Daring to Disappoint....

How many of us hate the thought of disappointing someone that we care about?   I've been meeting fairly regularly with a psychologist - it began as a way for me to figure out how to get back to work with at least the illusion of sanity, and it's becoming more and more like an  archeological dig - each session digs away and we find another layer, another plateau, and another look at the reasons for my choices... made either consciously or unconsciously.

At the end of today's session, the psychologist asked me to think about something - and she said, "if you don't think you can, if you feel like it's not right, don't hesitate to tell me.  You won't disappoint me.  You don't have to do this to please me."  Thud. I felt it like a lead weight dropped from my head to my gut.  Don't worry about disappointing someone else?  About not pleasing them?

Beyond that she wouldn't judge me, lies this place where it would be okay for someone to be disappointed in me.  I built myself into this unsustainable place of trying so very hard to never disappoint.  Only to find myself failing, and crashing and careening around in these vain attempts to be this perfect version of myself.  And, the joys in life can get ruined by the shoulds that come before or after.  I SHOULD have planned something better.  Been kinder.  Be thinner.  I SHOULD find a way to be a better mother.  A better wife.  A better role model for my children.  My house SHOULD be cleaner.  My car SHOULDN'T be filled with doggy foot prints and unwashed saddle pads.  My bathrooms SHOULD be painted by now.  I SHOULD be able to get my butt into work every day like a normal person.

How I wish I could be this 'should' girl.  This girl who doesn't run into this wall of fatigue.  Who can get everything that she wants to get done, done.  Can do all the right things.  And, still carve out space for herself.  

And, who doesn't have to get angry to stand up for herself.  Who doesn't have to be pushed past her limits and turn into "the bitch" just to advocate for herself.  

I have a sneaky suspicion that I am far from alone.  A big part of this 2.0 version has been to actually believe something that a dear friend spent a year trying to get me to hear, much less believe.  Over and over he would say "it's a problem, but it's not your problem'.  And, over and over I would nod and pretend to listen, all the while trying to figure out how I should help, what I should do, what I should not do, figure out whose fault it all was.  After all,  if I wasn't helpful, who was I?

Leaving that behind has been frustratingly difficult.  It's like the christmas lights that you just threw in the box and they are all tangled up.  And, so you need to carefully tease it all apart.  Just when you think you have one strand free, another knot appears.  Mine are called Responsibility.  Fear of Disappointing.  Guilt.  Anger.  

If you need me, I'll be curled up in a corner praying for patience as I untangle 50 years of crossed lines. 


2.0 and leaving behind the blame game...

Two years ago, right when I was diagnosed with cancer, several Doctors suggested I read Gabor Mate’s book, When the Body Says No.  I wrote about the book then, about how the book made me feel like it was either my fault or my parent’s fault that I had cancer.  At the time, I couldn’t hear its message because the lines it drew were too straight, too direct.  They painted my inability to cope with stress as the reason for the Big C, and my childhood as the reason I couldn’t cope with stress.

In my blame seeking state, neither were acceptable answers.  And, I couldn't see anything but blame. Understanding without blame, without judgement was a concept my head might have been able to understand but was a foreign language to my heart. 

But now I’m finally open to hearing the message of this book – the message that we live in our bodies, and these bodies of ours are driven by our emotions.  How we see the world relates directly to how we were raised in the world.  

As the child of imperfect parents, as an imperfect mother and an imperfect wife, I have always rejected the notion that we can or should escape our accountabilities by blaming our upbringing.  But that’s been my longstanding misunderstanding, for you see, you don’t have to be a blamer to try and understand yourself, and understanding yourself starts at the beginning.  And, understanding doesn't automatically make you an unaccountable victim of circumstance, with no part in the play.          

If I’m honest, I've struggled with myself since my mother died.  And, railed against myself for being so weak.  Even writing that down makes me feel…insufficient.  Everyone’s mother dies.  Why should I be so special, so dramatic about the natural order of the world? 

Only now am I beginning to understand that it was because of the pedestal that I as on from the time I was a child, the one my mother loved to see me on, the one I clung to at all costs, that blocked my ability to listen to my body, to listen to me.

My pedestal of being the ‘good’ daughter, kind, hardworking, successful, helpful to the extreme, made even more necessary to compensate for being the ‘fat’ daughter… It was what I thought defined me.  And, whenever I would feel myself slipping off, I would clamber back up.  Brush off the dust and bruises, ignore the aches and pains – the migraines, the rashes, the asthma attacks, the hives -  all of these were just my body betraying my need to be my best and most idealized version of myself. 

My pedestal cracked to the core when my mother died.  Not only because she was the eyes through which I saw myself, but because my pedestal was built on a tripod – of my mother and father’s love and my husband’s undying commitment.  That was my base – I had my girls, my friends, I had my work – but their perception of me was my core.  Without my mother, made worse by my feeling that I had let her down in her last days, the pedestal started swaying.

Some time and spackle later, I thought that I was finding my way back.  Only to lose the next leg of the tripod – when my husband became ill, and his commitment to me wavered, my world spun.  And, I couldn’t understand why – I shielded myself in anger, I found enemies (some just, some unjust) to fight and I dragged myself forward.  Still unrelenting – still clenching my jaw and ignoring my body whining and moaning at me – I pushed through and tried to clamber back up on my tarnished and swaying pedestal. 

Is it a surprise then that I spent that year, with a growing sore on my tongue, ignoring it…wincing when I brushed my teeth but not googling what it could be?  Not saying a word to my Doctor? What could have been a simple nothing the previous year turned into surgery and radiation treatments and lifelong (albeit mild) effects. 

The Big C and recovery from treatment sent the pedestal rocking so hard that I finally had to get off.  And, it’s taken me a couple of years and lots of help to understand, finally laying BLAME aside, that the effort of understanding the WHY, understanding what makes up this pedestal I clung to, is probably the most valuable thing I’ve ever done for myself.

The pedestal has no place in my 2.0 Version of myself.  So even though I often want to clamber back up, and sometimes pop up there without even thinking, I am trying (and sometimes succeeding!) at spending more time listening to the voice I'm so used to ignoring and testing my limits with kindness instead of a stubbornly clenched jaw. 


PS.  Dear select reader - I went a wee bit off topic on this post, it was supposed to be mostly about stress... but blame and understanding your stress is at the bottom of it all and that's where I went.  But for anyone who hasn't watched Dr. Brene Brown on blame, the link is below.  I love her and she makes me think... often.  And, I've also linked Dr. Gabor Mate's book, which is insightful.  And scary.  

http://drgabormate.com/book/when-the-body-says-no

Lost in the fog...

So, I've finally made it back to work.  I'm lucky enough to work with amazing, kind, brilliant and dedicated people.  But their brightness and quickness makes me blink like I'm staring into the noon sun sometimes.  Friends say that I seem like I always was.  Able to speak my mind, see the big picture.  But this return to work has been hard.  You see, a cog slipped, the cd got a scratch, a gear got stuck, and so things that I took for granted are shockingly, ridiculously hard.

Reading and writing is hard.  Writing is the worst, instead of being cathartic, instead of being able to just 'fall into' it, and let the words and thoughts flow, they get lost.  They swirl and twirl around me and as I chase one down, the follow-up, the next line is lost.  This damned post is like pouring cold molasses in a freezer.  It's there, but it won't flow.  At work, I  flew out of my office in frustration trying to capture some thoughts in a simple email.  An email that took me literally hours to write, instead of minutes.

And, then there is the reading.  I can read, I can analyze, but the stuff I read seems to keep getting filed in the wastebasket in my brain.  And, get dumped before I can go and fetch it.  So, my viewpoint is there, but what I've read is not.  

I've known for months that all was not the same.  That I wasn't the same as I was, pre-radiation, with a couple of scars to show for it.  And so I dragged my feet and dreaded returning to work.  I've spoken to my doctors, over and over again, and there is no magic potion to make this all better.  The Radiation Oncologist, when I finally saw him and told him that something wasn't right, was pretty direct.  And, quick to point out that it couldn't be the radiation.  When he turned to me and said "well, your brains aren't in your mouth", I felt like a ballon pricked by a needle.  My GP is less sure of the cause, and I know what I know about how I feel and when.  But the cause matters not. The impact is the same.  I find a bit of comfort in my kind colleague who has fought her own Big C battles and relates to this feeling of being less than before.  And, of course, I'm just supremely lucky to be working with friends... people who I trust and whose support means the world to me.

And, so I do all the things that I'm told to do and some that just help.  I see my acupuncturist, I do yoga classes with an amazingly talented and soothing instructor, I practice mindfulness, I see a psychologist.  I have a little pit crew assembled to put me back on the road.  But, I dunno.  For you see, gentle reader, I'm writing this with tears streaming down my face, and a headache pounding in the back of my skull.  It's so crazy hard to do this, you see.  I'm writing, rewriting, getting lost, rereading and getting lost again in my own muddied thoughts.  

I wasn't going to broadcast this, who wants folks to know that there's a slipped gear?  But I've got to practice this stupidly, ridiculously hard, thing.  And, this is what is top of mind to blog about... so there you have it.  Here's to hoping that this blogging practice is like a yoga practice.  It may look like crap, but I'm just going to breathe through it, and keep trying.  

Why so Foggy Ms. Brain?

It's been months and months since I finished my cancer treatment.  I've been off work for almost a year now and I ended my radiation torture months and months ago.  How naive I was thinking that I'd be back to work in November.  Or January.  Even though I couldn't eat or drink, I wanted to get back to Normal so badly and figured that if it could get that bad that fast it could get better just as quick. 

Now I wonder and worry if Normal is slipping away from me.  The physical scars are fading, the abuse heaped on those poor mouth and throat tissues is pretty well healed and I'm adjusted to my new normal.  Coca Cola still taste like sewage, I'd just as soon drink battery acid as have a glass of orange juice, but I'm pretty much put back together again.  Except this little Humpty Dumpty seems to have lost her head.  

It's so hard to explain, even to myself, what it's like to lose that edge that you had, that glimmer of brightness or quickness in your thinking.  Ideas would link for me, I'd see connections and I took my mind for granted.  I'd write, just for me, I loved to pour my heart out through my fingertips... and the words came easily.  The grammar, not so  much, but the words would just flow.  

Now...  now each word is stuck in molasses.  Thoughts don't run together, they slowly seep through a fog and get lost and swirled with other thoughts.  Reading has become a chore.  Instead of losing myself in a book, I labour through.  

I so remember that tired working mommy feeling, that overwhelmed feeling of being ON, tired, on edge and ON all the time.  Having that rolodex in my head of every appointment, every schedule, every deadline, every colleague that needed a push, every relationship to nurture.  I'd love to have the capacity, the endurance, the brain power to feel that again.  What I feel now is different, so very different.  It's a heaviness in my head and a tired that won't go.  A tired that makes you slow and stupid ... that pounds at the back of your head and sits in your bones.  I don't know where my synapses went, and what's worse, I worry that they are gone for good.  The Doctors say vaguely reassuring words, but they don't know why this happens to some people or what causes it.

For me, because I'm a complicated girl, and nothing can be simple, it's even less clear because there are three pieces to my confusion puzzle.  Is it from the radiation treatment?  Or is it that plus stress from my husband moving out due to his struggles with the ugly black dog in his head?  Or, just to kick a girl when she is down, is it the conveniently timed menopause?  

So I try and build around the edges of this foggy, grey puzzle.  Right now, this blog post is one piece of this puzzle.  If I can just put together one little corner of the puzzle, just a few pieces that would click together then maybe I'll start to believe that I can get myself put back together again... 




When the Body Says "No" - Take Two

I think I could fill up my pool with a dripping faucet faster than I can read this freakin' book.  It's is so irritatingly, maddeningly picking on a what seems to be a very raw nerve.  

What has me up tonight is the constant theme in this book, and to be fair, in most pop psychology, that the root of all evil, all the quirks and problems with how we are built, stems from our childhood.  Go see any therapist and just like the ubiquitous kleenex box in the soothingly lit room, questions about your childhood, and how you perceived your parents and your siblings, will be asked.  These questions serve as the tea leaves for them to build the story of why you are the way you are.  

Was your mother needy or jealous, neglectful and self-absorbed or a saintly martyr?  Were you the middle child?  An only child?  Last born like me?  Answer those questions and you'll find the reasons why you behave the way you do.  Do you crave attention, seek out conflict, have an air of superiority or disassociate when times get tough?  Well, how could you not, you were reacting to the way you were raised!  Pull together the pieces of your childhood, read those tea leaves, and the reasons, dare I say, excuses will be laid out for you.  

This approach makes victims of children.  And, by default, the parents become the criminals - the villains.  I look at my girls and wonder what stories they will have to tell.  What faults in my parenting will leach into their souls when they are 30 years old?  Will they remember their childhood as a frenetic, chaotic time or with that unrealistic rosy filter we drape on the moments of time that we want to keep precious? 

It also takes the faults of the child and plops it squarely on the parent's lap.  No matter how old the poor parents are.  When my girls are 30, I hope to remember to tell them to suck it up.  So what, we didn't do a perfect job.  So what, we fought, we had problems.  If you have some unresolved or deep seated problem with how you were raised and you are an adult, it's on you now.  Most parents do their best, and sometimes it is woefully inadequate.  

What is rubbing me raw with this book - with this line of thinking - is that people get sick because of the way they are built.  Which may be true.  But the second part of this thesis is that your childhood is the factory that builds you, so it is to blame for all your glitches and problems.  It's such a cop out, just like the drunk driver who pleads not guilty because they are an alcoholic.  Or the abused child who grows up to be an abuser.  

People who had great childhoods owe it to their kids to do even better than their parents did, but people who didn't have great childhoods get to see, first hand, the consequences of bad decisions, bad morals.  And, those lessons are expensive if you have to learn them yourself.  

* * *

Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

"If you have one parent who loves you, even if they can’t buy you clothes, they’re so poor and they make all kinds of mistakes and maybe sometimes they even give you awful advice, but never for one moment do you doubt their love for you–if you have this, you have incredibly good fortune.

If you have two parents who love you? You have won life’s Lotto.

If you do not have parents, or if the parents you have are so broken and so, frankly, terrible that they are no improvement over nothing, this is fine.

It’s not ideal because it’s harder without adults who love you more than they love themselves. But harder is just harder, that’s all."



Does Cancer = Stress or does Stress = Cancer?

Dear select readers, how many of you related to that first image?  Hands up ladies!  Knowing my friends who might read this, I'm betting many of you.  Now, this image is a pitch for some supplements, but I found it because I've been reading a book at the recommendation of my newly found cancer naturpath, "When the body says NO" by Gabor Mate.  It's been a really hard slog for me to get through.  Not because it's isn't well written or interesting, rather because I read a few pages and stutter.  And reflect.  And put the book down to think a little about why it keeps making me react.  I'm reacting more to this book that even the Sheryl Sandberg leadership manifesto that made my blood boil.  

I'm not through the book yet and I keep seeing myself in it, over and over again.  The author is a palliative care doctor, and he writes from his own experiences with patients with diseases such as MS, Crohns, cancer and the like.  The book explains some of the research done in an area called Psychoneuroimmunology.  It is an area of study that focuses on the connection between the mind and the nervous and immune systems of the human body.  When I think of the mind-body connection, I always think of my mother, who would always, always, get a horrible cold  or some ailment whenever there was a funeral that she was supposed to attend.  It was never a feigned illness.  She hated going to the funerals and her body, without fail, was happy to find a reason to make it impossible for her to attend. 

This book, while careful not to blame the patient, pulls on the connecting threads between chronic stress, repression of emotions and these life altering, life reducing or life ending illnesses.  It begins to explain the connections between our complicated immune system and  our psychological state.  Much of the book focuses on the childhood experiences and stresses of the patients.  Some is rubbing me the wrong way as I've never met a perfect parent, perfect family or perfect child.  I've always felt that we are all the victims and benefactors of our upbringing, and we all have the choice to benefit from the good and learn from the bad. 

But if you start to think this through, if chronic stress or rather an inability to cope with chronic stress causes not just your run of the mill, depressed immune system, cold/flu, your hypertension or migraines, but also diseases like cancer or MS, what do we do with that?   For someone like me, where I have a disease that from a statistical point of view, I shouldn't have, it seems logical to blame stress.  

It's a pretty easy leap, really more of a hop, to say that the unremitting stress of last year and the feeling of being totally out of control in my life was a catalyst for an immune system that was not up to the job of catching the growing cancer cells.  But if how we are built makes us sick, what do we do?  If your life is built on loyalty, family and love, what do you do?  Unmake ourselves?  Be people that we aren't?   

I think often about something that a former colleague used to say to me ALL the time.  Whether talking about work or home, just about every day, he would say "Yes, it's a problem, but it's not YOUR problem".  I've always wanted to solve problems, jump in and carve a path forward.  Push for a resolution, a decision, a direction.  But in reflecting on this connection and the few studies that have shown personality types being associated with diseases, I am starting to ask myself some uncomfortable questions.

I've spent a lifetime trying to live up to my expectations for myself, and trying to drive down my expectations of others.  Maybe I need to find a new balance.  

More later as I continue reading and reflecting!  



Of horses and girls

This weekend my oldest girl, my horsie girl, spent the weekend at a riding clinic.  Watching her ride far better than I ever have, even when I was young and brave, makes me so happy.

Even before I started leasing a horse, I started my oldest daughter in lessons.  Hoping she'd be bit by the horse bug as I was.  She never really seems to love it, but she persevered, liking it enough to keep going.  Her turning point seemed to be when I decided to buy both my girls a pony - suddenly for her it seemed that riding became more than just an expensive hobby.  It was a madly impulsive decision, but I wanted both my girls to have the opportunity to ride.  Truth be told, I thought my youngest daughter would be the natural rider.  She, who will never have an issue explaining her point of view to man or animal.  

But life happens and never in ways we predict.  An incident involving bossy mares, a pony, some ice and Mom being run over left a pretty nasty aftertaste in my youngest daughter's mouth.  She decided that she didn't like or trust horses at all - something I blame myself for because I pushed her too hard, and even as a toddler, she was very clear that she won't ever be pushed around -  the pony was sold, and we began the odyssey to buy THE mother/daughter horse.  Safe for Mom, and athletic enough for daughter.  

My oldest daughter started to really enjoy the competitive aspect of riding, she loved perfecting her skills and began to see herself as a rider.  Much as I groan and moan about how the mother/daughter horse rapidly became the daughters horse, and Mom was relegated to the difficult to ride and not very athletic, super sweet mare, watching my daughter develop the determination, kindness and focus necessary to train a horse while learning herself makes me one very proud Mama.  

And, the time we spend going to and from the barn, talking about shows, coaches, equipment, farriers is time well spent.  The friends we have made, our barn family, is a huge part of our life.  And, this time is my hook into my private and contained teenager, this soon to be adult, who just yesterday was my tiny baby girl.  



That prickly little feeling

Years ago I did the Myers-Briggs test and was so intrigued by the concept of intuition.  Finally, I had a label for how I had always lived my life and made my choices.  For better or worse, I've let my feelings and intuition guide my life.  I love nothing more than "reading" people, and I find nothing more entertaining than watching passionate people debate real issues.  I love helping people understand why people or issues are stuck, and getting them moving forward again.  And, when confronted by people who hide their feelings and shelve them in hard to access places, I love chinking away at their armour to be able to understand them better, to get a window into their minds.  For me, intuition is nothing more than the power of observation on steroids.

But, my love affair with intituion is also why, from the first minutes when the dental hygienist and assistants were dancing around my mouth measuring my little friend, my soon to be diagnosed tongue carcinoma, I quickly jumped to the cancer conclusion.  Not from any lack of professionalism on their part, but their concern pushed my intuitive lizard brain into full alert.  Once I did my internet sleuthing, well, that bad feeling I had in the dental office grew roots.  

It's a hard slog in our pithy positive world to be honest and say that you have a bad feeling.  People think it means that you think you are going to die.  They chime in wanting you to be positive.  To think positive.  To broadcast your sunny outlook to the world.  And, funny enough, when my co-worker was recently diagnosed with a different type of cancer, I was ALL ABOUT the positivity.  We need to say something, to do something because we care and we feel like we have nothing real to offer.

But, being positive doesn't change reality.  It doesn't change the cancer cells that continue to grow and multiply.  It doesn't change the reality that over this past year of my life, this most shittiest of years, I have felt like absolute crap.  And berated myself for my weakness, my fatigue.  It doesn't change those microscopic little cells that may or may not have floated their way to my lymph nodes and could be the changes that the CT scan found in two of them.  

Only time, surgery and a biopsy will tell if those are stressed out lymph nodes or cancerous lymph nodes.

The one thing that I do know right now is that it always seems that whatever you expect to happen, is not what happens.  Life just doesn't seem to work that way.  It doesn't mean that it won't all work out in the end, or that the slog through won't be worth it.  

But, for me, at least, it means that I'll spend my time LIVING today and I'll think about tomorrow when tomorrow comes.  Oh, and, next time that little voice tells me to go and see the naturpath, I think I'll go!  


Am I really going to blog?

I don't think I'm crazy.

Really, I don't.  But, it seems that crazy and I spend quite a bit of time together.  We're even a bit intertwined.  So when I sit down for lunch with my friends from work, or when I catch up with old friends, and I start telling them about the most recent thing that happened, I often hear "you should write a book".  Or, and I love this one, "that could only happen to you".

So, I've decided to start writing it down.  It's really mostly going to be a bit of journalling, a bit of story-telling, a bit of soul-searching.  Free therapy for me, and for the 2 people that will read it - hopefully a bit of entertainment.  After all, crazy and funny go hand in hand!

And, of course, I love horses and all things horsie - so they'll be lots of horse stories to tell.  This picture is my very pretty, not particularly athletic, and difficult to ride paint mare.  Her name is Lexi and I dreamed of a owing a horse that looked like her ever since I watched Little Joe ride off on his black and white paint on Bonanza!  Well, I bought her - without training and after not having ridden for 20 years or so.  What could go wrong?  

Did I mention the crooked legs?