Moving Beyond

We are so close to being done with this whole moving, fixing up the new place,and then fixing up the old place for the new renters thing.  So.very.close.

Sabrina and DezNik came over to help me with cleaning/painting the old place today.  Soooo much help.  Sabrina is such a fast painter. Daaaang.  She knocked out about 45% of what needs to get done in one day.  And DezNik made my refrigerator look like new.  Awesome- that was one of my most dreaded jobs over there.

While we were getting ready to leave, the subject of a wedding came up.  The whole wedding photography thing was sure to follow.  I have to admit, it's a bit of a sore subject with me.

It's one of those topics where I need to sort of stand outside myself and watch myself talk about it.  Obviously (at least to anyone who has ever heard me rant), I've been a bit hurt and burnt by the whole subject.  I'm not going to make this post be another rant about the whole thing.

Tonight, I watched myself rant (I didn't stop myself though), and I realized I've turned some corner into bitterness.  I don't want that bitterness to live inside me, and I don't even realize it's there until I automatically develop verbal diarrhea when the subject comes up.  The truth is, I do believe everything I am saying is true.  The truth also is, I don't want to care so much.  I want to release all of those hurt feelings that propel the words.

I need to move on.  I've implemented a plan to avoid anymore awkward/either being used or looking like a jerk situations.  Now, I need to just more beyond any of the stuff that helped me develop my little rants in the first place. 

How the Radio Makes Me Hate Most Songs

First DJ- WOW!!!  This is an AMAZING song.  It is so truly original!!!
Second DJ- You are correct, my good Sir.  How long do you think it will take before we totally suck the life out of it, and make most of our listeners complete despise it?
First DJ-  Good question, my man!  With a song this great, it is going to take a bit of effort on our part.  Let's start out with the obvious:  We will play this song at LEAST twice and hour, every hour.
Second DJ- Great start!  I think I will call our sister stations and let them join in, and with careful planning we can make sure the song has almost continuous play time!
First DJ- FANTASTIC thinking!  You are on FIRE!!  I think we should let this go on for a few months.  But, you know, this song has a pretty unique beat.  I suspect some people may be pretty hard to flip from loving it to the pure hate that we are trying to accomplish.
Second DJ- NO WORRIES.  While we've been talking, I laid out a fresh new dance beat we can use on our song.  And when I say "fresh new beat", of course I am being completely ironic.  Now it can sound like every other song we play on our station, with only a hint of what made anyone love it in the first place!!!
First DJ-  I knew there was a reason I hired you!!  Let's get going!  This song isn't going to get hated all by itself!

Challenge Day Three (part two)- Something with Which I Struggle

I did not feel like writing about struggling yesterday, but I actually do today.  Every body struggles, so what's the big deal with writing about ones personal struggle, except for that whole icky vulnerable feeling that results from exposing oneself.

One of my favorite quotes is, "Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.  Be kind."  In my experience, this is true.  Every.single.person. I know a lot of people who have big and sometimes heartbreaking struggles.  I know one young lady who has rheumatoid arthritis at the age of 20.  I have several friends who are guiding their kids through difficult challenges.  Some of them are raising kids by themselves while working full-time jobs. I have friends who have battled cancer and won, yet still have to look over their shoulder for any recurrence.  I have friends whose mothers have cancer, and they are working their way through that difficult journey. Watching them fight through their challenges is so inspiring to me, and makes me realize that mine aren't as big as they sometimes seem to me.  My life in general is full of blessings that far outweigh what I am going to write about here. With that said, here I go.

My challenge is really... myself.  Managing myself, that is.  I've written about it in here before, but I struggle with keeping the chemicals in my brain balanced.  Between hormonal shifts and seasonal changes, I tend to be up and down a lot.

I am pretty balanced for a couple weeks every month.  Some months I stay balanced longer than other months.  I feel good without even trying.  I am more outgoing, and socializing comes naturally to me.  I smile more and people reflect that back to me.  I like to think that this is who I really am.  BUT, the other part of the month always shows up, even as I pray the good times will never end.  It comes with different intensities, but it always comes.  If you look up PMDD, it will describe a lot of what I am going to talk about here.  This isn't just a pms thing, it's something that takes over my life for weeks at a time, every month.

Although anxiety is the main issue I will talk about here, I also experience major loss of interest in pretty much all areas of life.  Total lack of motivation and concentration.  I've even experienced dizziness so bad that I have had to pull over while driving (that happened last February, a particularly brutal month).  There are times I just feel.so.very.angry, and so on edge that something as small as the television being too loud will make me feel like losing it.  I get crazy migraine head aches some months.  I have other physical symptoms too, but they are nothing compared to where I go in my head during the bad weeks.  The world smiles back at me during my good weeks, and then world also has a way of reflecting all of my swirling difficult emotions during the bad weeks.

I know that it probably is confusing to the people I am around the most- my friends at the hall, probably even work.  Smiling doesn't come as naturally because of the brain fog that shows up (once again in different intensities).  Socializing, especially with large groups, becomes almost painful.  Being in enclosed places with large groups of people gets really hard.  Going to the mall or the store loses any enticement. I try to go on weekday mornings, if possible, because there won't be as many people there. If I do have to go, my heart is usually racing.  Eye contact makes it worse so I tend to stare straight ahead or at the floor (this last month when I had to do some last minute school shopping with Kloe, I intentionally didn't wear my glasses or contacts, and it really helped).  Sometimes (like a slightly crazy person), I hum softly to myself because it helps me calm down.  I intentionally take deep calming breaths, and that seems to help too.  But mostly, I get in and out of the store as soon as possible.

Going to the hall for meetings can be hard too.  While I very much want to be there, when it is over and every one is standing and there is the buzz of voices all around, I start to feel a bit panicky.  I want Derrick and the kids to be able to talk to everyone so I don't want to rush them out, so there are quite a few times I will bolt to the car and wait for them.  I know it makes me look very antisocial (probably because it IS antisocial).

For the last two weeks I was in that bad part of the month and could hardly make it five minutes in the hall after meeting. This week I am back on the good two weeks and last night I stayed for awhile after meeting and chatted with no anxiety (although I still couldn't stay long because I had some things I had to get done at home)- just like that.  Once again, this all hits with varying intensities each month.  Some months the anxiety is completely manageable, and it doesn't disrupt how I interact socially as much.  It's very unpredictable.
 
Being like this is hard on my relationships.  Not so much with my family and super close friends, because they understand I am doing the best I can and they choose to love me in spite of it.  It's more with friends that maybe don't know me as well, because it's not something I just talk about all of the time (although apparently I do write about it!)

So, I am extremely cyclical throughout my weeks.  Now add in the cycle of seasons.  Winter almost sends me over the edge.  I feel like I am hanging on to my sanity by my fingernails by the end of it.

I do everything I can to manage all of this. Some things I've tried have helped, some not so much.

I went to a doctor to balance my hormones for quite awhile.  Even though I took tons of pills (bovine in nature, supposed to replace missing hormones), used progesterone creme, took a gaba supplement and 5htp to control the anxiety, I didn't feel the results justified the crazy cost.  I'm disenchanted with the medical community as a whole when it comes to hormone issues with women.  I've told every doctor I have been to about how this just takes over my life, and how unbearable it can be.  They look at me, see a woman who is physically healthy as far as they can see, and then they treat it as just one of those things a woman has to live with.  No big deal.  Grr.  I feel like besides message boards full of other women going through this, I mostly am going to have to keep trying to figure it out myself.  I've toyed with the idea of taking birth control pills again (it helps some women), but am a little scared because I had such a violent reaction to them before.

There are some things that have helped though.  I am extremely regular with exercise- even though I have fallen temporarily off of the running wagon, I am still a regular at the gym.  I try to eat healthily.  Not perfect, by any means, but reasonable.  I try to stay in a positive frame of mind and surround myself with awesome people (and there are a lot of you), and even in my darker times I try to stay connected.  I go to the meetings regularly, fighting that voice that is telling me to stay home.  I keep going to work- very rarely do I call in sick or let myself off of the hook.  I fight through the bad days, and do my best to ignore the anxiety.  I take medication which actually has been helping quite a bit.  I try very hard not to take it out on my family and friends, even if it means hiding out in my room when I'm feeling unreasonably agitated; a healthy family is completely essential to my frame of mind.  One of the best things I ever did for myself was to marry a very supportive man.  His kindness and understanding during the bad times take a huge amount of the stress off of my shoulders.  I've also tried hard to develop a separate voice of reason that is as detached from my emotions as possible. It doesn't make the feelings go away, but it helps me to manage my reactions to life a little better, and to have some discernment as to what would normally bother me versus my current feelings toward a situation.  I'm not always 100% successful with that one, but I seem to be getting better at it as time goes on.

The most frustrating part of this, is that I've been like this as long as I can remember.  I know how to manage myself better than I used to, but I haven't been able to make it go away.  And the really sucky part as a woman, is it probably isn't EVER going to go away.  As time goes on, it will just morph into some other, equally difficult thing to manage.

So, there you have it.  This isn't something I like to talk or write about all of the time, because I don't want it to have any bigger claim on my mind and life than it already has.  It is my biggest goal to be a positive person.  I want to be a positive presence in my kids lives, Derrick's life, my sister and dad's lives, and my friends lives.  Even though this is something I will always be dealing with, it is not who I am, and it is my goal is to still act like who I really am regardless of what is going on inside.

The Good Life and Why I Shouldn't Watch Documentaries

I'm technically off of work for the summer, but today I am filling in for a co-worker.  The previous three days of this week, however, have been stupendous.  Things aren't exactly getting done with the reckless abandon I had hoped for, but I have enjoyed the slower pace of life.

I've managed to get my house (mostly) in order (although it could always fall apart again at any moment), go on a couple long walks/runs (well, I ran for a couple minutes; it was mostly fast walking), read a book, learned a new song with Derrin on our guitars, and go on a mom/daughter date with Kloe.

We are going camping/motorcycle riding this weekend, so Derrick and I finally went out and bought some safety gear for Derrin and myself (to share, since we also share a motorcycle).  For once we won't look like the only redneck riders in the bunch.  I'm relieved to have finally spent the money on the gear.  I had some gnarly wrecks the last time we did a moto trip, and I was very fortunate that I didn't end up getting really hurt.  This time I'm planning on NOT trying to keep up with the big boys, and mainly just trusting Derrick to take me out on the trails so I don't end up over my head again.

Kloe and I went out for sushi and shopping for our mom/daughter date.  The boys went to see Iron Man 3, us girls did our own thing instead.  After we went home and Kloe went to bed, I started thumbing through Netflicks, trying to find shows that I would normally only watch if Derrick isn't around (chick flicks and documentaries).  I watched one PBS documentary about what successful relationships have in common.  I enjoyed it, but it's light fluffiness made me feel like diving into darker documentary terrain.

It had been awhile since I'd watched a serious documentary.  I tend to go a little crazy over anything more serious than about what crap our food supply is, and even those tend to make me wander around the grocery store picking up items, putting them down, and then leaving with nothing but (organic) bananas and (organic) milk.   I was looking through some of my older blogs, and found this one about the time I watched a documentary called "Collapse".  Because of that documentary, that summer I convinced my poor father to plant tons of potatoes in his field.  Waaay too many potatoes for any one family to eat unless there was, in fact, the widespread famine they were intended for.  Clearly, documentaries are not my friend.  Sometimes, I just need to depend on my more informed and calmer type friends.

Anyways, I found a BBC documentary about Hiroshima.  It called to me; we all grow up knowing that the bomb was dropped over there, and of course we all know intellectually that it was horrible, but I'd never really taken the time to find out the whole story.  The documentary told the story with old movie footage, and first person accounts with reenactments.  The escalation of events was intense.  It might as well have been a horror movie.  By the time the bomb actually dropped out of the plane, I was following several experiences of what regular Japanese people were doing on that day, including a doctor, a nurse, a bank teller, and a husband and wife having breakfast and playing with their two young children.  These were all just normal people who had absolutely nothing to do with what their wacked out powers-that-be were up to (and the powers-that-be were truly mad), and yet they were the ones to pay a truly nightmarish price.

The portrayal of the city going through the annihilation was so incredibly realistic.  The people who vanished instantly in the eye of the bomb were the fortunate ones.  For the survivors on the edges, the sky was black, and everything was completely blown to bits and on fire.  I watched it as long as I could.  The story that finally made me burst into tears and frantically turn it off, knowing I'd have never be able to scrub it out of my brain, was about the young family who'd been having breakfast together.  The last scene was of the mother stumbling out of her crumbled house, screaming for her children, only to discover that one of them was half buried in the rubble, and there was no way she'd be able to get her out before the oncoming flames consumed her.  Even in my worst nightmares I have never thought of something so horrible.

The whole thing made me think of North Korea.  I read a lot of the articles about their leader's big talk and threats, but beyond the articles I always read the reader's comments below.  There are so many people think that preemptively nuking that country is the answer.  It makes me sick.  I hate how easy it is for humans to strip others of their own humanity.  It makes the whole "might making right" so much easier when you don't have to think about all of the babies and innocents that get fried so you can dominate whatever wack job is threatening you.  Man, I hate this world sometimes.  Once again, yes I know that this isn't how it is always going to be, but sometimes I can hardly take the present.   And that is the end of that rant.

Until next time....

"Paradise" Past

Paradise Past

"Many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."~William James


"It isn't what they say about you, it's what they whisper."~Errol Flynn


“Some people brighten a room by entering it; others, by leaving it.” Lynn Rios

Part of why I feel so verbally congested is that there is so much I'd love to scream out to the world, to just blast it out there, and yet to put it out there is to open myself up to another world of hurt. I am beyond frustrated with a world that is willing to judge me based on preconceptions rather than looking deeper into a history that should scream to truth to everyone.

I've heard comments made about how sad it is that people are so quick to criticize others with addiction problems. I have a very big problem when people say things like that. The people I know who may "criticize" someone with an addiction, are very rarely "quick" to do so. Most the time if you have had someone with an addiction in your life, you have fought for that person for YEARS. You have been through their ups, praying that they can hold it together this time, only to come crashing down with them. You have begged for them to make different choices, you have tried to love them through it, to believe in them and hold their hand. You have lent them money, you have let them live with you, talked your own employer to give them a chance only to later feel completely used and embarrassed. You have watched them lie to your parents over and over, saying anything to get more money out of them even when your parents are on a fixed income and barely able to make it anyways. You have watched your mother worry for years, the stress making her sick. And then you get to watch the person with the addiction sit back and blame everyone else for how crappy his life is. It is now YOUR fault, because you had the audacity to finally say enough is enough.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.

A lifetime of these people with addictions and zero personal responsibility causing myself and all the people I love pain, destroying themselves and anyone near them, and yes, I am done. I don't care if people think I am self-righteous and judgemental. If anyone is more interested in listening to the addicted person's 'wha wha' story instead of looking at the trail of destruction BLAZING behind that person, then I don't need that person in my life either.

Just know this: The people who came before you in the addict's life DID care. They did all they could to save the person you think you will be able to save with your love. But the problem was never that there wasn't enough love in the addicted ones life, it was that he loved his addiction more than he loved the people who loved him.

The truth is, I have had to make choices in my own life about addictions too. I could have chose to self-medicate my life away. I could have decided to live a life completely against everything my parents ever told me was important and true. I could have done things that made my mom cry and then drank until I didn't feel guilty about it anymore. And it did take me awhile to point my finger at myself and make the changes I needed to make to not let that poison infect my life like I'd seen it infect others.


Life is nothing but a string of choices.

Well, then addiction is a disease, right? No one chooses to get a disease. No one chooses to get diabetes either. But what about the choice to sit there and eat sugar until you die? You have to choose to live. You choose to not eat the sugar. And at least the sugar doesn't make you use and hurt everyone in your life so much that eventually there is nothing left.

This world believes in something called "tough love". I've been part of a family with issues of alcoholism for so long, words like "co-dependency" and "enabling" are completely understood. The only thing that ever protected my family from the the pull of enabling our addicted members was being part of an organization that practiced tough love when it got to the point where the addiction was so out there (DUI's in the newspaper, outlandish behavior) that it had to be addressed. Even then, help was extended first. Help has always been extended, from friends, family, all hands reached out with help. But what do you do when the addiction means more than all the love and help in the world? You protect yourself. Finally, you protect yourself.

When the addicted goes off and starts another life with a new host to feed the addiction, but keeps the addiction, do you quit protecting yourself? No. A lifetime of experience says NO. As long as the addiction is active, it's like poison just waiting to infect you and your life.

I am angry. I am hurt that people who should have the brains to ask me really important questions, haven't. People should be able to look at my sister and I, and see how much we love our parents, and that we have always and will always do anything we can to help them. We respect them. We cared for Mom all through her darkest years, and we fought for her with every single ounce of love we carry for her in our hearts. She was our best friend, a huge and essential part of our lives. Everything that ever hurt her, hurt us too.

Sometimes I think it may have hurt us more- it's a hard thing to watch someone you love get hurt repeatedly by the same person or people. It builds up in a person. To see a person you love hurt, and disrespected is almost unbearable, but when you have addicts hanging around, you get to experience it over and over. I am unwilling and unable to act as if there is no damage and that what has happened never really happened.

I am done.

Disgruntled on a Wednesday

On the way to work today, I realized I was in a far worse mood than usual. So, as I crept along on 39th Street traffic, I jotted down the top three things that had managed to aggravate me this morning the most:

1. The magazines displayed for everyone to see as they walk through the line at Safeway (or any other food store). Especially the ones shouting out "THE BEST AND WORST BODIES OF THE SUMMER", in which they show a perky, tanned and toned 16 year old girl in a bikini right next to a much older woman who may or may not have the best body ever. It makes me SO angry that they display this trash right where everyone in the world passes by (assuming you need to buy food to eat), trying to brainwash us all about what feminine beauty should look like. I don't need that!!! I don't think ANY woman needs to be force fed this absolute garbage. Most of us struggle with some level of body image as it is. It especially hurts me when I have my children in line with me. I don't want my daughter OR son to look at these magazines. My beautiful little daughter is only 6 years old, and already she has expressed worry over whether a certain pair of pants makes her look "fat". She already feels the pressure of this world's commercial monster, trying to make girls and women feel like we have to be perfect to be acceptable. And why do they want to make us feel that way? The next natural step is to spend money on the products that will make us feel pretty. *sigh*

2. The media in general. I hate how they make gods out of regular people. I hate how they set people up high and then gather around to feast on the very same people during hard times. I hate their "hard hitting reports" where they expose whatever and demonize people to the public, only to make the same people seem like absolute angels when they die.

We haven't had satellite for almost two months now- we pretty much only watch PBS- and STILL we had to hear about Michael Jackson every time we turned on the television. He was a great musician and artist and it is sad that he died, but I DON'T KNOW HIM or any other celebrity who dies. Why should his death receive so much more attention from all of us than any other mortal? *sigh*

3. Traffic on 39th Street. I have to drive this road every day to work, and inevitably I get stuck behind someone who wants to play it "safe" by driving 15 miles per hour in a 35 per hour speed limit. Last week it was this guy on a cute little motorcycle. I really had to resist the urge to push him along faster with my car. *sigh*

Anyways, thanks for reading my list. I feel a little better now.