I was feeling all twisty and weird and out of shape and so I started looking at Picasso paintings of women to reflect my current bendy shape and you know?  That guy was just a freak.  Seriously.  There are hundreds of pictures out there that he did of women and it’s not like I’m stupid.  I understand abstract art.  I can see the talent in what he does.  All of his women, however, are either really broken or wearing a bitchface.

The paintings above show that he has amazing talent and can paint angry women beautifully.  The ones below demonstrate a level of abstract art that mental patients of all ages can duplicate.

Uh huh

I think the one above is not Picasso but is an “in his style” sort of thing.  Of all of the paintings I am going to post, this one is the most me.

Really, Picasso?  I think I drew that in second grade and tingled a bit for drawing a dirty picture.  He must have had a really jacked up relationship with his mother.  According to my Bible – a.k.a “Wikipedia” – “His revolutionary artistic accomplishments brought him universal renown and immense fortune, making him one of the best-known figures in 20th century art.”  A fortune?  Seriously?  I want to meet his publicist.

So no mention of a mother trauma.  He was wrecked when his sister, Conchita, died of diphtheria at the age of 7.  He surpassed his father, who was an art professor, in talent by the age of 13 and his father vowed “never to paint again…harrumph” but did. Clearly, there were some issues there, but why he is not painting broken, angry art professors I cannot fathom.  Apparently, Pablo was accused of stealing the Mona Lisa from the Lourve in 1911.  He did plow through a ton of mistresses and lovers, including one who was 17 and two who killed themselves after he died.  ?!  One of his mistresses detailed some intense abuse he inflicted and then she ditched him.  I guess it’s no wonder all of the women he paints look pissed off or broken since he appears to have cheated on and abused them.  That’s probably about all he saw. OK, bored now.

…and that’s how I roll now…again.  I currently entertain the idea that my highs and lows mean that I am mentally ill and fourscore and seven minutes ago, I cared about that.  Now I have found, in a blinding flash of clarity, that I just don’t.  I rode the wave of pure joy for months, waking up in the morning thrilled to start the day and grateful for all it brought to me.  I fell into a hole of pity and anger, fed up with the world around me and full of the feeling that I don’t fit in, will always be the oddball and will die alone and unfulfilled (and very, very old).  That changed when I found this bit of common wisdom that has, I am certain, nothing at all to do with Sigmund Freud:

Right.

On.

People are just way more assholey than they used to be.  I’ve been alive for 50 years and during that time, I have encountered a lot of people when I was in several different mindsets, so we’re looking at a reasonable cross-section of factors here.  Whether it is their overall sense of resentment and entitlement and whinyness or what, people are just asshats. 

There was a time when Eric used to tell me that I was in no position to judge the world or even talk about it much because I was a hermit and never really dealt with the world.   That was around 2005 or so and there was some truth to his rather unkind observation.  I was, in fact, such a recluse that the teachers aide at the elementary school my sons attended tried to set me up with friends so I would have a name to put down on my emergency contact card.  (She failed).  I forced myself out into the world, did just a whole lot and after around 4 years, decided that the people I was around were people who I did not want to be like or spend time with, so I retreated back into my home.  All I really did was galvanized what I already suspected, which was people are pretty much assholes.  Unless I was willing to be involved in their petty little games and function at a high school level, I was not going to fit in.  I wasn’t.  I didn’t.  I left.

There were a few people left whose company I enjoyed, but their behavior after I withdrew was stunning to me.  One of the local women who is known for being cruel and abusive, targeted me and went on an all out smear campaign.  I was not surprised that she did this, but what surprised me was that the people whose company I did enjoy, continued to be friends with her while she did this.  Really?  This year, I talked to one of the respected people who gets around our town a good bit and asked, “Why are people still friendly with this person when they know what she’s like?”  The answer was immediate, “Because they are afraid she will do the same to them.”  Really?  (again?)  We’re in our 40s, 50s and 60s and we’re still controlled by bullies because we want to be popular???  For how this woman behaves, and I’m not talking about just toward me, she should be driven out of town on a rail.  People go to her parties, laugh at her jokes, and give her cursory attention because they are afraid of her.

That immediately causes me not to respect any of them in the whole bunch and write them all off, even more thrilled with my decision to retreat when I did and kind of wishing I’d done so a year earlier just so I didn’t feel so contaminated by the time I took while the knowledge really sank in for me and I was questioning myself.  Last year, I got a note of apology through Facebook from one of the women who had been involved in the attacks and I really appreciated that.  I am a person who absolutely believes in true repentance and I’d like to believe I know it when I hear it or read it.

After all that mess, I stayed in my hermitage for another 3 years or so, then I decided I was lonely and went out to cultivate social situations.  I figured I’d had time to process all that had happened and so I gathered up  my lessons and used them to pad my vulnerabilities and off I went into the big old world. Now it’s just over a year later and I’m already done again.  I knew it was coming on and I fell into a bit of a depression because of it.  I wanted to believe things were different than they appeared.  I wanted to believe that my subjective opinion was so heavily filtered that I was not close to any baseline of reality.

Like Iyanla said in my last post, “your eyes will adjust to the level of deficiency in your focus.”  I kept trying to blame myself and dummy down the situation.  I met people who I thought were more evolved and wiser than I was and they turned out to be even more broken than I am, if you can imagine that.  I met people with whom I should have connected well and it just didn’t happen for whatever reason.  There are connections that were made that I want to maintain and I am appreciative of the experiences I had and the people I met.  There are some really dear souls out there and they all have a story and a message.  Even though I did not find the social network and level of friend support I was seeking, I am thankful for what I learned.

One of the biggest obstacles I face is that Eric is quite a social butterfly, although he will tell you that he isn’t.  Between his friends from work and his non-work friends, he is flitting around from here to there a good bit of the time.  He has not outright rejected the idea of me joining him and in fact, has invited me on a few occasions.  The conflict is that they are all drinkers and I am not. I don’t know if anyone else has this problem since I am likely one of the few adults on the planet who does not drink.  I can tell you that it sucks to be the only sober one in the room, so I just don’t bother to go.

The only place he ever goes where there is no drinking is to the sweat lodge ceremonies every few months.  I enjoy a good sweat lodge and I like the people who host it, but their traditions are not mine and I find that I don’t get the experience I want.  It has tremendous value for them and I am so appreciative of that.  I love the feeling of purification that comes from the sweat.  Spiritually, however, I like the quiet.  People tend to get very emotional in the sweat lodge ceremonies and there is almost never a moment of silence.  There is a lot of singing and praying and chanting and whereas that has its place, I like for the majority of my sweat time to be silent, in the womb of the Great Mother, vision questing and going within.  For me, the nonstop sound detracts from what I, personally, am there to do.  I also prefer to go into the experience unshielded so I can have the full immersion into Spirit.  That is hard to maintain when there are people in tremendous emotional pain all around you.  Without my spiritual shields up, I tend to ease into their pain and that keeps me from getting all I can from the experience.

I have classes that I will continue to teach for as long as I have students who are interested.  I was only able to sign up for 3 credits for the summer semester of college, all online, and those are only on a waiting list, so they may not even come through.  I got a nice selection of fall classes in which I am enrolled, also all online. Summer semester will go fast with only a half class load.

Beyond those things and the coming GH Weekend in July, I guess I will retreat once more into my own sacred Womb of the Great Mother (a.k.a. “my house”).  Fortunately, I have worked hard to create a home that I love dearly.  I love being there and miss it when I’m away.  So what will I do with all of the time I was spending to look for a network of friends?

• I will work on my books.
• I will make the shuttle (my get away – the motor home) all nice again
• I will make craft things for the upcoming Faerie Faire where I have a vendor booth
• I will watch seemingly endless reruns of “How I Met Your Mother”
• I will read
• I will make a cursory stab at mopping my floors
• I will drink a lot of Diet Mountain Dew
• I will sleep

I will not:

• Do shit I basically do not want to do
• Give and give and give until I am empty
• Let others define who I am
• Say yes when I mean no
• Forget the things I just remembered
• Fall into the depression pit because I’m different from other people
• Convince myself that I’m the problem or that there even is a problem

So yeah, I’m all set.  I’m finished with my snit and I’m greeting the future with a big smile and a new (old) attitude.  I sold out for a while.  Now I’m back.

Besides, if I am really the one who is an asshole and Picasso is any indication of how things are in the world, my books should make a fortune.

Picasso in his "Pfft, whatever" phase of bored women

I just spent two hours trying to find a more colorful intro header for this entry and there just isn’t one thing in my head, which is also why I have not updated in so long.  For the first time in forever, I feel like I have nothing at all to say.  If you give me a script, I can follow it.  I’ve been teaching Energy Magic classes once a month and I can teach those by rote.  Coming up with any kind of original thought or particular insight, however, is just not happening.

I plugged some keywords into Google Images to try and get some mind-blowing inspiration and had no luck there.  For the record, if you search for “empowerment,” you’ll get some interesting images, including a lot of Rosie the Riveter.  Also, when you get desperate enough to just search for “WTF,” things get particularly interesting.  It all made me tired just to look at it. The sad part is that my spring semester of classes is winding down nicely and I am excited to get back to writing my books again, so finding that I have nothing to say is fairly inconvenient.

I never really got my groove back after that awful Mercury retrograde from a few weeks ago.  I kept thinking I’d feel the happy sneaking back in, but then it would turn out to be the light of a freight train instead of the sun, so I would go back into hiding again.

No segue.  Sorry.

I was thinking about the movie “Labyrinth,” in which David Bowie became the thigh squinching object of affection for every teen girl of the era.  There is a scene in the movie with a junk woman and Sarah, our protagonist.  In that scene, in an attempt to distract her from reclaiming her baby stepbrother in time, a facade of Sarah’s bedroom has been constructed and she has a moment of feeling right at home.  The junk woman tries to soothe her into the complacency of being in her (false) room and at first, she is successful.  One of the items that has been replicated in Sarah’s fake room is a book she was reading and she turns to a passage that is specifically about the Goblin King (Bowie) and rescuing the baby.  This reminds her of her quest and causes her to realize that what she thinks is her familiar reality is really just junk….literally.

She throws a music box into the wall and it tears apart, revealing the layers of junk beneath it.  In the clip below, Brian Henson (3rd son of Jim) gives a very insightful analysis of the junk people:

I guess that is the most profound revelation I’ve had in a while and truly, it was just a reminder of a lesson I’d taken before and thoughtlessly allowed to get lost in the shuffle.  It became one of those things that I knew intellectually and knew also in my heart, but I did not incorporate it into the useful part of my daily life.  It’s similar to the Iyanla VanZant discussion about how “your eyes will adjust to the level of deficiency in your focus.”  (See below)

This is why I write this online journal.  When I started this entry a couple of hours ago, I had no idea what my next move would be.  Labyrinth led me to Iyanla and that led me back to the old lesson I’d overlooked.

When I did the duck and cover back in March when things got bad and, quite frankly, mostly stayed that way, I retreated never fully came back.  Instead, I walked a few feet out of the darkness and pretended everything was OK.  I constructed a comfortable facade around me of what was familiar and comfortable and then I went through the motions of living.  I’m still there now when I am, in reality, so far away from the joyful place where I was before the crash that I can’t even admit how far I still have to go to really get back.  The facade around me is junk.  I have adjusted my eyes to the level of deficiency around me.

When I look back on the highs and lows I have experienced, there is a part of me that thinks I should set my standards lower and go for a happy, realistic medium.  The rest of me refuses to settle for that.  It’s exactly the same as when you know what it’s like to be really, really in love with someone and are unwilling to accept anything less than that feeling.  It’s not that I don’t think that there will be challenges; it’s more that I want the baseline of happiness to be higher.  I don’t want to dance so close to the edge of the abyss.  You all know what the abyss looks like.  It looks like this:

…and it’s filled with lies and fear and pain and hopelessness.  By the way, when you Google for images of “abyss,” you get pages and pages of shots from the stupid movie, so I just put a picture of the Sarlacc in there.  You’re welcome.

When the walls come down and I look around at the absolute junk that I thought was wonderful, I get tremendously discouraged, mostly because the trudge back to happiness seems far away.  Truth be told, it is also because I am frustrated with myself for working so hard to create my own illusion.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in mid-fast.  I fasted for 3 days and would have gone longer except that at the beginning of my third day, I started my period a week early.  As the day progressed, I began to feel weaker and weaker.  My hands and feed got really cold and I could barely get up out of the chair.  I realized that my blood count was dropping from the insane hemorrhaging I do with my period since I started the menopause process over ten freakin years ago.  When I hit the 72 hour point, I had a light dinner and felt better.  Since then, I have done intermittent fasting, which works well for me.  My blood pressure is normal for the first time in probably twenty years, which I greatly appreciate.  I have good energy and I am sleeping beautifully.  Two or three days out of the week, I will eat normally.  “Eating normally” is different now than before the fast.  I eat probably about 1/2 to 1/3 of what I used to eat at a meal.  My stomach shrank down a bit and is happier with tiny portions. That specific result, as well as rebooting my metabolism, is what I hoped to achieve from the fast.  For the other days of the week, I eat something light every 12-13 hours.  I drink juice or sip a cup of broth.  I’ll have one scrambled egg or some fruit.  I drink a lot of water and herb tea and a diet soft drink here and there.  I am not losing a lot of weight by pounds, but my body is reshaping and my clothes fit a lot differently.  My next step will be to add some strength training to the mix.

In reducing my eating tremendously, I took away my number one coping mechanism for stress.  I have very little interest in food now and do not really have any cravings.  In the past, if things got tough, I would eat and be soothed again, just like the scene of Sarah becoming complacent in her house of junk.  Now, I no longer have that option and the emotions just sort of hang out there.  I am dealing with them a few at a time, but I cannot say with any degree of conviction that I have really mastered anything.  I fell back into letting my full worth to the people around me be what I can do to help them.  I fell back into the fear and insecurity.  I fell back into the “keep others happy at all costs” routine.

On Sunday, I have a Women’s Wisdom workshop.  It’s kind of a story how I ended up going since this is really, really not my thing, but suffice it to say that it’s 12 hours long, from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m. and I am trying my best not to go into full blow anxiety attack over it.  (It is so completely NOT my thing)  I should have said no and for some reason, I didn’t, mostly because I was up to my neck in my people pleasing mode.  There was a chance it would be canceled due to not enough people signing up and the instructor instead decided to accept fewer students than usual.   I typically do not enjoy the company of women to start with and I know that goes back to the fact that with the exception of one time, every circumstance I’ve been in that involved a group of women, I have ended up getting shanked in some way.  I don’t enjoy the dynamics that go on in groups of women and I guess I just don’t play well with others.  With the possible exception of Disneyland and sleeping, there isn’t anything that feels good that I want to do for 12 hours.  This is looming over me like something akin to torture. When I got an email and follow up snail mail letter asking me to bring a photo of myself close to the time when I started menstruating I swear, a little part of me died inside.

I realize that I am judging a situation that could be wonderful and I am working to open myself to that idea.  There could be something amazing waiting for me there.  I will be sure and let you know.  I have two days for the horror to abate.

Did I mention that it’s not my thing?

As I mentioned, my spring semester is winding down nicely.  Only 2 more weeks to go.  I will really miss my Imaging (Photoshop) class.  It has been a lot of fun.  I have learned that gerontology is definitely not the field for me, but I took the two gerontology classes to better prepare for and maximize my own aging experience.  I also took a grammar class and that helped me to brush up on my fundamentals since my last English class was in 1977.  I may or may not take summer classes depending on the availability once my enrollment appointment rolls around on May 1st at 9 p.m.  I learned my lesson about taking classes just to fill the blanks.  There is very little worse than getting trapped in a class that you absolutely hate.  Fundamentals of Music and Principles of California Real Estate, I’m talking to you.

This means that I have literally weeks laid out in front of me that I plan to use to get a little further along in the 5-6 books I have been writing.  It hasn’t been easy fitting my writing into the cracks between classes, but I am excited to have another few weeks to get some work done, even if I feel as though I don’t have anything left to say.  Maybe when I re-read what I’ve written so far, I will get back into the groove.

So that’s where things are.  It’s not really anything interesting, but I didn’t want to leave you folks hanging for another day.

So yeah, long time no see.  I guess it’s a tickling irony that my last post was about my death plans.  I was sailing along great, navigating all kinds of rocky waters and holding strong.  People disappointed me.  People hurt others that I love.  People were stupid.  Things went wrong on a regular basis, but here I was, smiling and sailing and staying strong.

I swear, on the exact day Mercury went retrograde on March 21, everything started to go to complete shit.  It started out with just a ramping up of the ongoing annoyances and for the first several days, I had to laugh because so much was going wrong that it just defied the odds.  Everything from major stuff right down to me dropping absolutely everything I pick up.  Mercury retrogrades happen for three and a half weeks several times a year and because my sign, Virgo (and also Gemini) is ruled by Mercury, we usually get a fairly solid impact from the astrological phenomenon.  I have gotten used to this to the point that I can often peg the energy of a Mercury retrograde (once we’re in it) even if I don’t know intellectually that we were due for one.  Normally, it brings some inconveniences, but this one just knocked me to the ground.

Nathan, my 12-year-old, is also a Virgo and he started behaving very out of character.  He has been good as gold for over a year now and all of a sudden, he got in major trouble four times in a period of maybe 10 days for really big stuff.  That seems to have died down now (thankfully), but it was just wearing me out.  For a while there, it seemed like every day something new was cropping up that was just completely off the charts with him.

My lesson during this time has been that a person can only take so much before they crack and I was not about to crack.  OK, well, maybe there was this one day when I screamed down a local teen kid for being disrespectful to me (I was speaking to him on the phone about an issue with Nathan and he hung up on me deliberately) and I may have used words like “bring down the fires of hell” or something, pfft, who knows.  I was not, however, going to stay cracked for more than that few minutes and I was most assuredly not going to take shit off of someone else’s kid.  I am a firm believer that you teach people how to treat you and I wanted to be certain this young man got an idea that he should not hang up on me when I was speaking to him in a very calm and reasonable tone.

Anyway, I wasn’t looking to completely crack and I knew that the best way to complete crack was to forge ahead as though nothing was going wrong, smile like a crazed maniac and pretending that something isn’t the way it is.

So I went on skeleton crew for a couple of weeks and did basically nothing.  I cooked now and then when people thought they might be hungry. I swept the floor every couple of days.  I did the bare minimum I needed to do for class and was again thankful that I now have half the number of classes I had 3 weeks ago.  I didn’t return emails.  I didn’t go on Facebook.  I did almost nothing but curl on the couch with my electric blanket and listen to Sookie Stackhouse audiobooks (God bless Johanna Parker).  I slept an insane number of hours in a day, sort of like a cat.  I was also as unapologetic about it as a cat would be.

I think I only cried once, after I yelled at the kid when I was wallowing in shame.  Then it was just a quick 90 second or so ugly cry and I was done; no prolonged weeping or lamenting.  It was after that experience that I realized I was clearly out of my element and retreated into myself.  I did manage to teach my energy magic class in the middle of it all and other than arriving late, catching on fire and the class running long and even then not getting everything covered, it seemed to go fine.  The whole process made me remember the “duck and cover” filmstrips and newsreels we used to watch in school, just with better reading material:

Late Friday, I finished the last (11th) book and climbed out of my hidey hole to rejoin the world.  My ego took no beating whatsoever to find that the world had carried on just fine in my absence and nothing was really any the worse for wear.  (That is most assuredly good information to have for future reference)  On Wednesday or Thursday, I can’t be sure because it’s all a lethargic blur, Nathan came home from school and asked me if I’d eaten that day.  It was a silly question because seriously, has he met me?  I asked him why he would ask that and he said I was in the same position on the couch as I was in when he’d left at 7:30 and he wondered if I’d moved at all.  He does worry about me.

So I have rejoined the world again and I am working at fortifying my joy back up to its previous happy place.  The article I linked to about Mercury Retrogrades, this one in particular, in the first paragraph gave me a lot to think about in regard to my March 2012 experiences.  The emphasis in this REtrograde is on RE-things.  REconsider, REhearse, REflect and other such important things.  It occurred to me that both Nathan and I, the only two Mercury ruled babies in the house, REgressed back to some of our old behaviors.  His was getting in trouble every five minutes to try and seem cool to other kids.  Mine was escaping.  Whenever stress gets high, I get incredibly sleepy.  Sleep becomes my coping mechanism to let the world turn a few more times and maybe move out of the crappy circumstances that are rocking my sway.

To his credit, Eric did not flinch for a moment at my withdrawal.  He was loving and supportive and understanding and really, I could not have asked for better from anyone.  There was not a single complaint about anything left undone and not one cross word.

Today, I slowly began the process of finishing the painting job I left undone when my girls, Delena and Amber, came up and got me started a few weeks ago.  The thought of finishing it up alone was just too daunting, so, well, I just didn’t and so I have half my family room painted – OK that’s being generous and it’s more like a third – and an arbitrary line, previously a piece of painter’s tape, that divides the painted section of the living room from the stairwell going upstairs, which is the same wall.  I have some molding I need to paint “Last Black Rose” (paint companies are so pretentious, I swear) to match the stuff I painted years ago.  This is that color, although this is not my kitchen.  This is a picture I stole from Google Images.  Don’t judge me:

(The cupboards, not the wall, although to be fair, her red walls look so much better with that color cupboards than do my cheesecake colored ones).  My cupboards have not had doors for a very long time.  When I painted them from latex white to this color, I took off the doors because I was tired of hitting my head on them all the time.  They are just open now and it’s also clear that she has significantly more counter space than I have.  (Although I do have a porcelain flat top range top which I love that I picked up for $50 from the thrift store, so yay me).

People have asked me to post photos of the new painting, but really, it does not look significantly different than other photos I’ve posted.  The house is brighter and that doesn’t really come through on photos.  My kitchen was a sort of muted forest green and now it’s the cheesecakey color, but it’s still just a kitchen.  The main difference is that the walls look fresher and not as dirty, which is exactly what I wanted to have happen.

Every time I paint – and I can count the number of times I have on one hand because I hate it – there has been a psychological reason behind it, which I sometimes do not catch until later.  The first time in this house, I wanted to revamp everything and that reflected a desire to have everything in my life different (not just my house).  Back then, I hated my life and who I was in the world and what I’d done to try and make friends and be popular and that made me horrible company for anyone unfortunate enough to spend time with me.  I think this was back around 2006 or so.  About 2 years ago, I got a wild urge to paint all of the (previously cream colored) doors in my house.  I painted them the Last Black Rose or a deep brick red or a foresty green.  I realized recently that I had been highlighting the doors because at that time in my life, I’d about given up and just wanted an exit that was clear.  (metaphor, metaphor)  This time, I want things to be brighter and cleaner, so you can take from that whatever you will.  My life is great now; I just want to shine it up a bit.

Of course, that requires work and I’m balking at it halfway into the game.  I’ll get it done this week since spring break has me without classes and with kids and husband at home to help.  I hope by Monday (a week from tomorrow), my house is in top drawer condition and all Spring Cleany nice.

Over spring break, I also plan to work on my Gerontology final paper.  I chose the topic of sexuality in the elderly because it is such a taboo discussion.  My focus is on the complications of the expressions of sexuality in older people for caregivers when the elderly are in long term care facilities.  I plan to do a couple of interviews and a lot of research.  We do not stop being sexual beings unless health problems interfere and often, couples will enter into skilled nursing facilities together.  Since many residents in care facilities are not allowed to lock their doors (for safety reasons) and often, caregivers either don’t bother to knock or knock and immediately enter, privacy is not readily available.  Also, just because a person is in a long term care facility doesn’t mean that they are immune to falling in love and craving intimacy.  There is also the issue of true consent if the patient is at all cognitively compromised due to dementia, as well as dealing with family members who are often outraged that Grandma has a lover.  I think it will be an interesting topic to explore.  I don’t enjoy writing papers because my MLA skills are not great and I always feel as though I am not doing something right and usually, I’m not.  It’s a talent that evades me no matter how much I read and research the particulars of it.

Yesterday and last night, we piled on a foot of snow and it’s melting away today.  There is still plenty to spare.  This has been such a blessedly light winter that I truly can’t complain.  If every winter was like this, I would love living here a lot more.  Friday, it was 60 degrees and Eric got a sunburn while sitting outside drinking beers at the Placerville Brewing Company.  Yesterday, we got a foot of snow.  Today, it’s 50 degrees out and the sun is melting things away

That’s how my life shakes out these days.  This is the first day in a long time when I have had ongoing smiles throughout the day and started to feel the sunlight of that previous, pervasive joy again.  I am grateful I did not go into a true depression and knew when to retreat in order to preserve my balance.  I am grateful that I did not crack any more than I did.  I am grateful to be on the other side and feel I have made it through.  Mercury goes direct in two days, but I feel as though the worst has passed.

This is a class project for my Gerontology class:

Dear Family,

I’ll wait while you assemble all of the involved parties, then get their attention and decide who is going to read this out loud.  Just pick whoever it is who is not wailing the loudest in grief over my impending demise.  That will likely be Eric since he is not a public mourner, but since I am – or was – his wife, out of respect move on to the next person and let them start reading.  OK, go ahead…

There are very few traditional community based funeral homes in America anymore and none that I have found in this area.  (We are not going to “outsource” my post-life care to darkest Sacramento and its outlying areas)  Such establishments have gone the route of “Mom & Pop” shops that used to populate the communities before you were all born and these are now mostly all corporate greed machines intended to capitalize on your grief, of which you shall no doubt have boatloads when I am gone.  I am going to spare you having to deal with these sharks in Armani for the most part, so understand that it will only benefit you if you do exactly as I say.  If you try to move into the realm of independent thought on this matter, you are doubtlessly going to screw it up and your great ideas will end up costing more money than your father/stepfather has to spend on my exit party, so just do as I tell you for once.  Eric has signed off on this, having been well advised of my wishes, so do not imagine that you are going to try and pull an end run around me and get him on board with some alternative plan.  If you will look over at Eric right now as this is being read, you will see that he is nodding sedately and has likely already enacted most of these requests, so slow your roll and stock up on tissues.  Nod in agreement with me, Eric, if you are not already doing so.  Very good.

Since some of you are too invested in your own skin and bodily tissues to go the cremation route I will be using (in lieu of my actual wishes which were refused resoundingly and much to my great dismay), I will share with you some of the cost saving ideas I have found while researching my own end-of-life launch party.

For one thing, I want to see at least one of you build your own coffin before you die.  You can go to this website (http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/Build-Coffin.aspx) and order the kit.  After it’s built, you can just store it in some storage unit or someone’s garage until it’s needed.  In fact, you might even want to just polish it up nicely and use it as a coffee table until the time comes.  There is no stone left unturned in the manufacturing process outlined in that link above and on page 3, “biscuits” are mentioned and y’all know I do love myself some biscuits.  You should know also that it is against the law for a funeral home to refuse your handmade coffin provided it meets cemetery standards (which usually have nothing to do with the funeral home) and is big enough to fit you into (plan ahead ).  They also cannot charge you handling fees for using your own homemade coffin if it meets those guidelines.  (The guide posted in the paragraph below details this)

When you are discussing your grave with the funeral home, do not buy into that whole myth about how a special grave liner will keep your dead body “preserved” longer.  As this document tells you (http://www.cfb.ca.gov/consumer/consumer_guide.pdf) those claims are actually against the law.  That document is included with this letter as a handout, so read it well.  Besides, to what benefit is your lengthened preservation?  Think about it.  Don’t you want to get to that “dust to dust” part as soon as possible?  I know I do and will be taking the express train via “ashes to ashes” for just that reason.

One of the places where you can really cut cost on your own funeral process is on the viewing.  There is absolutely no more morbid practice in the Westernized concept of death than “the viewing,” which is really a kind of elaborated “sitting up with the dead” process that goes on for 2-3 days and just wears everyone out and the food is usually terrible.  If you absolutely must have a viewing, then limit it to one day and if anyone really cares enough, they can rearrange their oh-so-important schedule sufficiently to be there.  This cuts back on the amount of money you have to pay the funeral home for storage and presentation of the dead body, which people just ought not be seeing anyway.

Another thing you can do is to not order any flowers other than maybe a nice arrangement to go on the handmade casket as it would beautifully cover any water rings you couldn’t polish out from where people didn’t bother to use a coaster during that time when it was in your living room.  Even the casket flower arrangement, I recommend getting from a local florist (shop around) instead of ordering it through the funeral home exorbitant mark-up process.  The funeral homes always try to guilt you into buying a big ton of flowers to strew around, but you know good and well that everyone who is too busy to come to the funeral is going to send flowers anyway, so really, you just end up with too many flowers every time regardless.  (I have been to and arranged a LOT of funerals in my day, so listen up).

There is always a big to-do over the transportation of the family between the funeral location and the burial location with a big procession that everyone hates and which makes people late to work.  The expense of the funeral home providing all you perfectly-capable-of-driving people with limos is astronomical and you can cut out that expense, plus the expense of using the funeral home or church for the funeral by having a graveside service.  Everyone wants to do that thing where you toss in a hand of dirt to get the process started and it makes a nice little addition to the ceremony.  In movies, graveside ceremonies are always the most dramatic and intense anyway.  (As an aside on that dirt tossing thing, if there are enough people at the funeral and everyone is willing to make multiple rounds, you might be able to get out of that “filling up the grave” fee too by just keeping the dirt tossing rotation going for a while)

But back to me and my own impending send off.  I have not pre-purchased anything, so don’t imagine I have a plot in a cemetery somewhere or a mausoleum that awaits my final remains.  (There is NO reason why you people can’t chip in on this.)  Eric has an envelope in his safe that contains enough money to cover the transfer and disposal of my personal remains and some of the launch party, but you folks are free to contribute your own cash to upgrade the event as much as you like.  Mind you, I am referring specifically to the AFTER party and not the disposal of the remains, which is to go exactly as per my instructions.  Pre-paying for your funeral services might seem smart on first blush since the family has few arrangements to make, but after some thought, I didn’t go that route and here’s why:

1)  Once I pay for the services, we’re stuck with that company.  What if they go out of business or change ownership and start doing shoddy work?  With companies folding like lawn chairs and claiming bankruptcy as they do, this is a very serious concern.

2)  What if I live longer than I think I am going to and relocate to an exotic location to live out my extra years?  The facility I pay would no longer have access to my final remains except through a fairly uncomfortable and costly airline situation.

3)  Paying money into a funeral plan does not pay interest and if I put that same money into an interest bearing savings account, I would have an even better launch party than I could have had originally if I live a long time.  (I did not put that money into an interest bearing account, but I could have)

Now on to the fine print.  As you know, although I have a motivated drive toward the accumulation of personal wealth, I also (perhaps ironically) have a total disdain of corporate America.  For that reason, we are not going to line the pockets of the funeral industry’s crows any more than is absolutely necessary.

As soon as it has been established by someone fully qualified that I have breathed my last, whichever one of your lucky people gets tapped to do the job should contact Foothill Cremation on Cedar Ravine Road in Placerville.  Dig into Eric’s safe and get the $1340 (plus tax and maybe a nice tip) to pay for their STANDARD PLAN.  (Plans are identified here: http://www.foothillcremation.com/ImmediateNeed.html)  This includes all fees and costs from my last breath until I’m safely ensconced in my commemorative and sacred death container.  Do not choose the Basic Plan (I will not be downgraded!!) because it doesn’t include the “Minimum alternative cremation container” (MACC) which comes with the Standard Plan (you have to have the MACC and it’s basically a really nice cardboard box).  This plan also comes with a nice urn, but Eric is going on about wanting to buy my container away from “the establishment,” so since this commemorative urn is included with the price, just use it for something else or see if they will knock off a chunk of the price if you don’t take it.  Since he is the one insisting on going off-program here, he can foot that expense.  Make sure they put me into the container Eric picks and not their stupid one.  (Hint:  Do NOT get the one that looks like a boring, gray shredding machine.  Urns are shown on that link above.)

When you let them know you’ve got cash in hand, Foothill Cremation will scurry on over and collect my flesh vehicle from where ever I left it.  There will be a big pile of forms you have to fill out and they are all available for download and printing out here:  (http://www.foothillcremation.com/Forms.html) so click your Bic and get busy after you phone them so they are filled out when the staff arrives.  Please note that if I die in a hospital, I AM an organ donor and the hospital should harvest whatever of “me” it can use to help someone else.  If I die outside of a hospital, my organs will unfortunately not be able to be used since they were not taken before oxygen stopped flowing to them (http://donatelife.net/understanding-donation/organ-donation/).  You do not have to pay anything for my organs to be harvested.  That expense is born by the recipient.  Let the medical staff take anything usable and then send what’s left of me on my way with the Foothill Cremation staff.

The phone number for Foothill Cremation is 530-626-9508.  They will take my body to their crematorium and line me up for the blazing, which will commence as soon as the cremation chamber is available (I want to barely be cold when this happens, so get right on filling out those papers and making the call).  PLEASE take all my jewelry off before they take my body away because it’s stupid to not have someone else enjoy it.  If my rings are stuck, use a little butter or liquid soap to loosen them.  Also, please let my chauffeur from Foothill Cremation know if I have a pacemaker installed because they tend to get explodey when subjected to high temperatures.

Again (sigh) do NOT try to shop around unless the prices for Foothill Cremation have changed tremendously.  Those funeral pirates over at Chapel of the Pines want $3495 for the same services and insist that you have a funeral.  (bleh)  Those are the only two crematoriums in our immediate area other than (full body shudder) the county.

You can be there for the cremation if you want to, but really, come on.  It takes around 3 hours in total to cremate someone and I am sure you can find better ways to honor me during that time (Like setting up my party!), which is what you should be doing.  It would be nice, although not really necessary, for my nearest and dearest to autograph my MACC with Sharpie markers, sort of like when you sign a person’s cast when they have a broken arm or leg.  Just write some well wishes and nice thoughts on my box before I head into the flames.  My MACC and I will roll into the cremation chamber and will roast at approximately 2000 F for around 2 hours or so, by which time my “organic matter” will be consumed either by heat or evaporation, leaving only my bigger bones.  My big bones will then “processed” (beaten on by a guy with a little rake and then ground up) into fine particles.  You are only getting the ashes of the “processed” big bones when you get my “remains” and that is what they will put into Eric’s fancy container for me.  My fat will have (finally) melted away and my tissue and less substantial bones will be consumed by the fire.  If you dress me in anything in particular for the conflagration, make it long and black and flowing and gorgeous.  I recommend my Morticia Addams dress, but if I can’t fit into it, just send me through buck naked the way I came into the world.  My ashes are to be retained in the fancy container Eric buys which should lock well.  The urn with me in it will then be displayed in a place of honor in Eric’s home.  Do NOT scatter me ANYwhere, accidentally or on purpose, as I wish him to be able to frequently reference his wife who is at home… on the mantle… or in the curio cabinet… or in the bay window shelf, where ever he puts me.  Any subsequent wives he has must honor me and speak of me reverently and in hushed tones as “First Wife.”

Aside from the disposal and subsequent tiny entombing of my bone remains, there should be an elaborate party held in my honor.  Please sort meticulously through my phone, Facebook posts (password is saved in my computer) and email program and only invite people who have contacted me in a positive way within the previous year prior to my death.  “Liking” my Facebook posts qualifies.  If they did not contact me in the whole year prior to my death, clearly they did not care enough about me to come to my launch party, so they are completely uninvited.  I will have no false friends showing up pretending they were close with me when obviously they were not.  When you are the kind of person I am, everyone wants to claim they knew and loved you, but few want to do the actual work.  Those few are the ones who should benefit from my launch party.

The food for this event should be my very favorite foods and if you don’t know what those were, you have no business planning my launch party.  Since I am a person who absolutely wallows in pleasure, you will all know what I like to eat and drink and can round it up.  I am from the South, so the food should be provided via potluck and everyone should bring at least three different dishes.  Pick out my most flattering photo and have it blown up to huge proportions and framed.  There will be enough money in the envelope safe to cover this and I recommend the WalMart Photo Center for a thrifty and expedient enlargement.  Make certain I am really cheesing it up in the photo and that I look extremely saucy.

The music should be all music I love, so this means no rap, no opera, no top 40, no *whatever Ke$ha is* and no jazz.  Also no music by Ratt or Rush shall be played.  I highly recommend that “Red Solo Cup” by Toby Keith and “8 Miles Wide” by Storm Large be included.  The video that includes the phrase “Honey Badger Don’t Care” should play on loop on my laptop.  Eric knows which video it is.  In addition to all of the eating and listening to music, you should read excerpts from my books, talk about how talented and precious I was and cry a good bit.  I prefer the enthusiastic mourning with a great deal of wailing and asking “Why God, Why?” and pounding on the ground and things like that.  Live it up.  Get into it.  Fly your drama flag high.  Talk about how I was an angel and was too good for this Earth and how lucky you were to have me while you did.

These are my wishes for how my body and my memorial are to be handled.  Since you rejected my first request (being blown up with det cord and various explosive material pushed into personal orifices) and my second (back yard funeral pyre lit by archers with flaming arrows), you can at least honor these as they are perfectly legal.

Please note, dear ones, that it is considered generally unhealthy to ingest the ashed bone remains of a dead person, so do not sniff, huff, drink, eat, shoot up, douche with or otherwise attempt to get my ashes into your body in any way.  Also do not create comedic circumstances in which such ingestion may occur, including throwing my ashes into the wind (as was strictly forbidden in a previous paragraph).

If you do not follow this to the letter, I swear by the almighty Goddess I will haunt you to the ends of the earth and you know I can do it.  Additionally, I am sure you each and every one understands why I cannot trust any of you to write my obituary, so here it is already done for you:

Katrina Marie Rasbold (1961 – 21**) passed away quietly in her sleep [or screaming behind the wheel of her Cadillac or whatever is accurate] last ____day [insert day of the week].  The cause of death is unknown at this time [if it is and suspect it shall be].  Ms Rasbold was born in Augusta, Kentucky as Katrina Marie Chapman to Guy Allen and Judith Lou Chapman.  She was raised in Buford, Kentucky and has two brothers who are positively riddled with more psychological disorders than anyone could ever address as is evidenced by their lack of contact with their sister during most of her adult life.

Katrina married the late Paul Humphrey in 1978 and the couple had three sons together.  He regretfully left her for a homely woman in 1996 and suffered gravely for his poor judgment, loving Katrina until the day he died of sorrow as a broken man.  She generously forgave him and the two remained friends afterward, much to his great relief.  Shortly after her divorce from Mr. Humphrey, Katrina met and married the much younger, much more handsome and much wealthier Eric Rasbold, with whom she lived out the rest of her days steeped in total pleasure.  Eye witnesses testified that he dedicated his life to carrying her around on a little satin pillow and feeding her chocolates all day and that he loved and cherished her more than life itself.

Katrina also begat three additional children.  Her only daughter was born during a “break” from her first marriage when she had an affair with an actor who shall not be named and immediately became pregnant due to her total immunity to all (and multiple) forms of birth control.  She and Eric had two sons together and then, having birthed the equivalent of the entire Brady Bunch from her own body, she ceased her reproductive excellence.

By far the smartest of all of the Chapmans ever, Katrina traveled extensively after leaving Kentucky, ultimately settling in the tiny community of Grizzly Flats, California.  There, she became an accomplished writer and lecturer and many were aided by her self-help books and life-coaching skills.  Those who knew her in her final months and years said she looked more radiant and beautiful than ever and that the pearls of wisdom that dripped from her lips were words they would cherish for their entire lives.  It is widely believe that she less “died” than “consciously ascended.”

A memorial service will be held by invitation only at an undisclosed location.  The family asks that in lieu of flowers, you spend that money on someone who is living who you care about.  As Katrina often said, “Send me flowers and presents while I am alive and if you don’t, sending them after I die will never get you onto the boat you missed.”

So I am now officially, as of today, a month into this whole Joy and Happiness and Pleasure kick and I have learned just a whole lot about ins and outs of the process.  One of the things I have learned is that I am very protective of this state and will get a little assertive and go into heavy duty commando mode when someone threatens it.

I can handle *me* just fine.  I have learned to trust myself and my reactions and I rarely now have to redirect myself out of the slide into fear or unhappiness or pessimism.  I am not an optimist by nature at all.  I’m a Virgo and we tend to knit our perfectly arched brows together and fret and make lists of shit that could go wrong and likely will if we are not there to control it all.  Going into the process of letting go and pretty much going along for the ride, trusting the outcome will be a good place, is not my natural tendency and it has taken a lot to override that worry that in sort of inborn in me.  But I did it and now I “trust the process” fully and completely.

In was a gradual progression into that state.  I didn’t have some profound “I don’ know nuffin ’bout birthin’ no babies Jesus take the wheel oh lawdy!” moment or anything.  I just started to recognize through a full and extensive life review that every time I thought things were going terribly, they ended up taking me to a better place.  Most of the time, it was so much better that I didn’t even know to want it.  My brain couldn’t frame up that kind of concept.  It just seemed stupid at that point to presume that just because a situation felt challenging or painful that it was going to go down shit river in a handbag.  Mind you, it might, but at the end of Shit River, there’s usually a much better place than you were when you first got into the handbag and they’ll even let you shower and give you pretty clothes.

All that aside, my preference is to stay out of the river entirely.  Really, it’s like childbirth.  It starts to hurt a little and then it starts to hurt a lot and then you think you’re going to surely die and then you work really hard and then it’s over and you’ve got this whole new life in front of you (that will periodically smell bad, will keep you from sleeping well for a while and will ultimately camp out in front of your ATM like someone waiting for Garth Brooks tickets at the Tickemaster window).  Once you get to the new life, the pain of how you got there starts to fade and you’re so plugged into the present that it just doesn’t matter any more what it took to get there.  Now, when things start to look rugged, I batten down the hatches and ride out the storm until the sun comes out again.

I have had a few people write to me and say that I just must not feeeeel things as intently as other people do and that I must not have things happen to me that are as challenging as other people do if I am able to be happy all the time.  I really don’t think either of those things are the case, but I am given to using the phrase that has pulled me away from a lot of depression sink holes in my life:

I have been journaling online since around 1999, so that’s quite a long time.  In re-reading some of my older journals, I am stunned by how whiny I was.  I don’t know how you people put up with me.  I sure wouldn’t.  I was the Woe Is Me Queen, for sure.  As I read my words from back then, I was reminded of how it felt to be in pain all the time; to wake up and look up at the ceiling and not have my first thought be, “Thank you for this day” but “Oh, dear.  What’s going to go wrong today?”  I remember going to bed for days because it was too painful to be out in the world, even if “the world” was just my house.  Even a year ago, I remember crying to Eric about how much I hated my life because I spend my days doing things I hate to do.

Now, I am glad to be out of that, even if it’s only for a month.  The month has been completely precious and I know it is how I want to live my life.  Every moment feels sacred and like a gift from God.  Every person in my life feels precious and important.  Every bite I eat tastes delicious.

It’s not that frustrating things have not happened.  It’s all about how I have engaged those frustrating things.  I simply would not let them touch my sacred core where the joy and happiness lived.  It’s like I let the wave of the frustrating experience wash over me while I held my breath and then it pulled back again and was gone.  I just let it pass.

The toughest time was when Eric was struggling with some frustrations he had and was just not in a good mood for several days.  He was irritable and isolative and sometimes a little antagonistic.  He hadn’t been this way in over a year and honestly, I’d forgotten what it felt like or how to manage it.  As it became apparent that he was in one of “those” moods, I felt myself starting to go into the same old reactions as before.  I would nurture him and try to make everything perfect around him so he could be more comfortable to deal with his crap.  I would talk to him, trying to find the button to push that would make him feel better and help him work through what was bothering him.  I would get defensive and afraid.  I would walk on eggshells, waiting for the next emotional bomb to drop.  There was a whole dance we would do during these times and one bad feeling would feed into another one and another one until there was a big, emotional show down and then it would diffuse and we’d be fine again for a while until the next time.

Like I said, it has been over a year since anything like that happened.  I started thinking the thoughts of, “Crap.  Here we go again.”  It didn’t take long for me to realize that just like in day-to-day mode, these were thoughts and emotions I had to turn around into something different.  I reminded myself that even if he was being snappish and sometimes a little snotty and judgey to me, it didn’t define me.  It was just more of:

I did the separation of shit technique and recognized that he was going through his own crap and that wasn’t MY crap, even though I had to deal with the side effects.  I let him know that I loved him, but that I couldn’t let his bad mood take away my happy.  I continued with the be-bop and let his negativity roll off of me.  Once I stopped being defensive and worried, I could see that he was a guy who was overwhelmed and going through his own mess and just didn’t have much “nice” left in him.  I stayed to myself a good bit and like I described with the wave, it rolled over and pulled back and was done with no damage and no blow up and no emotional craziness.  It just ran out of steam and then was done.

There was so much potential for this to take away my joy and pull the drain out of my happiness sink and let all the pleasure drain out.  I am glad it is not as fragile of a state as I thought it was.  I could feel myself pulling up straight and tall, cocking my sawed off shotgun and shoring up the walls of the fort.  I’d been waiting for the attack to come and here it was.  This wasn’t “this line is really long at K-mart” or “Justified didn’t record on the DVR.”  This was old, familiar hurt that always manages to push my buttons and pull the rug out from under me emotionally.  I am actually kind of glad it happened so I could be more confident that I can manage the hard stuff when it inevitably does hit.

I stopped going to Bellydance classes and changed out my desk chair (traded with Eric) and now I don’t have much hip pain at all.  It’s nice to have that gone for the most part.  I look forward to catching up on sleep over the 3-day weekend.  I also am excited to see a dear friend tomorrow after way too long of a break between visits. I am happy that my school work is caught up and I won’t have to spend a lot of weekend hours retouching photos for Imaging and creating wine labels for Desktop Publishing.   Taking 6 classes this 1/2 semester has been really crazy.  I thought classwork was supposed to be proportioned as to the number of credit hours to receive for a class (as in, 3 one credit classes would take up as much study time as one 3 credit class).  Boy, was I wrong.  Instead, it’s homework for 6 classes, five of which are being crammed into an 8 week package, so there’s a stronger push.  In mid-March, those five classes will be finished and I will have either 2-3, depending on how the waiting lists go.  That will be a significant difference.  For now, I’m standin’em up and knockin’em down!

Speaking of rain, I love the rain and we have been having some now and then.  What’s really interesting is that the temperatures and the precip have never lined up at the same time to give us significant snowfall this year.  I feel like I’m running between the raindrops, living some kind of global warming miracle.  I am just loving one snow-free day at a time and making sure to step out into the beautiful sunny days.  Even though it’s cool, it’s nice to feel those rays shining down.  I keep hearing people say, “Oh, it’s coming for us!!” all ominous like, but I’m not convinced.  I’m not convinced it’s not, but like I said, “one day at a time.”  Those same people who are sure we’re going to get slammed were saying the same thing in December for January.  We are supposed to get a dusting this week, but then temps back up in the high 40′s and low 50′s for the end of the week.  I think it’s all about how big my smile is these days.  It must really be putting off some heat.

I am one happy girl these days!

You already know all of the adages about how we can’t choose what happens to us, but we can choose how we react to it and all of the multitude of reinterpretations of that thought. It’s so, so completely true and those who don’t believe that we can control our emotions rather than letting them control us have not gone through the extremely frickin hard work it takes to learn how to do it.  I am now almost four weeks into the project to choose to be happy, not give into the process of depression and make every day an exercise in the purest pursuit of complete joy.   As nearly as I can track, I started really putting the plan into action on January 10th.

As you may have already guessed if you read my previous entries during that time, I can enthusiastically and confidently give the practice a big two thumbs up.  It has worked for me and I expect it to keep on doing so.  I have heard the saying, “Once you look at the world through thrice-born eyes, you will never see it the same way again.”  That means, basically, that you can’t go back.  It’s like an optical illusion where once you see the trick or other perception of the picture, you can’t not see it.  I know I can’t go back to letting depression and worry and fear have control.  It just won’t happen.  I realize how overly confident that sounds, but it’s where I am.  The thing is…

Damn, this is not easy.  I thought it was hard work to work with depression and fight with inner demons and heal the past and maintain a neutral to happy demeanor.  I would “sit with” my spiritual discomfort and talk to it and learn from it and clean out yet another dark corner.  That felt like hard work.  Woooo-whee.  I had no idea.

When you get a taste of what it really feels like to live a joyful life, you think it’s so addictive that you’re going to want to do it all the time and it is and that’s the problem.  Since I’ve started this path, I have had a lot of people ask me what happens when thing DO inevitably go wrong.  When there’s a situation that would normally give you a day or two of pouting and depression, where does that reaction go and what happens instead?  There’s your work and it is such a motherfuzzy, let me tell you.

As an aside, I have to give thanks to Tami Skullz and Patricia Morello, who each gave me very useful new words.  Patricia gave me my happy word (“Aiiiyeeeee!”), which is such an exuberant expression of complete, unabashed joy that I had absolutely no recourse except to steal it.  Tami gave me my word for total complex and irascible screwed-upedness (“Motherfuzzy”) which is a brilliant compromise to what I actually want to say and often do when in select company.  I have friends and family who do not share my reverent and vibrant appreciation for words of all types and all shapes and all implications, which is sort of part and parcel with being a writer.  (Right, Maxine?)  For them, I make a respectful gesture of usually trying to tone down my rampant appreciation for words that are offensive to them.

So there y’go.

Anyway, so even though affirmations are a spectacular way of bringing about manifestation and actually changing the way you cognitively process specific sets of circumstances, I am forced to remember the words of a spiritual teacher from my past who used to say that as soon as you voice an absolute, The Universe will rise up to challenge your words.  This is less of an affront to your assertion, proving to you that it’s not really true, and more of an opportunity for you to galvanize what you have said.  There is no greater way to become completely seated in your own truth than to have it challenged in some way.  That’s just a fundamental reality.

This was my week for all kinds of little things to pop up and try to take away my happy.  I worked too hard to get here on a process that spanned over a decade and you can imagine that I am not going to sell it off cheaply now that I’m here.  There are some tactics I have developed on the fly to stay “in the zone” and not give in to the challenges.  I think that eventually, I am going to have to come up with a list of rules like in Zombieland.

Yes, “Double-tap” might actually make the cut.  Here’s what I’ve worked out so far, based mostly on the dance to stay on top this week:

1).  Journal.  No one really likes to hear that, but everyone has smart things to say and the only way to get them out is to sit down and make yourself write.  Like Dorothy Parker said, (paraphrased) “Writing is the art of applying the ass to the chair.”  We tend to lose our brilliant ideas if we do not write them down.  The whole idea is that no one reads your personal journal except you.  A friend of mind gave me an absolutely beautiful, elegant American Express Appointment Book.  It looks like this:

It has long time-to-time format columns for each week day and half columns that the weekend days share.  I make a point to write in it every day, even if what I am writing is not particularly poignant or meaningful.  Sometimes, it’s stuff that will ultimately find its way into my books and sometimes, it’s just random thoughts.  It looks like this:

What I mostly try to write in it is what messages I received from The Universe or what lessons I learned that day.  I love it and will likely try to locate something similar for next year.  When I write out these thoughts, I am able to ground myself in them for the day, whether I do the writing in the morning or at night.  It keeps me rooted in the positive and affirmative.

2.  Remember to let people own their own shiz.  This week has been hard for Eric because he is feeling overwhelmed by all that he has going on in his life.  That has spilled over a bit and I have had to do some careful self-monitoring to make sure that his mood doesn’t affect mine.  We are tied pretty tightly and it’s hard to have that kind of relationship and not have it get messy and a little too interactive sometimes.  I have had to consciously re-seat myself into the position of his stuff being his own stuff and not making it my stuff.  I can sympathize and support without collapsing into what’s going on with him.  This week, I had several situations come up where I had to step back and realize it wasn’t my deal.

3.  Don’t attach to outcomes or behaviors.  This has been an ongoing challenge for me.  I know intellectually that it is a sure fire recipe for disaster to let my mood be affected by what someone else does or does not do.  It’s hard not to have specific expectations for the people around you, especially as a Virgo since we automatically know what everyone ought to be doing.  It’s a gift, really.  The hardest thing to manage is to learn to take care of your own life and your own behaviors and let the rest of life just happen.  You can suggest.  You can assist if asked and if you want to.  You can’t control other people no matter how much you want to or think you should and the more you try to, the worse the outcome gets.  You just gotta let it go and let it flow.

4.  Self-esteem is fragile.  Shore that sucker up.  This is my biggest challenge of all.  It’s something that is still really new to me and I am still finding my way.  Until I did a thorough and honest exam of myself, I never realized how low my self-esteem had always been, from the time when I was really little.  I constantly attracted in situations that would reaffirm my own assessment that I was not good enough, not pretty enough, not thin enough, not productive enough, not smart enough, not sexy enough, not wordly enough, not social enough and on and on.  By constantly I mean that several times a day I would get that kind of feedback from one direction or another.  Any self-esteem I projected was truly nothing more than a lot of bravado.

I am taking 6 classes for the first part of this semester (only 2-3 next 8 weeks) and a couple of the classes are where I am completely out of my element.  I’m trying and I think I’m doing well and I am making good grades on my projects.  I am not an artistic person by nature and while I can do some artsy things now and then, it’s not my particular given talent.  I have to push it to make it happen.  I needed to learn to do better graphics for my website development company and so I took a class in Imaging for the Web to learn Adobe Photoshop.  I’ve put off learning this program for literally over a decade and I finally decided to demand more from myself and make it happen.  As I said, I’m not particularly good at it and I am plugging away.  I posted my most recent efforts on Facebook and most of the comments were very fun and supportive.  There were a couple that weren’t great and like how water always flows to the lowest point, I felt myself focusing on those.  I looked at the photos I’d been proud of a few minutes before (some took hours to do) and they looked poorly done, tacky and hardly worth showing off.  My instructor knows we’re only 3 weeks into class and that we’re just now starting to learn the program.  I’m sure she’s seen worse.  I, however, was feeling my mood shift to a not good place, so I took down the posts in that “cop didn’t see it, I didn’t do it” kind of way.

One of the exercises I practice to up the self esteem is to tell myself constantly that I am beautiful.  That isn’t something I have heard often in my life, least of all from myself.  It isn’t easy for me, but I do it.  It’s especially hard to do while I am looking into a mirror, but I do that too.  The more I say it, the more I believe it.  I bought myself some pretty clothes and I make a point to do my hair and spruce up every day.  I luxuriate in feeling beautiful and wearing clothes I like and that make me feel pretty.  Sometimes, I think of Stuart Smalley looking into the mirror saying, “I’m good enough.  I’m smart enough and doggone it, people like me!”

When I was going into the gym last week, a developmentally delayed man was waiting in front for someone to pick him up.  When I walked up to go in, he said, “Time to lose weight!  It’s time to lose weight.”  (*great*)  Walking into the gym, I suddenly felt conspicuously huge.  I went up to the desk to sign up for that night’s Zumba class.  The guy behind the desk looked at me and said, “Have you ever taken a Zumba class before?”  I told him I had not, but that I was working to say “yes” more often than I said “no” and I wanted to give it a try.  He said, “Um, it’s a very fast paced class.”  I said, “Well, I’m sure there is a ‘back of the class’ where I won’t interfere with other class members if I can’t keep up.”  He said yes, there was.  I told him I wanted to sign up for a month of classes.  He instead pressed me to take the free pass because, “You know, you might not like it.”  He also told me to be sure and bring in several bottles of water because I was going to likely sweat more than I was used to sweating.

o.O

I never in my life had to work so hard to take a class.  Finally, I just handed the free pass back to him and told him that the time didn’t work for me (it was advertised at 5:30pm, but was actually at 7:30pm) and I’d have to check back on a different night.  Then I went home and worked out on my Wii Fit a bit.  That particular night, I just did not have the motivation in me to push forward against these perceived obstacles.  On a stronger night, I would have taken the class and stopped and started a bunch of times and laughed my way through it (and that was just on Monday).

No, my self-esteem is still “curing.”  It’s like something that has been glued carefully together and the glue just isn’t quite dry yet.  One wrong move and you’re piecing stuff together again.  I have infinite patience in this respect.  I can scrape old glue and reassemble for as long as it takes.

As I look back on a week of challenges to my joy, I find that there are many points where I would have crumbled before and had a much more emotional reaction than I did this time.  Instead, I deftly stepped aside and restructured the situation into one that I could manage without completely caving.  That really is the key to staying in the Joy Zone.  You just go through experiences and when you start to feel the joy slipping away, to stop, plug in more deeply (instead of less), take a good inventory and then shift your perspective so that it’s no longer hurtful.  You know your limitations and challenge them when you feel strong enough to do so.  You work within your own boundaries when you feel challenged on a low day.

Since this was a little bit of a tough week, I didn’t feel like mopping my floors and oh lordy, did they ever need it.  I gave myself permission not to mop the floors, which sounds trivial, but I would normally obsess about the floors until they were done and then resent doing them.  I fixed a few other things I’d put off doing.  I worked hard on my school work.  I made nice meals for my family.  I pampered myself by doing some things just for me.  Today, I felt good about steam mopping the floors, so I did it and they look wonderful.  In the meantime, the world did not fall apart and I don’t even think anyone noticed.

It sounds like such a simple thing, but it is part of me learning how to take care of me and not creating or furthering situations that stand to make me unhappy.  It’s about honoring the resistance I feel, but not letting it control me.  It’s about caring about my life and my joy enough to take action to preserve it now that I have it.

It is so far from a perfect process and loving myself completely is quite a task.  I do know that I can’t expect anyone else to do it if I can’t do it, so that is my number one goal at this point.  I am going to give myself the love and acceptance and appreciation that I have begged the rest of the world to give me for 50 years now.   I am going to tingle with delight over the pleasures I have made manifest and work on the challenges I have because I love myself enough to want the best for me.  It won’t be because someone else tells me I should do it.  It will be because I make the conscious choice to take control of my own life and release the control I try to inflict on others.

Everything I do, everything I feel, every reaction I display is a choice I make.  I take this one day at a time, one hour at a time and really, one thought at a time.  This sacred life is too precious to waste moments on feeling bad over dumb stuff.  When I feel that coming on, I take quick and decisive action to redirect my perspective.  It’s a tough job and the benefits are unfathomable.  What I do know is that I don’t cry all the time anymore and I don’t spend days feeling unworthy and picked on and victimized and powerless.

Mostly, I just feel sorry for anyone who tries to slow me down.

No, admittedly, I do not have a taxidermied baby alligator in what appears to be a wedding dress in my house.  If only… and yes, yes I would in a heartbeat.  I can attest, however, that similarly to the thought posed in the journal entry below, when you enter “weird stuff” into an image search engine to find a suitable lead picture to swipe, the options with which you are presented prove the true subjectivity and multiple layers to the definition of the word “weird.”

This is probably something like Weird Stuff In My House version 5.13 or something, so don’t be surprised if you see some things in here you’ve seen before, especially if you live in my house or have been here a lot.  With all the crap I’ve got, it’s possible that you live here in my house and don’t even see all of the weird stuff around you.  It likely just blends into a great big weird stuff ball.

I have often described my decor as “imagine that the Goodwill Store and the Super Glue Factory were side by side and blew up at exactly the same moment.”  My house is like a museum of weird stuff.   I haunt thrift stores looking for those “under $10″ awesome things to haul back to my house to showcase.  They make me happy.  I know I should not be so attached to material things, but they are a part of me and reflect my own inner weirdness.  Actually, why do we imagine that we should not love our material things??  I don’t know what sainted person came up with THAT notion or why we are so deadset on propagating the stupidness of it.  I LOVE my stuff because stuff is FUN.  If I wanted to walk the earth like Cain and have no earthly possessions, I’d learn Kung Fu.

Anyway, here’s the newest edition of my weird stuff.  Might as well get something to drink and kick back.  You’re going to be here a while.  I do have to issue a disclaimer.  When you look at these photos, you are going to see an insane amount of dust and cobwebs.  Crazy.  I kid you not.  After living up here in the mountains with no sidewalks or paved driveways to break up the flow and not a lot of rain to keep down the dust, if you make it important to you to keep ahead of the dust, you will quite literally do nothing else but clean up dust every day of your life.  I did not give up. I did, however, stop caring much.  Twice a year at specific times (March and October), I take a day or two and go through and completely bathe the stuff in my house.  Every couple of months or so, I clean out the cobwebs.  Once a year, I’ll give the walls a wash and spot clean in the interim.  My house has really stupid placement of lighting which keeps it in low light almost all the time.  The flash on the camera really illuminate the dust and cobwebs, so you get the technicolor view.  So yeah, you’re going to need to cope with seeing a good bit of dust because frankly, up here, the dirt is dirtier than where you live.  Click the pictures to enlarge them.  So here we go:

So I am two weeks or so into this whole pleasure cruise of life thing.  OK, not quite two weeks, I guess.  According to my Virgoean kept records, I started this process on January 10th, which means tomorrow is two weeks and let me tell you, I feel pretty doggone good.  in fact, if I took any different kind of supplements than I am taking, I would think I was high a good bit of the time.  Also, that banner up there is a big fat lie.  I didn’t know I would feel good. I didn’t even have the confidence to hope I would feel good.  That’s just want James Brown sang and I wanted to stay with the flow, you know.

Also, when you look up pictures to steal in Google images, you can get a lot of interesting stuff when you search for keywords like “pleasure” or “satisfaction” or “bliss” or “ecstasy.”  Ecstasy is mostly pills.  If you type in “basking,” you get sharks (?!).  This photo is not of me. It’s some model who can likely be blissy on demand.

So I am completely sold now on the idea of being joyful and happy as a choice and a mindset rather than a condition of outside forces.  I think that is when we really set ourselves up to fail and I know from what I speak because I have spent something like fifty years telling myself the exact conditions that would make me happy and holding the Universe and everyone around me accountable for those conditions being met and not allowing myself to be happy unless and until those conditions are met.  Of course they never are all met, so if you put your joy as conditional on a set of experiences happening, you’re never going to get it.

…then you die.

Where’s the fun in THAT, I ask you??

In my whole life, I have never enjoyed having photos taken of me. In fact, most of our family photos are of anyone in the family except me because I am usually the one who is taking the photos specifically to avoid being in the photos.  This means that my whole life has gone largely undocumented.

The reason is, of course, that I never, ever like how I look in photos.  I am not terribly photogenic and because I tend to eat and talk a good bit, whenever someone takes my photo, my mouth is usually hanging open.  There is some essential *zing* that is there for me in real life that does not come through in photos.  In my whole life, I have had maybe 4-5 photos of me that I actually liked on the spot and – no lie – one was a drivers license photo.  I asked for reprints and they denied me, the fascist DMV bastards. The times when I took photos that I actually liked were times when I felt happy and confident.  That’s why there are so few of them.

Now, when I look back over the photos that I hated before, I think about how pretty I looked.  When I thought I looked horribly fat, I look back now and see that I was a normal sized person who was completely miserable over her normal sized weight.  When I thought previously that I looked lumpy and homely, now I just see a person with sad, haunted eyes who did not love herself enough and absolutely was not being nurtured or valued by the people around her.

It always sounded so silly and simple to say that if I did not love myself, I would not be loveable.  I was loveable, but people believed what I showed them, which was that I did not feel I deserved happiness or respect because I didn’t give it to myself.  People routinely showed me tremendous disrespect because I taught them through my own actions that respecting me was not necessary.  I did not respect my own limits, my own needs, my own wants, my own value… but I sure wanted them to do it for me!  If they would just do that, I would be happy.

I did not value myself as a person and did not trust my worth in a relationship, so in my relationships, I tended to work overtime to make myself indispensable.  After a while, I would get tired of being so damned indispensable all the time and would resent the other people in my life for depending on me when that was the very dynamic I’d worked to set up.  I was the do-er. I was the fix-er.  I was the support team.  I was the pit crew for everyone else who actually got to drive around the track.  I never let anyone think that I needed support or that I needed them and I surely did not show them how to do it.

I remember saying to Eric not even a year ago that I hated my life because I spent all of my time doing things I hated doing that largely involved taking care of and cleaning up after other people.  In an entry I wrote a while back called, “The Glass Ceiling:  Break It, Don’t Windex It,” (it is a subtitle of “Valley of the Shadow”) I struggled to accept the fact - not just the possibility – that all of the things I did in a day that I hated were things I actively chose to do.  I made people around me feel miserable and guilty for taking me up on what I freely offered!  That’s actually pretty twisted.

During that tough time, which was back in October, I realized that my family wants me to be happy.  That’s really it.  They don’t like feeling as though I resent them for needing me.  That makes them feel set up, is what it does.  They don’t like having to second guess whether I am offering something to them out of love or obligation.  The real fact is that my family wanted me to be happy, wanted to take care of me, but they had no idea how to do it because I was the one who insisted on always being seen as the capable one who did not need help or nurturing.  I worked hard to make everything fine for them, but not for myself.

When I changed how I am in the world, I did not make a big announcement or bring anyone else directly into the loop.  I just changed me.  I adjusted my vision so that I could see my situation more objectively and not personalize my relationships or obligations while I took a good look at them.  Then, I started telling people exactly what I wanted to do and I let them know how happy it made me that they were doing it.  I praised them like mad, batted my eyes, smiled big enough to break my face and thanked them profusely. They loved it!

In the past, when someone would help me, I felt guilty because it seemed like they where doing my job, which meant that I thought they thought I was not doing it well enough myself.  Eric has a thing about the dishes being done (we do not have a dishwasher in which to hide them) and if there are even 3-4 dirty dishes in the sink, to him it feels like the entire house is filthy.  He would often come in and start washing dishes.  He wasn’t angry.  He didn’t blame me.  He just saw something that needed to be done and did it.  I would be upset because I thought it meant he was judging me.  Now, I give him a big hug, tell him how much I appreciate it and he puffs up like he’s preening.  Nathan is 12 and when I ask him to do things, I thank him and tell him what an amazing helper he is.  He now makes the biscuits for our family because he does such a good job.  I don’t need to control how well he does it.  I just need to love that someone else made the biscuits and was excited to do the job for me.

Dylan is 14 and is very willing to help me if I tell him what to do.  My problem all along is that I expected my kids to walk into a room, look at it and automatically know what needed to be done to clean it.  Kids brains just don’t work that way.  They don’t see what needs to be done and you have to lead them to it.

These days, I walk around like I am the Goddess herself.  I constantly run thoughts about how much I love life and enjoy my body and I tingle with joy.  These are thoughts that I directly put into my own brain and now they are beginning to come as though they are organic.  They float around in there unbidden and I don’t always have to stop and intentionally run them through.  I smile a lot and not just because some outside source causes me to smile.  I started doing that on purpose and now it happens automatically.

I tell my family what I need or want from them and they just do it and if I am gushy enough about it, they get excited about doing it.  I do special things just for myself.  I started wearing shirts that are lower cut because my decolletage is one of the things about myself that I really like.  I give myself awesome, extended foot rubs and hand massages.  Last night, for the first time in over a year, I put on fancy fingernails because I have short, stubby fingers and they make my hands look slimmer and more elegant.  I stopped using them because I had deemed them impractical.

I (again) packed away all of my soccer mom clothes and threw out my stained clothes and got some new, inexpensive items that are flattering.   I bought new make-up. Not expensive Lancome stuff because I don’t know that I would ever spend that much on make-up, but just some moderately priced stuff that is more flattering to my skin tone and age issues.  Next, I will get a good haircut.  I dyed my hair burgundy because I always thought Rita Hayworth looked awesome with her red hair and I wanted me some.

I looked hard until I found exercises that I don’t hate doing and now I only do those.  I don’t make myself do exercises that I hate.  I used to spend my day eating food I didn’t love because it is what I should eat.  Now, I only eat foods I love dearly and only until I am full.

I take care of things (or ask others to do it for me) that improve my quality of life.  For weeks now, I have been bothered by how dim the light is in the kitchen.  Mind you, it bothered me and that was the end of it.  Yesterday, I actually had Nathan and Eric climb up and replace the bulbs with higher wattage ones.  Problem solved and I am no longer irritated because I took the few minutes to commission someone else to fix the problem.  I have never learned enough how to take the time to make my life better.  Now I am.

I don’t feel bad if the house is not perfect.  I mobilize the forces and get the boys to help me. I hate peeling and mashing potatoes, for instance, and Eric is great at it and doesn’t mind doing it and so he does it for me now.  All I had to do was ask.  If he doesn’t want to do it, it doesn’t get done and we have baked potatoes instead. I simply do not do the stuff I really don’t want to do and you know what?  Nobody cares.  Some days,I am able to do those thing and not feel oppressed or depressed doing them and that’s whey they get done.

The family has yet to get wound up over anything I don’t do.  In fact, they’re happier because they can tell that I am happy too.  I spent so much time putting it onto other people to find a way to make me happy that I never took the time to make myself happy or show them how to make me happy.  Now, I do.  They seem to like taking care of me and finding ways to make me smile now.  I also kind of work a “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” kind of deal on them by being so happy and dismissive of it that they can’t imagine that anything is actually wrong.  I set the tone for my home and if I’m happy and joyful, they just follow suit.

In the past, I always thought I would be happy if we had a steady income.  I would be happy if the kids would keep their rooms clean.  I would be happy if I could lose weight.  I would be happy if we could go on vacation.  I would be happy if the dogs would behave. I guess I just got tired of waiting and now, I’m happy and all that other stuff can happen or not. I can’t keep holding my joy hostage until The Universe meets my list of demands.  The problem with basing your own joy on the actions of another person is that you’re gambling with your own happiness.  They may or may not do it.  If I, myself, create the actions and thoughts that manifest my own joy, I can bank on it.

So I’m writing this to tell you that the process is still working great.  If nothing else, I am happier than I was the last time I wrote because the feelings are now less forced and more organic.  Sure, it has only been 2 weeks (well, 13 days) and of course, things are going to happen in my life that are tough, but when I feel like this most of the time, it makes me feel more like I can face the tough times and not crumble.  I’ve gotten my reserves up really high by not overgiving to others and by turning my nurturing full force onto myself.  I don’t feel emotionally depleted and I don’t feel resentment.  The more I love myself, the more love I feel for and from other people.

Common sense is trying to tell me that this should level off at some point and I should hit a baseline of contentment, but for the time being it is still climbing like crazy.  Hey, I’ll take it!!

…because I’ve earned the right to be a woman and not a girl.  Not going back for nuthin, no no no!

I am on such a roll and really, I am going to do my best to explain it here because sometimes, the feelings are just too big for words.  Like Tinkerbell said in Hook, “This is the biggest feeling I’ve ever, ever felt.  This is the biggest feeling I’ve ever had and this is the first time I’ve been big enough to feel it.” No matter how big I have gotten on the outside, I was never big enough on the inside to feel what I feel because I always let fear and ego and delusion get in the way of it.  As I look back, I am surprised by how hard I worked to get in the way of my own happiness.  It is as though I conspired to create my own misery.

Back in 1996, I made a wish and put some things into motion as a result.  My wish was that I wanted to have joy in my life.   It’s hard to believe that was 16 years ago…March, in fact.  Within a few months, my whole life fell apart and a lot of you already know this story.  At that time, I had no idea what joy would even look like or feel like because I had never really had it.  I’d had happiness, but those are fleeting moments and are different than joy.  When most people talk about happiness, they do it in terms of a passive action.  “This makes me happy” or “That will make me happy.”  It’s about something else affecting you and creating an effect of happiness.  Joy is about a prolonged state of being.  I think there is a reason why “joy” is a noun and “happy” is an adjective. 

I don’t know when all of this really started.  From an esoteric standpoint, it began the day I was born or even before.  From a tangible position, I would say it likely began a year ago when Eric and I took some time for therapy to get some objective insight into issues we’d tried to resolve on our own for years and had not managed to best.  I think we both went into the experience, at least on some level, with the objective of “Fix THAT!” (that being the other person).  I don’t believe either of us was prepared for the remarkable insights we would receive about ourselves.

Since then, I feel as though I have been on a magical mystery tour, with little indicators and directions signs showing up one after another, sometimes on top of one another.  I’ve been led to people and books and lectures and lots and lots of technique practicing.  The end result – not that this is anywhere near the end – is that I have discovered how I want to be in the world and my life’s quest.  It is for the total pursuit of my own pleasure.

Never before have I allowed myself to think in such completely selfish terms and construct my entire world around what makes me happy and let me tell you, Peaches, it is NOT an easy task!  I am continually surprised by all of the ways that I court negativity and welcome adversity into my life.  I am shocked by how often I find myself gravitating toward exactly the situations and experiences that I really, really don’t want.  I automatically strive to make other people “happy” at the expense of joy in my life.  When I have real joy in my life as my baseline of operations, I automatically want to spread that joy to others by helping them find their joy. You begin to recognize your own sacred gifts and are able to share them freely without feeling over-extended or depleted.

The pursuit of pleasure at first sounds frivolous and hedonistic and in a way, it is.  It is about eating the foods you love with great gusto.  It’s about having the best sex you can possibly have (even if it is with yourself).  It is about spending your time the way you really want to spend it.  It’s about listening to the music you love, watching the TV shows that really entertain you.  It’s about adding beauty to your life in the simplest of ways like burning incense or lighting candles or creating a completely silent home.

It’s not about necessarily spending a lot of money.  It is about finding the beauty and the pleasure in what you have.  We get so focused on fixing the things that are wrong with our lives that often, we ignore the things that are right.  Focusing on providing self-pleasure does not make the problems go away, but it does give you a whole new perspective on them.  It creates a power source within you that is vibrant and strong and able to handle almost anything.  The effects are absolutely amazing and I am here to testify about it.

Our “No pain, no gain” society teaches us that we have to suffer in order to earn our way to happiness.  We have to work for fifty years and then we can rest at the end and enjoy life for a few years before we die.  We have to give all that we have to others and then try to survive on the crumbs we have left for ourselves.  This makes us a “nice” person.  Seriously, what do you imagine when you think of a “nice” person?  Isn’t it usually someone who is always there for other people, always giving, always smiling, always making others feel as though their needs are going to be met on some level or many levels?  I don’t want to be a “nice” person.  Nice people get tired.  Nice people get depleted.  Nice people give away so much that they do not have enough to give to themselves.  So here are the deceptively simple steps that I have found really, really work:

Remember this?

You probably do if you have ever ridden in an airplane.  Put the oxygen mask on yourself and THEN help others.  Same premise.  Take care of yourself first.  If you do not tend to your own needs first, you will not have enough in reserve to tend to others when they need you.  When you are depleted, your blood pressure goes up, you become irritable and anxious, you can’t sleep well or your sleep all the time, you eat automatically, sometimes without even knowing that you’re eating or what you’re eating, you have extreme emotional reactions and you are angry and resentful a lot of the time, even if it doesn’t show.  When you take time during ever day to give yourself indulgent pleasures, life does not feel unfair and you feel better able to share your own fulfillment with other people.

Use a lot of superlatives and expressive words when you speak.  “This was the BEST DAY EVER!”  “I have had such an AMAZING hour!  I spent the whole hour listening to music and giving myself a foot spa treatment.”  “The traffic on the way to work was SPECTACULAR!  I hit every green light and cut off five minutes!  I was a driving GODDESS!”  Celebrate every single one of even the tiniest wins to the max.  Brag.  Brag out loud.  Smile broadly while you do it.  Smiling will feel foreign and feigned at first, but then it will feel very natural.

Get excited!!!  Get pumped up about things you are going to do and make sure you do things that are worth that excitement.  Get into the sensory aspect of the tasks you perform.  If you are waiting at a bus stop, it might not be exciting to think about getting on a bus, but you can think about the warm sun on your shoulders and how cool it is that you have a big vehicle that is willing to come around and haul you to where you want to go for a small amount of money.  You might hate to do laundry, but don’t they feel wonderful and warm when they first come out of the dryer?  Isn’t it great that we don’t have to beat them on rocks to get them clean any more?  Doesn’t the detergent smell nice?  Wasn’t Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog wonderful?

Flood yourself with the good parts of any experience, even if you have to reach for them.

Promise yourself that you will never again engage the world in an automatic, detached way.  Plug in and experience every moment.  How can you sift it for the good stuff if you aren’t even there?  To demonstrate how often we are not really in the moment, can you really tell what your partner looks like?  Sure, you can pick him or her out of a crowd (we hope), but do you really see them?  There have been times when I have had my hair dyed a whole different color for days before Eric noticed.  Eric once shaved off his beard and mustache in the morning (which is a remarkable change for him) and I didn’t notice until late in the day.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at one of my kids and thought, “Wow, you’re really tall!”  Sometimes, I will spend a whole day in town with my kids and then be looking for them in a store when we got separated.  I would be surprised to realize that I had no idea what color clothes they were wearing even though I’d been “looking” at them the whole day.  I’ve even had someone compliment my earrings or necklace and realize I had no idea which one I was wearing.

Have you ever lost something that you had in your hand earlier the same day and realize that you have no idea whatsoever when you last had it?  You have gone on autopilot to the point that full minutes are impossible to recreate.

For crying out loud, Plug In!  You’re missing your life and the minutes are precious!

Only eat foods you really love.  Many of us have, for years, lived in a state of constant or periodic deprivation in regard to food and drink.  If we do eat something we love, we flood ourselves with guilt or we make the appropriate “tsk tsk” sounds to ourselves about how “I really shouldn’t be eating this” or “I’m going to pay for this later” or “I was bad yesterday and ate…”  I say do think unthinkable and eat on purpose and eat ROBUSTLY and make sounds and enjoy and celebrate every single minute, but do that every time.  I’m not saying to eat dessert as a way of life, but when you eat breakfast, don’t just grab an old doughnut and a cup of coffee.   Get up a few minutes early and eat breakfast.  Have ready the foods you love for breakfast and have a real breakfast that is fulfilling to you.  Eat what you want for lunch and dinner without apologies.  Say out loud how delicious it is and make all of the “mmmmmm” sounds you can.  Talk about how delightful it is.  Talk about the specifics, “This sauce on this chicken is to die for!“  Once you are really, really loving the food you eat, you take away the feeling of deprivation, then you don’t have to feed the emptiness anymore.  You automatically eat less as a result.

The other side to this is that you never, ever, ever engage in automatic eating.  There is no denial of anything (provided the denial is not medically indicated – if you are allergic to shellfish, don’t decide to ‘mmmmm’ your way through lobster and go to the hospital), but know and register everything you are eating.  That goes back to being plugged in.  If what you would be denying yourself is Lays potato chips, take out a few handsful of Lays and eat them, but don’t sit down in front of the TV with the bag and mindlessly eat.  You have to stay in the moment of the pleasure of eating.

Also, plugging into your eating means that you take your time chewing your food and savoring it because remember, it’s the food that you love, not the foods you’re forced to eat instead of the foods you love.  When you’re talking about how delicious it is, (yes, even if you are alone and yes, especially if you cooked it yourself) you are interjecting space into your eating process.  This lets you better register when you are full and then stop.

When you are full, stop.  No more.  Why?  Because you are never going to deprive yourself again and you can have it again when you want it.  There is no longer a position of want, craving or deprivation in regard to food.  There is only pleasure with every meal or even snack.

Tell other people what you need or want.  Of course, this means actually knowing what you need or want and most of us get a kind of blank stare on our faces when that question comes up.  We look like this  o.O  This means we have to start a list and yes, an actual list.  It goes from the tiniest things, “I want my kids to get up in the morning without a fuss” to the biggest “I want a house on acres and acres of land with servants and plenty of room for me to hide.”  Then there’s everything in between.  Write it all out.  Write until your hand hurts and then rest your hand and write some more.  Write down, “I wish my hand had longer endurance.”  I want I want I want.  I want a bigger DirecTV package.  I want a dog.  I want my floors mopped. I want someone else to do the laundry.  I want another car.  I want some Shake and Bake for the chicken tonight.  I want a pool.  I want to get something fun in the mail today.  I want to sleep well tonight.  I want to take tango lessons…

The trick is that the things you want have to start from today and move forward.  They can’t go back to the past.  “I want my mother to still be alive.”  “I want to be sixteen again.”  “I want to go back in time and not marry my husband.”  Those things don’t count because they involve something happening in the past and when you process that kind of want, you are going to immediately through down more resistance than you will to things that are even remotely possible.

Write it all down, pages and pages and pages.  It might go slowly at first, but once you get into it, your hand will not be able to keep up with your brain.  If you can’t get your brain to kick into gear on it, just start writing anything, no matter how ludicrous.  Stay with it.  It will come.

Have you ever had the experience where you can’t even decide on a restaurant where you want to eat dinner?  Your husband or friend says, “Where do you what to eat?” and you freeze up and wait for them to make a suggestion.  You volley back and say, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter to me.  What are you in the mood for?”  This can go on forever until a decision is actually reached.  The next time you ask, don’t let it degenerate into the vulture’s conversation from Jungle Book.  Honor the fact that someone cared enough to ask and say, “Bar-B-Que!”  Say, “Olive Garden.”  Say, “Sizzler!”  Say, “Carl’s, Jr.”  Say something, but make it something you really want to eat.  Have a second and third choice in the hopper just in case you get blind-sided by an “Oh, I’m not really in the mood for Italian” counter-attack.

Say what you mean.  One of my biggest regrets, and this one is a doozie, is that I have trained my children to have to second guess me to the point that they no longer believe me when I tell them what I really mean.  I have invested so much time saying “yes” when I obviously meant “no” and my body language conveyed “no” that they can no longer trust my words.  Quite a while ago, I got into a mode of never giving to anyone what I knew good at well at the time that I would resent later.  Even though there has been a long period of time where I told my children exactly what I meant, there was still enough time before that where I didn’t that they just can’t quite kick it yet.

If someone asks you to do a favor for them and you could, but you really just don’t want to do that, then don’t.  Tell them no.  You don’t have to go into elaborate detail about why you can’t do it.  You don’t even have to give them a reason at all.  People are not entitled to your every thought, your every nuance.  Just say, “You know, I don’t think I can do that.”  If they persist, say something like, “I’ve said my peace and counted to three.”  OK, you don’t have to say that, but you can just continue to let them know that it’s just not going to work for you to do what they want.  People are resourceful and you are not their only or last hope no matter how hard they try to convince you of that.  Kids are a different story because they are often completely dependent upon parents to do things for them.  That does not mean you have to be at their beck and call.  As I used to tell my daughter when she was little, “You know, honey, sometimes, the answer is just no.”

If this is enormously uncomfortable to you (and it often is at first), you can use Oprah’s technique of deflection.  She will put the person off for a day by saying, “I have to pray about this and I will let you know tomorrow.”  Now of course, you already know that you are going to say no.  You then go back to them the next day (be sure and do that because you’re a jerk if you make them come back to you and ask again) and say, “I prayed about this and Jesus said, ‘No.’”  I don’t like to blame Jesus for the choices I make and I like to give people ample time to find other solutions, so I just tell them no as graciously, but firmly, as I can on the spot to avoid the time lapse.

It is absolutely essential that you teach your children that the time, energy and interests of other people are just as important as theirs.  There is a fine line between teaching them to honor the needs of others versus teaching them to become cynical and be a doormat because they never, ever have what they want honored.  Kids are hard-wired to be egocentric and I use the word “egocentric” in the most possible way.  Humans are not really capable of truly forming externalized thought about the needs of others until they are will into their 20′s, which is why delayed parenthood can be beneficial for all.  Kids are very in tune with their own needs because that is necessary for survival.  Kids don’t have to be programmed to keep other beings alive, but they do have to know what they need in order to convey that they need it.  That’s why they often jabber about needing every toy on TV and every cereal in the grocery store aisle.  Their biology and their psychology is screaming for them to be self-involved.  That being the case, it is up to you to say no at the right times.  That doesn’t just include saying no to purchasing the cereal that has the toy they want floating inside cups and cups of cereal they will never eat.  It doesn’t just mean saying no to spending the night at Tracy’s when her parents are away and ten other kids will be there.  It also means saying that you won’t put down your novel and get out from under your heated blanket and drive them to the mall to hang out with their friends because you just don’t want to do it.  We do not have to be martyrs who are completely subservient to the wants and needs of others.  If you do this and the guilt comes, push it away.   Remember the labor.  Remember the nights they were sick and you did not sleep.  Remember the endless homework assignments and meals cooked.  Remember the times when you DID get up and take them when you didn’t want to go.  Sometimes, the answer is just no.  As Kate Northrup (daughter of the esteemed physician/author, Christiane Northrup) says, “If the answer is not HELL YES then the answer is NO.”  Only say yes if you can do so with your whole heart, a giant grin and zero reservations.

On the other hand, don’t say no when you mean yes.  It is amazing how many fun things we can talk ourselves out of doing.  We have a thousand reasons why we can’t accept invitations that might be fun or do things for ourselves.  If you find that you are turning down opportunities for things you want to do on behalf of others, then you have a problem.  If you find that you are turning down opportunities for things you want to do because you are afraid, then you have a problem.  That is when it becomes time to trust other people to manage their emotions or to trust yourself to manage your own fear (or both) and listen to the Nike commercial and just do it.

Example:  My husband says, “Do you want to go for a walk with me?”  I’m thinking, “The hills out here are so steep.  I’ll have a heart attack. What if he wants to go further than I can go?  What if my hips or arches start to hurt?”  I can give into the fear or I can say, “Yes! I want to spend time with you and get some fresh air and a little exercise” and then I can take control and tell him what route I want to take and how far I want to go.

Fear controls us in so many more ways than we know.  They’re just little tiny pushes, little words that whisper in our heads and tell us we aren’t capable, we aren’t powerful, we aren’t safe.  For instance, I was at a Christmas party for my husband’s work and one of the ladies who works with me who I completely adore called me over to her computer monitor and said, “Would you ever take a class like this?”  She then showed me YouTube footage of a burlesque class that involved strip tease and tassels and such.  My first reaction was to think about how my body is just not cut out for that.  I didn’t want to do it and didn’t even want to think about it.

Instead, I said, “You know, that really wouldn’t interest me, but I would love to take a class in belly dancing.”  It’s something that has been on my bucket list forever and I have avoided because… and there goes my list.  I don’t think I can afford it.  I’m overweight and it won’t be pretty.  I am not graceful.  I am not coordinated…  I could stay here for a while listing all the reasons why I have not taken belly dance classes even though they are offered in my town and even though in the past, I have had friends who took them and even invited me to go with them and even though I have always really, really wanted to do that.

So this time I did something different and threw it out there.  Immediately, she and another woman who works with Eric said yes, they would take classes with me if I would get the information.  I called around and found an instructor and the only person I could find teaching beginning belly dance classes taught them at 8:30pm.  Now you figure that even if the class is an hour long, a conservative length for a class, I still have 35 minutes of driving to get back home again.  That means I’m not home until 10:15-10:30pm.  Wow!  Very late. There was a time when that late hour would talk me out of it and boy, I would make it sound perfectly reasonable that I’d backed out.  This time, I said, “Nope, I’m gonna do it!”  Turns out the beginner classes are only 4 weeks long to teach the fundamentals, then you join a multilevel class that meets earlier.  Hey, I can do this for a total of 4 times, right?  Just 4 times!  I have now had half the classes and I am enjoying it and guess what?  I’m very uncoordinated and I am not very graceful and I am not very good at it, but I’m having a good time trying.  I could write it off after the 4 times (I already did pay for all of the classes) and say I’m not very good at it (giving in to the negative thoughts) or I can just keep practicing until I DO get good at it!

As I result of taking the belly dance classes, I noticed the Zumba classes that our instructor teaches right before our class and you know, it looked fun!  I saw people of all sizes and levels of fitness doing it and having a good time, so I considered taking those classes.  The instructor told me the first class was free, so last week my second class, I made plans to come early and try those out too.  I had every intention, but after when I woke up the day after the first belly dance class, my right hip, which tends to be tricky anyway, was absolutely killing me.  It continued to hurt through the week and was still hurting the day of class.  Ibuprofin just was not cutting the pain, so I made the executive decision not to stress it further with Zumba.  I did, however, get to class early so I could watch more of the Zumba class and yes, I have decided I really want to try it.  In the interim, I have learned that there is a Zumba for the Wii and I really want to try that out.  Delena showed me clips of Just Dance 3 and that also looks like a lot of fun.  I am finding a lot of alternative ways that I can get moving and enjoy myself as well.

Those are just a few of the ways that I am working to say YES to things instead of talking myself out of the fun I could have.

Smile, smile, smile.  Until I made an effort to be aware of my expression (PLUG IN!), I never noticed how much I walk around with a neutral or unhappy expression on my face.  I have had several times in the past that Eric or one of the kids would ask me, “What’s wrong?” and then not believe me when I said, “Nothing,” believing it was one of those “Nothing”s that really means, “You need to keep digging to find out” or “If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.”  It’s not a trick.  There’s really nothing wrong, but my default expression is not joyful because my default feeling is not joy.  I have made myself so miserable through my own actions, that something extra has to happen for me to be happy or joyful.  Isn’t that just stupid??  My default feeling should be joy and the only time that should deviate if if I have to stop for a moment and get perspective on a challenging situation!

We have opiate sensors in our brains that biophysically program us to be happy.  We have to actively work to be unhappy and happy is our natural state!  How often do you see children or babies (minus the ones with horrible home lives) who are naturally unhappy?  It does happen (Nathan was a prime example among my kids), but most kids are by default, smiling and happy!  Over time, we train ourselves out of that by creating expectations of others and ourselves that cannot be achieved.  That locks us into a failure cycle that trains us to expect to be disappointed on a regular basis.

So SMILE.  You have to train yourself to get back into the habit.  The way to do it is the obvious one.  Whenever you remind yourself to become self-aware and plug-in, you smile, as big and wide as you can make it.  Put small stickers of some kind, any kind, around your house, your car, your work and when you see that sticker, plug into your world and smile big.  Just the action works, but it’s even better if you can connect it to something wonderful.  Baby ducks!! SMILE!  Christmas lights!  SMILE!  Popcorn at the movies!  SMILE!  Baby laughs!  SMILE!  Everyone, no matter how jaded and cynical they are, has something that will make them grin. Find yours!

Speaking of smiling…

Smile and Say “Thank You”  As the caregivers, we often take a great deal of our self-value from being able to do it all and not need any help.  In fact, we can sometimes get crabby when people try and help us.  Sometimes, we might feel defensive or insecure as though they are showing us that what we are doing is not good enough.  Another place where we get gummed up in not being able graciously accept a gift or feel comfortable when someone does something nice for us or says something nice to us.

How often when someone pays you a compliment, do you demure and say, “Oh, this old thing?” or “Are you kidding? I look terrible today!”  How often do you immediately insist on returning the compliment, “Oh, it’s not as good as YOURS!”  “You looks amazing too!”

Pssst:  It’s not a contest.  Let me tell you straight out that you devalue the compliment someone took the trouble to pay you when you negate it.  If you return it with a compliment of your own, they don’t know if you are saying it because it’s true or as payback for complimenting them.

Just smile as big as you can and say, “Thank you!  I feel really great today” or “I’m glad you liked it, I had fun making it!”  or “You know, this is one of my favorite outfits” or “I LOVE this haircut!”  Make THEM feel good and glow for having noticed and they will compliment you more often because it feels good to do so!

If your husband gets up and starts sweeping or washing dishes, even if you know he’s doing it maliciously, (And Lord yes they do, sometimes!) force yourself past the insecurity and frustration and those awful tapes in your head and treat it as though it is the most precious gift in the world.  Give him a hug and say, “Thank you.  That made my day.  It is such a blessing to have your help.”  Or you can go foxy and say, “You know it makes me so hot when you do that.”  Just smile your biggest, prettiest smile and act like he just handed you the world on a silver platter.

For the longest time, I had trouble accepting gifts from people.  When they asked me what I wanted for Christmas or my birthday, I would say, “Oh really, don’t get me anything.”  If they give me something, I’d immediately say, “Oh, you shouldn’t have!”  On some level, I am genuinely telling them not to ever buy me gifts when inside, I want gifts!  EVERYONE wants gifts when it comes down to it, but we don’t want to look greedy.

Do you know what we look like when we treat a gift or the offer of a gift that way?  It’s not humble.  It’s not gracious.  We look ungrateful.  Someone took the time to pick out a gift they thought we would like and WE tell them that they shouldn’t have done it.  SHAME!  When you make that list I talked about before and get in touch with your wants, pare it down to a list people can actually get for you, things of all different price ranges, have it ready and vow that you will make copies of it and pass it around to those who ask!  Even simple things like “I want a new coffee mug!”  “I want a pen that works!”  “I want silver hoop earrings!”  People LOVE to fulfill the wish list of someone else and it makes them feel special and good to take care of others.  Will you really deny them that because you are so broken you don’t know how to say thank you?

A very dear friend of mine is ill with cancer and has been fighting hard for 2 years now.  She has not yet had chemotherapy, but because the cancer is in her stomach, she has bouts of tremendous nausea.  A mutual acquaintance of ours asked her if she needed anything and true to the tradition of women in our generation, she said, “Oh no, I’m fine.”  Now this is a woman who, that day, could barely walk because she was so nauseated.  Her husband travels on business and she is frequently alone.  The lady she was speaking to brought her over a tureen of soup and my friend admonished her, reminding her that she’s said she didn’t need anything.  The woman stopped her and said, “Have you ever considered that this might be my ministry?  Please don’t take it from me.”  My friend learned a valuable lesson in “just smile and say thank you” and I got a great story to tell.

Let the people around you have their ministries.  Let them feel good by helping.  Empower them to do good things by letting them do good things.  If you tell them enough not to do it, it will burn right out of them.  We can look around and see the obvious results of an generation of people who were taught by the previous generation that their help was not warranted or appreciated.  We said, “No, I can do it” too many times.  Now, we have to take that back and re-empower the people around us.  Then, everybody wins.

I can’t call myself the Pleasure Queen because that title has already been claimed and the last thing I want to do is usurp the wonderful lady who has earned it.  Instead, I’m going to say that I am on a quest to live a life that is completely pleasure based.  There was a time not so long ago when I hated my life and, in fact, would whine incessantly to Eric about how I spend my days doing things I hate doing.  I was miserable and angry and I knew that somehow, some way, it was his fault.  Worse, he knew that I knew it was his fault and he had no idea how it was his fault.

So what I did was I stopped doing the things I hate doing.  All of them.  If I don’t feel like washing the dishes, they don’t get done.  Just giving myself permission to not do them is usually freeing enough that I don’t even mind doing them after all.  If I don’t want to make up the bed, then it’s “air the bed out” day.  If I don’t want to mop the floors, I do it the next day and the world keeps turning.  If I don’t want to drive to town for groceries, I find a way to make the groceries I have work out.  If I don’t want to go to bed, I stay up.  If I don’t want to watch a show Eric wants to watch on TV, I read my Kindle or go downstairs rather than sit with him and suffer through yet another fucking episode of “Survivorman.”  I literally do what I want to do and rarely do what I don’t want to do.

I have blessings in my life, but I would not say that I have a particularly charmed life in comparison to others.  I’m not wealthy by a long shot; not even the longest shot you could imagine.  I have four dogs and I’m not even a dog person.  My husband and I have gone through enormous struggles in our time together, both internally and externally.  We have six kids, three grandkids, a mortgage we don’t pay, many feet of snow pending in the near future (presumably), a long drive to pick up anything we happen to need from town, a lot of miles between us and anything like family, very few friends to use as a pit crew and my husband has the attention span of a gnat.  There are lots of holes in the wall plenty big enough for stress, fear, panic, insecurity and conflict to leak through.  The trick is to make good and sure that what comes through those holes is sunshine, fresh air and blessings.

It’s not that frustrating things don’t happen, it’s that I’ve worked hard to change how I respond to them.  It’s not that there aren’t aggravating people around me who try my patience and push all my buttons and hurt my feelings, it’s that I don’t spend time with those people and if I am put in a situation where I have to be with them, I have complete faith that it’s what was supposed to happen and that it’s time for me to work through that lesson.  I also shore up my reserves and make sure that there’s no way they can have my power.  They can’t bring me down to that painful place where they live.  If they are so hell bent on hurting someone else or making them miserable in some way, they must really be conflicted and in pain themselves.  Regardless, it’s a bummer they hurt, but I’m not going to let them feel better by taking away my joy.  It’s not theirs to break.

Instead of being angry and frustrated that there’s seven feet of snow on the ground and I can’t get out of my house, I feel grateful that I’m warm and there’s plenty of food and I’m with the people I love.  Instead of being upset that our power is out again, I am grateful that we have a generator and a wood stove.  I look for the joyful stuff and celebrate that to the complete max and somehow, that makes the tough stuff not seem to have so much power over me, just like those small people who want to act like assholes.  My joy is just not going to be sold out that cheaply.

So that’s where I am at.  As I look back, I can see so many of my experiences over the past several months leading up to this.  I can feel my plan for the year taking shape and I am so excited for where it is heading.  There are 8000 nerve endings wired up as receptors for pleasure sensations in the body.  I plan to find and exhaust every single one.  I hope you’ll join me in the Pleasure Crusade!

So I set about going around re-gathering my power eggs (see previous post) from the various places where I’ve left them.  Some were given to people who earned them. Some were given to people who were entitled to them by birthright.  Some were practically thrown at people who didn’t really want them.  Some I just sat down on the side of the road so I didn’t have to carry them any more.  I was pretty careless with my power eggs.  I think a lot of us are because our own empowerment is a lot to embrace.  It’s easier to blame other people and not have any kind of ownership of the things that made my life hard than to accept that in every way, we really do create our own reality.

I was reading in a book by Marianne Williamson called “A Woman’s Worth” and she goes into her take on the fairly recent societal change of men being present in the birth experience.  At the time she wrote the book almost 20 years ago, Williamson was not in a relationship and I was discouraged by how negative a lot of her writing was about men.  She very correctly maligns the (also a relatively new development) patriarchal society that has disempowered women, creating a situation where we have had to work our way up from being little more than chattel.  There are still a lot of work we have to do to get to where we ought to be, but you know, my experience both with myself and with counseling other women leads me to believe that the conditioning is less with fixing the rest of the world that has a really jacked up view of how women should be and more of fixing our own misperceptions and warped views.

In that book I mentioned above, there is a mention of the relatively new experience of men going into the birthing area when women are having babies to offer their support.  Now something you might or might not know about me is that I worked in birth for almost 20 years.  I attended a lot of women who were having both home births and hospital births and I taught childbirth classes for all of that time.  When I started in 1980, it was still the new thing for men to be in the labor and delivery rooms in hospitals.  In fact, not long before I started that particular career, a guy (I think he was in New York or Chicago or someplace back East) was arrested because he had handcuffed himself to his about-to-deliver-a-baby wife so he could not be removed from the birth experience.  In the hospital where she would deliver the baby, it was customary for the man to be present with the wife to comfort her during the labor, but to be sent away when she was taken into the delivery room.  He was having none of that.  He did get to see his baby born, as I recall, but he was also promptly arrested for trespassing.   

As I made my way through the next two decades, it became standard practice for the woman to have at least one comfort person with her all the way through the process.  Sometimes, it was the husband/partner and sometimes, it was not.  From my own professional perspective, sometimes the husband/partner was the most ideal comfort person and sometimes, they were not.  Mothers are often the worst support person a laboring woman can have, especially for the generation delivering babies at that time.  Moms often had a horrible childbirth experience and being with their birthing daughters was sometimes a complete disaster.  Specific to men, however, they were sometimes a tremendous asset and sometimes just a pain in the ass.

The point Ms. Williamson seemed to be making in bringing up men in the birth experience wasn’t all that stuff I just said.  That was incidental.  What she was referencing is that men often are gung ho for being involved with witnessing the strength, empowerment and magnificence of a woman giving birth (and truly, it is an awe-inspiring feat to witness and never lost its edge for me a bit), they are reluctant to give that kind of support to a woman who is birthing a new life in other ways, through her creative, empowered efforts.

You know.  I’m just not convinced that is true and I don’t think it gives men the benefit of the doubt.

As women, we are by our very nature creators.  There is an internet meme that was going around a while that said this:

One of the greatest measure of a man in this society – and I do believe this is true – is not how much money he makes, how much weight he can bench press or how fine his lawn looks.  It’s how happy he is able to make his lady.  When you see a woman walking around with a big cheesy grin on her face like she’s the cat that just ate the canary and has the sweetest secret anyone ever knew, some part of you has to think that her man is doing something right.  This means that when you work to make yourself happy, whether he knows it or not, it’s going to make him look good as well.

When you meet a man who has a wife who is just bitchy and crabby and demanding and shrewish and awful, you might feel bad for him, but don’t you also kind of think less of him?  As a woman, don’t you wonder even a little bit if maybe she wasn’t always that way, but maybe he turned her that way?  Men are not likely wondering that, but I imagine they are speculating why this guy would stay with someone like that.  Why are they letting themselves be treated in such a way?

When a woman is happy and glowing and thriving, everyone around them shines a little brighter and looks a little better.  I’m telling you the Goddess’s only truth, though and hear me now and believe me later:  They can’t give it to us.  We have to create it all ourselves.  We are the life givers and we just have to be able to to give ourselves life sometimes too.

There is an insidious truth that hides behind all of this that is sort of like the big white elephant stomping all over the room that not very many people mention.  Taking control of our own life and making the changes that need to be made for us to flourish and thrive is really, really hard work.  I would love to be able to tell you that once you take those first few steps and get up off the couch and claim more for yourself that the wind is at your back and the road just rises right up to meet you.  A good bit of the time, that’s true, but sometimes, the wind knocks you down and the road rising up to meet you is aimed at your face.

Let’s take an example with which I am very, very well acquainted: the overweight woman.  My husbands did not cause me to be fat, neither one of them.  Both have let me know they had a problem with it.  (Point noted)  My kids did not cause me to be fat.  My jobs did not cause me to be overweight (despite all of them being desk jobs).  My genes did not cause me to be fat, despite carrying a predisposition toward it.  What caused me to be fat is that I love food and I ate to feel nurtured and comforted when I was going through a long, painful time of my life.  What caused me to be a fat is not that I sat all day for work, but that I did not make an effort to move at any time during my day.  The years compounded and here I am.

I will feel so much better when I lose around 40% of my body weight.  Most of you can do the math and figure out that such a weight loss is of Biggest Loser proportions.  That is a LOT to contemplate and the enormity of that accomplishment is a component in why it has not happened yet.  It’s not the reason, but it is a part of the puzzle.  I can work up the motivation. I can intellectually see that it needs to happen.  I am well aware of the impact my extra weight has on my family and on my ability to fully enjoy life in a plugged in, engaged way.  A cognitive awareness of those issues is clearly imbedded in my head.  No matter how much support I get from family, friends, husband, physical trainer or people on a message board, I have to do the actual work myself.  I have to get on the treadmill.  I have to count my calories.  I have to lift the weights.  I have to sacrifice my comfort strategies or develop new ones.  All of those *I* messages are very clear that no matter how much someone else wants it for me or supports me, the responsibility rests in only one place and that is me.

My weight loss journey and ultimate destination will have a negative impact on my family as well as a positive one. Sure, I will probably live longer and my husband will have a healthier, more active and possibly more attractive wife (although I really cannot imagine it because damn, how much better can it possibly get?).  I will be able to do more with my kids.  The positive changes will be incredible!  Then we get to, “Hey!!!  Why do we have no cookies/chips/candy in the house?”  “Why are you working out all the time?”  “You need to buy new clothes, again?”  “What do you mean there is nothing at this restaurant you can eat?”  My husband is a very jealous person (according to him – I have not really seen evidence of it) and he has never known me when I was not overweight.  I wonder what kind of can of worms that could open?  How much safety does he derive from me being fat and not considered to have a socially acceptable body?

I use this example to illustrate a few issues.  One is that no matter what specific change you overlay onto the example, you are the one who has to do the work.  No one can do it for you.  That also means that you get all the credit for success.  Another is that no matter what changes you make, there will be fallout, both positive and negative, but can you really let the potential negative effects stop you from having what you want?  No.  Should you accept that the responsibility is yours?  Absolutely.  Should you let other people deal with their own reactions and trust that ultimately, they are entirely capable of handling whatever comes up?  Most certainly.  Should I get up off that couch and put down the Cheetos and start moving more?  Yes, I sure did.  Who am I doing this to benefit?  Me.  It’s not about my kids or my husband or anyone except me and the goals I have for myself and my life.

It has always been so much easier for me to pull the covers back over my head and dissolve into the oblivion of sleep, metaphorically speaking.  So many times, I have made a good start and then when the real work of it all set in, I gave up and started eating again.  I could pretend it was because some minor crisis threw me off track or blame other people all day long, but really, I failed because it was because it was hard and I did not want to do the hard work.  I wanted to eat and self-medicate and not work out.  That’s really what it was all about.

To show how it overlays with other problems, one of the other challenges I am currently facing is that I have no “in person” female friends.  I have women who I love to pieces and some who I see every few months for a few hours at a time, but no one who is in my life on an ongoing basis, right in front of me.  Part of what I am writing about in my books that are under development is the concept of “familiar pain.”  This is a theory I have that our spirit connects into a pain that happened to us during our formative years and continually recreates circumstances in our lives to duplicate that initial pain.  This continues to happen until we dig out that original pain and heal it, at which time we can move on without having to repeat the same painful situations.  This is a little too Freudian for my typical tastes, but it rings true for me.

In my counseling practice, I encounter a lot of people who are seeking out the same relationships over and over (just with different faces), playing out the same cycles over and over and wondering why nothing ever changes.  We all have these familiar pains in our lives and it is an integral part of the process toward our own self-actualization.  Sometimes, in self-defense, we push people away from us in order to avoid those cycles rather than healing the pain inside.  That will usually touch on an entirely different familiar pain, which is that of abandonment and loneliness.  Between the opposite reactions of going into the repeated cycles and pushing everyone away to avoid them, there is no “right” way of handling the situation.  Either will work or not work because the key is to figure out what the common thread is to the pain in your life and to work to heal that old pain, which helps you to understand and heal the new pains.  You can do that alone or you can do that while you are in the repeated patterns.  It doesn’t matter.

I believe that these patterns of repeated familiar pain are not indicative of weakness or mental illness or instability.  They are simply a part of life.  No matter how wonderful our parents were or what great relationships we had with our siblings or peers, none of us are blessed with a perfect life and hurts will be created.  When they are created, big or small, they will be duplicated until they are resolved and put to rest.  This is how our spirit heals itself, just as our body is able to produce antibodies to heal itself.

I also do not believe that we are normally in a position to heal those old pains until we are older and have greater understanding of human behavior and spirit connectivity behind us.  Some people can, but I think it mostly comes with the lessons of aging, which are wonderful and dynamic if you lean into them.  Around the age of 29-31, the planet Saturn (planet of limitations and challenges) comes back around on its orbit to the same position it was in when we were born.  The orbit is elliptical, which is why the length of time varies.  This seems to be the first true encounter with what I would call “dynamic self-awareness” and at that time in the life of most people, there is a formative event that changes their life in an extreme way, usually quite profoundly.  If you can effectively math your way through it, you’ll see that it happens again around the age of 58 or so, which is another touch point for this kind of development. This kick off tends to start a process of internal restructuring and begins building on the foundation of who we are to be for our adult years.  The foundation we established in childhood is still there, but the building that was on it is usually razed to the ground in favor of a “new build.”

Now, I told you that to tell you this.  My familiar pain lies in interpersonal relationships with women.  I’m just not good at it.  My relationships with women in my first 16 years were not particularly great.  My mom started off well, but when I was ten, it seemed like she was ill a good bit of the time with frequent hospital visits.  This put me, as the oldest child and only daughter, in a situation to have to take care of my brothers and my father.  The shift in the parent-child dynamic was not good for my relationship with my mother.  I loved her intensely, but it was hard for either of us to really ever know where we stood with the other one and as a result, it was very difficult for her to provide any kind of nurturing to me.  This is significant because anyone who knew my mother will tell you immediately that she was one of the most kind and nurturing people you could ever hope to meet.   I thought this was all in my head until my mother died and I received a copy of her book of poetry.  It was never published, but my aunt made copies of the poems my mother had written in longhand and put them into page protectors in a big binder.  That book is one of my most prized possessions.  Mom wrote poetry about nature, about the things around her, but mostly, she wrote about the importance of the people in her life. There are poems about her husbands, her father, her mother, her siblings and her sons and her grandchildren.  There are poems about her relationship with God.  There is, however, not one single poem about me in the entire book and that told me a lot of what I needed to know.  I was simply not a factor in her world or at least not one she could focus on in a creative way.

My friendships through school were strained and at times, I was too clingy.  I was so desperate for anything that kept me rooted in childhood that I held on too tightly to the girls who would be friends with me.  I know this made the relationships uncomfortable for more than just me.  I wanted to be a kid.  I wanted to be a teen.  But I was in a situation at home where I had to act like an adult.  I had to decide in the morning what we would have for supper that night.  I had to get my brothers ready to go out to school before I left.  I had to make supper around doing my homework and try to keep the house clean.  Dad worked all the time and was very traditional in his thoughts about labor division in the home, so there was not a lot of support there. I don’t remember ever even hearing thank you from either of my parents.  It was just assumed that the tasks fell to me and I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.

I was teased mercilessly from first grade until I left high school in my junior year.  I literally do not remember a single day of school when I was not spit on, called names or physically pushed around, usually all through the day.  When I look back on my school years, all I sense is a nightmare of tears shed and unshed and friends who drifted away and were not available.

I fell deeply in love a few times in high school in that intense way that teenage girls can love. Feeling loved and appreciated was exciting and new and refreshing.  Don’t get me wrong.  My parents loved me tremendously and I have no doubt of that.  They just had absolutely no clue what to do with me.  The young men I loved did.  The one who I most loved quickly set me straight that I was too young and that he was not obtainable.  I drifted to others who were.  When a rumor was started that I was a lesbian, I immediately became pregnant.  “See how wrong you are?” that seemed to say, which created little satisfaction when the ultimate result was that I was 15 and expecting a baby.

I got married and went away and started a family.  I married a man who degraded and ridiculed me on a regular basis and that was normal to me.  We invariably move toward what feels familiar to us.

My friendships with women for the next twenty years remained very surface and fragile.  I had many, many people at any given time who I would say were my friends, but who were not there to provide any kind of significant support to me.  They were warm bodies who came and went at my house and provided enough noise and distraction that I did not have to investigate any of the things that were wrong with my life and with me.

Right on schedule (Hello Saturn!) at age 30, my marriage began to fall apart. It had never been particularly strong to start with and after 14 years of struggling, Paul just let go of the tug-of-war rope and I fell flat on my ass.  I made a lot of self-destructive choices after that and fell right down a spiral that consisted of nothing but immersion in familiar pain with no real resolution to it.  I hurt absolutely all the time.  Relationships came and went.  I had a beautiful daughter, which was the best thing to come into that time, but she was born to a mother who was tremendously broken and emotionally, spiritually and mentally ill on several levels.

Two years later, I remarried Paul, mostly because as I said, we drift toward the familiar.  Also because he asked and I was not doing anything better.  We quickly began to repeat old patterns (a frequent relapse of the lessons Saturn tries to teach us) and he left two years later, this time for another woman.

The pain was exquisite, but this time, I was determined not to fall into the same trap as before.  What friendships I did have were unstable and very imbalanced.  I left for California and tried to heal.

I married again a year later.  This time, there were a whole new set of emotional challenges to work through, as well as some manifestation of the “familiar pain.”  I did not have many friendships at all over those years.  By then, I was in the rejection  phase where I avoided contact with people to avoid the familiar pain.  Plus, Eric was providing enough of that on his own.  It took years for me to work through and heal myself and he was a big help in that.  I literally could not have done it without him and my wonderful counselor.

The familiar pain of my relationships with women is another story and clearly he is ill qualified to help me with that one, although he does try, God bless’im.  He is a social butterfly and has a lot of friends with whom he spends time.  He does so away from me.  I do not drink alcohol, which, I have found as an adult, is a huge impetus to socialization.  I don’t like to drink and I don’t like to be the only sober one in the room and it is amazing how many adult social settings involve alcohol.  Even if people are just getting buzzed instead of drunk, there is an energy shift that is almost palpable.  I’m not in the club.

Several years ago, frustrated by my lack of immediate friendship and at the prodding of Eric to get out in the world and do something (I was an admitted hermit), I got involved in the community and tried hard to cultivate friendships.  I was growing girlfriends and let me tell you, I was not good at it.  The whole experience was another nightmare and yes, it completely reconstructed that horrible time of school peers.  Dear Lord, what an effin mess that turned out to be.  The long and the short of it is that the whole situation, which went on for several years, only served to reinforce to me that women are not people who deserve my attention.  The ones I was with where catty, two-faced, unpredictable (not in a good way), back-stabbing and emotionally crippled.  If there were any in the ones I met who were not that way, they were drowned out by the ones who were.  Ultimately, it was too much work and too much pain and too much ick and I turned around and walked back into my house after 3 years and closed the door.  My friend, Jackie, survived the turmoil with me and I cherish her, even though circumstances make it so that our only contact is a frenzied catch up every 2-3 months.  She is one of those wonderful people I know who is not in my life on an ongoing basis even though she lives 2 miles from me.

In a more removed fashion, I set up the same dynamic with my website.  I have run “Eye on Soaps” since 2000 and last year, it developed into “All My Writers” to encompass a broader scope of coverage.  I started the site to empower writers, mostly women, to step up and have their voices hear and over the years, some amazing women (and Sage) have been involved with the project.  I became personal friends with many and at one point, was very emotionally close to everyone on my staff.  This was how it was for several years sure enough, the same scenarios developed.   People came on board who were abusive, who were users, who exploited the site for their own gain and who behaved deplorably and were just not very nice or mature people.  My experience with those people caused me to pull back on that front as well.  I have a great staff now, don’t get me wrong, but I find myself hesitant to invest emotionally.  I am not sure if that is good or bad.

I also want to say right now here and in public that I am truly and deeply sorry for the pain I caused to any innocent bystanders when I was working through my familiar pain regarding this issue and was struggling to find my way in some really assed up and dysfunctional relationship that resulted.  I was rarely my best self when I was going through the re-creation of these hurts and I know I did not honor the people around me who were not actively involved in those scenarios that played out.  I am truly very sorry for not being at the top of my game, which is what you deserved.

I went back to shutting myself off and Eric pretty much agreed “Yeah, wow, you really suck at this.”  That was something like 3 years ago.  I have kept to myself mostly since then.  Last year, I started to feel as though I really wanted the company of women and read back through some of my old journals to remind myself of why I didn’t.  I do well in the company of men, mostly because I had brothers instead of sisters and sons instead of daughters (5 to 1), but a woman who is friends with men is treated as suspect around here and really, it’s not Eric’s first choice either.

I began to put out the beacon that I wanted to make friends with some women who are emotionally strong and steady, who are insightful and have a good, healthy spiritual relationship with whatever makes them feel spiritual and who provide me with a safe, loving and positive place to grow and learn and socialize.  The first thing that happened is that I tuned into the relationships I have with the women who are involved with my sons.  Amber and Kayla are amazing, strong young women and I adore them, as does Delena, my daughter.  I love them both tremendously and feel a strong connection there.

Over 2011, I connected with other strong women around me whose company I very much enjoy.  These are women who have been through adversity and are still, to some degree, coping with it, but who refuse to allow it to define them or keep them down.  They are not trying to prove anything through their friendships and are  more invested in the quality of social environment they are creating for themselves than in the number of people they can collect or the social status their friends bring them.  They are good at elevating themselves and the people around them through positive support rather than making themselves feel more superior by attacking and demeaning others.  They raise themselves up rather than lowering others around them.

All that being said and with the blessings around me of having met some amazing women, I find myself succumbing to the old conditioning.  I keep expecting them to act like the other women who have hurt me.  I keep expecting to walk up on the conversation I was not supposed to hear that tells me how they *really* feel about me.  I keep expecting to be rejected.  I keep expecting to be humiliated.  I drew in the quality women who I want as friends, but I can feel myself working on that familiar pain and having to constantly deconstruct the expectations I put in place.  I have to actively work to stay open to the “new” experience and not create the old one.  That causes me to move forward, pull back, expand, contract, reach out, pull back.

I struggle to find the balance between protecting myself and being available.  I work to say yes when I would normally say no and to say no when I would normally say yes.  I so much want these healthy relationships and I know that part of the contaminant that has caused problems in the past is inside me.  I also know that in the past, I was less healed of this particular pain and so I drew in the types of people who would play out those scenarios for me.  I instinctively know that the women I have met in the past year are different from that by my own design in drawing them to me, but I have to be careful not to layer my own conditioned filters over the relationships.

To reach back up to the example I gave of the weight loss struggle, again, the work that has to be done is mine.  I am responsible for the way I engage this new opportunity at friendship.  I have to do the internal work to break down the old conditioning and expectations and remain open to what it is like to have positive and loving relationships again.  I have to learn to trust women.  I have to challenge my own previous experiences and step out of what is familiar and learn a new way.  I have to provide an emotional place inside of me where these new connections can thrive and flourish and prosper into supportive and loving friendships.  Just like with the weight loss, I have to do the work to make it happen or I can go back inside and never have that experience.

So that is what I mean when I say that some of my power eggs are broken.  That is the sacred struggle that I’m working on now and I am grateful to be involved in that process.  I would rather be self-aware and involved in active healing, even if it is sometimes a painful and dicey process, than to have my head stuck in the sand or be running on autopilot and endlessly repeating the same hurtful cycles.

Ultimately, my goal is to create a loving, supportive network of amazing people to carry me and us into our golden years.  I want to minimize the drama and playing out of old, hurtful cycles and surround myself with people who make my world a better place to hope I do the same for them.

It is said that the true measure of a person is how we feel when we walk away from spending time with them.  Do we feel joyful, empowered, happy and blessed?  Do we feel drained, depleted, sad and bereft?

I want to be the person who engages in a mutual dynamic of uplifting and empowerment with the people I know and love.  I guess that is the goal I am planting for this year.  I also want a stereo for my caddy, but that is a whole other column altogether.