Damn, Damn, Damn Depression!

I'm sunk in the stupid pit again. Why? Hell if I know. And it's not just depression, although that is an overriding emotion. I'm crabby and antisocial. I'm terrifically stressed and anxious, to the tune of taking an extra 1 mg of Xanax each of the last two days. (So far today I haven't taken any extra.) I took a four-hour nap yesterday and still slept for 9.5 hours last night … and still didn't want to get up this morning.

I'm really tired of being "the sick one", the one people have to ask "how are you doing today?" I have no idea what I'm doing wrong or what I'm not doing right that keeps dumping me back into this debilitating space. "Functional" might as well be at the top of the highest glacier on Mt. Rainier, it seems to impossible to reach.

You can't get there from here.

I'm trying. But I've been sleeping so late (thanks to this great melatonin-based supplement my psych recommended) that I feel if I don't get up NOW then the day is fucking OVER, so I haven't been journaling or trying to meditate or visualize. And when I do try to meditate or visualize, I haven't been able to achieve the levels I was at back before I tried the Abilify (which I've been off of all this month).

In therapy yesterday, Michele asked why I feel I have to get up and start my day as soon as I wake up. What will happen if I put it off for another half an hour while I journal or meditate or something? If I stay in bed even later, I feel as if the entire day is over, wasted. I feel like a complete failure for the day. I feel judged and judging.

We also talked about writing. And drawing. About how I used to do them all the time virtually every day, from the time I was quite young. How somewhere in my 20s, I stopped doing them much and they became fraught with difficulties and issues. And yet, I need to do them. Writing and drawing are parts of me that need attention. When I do them I feel better. I feel like myself.

How Do You Do?

Doing: it's what I'm not and haven't been for a long while. I used to, a lot, and I need to again. I've just got to get over this speed bump that looms like a twenty-foot granite wall. I just need a way over. Or around.

I have a sign saying "Action" on my bathroom mirror, per the instructions of my good friend Bob. Most mornings I am now getting at least pretend-dressed (yoga pants and a sweater) before I come downstairs. And some days I even put on regular shoes to help put me in the mindset of activity, per another good friend.

I'm still mostly inert.

I did go for a walk around the neighborhood with the housemates today. It took Griffin to push us into it. I used to be able to push myself. Hell, oftentimes a walk would simply sing its siren song and I'd feel compelled to follow, to walk along the verge or the walking path to a park or a school or simply around the neighborhood. When did I become so solidly still? How did I turn to stone?

I think it mostly started with a devastating depression in my mid-30s that just about cut me off at the knees. With help, I clambered out of that hole and began working my way up to full functioning. Then, in 2000, I was hit with a bad case of vertigo of unknown origin (also known as "idiopathic") that allowed me to work only 20 hours a week or so. (Insurance did not accept anything my rack of doctors said and declared me "not disabled" — stupid things.) While I did that work, I also attended a program in scientific illustration. That's all I was able to do (including my homework); the rest of the time I was stuck on the couch, exhausted from feeling like I was always in motion.

Again, I eventually got over the vertigo (after about 18 months). I had moved to the beach by the time it passed and I started walking on the beach most days. I found work and walked around the estuary at our work campus most days. I still walked on the beach. When I moved to Houston, I walked in the park. When I was on the road, I walked whenever I could.

Turn Around and Walk Forward

Caution: A long post with complex sentence structure, complicated punctuation, and many, many different metaphors. Not for the faint-hearted.

The best path isn't always the straightest

That's my motto for the year. The last post was all about traumas of the past and how they have affected me and my life. Within the gentle and supportive comments ran a particular thread: perhaps I need to simply accept my past and look to the present and future.

This is not the first time this concept has been suggested to me. A previous therapist became quite frustrated with me for continuing to talk about the past. A couple of friends have suggested that I cling to the past — suggested with increasing frustration and decreasing gentleness. I appreciate the gentle directness of my commenters.

It's true: I do cling to and look to the past. When I was talking to my therapist on Tuesday of this week, I had this vivid flash of me walking backward, taking my cues on which way to turn from what I saw before my eyes. That way leads to missteps and even falling off cliffs. It was a powerful and stirring image. I resolved right then to turn around and use my present, and my visions and desires, to guide me into the future.

Of course, I asked Michele her opinion of, well, everything. What I said in the blog. The idea that I cling to and pay too much attention to the past. Some other stuff. It frustrated me that she didn't respond directly and completely refrained from answering my questions. I'm probably going to push her on that next week.

However, it is ultimately me who has the choice and power to turn around and move forward. I chose the term "walk forward" to indicate activity; I have been almost completely motionless since Mom died, and that was almost three and a half years ago; I wonder how many years that has taken off my life? So "walk forward" tells me to move my body and to participate in my life much more actively than I have been. "Look forward" would have been way too passive.

Christmas Memories: Sadness and Joy

I always loved Christmas while growing up because it was a big deal to us as a family gathering, both immediate and extended. For the first 11 years of my life, we got together with my dad's family on Christmas Eve, even at immense inconvenience to other family members, to open presents after midnight when my grandfather arrived from closing up the movie theater he managed. After that, the younger siblings (my dad's generation) rose up in protest and we began having our gatherings at a more suitable day and time and took to drawing names instead of giving gifts to everyone, another hardship on the younger families. Even with all the craziness and sometimes 35-40 people in a small, three-bedroom house, I loved the holidays. And Christmas morning was always just about the four of us: Mom, Dad, my little brother Jim, and me.

However, the year I was 16, we moved 1100 miles away from the town, and everyone, I’d known my entire life. At least that Christmas, it was still the four of us. Unfortunately, Dad died of a heart attack the following May (or March, I'm not sure after 35 years) and Mom insisted we stay where we were. So the Christmas I was 17, there was just Mom, Jim, and me. Mom wanted to make it something to remember as being different, so that it wouldn’t be a memory of loss — any more than it already was — but a new memory. So the three of us talked about it and decided to have lobster tail for Christmas Eve dinner! Mom had never cooked lobster of any sort before, but she asked the man at the fish counter where she bought the lobster. Jim and I made the salad and melted the butter and set the breakfast bar for our feast. We even had little glasses of wine with Mom's regular-sized glass. And it was a very fine meal! It was a nice way to start a new memory.

In addition, my brother and I were panic-stricken that there was no one to fill Mom’s stocking or give her gifts from Santa that year, so we did it. We bought small gifts for her stocking, and we went in together on a single gift for her from Santa. On Christmas morning, Mom quickly figured out who the 'elves' were who had surprised her by filling her stocking, but the look on her face when she found a package to her from 'Santa' was one of shock. I think she believed in Santa for a moment, or that an angel had reached down and given her a gift. Then she saw the smug looks on our faces and realized that her 'angels' were the two teenagers who were her anchor in this world.

By then, our extended families no longer extended. Our family was just the three of us.

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.

Feeling, Detaching, Continuing

I haven't written in wow — 10 days! I know I usually write about my therapy, but last week, I just couldn't.

Last week's therapy ended up being very emotional and very raw. We started talking about what I wrote about in my last post and pursued it far into my mind and my feelings to see what is behind this desire to reconnect with my past. At the very base of the vortex, we found abandonment and being completely alone. Intellectually, I know that my family did not abandon me and I am not completely alone (besides that fact that we are all basically one on one level). I have people who love me, both locally and scattered across the country. But, at the heart of the matter, those are what I feel.

I cried some. Not as bad as most of the times I cried in Karen's office, but the first time I've cried in Michele's, and the first time I've cried in a while. I really don't like to cry, for numerous reasons. Even more, I don't like to cry in front of someone else. It exhausts me. And when I experience a strong emotion, afterward I detach from emotion for some amount of time.

We ended the hour with a long imaging session. Imaging, visualization, creative imaging: whatever you want to call it. Michele led me and helped me find my way through it and discover things. I'm not going to describe it because it's intensely personal and there are very few people I would be comfortable sharing it with. Hell, I'm barely comfortable sharing it with myself!

Thus, whenever I thought about writing for the blog, I kept thinking about writing about the session, then about how I didn't want to write about the session. So I didn't write, and I didn't write.

I had therapy again today, and after I finished chattering, I told Michele about how I didn't write about last week's session and why. Which in turn led to my emotion/detachment pattern.

I don't want to have this pattern. Last week, on the way home, I left the radio off so I could stay with the feelings from the session and the imaging work. I wanted to ride that emotional wave to the end, the way Michele encouraged me to do. And I did ride it, all the way home. Then, exhausted, I took a long nap. Afterward, I didn't return to thinking about the therapy session or my feelings or the work we'd done and ended with. I didn't do so again until today's therapy.

Confidence Falls

Y'know, when I first set out to move back to Seattle, I was full of confidence about finding work back in high tech. I had a long history of high tech and I'd done a lot of extreme editing of scientific materials and I'd broadened the types of writing I've done with my various projects in Houston. Fantastic, right?

So now I am in Seattle and I've settled in and begun networking and looking for work. I've joined meetup groups in Content Strategy, Information Architecture/User Experience (IA/UX), general technology, and so on. I've gone to their meetup events. And my confidence has been pouring out of me like blood from an open arterial.

For example, last night I went to a Content Strategy meetup with my friend. The first presentation was fairly basic and I didn't really find it that informative or interesting, but the presenter was pretty excited about it so that made it okay. The second presentation was exciting, entertaining, and … confusing. I may have taken in about 10% of what the guy was talking about. The fellow to my right, an engineer and writer, had the opinion that the presentation was fairly content-free. I felt like I was too stupid to understand it, because everyone else seemed to really like the presentation. On the way home, I expressed my feeling and the other guy's opinion to my friend and he asked me what points I was confused about or what questions I had because maybe he could answer them. I only had one basic question because the rest of the presentation didn't make enough sense to me for me to even have questions I could articulate. I know I've been out of the high-tech biz for a while, and that things that used to be just what tech writers did are now their own professional niches with their own jargon, but I expected to be able to understand a hell of a lot more than what I did last night!

Secondly, I am not getting responses to job applications, other than the one where a friend submitted me via his company's employment referral system, probably because I've been out of high-tech for so long. There's a lot of jobs I'm not even applying for because of not having a few of their Required qualifications: specific programming languages, specific tools. I'm very happy to be here, but maybe I'm too out-of-date, too old. But if I'm not writing and editing, I don't know what else I can do. And honestly, I need to be working a professional job in high tech to be able to afford a decent apartment now and a decent house someday in this area. Besides all the other typical living expenses.

Yes, I have found a part-time freelance job, or rather, it found me. But it's taken me three weeks (okay, three part-time weeks, but still) to truly get up to speed on the information and how they want it presented for this first project and I've just been revising the existing stories written by someone else. I haven't even begun to write original text yet and I'm as nervous as my housemates' cat about doing so. What if I can't do this anymore? What if my work sucks?

A Body at Rest Tends to Stay at Rest

Inertia. Newton's First Law: a body at rest tends to stay at rest, unless a force is acted upon it. And I haven't been enacting any force upon myself since I arrived in Seattle. Well, not much.

As a result, I've lost the muscle tone I'd gained by doing exercises in the apartment. I have barely blogged at all. I haven't even been doing my therapy work, and I did my therapy work in Houston even when I was at my least functional! I have disappointed myself. My confidence has ebbed even lower than when I was in Houston.

However, I've had one phone interview for a full-time job and have another scheduled for next week. (According to my friend who works there, they screen very thoroughly so they get people who will work well with the team.) I think I have a shot, as long as I can convince them I am technical enough.

I've also acquired a part-time freelance job! They contacted me out of the blue: they'd found my profile on LinkedIn, then through that found my web site, which was unfortunately unchanged since Houston and they could only access one link to my work, but they still contacted me and by the time we talked in a two-hour meeting, they had decided upon me. It pays lower than a for-profit company would pay, naturally, but the work is very meaningful, challenging, and varied. Not only can I feel good about my contribution to this organization and the work they do, but I will not be bored and I will be stretching myself. Just for your info, this organization facilitates collaborations between researchers at small to large companies and institutions with other institutions and large pharmaceutical companies to address neglected diseases in the developing worlds and poor populations the world over. These diseases are not high-ticket items in terms of money-making, so the big companies don't pursue them. But the big pharmaceutical companies who have joined this consortium are committed to providing information — even about their compounds — and expertise to other researchers in this sphere. It's amazing!

So, this week my new therapist and I addressed my inertia. She asks good questions, such as when did I live my life more like I wanted it, when was I happier, when was I more active. We went all the way back to childhood for the answers. Among the answers we found was that I need to create for my mental health. I used to write and draw and paint all the time as a child, and even in my 20s. It began to taper off in my 30s, especially as my depression worsened. I developed the thought that I needed to write toward publication, rather than simply write the stories I want to tell. After taking my Scientific Illustration courses and doing beautiful work, I seemed to feel that I could no longer just mess around with my drawing and painting like I did before, but that I had to create at that same high level, so I stopped drawing and painting at all. And I really haven't crocheted a lot since creating a very intricate and difficult doily for my Grandma (which I now have framed).

Balancing Act

It's been an uneventful week. I went to therapy. I stayed home a lot and babied myself because I had a big bandage on my nose and a smaller one behind my right ear. I felt off, probably because of the surgery. 

Today I got the sewn-on dressing off of my nose so we could see how the nose and the graft were looking. The doctor, the nurse, and I were all very pleased with how it looks! It's a bit swollen and there are bumps from the stitches, plus smaller bumps from the dissolvable stitches still in my nose. But it looks fine. I'm very pleased, even though I have to keep putting a smaller bandage on it for another 1-2 weeks. Beats what I've been doing, though.

I've spent part of the day getting stuff ready to go to Dallas tomorrow to stay with Sierra and her boyfriend for my birthday weekend, just like last year. We'll have a blast. I'm not even stressing about the drive this time.

I'm kind of sad this afternoon. I found out that a friend had her baby yesterday evening, but the poor little guy died not long after birth. They weren't really surprised: he had a lot of things wrong with him. But they were hoping that he'd live long enough for those things to be repaired so he could have a life with them. It's so sad that she carried that baby to full-term and then lost him. My heart goes out to them.

I'm trying to find some kind of balance between feeling sorrow for my friend and her husband, and feeling happiness for my coming weekend. It feels heartless to think "well, I'm not going to let this ruin my day, much less my weekend." Yet it seems irrational to let this event do just that. So, looking for that balance where I can feel both sorrow and happiness for the separate things and appreciate that they are both a part of living life.

I've been packing my bag and folding laundry with this cloud over my head, feeling down about my friend. But that does no one any good. I, and Sierra, deserve my full and joyful attention this weekend. For my other friend, I will find a thoughtful sympathy card and tell her how much I've been thinking of them and how much sorrow I feel for them, and that will be enough I think.

Balance — in life and in thought — has been difficult for me. It's one more of the many entangled threads I am working on. Times like today make me work harder on it. But just writing about this has helped. I feel a delicate balance. And that makes me feel better.

Trapeze

Therapy was good today. Why was it so good? We went surprising places. And going to surprising places is what brings me further along on my journey.

At first we talked about my last blog post, about feeling that I'm home now. She said she thought it sounded like someone who was content with herself and where she was. Content. That is a place where a person could experience the highs and lows of life, all the happys and the sads, and still know that she is fine. Content is where a person could know she will get through the bad times and appreciate the good times for as long as they last.

Then I told her what I was thinking of writing about today: how I feel weird feeling so good, how I don't trust it, how I'm more than a little bit afraid of it. That's what connected content with surprising places. Because how and why would any person be afraid of feeling good, of feeling happy?

Well, it comes from learning experiences. Several times in my life, just when things were getting better after having been difficult, or when things were going very, very well, I have been hit by a major trauma: my father died, my brother died, my mother was diagnosed with metastasized lung cancer. There have been others, but these were, of course, the worst. My therapist said that post-trauma personalities are always prepared for the worst to happen because they know not only that it could happen but that it will happen. So how can I trust the good feelings won't just blow up into something horrible again?

In addition, there's the fact that I have struggled with anxiety and/or depression for most of my life. As I discussed in an earlier post, I have been having to work on not identifying myself with the depression or with the anxiety. But for a long time, they did become part of my identity, so this feeling good, this happiness, is something new and different (especially from the past couple of years) and it is unfamiliar.

Hope for Happy

I have struggled with depression and anxiety off and on for most of my life and have spent some very long periods sunk into the Abyss of Darkness that comes from being extremely depressed or anxious. But I have always continued to take my meds or see my therapist. I have always tried whatever I could to get out of the Abyss and to a better place. Why would I even try if I just kept falling back in? Because, except for a few extremely dark times in my life, I have always had hope that one day I would be happy and wouldn't even have an Abyss to fall into.

By happy, I don't mean always cheerful and everything's fine and nothing's wrong. Life is up and down: my life proves that in so many ways. I mean happy in an overall, general sense, knowing that I will be alright and that everything will work out and the bad times will pass again as they always do. Knowing that in my gut and my heart, not just my head. Right now, the only thing I know that well is that the good times pass; I need to know that the bad times pass, too.

I have moments where I know that, because change happens and all things change, both good times and bad times come and go and that I can find a kind of serenity that will allow me to ride them both out with equanimity, not holding onto the good times to make them last longer or trying to avoid the bad ones altogether. I've even had a few moments in my life where I felt that kind of serenity, briefly, but definitely.

There are things that will help me get there again and for longer and longer times. One of them, which I rarely practice, is meditation. Meditation truly does bring about a change in how I feel. The other things are continuing to do my work with my therapy and to practice being happy and serene.

Love is Not Geography

Technology has some interesting uses that I never imagined using it for. For example: late last week, after I'd gotten comments on my previous post, I realized that it would be useful for my therapist to read the post so we could talk about it, and if she did this before our session, we'd have more time to talk about it. So I texted my therapist about the post and she texted back that she was happy to read it. Then, in our session this week, she pulled up my blog on her iPad so she could comment on certain parts of it, or on something in a comment that struck her. So much easier than my trying to remember what I was thinking a week or so beforehand that had seemed so important but I'd forgotten to write down so I'd remember it for therapy!

So we talked about my post. She at first was concerned that I was going to Move Right Now, so I explained that, among the reasons for me to stay was the fact that I have this great therapist who is helping me a whole lot and I'd rather not leave her right now. And that I am just not ready to choose another place to live. I have too many things churning inside my head to be able to make a reasoned and good decision about where to live next. I'm staying here for now and continuing the good fight with my therapist. Not that I'm fighting with my therapist!

One of the main things that struck her was how powerless and passive the first part of the post sounded, where I talk about what I don't like or don't have where I live now, what would or wouldn't work in the other places I'm considering. It's like I'm a victim of circumstance. It also shows me having external loci of control (the weather, if my friends have time to spend with me, etc.) rather than internal. I discussed in a previous post ("Locusts of Control") how having external loci of control leaves you powerless to make your life the way you want and to make yourself happy. 

When I Was Alone

I was the only girl my age in the cul de sac where I grew up, which meant that I only had people to play with when the boys needed an extra number or they were feeling generous (or when a girlfriend from school asked me to come over for the afternoon). After all, I couldn't catch or throw a baseball to save my life (although my football spiral was a thing of beauty) and my basketball skills were unreliable. I had reasonably thick glasses from the time I was nine, which probably had something to do with it.

But I was the only kid who wanted to play the part of Spock when we played Star Trek with someone's LEGOs and sometimes they needed an extra number for a sports game (my little brother was a thousand times better than I was by the time he was seven, so he took my place completely when I was 11, which was also when the boys determined I was truly a girl. After all, I was now wearing a training bra.

So I played alone a lot, even before I got a bra.

The thing was, I was only seldom sad about it. I'm alone most of the time now, too, but I'm sad about it most of the time. What was different and how do I get back to not minding being alone?

Happiness Is

I just read on Reinventing Fabulous (a wonderful blog by three wondeful women) about a new thing they are starting for all of us to participate in: Three Things Sunday. On Sundays, we post three things that made us feel happy that week. Not grateful, mind you — that's different. This is for Happy.

Do you remember those "Happiness Is" comics from the 70s (and 80s?) with the basically nude male and female comic figures. They'd be captioned things like "Happiness is a love note from your loved one." And Charles Shultz gave us "Happiness is a warm puppy," with Charlie Brown hugging Snoopy.

There are warehouses full of books telling us what happiness is, how to find happiness, how to keep happiness. I'd be happy if I could write one that was a best-seller and made me financially secure.

Authentic Joy

Joy is always worth it.  – The Bloggess

Those of you who follow this blog, those who know me, you know what I've gone through in the past few years. Long unemployment, underemployment (still goes on), financial worries, and the biggest: losing Mom and having major difficulties coping with that and the grief and depression that come with that loss. I have been stuck and spend far too much time hanging out in my cluttered and chaotic apartment.

Today I read something special on the Internet and was inspired. I read about the adventures of the Traveling Red Dress over at The Bloggess's blog. Go there, read the whole story, then come back. I think it's necessary backstory.

January Sucks

My boy, HS senior photo

As I wrote yesterday, my brother killed himself 29 years ago,  just days before my birthday. I always get depressed in January. I was also always used to having my family making a big deal out of my birthday, even as an adult. Mom called me every year on my birthday ever since I went away to college and sang Happy Birthday to me on the phone, even when I lived in the same city as she did. She called me with my brother, then with her second husband, then with my grandmother, then just her. But she always called and sang. So I'm feeling quite unhappy about January these days, even more than before.

My mom, HS senior photo

Because of my brother's suicide, every January hurts, but at least every year prior to last year I had my mom — whose own loss of a child was greater than I could imagine — for comfort and to take my mind off my birthday loss and pin it on birthday gains (such as all those additional years that are better than the alternative). I miss her voice.

Simple

I'm not sure where I first learned about simplicity and the simplicity movement, but I got my first books on the subject in the early 90s. The first one may have been Simple Abundance. And while I had issues with the obvious religious overtones here and there, I found most of the rest of the book to be mind-changing. I found something I'd been missing (and I keep missing it because I'm a lousy shot — ba dum bum). 

My favorite simple-living book is The Simplicity Reader: Simplify Your Life, Inner Simplicity, and Living the Simple Life by Elaine St. James. It's three of her first books in one and I love all the suggestions and ideas. In the printed world, there are many, many books on simplicity: books on the Circle of Simplicity, Simplicity Groups, and more. Then there's the Tightwad Gazette for extreme frugality and there's Your Money or Your Life where, if you truly follow their instructions, you should be able to be financially independent (which is not the same as filthy rich) in something like five years, depending on your debt situation. It helps if you have an income to start with. (Unfortunately, a couple of books they say are essential are long out of print because the first edition was written like 30 years ago.) I include in my lifestyle bookshelf my books on Zen Buddhism (It's Easier Than You Think, by Sylvia Boorstein), Stoic Philosophy (Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius and The Enchiridion, by Epictetus), and mindful awareness (The Miracle of Mindfulness, by Thich Nhat Hanh). (And all but two of these books are in storage, which makes things a bit difficult for me: I have these books, just not here; I have no income, so buying new books is a bad idea; but reading these books helps my life.)

At one time, I followed a lot of these concepts and philosophies. Along the way, life happened and I got lost. I want to find my way again, because living simply, being frugal, being mindful and aware — these things make me feel good. My life has changed so drastically and dramatically that I'm lost there as well. I think that following these paths ... which, really, all form different aspects of one path for me ... will help me find my new life and help me find my new happiness.

Be Like Julie

For the next 28 days, I am striving to be like my friend Julie, she who comments here regularly. Julie is the most positive and most zen person I've ever known and I could use a lot of that in my life. So I am going to follow her ways of thinking and believing and, in part, behaving (I had frosting today, Julie!), to see what effects they have on me and my moods, my world view, and my blood sugar.

These are the things that most come to mind as I approach this month (hope you don't mind, J):

1. assume the Universe is a friendly, positive place
2. assume that my Spirit chose this life and these lessons, and that my life IS about lessons
3. believe in visitations, psychic phenomena, and magick
4. be zen and don't want what I don't have, refrain from envy and jealousy 
5. be unabashedly me ... er ... her ... us ... 
6. give voice to my true self, rather than being afraid of what others might think
7. smile a lot, laugh a lot (Julie, can I borrow Dan so I can, um, ... a lot? LOL)
8. and I'm going to eat frosting

There are probably some other things I need to consider, and I'm expecting her to remind me, but the first one is probably the most important and the fourth one is probably next most important. My life does seem to be strongly affected by seeing the Universe as a frightening, malign place (hey, I have my reasons!), and by wanting so much that I do not have, cannot have in the near future, probably cannot ever have. Always wanting. So other than a couple of things I honestly need (a dresser, a vacuum that works, curtain rods so I can put up some curtains, and possibly a simple, inexpensive sewing machine so I can do a couple of inexpensive decorating things to make the place more homey), I have everything I want. (Thank goodness I ordered that LEGO before I made this crazy decision!) I might have to stop reading catalogs and decorating magazines for the month, however!

But I honestly want to learn some of the ways Julie approaches life, with her positivity, happiness, and her zen quality of "enough." She seems much happier than I am. Of course, I'm sure that has nothing to do with our almost completely opposite approaches to life and our world views.  

Therefore, I declare June (and part of July) Be Like Julie Month. C'mon and join me!