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My 2014 Word Of The Year: Peace

January 6, 2014 By Jenny Ryan 1 Comment

I’m not really into making New Year’s resolutions given my tendencies toward compulsive and bi-polar-esque behavior, as well as the fact that I have no idea in January what will be capturing my attention by the end of the year.

Instead for the past 3 years I have used Leonie Dawson’s “Create Your Amazing Year” workbooks, which I highly recommend. They are all the things I love: fun, pretty, easy, flexible, colorful, creative, imaginative, and expansive.

One of the practices that she (as well as many others) recommend is that of choosing a word to be your theme for the year. So this year I have chosen as my theme the word “Peace”.

The other practice I have started has to do with my new found love of photography.

I started taking e-courses with Vivienne McMaster, most especially the “Be Your Own Beloved” class last fall (highly, highly HIGHLY recommend; go and sign up for the next session right  now!) , and now I’m seeing visual stories wherever I go. So I’ve joined Instagram, and everyday I look for a picture to represent how peace is showing up in my life that day.

I’m so excited at this new way I’ve found to tell stories, and so I want to start sharing some of my peaceful pictures here with you. Here is a collage of all the pictures I took last week:

PhotoGrid_1389024234909

Blessings to all as we start another new year.

Filed Under: CFG Dishes On Herself, Uncategorized

Thursday Afternoon

October 17, 2013 By Jenny Ryan Leave a Comment

My Brain: GAH! YOU MUST DO ALL OF THE THINGS! RIGHT NOW! OR ELSE YOU WILL DIE!!

Me: Dear Brain-Please use your inside voice. If you keep shrieking at me, I will not be able to get anything done. It will be OK, I promise.

My Brain: I just don’t want you to forget anything.

Me: Apparently you’ve forgotten that I’m a severely OCD firstborn child of two firstborn parents married to another firstborn. It is GENETICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for me to forget ANY of the things.

My Brain: OK, um, great then. Carry on.

Filed Under: CFG Dishes On Herself

You Know Your Grammar Snob Has Run Amok

July 25, 2013 By Jenny Ryan 2 Comments

…when someone comes to your door offering a service and you won’t hire them because they keep using first person plural subjects with third person singular verbs.

Filed Under: CFG Dishes On Herself

The Only Ph.D I’m Likely To Have: Dr. Of Doing Things The Hard Way

March 22, 2013 By Jenny Ryan Leave a Comment

Dear Me:

When you are in so much fibro pain that you’re on the kind of medicine that they give to terminal cancer patients and it’s still not helping, it is not the time to try and figure out the meaning of life.

Filed Under: CFG And The Effects Of Fibromyalgia, CFG Dishes On Herself

Yet Another Sign Of The Fact That I Have Way Too Much Time On My Hands, Or, Is This Really Using My Powers For Good?

March 21, 2013 By Jenny Ryan Leave a Comment

I don’t drink, but if I confess that I am occasionally tempted to start. Not because of the excruciating pain of my chronic illness, but because I spend all day alone with 3 cats.  Therefore, I have created the following fun drinking game based on the number of times in a day that have to say the same things over and over again to the cats.

1.    “Why the hell are you trying to reason with cats? YOU ARE ALWAYS GOING TO LOSE. Do you WANT to have a drinking problem?”  (YES/NO)

If NO, then proceed to a less painful activity, such as undergoing a root canal without the healing balm of Novocain, or watching a curling match on TV

If YES, then continue on to Question 2.

2.    Really? REALLY? Let’s just go back and have another look at Question 1, shall we?

If still YES, then please complete the following short survey:

-How many hours did you sleep last night?
-What is your pain level?
-Are you sure you’ve taken all your medications for today?
-Have you sent any texts to your husband that include the words “stabbing”, “sledgehammer”, or “running away from home”?
-On a scale of 1-10, how important is it really that Bailey stop “looking at me funny”?

If still YES, well, then on your own head be it; proceed to Step 3.

3. “Apparently you are delusional enough to think that you can actually get a cat to do what you want, so you might as well have a drink to ease the pain of your inevitable failure.”

Filed Under: CFG And The Laws Of Purr-modynamics, CFG Dishes On Herself

And…Now I Am A Redhead

March 2, 2013 By Jenny Ryan Leave a Comment

IMAG0639

Filed Under: CFG Dishes On Herself

In Sickness And In Health

January 3, 2013 By Jenny Ryan Leave a Comment

A week or so before the holidays we experienced a bit of a role reversal here at the Ryans as Mr. Cranky Fibro Girl was felled by a bad cold. He only gets sick once, maybe twice a year, but when he gets sick he gets really sick.

I enjoyed the opportunity to take care of him, since he does such a wonderful job taking care of me, and it got me to thinking about the part of our wedding vows where we promised to care for each other “in sickness and in health”. And it’s a good thing he meant his part of that vow, because it was no more than an hour or so after our ceremony when he was called to put it into practice.

But to properly tell this tale, I first need to give you a bit of back story; specifically, I need to tell you the story of my parents’ wedding.

My parents got married in July at a time when, as far as I can determine, man had not yet discovered air conditioning. So I can only imagine that, as bride, groom, and attendants stood on the altar, it was as if they were conducting the ceremony on the shifting, molten lava of the surface of the sun.

I’m not sure whether or not the heat was to blame for this, but apparently no one really ate anything before the ceremony, and so a few minutes in, as my mom described it, “people started dropping like flies”.

Mom’s brother went first and then, as my dad was leaning down to tell his brother-the best man, the one with the rings-not to lock his knees, down he went as well. At which time they had to pause the ceremony because, as the pastor said, “Man may come and man may go, but we have to have the ring,” and off he went in search of the fallen attendants.

As my own wedding grew closer and closer and took on a life of its own, dragging me on in the wake of its ever-increasing momentum, this story began to prey on my mind. Now, all these years later, I can see that things felt so big and so overwhelming, that I fixated on The Story Of The Fainting Groomsmen in hopes of finding something small that I thought I could control.

And I was not the only one using that particular coping strategy, either. Rather than think about the enormity of what was about to happen my mom fixated on finding the perfect shade of “bone” for her mother-of-the-bride shoes; my dad tried to convince us that we needed to hand-sketch all the maps from the ceremony to the reception; my future mother-in-law focused on perfecting the gift table; and my future father-in-law, after having spent the previous nine months refusing to wear a tuxedo suddenly changed his mind about five days before the wedding, and, I don’t even remember what happened with that.

But nothing, NOTHING, freaked people out more than the Unity Candle.

Mr. CFG and I thought it would be a nice addition to the ceremony to have my parents and his parents light one of the candles on each side of the Unity Candle. We meant it as a symbolic gesture of the bringing together of our two families, a symbol of the support that would carry us on as we began our life as a married couple. But somehow, something got lost in translation, because what they apparently heard was, “FLAME! DEATH! DESTRUCTION! WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!” The four of them obsessed over that candle for weeks. Mr. CFG said he even found them up in the balcony minutes before the ceremony was to begin, frantically reviewing the Candle Lighting Procedure. I feel kind of bad about it now; we’d meant it as a gesture of love and gratitude, but instead it seemed to be a gesture of a potential aneurysm-inducing event.

I tell you all of this to give you a little taste of what the emotional/stress level was by the time we finally got to the day of the wedding. Between the six of us five of us are firstborns, and three of us have what you might generously refer to as Dynamic Personalities. And, so now that we’d arrived at the moment of truth, my mantra for the day became, “HEY-PEOPLE STANDING UP WITH ME AT THE ALTAR! MAKE SURE YOU EAT SOMETHING BECAUSE THERE SHALL BE NO FAINTING AT MY WEDDING, SO SAITH THE LORD, AMEN!”

But (as I’m sure you’ve guessed), in a case of, “Physician-heal thyself!”, I neglected to follow my own directive. Unless you count swigging down an entire bottle of Donagel to calm my nervous stomach. (Which you shouldn’t.)

Happily we all made it through the ceremony, and no one was harmed in the lighting of the candles, and now it was time to relax, which in my case meant developing an absolutely brain-shattering “Relief Headache”. So one of my aunts pulled a bottle of Excedrin out of her purse and handed me two tablets. “Aha-I am going to be smart,” I told myself. “I don’t know how this medicine will affect me, so I will only take one of these.”

It was unfortunate for me that I hadn’t had that thought back at 2 in the morning when I started doing shots of stomach medicine, because by the time we were in the limo heading to the reception those two medicines and my empty stomach collided, and  I became violently nauseated.

Panicked and close to tears I said, “I can’t go to the reception. I can’t make it through.”

And then, in the first of what would turn out to be many such moments my new husband calmly assessed the situation, said, “Well, I think we have to,” asked the limo driver to take us to a drug store so I could get some Emetrol for my nausea (because that‘s what I needed-more medicine!) (which the limo driver purchased for us, impressing the drugstore patrons with his completely kitted-out chauffeur uniform, including white gloves and cap),  tucked the Emetrol along with some Rolaids into his jacket pocket, and, with his steady, calm, loving presence, carried me through the reception, which turned out to be a lot of fun.

Yeah-I got a good one 🙂

 

Filed Under: CFG Dishes On Herself, CFG On Love And Marriage

As Ron White Always Says, “You Can’t Fix Crazy”

December 20, 2012 By Jenny Ryan 2 Comments

Every year I swear I will never, ever, EVER again do Christmas cards. I’ve even written myself notes for the upcoming year’s Christmas that say, “REMEMBER: YOU HATE CHRISTMAS CARDS.”

And then, in a move that I can only blame on some kind of funky brain wiring, I buy Christmas cards, which leads to the following, uplifting holiday conversation:

Me: “I HATE CHRISTMAS CARDS WITH THE WHITE HOT INTENSITY OF A THOUSAND SUNS!!”

My husband: “I will help you with them.”

Me: “NO! NO CHRISTMAS CARDS! And if we ever do buy Christmas cards again, they are going to have some kind of pre-printed messaged inside!”

My husband: “You mean, like, ‘Merry &*#%*! Christmas’?”

Me:” Ex-actly“

Filed Under: CFG Dishes On Herself, CFG On Love And Marriage

I’m Sure What He Really Meant To Say Was, “Wow-That’s A Great Idea!”

October 26, 2012 By Jenny Ryan Leave a Comment

The other day my husband and I were discussing The Ice Situation in our house. I love ice. I must have ice. I need so much ice in fact, that it’s frequently difficult to fit any of my beverage in the same glass with all of my ice. So, unsurprisingly, my ice needs frequently outstrip the ice maker’s ability to supply them.

I have come up with what I feel is a brilliant strategy; if the ice is low and I’m finished with my drink, I will rinse my ice cubes off and dump them back in the freezer. (And before you get all skeeved out: it’s just the 2 of us here, we NEVER EVER have any company because we are both the biggest hermits that you will ever meet, and, after 23 years of dating and marriage, if we were going to each others’ get cooties,  it would have happened by now.)

As I was explaining my brilliant recycling strategy my husband looked at me and said, “Is that why sometimes the ice is purple? I cleaned out the entire freezer because I thought we had a fungus.”

“Oh-nope,that was just me,” I replied.

My husband just looked at me for a beat and then shook his head, saying, “You are the strangest woman I have ever known.”

“Um, I prefer to think of it as quirky, eccentric, and entertaining,” I countered.

“Well, you do entertain me,” he said, smiling.

I guess one out of three’s not bad.

Filed Under: CFG Dishes On Herself, CFG On Love And Marriage

Cranky Fibro Girl 5 Years Later: I Wonder Where We’ll Go From Here?

October 24, 2012 By Jenny Ryan 2 Comments

Now that my fibro has sort of leveled out and I’ve been able to catch myself up to myself, I’ve been looking back over the past five years to kind of review and integrate everything that’s happened to me.

And while at the time I was living through them those years seemed completely chaotic and random, in hindsight I see that each year was actually focused around a pretty specific theme.

2008 was The Year Of Being Deathly Ill, And Then Finally Getting A Correct Diagnosis

2009 was The Year Of Fury, Rage, Pushing Against, And Feeling Utterly Betrayed By Life

2010 was The Year Of Denial, Bargaining, And Magical Thinking

And then after all of that, the best way I can describe 2011 is, The Year Of, “Huh”.

It reminded me of a scene from the very first Harry Potter book, where orphaned Harry is living with his extremely non-magical aunt, uncle, and cousin. They cannot stand Harry, and so they do everything in their power to mistreat him, especially his spoiled rotten cousin, Dudley.

In the scene I’m thinking of,  Dudley has just been informed  by his father that Harry will be moving out of his cupboard under the stairs into Dudley’s “second bedroom”, at which time Dudley pretty much loses his sh*t.

“Next morning at breakfast, everyone was rather quiet. Dudley was in shock. He’d screamed, whacked his father with his Smelting stick, been sick on purpose, kicked his mother, and thrown his tortoise through the greenhouse roof, and he still didn’t have his room back.”

That is exactly how I felt at the beginning of 2011. I had raged and ranted, screamed, shrieked, agonized, emoted, dramatized, thought, willed, given up, started over, cried, resisted, denied, accepted, forced, surrendered, basically pulled out all the guns in my arsenal in my attempt to BEND THIS ILLNESS TO MY WILL. But no matter what I did, it didn’t work.

So by the end of those first three years, just like Dudley, I was stunned, and rather quiet inside. There was nothing left for me to try; I had to admit that, at least for the foreseeable future, this illness was sticking around.

The question then became, given the reality of my situation, how was I going to live with it? How could I manage the pain, and the fatigue, and the not-being-able-to-plan past-the-next-five-minutes, and the limitations on what my body could do, and the frustration of constantly having to start writing and stop writing and start writing all over again depending on my unpredictable pain levels, and create an everyday life for myself? A life that maybe, possibly, perhaps I could actually enjoy.

So the theme for 2012 has turned out to be The Year Of Investigating Possibilities And Exploring My Capacity.

In a couple of previous  posts I talked about exploring my relationship to my body and the way I was presenting myself in the world.

I’ve also been able to travel a bit which is nice, because we now have a nephew on my side of the family and a niece on my husband’s side. So I’ve had a lot of fun exploring what it’s like to be an aunt.

Additionally, I’ve been learning how to focus a bit more seriously on my writing. I took some great classes, and I’ve been working on how to choose an idea and then stick with it, developing it over a longer form than just a blog post. And I received the wonderful surprise of being named one of the top 21 Fibromyalgia Blogs of 2012.

But for the past few months or so, I’ve felt as though I’ve been experiencing a sort of identity crisis when it’s come to blogging here as Cranky Fibro Girl. Because I am a completely different person, in a completely different place, living a completely different experience of fibromyalgia than when I first got sick.

When I started blogging as Cranky Fibro Girl back in 2009, everything about this chronic illness experience was new. I had no idea what I was doing, I was ground down with pain, and I was pretty much pissed off at the entire world. Luckily for me, this provided me with a never-ending stream of things to snark about.

But now I am feeling a lot better (relatively speaking-I am currently in the fourth month of a nasty pain flare-up that shows no signs of going away anytime soon, but I know how to take care of myself now). I’m not so angry anymore; I don’t need to rage against the world like I used to. I have a great support system, great doctors, and treatments that are helping.

So now I’m wondering, how do I “be” Cranky Fibro Girl now?

How can I be feeling better and still be funny and snarky?

What do I want to write about now that I’m in Year Five, rather than Year One?

How can I keep the essence(s) of expressing myself as Cranky Fibro Girl while the shape of my illness is evolving?

I don’t know.

But I suspect that working out the answers is gonna be a hellavu fun ride.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: CFG Dishes On Herself

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