Feeling safe - depression - suicide - utopia

I can feel the sadness in the air with our incoming president. It is hard to feel good about someone that promises to turn back time. He is the president for that small group of people that enjoyed the world when it was a little more censored.  When you didn't know every bad thing going in the world and you weren't aware of the predators living in your neighborhood and you could just pretend they weren't there and the world is safe.

Now days there is so much information coming in and only the worst is ever reported.  We want to feel safe and if someone says they will make us safe we really want to believe them.  We want someone to just fix what isn't pretty about life and take us back to the days of Andy Griffith and Beaver Cleaver.  News flash they were make believe just like the idea we were or will ever really be safe.

Holding on to the idea that things will ever be the way they use to be stunts our ability to grow and adapt to how it is now. I know personally that change is not usually something you sign up for it is forced on you but you can learn to adapt quicker.

When my life was turned upside down. The breakup - menopause and the recession my mind could not accept it.  I could not accept that what I thought would be my life wasn't going to happen.  With so much uncertainty I had a meltdown mentally spiritually and physically.  I was in shock and thought about taking my own life daily it seemed like a perfectly logical solution with such an uncertain future.

Someone recently told me that during the recession they felt so out of control that they slipped into a depression that was so severe that that regularly kept a gun near them incase they wanted end it.  They said they laid next to their spouse at night an cried non-stop and hadn't told anyone except me about this time in their life. I can't imagine not telling anyone. I told you guys and regularly joked with the people that could stand to be around me that they might find me in the garage with a hose in the window. 

Just like the conversation with my friend it wasn't that I was sad it was that I felt nothing and without out feelings I didn't really see the point of going on. People say it is a selfish act but when your mind has had a break and there is no feelings it seems like a logical choice.  You are just there taking up space and since I am alone I felt no one would really be affected by my disappearance. I know these thoughts sound crazy and they were crazy but when you have no feelings there seem to be no point in living. 

I believe my higher self or holy spirit whatever you want to call it helped me make it through the each day.  I remember telling myself I can check out tomorrow if I want.  There is always tomorrow.

For me the life ahead of me was so uncertain that my mind could not process the changes quickly enough and I snapped. We have to teach people that feeling uncertain and scared is normal there is no utopia outside ourselves.  There is no magic pill or president that will save us the pills will only keep us from thinking too much about our fears dulling our minds.

When you are at the bottom it can be too late to pull yourself out without help of some kind. I was alone most of the time and my sickness liked it that way. It wanted me isolated so it could feed me a steady stream of crap that kept right where I was for longer than I should have been. I never questioned my thoughts until one day a voice said "you are doing this to yourself" and started asking myself "is that true?" and from that point on I got better.   

I guess my point to all this is that I understand fear of the future with all its unknowns.  I understand wanted to feel safe and crawl back into a life you once imagined you had. I would have done anything to not have had to suffer and change when I was facing it but you can't go back. Going forward is the point of life moving on besides the past was never quite as rosy I my mind would have me believe it was I can see that now. 

My friend said they fear everyday it will come back.  I never even considered that. I believe it was a spiritual correction for me.  It was a perfect storm to shake me to my foundation and make me question every thought I have ever had.  It erased who I was, one thought at a time, and left nothing but a foundation.  I have started rebuilding but it is a slow process but I have nothing but time. There is always tomorrow.  

Music - Feelings - Love

I stumbled upon this great band this week on Youtube and have listened to several concerts and was planning on collecting some of the their music when after googling them I saw that the lead singer left his wife of 13 years for a movie star.  Now I am not interested in listening anymore.

I know it seems ridiculous I don't know the circumstances but it struck a cord within me. You commit to someone through thick and thin and when they finally make it the first thing that happens is you get dumped. You don't get to enjoy the success after enduring the tough years together.  

My reaction to this unknown situation did make me realize that you never get over being left by the person you expected to spend the rest of your life with. Especially when they seem like they have found everything that the two of you dreamed of together with someone else. 

Luckily we all aren't famous and don't have to see the joy of the ones we lost in pictures. All though these days with the internet you can go out and cause yourself some pain on Facebook if you want.  I have done that a few time but for the most part my ex's are pretty private and not doing too much posting out there.

It never feels good especially today when it seems others have moved on and you haven't. You imagine that everyone in the world is in love and out celebrating Valentines Day. I say imagine because that is just what I am doing and from experience no relationship is as it appears on the outside. 

When it comes to relationships we can do a lot intellectualizing.  We talk about how things just happen and you fall out of love and it is all for the best. We can say we were young and we out grew each other but in the end it still hurts no matter how many years have past.

I have finally accepted that I have feelings of sadness this time of year. February is a month of losses for me including the loss of my mother. I have to acknowledge those losses because when I don't they surface in some unexplained way which make me feel nuts.

I know the sadness will pass more quickly if I just embrace it just for today.   If you live and love there will always be loss that is just life. 

I won't be listening to that band again for now. I will get over it once I stop transferring my feelings to them. In one of their concerts it was mentioned that one of the love songs cost a lot of money. I guess the ex-wife did get some monetary payoff for those thirteen years. Enough to mention it on stage. That did make me smile. 

Emotional Hangover - Healing in pajamas

I had a nice Thanksgiving but I wasn't totally able to avoid feeling down.  It didn't really hit me until the day after and then Saturday.  I would like to think all feelings are cerebral and be overcome with thought control.  These feelings are ego driven and relate to some story we have about ourselves and for the most part I think it is true.

I can't  buy this theory completely because it is not my own experience.  It is of course in our minds but I believe we must have levels memories as well as levels of healing those memories.  We can address them as they come to the surface.  Sometimes we know what triggers the memory of  hurt and sometimes we are taken by surprise.  For me it is Thanksgiving.

I say to myself that I have a good life and that I am a better more healthy person spiritually and emotionally but I was still hurt by what happen to me. It changed my life whether I admit it or not. Those feelings of self doubt surface and I am down for the count.  Saturday I slept until 11 and never got out of pajamas.

I was experiencing an emotional hangover and decided I needed to write in my journal.  I wrote about how I repelled the people I loved  in my life and that is why they left me. When I write things like that I feel worse because I feel I haven't made much progress. How can this be when I remembered feeling so good last year.

I decided to see what I wrote last year.  There is was in black and white slept until 11 and still in my pajamas along with some other bleak stuff.

Reading the words from last year snapped my out of it almost immediately.  I realized this is just a weekend of mourning for me. I shouldn't feel like it is a set back it is just me taking a moment to grieve some pretty significant losses in my life. To honor two major relationships that ended abruptly at Thanksgiving.

It is the thinking I shouldn't still feel this way that really bothers me.  If I could just let those feelings wash over me they would pass just like they did this year.  By Sunday I was painting the kitchen and feeling pretty good.  Can I just accept myself where I am at any given time especially at Thanksgiving? Maybe next year will be different. I don't think so.

The Three of Me - Living life a new way

I have been a selfish person most of my life. This doesn't mean that I didn't do a lot of things for people or that I didn't make plenty of sacrifices of my time and energy but most of the time the pain in my mind got top billing. I lived despite the circumstances I carried around in my mind.

I have experienced a lot grace throughout the years and have be reborn emotionally many times. At the end different episodes of my painful life I would emerge happy and lighter but in time something else would happen and I would enter a new period of pain and again a rebirth.

The difference for me this time is that I feel like I see myself from outside myself. I can look at how lost I have been and see that this kind of pain and suffering is a selfish pursuit. It couldn't be helped  I was trapped with only my own mind to give me advice and that was a dead end proposition.

But I feel healed in a way I have never felt before. I can see that I have been my only friend and my only enemy all along. I have discovered grace once again and I am feeling extremely grateful today.

I believe we have three parts of us that live inside and we must find harmony within ourselves in order to find peace and happiness. We have our mind of course and then our emotional self and last but not least the spiritual self or our core self.

The mind is easy to explain. Your mind believes you can think yourself out of any problem. Your emotions show up when the mind can't solve the problem usually with a meltdown or a burst of anger. Both are just distractions and provide us with a temporary solutions and we can get caught in a loop that just fills our time.

The harder part to describe is the spiritual self or the real self. It is a part of you that knows what you really want at that moment. The part of you that says ugh when you agree to do something that doesn't truly feed you. It is the part of you that patiently waits until the other two are exhausted before saying just the right words that change your life. It isn't interested in a discussion or how you feel about things it just knows in that moment what you really want.

The trouble is that when life hurls rocks at you starting at an early age it seems our mind or our emotions take control and we spend our lives unbalanced feeling like we are just not right going back and forth between thinking and emotions.

My mind has always controlled me and my emotions played second only emerging in sadness and suffering. My thinking self knew sadness was the logical outcome in certain situations so it was acceptable to let my emotions take center stage for a certain period of time.

It never seemed like a war within. It all seemed normal just part of who I was. I was mostly unhappy and felt sadness even when some my dreams came true.

My awakening came when my mind and emotions were both exhausted and there was no one left to run the show. It was quiet there for a really long time and it was uncomfortable for a really long time. I didn't know what was happening. I had never lived in silence before but I didn't have a choice this time.

One day one moment I heard a voice. Not audible so don't lock me up but a small voice that said "you are doing this to yourself". My mind was so weak at that point it barely had an opinion. I didn't change a thing I was doing but I started to get better. I have always wanted to get better but this time my mind didn't have a plan. This getting better as you know took awhile but I had nothing but time.

My core self is managing my mind and emotions these day. I say managing because my mind isn't always willing to do what is best for me and demands top billing and my emotions don't honestly reflect the reality of the situation or the truth about why I feel the way I do.

My mind and emotions grew from my childhood experiences and it is taking time for them to grow up and see I am no longer a child. My spirit wasn't affected by those experiences because it only lives in the moment. It has been watching and waiting for its turn and that time has come.

With  this balance life feels more like a vacation than a war. I am looking forward to what life has to offer now instead of bracing myself for more of the same. I know there will be ups and downs but now I know I can face them without fear.

Happy New Year.

A little story to tell - Life without emotions

I told my story this week the one about depression.  It came up during an appointment with a customer.  I am sure most people would say to keep it professional.  This isn't where I am in my life anymore. I kept it light and I have been so happy lately it is clear to anyone that interacts with me that I have recovered.

I don't tell my life story for sympathy like I use to and I don't tell it to get it out of my system like I use to either. In those days I was lost in my story and telling it was part of my own healing. Today I think I tell it more as a witness in a matter of fact way.  It puts my humanness on the table.  I think we all have secrets and and it helps other people to see that we are all in this together.

We fear that if the truth comes out it will be extreme and we will end up on some TV talk show or like that commercial where this ordinary guy with a normal life makes one wrong decision about his cable TV provider and ends up ruining his life.  That is our fear that we will end up locked up or living on the streets if we don't do everything right and keep our emotions in check.

The subject of depression came up when my customer said that they were fostering dogs for military personnel suffering from PTSD.  They were telling me how the dogs bring them back emotionally from being shut down with depression and without the will to live. The dogs keep other people at bay while the person is out in public and eases some of them back into a more normal life.

I shared about losing my own emotions and my own will to live. I told then that it wasn't that you want to die it is that you just don't want to live without feelings. There is a difference in being sad and hurting and when you can't bear the loss you have experienced and having absolutely no feelings at all. I didn't know this place existed I will take sadness over nothing any day.

I thought I would never feel anything again and I didn't think I could spend the rest of my life in that condition.  I probably should have taken something but coming from a family that scoffed at drugs I just did nothing and waited. I don't suggest this route for anyone else it was hard on me and hard on anyone that crossed my path for those years.

I have summed up my experience in this way too many things were happening at the same time and my mind and emotions could not adjust quickly enough and decided to take a break. I couldn't handle my reality and checked out for as long as it took.

I can't imagine what terrible things our troops have had to endured.  Obviously to the point of having their mind go into its own protection mode. It is good that that some are getting this pet therapy.

Sharing my story can only help people to know that depression can happen to anyone and that there is life after depression. I believe I came back from it because I was forced to see the fear at the core of it. The fear that without what I had lost I was nothing.

When I faced this story I was telling myself and got comfortable with the idea that I was nothing I was able to move forward.  I could see where my worth was based on my own idea of who I was and this was just another story I was telling myself. The things I lost were not me they were my idea of me.

I am happy today and that is enough.  Today I am a  blank slate without all the stories I use to have weighing me down. I feel my life is about just being and interacting with whoever might cross my path today. It is about not taking myself too seriously and getting on with my life.

Fathers - Saying what needs to be said - It is never too late

I wanted to write about my dad today. He has been on my mind this week before I even realized it was Father's Day this weekend.  He has been gone over ten years and even before that we had a distant relationship.

He wasn't a bad man his only real crime against me was his indifference to my existence. I let this indifference label me and have spent a lifetime trying to feel like I meant something to someone. With my intimate relationships I tend to pick people that also ultimately treat me with indifference.  I see now that I have repeated this practice many times even sometimes with my friends.  I pick people that are there one day and gone the next.

Until now I have taken these departures as personal against me. It definitely seems personal.. They move on to a new life with someone else and you are left to deal with it.

What I have realized is that, because of my dad, I attract this kind of person. They are not evil or mean in fact all of them have been generous and kind up until the moment they disappear. They all have one thing in common and that is that they don't like to share their true feelings. They avoid emotion at any cost.

I think in any healthy relationship you have to have regular discussions about feelings. No two people are happy all the time with everything. My only regret in life so far is that I didn't have the opportunity to at least talk through things before I got to the " I want this person instead of you" point.

It all started with my dad. When I left at 16 my dad chose my stepmother over me. It was the same as all the relationships that followed. " I want this person so much I am willing to sacrifice our relationship."

My point is it you can really hurt someone with indifference. It may feel less messy for you to just pretend that life goes on but for the other person there is not closure. I always blamed myself for people leaving me. I was not good enough in some way. I just wanted a simple explanation which of course doesn't exist.

My ex-husband did send me a letter just before he married the his new love. He made amends in that letter which I have kept all these years. He said he had blamed me for what was really wrong with him. I can't tell you how healing that letter was for me. It wasn't all my fault after all.

I wanted something like this from my dad but it never happened. I did have lunch with him a few years before he died and I ask him why he let me go. He said "every one's gotta to do what they gotta do." I realized that day that that was best I was going to get.  There was no hope that real feelings would suddenly come bubbling to the top. That was it take it or leave it.

I stopped blaming him then for not being enough for me. I have stopped blaming people for hurting me because now I know it isn't intentional. It isn't about me it is about what works better for them. I use to consider this disloyal but now I know it is just part of life and people trying to find happiness.

These are old stories but I thought they might help someone out there that is holding back from saying what needs to be said. Nothing unsaid really goes away even if you leave someone behind. It is never to late to say you didn't mean to hurt someone you once loved.

I loved my dad and he loved me. I am sure he is happy up there with my mother if you believe in up there. Happy Father's Day daddy.

Finding Your Own North Star - Feeling Light

new.discovery.com

I took the the day off yesterday. It was raining cats and dogs and no one was really looking for me so I made and executive decision to just stay home. I felt like a kid pretending to be sick and getting away with it.

I think my situation with work has put me into temporary grieving mode. The death of a dream. I had imagined that my partner and I were going to build something together like sisters and the work would be fun. Two creative people doing what we love and getting paid for it. But that was only my dream.

I realized that this situation along with the death of a close friendship around Christmas was the beginning of yet another grieving period. I couldn't really see that it made me not want to do this any more. I thought it was the design work and not the circumstance that was making me so unhappy.

From the time I was big enough to move furniture I rearranged my room at least once a month. All 60 lbs of me would sit on the floor against the wall and push my furniture around with my feet. Thankfully my mother didn't mind my reoccurring decorating sessions from black light posters to beads in the doorway. It kept me out of trouble just as it does today.

The problems I have been having made me doubt my love for design and my ability to be a entrepreneur. I have always been a entrepreneur even as a child when other kids played house I played restaurant or store. I always had a money making enterprise on the side that made real money. I loved the whole process of coming up with something someone wanted and would be willing to pay for.

I have also been doing a lot of reading this week which has helped me find my way. First a Martha Beck book Finding Your Own North Star and then The Power of Now. Martha's book is about finding something you love and the money will follow after a lot of work.  She says if you listen to your essential self instead of your social self you will be led in the right direction.

It is really about aptitude but she has methods in her book for first identifying what it is you don't like about what you are doing now and then how to find what you do like. I have read this book about four times it is way more than a book about careers it is about seeing how we cave to what is expected and become depressed because we are doing things we don't want to do. This book is also about the grief process and actually has a chart of the stages and what you might be feeling. It also help to show you the difference between grief and depression.

I went to bed night before last and ask God to help me find joy in my life again. To restore me to sanity once again and show me which way to go. I can no longer live the way I have been living in fear all the time. I decided to surrender and let the chips fall where they may. My sponsor says ask God to either " lock it or block it."

I woke up yesterday morning feeling light. I decided to stay home and my heart was singing. I watched design shows and just did whatever I felt like doing. After watching a few shows I thought "who are you kidding you are already doing exactly what you love." It hasn't been fun lately but that doesn't have anything to do with design itself. It has to do with the people I have been working with.

This is a creative business with a lot of technical stuff on top of that. Then there is the emotions of the customers and meeting every one's expectations. Having problems with fellow designers and contractors has added and extra layer that pushed me over the edge.

I have decided that I just need a little time off to find some inspiration. Even just not being here yesterday made me feel great. I actually worked on my new business plan. Just realizing that I do still love design made me feel like I am no longer on the fence. I can move forward and put my energy where I need it

Why am I always surprised by grief? If it doesn't come in the usual package I don't always see it. Losing a friendship and realizing my business partner and I don't want the same thing is a big loss. Even if I know I am better off it still hurts. I am no longer emotionally dead like I was before the program so I have to feel my feelings. What a bummer. It is why I have done all this work to be human.

Catching up

I watched three tiny birds at the shoreline yesterday running along together. One would get distracted by a quick bite and fall behind. The others would speed along until they got distracted and then the first would catch up.

It made me think about how sometimes we are on the journey with others and sometimes we fall behind and our friends move ahead without us. We might catch up we might not. At the moment I have fallen behind.

I made a decision to put some distance between myself and the office and took an extra couple of days off. Yesterday I decided to just get in my car and go. I ended up at a small fishing town near the beach. I went to a couple of antique shops and then had lunch at an open air restaurant. On my way home I stopped and sat on the beach for a couple of hours.

My head is clearing I am getting some perspective where I have been. Just how far down I have gone and just how self destructive my thoughts have been. My emotions were so strong that I couldn't override them with logic, the way I use to. I thought what I was feeling was fact.

Logically I knew this was triggered by losing my place in life. Losing a relationship that I thought would last a lifetime. Having to move from a home I thought I would live in for the rest of my life and then the economy tanking and putting my own earning power in jeopardy. It was all too much. I couldn't adapt and my body panicked and responded with instant early menopause.

So it is understandable that I have fallen behind. I still can't imagine that I will ever feel safe or happy again. This is why I know I am not out of the woods yet. They say fake it until you make it and for today that is what I intend on doing.

It feels like I have been in this place forever. My friends have moved on at my request. I have worn them out and I have worn myself out being stuck for what seems like an eternity.

I will catch up at some point. One day this all will be a distant memory. The thought of being like this forever is too much.

More on Denial

Yesterday’s meeting was very emotional. Two weeks in a row there have been a lot of tears. When people share that are living with active alcoholism or about the overall effects of alcoholism on their lives it brings out buried emotion in all of us. Compassion is felt for the person speaking and for ourselves. This is how healing begin and continues for everyone.

Denial was defended for the most part. I shared a little of my story and I do understand the purpose of denial as part of the grief process. Accepting my self and others where we are is part of why the program works.

I want stay more in touch with my feelings and not be in denial until a shock brings me out of it. I have to spend more time getting in touch with my higher powers will for my life and asking to gently guided in the right direction.