Recently a friend wrote this sentence in an email to me: "I used to be a HUGE oversharer before social media was a thing." I thought about social media. Lots of people just put up pictures of their vacations / parties / marriages / children at their finest moments and call it a day. I actually know of numerous people who have deactivated their Facebook accounts b/c the competition got to be too much. They feel like everyone else is saying, I have the best vacation, the best husband/wife, the best baby. With the implication of, and you don't. I got the feeling that this friend who emailed me feels like sharing their life, in all of its dimensions, is frowned upon.
I have a problem with the term "oversharing." Also, the word "needy." "Oversharing" assumes that no one wants to hear your personal stuff, that it's impolite or socially wrong to share your personal stuff, that we should all walk around projecting only positivity and the more shallower dimensions of our lives.
Everything looks shiny; no one allegedly has to feel anything except YAY YAY YAY.
When really, I think it's a continuum. At my old job, I sure as hell would not share personal things with certain people. Especially administration. Most jobs are like that. But I think it's okay to share things with people who are your friends or close colleagues. Because what the heck are friends for if you can't be there for each other during the positive *and* negative times?
My friends are some of the best people ever because they have listened empathetically to me and really been there for me, especially over the past year-and-some-months, when things happened with my mom. Or they have distracted me with wonderful things like coffee and Indian food and visits and children and simply the beauty of their presence. I never feel judged by them. And I in turn feel special and honored when they come to me with important emotional things. Like: wow, they trusted me enough to ask me to listen. I feel capable and strong when I can support them.
The word "needy"gets kicked around a lot, just like "over-sharing." "Needy" pathologizes the idea of interdependence. As a culture, we live under this delusion of self-sufficiency, like that's the ultimate thing to strive for. It's very American. Or United-States-ian, I should say. But when you dissect it, the idea of INdependence is fundamentally impossible unless you decide to become a hermit on top of a mountain. And then what happens if you break your leg or need to go into town for food?
Each in their various ways, my mom and dad raised me to believe that self-sufficiency was the ideal. In reality, they were not self-sufficient, but I was raised to believe that I should strive to be. I think they thought they were doing me a service. This created a schism in my thinking which still continues. On one hand, I feel the old emotional pull: do it yourself at all costs. Appear strong at all costs. If you can't, that's bad. Other people will take advantage of you OR You're weak. Incapable. Less-than-adequate.
On the other hand, I know my reality, and I try really hard not to judge myself for it. Ahem, I'm not saying I succeed in being nonjudgmental, but I try. Yeah, sometimes I need. Everybody needs. And sometimes I NEED. And everyone in their life goes through a period of that NEED too, whether they admit it or not.
I think about need, and sharing, and interdependence also as it applies to teaching. I think about it a LOT. When I went through teacher training in grad school (ages ago… yikes!) I was taught that students are people, that learning is collaborative (students learn from the teacher, students learn from each other, the teacher learns from the students), that each student will have a different learning style, that it's okay to be honest with your students when you don't know the answer, that it's okay to be vulnerable and to expect (and accept) your students' vulnerabilities.
Then… I taught at a certain place for awhile and it really made an impression on me. The culture was rather the opposite of the way I'd learned to teach. Not necessarily through word but through example, the ideal classroom was presented as: the teacher makes the rules, the students follow the rules, the students get punished if they don't follow the rules, each student is an information bucket into which you deposit key skills, and then they somehow translate those skills into a well- or poorly- written paper and then you grade them. Nobody needs to be feeling their feelings all over the place b/c there's no room for that in the syllabus.
I really tried to be that latter teacher and I did not do well being that teacher, and it burned me out. I had colleagues who taught at that place, and still do, who somehow managed to be a combination of the former teacher and the latter teacher. Or colleagues who were so untouchable (some concept called tenure of which I know not) that they could be the former teacher and the administration could go… fly a kite.
If anywhere I thought I could succeed as the former type of teacher, it would be in the teaching of writing. Whether you are writing poetry or a thesis-based argument, the idea of empathy is important. The ability to accept and not vilify emotions is important.
Now that I'm feeling a lot better, I'm going to start revising / submitting my own work again in January. I'm also thinking about teaching (as a concept), because I really miss it. But, especially given my geographic limitations, I don't know where the right place is for me, if any.
Showing posts with label progress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label progress. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Monday, November 11, 2013
20 things : Positivity
So for those of you who read my blog and think that I've fallen into an abyss of morbid reflection... you may be right. However, DBT is all about the "and." Simultaneously acting on behalf of your recovery while accumulating and acknowledging positive experiences. I wanted to make this entry b/c I need you to know, and to remind myself as well, that there are positive things in my life. These are in no particular order.
1. I helped Mike re-jigger his office set-up in the apartment last weekend, which involved the purchasing of a desk, the disassembling of another desk. I felt... well... helpful and not burdensome. It was a really REALLY good feeling. And the new set-up, although it will not be complete until December, is already looking smashing. It unblocks some energy in the apartment, allowing for new openness and flow.
2. I've taken advantage of National Novel Writing Month to write a poem a day. The official NaPoWriMo isn't until April, but I wanted a project for November to push through my writer's block. In regards to beginning a draft, Stacey Waite said "writing ain't no thing." Because all my emotions have been so weighty lately, it's bled into my attitude about writing as well. Every possibility becomes too heavy, too important. When you write a poem a day, they just can't all be important. So far it's working out well. I'm eleven poems in.
3. Autumn: the colors, scents, tastes, sounds... except the sound of leaf blowers. Use a rake, dammit.
4. I lost a lot of weight and thus dropped some sizes. I went from a size 12 to a size 6 or 8. Probably I'll opt for 8 because I like things to not be too tight. I like jeans better now. So I bought myself some pairs of jeans. The losing weight did not make me happy or sad --I did not intend to lose the weight. But I'm trying to keep it off. The reason this qualifies for Positivity is the jeans. Jeans are nice sometimes.You can just put them on. I forgot. (for those of you who don't know me IRL, I wear dresses and skirts).
5. I've been making a lot of progress in my healing process. I don't really want to talk about it right now though. But I can notice the progress, which gives me hope for the future.
6. I've had the fleeting desire that it's time to consider making a plan to go back to teaching.
7. I like Thanksgiving and Christmas. And my birthday. They all take place in November and December. It's like bathing one's brain in mulled cider to make January and February go down more smoothly. Not saying it works 100%. But I'll deal with January when it happens.
8. Friends. They are good to me. I value them like family. I love them. I need them. They mean more to me than words can say.
9. Shutterdown <<< this is a friend's project. It's also the music of dream alchemy. You should click / listen / support.
10. I made soup for the first time this year. It's possible that I made soup for the first time in two years, because I may not have made soup at all last year. Now I have a lot of soup. Chicken soup anyone?
11. The art community at Polyvore. This site may look commercial and material on the outside but once you peel back the layers you find many amazing sub-communities of collage artists.It's not actually all about clothes.
12. Our apartment keeps getting cuter as we make improvements to its layout and decor. I'm tentatively planning a crepe party for my birthday. Like, I make crepes and everyone brings a topping and then there's a lot of eating and celebration.
13. It's a year since I started IOP and I can notice how much better I am. I'm listing this one separately from #5. [It's my blog and I can list stuff how I want to.] It's just that... at the time, I didn't / couldn't see ANY way that my life could get better. It was all raw emotion. There are still days when I take life in hourly chunks. Sometimes minute-ly chunks. But that is okay.
14. I've gotten back into yoga. Yoga is good.
15. I can read stuff again. You might not know this b/c I've kept it quiet, but a year ago my concentration was so bad I could barely watch a half-hour sitcom without getting restless and amped up. I wasn't able to read a magazine, much less poetry. Reading poetry made me cry. It reminded me of how much I [thought that I had] lost in a short period of time. But last week I read a fucking essay on poetic theory by Lyn Hejinian, and it made sense to me --relatively speaking-- the argument was not very accessible. So yay for the restoration of cognitive function. Therapist N said it would come back.
16. I had both kitties with me on the couch the other day.
17. I've managed to not fall off the DBT wagon, and my last IOP stint ended in early August.
18. My hair came out this really unexpected, pretty color the last time I dyed it.
19. I've made the decision that in January, I'm going to start again to send work out on a schedule. Last January I was not ready. I'm taking it slow this time. Planning two months ahead. I'm excited that my psyche has / will have mended to the point where I can actually consider a work schedule again and not just make stabs at it and beat myself up when I don't fulfill my expectations. Even though January 2013 did not work out so well, the month of January has momentum. I broke away from university and started my full-time devotion to writing in January 2012. It feels like longer. Can you believe I only got seven months into my one-year [ha!] sabbatical when my mom did what she did? I was at the top of my game. It was like being smacked down by a force of nature.
20. My dad and Pam said they were gonna come to Pittsburgh and visit me. Maybe it will be near my birthday. I really miss my folks and although they can probably only do 48 hours, it will still be good to see them.
20. My dad and Pam said they were gonna come to Pittsburgh and visit me. Maybe it will be near my birthday. I really miss my folks and although they can probably only do 48 hours, it will still be good to see them.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
20 things : Radical acceptance is going to drive me more crazy rather than make me more serene
1. I was riding the bus home (of course?). The second leg of the ultra-annoying-because-it's-cold-and-two-buses-early-morning-Tuesday-yoga commute.
2. I felt rather centered.
3. Plus, I'd been in terrible pain all yesterday evening and this morning. We did some serious shoulder stretching that actually relieved it.
4. As we lurched along, I reflected on my progress of late and thought I've been doing pretty good. I have been SLOWLY desensitizing myself to the World of People.
5. In order to get better, I have been doing these things, in order: therapy, meeting friends, poetry stuff, and yoga. Every week. And it's still challenging to get most of them to happen --everything except meeting friends.
6. But I'm starting to feel good because it's less challenging now. Thought I'm frustrated with the crawling pace, I'm also starting to be more okay with that too.
7. So I'm contemplating these thoughts, and I go to get off the bus.
8. As I'm walking up the aisle, I let go of a pole too soon, the driver slams on the brakes, I severely unbalance and run into a crowd of old people waiting to get off at the front.
9. I could feel myself fall forward, try to stop myself, know I'm going to hit them. I'm helpless in my momentum.
10. I hit them.
11. I rain a hail of apologies on them. Not just like sorry but SorrySorrySorrySorrySorry!
12. This old man turns to me and gives me the look of death. Like, "you're nothing." Like, "I curse you and your future generations." And then slowly looks away.
13. The bus doors open. They get off and proceed to the intersection.
14. I stay farther up the street and have a panic attack.
15. Finally I make my way to my apartment, barely able to keep it together.
16. During my, um, surrendering process, this thought occurred to me: what would it be like for me to be able to forgive myself? Especially for stupid shit. Stuff I can't help. Stuff that's an accident.
17. I monitor my every move. I'm choreographing all the time. I rarely stop being self conscious.
18. Monitoring and choreographing is a life-long trait. That is not a Jill-had-a-setback-after-her-mom thing. The self-loathing I feel when I slip up is also perpetual. Post-mom-suicide, the amplitude is higher.
19. But, you know, what if it weren't? What if I could somehow stop hating myself so viciously? [I can't believe I'm blogging this to the entire goddamn internet. Well, theoretically.]
20. I see no concrete way forward to this goal. It's like saying I'm going to build a rocket from recycled cereal boxes and shoot myself to the moon.
Here's a photo:
Choose Life
Friday, September 20, 2013
20 things : the group
1. I feel such a sense of relief, having experienced the first iteration of the Survivors of Suicide support group last night.
2. I was worried that the group was only going to be heavy, crushing, scary, and not show its helpful aspects immediately.
3. I want to give an indication of my experiences without breaking the confidentiality of others... so no details about other group members. Which means that I probably won't blog about the group much other than this first week.
4. I feel I owe it to those who were extremely concerned after my last blog entry to show that I am feeling somewhat better. I feel guilty about making others extremely concerned. I don't think the last blog entry was particularly extreme, considering all I've written about. Joanna's voice echoes in my head right now we are not responsible for other people's feelings. We are responsible for our own feelings.
5. But sometimes, with loved ones, the boundaries blur. About who is responsible for what. So I write this entry, in part, because of that. To reassure others, and to assuage my own guilt.
6. I mostly want to talk about the philosophies of the group leader regarding suicide. To me they are unusual and comforting at the same time.
7. She believes that suicide is not, in fact, preventable. She has research to show that with or without psychiatric treatment, the suicide rates remain the same.
8. She believes that suicide is its own illness, a massive failure of the frontal lobes' executive function--separate from depression, bipolar disorder, and so forth.
9. She believes that the idea that is prevalent in society "suicide is preventable" leaves the survivors with a huge amount of guilt over what they could have, should have done to save their loved ones.
10. This idea is, in one way, immensely comforting to me --because I am still obsessed with what I should have done to help my mom. If only I had been more aggressive about talking to her doctors. If only I had taken charge and flown her up to Pittsburgh.
11. You see, I'd had this idea that at some point, I would have to move her up here and take more of an active role in her life, sorting out her myriad problems for her. Because her decision making skills had been going downhill for decades, plural. Talk about failure of executive function.
12. But we could never have lived together, ever. Because of how toxic our relationship was when we were that proximal. It was not good for me.
13. I had been trying for years--half my life--trying to and succeeding in repairing the damage that --to be frank --she either caused or set me up for.
14. So I had been putting it off --offering to move her to Pittsburgh --b/c I knew it would cost a lot of money to set her up and she has none. I also knew that much of the time it would be like taking care of a child. And I also knew that the relationship had the potential to quickly turn into me = caregiver and she = a mean, combative, even at times violent child.
15. And I've been struggling with this idea of I PUT IT OFF FOR ME ME ME. And so I let her die. I chose me over her.
16. Ironically, I wonder if my relatives in Georgia thought they were doing the same thing when they moved her down there. Like they could swoop in and fix a truly unfixable situation.
17. My mother had a real talent for inspiring this kind of We Will Save the Day kind of help... and then TOTALLY resisting 99% of the help. It. Was. Truly. Maddening.
18. The DBT version of helping me with my survivor's guilt is : waterfall. I may have blogged about this before. Joanna asked me one day to come up with an image that would snap me out of the rumination (dwelling-on) trajectory that I've just described. I came up with waterfall. Not because it was a beautiful example of mother nature's creation... but because it was beguiling yet destructive. If you stand under Niagara, you will be crushed. The water surges forward under its own power, cutting a channel into the rock because that's what it does. You are just a brittle bag of bones compared to the power of the waterfall.
19. According to our SoS group leader, my mom's brain slowly stopped being able to make the decisions necessary to keep her alive. Complex decisions, but also decisions that we all take for granted. It is a radical idea. However, I'm considering it. Not only do I want to believe it because it lessens my guilt, but it also makes so much damn sense when I look at the course of her life over the past twenty years. If you think about it, it actually connects to waterfall. Well, okay, it does for me.
20. So that's what I got from my first week of group. I'm glad there are only 20 things. It tells me when I can stop writing. B/c I'm exhausted now. Whew. Time to hop in the shower and start my day!
2. I was worried that the group was only going to be heavy, crushing, scary, and not show its helpful aspects immediately.
3. I want to give an indication of my experiences without breaking the confidentiality of others... so no details about other group members. Which means that I probably won't blog about the group much other than this first week.
4. I feel I owe it to those who were extremely concerned after my last blog entry to show that I am feeling somewhat better. I feel guilty about making others extremely concerned. I don't think the last blog entry was particularly extreme, considering all I've written about. Joanna's voice echoes in my head right now we are not responsible for other people's feelings. We are responsible for our own feelings.
5. But sometimes, with loved ones, the boundaries blur. About who is responsible for what. So I write this entry, in part, because of that. To reassure others, and to assuage my own guilt.
6. I mostly want to talk about the philosophies of the group leader regarding suicide. To me they are unusual and comforting at the same time.
7. She believes that suicide is not, in fact, preventable. She has research to show that with or without psychiatric treatment, the suicide rates remain the same.
8. She believes that suicide is its own illness, a massive failure of the frontal lobes' executive function--separate from depression, bipolar disorder, and so forth.
9. She believes that the idea that is prevalent in society "suicide is preventable" leaves the survivors with a huge amount of guilt over what they could have, should have done to save their loved ones.
10. This idea is, in one way, immensely comforting to me --because I am still obsessed with what I should have done to help my mom. If only I had been more aggressive about talking to her doctors. If only I had taken charge and flown her up to Pittsburgh.
11. You see, I'd had this idea that at some point, I would have to move her up here and take more of an active role in her life, sorting out her myriad problems for her. Because her decision making skills had been going downhill for decades, plural. Talk about failure of executive function.
12. But we could never have lived together, ever. Because of how toxic our relationship was when we were that proximal. It was not good for me.
13. I had been trying for years--half my life--trying to and succeeding in repairing the damage that --to be frank --she either caused or set me up for.
14. So I had been putting it off --offering to move her to Pittsburgh --b/c I knew it would cost a lot of money to set her up and she has none. I also knew that much of the time it would be like taking care of a child. And I also knew that the relationship had the potential to quickly turn into me = caregiver and she = a mean, combative, even at times violent child.
15. And I've been struggling with this idea of I PUT IT OFF FOR ME ME ME. And so I let her die. I chose me over her.
16. Ironically, I wonder if my relatives in Georgia thought they were doing the same thing when they moved her down there. Like they could swoop in and fix a truly unfixable situation.
17. My mother had a real talent for inspiring this kind of We Will Save the Day kind of help... and then TOTALLY resisting 99% of the help. It. Was. Truly. Maddening.
18. The DBT version of helping me with my survivor's guilt is : waterfall. I may have blogged about this before. Joanna asked me one day to come up with an image that would snap me out of the rumination (dwelling-on) trajectory that I've just described. I came up with waterfall. Not because it was a beautiful example of mother nature's creation... but because it was beguiling yet destructive. If you stand under Niagara, you will be crushed. The water surges forward under its own power, cutting a channel into the rock because that's what it does. You are just a brittle bag of bones compared to the power of the waterfall.
19. According to our SoS group leader, my mom's brain slowly stopped being able to make the decisions necessary to keep her alive. Complex decisions, but also decisions that we all take for granted. It is a radical idea. However, I'm considering it. Not only do I want to believe it because it lessens my guilt, but it also makes so much damn sense when I look at the course of her life over the past twenty years. If you think about it, it actually connects to waterfall. Well, okay, it does for me.
20. So that's what I got from my first week of group. I'm glad there are only 20 things. It tells me when I can stop writing. B/c I'm exhausted now. Whew. Time to hop in the shower and start my day!
Sunday, September 8, 2013
20 things : Opposite Action ftw / wtf
1. So, opposite action is a DBT concept wherein, even (or especially) if all one's emotions are screaming that one does a behavior that isn't helpful, one does the opposite behavior.
2. I realize that if you are reading this and have never worked a recovery program with behavioral elements, it may sound like I'm in a cult or something. For those of you who have known me since 1995 or so, you know this therapy has helped me greatly before, and now it's helping me rebuild again after what happened last year.
3. For some reason my immediate grief response was extreme social anxiety, bordering on agoraphobia. In general, the action-urge for anxiety is to avoid the thing that makes me anxious.
4. [Note that avoiding was a useful and protective device at a certain point in human evolution. Is that a saber toothed tiger waiting for me in the brush? I'd better hide until it passes by.]
5. People make me anxious. Thus, 99.875% of them I would rather avoid.
6. But then I'd never leave my house. Which is sort of what happened in April when I had that relapse bit.
7. Needless to say, never leaving the house would end up with me bitter, angry, ever more phobic, and possibly dead before my time b/c isolation leads to the Circling Thoughts.
[....]
8. Exposure therapy is a thing they do for OCD and phobias. For example, if a person is deathly afraid of dogs, she might start out looking at pictures or videos of dogs, then move to, I dunno, five minutes of a dog on a leash in the same room with her... And end up where she can pet the dog or have it lick her hand and such.
9. The idea is that the patient participates in increasing levels of exposure. She sits with the frightening experience until her fear comes down. Allegedly, her brain can't maintain a fear response with the volume cranked to 11 for an extended period of time. When her brain processes the fact that nothing bad is happening as she looks at the video of the dog, the anxiety will "naturally" start to abate.
10. Although I've had OCD all my life, I had never done an exposure before starting my second round of DBT in 2012. Honestly, I was a cognitive-behavioral therapy hater for a long time because of one bad experience when I was a teenager.
11. I don't want to overdramatize, but every time I go outside, it's basically an exposure.
12. When contemplating the recent (about two weeks ago now) ending of intensive outpatient treatment, I wrote in my therapy journal my continuing recovery just seems like a lot of self punishment, with much alone time and extensive amounts of exposures. Basically, at my worst, I don't want to be with others, nor do I want to be with myself.
13. My prediction has panned out, sort of. But I haven't launched myself into the downward spiral of fear that indicates I am at my worst. I'm managing to mitigate the alone time pretty successfully, but it's challenging. The exposures continue to feel like sandpaper scraping a fresh wound.
[....]
14. When I interact with most people, I just don't feel like I'm behaving humanly... I'm frantically searching for what a human says, how a human moves in the space of the world. And when I get it right, my internal response is somewhere between whew that was close and I've Accomplished Something.
15. When I (feel like I) get it wrong, my breath stops and my head starts spinning. And I want to be home immediately.
16. Home is usually far away. But not as far away as it was when we lived on the south side.
17. Although it is painful, I can see the ways in which my anxiety is coming down. I'm more spontaneous. More talkative. More gracious to others and also (er, sometimes) to myself.
18. I even went to the coffee shop to write yesterday. That was impossible... basically up until the time it was possible. I didn't know if it was gonna work, but Mike suggested starting out with prompts and exercises instead of a blank screen / sheet of paper and that was super-helpful.
19. The thing I have to fight against, or as my DBT therapist would say gently push away, is my rabid desire to be better than I actually am, even though recovery is a process, and rationally I know that.
20. Going to the coffee shop and writing was a HUGE deal. But there were many small unglamorous accomplishments that led up to it.... perhaps I'm writing this entry to myself as well as to you. It's very hard for me to acknowledge the small steps that lead up to the bigger ones. I mock myself, like, whoa, big deal: I went to the supermarket. When it really is a big deal dammit.
That is all.
2. I realize that if you are reading this and have never worked a recovery program with behavioral elements, it may sound like I'm in a cult or something. For those of you who have known me since 1995 or so, you know this therapy has helped me greatly before, and now it's helping me rebuild again after what happened last year.
3. For some reason my immediate grief response was extreme social anxiety, bordering on agoraphobia. In general, the action-urge for anxiety is to avoid the thing that makes me anxious.
4. [Note that avoiding was a useful and protective device at a certain point in human evolution. Is that a saber toothed tiger waiting for me in the brush? I'd better hide until it passes by.]
5. People make me anxious. Thus, 99.875% of them I would rather avoid.
6. But then I'd never leave my house. Which is sort of what happened in April when I had that relapse bit.
7. Needless to say, never leaving the house would end up with me bitter, angry, ever more phobic, and possibly dead before my time b/c isolation leads to the Circling Thoughts.
[....]
8. Exposure therapy is a thing they do for OCD and phobias. For example, if a person is deathly afraid of dogs, she might start out looking at pictures or videos of dogs, then move to, I dunno, five minutes of a dog on a leash in the same room with her... And end up where she can pet the dog or have it lick her hand and such.
9. The idea is that the patient participates in increasing levels of exposure. She sits with the frightening experience until her fear comes down. Allegedly, her brain can't maintain a fear response with the volume cranked to 11 for an extended period of time. When her brain processes the fact that nothing bad is happening as she looks at the video of the dog, the anxiety will "naturally" start to abate.
10. Although I've had OCD all my life, I had never done an exposure before starting my second round of DBT in 2012. Honestly, I was a cognitive-behavioral therapy hater for a long time because of one bad experience when I was a teenager.
11. I don't want to overdramatize, but every time I go outside, it's basically an exposure.
12. When contemplating the recent (about two weeks ago now) ending of intensive outpatient treatment, I wrote in my therapy journal my continuing recovery just seems like a lot of self punishment, with much alone time and extensive amounts of exposures. Basically, at my worst, I don't want to be with others, nor do I want to be with myself.
13. My prediction has panned out, sort of. But I haven't launched myself into the downward spiral of fear that indicates I am at my worst. I'm managing to mitigate the alone time pretty successfully, but it's challenging. The exposures continue to feel like sandpaper scraping a fresh wound.
[....]
14. When I interact with most people, I just don't feel like I'm behaving humanly... I'm frantically searching for what a human says, how a human moves in the space of the world. And when I get it right, my internal response is somewhere between whew that was close and I've Accomplished Something.
15. When I (feel like I) get it wrong, my breath stops and my head starts spinning. And I want to be home immediately.
16. Home is usually far away. But not as far away as it was when we lived on the south side.
17. Although it is painful, I can see the ways in which my anxiety is coming down. I'm more spontaneous. More talkative. More gracious to others and also (er, sometimes) to myself.
18. I even went to the coffee shop to write yesterday. That was impossible... basically up until the time it was possible. I didn't know if it was gonna work, but Mike suggested starting out with prompts and exercises instead of a blank screen / sheet of paper and that was super-helpful.
19. The thing I have to fight against, or as my DBT therapist would say gently push away, is my rabid desire to be better than I actually am, even though recovery is a process, and rationally I know that.
20. Going to the coffee shop and writing was a HUGE deal. But there were many small unglamorous accomplishments that led up to it.... perhaps I'm writing this entry to myself as well as to you. It's very hard for me to acknowledge the small steps that lead up to the bigger ones. I mock myself, like, whoa, big deal: I went to the supermarket. When it really is a big deal dammit.
That is all.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
20 things : losses and gains
1. I've been out awhile, and struggled with how to tell people exactly why, and what I've been up to, and when I should come back to blogging, if at all.
2. The other day a friend told me she missed my blog, and so it was motivational.
3. I'm trying to participate in my life again, on a more social scale, after nearly a year of grieving.
4. For a long time now I thought we lost Ravi on August 8, but I look and it's actually August 22.
5. That's almost exactly a month before my mom did what she did.
6. I'm thinking a lot about anniversaries, because I'm being transitioned out of IOP round two, and because we are closing on our house --selling it --on Friday.
7. I dreamt about Ravi for the first time in a long time last night.
8. Around the time he went missing, a friend said, If you're dreaming about him, that means he's gonna come back. I had been.
9. I understand that's just some BS that people tell other people b/c they want it to be true, but I still wish she hadn't said that.
10. Sometimes when you love someone, they go away and don't come back. I had two someones who went away.
11. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever be over it.
12. But I have to start rebuilding my life somehow, some way.
13. At first I was pressing myself to do this really hard, like I had to score an A+ on a test and the test was My Life.
14. But now after a raftload of therapy, I realize that the rebuilding will occur in its own time, and, although it doesn't hurt to encourage them, certain aspects of my life aren't going to come back before they are ready.
15. For example, I've been making status updates on fb in the past few days, and now I'm making this blog entry. But I wasn't doing those things for a long time.
16. However, if I choose to envision these things as a dramatic re-launch of Me in Social Media, then I will crawl back under the couch.
17. In other news, I'm doing a reading this weekend. When I signed up to do this reading months and months and months ago, I thought I'm gonna be so much better by August!
18. There was another reading, in June, that I'd signed up for and actually had to withdraw myself from, because I wasn't ready. Now I think I'm sort of ready. We shall see.
19. It's hard to tell when to push and when to just let myself be. I used to think the answer was always push, and I would feel guilty every time I did not push. I don't think that anymore.
20. So this is a post. It's not an epic post. It's not an official re-launch. It may be a "soft open." But I don't even know what those words mean, when you're talking about a person. I hope I'll post again soon.
Here's a painting; click to see larger:
2. The other day a friend told me she missed my blog, and so it was motivational.
3. I'm trying to participate in my life again, on a more social scale, after nearly a year of grieving.
4. For a long time now I thought we lost Ravi on August 8, but I look and it's actually August 22.
5. That's almost exactly a month before my mom did what she did.
6. I'm thinking a lot about anniversaries, because I'm being transitioned out of IOP round two, and because we are closing on our house --selling it --on Friday.
7. I dreamt about Ravi for the first time in a long time last night.
8. Around the time he went missing, a friend said, If you're dreaming about him, that means he's gonna come back. I had been.
9. I understand that's just some BS that people tell other people b/c they want it to be true, but I still wish she hadn't said that.
10. Sometimes when you love someone, they go away and don't come back. I had two someones who went away.
11. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever be over it.
12. But I have to start rebuilding my life somehow, some way.
13. At first I was pressing myself to do this really hard, like I had to score an A+ on a test and the test was My Life.
14. But now after a raftload of therapy, I realize that the rebuilding will occur in its own time, and, although it doesn't hurt to encourage them, certain aspects of my life aren't going to come back before they are ready.
15. For example, I've been making status updates on fb in the past few days, and now I'm making this blog entry. But I wasn't doing those things for a long time.
16. However, if I choose to envision these things as a dramatic re-launch of Me in Social Media, then I will crawl back under the couch.
17. In other news, I'm doing a reading this weekend. When I signed up to do this reading months and months and months ago, I thought I'm gonna be so much better by August!
18. There was another reading, in June, that I'd signed up for and actually had to withdraw myself from, because I wasn't ready. Now I think I'm sort of ready. We shall see.
19. It's hard to tell when to push and when to just let myself be. I used to think the answer was always push, and I would feel guilty every time I did not push. I don't think that anymore.
20. So this is a post. It's not an epic post. It's not an official re-launch. It may be a "soft open." But I don't even know what those words mean, when you're talking about a person. I hope I'll post again soon.
Here's a painting; click to see larger:
Stripped
Tuesday, April 9, 2013
20things : Alterations
20things : Alterations
2) When Mike came home he asked if there was anything he could do to help and I suggested a walk.
3) So we walked to Frick Park, which is very close now, which I haven't been to in years&years&years.
4) As soon as we got there I got this "opening" feeling.
5) Like, I wasn't Feeling Better, but I could see the concept of feeling-better out there in the universe, waiting for me to find and retrieve it.
6) Like maybe all the weight of Since August could potentially be lifted, not right now, but eventually.
7) It's the first time Since August I've felt this.
8) So that happened. Hence, more walks in my future.
9) This morning I took in a dress.
10) I'm one of those "pear" shaped women, smaller at the shoulders than the hips.
11) I've accumulated three really pretty summer dresses with wide straps that fall off my shoulders.
12) It was either fix the dresses or donate them; I've been putting it off since last fall.
13) I was worried that Luna would immediately be hunting the needle and thread as soon as she figured out I would be engaged in a task that involved slow, intriguing, repetitive movement, carefulness, and of course sharp objects.
14) Thankfully she didn't figure it out until the second shoulder.
15) By then I was halfway done so I was able to stay more or less patient.
16) Did I mention I'm thoroughly mediocre at sewing?
17) It's not my favorite task. I nearly failed home-ec because of a teacher who chose to treat me like a dummy in front of the whole class b/c I'm visually impaired.
18) Everything I learned about sewing came from a very patient art teacher and a room mate who majored in fashion design, neither of whom assumed that because I'm mostly blind I couldn't sew.
19) Still, I've never actually taken in the straps of a dress before, just imagined what it would be like to do it.
20) And now my purple butterfly dress, which I'd bought to wear for a big SIT presentation two years ago, fits like the straps will stay on my shoulders and not start that embarrassing slide down my arms.
I think I will wear my "new" dress today.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
20things : movement
1) Have had extreme bouts of anxiety wherein I haven't been eating.
2) And then I don't sleep and then I sleep a lot.
3) And then I throw out more stuff.
4) And then I donate more stuff.
5) And then I build boxes to pack more stuff.
6) Occasionally get pulled out of myself to meet with others.
7) The leaving is hard. I don't like it.
8) I don't like it.
9) But the destination is worth it.
10) When I'm back at home more anxiety...
11) ...which usually comes with hysterical crying.
12) I try to do this when I am alone as it is troubling to others. Crying is new for me so I mostly welcome it though.
13) Or sleep. Sleep also.
14) I no longer have the layout of my house memorized in the dark.
15) Because of all the boxes and some furniture rearranged.
16) Since I can't see in the dark I developed this coping strategy.
17) Mike says turn on lights.
18) I like navigating in the dark.
19) It makes me feel special.
20) I have some new bruises now.
Monday, February 25, 2013
Punch to the gut
So I was juuuuust getting ready to head out the door when I realized I had to open my email to print out the actual assignment I'm doing the homework for. And I received a rejection for a press prize that I was really really hoping to at least be a semi-finalist for. Everyone who knew my work was like "did you try ____ Press?" And the judge was the editor of the press. And I sent it out way before the deadline. So I felt like my work would get a good read.
It's not like this is the first time. Maybe that's the problem.
I think the worst part about these rejections is I never know how far I got or what was missing in the MS. In retrospect I think that maybe my work was too risky for this particular press. That's the absolute best interpretation of the situation. But how can I know for sure? Maybe the MS is horrible. I've gotten enough feedback on it to know that's not true though. But maybe it's.... subtly *wrong*.
I write intense, high-stakes poetry. And I don't know where to put it. Or there's something intrinsically bad.... ugh, I have to stop the negative self-talk, because I've had enough success to know that I can succeed, if that makes sense.
I should maybe delete this post because it's rambly. But I'm not going to. This is difficult work.
I used to have a lot of confidence. The confidence got sucked away since August. But I'm trying to keep on anyway.
I just see... the career that I pictured myself having falling out of reach. And I wasn't deluding myself. At one point, it was within my reach. I received credible encouragement. No one ever said, hey, you're not good enough; find a different niche.
Four out of the six poets in my MFA graduating class have now published full-length collections. I graduated in 2005. It sucks being on the bottom.
My alma mater doesn't even count chaps as legit publications on the "graduates who have published" page. I looked.
Poets whose work I admire, poets who I wanted to emulate, have, by this point in their career, by the age that I am, published loads more.
It's not like I've dedicated my life to something else, like law school or marketing or psychology or technical writing or raising babies or organic farming in Montana and the poetry thing is an "also."
I wanted. I w a n t e d. I wanted a different life.
I want.
Oh, and btw, I'm not even sure I can work full-time with all the different disability shit, and this morning I am not proud, I feel like it is shit, going on. I feel like the scraps of my life are just falling through my open hands.
Thought: I have so much to give. I just don't know who will receive.
Other thought: when poets whose opinion I respected, poets who I wanted to emulate, told that I was really good, it just meant I had further to fall / fail.
I'm not giving up; that's not in my nature. It's just... I had a vision of who I was going to be, and
I've not become that person, and it makes me weep. I'm going to have to be someone else, and I don't know who the fuck she is.
DBT says I need to go out there and do the homework anyway, like I had planned. But the anxiety. And the sadness. They hurt so fucking badly. My head is spinning, spinning, spinning.
It's not like this is the first time. Maybe that's the problem.
I think the worst part about these rejections is I never know how far I got or what was missing in the MS. In retrospect I think that maybe my work was too risky for this particular press. That's the absolute best interpretation of the situation. But how can I know for sure? Maybe the MS is horrible. I've gotten enough feedback on it to know that's not true though. But maybe it's.... subtly *wrong*.
I write intense, high-stakes poetry. And I don't know where to put it. Or there's something intrinsically bad.... ugh, I have to stop the negative self-talk, because I've had enough success to know that I can succeed, if that makes sense.
I should maybe delete this post because it's rambly. But I'm not going to. This is difficult work.
I used to have a lot of confidence. The confidence got sucked away since August. But I'm trying to keep on anyway.
I just see... the career that I pictured myself having falling out of reach. And I wasn't deluding myself. At one point, it was within my reach. I received credible encouragement. No one ever said, hey, you're not good enough; find a different niche.
Four out of the six poets in my MFA graduating class have now published full-length collections. I graduated in 2005. It sucks being on the bottom.
My alma mater doesn't even count chaps as legit publications on the "graduates who have published" page. I looked.
Poets whose work I admire, poets who I wanted to emulate, have, by this point in their career, by the age that I am, published loads more.
It's not like I've dedicated my life to something else, like law school or marketing or psychology or technical writing or raising babies or organic farming in Montana and the poetry thing is an "also."
I wanted. I w a n t e d. I wanted a different life.
I want.
Oh, and btw, I'm not even sure I can work full-time with all the different disability shit, and this morning I am not proud, I feel like it is shit, going on. I feel like the scraps of my life are just falling through my open hands.
Thought: I have so much to give. I just don't know who will receive.
Other thought: when poets whose opinion I respected, poets who I wanted to emulate, told that I was really good, it just meant I had further to fall / fail.
I'm not giving up; that's not in my nature. It's just... I had a vision of who I was going to be, and
I've not become that person, and it makes me weep. I'm going to have to be someone else, and I don't know who the fuck she is.
DBT says I need to go out there and do the homework anyway, like I had planned. But the anxiety. And the sadness. They hurt so fucking badly. My head is spinning, spinning, spinning.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
the grief grind
Last night Mike informed me of an email that he got four days ago wherein my uncle said that my aunt --his sister --was going down to GA for some furniture and possibly boxes of mom's stuff. She's flying down and renting a truck and driving back.
Mike and I can't drive like that.
*
Not that his coping strategy surprises me. My grandfather was entirely like this. Even my mother was, to some extent. And I did it for all the years that I was at The University Previously Known As My Place of Employment because "getting it done" was way more important than feeling my feelings about whatever "it" was.
In all the offices I worked in I was described as "sweet," "cheerful," "perky," and "bubbly." My teaching evals always said I had great rapport.
*
I just... I would like to be asked, you know? Even if I'm not ready to talk.
*
*
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
I stuck to my plan
and went back to work on Monday even though the thing with Alaina happened and I'm still splashing / flailing around in the grief pool. In fact it did re-open things with my mom so it's like twin griefs each hauling downward on an ankle.
My work right now consists of writing, revision (of poems and the full-length MS), going to readings and reading at open mic so I can hopefully get offered gigs, submitting to one journal per workday, sending the MS to two presses a month, and putting together a chapbook.
I'm thinking of doing a second chap because it could be awhile before the full-length MS is taken and I need a self-esteem booster. Somehow I feel it is easier to do a chap now that I have done one successfully. That could be a load of crap.
I'm investigating micropresses. I find the concept and the aesthetic highly appealing.
This work takes between 3-4 hours per day.
I do a LOT of research on the journal and sitting with poems before I decide what to send. The decision of what to send ends up being more intuitive and less scholarly, for me. This feels right.
I'm still going to group. The discharge date has been pushed back a little. Basically I'm trying to get comfortable with the fact that there is not a date, and that I don't have to be well, rather, improved, before I go.
This work involves a lot of solitude and rejection, which I knew before I accepted it. However, I wish I could shed more grief before getting back to it. I came to the realization, though, that it's probably better to get back to it AND be going to group, so that I can process any issues that come up.
Part of me thinks that I'm blocking feelings by going to work. But doesn't everyone block feelings by going to work? Isn't that called "keeping busy?"
Mike tells me to not overdo it.
The fact that I can work, after many many months of simply not having the energy / concentration level, is such a relief to me that it is almost intoxicating. Well, yesterday it was. Today it just feels like work.
My work right now consists of writing, revision (of poems and the full-length MS), going to readings and reading at open mic so I can hopefully get offered gigs, submitting to one journal per workday, sending the MS to two presses a month, and putting together a chapbook.
I'm thinking of doing a second chap because it could be awhile before the full-length MS is taken and I need a self-esteem booster. Somehow I feel it is easier to do a chap now that I have done one successfully. That could be a load of crap.
I'm investigating micropresses. I find the concept and the aesthetic highly appealing.
This work takes between 3-4 hours per day.
I do a LOT of research on the journal and sitting with poems before I decide what to send. The decision of what to send ends up being more intuitive and less scholarly, for me. This feels right.
I'm still going to group. The discharge date has been pushed back a little. Basically I'm trying to get comfortable with the fact that there is not a date, and that I don't have to be well, rather, improved, before I go.
This work involves a lot of solitude and rejection, which I knew before I accepted it. However, I wish I could shed more grief before getting back to it. I came to the realization, though, that it's probably better to get back to it AND be going to group, so that I can process any issues that come up.
Part of me thinks that I'm blocking feelings by going to work. But doesn't everyone block feelings by going to work? Isn't that called "keeping busy?"
Mike tells me to not overdo it.
The fact that I can work, after many many months of simply not having the energy / concentration level, is such a relief to me that it is almost intoxicating. Well, yesterday it was. Today it just feels like work.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Errands
I went on my first solo outing today in awhile. Probably since before I started group.
I think I'm supposed to begin being able to say it specifically. Probably since before my mom decided to end her life this past August. Wow, that was extremely uncomfortable.
[I wonder how many people are reading this and whom. I re-read the sentence and don't hit delete.]
Solo, meaning I did not have any assistance getting out of the house (namely a ride), nor was I going to see someone.
I took the 48 to REI to investigate their winter boot sale. And came away with a nice pair of boots. North Face. Waterproof. Stylish for being so good in the snow and wet.
And then I waited at the bus stop for 20 minutes. The temperature with wind chill was 16. First the cold stung my face and made tears run down it. Then my face went completely numb. I got on the warm bus with the young moms on welfare who all seemed to know each other and talked about the vicissitudes of bureaucracy and people who smelled like they'd been drinking quite a bit since before noon. My face thawed. I felt class-conscious and race-conscious and very aware of where my own inadequate, ridiculous self ended and other selves began. I felt just the smallest bit of happiness that I had accomplished it.
Even asking the question of myself, has my rabid social anxiety come down a micrometer? --this makes me want to not dwell even for a second on what I believe to be the answer. I don't want to jinx it.
I think I'm supposed to begin being able to say it specifically. Probably since before my mom decided to end her life this past August. Wow, that was extremely uncomfortable.
[I wonder how many people are reading this and whom. I re-read the sentence and don't hit delete.]
Solo, meaning I did not have any assistance getting out of the house (namely a ride), nor was I going to see someone.
I took the 48 to REI to investigate their winter boot sale. And came away with a nice pair of boots. North Face. Waterproof. Stylish for being so good in the snow and wet.
And then I waited at the bus stop for 20 minutes. The temperature with wind chill was 16. First the cold stung my face and made tears run down it. Then my face went completely numb. I got on the warm bus with the young moms on welfare who all seemed to know each other and talked about the vicissitudes of bureaucracy and people who smelled like they'd been drinking quite a bit since before noon. My face thawed. I felt class-conscious and race-conscious and very aware of where my own inadequate, ridiculous self ended and other selves began. I felt just the smallest bit of happiness that I had accomplished it.
Even asking the question of myself, has my rabid social anxiety come down a micrometer? --this makes me want to not dwell even for a second on what I believe to be the answer. I don't want to jinx it.
Monday, December 31, 2012
Thinking about the new year...
Lots of people take stock in their new-year posts; I'm thinking about what's coming up. Soon I will be leaving group. It's inevitable. They said they want to discharge me in January. It's mondo-bizarro how these complete strangers have come to mean so much to me. Well, some more than others... and most of the "some" have already been discharged. So I can say I'm on the tail-end of what I consider my cadre: peers in age and stage. Which means I gotta get my ass out the door soon. But what next?
I was talking to A about a week or so ago and she suggested I "work with the energy of the solstice" (so yeah, it was around Dec 21) and consider, in a playful way, the concept of starting over new. She said it was important to consider it as mental play, not a serious undertaking. I didn't know what to make of her comment at first so I put it on the back burner.
During some idle time when I got home I turned it over in my mind. I could see why she said to not consider it seriously. I take everything seriously, perhaps too much so. When I thought seriously about it, I started to cry. So many things have just gouged the hell out of me in the last four months that the idea of starting over new is like... hello? I'm barely scarred over! Give me some time! But as a "pretend" question, it made me feel a bit liberated from my sadness. I thought about last January, when I was starting my "year of quitting." I never imagined the ending it would have, or should I say, the last third of the year. Act 3. What if I started over on my year of quitting? [Note: I think my blog was on tumblr at this point so you might not know that I had sarcastically referred to taking a year to solely concentrate on writing, publishing, attending and giving readings as my year of quitting. Like quitting the job that sucked the life out of me for something that doesn't pay but is super-fulfilling.]
I remember now with great nostalgia the anxiety that, then, had made me cry. I was taking a huge leap of faith and I was doing it in the shittiest part of the year for taking leaps: winter. I had to fill a blank slate (woo, mixed metaphors) not knowing if my endeavor would be successful. One of my fb status updates at the time was "looking at design blogs and crying." Well, in my world, art begets art. I started myself on a disciplined schedule. I submitted every workday in the beginning --I would say the first 3-4 months. I kept up the momentum on faith, until the acceptances started coming in, validating my decision. I would say the best part was April through July. I was ON FIRE. I was so happy. I was so not prepared for what August would bring.
Now, despite my recent (and for the second time!) publication in MiPOesias, and upcoming pubs in RHINO, Hayden's, and Bone Bouquet, my submission pipeline is low. I feel like I don't have a lot of work to submit.
That feeling of having nothing may be false. It is false. I haven't been writing at the speed I was --I was generating 1-2 drafts A WEEK. For eight months. But I haven't published all of it. And I wrote a chapbook-sized sheaf of grieving poems, some of which have to be good enough to revise.
[Note: can you tell I've become worse at writing blog entries? It's my ability to concentrate. It's gone way down. I can't put together ideas as fluidly as before. Nor can I read a book all the way through. Or watch a whole movie without great restlessness. I don't watch them in the theatre any more-- at least for now. Therapist J says that this restlessness and lack of concentration is normal when experiencing grief. She also says it could go on for awhile.]
Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is even though I have great anxiety about "my year of starting over," I began "my year of quitting" also with great anxiety. And that time it was fruitful. I showed up and did the work and I was successful.
There's this little (actually it's not so little) voice, the anxiety voice, that says, you never knoooooowwwwww about the future. You might not be any good any more. Maybe you broke yourself.
But I leapt before and it was good. Maybe I can do it again. I'm lucky to be in a financial position to try it. I don't have to go back to some thankless job. I can do YWI part-time and maybe everything will be okay. Not grand, but okay. I'm shooting for okay.
I was talking to A about a week or so ago and she suggested I "work with the energy of the solstice" (so yeah, it was around Dec 21) and consider, in a playful way, the concept of starting over new. She said it was important to consider it as mental play, not a serious undertaking. I didn't know what to make of her comment at first so I put it on the back burner.
During some idle time when I got home I turned it over in my mind. I could see why she said to not consider it seriously. I take everything seriously, perhaps too much so. When I thought seriously about it, I started to cry. So many things have just gouged the hell out of me in the last four months that the idea of starting over new is like... hello? I'm barely scarred over! Give me some time! But as a "pretend" question, it made me feel a bit liberated from my sadness. I thought about last January, when I was starting my "year of quitting." I never imagined the ending it would have, or should I say, the last third of the year. Act 3. What if I started over on my year of quitting? [Note: I think my blog was on tumblr at this point so you might not know that I had sarcastically referred to taking a year to solely concentrate on writing, publishing, attending and giving readings as my year of quitting. Like quitting the job that sucked the life out of me for something that doesn't pay but is super-fulfilling.]
I remember now with great nostalgia the anxiety that, then, had made me cry. I was taking a huge leap of faith and I was doing it in the shittiest part of the year for taking leaps: winter. I had to fill a blank slate (woo, mixed metaphors) not knowing if my endeavor would be successful. One of my fb status updates at the time was "looking at design blogs and crying." Well, in my world, art begets art. I started myself on a disciplined schedule. I submitted every workday in the beginning --I would say the first 3-4 months. I kept up the momentum on faith, until the acceptances started coming in, validating my decision. I would say the best part was April through July. I was ON FIRE. I was so happy. I was so not prepared for what August would bring.
Now, despite my recent (and for the second time!) publication in MiPOesias, and upcoming pubs in RHINO, Hayden's, and Bone Bouquet, my submission pipeline is low. I feel like I don't have a lot of work to submit.
That feeling of having nothing may be false. It is false. I haven't been writing at the speed I was --I was generating 1-2 drafts A WEEK. For eight months. But I haven't published all of it. And I wrote a chapbook-sized sheaf of grieving poems, some of which have to be good enough to revise.
[Note: can you tell I've become worse at writing blog entries? It's my ability to concentrate. It's gone way down. I can't put together ideas as fluidly as before. Nor can I read a book all the way through. Or watch a whole movie without great restlessness. I don't watch them in the theatre any more-- at least for now. Therapist J says that this restlessness and lack of concentration is normal when experiencing grief. She also says it could go on for awhile.]
Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is even though I have great anxiety about "my year of starting over," I began "my year of quitting" also with great anxiety. And that time it was fruitful. I showed up and did the work and I was successful.
There's this little (actually it's not so little) voice, the anxiety voice, that says, you never knoooooowwwwww about the future. You might not be any good any more. Maybe you broke yourself.
But I leapt before and it was good. Maybe I can do it again. I'm lucky to be in a financial position to try it. I don't have to go back to some thankless job. I can do YWI part-time and maybe everything will be okay. Not grand, but okay. I'm shooting for okay.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
The Universe Box and Radical Acceptance
The day I walked into the room where my therapy sessions are held, the words RADICAL ACCEPTANCE were scribbled on the whiteboard in failing black marker. I dimly remembered this skill from last time (199something). There was something else written under it which my mind wants to paraphrase as "This really sucks right now but there's nothing I can do about it."
Easier seen on the whiteboard than taken into the heart and mind. A few days later, a fellow group member let me in on his idea for something called a God Box. You made a special box where you put thoughts and feelings that were just too big, overwhelming, too much for you to handle. The idea was to physically and metaphorically give up control to a higher power, who has the capacity to handle these things much better than you do.
This box works if you believe in any version of a higher power at all.... even if the higher power is just the best parts of your Self, not easily accessed --that strong core that has kept you alive thus far. I called mine the Universe Box because it suited me.
Here's a picture of the top of my box. I didn't have the energy to make the whole thing pretty but I did at least do the top.
That uneven black rectangle is the slot I cut where I put the thoughts. I made it small deliberately, so that I would have to fold up the pieces of paper REALLY TINY to get them in there. And I glued a nautilus to the front because I find them beautiful. It sort of looks like the thoughts might all be pouring into the mouth of the nautilus as well.
Here's more about radical acceptance. This is from the book, by Marsha Linehan, Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder (c) 1993. When I first did this therapy, they were only using it for borderlines, but docs and clinicians have since seen the value of using it as a therapy for bipolar, depression, eating disorders, anxiety disorders, and probably more than that.
Btw, if you google Marsha Linehan, the first thing that comes up is all these images of tees and sweatshirts from CafePress that say things like "Marsha Linehan is my homegirl." Not even kidding. Well, her therapy did save my life once, and now we're working on rescuing my sanity 17 years later.
Okay, so the ideas of radical acceptance, straight from "Distress Tolerance Handout 5: Basic Principles of Accepting Reality." There's two sub-sections I'm going to outline here. One is called Radical Acceptance. One is called Turning the Mind. These aren't my words. Please Marsha, don't sue me.
I do have lots of italicized notes though, like this one.
[NOTE: if you are reading this blog and you're pretty well-adjusted, you might think that the worksheet title is odd. You may not have trouble accepting your reality. You may even enjoy your reality most of the time. And for the times when you don't enjoy it, you may be doing things about it that are effectively helping your reality conform to the way you'd rather have it. That person was pretty much me, from about 1998 or so to August 9, 2012. I'm not saying I was super-sane or asymptomatic, but I was relatively good until the flea infestation that started off my downward spiral. Which I am planning on discussing in group today. Anyway, IF you have trouble accepting your reality because something SO world-rocking happened and you have limited or no control over it, then radical acceptance may be for you.]
Easier seen on the whiteboard than taken into the heart and mind. A few days later, a fellow group member let me in on his idea for something called a God Box. You made a special box where you put thoughts and feelings that were just too big, overwhelming, too much for you to handle. The idea was to physically and metaphorically give up control to a higher power, who has the capacity to handle these things much better than you do.
This box works if you believe in any version of a higher power at all.... even if the higher power is just the best parts of your Self, not easily accessed --that strong core that has kept you alive thus far. I called mine the Universe Box because it suited me.
Here's a picture of the top of my box. I didn't have the energy to make the whole thing pretty but I did at least do the top.
That uneven black rectangle is the slot I cut where I put the thoughts. I made it small deliberately, so that I would have to fold up the pieces of paper REALLY TINY to get them in there. And I glued a nautilus to the front because I find them beautiful. It sort of looks like the thoughts might all be pouring into the mouth of the nautilus as well.
Here's more about radical acceptance. This is from the book, by Marsha Linehan, Skills Training Manual for Treating Borderline Personality Disorder (c) 1993. When I first did this therapy, they were only using it for borderlines, but docs and clinicians have since seen the value of using it as a therapy for bipolar, depression, eating disorders, anxiety disorders, and probably more than that.
Btw, if you google Marsha Linehan, the first thing that comes up is all these images of tees and sweatshirts from CafePress that say things like "Marsha Linehan is my homegirl." Not even kidding. Well, her therapy did save my life once, and now we're working on rescuing my sanity 17 years later.
Okay, so the ideas of radical acceptance, straight from "Distress Tolerance Handout 5: Basic Principles of Accepting Reality." There's two sub-sections I'm going to outline here. One is called Radical Acceptance. One is called Turning the Mind. These aren't my words. Please Marsha, don't sue me.
I do have lots of italicized notes though, like this one.
[NOTE: if you are reading this blog and you're pretty well-adjusted, you might think that the worksheet title is odd. You may not have trouble accepting your reality. You may even enjoy your reality most of the time. And for the times when you don't enjoy it, you may be doing things about it that are effectively helping your reality conform to the way you'd rather have it. That person was pretty much me, from about 1998 or so to August 9, 2012. I'm not saying I was super-sane or asymptomatic, but I was relatively good until the flea infestation that started off my downward spiral. Which I am planning on discussing in group today. Anyway, IF you have trouble accepting your reality because something SO world-rocking happened and you have limited or no control over it, then radical acceptance may be for you.]
RADICAL ACCEPTANCE
- Freedom from suffering requires ACCEPTANCE from deep within of what is. Let yourself go completely with what is. Let go of fighting reality.
- ACCEPTANCE is the only way out of hell. >>> I starred that one
- Pain creates suffering only when you refuse to ACCEPT the pain.
- Deciding to tolerate the moment is ACCEPTANCE. >>> with all the self-medicating I'm doing right now, I really want to work on this aspect some more
- ACCEPTANCE is acknowledging what is.
- To accept something is not the same as judging it good. >>> This one is very important to me. It means that even though my mom killed herself, I don't have to forgive her right now, or even seek my own emotional understanding of her motives. It just means I have to accept, for example, that there was no way I could fix her.
TURNING THE MIND
As I understand it, this means literally re-orienting your mind from a place where you are attached to the pain, where you ruminate and dwell on what-ifs and should-haves and whys --which, remember, you have no control over--to a place where you allow yourself to let go.
- Acceptance of reality as it is requires an act of CHOICE. It is like coming to a fork in the road. You have to turn your mind towards the acceptance road and away from the "rejecting" reality road. >>> Note: rejecting reality is not the same as denial, although it might be. Rejecting could be, for example, going over a problem in your head that is past all help, but you can't stop dwelling on it. I just thought of Adam's t-shirt on Mythbusters that says "I reject your reality and substitute my own." I love that shirt. And it's fine in an imaginative sense, when you are engaging in acts of creativity, or when you need an escape, or if it's a joke printed on a shirt. Or if substituting one's own reality can actually produce a positive change. Damn, I love that show. I wonder if they had a new season when I wasn't paying attention.
- You have to make an inner COMMITMENT to accept. >>> I find that if you believe in a higher power, it's really helpful to lean on that higher power to help you make the commitment.
- The COMMITMENT to accept does not itself equal acceptance. It just turns you toward the path. But it is the first step.
- You have to turn your mind and commit to acceptance OVER and OVER and OVER again. Sometimes you have to make the commitment many times in the space of a few minutes. >>> I starred this one too. It's so important. I remember when I was in my first year of recovery from self-injury. I definitely had to re-commit every minute in some stressful circumstances. Because it's like your brain has carved these neurological pathways that tell you [insert destructive pattern here] is the only way, and it's not. My pathways for self-injury haven't caused me to act on them for 14 years, even though those neurons that say do it still fire.
[end handout]
I hope that I can switch my neurons again. Before (in 199something) I felt it was the one pattern I had to work on. Don't self-injure. Don't self-injure. But now I feel like it's a bunch of smaller counterproductive patterns (erm, like a fear of leaving the house, e.g.) that I would like to mend, and it's all complicated by this grieving process that I know barely anything about. Except it's unpredictable, nonlinear, and it can take a long time. Woo hoo.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Happy anniversary to me
Today 11/1 is my fourteenth anniversary for being in recovery from self-injury. This past year, well okay, these past few months have been the hardest... I won't say in fourteen years b/c that first year was rough as hell but certainly in the past seven years.
There's this artist that I really like whose name is Kimya Dawson. She got a little pop of notoriety when they used songs of hers for the soundtrack of the movie Juno, which is when I found out about her. I can't really describe her style, just to say that she's amazing and other people have used labels like "anti-folk" and "freak-folk" so there you go.
Last night when I was journaling I can't remember what gave me the association but I thought hm what's she up to lately and re-checked her out. Apparently she released an album last year with this great song on it, "Walk Like Thunder." I listened on YouTube this morning. Talk about serendipity or fortuitousness or the universe giving you the thing you need at the right time.
I found two links, a studio version which has a cool pic of the tattoo she references in the song, and honestly the quality is better, but the other version I found was a live one at a bar in Pittsburgh (!)-- I hope she comes around again on her tour this / next year. I'm giving you the live one b/c the energy is there and you get to see real people and real faces and emotion even though it's less polished.
The reason this song is important to me today is b/c I realized yesterday when I was talking to A that this grief I'm carrying around --I can't stop and wait for it to be over. I have to somehow start getting on with my life, my work, again. I need to go to readings and hear people. I need to go to open mics again. I need to submit more stuff. I feel like I'm on the cusp of figuring out how exactly to do that. Like emotionally, how to do that. There's no way I can sort out all the strands of this giant clusterfuck that was dropped on me and THEN get back to my endeavors. They will have to happen at the same time. Yesterday I was like, I have no idea... just NO IDEA how to do that. This morning I heard the song and I felt like maaaaaaybe I could build a little bridge between here and there.
So listen to it dammit! If you can't spare the whole eight minutes, at least listen to half. It's really good.
Clicky click.
There's this artist that I really like whose name is Kimya Dawson. She got a little pop of notoriety when they used songs of hers for the soundtrack of the movie Juno, which is when I found out about her. I can't really describe her style, just to say that she's amazing and other people have used labels like "anti-folk" and "freak-folk" so there you go.
Last night when I was journaling I can't remember what gave me the association but I thought hm what's she up to lately and re-checked her out. Apparently she released an album last year with this great song on it, "Walk Like Thunder." I listened on YouTube this morning. Talk about serendipity or fortuitousness or the universe giving you the thing you need at the right time.
I found two links, a studio version which has a cool pic of the tattoo she references in the song, and honestly the quality is better, but the other version I found was a live one at a bar in Pittsburgh (!)-- I hope she comes around again on her tour this / next year. I'm giving you the live one b/c the energy is there and you get to see real people and real faces and emotion even though it's less polished.
The reason this song is important to me today is b/c I realized yesterday when I was talking to A that this grief I'm carrying around --I can't stop and wait for it to be over. I have to somehow start getting on with my life, my work, again. I need to go to readings and hear people. I need to go to open mics again. I need to submit more stuff. I feel like I'm on the cusp of figuring out how exactly to do that. Like emotionally, how to do that. There's no way I can sort out all the strands of this giant clusterfuck that was dropped on me and THEN get back to my endeavors. They will have to happen at the same time. Yesterday I was like, I have no idea... just NO IDEA how to do that. This morning I heard the song and I felt like maaaaaaybe I could build a little bridge between here and there.
So listen to it dammit! If you can't spare the whole eight minutes, at least listen to half. It's really good.
Clicky click.
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Throwing myself back into work
So even while everything is sort of crumbling around me, I find it consoling to work on work. Anyone who admonishes me, oh go ahead, take another pill that'll solve everything has no idea how grateful I am that pills make it possible for me, right now, to not be losing my composure completely as various actions play themselves out in GA. I'm all for "better living through chemistry" as they say. It made my 17-year-old self able to leave the house twenty years ago, and today chemistry is helping me be out of bed, thinking and working, without my emotional core breached and spilling all over the house.
On the DS-HUM listserv, Kevin Gotkin (at UP) shared a film that he produced. To get the most out of this blog entry, you should really go watch it before reading on. It's about half an hour long though, so I understand if you can't go see the whole thing. But at some point in your copious free time, you should.
This film, as I understood it on 0.75 cups of coffee, is about disabilities making possible genuinely and innovative views on, and thus methods for conceiving of, artistic production. Toward the end, this film Rupture, Sometimes focused on a woman, Jessica Feldman, who spoke of her experience with seizures and then being on medicine to ameliorate the seizures so she could function and produce in our larger normalizing society, which she recognizes as "linear." Her own experience before that, because of the disorientation of periodic seizures, had her perceive time as "ruptured." And she says that while she is glad to be productive, she misses the opportunities that "the rupture" offered her in terms of knowing the world differently.
This kind of ties into an idea I formed when writing up a sort of personal artistic statement for Prosody a few weeks back. I never got to include this idea in the show, but I'm coming to realize the benefit, the artistic fruitfulness of what I'm calling creative navigation. For a long time I saw only the obstacles of having a disability (or several). I was disheartened about how there will pretty much always be obstacles. We're not going to transition into this universally accessible society in my lifetime. But now I'm beginning to see that the process of working around / among these obstacles can be incredibly fruitful. It's causing a shift in my own poetics that I can't quite articulate yet because it's still happening.
If you have a disability, you get thrown into the vicissitudes of your own idiosyncratic body, or brain, like, a hundred times a day.
For me, it's like all of a sudden I'm thrust from a situation which is normal for me and my own idiosyncratic body / brain, and then something new comes along to add to my experience.
I am legally blind, have fibromyalgia, OCD, and PTSD. Going out into the world is really challenging. Like, psychologically taxing. Even when the event I'm going to is something that's supposed to ease the burden, like yoga or massage therapy. Simply getting there and back can be so stressful that it almost-but-not-quite cancels out the good that happened at the session.
Just when I think I have my shit together, so to speak... just when I can say, all right, I've reconciled with these certain obstacles, there are new ones. And all I saw, before I paused to reflect on it, was the stress.
In the moment, it feels like someone picks me up, turns me on my head, holds me by the feet, shakes me around until I flop like a ragdoll. Then this "force" plops me back down at, for example, the bus shelter and says, okay kid, back to your regularly scheduled program.
But maaaybe it's worth considering the alternate vantage points that this very wobbly, ungraceful, and out-of-sync journey opens up for me. I don't know the answers yet for myself, on how this POV-shift (from stress to access --and the thing I'm accessing is a different part of my artistic brain) will redefine me and my art. But a shift is coming. Really, it's already happening.
FAVORITE MOMENTS of the film:
Georgina Kleege about "dismantling simple binaries"
Kleege again: "all of the messiness of lived experience is ... wiped out of the philosophical discussions of blindness"
"gradations, shades, and registers"
Kathe Kudlick about "alternative soundtracks"
Amanda Cachia "generative aspects of disability"
Jessica Feldman "time doesn't actually function the way linear history describes it"
[and I appreciate all the music credits as they happen-- new stuff to d/l from itunes]
On the DS-HUM listserv, Kevin Gotkin (at UP) shared a film that he produced. To get the most out of this blog entry, you should really go watch it before reading on. It's about half an hour long though, so I understand if you can't go see the whole thing. But at some point in your copious free time, you should.
This film, as I understood it on 0.75 cups of coffee, is about disabilities making possible genuinely and innovative views on, and thus methods for conceiving of, artistic production. Toward the end, this film Rupture, Sometimes focused on a woman, Jessica Feldman, who spoke of her experience with seizures and then being on medicine to ameliorate the seizures so she could function and produce in our larger normalizing society, which she recognizes as "linear." Her own experience before that, because of the disorientation of periodic seizures, had her perceive time as "ruptured." And she says that while she is glad to be productive, she misses the opportunities that "the rupture" offered her in terms of knowing the world differently.
If you have a disability, you get thrown into the vicissitudes of your own idiosyncratic body, or brain, like, a hundred times a day.
I am legally blind, have fibromyalgia, OCD, and PTSD. Going out into the world is really challenging. Like, psychologically taxing. Even when the event I'm going to is something that's supposed to ease the burden, like yoga or massage therapy. Simply getting there and back can be so stressful that it almost-but-not-quite cancels out the good that happened at the session.
In the moment, it feels like someone picks me up, turns me on my head, holds me by the feet, shakes me around until I flop like a ragdoll. Then this "force" plops me back down at, for example, the bus shelter and says, okay kid, back to your regularly scheduled program.
Georgina Kleege about "dismantling simple binaries"
Kleege again: "all of the messiness of lived experience is ... wiped out of the philosophical discussions of blindness"
"gradations, shades, and registers"
Kathe Kudlick about "alternative soundtracks"
Amanda Cachia "generative aspects of disability"
Jessica Feldman "time doesn't actually function the way linear history describes it"
[and I appreciate all the music credits as they happen-- new stuff to d/l from itunes]
Monday, September 17, 2012
Where my poems at.
A few people have requested me to be more forthcoming about where my poems are currently published, providing links and such. Yeah, I can be a bit lackadaisical about that, so here's a blog post just with links to my stuff. Thanks, readers, for giving me the nudge.
My most recent pub, and one of my favorite ones this year, at Escape into Life. Rather than starting at my feature, you should really take some time, begin at the main page. The site is more than it seems on the surface. It has an amazing origin story and it's like a hybrid-art wonderland. Don't forget to check out the complete feature of Viktoria Sorochinski, the woman who took the photos my poems were paired with.
What I like about all of these journals is that they each are so different. I'm honored to be among such great company!
Menacing Hedge
MiPOesias
Rufous City Review
The Shwibly
Thirteen Myna Birds (my work is no longer up and she doesn't do archives, but you should check out the journal anyway)
Wordgathering
More coming in autumn and winter from Blood Lotus, Prick of the Spindle, right hand pointing, and RHINO.
My most recent pub, and one of my favorite ones this year, at Escape into Life. Rather than starting at my feature, you should really take some time, begin at the main page. The site is more than it seems on the surface. It has an amazing origin story and it's like a hybrid-art wonderland. Don't forget to check out the complete feature of Viktoria Sorochinski, the woman who took the photos my poems were paired with.
What I like about all of these journals is that they each are so different. I'm honored to be among such great company!
Menacing Hedge
MiPOesias
Rufous City Review
The Shwibly
Thirteen Myna Birds (my work is no longer up and she doesn't do archives, but you should check out the journal anyway)
Wordgathering
More coming in autumn and winter from Blood Lotus, Prick of the Spindle, right hand pointing, and RHINO.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
What I did and didn't do on my summer vacation
Although I was completely bummed about dad changing shore plans last minute so Mike and I couldn't go, I do want to say that I got to do some pretty cool things this week instead of being at the ocean. I actually skipped two readings because I was rather fatigued. Which means I could have done cool things four out of five nights of the week. Actually, there were two on Friday night, but I was dead-exhausted and opted for neither.
What I did do: I went to the Beauty Is A Verb reading on Thursday. I'd been anticipating this reading since last April, when the date had to be moved because of the f*ing bomb threats at Pitt. Usually I find academic venues a bit dry and difficult, lacking in ambiance. This was still the case at the O'Hara Student Center, but the readings were fantastic. And and AND I got to meet three people who I'd been wanting to meet for quite awhile: the smart and sassy Jennifer Bartlett (she's really funny too, and kind) the fierce and feisty Kathi Wolfe (I think I have a crush on one of her new personae, and she said she likes my work and I should email her) and ... Mike Northen, who was rather laid back and professorial and I felt a little awkward because I'm shy and I wonder if he is too. I had that magnets-repelling feeling that I get when two shy people, myself being one of them, try to have a conversation. Nonetheless, he recognized my name from having a poem in Wordgathering this month, and he told me to keep sending... which is really a moment of validation I needed and I sooooo appreciated it.
ASIDE: I had this convo with Mike (husband Mike not editor Mike) about my ridiculous neuroticisms whenever I have poems accepted. For example: an editor quickly accepts four out of five or six poems I sent. My response, although I'm very happy about it, is also tinged with OMG, that editor wasn't very discriminating. They're probably just desperate. They need to fill in some space. It couldn't possibly be because they liked my work that much. If an editor accepts one out of five or six poems that I send, especially if it's an online venue, my reaction, although I'm quite pleased, is tempered with really, only one poem? Wow, I just barely got in. The editor must just barely like me. Why did they choose this poem at all? What about the others? Were they bad? REALLY bad? It was probably a pity-acceptance. I mean, what is wrong with my self-esteem that I can't win either way? But really. Acceptances are winning. Period-end-of-discussion. Even rejections are winning, because it means I actually sent stuff out instead of procrastinating on it. Now if only someone would pick up the manuscript...
Anyway, then on Friday Pitt had a roundtable discussion about dis-studies in the humanities. I guess right now their dis-studies program sort of follows the medical model (grumble, cure, etc.). But they want to parlez. So good on them. I hope this panel got the ball rolling as far as a possible program at Pitt. But it'll be years, I bet. It was a good, stimulating discussion though. I felt like my brain had been to a mini-conference. This is a good feeling. I haven't gotten to go to conferences in quite some time, due to health stuff and work stuff. But... Multiple Perspectives in April and AWP in February. I think I have the months right. Anyone wanna split a room for AWP?
What I did do: I went to the Beauty Is A Verb reading on Thursday. I'd been anticipating this reading since last April, when the date had to be moved because of the f*ing bomb threats at Pitt. Usually I find academic venues a bit dry and difficult, lacking in ambiance. This was still the case at the O'Hara Student Center, but the readings were fantastic. And and AND I got to meet three people who I'd been wanting to meet for quite awhile: the smart and sassy Jennifer Bartlett (she's really funny too, and kind) the fierce and feisty Kathi Wolfe (I think I have a crush on one of her new personae, and she said she likes my work and I should email her) and ... Mike Northen, who was rather laid back and professorial and I felt a little awkward because I'm shy and I wonder if he is too. I had that magnets-repelling feeling that I get when two shy people, myself being one of them, try to have a conversation. Nonetheless, he recognized my name from having a poem in Wordgathering this month, and he told me to keep sending... which is really a moment of validation I needed and I sooooo appreciated it.
ASIDE: I had this convo with Mike (husband Mike not editor Mike) about my ridiculous neuroticisms whenever I have poems accepted. For example: an editor quickly accepts four out of five or six poems I sent. My response, although I'm very happy about it, is also tinged with OMG, that editor wasn't very discriminating. They're probably just desperate. They need to fill in some space. It couldn't possibly be because they liked my work that much. If an editor accepts one out of five or six poems that I send, especially if it's an online venue, my reaction, although I'm quite pleased, is tempered with really, only one poem? Wow, I just barely got in. The editor must just barely like me. Why did they choose this poem at all? What about the others? Were they bad? REALLY bad? It was probably a pity-acceptance. I mean, what is wrong with my self-esteem that I can't win either way? But really. Acceptances are winning. Period-end-of-discussion. Even rejections are winning, because it means I actually sent stuff out instead of procrastinating on it. Now if only someone would pick up the manuscript...
Anyway, then on Friday Pitt had a roundtable discussion about dis-studies in the humanities. I guess right now their dis-studies program sort of follows the medical model (grumble, cure, etc.). But they want to parlez. So good on them. I hope this panel got the ball rolling as far as a possible program at Pitt. But it'll be years, I bet. It was a good, stimulating discussion though. I felt like my brain had been to a mini-conference. This is a good feeling. I haven't gotten to go to conferences in quite some time, due to health stuff and work stuff. But... Multiple Perspectives in April and AWP in February. I think I have the months right. Anyone wanna split a room for AWP?
Monday, September 10, 2012
Another clarification
Ah yes, ladies and gentlemen, you've been waiting for it. At last... drunk blogging. Those of you who know me well may wonder how it was I come to have never drunkenly blogged before. Ahem. Anyway here's how it happened: 1) I got some good poetry related news 2) I'm a total lightweight. 3) No, no one has accepted the MS yet; it wasn't that. 4) But I will share it tomorrow.
I could never do this for someone. Starve them. Even if they begged. Not starving. Not withholding life / water / food. It's too cruel. I couldn't do what my aunt is doing right now. But the situation is different, maybe. To not-starve my mother would take colossal positive action, defiance of her immense gravity, her intense sadness that no one acknowledges but surrounds her like an aura.
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
20 things : after
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