Cranky Fibro Girl

Harnessing the healing power of snark

It’s The Most Suckiest Time Of The Year

By 6 Comments

Image courtesy of Free Foto.

I really, really hate this time of year.

Specifically, I detest December 26 through the Monday in January when everyone goes back to work and school. Just like agoraphobics break down in the face of wide, open spaces, I am paralyzed with anxiety when I am forced to endure great swaths of unscheduled, unstructured time.

I found something on Wikipedia that makes a lot of sense to me. When talking about the cause of agoraphobia it says, “Research has uncovered a linkage between agoraphobia and difficulties with spatial orientation.[8] [9]Normal individuals are able to maintain balance by combining information from their vestibular system, their visual system and their proprioceptive sense. A disproportionate number of agoraphobics have weak vestibular function and consequently rely more on visual or tactile signals. They may become disoriented when visual cues are sparse as in wide open spaces or overwhelming as in crowds. Likewise, they may be confused by sloping or irregular surfaces.[10] Compared to controls, in virtual reality studies, agoraphobics on average show impaired processing of changing audiovisual data. [11]” (emphasis mine).

I think that is what happens to me when not just I, but the whole world around me, is taken out of our everyday routine for this extended period of time. No one is where I expect them to be. No one is doing what I expect them to be doing, when I expect them to be doing it. And I am unable to get in my necessary 150 hours of solitude per day that then allow me to briefly interact with other living beings without having a nervous breakdown.

Added to these difficulties is that fact that one symptom of fibromyalgia is that it amplifies all sensations, to the point where literally it can be painful to have air touching your skin. Speaking for myself, I can be in a situation that most people wouldn’t think twice about, say, having dinner at someone’s house, and suddenly I will be overwhelmed with sensory input-the sound of people’s voices, the smell of the cleaning products the host used in the dining room, the way the overhead light shines off the table, the odor of dinner cooking-and my system will just get completely overwhelmed, be unable to process all of this sensory information, and just crash-into migraines, anxiety attacks, severe digestive problems-anything that will allow me to go off by myself, into the quiet and the dark, and completely withdraw into myself until my system can rebalance itself.

I feel like such a baby, and like such a retard. Like, “Oh no, I’m sorry, but we can’t come over to your awesome New Year’s Eve party because Jenny is currently unable to tolerate sound.” I hate that my sensitivities sometimes limit what my husband does. I hate that I really do have so many special needs. It makes me feel like some bitchy, selfish prima donna who will only condescend to eat green MnM’s which are fed to her one by one by a pair of nubile servant boys while sitting on a gilded throne and being fanned with the feathers of specially-raised peacocks.

It also doesn’t help that the weather seems to be experiencing a severe bout of Alzheimer’s and has confused Atlanta with Seattle, meaning that we’ve had a total of approximately 17 seconds of sun over the past six weeks.

My husband, on the other hand, loves this time of the year-LOVES IT! I am completely unable to comprehend how he could possibly feel that way. Not even under the influence of copious amounts of mind-altering, highly narcotic substances would that even begin to make sense to me. Because for one thing, he is pretty much forced to spend this time with me when, to put it kindly, I am not exactly at my best.

When I asked him yesterday how he was enjoying his vacation he said that he was having a great time, but he felt that I had been “brooding around the house.”

I was all, “Yeah. You’re right. I have been. And?”

And…he decided that there would be significantly less hostility for him to deal with if he went back to fighting the crazed zombies on Resident Evil 4.

So basically, between the horrible grey limbo of the weather, and the horrible grey limbo of this “in-between” time, and the absence of my normal everyday routine, and all the stories/expectations out there which tell me that I should be LOVING this time even though it makes me want to curl up into a little ball and weep, and everything involved with the holidays, and having been around my husband pretty much non-stop for over two weeks now, the strain of being able to pretend that I am someone able to keep my shit together is really taking its toll.

Maybe I am a horribly selfish person, a burden on the lives of those around me.

Or maybe, just maybe, I am someone with a pretty severe anxiety disorder who’s doing the best she can during a really challenging time.

A Moment Of Truth

By 4 Comments

I have spent an awful lot of time in my life trying to reconcile some pretty impossible conflicts.

It all started when I was very young.

I grew up in a religious system which was very fond of emphasizing Just How Bad We All Are. How we are all born into this world as terrible, wretched sinners, and how everything about us is offensive to God and makes God very angry, and how all that we deserve is to be eternally punished by God. But maybe, if we grovel and abase ourselves enough, God will grudgingly agree not to smite us down from the heavens-but only if we agree to remember in every second that we really do deserve the smiting, and never ever dare to think of ourselves as anything better than the sniveling worms we truly are.

(I know that I tend to exaggerate a lot in the interests of humor, but I’m actually not exaggerating this. See: Why I No Longer Participate In Organized Religion)

And at the same time that I was under constant bombardment by this dogma, I was also being told that I was supposed to love God, and do everything for God, and want to spend all of my time with God.

Um, I don’t think so.

It never made sense to me, why I should want to have anything to do with a being that was reported to hate me so much, but because I wanted to be A Good Girl, and I wanted people to like me and approve of me, and I certainly wanted God to like and approve of me, I did my best to follow this convoluted system, which pretty much boiled down to agreeing to lose my mind.

[Read more…] about A Moment Of Truth

Blog, Blahg, BLAARRGGHH

By 9 Comments

So you’ve probably noticed that it’s been kind of quiet around here lately. Even though I’ve been moving through so many different situations at what seems like the speed of light, for the first time in my 35 years, I seem to be out of words to describe what’s currently going on in my life.

I haven’t really known how to BE in this place, because always before, even if everything else fell apart, I could always fall back on a cushion of words to soften the blow. So I turned to one of my tried and true coping strategies, namely; “When in doubt, freak out.”

Because I am nothing if not generous, not to mention an excellent Drama Queen, I decided to share the freaky love with my coach during one of our sessions.

“GOD,” I announced, in my best, quivering, innocent-victim-of-the-universe voice, “God has taken all my words away! The one thing I most loved to do in the world, and now He’s taken it away from me for no reason!”

In what can only be described as a Superhuman Exercise Of Will which most likely led to severe internal hemorrhaging on her part, not only did my coach NOT laugh at me, but somehow she was also able to ask me helpful, non-mocking coachful questions to help me work through this issue.

“Well,” she asked, “does everything you write on your blog have to be funny?”

“Uh, DUH! YES!!” I replied. (Aren’t I just a dream client? Don’t you want to coach me too?) Fortunately she has raised two children, so she never takes snottiness personally.

“OK,” she replied, recognizing an Intractable Brick Wall Of Stubbornness when she saw one, “think about this. You had a plan for your blog when you started it three years ago. But you’re not the same person you were three years ago. Think about everything that has happened over the past year. So what if you could allow your blog and your writing to change, and reflect who and where you are now?”

She makes a good point. Especially given the fact that, if I had to give it a title, the theme of this past year would be,

I have hurt, in some way, every single day, for the past eight months.

Eight months of sickness, trauma, my life being completely out of my control, and pain.

One day last October I lost my health. Not because of anything I did or didn’t do. Not for any logical, rational reason. Just ‘cuz.

Overnight, I lost the ability to be the person I had been, and do everything I’d been doing up to that point.

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with.

I never knew pain could hurt like this.

And even though I seem to have reached a place where the original illness is gone and the side effects are more or less managed, who’s to say they won’t show up again one day, out of the blue, for absolutely no reason at all? My body, my mind, my emotions, they are all tied up in knots and braced against more pain. Because I remember the pain. And I don’t know if I could bear to go through it again.

This was, and continues to be, a huge trauma for me. And I really don’t know how to be with it.

But I am still here. I do show up every day, even if all I do is open my eyes in the morning and acknowledge that I’ve arrived at the beginning of another day.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.

Still Suffering, After All These Years

By 2 Comments

Every so often I toy with the idea of going back to school and getting my Ph.D. in Spanish. But I never do, and I think I’ve finally figured out the reason why. Apparently, I’m already doing a post-doc in Suffering and Doing Things The Hard Way. Or, to be more accurate, I’m doing extensive research into how to unlearn this.

Back when I was about to turn 29 and I saw the rest of my life stretching out before me as an endless procession of unhappiness and dissatisfaction, I decided that I had had enough, and by God, I was GOING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO BE HAPPY! So I hired my very first coach and got to work.

Now, 6 years later, I have completely transformed myself and my life. And what’s more, I’ve gotten really good at no longer staying stuck in anyplace where I’m suffering emotionally. This is not to say that I never have hard times or never feel anger, sadness, disappointment, and the like. But now I know how to feel what I’m feeling and just let it be without making up all kinds of stories about What This Means, and I have lots of support, and resources, and skills, AND I know that if there’s something I can do to help myself feel better, I can do it. So I’ve gotten really skilled at navigating the flow of all of my emotions.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for those times when I’m facing any kind of physical suffering. Anytime I’m faced with physical pain, it practically takes an act of God for me to realize that maybe, perhaps, there might be a way for me to do things differently and actually feel better.

And apparently the Universe has decided that it’s finally time for me to “get” this, because it’s bringing up those final few places in my life where I’ve had trouble really getting things to work well, and they are all somehow tied into some kind of physical issue.

[Read more…] about Still Suffering, After All These Years

My Declaration Of Independence (Which Turned Out To Be Quite Long)

By 9 Comments

I have been in a very quiet, contemplative place lately, watching as some new energy percolates and rises to the surface, and I am now in a place where I am ready to declare independence for myself. I am declaring independence from the belief that I have to make my life match up to anyone else’s definitions of success for my life, as well as from all the places in my mind telling me that my life should somehow be in any way different from the way it is right now.

About six years ago I decided to leave the work-a-day world and go into business for myself. I’ve spent a large portion of those years with different classes, workshops, books, seminars, and programs designed for entrepreneurs. It’s all great information, especially since I was on a pretty steep learning curve. But I’ve reached the point now where those products are actually keeping me out of my life.

I realized that what I genuinely desire, and what the people who produce those products desire, are not the same thing. And I’ve been making myself wrong and feeling guilty for wanting what I truly want, and not wanting what they say I should want. Let me explain.

After six years of trying out a lot of different possibilities, I realized that my goal in life is not to be a worker/earner. If I had to give a name to my “reason for being”, I would say that I am a spiritual contemplative/mystic/writer/professional dreamer. So I like working about 10-12 hours a week, with lots of time left to create a nurturing home, take care of the errands of daily life, maintain my connections with other people, think, observe, process life, and create.

I like that the way I contribute to and help change the world is through working on myself, and transforming my connections to the people around me, one encounter at a time.

Unfortunately, even in the personal growth/New Thought community, that business model is never really presented as a viable option. It seems to me that whenever people are talking about things like The Secret, and The Law Of Attraction, and other principles of Deliberate Creation, the emphasis is always on BIGGER, and MORE. If the concept of “enough” is ever addressed, it only seems to be in the manner of finding a way to temporarily let what you have be “enough”, only so it can move you to a different place where you can finally get MORE. There doesn’t seem to be much work addressing the question of genuinely being satisfied and feeling like you have enough.

And that is where I started to feel disconnected from the popular concept of personal growth, because I could no longer ignore the fact that I am really satisfied with my life right now.

[Read more…] about My Declaration Of Independence (Which Turned Out To Be Quite Long)

The Word Of The Lord

By 3 Comments

Since January 1st of this year, Marianne Williamson has appeared on Oprah and Friends radio each afternoon at 3 pm to teach A Course In Miracles. I first went through the Course about 5 years ago, and I thought it would be a really neat experience to go through it again under the guidance of Marianne Williamson, whose work I really admire.

I’ve been doing the daily exercises, as well as practicing applying the principles to my everyday life. Yesterday was a hard day, because I was dealing with a lot of health challenges-AGAIN-and it was making my arthritis flare up-AGAIN.

So I prayed, “Dear God, please help me. I need a miracle.” Then I got really quiet and listened.

I felt guidance and support come in, and I could tell that it was God because it was loving, kind, and gently amused with me.

“Dude,” it said, “take some pain medicine.”

Oh…right.

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Today

By 1 Comment

Today I am feeling every single moment of the three months I’ve been sick. I think now that the infection is gone and I’m off the medicine, I’m settling into my body and just feeling things out; okay, this is what has happened, and this is where I am right now.

I’ve been taking an inventory: okay, this is how my knees feel; hm, it still hurts to walk and wear shoes; wow, my jaw is tight. It’s almost like I’m getting reacquainted with my body. I have to get to know myself again after all that I went through in the fall.

And if I was tuned in before to people and situations that were not a good match for me, now I am super-sensitive in those areas. I know right away if an opportunity or a relationship is not going to work for me, and I literally cannot rest until I take the action I’m being prodded into by my inner guidance.

Mostly that has meant, once again, learning to be okay with disappointing myself and other people. I’ve had to rearrange some tutoring clients to better accommodate my needs, rather than fitting myself in around their lives. I’ve had to let go of being able to manage our entire household, and instead pick just one thing to do, like keeping the kitchen clean. I’ve had to learn to speak up and say, no thanks-please don’t tell me about the C DIF research you’ve been doing on the Internet, or all the illness horror stories other people are sharing with you, because that makes me feel worse, not better.

Today I’ve had to learn how to be all right with the fact that I feel bad-Just. ‘Cuz. There’s nothing to investigate, and nothing to blame. In my recovery, today is just a day where I don’t feel good. Today the best I can say is that I was here, and I showed up for this day. And eventually, this day will pass.

What Do Mayflowers Bring?

By 3 Comments

Lately I’ve been reading the book Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick. I always enjoy learning the stories behind history, but this particular part of history has a special place in my heart because I am the 15th generation descendant of 4 people who came over to the New World on that ship.(Important Side Note: Which does not at all cause my husband to crack frequent jokes about “inbreeding” at my expense.)

This material is dovetailing nicely with all the things I was thinking about after reading Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert, back before my intestines became the unfortunately fertile breeding ground for Hostile Alien Bacteria. Specifically it’s helping me to answer the question, “What’s my word?” Because not only have I realized that, of course, my word cannot be anything other than FREE, all this reading about my ancestors has given me a good idea of where that might have come from.

Of course we all know the traditional story of the Pilgrims and their desire for freedom from the king of England and his church, but it’s the way that Philbrick describes these desires that sometimes has all my hair standing on end in amazed recognition.

When I read things like, “…the Puritans had chosen to spurn thousands of years of accumulated tradition in favor of a text that gave them a direct and personal connection to God,” I remember how powerful an experience it was for me to go through the workbook of A Course In Miracles for the first time (Philbrick, p.8).

Or when I read that they wanted to be “…free to establish themselves on their own terms”, I think about how I have done the very same thing in creating my own work, my own contribution to the world, and my own role within my marriage (Philbrick, p.16).

And when I read that during their services, “…the entire congregation had participated in a passionate search for divine truth”, I almost shot out the top of my head, because that is what my entire life has been devoted to (Philbrick, p. 12).

[Read more…] about What Do Mayflowers Bring?

Those Two Little Words

By

There are many things for which I am grateful to my friend, Lynne, but one of my favorites is the fact that she was the person who introduced me to the fantastic phrase, “Just ‘cuz.”

Until I met her, nothing in my life had ever been done “just ‘cuz”. I always backed up everything I decided to do with case plans, legal arguments, graphs, pie charts, handouts, and a Power Point presentation so that, if asked, I could at any moment give a detailed presentation on exactly why I should be allowed to do the activity in question, and exactly how it would lead to some sort of measurable result such as more money or a better job.

Then I met Lynne.

And one day when I was telling her about some kind of training I wanted to take, and I finished my whole song-and-dance routine of justifying why I wanted to do this, she said, “What if you just did this. Just. ‘Cuz.?”

For a while I was speechless, mostly because I was involved in picking all the pieces of my brain up off the floor. And then I was all, “Oh, sure, but first why don’t I go rob a bank, and then go knock off a chain of convenience stores because, HELLO!, you are not allowed to do something just because you want to and you think it will be fun. What’s wrong with you?!”

But truth be told, I was fascinated with this idea. It was sort of like mental cocaine, the idea that maybe, just maybe, I could actually do the things I wanted to do just ‘cuz. No need for any lengthy dissertations or comprehensive oral exams where I had to prove my worthiness. Just. ‘Cuz.

So ever since then I have been luxuriating in the freedom this thought brings. Like, the kind of luxuriating where you roll around naked in giant piles of money while your handsomely oiled and scantily-clad pool boys fan you with large palm fronds and hand feed you individual pieces of gourmet chocolate on the beach of your own, private, Caribbean island.

Yes, I’ve been living it up big time with these two little words. And then recently, I discovered yet another liberating aspect of this powerful thought.

As I’ve written before, during the past few months I’ve been very involved in learning how to manage my anxiety disorder. I’ve also had to deal with a lot of health challenges, as I often do in the fall.

And while I love all the personal growth work I do, the shadow side of that comes out when I blame myself for my conditions and tell myself things like, “Well, if I were more enlightened, I wouldn’t be having all these problems. If I were just doing this stuff right, I wouldn’t be so sick.”

And once again, Lynne stepped in and helped me see this another way.

“What if,” she suggested, “you are not to blame?”

“What if this is just a thing, like, you just have an anxiety thing?”

“What if,” she posited, “just like we can be happy ‘just ‘cuz’, we can just have an anxiety thing ‘just ‘cuz’?”

“What if you could let yourself off the hook?”

I’m not exaggerating when I say that there is no number high enough for me to describe the amount of shame, judgment, and blame that lifted off my shoulders when she said these things to me. It was such a tremendous relief to have another way to view this situation, one that did not involve the need to constantly abuse myself mentally.

Such a powerful little phrase, those two little words. Once again they are proving to be quite the lifesaver for me.

To read some more great posts about how we can let ourselves off the hook, check out:

“Doing our work” by Lynne Morrell, and

“Positive Attitudes: All Powerful…or Maybe Just Warm and Cozy?” by Alix North.

What’s Your Word?

By 5 Comments

“I remember something that my friend Maria’s husband, Giulio, said to me once. We were sitting in an outdoor cafe, having our conversation practice, and he asked me what I thought of Rome. I told him I really loved the place, of course, but somehow knew it was not my city, not where I’d end up living for the rest of my life. There was something about Rome that didn’t belong to me, and I couldn’t quite figure out what it was.

…Then he went on to explain, in a mixture of English, Italian and hand gestures, that every city has a single word that defines it, that identifies most people who live there. If you could read people’s thoughts as they were passing you on the streets of any given place, you would discover that most of them are thinking the same thought. Whatever that majority thought might be-that is the word of the city. And if your personal word does not match the word of the city, then you don’t really belong there.”

-Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

I know exactly what she’s talking about.

I’ve visited places that, for no apparent reason have felt just as comfortable as a perfectly broken-in pair of jeans, as well as places that, for no reason I could see, made me feel so uncomfortable that I just wanted to peel off all my skin and flee the planet.

I’m in a very good place right now, and since my environment is such a great match for my word, now I’m really curious as to what exactly that word might be.

I definitely know some words that it is not. I spent many years forcing myself to stay in environments and situations that did not match my word, as apparently I sometimes like to take the extra special bonus course in Learning Things The Hard Way.

I served a tour of duty in BLIND OBEDIENCE.

I did some hard time over in IMAGE AND ILLUSION.

I dabbled in ACADEMIA and BEING A PROFESSIONAL.

I served a sentence as LABORER.

And I spent an inordinate amount of time in the land of VICTIM.

Of course, the fact that I was constantly beaming out a vibration of VICTIM into the Universe meant that I was constantly attracting people into my life to play the accompanying role of VICTIMIZER to my VICTIM. For me this showed up as an endless stream of low-paying, dead-end jobs with horribly abusive female bosses. We’re talking y-e-a-rs here. (I was apparently going for my Ph.D. in Misery and Suffering.)

And then one day, somehow, a little space opened up inside my brain and let in a new thought, which said…maybe…just maybe…it’s me…not them…

That was the first time it had ever occurred to me that if I was in a situation I hated, a situation that kept repeating itself in ever increasing amounts of horror, that maybe, just maybe, I needed to change something within myself, rather than something external.

I think this was a result of September 11th. Looking back now I can see that, because everything about that time was so horribly beyond anything I’d ever imagined was possible, it also opened a space where maybe, just maybe things could also be joyful beyond my imagination.

And so I finally gave my notice to that last, soul-sucking, dead-end job, and the very day I did I went to a workshop where I met my very first coach and began the process of taking responsibility for and creating my own life.

During 2003 and 2004 when I was doing A Course In Miracles (aka, “The Year Where A Giant Hand Reached Inside My Brain, Stirred Everything Up, And Then Turned It Completely Inside Out”), I learned that the woman who scribed the course had had a very similar thing occur to her. She was in a very difficult situation at work, and finally she and her boss (I think) said, “There has to be another way to do this.” And once they opened up that space, the Course was born.

According to the Course a miracle can be defined as “a shift in perception.” And that was what finally happened to me at the beginning of 2002, when I took the first steps down the path to finding my word (which I know, I know, I haven’t gotten to yet, but if I break this long epistle up then I have something to blog about next week too 🙂 )