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Dear My Accupuncture Guy

January 4, 2011 By Jenny Ryan Leave a Comment

When you ask me how my last session was, and I tell you that it hurt A LOT when you put needles in my hand, ESPECIALLY RIGHT HERE, and ask you if there is an alternate spot, I do not mean, right next to the spot that hurt last time.

Also, I have a bruise on the other hand.

Also, I don’t CARE if “most people” have a hard time with that spot over there. That spot is fine for me. I have a problem with this spot right here.

And if you’re gonna ignore all the stuff I tell you, then don’t even bother to come back in a few minutes and ask how I’m doing. Because I’m starting to think that you don’t actually care.

Feeling like a cranky pincushion,

Jenny

Filed Under: These Are The Chronic Pain Days Of My Life, Why Am I Doing This Again?

Suddenly I See

January 4, 2011 By Jenny Ryan 2 Comments

Over the past couple of years I have seen so many people who have had big “stuck” and big dreams. And it has been so cool to watch them being stuck, working through their stuck, and then arriving at the place they thought they’d never ever get to.

And at the same time, I’ve been feeling kind of sad about myself. I know that comparing myself to others makes me feel sh*tty. And I know that I can’t compare my insides to anyone else’s outsides. And I know that I don’t know what’s going on for all those people, what they’ve gone through, where they are now. But it’s still hard.

AND, I feel frustrated because even though I know that I do tons of stuff, and have worked through tons of stuff, it’s not anything that most people see. I’m not trying to “grow a business”, or figure out how to make (more) money, or do some giant, soon-to-be public creative project. And it’s not anything that, say, I could write about in a Christmas newsletter. And that is hard sometimes, especially when I see someone I’ve know for a while get something they’ve really wanted. It’s hard not to be in a place of public achievements right now. It’s hard to be almost the only witness to myself and what I do.

But when I ask myself, I don’t really come up with anything I’d like to do that I’m not doing. I don’t feel like there are things I want that I’m not getting to have. And I’m not feeling like being out in public doing things. Quite the opposite, actually.

This is (and has been) a time of turning inward for me. I’m learning how to take care of myself. I’m learning how to ask for help. I’m learning how to receive help. I’m learning how to be interdependent.

I’m learning how to acknowledge and live within my limits.

I’m learning how to still be me, and still thrive, and still have an everyday life I love EVEN WITH chronic pain and chronic illness.

I’m learning how to be in relationships with all the changes these circumstances have forced on me/us.

I’m learning how to actually live in now-moments. I’m learning how to be here, even though “here” frequently hurts like a m*&^%$-f!@#$%r.

I’m learning how to live in a place of both/and, as in, “I am having a 10 pain day, AND I’m grateful for the sunny weather.

I’m learning how to take advantage of things like the Internet in order to have an outlet for my creative expression, as well as have a way that I can stay connected to people that works with how/where/who I am now.

I’m still taking classes. I’m still trying new things.

I’m still contributing to our household and our life together, just in different ways and at a different capacity.

I’m STILL FUNNY-I still have my sense of humor, and can find the funny in my circumstances, AND write funny stories about them on my blog.

I still take care of my husband and my cats and our home.

I actually do have an everyday life that I really love.

I am still walking my spiritual path. I am still working on myself.

I’m learning how to release treating myself as though I only have value to life and to other people if I DO. I’m learning to see the value I have by simply existing here, and being in other people’s lives.

We’ve figured out how to organize things financially so that we’re ok with my not working.

I have learned how to educate the people around me on how to communicate with me, and how to help me in ways that actually help me.

Hm. When I look at things this way, it appears that I have, in fact, created an entirely new world for myself and the people around me.

Wow.

Apparently I really do have magical superpowers.

Nice.

Filed Under: CFG's Inner Space

Stuff: I Haz It. A Cool Title-Not So Much

January 1, 2011 By Jenny Ryan 8 Comments

I have the great, good fortune of being a student of Havi Brooks as one of the members of her Kitchen Table program. And underlying everything we do there, the skill we are all learning and trying our best to practice is the ability to meet ourselves and our “stuff”-whatever it is, and wherever we are-with kindness and compassion. We also talk a lot about how our relationship to one area of our life is a mirror of our relationship to all the other parts of our lives.

For example, I have identified a number of personal patterns that I am working on, and I can see how they show up all over my life. I am driven to hoard. I go back and forth between depriving myself and binging. I have a fear of there not being enough. And this stuff comes up for me repeatedly: in my relationship with food; in my relationship with money; even in something as simple as my relationship to books.

The good thing about this inter-relatedness is that if, say, my relationship with money is too scary to look at right now, then I can go to something more neutral, like my relationship to books, to do some work on these patterns. And the destuckifying** I do there will spill over into those other, scarier areas.

The bad thing is that, now that I’ve been doing this kind of self-inquiry for so long, when I feel things like resistance, being triggered, anxiety, or the like, I can no longer pretend that I have no idea what’s going on and find something (or someone) external to blame it on.

Stoopid self-awareness.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because nowhere is this stuff as real, or as challenging, for me as it is here, in my relationship with this blog. I often feel like there’s been some kind of fundamental stuckness here, and I’ve been slowly working my way through it over the past 5 1/2 years.

Lately it’s been taking the form of feeling really stalled out-in every area-because I’ve been pretty sick lately, and whenever that happens I start wondering about the questions of my identity and my existence (and the justification thereof).

One area in which these issues have been triggered is in the fact that my husband’s been home on vacation for the past two weeks, and while I have really enjoyed the opportunity to spend time with him, watching him attack a billion projects around the house has really made me feel my severely diminished capacity to do things. For example, housework used to be a breeze for me. I could clean the whole house in a day or two over the weekend. But now, it frequently takes me all day JUST to do the dishes (whereas my husband can whip out an entire clean kitchen in 15-20 minutes). And in my pre-sickness era, even when I felt like I hadn’t done anything else productive during the day, I could always fall back on my role of maker-of-the-home. But not anymore. (Hello, pattern of comparison, that never fails to make me feel totally shitty about myself.)

And then there are so many days where I can’t do anything at all, which of course makes me ask myself things like, “So is this really all there is to my life now-just managing pain?” or, “Well, why am I even here then if all I’m doing is being a burdensome sick person in all these people’s lives?” (And, hello patterns of linking my identity and right to exist on this earth to my ability to DO-fancy meeting you here.)

So I really struggle with the questions of, “Can I allow myself to believe that I am allowed to be here in this world just ‘cuz, and that people still value having me in their lives even though I’m sick?”  Sometimes. And then sometimes I just can’t.

So today, for some reason, things finally clicked for me and I realized that these questions are a huge part of the reason that I get stuck in my relationship to this blog. Because I’ve spent so long thinking that I had to come up with some kind of snappy, all-encompassing, highly marketable identity for myself as a writer/blogger, and that the only reason I can dare be so presumptuous as to suggest to people that they read my stuff is that I justify this blog’s existence by providing entertainment for people (ALSO a pattern that shows up in other places for me), or as I call it, being a “tap-dancing bear.”

And then the struggle sets in because it is physically impossible for me to fit into some sort of snappy, all-encompassing, highly marketable identity for myself, because if there is any phrase that truly defines who I am at my core, it is this:

Professional Free Spirit.

And sometimes there is entertainment in that. But a lot of times there isn’t.

And so once I finally admitted this to myself, I realized that underneath all of my “stuff” surrounding my blog are questions like, “Is it I presumptuous to think that I and my life are worthy of being put out here in public? Do I dare ask people to come here and read what I write without offering some kind of justification of my online existence (like constant entertainment?) Am I being like those people on all those reality TV shows who think that they are really worth having people follow their entire lives, when really they are just delusional and embarrassing? Do I really think that I have something to offer here, something that is worth people’s time and attention? Can I allow myself to believe that I am allowed to say to people, ‘Hey-come look at me. I’m worth listening to.’ Just ‘cuz?”

Sometimes.

And maybe, for right now, sometimes is enough.

**term courtesy of Havi Brooks, Pirate Queen

Filed Under: CFG's Inner Space

Cranky Fibro Girl and The Acupuncture

December 18, 2010 By Jenny Ryan 1 Comment

So today I had my very first ever acupuncture session, and oh, it was GLORIOUS.

I went in with a migraine, spent 20 minutes with the needles, and left with a neck so smooth and devoid of knots that I probably have not experienced since the womb.

As I left, the medical assistant gave me a chart that had suggested food to increase, and suggested foods to decrease. I read over it quickly as I was getting ready to leave, to make sure I didn’t have any questions.

The foods to increase looked good, with lots of fruit-LOVE my fruit.

Then I read the list of foods to decrease: chicken-ok, I can do that; corn-I’ll miss it, but it won’t be the end of the world; goat…

…

GOAT.

G-O-A-T.

“Uh, yeah,” I said to the medical assistant. “I DON’T think that one’ll be a problem.”

Filed Under: These Are The Chronic Pain Days Of My Life, These Are The Days Of My Life

Sometimes Tigger Just Needs A Little “Me” Time

December 14, 2010 By Jenny Ryan Leave a Comment

IMG_1635

Filed Under: CFG And The Laws Of Purr-modynamics, These Are The Days Of My Life Tagged With: cats

A Little Bit Country

December 8, 2010 By Jenny Ryan Leave a Comment

So this year my husband and I spent Thanksgiving with his family. And one night, as usually happens when families gather, we all ended up in the kitchen together, and after flowing across a wide variety of topics, the conversation eventually turned to music.

First up was my sister-in-law, whose musical tastes range from hip hop, to country, to rock. But apparently when she and her husband ride in the car together, their musical tastes collide.

“He claims that listening to country music makes him physically ill,” she said. “But I told him, ‘Stephen-you cannot get a headache from a specific genre of music!’ ”

So then that was the perfect segue into a never ending struggle conversation that my husband and I frequently have about some of the songs in his music collection. Specifically, the song, “What The World Needs Now Are A Few More Rednecks.” Which is CLEARLY a country song, although not according to my husband, as I discovered the first time I heard him play it.

“I thought you didn’t like country music,” I said, confused.

“It’s not country. It’s SOUTHERN. ROCK.”, he replied.

I’d gotten tired of rolling my eyes at him all by myself, so I decided to win everyone else over to my side get a few second opinions as long as we had some other people around. So I told them about my husband’s misguided classification of that particular song.

“Well, who sings it?” asked my mother-in-law.

“The Charlie Daniels Band”, said my husband, grudgingly.

And then the kitchen erupted in disbelief, which made the part of me that likes being “Right!” so very, very happy.

“So what about Johnny Cash?” asked my sister-in-law, knowing that he was also a favorite of my husband, and curious to see what my husband had to say about this UNDISPUTED star of the country music  world.

“He’s ‘bluegrass‘,” clearly losing this argument, but refusing to abandon his staunchly-held beliefs.

“Wow,” I said, stunned, looking at my husband as if I were seeing him for the first time. “I had no idea just how much you were lying to yourself  about this!”

He was not amused.

Filed Under: CFG And Family Affairs, Holi-daze

And People Say Grammar Is Boring

December 1, 2010 By Jenny Ryan Leave a Comment

They obviously have not read the book, “The Well-Tempered Sentence”, which states on page 1 that,

“The period is used to mark the end of a declarative or imperative sentence.” and gives the following illustrative example:

You don’t have to give me all the gory details about how you got hepatitis.

Filed Under: CFG Loves Things Wordy

What It Looks Like When Opposites Attract

November 25, 2010 By Jenny Ryan Leave a Comment

Our big cat, Bailey, who is 13 years old, has an overactive thyroid and needs to take a pill twice a day. We disguise it in a little pill pocket, but whether or not she’ll actually eat it is anyone’s guess.

So yesterday morning she refused to have anything whatsoever to do with her medicine, which meant being constrained by my husband while he shoved the pill down her throat. But then last night, she gobbled up her pill like it was the best thing she had ever tasted.

I, being the artsy-fartsy, liberal arts student that I am, immediately began pondering out loud the complete randomness of her behavior, and how this was probably a significant, illustrative example of some kind of chaos theory.

But my husband, the engineer, disagreed. “Nah,” he said. “I prefer to think of it as that we don’t yet know all of her required parameters.”

Filed Under: CFG And The Laws Of Purr-modynamics, The Perfect Blend

The Arrival Of The Hostile Alien Intestinal Bacteria

November 22, 2010 By Jenny Ryan 1 Comment

or, “The Day My Old Life Died”

Part Two in a series. (You can find Part One here.)

You know that old saying, that “fish and company start to stink after 3 days”? Well apparently the Hostile Alien Bacteria never got that memo. Because when they arrived they pulled right up onto my front lawn with their jumbo-sized recreational vehicle, unloaded some ratty old patio furniture, sat down, and immediately started smoking in their underwear, making it very clear that they weren’t going anywhere.

It all started off so innocently.

A week after my 35th birthday I got what turned out to be strep throat. So, okay, I did wait a few days before actually going to the doctor and getting some antibiotics, but compared to the rest of the story I’m about to tell you, that was some gold-medal quality self-care right there (for me, anyway.)

AND I was being all responsive and proactive about my health, and requested a different antibiotic than the one the doctor was going to prescribe, because I’d had problems with that one in the past.

So I was feeling pretty good about myself (you know, except for the sickness and all), when a few days later I began to have what we will just refer to here as, “intestinal distress”. But I thought, “Well, antibiotics do upset my stomach, so it’s probably just that,” and assumed that it would get better after I’d finished taking all the medicine.

And then I began to develop additional symptoms, like fevers, the shakes, and the inability to tolerate food. But I thought, “Well, it’s probably just the flu,” and figured that it would pass in a few days. (Are you seeing a pattern here?)

So finally, after 12 days in a row of diarrhea, fevers, shakes, and being unable to eat or drink anything, I began to think, “Hm-maybe I should go see the doctor again.” (Important Side Note: Apparently the most you should ever go without treating these symptoms is 3 days so, in the immortal words of Heather “Dooce” Armstrong: “BE YE NOT SO STUPID!”) Actually, what got me to the doctor-FINALLY!-was the fact that my husband was about to go out of town on business for a week, and by the Sunday before he left I started to hear a voice in my head that kept repeating, “You know he’s leaving tomorrow, and, so, just in case you have to be hospitalized, you should go find out what’s wrong with you.”

Never in life have I had a thought like that. Never. Ever. So clearly my poor body was waving red flags and shooting off warning flares wherever it could. However, even with my brain shouting “HOSPITALIZATION IS MOST LIKELY IMMINENT, DUMBASS! You maybe wanna DO something about that?!”, I still didn’t take the whole situation all that seriously.

And, OH, how I would come to regret that.

(To be continued)

Filed Under: Sometimes I Get Sick

Things That I Am Giving Myself Permission To No Longer Feel Guilty About

November 15, 2010 By Jenny Ryan 2 Comments

Starting with: ending my title with a preposition 😛

I finally realized that if I kept waiting around for some kind of Comedy Masterpiece to suddenly drop into my brain, that I would never start writing here again. So I decided to just pick something and start writing, and this seemed like as good a jumping off point as any.

1. My Surgery Story. Back when I started to recover after my surgery, I was all inspired to write about it. And I actually did produce a post or two that started to tell the story. But then I stopped-and I don’t know why. I guess I just wasn’t feeling it anymore. So I therefore grant myself permission to never ever have to finish writing the story of my surgery. I grant myself permission to Declare It Done, exactly the way it is right now. Amen.

2. Cranky Fibro Girl’s Twitter Chat Transcript. Back in the summer Cranky Fibro Girl and I did a live chat on Twitter, and I had all these grand ideas of how I could take that and turn it into some kind of something here on my site. Plus, I promised that I’d at least post the transcript here as a post. But I never did. And I’m tired of feeling guilty about this, and having it hanging over my head. So I therefore grant myself permission to never ever have to post  the transcript, or to have to do anything with it, or to even have to think about it ever again. Amen.

3. Responding to blog comments. I LOVE it when you guys leave a comment for me. I so much appreciate that you let me know that you’ve been here, and that you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read. And I wish that I could/would respond to every comment I receive. Sometimes I can. But then sometimes I can’t.  And sometimes you guys feel like commenting. But then sometimes you don’t. And so I’m therefore giving ALL of us permission to comment, or not, according to how we feel in any given moment. Amen.

So on that note, according to whatever powers that might be vested in me, I grant YOU permission to grant YOURSELF permission for whatever you need to do-or not do-on order to take care of yourself today.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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