Rejection - Truth - Letting go

I didn't realize we would be closed on Monday for the holiday.  When you are in sales you don't always get those expected holiday.  I is almost 100 today and I just came in from putting the last bag of mulch on the flower bed.  I had to stop a few times to rest or cool off and the last bag I had to drag behind me to get it out there.

I pride myself on my ability to adapt to the heat.  I can't really say I adapt well to anything else. I listened to T.D. Jakes while I was on a heat break.  He was preaching at Lakewood this morning and had a pretty powerful message.  I have to say that history is repeating itself.  My Aunt Ruby use to make fun of my grandmother for watching TV evangelist and then in her own last days that is all she wanted to do.  Now here I am doing the same thing not that it is my last days.

I have found that everything in life that is painful comes from resistance.  When you resist what is then that means you want something else instead.  No matter how hard you wish for something different you are sitting right in the middle of something you don't want.  Whether that is a job or a relationship or a even a sickness you can't change it in the moment.

Today's message was very powerful.  When you are in the dark it means there is an absence of light. Darkness isn't evil or powerful just a place where you just happen to be at the moment.  All growth starts in the darkness and only when it emerges from the ground does it even need the light.

I have had long periods of time where I just wished I was someplace else.  When I headed into the darkest of depression I wanted life itself to be over.  I could not endure not one more minute of the nothingness I felt. I thought about that time when he was speaking this morning.

I can only say it was some sort of grace that saved me. Right now I can remember sitting on the porch when something turned inside of me and a voice said "you are doing this to yourself".  I started thinking about that and wondering if that was true. I felt that I had been rejected so many times by the people that were suppose to love me that there must be something about me that made me unlovable.

This was my core belief and every thought I had about it proved me right.  I am very logical person and looked at all the facts.  I have the kind analytical brain that latched on to these facts and could only come to this one conclusion.   It had to be my fault.  A child raised in a fundamentalist home where you take responsibility for yourself and your actions this was how we thought.  You must do better next time.

I never occurred to me that in life random things happen to everybody all the time.  Even at birth you could be born just about anywhere to anybody.  Anybody can get sick and die.  I should have realized that when my own mother died.  But my child brain decided that if I worked hard and was the best person I could be I could prevent bad things from happening to me. 

Plenty of bad things happened to me from that point on but somehow I just thought I wasn't trying hard enough. This is an exhausting way to live trying to out smart unknown random stuff from happening and blaming myself when it did. 

That day on the porch I just gave up and let go.  I decided to not to blame myself and not even look for an answer to why I ended up where I did.  I rested from the responsibility of my situation and I got better slowly.  I even decided that if I was unlovable there was nothing I could do about it. I was in the darkness for a long time but eventually I got rid of the thoughts that were hurting me.

I am a happy person now and feel sad for that girl inside me that didn't know any better.  I raised myself without a mother and there were things I didn't know.  I am smart and used the spiritual knowledge of others to get where I needed to go.  In the end I had to see it was my own thoughts about myself that hurt me more than being rejected by other people.

You can't always trust you own thoughts about any situation.  For me I had see that it didn't matter whether my thoughts were true or not I had to just let them go and start loving myself.

Ordinary Day - Wishing for future happiness - suffering

Not much has changed here I had a busy six days at work and spent yesterday in the yard.  The front is really finished but I planted some impatiens that were suppose to be sun worthy but were suffering so I moved them yesterday to a more shady spot. I replaced them with bright pink ehinacea plants.

I am glad to have something I am excited about.  This can be an issue when you get older and more peaceful. You have done a lot of things and even the things you haven't done you know that once you do them you will have to find the next thing to fill your time.  Even vacations will be over as the time passes by and when you come home began each day again. 

You could embellish your time away to others or to yourself just to make your normal life more bearable or you could just enjoy your life the way it is and look for the joy it offers each day. Getting away can renew your spirit but it doesn't solve day to day suffering.  In my experience spending concentrated time with people you already have unspoken issues with can make you wish you were back at work.

This sounds sad but it isn't meant to be.  It is just about seizing the day for what it is an not trying to get to some day in the future where things are different. We wish things were different than they are now and know that perfect day is out there somewhere.

When you are living in a crisis whether that is addiction, sickness or lack you can't wait to get past it.  I get that for sure I have lived with all of those things and I suffered most when I was wanting to be someplace else.  Someplace far in the future where this wasn't happening to me.

Today I am grateful that I can just in enjoy the day I have and not wish for happiness in the future. I will see where I can find joy in this ordinary day.

Changing - Giving up what seems natural

I am in a good space working on my yard.  I feel balance mentally, spiritually and physically.  I am still giving all the credit to the Keto diet.  I don't remember feeling this good except when I was in love.  New love anyway.  How can that be?

Our whole lives are geared towards eating. Maybe the memories we have of our mother's making special meals for us. The relationships that grew over eating meals together.  I have a lot of those first at my Al Anon mother's house in my thirty's.  We had big parties and the two of us worked together alone in the kitchen.  Something I didn't have with my own mother.

I then moved on to my adopted family.  My ex's family and a few of my Al-anon friends that migrated with me.  I cooked with love and after many years finally felt at home.  After ten years I felt relatively safe as long as I kept doing what I was doing.  That was the deal even though never said it was implied that I would continue to take care everything.  I didn't mind I had been doing that all my life and it was the safest I had ever felt.  Of course three years later that life was over basically finished over night a 13 year relationship was over.  We have spoken once since then.

The rest of the story is old and I am sick of it by now. I have recreated myself since then some things intentionally and some changes forced on me.  After all of the work I have done in counseling and in Al-Anon I never even considered addressing my diet and that changing it could change me.

I could say that the way I feel is because all the stars are aligned now and that is why I feel so good.  Maybe that is partially true but my mind is different.  I don't get stuck in the problem loop like I use to dwelling on the past or any particular problem.  I feel whole and excited about what is going to happen next. I have never experienced this as an adult.

The change isn't easy and has stunted my social life for sure.  I have long term relationships built around food.  I am rarely hungry and that makes the reward of eating less interesting to me.  Since I am not that interested in food my love of cooking has mostly disappeared.  I need very little to sustain me each day.  I did order the Flavcity Keto cookbook coming out May 15th.  His food is similar to what I like to eat and not too complicated.

I think I am really happy in a healthy way for the first time.  I feel separate and whole not wanting for anything today.  I have to say a word about Mother's Day.  My own mother even though I didn't have her long did good job preparing me and my sister for her not being around.

She instilled in us that we needed to think for ourselves.  She wasn't controlling and let us fall and suffer sometimes.  We were encouraged to work it out for ourselves even if this meant suffering
for her.   Thanks Mama.

Not change a thing - Holding on

I didn't sleep well last night with radiating pain all over my body.  This happens from time to time so I just try to get up and walk it off in the night.  It feels a little like the flu and is gone by morning.  I feel kind strange today a little gloomy me and the weather.  This morning I have been out in the yard admiring the fruits of my labor over the past few weekends.

It looks great and only needs time and a little mulch to be finished.  Patience is required for gardening especially when you are waiting for perennials to come back from last year.  This is hit or miss in our part of the country.  I think it gets too hot or maybe not cold enough some winters to alert the plants to come back.  My neighbor ask me if I was planning on planting flowers this year.  I guess she couldn't see that I am finished.

Things are changing at work and this has added to my lack of enthusiasm for life in general.  A teammate left and moved to the other side of the country.  A young person with the enthusiasm of someone that has not encountered a lot of disappointments.  That is not really true just a personality that seems to just move on quickly to the next thing. 

I am not built that way but I am working on it.  If life is good I want to hold on to things the way they are not change anything hoping that I can sustain the happiness that I have found.  Life doesn't ever work that way it goes in and out in waves and sometimes you are on the shore and sometimes in the water.  I like to be near the water but never learned to swim so I prefer the shore. When I feel like I am sinking I can start panicking or just float until a wave takes me back to shore.

I watched the Netflix special Knock Down the House.  The story of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and her long shot win over the democrat incumbent.  This is what it will take to change the business as usual in our country.  The enthusiasm and youth that we all had at one time to make a difference.  The country is corporate owned and operated.  It makes us feel really helpless to change things.

This is a weird post but just where I am today.  Mostly regrouping after a 6 day work week and feeling less than inspired. 

Security and Peace - The search is over

I have spent my life trying to feel safe.  I never felt secure after I lost my mother early on and this drove me to look constantly for security.  I felt like I had lost something and I needed so desperately to find it.

When I found new love the first time I thought "this is it " this was the thing I had been missing.  I gripped it so tightly but as we all know that first love feeling doesn't last.  I was too young to know that then and blamed myself for the failure of those early relationships.  I was not good enough is what I believed. 

I searched next for a different kind of love and found my first addiction relationship. It was a fierce love and the intensity of that love made me feel safe. It was intoxicating and we were the same touching the parts of us that needed to feel safe.  Unfortunately you can't do that for someone else. It only works when the neediness is equal if there is a crisis where one person needs the other person more can bring it all crashing down. I learned in this relationship it was not safe fo me to be needy.

After experiencing that I moved on to loyalty and routine. Another broken person but not so volatile it felt safer a daily routine.  A loved and felt love for awhile and it seemed like a good bet for feeling secure.  I didn't jump in like I had all the other relationships I had been burned and wanted to try something different. It was good for long while but I still felt lonely a lot.  I definitely got the security I thought I wanted but the trade off was that I was alone in a relationship.

When I lost that relationship I turned to God and sought out very intensely the meaning of life.  Spirituality and something greater than myself had always been part of my personal beliefs but at this time I needed it to be more and it replaced that search for someone physical to satisfy me. Just like all intense relationships it didn't sustain me or make me feel safe.

When I step back and see that my life has been spent looking for something that doesn't really exist I feel somehow relieved that I can let go.  There isn't one person or even God that can give me that security the young girl in me wants so badly.  I can be free now to just enjoy everyday life and the miracles that present themselves.

Wanting all the time kept my mind busy and it me exhausted. I can now be content to just be here and be grateful.  I do still rely on the wisdom I got from having a spiritual journey and I do think that collectively those that believe in something greater than themselves are usually happier.

The world on its own isn't a loving place and being with other people that have found some peace is inspiring.  Maybe because we are positive unit a spiritual energy together.  It sounds weird but we are all connected and we can carry peace to others with just our presence every day.

Not wanting something more - freedom

I have been a little apprehensive about writing here because the traffic was coming from an unsavory source.  It appears to have been corrected.

I have returned to my happy self after my trip to see my family.  I hadn't wanted to admit to myself that it was the trip and what I felt while I was there that was making me sad. The girl in me imagined that if I could be a part of my family would make me feel complete.  This is what I have been looking for in every relationship I have had since my mother died. 

I first married someone who was overly protective of me.  Someone that would literally fight for me if I needed them to no one had ever done that for me. Since my dad never even verbally stood up for me after my mother died this was really appealing. I ended up with a raging maniac in the end who wanted to control me every minute. I moved on to the duplicate of dad a relief that felt so familiar and the relationship did help me work through all the indifference I felt with my dad.

The point is that I have always felt something was missing.  I had moments where I felt safe and secure and loved but inevitably history repeated itself and I was left. Rejected just like that girl who left home at sixteen. They wanted me there for my cleaning and babysitting skills because I was reliable as a support staff. This also has been repeated in all of my relationships.

Getting back to the visit with my sister.  I felt invisible there or worse like just another person to manage around all the drama.  When you are given instructions about what not to say or ask about. I just stayed silent most of the time.  I enjoyed having one lunch with my sister just the two of us. We talked about life and her kids.  We are similar in many ways which always surprises us both.

I think what I have been looking for is a rare thing.  I want to feel like I matter to someone when most of the time people are so wrapped up in their own life that they can't even see you most less appreciate you. The next thing I ask myself is "do I appreciate other people?" probably not as much as I should.  My own life circumstances has made me pretty self absorbed and autonomous.

When I lost the idea of who I was 10 years ago I almost didn't recover.  I never imagined that I could be happy just being myself and not wanting something more from someone. A maturity that I didn't think was possible. Today I feel that a kind of freedom that is hard to explain.

My recent sadness was from realizing that what I want cannot be found with my family or anyone else.  I have been mourning that loss since I got back. I am happy again because I can see that I don't have to keeping trying so hard to make myself a part them. Their indifference to me has nothing to do with me or whether I am worthy of their love.  They are just wrapped up in their own story.

I have decided to stop thinking that I will spend my twilight years with my family and make other plans.  I have also decided that I will make less visits and maybe get my sister to meet me somewhere for a long weekend.  She is growing too and realizing her kids want to manage their lives without her input. She is accepting that she has done her job and they have to find their own way.

I have been working on my house and very busy at work the two things I do love.  I am wrapping up my oil painting class something that makes me feel more balance.  I feel good just being me and not wanting something more. Enjoying each day as it comes.

Don't take anything personally - Family

It feels like I always begin my post with I have had a lot going on and it is always true.  Since my break over the holidays I have been working to try to balance my work and free time a little better but the universe has answered the challenge by amping up the volume at work.

This is never something I will complain about since I work 100 % commission - not something I recommend to the faint at heart.  In the red then in the black you can't take it personally and you can't let the anxiety show through to your customers.  I have been doing it so long I mostly remain unattached to the outcome of any transaction until they are signed.  This keeps my stress levels down.

In the book The Four Agreements one agreement is "don't take anything personally" - if you can do this you can really find happiness but it is really difficult.  It is especially hard because when we are stressed we are always looking for someone to blame.  If you are analytical like me you can really get stuck. I would always look for a solution to make sure next time the outcome would be different. 

This is a trick of the mind and feeds our controlling nature.  It also feeds our ego who wants to believe the world really does revolve around us at all times.  Even thoughts like "it is my fault" sounds very humble but really that just means you have given yourself a lot of power over the situation and you believe it is about you.

I went to visit my family two weekends ago taking my new happy self to celebrate the 1 year birthday of my great nephew.  I haven't seen him ever and when I got a last minute invite I scrambled around to make it work.  It rained and it was cold and everyone was stressed.  Not really that different than anytime I have visited before but I thought since I was different somehow they would be different.

We are a family of survivors wading through one problem after another.  Joy and happiness wasn't really a part of our upbringing and wasn't passed down generation to generation.  You love Jesus because he gets you through the tragedies of life so you can go on to a better place.  I do remember some happy times squeezed between chores and church and sometimes mixed with church in the form of after service homemade ice cream social.

When I visit I have learned when it is time to go and left a day early.  Ironically the sun was shining for the first time but I wanted a day at home to recover before going back to work.  It did take me four days to return to happiness and understand we are products of our upbringing. The survival spirit is deeply grooved in our childs mind and we don't really know any different.

I think this was why I always attracted the fun people in the room mostly those drinking too much.  They seemed happy but it was really the spirits that made them temporarily happy.  Those liquid spirits never worked for me they just made me sad.  While writing rccently about my childhood I realized I was a happy child.  I lived in my own world and managed around my family and used my great imagination to create a world I could live in anytime I wanted.

What does any of this have to do with "The Four Agreements" and "don't take anything personally" well for me it helps me to understand that everyone is experiencing life in their own way and it really isn't about you.  It is the timing and that timing is rarely right when it involves a lot of different people. Try to find what works for you and stick with it.

My nephew and his wife are super stressed about being new parents.  What is new about that? The rain and cold will go away eventually. My sister has lived in survival mode just like me since our mother died.  She doesn't know anything else but with a grandchild she wants things to be different and is making changes to feel more free.  I know she feels strange but she really wants to make the change.

My point is everyone is in a different place emotionally all the time.  It is a miracle we ever sinc up with anyone so relax and just be there in the moment and get out when you can't take anymore.

I have read a million books about life and finding answers -  The Four Agreements was one of the first and it really says it all.  Not taking things personally has changed my life and the expectations I have for others.  We have to know we have no control over where we are or other people and sometimes with relatioships you have to just accept what is and move on.