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Bears.

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My husband and I are nurturing our inner children. We both had difficult childhoods. It may seem strange but it is never too late to reinvent yourself.

There is nothing about being a parent that means you are competent at it. Often you just continue doing the same stupid thoughtless things that were done to you. You don’t stop being selfish or needy or controlling. So you raise children who are broken because you were broken.

It wasn’t all bad. There were trips to cultural events. Education was encouraged. But how to be human? How to deal with emotions? That was too hard. They didn’t know how to do that.

They did the best they could with what they had. They didn’t know there was more to being an adult than paying the mortgage and cooking dinner. They weren’t intentionally neglectful or abusive. But the damage was still done. And it still has to be undone.

I’m grateful that we both were aware enough of our weaknesses to decide to never have children. We didn’t want to continue the cycle. Slowly we are learning ways to heal ourselves.

We have teddy bears. They have names and stories. We drink tea every Sunday evening with the bears, and afterwards we read a children’s story. This may not be what adults usually do, but it is healing. I’m starting to think that everybody should keep their teddy bears. More bears, less drug abuse. We all need something to hold on to when times get difficult.

There is a lot that is hard about being an adult who never had a healthy childhood. There aren’t a lot of instructions on how to heal your inner child. There is a lot of shame involved. It is hard to admit that you need help. You have to learn how to grow up backwards. I think there are a lot of people who have to do this. Maybe we should start a club so we don’t feel alone.

Maybe we should also start a 12 step program for people who have escaped from church, for the same reasons.

Poem – the key in the rubble.

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Just by being stubborn
you can get to be the person you have been.

Many people have to be able to do the work.
Maybe they should not be afraid.

We have buildings in our childhoods.
We have buildings in our hearts.

Inside each person is the key,
located in the middle of an argument,
buried under the pain of grief.

Our pain is our teacher.
Our hurt is our healing.

Without judgment
without fear
without turning away

look into your life.

Look into your own building site
among the abandoned rooms,
the peeling paint,
the broken bricks,

and find your heart
Again.

Mirror People

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In the “Rules for Being Human” there is this – “Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate anything about another person that you do not love or hate about yourself.”

This means in part that if you are at peace and comfortable with yourself, then you will be at peace and comfortable with everyone you meet.

Whatever you see in another person that you admire, use that as a signal to work on that quality – improve it, strengthen it, deepen it.

Conversely, whatever you see that you dislike, work on that too. Whatever annoys you about another person – whatever quality or quirk, is actually a trait in yourself that you dislike. This is a great tool for self-improvement. That quality is what you most need to work on in yourself.

And there is yet another way. Make peace with yourself, just as you are. Accept it as the way things are. Instead of fighting against your nature, accept it as it is. A lot of our stress comes from trying to change things that are just simply that way.

Marianne Williamson tells us “The way of the miracle-worker is to see all human behavior as one of two things: either love, or a call for love.” With this mirror technique, the way to self and world improvement is seen by examining your reaction to other people. However you react, it is either with love, or a call to love. It is either something that draws you in, or repulses you. If it repulses you, it is something to work on – either fix that quality in yourself, or fix your reaction to it by making peace with it.

In this way, even annoying people and situations are blessings.

Dig down deep to the roots. Why do you feel this way? Who made you feel this? Love it. Love that feeling, in all the brokenness and pain. Love it, because that brokenness is how the light of healing, the light of God can get in.

Home remodeling for the soul.

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I’ve realized that some of what I’m writing in this blog is like the “how-to” articles in home-repair magazines. They show you how to build a deck or remodel your kitchen. They show you the tools to buy and all the insider tricks to make it come together well. There are pictures and words, and somehow in the middle of it you figure out how to do it in your own home. Perhaps you don’t have a square deck – yours is rectangular. Perhaps you don’t want granite countertops in your kitchen, but the pictures of the cabinets going in explain something that you needed. This is that, but for the rooms in your heart and head.

Sometimes “home remodeling” hits closer to home. Your first and truest home is you.

This is my journey, and my work. If any of this helps you figure out things, all the better. Our paths will be different, but there will be some similar landmarks along the way.

I’m “growing up in public” as one friend tells me. Either he learned it from his therapist or from group work. Either way, it is a good phrase. It isn’t easy when you haven’t gotten all of your growing-up out of the way when you should, but late is better than never. Writing, beading, and drawing are how I do my growth-work these days. I use eating well and regular exercise to help keep me on this path. It is all connected, body-mind-spirit.

Recently I went to my spiritual director (kind of like a personal trainer for the soul) and she told me that there are many rooms our hearts, and Jesus wants to enter into all of them. This includes the good and the bad, the happy and the sad. Hmm. Kind of sounds like wedding vows when I phrase it that way.

One room we are working on is my childhood, and feelings of loss. I’m angry about the bad choices my parents made. I’m angry that they smoked themselves to death. I’m angry that they died young, leaving me to defend myself against a predatory brother and an insensitive, bossy aunt. I’m angry that they weren’t there for my graduation and my wedding, because of their bad choices and their lack of self-control. I’m angry that they left me alone a lot, even when they were alive.

But she pointed out that anger is a symptom. There is always something that comes before anger. I’ve been working on this technique recently, so I understood where she was going. Trace it back to the root. Dig down to the source.

The feeling before anger in all of this is sadness. It is grief. It is loss.

Instead of dealing with my sadness, my grief, my loss, I went straight to anger. Anger is useful but you can get stuck there. If you don’t dig out the root cause of anger, and dig down to the grief, you’ll be treating the symptom and not the cause.

She asked me to name this room. I call it “The Room of Abandonment”. I spent a lot of time alone as a child. There were a lot of things that I wasn’t taught before they died – basic things like taking care of a house inside and outside. How to cook, how to garden. I’m learning these things backwards. I still am terrible at plants, but I can get by without a garden. I’m not great at cooking, but I make do. I celebrate everything that I do figure out. I’m pretty awesome with hedge shears. I make a pretty fabulous stir-fry. My hummus is getting better too.

I felt abandoned before they died. I felt abandoned after they died too. I was just 25, so I was old enough to take care of myself. But being the youngest in a family where the older brother is abusive is hard. It was hard to claw myself out from underneath his mountain of lies. I didn’t have any perspective on what “normal” was.

So. This room. Look how I’m not really dealing with this room. This is normal. We want to turn away from hard things. So I’ve drawn it. I’ve made it into a prayer bracelet as well. I have reminders of it to force me to look at it. These are like writing notes to myself on my hand – “pick up spinach and cheese and Triscuits”. They are reminders for what I’m trying to forget.

She asked me to visualize what it would look like. I saw a light-blue room, empty, save for a chair. The walls are blue like a robin’s egg. The walls are windowless, but there is light. I’m not sure where the light is coming from, but the room feels clean and bright. The chair is an old wooden chair, like the one I rescued from my grandmother’s house when the time came for her to be put into a nursing home.

WP room 2.
(The drawing of the room)

My director told me to invite Jesus into the room, and to invite Him into any hard feelings. He wants to be there, to help me with them. This is some pretty foreign stuff. Jesus as a friend? Jesus wants to heal me? Jesus wants to hang out with me, in the boring times as well as the beautiful times? She says that Jesus wants to be with me all the time, in all the rooms of my heart. He wants to be with all of us like this.

It is like getting a notice that the President of the United States, or the Queen of England, or the Pope is coming over to my house and wants to hang out in my basement. I want to say no – come sit over here in my living room. It doesn’t have a lot of clutter. There are comfy chairs. There is natural light. Surely you don’t want to hang out in the basement with the spiders and the one overhead fluorescent light. There is a lot of clutter in the basement. It is really embarrassing. Nope- that is where Jesus wants to go. Not only does he want to hang out there, he wants to help me with it. He wants to help me clean it out, or be OK with it as it is.

When she asked me to invite Jesus into it, and I felt that while I wasn’t ready for Him to be in the room with me, He came in and put a fuzzy green shawl around my shoulders while I sat in the chair. The shawl was a reminder of His presence, and it was comforting.

While there in that visualization, with that shawl, I worked on my feelings. I’ve been working on this for days. I return to it again and again, refusing to turn aside. I’m trying not to obsess about it because that isn’t healthy either. Just like with yoga, it is important to have rest periods in this work.

When I started drawing the room, I felt that it needed something extra. I was wary of putting too much in the room. If I clutter it up with tools or toys then I’m being distracted from the work at hand. Often it is so easy to use noise and activity as an escape from being by ourselves. There is a lot of fear of silence in our society. We don’t like to be alone with our thoughts. This room needs to be quiet and clear, so I can process this feeling.

When I was thinking about it, trying to remember what events made me feel abandoned, I felt that I had to draw a rug under the chair. While I was drawing it, the events came to me. While inviting Jesus in, I started to see things clearer. He is helping me to deal with these feelings. I wasn’t ready to process this years ago. I’d put a wall around it because I wasn’t strong enough to deal with it. I don’t feel like I’m ready yet either, but I think that is normal. There are a lot of things that God calls me to that I don’t think I’m ready for.

One of the biggest things I realized was that I was taught shame about my body, and of being female. This was taught to me by my mother. Ignorance was masked by fear, which lead to more ignorance and fear. The body was always to be clothed, and periods and sex where embarrassments. Necklines were always high, and bras were always padded so no nipple showed. I learned about the mechanics of sex from a library book. I learned about how to deal with periods by accident, on the sly. Bodies and how they worked were seen as disgusting, shameful, wrong.

And then I dug down further, past the grief. All of it traces back to a feeling that I didn’t get something that I thought I deserved. All of it traces back to not being OK with things as they were, as they are. It has to do with not trusting the process, and the Director of the process, God. All of it has to do with not being ok with the Now. Anger comes from grief. Grief is a sense of loss. It is an unwillingness to accept change. That is an unwillingness to accept things as they are. It is a desire to shape the world to fit me. Nothing is ever “good” or “bad” or “half-full” or “half-empty”. It just is.

It is our society that trains us to define things as good or bad. We can unlearn this. I believe that all the sages from all the ages have been trying to teach us this.

Jonah praised God in the whale. Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek. The apostle Paul tells us that all things work together for good, for those called by God. There is something in these ideas that is so revolutionary and yet so simple.

Sometimes I feel that I’m trying to make wine out of grapes, and it just isn’t ready yet. I’m reminded of my story of when I tried to encourage the tadpoles to be frogs sooner than they were ready by pulling on their tails. I think I need to hang out in that room for a little more, and let things ferment. I’m not very good with waiting, but I’m inviting Jesus into that too. I think He understands the quiet times, the waiting times.

WP room 3

Here’s the bracelet I made to remind me to work on this. The blue beads are for the walls in the room. The Green bead at the top is the green shawl from Jesus, to remind me that He is there with me. Going clockwise, the white bead is me. It has two millefiori on it, one on either side. The square brown bead represents the chair. The broken-looking beads represent the “stuff” that created the need for the room. They are made from recycled glass from Africa.

Playing chicken with God, and being a spiritual vagabond.

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You can’t play chicken with God. Say you have a specific task that you were put on this earth to do, and you are one of the rare ones who knows what it is. To delay doing it to buy more time won’t work. God will just take it from you and give it to someone else to do. I’ve lost track of the number of times this happens in the Bible.

Even questioning God can get you in trouble, if you do it too much. Moses questioned God four times, when God called him to go to Pharaoh to get the Israelites freed from slavery. He didn’t think he was able to do it. He kept coming up with excuses and God kept coming up with workarounds for him. At the end, God sent an angel to kill him, and it was only the intervention of Moses’ wife that saved him. Kind of a crazy story. The Bible is full of them.

My theory? If God calls you to do something, it means that you have the ability to do it. God knows you better than you know yourself. God made you. The problem? Knowing that it is an actual call from God.

You are a tool. The pot cannot tell the potter how to use it. The car does not matter to the driver. If the car breaks down, the driver will just get another car. So questioning God and coming up with reasons you can’t do it won’t help you at all.

But what if you don’t know what your calling is? What if you have no idea why God put you on this Earth? Then it is good to not fight it either. Be OK with being a block in the building. Be OK with being a puzzle piece, and not seeing the big picture.

My problem, well, one of many, is that there are a lot of things that I would like to write about that I think are of significance. There are things I’ve come to understand through my prayer life that I feel would be helpful. There are insights I get from reading scripture that I think are new takes on old words. But I don’t feel that my writing is good enough, or that I have the time to dedicate to it to do it justice. I find that I only have time to write for about thirty minutes at a time, and for some reason I feel I have to create a completed post in that time.

Yes, I realize these are all excuses. I don’t have to post something every day. I’m not being paid for this. Nobody would notice if I didn’t post for a few days, so I could work on something bigger. But I know me – if I get out of the habit of posting, then I’ll take more time off, and then I won’t post at all. There is something about making a routine of it that is forcing me to write, and writing is helping me figure things out.

I’m reminded of the last meeting I had with my former priest. She said that my spiritual insights were immature. She said that she often had to bite her tongue to not say “I figured that out years ago!” The fact that she told me that erased all the tongue-biting she had done.

This is harmful, and hurtful, and not Christ-like.

This is part of why I had to leave.

Maybe my insights are simple. Maybe they are things she figured out years ago. But making fun of someone else’s spiritual journey isn’t the mark of a religious leader.

Perhaps I shared those insights with her because deep down I didn’t think she knew them. I’m not sure which ones she was talking about. Obviously at one point she thought I was onto something because she was the one who proposed that I enter the deacon discernment program.

Ugh. I’m still bitter about that whole thing. I’m trying to process this. I don’t want to be stuck here angry with it, but turning away from it is not a good idea.

There is a sense of abandonment, of being hung out to dry. There is also a sense of freedom in leaving. I feel that in a way she did me a favor by being so over-the-top in our last meeting. It provided a clean break with no turning back. I knew when I first started going back to church that the Episcopal Church was as close as I could get at the time. I’d prayed about it, and that was the reply. So I knew going into it that there was going to be an end to it. I knew I was going to leave.

I was hoping for more of a dove-tail leaving than a severing, but it wasn’t up to me.

And that too is part of the process. It is about trusting God, however I’m led. It is about following, and trying not to get in the way. It is about trying to be a worthy vessel.

I feel alone in the wilderness, yet right at home.

Organic food is just a start.

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One advantage to eating organic food is that you feel like you are making a difference. Whether the benefit is all in your head or real, you feel healthier and more vibrant. I feel like I’m doing something good for myself and the planet. I think also that if more of us eat organic food, then it will get less expensive.

I don’t eat a lot of organic food because of the cost. I have a low level civil service job with the government, so I’m paid very little. I feel like I’m being paid in a future pension and in health insurance rather than in wages. But that is part of the package. Government jobs aren’t get rich quick. They aren’t get poor slow, either. They are middle of the road.

Currently I eat organic oatmeal and apples and hummus. It isn’t much but something is better than nothing. You have to start somewhere.

The disadvantage to eating organic food is you retrain your taste buds. I had some regular oatmeal this morning and it tasted terrible. I felt like I had a coating of chemicals in my mouth. I felt a little dizzy too. This was the same flavor as the organic version, so there isn’t a flavor issue I’m dealing with. Perhaps it was artificially flavored as well? Generally maple and brown sugar flavor isn’t messed around with. Dang it, I just checked. “Natural and artificial flavors”. Bleah.

It reminds me of when I switched to drinking water instead of sodas. I used to drink Mello Yello every day, several times a day. Lots of caffeine and sugar and fizz loaded in that. Let’s not forget the artificial coloring too. I hated drinking water at first because it is so boring. But then after a month of water, a soda tasted terrible. I burped a lot from the carbonation. The sugar was too much and made me feel weird, or maybe that was the caffeine. Or maybe it was both.

I started to wonder why I even drank that stuff to start with. Now I wonder how I could eat regular oatmeal. I’m starting to dread finishing that box in the pantry.

I’m wondering what else I’ve come to think is “normal” that isn’t normal at all.

This isn’t just about food. I’ve been looking into everything I can and trying to uncover and unveil what I’ve ignored. I’m trying to open my eyes and my mind. What am I missing? What have I always assumed? What have I not questioned? This applies to education, healthcare, government, religion – everything.

There is a lot to studying other ways of doing things involved in this. Different ways of communicating, eating, thinking, believing all factor in. There is a lot to learning different traditions and faiths. The more I question why “we’ve always done it that way” the more things open up.

The bad part is that the more I become aware, the harder it is to fit in. Perhaps there are others who are faking it too. Perhaps by just talking about it, we can start to change things. Wouldn’t it be nice to go into a restaurant and have everything on the menu be not only tasty to eat but good for us and the planet? Wouldn’t it be nice to go into a doctor’s office and be told how to prevent our illnesses by eating the right things and exercising properly?

I want everybody to be awakened and empowered.

Fishing/Gardening

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I’ve decided to think of gardening as like fishing. Instead of the end result being the goal, the goal is just to do it. This way I don’t get upset when the plants die.

My Mom had a huge garden. She was the kind of Mom who asked for power tools for Mother’s Day rather than flowers. She needed the tools to work on her garden so she could grow her own flowers. It was common to find her outside moving rocks or planting something. There were daylilies and rose bushes and lily of the valley. She planted very few vegetables. Her garden was mostly about pretty flowers. Something different was blooming all the time.

She never taught me how to garden. She didn’t teach me how to cook or take care of a house either. She had a strange idea that because I was “gifted” and I “picked up ideas fast” that she didn’t have to teach me. Maybe I do understand some concepts quickly, but I still have to be taught them. By never showing me at all, she unknowingly shortchanged me.

I remember one time she saw me cleaning up a plant by taking out all the dead leaves and she was surprised. She wondered out loud how I learned how to do that.

I get a little angry when I think about this.

I’m pretty sure she was intentionally trying to make my life harder by not teaching me these basic things, but the end result is the same.

I’ve tried to learn how to garden from reading books, in the same way I’ve tried to learn how to cook. I understand a little bit of both but I think I’m missing something. That is fairly common for me. I’ll get the big picture but miss something really essential that is small and easy. I have a lot of “duh!” moments with myself.

My big concern is that I’ll spend a lot of money on plants and then kill them in short order because I don’t know what I’m doing. Either I water them too much or feed them too little or I don’t know how to prune them. I forget to look at them sometimes. I’ve taken to putting plants in areas I have to walk by so I have no excuse to forget about them.

I’ve decided to be patient with myself and with the process. Just pick an area and a plant or two. Go outside and enjoy being outside. Admire the bugs and butterflies. Commune with the Creator. Just try.

Because like fishing, the point isn’t about catching fish. The point is to be outside, in nature, enjoying the day.

Family secrets

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I realized that it was very freeing to let go of family secrets in a recent post. I’m not sure why they were given to me to hold on to. When I told the story about my brother’s fake military service credentials I felt a weight come off of me that has been there too long.

There was a lot of lying that I was encouraged to do as a child, and that habit went on too long. I was strong-armed into not telling. Something about “family name” and “honor” and “pride” got mixed into there. After I was about 5, the only trips my family went on were of the guilt variety.

There’s nothing healthy about this, but I went along, because that is what you do as a child. I didn’t know better. Here was my family, teaching me something harmful. I was the youngest member, so I didn’t have any perspective. I didn’t know that what they were teaching me was wrong.

There is a lot of shame tied up in lying. It takes a lot of energy to pretend that you are something you are not. It weighs you down, like the proverbial millstone, like the metaphorical concrete shoes. I was drowning in someone else’s stories. I inherited bags of lies and half-truths.

I was told by my brother to not tell anybody the truth for the sake of our family name. The funny thing is that he changed his name. What name? He modified his last name some time when he was in the Air Force for that one year. Did the lies start then? Or was it when he was having “naps” with his girlfriend in the family home and got her pregnant? Did it bloom into full fruition when he somehow forgot to tell wife number four that she was in fact wife number four, and not number two as he’d told her and the county clerk when they got married? Everything started to crumble when the child from the first marriage showed up on their doorstep, 16, and running away from home. Wife number four didn’t know about any other children. Somehow it seems that the person who needs to be concerned about “honor” and “family name” is him, not me. I don’t have anything to hide. Everybody knows my business.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

He threatened me to never tell his girlfriends about him. He realized after our parents died that I was the only person who knew the truth about him. I was the only person who could kick down that house of lies he had built around himself.

He blamed me for marriage number four falling apart, saying I told her something. I never talked to her. The problem was, neither did he. It isn’t my fault that he forgot to tell her really important facts about himself. But his habit of blaming me for his failure is very common.

And I took this for years. I’m now seeing the lies that I was fed. This may not be pretty to read, but it is very healing for me to write this. I’ve held this in for a very long time. It is like I finally noticed that there was a festering boil, and I’ve lanced it open. A lot of gross stuff is coming out, but better to get it out than keep it in.

He stole money from me on a regular basis when I was a child. I started to notice something was wrong and I started to keep a tally of money in and out in a separate place. When I saw what was happening, I told our Mom. She confronted him and it stopped – but he never apologized and never paid me back.

So he started stealing from me in other ways.

There was a time in my childhood that I remember intentionally forgetting about things. There was something so bad that happened that I made a point of not remembering it. Apparently I was successful, because all I can remember is that I chose to forget. It is like having a spraypaint outline of a stencil. You can see that something happened there, but you don’t have the full picture.

He blamed me for going into debt. A few years ago he was a quarter of a million dollars in debt. The real estate business he was in had taken a nose dive, and he’d borrowed money to start up some get-rich-quick plan. It failed, and he borrowed more money, for another stupid plan. He had to declare bankruptcy and moved into a friend’s green house.

He actually said that he thought that the reason he was a quarter of a million dollars in debt was that I had “prayed for his downfall.”

How’s that for a guilt trip? That’s an express trip to crazytown. If my prayers are that powerful, I’m pretty connected.

He didn’t want to admit that it was the fact that he kept borrowing money for yet another hare-brained idea that got him in the hole he was. Once again he wasn’t taking responsibility for his own actions.

Then his new girlfriend asked to be my friend on Facebook, and he freaked out. I got numerous messages from him begging me to not tell her anything. I said that was his responsibility. I didn’t contact her, but just watched what was going to happen. Then she posted a picture of her engagement ring. So she was going to be wife number 5. I asked him if she knew about the others. He fudged on the answer. I suggested they go to premarital counseling. He got very angry and said how dare I not wish them happiness together. My point was that with counseling there would be a chance of happiness.

You won’t get good fruit from a rotten tree.

And he’s pretty rotten. Time to dig out the root of it all, the reasons for the lies and the deceit. Time to dig down deep and clean things up and out.

Things got pretty ugly there, right after they got engaged and we were still communicating. I was reading a lot of self-help books and ones on better dialogue in difficult situations, but unfortunately he wasn’t. I tried to tell him how I felt, and like always he twisted what I said.

My brother is the kind of person who you can say “It is a pretty day outside.” to and he will reply “What do you mean – are you telling me it is time to mow the yard again!?”

When you are raised with crazy as your normal, it is kind of hard to know what normal is.

I know crazy. I admit that I’ve hospitalized myself twice. Bipolar disorder runs in my family. Both times I knew something was wrong and I asked for help. Both times I needed to get my medications adjusted. I’ve heard it is very rare to realize that you aren’t well mentally and ask for help.

When Ian went crazy, he certainly didn’t know that he needed help. At the time was living just 45 minutes away from where I lived with our Mom. She was dying, and he’d been in denial of it. He’d ignored the fact that we were living on Social Security and disability for one. I’d quit my job so I could take care of her and drive her to her appointments. Dad sent money to us when he could. He was living in Birmingham with his Mom, who had Alzheimer’s. Our parents had separated a few years earlier.

Instead of being a help, he’d send letters to us with clippings from the paper showing how much money he had made off a commission. He’d send a copy of his planner, showing how busy he was, to “prove” why he couldn’t come and help or visit. During the year she was sick, he visited twice. He sent only $100. Most of his energy was devoted to harassing me on the phone, telling me that I “could do more” to help her. I was 24, had quit my job, was buying food with food stamps, and doing all the cooking and cleaning and caregiving. He was 30, and was being a jerk.

When it finally became clear that she was dying, he lost his mind.

He called once and was talking very excitedly. He went away for a little bit and I could hear coughing in the background. He said “Mom is going to feel a lot better now!” When I asked what he meant, he said that he had just coughed up some of her cancer.

This was not helping. This is insane.

A few days later he trapped his girlfriend in their house and took the distributor cap off her car so she couldn’t leave. He painted crosses on the windows with wine. He said that “she was pregnant with the next Christ” and that “demons were going to come to take the baby away.” Now that is off the charts crazy. That is certifiable. That is a danger to others crazy. And so he got committed against his will. A judge got involved. He spent two weeks in. He simply learned what not to say to appear normal, but he didn’t ever admit that he was sick.

Six weeks after Mom died, Dad died suddenly. I had to handle both estates. Ian’s name wasn’t on the will. Turns out Dad created the will after Ian threatened to kill him, and the situation never improved.

Ian insisted on getting the Rembrandt etching that had always hung over the mantelpiece. It was entitled “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” He said that Dad had always wanted him to have it, because it symbolized their relationship. I think I’d have heard about something as earth-shaking as reconciliation between them. I let him have it, because it wasn’t worth arguing about. But in reality, he was just propping up his house of lies. The son had not returned to the father. The son was adrift in a sea of deceit.

Sometime around then I also insisted that we communicate only in written form, because he had that habit of twisting what I said. I’d write letters to him and save a copy for myself. That way when he said “you said this (insert hateful comment)” I could point out that I didn’t.

It is tiring to communicate with someone like this. I wonder how tiring it is to be him, to have to constantly be checking up to see how his lie-house is doing. Nobody is perfect, and nobody is awesome. It is far healthier to admit your mistakes and move on. When you have to lie to cover up a lie, then you are getting into really deep trouble. Maybe one day he’ll figure that out. I’ve had to admit that I’m not the one to help him. I tried, and it only got worse. For my own mental health and for his, I left.

Our last conversation was a message on Facebook. He told me to read Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”. He told me that I had to read that before I talked to him again. That seemed to make it easy on me – I chose to not read that book. Ever.

I unfriended and blocked him and everyone directly associated with him. I can’t take the lies anymore. I can’t take him or any of his drama. I don’t know what is real about him, and I don’t think even he knows anymore.

So I’ve honored his request. I’ve not told his girlfriend (possibly now wife) about him.

I’ve told everyone.

Meditation on snake charming – the eye of the storm.

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There are several people who complain, gossip, whine, kvetch, etc. at work. This is every day, all day. All day long, if they are saying anything to anyone who is not a patron, they are complaining. It is very tedious, because I can’t escape it.

One was in the habit of gossiping, all the time. I’ve told her repeatedly to not do this because I don’t like listening to it. Gossip is displaced communication. When you don’t feel safe talking to person A about your issues with them, you talk to person B. Meanwhile, the problem still exists with person A and you, and now person B looks at person A differently. Also, you have just spread your negativity around. It is very hard to carry around someone else’s burdens, especially when they keep pushing them off on to you.

If this was any other environment, I could leave. I could walk away. But I’m stuck with these people for 40 hours a week, every week, for what feels like forever. I’ve told them that their negativity is bringing me down, and one of them agrees. She said she’d try to do better. It hasn’t happened yet.

One, years ago, when one of them asked if I minded her complaints about another coworker (simply a prelude to a complaint, not really asking permission), I said, “Yes, I do mind” and she got really huffy. You have to establish boundaries – what you will and will not accept. This is the same coworker who thought it was OK to come up behind me and hit me (lightly) on the head every day. When I stood up to her then, she was indignant, and my boss laughed at me. She has a lot of issues too.

This environment is a little messed up. But it isn’t a hard job, and it pays OK, and there is health insurance and a pension. And I’ve realized that it provides raw material for this blog, so I’m using this as a transformative experience.

Somewhere in the middle of a rant last night, I had an epiphany. I remember the story where Jesus says that if you are in alignment with God, if you are doing God’s will, then snakes and poison cannot harm you. I also remember in Pastoral Care class that you can’t fix another person’s problems. Your goal is to just let them vent. Let them talk it out.

I’m a little torn at times about this, because I feel that I’m enabling the problem. If they continue to vent to me, then they aren’t facing their problems head on. But, then, it took me years to get strong enough to look at them head on. But their rants and complaints are like poison to me. I’ve told them I can’t handle it, and yet it goes on. It is a bad habit for them, and I can’t escape.

So in my meditation last night, I thought, perhaps this is part of the plan. I need to be able to endure this. I need to learn how to stand in the middle of the storm. I need to learn how to be Daniel in the lion’s den. I need to be calm and with God in the middle of this, and not let their poison affect me. Their poison isn’t directed at me. I’m just a captive audience.

Maybe it is healing for them to vent. Maybe they’d be better off going to a counselor or a therapist. Maybe they already do, and it isn’t helping.

But I can use this as a pathway to healing for myself. I can learn to pray and meditate during their rants. I can learn to stand there and not really be there, because they don’t really care what I think about their complaints. They just want to complain. I can see every time they complain as a reminder to ask Jesus into the situation, to be there, with me and with them, in that moment, in that painful time.

Why do I call this snake charming? Because their rants, their complaints, their gossip is poison to me. It is like sitting down at a park bench to enjoy your lunch, only to find out that stick next to you is a snake. When they come up to me, I actually wince, because I expect another tirade.

But using this time as an opportunity to pray transforms that snake back into a stick. It is yet another reminder to seek God in all situations, and to try to see God in all people. I’m now going to try to look differently at these times. It won’t be easy. But I’ll do it, with God’s help.

Thriving with a mental health diagnosis.

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This is about mental health. Some of it is about depression, because that is something that many people wrestle with. But some of it applies to mental health in general. These are things that I’ve discovered that have helped me. I offer them to you with the hope that they may be of use to you as well.

Depression feeds on itself. It has its own gravity. It is like a planet that is larger than you, sucking you into its own orbit, making it hard to escape. But you can. Inch by inch, step by step, you can get further away from it. You have the power and control. It is a thing, a force outside of you. It isn’t you. Do not let your diagnosis be your definition. You aren’t mentally ill. You have a mental health diagnosis. It is very hard to be objective about your own care when it is your mind that is affected, but it isn’t impossible. It takes a lot of work, but it is completely worth it. Every little step counts.

I was diagnosed as bipolar when I was in my early 30s. I’m in my mid 40s now. I’ve hospitalized myself twice – the last time was over 12 years ago. Both times I realized that I needed help. Since then I’ve bought a house, gotten married, and been at the same job far longer than I can believe. I’ve become a stable adult SINCE my diagnosis. If it weren’t for my diagnosis, I’d probably be homeless now. It isn’t the illness that is the problem – it is what you do with it. You can live very well with a mental health diagnosis- you have the power.

There are steps you can take to take control of this condition, to not let it be in charge. Every little tiny thing you do is a positive step towards health, and each step generates a little more energy to be able to do the next step. You won’t be able to do it all at once, and you will fall and fail several times. This is normal. This is normal for everybody – not just those with a mental health diagnosis.

You won’t be able to do it all at first. But doing something is better than doing nothing. Yes, it is hard. Yes, it is worth it. You are worth it. The disease will tell you otherwise. But I’m here, standing on the shore, having waded through the rapids and slipped on the rocks, and I’m telling you there is hope after diagnosis, and there is a way. There is a way to feel better, even to feel great.

It isn’t going to happen on its own, though. You have to do something.

Take your medicine every day. This isn’t like an antibiotic, where you take it for ten days and then you are done. You have to come to grips with the fact that this is a chronic illness. Chronic means forever. That alone can get you a little depressed. But – here’s a way to think of it. Without medicine, you will get worse. With medicine, you will be fine. We are lucky to live in a time where we have medicine to take. Medicine is essential, and taking it is a step in the right direction. Taking your medicine isn’t a sign of weakness – it is a sign that you want to get well. It is the opposite. It is a step on this path to health.

I like to think of mental health medicine as the same as medicine for diabetes. I used to think I could do all this on my own, that I could just eat right and exercise and I wouldn’t have to take pills at all. But if I had diabetes, I wouldn’t think that way, I’m pretty sure. I’d do what I could to help myself, and I’d take my medicine. We forget that we are biochemical machines – being in a human body is being part of a moving chemistry experiment. We are faulty in bits – it isn’t perfect. So we take medicine in order to fix what doesn’t work well. It is the same with glasses – if you have bad vision, you wear glasses or contacts. You don’t think you can adjust what you eat and do and suddenly see better. Props are healthy. It isn’t admitting weakness to ask for help. It is healthy.

Work with your doctor. If your medicine needs to be adjusted, tell her. Sometimes our body chemistry changes and the medicine no longer works. If your doctor doesn’t listen to you, get another doctor. I had one who treated me like a stupid child. He also said “That’s normal” when I said that I couldn’t concentrate enough to read and I was sleeping 10-12 hours a day. That isn’t normal. And a doctor who thinks that is isn’t a doctor, he is a quack.

Yes, it is hard to find another doctor. Making any change is hard – you feel like you are pushing a huge rock up a hill. You just want to sit there on that hill and just let things happen to you. This is the disease talking. If you let it win this conversation, it will keep winning. Remember, slow and steady wins the race. Every step you take gets you stronger.

Eating well and getting regular exercise is essential. It isn’t about a starvation diet at all – it is about making good choices with food. It is about seeing food as healing. It is about movement too – about intentionally incorporating moving into your daily routine. The human body isn’t meant to sit for hours at a time. You’ll feel much better if you move. It will be hard to do at first. It gets better. It gets amazing. You’ll be creaky and whiny at first. Keep on going. It gets better.

When I first started working out, I felt like I was going to die. It hurt, I was worn out, I was sore. It was really hard. I hated the class. I hated being there. I wanted the class to end. I puttered through, doing only about half the routine. But I felt better after the class was over. I felt glad that I had gotten through it, and done something good for myself. And then I got stronger, and now the classes seem easy. This is the trick. Stay with it. Of course it hurts at the beginning. You aren’t in shape. But keep going. Every good thing you do is a step towards healing.

Find what is right for you. I’m going to tell you what I do that works for me. It has taken me years to figure this out, and I’m OK with the idea that this may change. Currently I do yoga, water aerobics, and I walk.

I do yoga for 10-15 minutes every morning. I also take a yoga class every week. I have made a commitment to myself to do this. I’ve noticed that if I decide to skip one morning, or the class once a week, then I start to want to skip every day or every week, and then it is a month I’ve not had my class. My body and my head let me know that this isn’t good. Push through that resistance, that desire to not do what is good for you. Go ahead and do it, and you’ll feel better afterwards. You’ve won that battle.

There is something amazing about yoga. It unkinks your body and your head. It isn’t just exercise. It teaches balance, both physically and mentally. It teaches about acceptance of where you are, and gently pushing yourself to get better and stronger. Yoga is like a massage you give yourself. I recommend it highly. I’m grateful that my local YMCA teaches classes. There are many different kinds of yoga classes. Some are very basic, some are very advanced. If you go to one class and it is too much or too little for you, go to a different one with a different teacher.

I do water aerobics, at least twice a week. The class I take is taught by a very energetic teacher. I had thought that water aerobics was just for arthritic little old ladies, and while it can be, it doesn’t have to be. It can be a very vigorous cardio exercise with resistance. The water provides support and resistance at the same time. This exercise is great on your joints – you can move them and not hurt them like you would with land exercises. Also, water aerobics is fabulous for your core. Having a sexy belly does wonders for your self-esteem.

I walk every day at lunch for 20 minutes. I’ve had to bring my lunch to work to make this work out. I have changed how I work as well, and I get in a mile and a half. Again, every little bit counts. Even ten minutes of walking is better than none.

I’ve had to give up a lot to do these things. There is only so much time in the week when you work a full time job. But I’ve found that being healthy is more important than reading ten books a week. You have to figure out your priorities and find a healthy balance. Sometimes you can do several things at once – you can listen to an audiobook or a podcast while walking or gardening, for instance.

What you eat is important too. Why go through the effort of exercise if you aren’t going to put good fuel in your body? Balance is important here. If you eat a lot of high-energy foods (caffeine and processed sugar) you’ll crash hard. If you eat a lot of low-energy foods (junk food, fried, processed, meat) you’ll just drag through your day. You have been taught by our society that you need these things to get through your day. You don’t. Our culture lies about a lot of things, and is totally unaware of consequences. This is why so many people are dying of preventable diseases. Don’t be them. You have a choice, and you have control.

I eat yogurt or oatmeal for breakfast, along with grapes and bananas. Eat organic when possible. Eat more vegetables than meat. When you do eat meat, eat fish. Don’t eat anything fried. No sodas, and avoid processed sugar. It causes a crash. I’ve gone without caffeine for over 5 years. Caffiene is a cheat – it over balances. Drink mostly water, with some fruit juice. Go natural as much as possible. Eat real food, not processed. Again, you won’t be able to do everything at once. That is normal. Even doing one thing is a great start. This is kind of like learning how to juggle. You won’t be able to have all the balls up in the air at once. But do one, and get used to it, then do another. Patience yields progress.

Get outside. Get some natural sunshine. Go for a walk outside, or garden.

There is no substitute for sleep. Get enough sleep every day. You can’t shortchange yourself on that.

Avoid overstimulation. For me, this means avoiding the news. It isn’t news, so much as bad news. I can’t handle it. I’m overwhelmed. I feel helpless. I started by not watching the news. I would read it instead. Then even that got to too much. If you can, reduce noise around you. This is at work and at home. Too much noise jangles our nerves. The same is true with a lot of visual stimulation. I try to make sure the TV is off at 9:15, and I’m in bed by 10. I need time to wind down. I read before bed, but nothing stimulating or exciting. Usually non-fiction does the trick.

Find a creative outlet. Bead, paint, sew, make music. Do whatever makes you happy. It won’t be perfect at first. Nobody ever is. That isn’t the point. Get over your need for control and perfection and allow yourself the ability to play again. This is play. This is fun. It is the opposite of work. Allow “mistakes” – let yourself discover. I also highly recommend writing in a journal. Writing is essential. Write every day. Not only will you get things out, you will learn things.

Seek the company of good people. If someone is constantly bringing you down, they aren’t a friend. Friends are helpful, not destructive. Understand you may have issues with your boundaries. A lot of us do. Look at my post called “Survival books” under “Resources” and pick one. Read it. It will help a lot. You also might be a “highly sensitive person” – there are books in that list for that too. I’ve learned a lot from those books that have helped me understand how to deal with this diagnosis. You aren’t alone.

This is what I do to turn around depression. I look at what I’m doing that is different from my usual routine. Usually I’ve started eating more candy, or I’ve not gotten enough sleep, or I’ve slacked off on my exercise. I redouble my efforts. Drop the candy and pick up the walking shoes. You’ll turn this funk around. There will be times where you will want to slack off. Don’t. That creates negative energy. When you feel “I don’t want to exercise/eat well/ go to sleep on time” see it as a cranky toddler. Be the adult – you are in charge. If you slack off, it will win energy and get you to do it again. Then you are in a hole again.

I find having a faith is important. I read the Daily Office every day – it is a selection of three Bible readings. It is a regular structure. If left to my own devices I’ll read whatever I come across from a random page flip. And then I’ll not read at all. I’ve discovered that having regular habits is very important. I pray regularly. I’ve also developed a habit of thankfulness and gratitude. I find this is essential.