In which we all gaze at my navel
Breathe through it
write a list
of desiresMake a toast
make a wish
slash some tiresPaint a heart repeating, beating
“don’t give up, don’t give up.”- The Weepies, Not Your Year
I guess I am pretty introspective at the moment. I am not really trying to be, but to be honest I haven’t really tried to be anything at all for the last eight months, except alive.
Last summer when my Mom got better after being so sick, I swore that nothing non-fatal would ever seem serious to me again. And that really lasted for a while. I did my best to embrace life, to forge new connections, to be happy. Things were going well at work, at home, in my personal life. It was exciting and new and fun. But there’s no accounting for fate, what will happen and how/whether we will be able to accept it. If I had known at this time last year what the following year would be like… I think I would have just given up on it, quit my job and gone to live on the beach somewhere. And I would have hucked sharp rocks at anyone who tried to get within 30 feet of me.
Maybe the only reason we don’t get to see into the future is that none of us would choose to live it if we saw it coming. It was hard enough to live through this year once, I would never choose to do it again.
Life is seeming better right now. The summer, full of sun and flowers, is in front of me. I am off for vacation next week and will have the chance to finish my Savannah research for CWaCS. That means a hell of a lot to me. Not just the getting out of town aspect, but the “finishing something I challenged myself to do” aspect, too. Things at work are absolutely dismal, but dismal is four-and-a-half steps up from where they were in March. I finally got a diagnosis for WTF my problem is (again I remind you that it’s not mental – I don’t CARE what it seems like to you). I can walk (almost) normally again, with little pain on most days, although my foot has a tendency to swell up all crazy-like if I sit too long, and I feel like someone’s dead grandma when I take my first few steps each morning. But I can get out and about, I am not trapped in the house for day after endless, depressing, repetitive, gray day. I am back to where I was last year at this time – a state of “OK, OK this isn’t as bad as all that. I can do this. I really think I can do this.”
Hopeful, I think we call that.
And I am trying to look forward rather than back. Trying hard.
But by nature I like (love? need?) to dwell on things, pick them apart, put them back together until I really see how they work – and I am in that phase now. Maybe I need that phase right now. To be honest, I had enough on my plate just trying to stay alive this winter. I didn’t have time or energy to ponder, understand or learn. Just moving my exhausted, broken carcass from place to place and doing the basics needed to survive – that took every ounce of will I had, and then a few. So now that I have some energy to spare, some time on my hands, some new internal strength reserves from which to draw, I am in full-on wonder mode. If it bores you, there are many,many porn sites within a few clicks of here, knock yourself out.
What I am dwelling on right now is the fact that I seem to keep learning the same lessons over and over. And each time they seem so shiny-new, and I think “How did I not know that before?” and then I read something I wrote a long time ago, or re-read something I underlined in a book a long time ago and I realize that I DID know that before, I just didn’t know it THIS MUCH.
My wise, beloved, former therapist once told me that you need to learn the same things over and over in life. You can know something on Monday and know it on a different level on Wednesday. Friday you can know it ten times more. A year from Friday and you know it in a new way, about a new thing. Understanding comes in layers, you rarely get to bottom.
I haven’t gotten to the bottom of any of my own lessons yet, I suspect. Right now I am working on three things.
This summer I am going to:
1) Let the past fall away
2) Dare
3) Stop trying to fix things which are irreparably broken
It’s that last one I anticipate trouble with. I am nothing if not tenacious. I hate to accept broken as a diagnosis – for situations or people. I know that I need to, but I suspect I am going to spend most of my life relearning that particular lesson.
6 Responses to “In which we all gaze at my navel”
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You’re right about having to learn the same things over and over though. Buddhist (and therapist!) lore is full of stories of really smart dudes going, “Oh wow, now I get it! Wait….whut?” Apparently it’s just the way it’s supposed to be. Forget, learn, forget, learn. :)
This week I decided I’m giving myself permission to be selfish. Not that I haven’t been selfish anyways, but I’ve decided I’m not going to hold in the guilt and anger anymore about it. Everything gets exhaled. Out of here. I’m sick of poisoning myself. Everyone’s got some burden to bear, and how I bear mine isn’t for anyone to judge but me ultimately. No one knows me but me, and I’m honest enough with myself these days that I can’t bullshit myself anymore, so I don’t feel the old fear of turning into one of the dreaded narcissists if I let myself be my own arbiter of right and wrong…or rather, that best-I-can-do and wrong.
Speaking of narcissism, sorry this reply has been more about me than you. I guess your navel-gazing prompted some for me. The only advice I have that might be of use to you for your #3 is that sometimes it’s okay to stop trying. Not forever obviously . . . but sometimes it’s good to be reminded that thinking more and trying harder isn’t always better. Sometimes it just sends you further down into a negative spiral, and it’s actually more productive to think and do nothing for a bit, then try again later.
Oh yes, one more recommendation. Fictional unrealistic beautiful men in Japanese Anime. Now THAT’S been some good therapy for me lately. :)
Pil, there’s a magical line somewhere between self-absorption and self-care, between narcissism and the protection and fostering of one’s real self. I think the thing that makes us NOT narcissists is that we worry about being selfish. Not whether we’re *perceived* as selfish, but whether we actually are.
I think I can be pretty darn self-absorbed (introverted navel-gazers can’t help themselves) but also caring and available to others when they really need me. Not perfectly so all the time, but enough.
Another thing you said reminds me of something I saw at one of my doctors’ offices a few months ago. It was a sign on the receptionist’s desk and it said:
“Everyone you will meet today is fighting a battle.”
Isn’t that the fucking truth? Everyone you run into in a day is fighting whatever personal demons they woke up with that morning – they’re wrestling with concerns far outside our ken. It would do for us all to be more gracious with others – and also with ourselves.
If it helps I give you permission to be as self-care-oriented as you need to be. And I have a magic wand that has lights and makes a twinkly noise, and if need be I will wave it, and that TOTALLY makes it official.
And you know, beautiful Japanese anime men haven’t ever DONE it for me, more’s the pity. But you please enjoy, in depth. :-p
Anyways girl, you said it. I actually saw that line, “Everyone you will meet today is fighting a battle” somewhere online recently, and it’s been helping me be a lot more tolerant of arseholes lately. Which saves a ton of time and energy, seriously, two things I’m always whining I don’t have enough of.
And -my- old therapist (the one I used to see before I became my own Suerapist — a word that may alarm you unless you are an Arrested Development fan) used to always laugh at me when I would try to justify why I wasn’t allowed to be selfish. She had to constantly remind me that narcissists didn’t get that way because one day they let their vigilance slip and forgot to think of someone else.
Still, it’s difficult to walk that magic line and not be concerned about how people perceive you. But I’m pretty much to the fuckit place with all that. I know I will drop everything to help people, and not just friends but anyone I see that could use a bit of whatever I’ve got to give. If other people don’t know it yet, they will learn it or they don’t care enough to where their opinion matters to me.
It sounds like we have some similar goals this summer . . . being courageous enough to try some really new things. As for learning not to fix what’s broken, well, I don’t believe in accepting a “final diagnosis”. Everything is always changing, so that’s crap, nothing’s final. But sometimes I have seen the best way to effect change is to walk away and let someone else fix it (especially when it’s -their- problem).
Why do I write here more than my own journal?
And LOL @ Japanese anime boys – just because I crushed on men like them then doesn’t mean that I like them so much now I guess. Yeah, idealizing them then turned me into a big old fag hag, and up until I graduated from college I liked my men very feminine and wispy. But now for my own men I like something a little more…burly?
Oh and you’re totally scolded for telling me there’s no “broken”! Dammit! If I think there’s the slightest chance of fixing a thing I will try it, so I am going to willfully deceive myself with the belief that some things/people are broken beyond all conceivable types of mental crazy-gluing. Otherwise I will be 158 years trying to put the pieces in order while said person stomps my soul under their boot.