Editing for Greater Than

For the last 1 ½ years or so, one of my main spiritual/emotional quests has been tracing the trail of wanting to be cared about. I’ve been looking at how and why so many of the things I do and the choices I make are completely affected by this haunted feeling that if I don’t do certain things a certain way, nobody will care about me. I guess I have this deep inner fear of being judged “unlovable” based on an ever-shifting set of criteria. I know on level deeper than my mind that my fear is unfounded, so right now I feel like my main focus is to edit the criteria, to really look at all of the things that affect my level of happiness with my life.

The main set of criteria are created by the society I live in, and are a very strong template for what is and isn’t acceptable. I’m not talking about on a moral level. I’m talking on a very physically observable level. Judgment of worthiness in this society is based on material wealth, a particular form for physical beauty, and the acquisition of stuff. The main intangibles of importance are titles, images, brands, and to some very small extent, actual knowledge (I don’t think advanced degrees, wisdom, or experience buys that much cred anymore). Behavior, putting your money where your mouth is, is only important insofar as what your image can support. People can get away with all sorts of crimes if their image portrays them as not being a criminal. Integrity, showing yourself to be exactly as you are, is almost unheard of.

I think that most people, including myself, can’t have full integrity because they’re so confused by image, by our social template, at this point that they have a hard time knowing who they essentially are. We are so dogmatized in the church of stuff and image that many of us don’t even know we’re trapped. Those of us that know we’re trapped can remain in the unpleasant task of sorting dogma from reality for years, if not a lifetime, because the dogma is so all-pervasive in every aspect of our lives. We can easily become so wrapped up in one or a couple of the many socially-tangible angles (politics, religion, economics, pretty much any “ism”) that we fail to ever recognize that all of those things are just a different kind of trap.

Similarly, when we first begin to reject the dogma, I think that a lot of people (again, including myself) go into a kind of psycho-spiritual free-fall where they look for any available cliff to cling to. Often the cliffs we cling to are just another set of “isms,” but they are an “alternative” to the more mainstream “isms.”  The so-called “alternative lifestyles” (they are so ubiquitous now that the public can just refer to them that way and know that people will have a general idea of what is being discussed!) have their very own sets of criteria and dogma, and they can be even more confusing precisely because they offer an escape from the mainstream dogma. Ultimately, some of the tools we learn down these paths as we’re fumbling towards bliss can be helpful. But in the end most of these systems and templates of being just obscure the one key that each of us hold to our own individual happiness: Ourselves.

It’s very common in psychology and alternative spiritual paths to hear the phrase “you are enough” or “I am enough.” I have been thinking deeply about those phrases recently, thanks to conversations with friends and various things that pop up on the web. I think that those phrases are very powerful and real, but I want to make a final edit in this post: I think that they are easily misunderstood as simply “stop beating up on yourself.” I think that they do mean that, and that we shouldn’t beat ourselves up, but that they also mean that we are greater than all the criteria that the world puts on us. It means that I am an essence beyond any image I might feel the need to portray. It means that to find joy all I really need to do is strip away all the layers of bullshit and get back to the very core of who I am (spirit). I don’t need to add more things, more stuff, more practices, and more activities; if something doesn’t feel authentic for me, even if it is something I admire or know that others admire, I am free to reject it. And that, as far as I currently understand, is the way out of any spiritual trap (even if it takes a long time!).

A Better Day

Yesterday, immediately after writing my post about not having anything to whine about, it seemed that things to whine about appeared at every turn. It is my punishment for being un-American (ie., trying to be more realistic about my actual place in the world!).

First of all, I should say that, once again, after being on a smoking bender for the better part of the last 2 months, I am off it. So my level of patience is pretty low at the moment. Being a bit on the uncontained-sass end of the patience spectrum anyhow, you can imagine what goes on in my head when I’m going through nicotine withdrawal. I try hard to be nice on the outside, at least. But the inside of my head is a rage storm at pretty much every move that anyone makes. I know, intellectually, that I’m being completely ridiculous, and that nothing that is making me off-the-charts ragey is actually worthy of even minor disgruntlement. But I really can’t be held responsible within three days of quitting smoking. I blame the drug.

Luckily for me, and a lot of people’s shins, the knee-jerk impatience part only lasts the length of physical withdrawal, which, for me, is about three days. I deal with my withdrawal in three ways: 1. Meditation/ repeating internal soothing mantras (I know that is very cheesy and cliché, but that shit works!), 2. Giving myself permission to eat whatever I want for the first three days, 3. Working out like a complete fiend-beast.   The evening of the third day is always the worst. I typically have insomnia for a couple of nights after quitting. I’m not sure if it’s the withdrawal or the amount of sugar I consume those first couple days, but it means I am very tired by day three. I am tired, and I have had to behave myself all day at work, and by the time I get off work I am pretty much nuclear. That is how I was yesterday.

So, I had ridden my bike to work yesterday. On the ride home I made a traffic mistake and had to cut in front of some cars to get to the bike lane. Whoops. Of course, some impatient jerk had to honk at me (like I didn’t know I had made a mistake and wasn’t already stressed about the possibility of being totally CREAMED by his f’ing executive-style SUV!!!). Knee-jerk reaction: a big, flamboyant, arm-extended BIRD to all four lanes of traffic sitting at the stoplight. Who knows what co-workers, bosses, CEOs, etc., could have been sitting at that light with their tinted windows?! Man. I could have inadvertently flipped off every professionally-important person in my life and I wouldn’t even know it. And for what? A momentary soothing of needless, ridiculous and impotent rage.

The minute I hopped off my bike at home I grabbed my rollerblades and headed to the lake. I own a smart phone, for which I pay exorbitant monthly fees, mainly so I can listen to music.  I use it for almost nothing else except talk and text. Of course, the music-playing app malfunctioned for the entire hour that I skated, which happens all the time and always kind of pisses me off. But nothing like what happened yesterday. I was absolutely fuming. There may have been some quiet swearing and a tiny bit of frustrated flailing.   I came *this close* to flinging the stupid thing on the ground. Thinking about this is the only thing that kept me from doing so:

I love that man. I might even classify him as a hero of mine.  Anyhow, today is day four, and I feel completely normal (aside from feeling a bit bloated from all the junk I ate the last few days!). I seriously don’t understand the forces that make me keep starting to smoke, if this is what happens every single time I stop. A three day minimum of beating my head against a brick wall; what could be more fun than that?!

Gratuitous Self-Pity

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find an embeddable clip of my favorite example of gratuitous self pity in a movie, so here’s a link to it!

Do you ever come out of a funk by just realizing how absurd you’re being? That happens to me pretty frequently. I by no means intend to invalidate clinical depression or any other mental illness – I know that these things are very real. In my case it is pretty atypical for my depression to get very bad for very long. There have been three times in my life thus far that doctors have advised me that antidepressants would help, and I have been able to decline the meds and deal with it behaviorally each time (though none of those times were super-fun. My depression tends to manifest as anxiety and/or compulsive behavior).

At this point in my life, the line between depression (feeling utter lack of motivation or hope, accompanied by obsessive thought and usually excess of some kind; whether it’s eating, drinking, smoking, whatever) and wallowing (feeling sorry for myself) is pretty clear. Usually I can avoid depression all-together if I stay on top of my game in terms of eating well and getting enough exercise. However, sometimes at the tail end of an episode of depression I will catch myself dragging it out by wallowing. Let’s face it: feeling sorry for yourself can feel pretty good. Wallowing in self-pity and blaming everything and everyone but yourself and thinking about how the-whole-world-is-against-you-and-you-can’t-help-it can be strangely comforting. It protects you from taking any responsibility for your life and from doing the work that you don’t feel like doing.

When I was just coming out of my most recent bout of depression in March, I had one of those “lightbulb” moments while I was talking with a friend. I had been relating some of my woes about my financial situation and feeling like a failure and blah, blah, blah; and there might have also been a little bit of “so and so doesn’t realize how good they have it.” Then, just as a charitable gesture, I said “but it’s all relative. One person’s terrible situation seems ridiculous to someone whose situation is terrible for real.” In that moment, it suddenly dawned on me what a jerk I was being whining about my student debt and my lack of a house or kids or other tangibles.  I said “Wow. I just realized that I pay $18 per month to not be fat (Weight Watchers), while a huge percentage of the world’s population is starving.” Um, yeah. I have nothing to feel sorry for myself about. Wallowing desisted. The depression was over.

I think that this is why it’s funny in movies, etc., when you see scenes of gratuitous self-pity. It’s funny because we all do it, and because deep down we all know we’re being ridiculous. We’re lucky to exist. We’re lucky for so many things just by being alive. We’re luckier still if we are not hungry, have access to medical services, water, etc. If we’re lucky enough to be watching a movie or reading a blog, we’re luckier than most of people on this planet.

 Ah perspective. Ain’t she a bitch and a blessing sometimes?

Part of Why TV Can Be Good

So, I’m one of those really annoying people who “doesn’t watch TV.” Well, not so much, anyhow. I have never, in my whole life, been one to spend a lot of time in front of the TV (except for about 4 months when I was really, really depressed during college, and also when I broke my ankle). I have had my shows that I’ve made a point of watching, but I have never really been a channel-surfer.

Back in December when our TV converter box died, our response was something along the lines of “meh.” The DVD player still worked, and we mainly used the TV for watching movies anyhow. It took a couple months for it to happen, but somehow it came up in conversation with my parents that we didn’t have television. Oh my god – the response was somewhere between anxiety and full-on panic:

Mom: “What?! How can you not have TV?! How do you get the news? How would you know if the sky was falling?” (yes, my mom actually uses that phrase. For realz).

Me: “Well, I would probably just look at the sky. But also, we have Internet.”

A week later we were gifted a fancy flat-screen TV. I really thought that it would be years before that would fit into our financial priorities! Mom and Dad deemed it important enough that we should have one immediately (this counts as birthday and Christmas for both my hubby and I!). Anyhow, we got this nice TV, and then didn’t watch it much for about two weeks.

Our computer is also a piece of crap, and it just so happened that around the time we received the TV, David was getting frustrated with being unable to watch videos online because he was looking for yoga tutorials. Then he happened upon the Roku (which I already knew of, thanks to a friend, but Dave found it on his own!). He purchased one, and the rest is history. Now we have the Internet TV, and we can get Netflix streaming, etc. At first it lead to each of us watching over an hour of TV per day, in a spasm of zombie-like staring and almost-drooling , but that has tapered down to one or two nights per week, and usually together.

Now that we can pretty much watch whatever we want, we’ve been watching A TON of social, spiritual and environmental documentaries. I have learned A LOT of facts that I have previously been too lazy or overwhelmed to research on my own that have reinforced some attitudes and totally changed others. Hopefully I will get to writing a bit more about some of these. However, knowing my own distaste for summarizing, here are my top 5 mostly-unexplained recommendations (from the “recently watched list”) for all thinking Americans:

1. The Corporation – Seriously, a must see! Do it.
2. Secrecy – A pretty balanced look, though maybe unintentionally leaning a bit towards being “against.”
3. Countdown to Zero – Much more hopeful than you’d expect out of a film about nuclear threat.
4. The XXI Century – This is actually a series that I haven’t quite finished. But it is fascinating.
5. Capitalism: A Love Story – Even though I hate Michael Moore’s style. This one is a bit lighter on the stunts than he usually is, but there are still plenty of squicky moments. Good points are made.

If you have already seen any of these, I would love to know your thoughts!

The Tale of the Squirty Birdie

So, this happened yesterday. For real:
 
David got home from work to find Stella all wound up and frantic. He thought it was kind of weird, but didn’t think too much about it (she is wont to have freak-outs sometimes!) until he heard a flapping noise coming from the back bedroom. He went back there to find out what it was, and lo and behold there was a GIANT FRIGGIN’ BLACK BIRD in our apartment! Apparently this bird was first in our neighbor’s apartment; she figured that it got in through a hole in the wall around some of the plumbing in the bathroom (our building is 104 years old, so holes around pipes aren’t that weird!). Of course, she was all freaked out because, well, there was a crazed bird in her apartment, so she panicked and just locked it into her bathroom. Instead of making its way outside, the bird apparently made its way in to our bathroom and out into our apartment where we think it realized, “SONOFABITCH!!! There’s a big ol’ dog in here!!!” and proceeded to fly all over the apartment, with Stella in tow, literally losing it’s sh*t. The dog must have finally cornered it in the back room where David then found it, still freaking out.
 
One of the many hilarious things about what ensued after David was in the picture is that he hates birds. He is almost phobic of them thanks to being exposed to Hitchcock’s The Birds at way too early an age. Once he processed the fact of a giant bird in his home, he then had to force himself to suppress the image of the guy with the pecked out eyes in said movie (*shudder*) and make the leap over the threshold of the back bedroom to begin trying to shoo it outside. He decided that his best option for getting the bird to hit an exit was to usher it towards the sun porch (giant door that goes directly outside, rather than into a hallway). Unfortunately, he and his feathered friend were at the opposite end of the apartment from the porch. So began the flailing and swearing and continued pooping across the full length of the apartment. Hold this image in your mind: David, a grown-ass man, wildly flapping his arms, chasing this wildly-flapping bird, and dealing with his own bird-neurosis by spewing a Tourette’s-like stream of “FUCK! DICKHEAD! ASSHOLE!” at the poor scared bird, who finally escaped out the sun porch, and may or may not have immediately dropped dead of a heart-attack (and/or apparent loss of it’s entire digestive system).
 
Here is David’s final damage-assessment report from the situation:
 

From: David Thompson
Date: Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 2:47 PM
Subject: Blackbird!!!!!
To: Alissa Thompson
HOLY $HIT!!!!

33 of them to be exact, at least, what I’ve FOUND!!  Here are some of the highlights:

Our stuff:

Wireless router
Base for computer monitor
Butter dish
Scrub Brush
Liquid Vitamin D bottle/dropper
Stove
Dining table twice
Gazelle
2 bills
Flowers from Grandpa’s funeral
Kitchen counter several times
Sink
Stove
Frying pan
Roku remote
Couch

My stuff (I win!):

Toothbrush!
Open can of Coke (mostly full!)
Massage Table
Personal check written out to me

Alissa’s stuff:

Fleece Jacket

Stella’s stuff:

Food dish

Floor?  Only 4 times!!!  How the bleep does a bird have that much $hit??!!!  And only manage to hit the floor 4 times??!!

Thought you might get a kick out of that!

Love you!!!!
 
Ah, hilarity. All the crap has been cleaned up at this point, and life is back to normal. Except I’m pretty sure our dog now has PTSD.
The end.

A Small Gift Amongst Many Big Ones

Holy Crap. This has been a strange week. It’s not often that a family patriarch passes away at the same time that you’re just beginning to pull yourself out of a three-week dead-eyed depression. But that is what has happened this week.

The man in question was my husband’s grandfather. He was truly a patriarch in the old-fashioned sense: He was an active Lutheran pastor for 70-some years. He had 5 children and 11 grandchildren, and he performed baptism and marriage ceremonies for almost all of them (including our wedding!). At age 94 he was still a fountain of support for his family, spiritually, emotionally, and physically, right up until he got sick less than a year ago. Even though he was quite elderly, he was the type of person that it was nearly impossible to imagine ever dying. My husband said “I just really have always felt like he was invincible.”

Grandpa (which everyone in the family calls him, regardless of whether or not he is your grandpa, specifically) lived simply in terms of material wealth, and was a very busy person. He was a master gardener, a key member of the senior cooperative he lived in, a family man, and continued as a substitute pastor and otherwise active church-member until the end of his life. He was passionately faithful, and he lived it out by being passionately giving and open to others. I knew him for nine years and never heard him utter anything remotely judgmental.  In other words, the man did not pull any punches. He was the real deal, a true model of what it means to “live a good life.” Because of all that, his passing, once his discomfort ended (he wasn’t in pain, but for some people, dying can be hard work. One of the last things he said was that he felt “dead tired;”and yes, that was meant to be a joke!), hasn’t been terribly mournful. Everyone is sad and grieving because they will miss him, but everyone knows that he was satisfied with his life here, and was ready to move on.

I am lucky to have known him, and to have had him as a little bit of a surrogate grandfather (both of mine passed away a long time ago). As for the depression, it is impossible to remain in a funk when contemplating such a well-lived life. He wasn’t super-famous, or accomplished in any superhuman ways, he just did a really good job at life. It’s a little gift that he didn’t even know he was giving: whatever you’re doing, don’t be bummed that you’re not doing something “better,” don’t think so hard about it. Just do a good job.

“O me! O life!…of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless — of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these O me, O life? Answer. That you are here – that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.”
- Walt Whitman

The Corporate Compliment

As I’ve mentioned here before, I find the whole issue of the corporate image annoying. I don’t personally like business casual clothes. My personal aesthetic revolts against all the black and gray and stiffness. I don’t care much for the “polished” hairstyle (well, O.K., honestly my hair just won’t do that, even if I did like it!), and I just don’t like wearing a lot of make-up. I like some, but I just don’t feel like it’s very “me” to wear a lot – it makes me uncomfortable. Why should I have to spend my personal money on things that I don’t even like?!  Unfortunately, it is a trap. I’m not going to change corporate culture by refusing to look the part; I’m only going to hurt myself. But, I only invest the bare minimum (really, I can only afford to invest the bare minimum in money, and I just don’t care to invest the required time!). When you only invest the minimum, you are an open target for the “corporate compliment.” I think that it’s something that only women do, and it is kind of the grown-up version of Jr. High bullying. I have heard all of these (some multiple times), and they are all about the tone:

• “Wow, your hair is really long.” Translation: “You look like you just wandered out of a cave.”
• “You look really nice today!” This one seems innocent enough on paper, but what it really means is “you look like crap most of the time, but are kind of O.K. today because you are wearing more accessories than usual.”
• “Are you wearing make-up?!” Translation: “you normally look like you just rolled out of bed.”
• (as I’m applying mascara in the ladies room): “I didn’t know you wore make-up, you look so natural all the time!”Refer to: “just rolled out of bed”
• “Well, your brows are very natural.” Translation: “for the love of god, why don’t you remove those fuzzy caterpillars from your face!”
• “I like your (insert item of clothing here).” Almost 100% of the time this means “I can tell that for once you didn’t buy that at Target.”

The list goes on! Most of the time I think that it’s kind of funny that people will be so obviously critical of something that really doesn’t matter except to shame people into fitting an image, and yet they will totally beat around the bush on constructively criticizing your actual work: “Well, I can tell that you put significant effort into this part, and I really like what you did here, but, blah, blah, blah.” Like, they really actually believe that though my work is intelligent, I’m a TOTAL idiot because I don’t do the corporate image thing. I’m not stupid; I just don’t enjoy (and can’t afford) that particular wing of the girly arts! Recognize!