I don't deserve to belong - Thoughts that hurt me

It is amazing just what a teacher life continues to be for me.  I am getting ready to take a trip visiting friends and family.  I have been hesitant to visit my sisters after my last visit resulted in a slump that lasted a few weeks even to the point people commented on my change in mood.  Yesterday I was debating whether to go or not.

I am not sure they really want me there and I feel that I am just another person to manage.  I have spent so much of my time off there and have been disappointed with how I felt when returned home.  Should I subject myself to another one of these visits?  With this thought I got really sad yesterday.  I was thinking they really don't want me there. Then I thought "just another place I don't fit in."  Where do I belong a life long quest that has taken up so much of my life that I have let me opportunities for connection to slip by.

What I realized yesterday it isn't the idea "I don't belong" that makes me sad it is that I don't think I deserve to belong.  I have spent my life trying to find a way out of my own pain and everyone has gone on without me.  Why should they want to include me in their lives I haven't been there for them.

I got to stop right there.  This is just another self absorbed thought that can siphon away my time and energy.  This is just the kind of ideas that hold me back from just living and being content with life the way it is now. 

Everybody is just trying to find there way through life.  I have been blessed with the ability to get past myself sometimes and see clearly just how my thoughts are hurting me. My ego would like to believe that everything is about me but the truth is no one is thinking that much about me. They are too busy getting through there own problem.

I my paralyzing fear of feeling I don't deserve to be wanted. I decided to stop and meditate. This is when I could see the truth and turned it over to a power greater than myself.  I said "you have to work this out - I am out of it."

I got in my car and drove to an art store twenty minutes away.  In that time my sister called and I told her of my plan to visit weekend after next. Everyone was in the car coming back from my nephews birthday brunch.  They were really happy that I was coming but my niece was staying with her boss's kids for the weekend and thought that this coming weekend would be better if I wanted to see her. 

I had already made plans to stop at my aunts and then my friends ending at my sisters. Just in case I decided not to go at all.  I said I would see what I could do.  When I reached the store I sat there in my car and with in minutes my friend called.  I told her about my sister's request she said "no problem we were just going to hang out anyway."   My aunt calls while we are still talking and I take the call.  She says she has been sick I tell her about the change and she says "great". All in about 30 minutes.

As a sometimes self absorbed neurotic I do take responsibility to for everything.  My analytical mind can only see my own part in anything that doesn't go my way.  Yes I haven't always been there for my sister and her family but she was living in a severely dysfunctional situation and didn't really want me to know what was going on.

We have suffered all these years alone with our problems and not feeling we wanted to let each other in on our secrets.  She is 4  years older and wanted to appear to have it all together. This is how we have survived without our mother. Just suck it up and move on. This doesn't work long term.

So I got over myself and thought so what if I haven't done everything right I have done my best.  It is my own self blame that hurts me and drags back to the past.  I am good person and have done my best even if some times it wasn't good enough. 

I am happy to have this blog to gather my thoughts.  It saved my life when I started it so long ago but now it just keeps me honest about my feelings.

Child's Perspective - Past Revisited

I was watching "Field of Dreams" last night.  I can't seem to pass it up when I am surfing the channels and see it there.  I always cry at the end when he plays catch with his dad.  They parted ways early in life and he has the opportunity to see his dad a younger man with hopes and dreams like himself.  I always think wouldn't that be great to have a do over with my own dad.

My dad has been gone more than a decade now and wasn't the kind of person that thought too much about the feelings of other people.  He was a kind man and willing to do just about anything anyone ask him to do without complaint.  He rarely got mad unless you did something that he thought wasn't godly or if you said you didn't want to go to church. He never disciplined us and left that to my mother.

I woke up this morning a little sad and thinking a little too much about my life. Wishing that my life had turned out differently.  After my mother died I never like I belonged anywhere.  When my dad remarried I had to earn my right to be there and ended up like Cinderella with a string of chores that had to be done including babysitting my little sister full time so my stepmother could be free to do what she wanted.  I took this idea of earning my place in every relationship since then. This is why I am so successful in work.

With my dad I always wanted him to show me that I was important to him. He never called me and when I called him once a year for his birthday he would put me on hold several times when the call waiting clicked. He never ask me about my life or even where I was living.  Ironically have I repeated this same relationship over and over in my life. Even with my past friendships they have been with people that if I disappeared it would never occur to anyone to call me and find out what is going on.

I feel really good most days now and very autonomous.  I am spending time with people who seem to want me around and the give and take is more equal. I am a strong person but I don't want to be the only person keeping a relationship going anymore.  I am willing to let the people go in my life that really are only interested in what I can do for them.

I can see that I have have spent my life trying to get over the past.  I can also see that I did this from a child's point of view.  I was wounded and just wanting to feel like someone cared about me. My story has dominated my life and kept me from reaching out. Life goes on and people are busy with their own stories and do not have time to think about me.  I am grown up now and I am reaching out. 

I am taking a vacation at the end of the month.  I am going to visit a friend from childhood.  We reconnected after her mother's death a few years ago and talk every week on the phone.  I am also going to stay a few days with dad's sister.  Over the years she has kept in contact with me.  My cousins live in the same area and I am going to see if they would like to get together.

Part of me feels this reaching out is too late but if I am rejected then I am no worse off than I was before.  I know that my life is the way it is because I was lost in my own pain and stayed busy to avoid facing the feelings I had of not being worthy of love.  Really because I didn't love myself. 

I also know that I am like my own dad in a lot of ways happy to do the next thing and not thinking too much about the feelings of others just getting the job done.

My dad's family keep to themselves.  Not like my mother's family with drama after drama.  They are quiet and autonomous never complaining never asking for help.  I am like them good sturdy genes staying away from drama of any kind. I hope this will be a good visit I really need to get away and looking forward to it. 

Sisters - Sorting thing out - love - conflict

I was taking ice out of ice trays a few minutes ago and remember a funny story about me and my older sister.   On steamy hot southern days I would intentionally wait for my sister to get up and make herself a glass of ice tea and then I would say "please can you make me one too" knowing with my parents sitting there she wouldn't be able to refuse me.

Back then in our house we didn't have an ice maker just those metal trays with a handle that you pulled to break the ice open.  I wasn't really strong enough to pull the frozen arm to get the ice out but that wasn't why I ask her to do it for me.  She hated me we were four years apart and I was a thorn in her side.  At first she was my idol I thought everything about her was perfect and from the outside it seemed true.  Mother mother constantly raved about her.  She had perfect attendance - straight "A's" - she kept her room in perfect order and she never got dirty.

Of course when your eight you don't realize there is a big difference between being eight and twelve. I viewed myself as a problem inferior to her in every way.  I tried so hard but I couldn't be like her it was too hard for me.  I finally let go and decided to not try at all.  It was a relief but I took something away from that decision.  I believed that because I wasn't perfect like her that I wasn't smart.

This thought was based on our years in school compounded by the death of my mother.  I had this belief despite the successes I had once I left school. Even working fast food in while still in high school they wanted to get an age exception so I could be a supervisor. In truth after I decided that being perfect like my sister was impossible for me I never applied myself in school. 

My dad and stepmother were happy to discourage me from college so it didn't cost them anything. It isn't that important in traditionally southern families that girls go to college.  My mother went to college and would have freaked if she had known they weren't making me go.

I made a success of my life becoming the youngest VP in a mortgage company of 1,000 people.  I still have those congratulations letters.  I still felt like a fraud because I didn't have the education that other people had. When I lost my job after 13 years I felt like I was found out.

At 40 I decided to do the one thing I had never done go to college. I always tell people I went back to school but really I went for the first time. I tested out all the remedial English courses but the math I had to start from scratch.  I did it with those punky eighteen year old students.  I had an advantage I wanted to be there and enjoyed every minute.  I got my degree with a 4.0 average because nothing else was acceptable.

I have had a good life with the work ethic both my parents taught me.  My sister is a lawyer but after my mother died she lost her shine and never really regained her love for this world. My mother was a great force in our lives and without her and my dad distracted by his new family we barely made it. Suffering has been the norm for both of us and we accepted early on that nothing in life comes easy.

We both love our work and it has been the one consistent thing in our lives.  She seems really happy now that she has grandchildren and her love for work is wavering.  Now she is thinking she only needs to do the work of two people instead of three.  I am happy for her.

We talk a few times a week when she can squeeze me in coming home late from work. She is always surprised how alike we are but we did have the same mother even if  her influence lasted four more years than mine.

I think our  mother would have been proud of us both.  Of course my sisters traditional life would have met her approval for sure. With me she had to accept very early that I had my own ideas about things and without a logical presentation of the facts to show otherwise those ideas would not be changed.  I preferred punishment to giving in if I thought I was right.

I still believe no human has all the right answers all the time.  We have a right to question what we are being told and even what we tell ourselves. We have to look at the motive behind the words. It isn't easy to go against the majority or long entrenched doctrine but it is important to look at whether those ideas are hurting people.

If you alienate someone it is unlikely you will convince them you are right.  You have to give people love and space to decide for themselves. I always loved the program phrase "attraction not promotion" it gave me the opportunity to figure out my own path.  In church they taught us "let your little light shine" I think this is the same thing.

My sister and I have a worked things out between each other.  She no longer sees me as the brat that forced her to serve me ice tea on those hot summer days.  I am only sad that we had to suffer separately our whole lives when we are so much alike. 
 

Gettting what you want - Mental health

Life is good.  I use to wear those t-shirts all the time it but I didn't really believe what they said and now they represent a time in my life that I was the most un-conscious.  By all means possible from the outside it looked like the perfect life but spiritually I was vacant still carrying the wants and needs from my childhood.  Hoping magically they would get met by the strangers in my life at the time.

Being abandoned by my own family I found different groups of people that I substituted for the imaginary family that I thought I missed out on.  My view of the world was a combination of sit coms from the seventies where you were surrounded by people who loved you no matter what stupid thing you have done. I definitely believed in magic I had to my mother was dying and I wasn't aloud to even acknowledge she was sick.

My sister buried herself in mostly Gone with the Wind.  Being four years older I think she might hold the record for the number of times that book was read in a short period of time.  I am not sure how that book shaped her twelve year old mind.  Maybe she liked where Scarlet pulled herself together and rescued herself.  I can only think of the part where she thinks Rhett has come back to help her and he rejects her.  Scarlet has burned all her bridges. 

I can now see how I was looking for trust and support and imagined other people had family's to give them that and I didn't. Blood is thicker than water. I wanted a shoulder to cry on but from as early as I can remember you are just suppose to suck it up and move on. Crying was not permitted - "I will give you something to cry about" - I only write this because it was shaped my life in a way that makes it impossible for me to be genuine about my pain except in words.

I gravitate to people like me because it feels comfortable.  I remember at my lowest sitting across the table from someone with tears running down my face and not getting even comforting words from that person.  The hard shell cannot be penetrated. I often said about my ex that if I was laying on the ground on fire I would have to say "call somebody".

My parents loved me but they had tough lives.  They said the words but but emotions were mostly off limits.  I think this is why they loved the Pentecostal church where when you were worshipping in the spirit you could be free emotionally.  You could cry or even laugh all you wanted.

My dad  told me the first date he had with my mother she made him go to a prayer meeting.  He said when he walked in he knew this was what he had been looking for all his life. It is a powerful release to be with a large group of people letting their emotions go and freely worshipping.  A celebration of a living God pretty powerful.

I think my point of the post is to say that we are conditioned by our past but if we can see this is just conditioning we can move on and not feel we aren't getting what we want. What we want is to feel safe and accepted.  We want to think that if something happens we will have a soft place to land and Rhett will save us and everything will go back to the it use to be or maybe we will have to start again because we have burned too many bridges.

I think that life is life and that we don't know for sure who will be there when something happens.  It is really frightening to think too much about this but for me I know it will work out.  Families are just people going through life the same as we are and can't magically solve the insecurities we have inside.

When I was sick and sad everyone ran from me.  Slowly everyone drifted away except one person who just made sure I was eating and occasionally getting out. I was physically ill and this was contributing to my already grief stricken mind.  One brought on the other and a crash was inevitable.

I would say to anyone going through something traumatic and having feelings of hopelessness and loss to get your thyroid tested. I know this sounds life a diversion from the rest of this post but a crisis can lead to a physical change in your body and add to an already bad situation. My anxiety was so high that late at night I would run around the neighborhood to try to feel better.

I never ate and when I did it was those comfort foods that heaped more bad on top of bad. I was just surviving and wasn't thinking rationally.  There is a lot of stories like mine out there.  Today my mind is clear and I am happy and healthier than I have ever been before. Mental health and physical health are tied together in ways that we can't imagine.  Your not alone with those thoughts and you can find health and happiness just ask for help.

Finding a way - A trail - The Past

I am the kind person has created a life trail.  What this means is that I keep things from different periods of my life like a trail of bread crumbs just in case I get lost and need to find my way back.  Today I found a church bulletin from 1992 with the name and phone number of a woman I knew back then.

We worked together and were very close.  She lived here but her long time boy friend lived somewhere else.  I was newly divorced and we met during a work out class our company sponsored in the cafeteria once a week.  Ironically they cancelled the class because they said they could feed the entire building cake for what they were paying teacher for our class. You got to have your priorities. 

My friend was a person that was exactly who she was no matter what.  I remember in class when we were doing leg lifts with weights she would groan loudly with every lift.  She asked me one time if I was feeling pain and I remember saying " I guess I am a silently sufferer."  This is so true.

She was also a fundamentalist christian and was in conflict with the fact her boyfriend didn't want to get married.  She was dedicated to her beliefs and I remember going to her house and her mirror was covered with scriptures.  I liked that about her that she was all in no excuses or apologies. 

Once she talked me into going to a women's Bible study.  This was a serious study and the woman running it was very strict.  No talking and you had to come into the auditorium single file.  I felt like it was a group that was trying to keep women doing what they thought the Bible said they should do.
After the way I was raised this militant study of the Bible definitely didn't appeal to me.

Another time she invited me to lunch to meet a women from her church.  I agreed and the woman was nice enough and lunch was fine.  She gave me some pamphlets to look at and invited me to church. Later I found out she was the leader of a group that converts gay people to straight.  I wonder now whether my friend thought I had a girl crush on her.  If I did I didn't know it.  I was newly divorced and lonely.  My husband took all his drinking friends and their wives with him.

I had not found Al-Anon yet and with my husband gone there was a huge void from the drama he took with him. I had a lot of time on my hands and it was good to have a new friend.

She did get married and move away but sadly he died suddenly only a few short years later. The last time I spoke to her she was going on a date with a veterinarian.  That worked out for her I guess I saw on face book they are married and he just retired.  I was happy that she found someone so quickly.  She was always a kind and generous person to me.

She would be happy with me now I have started reading the Bible again.  I have studied many religions so I thought I should commit to the reading it as an adult.  My family treated me with indifference most of my like claiming to be loving Christians the whole time. I never wanted to associate myself with their beliefs.  I didn't want to be like them.  I have finally grown up and found my own way.  I no longer reject my upbringing and associate everything spiritual with them.

It has been an interesting read.  I have my old Living Bible from my teen years.  I even made a groovy cover for it back then.  I am sure people would say it isn't the real Bible because it is interpreted into common language.  In my youth I color coded with three different highlight markers the whole Bible.  I have no idea what the different colors mean now.  I have always had a thing for school supplies so it could mean nothing.  The bulletin fell out of this Bible.  Funny huh?

Meditation - Bill Gates - Thinking

I am not sure I have anything to say today.  The week was an emotional one especially since I didn't rest much last weekend.  Today I worked in the yard and pulled what seemed like a million weeds. It is still pretty hot here but the breeze was nice. I really like the physical part of yard work since most everything in my life is mostly mental.  I have been having problems with my eyes and having to go to bed early just to rest them.

I watched the new Bill Gates series on Netflix last night. The work he and Melinda"s foundation is doing is incredible. He seems like a nice person and in one interview he admitted to his arrogance in the early years.  I thought if anyone should be arrogant it should be him he changed our world in ways that we will never fully appreciate.

Not a surprise but he is a constant reader and carries a huge canvas bag full of books wherever he goes.  He also since the 90's has taken think weeks.  This is where he takes his books and goes to a super tiny house overlooking the water and thinks. Organizes his notes from all the reading and comes out with a plan.

I really like that idea and feel we don't appreciate the value of just gathering our thoughts.  I feel guilty for not have a plan every day or if I am not accomplishing something. Like today I am tired but resting doesn't really seem to be what I need. I need to recharge but I am not sure how.  This series is really worth watching.  In the end I am sure a man like Bill will feel he didn't do enough which is sad.

I think the closest we can get to the think week would be daily meditation.  Just sitting being comfortable doing nothing watching our thoughts go by without reacting. I think I will try that now.

Order and Chaos

This is my birthday month and I gifted myself with a art workshop the past weekend.  Two full days of creating and producing are under the guidelines of a retired art professor.  The instruction given was to be loose and repetitive not really my cup of tea.  I did what I always do and just put something on paper to get me started.  As the teacher circled the room she said really nice drawing but not what I instructed.  I am new to the group and she was cautious about her direction at first. I finally said "give me direction" she said to draw the pile of bones on the table without looking at the paper.

I did it an produced a decent drawing.  My middle name is order and her middle name is chaos.  I am glad that I didn't look at her work before the workshop or I might have decided not to sign up. At the end of the first day I was tired and asking myself "do I care about doing art anymore?"

Doing art has been a part of my earliest memory.  I kindergarten we colored one day and painted the next every day they would ask us, "Did you paint or color yesterday?'  I always said, "I colored" so I could paint.  I loved the vibrant colors of the tempera paints.  In my teens I skipped my other classes to hang out in the art room telling my teacher that I had a study hall. Art was my salvation even though I never was seen a gifted by the teachers or encouraged in any way. Artist can be elitist amongst themselves it is a competitive world and insecurity runs deep just like any place else.

I feel that just like anything else the ego needs something to make it feel special.  Something to identify with " I am an __________."  This what we do not who we are and it is hard to give up if you don't want to do it anymore.  Who will I be without this label? 

When I crashed into darkness this was what I felt.  I knew I was not longer the person I use to be.  I was floating around with no identity with the people around me waiting for that person to come back.  This is a trap that makes us feel stuck in places we don't belong anymore for a really long time.  For me the change was forced on me and I felt I couldn't live without being the person I was before.

I felt I was floating out there being nothing. I knew I couldn't go back so lingered for along time in no where land. Nothing interested me for a long time.  This was so painful but I got use to it and quit fighting it and when I finally let go I felt lighter. I did the necessary things I had to do to get through the day and that was it.

We are taught that we are who people say were are or who we say we are even if it doesn't feel right anymore. Art was my salvation from those days in kindergarten.  I still love color and create everyday in my work but I don't need to be saved anymore.  I can do art because it is fun and not because I need to get the pain out. Ir isn't who I am it is just a couple days filled with art.

I loved the workshop and will do it again.  The group was very supportive of each other. It was scary at first when my own ego felt like I didn't belong there with other artist but I go over myself.

I met some interesting people and by the second day I felt refreshed and put out some nice drawings. The teacher said " I know I am intimidating but I mean well."  I said "people say the same thing about me."  I have no problem with straight shooters it is those that don't say what they mean that can blind side you.

It was good to get out of my comfort zone and I do have some ideas for art projects.  It was exhausting at first but chaos can be fun if you just let go.