Monday, August 22, 2011

The next steps

Socially impaired.

That is me.  I cannot manage to be the happy, sun is always shining, life of the party that everyone expects from me.  Not only could I always do that, it did not have to actually think about it because it was what I did.  Unconscious, easy.  Sure, I would receive the occasional mean remark disguised as a compliment, such as when someone called me a Pollyanna. And, well, there is that one person who used to call me a Berk-wearing-tree-hugging-annoying-optimist-hippie-freak, but that was the exception.  But, not much of the crap in my life had a serious or more than momentary effect on how I am.

I am a bounce-back girl.  I am really a very sunshiny person.  I see all of the positive and supportive aspects of my life, even extending that to parts of life that do not involve me.  I make lemonade all the damn time and share it on the sunny side of  the street.  My glass is always more than half full, and it is never covered, so that it can be filled and spent as needed.  I really am all of these positive things, and more.

Well, I think that I used to be because it is now something that I have to make happen instead of just letting it happen.  I thought that spewing all of the parts of my crap that are not too personal or too painful would allow them to just go off somewhere and not continue to bother me.  And, that mostly works.  Experience it fully, wallow as needed and then just get rid of it.  I have, or at least used to have, this flash meditation.  It is, was, that I would allow myself to re-experience whatever had happened, bodily feel the emotions and then let the whole thing pass through me and fall to the Earth, where our Mother would transform it into something good.  You know, something wonderful created from the not so wonderful.

I still believe in that process.  All energy all the time and being a part of it only as it flowed through me and where I was a part of that particular thing, that process, that being.  Simple.

But, now I have to consciously generate some positive feelings and energy when I am around certain people.  That distresses me more than I am able to express.  I have to think about how to arrange my face, make adjustments to my expressions, think happy thoughts and be part of the happy and friendly stuff that is going on around me.  I mean, I can still do it.  I am in no danger of having some major fail when I am with someone else.  It is just that something that used to be effortless, something about which I never had to give a thought, is now so much work, laborious, just so damn hard.  I have little fails, and a couple of people have mentioned it to me, so that means that I am not successful at hiding how difficult this is for me.

It has been happening more and more often over the past six months or so, and it happened on Saturday,  with my coffee friends and again at the family thing on Sunday.  I thought about those two days, back-to-back like that, on the drive home yesterday.  And, I thought, well, Simpleton, this is just the withdrawal experience from not spewing for the past couple of days.  You are used to getting rid of the crap, letting it pour out of your head and heart, through your fingertips and onto the electronic page.  You will be fine in a few days, you know, just like you would recover from going on a cake binge.  Ah, I digress, but I do remember the cake binges.  Good times.

Anyway, it is not only the past few days of not spewing all over the place, because this is a fairly long-term problems for me, and then when I got home I thought about it some more, took a nap, thought more and repeated the process, minus the nap, this morning.  And, I came to a few decisions.

I am going to continue to not spew about all of the less positive aspects of my life.  They are never going to end, mostly because I am such a loser that I will never leave here.  And, since they are never going to go away or even be less of an issue, I just have to get over the need to do all of the navel-gazing.  I am going to ignore the crap and just do whatever I have to do.  Besides, all of the weeping makes it hard to use the computer or knit, and is really messing up my sewing and my efforts to master crocheting.  And, a bigger and more important besides is that the person who did that big thing was at the family event yesterday and despite my most fervent and loving desires, I think that that relationship is pretty much over.  I can manage, even embrace, being loving and polite and non-confrontational, but it seems that I might not be able to reclaim the trust that existed between us, at least on my end of that equation.  I just have to let that person drift out of my life.  It really sucks, but I really do not have any influence, much less any control, there.

I am going to get away from the big-picture stuff and concentrate on the small stuff.  I have great hopes that this could work.  And, this fits in with the plans that I have for the next hundred days project.

So, beginning next week, I will begin Hundred Days to Greater Creativity and More Positive Thinking.  I might wait until September first.  Maybe not.

Every day I will find at least one positive thing that happened during that day, and I will try to do something creative. 

Creativity.  It will not always be sewing or soap making, knitting or painting, but it will be something.  More importantly, it will be an aspect about which I will have to think and plan so that it actually happens.

Positive thinking.  Frankly, this one is going to be much easier.  On my first hundred days project I had decided to say one positive, supportive thing about myself.  Every day.  Every freaking day. Within minutes of making that commitment I knew that it was impossible.  My best guess is that even the most well-adjusted, positive thinking person would have trouble doing that every single day.  So, I added the divesting of one item each day.  I rarely, as in for all practical purposes, go back and read anything that I have written, not electronically or on paper, so I cannot be sure, but I think that I did a fairly good job of coming up with many self-affirmations.  The getting rid of stuff went better.  And this time, the positive thought is not restricted to me, but can be about anything that happened during the day, about any person or any aspect or condition in the world.  As a fall-back, I have the cats to provide some heartfelt and comic behaviors, so that is making this much easier.  What I cannot do is use this as an excuse for being ironical, sarcastic or even the teeniest bit snarky.

Continuing to divest myself of all of the stuff that is burdening me is a given, as doing so will be manifesting both my creative juices and some serious and conscious work on having positive viewpoints and adjustments to not having this stuff around.  I am going to avoid any big-picture aspects, hoping to keep this up close and very and significantly personal.

I think that these plans are both challenging and doable. 

So, I will be going away for the next several days and then dealing with the consequences of having dared to actually go away for several days.  That should pretty much make the beginning of September when this gets started.  I had thought about waiting until the Autumnal Equinox, but that is too far away.  I need more immediacy than that, although I am now thinking that a ritual then might be appropriate in support of this.

As for my social ineptness and sadness and all that jazz, well, I am going to take a break from both my coffee friends and from family stuff for a while.  I am already missing those, as the pressure in my chest informs me.  But, I need some perspective on why I am so unable to simply be what I believe to be my authentic self.  There is some, no matter how remote, possibility that it is simple sadness about all the stuff.  Maybe it is hormones or depression or something.  Maybe I need vitamins or a swift and enduring kick in the ass to remove me from a self-imposed pity party.  Nah, this is no party, pity or otherwise.  It is a definite change in how I am able to be in relationship and it is in my best interest to figure out what is causing it and to fix it. 

So, daily creative activity and a positive thought about someone or something.  Dribble on some divesting, slop on some improved social interaction, give it all a big shake and it should be an excellent few months.

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