I must admit that I am overwhelmed on what to write about and it is creating a logjam of ideas and thoughts in my head. I am lost at where to start and what to write about. I thought about doing an audio recording like a lovely blogger on the IDP website. I talk more than I write but I am trying to change that so I am going to stick to the keys of the computer until I cannot take it any more. There are so many things going on in my life that are new and changing the way I look at the world and I do not really know where to start.
So what is going on? I have started a relationship with a little sister from the Big Sister/Little Sister program. It is at least a year commitment and for the first three months we see them once a week to build a relationship, then move to every other weekend. I have also started working with a teacher of NonViolent Communication at "the Farm" at a Prison near by. The farm is for those that have been moved to minimum or pre-release status. The class is 12 weeks long and there are about 15 guys in the class. I am observing/participating in hopes of being able to teach it. The teacher is also looking to take the class into the Medium Security prison near by which ups the stakes quite a bit. The other big event is that I have broken up with my long-term significant other for what seems like a permanent break (the first breakup did not take) and here I am older, alone and trying to figure out my life. I constantly miss him (or miss having someone) and am working every day to "reframe" my world. There is more that is going on too - uncertainty with my job and career, finishing up my Stanford Compassion Teacher training, my boys are growing up and the house as of August will be completely empty, and all this while I try to answer the big questions about my life - what am I doing and why? What do I want to offer the world? What do I want the world to offer me?
I have learned so much from everything that I am participating in right now. It is opening my world and mind in ways I never really expected and is helping me create a greater commitment to my own life. I did not know what to expect from it but I have received already more than I ever could have imagined.
I am going to create a post for the Little Sister, NVC Class, and Reframing my life alone and keep you updated as the experiences progress. It feels awkward to break them up because there is interdependence between all the experiences and how they are impacting my world view but it is just too much in one post. I cannot imagine how wordy I could get and several pages later....well if you knew me you could imagine.
What I hear is I love you but I cannot be with you.
What I believe is that you are going to enjoy your life and figure out how I fit in, if I do.
What I feel is rejection at the deepest level of me.
Trying to stay present to the experience and emotion
Am I clinging to love or avoiding the fear of being alone?
Are we learning anything or am i just being destroyed on bit at a time?
Should I let go because of the pain? Should I hang on because of the love?
i want to let go.
i want to run away
i want to be with you
This morning I feel like writing - if only a little bit. I have been lost for so long I am not sure where I am. There were these days where I felt strong and my intention was clear, but I have long since slipped back into the swampland of confusion and indulgence. I can feel the murkiness in my mind and lack the sword of clarity and wisdom or maybe just the strength to hold the sword so I shrink back into the darkness, waiting, unsure.
I feel fractured between the lives of my past and the potential ones in my future. Where is it that I belong? As I move forward, where do I need to exist? Where can I exist? Should I stay still and represent a life that no longer fits but still is important? Should I move away and deny my wants and desires to be near and with those that matter? I feel guilty saying things out loud that are not criminal, not harmful and yet feel like I am betraying my life until now. When am I me versus who I was and are those things really that different?
So much time in my head. I renounce my body. I fight with the me of discipline and virtue and the me of hedonism and indulgence. I have made no progress and yet I have come so very far. I am still alone and still struggling. Perhaps I always will be.
I have been reading over the last few days many posts and articles about intention and goal setting. I have also been contemplating my own intentions and goals for the upcoming year and where I keep coming back to is to death of my biological father on November 16th, 2012.
My father had a rough childhood but I do not really know anything about because we never talked about it. I know that both my biological mother and father completely self-destructed when they met, got pregnant and had me, their lives changed forever. My father ran away from his entire life the world he knew and disappeared for many years from his entire family. When I met his family, they were scared and sad about his renunciation of his family and their love. His absence was the center of his mother's life and left his sister to clean up and care for the destruction that he left behind.
He returned about 15 years ago and seemed to settle down and reclaim a normal life. He got a good paying job, in a smallish town and a community that adored him. I forget exactly how I was reconnected to him but I was excited to finally get to meet the missing link of my family. I had not really connected on an emotional level with many of them and I thought perhaps he would be different. I thought this would be the familial link i had wanted so desperately in my life.
The first time I met him was for dinner in Las Vegas while I was at a work conference. We had talked a few times and it was interesting but awkward. I was very nervous when we met and I did not show any emotion and acted far away from someone that was excited to meet him. I was understandably cautious. He brought a package of old photos that he showed me with pride and pleasure these pictures of my very early childhood. He spoke of it with fondness and joy in a way I could not really digest. My childhood was not very spectacular either and after seeing the wreckage caused to all the families by my birth and mere existence I could not understand how he could have the sparkle in his eye when recounting this time.
We did not really talk much or see each other because we lived on different coast and had very different lives. I realize now I was angry at him for being so romantic about what I had seen as a very painful period of so many peoples lives. It is strange to me now that thing that upset me most about him was his inability to express the pain of my very life.
I met with him on Father's Day in 2010 with his sister in his home town and it was a very difficult weekend for me. He was a wonderful host taking us around to introducing to his friends and showing us his world. He seemed happy and settled but there was still this tainted view into his version of the past and how we were all interconnected. He refused to go see his mother who was getting older and longed for a glimpse of him. He spoke of the time with my biological mother as if it was an epic love story. He remembered his multiple wives and times in jail with a cowboy outlaw renaissance that was unnerving. Did his life really feel wonderful to him or was he in such denial that he had created a fantasy version of everything?
He wrote haiku poetry and shared it with me but we never talked about it. We never talked about anything. I never asked him about how his memories were so rosy compared to our lives. I never asked him about why he ran away for so very long and how he felt about his new life. He only shared these portraits of his life he displayed for me that had no connection.
He asked me to call him before his death. I did not. I had solidified my belief that he was not good for me and it was too painful. I responded by detaching and ignoring and I felt justified as he was someone I needed to protect myself from. I walked away from him and left him there alone. In November, he took his relatively normal stable life and shook it like a snow globe and once again self-destructed. He first took everything he had and made it impossible to live his life and then when caught against the wall he took his own life. He is gone now and there is once again chaos, pain and destruction in all those who knew him. We are left in the wake wondering what we could have done differently.
Where has it left me? I did not go to the memorial service in his town with his sister this weekend. I did not know him and I do not know if anyone ever did. His family and friends are trying to paint a picture that allows all of this to make sense but there is no view that makes this ok. Where did it leave me? It left me with a strong desire to reconnect, review past assumptions and biases and try to find my way through my own blindness. I can see that the hardness I put around him and others was unnecessary and to let him in and try to reach him on a different level would not have put me at risk.
Reach out. Let go. Connect. This is what in the end his death has taught me. If I can live a more connected life, maybe his pain will be worth something in the end.
As I walked out of the show last night my heart felt raw and exposed. It was the day before new years eve and Times Square was jammed with people. I felt the armor pop on and more defensive, frustrated and angry than I do on a normal day. As I walked I became aware of the dichotomy I felt between the open hearted tenderness I felt and the cold loneliness I was allowing to consume me. It reminded me of my theory that the arts really destroyed most little girls version of love and romance. I used to hold this theory to blame for my own failed ability to find love and be happy with it.
I was not allowed to watch "normal" TV as I grew up - PBS or nothing - unless as I often did was able to pull off sneaking some "real" TV. PBS like MTV used to have a very different programming 20 years ago, it was filled with the entertain like the old Fred Astair movies, or musicals like Brigadoon and shows like The Thin Man. My world was filled with these pieces of a "better" time and many many books. My family was not emotional or loving so my entire vocabulary around love and communication came from these stories. I took from these stories while they had loss and disappointment, in the end it always worked out some how, forgiveness, hope and love always seemed to prevail. I remember reading Anna Karenina as a young girl and thinking more about the passion and the love than the desperate ending that ended up destroying her life. I saw only the things I wanted to see which was something I had never felt which were passion, and undying love.
As I grew up I start to realize that I longed for a love, a friend, a relationship, a family that I had seen or read about while growing up. I thought a good life was full of happy endings and that if you were good enough everything would work out for the best in the end. This statement is crazy if you know anything about my life as happy endings rarely came and yet I hung to the hope perhaps clung to it to survive that some day I would find my own place where happy endings and love would flow. I just needed to be good enough to deserve it even though in the movies and books that was never a requirement. Fortunately (or not) life never provided me with a space or people that showed me this dreamy type of love and feeling and that it can only happened when you were able to write your own ending and you can ignore parts of the story you do not like.
What I noticed in the plays I saw over this weekend is that there were no happy endings but yet the characters and stories were still raw with emotion. For the first time I was able to see not only the passion and the love but the heartbreak and the pain. I had room in my mind and heart for both to exist without it destroying the story. I was moved in both plays by how these characters shared and talked and wore their hearts on their sleeves without fear. I saw that this was my new ideal, my new hope to cling to as I long for that life where the people around you are open, generous, loving and comfortable to share how they really feel. For me it is no longer about happy endings but the desire to have open hearts and open minds. The real romantic is able to face their fears, throw down the armor and just feel.
I saw my feet in yoga the other day and I realized how unfamiliar they seemed to me. I could not remember the last time I really looked at my body as my eyes always work to avoid and avert my own gaze. The last few days I have been paying attention and noticing the state of my body to try to bring it more into my sense of self rather than this foreign object in my peripheral self. With every step and breath I tried to pay more attention and am actually amazed at how much my body does for me. How could something so critical to my enjoyment of my life be so neglected and ignored?
So I started at my feet, which I see every day when putting on socks but do not really see. How is that possible? I guess it is just not registering as important anymore as I have seen them for 45 years. I have a lovely tattoo on one foot and the other is plain and white. My feet are in pretty good shape even though the arches often ache and when i wiggle my toes i feel stiff and tight across the top of my feet. They do so much for me and yet their pain I tend to ignore as just part of being feet. As I move up to my legs I remember for a moment the "early years" of shaving my legs. The fear, the often misstep and slicing a little piece of skin off, they were so foreign to me then and now I could shave my legs without any real effort. Through the years I have learned to trust my hands and know where my skin and the razor stops and starts. The skin is white and has various bruises and scars. I used to want to be tan so desperately that I would lay out in the sun with baby oil just trying to cook myself just to end up red, in pain, the peel and then back to very white again. I am lucky my legs have no varicose veins (yet?) and are strong and able.
My knees and ankles have held up well and I have never had surgery or injury. I do notice real pain in my ankles when I start jogging especially if I have not run in awhile. My knees, ankles and hips get stiff and pop and crackle like a bad musical but I have learn to expect that "at my age" but I wonder is it genetics, weight, diet or just the evolution of impermanence? My thighs are triangle shaped from the extra weight that I am carrying. It is surprising how big my thighs are as I do not remember them ever being this wide, but I am on the heavier side of my weight spectrum right now. As a child my mother told me that if your thighs touch that you are fat. I used to spend years in every shower putting my feed together and seeing if my thighs touch and if they did seeing that look on her face of disappointment. All though lately it has been a long time since they did not touch and I have stopped looking but I know the disappointment is there for her (if she still talked to me) and me. With horror I realized the other day that my jeans were so tight they had rubbed a red rash on the inside of my thigh. I felt deep shame and then I immediately erased the thoughts it from my consciousness but the shame remains.
For the squeamish I would stop now, all thought I cannot imagine who would be reading with any interest about this at all. My stomach is a diaster. I am one of the fortunate women (not) who gains weight in her belly (and thighs and ass) so I have this rolling doughy look that is actually uncomfortable when I sit. You add that with my breast that sag down and the whole thing is this rolls and folds of skin jutting out so I could pass for 4-5 month pregnant, maybe less but not by much. I have stretch marks from my 10.5 pound son, scars from my gallbladder removal and from the scars from the three lumps removed from my breast. As I have gained weight my breast have gotten bigger and I am thankful that I was not born with large breast. They are terribly uncomfortable and just lay like saggy water ballons. When sitting down I feel squished together, layers of discomfort, and even breathing seems laborious.
The back of me I cannot see well but what I do see is the back of my thighs and my ass have that cottage cheese cellulite look. My back on the other hand is ordinary white. The freckles I had so pervasively on my back as a child have diminished significantly as I have stopped trying to bake myself alive with baby oil. My shoulders slump as most people these days who spends hours on the computer. I remember my father used to always get on me for my posture and in the morning before school would make me lay on the floor and straight my back and lower back to avoid getting scoliosis. I see these older people walking around the streets completely hunched over and I worry from time to time. To be so limited to never be able to stand up or sit up straight again seems frightening. My shoulders and neck are constantly stiff and feel twangy. I roll my neck and I can hear the grinding of the vertebrae on vertebrae. I do not know if it is my bed, my pillow, my genes, my stress or my inactivity that keeps this constant pain and tension but I have just accepted this feeling as well.
My arms are freckled but more mottled looking that the millions of freckles I used to have. As a kid I would get teased and questions about all my freckles, they would ask me how many freckled did I think I had, try to count them or guess that there were millions. I never really tried to count and was embarrassed of my own skin being so different than all the tan beautifully brown kids. I had a boyfriend tell me I obviously did not want to be tan enough otherwise I would be and when I questioned him how he shrugged but he was convinced it was an attitude issue. I wish I could find him now (not really) and explain melanin. So now they have faded a bit and freckles are no longer misunderstood, I had almost forgotten about how I used to hate them. All I hate now on my arms is that I am starting to see signs of a flabbiness in my arms, the wave good-bye that keeps going. Ugh. On the up side my skin looks younger and healthier rather than many of my age group, I think it is probably because while growing up my father made me always wear long sleeves, long pants, a hat...basically i looked like a muslim in hijab but in jeans and plaid.
My hands are starting to show signs of wrinkles but I like my hands. Lately my thumbs ache so much all the time that I try to not think about my hands. I am convinced that I will be crippled with arthritis and unable to use my hands when I am older - how much older? I think about playing the piano when I look at my hands. It is the grace and the beauty of the music they can create (trust me I am not that good) that elevated my hands into a better place. The ability to touch and feel, brushing my fingers through a loved ones hair, running them across someone's skin, the ability to type all these things make the hands almost the coolest part of the body. What if I really do lose function of my hands? Why am I not working harder to get some sort of help with this constant pain that scares me? I think I just assume these pains are all normal part of the decay of the body.
I have my fathers face and neck which is not a good thing as it means I do not have a single chin, but I do not really have multiple chins either unless I squish my neck down which I think most people see multiple chins when they do that. It is kind of a loose chin that looks sloppy and on the verge of being a double chin. The same is for the eyes, as we always have multiple rings under our eyes no matter how much we sleep. When you are a little girl freckles on your face is so cute, but as I aged and wanted acceptance and to be seen as pretty freckles were something to hide under make up. Now the freckles seem to look like age spots and I cover them to make myself look younger but I am lazy enough that I rarely wear make up so we have kind of come to terms with each other. I used to get comments about my beautiful eyes when I was a child and since then the color seems to have faded. I miss it actually as it was one of the few things that I thought made me special or even pretty - but just the eyes not the rest. My eyes are now a dull average blue gray that makes no real impression and that breaks my heart.
My hair is fine and thinning. Every girl wants long beautiful thick hair as they will tell you all men think that is the definition of a pretty girl. I know I used "all" and I know there are exceptions but really for the most part I think it is true. I had a miscarriage in my 20s that left me almost bald, my father asked me at dinner once if I realized I had a bald spot and with horror I said yes I know. He was shocked that I did not try harder to cover it up but other than wear a hat 24x7 there wasn't much I could do. Since then if I am under stress or physically having troubles with my thyroid or just health in general my hair is the first to abandon ship. I wish I could wear one of those haircuts that were really short but my head and face and even my hair just cannot carry it off well. Even my skull is strange as I have all these bumps and angles that are not natural for a head. I have never asked but I get the sense I was yanked out of my mother with forceps and must have gotten stuck and wrenched out leaving me with a very awkward skull. Can a skull be awkward?
My heart is strong, my lungs are strong, my bones are strong and I am very fortunate that most of me works just like it should. My thyroid was radioactively treated and now I wonder what state it is in. Do I really need my daily medicine? What harm has it caused in my body? I do not feed my body well and my stomach suffers from that the most - other than the weight I put on. I am often suffering from an upset or painful acid stomach. My liver is probably in deep trouble too. I know that the stress has me clench my jaw and my hands at night when I sleep but that is something deep inside me that has always been. My teeth are a diaster and always have been, they feel weak but maybe it is from all the hours of grinding? My senses are holding up for the most part. My hearing is as good as I pay attention and my smell has never been all that but it works fine. My eyes are starting to fail me as I lose my able to see far. I have started wearing my glasses again and am amazed at how much I had been comfortable with not seeing. I had let this vaseline gloss land over my world and it never really bothered me. I find seeing everything in the world both interesting and exhausting.
So in review, my body is amazingly strong and healthy. I am overweight and I can see the impact of it on every part of me. I am fading a bit as my body begins its decay and there is no real stopping it. This disassociation with my body however has made me complacent about some of the things I could probably make better or last longer. I can feel the shame as I look and think about my body and it is hard not to notice the disdain and disapproval I have as I look at the thing that is myself. It is time to appreciate the wonderful things my body lets me do and work on making the awkward, painful and uncomfortable things better. The pain of the decay and impermanence does not need to lead to a premature loss of my self.
I must admit that I am overwhelmed on what to write about and it is creating a logjam of ideas and thoughts in my head. I am lost at where to start and what to write about. I thought about doing an audio recording like a lovely blogger on the IDP website. I talk more than I write but I am trying to change that so I am going to stick to the keys of the computer until I cannot take it any more. There are so many things going on in my life that are new and changing the way I look at the world and I do not really know where to start.
So what is going on? I have started a relationship with a little sister from the Big Sister/Little Sister program. It is at least a year commitment and for the first three months we see them once a week to build a relationship, then move to every other weekend. I have also started working with a teacher of NonViolent Communication at "the Farm" at a Prison near by. The farm is for those that have been moved to minimum or pre-release status. The class is 12 weeks long and there are about 15 guys in the class. I am observing/participating in hopes of being able to teach it. The teacher is also looking to take the class into the Medium Security prison near by which ups the stakes quite a bit. The other big event is that I have broken up with my long-term significant other for what seems like a permanent break (the first breakup did not take) and here I am older, alone and trying to figure out my life. I constantly miss him (or miss having someone) and am working every day to "reframe" my world. There is more that is going on too - uncertainty with my job and career, finishing up my Stanford Compassion Teacher training, my boys are growing up and the house as of August will be completely empty, and all this while I try to answer the big questions about my life - what am I doing and why? What do I want to offer the world? What do I want the world to offer me?
I have learned so much from everything that I am participating in right now. It is opening my world and mind in ways I never really expected and is helping me create a greater commitment to my own life. I did not know what to expect from it but I have received already more than I ever could have imagined.
