Catching my breath

From the look of my blogger interface, it looks like folks are stopping by more often, which is good, because I've not been doing much writing - at least for me. 

Life can get busy. The urgent can crowd out the important. 

Appointments (dental, bank, and physio - mostly physio) have been occupying my thoughts and my schedule for the last two weeks. I've been trying to make a little extra money, so overtime has been in the picture; fortunately it has been offered to our group of late. I've been going "flat out," trying to pair my extra time at work with times that my husband has other commitments so that I don't sit at home and wait for him to come home. I've been pinging around trying to find new ways to bring in some more bacon - by trying my hand at some Internet sources of income. So far, I've made a total of a buck forty-eight, which falls just short of slave labor. Frustration and panic have been building. 

In the midst of all that, my body was sending me messages: slow down! I didn't listen. So it rebelled. I developed a recurring muscle tear in my lower abdomen, probably associated with my back problems ... and the extra weight of course. I guess that the tear in my belly would qualify as a hernia, I don't know; I know it's hard for me to take a full breath when I'm in certain positions. (And yes, I've thought about having it checked out - and no, I'm too chicken to have a doctor poke around down there!) Add to that a 24-hour 'thing' this past Monday where all my joints hurt and I spiked a fever, and it just added to my stress because I felt that I should be up and about. After all, I'm the primary bread-winner since hubby's retirement and the realities of that are weighing down on me more and more. 

So when i woke up this morning a lot earlier than what I would have liked, I had a choice: rail against my ebbing hormones or go with the situation and use it to take some time for me - to catch my breath, to use the skills I preach and actually practice them. Accept. Pray. Take care of myself. Set boundaries. Rest. 

Breathe.

Now there was a guy who knew how to relax!
My dear old Cody - God rest his soul.

Even if my mind is going in fifty different directions, forcing it to focus on one thing - this thing - allows me to stop long enough to catch my breath and see where I've been spinning my wheels and where I just don't need to waste my time. It helps me to think about what I really want at this stage in my life and how I can be kind to myself while trusting God to do what I can't do for myself. 

It's harder than it looks. ;) But I have a few examples I can look up to, and I am learning. I don't have to be do, do, doing all the time; being precedes doing. 

One of the side effects of spinning those wheels has been the way I have been interacting with some of my friends; I've been kind of a jerk at times. I hope that they know it's that drowning sensation talking - the feeling of being trapped, flailing around in fear with no way out. 

There is a way out, of course. I just haven't found it yet (I've been too busy flailing around!)  It's like what they told folks on a commercial many years ago in case they fell into the water ... don't splash around. Swim one, long stroke. Relax into it; you'll rise to the surface.  

I can trust God. I can accept what is. I can trust myself: my real self, not that frantic reactive person that pings from crisis to crisis. I'll figure it out, as long as I make it a point to look after myself. In so doing, I will have enough of the best of me to share with those who count: my family, my friends.

And maybe, just maybe, I'll have the courage to change what I can, and also to know my own limitations and stay within them. 

Breathe, Judy.

Digging Deeper

Last evening at 5:30, the rumbling stopped.

But only for the weekend.  At 6:30 Monday morning, the trucks and backhoes will be back again.  After two full days of working, they've replaced the culverts in two driveways and prepared the ditches in between.  At this rate, they'll go up the other side of the street next week and down our side of the street the week after.  We'll be almost the last ones on our street to "benefit" from the "improvements" - yet we were the first to have two huge piles of soil dumped in front of our property.  

Hm. 

And we've learned that - joy of joys - the culvert we had paid someone to install two years ago will be dug up, taken out and replaced by their (larger) culvert pipes and concrete access wells.  We've been busy taking "before" pictures so that if the company wrecks anything on our property, we'll be billing the city (who is paying the company) for any work we have to get done to bring it back to the way it was before.  Like, for example, if they wreck our hedge and we need to replace it! 

The view "up the street" from just behind the central opening in our
fledgling hedge.  You can see some of the silent machinery in the distance.

That said, the whole idea of having to re-dig and redo a job that has previously been done brings up several intriguing thoughts to the surface.  The accuser that sits on my shoulder has been whispering - sometimes shouting - the insults, fast and furious, voices from my past echoing their agreement. The most common one is this:  "Nothing you ever do is good enough."

It's a bald-faced lie, of course.  But the voices persist.  

And my response is that if I had it to do all over again, given what I knew at the time, I would still have gotten the work done.  

The fact is, it was a safety issue in 2010 and I wanted my hubby to not run the risk of injuring himself on such a deep slope as that ditch when he was mowing the lawn.  Technically it's not even part of our property ... but  .... the city certainly wasn't going to mow it!  No, it was the right and healthy choice to make ... for the ditch, for safety's sake.  

The whole process  has me thinking again.  A dangerous thing, I know.  Yet it has brought something new to my way of thinking.

Sometimes, in the emotional and 'inner healing' realm, after I've dug down inside of me and "made it right" to the best of my ability - then .... I grow some more.  And when I've grown some more, there are more subtle, stubborn things that come to the surface - things that make me realize that it IS necessary to dig deeper and do it again, work a little harder than before, root out even more of the dangerous stuff, and make it easier to access should I ever need to get in there again and dig something out. 

The original internal excavation was necessary. (And I was SO glad I didn't have to face it alone!!)  It made life liveable... functional... better.  But it also opened up new possibilities, and set new standards for my inner life.  This new lifestyle isn't easy, and it isn't comfortable.  And often old, long-standing ideas bubble up from beneath - like sewer gases - and undermine the new thought patterns.  It's easy to slip back into them; I held them for such a long time.  

The fact is, the process is never over. That's why they call it a process.  There's always more to do, deeper to go, more improvements to make. And I can see cracks appearing in what I thought was solid.  I can smell things I thought were gone.  Reactions I have, some good - and some not so good.  The way I handled the hard-hat fellas, pretty good.  The way I handled a recent conversation between a relative and myself - some aspects were good, but there were things I could have done or said better, or not done and not said; these things let me know that there is still work to do inside of me: in my attitudes, by being more honest with myself, more open to God's renovations, and more willing to change.  

And that's okay.  
Sometimes it's good to dig deeper if it means an even better life.

Restorations

One of the most famous art restorations in history is the one done of the Mona Lisa.  It was painted on a block of poplar wood by one of the most remarkably talented painters of the Renaissance period, if not of all time.


Amazing.

In 1956, someone threw acid at Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting.  The acid landed on the lower half of the painting and the restoration took several years before the restored painting went on display in New York, Tokyo and Moscow in the 60's and 70's.  

Perhaps if it hadn't been for the acid attack, nobody would have thought of trying to restore the painting to its original beauty.  There's a thought!  Isn't it odd that it would take a seeming tragedy to bring about a means for countless people to enjoy the enhanced wonder of da Vinci's brilliance.

Someone recently did a computer scan of the Mona Lisa and found that da Vinci used over 30 layers of varnish over the painting to preserve it.  Over time, the varnish darkened, producing the yellowish cast most associate with the painting. Removing those layers - little bit by little bit - allowed the natural colours of the original work to shine through.

The process of restoration is painstaking.  Brushstroke after brushstroke, millimeter by millimeter.  It takes a great deal of skill.  It also takes time.

It takes a LONG time.

The restorer has great skill.  He knows what he's doing.  

When I get discouraged at how long my own restoration of spirit is taking, how sometimes I tend to take a step forward and then three steps back, I remember that I'm not in charge of this process, and that my Restorer IS.  I am encouraged to look back over the whole of the journey and not just the events of the last day or week or two.  When I do that, and realize how it is God who has empowered me to go through this process, I am so very grateful ... and another millimeter of yet another layer of lacquer comes off of my spirit.

I'm very, very glad He doesn't give up on me. 

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

And sometimes it's one step forward, and two steps back.

I got thrown for a loop this morning.  

Something I had been counting on, something someone else was going to do and which I was fully supportive of, even to the point of looking forward to more things I could do to help this person, fell through because the person involved backed out.


Whoomp.

I was hit like a ton of bricks - broadsided.  And guess what.  I was ANGRY.  I was totally ticked, royally bummed out, and thoroughly disappointed.  I felt betrayed, dismissed, and totally disrespected.  And yet - it was that person's choice to do (or not do) what he or she did.  


It takes something like that to really show me how insidious, how cunning and powerful and totally mystifying my addiction to control is.  I was close to tears most of the day (okay, I did have about a 5-minute cry at my desk) because of this ... this thing over which - truth be told - I have no control, have never had control and will never have control.  Period.

I summed it up during a rather ill-advised conversation with someone while I was still smarting from this perceived slap-in-the-face - "I'm finding it really hard to let go of this."

And a bell - faint and distant it seemed because it was drowned out by self-pity and frustration - started to ring in the far recesses of my spirit.  Where had I come across this before I wonder .... oh yes.  The Serenity Prayer.  "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change ..."  Hm.  Well, if anything needed accepting it was this.  My stomach was in knots.  My mind was inventing all kinds of things that would happen because this person wasn't behaving right.

Right....did you catch that?  "Right" being "the way I wanted him or her to behave."  

I knew what I needed to do.  I needed to let go.  I was having a hard time doing that and it was because it was ME trying to let go.  I hadn't prayed about it.  I was reacting - just like the old me.  Ping-ping-ping Ricochet Rabbit!!

So coming back from the washroom at one point, I prayed.  Since I couldn't think of better words, it was "God, grant me the serenity to accept the thing I cannot change..."  and I reached into my spiritual kit of tools and pulled out the first one I had ever used.  "I am powerless over others; my life is unmanageable because I keep trying to control them."  "Let go and let God."  With that, I could put the situation on hold and concentrate on something else, give time for God to work in me, on me.  

Is the situation resolved?  I don't know.  And I wish I could say that my unrest has disappeared like fog when the sun comes up.  But what I can say is that I'm learning to let go and let people be who they are, do what they'll do and bear the consequences of their own choices.  I don't have to like it.  But I do have to take my hands off and leave it alone.  

And thank God I don't have to do it alone.

URL: Unhook, Release, Learn

RIGOROUS 
HONESTY


The words were blazoned on the whiteboard by our back door for over four years.


These words were the first things we saw when we came home from work, church, or shopping, and the last thing we saw when we went out anywhere. They were a constant reminder of the lifestyle we had adopted.  

There was something comforting to me about those words.  I put them there when my hubby was still relapsing into his addiction all over the place... and I was deeply into trying to control his behavior.  But as we both grew, at least for me, those words were a constant reminder to me to be honest with myself, to be true to my recovery, and to maintain a lifestyle that demands rigorous honesty.  

And oh yes.  They reminded him too.  ;-) 


So when my youngest daughter decided one day last week to erase the words - I must admit that I was annoyed.  


Okay, I freaked out.


The words on the whiteboard represented the lifestyle we had come to rely on, the things restored to us from the years that the locusts of addiction and codependency had eaten, the years they had stolen from us.  I guess in a way I thought that if the words went away, our lifestyle might too.  I'd worked too hard to get to a place of freedom for that prospect to be attractive to me.  

So I put the words back on the whiteboard - and then my daughter saw what I'd done. 

SHE freaked out!!  To her, the words were a reminder of a very sad time in her life when Dad was relapsing and Mom was hunting all over the house, looking behind the freezer, snooping in the trunk of the car (how pathetic was that...) and she just wanted to move on.

I wasn't ready to unhook.  I needed some time to think.  Rather than let us continue to fight over it, hubby removed the whiteboard and put it in our room.  He bought me the time I needed.

So I started thinking very hard.  Why was this important to me? Was it really representative of what I wanted to remind myself of NOW?  Was there a better way?  

Slowly, I began to unhook from the habits of the past, to let go of the reins.  I decided to let someone else - God - direct me. (Just like the girl on the horse in the picture is learning the exact way to sit on the horse to achieve balance even on the bumpiest ride!) Awkward as it felt at first, it was the only way I could learn to live the right way - in freedom. 

And then it dawned on me.  I was trying to control again. All over whether two words should or should not be on a whiteboard!!

So what did I decide to do?  Well, after much thought and reflection, and after talking about it with hubby, I learned something.  He had always taken my reminder of the saying "rigorous honesty" as my trying to be his conscience, to be a watchdog over him.  He thought (as had my daughter) it meant that I didn't trust him.


Well, to be truthful, I didn't - at least not back then.  Slowly, over a period of well over a year, the trust started to be built back up again.  He was working at it; I was also working at it, and learning more and more how to let go, just let go.  Now THAT was a concept...

I felt as though this was a new stage in my recovery, a new phase in my relationship with God, with myself, with my husband, and with my children.  A stage where I was learning to release from the patterns of the past, and then learn a new way of being - completely relying on God and not my own idea of the way things should be.

So I knew what I had to do.  

I put the whiteboard back on its hooks by the door.  Erasing the words "rigorous honesty," I wrote two well-known slogans:

LET GO ...

LET GOD !  
(and then, in smaller letters)

First things 

    first!!

Stressed OUT !

Yes, lately it's been a very stressful time.

I'm in "refugee status" at work because they're carpeting my floor and the fumes really kick my MCS (Multiple Chemical Sensitivities) into high gear.  So I asked for other accommodations, which they found me.  The first week was great. Then there were some personnel changes in my immediate vicinity which caused my sensitivities to flare up again. Briefly put, someone right next to me was using lots of mousse every morning in her hair.  Plus she used "deodorant" (a misnomer if ever there was one) and either hand lotion, fabric softener or Febreeze, or a combination of two or more of those. She wasn't the only one; there were about six or seven people in that closed office who were wearing some sort of product and they all had to pass by my desk on their way in and out of the room. The effects are cumulative, which means that they build and build in the system so that the longer I am exposed, the less it takes to trigger a reaction.  By noon I was in bad shape.  But I stuck it out because hubby was at a coffee meeting with a friend all afternoon - something I do NOT begrudge him.

Anyway, the combined effect was that it was impossible for me to take a full breath of air yesterday.  I would try to force some air into my lungs, and that last cubic cup of air just couldn't get in there, it was like trying to breathe water.  I was irritable.  I was angry.  I was exhausted from having to struggle for breath.  I felt alone and abandoned.  And those things are never a good combination for me.  So ... when my supervisor took me to task for something I had done (overstepped my authority in something) ... I freaked out.

I lambasted the guy verbally.  I'd hit my saturation point, it was near the end of my work day and I was fed up.  So I blew.  Just like the old me.  And as usually happens whenever I lose my temper, it threw my whole day off, and I didn't sleep well last night.  The extra cup of coffee and the can of Pepsi I had at work to try to open my airways, didn't help my insomnia problem either.

This morning I woke up early (why not? I couldn't sleep well anyway) and had a shower, started a pot of coffee, woke hubby and then made an omelet. A good start to the morning.  When I got to work, the girl that had been there yesterday was not in today. That improved the air quality by about 40%.  Enough for me to manage to get through the day.  I know she'll be there again tomorrow but right now it doesn't bother me as much as it would have if someone had told me that yesterday.

The difference?  Well, it's a combination of things.  I had a chance to recover from the effects of yesterday even though it was near midnight before I could breathe fully.  I could review the events of the day objectively - once removed from the toxic atmosphere.  And I suddenly realized that I had allowed my spiritual "gas tank" to get low; I had forgotten to remind myself that God loves me no matter what!  When I'm running on "Empty" I get ... how does a new friend of mine put it? ... oh yes, "cranky."

Yes, I screwed up yesterday.  Part of it wasn't my fault - and as little as 2 years ago I couldn't have seen that.  I am learning to accept God's forgiveness, let myself off the hook because He already has, and then move forward. (Sighhhh....) Lesson learned.

This time.