Harnessing the healing power of snark
January, much like August, is not a very good month for me.
I feel dull and grey inside, bored with everything, and convinced that there is nothing new left to experience.
But sometimes, when I least expect it, a cracks forms in the grey and a tiny surprise peeks through.
Sometimes it can be so challenging, this life in a body.
Without it I couldn’t be here in this physical world. I’d never smell the gardenias by my front door, or head butt my kitty to say good morning, or feel the thrill of penning a really great story.
But then again, I also wouldn’t have weeks on end of burning fibromyalgia pain and explosive migraines either. (Can you tell that this happens to be one of the times when dealing with my body pretty much sucks enormous donkey balls?)
For me, having fibromyalgia is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces are not only constantly in motion, but are also constantly changing shape, size, color, location, and orientation in space.
There’s an infinite number of ways these pieces can come together. Sometimes I’m lucky, and I end up with a portrait worthy of Michelangelo himself. Some days I get dogs playing poker on velvet; not the worst picture ever made, but not one I’d really want to hang in my living room. And some days resemble nothing so much as Edvard Munch’s “Scream“.
I never know which picture I’ m going to get on any given day, or why I get the picture I do.
I just feel the swish of butterfly wings, grab my paint brush and palette, and follow the wind.
So many different ways I can see myself: woman, wife, fibro patient, artist, blogger, shit-kicker, bipolar, seeker, student, trailblazer, chronically fatigued, renaissance soul.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
-Walt Whitman
You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Plus, I’m taking Vivienne McMaster’s new photography class, and this gives me a chance to show off the picture I took with my fancy new tripod and wireless remote control (because I am ALL about the hobbies with way cool gadgets).
This week my inner Vision got a little cloudy because I got stuck in a story that my mind was running, and so I ended up in an anxious, paralyzed, beating-myself-up kind of place.
The past three or four weeks have been really good for me. My pain’s been pretty manageable, I’ve decided what projects and goals I’d like to work on this year, and, most importantly, January has been SUNNY. But then a few days into this week my pain suddenly spiked to over 10 levels (the “official” pain scale does not have nearly enough numbers to rate fibro pain) and I freaked out because, WTF, pain?!
Pain always knocks me out of alignment, especially when it’s so unexpected. So I found myself madly scrambling around, trying to find an explanation for why I hurt so badly. And, as so often happens for me, the explanation my mind came up with was to blame myself for everything. Clearly I must have done something wrong this past month, so this pain must be all my fault. And since I had caused this pain myself, I deserved to suffer for my mistake (or so my story went).
This, unsurprisingly, only served to paralyze me in anxiety and shame, which in turn then stirred up more pain.
Luckily I talked to Lynne who reminded me to question my thinking and took me through “The Work” by Byron Katie, one of the most helpful tools I’ve learned for dealing with my monkey mind.
“The Work” is a series of questions you use to help untangle the stories that are causing you pain. Here is a sample of the dialogue I had with thoughts:
My story: This is my fault. I caused this pain. I deserve to be punished and suffer.
Is this true? YES! It is the truest thing that ever existed! Why are you even asking me this?!
Can I absolutely know that this is true? (Can I absolutely, 100% guaranteed know that I did “x”, which caused this pain?) No.
How do I feel when I think this thought? Horrible, awful, ashamed, anxious, afraid, sad, stuck. (Related questions: Is this story working for me? No, not so much. Can I think of a good reason to keep this story? Not really.)
Who would I be without this story? Free, forgiving, accepting, compassionate, kind, understanding, open, loving, creative.
Is there a story that feels as true or truer than my original story? I don’t know exactly what caused this pain flare-up.
And that’s the part that got me stuck. I HATE the randomness of this illness. I hate not being able to predict how I’ll feel in the next hour, let alone next day or next week. I hate not knowing “why”. I hate that things can be going really well, and then suddenly they’re not. So I scramble to find a reason, any reason, for why this might be happening. Because even if it means blaming myself, convincing myself that there’s some kind of explanation for my pain feels a lot better than having to accept that sometimes it happens for no other reason than the fact that I have fibromyalgia.
Which sucks. A lot. But if I can get to this point in my thinking, I can at least stop adding mental suffering to my physical pain. It’s not much, but I’ll take all the relief I can get.
Yesterday we here in The City Formerly Known As Hotlanta got snow; actual snow, and not the usual 27 tiny flakes that constitute an emergency shutdown of the entire world.
Naturally I grabbed my camera, eager to photograph this mysterious substance of which I’d heard so much lately. And then my stupid monkey mind woke up and started yelling at me that there was no point in trying to take pictures of anything because it’s all been done before, and there was no way I could do anything original. Because that is the point of a hobby: to use it to beat yourself into a bloody pulp of self-declared unworthiness.
I’d like to say that I eventually had a beautiful epiphany about my uniqueness as a person and how I couldn’t help but have a unique vision, but mostly I was just mad. So, determined to give my mind the finger, I just kept shooting until I ended up with some pictures I really liked.
Whatever works, I guess.
(P.S. For anyone who’s mocking Atlanta for what happened here yesterday, this article explains why we are not just a bunch of wimpy, skittish Southerners.)
