Is it a boundary setting hangover? Is it a vulnerability hangover? Is it a lack of boundaries? For all of my talk (writing) about how I’m trying to focus on myself, I still do it. I give too much of myself. I let other people make decisions about how I’m using my time and my energy. I keep putting oxygen masks on everyone else because, “What will they think of me if I’m sitting here putting my oxygen mask on when there are other people who don’t have oxygen masks on?”
I keep forgetting the rules: What other people think of me is none of my business. And also: Do unto others what I would have done unto me. I am perfectly capable of putting on my own oxygen mask. I’d rather do it for myself than have some random passenger who thinks I need help but doesn’t have his own oxygen mask situation sorted help me.
Here’s the thing. I’m learning.
The other day, I went for a swim. A few days later, I felt rather sore. I probably pushed myself too hard. And I can kind of remember the exact moments when I pushed myself too hard: when I wanted to get another lap or a few more strokes in when I should have actually just slowed it down a little. So the next time I went into the pool, I was a little bit better about listening to when I need to ease off a little. My body is good about telling me.
Another day, I gave someone just a little more time than I actually had. It threw off my whole day. And it probably disrupted my sleep that night. Next time, I’ll back off a little bit more in that arena too. When I was younger, it always felt like I had endless amounts of time to give to other people. Like a cup of coffee or a beer could easily turn into two or three and then a whole afternoon or evening. When I write about it now, it sounds kind of romantic. Youthful. This kind of feeling that I had all this time.
Maybe it’s the cliche of the mis-spent youth but that feeling of just having hours and hours, endless days? Too often I spent it on the wrong people. Not that these people who I was spending time on were bad (although some of them were) but that I wasn’t spending that time on the one person I should have been: myself.
I’ve only learned very recently that I actually really enjoy my own company. I enjoy being by myself. Yes, of course I also enjoy being with some people, some of the time. But I enjoy being with myself all of the time.
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If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!
I would have liked to have gotten here, to blogging earlier today but I’ve been on the phone with insurance, e-mailing and leaving voicemails with cancer center billing departments. It seems that at least one place is trying to bill me a second time. I triple checked my credit card statements. Brain fog from chemotherapy is a very real thing, my doctor (whose office sent me a bill for a payment I already made) assures me. So triple checks it is. I pulled out my calendar to make sure the dates of the payments and appointments lined up, that I didn’t just mis-remember everything through the brain fog. Sure enough, they charged my credit card.
I didn’t sleep well last night — another side effect of one of my medications, apparently — and so I really would rather have been taking a cat nap or even just reading. OK, let’s be honest, even if I’d slept well last night, I would not have wanted to have to spend my morning dealing with medical bills.
And the other one, well, I guess it’s my fault for not reading the fine print before receiving radiation treatment. Or not asking questions like, “how much is this going to cost me?” ahead of time. I guess I have too much faith in insurance companies to do the right thing and for providers to be up front about how things are going to be billed.
It’s exhausting. A good chunk of my time, I was on the phone just trying to get to a live person, inputting the same information over and over and then when I finally got a live person, it was someone from a pharmacy, not billing. TWICE. Plus, the line was all crackly and there was some sort of lag time in our conversation. As if we were all in 1979, trying to make an overseas phone call. And, yes, part of me did think that this was by design, that the insurance company makes all of this as unpleasant as possible, hoping that you’ll give up. And I guess eventually I did.
This is hard. Really, really hard.
And, yes, I can turn to my breathing and meditation and all the rest of it to get through these moments, but the bills are still there. I can’t breathe the bills away. If I’d known how expensive cancer was, I wouldn’t have asked for it. Oh, that’s right. I didn’t.
Still, there’s something about not receiving bills until all of the treatment is done that feels kind of gross. It would have been easier to swallow had I been told that I was going to be billed this way ahead of time.
And right now, I just kind of need to write through all of this, just get it out and into the world. I wish I could be using this time and energy to write something beautiful and creative, to escape into something else. But right now it’s more helpful to me to write something real. And to try to be grateful that I have some place to at least do that.
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If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!
For the past several months, I’ve been posting every day to this blog. They’ve all been responses to the daily prompts. It’s been immensely helpful in building a daily posting habit. And I’ve been actually quite pleased with a lot of the writing that I’ve done in response to the daily prompts.
There was a time in the past when I would have viewed daily prompts as a sort of crutch. What I believed was that I should be generating my own writing and ideas and creativity on my own, with no assistance from beginning to end. “Real artists”, I thought “are spontaneously inspired.”
Of course, now I realize the ridiculousness of this way of thinking. Inspiration can come from anywhere and that includes daily prompts (even ones that are AI generated). More often than not, having the prompts pushed me into the flow state that I needed in order to write.
They ushered me to this point of being able to push myself into that desired flow state on a day to day basis.
Here’s the other thing. I realized that part of why I was using the daily prompts is that it connected my blog to other readers. The result was that I got views and even likes. I’ve written a big game about how I’m not in this for the likes or even for the views and yet here I was, responding to the daily prompts each day in part to get the views and likes. I’ve gotten pretty good at linking the daily prompts to whatever I wanted to write about anyway, whatever happened to be on my mind. Even today, the question is about retirement and it would be easy enough to think about this as a “retirement” from daily prompts.
But I’m not going to do that.
I still believe, perhaps even more fervently now, that inspiration can come from anywhere. But I’ve also decided that this blog is my own space, to do with it as I please, to express myself as I’d like to, to write about what’s on my mind and what my interests are. That is inspiration enough. I am my own inspiration. I’m glad I had these daily prompts to get me here. And also glad that I’m ready to take off on my own.
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If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!
I was recently reminded of the fact that female humans are born with all of the eggs that they will ever produce. This means that the half of me that came from my mother was inside her when she was inside my grandmother. Wild to think about.
It keeps crossing my mind today to get on the computer to post to this blog and in the same moment, that keeps slipping away towards something more… more what? Just something more.
Which is good. To be immersed in each moment in this way.
And just now, I noticed that the late afternoon glow of the nearly solstice sun is so particular. And how this moment of sunlight will not be like this for a whole other year. But even then, the cloud cover will be different and the shade from nearby trees will be more or less depending on what kind of year they’ve had.
And so I decided that perhaps I needed to write this down as my favorite moment. But by the time I had arrived at my desk, it had all changed. And so this had become my new favorite moment. And even so the sun continues it’s shifting through the sky. It mirrors a longing that I feel and yet cannot explain. A longing for this moment.
It’s still morning here. But I already had a perspective-changing moment. I don’t need to go into the details of what happened. The germane point is that I experienced a moment in which it was very clear that the only other person who was in the same space as me did not (or perhaps could not) see or notice me. I was invisible.
This moment brought up all sorts of feelings. Initially, I was frustrated, angry, and annoyed. Part of me wanted to shout, “Hey! I’m right here!” But I had things I needed to get done so kept calm and carried on.
But, as these things do, the moment kept returning to my mind. There’s something to be learned from this. And so I’ve been sitting with it at moments. I wrote about it in my journal. And now I’m writing about it here.
Being invisible actually felt quite familiar, as something that I’ve experienced regularly in the past. And that’s because it is something that I’ve experienced often in the past. But I didn’t really have the words to name that feeling. Now I do. Examining this moment from today allowed me to articulate what had happened to me in many previous moments. “Oh! I was invisible all those other times too!” It feels very good to be able to name and thereby validate those other times that I’d been rendered invisible.
But this morning’s moment of invisibility stood out because even though it was a familiar feeling, it wasn’t familiar from recent times. In other words, I’ve been able to build up my life and myself such that I am rarely rendered invisible these days. How so? I see myself. It’s actually that simple.
And there was something else to be learned from this moment this morning. The other person (who did not see me) and I were sharing physical space (although this other person did not seem to be aware of that). I think that there have been times in my life when I have been invisible and my response has been to try to render myself visible by taking up more physical space; when the physical realm has been my primary place of interacting with the world. The physical/ bodily world has been the primary space for making myself visible.
But as I sat with this moment, I realized that physical body-space is only one third of the story of human experience. I also have a mind and a spirit. And perhaps these moments when I am invisible in the physical worlds are small reminders from my mind and spirit that my body — and how it is seen or not seen — is not the end of my story. In fact, it’s not even a narrative thread in the story of my body. The story of my body is the story of my body, not how it is seen or not seen by other people.
I just googled the phrase, “Invisible Man” because this experience made me think about re-reading Ralph Ellison’s novel. Of course, a good portion of what came up on the first page of this search was about the 2020 horror movie. There’s some layer of irony in that. Oh, and trust that I did get sucked into the horror film trailers. And will probably end up watching it at some point. No judgment (of myself or anyone) there. It’s telling that the book is rendered invisible by the movie. IYKYK.
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If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!
There was a time when I would have thought that it was “selfish” to have this answer to this question. And when I thought that being that kind of “selfish” was a bad thing, something to be avoided. I used to think that being a good person meant being completely self sacrificing, to deny myself my own needs and wants and pleasures. And therefore my passions were always tied up in what I construed as other people’s needs and wants. It wasn’t a very healthy way to live.
Slowly, slowly, I’m starting to learn a different way of thinking about myself.
Selfishness can, of course, be a bad thing. This sort of selfishness is when someone takes away from other people for their own benefit. But selfishness can also take the form of assuming what other people want without asking them. Even though this looks like it’s giving and not selfish, it’s actually projecting one’s own needs on to someone else. In the process (at least for me), I’ve often ignored my own needs and wants. And in this way, I thought I was a good person. But I wasn’t. Because I wasn’t taking care of the most important person in my life: myself.
Now, I’m trying to learn about my own needs. And I’m trying to learn about myself, get to know myself better, figure out what my needs and interests are and give them to myself. This is my passion.
How am I going about fulfilling my passion? I take it easy on myself. This sounds like the opposite of passion, but I guess you could say that I’m passionate about taking it easy on myself. I check in with myself often. I let go of trying to be “perfect”. I pause a lot lately. I’ll take a deep breath and make sure that I am not skipping breaths. When I’m excited about something — an activity or a pursuit or learning something — I let myself pursue it but not the point of neglecting myself or being in pain. I try to extend myself grace.
Do I get it right every time? Not by any stretch of the imagination.
But my other passion is this: beginning again. Allowing myself to start over again and again and again as many times as is necessary.
Each new moment is exactly that: A. NEW. MOMENT.
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If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!
So, right now, that means spring is my favorite season. In Maryland it already feels a bit more like summer, hot and humid, the constant threat of thunderstorms, even though we are still ten days or so away from the summer solstice. The minutes of sunlight are still piling up on each side of the day. School is still in session, but the community pools are open. It would be easy for me to get caught up in either looking forward towards summer break or backwards to the cooler days of spring during this time of transition. But I’m putting a great deal of effort into being in the season I’m in — weatherwise and otherwise.
I learned a lesson about this just yesterday in my guitar lesson. I’ve been working the same piece of music for a while now — maybe as long as two or three months? — I’m not really sure. In any case, it’s been a challenging piece and the last few lessons, my teacher has worked with me with the same few trouble spots for a few weeks now. At the end of the lesson, she’s sent me off with some thoughts on how to work on those few measures. So at each practice, I will follow her suggestions and work on those few measures, practicing them over and over. And there certainly has been some improvement.
And yesterday she called me out. “You’ve been working on these other parts of the piece, haven’t you?” indicating the lines and measures that we hadn’t started working on during my lessons yet.
I laughed and wondered, “How did she know?“
I confessed that I had been. She also teaches my daughter and she told me that I’m just like her. There’s probably some truth to that. But when I talked to my daughter about it, she said that she has some favorite parts to pieces of music that she just really enjoys playing and so she plays those parts over and over.
That’s not what’s going on for me.
As I explained to my guitar teacher, I have it in my head that there’s some sort of deadline or like a “test” at the end and I start to get worried that I’m not going to have covered or practiced that part of the piece.
I know. There is no deadline. And that’s also exactly what I said to my teacher. “You’re type A,” she said.
We both had a bit of a laugh over the whole thing. The whole thing forced to me to examine and articulate some of these ridiculous thoughts and ideas that underlie how I’ve been approaching practicing guitar. And it also made me realize that I present as a Type A personality. And I realize that this is a survival/ defense mechanism that I built up in school and probably in life in general. It’s that I always feel like if I’m not three steps ahead, then I’m three steps behind and slipping even faster.
But in my heart of hearts, that’s not who I really am. It’s just how I’ve been presenting myself. It’s a coping strategy. I practiced those other sections of the music because I was worried I’d somehow be called upon to know the whole piece and I wouldn’t be prepared.
All of this for an activity that I’m partaking in supposedly “for fun.”
In the meantime, the few measures that my teacher suggested I practice aren’t really getting that much better. And the whole thing isn’t really that much fun. Or, at least, it’s definitely not as much fun as it could be if I just trusted the process. Just focus on the parts that my teacher told me to. No need to be a super student, to know the whole thing ahead of the class (by the way, there is no class, these are private lessons). I’ve been cramming all of the music into each week, each practice. And in this way of thinking, I’ve ended up not really knowing any of the music that well. I haven’t been giving each line, each measure, each note its space and time.
I’d like to be able to tell you that since this lesson and commensurate change in attitude, I’ve picked up the guitar and the whole thing has come together. That’s not true. This isn’t some neat little lesson with a change of attitude and a happy reward at the end. In fact, I haven’t even picked up the guitar since yesterday’s lesson. In part because that’s part of the lesson too. I’m doing all of this for fun so I don’t need to practice just to “prove” something to myself. And I also don’t need to “over practice”. I practice once a day for thirty to forty-five minutes. When I’m done, I’m done, I move on to something else. I don’t fixate and obsess and try to perfect it all.
So what does this have to do with my favorite season?
Like I said, my favorite season is the one I’m in. And being able to say that means that I don’t spend a lot of time looking forwards or looking backwards at the other seasons, which will inevitably come in their due time. Just as those other parts of the music will get their due focus and attention in their time. In the meantime, I’ll just live in the moment, the season, the measure, the notes I’m in.
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It’s Wednesday, which means that I’m going to include a brief summary of what I’ve been blogging about in this past week.
Let’s begin with last Thursday where I answered the prompt about my dream chocolate bar, which ended up being an impossible one because what’s the point of dreaming if it doesn’t transcend reality?
Friday was my shortest post yet about why I wouldn’t change my name.
Next up, I revealed who I spend most of my time with. (MY answer was unsurprising.)
A bit of silence. And then a discussion of why I shouldn’t actually feel awkward about speaking aloud by myself.
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If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!
I take it for granted too often that I can just walk into my kitchen (or one of the two bathrooms that are mere feet away) and drink water straight from the tap. But I would be well served to consider this the miracle that it is every time I get a drink, wash my hands, use the toilet or take a shower or bath. Oh, and wash my clothes (sheets/ towels/ etc…) in the machine that I have literally right downstairs in my basement. Just this past weekend, I gave my dog a bath (shower, really, as my daughter pointed out while she was cleaning him with me) using one of the two hoses connected to our house. How is this possible? If I lost this access to potable water in my own home, I would not survive.
When I was much younger, I did live for a brief period of time without indoor plumbing. The water had to be boiled (or bought) in order to drink it. And I suppose that all of that just becomes a part of the routine of daily life: taking bucket baths, carrying water from the well or tank (or asking someone to do it for me which is more likely what I did), remembering to stock up on potable water or to boil it. But all of that is, well, it’s a lot. And I was younger then and more adaptable. I’m probably softer now. Yeah. Definitely softer.
And so: I’m left with trying to not take what I have for granted.
If you enjoyed what you’ve read here, please check out other posts. Likes, shares, and reposts help get my writing out to where it needs to be. I’m also grateful for financial support. Even though I post daily, I only send out a once a week summary email to subscribers. Thank you!
Rhena Writes 