awareness

I Should Be Packing Right Now

/ christyterese / 1 Comment

The journey to this moment has been long and hard and chaotic and sometimes frightening.  So, now that I am here, I am paralyzed.

This is certainly not the first time that I have fought my way through all sorts of trauma to find myself safe on the other side and stuck.  Just stuck.  It is like my self doesn’t know how to handle “normal” living. Which should not be surprising to anyone who knows me or my story well, because the great majority of my living has been disordered and chaotic and traumatic and totally fucking wrong.  It isn’t a shock to suddenly feel all weird and confused by normalcy and calm.

But it is a problem.

Sometimes you meet people in life whom you believe create drama.  I’m not one of those people, but I do believe that they exist. I understand why people could believe that I am one of those people, however.  Because I share a lot of characteristics with those people, I am sure.

I don’t create drama.  I’m not running around seeking problems and hoping to add them to my list of affairs.  But I do have a life that attracts many dramatic or uncommon or challenging events.

For instance, this past weekend I discovered that my daughter’s father may or may not be the biological child of the man that he and we have believed him to be the son of for many years.  And I found this out from the adult child of that man, whose stories while she was growing up, completely estranged from the “other family” the man had previous to the family he shared with her mother, are the proofs that we have for this new information.  Is he my daughter’s grandfather?  Not according to him.  But that doesn’t change much other than the storytelling gene might be really strong among the men of this particular family.  Or it could change everything, and my daughter, and the father she has never met and does not want to, might have a totally other family they are completely unaware of out there in the world.  And the grandmother she never met—who then is more unfaithful and dishonest a woman than we imagined, which is saying something—is the only one who would know the truth, assuming she is still living (as I mentioned, we don’t exactly keep in touch with her dad’s family).

See.  This creates all sorts of fucking drama.  I don’t want it.  I don’t need it.  It is confusing and chaotic and leads to all sorts of questions that I don’t know whether to answer or leave alone.  And it doesn’t just involve me, but a woman who may or may not be an aunt to my daughter, and a man who may or may not be her grandfather, and a daughter who may or may not want to know the answer to whether or not they are or whether there is an entirely other family out there somewhere.  But then, how do I help her find that identity if we have no way of accessing that information without contact with a family we don’t want to have contact with?

There is an aspect of the life I am now living that creates this complication.  It isn’t necessarily a simple choice to be or not be in the midst of drama.  Sometimes drama comes for you, and you need to figure out if there are any ways to avoid it, or ways to tackle it without becoming completely absorbed by it.

My therapist likes to say, and I am getting good at saying it before she reminds me, that there is “no such thing as normal”.  All of us have some things in life that others cannot relate to exactly.  All of us have some things in life that are relatable to almost everyone.  But there isn’t one way of living life, and there isn’t one way of living it correctly, certainly.

I know, however, that much about my life is uncommon or not very relatable for a majority of the people that I encounter on a day to day basis.

Not many of us can say that we were abused by a relative from a very young age and for an extended period of time, causing us to develop a complex form of PTSD that acts much like the trauma of captivity in terms of brain malformation, and because that disability and that abuse were not discovered or appropriately handled until well into adulthood, repeated traumas of all sorts were added on top of that early trauma, leaving layers and layers of trauma and pain and suffering and alienation and mistrust.  So many layers.  And then, because that trauma was not dealt with appropriately and all those layers were trying so hard to be forced into alignment with “normal” or at least “average” living during the everyday, our bodies took on that trauma and turned it into physical disease.  Or at least that is one theory, and one that I can easily wrap my malformed captivity brain around.  So, in the prime of our lives, as our little birds leave the nest, and we can go out and do anything we want, we are actually left with the option to A) live according to the very strict and challenging rules of the state regarding disability income and expense, letting decisions be made by another in most cases and feeling like we still have no agency all these years after abuses can supposedly no longer reach our bodies, or B) suffer and die.

And all the “normal” people will think that statement is overly dramatic.  But they don’t have the life where the drama attacks you in the calm of a sunny Saturday afternoon when you see a message about a man named Marvin.  They have lives without disordered thinking and layers and layers of trauma.  They have working dominant hands.  They have sisters who answer the fucking phone when they call—for the third time, to wish her happy birthday.  They don’t freeze when things seem good or average or positive.

They call that fucking Wednesday!

Wednesday.

To me it is like hell freezing over.  And, granted, the temperature in Chicago this week could probably freeze hell.  So, maybe that happened.

I don’t generally have the luxury of a normal day with positive normal things happening.  There aren’t many days when some aspect of depression, anxiety, trauma, abuse, addiction, violence, poverty, pain, or some other messy, bad, or unfortunate thing is having an effect on me or the things around me.  And it isn’t that other people don’t also have these struggles.  I know that they do.  I know many people who have similar struggles.  But I know very few people who have ALL of these struggles.  And the compounding effects are significant.

I carry the weight of a hundred traumas—not just three or four.  So, a trauma-free day?  That just doesn’t exist for me.  I cannot imagine it.  And it frightens the hell out of me.

I know that the more I work in therapy, and the more I work to repair or bypass the disordered thought processes that have become normative for me, and the more remedies and treatments I discover, and the more I work to deconstruct what others have crafted and build for myself a self and a life that I love, the more I will have days that are free of these traumas.  At some point, I may even become accustomed to “normal” or “average” days.  (God, I hope not! Lol) But I am not there yet.

So, while I should be rejoicing in the fact that I probably have an apartment, and that all the pieces of the puzzle are fitting together for my move to the northside, where it is safer and I am closer to amenities and friends, I am, instead, writing this.  Because, I have been packing for months through chaos and threats from my landlord, but now that I have the promise of new owners and another lease, I don’t know what to put in a box.  I’m completely stymied by the normalcy of it.

Can I really be getting a decent apartment in a good neighborhood?  Can that be true?  Can I be inside the margin?  Am I allowed that?

Or is the bottom going to fall out and the earth is going to swallow me up, proving that hell hasn’t actually frozen over, but it was just waiting for me to be lulled into a false sense of security before it devoured me?

That question would sound like insanity … except for the fact that the bottom has been dropping out and hell devouring me for the last 35 years.

Yes.  I should be packing right now.  And by later today, or at least tomorrow morning, I likely will be, but for the moment I am processing this news slowly and cautiously—not wanting to get too happy too hastily, just in case.  Not to believe in the good before the good proves itself to be existent.

Yes, people of the Jesus-loving variety, I know what faith is and I need no proof-texting from the book of Hebrews.  I graduated from two seminaries.  But that definition means nothing to the malformed captive brain.  Only proof of the existence of the good works, and the only good guaranteed is that which comes from within, frankly.  I can only control me.

And you can’t control me either, so that is probably a good point to state, just in case that isn’t self-evident.

I don’t make life complicated.  It made itself complicated over time.  And it now doesn’t become easy because I want it to become such.  I don’t create drama.  My life has had lots of events that were traumatic and the traumatic brings along the dramatic.  The trauma doesn’t disappear because I want it to, and the drama doesn’t either.  I need to deal with them, cope with them, work through them.  And that takes time and hard work.

I don’t actually believe that my apartment with fall into hell.  I don’t believe in a literal hell, so that can’t be a thing I believe.  (I wrote a paper on it once for one of the classes in one of the seminaries.  I received high marks.)  But I do believe that the world should be kinder to those of us who have struggled much in our histories as we seek to find stasis in our present.  It isn’t as easy as it looks.

It is easy to believe that walking on flat, solid ground takes no effort if you have never been out at sea.

Stasis isn’t a given in a life that has been largely characterized by turbulence.  And choosing stasis isn’t easy when turbulence feels more natural.  Choosing the unnatural thing continuously until it no longer feels abnormal, or hard, or foreign is a great burden.

Change of any kind is difficult.  But changing patterns in this manner—taking what feels wrong and trying to tell your brain over and over that it is right, despite all sorts of triggering objections, is excruciating.

Packing right now is a devastating choice.  It means hope beyond all telling, and if things go wrong and this apartment doesn’t happen, it means pain that I cannot ever express—not ever … I don’t have the physical capacity to express it and even now, imagining having to express it at some point makes me feel like I must vomit.  That is what this means to me.  That is what choosing stasis means to me.  That is what “doing the normal thing” has invested in it.  I feel like my head might explode and I want to vomit—that is what normalcy is doing to me right now!

I’ll do it.  I’ll get there.  But after almost 5 years of therapy, with 20-some medications, and in the best physical and mental state I have been for some time, this is still an excruciating moment.  So, the next time you cannot understand why your child hasn’t finished their spelling homework, or your neighbor is dating another loser, or your grandpa gets all weird when you mention that son he rarely talks about remember this post.  Remember that sometimes choosing normal is extremely difficult and painful.  No matter how much being and having something—anything— “normal” is what we want.

Be kind to one another.  And for heaven’s sake somebody come over and help me pack these fucking boxes!!   lol

Too Much

/ christyterese / 1 Comment

There has been so much to say that I haven’t been able to say anything.

It’s one of those things that seems inevitable for me.  The more there is, the less I do.  I have heard others speak of this phenomenon.  I’m, apparently, not the only one who suffers this problem.  And I have read a bit about how decision-making gets more difficult with each decision, so having too many things to decide leads to a sort of fatigue or paralysis for your will.

I think I currently have some fatigue or paralysis of productivity, because there is just too much I feel like I must produce—or do, in other terms.

I have this long list of things that I am working on completing … so I spend no time completing tasks and all the time bingeing on The Mysteries of Laura and The Killing on Netflix.  The sheer volume of tasks makes me unable to choose a task.  I am overwhelmed before I even start.

There is this thing that they call “uniform dressing”.  It is basically taking the school uniform into adulthood, and removing wardrobe decisions from taking up your precious decision-making energy.  Steve Jobs, Barack Obama, and Vera Wang all practice(d) this way of dressing.  When you think about it, they wear the same thing all the time—not the actual same clothing, but the same basic type of outfit.  Vera Wang wears a legging for her everyday, and Steve Jobs used to be in a black turtleneck at almost all times.  Obama has a white button down and a grey pant for every occasion—dress it up or dress it down, he is always wearing the same thing.

I’ve been thinking about trying the uniform dressing out with my own closet.  I don’t know about everyone else, but I stand in front of that damned closet for way too long.  And it doesn’t matter where I am headed or what I need to do that day.  I spend twelve minutes in front of the closet even when I am choosing joggers and a tee for a reclusive day in my apartment.  And that time staring at my clothes or trying on and taking off items increases in direct relation to the amount of “fancy” associated with the event.

The concept of uniform dressing seems like a good one, in terms of reducing time spent considering clothes.  What I wish for is a similar concept for the rest of the tasks in my life.  How does one “uniform clean” or “uniform pay bills” or “uniform consider the state of the union and freak the fuck out”?  How do all those decisions and determinations and actions become rote and leave my brain less fatigued and less paralyzed?

I’m not sure there is an answer to those questions.  They are mostly rhetorical—unless someone reading this has a solution, in which case, please share your wisdom!

So, yes, there has just been so much to write and so much to think about and so much to plan for and so much to accomplish that I have been stuck not writing and not thinking and not planning and not accomplishing.  I’ve been in this sort of non-being—walking around and appearing to be handling life, but being completely stymied by all the things inside my head.

And being overwhelmed is not new to me, sadly.  But this is different, because every aspect of life seems overwhelming, not just one or two.

I have worries about all the parts of my existence, because the world has changed in significant ways over the past few months, and my view of the world has changed in significant ways over the past few months.  I’ve had all sorts of experiences where what I thought was true, turned out to be false.  I thought that people were reasonable.  I thought that Spring brought security.  I thought that my worst fears were never to be realized.  I thought that life had a certain level of sense attached to it, and that nonsense couldn’t become normative.

I was wrong.

And the world that I have been cast into, by my realizations, isn’t the whimsical Wonderland that Alice gets to explore, but the opposite.  There is no whimsy here.  There isn’t joy here.  There isn’t hope here.  The only thing that my world shares with Alice’s world is the irrationality—the senseless replacing the reasonable.

And the chaos is too much.

I have degrees in philosophy, religion, and social justice.  I understand well the ways that thought and belief and social problems shift and form and reform throughout history.  But I have never experienced a time when that shift happened with such force and velocity that I could see the change happening—feel the pendulum swing.

That force and velocity made the pendulum swing right into my gut, and throw me flailing across the room, proverbially speaking.

The worst of that flailing was in response to the emotional connection I made with the change in thought that I was experiencing.  The knowledge that people whom I have connected with, stood with, and related with believed in and supported this swing of the pendulum was painful.  It still is.  Those who would claim to love me, on one hand, promote ideals that would kill me, on the other.  And the cognitive dissonance isn’t the thing that bothers me most.  The thing that bothers me most is the knowledge that I am the Other.  When it comes down to the nitty-gritty truths of the matter, I am not the person who “deserves” care and kindness and assistance and love and life.  I am the expendable “drain” on society.  I am the margin.  I am the fringe.  I am the problem, and the solution to fixing me is denying me basic rights and basic needs—effectively exterminating me.  Let’s all hope and pray that the literal extermination of people doesn’t become normative.  But we also need to be honest about the fact that denying anyone basic rights and basic needs casts a death sentence upon them.  And I feel like many in my nation are not being honest about that.

Paint the world with your fascism, if you must.  But don’t pretend that you have painted it with hope and love.  Admit that you have painted fascism.  Admit that you are making my life a challenge.  Admit that your actions are placing so much undue stress upon my brain that it cannot function normally—being paralyzed and fatigued by the hopelessness and fear that weights the synapses, slowing them to a crawl.  Admit that you have painted a picture that doesn’t include me, or at least puts me in the dirty, decrepit corner where the others cast out the “problems” they don’t wish to acknowledge or deal with.

And now all the Trump voters are freaking the fuck out because they believe this is a political post.  It is only partly such, because making the presidency a reality show cannot be ignored as a part of the dilemma.  But, it is mostly just me looking at what is happening in the world right now, and acknowledging that I no longer have a place in it, in the view of many.  I don’t deserve a space on the board when we are playing this game.  I’m continually told to not pass go and not collect $200.  I’m stuck in a world where nonsense is sense and reason is replaced with weird tweets and executive orders that can only serve a handful of people.

(Wait.  Are we literally in a game of Monopoly right now?  That would explain so much.  I fucking hate that game.)

So, here it is:  a post with no wise expressions and no neatly packaged solutions, but just the admission that I am overwhelmed and that I don’t know how to fix that.  I don’t even know how to begin to fix that.  This post ends in the same place it begins.  It ends with me paralyzed and fatigued in ways that make me completely ineffective and incompetent.  It ends with the pain of betrayal, and the questions about how and why my experience is invalidated and ignored.  It ends with me having too much to say and too much to do and too much to fix and too much to think about.  It ends with a plea to be heard falling on deaf ears.

Because that is exactly how it started.

And it is too much.

 

Wide Awake

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

I woke to a crash at 5:00 this morning.  My daughter’s cat has finally managed to do what I have been anticipating for some weeks now—she broke some shit.

I investigated the crash and found that the beautiful orchid that was thoughtfully gifted to me after my recent hip surgery was currently lying on the living room floor, surrounded by chunks of clay that now resembled an exhibit in a museum rather than a pot.

Thankfully, the orchid itself was mostly intact.  Though, being a living thing, it has the opportunity, as do all living things, to experience shock, so we shall see if the trauma of being knocked to the ground has a negative effect in the coming days.  (Fingers crossed that it stays beautiful and blooming for a long time.)

I swept up the bits of pottery and a bit of dirt.  I put the orchid into another pot and placed it back onto the television stand where it resides.  And then I tried to return to the warmth and comfort of my bed to sleep again.  But the cat had started a chain reaction.  Because I was awake, the dog assumed it was time to be up and about, so he continually nudged me and licked at my hands until I gave in to his demands and took him outside.  And then, because we had begun the morning routine, he decided he should also have food.

While feeding him, I realized that he was out of water, so I filled that.  Then the idea of water alerted me to the extreme dehydration that was causing my tongue to stick to the roof of my mouth.  I drank two glasses of water and, when that didn’t seem like enough hydration, I downed a Gatorade.  And then, after using the bathroom, I went back to my bed once more.

But sleep would not come.  I was now wide awake.

As is customary, I began to think about all sorts of things while I laid there hoping for sleep.   I have medications that help me sleep at night.  I take the first at 7:00 pm, and take the last at 9:30.  There is a complex system of getting my brain and my body into a sleep state.  Sleep doesn’t come easy for me because of a few illnesses that I cope with, but I have developed a great system over time, and most nights sleep comes with relative ease.

Morning is another story.

Once I had begun the routine of the morning, I couldn’t get back to sleep.  And, while my brain wasn’t as functional as I would have liked—I sent a text to my daughter that said “don’t gorget” when I meant to remind her “Don’t forget to ask about time off for xmas”—I decided that if sleep would not find me, I would simply get up and do things.

The words “wide awake” kept returning to my mind in the semi-dazed moments when I was still struggling to sleep.  And while I can understand the connection in the literal sense—my inability to sleep—there was something beyond that use of the phrase that kept coming into my consciousness.  I couldn’t help but think about what being wide awake means in a more proverbial sense.  I couldn’t help but think of how I became the person that I am today, and how that person is one whom I consider “wide awake”.

People often use the word “enlightened’ as an insult when they respond to what I post on my blog or my Facebook page.  Many seem to take offense when I express my views, and they react by making sarcastic and rude comments.  A fair amount of those comments includes mocking my “enlightened” state.  This past week, I had multiple people slinging verbal attacks at my blog comment section.  And those attacks included that term “enlightened”, used as a pejorative and not a compliment.

But as I laid in bed, and remained wide awake, I had the overwhelming feeling that enlightened is exactly the correct statement to describe me.  I am wide awake.

Let me elaborate.

I have been through transformation after transformation.  And some of those transitions were not easy or came at great personal cost, but life doesn’t easily become other.  We like to stay in our little bubbles of safety and familiarity and commonly held understanding.  We don’t like change.  We certainly don’t like change that takes deep thought, definitive action, and amazing strength.

I never had the luxury of a bubble.  The place that is safe and familiar and commonly held never existed.  And that safety and familiarity will likely never come to fruition.  Mostly because the amygdala doesn’t heal after long-term exposure to abuse, fear, stress, and captivity in developmental stages.  You just keep on being in fight or flight or freeze mode for what seems like eternity, but is actually a lifetime.  Some people might comment here about how devastating and sad and sorrowful that mode is, and how it needs to be fixed.  But they would be wrong.

Here is why:

I’m always afraid, but that fear has made me capable of enlightenment—not in the pejorative sense, but in the literal sense.  I have been given this strange and difficult story to live out.  But because it is strange and difficult, it offers me reflection and recognition that many do not experience.

I’m wide awake.

When you see things in the light which I have seen things, you need to change the way you think.  You cannot come into contact with new ideas and different experiences and come out the other side with the same thinking you had before those things happened.  You cannot see what I see and know what I know and not change the way you participate in life.

I’m an addict.  And many people I know would say that this is a choice—a moral failure on my part.  But those people are not addicts.  Addicts know better.  We know that there is no amount of choice and will power that can keep you clean or sober in an environment where drink and drugs are present.  We know that this is a chemical imbalance in the brain, and a weird reaction in our pleasure center hastily throws us into the rock bottom of substance abuse.  We can manage this disease.  We cannot cure this disease.

I’m a divorced, single parent.  And many people would say that this, also, is a moral failure on my part.  But those people weren’t living in my household, with my abusive partner, and experiencing the terror of never being able to control what happened to me.  Domestic violence survivors know that you cannot go back and start over.  We know that the violence escalates, and it doesn’t reset at the beginning when you reach a terrible end and decide to “try again”.  Instead, you pick up where you left off—in a terrible state and creating greater and greater catalysts for further violence.  Sometimes you just need to leave.  Sometimes your life, and the life of your children, depends on you leaving the violence behind.  But that isn’t easy.  Domestic violence survivors know this.  And those still in abusive relationships know this too.  Because when you have been manipulated and conditioned in ways that leave you isolated and without resources, there isn’t a safe place to go or to be.  It is much harder to start life over with nothing than it is to stay and suffer through the abuse, in many cases. We know this.  We cope with this.  We cannot “fix” this.

I am disabled.  People constantly misunderstand or deny that fact.  “Get well soon”, is an offensive statement.  Because I know what it is to be in pain every hour of every day and night.  I know what it is to have to mourn the life you planned and worked for and ran toward.  I know what it feels like to always be unable and to always feel insufficient and to constantly be in need.  It doesn’t feel good.  And the people who say “get well soon” and who suggest I edit my life or my lifestyle in particular ways do not know that feeling.  They don’t have to mourn the loss and feel the pain.  So, their “solutions” are not only impossible to carry out, but they are reinforcing the idea that I am faulty, not good enough, and not accepted as I am.  I understand this disability in ways that most never will.  (And thank the Divine for that, because I don’t wish this experience on anyone.)  I manage this disability.  I work to be my healthiest self.  I cannot get rid of the disability.  I can’t “change it”.

I am pro-choice.  This is one of the things that makes so many people use the term enlightened in sarcasm and mockery.  This makes so many people think I am a moral failure.  But I live in spaces where choice is essential.  I live in a space of poverty.  I live in a space of fear, of scarcity, of abandonment, and of desperation.  And I should never be forced to bring a child into that space.  I was molested, assaulted, and raped.  I know what it is to not have agency in your life.  I know what it is to not have agency over your own body.  I know what it feels like to be used and owned and threatened and left alone in shock and disillusionment, because other people didn’t listen when I cried out for help.  So, I know what it is to need control over your own body and your own life and your own choices.  Because I cannot let another determine what happens to me.  That cannot happen again.  I cannot have someone else control me—not after all that I have endured.

I’m wide awake.

I understand why people reject my ideas.  I understand that they cannot see from my perspective.  I get why they don’t want to hear and accept and work through the things that I say or write.  It is hard work to change the way you think and behave.  It is hard work for me too.  But I know that I need to keep living my life with eyes wide open, and accepting even the most difficult and dangerous of facts and stories.

I didn’t get where I am today without struggle.  Struggle was often the catalyst for change, because I was shoving myself forward in ways that meant I met many others on my path, and I encountered facts and stories that I couldn’t have encountered if I hadn’t been on that path.  And my path is a rare path.  Not many travel through all the levels of hell that I have walked through.  So many have not had the terrible blessing of a hard life with life-altering experience.  It is awful and wonderful.

There is a quote that I think might be helpful to increase understanding here: “It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.” ― Stephen King

For those of you who prefer religious text to horror and suspense novelists, there is also this passage from Ephesians 5: “but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light.  Therefore, it says: ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light’.”

I am wide awake.

Many people look at the darkness that is expressed in my posts.  They think that these supposed “moral failures” and the challenges that I face are evidences of evil, and of a need for change.  And maybe I got to this place because of darkness, in some sense, but that darkness made the light possible.  I shine out all the brighter because of the dark.  Darkness isn’t necessarily a thing on its own, technically speaking.  It is the absence of light—or of light perceptible by the human eye, at least.   Light shows up, and then we can see clearly, because of the reflective and refractive rays that show up as colors and shapes that we could not discern in the darkness.

Everything that becomes visible is light.  And light is what makes everything visible.  Yes, I know that is circular reasoning.  It is also true.

Here’s the crux of the matter:  I believe that my life is full of light.

I’m wide awake, and the sun is shining down upon me.  It took a while for it to get here, and I watched it rise over the city this morning, but it is now shining down upon me.  And the light shines out all the brighter because of the contrast against the darkness.  Was it devastating and sad and terrible to be harmed in my history?  Yes.  Was it difficult to find my way beyond the pro-life stance that I adopted to fit in with my friends and neighbors and to step into the truth that science and experience offered, becoming pro-choice?  Yes.  Was there much that seemed dark and damaging and defeating in my life? Yes.

But there was also light.

There was love, support, grace, the voice of the Divine, strength, fortitude, passion, and purpose.  There still is.  It just looks a bit different than I had imagined it would.

I’m wide awake, because I let the light of truth transform me, over and over again.  Each time I encounter something that doesn’t make sense, or challenges my current belief system, or shakes me out of dissociative states and requires I be present and thoughtful, or offers a story that has new perspective, I let the light shine upon it.  And that light transforms my ideas, my actions, and my person in many ways.

Last week there were people who called me names in my blog comments, and made all sorts of assumptions about who I am and how I think and what I do.  But today that doesn’t bother me.  Because this morning I was wide awake, and saw clearly (with help from some insights borrowed from a friend) that the upsetting thing about these interactions was not that I am morally bankrupt or doing life wrong, but the upsetting thing is that these people are not letting light shine in darkness.  They are not stepping into truth and letting it transform them.  They are not listening to my story, even though they may be reading my words. And they are not doing so, because it is very hard to do.

Darkness gave me what others lack:  the opportunity to distinguish the dark from the light.  Darkness pushed me toward the path of the light of truth.  Escaping the suffering meant moving toward a new way of thinking and being.  And that way of thinking and being is better than the way of my past.  Truth and light shine in my present and my future.

I’m wide awake.

I understand my situation, and I know my value, and I feel my emotions, and I acknowledge my weakness alongside my strength.  I live in the light, and I seek truth.  If you believe that you can know better, and understand more about my life and my history and my current situation or actions, feel free to make your suggestions, but please do not be angry when I tell you that I don’t need your input right now.  Because I am walking the path of light, shining out in the midst of the darkness, and I don’t necessarily believe that your comments are contributing light.

I know what I am doing.  I know when what I am doing is helpful and when it is not.  I can own the times that it is not helpful.  But I have an awareness regarding my life and my situation that you do not share.

I was recently reading a book from the Song of Ice and Fire or Game of Thrones series.  I was talking with my physical therapist about watching the show versus reading the books, and I told her what I have told others:  I like reading the books, even though I know from the show what is going to happen, because the books offer you internal monologue that the television series cannot portray.

I think that this applies to my life too.  Others can share my experience to a degree, but they are not allowed the privilege of being inside my head, and feeling and knowing and understanding the depth and breadth of who I am and what I believe and why.  You are missing the monologue that shapes the story in important ways.  You are reading from your perspective and not from mine.  And if you do not seek my perspective when you read my words, then you are not practicing the empathy that is required for change and connection.

My perspective is important.  And yours may be too.  But insisting that I do not know my own situation or life experience or whatever else pertains to me, and that you know a better way of being me, simply because you say so (with no facts to back that up whatsoever), is not only uninformed, but it is offensive.  It is offensive because I am an aware, educated, experienced, adult.

There’s more to me than people know.

And I am wide awake—shining light on my life and my surroundings to continually seek truth.

Whatever I am, and whatever I do, I do it wide awake.

And now, I think it is time for a nap. 😉

Backward

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

The last few days I haven’t been able to keep control of my letters.  They keep switching up and making the words I mean to write a jumbled mess.  And this is not figurative in any way.  I’m seriously dyslexic of late.

It isn’t a major issue, since we have these lovely computer checks of our spelling and grammar these days, and the only thing I end up writing with my actual hand and a pen is notes from my online nutrition course, so I should be able to decipher what I meant to write.  But, even without severe consequence, I get annoyed with this trading of letters and destroying of words.

It isn’t that I’m a perfectionist…

Just kidding, I’m totally a perfectionist.

And that hasn’t always served me well in life.  There are many times where I put too much effort and too much stress into a project of some sort, because I had to achieve my own standard of perfection.  And my standard has always been high.

I don’t think I came to be such a perfectionist by accident.  It has been shown that there is a correlation between perfectionism and trauma.  And I grew up with a mother who didn’t allow anyone to settle for less than what she deemed perfect.  Though I constantly disappointed her hopes of perfection, I still adopted some of her desire for all the things to line up perfectly and look neat and clean and good.

I didn’t realize that I was dyslexic until adulthood.  For some reason, even though things were constantly being reversed in my early education, nobody ever diagnosed me with a learning disability.  In adulthood I would also be given the diagnosis of ADHD, which often travels in tandem with dyslexia.  Both have been linked to low DHA and EPA, the omega 3’s from fish, in utero.  So, basically, my mom wasn’t perfect, because she clearly missed out on oily fish while my cells were multiplying and differentiating and doing all the scientific shit that cells do.

Because I wasn’t formally diagnosed with these maladies in childhood, I felt stupid a lot.  I couldn’t meet the standards of perfection.  I kept messing up in the same ways and living in the same mistakes.  I couldn’t pay attention, my desk was a mess, I was terrible at penmanship and spelling, and I kept drawing “b” and “d” either identically, or replacing one with the other.  I was flawed.   I couldn’t get it right.

And doing things “right” was of high importance in our household.  Or at least making them look “right”.

Perfectionism didn’t just apply to my handwriting.  I needed to have perfect hair and perfect clothes and look like a perfect daughter.  But I wasn’t a perfect daughter, so lying about my imperfections became commonplace.  I was always the daughter bouncing around when she should be still.  I was always the daughter who spoke when she was expected to stay silent.  I was always the daughter who would leave when told to stay and stay when asked to leave.  I was belligerent and defiant and not at all the kind of daughter that my mom wanted.  And, until my sister came along, I might have believed that daughters didn’t come in a perfect model.  She was compliant and accommodating and capable of making my mother happy.  I wasn’t.  And I used to envy or despise my sister, depending on the moment, for her ability to be the child that my mother had wished I was.  But I eventually let that go, because it had nothing to do with my sister and everything to do with my mother, and my relationship with her.

I couldn’t be perfect, but I tried, until not living up to the challenge for years and years finally made me give up.  And I gave up in gigantic ways.

My house was a disaster area, and my husband was an asshole, and I was a cursing, loud, obnoxious, addicted, defiant mess.  And it was fabulous.

I became the exact opposite of what my mother wanted me to be, and I stayed that way for some time.

Eventually, I came to see that some of my behavior wasn’t serving me well, so I started to travel from my backward ways and get closer to the ideal daughter.  But, after travelling so far from that ideal, you really don’t come back.  Your experience becomes a part of you. Whether you want it to or not, your history is always a part of your story.  So, I formed my own ideal.  And I started to strive for that ideal instead.

I accepted that I would never be the daughter my mom wished for, but I could be the best possible me imagined.  Right?

Wrong.

I’m an idealist at heart, but pragmatic overall. However, I formed an ideal that I couldn’t live up to.  And I think that all of us do this, on some level.  We imagine a self, and spend so much time and energy living into that perceived self that nothing else matters, and then we cannot meet the standards imagined.  We fail ourselves—not just our mothers.

I didn’t learn the lesson quickly, and spent years struggling with myself, but I have finally seen that I was designed to be backward.  Not in the sense that the divine wished dyslexia upon me, but in the sense that we are all designed to be different from what we expect of ourselves.

I fought to become what I envisioned a good woman to be.  And that vision was based upon what I knew from my history, and upon what I imagined my mother wanted, and upon what I deemed culturally appropriate.  But I am no more culturally appropriate than I am able to keep my letters in the correct order while I write.

So, when I did learn the lesson, and I did discover who and what and why I am, I learned that I am not now, and not ever, going to fit into an imagined ideal me.  That isn’t how development works.

When we are babies, we don’t make a list of things we want to accomplish before we begin to explore the world and start to meet milestones.  We never say, “Hmmm…I think walking might be cool.”  We just engage with our environment in such a way that we eventually discover that walking gets us to places we want to go.  And somehow we have forgotten, by and large, that development happens as exploration happens, and that no amount of wishing for a baby to walk gets them walking, but they do so when it serves them well.

It sounds a bit selfish, but it really isn’t.  Being your best self doesn’t mean adhering to an ideal that constantly lives just outside your grasp, but accepting who you are and what you need in the moment. And while you might imagine that as self-serving, in truth, when you care well for yourself you are set free to care well for others, instead of putting all your energy toward meeting the unachievable ideal.

There are lots of people who still think I live life backward.  They comment about how I should get a job or get more exercise or try this or that home remedy.  They tell me they worry about my choices, because I like both men and women, because I have sex while unmarried, because I am pro-choice, because I live in a ghettoized neighborhood, because I date outside my race, because I am not a biblical literalist …

The list goes on forever.

But the best thing that has happened for me in a very long time is that I stopped caring what those people want Ideal Christy to be like.  I no longer care what my Ideal Christy was.  I have learned to simply live within the Christy that I am.  I accept my beliefs.  I offer gratitude.  I increase my awareness.  I educate myself, and I transform what I can based on new information.  I let go of what I cannot change.  I release expectations and, instead, hold on to who I am at the core—deep in my heart, or my gut.

I don’t need to be perfect.  I just need to be who I am, in the most authentic way possible.

There are many ways that perfectionism still sneaks into my daily life, including my frustration over the order of my written characters, but even that tendency toward perfectionism can be accepted and released in my newfound, mindful approach to living.  And there are still many ways that others view me as failing or a failure that hurt my heart, but those too can be felt and then released.

I spent so much of my life trying to be the perfect daughter, the perfect wife or girlfriend, the perfect mother, the perfect student, the perfect employee.  And all of that was not waste, but much of it was unhelpful.  I don’t need to fit the mold for any perfect ideal.  There is no longer an ideal self.  There is only me, simply being.

And I think that being is better than perfection, without a doubt.

I do waste energy, from time to time, on the things that others desire for me to be.  But, for the most part, I have learned to break free from expectations and to accept myself as I am.  Once the keeping of lists stopped and the toddler-like exploration of self and environment began, it was difficult to revert to the perfectionist striving.  Because exploring self and life is so much more rewarding.  It offers wonder and surprise and enlightenment and new life.  And that is much better than the struggle that perfectionism offers.

I’m becoming proud of the process of becoming.  I’m accepting that I may be any number of things, and some of those things might align with the ideals of others, but others will not.  But those ideals aren’t my goal anymore.  Mindful living is my goal.  And mindful living always offers me good things, and never disappoints.

I understand that this way of being will be considered backward for some.  But those people are probably still striving for a perfectionist ideal that will never be reached.  And I don’t need to care that they see my way of exploring the world and the self and the environment and the world as not “right” in its approach to living.

If loving me is wrong, I don’t want to be right!

Annoyances like transposed letters still frustrate me at moments, but I’m learning to accept even that as a part of who I am.  And I’m learning to accept that I am good, just as I am.  I am “right”, because I am being true to myself and my experience.  I am being true to my heart and my gut.  I am letting me be enough.  I am allowing myself the space to fall and to rise and to be, without judgments.  And something that offers that much love and grace and compassion toward the self, instead of the usual berating and judging of perfectionism, cannot be wrong.

So, since today is not a class day, filled with strangely spelled notes, I will spend it doing that which makes me be, without perfectionist ideals.  Maybe I will do some yoga, or a meditation.  Maybe I will color mandalas, or work on some art pieces, or finally attempt some sewing, or plant some stuff, or take a bath.  And others can think of those things as selfish, if they want.  But I see them for what they are: practices that accept who I am and where I am, practices that lead me to my best self, and practices that never ask me to strive for perfection.

And you might think that such things couldn’t possibly be added to your day, because you are too busy.  But you would be wrong. Because practicing mindfulness strips away the busy, and leaves you with what is most important—it always leaves you with the best possible you.

End your striving.  Stop trying to be perfect.  Let your heart speak to you, and then speak that to others.  Don’t pretend you are something you are not to please your mother (or anyone else, for that matter). Look inward. Be backward.

I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Diet

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

I think that this title is somewhat of a “dirty” word.  Most of us think of it in terms of restrictions and frustrations and defeats.  I know that is how I often view dieting.

This is also a somewhat new concern for me.  I am one of those people who was born fit and stayed fit for most of my life.  I ate all the carbs and all the candy and still kept my 120 pound perfect figure.  When you look at pictures of me in my youth, I am bronzed and buff and looking like a tiny body builder.  And then, in my teens, I had that great T and A with a tiny waist that was apparently super desirable.  And that figure stayed well into my 20’s, though a couple of pounds more T and A were added.

But then, I got sick.

I didn’t even know that I was sick.  I just knew that I was tired, and I was gaining weight.  I decided to take up running.  I would make it about a half mile and then be in pain and walk back.  Then it would be four to six days before I could summon the energy to run again, with similar results.  I started spending more and more time on the sofa and less and less out trying to run.  And I kept gaining, slow but sure.  140.  145.  And then I had three or four rounds of steroids.  160.  Trying to run again.  158.  162.  And then the dreaded diagnosis happened.  The reason I had been so tired all those years, and complaining of fatigue came to light—fibromyalgia.  I started on Neurontin and kept on gaining.  I went through a really bad year, where almost all of my time was spent sleeping or lying on the sofa depressed and in pain, and I gained even more.  170. 180. 198.  And then the horrible moment when I hit that mark I was struggling against: 200.

I’m currently 208.  And my BMI is 35, which puts me in the category of the “obese”.

And I found the bright side in that by saying, “at least I am not morbidly obese!”  But inside something was cracking and a fissure that could swallow my obese butt was opening.

For the past several years we have been trying all sorts of things to keep my weight from climbing.  Switching up medications, sending me to physical therapy regularly, getting me into the pool to swim, increasing my calories, then decreasing them after new studies showed my low calorie diet actually made sense given the way that fibro bodies metabolize in comparison with “normal” bodies.  And nothing has been helping.  And it is ridiculously difficult to cope with this, after a life of great bodiness.

I know that I shouldn’t be saying some of these things in this manner.  I know that there are men and women who have struggled for an entire lifetime to manage their weight—kids who were “husky” from childhood and who were constantly challenged by body image and weight control.  And I don’t mean to deny their experience or trivialize that struggle.  But I didn’t know that early struggle, so becoming acclimated to a big body has been really difficult for me.

I used to be able to put my foot behind my head, or do the splits, and now I can’t touch my toes without a blob of belly fat getting in the way.  It is quite the transition, and not in a “good” way, according to most.

But in some ways I have learned good lessons from this experience.  I have learned that I only judge myself by societal standards of beauty and size, and not my friends.  I have learned that I don’t accept or love myself well at any size.  I have learned that bodies aren’t all made to appear the same, but we are very diverse.  I have learned that health and size are not necessarily linked in the ways society teaches us they are.  I have learned that bodies are still amazing, complex, beautiful, and fantastic at any and every size.  And I have learned that all of the things that I was taught about “calories in/calories out” can be thrown out the fucking window, because it just isn’t always true.

One lesson that I haven’t quite learned is to love my own body in this state, and not to shame myself for being larger than I once was, or being larger than society and the media and whatever other influences dictate as appropriate or beautiful or “healthy”.   I’m working on that.  I have this fabulous yoga sequence I do from yogaglo where I get naked and jiggle my parts and offer love and thanks to all the parts of myself that I struggle to accept.  I have a list of things I love and am grateful for about my body.  I work on dissecting my illness from my personhood, and instead of saying things like “I’m so dumb today” I correct and say “my fibromyalgia and PTSD are really affecting my cognition today”.   And I am far from perfecting these strategies and loving my jiggling parts wholeheartedly, but I am on the road to accepting who I am as I am.

And I think that is the space we all need to start from before we seek to make any changes, ever.

I spend a lot of time using mindfulness exercises to stay in the present moment, and to accept that moment as it is.  This is a coping strategy that is basically saving my life.  Chronic pain and chronic mental illness are really difficult to manage, and learning to accept the present moment, and to sit in it without reacting to it in any way helps.  Separating pain from suffering, letting go of thoughts, noticing my environment, and being more aware have all helped me in myriad ways.

And this way of being aware and of accepting are transformative.  So, when I think about transforming my body, I can’t begin without finding an awareness and acceptance of my body now.

Getting naked and letting all the parts wiggle and flop and whatever else they may do is part of that, but so is looking at the ways that food and I interact, and noticing the ways that I am influenced by outside media and standards, and looking honestly at how healthy or unhealthy parts of me are, and being able to recognize and embrace all of the amazing things my body can and does do.  I mean, have you ever stopped for a moment and considered the process that happened in order for you to pee?  It is kind of amazing.

My body has lots of flaws—dissociated parts of the brain, pain where there should not be pain, benign tumors hanging out in a few places, a pelvic floor that can’t figure out when to hold tight and when to release, weak quadriceps, ruptured bursa sacs, a CMC joint that can’t seem to get its shit together, and the list goes on.  But it also has lots of amazing power and strength and goodness and health.  The fat bits are just one part of the whole.  And the whole is actually pretty fabulous.

I am scheduled for a visit with a nutritionist the end of next week.  And I suppose you were not expecting to hear that, after all of this loving the fat bits talk.  But I want to choose my best self, so even though I have tried many ways of eating and exercising in the past, and even though I think that diet should refer to an abundance of good foods, and not refer to restrictive and uncomfortable programs that usually fail us, I want to make certain that I am actually doing what is most healthy for my body, and for my life.

Choosing my best self includes ensuring that I am eating well, and not allergic, and not suffering from some metabolic issue, and being certain that there isn’t a disconnect between what I think is healthy behavior and what science says is healthy behavior.  And that doesn’t mean that I am going to “go on a diet”.  It does mean that I am going to work toward my best body.  If I don’t lose an ounce, but I find that I would be healthier with less sugar and more fat in my diet, I will still be pleased with the experience. Because awareness and acceptance create change.  I don’t fully understand why or how they do, but they do create change.  Being aware of myself and being accepting of my body as it is moves me toward changing myself and my body in positive ways.

People often use a saying that the Buddhist gains nothing from meditation, but then goes on to list all of the negative things that have been removed or lost.  This is what I think needs to be kept close when I think about diet and body image and size and health.  I gain nothing from accepting my body, but I lose the tendency to criticize or compare myself to others, I lose an unhealthy connection with food, I lose the need to prove my beauty or strength to myself or others, I lose the need to force my body into a mold made by unrealistic normative standards, and I lose the habit of speaking negatively about this amazing body that offers me life.  And losing all of that is more important than losing pounds.

My body might always be this size.  The nutritionist might say that all the medications I am taking and all the ways my diseases harm my cells are not things that I can overcome with dietary changes.  The verdict may be that I remain above that 200 mark, that I am always hoping to get below, and that I need to set more realistic goals for my body and my life.  Or, conversely, I might learn that I have terrible habits that are contributing to the ever-increasing waistline, and be taught ways to eliminate or manage such habits to reduce my weight.

Either way, I intend to remain committed to the jiggling of the naked parts and the offering love to my body.  No matter my size, I still know that awareness and acceptance are the tools that bring me the most good, and the least struggle, in every part of my life.  Skinny or fat, frail or fit, tall or short, dark or light, broad or petite, stout or lanky … none of that matters more than the awareness and acceptance of the self.  And, really, none of that matters at all.   I won’t love you any less because you are short and wide than I would were you tall and thin.  And anyone who would offer love and compassion and kindness only to the thin or the tall or the light or the petite or the whatever is just an asshole.  Because the point of this post may be that we are all human.  And all humans are equal.  And all humans deserve to be treated with respect and kindness and compassion and love.  Just because.

So, I encourage each of you to go get naked (probably in private, given the laws against public nudity in some areas) and shake out all those parts, and offer them love, and thank them for being, and start being aware and accepting of your body and self.  Bask in the glow of the beauty of being.  Revel in humanity. Love existing in space and time.  Love your body. Love yourself.

Yesterday

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

Yesterday I did a thing that hasn’t been done in years:  I forgot to put my medication in my bag when I left the house.

Those who are close to me know that I take a ton of pills and I am taking them what seems like all the time.  I have five alarms set for medications, and in the middle of a conversation I will haul out my pill container and some water and take drugs, or I will stop walking and lean against a wall somewhere in the city to haul out my pill container and some water and take drugs, or I will haul out my pill container and attempt to create more saliva and swallow drugs without water because I forgot

…

My medication alarm just went off, so I stopped mid-sentence and went to find my pill container and a beverage and took some drugs.  I think you get the picture.

But yesterday, when the alarm went off on the bus, and I silenced it and opened up the zipper pouch on the front of my backpack to get out my pills, they weren’t there.

“No problem”, I think.  I have an emergency backup container in my bag, just in case I forget my medications.  And I unzip the bag and find the inside pocket where the emergency backup drugs are kept.  They aren’t there.

Moments later I realize that the girl across from me on the bus thinks I am a crazed lunatic, as I frantically zip and unzip and search and search and pull out toothbrush and wallet and keys and pens and all sorts of things while I dig for what must be there.  It has to be there.  I have to have pills!

As I see the look that girl is giving me, I slowly breathe in and out, focusing on the moment, and bring myself back to a state of calm.  I put all the things back in the bag, and I accept the horrifying idea that the meds are not with me, and I alight at the stop where I am meeting my friend for our monthly shopping event. He assists me with one big shopping trip each month, because it is very difficult to access fresh foods near my home, and carrying groceries on the bus is challenging and exhausting.  And when I say assists, I mean I point to things I need and he puts them in the cart for me, pushes the cart through the store for me, keeps track of the costs on the calculator so I don’t go over budget, puts all the groceries on the conveyor belt, loads the groceries into the car, drives me home, and carries all the groceries up the stairs and into the kitchen.  If he were religious he would be a saint.

He was a few minutes behind me in arriving at the store, so I started pushing an empty cart through the housewares section, where I knew there was little I could afford to purchase and wouldn’t likely need assistance.  I was basically browsing until he arrived.  And when he did, I told him, with a frightened look on my face, that I had done the dumbest thing ever, and not brought my pills.  In response he did all the normal shopping things for me, and made me sit while he loaded the car, and refused to let me carry anything heavier than some chips and bread up the stairs, because he knew my pain was increasing with every moment away from those drugs.  Did I mention he is saint-like?  He really is.

And he was right to make me sit and not let me overwhelm my body with the tasks it could not and should not attempt.  And he was right that the pain kept increasing by the minute.  It is the worst and most pain I have endured in a long time.  And since I usually live with pain that is probably about a 6 or 8 of 10 daily, that is saying something significant.

But there is another thing, besides the pain, that was significant.  As the pain increased, so did the knowledge that my pain without medication would always be that severe.  The knowledge that I am feeling ten times less pain with proper medication than I otherwise would experience kept entering my mind.  And then I thought about the difference in my life this year as opposed to last year around the same time.  I am SO much better than I was.  I have much less pain, and I have greater strength and range of motion than I had last year.  I have much stronger doses and more pills than before, which often annoys me, but those pills are staving off debilitating disease and helping me to feel more human and more active and more happy and more balanced than I was a year ago.  The contrast between Christy on drugs and Christy without drugs was so stark that it could not be overlooked.

In that moment, I knew how much worse my life could be—how much worse it was, not long ago.  And I became very thankful for those few hours without medication and the lessons they were teaching.

It is difficult, when your life includes chronic suffering, to keep a positive outlook all of the time. It is lonely, and painful, and depressing, and challenging, and anger inducing, and a great loss, and it just makes all of life seem tainted.  The greyness hangs over your every experience, like fog along the water.  You can walk through it, but it doesn’t lift.  The grey is always surrounding you.

But yesterday, I grasped the difference between the grey and the black—the haze instead of total darkness.  And I became grateful for the grey.

That isn’t meant to sound depressing or sad.  It is meant to express that whatever my situation may be, it could likely always be worse.  And that is a good thing for even those who are not suffering, or for those on the brink of death, to remember.  There is always someone experiencing life less comfortably than we are.  We always have something for which we can be grateful.

The same friend that assists me with my shopping gives me a very hard time about beginning to celebrate and decorate for Christmas long before Thanksgiving Day.  And I often tell him that I practice gratitude each day, so I don’t need a special day for it … and I love the heck out of Christmas, because it just makes me think of all the joy and generosity of the season.  But when I practice that gratitude every day it can become a rote practice of naming off things that are always there, and sometimes the depth of gratitude isn’t reached on all of those days.

Yesterday taught me that depth of gratitude.  It showed me how much better life is, even when it is a very difficult life, than I sometimes acknowledge.  It showed me that some pain is better than all the pain.  It let me see how far I have come, instead of focusing on how far I still have to travel on this journey.

It seems odd that pain would offer me joy.  But in some ways the pain I suffer is a gift—opening my eyes to what I might not see if I were flying through life to get to my job and my meetings and my kid’s soccer game.  Pain offers me opportunity to consider other’s sufferings with a broader perspective.  Pain gives me time to think about and to learn and to ponder what I otherwise might not.  Pain sends me the chance to ask for help and to accept the generosity of others, and to let go of the notions that pushing harder and trying harder and working harder will get you to whatever goals you might seek.  Pain puts me in a space where I cannot be in control, so I need to learn to release and to let be.  Pain heals my spirit in some ways, even while it breaks my body, and makes me angry, and causes me to struggle.

It is interesting that I use grey to describe the way that suffering lingers.  I was taught to think in black and white when I was younger.  There was good and there was bad.  Any sort of concept of middle ground was not introduced until I was much older.  And at times I wish that it were simple to see the difference between the good and the bad and to stick to one side or the other.  But life doesn’t work that way.

I am reminded of a bit of Harry Potter where Sirius tells Harry that we all have some dark and some light in us.  We aren’t just good or just bad, and there aren’t clear categories of black and white.  We are all a sort of mixture of elements, and some things and thoughts and actions about us are less desirable and some are more so, but none of us is completely positive or completely negative.  We are an assemblage of protons, neutrons, and electrons.  We have both positive and negative.  We are meant to be both.  And life is meant to be both.  And mixing white and black gives you grey.

My life is grey.

My choices are grey.  My words are grey.  My intentions are grey.  My feelings are grey.  My actions are grey.

Some of my life is exquisitely perfect, and some of it is as dark as dark can be.  I need to hold and honor and examine and express both dark and light.  We all must, in some sense.  We are all living in the grey.  It is inescapable.

Yesterday, I saw the light in what is dark.  Yesterday I remembered to view things from both the positive and the negative—and sometimes both simultaneously.

Yesterday I embraced the grey.

 

When The Pain is All That Is

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

When I was younger I used to write late at night often.  I was a single mother, trying to raise a child and finish college and figure out life all at once.  The late nights and the early mornings were the times I could write without taking time away from my little girl.  Early mornings were usually reserved for assignment completion, since my brain was fresh and unencumbered by the thoughts of the day to distract me.  But at night, the emotions were what flowed onto the page.

I used to write with ink pen and notebook … I suppose most of us did.  But for me it was an emotional expression that needed the feeling, the movement, the flow.  And you could tell whether I was feeling nostalgic or angry or confused by the way the letters formed and the speed with which they formed and the strength with which I pressed the pen to paper.  I wouldn’t have made it through those years without pouring thoughts on paper.

Now I rarely stay up past ten at night and can’t use a pen or pencil for more than a few minutes at a time, so that pouring out has largely disappeared.

But tonight is a different story.

Tonight I am letting it flow, in lots of ways.

The past few days have been an ongoing assault for me.  Early December reminds me of death, and death reminds me of my mother’s death, and my mother’s death reminds me of all the other deaths, and so it goes with grief.  The more loss you have experienced the more deeply each loss is felt, because they tie themselves to one another in some strange cosmic or cognitive way that none of us fully understands.  But I don’t need to understand it to feel it—deeply.

So, I am in the middle of this grief spurt, of sorts, where feeling anything seems difficult and feeling something means feeling loss and pain.  And of course, that is when I jump on the bandwagon of organizers everywhere and comment about the social problem that plagues my country now: gun control.  (I actually could have chosen from any number of social problems.  I wish that would have been a self-evident choice, but there are too many issues here to not name it specifically.)

And then the judges rule.

And by judges I mean people that are not at all qualified as judges or to make any particular judgments about the issue.  Some of them put out a string of falsehoods.  Some of them accuse me of “name-calling” because I use “stupid/classist/racist” as reasons one might think more guns would be better while simultaneously commenting on the number of shootings in Chicago.  None of them do, or have ever to my knowledge, lived in Chicago, mind you.  I do. In an area where gun violence is a constant. So, I am well aware and educated regarding what may or may not be helpful in ending this violence.  And when I tried to fight back and stand up for my views, I was called a bully and treated like I am being a terrible person, or morally corrupt, or some other form of bad.  Except those things arose after multiple people basically said a whole bunch of stuff about how wrong I am and how dumb my ideas are, and I responded with reasoned arguments and strings of facts.  The idea that I am being mean, or bullying others by stating facts and reasoned arguments is ridiculous. The idea that a bunch of people ganging up on me to say how wrong and dumb and morally bankrupt I am, for expressing factual information about gun violence, seems a lot more like bullying than anything I have EVER done, in my entire existence.

I am, by the way, the opposite of a bully.  I learned how to behave politely in the midst of great struggle and to pretend that my world wasn’t spinning out of control from a young age.  I was the one who was bullied, repeatedly and viciously, by others.  I was crying myself to sleep by age 9 and suicidal by the time I was 18.  I’m not the oppressor, but the oppressed.  I always have been.

I remember a time when my daughter was struggling with asserting herself, and in therapy this was something she was working on.  One day, on the playground, she called a boy a name and told him to leave her alone. That boy had been bullying her for months on end, and she finally stood up to him, and she was sent to the principal and I was called to come get her because she refused to follow a teacher’s instruction to apologize.  When I picked her up, I got angry with the principal, and said she most certainly would not be apologizing, and that we had been working all year to get her to voice her frustration and stand up to this bully.  This was a moment of triumph, not a moment of failure, for a timid girl who always ended up under the sole of someone else’s boot.

She learned that by watching me.

There are things you don’t mean to teach your children.  They are a part of you, so they become a part of them.  I always bent to the will of others.  I always hid the secrets.  I always played the part.  I tried and tried and tried to be the perfect daughter, and I failed.  Because perfection isn’t actually a thing. Nobody is perfect, we say, but then we try to force people to be exactly that, and we strive for exactly that. It makes no sense.  I taught my daughter to play the part too, and to not ruffle too many feathers and to not rock the boat, and I didn’t intend to, but she was subject to the same consequences I had been—being abused and manipulated and taken advantage of by others.

So, here is how I know I am not the bully.  I can’t be that.  I never learned how, and I am still trying to learn how.  Every week in therapy we talk about how I deserve to be happy and I don’t need to care what others think and I don’t have to live up to any expectations and I get to choose whom I wish to be.  Every week.  I don’t know how to be a bully.  But I am learning to voice my opinion and not back down and say things without sugar-coating every single word.  And that is met with all sorts of opposition.

It occurs to me tonight, after enduring days of negative comments about me and my thoughts and my action and my words and my ideas and probably the size of my ass, when you get right down to all the comments I have heard in the past week or so, that maybe those other people—the ones making me out to be the bully–are actually the bullies themselves.  Maybe they are so accustomed to people telling them what they want to hear, and to me being polite and diplomatic, that they lash out the moment that is taken from them.  Or, perhaps the converse is true, and those people are the ones being abused by others, and my insistence on maintaining my views without any pandering or trying to be perfect opens up a view to their own insecurities.  I’ll probably never know (especially because I unfriended most of them on Facebook, and I don’t think they have any other way to contact me).

It doesn’t really matter why they reacted in the way they did.  It doesn’t even matter if how I was speaking made them think I might be a bully.  Because the thing I can see, even in the midst of much pain and loss, is that I am not the kind of person they described, even at my worst.  Anyone who knows me well knows this to be true.  My good friends have watched me in the darkest and worst moments, and they know that I am love to the core, and that frustration only comes with pain, hunger, exhaustion, or injustice.  It doesn’t live in my core, but it assaults me from without.  I have the best of intentions, and the kindness of a saint, and love enough to pass it on to even the most desperate and marginalized among us.  Hugging homeless prostitutes isn’t something that you do when you are a bully, or morally corrupt, or without character.  That depth of love and understanding and that level of acceptance is a rare gift, and I am one of those blessed with that rare gift.  And I don’t need someone else to tell me this.  I know who I am.

Even though pain is all I feel and struggle is all I can seem to find these days, I know who I am.  I am not what those people who haven’t seen me for the last 7 to 20 years believe me to be.

Even when the pain is all I feel, I am still looking inside for my value and my worth, not to the outside.  I am finding the voice within and letting it out.  I am the girl on the playground who is fighting back with her words against an onslaught of injustice and being called to the principal’s office for doing so.  And that is fabulous and amazing and good.  That is a triumph!

I know that few to none of my friends throughout the years struggle from C-PTSD, so I understand that they don’t get how important it is to find value in yourself and to let go of the expectations of another and to stand on your own, even if the other doesn’t appreciate you doing so.  But it is extremely important.  Earth-shatteringly important.

The PTSD mind is a mind divided, and often accompanied by a confusion or a lack of knowing the self.  You can’t always—or maybe ever, in the beginning—trust what you feel to be yours and to be true.  Those core beliefs that you have held for your whole life are false, and it takes so much work to root them out, recognize them, and respond in ways that help to break those down.  To find your worth and to let go of shame and to release anger and to love yourself are nearly impossible.

I’m doing those things.  In the face of all sorts of criticism, I am holding on to me, and letting myself feel what I feel and believe what I believe and stand up for both.

When the pain is all you feel, it is really hard to have breakthrough moments like this, or to find your footing at all.  Today I am stomping with confidence, not just finding my footing.  And if other people felt on the bottom of my boot sole, I suppose that saddens me a bit, but not enough to let up right now.  Because I didn’t actually do any intentional harm to anyone, but others did do intentional harm to me.

Earlier this evening I posted that you cannot offer violence and expect peace in return.  This is how I feel about my whole life, not just the past couple of days of comments.  I was offered year upon year upon year of violence, and it is a wonder and a joy to know that I was not so damaged by that to deliberately harm others, or to deliberately harm myself, or to end my life, or to lose my mind completely.  I was repeatedly offered violence, and ninety-nine of a hundred times, I respond with peace.  That is a lot of peace, under the circumstances.

I am not a bully.  Even when the pain is all that is.

So, I end the night and begin the morning having peace within once more.  The assault of depression might linger for some time, or it might lift in a matter of days or weeks.  Eventually I will find ways to feel joy again.  I know, because I do it time and again.  I always will.  But, I rest in the knowledge that my strength is being found and held and kept against that which would seek to define me against my will.  I am still me, even when me is a pile of grief and loss.  And I will keep on being such, no matter who opposes me.

And it is a triumph.

Some things never change

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

I’m sort of a change addict.  I rearrange things all the time.  From the files in my office to the paints in my studio to the furniture in the rooms to the items on my bedside table, I am always looking for another way to place things.  And I often like to pretend that it is for increased efficiency—and sometimes it accidentally brings about increased efficiency—but I think it is just that things need to be constantly in flux for me to feel comfortable.

This is actually the opposite of what makes most people comfortable.  Stability and stasis and knowing that you won’t bang your toes on a credenza that wasn’t there yesterday seem to be more comfortable for most.

I used to attribute my desire for change to boredom.  I just figured I was the kind of person who needed new scenery … and that is true in part.  Highly intelligent and creative people often need movement and change, and lots of us live in mess or chaos as a result.  We feel life more than just live it.  And, like anything that you see or feel each and every day, you become numb to things if they stay the same for too long.

Once my daughter’s teacher thought she would place a brightly colored sticky note to my daughter’s desk to remind her of something.  That sticky note had an effect for about a week and a half.  After that time, the note just became a part of my daughter’s normal desk environment.  It no longer screamed brightly to remember, but it sort of faded into the everyday.

For those of us who feel our way through life, everything fades into the everyday, and we need something new in order to feel stimulated and excited and motivated.

I am one of those people, so boredom is an apt way to describe much of my need for change.

But, over time, I discovered something else about the way I desire change.  It felt like an escape.  It felt like freedom.  It felt like a release from captivity.  And it still does.

I often describe my situation as “stuck”.  I can’t afford to move.  I can’t find decent housing with a voucher that is meant to safeguard the poor from not finding decent housing (another tale for another time, perhaps).  I can’t leave the state without throwing my disability case out the window after 16 months of fighting for my rights.  I can’t change the ways my body and mind react to particular stimuli.  I can’t end the pain that plagues my whole body.  I can’t stop seeing the doctors and therapists who already know and have seen the ways my disease affects me.  I can’t end the awareness of the past events that led to this point.  I feel trapped within my disability and within a particular way of living as a result.

And I want to escape once more.

I keep changing what I can.  The furniture, the nightstand contents, the filing system all move around.  But I’m still feeling stuck.

Last night, while I was attempting to catch up on the washing of dishes (a failed attempt, but a bit of progress at least), I was thinking about my relationship with my mom.  It wasn’t great, for most of my teen and adult years.  We didn’t understand one another very well, and communicating emotion wasn’t a strong point for her, and obeying without question wasn’t a strong point of mine.  We argued as a result.  But last night I was thinking more about how she must have felt when all I wanted to do was escape, and even though I don’t really think my mom floats around my kitchen in some non-corporeal form, I said aloud, “I’m sorry if it hurt you Mom, but I needed to try … I needed to try to be free.”

I hadn’t thought of what I did from age 18 to 28 as trying to be free before, at least not in any real and deep sense.  But I was trying to be free.  I didn’t want to be captive or kept.  And running from place to place and moving from man to man and snorting line after line felt like flying after years of living caged.  It wasn’t a crazy person living out her crazy.  It wasn’t a woman lost seeking a place to fit in.  It was freedom–finally freedom!  And all of those things in all of that time didn’t necessarily serve me well or bring me wholeness and good, but they weren’t necessarily meant to do that anyway.  They were just meant to be the opposite of captivity.

When my little dog gets free of the tethers that hold him, he runs like a motherfucking bat out of hell.  He doesn’t know where he is going, or why.  He doesn’t care.  He just runs, and runs, and runs, and runs.  And there isn’t any catching him.  You have to run past him (which, by the way, sucks for a good runner, so the few times I have had to do so I nearly died as a result) and then convince him that running in the other direction sounds fun, leading him back toward the house or car from which he escaped.  Freedom.  Flying.  Just going because you are finally allowed to go.

I spent 10 years of my life flying in glorious freedom.

And then, I went back to living as others expected or anticipated I would or should.  Because you can only run so far before you tire and need to turn around.  But I still miss the flying.  I still miss that freedom.

There are all sorts of expectations once more, and there is a lot of weight to the conditions of disability and poverty that I am struggling to carry, and there are rules and rules and rules about how you may or may not be when you are dependent on others (and very few of the rules or expectations are reasonable or intuitive or helpful).  And I start to feel trapped and stuck and without an exit plan.  It reminds me of being a child, and not being able to express that really bad shit was going on in my life, and not being old enough or aware enough to leave the situation to which I felt captive.  All the ways I tried to escape that captivity—throwing tantrums, threatening my abuser, trying to run away, becoming despondent, sleep walking, wetting the bed—went unrecognized or were blamed on other causes.

I don’t fault the people in my life who didn’t know those were attempts at escape.  It isn’t easy to understand when you haven’t been informed or educated about such things.  All you see is a bunch of crazy and inconvenient and inappropriate, and you don’t know how to fix it.  And even when I did get the attention of therapists or doctors, they were kinda shitty therapists or doctors, and they did more harm than good in most cases. I wasn’t properly diagnosed with C-PTSD until a year and a half ago, because I had a breakdown/freak out/panic in the right place and the right time, for a change.

The thing about this desire for freedom, however, is that it starts to morph into something new as I age and become more aware.  I still want to run away, but I want to run to a place that brings stability, a therapeutic environment, and release from the debt and dependence of poverty.  Being free looks more like stasis and stability than I like to admit at times.  And I think that I would still rearrange the furniture and the files and the art supplies and the books in this more stable version of freedom, but I don’t think that it would make me feel stuck or captive or without freedoms.  If I had a little house on the beach, just big enough for me and the dog, and the occasional visit from my dad or my daughter, and if I could swim every day and get a massage and take a walk along the water, and if I could write and create and sell my work, and if I could grow a few plants out in my tiny garden instead of on an apartment window sill, and if I could choose the life I want and not be forced into situations that I don’t want, I could feel free in one place, and not ever need to feel the need to flee or fight or struggle toward something else.

I started with a title that implied that things don’t change.  And many things don’t.  But many things do.  And it isn’t true that the more things change they more they stay the same, even if my freedom becomes a little cottage which I own and can settle into for years to come.  Because, while that seems like stasis, it is much different from anything I have experienced in all my years—it is something I choose, without influence and expectation and abuse and appropriate cultural expression and manipulation and guilt and force making me choose (which isn’t really choice at all).

Much has changed inside of me, and in the way I see myself, and in the ways I understand my history and my illness, and in the ways that I act and react because of new awareness, and in the way I treat myself as a result.  But much has not changed.

I still long to be free.

I still want to fly.