THANKFUL FRIDAY

I don’t consider myself to be a true sports fan. I own one KC Royals T-shirt that ended up as a pj top because it’s really soft. There is not a single red item in my wardrobe for representing the Chiefs. I do have a KC Current sticker on my scooter. I know nothing about the sport of soccer, but I am one hundred percent supportive of this team and what it means to have the first women’s soccer arena in the country. I will listen to updates of the games on our local Bridge radio station. Other than that, most everything is grouped together as ‘sports ball’. That being said, I do get into watching the Summer Olympics.

Most evenings since the opening ceremony of this year’s Summer Olympics, we have just had the TV on with the games playing as background. Sometimes we’re paying attention. The surfing competition has been riveting and watching Snoop-dog and Flavor Flav interacting with the US athletes has been a thoroughly joyful thing to watch. I have always watched the gymnastics. Many many years ago when I was tiny, I was in gymnastics and even competed. I was terrible at the uneven bars, okay with the floor routine, and pretty good on the vault, but the balance beam was my jam. That is the place where I excelled and I really enjoyed it until I got taller. The taller you are, the harder it is to flip yourself off the end of a balance beam. Once scary fall was all it took for me to move on from gymnastics. But it didn’t stop me from watching the sport and watching the US Women’s gymnastic team gives me all of the feels.

My experience with coaches and work-out instructors have all included a ‘no pain, no gain’ mindset. My gymnastic coach was one of the nicest people, but even he had his moments. One of the reasons why I was so terrible at the uneven bars was because I could not pull myself up and often, my coach would leave me hanging on the top bar until I would eventually lose my grip and fall. I learned to hang for a really long time. After gymnastics, came dance coaches who would force a dancer to bend in ways the joints should not bend. There were aerobic coaches that yelled at you to keep moving. I have even been in a yoga class where the instructor encouraged a student to keep forcing their handstand despite the obvious shoulder pain this person was in. Many of us were taught that pain comes with fitness, that in order for you to have a fit and trim body, you must hurt. Muscle tears. Joint pain. Just the price you pay.

Pain is weakness leaving the body.

Tokyo, Summer Olympics 2020, Simone Biles had a wobbly twist as she came off the vault. If you were watching and are not a gymnast you probably didn’t think anything was off. She had flipped around in the air and landed mostly on her feet, not her face, something you or and I could not do. But to a trained gymnasts and Simone Biles, that wobbly twist was evidence that something was off with Simone. Then Simone Biles did something that shocked the country. She quit the olympic trials, taking herself completely out of the competition. She cited mental health concerns as her reason. Her head wasn’t in it or in the right place and that disconnect can lead to serious injuries. Simone Biles made her mental health, as well as her physical health, more important than medals and it was something many people had never seen happen before. Many thought that this was it for her, that she would never again compete in gymnastics.

Now, if you’ve been watching this year’s olympics, you know that we had not seen the last of what Simone Biles has to offer. She came back and showed the world that she’s better than ever, but she also showed the world the benefits of making your own health a priority. Simone Biles is an athlete that little girls across this nation have looked up to for years. She is an inspiration, but in that moment she decided to step out of the 2020 Olympics, she became an advocate and an inspiration. I’ve been following Simone Biles for years and I am grateful to see her return to the mat. The joy on her face as she has expertly completed her routines is blinding and beautiful. I am grateful that she has been able to compete with a safe and healthy mindset. But more than anything, I am grateful for the reminder that it is more than possible to step away from something you love in order to heal your mind and or body so that you can come back and be better at that thing you love.

This summer, I have stepped away from doing some things that I love. My personal yoga practice has been garbage. I’ve rarely made it on to my mat for anything other than teaching in well over a month. The same is true for my photography practice. My camera has not left the camera bag since we left Minnesota back in June. These things that I love to do have hit a lull or more likely, I’ve been experience some burnout. I finally made it back to my mat this week for me and I have felt stronger on my mat this week then I have felt in a long time. Breaks are necessary for healing, but also for missing the act of doing. I’ve missed my yoga time and grateful to have it back. Today, I realized that I miss my photography practice too. I miss taking the time to look around me to find beauty in the simplest things. It’s back to school time for many next week. Maybe back to school for me means getting back to my photography practice.

Sometimes I need a break and reminder to ask myself “Why do I do those things that I love?” So far, I have always been able come up with solid answers for why. I am thankful for those reasons of why.

THE BOXES WE DON'T CHECK

I just finished filling out new patient forms for some acupuncture treatment that I am getting this week and there was a whole section on emotions. I had to check the boxes for all of the emotions I feel on a regular basis and I feel like I checked all of the emotion boxes. I checked and underlined the anger box. Then I went back and highlighted the word ‘anger’. It seems I’m filled with rage these days, but seriously, what woman isn’t? The new patient forms also wanted family medical history and for the ‘mental disorder’ box, I wrote in ‘maybe?’. The questionnaire wanted me to answer questions I was not prepared to answer or even wanted to answer. It wanted to know more information on the state of my mentratution than my gynecologist even cares to know. Which might be a sign that I need a new gynecologist.

It is March, nearing the end of it really, but still 2022 is young. So far this year, I have had to answer more difficult questions than I have ever had to answer. This includes my thesis defense in 2000. The questions I am answering now have nothing to do with emission and excitation wavelengths or bacterial growth conditions. Those kinds of questions are easy. It’s the questions about my personal and mental health that are the hard questions for me to answer. I’d like to blame some of that on ignorance. I just don’t know the answer. Last week, that fortune teller looked at my palms and asked me if there was a family history of depression. I just shrugged and said “Maybe? I know there’s a family history of diabetes?” Diabetes. Depression. They’re the same thing right?

I honestly do not know the answers to most of those family history questions. Medical history of any kind is never on topic and when it is, the information is hearsay because no one knows how to read a medical file or actually listen to what the doctor is saying. My family is sad, but I don’t remember us being sad unto 2005. So I don’t know if the sadness is genetic or circumstantial. Whatever the reason, the sadness exists and some of us are better at staying just above it than others. Depression is the box I never check on these forms. It’s not that I don’t believe that depression is a real clinical disorder. I could give a good long list of scientific journal articles about brain chemistry and rearranged axioms that prove depression is a real thing. I never check that box because I would rather ignore it. It’s kind of like the time I noticed a weird freckle on my arm and then proceeded to scratch the freckle off of my own body instead of going to a dermatologist.

Yes. I did that.

Here’s why I really don’t ever check the box. Sometimes, I am sad. I have some pretty good reasons for being sad and I believe we should be allowed to feel those feelings. Without guilt. But, sometimes I spend a little bit of time wallowing in that sadness, maybe too much time. I always muster up the strength to pull myself up and out of the muckiness of the sad. I have mustering plans for the sad. Exercises like walking outside, getting on my yoga mat and my gratitude practice are integral parts of that plan. The gratitude practice is probably the most important, because there’s nothing like being grateful for this privileged life I have to make me get off my ass and go live it. I figure that when I reach a moment when I can not pull myself out of the mucky muck, that is the day I check that box and get professional help.

Je suis forte.

I am also stubborn. The fortune teller looked me directly in the eyes and said this to my face. Maybe that’s what I need tattooed on my other wrist. I am not stubborn enough to recognize that there is some cowardice in not checking the box. That if I was truly brave, I would ask for help when I need it. So I went back and checked the box. Sometime earlier this year I made a decision to stop bad habits, become my own biggest fan and loudest cheerleader. Sometime early in the year I decided to take the version of me who believed she could do anything and move her from the back of the room to the front podium and put her in charge of the meetings. That version of me used to be in charge, but she got moved to the back of the room when there was an internal vote of no confidence. But I am putting that version of me back in charge because I can do anything.

That includes checking boxes I would normally ignore.

INCOMPLETE

Lately, on Saturday mornings when I’m sitting at the coffee shop before heading out to do the weekly grocery run, I’ve been writing on a story. This sounds normal to you, like yes Cindy, we know you write those fortune cookie stories. This is different because I’m not writing in the Fortune Cookie journal. In fact, and I feel bad about this, I have not written in the Fortune Cookie Journal in ages. Instead, I’ve been writing in a regular no prompting notebook and it’s one long story arc. This all started when I took those mushrooms on a camping trip in July. I started writing a story based on a very real dream I had had. It was one of those past life kind of dreams that played in cinemanic format through my brain. Every weekend since, I’ve spent time just adding to that story. A paragraph here. A couple of pages there. I don’t know where this is going or what my intentions are with this writing. I mean, I’m writing it out in pen and ink on paper. It’s not like it’s going to be an easy thing to polish up for an editor or publisher. The thing is, I am writing it.

This Saturday morning, I went to the coffee shop but I didn’t take that journal. I didn’t write. Instead, I worked on a Thanksgiving menu list. That journal sits on my desk under the grocery list because I pick up both of those things when I leave the house on Saturday mornings. I looked right at that journal as I set the grocery list back down when I got home and unloaded all of the groceries and I heard the tiniest of naggy voices in the back of my head, but I shrugged those voices aside. They were not very loud and easy to ignore. By Monday, the naggy voices had gotten louder and I was starting to feel a bit twitchy. It is almost like the feeling I get when I’ve been away from my yoga mat for too long. My hands and my brain are all “where’s my weekly exercise?!?!”, but also the action has a cleansing quality. It clears some words from my brain and allows for better word traffic and it wasn’t until Monday afternoon when I realized how important that weekly word dump really is.

I shouldn’t call it a word dump. There’s a real story here. It might not be a good story. It might be a far fetched story, but it is a story. It is more story than I’ve ever written before which is why I believe it might be a past life story. It’s real to me, even if I’m still on the fence about past lives. I can see my characters’ faces. I can smell the air where they live. At times, it feels more like me just writing in my diary than it feels like plunking out a tale. I’m not working and if I started taking it more seriously, it would probably turn into work. I think that’s how I’m going to finish something, by not working. Though it does require attention at least once a week because I’m more scattered today than I have been since starting this new ritual. I am surprised by this. I had no idea that the twenty minutes I spent writing on this story one day week would turn out to be such an important part of my mental wellbeing.

Maybe I should have signed up for NANOWRIMO….

THANKFUL FRIDAY

I was perusing my recent copy of Yoga Journal and it is pretty much two pages of poses and thirty pages of mental health articles. Meditations, doshas, mantras, pranayama. All things for relieving anxiety and depression. As I’m reading through them, I started to question my own mental health. During the weekend, I overheard Chad ask Michael how we all did during the pandemic. Michael said “Cindy did great!” Which tells me that I am deserving of an Academy Award for best actress during a pandemic. I know why he partly believes that I have been just fine and dandy is because I have lost weight, but weight loss is not a good indicator that someone is mentally doing well.

I lost ten pounds when Chris died.

All of my conflict, despair, anger, anxiety…all of that stuff happens internally. I might get a slight tone in my voice or snip back a response to a question I think is a dumb question, but for the most part people do not know that on the inside I am a knotted ball of mess. All of the things I did last year were activities performed as a way of dotting i’s and crossing t’s. I thought that if I just kept moving, everything is would be okay. On top of that, I took on all of the things that required interactions with people outside our household, while doing my best to be supportive of those within my household who were convinced they were going to get COVID and die. I did a lot (still do a lot) to make the lives of those around me easier. I do this even though it is often one sided and I have always done this, but the pandemic added an extra layer of work for me to do and I am tired. How has it become the woman’s job to ensure the comfort of others at the expense of their own comfort?

It is not my responsibility make other’s lives easier.

I feel a shift, something bubbling up inside me that wants a different way of life then the one I am living, a life that isn’t focused on other’s needs and a little more focused on my own needs. Part of this change will require me to reclaim some independence and just do things. I need to stop depending on people who have never really proven themselves to be dependable. I need to dust off my meditation pillow and dig out my journal and colored pencils. I need to remember my own value and I need to start unraveling that ball of mess. Today, I am grateful for recognizing my own needs.

DON'T ASK

Michael put a few Nutella Happy Hippos in my stocking for Christmas. The other day, after lunch, I opened one up and chomped off the nose of a hippo. I suddenly turned into someone who had just walked for days without food and crammed the rest of that hippo into my mouth like my life depended on it. Then I opened a second Nutella Happy Hippo and repeated the process. I don’t know how I managed to pull myself together before finishing off all of my Happy Hippos (seriously though, how can they even be happy. they’re filled with Nutella and are going to be eaten). I know what you’re thinking. “But Cindy, you can always buy more Happy Hippos.” This is true, but they’re not sitting in with the Hershey bars in the impulse buy area at the grocery store. These guys come from the same place as where the whole Table Incident of 2020 happened. I have been back to that store once since then and I tried to make myself as unnoticeable as possible because I am still embarrassed to show my face there. So again, why are these guys called ‘Happy’ Hippos?!?

When I was a kid, my Dad installed a monkey swing for me in the backyard. It was a wooden disk with a rope running up through the center so you could swing in every direction. I feel like I am on the swing right now. When the swing moves to the east, I flip into a rage. Then the swinging motion shifts north and I am sitting on the bathroom floor sobbing while Josephine brings me all of her toys and two of her bones. There’s occasionally a direction the swing goes where I mellow out, but only long enough to shift into a new direction. There’s a large basket of fancy chocolates at work that someone gave our department as a thank you Christmas gift. I am embarrassed by the number of them that I have shoved into my face on the days I am actually in the office. Not taken a bite and savored, but eaten without even really taking a moment to taste it. I do a lot of online window shopping at some very high-end expensive stores. I spent an hour browsing around the Container Store website, dreaming about putting all of our food into clear boxes. My right collar bone is sitting almost half an inch higher than then the left one.

Eneviatabley, someone will ask me at some point in the day ‘how am I doing?’ and I always respond with “I’m good.” Because I am a liar. Really, I lie to spare the person who asked me that dumb question in the first place. Also, I lie to myself as if mental health has no playground here. I’m still COVID free, my family is still healthy. We’re alive. We still have our jobs. ‘I’m good’ seems like a reasonable thing to tell people. At night, just before I go to sleep, my grief settles in next to me and whispers memories into my ear. They are not always good memories and many nights, I place my hands over my ears and squeeze my eyes shut tight until my grief gives up or I succumb to exhaustion. Usually it’s the latter. The winter months are never really my better self months. Toss in a country I no longer recognize and a pandemic that’s killing about four thousand people a day and I am truly not my better self. Every venture outside of my home is stressful. I don’t think I even know how to talk to people or be around people. I’ve become feral. I’m a hormonal, feral, chocolate devouring Homo sapien and I will eat your children. Or maybe just their fingers.

Not really.

Only maybe.

I don’t write all of this so that you know what’s really going on with me. I write it all down here so that I know. It’s me taking inventory of my own mental health. It’s me telling myself to stop working so hard at making it look like I’m doing well. What many of us do not stop to consider is just how exhausting it is pretending to be okay and how that added exhaustion just makes everything harder. Writing everything here is a reminder to allow myself to feel the things I am feeling in that moment. It’s me telling myself that it’s okay to shove chocolate into my mouth like it’s the first meal I’ve eaten or sit on the bathroom rug and cry. Or just sit anywhere and cry. Because it is honest. Because I know that swing always shifts directions and eventually I swing around to a better mood.

WHERE'D YOU GO

Intersect

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Three days after we got back from Boston, I had to have blood work done for my new doctor in order to renew my medication for triglycerides. That was some really poor planning after a week of eating lobster rolls and fried clams and steamed clams and pasta (Boston has a large Italian community with lots of homemade pasta shops). One day, just on this one day, I had a salad for lunch…topped with seared sea scallops. My dinner one night was literally a giant bowl of clams cooked in a hot bean curd sauce. No vegetable. Not even rice. Just clams. The only fruit to enter my body during those seven days was the pound of grapes I ate on our picnic. I also have not taken my triglyceride medication since May, when the prescription ran out. This happened right after my doctor retired and I had to find a new doctor. So really, I should not have been so surprised when my new doctor called me the day after my bloodwork to tell me she wanted to put me on Lipitor.

Like an old man.

She did suggest that losing some weight might help me get off Lipitor. We talked about what I’m currently doing and she said “you just need to walk more steps and maybe lay off dairy.” Easy peasy. Just walk a few more steps. That fat will just fall right on off you. Well you can imagine what this news did for my mental health. I was pretty pouty and weepy for a few days. Then I buckled down, took cheese off the menu and added more broccoli to my diet. I eat less food at dinner time and go to bed a teensy bit hungry. I combined my inside walk loop with my outside walk loop and I always take the stairs. This week I decided to swap out my Tuesday/Thursday bicycle time with weight training. So now I’m hungry and sore, but I’ve lost about two pounds in just as many weeks, so that’s better than nothing.

All of this focus on diet and exercise and trying not to obsess but still kind of obsessing has zapped my creative energy something fierce. I have Boston pictures to edit and I need to compile a list of what pictures I want to print, what size to print, and set up a budget sheet of costs for printing and framing. I really should start pulling photos for that book idea. Michael is picking up the Cabbage on Friday and then they’re going to spend the weekend with his moms. This would be an ideal time for me to do all of the above. Instead I’m thinking about making a trip to the Farmer’s Market for crates of tomatoes and deep cleaning the house while I roast those tomatoes. I also have been craving black-eyed-peas and okra, both of which are great disappointments when cooked from frozen. I bet I can get both of those things there and if I’m willing to pay a bit extra, I can get those peas already shelled. There’s an exhibit at the Nelson that I’ve been meaning to visit. This is the last weekend for it and I’d feel really bad for missing it. There’s no excuse for missing it. I’m a museum member and it costs me nothing. A weekend to myself is a gift I just don’t know what to do with. There are so many possibilities that it’s almost paralyzing. Isn’t that just the way? I asked for this and now that I have it, I’m at a loss of what to do with it. I think that I can probably do all of the above and maybe even throw in a foot spa visit.

I’m going to pat myself on the back right now for typing that last sentence and showing some ambition.