That’s my secret, Captain. I’m always angry

April 20, 2020 by

I am losing my journey.

Ok, so I am trying to get into writing the truest sentence I know first, then working through all the stuff later. So let me expound on that just a bit and see where we go.

I am still afraid. I am not going to talk about being afraid today because frankly, it is exhausting. I’m like the Incredible Hulk of fear.

That’s my secret, Captain. I’m always angry.

How tired did Bruce look when he said that, I mean, for real.

Ok, so today’s little offering may not be very elegant, and I am going to be okay with that. I am just going to tell it how it goes. While it may not suit my ego, it suits the purpose – the purpose to stop sacrificing the journey.

  • I type “I am the Incredible Hulk of fear”
  • I google “Incredible Hulk angry” in order to make sure I get the quote exactly right – I am not looking to piss off my fellow Marvel fans today.
  • The very first thing that pops up is a StackExchange forum discussing the meaning behind the quote. I find the teaser intriguing and click through.
  • It’s really good. In fact, it is so good, I am going to interrupt my original thought, sacrifice elegance, and substitute flow of thought.
  • Forum participant, Avner Shahar-Kashtan offers:

In the beginning of the Avengers movie, Black Widow finds Banner in India, treating sick children. This isn’t just a humanitarian endeavor for him; Banner purposefully surrounds himself with injustice – with poverty, with senseless death – so that he could be constantly angry at something.

Being constantly angry allows him to keep his anger under control – it’s not a sudden spike of anger that disrupts his concentration and lets the Hulk out, it’s a constant, background anger that lets him decide when to unleash the green beast.

From the script:

 NATASHA ~ You know, for a man who’s supposed to be avoiding stress, you picked a hell of a place to settle.

BANNER ~ Avoiding stress isn’t the secret.

This doesn’t say it explicitly, but implies to me that his choice of location and activity are part of his secret.

In a flash, this provokes a few other references

  • Rocky and Mr. T
  • Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic
  • Joyce Meyer’s “Do it Afraid”

Actually, that’s not entirely true. The first two were flashes, the last one happened while typing the other two. Just trying to keep the actual flow here since this is a bit different for me.

Anyway, I am still not real keen on talking about me being afraid today – it is still exhausting. But this general look that I have discovered on my way to saving the missed journey is interesting.

  • Bruce learned to manage his anger by confronting it, immersing himself in it.
  • Rocky nearly lost himself because he refused to acknowledge his fear.
  • Elizabeth Gilbert has created a boundaries for hers; it is not allowed to impact the journey.
  • The Joyce Meyer one I don’t really remember. I read that one a long time ago but I am pretty sure it went something like “everybody is afraid of something. God has you. Do it afraid.”

My strategy isn’t any of these. It is more Piglet in nature; let’s not get anywhere close to anything that is scary. Let’s just sit here on this nice patch of earth and just love each other.

That really isn’t working for me. It is obvious my fight, flight, freeze is all out of whack. Hence the exhaustion, hence the lost journey.

I have done a lot of really neat stuff this year that have been accompanied by neat thoughts, incredible conversations, and new ideas. I have written about none of them. Fear takes my words first. I intended to write much more often this, year. I was going to document the college journey, the business progress, the life at home – all of it. I am so grateful for this rich and amazing life I have. I was committed to preserving it better, honoring it more, passing it down with better record by way of this keyboard.

We know what they say about the road to hell…

  • I am nearly finished with my first semester of college – and it has been amazing
  • I am on day 28 of a quarantine that has had me nearly 98% housebound and isolated. My day to day life, like so many others, is nothing like anything I have experienced before
  • My husband is a licensed pilot and an adventurer
  • Our oldest daughter and her boyfriend have bought their first home, our youngest has been accepted into the STEM program
  • I am running a pretty successful business
  • I have reengaged with my fitter self
  • I am reading A LOT

I have had time. I have had things to write about. I have memories that I have lost already. They go so fast. Oh sure, I can go back through, peek at my calendar, get a pretty good feel for what was going on and give you a record. But I am too far removed to give you an account. I am too much changed to give the in the moment words. Think I am exaggerating? Think about how much time it takes you to reconsider a knee jerk. Myself, it takes me very little time – my go to is to consider nearly everything a knee jerk and thus analyze it immediately. And I go back to it, boy do I ever go back to it, just to make sure I haven’t created some unfixable chasm in the universe. Therefore, a few days, weeks later, when I go back to recall the moment, I can pretend like all the updates aren’t there – but they are.

So I am losing my journey. More correctly, I am allowing fear to corrupt my journey. I am worried what other things I might be losing to fear…

Filed Under: Chrysalis Tagged With: , , ,

Uncaging Courage

January 1, 2020 by

What’s got your courage caged? I have been walking around in a fog for days trying to figure out how I am going to walk into the new year with no real answer or where to start or where I want to go.

Couple of things (not literally because I am not sure how many things I have). First, this time of the year is always amazing for me. My brain is perpetually opening loops. Therefore, I have to be consistent about closing them or they will drive me absolutely crazy. They hook into each other and mesh where they have no commonality. They will bleed into each other creating their own new brand of loop that seems real but it completely fictitious. They will connect together to form themselves into big giant distractions of paralyzing mazes of “what if”s. Therefore, I have made it a habit each year to take the six days between Christmas and New Year’s to wrap up the old year and make welcome the new. Kinda like a cache clean out or a car detail. Not so much a focus on resolutions or declarations, just a little wash down.

Second, I haven’t been able to write lately. I know I have all these ideas about writer’s block and making time and schedules and priorities. But I just didn’t have it in me. Not being able to write, not having the words – or rather, not letting the words have me – create for a tough time of untangling thoughts.

Third, well, life is pretty great. I am a blessed woman. I am safer, more loved, better couched, more stable, than I have ever been. So when my brain goes into the all the “should” – I should be better to myself, I should exercise more, I should be more productive, I should have more accomplished, I should focus, I should be a better (insert whatever role happens to be forefront at the moment) – I begin to feel guilty for being unappreciative of all my haves. It takes a minute to get to the point where I remember that life is not a vacuum. Many things can be true at the same time – even when they seem to be at odds with each other. I could be more intentional about my gratitude practice – that does not mean I am ungrateful. There are improvements I can make. In fact, it is my belief that there are always improvements that can be made – that does not mean my place in life isn’t magnificent.

So now here I am, the second to the last day of the year, and I have spent more time than is typical trying to find the first word, the first idea, that will act as the catalyst and detangler for all the other ideas. That momentum that closes and sorts loops into something I can use when I sit down with my Happy Planner without feeling completely overwhelmed and deflated.

To that end, I have found a few things. The first was from my journal, the second from my husband, the third from a woman I don’t know. They have come together to give me just a hint of where I need to start. I am currently 539 words in attempting to avoid writing the truest sentence I know. The sentence that is clogging up everything else…

I am still afraid.

There it is. That’s not so bad. Actually, it sucks pretty good. I hate everything about it except that it’s finally released from my fingers. It has been haunting around my head for a few months now waiting to be acknowledged as the next thing that I really need to deal with. I said it once to my husband. Well, I didn’t really say it. I wasn’t very direct so it didn’t really do what it needed to do. I called up my therapist who I have not seen in over a year and asked if I could come by, but I didn’t say it at all then. I have heard it echo loudly in my brain more than once, but never gave it the space it needed.

But, I am still afraid. I am more secure and more loved and happier than I have ever been. My bent towards fear should be straightening out. Interesting thing I am learning – fear follows the same rules as all other energy. You can’t just dispel it – it has to be transformed into something else. The dispel part was great. I regained my life, my heart, my peace of mind. It is good. However, I have so much more to lose now, if I were to fall, the drop is steeper, the stakes higher. There is no longer that fear, but there is this fear.

I have found that I have gone back to editing myself to protect against the scary things. Not in the whitewash, fake way I used to (win!) but in a subtler way that leaves me feeling a bit muted. It is frustrating to be in this place but I am finding encouragement in the real things. Most importantly, this edit, while not ideal, is more palatable as it is a condition I place upon myself versus the feeling of being put upon. While there is fear and cautious movement, it is of my own doing and therefore in my control. Realizing you are in control of nothing but yourself is a powerful position if you understand what you are working with. It is also scary because there is no scapegoat – it is all you.

Now that I have that out of the way, I have some decisions to make…some truths to figure out.

“What’s got your courage caged?”

That one is easy – fear. Fear has my courage caged.

I want it to keep being easy. The next obvious question is, “Fear of what?” This is a question I ask myself regularly. However, it is usually in response to a particular situation, feeling, instance. Tackling it as a 360 degree life view is something else entirely. It’s deeper, rooted in soil I haven’t turned in a long time, shaded by uncertainty, and covered in years of push down.

What I do know today is that I do not know the answer. If I had to guess, there’s probably some fear of loss, abandonment, attachment, and just a general fear of being unworthy of love or goodness. Unfortunately, even if that turns out to be right, I have learned I can’t dispel it by simply naming it. I have to understand it, I have to overcome it and convert the negative energy into a usable one.

The Motives of People

While it may not seem like I have made any real headway in this journey today, I can assure you it doesn’t feel that way. The questions that may come up may not always be fun, but they are necessary to keep out the crazies. And that negative kind of way? I’m just going to keep leaning into the support that I couldn’t be more thankful to have. Hello 2020…let’s see about uncaging some courage…

Filed Under: Chrysalis Tagged With: , , , ,

I am a Terrible Person

April 15, 2019 by

Saying what’s true, or rather working through what feels true to get to what is actually true, fucks me up sometimes. It actually fucks me up a lot of the time. I am working on getting comfortable with what is rather than my judgement (or the judgement of others) of what should be. Those thoughts, those feelings, rather than the actual thing itself will tug my heart, strain it to the point that my feels and my tear ducts try to take their turn.

I sat on the porch with myself for quite some time. He looked at me and said, “What’s wrong?”

I love that about him, by the way. Even when he is pretty sure he knows what my problem is (and he is almost always right), he never assumes. He doesn’t try to make me simple in his head so he can manage me. He doesn’t skip the part of the conversation where I have to own what I feel at least enough to say it out loud to him. He doesn’t save me from my fear that I will say something he will find distasteful. He doesn’t try to live for me in an attempt to make me comfortable for him. He insists that I do these things for myself. You wouldn’t think there was so much packed into asking a question you probably already know the answer to, but there is.

We talked for awhile about ancillary woes. He let me move through my process of getting to the thing. Finally, I didn’t look at him (of course, I’d like to tell you I looked square in his handsome face and declared my truth – that isn’t how it happened). “I think I might be a terrible person or at the very least, not a very good one. I don’t think I feel the way a normal person feels.”

And that’s it really. If you take 100 things I get twisted up in my brain about, I would bet at least 50% of them (modest guestimation as I don’t want to exaggerate and I certainly am not going to launch an inventory) pare down to “I think I might be a terrible person or, at the very least, not a very good one. I don’t think I feel the way a normal person feels.”

Here’s the funny thing – and seriously, I don’t care how this sounds – out of all the feels I catch, that one is probably the most ridiculous. Allow me to set down my loosely held humility card for a minute and be clear. If there is anything I know about myself unequivocally, it is that I am a good person.

Now, that isn’t to say I don’t have a good row with my share of selfishness, pettiness, judgement, and many other baser emotions. I absolutely do. I am human after all, and a flawed one at that. Catch me in a bad moment, push the wrong buttons, pull the wrong strings and I have been known to behave less than my raising. But, at my core, I am a good person. The idea that I could be labeled as otherwise is Ludacris (and my autocorrect totally just made that the rapper and not the word and for reasons that I just can’t pinpoint, I am not compelled to change it.)

All that being true, once again on my back porch, I battled with the idea that I was, in fact, a terrible person. And, because one of my greatest goals in life is to be great for him, I knew I had to get to the point where I said it out loud. Because here is another feel almost as ludicrous as the other; I am actually afraid he will agree with me. I am afraid I will say that I am feeling some less than emotion and he will either realize some inner truth about me and be disgusted, or seize the opportunity to finally tell me how he really feels. Either way, I am ruined.

Roll your eyes, I don’t give a shit. I would rather you roll your eyes at my absolute and acknowledged crazy than to go one more day pretending I have something together that I do not. I spent a lot of years that way. It turns that’s a real good way to turn fake crazy into real crazy. Yeah, I’m out.

Anyway, I looked him dead in the other direction and said “I think I might be a terrible person or at the very least, not a very good one. I don’t think I feel the way a normal person feels.”

I could feel him looking at me. I could feel him looking at me in such a way that said, “I am not going to stop looking at you until you look at this expression on my face.” This is a nonverbal conversation that happens between us regularly. But I wouldn’t turn. I was immensely engrossed in the leaf on the tree that was holding on to its branch as desperately as I was holding on to my courage. I hear him say, “look at me.” While you can ignore what might be a nonverbal feeling, an actual request requires acknowledgment. My head turn is met with a solid “bitchpleaseareyouseriousyougottobekiddingme” face.

Funny thing about that. I believe he is being completely honest with me. His complete and utter dismissal of my lack as a person takes every bit of fear I have in sharing this revelation and transforms it into a fierce defense of the feeling regardless of its validity. Yeah, he’s a saint.

“I am serious,” I insist. “A normal person wouldn’t feel this way. A normal person would not be okay. A normal person would feel something different. I think I am broken. I think there is something wrong with me.”

I was grateful when I saw his face change from the “maybe I can make her laugh at the ridiculousness” to the “okay, so we are doing this” look.

“I think that you are just stronger than most. You are able to do things that other people just aren’t built for. You are going to handle what needs to be handled. You always do. That doesn’t make you a terrible person. That makes you the best person I know.”

Okay, some intellectual honesty here. The quotes are used to designate mostly what he said. It’s edited to eliminate some name dropping, situation specifics, and other stuff that is important to us but not for public consumption and would just distract from the main point.

The main point is, by the way, I do forget who I am sometimes. Either due to the opinions of others or because of the Many in my own head. I don’t think I’m far off in my thinking that most of us do.  Having a partner who is gifted in reminding you who are when you forget is a gift. Being able to hear it is a product of the work. Both together, well, that’s just worthy of next level gratitude.

Filed Under: Chrysalis Tagged With: , , , , ,

Confronting Fear

September 9, 2018 by

It isn’t always comfortable or easy – carrying your fear around with you on your great and ambitious road trip, I mean – but it is always worth it, because if you can’t learn to comfortably travel alongside your fear, then you will never be able to go anywhere interesting or do anything interesting.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic.

I have a hard time with fear, mostly because I have a lot of it. I find that unfortunate as I believe it is one of the two primary emotions. And if I am fearful, if the majority of my thoughts are fear based, how much capacity can I have for love, the other primary emotion? Is a person’s emotional capacity finite? Does a person who feels a large amount a fear handicap themselves from being able to feel large amounts of love?

I want the answer to that question to be “no.” I want to sit here (in fact I have already tried) and say that I think that a fearful person is as capable as a less fearful person to express, receive, and process love based thoughts. And the best that I can do is to acknowledge that it might be true for some people.

It is not true for me.

I do not travel comfortably along side my fear. We are not road dogs. We do not have a working relationship. The secondary feelings my fear produces are not helpful. It does not energize, motivate, provide productive adrenaline, or excite. My fear is in no way functional.

I can recognize fear when it presents itself in the “normal” ways in response to the “normal” things I am afraid of. That is typical fear and, for me, falls more into the instinctual “fight, flight, or freeze” dynamic that I think is normal and appropriate for most people. It is the less obvious instances that create journey difficulties. In those situations, I am learning to recognize when fear is the dominate force. If I am feeling overwhelmed, indecisive, melancholy, or distracted, I am more than likely operating in fear. Unfortunately in these nuanced situations, I am still only able to assess this truth outside of the moment, after behaviors have been decided and choices made. Not ideal.

But I think I have discovered a strategy that may help in becoming less fearful – at least for me. Funny thing about it, it’s super scary. Let’s see if I can coherently walk you through my thought process…

Shame derives its power from being unspeakable.
~ Brene Brown, Daring Greatly

In all the things that Brene has ever said or written, this one point has resonated with me the most. I have found it to be 100% true and I have successfully employed it a number of times. My ability to handle shame laden feelings has become quite proficient if I do say so myself.

In Brene’s research on shame, she has created a definition that I think works: Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.

She more simply states it this way – Shame is the fear of disconnection.

So if shame is the fear of disconnection, then I can deduce that shame belongs to the primary fear and not the primary love. And if speaking shame works to neutralize it, then maybe the root emotion fear has the same Achilles’ heel.

*Note – I originally wrote “dispels” instead of “neutralize.” I think recording that edit is important. Shame, fear, are never dispelled. They always exists somewhere in some form. It is unrealistic for me to set the goal as “I will never be fearful.” I do not need to find a way to make fear nonexistent. I need to find a way to remove its influence in my decision making. The better goal for me is to transform fear into a decision neutral force.

In considering this thought it occurs to me that fear rarely gets named or called out. We hear the questions “are you okay,” “what’s wrong,” “is everything alright” and the like. What if the question was, “What are you afraid of right now?”

In considering areas of my life where I know I need improvement, time management is a big one and has been for quite a while. I sat with that one this morning and couched the idea in the new “what are you afraid of” strategy. The issue sprung open like seedling that was just looking for the right path to the surface. The obstacles were obvious. I suck at time management because I am afraid of choosing the right priorities. I am afraid when I do choose, I will execute the choice poorly. I am afraid that my choices will inadvertently reveal some actual truth or misconstrued truth about me that cause others to feel negatively about me. I am afraid that I will fail in following my schedule and appear incapable, undisciplined, lazy.

That’s a lot of bullshit going on when all we are talking about is taking a pencil to my calendar and deciding whether I want to put my gym hour at 0800 or not.

Let me say that to myself again – all we are talking about is where to put my gym hour, in pencil.

Let me say that again – a penciled in gym hour creates fear that I will be unloved, judged, disconnected.

Seriously? AYFKM?

And now the time blocked doesn’t seem so scary.

Understand I am not sitting here feeling a rush of “Tada!” I understand that this is just one thing and it feels successful right now. It has also taken about 72 hours of occasional idea rolling and three solid hours of Thinking Chair sitting to deduce that I will not lose the love of my life, my family, and my friends if I pencil in the gym on my calendar. That’s not exactly efficient. But it is a start. It is a step. This morning, I’ll count it a win.

Filed Under: Chrysalis Tagged With: , , , , , ,