Weathering Emotional Umbrellas...

Emotions travel in packs. They set upon you from all dimensions. When I was working I called emotions like anger an "umbrella" emotion because there were so many more different feelings wrapped up in it, but anger is the societally accepted label. Frustration is another one, discouragement, sadness, helplessness, etc. Spectrum feelings. No feeling exists in a vacuum. No feeling exists on its own.  It's a sociological phenomenon as well as psychological.

Whatever, I had a thought last night and though I could write about it, I haven't written in a long time. I feel reluctant to write now, I know it helps me detox yet it's a struggle to let myself succumb to writing about them. It's twisted that way, I know I need a ventilation system. So just write Kel, be in the moment and reach inwards, there is always something to say if i just keep at it. it doesn't matter if it is relevant to anyone else, yet I hope it is. I feel so alone, and I self-isolate, so it's an chicken and egg thing too.

We are conceived in a group, we develop inside another person, we don't start out in  this world being alone, we are never alone and yet loneliness can assail us. Neglect, deprivation in all their forms. I get hurt so I stay away. I crave acceptance yet dread the idea of feeling un-special. This is a relentless battle I imagine  everyone struggles with, how do we give our uniqueness and similarities a balance of attention and nourishment??

Treating different people the same ways gets different outcomes. However we are influenced - biologically, organically, socially, etc., equality of opportunity does not guarantee equity. How do I celebrate rather than denigrate my self. What are the real character flaws, which are the imagined ones?

Anyhow, I am feeling uninspired writing wise. Bye.

Puppy Love

Too much traffic in my head. Things darting in and out like angry rabbits, memories, feelings, judgments taking little nips at me then skittering away. Some don't dart, some sink in their damning maws and draw  blood. My puppy is in my head. Not so surprisingly I suppose, he has become a clear window through which to see - even more glaringly - how passive and frightened I am. all the time. Although the intent was for him to be my dog as therapy as nonjudgmental role model for me, but in 3 short wks I am not alpha - K. is -  and I am not assertive enough. I have so much fear, and puppy reads me rather well. I try to be the calm assertive Dog Whisperer advises, but I am neither. It's not his fault. I watch my partner with him and there is this easy strength (although he gets frustrated too), he plays with the dog in a way I realize I have no clue about. I don't know how to play. I feel threatened  and he reads. I feel uncertain and he reads. Such a little scholar. He is beautiful and lovely and likes my company but clearly sees K as the one to go to. So my little lonely self feels abandoned.

Trigger happy. I am in my head rending, churning out as much evidence as it can, elucidating failures. I am feeling rather starkers (yes, naked and raving). There are much worse things in the world than to have a constant reminder of my doormat-self. I'm trying to escape but this overriding (or underpinning - either way I'm surrounded) sense of  doom does tend to shred one. Dispirited are us. I have black and white positions, fear and attack. I just want it to go away, I want to stop feeling so bad inside. I'm becoming more and more convinced that it's just not gonna happen. So bleak so spare this inner terrain,  I am a miracle of lichen surviving under harsh conditions. How does a mind (using the term loosely) get this way, I mean it's a rhetorical question as I believe I have some pretty good ideas about that, but it's crying out from within, I just don't want to hurt anymore, is it too much to ask? I didn't ask for it so someone something please take it away. Have I been so awful that i am meant to feel punished and unliveable, I have not earned a life so it would seem. Yet I am here, awash in this excreta. Increta really, it's inside and it's all been said, felt thought before. I am by no means charting new waters here, and so I feel ashamed to ask for so much. So much. Don't I have enough all ready? But I'm going through some motions, others I am not even trying. I'm not living my own life, someone else should have been given this chance, I appear to be wasting mine away. I wrestle with writing all this down in public, I rationalise by saying I can put my thoughts down quicker and not miss so much in my efforts to houseclean, yet I know I also want to be seen, and loved. I don't love me though. Others profess too but it rolls off like rain over oil. There's nothing worth loving in here I whisper. Give your love where it will do some good.

I pop my pills and there is less edge, but it's still looming out there, very close, willing me to just go, slip over. I'm still here, so something is keeping me going, but I'm not happy about it. Ha. ha.

The long line of the let down

I am so restless and anxious right now. I am trying not to eat  or play solitaire or anything else that won't really help. We have a new puppy and he is a beautiful dog and it is a good and positive addition to our tiny family. So I know I a thankful for him, yet I also feel that somehow this new positive element in my life overrides any permission to feel shitty. And i do. Feel shitty. I can look aside and say  it's jet lag, it's new vulnerable life as puppy, family grief (always there as a low-grade electrical current, just the other side of pleasant), feeling demands to be a good pet carer of-er. Billions of people have had and continue to successfully have pets, one or many. Some of these billions even successfully raise children. So where is this lack of self-faith. My brain says I'll never know "why", although I could hazard some sharp guesses, with these revelations there lingers an aftertaste of doubt, spoiling, tainting the fleeting good feeling. So fleeting it never actually got to the good part.

I feel competitive with this puppy - how ill is that? I have been trying to give myself and pup time outs. It seems to help. we just had a nice gentle quiet time together. I am so afraid of harming him, damaging him in any way. His spirit is so bold, so boundless. So brave, he seeks out, he  examines - I can see him learning. It is fascinating. I envy this. It is hard to detect evidence of self-learning. again, the verge of tears WTF. The cruelty of depression is how mystified it leaves me. all I know is this heaviness, unease, unassailable. I feel it is wrong. I know it is wrong. It has been said countless times that how I feel is normal for my experiences, yet there is no commensurate balm. I remain unassuaged. For now. (SAY! wasn't that hopeful???)

It's many triggers.

I am tired.

I have a new responsibility that I dread/anticipate failing.

Family is always searing. How many times can a heart break?

The long line of the let down shuffle forward, there is no escape from their bleak grief. The guilt. My guilt.

I want to make everything better for everyone. How's that for goal setting?

I think this is why I stopped writing emails. Good for those who can soldier on. I wonder if i ever have.

I feel untested still, yet endlessly tested, ahhhhhhhh, paradox thy blade cuts twice.

Doug Supple - Musician, Human Being

A very gentle soul and friend died on Thurs night after a long duel with prostate cancer. He was our lighting guy and a wonderful singer and guitarist. He ran countless jams and always had a kind word, no matter what. He was quirky and funny and generous, he was unswervingly upbeat. There was a community fundraiser for him last year while he was in round two of Chemo and he had lost so much weight, but he never lost his beautiful genuine self. Our little valley has suffered a great loss.
Sleep well Douglas, may your pain be finally
gone

What about MY Dark Matter? plus Robert A. Lowe aka Lichens

Very moving for me, very long (17 minutes), but I found quite worth it. I hear it as a soul gathering courage and reaching out meeting like-souls and reverberating around itself. I love music and the power of the voice, the language that we can all understand.

The snow is falling again, we have almost 4 inches, and it is beautiful. The element that turned the word blanket into a verb! Although I think our culture today allows for the "verbification" of pretty much any and every word.

I love to sing, I have been in a few bands and choirs over the years. Most recently a Pink Floyd Tribute Band called All in All (www.allinall.ca/). We covered all of their songs from the mid 60's to The Division Bell (1994 I think). I got to sing a part of The Great Gig In the Sky, we even put about 10 videos on Youtube. Great Gig was a wondrous experience because there are no words. As the subject matter is one's death, the song is about putting sounds to the feelings one might have whilst pondering death. So every time I got to sing it, it allowed me to channel my rage, my grief out to the audience. While I have definitely received many less than flattering reviews, I always felt cleansed after singing. Detoxed a bit. As if the song were the leeches through which I bled out my despair. In my worst times, I stopped listening to music, I didn't laugh, indeed seeing/hearing others laugh left me mystified.

Yesterday was therapist day, started off okay just discussing the week's events and the puppy (of course!), even brought in my crackberry to show her some pics, however, me being new to the technology, the images remained unviewed. Oh well. Then I went on to describe an encounter I had had with a man busking downtown, he was still wearing a poppy so I thanked him for the music and asked him if he was a veteran.

Suffice to say, bad idea (for me anyway). Tragic story ensued (well d-uh Kel). He seemed to want to talk though, and I tried to listen and then I needed to excuse myself and walk away. I could barely tell Maura (my psych) about it. I cried so hard, words choking out of me wanting to tell, couldn't look at her, I closed my eyes. I guess the story was a lightning rod for every other sadness I had witnessed - mine or another's. It is astonishing to me how completely my sadness and shame take over, suffusing my entire body, and I played cat, closing my eyes in an effort to hide. Part of me understands how the mind can work in these ways, yet my heart is so full to breaking, the proverbial lump in the throat - with me even now. I wonder if therapy is just retraumatising, or instead does it serve to tweeze out my psychological splinters? Some pain in the extraction, some lingering pre and post inflammation, then a gradual cessation of all. What differs is I cannot see the site of the extraction (or the entrance for that matter). There is no where on my body to place it. No map. No GPS. My body is surely storing these memories, I have no doubt, in the U-store that is my brain. I guess there are just many remaining, all jockeying for position, wanting to be seen and heard before they will stop haunting. Isn't this the theory behind ghosts? We are here, despite ourselves sometimes, and we call out in various ways (sometimes encoded and or incomprehensible barely detectable). The catch of being acknowledged. Wanting it, but fearful of the consequences real or imagined. And I am supposed to have faith that these are real and my emotions understandably hyperboled, I am supposed to have faith. How does one have faith when those things which seemed faith-worthy in the past have proven unworthy?

Yep, an emotional GPS would be fantastic. I mean this says a lot about what is considered important in our culture. We have devices to tell us where we are in our car or on foot, devices to connect us to other devices ad infinitum. Soon we will have no need of hardware. So much money, so many brilliant minds dedicated to unravelling the mysteries of space travel, launching thousands of satellites into orbit, detecting the most inner working of atoms and matter, billions maybe trillions spent on the Hadron Collider (and concomitant t-shirts). Yesterday they "successfully" smashed two beams of protons together, falling on the heels of their "successful creation" of a mini black hole Nov 8th). I want someone to detect the whereabouts and characteristics of MY dark matter, spend some money and minds on that, assholes!

Until we get the gist on ourselves, we have little hope of replenishing our planet.

Flinching at What's Possible

Nothing like a call from Veteran's Affairs to fuck me up. Suddenly I am stripped bare of all protections. Not even my scar tissues can stop the stabbing guilt. Plunging to the root of me. I am rendered speechless, dreadfully fearful. They'll find me out! They'll call me a faker, i see the call as a waste when there are SO many more people out there suffering, people without homes, without loved ones, without the prospect of any of these  - they are invisible, their urge to self-protect keeping themselves out of view, out of harm's way. Any interaction can be harmful. So we stay away we hide out, we don't speak we don't connect, all the while staring longingly at signs of friendships blooming elsewhere. People giving up because you take too much energy to sustain a relationship.We excel at self-fulfilling prophecies, at self-sabotage. It adds credence to our self-theories. If we are indeed bad people, everything makes sense. No other explanation is necessary.

Fear is so powerful, it is a paradox. Our will to survive at odds with our will to survive. We live with the harm we know, dread the the risk of others. Flinch at what is possible, because anything is possible. We know this so bitterly and painfully. Any thing is possible. The capacity for utter ruination lurks everywhere. This stark existence suffices.

New Life and Rituals to Assuage Some Grief

Snow's still here, very unusual for Nov on the west coast. Excitement permeates the household cause we are getting a puppy. Here he is at 3 wks. He's very cute and will be needing a great deal of love, exercise and activity. We've called him Strider. We love the Lord of the Rings. We haven't had a pet since my cat died in 2003. Feeling like we are finally ready. He will be a wonderful addition to our little family of 2. Adding life and energy to our home - we both need it I think. I am of course very nervous about the prospect - not trusting that I can properly care for the little fella. That's not surprising, I still feel guilty over my cat's death, although my family reassures me that there is no reason to feel this way. I loved her though. I still miss her. She was whacked out, hostile and yelled at birds.

I think maybe it will help with our grief over losing our baby too. Almost 4 yrs ago I miscarried (well in truth the miscarriage was induced because the little life inside me had stopped developing, even before I knew I was pregnant).  13 weeks. I remember how happy Ken and I both were when I found out. We had sort of quasi talked about having children and I think we both wanted one together but felt it was too late in life. Nonetheless we were happy and excited at the prospect. Then I had 2 ultrasounds and there was the sac devoid of something - what was the word they used? viable. Such detachment, it sends the message that I am not then allowed to grieve this non-viable fetus. So what ensues falls under the rubric - complex (or compounded) grief. We performed a ritual - we kayaked for 15 or so km one way to the end of this island in Johnstone Strait (North end Vancouver Island)to where there are powerful ocean currents - I had made a message in a bottle, each of us wrote a letter to our lost little baby - I had named her Nova - and I added some of our hair and my pre-natal vitamins. We reached the end of the island then together released the bottle. Then we paddled back, the weather had turned so it was a much more intense return trip. Then 3 of my sisters came to visit and we had a little ritual at the beach at a good low tide. These rituals help, they give focus and permission. Yet the grief lingers with each menses - my body discarding itself. I look at the blood and tissue with wonder and longing. There is such mystic promise within us all.
Got some more wood, filled up our woodbox, it's chilly for here. I have love to give, and soon more lives to give to. I can't help but think that this helps my little corner of the world. I know little Strider will help us.