Writing my way from darkness back into light
I love the color of lavender. I love the smell of lavender. I love amethyst because it reminds me of lavender. I wear a small raku bottle around my neck filled with lavender essential oil when I travel to keep me calm. This is the balm my soul often craves. And whenever I see it in a garden I feel all the love at once.
It’s always good to have someone watch your back while you push forward, but precious is the friend who watches your front so you can rest. Thank you to all my friends who have done this for me.
(Did you notice the decoy duck next to the sleeping duck? I don’t know if that was human made as a joke or ducks made to let the humans know it was a sleeping cove and to be quiet. My money is on the ducks.)
I love birds. I keep walking a path in a town over that really isn’t doing anything for me any more because of the ducks. I love the way the one feather on this ducks tail curls up in opposition to the perfect conformity of the rest of her body. Perfection, im learning is overrated.
To say I like peanut butter is an understatement. I LOVE peanut butter. For the last several months I have been pretty much living on the spread. I buy it at Costco in the double 40 oz jars and can lick the plastic clean in two weeks. I don’t think it’s just the peanut butter, but the honey I squeeze into it and mix in before hand. Yum!
I had deluded myself into thinking peanut butter is a healthy food. It’s high in protein and that is my only requirement for my diet right now. It’s easy. I just have to take the lid off and grab a spoon, no cooking, no prep, just eat. And, if a little is good for you, a lot has to be sooooo much better, right? Hence the killing of 40oz jars in record time.
There are some health benefits to eating peanut butter, including reducing heart disease, weight loss and satiation. And believe me, you are satiated when you eat four or five recommended serving sizes. With honey.
Peanut butter has been a staple in my life since I was in grade school. We rarely had jelly, jam or apple butter but we did have a dense wheat bread and peanut butter for lunches. I would put it on so thick it would get stuck in my throat and I’d have to run to the water fountain to push it all the way down my throat. We never had the money to buy milk at school, and knowing this I’d still slather the bread with an unhealthy serving.
I don’t know if it’s the taste, the texture, the childhood connection or just that it’s fast and easy but I do love me some peanut butter. Until I realized I was going through 40 oz of it in 7-10 days….not to mention a hive full of honey as well. Even when I was doing it I knew it was a reaction to the stress of the holidays, unemployment, no money, terror of the political climate being unemployed, coupled with depression and anxiety and, well, life. But I knew it had to go.
I went cold turkey on the peanut butter. I still smell it and it sets my mind wandering the empty shelves looking for it, but I refuse to be addicted to it. I have tendencies towards binge eating, which is what I was doing with my delulu attachment to the peanut butter. My compromise for binging currently is I can have anything I want out of the house, I just can’t bring it home because I eat it…..ALL OF IT….in one sitting. So if I want ice cream I go out and get it but not have a stock pile of Ben and Jerry’s in the freezer. However, it’s hard to go out and have a small jar of peanut butter, so it’ll be gone from my life until a time when I can be reasonable about my portions and contain my emotional need between two pieces of bread.
What do you use to satiate your emotional hunger?
I found out peanut butter is good for depression. Junk food science? Maybe. I’ve switched from regular Skippy to Natural Skippy and I don’t buy it from Costco, so I don’t have as much on hand but it is nice to have it back.
Although no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start now and make a brand new ending.
Carl Bard
I used this quote in my Birthday Blues Early post what feels like 100 years ago. It is more relevant now than it was then because it feels like I’m starting from zero in my public life. I’m trying to step in time with the spring renewal and make a new start with what seems to be a world against me. As an unemployed woman who is actively battling high functioning depression with a heaping side of anxiety I feel most days aren’t worth getting out of bed for. I toy with the idea of going on disability but I know it won’t get me to my goals…..and my goals are everything. But I am getting out of bed, and I am fighting the good fight most days.
My absence from the blog wasn’t planned. I thought about it often but my job had become too much for me to do anything else other than work, eat and sleep. I stopped going to church, I stopped writing in my journal, I stopped writing period and I stopped sharing my struggle (which had almost become a pleasant journey instead of the arduous saga of anger and sadness it started as).
I’ve been able to track this physical change back to January 2024 when I got COVID-19 for the first time. My symptoms started a week before the traditional COVID symptoms started. I got the gastro-intestinal start, and with IBS it’s hard to tell the difference. I used all my sick days (5 work days) and went back to work feeling not totally well but I persevered and I slowly eased back into the workload.
then, people quit, people were fired, people changed positions and I ended up working alone which caused the lingering COVID to encourage my IBS into overload……or over un-load, if you will. I was taking an antidiarrheal every third day and being completely exhausted when I got home to the point I had to sit in my car for 15-20 minutes after the drive to just rest.
My symptoms progressed to sever bouts of nausea, light headedness and my eyes pinning down to a single point of light if I stood to long……Essentially I couldn’t work. I took a month off to find out what was going on. When I went back I was okay according to the tests and paperwork but I wasn’t. The company and I found it mutually beneficial if we parted ways and I’ve been unemployed since.
Being unemployed is both a boon and a bane. My hope is these intervening months of rest have strengthened me physically and mentally. I will say, the holidays were hard and dark and somewhat dicey for my mental health. I continued to employ the tools I have learned in therapy like breathing and CBT, I took my medication religiously, and I crocheted a lot and listened to a multitude of books.
Additionally, I’ve prepared the first book in my trilogy for publication, completely wrote the second book and I am outlining the third book….when I’m not telling myself I’d be better off dead. Suicide does not align with my goals for life or the afterlife so I know not to take it seriously but it upsets me when my brain falls back to the old coping mechanisms. It does remind me how much I need to be ever mindful of my recovery. I don’t like feeling ‘the void’ in the background but I am very proud of myself that I am aware of it and I am fighting the good fight to get away from it.
I’m waiting for the third keynote speaker of the conference to step up to the podium at the 8th annual (I think) LDSPMA Conference 2023 Saturday Morning Session. I thought I was paying for more but I just get live feed of the keynotes and then access to recordings of of the breakout sessions in November. Which is fine because I couldn’t afford to fly to Utah, pay for a hotel/car/food and boarding for Sammy this year. This is the conference I was pushing myself to get my first draft done in Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed so I could pitch it to publishers. I decided I would pitch my other completed novel to the publishers in the virtual fast-pitch at the end of next week but those publishers had already rejected the manuscript several years ago. [If you’d like to read the first chapter you can find it here.]
There is a lot of in-person networking involved at the conference which, honestly, terrifies me. I’m affable enough when my anxiety is ramped up to full luminosity, which is how I’ve survived and functioned in the world my whole life. However, the fall-out of pushing myself is very painful and lasts for weeks after as I nit-pick and denigrate myself for every little mistake the anxiety has magnified from that time. Doing social things like meeting strangers, remembering their names and the conversations, yadda, yadda, yadda quickly depletes my nerves and temporarily wipes my memory like a prolonged trauma. Doing that over a three day period makes me winge over how long it would take for me to recover sufficiently to function in my life again. My job requires me to be out and among the world every day and to be cheerful and nice to EVERYONE even when they annoy the living daylights out of me. I will say I am stronger for the daily torture it provides but I see the effects on my emotional state at the end of the week. And that’s when it doesn’t matter. This matters! This is my foothold into the publishing world and possibly an agent. Someone who will do the footwork and networking for me so I can passively sit in my writing space and, well, write.
So the goals are to sit and watch the keynote speakers, to listen to the breakout sessions in my track, and then apply them into my writing life. Next year I will choose to actively participate and be prepared with manuscript(s) in hand, a smile genuinely plastered on my painted face and an emotional equilibrium to sustain me until I get home to read through all the offers to publish my copious selection of completed works. Wish me luck!!
a false or deliberate misstatement; lie:
Dictionary.com
Last Saturday I volunteered to close at the site we staff 365 days a year. I came in at open so it would be a nine hour day…ten if you count the hour I get for lunch…away from home and out of bed. I was trying to be helpful to my team and my bank balance. Mostly my bank balance. I made the decision before I left home actually, so when the offer came I didn’t ask the necessary question…Who am I working with?
I was working with a person who’s opinion of herself in regards to the rest of the team is of a queen bee over her drones. When I worked with her a few weeks ago, she said I “You are so slow. I’m fast.” When I scowled at her she quickly clarified “Because I just ate sugar.” Yes, I hadn’t gotten much processed for the first pack (40 something), but I got something done and it was correct. I tried processing the first pack early on in my tenure with the company which ended with me in tears and my manager and I agreeing I shouldn’t do the first pack until I felt I was ready. I did it that Saturday because I wanted to see if I was ready. Her jab, though self-aggrandizing, placed a spotlight on my self doubt and discomfort at the job I had done. I decided I shouldn’t do it again for another several months.
Saturday she came out and told me she talked to our manager and our manager said “She wants you to do the first pack,” I objected and said I was more comfortable doing the evening pack, she cut me off before I could finish with “No, our manager said I should do the closing pack so it’s done right.”
Saturday was our managers first day of vacation and gave instructions to contact someone else. If she actually did talk to our manager, our manager wouldn’t have green-lighted me working the first pack because of our past discussion. I could have called her on it, but I didn’t. I was angry and instead of confronting her about it I allowed the fury to transform into a soul darkening I’ll-show-you mantra knowing if I failed she’d have to clean up the mess ‘so it’s done right’. I processed and packed over 80.
I’m very pleased I did so well. People do more during the first pack but people do less too. I don’t need to be the best; the middle of herd of phlebotomists is just fine with me. What I am upset about is how I handled it. Though I’m not caught up in the anger of being so blatantly lied to, I am upset I didn’t stand up for myself. I am upset I didn’t protect me from what my psyche sees as a bully, a manipulator. I hate I still fall prey to those people. My protection for now is to not work with her again. Meaning, not working the closing shift which she normally covers and if that leaves my team in a bind then it leaves my team in a bind. I don’t like being around abrasive and abusive personalities, and if I can avoid it I will.
My other need to do is to talk to my manager. On the off chance she actually *did* talk to her on Saturday I need to clarify with her we hadn’t decided I was ready to do the first pack and to tell her I can do the first pack if called upon to do so. The discovery I am just as good and bad as anyone else in the group is the one positive thing from this negative episode at work.
Why am I so focused on this? That is the question. I’m still not back to writing other than here and my journal. I haven’t really discussed this in my journal, but I will. I think I’m taking this person’s behavior as a personal attack on me when I know she does this to EVERYBODY. What I’m realizing as I write this, which is why I love writing here, is if I were back doing what I’m supposed to be doing with my life-Writing-things like this roll off my back because I gain strength in and for myself when I write. Starting this weekend I’m going to force myself, in a nice way, to sit at my computer and try to push past the last of the debris of my fall and start taking those small steps I talked about. I need to stop self-prevaricating that I can’t so I shouldn’t try, for there is strength and honor in the trying.
That’s what I’m doing, slow small steps out of the madness I pushed myself into. I’ve been writing, but just in my journal. I can say anything I want in my journal; no one is listening. It’s the only true place where I can open a vein and allow the words to flow out with the pain. The writing there is a pressure bandage on the gushing self-inflicted wounds I’ve made. Yet to truly stem the flow I need to make plans. Real plans. I’ve found opening my heart here helps me form the lumps of ideas into a solid sculpture; something I can work with and towards.
My last blog “Humpty Dumpty was Pushed!” I talked about needing to go back to basics. Journaling. {check}. Chilling {check}. Blogging { }. That’s where I am today. Where chilling has been mostly watching TV/Movies and Miss Fisher (I don’t know why but the show is the best at relieving me of my need for reality for a short time). As things have quickly changed I’ve changed my to-do list as well….
Murphy’s Law popped up and ripped the rug out from underneath me with the news I had to close down my site and work at the other one in the same town. Not a horrific thing, I’m still employed and it’s only temporary, but it’s a new site, new people (not absolutely new, I’ve worked with the other two at different times). Today was the first day in the new work environment. It’s not horrible. I still get lost, it’s like four times larger than my site and there are two room dedicated to just employee space. Quite posh for a PSC. (Patient Service Center). I still turn into the wrong room for processing and I always go the wrong way to find the employee bathroom. But it is just the first day. Knowing this would be a challenge I spent the weekend trying to put my life (room) in order. I didn’t get it all the way there but enough so I can try and do a little bit every day to keep it neat and orderly. I don’t need orderly, per se, but it is nice to find what you’re looking for or having a nice clean space to write it when the urge hits. So, that’s the other small step out of madness: Making space for healing.
The writing…
The writing still scares me. I hate how pathetic that looks on the screen. Something I love, something I feel defines who I am and what I’m suppose to be doing with my life scares me. Even still, my brain is simmering the storyline in the back of my brain as a way to keep the aroma wafting in the air to call me back to the page with intriguing turns in the plot….but I just can’t do it. It’s too soon. I was hoping to do something this weekend, but instead I cleaned. I work next weekend and I’ve made plans with my niece for The Renaissance Faire for the 14th. Again, a way to chill and allow the pieces to come back together and solidify to bear the weight of my working again. So, in essence, I won’t be ready to present anything to anyone by the following weekend. And, as badly as I wanted it a few weeks ago, I think I’m okay with that. I’m not beating myself up about it, or berating myself…I’m just taking care of myself. Maybe the next time I push myself off the wall I will only crack, and the time after that I should have enough epoxy on my soul to bounce and laugh it off like a whole person.
My mother used to joke when people asked how many daughters she had and she would laughingly reply “A pair and a spare,”. I didn’t realize how she really saw us until later on in life when the spare had to take care of her. She wanted, and invested in, the pair with full rights to demand care when she could no longer care for herself, or when she was just tired of taking care of herself (We’ll never know which). Both my sisters, twins, knew how to cook, knew how to clean, had practice with their own children on how to change diapers and how to take care of another human being. I can barely take care of myself even now and I’ve been practicing. I prefered to write or craft rather than clean house, sue me.
I just finish listening to Spare by Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex. I appreciated his experiences with depression and anxiety and felt a kinship with the rage that accompanied his depression which he called “the red mist”. Though he was allowed to wallop his brother and friends to get it out of his system, a perk of not having any proper parental supervision and being a boy, he described the pain of it very succinctly. Though each journey through depression is unique to each individual it’s nice to know you aren’t alone in the void.
We are reading/listening to the book for the Aunt/Niece book club. The chapters read like blog posts, chronologically from the death of his remarkable mother to the present. I know the book was about his coming to terms with the unnecessary and tragic death of his mother, the lethal abuse of the tabloid press, the absolute narcisism of his father, his service, his stumbles in the public eye, the rank racism towards his wife and children and ending with his separation from the institutionalized dysfunction of his family. That was the point of the autobiography; to take control of his own narrative and his own life. I guess, on a microscopic scale that’s what I’m doing here as well.
I pulled a different meaning from the whole of the book. I saw it as his fight and flight from the void, almost completely on his own. But more important, discovering the happiness to be had in the light. He reached a point in his recovery when he realized he had progressed beyond the constraints of the little bubble universe the family and the tabloids created for him. I’m still occadionally bumping my head on the constraints my up-bringing (such as it was) put on me. Writing here has helped me push my mental and emotional boundaries to realize I am the master of my own mind/life/soul. Like Harry, I understand the need to move far away from the funk in the my dysfunctional family because I’m afraid I will go back to where I was. That is not a crack at my family in any way. We are all on different paths now, nolonger slaved to the one our mother picked. I like the path I’m on but it’s new and it’s scary and it would be so easy to go backwards and be, instead of moving on my chosen path to becoming.
The book as a whole is an interesting, albeit asingle hyperfocused view of the monarchy. He is very respectful to the Queen yet didn’t exclude her from the spotlight of dysfunction either. He owned up to the things he had done wrong, the few things the news outlets got right and how he is working to move forward in his life. I appreciated his honesty. If you are an anglophile you should enjoy it.
One of the points in Essentialism by Greg McKeown is Protecting the Asset. The asset being the Essentialist. I don’t know if I have declared it publically, but I am trying to be an essentialist. Protecting the asset is pretty much what it sounds like….I am the asset and I need to protect me. This isn’t the setting-boundaries-with-people-who-want-to-hurt-me-emotionally protecting but protecting myself from entropy in life to keep me working towards my goal. Essentially, I need to sleep regularly and for a set amount of time. I need to eat right and drink water. I need to keep my finances in check so I can have the time I want to write. And {sigh} I need exercise to stay strong to sit for hours at a time to work.
I joined Planet Fitness because their monthly rate works out to be the reimbursement my company provides for a gym membership…..and this is the Black Card Membership where they have massage chairs, hydro-tables and and infrared light booth that the teen-ager behind the counter told me will help remove wrinkles. I’m more interested in these benefits…
Infrared therapy has many roles in the human body. These include detoxification, pain relief, reduction of muscle tension, relaxation, improved circulation, weight loss, skin purification, lowered side effects of diabetes, boosting of the immune system and lowering of blood pressure.
http://www.news-medical.net
To be perfectly honest though, I said yes to the massage chairs and the hydro-table. Never heard of a hydro-table before but now I don’t think I can live without it. I signed up last weekend, took a tour of the facility on Tuesday and gave them both a whirl. The hydro-table is like having your back turned to a warm water firehose (you can adjust the pressure and speed) running up and down your back. It kneads and relaxes with the heat. The only downside is you have to get up after 10 minutes to tell the kids at the front desk to flip the switch again. The massage chair found knots in my shoulder and neck I didn’t even know I had! I have one in the middle of my right scapula which I tied up by working in a non-ergonomic position to finish my birthday jacket. I noticed last night was the first night I didn’t wake up with the gnawing pain in the middle of my back pushing it’s way through to my front. I’m hoping to have the other bumps the massager found gone within a reasonable amount of time as well. I spent 45 minutes there today doing both twice. This time having the hydro and heat soften up my muscles and then letting the chair knead the knots out. I’m hoping a faster relaxation for bed tonight.
I’ve actively chosen to not listen to the evil pixie in the back of my head telling me I’m not worth it, I’m wasting money, and I’m just going to be a dumpy gray-haired wanna-be for the rest of my life. I think ignoring that is part of protecting the asset too. Not believing all the people, pixies and statistics telling me I’m not going to succeed as a writer is going to be the metaphorical armor I’m going to have to wear for a while until I can massage my ego up from the depths of my psyche to essentially stand in the light with me and my convictions.
Blogging From The Void 