Lizard Brain - Change

I feel change in the air and it is a little unsettling.  I think for the most part we want things to be the same and comfortable.  I have heard this called the lizard brain.  We want to relax and be free from worry and the way we do this is to imagine everything will stay just as it is today.  Our lizard brain wants us to get settled into a routine good or bad because change feels uncomfortable.

Right now I feel a little scared and excited because a few things that impact my daily routine.  We have an new person on our team. We are training her and she is bringing a new dynamic to our stagnant routine.  She is young and has opinions of her own and can see things with fresh eyes.  We are older and have encountered the limitations we have in our work life and have learned  to work with in the system.

It is nice to see the unstoppable nature of youth.  At her age I was setting the world on fire and didn't take no for answer.  This is her opportunity to buck the system and see if she make some changes. She doesn't have our history so she doesn't know why we have the limitations that we do. 

We get stuck and with time we learn to adapt to what is instead of what could be.  I think when you get older you realize that you have a limited amount of time and don't want to waste it stirring the pot. You want to get in and out as fast as possible so you can do what you want in your free time.

She is also an artist and studied art locally she gave me a name of a woman that is holding a great weekend workshop in September.  I signed up for it today. Change is good for getting things moving. I need a new personal life and I am trying to do that even if my lizard brain is nervous.

We are slow right now and have too much time on our minds. It is normal for the middle of summer but it feels weird to step off the roller coaster even for a few weeks. This is also puts my lizard brain on high alert. I want to be more comfortable with change and not see the unknown as possible pending doom.

Making changes - Fitting in - Not getting attached

Sometimes I can really get in trouble when I start analyzing my life.  I like being happy and I am really starting to get use to it.  I had a particularly unhappy week at work.  I lost my sense of peace.  This happens to me when I feel like I have put a lot of effort into something and it doesn't work out.  With work that means I didn't get a job that I have invested a lot of time in.

When I do my best and don't get too attached to people or outcomes I keep my peace. If I want something too much I feel a great loss when I don't  get it.  This is when my mind tells me I am not in the right job or even relationship.  I start comparing myself to others peoples outside success.  At work I have never thought of myself as a natural born salesperson.  I have to be authentic and when I am not it makes me feel bad some people appreciate this but the majority would prefer to be razzled and dazzled.

This is where I always feel like an outsider because I really am outsider.  I want to fit in but it feels dishonest to pretend I am something I am not. Customers bring their lives to the table and sometimes that it very stressful for me. Over the years I have learned not to get too attached to the outcome or the customer. I get too invested because I like them or because of the potential income from the job.

This just makes me feel trapped and desperate to close the deal.  Sometimes when I like someone too much and they do something that disappoints me I feel frustrated with myself for getting too involved.  I do feel like it is my fault because I can usually spot the people that mostly don't consider sales people as people. They don't appreciate the investment of time and energy that I put into the design process and it is only about the lowest bidder. 

What this week has shone me is that I need a fuller life outside of work.  I have put too many eggs in one basket and I need something more.  I love what I do creating new spaces for people and I mostly love the people I work for and with even if it sometimes doesn't work out. 

Yesterday I met with a woman who said to me "I have met with several people and I just kept coming back to you because you have a kind spirit."  The people that are nice and thoughtful never really get the attention they deserve and in this case I am talking about the customer not me.  The draining ones are the ones you remember and talk about.  It isn't right is it?

I have recovered from the week and made plans to visit a museum with a friend today instead working in the yard.  Trying to change things up a bit.  I also am planning on visiting a church in my neighborhood tomorrow.  I would like to get more involved in my community.  It is an denomination that is unlike my own upbringing but they seem open and friendly to all types of people from their videos on face book so we shall see.

Grabbing on to people or outcomes of any kind can only set you up for disappointments.  Also when you have a bad week and you feel unhappy it can give you the opportunity to step back and commit to making changes.  Even small changes can make you feel just a little bit more alive.

Left Behind

I met a woman yesterday that told me her husband left her after 35 years of marriage. She said her friends want her to just get over it.  She actually lives in my old neighborhood and I shared that I also had been left and that it takes a long time to get over idea of what you thought your life was going to look like.  He left her for another woman how shocking.

I have a lot to say about this topic.  I use to think that this was just bad people doing bad things or selfish people who really can't keep their promises.  Now I think that it is a lack of maturity and most people are looking for someone to fill the giant space inside we all carry.

Sadly the space is permanent and nothing or no one can fill that long term. Happy mature people know this and find ways to fill this space inside their promises. They see that being bored and feeling trapped is part of every one's life from time to time and you just have to find a way through it. 

In the middle years where chaos reigns and your just getting through the day you don't have time to think about your personal happiness. When the kids are older or for me when I found some success in my career it gives you a chance to look at where you are and the emptiness can surface. In our society of happily ever after we think out mate should be what makes us happy.

In my last relationship I could see this happening and I knew from experience that there was nothing I could do about it. I tried on several occasions to have the talk but I was dismissed. This was just like my first marriage avoid having grown up conversations about what wasn't working.  I just stayed busy until the solution of another woman solved everything.

It is the perfect solution for one person.  You can tell yourself you just made a mistake and you can start over an believe that you will never end up where you are now again. The boredom is certainly gone for at least a few years while you merge your life with someone else work out through all those issues.  No time to slow down and think.

I think the emptiness is always there and has to be filled by a lot of things.  I think for myself and the brain I was born with it needs a lot different  things to keep me from feeling bored and empty. I liked being in a relationship because it made me feel secure enough to pursue other interest.  It made me feel anchored and safe to just live.

I have been alone along time now and I have had to reached a point where I can be happy with who I am and know that sometimes I am going to be bored and restless.  I know that a relationship would not solve this for me and even if it did it would only be temporary.

I felt bad the that women whose husband left her and really understand what that feels like.  It is the  death of the dream that keeps us in grief so long.  We imagine our lives being a certain way and then we have to adapt to the new dream. If feels so overwhelming at first but eventually we see the dream was mostly in our minds and not our day to day reality.

Creativity - Enthusiasm - Getting things done

I took the long weekend off.  It was a surprise to me that with our rotating schedule that I could potentially be off for five days.  It is the best time to do this is around a holiday because few people are thinking about design while they are eating burgers and hot dogs with friends and family.

Since I am mostly solo these days I have been working on a few different projects.  First organizing my garage by hanging shelves and having a place to put all the plant stuff I am accumulating.  I want to make an attempt to grow plants from seed so I have save a few of the trays and little pots the annuals come in.  The question is will I do this or is this some fantasy that I have that I am a Monty Don in the making or in America Martha Stewart when she was doing everything.

I am a big idea person and I get so excited about something that I run out and buy what I need to do it and by the time I get home my enthusiasm is gone.  When I was young use to hate myself for this because all I could see around me was the unfinished projects.  It reminded me of the alcoholic in my life with grandiose ideas that never came to life or were left to me to finish.

I really don't like things undone or unfinished and this is also why back in the day I never started anything.  Once I was into to a project I just wanted to blow through it as fast as possible before I got bored with the whole thing.  This is why my job is perfect for me I can get excited about a project design something spectacular and turn it over to someone else to make it come to life.  I also like details so I know I have designed everything down to the last inch and it will work.

In my first marriage living with alcoholism I felt like I was always chasing my husbands big ideas. Once a friend gave him a bunch of wood from a deck they had torn down and he decided we were going to build a porch on to our mobile home. Did we know anything about attaching a porch to an aluminum structure.  Half way through it was abandoned.  After the divorce and a few houses later I sold that little mobile home and when they drug it off the lot the half built porch was still attached.

Today I don't really worry about finishing anything but my professional work.  Don't get me wrong I love looking at the "after" from the "before and after" more than most people do.  I relish in any kind of transformation of really anything.  My mind looks at something or someone and can see all the possibilities.  I really don't understand the limitations others put on life in general.

The creative spirit is a gift that has to be nurtured at all times.  When I get excited about something now and I run out and get supplies I don't beat myself up if I lose interest.  It is the anthem that I cherish now more than anything else.  It is that I can still find something that I am excited about.

I no longer analyze everything to death and take the joy out of my creativity.  I don't think of the thousand ways it won't work before investing my time and energy into something.  If it is an expensive project I do way out what I willing to invest and lose if in the end I hate it.

Right now I have three fish tanks that I would like to one into real tank with fish and the other two into elaborate terrariums. I know that I may not want to maintain any of these in the long run so do I want to make the effort and spend the money?  I am not like the guys on YouTube that this is their life to maintain these tanks and of course make videos about it.  It is their passion and I will never be them but the fantasy is there in my mind anyway.

I have been slowly working towards setting them up.  Looking at the lighting possibilities buying plants and getting new bulbs for the tanks.  The baby steps towards commitment.  I have made drawing of the plant tanks.  I want to build a rock wall with stones I already have.  I am getting juiced about it right now.  I can do this right?

My point is that sometimes it is the process and not the end result that is important.  The journey not the destination as they say.  I always hated that phrase because I thought "somebody has got to get things done."  I have accomplished a lot in my life and if you want something done just hand it over.

Being like that has earned me a lot of money but now I want to enjoy the moment more and savor the enthusiasm a new idea generates.  I am enjoying chasing the dream instead beating myself up for not getting it done.  In the end it is suppose to be fun and the thrill of finishing something doesn't last and then you got to find something else to do.

Not being enough - Order - Life choices

I have spent most of my life loathing who I am mainly because I am analytical and seemed wired for just looking at every thing that isn't quite the way it should be including myself.  Order has always been a destination for me.  If I can just get things in order I will be ready to tackle the big stuff.

I can sit down in a clean organized space materially and really get something done. At least this is what my more intense OCD part of me would like to believe but it is just not true.  This kind of order doesn't exist in this world.   I did visit a garage recently that looked like an operating room.  You can have the illusion of order but it takes a lot of time and money and doesn't make you happy.

On the spiritual front I think it is another form of control.  It is acceptable and everyone would like to be that neat and orderly but life is messy even if you can eat on your garage floor.

The spouse of the garage owner is a very angry person it felt oppressive to be in their home. It was beautifully decorated and everything was perfect but there was an elephant in the room.  This is when I wish I hadn't taken the red pill like in the Matrix movie. I can see the pain in others so clearly and wish sometimes that I didn't.  In the past I would try to help but people have to find their own way out.  Sometime it has to be a lot of pain to make you move forward.

I have always been able to see the pain in others.  Even as a child I remember questioning the behaviors of others and wondering why they were so unhappy.  Seeing just so clearly their suffering and asking questions that got me in a lot of trouble. My daddy called it the spirit of discernment. 

We all feel trapped in our lives and our pain from time to time.  We really think that we have no choices when it is that we are not ready for the consequences of the choices we need to make.  Staying too long in a marriage or a job.  Living with a controlling verbally abusive person who knows your fears and uses words to keep you from having the courage to move on. This situation can make you think you have no choice.  That was my first marriage.

In my second marriage it was the opposite but sometimes just as painful.  I lived with someone that didn't even see me. As long as I did everything to make things run smoothly and didn't change one thing then it was great. The truth was I was happy to be invisible left alone to entertain myself I was comfortable in that role.  It was the opposite of my relationship the the explosive alcoholic and  my childhood.  In both cases I knew I was less likely to get in trouble if I was invisible. 

I stayed because I imagined that there wasn't anything better and weeks turn into months and months turned into years and I felt like I had invested too much time to leave.  Besides what did I have to complain about ?  I felt safe and I was use to the pain so I just stayed busy to avoid thinking about it. I was happy that someone would have me and worried that I would end up alone.  It felt great compared to my last relationship even if I felt alone most of the time.

Of course I blamed myself for the choices I made but that doesn't help.  I made the choices I made because of where I was at that moment in my life.  I made that choice because I hadn't grown spiritually enough to see that I was repeating the past.  I married my daddy the second time.

A kind peaceful man that emotionally wasn't there ever. He only got attached to his wives and his religion nothing else existed.  He had great wisdom to offer strangers but if you were related to him you had to accept that he wasn't capable of really seeing you.  I loved him so much and before my mother died we were inseparable. When my stepmother came alone I no longer existed.

I guess my point is that we make the choices we make for a reason.  I think it is mostly because the person or the situation seems familiar.  Even if I hadn't married my father the second time it would have been someone that would have been similar.  That relationship felt good for a long time and I got to understand what it would be like to be my mother.

I am not sure how I got here today in the post but I can feel a little healing for myself. I am like my daddy in many ways. Offering hopefully good advice to strangers.  He fell in love with my mother and her religion.  He told me once that when he went to that first prayer meeting that he knew it was what he had been looking for all his life.  I figured he was attracted to the emotional freedom of the Pentecostal church. He grew up in a home where no one was allowed to have feelings except his abusive father.  The kids stayed silent at all cost.

We all have things to understand about ourselves and the choices we have made.  We can't believe there is anything really wrong with us. It important to find out what thoughts we have about ourselves that keep stuck and hurting ourselves.  I am at a place where I know what thoughts have caused me pain and I just want to be happy.

I have reached the end of my spiritual quest. I am glad I have stopped thinking I need to change to be happy I just need to enjoy today and my freedom from not being enough.

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.