Archives for April 2012

Well I don’t know about you, but so far I have spent all of 2012 trying to deal with all the crap that happened at the end of 2011.

First off was the disappearance of an online group of which I’d been a member for the past 3 years. I LOVED that place. I met the coolest people there. We had a bunch of different forums where we could rejoice with, sympathize with, and brainstorm ideas with each other, which really knit us together as a community. Plus we had monthly teleclasses on topics ranging from copy writing and marketing, to leaning the principles of non-violent communication, to how to deal with the scary stuff that can come up when we’re working on our relationship to money. It was a really safe incubator for personal and professional growth, and we saw lots of different dreams come to fruition over those 3 years, including Cranky Fibro Girl.

But then the woman running it decided that she didn’t want to run it anymore, and so she shut it down. It was a big investment on her part to maintain it, but no more so than our investment of our time and our money. So then this wonderful place, which for me and many others was our main source of support and community, was suddenly gone. And not only had it ended, but it had ended badly, with lots of hurt. So everything was made that much worse, because the place where we would all normally go to work through our hurt was the place that was causing the hurt. So we were kind of screwed. And it really, really sucked.

So now there’s this quiet, sad, empty space inside me where this community used to be. I know that something new will eventually arrive for me, but it hasn’t shown up yet. And since I spent most of my online time over the past 3 years interacting with that community, going online now just reminds me of what isn’t there for me anymore. So I’ve been avoiding The Internetz until that starts to feel better.

Then there was a little experiment that I decided to try last November. For the past couple of years or so I have been a practitioner of something called Shiva Nata,  or Dance Of Shiva. It’s part movement practice, part brain-stretching practice, and part meditation/noticing-your-process practice. So in November I decided to do a little bit of Shiva every day, and then blog about my personal process, as well as any insights that showed up for me.

It started off great, but unfortunately I sort of forgot that anytime I start focusing intently on my inner processes for an extended period of time, it triggers my bi-polar, mood-cycling things. I’m not really sure why this happens, but if I’m not careful I just get lost in my own mind.

It finally got awful enough that I had to stop my practice and find a way to recover. Plus, it was also all tied up with the online community I mentioned above. So because Dance of Shiva has all these anxious, emotional, charged associations for me I’ve been kind of gun shy about starting to practice again. And so that’s another loss I’ve been grieving.

As a matter of fact, my emotions were so intense, and so out of whack that I made an appointment to go see my psychiatric nurse a few days before Christmas. I was afraid that something bad might happen while we were all off for the holidays.

So we talked and decided that between my Shiva experiment, the never-ending health problems that kept cropping up over the previous three months, and all the pain medicine I was currently taking for my fibromyalgia, it was not surprising that I was experiencing so much emotional overwhelm.

And then as we were getting ready to leave, I asked her a question I’d been wondering about for a while; namely, what was my “official” diagnosis. (Extremely Important Side Note That I CANNOT Stress Enough: If you ever ask a question like that, make sure you really, REALLY want to know the answer. Because once you know, you can never not-know again.)

She told me Bi-Polar II, which would account for the anxiety and depression I experience. And then she said, “Have we ever talked about Borderline Personality Disorder?”

We had not. But we did then.

On the one hand, when she was reading all the diagnostic criteria my body actually started to vibrate, and in the flash of one second I saw my entire life played backwards and thought, “Oh. I GET it now.”  But on the other hand I just thought, “Huh,” and was kind of thrown for a loop, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to come to terms with this latest diagnosis.

So I’ve had kind of a lot going on over the past few months, but I think I’m coming back to myself, and words are starting to show up again.

So Happy Friday to everyone, and thanks for sticking around 🙂

Those of you who’ve been hanging out with me for a while know all about  my torrid and passionate love affair with The Number 8.  (Or, as I refer to it, “Perfection”.)

I haven’t really thought much about 8 lately, but today I was going through some of my archives and I found this post, which describes, in all its glory, the awesomeness that is The Number 8.

I guess I must have run out of happy Number 8 stories, because the only new story I could think to write about was, sadly, The Day When Eight Was Not So Great.

It was back in 1998 and my husband and I were traveling through Spain. We were in Seville about halfway through our trip, and for some reason we hadn’t eaten all day. Luckily we happened to pass by a McDonald’s, so we stopped in for some lunch. But because we were so hungry we became super-focused on the food when it arrived, and unfortunately we stopped paying attention to what was going on around us.

We’d been eating for a few minutes when we were approached by a trio of twenty-something guys. They didn’t say anything, but one of them tapped my husband on the shoulder and pointed to a coin lying on the ground by his chair. He picked it up and we were grateful for the kindness and thoughtfulness offered to us, strangers in a strange land, right up until the moment when we discovered that they had “kind-ed” us right out of our camera and our little traveling backpack.

We didn’t really think we’d recover any of our things-THANKFULLY, our passports and money were NOT in the backpack. But we decided to report the theft anyway so that later we could file a claim with our insurance company to replace our camera.

We walked into the local police station ready to speak to one of the Guardia Civil.  But instead we were greeted by a little electronic kiosk which instructed us to type up a little report detailing the nature of  our complaint. And unfortunately, rather than soothing us it actually made us feel worse. Because we were  already feeling stupid for letting this happen to us, and violated, and very far from home. Then instead of maybe getting to tell our story to a sympathetic (human) ear, we had to give our details to a very not-personal machine.

But the final demoralizing straw came when we clicked on the first screen and began filling out our report. We entered all of our personal information, and then clicked over to the screen which asked for the details of the crime. We were all set to lay out our own, personalized mugging experience story in exquisite detail, but instead found ourselves looking at what was basically a “choose your own adventure” style crime menu. And there it was: Theft By Distraction.

So even though we felt especially and personally targeted by our thieves, officially we were just another foreigner who got duped.

Needless to say, we were pretty down by the time we were finally ushered in to a tiny room and greeted by two officers. My husband doesn’t speak Spanish, so I spoke with the men and then translated for him. The computer program had turned all of our information into an official report, and we were called in so that we could answer any additional questions and then sign our statement.

The printer spit out one copy, and we both signed it. Then came another one, which made sense because it’s always a good idea to have duplicate copies of important documents. But then, the copies kept coming. And KEPT coming, with no end in sight.

Since  we had all only spoken Spanish this whole time, my husband and I would occasionally have little mumbled conversations off to the side. We figured we were safe because there’d been no indication that either of the officers spoke English. So when they kept handing us sheet after sheet to sign, we finally turned to each other and asked, “How many copies are there?”

At that the officer in charge straightened in his chair, turned to face us, and, smiling broadly, replied in tones as clear as a bell, “Eight!”