Making a decision - Stuck - Fantasy

I sometimes wonder if what I am writing here is doing anyone any good at this point. I started writing this blog when it felt like the only way for me to stay alive.  I mean that in a literal sense.  Every word that came out of me helped me to endure just one more day of the emotional excruciating pain I was experiencing at the time.  In my mind my life had been reduced to ashes and I was starting over again and I resisted with every fiber of my being.

Because of my resistance I stayed stuck for a long time.  I also believed this made my body react by rejecting health and my adrenals failed and my thyroid stopped working. I was thin and refused to go to the doctor. In my emotionally and mentally weakened state I wasn't sure there was a solution to my problem or if living was really for me.  I kept going despite what my mind was telling me.

I tried to do the things that worked for me when I was left at 30 by the man of my dreams. Ironically last night I dream about him I was lost in a strange city and the only phone number I had in my phone was his and I called him to come and get me.  He never said yes before we got disconnected.  He is still not there I guess. In my pain it felt hollow to repeat the things that I had done before I was more spiritually mature and it seemed obvious that all the work I had done on myself didn't keep bad things form happening to me. 

The first time I thought I could mold myself into a pillar of spiritual strength and attract only goodness in my life and it worked for awhile anyway but in the end I still wasn't good enough and was left again. I couldn't reconcile the fact I was exactly where I was before.  This conflict cause me to stay stuck for what seemed forever.

What I would say to the broken person I was then is that crap happens to everyone and there is no magic bullet to stop it. You can only do so much and then you got to just live and be happy being who you are. We get trapped in the idea of working on ourselves forever when it is suppose to free us to accept ourselves and just live. 

I feel feel whole now for the first time in my life. I am thinking about what am I going to do with the rest of my life. I do want to live deliberately for a change deciding how I want to spend my time instead of just riding things out and waiting for something to happen.

Yesterday I spent 2 1/2 hours on the phone with my sister using face time for the first time.  It was nice we showed each other our planted flowers in the yard. She has a lot things in her world that she can't do anything about right now.  You can't really solve other people's problems they have to be ready to receive help. I am an excellent example of that. She isn't ready to hear that.

We get entrenched in our version of life and only when we are ready to admit that it isn't working can we move on.  We don't want other people poking holes in our fantasy version of life.  Only when the pain becomes too much do we start looking for an answer. Our mind says "I can't do this anymore". 

I have had a great journey here with this blog and I haven't decided to quit writing yet but I feel this is coming to an end for me.  It seems I am getting mostly traffic from some porn site in Italy so it doesn't feel that I am making a difference.  Until next time.

Parents Wedding Facing the truth

I am spending the weekend alone which isn't such a shock but this weekend I am not particularly inspired to do anything.  I did pull weeds yesterday morning but that is about the only routine thing I have done.  I usually have a least a to do list my head but I decided to just do nothing.

This isn't something I am at all comfortable doing and lets just say that my idea of doing nothing can sometimes translate into another persons doing a lot.  I talked to my sister for a couple of hours yesterday while she fixed herself lunch and then walked to the bottom of her property and pulled weeds while we talked. Our friendship is growing as she realizes we are more the same then she imagined.

Today I got up and decided to clean my home office and move towards changing it into a studio. I don't really like this room and when I bring work home I sit at the dining room table. The office is paneled at the bottom and has a large bookcase a perfect set up for a working space.  It is northeast facing and seems dark and uninviting.  I painted it a saturated blue to contrast with the dark paneling but it made it worse. I do write my blog here but that is really it.

To start the cleaning process I first took the two last boxes of my old business files upstairs. When I got there I faced a bed covered with family photos.  A few months ago I started looking at mostly my mothers family photos and got too overwhelmed and left it. Today I decided to put them away and move on and then I stumbled upon my parents wedding album. It is the original with thick white pages with plastic on both sides of each page. It has no cover or order and some of the plastic has cracked.

This album used to be kept in the bottom drawer of my mothers secretary. As a child I loved to pull it out regularly and look at my parents getting married.  I have often thought of creating a new album but this one has a smell that reminds me of my childhood.  Probably off gases of the plastic they used back then but I could bear to get rid of the original album.

Today I brought it downstairs and started scanning the pictures.  I want to make a digital photo album for my sister.  Along with the wedding the album has all the professional pictures of our family.  Ones with Santa and a few during a time when my mom bought one of those packages from Olan Mills.  I have added a few random photos I have found over the years. 

My mother had dreams for herself and for us.  She made every moment count with her entrepreneur spirit she made our lives feel full and safe.  She kept us motivated and everything at our house was organized and drama free. Her own family growing up was plagued with addiction and lived drama to drama this sometimes invaded our lives with phone calls in the middle of the night. She always downplayed the situation and everything went back to normal. 

Looking at my little family today starting with my mothers late teenage years.  She was at a dinner getting and award for vocational leadership to the last professional family picture just before she got sick. Her smile from the first picture change from genuine to fake to even forced in the last one.  She gave up her own ambitions mostly at the direction of the church. It was a choice she made and certainly had nothing to do with my father who would have joined the circus to be with her.

Her mother and the indoctrination she received from her church kept her on the straight and narrow.  She chose that path and lived it with her whole heart and would not be happy about me writing this.  We make choices based on what we know and who is influencing us day to day.  My dad raised a Methodist loved the rigidity of my mothers religion. He didn't like to make decisions for himself so it was great to have the church do this for him.

Looking at all the pictures together has helped me to see the bigger picture and where I come from.  I can see where everything is a choice and how I can choose again. My mother didn't choose to get sick but I think she lived against who she really was and that can make you sick. I only remember her wanting to get well for my father.  Anything treatment he found she would try.  In the end because she had to have faith she couldn't be honest with us girls that she wasn't going to make it.

I am glad my sister and I are getting closer.  We have been alone most of our lives emotionally and spiritually with only our faith to get us through.  I am grateful for my family history and the values both my parents gave to me.  It has served me well.

Spiritual Genetics - Self Acceptance

I had a marathon conversation with my sister this week.  She called at 9:30 and we talked until 12:30.  I wasn't expecting this and had to be at work at 8:30 the next morning but took it all in stride. I am happy that we are really starting to get to know each other. 

My sister like me has spent most of her life alone emotionally.  She feels she has a leg up on me because she has children but now that they are grown they are starting to see that we are not normal. There is a number of reasons for that first with our Pentecostal upbringing we were taught that the things of this world are not important. If you have talents and abilities then you use them for God's good and to encourage people to find Jesus. 

We are analytical and our minds are in a constant state of processing and we aren't really interested in small talk or the latest TV super show.  My sister has stayed close to our family faith and pretty isolated to what is going on in the world.  My brother in law keeps Fox News running constantly on the TV so that gives you an idea of the slant of the house.  Everything points to the end of time.

I once said something about Tony Robbins to my sister and she had no idea who that was. I think it is funny that after such different lives we do have a lot of spiritual ideas in common.  I talked to her about the spiritual books I have read and she comes back with a christian book that says the same thing. 

We haven't been close all these years.  She has called me regularly most of my life but usually she did most of the talking.  She is having an awakening now with her kids wishing she was more like other people.  She wants to withdraw from their lives because she doesn't measure up in their eyes.

I told her that we are who we are and that there is nothing wrong with us.  Our mother gave us the gift of individualism and knowing what is important.  We were born in the deep end of the pool and the sooner we accept ourselves the happier we will be. 

I have always wished to be like other the people but I am not.  I have finally come to terms with just living and enjoying who I am.  I did tell her that loving herself will make her feel less like a victim.  The kids will come around one day and see that she has dedicated her life to making them strong individuals.  They want to fit in right now and they are not sure what to do with mom the spiritual intellectual. 

I was happy when she told me that during a recent family get together she was able to take a walk and enjoy the spectacular scenery.  She said it was the first time she didn't try to be something she wasn't.

We can't get away from who we are at the core.  My sister is an amazing person and has done a lot with her life despite a lot of road blocks and a rough start.  I think it is funny how much the same we are and how only now she can see that.  Spiritual genetic I guess.  Thanks Mom.

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.