rejoining the real world; leading an ecological life

Today anxiety visited me in the hot waves of terror.  I have been addressing many issues within my family for a few weeks now and I think I may not have released the build up of stress adequately.  I feel like running away again and get a break from the grind, but I forgot what it is to take a break and have a laugh and connect with human beings on a one to one basis.  I get so warped up in my minds troubles that I forget to do things just for fun.  Things that I like to do to relax are usually things I do alone.  Up until recently I have a very strange view of the world.  I felt judged so much but it was only me projecting my fears onto others.  Yes people judge me but I judge myself too harshly too.  Most people  understand that we are all imperfect people, flawed human beings, doing the best we know how.  There are those who have expectations that others should be perfect and should be able to perhaps read their minds and know and interpret their needs.  Sometimes those people do not even know what their needs are.  I can only deal with my stuff.   Right now my stuff is about getting my family life back on track, getting my work life back on tract, getting my personal life back on track, joining up the parts of my life that were disjointed and keeping a balance in my life.  Tonight I went out to a "do".  There were people for all parts of the county there.  I knew quite a few people there from different parts of my life.  That would have been quite difficult for me six months ago.  I kept all parts of my life very separate.  I got so fed up of people from the different parts of my life reacting badly to each other that i just separated it out.  I suppose that happens to so many different people.  I was constantly getting that from people when I was married as did my x.  When my childhood friends met my college friends it could sometimes be weird.  When my girlie friends met my work friends it was weird.  So it was all separate.  But I am not disjointed I am multi faceted.  It is ok to have many sides and angles , many planes , be a giant mirrored disco ball reflecting different parts of me.  but that mirror ball is made out of  tiny bits of a mirror, in effect it is a broken mirror but by joining up the broken mirror it is transformed into one of my favorite thing in the world a mirrored disco ball.  I have some small jewelery boxes on my window sill, on sunny days I lie on my bed doing my meditation and I get the wonderful arrangement of sparkles on the ceiling as the light is reflected.  Sometimes the mirror in the front room crates a rainbow on the wall.  It brings back fond memories of the lusters my granny had that created beautiful rainbows on the walls.  So simple and so lovely.  I am more than the sum of my parts.  I am a bit innocent, I am very sensitive, I am vulnerable.  I can show that side of me.  I do not have to be "the man".  I can be a woman and an engineer, I can be an engineer and an artist, I can be an artist and a mother,  I can be a mother and creator, I can be a creator and a lover, I can be so many things and still be me.  So I can not do things like service the car and then panic about it.  But I can find a solution to my panic.  I read one time of a man who was bitten by a snake, he panicked so much that he forgot to suck out the poison and died.  So what is panic and what good is it.  It alerts me to danger but is that real or imaginary danger.  It is both.  the trick I think is to be able to tell them apart.  I feel things so intensely and spent so much of my life interpreting other peoples reactions so that I could tell what mood they were in and if it was ok to be myself, did I have to be quite or could i speak, would they be upset with me if I spoke.  But I now realise that is their stuff.  I will express myself and when I am visited by the anxiety fairy I will ask her is this real or imaginary and then look at the supporting evidence.  I will say Tina( I named her Tina) Tina is this real or imaginary and then I will ask myself what is my evidence.  I am a logical woman but I am also intuitive.  I blocked off my sixth sense for so long I nearly gave myself an ulcer.  I have intuition and I have logic.  I have the skills and tools to identify the source of my panic and the ability and intellect to examine the evidence and come up with options of how to solve the thing that is causing me to panic.  I have always had them but forgot to use all my skills in all parts of my life.  I will lead an ecological life.  I was looking at the different butterflies that came out to day as I walked home from doing my messages.  I walked to walk off the adrenalin of the visit from Tina.

Different plants flower at different times of the year, now the yellow flags, the dog roses, the white clover are coming into bloom.

Soon it will be time for my favorite medow sweet.  It is the true fragrance of summer.  I looked at the flowers, I looked that the butterflies.

I saw a few happy pairs of some small ,as yet unidentified type of blue, doing their courtship flight of joy twirling around each other and swirling with happiness(lust perhaps but happiness is nicer) butterflies in love :-) I started to think about ecology.  How the butterflies adapt to their surroundings, how things evolve to fit into their surroundings but they do so in harmony.  For example each butterfly needs a particular type of plant to lay it eggs on for the caterpillars to feed on and to eat and sustain itself as it lives.  So at each stage of the year you have different plants and butterflies that have adapted to those plants and they are in harmony.  It is ecological: I want my life to be just that; ecological.  I want each bit to benefit the other bit and provide me with the things I need to flourish and do my own dance of butterfly love. :-)

Take flight my little butterflies and spread your wings in the sun, find your mate and spend the happy sunny moments doing the dance of love with them.

Happy Saturday.


   

you are looking well, you look very refreshed after your break

You are looking well, you look very refreshed after your break.  Oh god why do I just cringe when I hear that.  Yes I do look well , its a pity you cant see into my soul, is how I would like to respond, or sometimes I just want to say thank you but how did you expect me to look.  Or even F**k off you hypocrite, what you would like to say is Jane I thought you would look like a bag lady but you look normal, I bet there is nothing wrong with you, you have been faking it all this time , really you have been secretly off on holidays for 6 months.  AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Some people cross the street when they see me, either they dont want to speak to me because they are afraid I will unburden myself on them, they dont want to acknowledge the fact that if i can crumble then they can too, they are wrapped up in their lives and I am no longer a part of it.

There are those of course who give me their email address or number or invite me for coffee or lunch , those who unexpectedly show up with flowers and presents, those who show they care by comming up to me and hugging me.

There are those who come up to me and share their story of hurt, abuse or despair because they think I will understand it now.

I was always the same person, but I might not have understood.  I have been all of those people I describe above.

Today I have to deal with some very difficult stuff and I have devised a note to hand people when I cannot speak or understand because I am so overwhelmed.  It says;
I am anxious; when I get anxious I panic.  When I panic I do not understand what you are saying to me.  Can you please write down the most important part of what you are saying and what you need me to understand so that I can refer to it later when I am calm.  Thank you for being patient with me.  I might look fine but really I am too anxious to hear what you are saying to me properly right now.  I wrote this note to help me cope in moments of utter panic, When I am too overwhelmed to speak. Thank you for treating me with kindness and compassion.

I think it is worth a shot.  I look OK. I look like myself , the woman who can do what ever she puts her mind to .  I sound OK , I sound like the profession well educated woman that I am, but oh god how i feel is far from OK.  Do I need to be a crying jibbering idiot, with bad hygiene, weird hair speaking in tongues for people to understand that I am not able to function as well as I look and sound.  I have been struck dumb by the intensity of the confusion I feel some days.  When I can finally articulate what I was feeling many people tell me that is normal and they accept it as part of their life.  for me it is not what I think of as normal.  I had excellent recall, I could juggle chainsaws(metaphor) I could reason and understand.  I did not see the signs that how I saw myself was not really how I felt and I compartmentalised my life so that I could present the well adjusted image of myself to some people and hide the absolute terror I felt.  Joining myself up is proving to me more complex and demanding that I anticipated.  I thought take a few tablets, get some counseling and everything would be as I want it to be.  Be I am not God, I am not the man who runs the world. I am not perfect  I am me, a flawed human being a woman trying to make sense of her world.  I may not be able to ask for help yet but I can hand someone my note and perhaps some of the people I encounter today might be able to understand that under the veneer of calm and control there is a very confused person who is struggling to find her way in a rapidly changing world.  who is struggling to understand what is happening and why.  Who is not superwoman but just Jane an imperfect woman doing the best she knows how, trying to find her way in a very confusing world.