One Ball Juggler

A statement I made in my last blog Competent Confidence has been bothering me since I published it. “…I’ve learned in the post apocalypse, I can’t handle more than one challenge on my plate at one time.” There was a time when I was actively involved in church, working more than full time, volunteering for The Greater Bay Area Make-A-Wish Foundation, and chaired and coordinated the Wish Children’s Holiday party for several years. Not to mention writing with abandon. I was an avid Franklin Day Planner enthusiast, which is how I kept my life straight….mostly. I hoped the plasticity of my life would come back to me over time but it hasn’t. I’m not really expecting my life to spring back to my pre-caregiver days because 1) A lot of the frenzied activity I participated in was to prove to myself and other people I was a good person and 2) I’m older and a little wiser now.

I want to write. I want to re-engage in the world. I want to get my “gig” going to supplement my income to help me reach my financial goals. I keep having false starts on all of it. I am proud of the fact my website is up, pamelagartner.com, but I’ve not gone any further on that. I want to write everyday either my current novels, my journal or my blogs. So far, blogging here is the only consistent writing I’ve been doing and honestly, this is just opening a vein and letting it flow. To be a single, self-employed writer, by necessity, you have to be able to keep two balls in the air at one time. When you have your body breaking down and betraying you, you need to work-out, plan meals and eat right. (ball three) To be a member of any sub-set of the whole of society you have to be willing to go out, engage in activities, make friends and be a part of it all. (ball four) I am blessed with a truck-load of friends and family so, maybe a cadre of acquaintances and new experiences will be sufficient. However, I still need to do the basics for that.

My writing has always been the most important thing to me since I was eleven. I’ve always wanted to be a published author. I used to write (pen and paper) every chance I got. I used to carry a 5 subject notebook around with my school books and I wrote instead of taking notes in class or studying in the library. Later, I carried 5.5″x8.5″ paper in my Franklin to write when I was bored in meetings or on a long lunch. I loved the freedom. I’ve gotten so keyboard-bound the idea of handwriting now seems laborious and a waste of time so I’ve abandoned the practice. My imagination and desire to write has come back to me now the stressors in life are receding, and like a petulant child, the muse wants my undivided attention…NOW! This unrelenting presence in my head makes me frustrated with everything I do because I’m not writing. I try not to let my projects distract me while I work because I can’t stop in the middle of a blood draw or accessioning someone into the system to write down an idea, line of dialogue, or plot twist before it’s gone. This makes it doubly hard for when I get home because it takes time to get the muse to answer your calls when you’ve ignored her all day.

As I’ve been writing this I realize I’m expecting too much of myself, again. It’ll be five years this December since the apocalypse happened. When that life consuming, ginormous snow-ball of a task was finally taken out of the juggling rotation and I started to rebuild my life I expected things to spring back to what was my normal. It hasn’t. At times in the past half-decade I was gifted with time to re-write my last novel twice during the 18 weeks of convalescence of breaking my foot and then the three months of pandemic confinement. It was the only ball I had to keep in the air. During those times I was living my authentic self, and I LOVED IT.

My broken brain has conflated the idea I did all the writing while working full-time; successfully keeping both balls in the air, and berating me for not doing it now. I need to be happy I am able to keep the working-full-time-ball in the air without losing it. Putting pressure on me to get all the balls up in the air again and gracefully moving in artistic patterns and mesmerizing circles is only going to distract me from the one ball I have successfully flying now. Juggling is all about timing and stamina. As much as I need it, as much as the little demanding muse wants it, the timing just isn’t right for more than one ball until I am stronger to handle a second. Dangit.

Competent Confidence

A hundred years ago I used to (try to) sell mobile homes, or the proper term is Manufactured Houses. These weren’t trailers and none of them could be hooked up to the back of a truck and moved in the dead of night to skip out on space rent. When I started in the business the licensure was a step above used-car salesman. I worked at a now defunct firm in Santa Clara called Roney and Associates where the broker was ga-ga over a real estate sales guru called Tommy Hopkins. He was big in the business at the time and he did seminars, boot camps in Scottsdale AZ and sold all sorts of books and cassette taped lectures. Though he was an accomplished real estate salesperson, he made his hard core money selling his classes, books, boot camps and cassette tapes. My mother internalized a lot of it as a professional way to manipulate the family. Her mistake was to let my sister C and I listen to the tapes and we could hear the “close” coming and realize we were being played. I bring him up because one portion of a lesson has always stuck with me…

The Stages of Competence

Stage 1: Unconscious INCOMPETENCE

This is a euphoric state when you realize everyone around you is floundering and you’re sailing through. All the square blocks are effortlessly falling into the really large round holes but you’re too pleased with yourself to notice. You keep plugging along because it’s working and you aren’t sweating it.

Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence

Suddenly the euphoria erupts into chaos. The round holes are smaller and the square blocks were actually pyramid shaped and they HAVE to go sideways into the only visible hole in front of you. You throw your hands up and scream to the heavens but you don’t quit because you know you can and will get it…..maybe……someday…..if they don’t fire you first. I will have to say, at this stage it never occured to me I could go back to my old job. Like I said before, the benefits are just too good to leave. So, the only thing to do is remember all the kind encouragement, barked instructions and training and keep pushing toward stage 3.

Stage 3: Conscious Competence

I think I hit this stage today. Our float to help out didn’t make it, probably had to cover for someone who didn’t make it to their site. It was steady and I wasn’t overwhelmed by a throng of patients. Luckily. I found myself pausing when stressed and taking a deep breath and (I hate to admit it but…) the trainer from Training Is Fun-Da-Mental‘s advise of highlighting everything (even though it eats into the wait time) is helping me catch things like stool samples that also read as blood, duplicate orders and other things I’M SUPPOSED TO BE CATCHING but generally don’t. We’ll see how well this works when it’s busy tomorrow, especially if I’m alone at the desk but it was nice to evaluate myself today as not drowning at the front desk for the first time EVER.

Stage 4: Unconscious Competence

The hithertofore yet to be obtained stage for my work at the front desk and in the lab.

This is the goal.

This is the ultimate of ultimates.

I know once I subdue the beasty known as the front desk my next battle royale will be the lab. I’m doing okay, I have help if I have any questions, but I need to go faster. But I’m not beating myself up about it because I’ve learned in the post apocalypse, I can’t handle more than one challenge on my plate at one time. It stymies me into inaction which doesn’t help anyone…..especially me. So, for the front desk, I’m hoping by the end of this month or the middle of next I will have a handle on it and the aforementioned trainer won’t have too much of a need to bark instructions at me from over my shoulder. The lab is just a matter of accurate speed. Speed is a matter of muscle memory. Muscle memory in a body which feels like it’s wrapped in dementia most of the time is the hurdle I need to clear. But that, my dear reader, is a blog for another day…..soon.

Now & Zen

I’ve been working on reducing my need for Ashwagandha, not remove it, but to lighten my dose a little to see what happens and what other supplements I can use in concert with my Ashwa habit.  I’ve done some research and I settled on L-Theanin.  It’s found in green tea, but it isn’t green tea…no caffeine, no tannin no thermos full of machta to get my RDA.  It’s suppose to sedate the mind without making you tired.  At the moment,I want to be sedated.

Perhaps starting this new regime while still trying to acclimate to my new job might not have been the best decision.  I added it to my morning meds on Monday and until Wednesday everything was peachy, nothing had really changed.  I even had the same trainer I mentioned in Training Is Fun-Da-Mental who seemed to want to kick my legs out from under me every chance she got.  (My paranoia has informed me she has reported every foible back to the boss lady.  It has been a struggle to keep my paranoia and anxiety from comparing notes.)  But I survived, that was my point.  I had therapy on Wednesday night and woke up tired on Thursday and struggled to do the morning draws and processing but I felt every prickly ounce of stress and salty drop of anxiety the whole day.  I came home, ate a bowl of cereal and went to bed.  Today was a re-run, just add diarrhea .  I did do better with getting through but the Zen-like calm I normally feel with the double-double dose of Ashwa was barely holding me up.  I hate feeling stupid, and constantly correcting myself when I call myself stupid, idiot, etc. 

I have noticed though when I am able to push through the initial onslaught of anxiety due to a new situation, or a change in process, correction and so on, I can quickly take stock and realize what it is I need to do to get it done, fix it, or who to ask to help.  I am asking for help.  I consider that a win and a move in the right direction.  I’ve been assured I am doing well, and my coworker has heard nothing but good things about me from the people who have trained me but when I have days like today and yesterday I wonder.  I soothe myself with the statement “lf if this job doesn’t work out I will just get another one”  I honestly don’t want another one, the benefits of this one is AWESOME. 

Tomorrow I work at a busy site that’s open 7/365 and I don’t think anyone in the group will assign me to work in the processing lab or checking people in so it should just be a busy day of sticking people with needles.  I am going to double my L-Theanine dose and see if I feel any calmer.  I can’t afford to lose my Zen.  I like my Zen.  I want to take it home, put it in a box and buy it squeaky toys.   Plan B of my Zen-Quest is to take the L-Theanine at night and the Ashwa in the morning.  Plan 3 is to just go back to the double-double dose  and keep and eye on my Thyroid. 

Wish me Zen.

UPdate

i was wrong. When I showed up on -time with my co-worker from my site I couldn’t find a lab coat in the room that was in my size. No lab coat, no sticking people with needles. I spent the first few hours on the front desk after everyone else on the team trickled in fifteen to thirty minutes later, giving the people in the waiting queue about and hour to contemplate how easier and convenient having your blood drawn on Saturday isn’t. The lead eventually found me a labcoat that would fit, almost, and I’m pretty sure by the wrinkles in the thing she pulled it out of the dirty dab coat bin. It didn’t smell and it didn’t have any unsightly or unexplainable stains on it so who am I to complain. It got me off the desk.

As for the re-mix of the morning supplements, the double L-Theanine did the trick. I still felt a little harried, especially when the lead would go through her personal exercises of correcting everyone, not just me. I guess that was something, I’m not the only one she feels is totally inept and needs “training”.

I was exhausted though. My mind work up at the normal time, 4:30am, and wanted me to get up and work in my journal, write, or do something productive. My body refused to obey. It’s been a nice quiet restful day. I did get the nibs and converters in my fountain pens cleaned and ready for the new ink I just bought….One is called writers blood. If I like the way it flows I might buy a big bottle and make it my signature color. I don’t feel the heart of darkness black ink I used to use doesn’t represent me any more. We shall see.

Heart Beats in Time

Back in Uncomfortably Numb I mention my heart was constantly racing and I was dealing with runs of palpitations. I willed it not to be a cardiac problem because I didn’t have the time or emotional bandwidth to deal with it. I convinced myself it was the anxiety flipping switches in the my electrocardio system. I believed once I moved, got settled, got my unemployment paying my bills while I looked for a job everything would settle down back to normal. It didn’t. I’m able to track my heartrate thanks to this cool device called an Oura Ring. I learned about it when I was doing home exams and was told a big research hospital (either Johns Hopkins or Mayo, can’t remember) and the military were using it to predict COVID symptoms days before they were visible. It also tracks sleeping patterns, tells you how hard you should work out depending if you recovered enough from the day before based on your body temperature, restfulness, and heart rate through the night. It also tracks activity, not steps. Steps might be better because when I do a marathon stretch of crocheting it says I’ve walked 5 miles….without leaving my chair.

When I first got the ring my resting heart rate when I slept was in the 45-50 range. When I did my EKG training we had to give one another EKGs and my strips actually were marked as bradycardic (a slow heart rate under 60 bpm) but just barely. I bought it in March 2021 and wore it for about 5 months then it disappeared. I put it on it’s charger, went to the bathroom and when I came back it was gone. I cleaned out my room looking for it and didn’t find it. When I was moving at the end of this May it had miraculously found its way into a caddy I kept under my bed; a caddy I searched twice. Paranoia has provided a list of suspects and reasons, but I won’t go into that now. I charged the ring and when I first uploaded the nights report I was astounded to find my lowest heart rate was in the upper 80’s. Sometimes it would dip to a low to mid 60’s bpm but it still was hanging out in the 80’s. This was the week I was unpacking, so I wasn’t too worried. But it became a constant. I would take my pulse during the day for a whole minute and I would get the same numbers, plus I could feel the premature atrial contractions (PACs) which make up the palpitations. I figured I just needed to settle into my life more and find a job, so I tried not to worry about it.

Once I got the job my heart rate did decrease down to the low to mid 80’s. Still double when my consistent heart rate was when I first got the ring. All through the LabCorp training my heart rate was consistent with my pre-employment rate. I wasn’t having the palpitations as often as I did before but I was still having them when I sat still and cleared my distractions. I started working at my site. And then I got paid. And then my resting heart rate went back down into the low 50s. I’m still feeling the anxiety because I’m worried I’m going to fail, but that’s a normative state for me and I’m still having problems making ends meet right now because I’ve only had one paycheck and several months of bills but my sister C has been helping me (Thankfully!). Having the consistency of a job, of a schedule, of an income seems to the the balm my anxious heart needs to settle down into a normal rhythm.

This is something I’m going to need to keep in mind when I finally do make the big move. I need to have more money in the bank and a job in place so I won’t have to deal with my heart racing three paces ahead of me for months on end until I finally catch up to it.

Training is Fun-Da-Mental

So, I’m employed. I think I mentioned that. If I didn’t, sorry.   I spent one looooong week in a school-like training in front of a computer reading, no thinking required, and it completely flattened me. The second week was learning how to read, and enter orders then mock draw and process the ‘blood’. This week marks my first full week putting the second week’s processes into practice. I draw more in a day than I used to in a week, and after the first few very painful days I’m starting to get the hang of it.  I am picking things up quickly but as per usual with me, never quickly enough.

A question I get from my family is “will you be able to do this job?” Their meaning is are you going to be able to do this long term without going around the bend.  I think I can.  It’s not rocket science, it’s just sticking people with needles. It is very fulfilling when you think you know where it is and you’re right.  It’s rewarding when people say they didn’t feel anything or when they say they’ll ask for you next time because you’re one of three people to EVER to get the vein on that arm.  It is nice to have validation from perfect strangers that I am doing the job I am meant to be doing.  (To clarify, writing and being a writer is who I am, vampire is what I do to be who I am).

I’ve been thinking back to the late nights spent with my  journal planning for after the apocalypse.  The plan was I would go to the two week vampire school, I would get a job, I would move away and happily become who I want to be instead of what I was.   I expected it to take about a year. I was a little short sighted as to  how long it would take and how hard of a slog it would be and, of course, COVID. The joke about parents walking to school ten miles in the snow barefoot uphill…both ways, barely describes the process it has been. (Note ‘it HAS been’, not ‘it is’.) I’m still pushing forward on those plans concocted alone in bullet-proof ink only now I’m stronger, a bit wiser and just a little germaphobic.

Training was an exercise in keeping the anxious ‘I can’t do this’ and ‘I’m going to fail’ carefully cordoned off with a rope of self-talk and prayer. I did better than I thought I would even though I over-thought the simple stuff. The last few days of this week I purposely stretched my back and shoulders between the waves of patients, found comfortable shoes and meditated during lunch. Basically, figuring out what I need to do to do my job with the way my mind works. I’m enjoying the people I work with, they aren’t off put by my anxiety and understand I will do more and go faster I just need to settle a little. We had a float/trainer come in on Friday who, I don’t know if she meant to or not, but did a great job in shaking those foundations I had already built. She’s one of those trainers who believes her way is the best way and just barks instructions over your shoulder while you’re trying to learn something. Telling me to put in a code isn’t training me to find the code when she isn’t there. I’m sure I’ve been that kind of trainer when I was younger but I sincerely don’t appreciate it now and I strained to hold back my comments on her ‘training’ skills. How do you tell someone they need to be trained to train? My experience for training is from training volunteers. Two different animals, I know, but the process is the same.

So, the tally is…two weeks at an off-site training facility, one week on site, one paycheck that is already spent and my first six day week coming up. I’m looking forward to September 5…..Memorial Day…..a paid day off. What a concept. I balked at the two week off-site training we were required to endure when I was hired, but because of it the first week onsite was far more fun than mental.

The Rest is Silence

I lost a member of my flock last week. Dotty was a budgerigar which is more commonly known as a parakeet. I adopted her from a foster mom back at the height of COVID in 2020 as a companion for my bird Blu. Blu had lost his mate, Fluffy, a few years before and as social birds I thought having a companion would be good for him. Blu, sadly passed away a year or so later at the beginning of 2021. Dotty lost her mate as well and came from a home where human/bird interaction wasn’t very high on the young families list. I’m a hands on kinda bird owner but I learned to respect her boundaries. She was never let out of her cage before and I’m a big believer in free flight in the house. She smacked into the sliding glass door a few times and resented me having to hunt her down behind furniture to put her back in her cage. Sammy, the macaw, kinda wanted to see how comfortably she could fit the little ones head in her beak so I never let them play together. She liked to be sung to. I used to sing “Hello Dotty” to Hello Dolly. The most remarkable thing about this little feather-ball was she was always trying to talk and master the sounds around her. She always sang, chattered, and made vocalizations which were solid attempts to talk. I should have spent more time with her to aid her speaking ability but shoulda/woulda/coulda seems to be the refrain which serenaded her life.

When I lifted the cage cover to check on her after she had been making odd noises I found her with her wing caught in one of the slats on the bottom of her cage. I extricated her and moved her over to my bed to observe her. She was breathless from the struggle with the bars, both wings drooped in exhaustion but she wasn’t fighting my hold on her, and when I uncurled my fingers from around her she didn’t try to fly away. In fact, she held fiercely onto one finger. She started having some sort of fit where she would try and bend her head all the way back to her tail and fly. The first time this happened she landed on the floor. I got her back on the bed and made a nest in the blankets for her but the fitting kept coming over her and she would get dislodged. I had never seen this kind of behavior before and I was terrified she was dying. Frantic, I found a site that connects people with questions with experts with answers and paid the $1 sign-up fee and was passed off to a vet who wanted to look over the techs notes before she continued. I never heard back from the vet. By this time I had Dotty blocked on the bed with my leg, she was still fighting the seizures but she was getting tired. I took a video of an episode and sent it to the vet. She was against my leg a little on her side when I saw her wing quiver; then she was still. I informed the vet she was gone and put my phone down and picked her up and gently held her to my chest and sobbed. I cried harder over that small bird than I did for my mother or my two brothers deaths. It’s taken me almost a full week to clean out her cage and move her out of my life. I miss her singing.

I wish I could say my mind allowed me to make this all about her. Recriminations rained down on me like a flight of arrows calling to mind every mistake I made, when I didn’t keep her cage clean, when I didn’t let her exercise, when I kept her in front of the window on a hot day, how I never took her to the vet, how I shouldn’t have let her suffer and I should have just rung her neck and put her out of her misery. Then a shield came up and deflected the arrows with comforting words (which has never happened before, at least not this consciously); You didn’t know her age, birds hide their illnesses, budgies don’t have a long life in a cage. You loved her, you took care of her and you were with her up until the very end. I don’t know which voice is true. I know which one I want to believe and for the first time in my life, it isn’t the negative telling me it’s all my fault. The self talk I’ve been practicing in my daily life, when it doesn’t seem important, has built up the muscles of support when I was to weak to block the old ingrained mantra of self loathing and disappointment.

The emotions of mourning have unsettled me, tho. I spoke to my sister about it briefly because I’ve not been able to talk to anyone about it without tearing up, and she speculated it might be an accumulation of all the changes, deaths if you will, I have experienced in the last five or six months. She might be right, I’ll have to talk to Ellen about it at our next session, but having these emotions so close to the surface is troubling for me, well, emotionally. Crying is so foreign to me, I feel like I’m forcing the emotions so I try to stop it and it comes back up to the surface in the most inopportune moments. I’m trying, on one side of my brain, to allow myself to cry when I’m alone and where I’m supposedly safe and the other side decided it wants to watch TV, write a journal entry or a blog, play with Sammy, crochet or do anything other than the needful. I guess I will cry when I cry. Maybe once the tears are all dry I will find the peace which comes with silence.

Faith as a Verb

Verb: a word used to describe an action, state or occurrence, and forming the main part of the predicate of a sentence, such as hear, become, happen

Oxford Languages

Well, I got offered a job late Friday evening! I’m back to sticking sick people with needles. Well, hopefully not horribly sick people. I have been keeping a nebulous prayer in my heart that I would get a job quickly. I have faith, I have faith which has become knowledge. I knew God would not let me float unemployed for a long time. But trials being such each day felt like a week. Finally, I prayed outright to find a job, and a job was offered less than 12 hours later. You’d think after all this time of having faith and ‘knowing’ isn’t enough without supplication and action. Will I ever learn?

Doing the Needful

Boxes have been dancing around my head like cubed sugar plum fairies. In my first attempt at therapy with a Jungian therapist she diagnosed me with past sexual trauma based on an image in a dream she made me draw out (it was a doozy of a dream). I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO MEMORY OF THAT KIND OF TRAUMA. She told me it didn’t matter if I remember it or not, the dream image was proof. So I’ve been carrying around this idea in my head and dreading the day I would have to unbox it and deal with something I couldn’t remember. Ellen and I talked about this. No memory means no memory. The dream image is just a dream. There are survivor behaviors I exhibit (behaviors defined by talk-shows and internet articles), but it’s still not proof of abuse. We discussed my childhood and some of the frugal techniques my parents employed could explain a lot of those issues. Something which needs reframing further down the road.

Ellen pointed out the issues are in boxes and neatly put away. They are safe and secure and they don’t need to be dealt with right now, if ever. Not avoiding. Not ignoring. JUST NOT NOW. I can adjust their position on the shelves, but I don’t have to do anything right now. Right now is just too busy to be opening a possible cobra-in-the-box to scare me back into the void. I don’t need that right now. Relief doesn’t even describe what I felt at this realization.

Then why have the dream? Why would my subconscious bring this to my attention? One of the ideas which came to mind is I am starting to reduce my dependance on Ellen. It’s nice to have someone help you sort out the threats from the paranoia, if you will and it’s easier to have her on my calendar then to deal with things as they happen. I am doing okay on my own but I’m always afraid I’m going to mess up. When I start spinning on that fear I eventually stop myself and correct it with: “So what? You mess up. It’s not the end of the world.” Considering how many time I’ve found myself at the equivalent of square one due to mis-calculations and didn’t die or get arrested proves messing up isn’t the horror my brain has always made it out to be. Though the tool doesn’t present itself at the start of the spin, it does work once I get my hands on it. As long as I don’t stop trying I will succeed. As long as I get up every time I fall, I will cross the finish line. Right now, doing the needful is enough.

Dream a Little Dream

I have always had vivid dreams. I think of it as the wellspring of my creativity and imagination. You know, if you dream it you can do it. Unfortunately flying is still only capable in a plane, but I love flying in my dreams. It means you’re happy. I haven’t flown in months. What I don’t normally have are nightmares. Dreams where you are so relieved when you wake up and realize it isn’t true, when you have to repeatedly assure yourself ‘the monsters aren’t real’. I realize now that writing in my journal on Saturday defining my current mental state and having a frustrating conversation about my mother and brother with my sister the night before might have been enough to crack open the door of darkness.

The Dream

I was with my mother again and she was ordering me around like a five year old. I felt compelled to move around boxes, like wood shipping cartons, in a storeroom to “straighten things up”. The containers were too heavy, too over my head and the utter helplessness made me feel too weak to tell the monster of my dream “No, I don’t want to”. I was plotting to let one of the oversized vessel fall carelessly on my forearm and I could vividly envision the ulna and radius shattering about one third of the way up my right arm; essentially hurting myself to escape the situation I was in. I was successful at talking myself out of it because there was the an urgency of having to have to move in a set amount of time oppressing the whole psychodrama. I felt as trapped as I was when she was alive. Back at the time I didn’t realize I was feeling trapped because I committed to taking care of her, I just felt tired and drained. Not knowing I was trapped it never occured to me to gnaw off my leg to get away because it would be better than to be dead. I was trapped again, I was terrified and I couldn’t find a way out. Then I woke up.

My Interpretation

  • The boxes: Boxes that are out of the way, tucked high on shelves in a dark warehouse-y environment I see as the major issues I still need to address in therapy. They were on huge gorilla racks and I needed an industrial step-ladder on wheels to reach them. The shelves below were empty. There was trash on the top shelves around the boxes I was able to remove but trying to get my arms around these sharp edged monstrosities was not really an option. I’m not sure I was able to even shift them on the shelf much less navigate them to break just my arm, I did try. Luckily unsuccessfully.
  • The Warehouse: This is rather obvious, but the portion of my subconscious where I store all the things I don’t/can’t deal with right now.
  • The Shelves: The lower shelves were empty. To me, that is a confirmation of the work I have completed. I have done a lot of work. However, I have done the stuff that was in reach, the more recent trauma/drama of the last, I dunno, fifteen years or so. Having made the room, maybe that means I can move the bigger boxes down to the lower shelves and spread out the items in the box one by one. This would negate the need to accidentally lose control of the box and break something in an act of defiance and avoidance.
  • The Trash Around the Boxes: I’m not completely unaware of the storage facility in my subconscious. I know there are big things in there that need to be addressed. Since the lower shelves are clean I keep making a superficial attempt at moving the boxes around to make it look like I am working on it. Its like I can’t open those boxes until everything in my life is perfect. I need to stop studying the trees with a magnifying-glass and take in the scope of the forest ahead of me. I have tools, whether they are strong enough to fell trees we will see.
  • Mom: Other than being the general dragon in my dreams, trapping me and stripping me of all power, I don’t think she has any more weight in my dream than that. I believe your subconscious pulls the best characters in your mind to put on the scariest, freakiest and most unsettling drama it can to both scare you away from what it’s protecting and yet to encourage you slay the dragon.

what’s Next

I don’t know if it needs to be said, but I need to slay the dragon, (overcome my fear), bring the boxes down to a safe and comfortable working height (figure out and deconstruct the hidden trauma) and then store it in the light and close down the hidden place where only trauma dares to tread (bravely confront the past injuries, resolve the confusion, and end the subconscious suffering to move forward).

Psyche Stew

I realized yesterday I am stewing in anger…..not drowning in it like before…..but stewing in a thick savory broth of anxiety with juicy pieces of frustration at myself and the world. Quartering my accomplishments like new potatoes into my “inabilities”; not being able to or have a way to take care of myself, to think clearly, to get a job, to pay my bills. With some self-assessed failure and corresponding flagellation like peas and carrots in one big InstaPot life.

What this means is I am going back to the basics, the meat and potatoes if you will, of my recovery and try to gain the ground I’ve lost. I haven’t really lost it, I know where it is, I just need to deconstruct the stew, portion it out into easy-to-deal-with sizes, and trust in myself and God that this isn’t my last supper.