Part 3 & 4 -- Completely judgment-free zones

Goodwill.  You don't have to dress up.  It is cathartic because like a garage sale you can spend very little or nothing and still feel entertained.  Unlike a garage sale, it is air-conditioned, has bathrooms and everything in one stop.

Goodwill is a good-familiar, and out of town today, guaranteed anonymous. No one knows I'm here.  No one is waiting on me in there to return a call, answer an email, or fix a problem.

I can move slowly or quickly.  I can feel my tension easing, like a good meditation.  Used books.  Forks.  Crazy outfits. Restful to me.  Today I find a book called "Seeds" by Thomas Merton.  Lots of sticky notes, tabs, highlighted passages. Someone has done all the work for me.  Inside front cover a jotted note to look at page 115.  Where I find "Our vocation....Work with God in creating our own lives, our own identity, our own destiny."  Not subtle, God.

Books. Bookstores. The beauty of.
No one tries to make eye contact in a bookstore.  People casually browse knowing the protocol.  Bookstores are not for chit chat.  Not for phone calls.  Not for laughter.  Bookstore-lovers follow these unwritten rules.  I am pleased.  I feel safe in bookstores.  No judgment. Obviously bookstores have a thousand facets to their wonderfulness, but for today, I'm just claiming the white-noise-like quality that soothes the brain.

And, they contain, b o o k s.  That is all.

Part 2 -- Walmart
As you pull it the parking lot it looks pretty much exactly like any other Walmart.  Except I'm not at home.  So I will not bump into anyone from high school or church or work or the neighborhood.  I can wander from 17cent spiral notebooks (too flimsy, I like hard backing) to $5 pajamas to $22 phone chargers that are out of stock.  I can browse every book in the book section.  I can buy deodorant and get back to my car without revealing anything. To anyone.

I am relieved to get outside my head for 35 minutes and to sit in the parking lot writing for five more.

Babies, young adults, flip flops, electric scooter, heavy white Velcro tennis shoes.  Fifteen SUV type vehicles of approximately similar shades of gray are in my site.  Am I the only person who doesn't own one?

An elderly man gets out of his shiny red junker, all four windows down, shirtless.  He grabs a  shirt from the back seat and finishes dressing.  Slowly, casually, like he's done this before.  He saunters inside looking suitable. A bright orange shirt with black writing on it.

Someone pulls over just to remove a flier for a local fundraiser from their windshield.  A retiree in a mint-green golf shorts and a Hawaiian shirt places his cart is the cart farm cautiously.

Lots of top knots of messy hair. It is 3pm on a Wednesday.  Why are they all here?  Why aren't they stuck in a windowless cubicle?

Places I go to get away from myself (A four-part series)

Part One -- Why?

Don't you ever get tired of yourself?  You want to take a vacation and leave 'her' behind for a bit?  A few hours, a few days.  It isn't like I wouldn't come back, I just want to get away from me.
I want to get away from over-thinking, under-thinking, and just-right thinking.  Away from the reflective substance on the lining of my brain that keeps the same thoughts bouncing around, back and forth over and over, like a pinball that hits a bonus ring.
Ping.  Ping.  Ping.    Ping ping ping pa-ping.

I want to get away from my own sighs, my breathing, my skin, my eyes,.  I want to see the world from a fresh new perspective of someone else's skin. It is the opposite of "Cheers".  I want to go where "not anybody knows my name."  Oblivion? No. Anonymity is a better word.  No one knows me.  I'm just me.  I can be anyone.

Sometimes I want to get away from my goals, my fatigue, my boring bad habits, my lack of resolve.  I spend a lot of time letting life happen.  Flow.  Chill.  No worries. No aim. No fire.  Too much fire.
I also get stressed out and overcome.  How can I be bored and overwhelmed in the same mind, body and soul? How do I get away from myself?

Picture taken just after cleaning up where the dog threw up a chicken bone....

This is my dining room of course.

I post a lot of pictures on facebook.  I think of it as my replacement for the picture albums of yesteryear.  I could print them some day, I can look back at them at any time from anywhere.   But I take 100 photos, and I sort out all the frowns, shut eyes, blurred focus (lots of those in my haste), too dark, too bright, too shadowy.  And these days I have to usually make sure one of my offspring won't be upset if I post a pic. A highly complicated process, to make it through that filter for reasons you could never tell looking at the photos.  But they'll all laugh 'I can't believe you think that one is good??!' shaking their heads in despair at my gaucheness.  The few that make the cut, I fix the colors and crop them on my phone in about 17 seconds (I remember the old days, when it took me half an hour to do that.)

Facebook or similar photographs, which I enjoy, are not my real life. Not mine.  Not yours. Not that friend who was a cheerleader in high school who still looks good in yoga pants.  I've heard "I can't stand to be on facebook and see how great everyone else's life is compared to mine."  I don't suffer from this very common and understandable malady, because I know how the slices of life I (me. Toni) post on facebook are the grain of sand moments grasped among mostly long, boring, tough, argumentative, tiring, humdrum, routine, vanilla regular old sandbox-of-life.  I know that when others post pics, they aren't showing me (usually) the overflowing toilet, the lost cell phone, the toothepaste cap that rolls out of reach, the front door that won't stay shut when it drops below 40, the letter from the mammography center.  They aren't showing me the 47 unmatched socks in their laundry basket, or how they felt after a bad phone conversation with the bank, or a depressing visit to their parent's nursing home.  Do not judge me, or anyone else we meet on facebook or instagram or twitter by the short witty sayings and sunset-background couples shots that we all love to share.

Facebook photograph sharing is not real life.  That is why today, I shared the picture above.  It really was taken just after we cleaned up from the dog, Molly.  Molly got into the garbage when our back was turned (OK, my husband's back was turned, I wasn't home.) and rooted out some old fried chicken, bone and all. After she threw it up the first time, while we were running to grab something to clean it up with, she managed to eat that same deliciously-regurgitated chicken bone again.  The next time it came up we found it on the dining room rug.  Happened to be just before I took a bunch of shots of my crazy Thanksgiving dining room and kitchen.  Shots that were only for me, until now.

This is a dining room you ask?  Isn't everyone's dining room covered in miscellaneous flip house leftovers and the entire contents of their kitchen pantry?

Doesn't everyone's kitchen ceiling open up to the plumbing runs above it for repairs?

No?  No plastic sheets hanging everywhere to keep the drywall dust down?  

Am I getting new counter tops for Christmas?   No, but I did get a patched ceiling, for which I'm very grateful.  It was opened to fix the pipes that froze once upon a time and have kept our second bathroom out of commission for many long months, because, really, when is it a good time to cook under cover of 120 year old falling insulation?

But I digress.  My point is, that you (and I, definitely I) may not post pictures like this, and I am A-ok with that.  I like pictures of snow falling and babies crawling and sons playing amazing bass guitar.  The photos we all share online represent the brief breath of life we want to hold onto, remember, keep.  Sometimes we want to brag or make one of our children or our aunt or our dog groomer feel special.  Sometimes we just want to reach out and say 'hey, I'm here' or laugh along with Jimmy.  Nitty-gritty life is not frozen in time, but messy, grassy, muddy, windy, old, new, broken, stained, taupe, scotch-taped and hot-glued.  Don't compare your well-worn Target version of Keds to someone else's satin-pink-ribboned toe shoes.  They really aren't comparable.

One Way. Or Another...

I tend to re-read my own blogs in the day or two after I write them, as people send me comments, and I have to admit, last week's I kept wincing at the last couple sentences.  Because I sound flippant, like ALL you need to CURE depression is a pill and a plan.  I should have spent a little more time on the ending before I clicked 'submit'.

Yes. Sometimes, when I have a difficult week, and the Prozac isn't enough, having something to look forward to is what makes the difference between living life and giving in to symptoms.  But I do realize there are dozens of levels of depression.  I know many people try five or six meds without any of them making a dent.  I know some people kill themselves, and some people think crying at sad commercials is depression. My goal was to share about my own experience, so that I can contribute to it being less of a taboo subject in general.  The more people talk and share their own experiences, the less square-peg-in-a-round-hole I feel, and hopefully you feel.  Admitting my imperfections, failings, human-ness is not so much scary, or bad at all, but stabilizing.  

I don't know the cause or cure for depression, just coping mechanisms I've learned.  But I do know a huge contributing factor in my case, is my brain not shutting up for one second.  You must all be like this right? Where one minute you are writing a swim team event on the calendar and then suddenly ten minutes has passed and you realize your blood pressure is high because your brain went from swim meet to coach to lack of communication, to that time last fall when you volunteered and no one showed up, to those other parents....  You get the idea.  My brain left to its own resources heads down a darker, more prickly corridor than it needs to.  I imagine some people just write 'Swim Meet 5:00 pm home' and then they move on to the next thing they need to do.  Do they?  Well I'd like to try going 24 hours without letting my brain take the reins.  Every single time I look at the pile of mail, I don't start thinking of insurance bills, and then taxes and then my checking account balance and then...  When I see a pile of dirty dishes I don't think 'Should have, could have, why didn't I?'  but just 'Dirty dishes, let me wash them.'  I can't imagine being successful at this for even an hour.  Also part of me thinks, well this is my creative mind at work.  If I stop being creative will I still be a writer?  If I stop being creative will I turn into a boring robot? 

Things at work are at a stress level of 9 out of 10 right now, and yet someone told me this week 'Yes, but you are always happy.' and it caught me off-guard.  That is how I appear?  I was surprised.  It reminded me of more than once taking one of those surveys that says 'If you have five or more of these symptoms of depression, seek medical help.'  And I would have 17 of 20.  Yet my co-workers think I'm happy. All the time.

Which leads me to the conclusion that happiness and depression are not mutually exclusive in the same person, or for me, even in the same day.  Or another conclusion might be that I'm good at acting happy even when I don't feel it.  Certainly you hear many comedians are depressed in real life, and I do spend an unusual amount of time trying to make people (and myself) laugh. 

But then, my supersonic brain can be a pleasure. Sometimes I look back at my 20s and think 'Oh I wish I could live that over again.' but mostly I appreciate the perspective another 30 years gives a person.  It is clichéd but true to say my life is much richer now.  I try to look at things and really see them.  In my 20s I was distracted by having enough quarters to do the 7 loads of laundry I had, how to get the cat to the vet, or being late to catch the train.  I rushed from one thing to another, never fast enough, always wanting more, more of everything.  Now I can sit and marvel at the sunlight hitting our leaded glass window, making rainbows on the old carpet.  I can sit at the high school and instead of wishing she would hurry up and get out here so I can _____, I'm thinking 'take your time, the radio is on, the window is down so I'm breathing fresh air, I can sit and think for a while.'  When I look at a child, I see her pigtails, and her mis-matched socks, and the marker on her hand.  I don't just look at them, I see them, and I think about what she was doing earlier, and wonder if she likes getting her hair put into pigtails, or if she cries. 

These two ideas, are at cross purposes.  On the one hand my loose-cannon thinking contributes towards my depression, but on the other hand my color-palette thinking makes life so much more flavorful, interesting, more of an adventure in the every day.  Over-thinking is like a thorn in your shoe, it never feels good, but not thinking at all?  That is like never going outside, so you don't need shoes.  I'm not willing to sacrifice that much.  I guess my experiment should not be to spend 24 hours not thinking, but to spend 24 hours asking myself every five minutes 'dark path or light path' and trying to go back and take the other fork in my road of thoughts.  Maybe there's a Fitbit for that?

 

 

Stress at work? Perspective.

I always declare in planning, in job interviews, when discussing with others, that I like/love change.  I hate stagnancy.  I hate boredom.  I don't use the 'H' word lightly. I want to help manage change, think of great changes, implement change, and never do the same thing twice.  But I have reached a level of change to the hundredth power at work that is (no longer) bordering on chaos, and is no longer feeding my desire for variety or challenge.  It feels more like I'm in a blender with dull blades, and somebody is pushing down the 'chop' button every morning. And then again every five minutes.

For 20 years in IT, I've marveled at the accuracy of the Dilbert cartoon.  I mean we have good days and we have bad days, but a lot lot lot of days resemble this now classic cartoon.  You are telling someone why they need to care about something.  Because if not, the company might fail or a person could suffer, and you are wondering for the ten thousandth time, why you are always the one trying to get everyone to act responsible.  Why are you expending twice the effort trying once again not to do their job for them? But I only feel this way when I am self-centered, which is only 'most' of the time, thanks be to God.

I know I sound jaded, and in actuality, I am 100% positive and 100% cynical and 100% creative and 100% bored, it just all depends on the day at work.  Most days I see no reason to be negative.  Who wins there?  Who benefits?  Even I don't win, so why do it?  Counteracting that is my sarcasm level,  set somewhere around sophomore year of high school to a 96 out of 100.  I don't know where it came from, but when that personality takes over, you are going to laugh.  There are so many jokes out there about how lucky I am that I amuse myself, and I do feel lucky.  So many times, in an elevator or walking to my car I will just start laughing out loud, because of a thought in my head.  I amuse myself.  I try not to share things that tear a person down, but I don't always win that battle.  But I ask for forgiveness and move on to the second hour of my day :)

So, if 39-year-old women are dying of cancer this week, and houses are burning, and college kids are getting shot, and other people are laid off work, why am I complaining about stress at my job?  I mean, I'm lucky to be alive, have a house, have healthy kids and have a job. 

Telling myself this helps, it does.  For a while. For some problems.  But it doesn't fix anything broken.  It just helps you get through it.  No matter how positive and strong and capable you feel going in in the morning, if you spend the day in a blender,  you are going to come out rumpled, disoriented, and feeling pissed off at yourself for letting any of it get to you.  We work to live, we don't live to work, right?  Yet work causes such impact on sanity and spirit.

The only answer I have is quantity. We spend so much of our lives at work.  Anyone working full-time is spending say 50 hours a week if you count lunch and breaks and overtime.  Plus at least an hour per day gearing up for work (i.e. putting on mascara) and gearing down from work, so that's 55 hrs.  I happen to be on-call and travel at times and work from home here and there.  With 32 waking hours on the weekends plus 25 waking hours through the week, that equals 57 hours of non-work vs 55 hours of work.  So a minimum of 50% of my waking hours are spent at work. 

Now you might have a friendship, a marriage, a church-life, a child, all things that fit into that 57 hours.  You might read the bible, or watch TED talks, or do yoga at sunrise, but it ALL fits into that 57 hours.  Each thing is a piece of the puzzle.  WORK is work.  It is one big chunk compared to the littles.  It is like the wedding cake next to the cupcakes.  There is no hiding that wedding cake behind a cupcake--it is not just easy to see, it is impossible to miss.   Imagine, if you spent 55 hours per week...hmmm...I don't know....sitting in your car.  Your car is your life 55 hours per week.  You clean it, you polish it, you buff it, you organize it, you find the best radio station and then you do it all over again the next week, and the next, until years pass.  Imagine telling yourself not to allow that car-time to affect the rest of your life.  To put it aside the minute you get home and not dwell on it,  not think about it, not dread it or look forward to it, but to compartmentalize and leave it behind. 

OK, let's say that is a dumb example, how about 55 hours per week shopping?  You are a professional shopper and you are told to visit every retail establishment in a 20 mile radius, and shop.  You might take on the challenge, you might enjoy it, you might have strategies and like me, look for beauty in the parking lot or the historical quotes on the wall or the view from below.  You might be given adorable shopping bags for your birthday and end up with every credit card ever seen, but eventually, no matter how professionally you take this role, no matter how much you like shopping, 55 hours a week is going to get old.  And after five weeks or five months, you are going to hate it at the worst, and lose your perspective at the very least.  What can you do not to hate doing the same thing every day?  Working the same place?

Well, for one you can not work the same place forever.  Most IT people move about ever 24 months to a new company to learn something new or try a different role. 

Or, you can stop working, go on welfare, and never have any money to spend. 

Or you can make friends at work, goof off, and party all the time the boss isn't around (even 55 hours per week of fun gets old I'm sure).

Which leaves, figure out someway to stay sane amid sameness, steady stress, personality conflicts, bickering over mouse pads or locked doors or wet floors.  Stay sane, make a difference, not lose your sense-of-humor.  Try to contribute towards something in case you die long before retirement.  Try to make a difference.  It doesn't work for me, to say 'its just a job it will be over in 8 hours' because I can not swallow spending 8 hours per day not making a difference.  If I'm not making a difference, I want to be creative, if I'm not being creative, I want to be learning or problem-solving or laughing.  These four itsy-bitsy things are all I need from my career:  purpose, creativity, learning and laughing.  Is that too much to ask?  I know, you want money too.  On a good week, I make sure those four things happen.  I mean, I laugh every day, period.  The other three are goals.  But even so, I am stressed at work.

Here are my coping mechanisms for stress, not recommended by any sane therapist or wise person, in no particular order:
1. chocolate--fast and cheap and it works every time for a few minutes.
2. books--far, far away within minutes of picking one up.
3. nature--easier to forget about IP addresses and Medicare rulings when looking at leaves, rocks, and water.
4. pinterest--this really is my current therapist. I know, you're embarrassed for me.  I search for funny quotes.  Or I search for cottages by water.  Or I search for my next hair color.  It is escapism like a women's magazine custom-designed for me, by me.  Free, can last 90 seconds or 90 minutes.
5. fellowship-- this is not my first thought, I'm an introvert, but whenever I do step out and force myself to 'people', I always come home glad I went.  I hear a story or a bit of gossip, or a sliver of news that enriches my life and makes me gain perspective.
6. volunteering -- any time you can forget about your own perfectly imperfect life and concentrate on another-- run, don't walk.  It works every single time.

All of these basically are ways to escape.  Once I escape, I gain perspective.  Perspective allows me to remember all the truth. It allows me to forget my ego which is obsessed with the work day, and then I can actually participate in something else.  Whether it be read the bible, scrub the kitchen sink, or be a car-pooling mom again, it is perspective that allows me to see clearly.

p.s. here is a picture from an interesting perspective I took last weekend.

Mother’s day is not my favorite holiday…

I believe Hallmark and such make too big a deal out of Mother’s Day (and several other holidays).  I daydream of my own mother often (she died 16 years ago now), and don’t need a holiday to remember her.  I think of my own children daily if not hourly, and I always celebrate their birth (literally) and reminisce about my part in it on their birthdays. Now that I think of it I’m not very big on most holidays other than Christmas. Confession: I’m often glad when they are over.  But I love birthdays. I love vacations.  I love celebrating for no reason and I love celebrating my children’s important moments. I love the day after Thanksgiving when we are all in our pj’s playing Scrabble and watching reruns of Parks and Rec together. 

Mother’s Day is a holiday of exclusion for any woman who doesn’t happen to be a mom.   I know women who lead happy and full lives without children. I know people who have yearned for children and it has never happened for them.  I know people who have lost children, or lost parents certainly, and this holiday only brings them pain.  Why do we need to go there?

Being an introvert, I also dislike any occasion that makes me the center of attention.  Too much pressure.  Gosh a whole day I have to be happy!  My kids and husband usually do a fine job of marking the occasion too, you would be jealous.  I’m ungrateful, that is the root of it.

Now, you’re thinking, Toni isn’t usually so negative.  She is being a drag, it’s just a little holiday.  And you are right.  I’m being  nudged with thoughts of Dicken's Scrooge here so I’m trying to remember what he learns from all those ghosts.  Oh yeah, life is good, enjoy it.  Relationships are important so build into them while you can.  So I will.  I will enjoy myself and sincerely appreciate whatever pleasantries come my way.  I hope all of you will too, but I still secretly wish holidays were about an hour long and wanted to speak up for any others of you out there who do too.  Someone work on that.