Spring has officially sprung when you see more ducklings in the pond than ducks. Happy Spring!
The Cutest Ducklings Welcome Spring
Spring has officially sprung when you see more ducklings in the pond than ducks. Happy Spring!
Category: Random Voidness
Drive-Thru Delight
Saw this beauty while going through the drive-thru to get my soda. It was just sitting there hanging out. I rolled down the window and got it. Beauty is everywhere. What a wonderful blessing!
Reality Schism
I’ll admit it, I’ve been struggling. I’ve been fighting the good fight for weeks but today the void is sucking me back in. Yesterday I realized I was doing it to myself and I need to stop…..but I’m having too much fun!!
I’ve been free writing again. I’m blissfully living in the space between my ears. I broke one book I wrote (Heart of My Mothers) into a trilogy. The original was too dense because I wanted my character to grow and experience life adjacent to the plot. My readers liked the story but it was suggested I break it up into three books so I could bring in more detail.
- Book 1 Andi (Mother): Is ready to be sent to an agent or publisher, I just have to create the query letter and do it. It terrifies me I’ll do it wrong. Wrong means I fail…..again,*
- Book 2 Veronica (Grandmother) : Is written and needs editing….like Edward Scissorhands level of editing, which magnifies my skewed reality I can’t write perfectly the first time around.*
- Book 3 Claire (Great Grandmother): Free writing where even the original book isn’t a reference and anything can happen. I’M LOVING EVERY MINUTE OF IT.
The problem? I still have to live in reality. I still have to drag myself out of bed every day and face the world. I still have to take my medication. I still have to apply for jobs. I still have to go on interviews. I still have to remind myself death isn’t a solution.
This morning, by the time I convinced myself to get up (It took an hour today), take my meds and feed my bird I was crying. My reality is just really hard right now. I’m looking for glimmers, I’m walking more than I have to (goal is three times a week) and I still feel like I’m failing. Failing crushes me.*
My character isn’t failing. She fabulously wealthy, she’s popular and she’s the hero in her own story. I’m poor, few people know my name and I’m trying hard not to be the villain. Is there any doubt why I want to live there?
So, right now I’m straddling these two worlds. The endorphin rush from creation strips the serotonin on my brain. Low serotonin makes me want to escape into the story. I don’t know how to heal the schism without tearing me in two.
So I bought yarn.
Any suggestions?
* I know this is wrong thinking. I feel like Sisyphus constantly pushing the right thinking up an impossible hill only to get flattened when the rock rolls over me.
Constant Vigilance Is Everything
The color attracted me. Its like purple with a green undertone. Then I realized it represented how insidious depression can be. I broke a long time ago and I’ve been putting the pieces back together wanting to be whole and then a hidden root wiggles it way though a crack to remind me I’m not. The positive take-away from this image is just a little concerted effort and the little tendril of doubt/sadness/darkness can be yanked out and the crack repaired. All it takes is constant vigilance.
Glimmers
This is something I learned about at the beginning of the year. It’s called a Glimmer…
A glimmer is the opposite of a trigger. Glimmers are those moments in your day that make you feel joy, happiness, peace or gratitude. Once you train your brain to be on the lookout for glimmers, those tiny moments will appear more and more.
So, I’m going to try and post my daily glimmers which I normally find on my morning walks. Some make me smile, some remind me of truisms I often forget when I’m busy trying. Stay tuned.
Starting Over…..Again
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.
The absence…
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.
Now…
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.
People Are Annoying
Not all people are annoying, just the ones that seem to come into my office this week. To help take the edge off we’ve devised a Bingo game called C.R.A.Z.Y., so when stupid/funny/annoying things happen we get to mark a square. We have five different cards with some overlapping squares. Everyone gets a FAINTS and OLD MAN TAKES OFF HIS SHIRT INSTEAD OF ROLLING UP HIS SLEEVE, and of course the FREE square.
The most annoying thing which happened this week is people feel the need to tell me all the things that are wrong with my company, as if I could actually do something about it for them. I’m all for customer service from the time you walk into the office until you walk out again, and that’s where it stops. I will not tilt at the capitalist machine for anyone. I have no power. I have no control. I’m good with that. I bluntly tell them in hopes they would just shut up and go away but they interpret my plastic smile as an invitation to continue. One man couldn’t set up an appointment on our website because he wanted to do it during our closed hours. (not making this up). He complained that he had made several appointments for the same day but his name didn’t show up in the confirmation. Finally he called IT and they gave him an appointment for a time he didn’t want because…..he had already booked them with Name Unknown. Luckily for me the conversation took place on the phone and he couldn’t see me trying to do a Darth Vader neck squeeze at the handset.
Another one came in complaining about how America is all messed up because no one can do their job right. He broke a bone and after three hospitals and two ambulance rides in Hong Kong he was all better and paid less than $100 for his trouble. That, in his opinion, is medicine done right. He was in getting a stool sample kit for a hospital transmitted illness. Irony totally flew over this retired pilots head. He brought our competitions requisition for the super delux stool sample kit he paid for which said in perfectly modulated text the name of a single test. Again, he acted as if I or my colleagues could or would do something to fix the whole grand scheme. As a pilot for a well known airline he assured me if anyone had experienced the same level of incompetence on a flight they would recieve a check for $5,000. In this day and age, if the plane took someone to the wrong destination I can assure you it’s because the idiot got on the wrong plane and the airline would be charging his credit card to its limit for the extra cost of the fare. He brought his son in on his second trip in to assure me I didn’t give him an order for a different test. He ordered him around like some assistant, making him get the information we already had off his phone to prove to me he had an order for a full gastro-intestinal stool sample kit, which had nothing to do with what I asked him to bring in. While I was researching it, again, my co-workers and other patients in the lobby were regaled about how his son is going to be a pilot and how his starting salary is going to be $300k a year. His son was silent and just stood there miserable and cringing at his elderly fathers behavior. I say elderly not because he was old but because he brought up how old he was and how it would be unfair for me to make him to go home again and look for the requisition and bring it back in because of his advanced age.
Maybe it’s just because of my experiences but is the whole freaking world filled with narcissists? Or do I just attract them? I get technology is frustrating if you haven’t bothered to keep up with it, or if you don’t have Geeks in your family to tell you to Google it when you have problems, I get closures are inconvenient but that doesn’t guarantee you a pass when it comes to the necessary information needed to process an order in the medical world with all the mandatory rules and government regulations imposed on labs.
These encounters are stirring up some subconscious detritus adding to my already stressed out nature with the season and work in general. My dreams last night were of my mother, She moved out and sent an ombudsman to inform me she was leaving and it was my fault. I told my sister I wanted to move far away for when she decided the place couldn’t meet her expectations and would manipulate her way back. I told the man she was a narcissist and abusive he just replied, “I know.” But he was still doing his job.
So, what have I learned? People are unbelievably annoying. I’ve lived this and I know this, and all I can do is take deep breaths and keep doing my job.
Passive Participation
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!!
Preverication
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.
Another Spare
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.
Blogging From The Void 