I was so close to postponing this entry. I spent most of the past week stressing about which change I should be making for the LAST WEEK OF THE BLOG, LIKE, EVER. I obsessed over the ones that fell through the cracks, the ones I was too lazy to attack – so much so that I found myself mid-week without really having committed to much of a change.
Thus, I thought I’d just push it back another week. Postpone the inevitable. Give myself some more time to…uh, delay.
Then I had this thought, powerful and fully-formed: I don’t want to. I want to be finished with this blog. I’m done.
So I decided that this would be my change. Letting go of the anxiety and worry and the regrets and fears that I didn’t do a good enough job, and just letting this week and this entry be whatever they were going to be. If that sounds lame or disappointing, or if it seems like I’m phoning it in…well, I don’t have much of a defense. It is what it is. See? That’s the change. It’s so meta it’s killing me.
Weak? Maybe. But letting things be what they are felt more right than any of the changes I debated doing. After all, I’ve built this thing up so much in my head over the past 52-plus weeks that I thought I had to cap it off with something truly phenomenal. (You might have expected that, too. If so, my apologies. You can thank me later for that life lesson in expectations and disappointment.)
Nothing I debated doing – a week without TV, going gluten-free, being a tourist in my own town – really spoke to me. I’m tired. It’s cold. I love TV too much. The only thing that did speak to me was the realization that I was mentally finished with this project.
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February 11, 2011
Sometimes, I realize, it must seem like I’m just making stuff up in order to have a blog entry for the week. Sometimes, I confess, it feels a bit like that. Lately, I’ve been so concerned about making my last two entries Important Changes that I’ve run completely out of time and had to look at what changes the nice universe seemed to be putting in my path instead.
This one’s kind of a doozy. As I may have mentioned in a previous entry, I recently made a foray back to therapy, which is good for me. I assert: I think therapy’s good for everyone. That is, I think everyone should be in therapy. Yes, that includes you. Don’t look at me like that. It’s not an insult. It’s just that I think everyone can benefit greatly from an unbiased third-party perspective on their lives. And I think self-knowledge is the most powerful tool we have.
But enough about you and your crazy mental problems. This is about me and my crazy mental problems. Having been in and out of therapy for years now, I’m pretty comfortable with the process and very open to trying new things, particularly if they will help relieve me of the albatrosses I’ve been carrying around for years (food issues, fear and anxiety, etc.)
When my therapist suggested I try EMDR a couple of years ago, a large part of me thought it sounded hinky. But another part of me was in enough pain from some past issues that I was willing to give it a shot. And I’ll just say this: I don’t understand for a moment how it works, but it worked for me. It rendered some of my most difficult, raw and painful memories into benign recollections. That, for lack of a more scientific term, kicks ass.
So when I went back to her recently to discuss how my underlying fear and anxiety has been manifesting of late – with eating issues and an increased fear of flying – my lovely therapist mentioned she’d been training in a new modality. A little something called sensorimotor psychotherapy, should I want to give it a shot.
“Sure,” I like to think I said. “Only…what the hell is it?” My therapist explained the basics. (And, yes, I realize I may be losing you here, to which I can only say: I understand. You’re dismissed.) Sensorimotor psychotherapy. According to the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute, this is “a body-oriented talking therapy that integrates verbal techniques with body-centered interventions in the treatment of trauma, attachment, and developmental issues.”
Got it? Okay, let me see if I can explain, bearing in mind that I have little to no idea what I’m talking about. So…regular therapy deals with the conscious part of the brain and tries to resolve issues or trauma through its processing ability. Conversely, sensorimotor psychotherapy focuses on how the body responds to stress or trauma and attempts to change physical responses first, in the belief that they will, in turn, change responses in the brain.
Wow. That does sound weird.
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February 4, 2011
I am nothing if not a living example of irony. To wit: I am a terrible procrastinator who cannot bear to be late. It isn’t just that it bothers me to be tardy – it’s as though I physically cannot be late. My body, my mind and/or the universe all conspire to make sure that I am an early arriver.
As is my habit, I shall present some back story and completely made up theoretical psychobabble to explain how I’ve come to be this way. I believe it stems from a) coming from a long line of genetically impatient people with impeccable manners, for whom being late was simply unacceptable and b) being a painfully shy youngster who couldn’t stand to garner extra attention.
When I was a kid, I hated, hated, hated when all eyes were on me, so there was nothing worse than arriving at school or to a group activity late and inviting scrutiny. I learned early (ha!) on that the best way to avoid drawing attention to yourself was to arrive early and inconspicuously and, preferably, find a seat in the back..
Now, those who employed me during my drinking days will claim – quite fairly, too – that I seemed to have no problem whatsoever being late to work. Habitually. And while I want to claim extenuating circumstances, I also want to note that just because I was late didn’t mean it didn’t cause me a wave of nausea and panic every time. In other words, I was late, but I still hated it.
As an adult, not being late has its benefits. I usually get a good seat at concerts or movies. And now I can’t think of any more. So I suppose it has its benefit.
It also has its drawbacks. It’s hard work being the first at every party, and more than a little awkward to show up while the hostess is still in curlers. In addition, it’s tough on the ego to weather the pitying glances of wait staff who presume, after ten minutes or so, that your “friend” is a figment of your imagination.
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January 28, 2011
This is hard. I’m about to write about something I’ve never written about before. Something I’ve only ever spoken about to a handful of people. Very private, very safe people. (How’s that for a suspenseful build up?)
In short, here it is: sometimes I make myself throw up. For the past seven days, I haven’t.
It terrifies me to write about this. I’m so afraid of people’s reactions, so addled by fear about what you’ll think of me, how you’ll judge me. Whether you’ll ever be able to look at me again without picturing my head in the toilet. How I wish, wish, wish that there were some other far more frivolous, far less personal change to write about this week. But sometimes these things are born of necessity, and this is one of those times.
Perhaps I should backtrack a little. I have, as you have probably garnered from reading this blog, always had a difficult relationship with food. I’ve always been an emotional eater, always struggled with my weight. I carry with me an inherent sense that I’m simply not okay much of the time and I’ve historically turned to food – if not to make me feel better (because it never really does, not in the long run), then at least to numb and distract me from whatever I’m feeling.
At some point in my binge-eating history, the shame of what I had put in my body, paired with the physical discomfort of having over-eating so heinously delivered me to a place I never thought I’d be: making myself vomit. I know. It’s horrible to even write the words, but I don’t know a more delicate way to put it.
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January 21, 2011
I blame Patti Smith. Not for her music, because I have to confess I’ve never been the biggest fan. No, I blame her for her book, “Just Kids,” in which she writes about her enduring friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, leading up to his death from AIDS in 1989. Though the prose is often a bit flowery and dramatic for my taste, there remains at the book’s center this passion, this certainty that life is to be lived for art.
Maybe it’s a largely youthful exuberance, the luxury of a certain age, but as I read the book I found myself wistfully remembering my own late teens and early twenties, when it did seem like art was everything. Or, if not everything, then something large and looming and ever-present, something to be discussed and worshipped and debated.
I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was 13, but there was a time – shortly before I went to college – when I also wanted to be an art historian. I loved, loved, loved museums. I loved paintings and sculptures. I wanted to surround myself with art for the rest of my life, tell its stories, help other people understand context and what the artists were trying to achieve.
Some of my earliest memories are of spending rainy days lying on the floor in my parents’ living room in Glasgow, leafing through enormous art tomes, poring over glossy color plates, tracing the figures with my fingers. More often than not, I had no idea what the pictures were all about – but I knew they were magically able to make me feel something – sometimes contentment, occasionally fear and confusion. I understood early on that art was important and it was powerful.
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January 14, 2011
Some people are just exceptionally lucky. Maybe you’re fortunate enough to have one outstanding Cathi/Kathi in your life who spells their name with an “i.” Me? I have two. And although they’ve never met, and although each is from a very different part of my life – one I’ve known two decades, the other just a handful of years – I have a strong connection to both.
Why am I bragging about my Cathi/Kathi wealth? It’s relevant, I swear. Because another thing they have in common, although to different degrees, is the openness to alternative ways of thinking about how our mind and spirits and energy interact with our bodies. And they’ve both influenced me to be less skeptical and more open and to try things I mightn’t have otherwise.
Like trying to heal myself of fibromyalgia.
See, when you have a condition like mine – there’s no clear cause, no unilaterally effective treatment and certainly no sure cure – people develop all sorts of ideas about how to treat it. People, I should note very clearly, who mean very well. They suggest to you this one thing they heard on the radio that they’re certain will make me better. It’s both really lovely and really annoying. Because my general, pragmatic sense is that if someone had found a way to make people better from fibromyalgia, we’d all kind of know about it.
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January 7, 2011
It’s no secret that I’m not a religious person. I was raised heathen – not officially, of course, but my parents were lapsed Protestants who hadn’t much use for organized religion or, as far as I could tell, God. Still, when Christmas time rolls around I find it’s hard to ignore, as the billboards so delicately put it, the “reason for the season.”
Holidays are tough. There’s stress, travel, anxiety, craziness, family. Each year, I try to come up with some sort of coping mechanism for all of it and each year I basically fail. This year, I found myself – for reasons I cannot explain and do not care to explore too deeply – wondering if there wasn’t some aspect of the religious celebration that I could incorporate into my own life. At least for, like, seven days.
And that’s how I settled on a genius new approach to a stress-free, peaceful and calm Christmas week: I would endeavor to be more like Jesus.
It sounded like a good idea when I first came up with it, although it presented a rather large problem: I don’t actually know much about Jesus. Mostly anecdotal stuff, whatever I see on TV, read on billboards. When I was a kid, there was a minister who would come to our school every once in a while and tell us stories of Jesus, but who was listening to that?
Settling the question of what it means to be like Jesus quickly and neatly is a bit like trying to scale Everest in an hour. It’s simply not going to happen. People on all sides of every issue have been asking this question for centuries and then twisting the answers to fit their agendas. (Although, it occurs to me as I write this, I was also creating an answer that would fit my agenda.)
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December 31, 2010
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December 31, 2010
I was gonna steal some time away from my family to put together a post on this past week’s change, but I think maybe that’s not the best priority choice in a year of change. So I’m going to get today’s blog posting up after the weekend, when the holiday dust has settled a bit.
I know, you’ll somehow manage. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate and happy happiness to those who don’t!
December 24, 2010
First, before we get to this week’s change, I just have to say: how are we possibly only on #44? It feels more like 74. Is there room for negotiation? Could we call it 50, at least? No?
Good Lord, you people are unrelenting. Always trying to hold me to my word.
Anyway, back to business. Friends, a funny thing happened to me this past week. I had in mind a change to make but the universe, as it sometimes does, had other plans. A different approach emerged. And what struck me as most interesting about this change is that I think it was the direct result of my last two changes – advocating for myself and getting ahead of the game. Like, change begetting change. Yeah. Take a moment to let that sink in. Dag!
As a result of advocating for the right medical treatment and proper adjustments from both my physician and my orthodontist, I experienced a rather sudden and significant reduction in pain. I mean, less pain than I remember being in well over a year. It was weird, frankly. In accordance, I also experienced a sudden uptick in both energy and enthusiasm, a lifting of the mild physical and emotional “depression” – for lack of a better word – that I’m used to having as my baseline.
As a result of the other change – getting ahead of the game – I had so much of my Christmas stuff done, I wasn’t bogged down with To Do lists, nor was I freakin’ out or stressin’ about obligations. Instead, I found myself with the rare combination of a lot of time on my hands plus the energy – and the desire – to do things. To get stuff done. To participate more fully in my life. And while it may be the most boring change of mine you read about to date, the combination inspired me to spend seven days – assuming the relief would last that long – simply making the most of it.
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December 17, 2010
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