Hush!A mother tenderly sweeps her fingertips over her

Hush!

A mother tenderly sweeps her fingertips over her newborn daughters lips, a gentle gesture that exhibits a soft display of affection to any onlooker. The landscape moves forty miles an hour in a sweet rush of color and motion outside the subway train window. The mother squints and shakes her head subtly, woozy from the motion. It’s a bleak and grey Sunday morning and though it is only seven in the morning, the train is surprisingly crowded. She glances at her watch calculating how long it will take for them to arrive. Fifteen minutes left. Fifteen minutes left to pacify the infant who stirs again in the mother’s arms. She begins to rock her child slowly, mumbling a lullaby. A sleepy passenger, head back, spit oozing only slightly from one corner from his mouth, raises his head and opens a sole eye to witness the moment. He grins to himself before sinking his heavy head back on the cold, hard yellow plastic of the seat. 

How I Measure Time: A Writing Exercise

I measure time by steps and movement, how many poundings of the sole of my shoe on pavement it takes for me to get from point A to point B, a symbol of progression, of space covered and territory gained. I measure time in moments, in fragments of ideas, the whirlwind of thought and emotion that pulses through my veins and mind at an alarmingly fast pace, never ceasing to calm down long enough to make sense of things. I measure time in seasons, the seemingly abrupt change from winter to spring, the drab, dull landscape lush and vibrant with color, life, with spring. Rebirth signifies the passing of time, rebirth signifies the beginning of a new era. I measure time in calories, how many I’ve burned and consumed, if yesterday was better than today and if tomorrow will be worse than both, as if defecit and gain were all there was to time and space, a meaningless waste of mental energy and thought. I measure time in meals, last consumed and to be consumed. I measure time in moments spent with friends, the time we hold together and how swiftly time slips from grasp when in the company of those we love. I measure time by change, the loss of a personality trait and the gain of a new one, the emergence of wrinkles and sagging skin on my body, the fall of a schoolgirl figure to that of a woman, round and soft with curves, with age with experience. I measure time by bus arrivals and departures, the loud booming speaker blaring through the streets, drifting up to my window and into my eardrums to shake me from sleep. I measure time in how much time is left until I have to leave for such and such a date, appointment, class, work, the end of the day or the start of a shift. I measure time by wishing for other things and places, I don’t want to be here, I’d rather be there. I have to do this or that tomorrow and I didn’t do this or that today. I measure time by wasting it.

workplace blues

Have you ever made an error at work that proved to be fatal to your employment or career?

I’m shaking in my boots with anticipation at the outcome of a questionable incident that happened last Wednesday at my workplace. It involves me and my lack of ability to concentrate (fuck yeah ADHD!) coupled with debilitating migraines or an employee who wanted goodies from my retail location OR somebody with a key who wanted to cause a little uproar. I can only momentarily shake the worry. It creeps up and engulfs me, making my body hair stand on end and little goosebumps pop up all over my body. I’m terrified of losing my job and simultaneously wrecking the little bubble of comfort I’ve gotten used to.

I suppose that’s what happens when we get comfortable in life. We start to make mistakes. A few weeks ago, my direct supervisor quit his job and moved up north for a new job. His direct supervisor took his place, working her initial position and his. She’s a hard-working woman and has made some excellent changes and upgrades to our work environment. With her hard-working demeanor comes a desire for others to exhibit the same. This is a HUGE contrast from the previous boss. He was laid-back, passive and hardly said a work if there was any issue in the store.

I sensed the desire to have things done correctly so the perfectionist in me immediately jumped out and took over. I have been determined to have everything perfect. The store must be neat, orderly and well-kept. All product must look great. My employees must be working constantly. I stretched myself thin.

I forgot to lock a door.

This was okay the first time, until I got a phone call on my morning jog that the morning manager entered the unit and found the lights on and the back door of our retail location wide open. Did I do this? It might be possible. I exited the store the night before ahead of the employees rather than behind and due to a migraine that left me unable to see out of my right peripheral, I haphazardly stumbled out for the night forgetting to check behind them.

This could be my damn fault.

They’re pulling video tapes to see just what really happened. I’m terrified that if the lights were left on and the door was in fact unclosed, I’m going to be canned, which will send my little bubble of comfort shattering to pieces. What am I supposed to do?

As I wait in anticipation, I play all the scenarios. I’m safe and keep working my job that I kind of enjoy with people I like working with. I’m canned and sit on my couch for a week eating tubs of gluten free ice cream before getting off my ass to get a job.

Things will be the way they are supposed to. However, I’m bracing for the worst.

Here’s to hoping shit works out.

Brief Thoughts on Recovery

It’s been a long time since I’ve written. I’ve become a corpse, a walking skeleton of the person I once was. A few months ago, I relapsed into my eating disorder, an issue that hasn’t reared it’s ugly face in years. I didn’t realize what was happening until I woke up, cold, alone and weak in my bed, begging to sleep through the day.

Once again I find myself facing recovery, a process that gets harder each time I go through it. After 15 long years of struggling with mental illness and eating disorders, I find the thought of recovery bleak, yet I fight again with courage. Maybe this time will be the last. May I will truly “recover”, whatever that word means. I hope that this time, recovery is actually recovery, not merely a “remission”. I want my life to be full.

 

When I was eleven years old, my family decided to move from the small town I was born in. Somehow, I felt then that I was being violently torn from the tiny bit of familiarity I had, severed from the minuscule connection I had with the mystery of my heritage and roots. I was born a puzzle, the product of two unknown beings’ sexual intercourse, planned or unplanned, I’ll never know. I assumed I was unwanted for whatever reason. My mother told me that this was an act of selflessness but to the eyes of an eleven year old who couldn’t quite comprehend the bravery of carrying a child en vitro for nine months only to surrender it to an unknown couple, it seemed more like an act of cruelty.

I was a mystery to myself.

Apparently, I cried and bawled the whole way to my new home, screaming hate slurs at my parents for taking me from my old life and forcing me into a new one. Desperate for identity in the suburban sprawl of my new home, I clung to whatever I could. On the brink of puberty, I wanted to change from the tubby young girl I was in my old city, prone to teasing and bullying. I wanted to be “cool”. I wanted people in my new school to like me.

Depression set in.

I slept most of the summer after the move. I rarely got out of bed. I didn’t eat. I was sick and alone in a city that I didn’t recognize. I was terrified of the concrete slabs separating the streets, casually planted baby trees in the middle, a nice added effect for the destruction they had previously done to nature. I hated suburbia and I hate the uppity sense of entitlement the kids in my new neighborhood gave off. I hated that they teased me for not being muscular or not playing organized sports. I hated that they called me names  because of my pronounced front teeth. I hated them for not including me in games of kickball on warm summer nights. I hated them for inviting us to come over for lunch because it was “the nice thing to do”.

I retreated into myself.

I recall, in the fall of my 12th year of life, my home education teacher stopped her lesson plans on creating blueberry muffins and showed us a film about a young girl that hoarded food and kept it under her bed. She binged on cupcakes and ice cream and threw up into plastic bags. She was skeletal, fragile and weak. I didn’t get why we were watching the film but I understood that I was like the girl in the movie. I excused myself into the bathroom where I sat for the remainder of the class.  When it was over, the teacher called me into her office and asked me if I needed help. I declined and walked out of her office and to my next class where I was promptly pulled by the principal.

The school counselor drilled me, my mother was called and I was forced into a psychiatrist’s office the next week.

And so I started recovery for the first time.

 

It’s funny that almost 14 years later, I still feel like the traumatized 12 year old I was then. I’m scared, weak and beaten. Only I’m an adult now.

 

Here’s to hoping this time’s the last.

On Being Grateful

I am the very worst at stopping to take a moment everyday to acknowledge and reflect on the things that are going right in my life and the blessings that I have. Far too often I find myself caught up in what is going wrong in my life and around me, no matter how trivial the matter. I’m worried about how exhausted I am, how stressed I am because of _______ & _______ & ________. I think that we all do this and only by acknowledging our inclination to do so can we begin to modify our thoughts and take time to slow down.

A friend of mine sent me an unexpected email this afternoon. It went straight to the email application on my phone, so when I heard the tiny “ping!” notification on my phone and saw that the email was from him, I was immediately concerned something was wrong. Getting an email from him is something that only happens when he’s traveling or has some kind of bizarre Youtube video to share. What I found in my inbox sparked this post and a brief time period of meditation on the things I am grateful for. His email was brief but basically said that he was grateful to have me as a friend. I don’t remember the last time I told somebody close to me I am grateful for them which is something so important to express since we do not know how or when our time with another person could be cut short. So, I thought, I’ll start being grateful today.

This week, I am going to challenge myself to reflect for a moment or two on the things in my day that I am grateful for. Whether it be on the drive to or from work, before sleeping at night or rising from bed, I am going to make an effort to stop thinking about what I don’t have and what’s not right and appreciate what I do have and what is right and move slowly from an attitude of “I want!” to “I have”.

 

x-posted from my healthy living blog @ feast or famine

reflections on gut instincts

“Emotions can be a barometer of what needs to change and what’s lacking. For instance, if the color of your bathroom upsets you, instead of adapting to it, thinking, ‘I always overreact, it’s just a color, I must be crazy’, which is the way we have been conditioned, it might be time to change the color. Then there’s some relief and something else might come up, and we can change that, and our please grows and a different kind of awareness can begin to take root”.

-From Bluebird, by Ariel Gore

This sounds so familiar to me. So often, something presents itself in my life and if I’m stressed or angry about something, I think to myself, “I’m totally overreacting to this situation, I need to chill out”. Then, in the future, when I reflect back on what was going on, often my emotions were telling me something that I didn’t pay attention to, or wrote off as overreaction.. This has happened countless times in my life, without fail.

The above quotation is a rather simple example of something complex. How often have we confided in another person, a friend or relative, about something going on in our lives only to be met with the reaction “I think you are overreacting”. Deep down, it doesn’t feel like overreacting. I remember one time I had a friend that I was worried was taking advantage of me. Deep down, I knew I was being taken advantage of. I was giving rides, money and going to extended lengths to help somebody out who wasn’t reciprocating or even showing appreciation. I knew at the time that I needed to distance myself from said friend, but I felt guilty for doing so because I knew this person needed support and was going through a hard time. When I spoke with another close friend about it, the reaction I got was “I think you are overreacting because so many people have used you in the past”. I got mad. I felt taken advantage of and my boundaries were being crossed. It wasn’t until I was angry and hurt at the amount of wrong this particular needy friend had done to me that I finally listened to my gut instinct and distanced myself from the non-reciprocating friend.

That’s the tough part… stepping back and taking care of ourselves, allowing our boundaries to stand firm and not let others take advantage of them. Like the quote says above, our emotions are great indicators of what’s going on in a situation, we just choose to sometimes dismiss those feelings until we’re overwhelmed, angry and hurt and blow up.

It’s time to start listening to our emotions, tuning into them and wondering what they are trying to tell us and then listening, being kind to ourselves and our souls. We listen to our bodies when they tell us we need to rest or eat, sometimes we push those limits, but we know those feelings when they surface. The next time a situation makes your heart race and palms sweat, listen with kindness and acknowledge those feelings. We know more about ourselves than we think.

Reflections on Gratitude

I’ve been deeply engrossed in Ariel Gore’s book Bluebird recently. I found the book when I was browsing the women’s studies section of my local library and I’ve had some serious difficulty putting it down. I’ll admit I was very pleasantly surprised by the book and the inspiration it’s brought me in the past few days of reading it. I was drawn the the book solely because of the cover art and the fact that the cover sports the words “women and the psychology of happiness”, which is something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. Gore put a lot of heart and soul into writing the book it’s definitely thought-provoking and heartfelt.

I’m not so much of a feminist as the author is, and the book tries to present the differences between men and women and their views on happiness which is something I’m not so interested int, but I appreciate the subject content, even though I had difficulty relating to some of it (ie- being a mother etc).

What I do feel compelled to relate my experiences to is her take on gratitude. In the novel, she writes about her experiences writing in a “gratitude journal”. She admits that when she first tried sitting down every night and writing about things that she was grateful for, she had difficulty doing so. She said it felt hokey, the same way I felt hokey when I tried to do the same.  I realized that when I journal at night, when I remember to journal, I often complain about the negative things that happen in my life and rarely focus on the moments that bring me happiness.

I thought about it this weekend while I was at work. The young boy with autism that I am an aide for wanted to go to the river, so we did. This trip took up a large percentage of my day. We walked down muddy paths looking for snakes and bugs, enjoying the early morning sunshine and the sound of the river crashing against the rocks. He wanted to swim so I sat as he swam, my feet in the water, the sunshine on my face, completely lost in the nature.

When I went to write later that afternoon, my thoughts immediately crept to writing about the debt that I owe, the irritating phone call I received that was causing my anxiety and how overworked I felt at the end of my workweek. I had to force myself to reflect on the positive moments of my day, the river and the bond I felt with the child I work with, the peace and serenity I had felt at the river. Those moments were lost in the hustle and bustle of the day, of life’s demands and obligations.

In spirit of the book and gaining a more positive spirit, I’ve taken it upon myself to make a weekly goal toward positivity. This week, I’m focusing on writing about the positive things that happen in my day to day life in hopes that my spirits will lift and appreciating simple moments in life will become less of a chore and more of a common thing for me.