And I feel fine
Haven't checked in for awhile and wanted to reassure my nonexistent readers that I am fine. Funny how I still always feel guilty saying that, as if I'm being not quite 100% honest. It's true though. I feel good, I feel fine, I feel happy most if the time these days. It's pretty gratifying.
I was reading a blog of another anxiety prone person recently and felt good to be able to notice that not only have I not felt my old crippling anxiety in quite a long time, I hadn't even thought about it in awhile. Not even to notice its absence.
As usual I still feel compelled to qualify these statements with the disclaimer that of course I'm not saying everything is perfect, or that I've figured out how to stop worrying about my standard list of issues - which has changed somewhat, but then again, maybe not so much. Worrying is still part of how my mind seems to be made and I don't expect that will change.
One thing I would like to work on changing is this tendency to want to qualify whatever happiness comes my way. To learn how to accept joy without having to balance it out with "...but..."
My worries are boring to me lately.
What makes me happy is this.
1. Bea is the little light of my life. Shes turned out to be more of a border collie than I would've felt comfortable committing to when I was looking for my next puppy, and it's actually kind of fun. I always felt that it's best to have a dog who is smart, but not too smart - or she would surely get bored with the simple life I have to offer. Bea is so smart though that she teaches Me new games, at the rate of about one per day, and is so quick to pick up on what I teach her that my being boring hasn't really come into it. I need to give her more exercise (something I need too) and now that my big project has gone to press and it's getting lighter again at the end if the day, this is something that can and will happen.
2. Seaweed snacks! I've renewed my efforts to feed myself well and have been loving eating a lot of my favorite old things that I had set aside over the last several months, like seaweed and liver pâté (or just plain old liver & ketchup) and winter squash and roasted chicken ... I had sort of gone off the deep end in terms of nutrition for the duration of my work crunch. Day after day of hurried,lackluster meal planning plus multiple baskets full of Halloween candy, Thanksgiving cookies, Christmas treats - not good. I'm attempting to give up my food shame and train myself to ask, before I eat something, not "How many grams of sugar?" ( which too often leads to the answer, "too many" and immediate capitulation to whatever temptation has sucked me under) but "Does this food nourish and strengthen me?" Or sometimes "HOW does this food nourish and strengthen me?" This phrase is borrowed from the mealtime prayer my family said when I was growing up and has a lot more to do with the relationship I would like to have with my food than the guilt-inducing meditations I've been punishing myself with. Another good self- reminder: "I am allowed to eat!" Walking around with a pocket full of ham and dried seaweed might seem funny to some people ... But it's working for me.
3. Knitting a lot this winter and finally submitting myself to the discipline of learning to follow a pattern, achieve the proper gauge, block everything, and give away more than I keep. Hats are still my favorites and I'm trying some new shapes.
4. Hair. My hair has been stressed and sort of fragile since about September so I'm doing a year-long no ponytail challenge to see if I can grow out the area where the elastics have caused it to fray a bit. Possibly I might cut it all short, if I get really tired of dealing with it. When you have red hair people make it a huge part of your identity whether you personally identify with it or not, and sometimes I think it might be interesting to have some radically different kind of hair for awhile. I've never done it before because I've usually loved my hair the way it was. Now that its changing, maybe it would be a good time to experiment.
5. And not but. This has to do with making it a habit to embrace and enjoy, more than question and qualify. Try it. A lot of the time I find I can use the word "and" instead of the word "but" and it doesn't negate my meaning, it simply expands it, makes it more inclusive.
Funny - it's now the end of February and I just looked in on this blog trying to find a description of a dream I had last year, and I found this entry is still here, after all. I started it in January, writing on my iPhone during lunch at work, and then it somehow got deleted when I tried to save the draft. Except that it didn't. A Blogger miracle!
I did not find the dream I was looking for (yet) so I'll record again the gist of it, which is that I was a passenger on a plane that was about to crash, and then it did crash, and as soon as I realized I was dead I said to myself, "Well, that wasn't so bad after all!"
I'm reading a book about the dreams and visions people experience as they're getting ready to die, and it says dreams about being in danger and *about* to die are very common, yet people very rarely report dreams in which they actually *do* die. Usually we wake up first. I'm typical in this way, because this is the only dream I can remember ever having in which I actually die.
In my 20s I had a fascination with birth and played for a little while with the idea of becoming a midwife. Now that I'm coming up on 50 I seem to have developed a similar interest in death, dying, and the grieving process. It's all just so moving to me, to think of how hard people strive to find or create meaning in their lives, even though we all know how it's going to end.
I saw a long montage of Victorian post mortem photos on YouTube and could not stop thinking about all those people, many of them in quite humble circumstances, and all the care they had put into memorializing their loved ones. I don't understand why so many people think those photos are creepy, and I also don't totally understand why I find them so beautiful. Even when the dead person looks terrible ... In a way those ones are maybe the most poignant of all. Nobody wants to remember their child like that, but to these people it was clearly better than not remembering them at all.
Another thought - I notice when I look at these photos I'm not thinking about the person who has died. I'm thinking about the people who were left behind, the ones who arranged to have the photos taken. To me the photos are not about death - they're evidence of love. A connection to humanity.
I feel embarrassed sometimes about my interest in these things. I don't know anyone else who is into them. Still, it's part of what feels alive to me right now. Mourning jewelry, memorial candles, dream paintings, antique photos of dead people ... It all feels somehow heart-opening and life affirming.
Like the bumper sticker says, "Believe in what makes you shine."
I was reading a blog of another anxiety prone person recently and felt good to be able to notice that not only have I not felt my old crippling anxiety in quite a long time, I hadn't even thought about it in awhile. Not even to notice its absence.
As usual I still feel compelled to qualify these statements with the disclaimer that of course I'm not saying everything is perfect, or that I've figured out how to stop worrying about my standard list of issues - which has changed somewhat, but then again, maybe not so much. Worrying is still part of how my mind seems to be made and I don't expect that will change.
One thing I would like to work on changing is this tendency to want to qualify whatever happiness comes my way. To learn how to accept joy without having to balance it out with "...but..."
My worries are boring to me lately.
What makes me happy is this.
1. Bea is the little light of my life. Shes turned out to be more of a border collie than I would've felt comfortable committing to when I was looking for my next puppy, and it's actually kind of fun. I always felt that it's best to have a dog who is smart, but not too smart - or she would surely get bored with the simple life I have to offer. Bea is so smart though that she teaches Me new games, at the rate of about one per day, and is so quick to pick up on what I teach her that my being boring hasn't really come into it. I need to give her more exercise (something I need too) and now that my big project has gone to press and it's getting lighter again at the end if the day, this is something that can and will happen.
2. Seaweed snacks! I've renewed my efforts to feed myself well and have been loving eating a lot of my favorite old things that I had set aside over the last several months, like seaweed and liver pâté (or just plain old liver & ketchup) and winter squash and roasted chicken ... I had sort of gone off the deep end in terms of nutrition for the duration of my work crunch. Day after day of hurried,lackluster meal planning plus multiple baskets full of Halloween candy, Thanksgiving cookies, Christmas treats - not good. I'm attempting to give up my food shame and train myself to ask, before I eat something, not "How many grams of sugar?" ( which too often leads to the answer, "too many" and immediate capitulation to whatever temptation has sucked me under) but "Does this food nourish and strengthen me?" Or sometimes "HOW does this food nourish and strengthen me?" This phrase is borrowed from the mealtime prayer my family said when I was growing up and has a lot more to do with the relationship I would like to have with my food than the guilt-inducing meditations I've been punishing myself with. Another good self- reminder: "I am allowed to eat!" Walking around with a pocket full of ham and dried seaweed might seem funny to some people ... But it's working for me.
3. Knitting a lot this winter and finally submitting myself to the discipline of learning to follow a pattern, achieve the proper gauge, block everything, and give away more than I keep. Hats are still my favorites and I'm trying some new shapes.
4. Hair. My hair has been stressed and sort of fragile since about September so I'm doing a year-long no ponytail challenge to see if I can grow out the area where the elastics have caused it to fray a bit. Possibly I might cut it all short, if I get really tired of dealing with it. When you have red hair people make it a huge part of your identity whether you personally identify with it or not, and sometimes I think it might be interesting to have some radically different kind of hair for awhile. I've never done it before because I've usually loved my hair the way it was. Now that its changing, maybe it would be a good time to experiment.
5. And not but. This has to do with making it a habit to embrace and enjoy, more than question and qualify. Try it. A lot of the time I find I can use the word "and" instead of the word "but" and it doesn't negate my meaning, it simply expands it, makes it more inclusive.
Funny - it's now the end of February and I just looked in on this blog trying to find a description of a dream I had last year, and I found this entry is still here, after all. I started it in January, writing on my iPhone during lunch at work, and then it somehow got deleted when I tried to save the draft. Except that it didn't. A Blogger miracle!
I did not find the dream I was looking for (yet) so I'll record again the gist of it, which is that I was a passenger on a plane that was about to crash, and then it did crash, and as soon as I realized I was dead I said to myself, "Well, that wasn't so bad after all!"
I'm reading a book about the dreams and visions people experience as they're getting ready to die, and it says dreams about being in danger and *about* to die are very common, yet people very rarely report dreams in which they actually *do* die. Usually we wake up first. I'm typical in this way, because this is the only dream I can remember ever having in which I actually die.
In my 20s I had a fascination with birth and played for a little while with the idea of becoming a midwife. Now that I'm coming up on 50 I seem to have developed a similar interest in death, dying, and the grieving process. It's all just so moving to me, to think of how hard people strive to find or create meaning in their lives, even though we all know how it's going to end.
I saw a long montage of Victorian post mortem photos on YouTube and could not stop thinking about all those people, many of them in quite humble circumstances, and all the care they had put into memorializing their loved ones. I don't understand why so many people think those photos are creepy, and I also don't totally understand why I find them so beautiful. Even when the dead person looks terrible ... In a way those ones are maybe the most poignant of all. Nobody wants to remember their child like that, but to these people it was clearly better than not remembering them at all.
Another thought - I notice when I look at these photos I'm not thinking about the person who has died. I'm thinking about the people who were left behind, the ones who arranged to have the photos taken. To me the photos are not about death - they're evidence of love. A connection to humanity.
I feel embarrassed sometimes about my interest in these things. I don't know anyone else who is into them. Still, it's part of what feels alive to me right now. Mourning jewelry, memorial candles, dream paintings, antique photos of dead people ... It all feels somehow heart-opening and life affirming.
Like the bumper sticker says, "Believe in what makes you shine."
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