The Wrong Life

Sometimes in therapy I learn something about myself that seems so new, or I get a brilliant new perspective or I see something I hadn't seen clearly before. I guess that's why going to therapy remains worth it. (Besides that whole life ring while I'm drowning in depression thing, of course.) Moments like that bring into sharp focus how for quite a few years I learned nothing new in therapy.

In my mind, I sometimes try to "re-do" my past, think that I can somehow "fix" things. I know it isn't rational: I'm not going to be able to make my family be alive again or change any of a number of other past traumas. But emotionally I feel as if I can do so if only I do it right.

People define themselves differently. In many places in the world, people define themselves by their place within their community. The Navaho people define themselves by their family connections. LIke the Navaho, so did I. Without my family, I feel cut off, I feel like there are huge gaping holes inside me that nothing can fill.

This is not how my life should be. I wanted to marry and have children: I would have made a terrific wife and mother. I am nurturing and loving and giving. The fact that no one ever wanted to marry me has long made me feel there is something wrong with me. I see so many people who have lifelong relationships, people who don't seem to have the qualities I have, people who are takers or who are high-maintenance, and I have to wonder what is wrong with me that no one wanted what I have to give.

My brother was supposed to be my friend when we grew up. He was supposed to be here with me after our parents died. Our children would have been friends and we would have spent a lot of time together.

When I'm Stronger

NOTE: This is an extraordinarily long post and delves into more detail in ugly places than normal. Don't feel you have to read it.

My therapist and i talked about journaling at my last appointment, referring to my last blog post and the epiphanies that came to me while journaling early one morning. Michele suggested I continue to journal when I first wake up because your mind is still open then; it hasn't put up the usual barriers it does once you get up and start your day. That was Monday. (We had to meet out of order due to Xmas, and we'll meet on Tuesday next week due to New Year's.)

So I started on Tuesday, two days ago. In less than 2 pages, memories of Mom bubbled up in my mind. These memories promptly turned into ones that hurt and disturbed me, memories I have shunned and shunted away, memories I don't feel able to deal with. i want to be able to deal with all my memories of Mom during the few, short months leading to her death with acceptance and equanimity. The set of memories that came to me Tuesday morning hurt. They scared me the way the events I remembered scared me. My stomach is tight just remembering my reactions on Tuesday. I cried a little, but held myself back from full immersion into the emotions those memories contained. I was strong enough to hold myself back from that. I tell myself I'll deal with those memories when I'm stronger.

Today, after I'd been home for about an hour and a half (I spent Xmas with other friends), I took a nap. it was a wonderful nap: a gentle sinking into unconsciousness under a warm, fluffy cloud of a comforter with the sun shining through the window onto my face. Then lovely vague dreams, and waking up feeling soft, pliable, and happy.

Somehow, ideas relating to my past rose up inside my mind. I remembered a memory from when I had to be nine months old: I was lying in a cool, twilight-dim room and knew I shouldn't cry or make a fuss, just wait for someone to come get me out of bed. I know I was 9 months old because I knew who was my regular babysitter at the time (I checked with Mom). It was my Aunt Nita. She and her sons always seemed kind of tense and unhappy, for very good reason: Uncle Jack was a drunk. He wasn't just an alcoholic — he drank himself into a stupor, drank himself into the gutter, and, when brought home by my father and/or his other brothers and put to bed, would promptly climb out a window and go back to yet another bar. As an infant, I was completely aware that I shouldn't cry, shouldn't upset that household, should wait to be picked up from my nap.

That memory came to me as a corroboration of how I could remember that my cousin's molesting me started when I was two. How can a two-year-old remember anything? How can a nine-month-old? But traumatic events can set memories into stone.

Who Am I?

Just got back from therapy a little while ago, a session that was basically a rambling, tangled talk about how I no longer feel as if I know who and what my authentic self even is, much less how to find her.

I articulated my ideas about self (well, at least I tried), and Michele provided some other ways to view self. I rambled over how much I hate that I am still in therapy, almost 30 years later; how I am afraid to "follow my dreams", not even being sure what they are anymore and being afraid of following them and being poor and insecure; about choices I've made in the way of relationships with men that where less than beneficial for me and why I might have made those choices; about feeling so many emotions and how they affect me physically and how I wonder if all my meds are messing me up and I wish I could go off them …. It was a turgid, tangled mess.

Sometimes I wonder if therapy is even helping me anymore, if I'm beyond the point where it could help. I wonder if I can every be functional again, or if I am now stuck in this mental and emotional tangle forever.

In therapy, I posited that we all have a basic (right now I'd say "essential') self — the person we are when we are born. The core of our personality, perhaps. And that we gain layers as we grow, and maybe we get twisted around our core self, or get too many layers between our authentic self and the self we have become, obscuring our authentic self. In this schema, I no longer know who I am when I'm authentic, what my core self is like. Is it the child I remember? The woman in her early 30s who went to Britain alone for a month, who published a story, who applied to and was accepted into a competitive six-week writing workshop?

Or am I the pleaser, the one who has a puppy-like need to make others like me, who makes herself as "normal" and non-threatening as possible, who doesn't make waves?

Michele's concept is that we have a central personality who is the kind of overseer of the sub-personalities. Our sub-personalities — the rebel, the responsible adult, whoever else one may have tucked in there — are kind of like board members of a corporation or organization. And that I, as the central personality, can have dialogues with the various sub-personalities of me. This concept has intriguing possibilities. However, it doesn't answer the questions of who am I? What is my authentic self like? And how do I know what my "dreams" are that I should follow?

I pointed out to her that she didn't give me what I wanted, which was a clear, pure answer. She was understandably amused.

Bedtime

When I was a child, bedtime was a pleasure I looked forward to. When it was time to go to bed, I went happily, looking forward to resting and dreaming. Even though I was prone to nightmares and night terrors that my parents didn't even know about, I still had more good dreams than bad and I looked forward to each new day.

Fast forward a few decades. The summer of 2007, I wasn't working and it was one of the most glorious summers ever on the Oregon Coast. Temperatures ranged from 75 to 85 most days, with sun and a bit of a breeze and I spent almost every day walking down the hill to the beach, walking up and down the beach, including into the breakers, and then walking back up the beach. I was in good condition, I was losing weight, and I was actually enjoying myself, but I wasn't going to bed until between 2 and 3 am every night. This was highly unusual for me: I hadn't pulled all-nighters or even super-late-nighters in college!

That summer, I was staying awake late because I had created an enormously detailed imaginary life and I stayed up every night into the wee hours living and creating that life. The people sharing that life with me were so real, with complete life histories and backstories. It was beautiful. Every night I would turn off all the lights in the house, turn on some music, light some candles all over my bedroom, and watch the moon wash across my bed and the floor in the room outside my door. And I would dream.

This imaginary life bothered my therapist. She was afraid I was hiding from reality within it. It wasn't until a conversation in mid-summer that she suddenly said "I get it now! Your mind needs to be occupied and it's so unused right now that you need to do something with it." And that was, in great part, why I stayed up late every night dreaming. Once I went back to doing some work and thinking about what I wanted to do next, the imaginary life just melted away.

Fast forward another few years. I've returned to Houston after getting things moving with my mom's estate. I'm miserable: lost, rudderless, and more alone than I've ever been in my life. My closest friend in Houston was rearranging things in his life, in particular his marriage, and he no longer made time to do things with me other than a few days in the Spring to go photograph birds and the occasional lunch. I spent my time — all day, every day — surfing the web. I stayed up far into the night more often than not, not because I had an imaginary life I loved but because I had a real life I despaired of and I stayed up late to put off having to begin another new day.

It's Hot

It's hot out — 102-plus this afternoon. I'm learning to be like the natives and stay inside during the hottest part of the day. I still haven't developed the habit of getting up and out early. It's the habit of the unemployed: stay up late and get up late.

I'm taking a trip back to the Oregon Coast in a couple of weeks, where it's still not hit 70 degrees even once this summer and sometimes doesn't get out of the 50s during the day. Unless the weather changes substantially, I will experience a drop of 40 to 50 degrees over the course of an air trip and a shuttle trip. In fact, I'll probably hit 90 degrees temps in Portland. I'm pulling out a pair of shorts and a couple of tees and the rest is jeans, a sweater and some long-sleeve shirts. Thank goodness for layering! And staying with someone who will have sweaters.

I wouldn't mind being a snowbird, because I love my temperature range to be between the 40s or 50s in the winter (I like sweaters) to the 80s or low 90s in the summer (I like shorts). But I'd need to be able to work anywhere I lived, either having a job that existed in two places or having two jobs or being able to telecommute. 

My friend Thea told me I need to live in San Diego. My BFF and a handful of other folks want me in Seattle. I have some people who think I'm in Houston forever. And I have a compulsion toward living on the Oregon Coast. 

I feel as if I were a kid wondering what I'm going to be when I grow up: I don't know what I want in specific. It's all just dreams right now, dreams of heat and cold, light and dark, here and there.

What climate do you prefer? Would you be a snowbird if you could? Where do you want to be?

I Wrote A Novel!

I've been writing my own things since I was seven years old, when I wrote my first poem that wasn't an assignment for class. My father took that funky little poem with it's not-always-exactly-rhyming lines and called each of his six siblings and read the entire thing to them over the phone.

This, I thought, was powerful. This is what I want to do. Nothing else I did ever brought me that kind of reaction from my dad or my mom. So my future was chosen.

Of course, I mostly wrote short stories growing up, and the beginnings of novels. In college it was all short stories and expository pieces. When I went back to school to get my technical writing degree, what I wrote was even further removed from my dream of writing a novel.

I'm Rambling Blue Today

Today I have no umph. I don't care about much, I'm not particularly hungry but I was craving ice cream and cookies before lunch (peanut butter and butter on english muffins). There is a dark chocolate bar in the fridge but I don't have any real compulsion to go get it. I feel vague and kinda numb.

I'm feeling depressed.

Nothing specific I can think of, except that I am still struggling and needing therapy and meds (and the meds are probably forever, at least some of them). 

I even woke up feeling kinda good because my mom was in my dreams and it was her voice saying the kinds of things she would say (I think we were shopping). It felt nice waking up with her voice in my head.

But since then the day has gone downhill. I keep saying I'll go to the farmer's market on Thursdays (3pm to 7pm), but I don't want to today. I don't want contact with strangers. I want my mom, but that aside, I'd like to be with one of my close friends. Maybe they'd hold my hand and stroke my hair and tell me it's all going to be okay, because I feel like it's all going to be bad and just fall apart.

Frozen

You know how people refer to the fight or flight reflex? They forget the third option: freeze and hope you aren't seen. That is my response to stress and anxiety and fear. I have all the chemicals for the fight or flight, but they have nowhere to go because I stay still and hope that no one, or whatever is causing me stress, doesn't see me. So the adrenalin et al. have no way to burn off.

When I am anxious or stressed in some way, I minimize myself, try to not draw attention to myself if possible. That goes on at all levels, even to the level where I breathe shallowly and hold my breath.

I used to have nightmares as a child — lots of them. But my folks didn't like me to wake them up or climb in bed with them, so mostly I just stayed in bed quietly after having them. There was one I had a lot: I'd wake up and be sure that a big, black dog was sitting next to my bed, just waiting for some sign that I was awake. And once it knew I was awake, it was going to tear my throat out. So I would stay as still as I could, which involved breathing very shallowly (I had no idea how a sleeping person breathed and wanted to take no chances of attracting the big dog's attention). I would do this until I either went back to sleep or passed out from lack of sufficient oxygen, I'm not sure which. 

As a result, I am very good at remaining very still and at breathing shallowly. Given that I am anxious all the time currently, I breathe shallowly a lot. I hold my breath a lot. And I sit unmoving except for some occasional involuntary fidgeting for very long periods.

And that's nuts. Moving and breathing are supposed to help diminish anxiety and stress. So why isn't my body (and that little mind of mine) trying to do what would help it? Because there might be a sabre tooth tiger — or a big black dog — waiting just outside my door. Or somewhere, just waiting for me to prove I'm awake and alive. And the primitive part of my brain is very strong.

So I sit, a block of ice, not getting any better because I am a sea of stress and fear chemicals with no way to burn them off.

Tell me, do you freeze or do you fight or flee?

On Simplifying My Life

I like reading about simplicity — there is always a new perspective or something new to learn. Because I don't have my favorite books with me, I've been cruising teh Interwebz and found a post on one of my favorite sites: zenhabits. This post is "Simple Living Manifesto: 72 Ideas to Simplify Your Life" by Leo Babauta, the author of the site. 

The post isn't about 72 things you must do in order to simplify your life. The 72 things are ideas and suggestions, things to think about. I am beginning with the first one, because it seems central to how to live my life in general, not just how to simplify it.

"I. Make a list of your top 4-5 important things." This list basically sets your priorities and the way you want to live your life. This is what I wrote:

1. Creating. Writing!, drawing & painting, crocheting.
2. Freedom. Being able to do what I want to do when I want to do it, not being tied to an 8 to 5, commuting, unsatisfying-job existence (and getting burnt-out, and getting sick — again). Being able to do work that I think is fun, being able to work wherever I want to work. Having time and energy for my important things.
3. Love & Friendship: having close friends to talk with, having friends to do things with, having people to love. (Having a "romantic" relationship would be nice, too.)
4. Compassion & Giving:  Things like volunteering for EcoBot and being the Vice-Chair for its committee, volunteering to do stuff here and there, and maybe volunteering to work with shelter cats and cats at adoption events. Giving my time.
5. My Health. Physical, emotional, mental. Getting the care I need and taking care of myself in every way.

It's not an exciting list: there is no lust for travel (not that I would turn it down, and the Freedom item would allow me to do so, but travel isn't important to me as a thing by itself). No building a hugely successful business (that wouldn't leave me very free). It's a list that feels good to me. It feels open; all of it feels "free" to me. I wasn't sure about 4 and 5, because they weren't exciting, but even though I'm not doing all I could be doing (possibly because I'm not free as I struggle with money and worry and grief), I am doing some and there is lots of room for growth.

I can see what I want here. I'm not sure how to get to all of it. And I need to just start writing: if I can write more than one blog on a regular basis, I can write a story. I can start a novel. I can work on any of a number of things I want to write. The blog seems different from "real" writing, but for goodness sakes, look at my weekly word count! That's real writing alright.

Who knows? As I pursue the things I can easily pursue now, maybe the others will simply come to me.

What are your top 4 or 5 things?

All Whacked Out

Not in the right place. My bad. Let's just say I had an annoying day full of too much caffeine and too little sleep. I fell asleep over my laptop and woke with a mind and body that just didn't want to function or work together.