been through a lot. We all have. Please pray that there really are ponies for all of us somewhere in all this horseshi-.

This entire weekend, even during the presentation, I have felt physically awful with aches and pains everywhere. I haven’t been able to stand up straight and even the tops of my cheek bones have hurt.

I have a theory that this is happening because I am releasing some stored up toxins in my body as a result of the therapy work I’m doing. Not totally sure about this theory, but I do feel a lot like I do after having had a deep tissue massage.

So tonight I was feeling really sorry for myself. And scared. Scared out of my wits. Asking myself, what can I do? A question I always ask when the future is terrifyingly unknown.

Then I read this post from one of my favorite blogs Buddha And The Couch. This stuck out for me:

…imagine you are sitting in theater, watching your life being performed up on stage. You are not in the play, just sitting back and seeing it happening. Remember that the backdrop to the play is a blank stage, just wood flooring and a curtain. That’s what was there before the characters arrived, and after the drama is over, that’s what will be left. So, with that in mind, let the content of the play–the specific characters saying their specific lines–drop into the background, and appreciate that there is something onstage rather than nothing. This is the effort to find that place in you that can relish it as a creative act, a collecting of raw elements into forms and stories, movements and direction.

Author Marty L. Cooper is talking about the power of simply noticing our emotions. While I am somewhat practiced at this (I need to give myself some credit), it can be so hard for me to remember this when all I can feel is the pain. I am so grateful that this post came out tonight, and I was there to read it.

I didn’t even picture myself up on the stage so much as I started to appreciate that something was happening. Marty says more about this:

With this “wild creativity” experiment, feel the difference between seeing your experience of depression and anxiety as an oppressive and inescapable force, versus seeing them as an expression of an amazing, universal, raw force of creation.

I couldn’t quite say this when I was writing before but I was really scared that I was feeling emotions that I wouldn’t be able to handle, that I was coming to territory that would be so painful I would have to shut down. In fact I had read something on the internet that said that sometimes pain can be a defense mechanism against feeling what is true for us.

Believe it or not, it’s now calming to see myself up on that stage, feeling the terror, imagining the worst happening, walking hunched over, crying out in pain even as my cheek bones hurt. That’s just me living out this phase of the story.  And this phase will change and lead to another phase.  It always does.

Oooh! I want Thrane to read this so he can remind me of the stage metaphor when I will inevitably lose my bearings again.

(Well, this is already becoming an empowerment story. It just can’t seem to help itself.)

Today our neighborhood met (we do this every few months or so) and we gathered around the theme of water conservation. After taking a trip to Bear Creek Reservoir, I felt like I just had to do something so we arranged this get together and I gave a presentation of the photos my friend Margaret had taken on two recent trips (one before and after the rain a couple of weeks ago).

There were lots of things about this that were different for me today. Usually, when I have something like this to do, I perform. In fact I am addicted to performing, and doing it well, and seeking perfection. So today that didn’t happen so much.

But the really big thing that happened today was that I told my story about visiting the reservoir with Thrane in the room. You see I have been so uncomfortable in the past letting him see me do public kinds of things. I was afraid to show this part of myself to him. How much I care about things, what I think. I was worried that he would disagree with me and be ashamed of me. Of course, this had nothing to do with Thrane and is not in line with Thrane’s personality at all. But that didn’t matter. I was scared I wouldn’t meet my own perfect standards and then come home and not only have to face my perfectionistic self but also the one I imagined in him.

Because today I wasn’t trying to do it just so, because I was focused simply on telling my story from my heart and being me in front of these folks, I could do this with him in the room.

I got some unexpected things out of it, too. He was there to set up the projector and make sure everything worked. I could relax. Usually, I would have had to do that by myself, alone. That’s the thing about perfectionism. It’s lonely.

I’m glad I wasn’t lonely today.

This evening I was listening to an archived edition of Fresh Air where author Katha Pollitt was talking about her new book ‘Learning to Drive’ in Public. She tells some revealing stories about herself that her friends at times urged her not to share publicly. She said, though, that she realized that most narratives about women are the empowerment stories where the woman overcomes in the end, and we need some more realistic stories. Her comment was the feather brush I needed to push me over into writing a blog about what’s going on with me that I share with friends.

One day I will have an empowerment story where I do come to the end and say, whoa what a journey. (Well, I kind of do that now. And even now I know that I’m going to come through to the other side.) But some days my life does not feel like an empowerment journey with any end in sight. I need to write about the muck so I can really tell the full, real story.

So I am writing to share my life and be known. I am starting this following a time when I have kept very, very quiet about my life. For whatever reason it hasn’t felt good and right to share much of myself. I guess I needed the privacy. I still may down the road, but I am going to give this blog a stab and see what happens.