Out of gas

Today I am thankful that on a night like tonight, when I am so tired that the tiredness is like a scuba suit enveloping me, when each motion feels like I’m pressing against dense water (can water be particularly dense? isn’t any water as dense as any other water?  Who didn’t take a proper physics course, ever?)  that I don’t have to do anything but take a shower and get into bed with my excellent novel.  In other words, I am thankful that I am not a typical lawyer.

I’m writing an article for my day job, and even though its mostly a pastiche of other things my colleagues and I have written, it’s taking up all my writing energy.  I’m surrendering, giving up on a real post tonight, and I don’t even feel bad about it.

Where I want to be

Today I am thankful for a lot of little things.  I got all the laundry folded, so I don’t have to look at a reproachful pile for several days.  Miraculously, I maintained my patience with Milo all day, and was conscious of doing so (one place that intention did actually work for me).  I got supportive comments.  I feel better than I did yesterday.

I am still struggling with how elusive gratitude is, my new opening paragraph notwithstanding.  (I actually would have forgotten to do it today if I hadn’t re-read yesterday’s post, which is ironic given that I’ve been composing this post about my insufficient gratitude in my head all day.  Or maybe not it’s not ironic at all.)   Last night, as I was toodling around my favorite blogs, I read this post.  In case you don’t click, in that post, a woman who is 72 hours away from a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy (after an oophorectomy, radiation and chemo for breast cancer this past year) basically says, “My stuff is not a big deal.  My kids’ health is a big deal.”

And then there was this letter in the NY Times magazine today:

Peggy Orenstein is right. Breast cancer is awful, and the pink-ribbon thing has gotten out of hand. I appreciate her giving me points for being honest about the awfulness of breast cancer in my book “First, You Cry.” But I have a confession to make. Thirty-five years after my first mastectomy and 26 years after the second, I’m feeling oddly cheerful about the whole cancer experience — not that I recommend it. But I slowly came to realize that just because something is awful doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from it. As I wrote in my most recent book, awful things happen to a lot of us, and it’s a happy moment when you start noticing some kind of payoff. Cancer survivors, for example, notice that they’re breathing, the way other people don’t. And because they’re breathing, they’re grateful, the way a lot of people aren’t. And grateful is a good place to wind up in life. It beats Poor Me.

BETTY ROLLIN

New York

I forget to be grateful because I’m breathing, because my biopsy was negative, because Milo is healthy right now, because Milo exists (in full color, high volume, extreme intensity whenever he is awake).  I have noticed a payoff — one payoff being that I now know how to be grateful.  Oh but it’s so fleeting.  I choose to let go of it and grab onto the more familiar thorn of resentment and discontent.

And yet… I also have this rebellious thought that I need to make space for bad feelings, too.  I need to fuss, I need to be sad, I need to mourn.  Not exclusively.  But I’m wrestling.  A peace that comes too quickly feels like a false peace.  (I just mistyped it as “peach” — it’s also a false peach.)  Whatever I’m holding back from this blog by not being upfront about my name, my city, my profession, I am not holding back anything about how I feel.  It’s all here.  And I think there’s a benefit to having it all here, for me certainly and for people who might read this.

Gratitude or making peace or getting the payoff is — for most of us, or even for some tiny grumpy sliver of us — a big f*cking effort.  And it’s constant work.  It’s not some transcendent state of bliss that settles about one like a cloud or a halo.  It’s every day remembering to be grateful for breathing.  And then forgetting it and being a real pill when you shouldn’t be and at the end of the day saying, “Oh bloody hell I forgot and I am idiot and okay, I’m now consciously remembering again and where’s the corkscrew anyway?” It’s training oneself in particular habits of mind.  It’s deciding not to lose anymore when losing more is the path of least resistance.   Gratitude is a practice.  Getting out of my own head and my own sadness and seeing that having any damn drops in the glass, never mind half full or half empty is a great thing, is a practice.  I am a pre-beginner.

Oprah and the demon door

Today I am thankful that I made myself a lot of really good food yesterday (I know, it was yesterday, but it was really good and I’m still grateful and I ate some of it again today): an avocado smoothie for lunch and vegetarian sausage and braised kale tossed with whole wheat pasta for dinner — I know it sounds terribly healthy, but it was great.  I’d never braised before.

Daniel is a world-class intellectual, but even so, when he goes to the grocery store he will usually buy me Oprah magazine.  I usually like Martha Beck’s column, and I like seeing grown-up women of many shapes and hues in fashion spreads.  But last night was, I think, my last foray into Oprah land.  This month the magazine has a long section on miracles and the miraculous and how miracles are all around us if we just open our hearts and minds and believe properly.  One article is about a Brazilian faith-healer, and how his intercessions enabled a woman with no uterus or fallopian tubes to conceive and give birth.  Y’know, because she had faith.

We know I am susceptible to this stuff.  I can’t even bring myself to dismiss the article as unmitigated crap — I mean, sometimes unexplained medical things do happen (but, um, not giving birth without a uterus.  Really.)  I am just superstitious enough to say to myself, “Don’t close the door on miracles because you may need one.”  So I say to myself that there are miracles, and I just didn’t happen to get the one I hoped for most recently.

But again it gins up all the old self-blame of not trying hard enough, not praying enough or correctly or at the right time or in the right way.   Not believing enough.  And on top of my difficult exploration of past career missteps, I am having a hard time bearing the weight of more self-blame.  (Actually, self-blame always sucks, in any quantity, at any time.)

Daniel and I used to talk about our demons, and our demons jumping on us.  Mine are jumping on me right now.  They are on my back and really enjoying the ride.  My strong hope is that this is because I had a real breakthrough with my career review and learning to ask for help; and I’m having real breakthroughs all the time, like last Sunday when I learned how to get better, or even a few days ago when I asked for a mentor.  I am creating.  I am reading great books.  I am doing good stuff.  So of course it’s a great time for my demons to break out to bring me down.

My demons aren’t faithful traditional Jews, either — they work extra hard on Shabbat.  Shabbat is hard, and I think it will be hard for a while, and I’ll just have to breathe through it.

My demons tell me I’m a bad mother — way too hard on Milo, too hovering, too correcting, too much in his business, insufficiently patient, too demanding, too threatening, yet at the same time insufficiently attentive.  My demons tell me I’m a bad wife — substitute “Daniel” for “Milo” in the above sentence.   Oh, and my demons are telling me that I’m looking old and worn out.  I’m looking decidedly middle-aged.  I am in fact middle-aged in an actuarial sense.   And I should reject “middle-aged” as an epithet and embrace it like a good feminist.  (And when I have the formula for doing that, I’ll patent it and sell it and make a million dollars and start trying to have a baby again. )

And… and I’ve come to the end of this post and I don’t have a twist or lift or realization.  And my demons are laughing their heads off.  They don’t know that tomorrow I’m taking Milo to the indoor rock climbing palace.  I wonder if they can stay on my back when I’m 10 feet up a climbing wall (I’ve never climbed before — 10 feet may be ambitious.)

 

 

 

Thankful for…

I’m going to try an experiment for the rest of the year.  Rather than writing a single post about all the things I’m thankful for at the moment, I’m going to open each post with at least one thing.  I may forget by tomorrow!  But here goes for now:

I am immensely thankful for Europa Editions.  Just click that link to their “about” page– how lovely, right?   You want to run off and join the staff.  You want to, or I want to, buy the whole catalog.  The Elegance of the Hedgehog (life changing) is a Europa Editions book, and so is the novel I’m reading now that I adore, A Novel Bookstore.  I had been reading the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but couldn’t stomach the violence.  So I treated myself to A Novel Bookstore — absolute heaven.  If you see a Europa Editions book, you should presume that it’s great and worth buying or reading.  Then read the blurb or do whatever you do to see if you really do want to buy or read it.  But definitely pick it up.  Do that.  Really.  And read The Elegance of the Hedgehog, now, if possible.

My bold declaration of last Tuesday triggered, not surprisingly, an emotional retrenchment.  My confidence is a little wobbly and I feel a little unmoored.

I can always tell when I’m off-kilter because I search the internet obsessively for a particular item.  For two days it’s been the perfect t-shirt.  I rarely buy, I just click and click and click.  It’s like sucking my thumb.

My career coach and I had talked about how I used to be bold, fearless, full of moxie (what a fun word), but then I lost it, quickly, over the course of about four years.  She asked me to write down particular incidents that I remembered as blows to my confidence, to see if there were particular patterns or triggers.  I did that last night and realized that for the last 18 years, I have not asked for help nearly enough in situations in which I really needed it.  There are lots of reasons for it, but it was really upsetting to realize.   It seems like so much pain could have been averted with something so simple.  How could I not have seen it?  Why didn’t I ask for help?  I knew people weren’t helping me — I didn’t know I had to ask.

Related, somehow, I am just starting to realize how much I idealize all the lives I don’t have.  I had imagined our Thanksgiving would be so rewarding and fulfilling (Milo and I spent it with friends — Daniel is away for a very good reason).  But it wasn’t, particularly.  It was merely fine.  And most people’s Thanksgivings are merely fine — my family’s were when I was growing up.  It’s a little awkward, a little stilted, nothing like you see on TV, or the TV in my mind.  I am like that with other families, other marriages.  I think they are like the TV families — charming, stressed but in a cute sit-com way, endlessly patient, full of fun.  The families I know best are nothing like this.  But surely all those other families are, right?  Those families I see but don’t know.

I know this is foolish.  TV families are on TV precisely because they are fantasies — a big collective wish.  The movies, the magazines, all of it, are just telling us something we wish were true, but don’t see in our own lives.  I know this, I do, but damn those magazines are really good at selling it, are really good at saying “with this recipe, with this plan, with this table setting, it could all be all right.”  Interestingly, I’m not usually disappointed by Sukkot, because there’s no picture in my head of what Sukkot is supposed to be like.  It has nothing to live up to.  This is perhaps why it is my favorite holiday.  I’m also fond of Hanukkah, which is actually a very minor holiday.

Okay, so maybe I’m thankful for this process of, at last, of being disabused.

Poem for Wednesday

(Thanksgiving edition — and by the way, it’s hard to find a good Thanksgiving poem.  For something really dark, see C.K. Williams, Zebra)

Should the wide world roll away,

Leaving black terror,

Limitless night,

Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand

Would be to me essential,

If thou and thy white arms were there,

And the fall to doom a long way.

Stephen Crane

And in a less elevated vein, the lyrics to my second-favorite Poi Dog Pondering song, which, unfortunately, I can’t find on You Tube.

Thanksgiving

Somehow I find myself far out of line

from the ones I had drawn

Wasn’t the best of paths, you could attest to that,

but I’m keeping on.

Would our paths cross if every great loss

had turned out our gain?

Would our paths cross if the pain it had cost us

was paid in vain?

There was no pot of gold, hardly a rainbow

lighting my way

But I will be true to the red, black and blues

that colored those days.

I owe my soul to each fork in the road,

each misleading sign.

‘Cause even in solitude, no bitter attitude

can dissolve my sweetest find

Thanksgiving for every wrong move that made it right.

All best dear readers.  Happy Thanksgiving.

A gold star

I sent the following email today:

Hi <…>,

I hope you’re doing well and getting ready for a great Thanksgiving with your family.

As you know, I really trust your judgment and advice on career-related issues and wonder if you would be interested in being a mentor to me.  I’ve been looking for one since I came to CITY 16 years ago, and I think I can do so many more of the things I want to do – and am capable of doing – with a little bit of structured guidance.  Since you’ve given me great advice in the past and since you know so much about the idiosyncratic environment I work in, I hope you would consider being that person for me.  I have been working with a great career coach (although not who you recommended – I found someone who is a really good fit for me through other channels), but I would also like to have someone who can say, “Yes, I was in that situation (or  I recognize that situation) and X worked and Y didn’t.”

Would you be interested in meeting for lunch or coffee (my treat!) once or twice a month?  The areas I want to work on are: building my confidence so that I see myself as a leader and initiator, not as a helper; sorting out whether I want a traditional path to advancement at <my company> or whether I want to do something a little more idiosyncratic; and determining how to build my own network, reputation, “brand” that’s independent of <my boss> (in other words, how do I get on the path to giving my own TED talk about <my work subject> in 10 years?).  I can’t think of anyone else who could help me, particularly on the last two issues, more.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Have a great holiday,

All best

This was a really big deal for me.  I have always craved a mentor, and was always a bit confused and bereft that no one ever emerged to mentor me.   My career coach told me, yesterday, that I needed to ask for a mentor.  I needed to make it happen, and I needed to make the request in the next 48 hours.  Of course, I wondered, “Why the hell would any want to mentor me?  Why would someone want to take their time out to help me?  Aren’t I too old for that?  Aren’t I supposed to have figured all this out on my own?  Isn’t it kind of needy and creepy?”

But not asking wasn’t getting me anything.  I remember that once during a spat with Daniel (really, we do other things besides fight, I just write a lot about our fights), I told him he needed to ask for what he wanted:  “If you don’t ask, it means you want to be mad more than you want to get what you want.”  So I asked.

One of the things that’s happening as I recover from infertility and sadness is a return of my sense of agency — my ability to make change in my life and my world.  Not getting pregnant and all that entails about my body, my marriage, my will, and the difficulty in even persuading Daniel that we should try to get pregnant, all of that was a devastating blow to my sense of myself as someone able to make things happen.  That sense was already weakened by years of career frustration and wandering.  I lost, years and years ago, well before infertility, the straight-line path between effort and result.  Maybe there isn’t a straight-line path, but I lost any sense at all of connection.  I felt like my ability to make things happen in my own life was tiny, and what I could make happen wasn’t very significant.   I discounted any evidence to the contrary.

After I sent that email, I was elated.  I felt great.  I had a meeting with my boss immediately afterwards and I was thinking, “Hey, you aren’t the only big idea person in the room.  I’m smart, too.  I’m going to say cool things.  I just might give a TED talk in 10 years” (I love the alliteration, TED talk in ten.  I haven’t even ever SEEN a TED talk.  Maybe I should check one out?).

I am remembering what it used to be like to be me.  I used to live in a world with a lot of yeses — in the public realm anyway (my social and romantic life was a bit of a mess).  Then it all flipped, and I encountered what looked like endless nos in my public life, and some lovely yeses in private.  And then it all looked kind of no-ish.  And I got small and disappointed and didn’t want to make big requests because I couldn’t bear more big nos.  But to hell with all that.  This year I  got a giant, cosmic, intergalactic, permanent, crushing no.  And I’m still standing.  Most days, I’m okay.  And some days, like today, I am even better than I was before.

I thought this blog would be all about the conscious effort to rebuild my marriage, it turns out that other things are jumping the queue and demanding my attention.  I think this may be a good thing.  My marriage does need more conscious effort on my part, but infertility had so many marital ramifications.  I think the best thing for me and for Daniel is for me to refrain from launching an all out campaign for marital happiness.  We’ll just be a little quiet for now and muddle through like regular people.

I got bettah

I did.  Yesterday at noon I was disgruntled and frustrated and vexed with Daniel and feeling really clenched and boxed in.  By 4pm, I was feeling fine and lovely.  And I’m writing it down because this is one of the ways that I can remember how to make the feelings temporary and the breath permanent.  The key was that I broke some rules I had for myself and I got back to some good practices, some of which have been neglected for years.

First: I blogged.  My goodness but writing is therapeutic for me.  I wrote the bad feelings out of myself.  I could look at them.  I did something with them, and then I could leave them alone.  (And thanks so much to my commenters Belette and Susan who are so lovely and supportive.  They make writing especially rewarding.)

Second: I did yoga.   I hadn’t done a good practice in almost 4 days, partly because of limitations on exercise after my biopsy.  I need to practice every single day, even if it’s just for five minutes, but of course much better if it’s for 15 or 30.  And even if I’m going to practice later in the day, I still need to get on my mat very first thing for five minutes.  Yoga is as necessary to my well-being as sleep.  Sometimes I wish it were otherwise.  I wish I could be my loveliest self even without yoga (or writing).  I fear that it makes me rigid and high maintenance.  But those minutes actually make me much more easy-going and flexible (pun kind of intended) for the rest of the day.   Self-care won’t wait.  This is actually a good thing, and I need to just insist on it.

Third: I broke a rule.  My first yoga training was in a very classical Iyengar method.  There was never, ever music in the studio.  Classes were teaching classes, not the groovy, glowy, flowy classes that are so popular.  We didn’t work out.  We learned stuff so we could do a practice at home.  It wasn’t like going to the gym, it was like going to piano lessons.  Even when I started going to vinyasa classes (groovy, glowy, flowy), where there was always music, I never listened to music when I did yoga at home.  Y’know what?  It’s great!  It’s really great for a long practice.  I love it!  I’m going to keep doing it.  I just had this internal rule about it, but it didn’t make sense.  It wasn’t necessary for me to exclude music from my practice.  It’s MY practice.  I get to say what it’s about.   This is actually kind of earth-shattering for me, to define something that could be very rule bound (Iyengar is so very rule bound — lots of people don’t like it for that reason) according to my own needs and judgment.  I took back a little bit of authority for myself.  All it took was some Astor Piazzolla.

Fourth: I went on a walk.  After my practice, I walked, fast, to the vegan bakery a couple of neighborhoods away.  I used to be a pretty dedicated (although not very fast) runner, then, when my knees and back said, “hey, you’ve been doing this for almost 20 years, and that’s enough,” I was a pretty serious walker.  I loved running and walking through neighborhoods.  I rarely listened to music, I just paced myself with my breath and lost myself in my surroundings.  The best was when I’d walk or run at twilight and peek into lit-up windows, or walk or run in the morning before the city woke up.  But I fell out of the habit — let’s put it this way, the last time I walked regularly, having an iPod wasn’t an option.  It’s hard to find time now to take a long and strenuous walk (I walk to and from work, about 20 mins each way, but not aggressively enough to get my heart rate up.)  But I’ve been feeling the tug, ever since the fertility treatments failed.  Running or walking again was one of the things I wanted to take up to mark the next phase.   But I hadn’t, until I did.  I just did.  I decided that nothing I had to do around the house was as important.  I decided I didn’t need to be home when Milo and Daniel returned from their outing.  I just did what I used to do so many years ago when I was young and carefree: I grabbed my keys, tied my shoes, and just went.   And I felt great.  I reclaimed something that was valuable to me and a big part of me but that had fallen by the wayside.

How simple is that?  Movement, music, and a wee bit of self-assertion.  Why is that so earth-shattering?  How have I kept myself away from that?  I have let go of these very simple but very important things.  I am getting back to who I used to be when it was easier for me to be happy and hopeful.  I am putting a little bit of useful space between me and my domestic obligations and the people I live with (this is good — we are too enmeshed).  And I’m writing it down so I can remember it.

(The title only makes sense if you recall the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  My adored college roomate and I used to crack ourselves up by walking around the apartment saying that, in bad British accents.  Actually, there was no end to the ways we’d crack ourselves up.  Still do.  So, the clip below is for beloved M.  You can stop after 1:32.)

I had a hat

Two jokes:

A Jewish Grandmother loses her grandson at the beach when a tidal wave sweeps him away into the depths of the ocean.

The Grandmother immediately bows to her knees in the sand and prays to God for the return of her grandson.  “Please G_d, I have always been a good person, a good Jew and a loving Grandmother; please return my grandson to me.”

Just as she finishes her prayer, a huge wave crashes back on the beach, returning the young boy to his Grandmother’s side.

The Grandmother begins to cry and hug her grandson that she thought she would never see again.  She is overcome with joy and gratitude.

She looks once more at her grandson, then looks back at the sky and yells, “He had a hat!!!”

An Englishman and a Frenchman riding in a carriage on their way to Paris.  Several miles outside of the city, brigands attacked, knocking out the coachman, scattering the horses, stealing the luggage, and turning over the coach.  The Frenchman becomes hysterical and retreats behind a tree.  The Englishman binds the coachman’s wounds and rests him in the carriage, gathers the horses, rights the carriage, and brings the group safely to an inn.

Four hours later the Frenchman is drinking wine, telling the patrons of his brave escape from death.  The Englishman is upstairs having a nervous breakdown.

Here’s how I feel now:  I’m the Englishman and dammit, I had a hat.

I do not have cancer.  I am not grateful.  I wish it were otherwise.  I wish I felt a surge of gratitude.  I wish I was full of love for Daniel (who held up very well — he didn’t flip out and make his anxiety my problem, which is what we both usually do).  I wish I looked at my life with new eyes and blessed the turning leaves and my high-maintenance boss and my messy house and vowed to let my week on the edges of cancer-land teach me to love what I have with all my heart.

But that hasn’t happened.  I am anxious.  My infertility sadness has closed the distance I put between me and it.  I am berating myself for not having saved more.  I am having stupid quarrels with Daniel.  I am angry at women in their 40s who are pregnant.  I am pissed off that what I have to be grateful for is not having cancer, is something negative not happening, rather than something positive happening (hmm, what could I be thinking of…?).

There has been a bad convergence of events.  I got the news, and felt relieved and happy.  I really did feel as if warmth was returning to my body, or as if the color was coming back — it was a physical sensation.  But then little things that trigger big things tripped me up.  Daniel didn’t do the shopping for the Shabbat meal, so I had to run to the grocery at the last minute, and Shabbat comes in very early these days (4:30).  I am always a whirlwind when I come home and start getting ready for Shabbat, particularly this week.  We had a guest for dinner and overnight, and I like him, but he always makes me very uncomfortable — I am relying on Belette’s explanation of projective identification to explain why.  We got on the topics of infertility treatment (he and his wife went through them) and then savings, and I learned that this couple, both in their early 30s, who are academics with new PhDs, have more than $200,000 in the bank.  I went upstairs and cried.

Weirdly enough, it was the money conversation that most upset me.  I am fetishizing money right now.  If you offered me a baby or $200,000 in the bank right now, I’d hesitate before choosing.  I’d choose the baby, but I’d hesitate.  I am choosing to let that be a symbol of my general incompetence and inefficacy, and how I’ve been blindsided.  I thought I was making all kinds of good choices, I thought I was being frugal enough by foregoing an iWhatever, or really expensive handbags, or a gym membership, or new jewelry, or a big TV, or…  I thought I could afford slightly nicer clothes, and my luxury car that we will keep for at least 5 years after it’s paid off.  I thought saving 10 percent of my salary was good.  But, no.  I wasn’t working hard enough.  I wasn’t doing it right.  I was fooling myself.  It wasn’t good enough and I was a dupe. That is my ugly script, that is truly my deepest fear: I wasn’t working hard enough, I was a dupe, I let something really important slide and I didn’t even know it.

(Wow, now I’m starting to feel it echo when I think about my relationships with Daniel and Milo — who cares about the laundry, or the dishes, or anything except their happiness?  It’s wrong to worry and fret about keeping house, just love them and let the rest go to hell.  Okay, I’m stopping now.)

Then yesterday we went to synagogue.  Shabbat has started to be difficult for me.  In synagogue, I feel cold and abandoned.  I prayed, and nothing happened.  God didn’t care, He didn’t listen.  So what’s there to say?  Once we get home, I feel colossally bored.  The day is always the same, and lately it’s not satisfying.  So what if I get to read or sleep for a couple of hours?  It’s stultifying.  It’s the day when creating things is forbidden, and one of the things that is making me feel better at all is creating.  And this week, a man saw Milo playing with this man’s four sons and said “Milo’s going to ask you for a sibling in a minute, he’s working it out with my boys.”   And everyone’s pregnant and happy.

And then I go meta.  I feel doubly disappointed in myself because not only are my priorities screwed up, and I am a spendthrift (again, you have to understand, in my family of origin, that’s a very serious charge), and I’m a bitch in the house… I can’t even be grateful that I don’t have cancer!

I’m going to hit publish before I change my mind.  I fear people will stop reading my blog once they read this, because it will reveal so much unpleasantness.  But saying is better than not saying — here, anyway (maybe not in real life).  This blog is the place for all the things I can’t say.  So, publish.

Sometimes, I hate yoga

I hate yoga when the yoga studio directors send out their chipper mass emails, and this is what they say:

Dear Dorothea

In the midst of some major personal transitions including a move into a new home, a baby on the way and a new year to experience —  I carved out some rare quiet time to create a “treasure map” aka vision board to clarify my dreams and goals.

Yoga philosophy reminds us that where our attention goes, energy flows.    Take a moment to recall some of your latest thoughts.  Were they negative or were they uplifting?   If we constantly think of negative situations, we increase the capacity to attract them into our lives.  If we think we can’t, we won’t.  If you can never imagine yourself balancing in crow pose – it probably won’t happen.   If you think that promotion won’t come to you — well, it most likely won’t.    If we focus on positive visions and ideas – such as getting that raise  or meeting someone special – they are more likely to manifest.

I once read that we had 70,000 thoughts each day – and many of them the same thoughts – repeated day after day, year after year.  So, if our thoughts are our prayers (and I believe they are)  … then we are spending quite a bit of time praying.   What is it that you are praying for?

A treasure map is a visual tool that will help you realign your thoughts and tap into their absolute creative power.    Expressing your aspirations in symbols, words and pictures helps to turn dreams into reality.   Take some time as the year comes to a close to create one.

Thoughts become things – so choose good ones!

I hate this because I half believe it.  I half believe that if I’d made a treasure map, an inspiration board, if I’d set my intention in some yogically correct way, I would have had another baby, despite the odds.  It suggests there was something I didn’t do, and I could have, and maybe I didn’t really want it or it would have happened.  (If anyone else said this to me, I would say that they are nuts — if this really worked, oncologists and reproductive endocrinologists would be largely out of business.  I know it’s bullshit, but there’s something so seductive about it.  It puts me back in control, even as it makes me a failure.  But maybe I’d rather be a failure than not be in control.)

And more than anything hate being back in this place.  The incredibly weird thing about learning that I don’t have (gulp) cancer has been that I feel extremely vulnerable about everything else.  I held off all bad feelings for a week, I froze myself because I couldn’t deal with the fear.  But when I thawed out, those bad feelings came in anyway, wearing their old clothes.  So now I’m not grateful about being healthy, I’m just low about all the old things.  When I froze, I lost my be-happy-anyway adjustment.  I’ll write more about this tomorrow.  That yoga blast email was irritating me so tremendously that I just had to expell it in this way.  I had to get angry before an audience.  I feel like apologizing, which is never a good sign.  It just shows how really shaken up I am, and how it’s all coming out now.  More tomorrow.

Benign

That’s really all I need to say, right? Now back to life in progress.