Facing fear

I can’t help but be glad that January is over. I spent a good part of it sick with various ailments and took three different antibiotics trying to get over everything.

The good news is that February started out wonderfully: I faced a fear.

You know that I love animals, especially cats. Over the years I have become more passionate about animal welfare, especially with companion animals like cats and dogs. I have read a lot and thought a lot and talked a lot and written a lot. I have taken care of four different cats. But I didn’t believe I was doing enough.

I have talked about volunteering with the local shelter, but I haven’t done anything about it besides inquiring about opportunities by email.

The Campbell County shelter. It's a dreary looking building. The county government is discussing whether to renovate or build a new facility.

In Campbell County, the Animal Control Care Center is separate from the humane society that operates in the county. Animal Control has to accept every animal brought to it—stray or surrendered by owner. And it is not a no-kill shelter.

Some caring people formed a group called Friends of Campbell County Control. The mission of the group “is to provide support for the animals of Campbell County and reduce the euthanasia rate.”

I follow the group on Facebook and have been so impressed at the all-volunteer efforts to care for animals and try to get them fostered or adopted.

Fern, one of the cats in the shelter. 

I never moved forward with my efforts to volunteer because I was afraid.

One of these fears is an OCD fear: fear of responsibility, that I would hurt an animal because I would shirk in my responsibilities and do something wrong. I would obsess over safety and health issues and compulsively do unnecessary things to try to make my anxiety go away.

My thought process was that if I avoided responsibility, I wouldn’t have the obsessions.

Adopting Waddles helped me a lot with this fear. But taking care of more animals, more than we ever had in our house, raised the fears again.

Honey Bee loved being held and cuddled. She wanted me to continue paying attention to her.

And I was afraid because of my anxiety. I tend to take the suffering of others to heart, sometimes to the degree that I get very emotional. I was afraid of what I would see and experience in the shelter. I was afraid of how I would feel when I had to leave the homeless animals behind when I went to my own home.

I used to put much more value on my feelings about something than I should have. That’s an OCD problem, too. If I feel like something is wrong, then something must be wrong and I better check it, fix it, repeat it, or avoid it.

Turbo has a loud purr when he's held.

But the more I spend in the quiet, thinking and writing about my values and beliefs, the better I understand that fear is a natural response to doing something different. I have to push through such fears and the accompanying feelings and at least give things a chance.

Kittens surrendered to the shelter by the owner. The yellow ones are boys and the black ones are girls. It's hard to get a still photo of a moving kitten!

This boy is new to the shelter and doesn't have a name yet. He seemed frightened. But when I opened the cage and talked to him and rubbed him, he started purring and rolling around.

This past Friday night, I sent the Friends a message on Facebook asking about the next orientation date. They wrote back that it was on Sunday. I told them I planned to attend.

I was excited and afraid. Believe me, I thought of excuses not to go. I didn’t feel 100 percent physically. I felt guilty leaving Chase Bird to go help care for other animals.

But I got in the car and drove to the shelter. I exposed myself to my fear.

When I left 90 minutes later, I felt joy and contentment.

I will be spending most of my time with the cats, which I was told was good because most volunteers want to walk the dogs.

I loved on the animals and talked to them and helped with some simple assessments on whether certain cats were OK with dogs and/or other cats.

Barbe, the leader of the volunteers, knew I was thinking of getting another cat, and she insisted on taking a photo of me and Bastet, a lovely tortoise kitty. Then she texted the photo to Larry.

Me and Bastet. She is in a purple cage in the waiting area, acting as "greeter" to visitors.

No, we’ve not made a decision to adopt yet. But I plan to go back soon and whenever I can to volunteer and love on those cats and let them know that humans can be kind to them.

What a great day it was!

I am still waiting on word about the job. The person in charge of hiring was out of town three days last week but told me he would be in touch with me this week. So I wait. Thank you for your good wishes!

What has been your favorite volunteer activity?

Remembering Thunder Cat

Thunder Cat

Thunder Cat had gray, luxuriant hair. He was stalwart, regal, a king of a cat.

He was Larry’s first cat. In the mid-1990s, Larry lived in Lynchburg a city 20 miles north of Altavista. He didn’t have any pets when he moved into his neighborhood.

One night, as Larry sat out on his front steps, a neighbor’s cat, Thunder Cat, walked right up to him and rubbed against his leg. Larry was surprised because he didn’t really consider himself to be a cat person.

But later that night, he went to the grocery store and bought some treats to give him when he visited.

When Thunder’s original family moved, they asked Larry if he’d like to take in Thunder. Larry jumped at the chance.

When Larry and I started dating and I met Thunder, I was a little afraid. He was a grouchy cat and didn’t like to be touched except on his very limited terms. He would bite if he didn’t want to be touched—not hard enough to break the skin, but hard enough to hurt.

When Larry moved to Altavista, everything was different. Larry kept him inside all the time, and the new environment seemed good for him.

He calmed down and would even sit on our laps for short periods of time.

Here are some things I remember about Thunder:

*He could leap long distances. One day Larry was playing with him and was lying on the floor with his knees bent. Thunder jumped over Larry’s entire length. Larry looked up and saw only a blur of gray fur.

*I loved watching Thunder. When I sat in our living room reading, I had a view of the kitchen and the hallway leading to the bedrooms and the litter boxes.

Sometimes I’d look up and see Thunder quietly walking by, his paw steps mere puffs of sound, winding his way back to the litter boxes.

After he used the litter box, he would run back by me, his paws pounding the floor, hurrying back to his domain, the den.

*Thunder loved my shoes. When I took them off, he would stick his nose in them, then wrap his front legs around them and lie on them.

At night, he would usually stay in the den, not coming into the bedroom. Sometimes he would cry in the night. If I went and got him and brought him into the bedroom, he wouldn’t stay. But I could take him one of my shoes, and it would calm him.

*Just as Waddles helped me overcome a lot of my OCD and the fear of responsibility I had, so did Thunder. I loved being his mother and taking care of him. I embraced the responsibility.

We lost Thunder Cat to kidney failure on Feb. 12, 2009. I can’t put in words how devastated Larry and I were and how much we miss him.

We still feel his gray presence.

Is there a pet or other animal that you have admired?

In memory of my sweet Wa



Waddles in 2003.



I spent her last night on the floor beside her. She was on a pad in the large hallway in our house, right outside our bedroom where she also had a pad.

She had made it to the other side of the house early in the evening of that last night, all the way into the den to sit by my husband on the couch until I got home from work.

At some point that evening, she could no longer stand.

I put a blanket and pillow down on the floor beside her, not wanting to be far from her because she periodically woke up and cried. I wanted to be close so I could comfort her.

Waddles had chronic kidney insufficiency, arthritis, a heart murmur, low potassium and low iron.

She was 21 years old.

During that last night, I knew it would be her last. I knew that I would have to call the vet in the morning and talk with her about the end.

I knew that I couldn’t keep her when she was suffering.

I knew I was going to have to give her up.

And we did give her up. Larry and I took her to the vet’s office that morning and held her and talked with her as the vet gave her the medications that could not heal her, but lifted her suffering.

When Larry and I returned home, I immediately lost any composure I’d had. I immediately doubted that I had done the right thing.

That was Oct. 13, 2011. I can’t believe a year has gone by since we lost our sweet Wa.

She was a beautiful half-Persian, black and white girl. Her voice was sweet and melodic, only demanding when she was hungry or scared.

She was very dignified. She would sit with perfect posture, her front paws crossed.

She liked to play with toys that we swung near her with a small fishing pole toy. She liked to bat at them and grab them and roll on her side, conquering the toy mouse.

She had some stuffed toys that came with her when I adopted her. She mostly ignored them when we were around, but we’d come into a room where she was sometimes and find the toys moved from one place to another.

She was a thoughtful eater. She’d eat a little, then pause and think about it, then eat a little more, then walk away for a while, then return and eat more.

She was a plucky girl, learning to live with new cats when Larry and I got married. She could hiss and then walk away with great dignity.

Waddles helped me break though my fear of being responsible for another creature. She helped me with my contamination OCD. I could clean up kitty messes without a thought.

I miss her every day. Sometimes the grief has overwhelmed me, and I think my heart will burst from the pain.

   I am forever grateful for my sweet baby Wa. And I will love her forever.

Top 5 things that have helped my OCD

I have put together a list of things that have helped me most with my obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Other things have been of help to me, including meditation. But the following list includes what has been most important.

Not all of these things are for everyone. For example, I realize that medication is not the right choice for everyone. But these are the things that worked for me.

Once I made the list, I couldn’t rank them. I couldn’t say for sure that one was more important than another in helping me control and live with the obsessions and compulsions. So here’s my list, in no particular order.

Medication

Medication changed my OCD from being debilitating. With medication, I was able to consider that there might be ways to live with this disorder.

I have had to try different medications through the years, mostly because of my co-morbid diagnosis of depression. It’s not an easy thing, to change medications, to wait for them to work, or not work.

But it has been worth it to be able to gain some distance from an all-consuming OCD to an OCD that I can work with.

I’ve written more about my medication journey here.

Therapy

I’ve had talk therapy through the years, but the therapy that has helped me the most has been the practical cognitive behavioral therapy that I’ve had this year.

While it’s not been the formal exposure and response prevention therapy, it included exposures and the whole philosophy of learning to tolerate the anxiety and moving beyond it. The exposures my therapist led me in were helpful and instructive.

While the CBT got waylaid because of other therapy needed for my depression, I look forward to getting back to it. In the meantime, I’ve been doing some of my own exposures.

Brain Lock

I first read Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior-A Four-Step Self-Treatment Method to Change Your Brain Chemistry, by Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz with Beverly Beyette, in the 1990s, and I worked on its principles on my own with some success.

The book taught me to walk away from compulsions even though I was feeling intense anxiety, and I learned that the anxiety eventually died down.

I wrote in detail about how I use “Brain Lock” in this post.

Adopting a cat

Adopting Waddles in 2000 changed my life in many ways. One of the ways was to give me almost constant exposures for my contamination OCD and my hyper-responsibility OCD, though I would not have known to call them exposures.

I learned to live with an animal and clean up messes without freaking out. I learned the joy of responsibility, which began to outweigh my fears of responsibility.

Learning that I wasn’t alone

From finding out a person I really respected and liked had OCD to starting a blog and connecting online with others who have OCD, finding out I wasn’t alone in my suffering has been a big component of my OCD improvement.

What has helped you the most in your battles with OCD and other anxiety?

Learning: Meditation is a safe space

When my husband and I got married, it didn’t just change our lives. It changed the lives of our cats.

Waddles had lived with just me for three and a half years. My husband had two cats, Thunder Cat and Sam.

It was not love at first sight when Wa met TC and Sam. It usually isn’t with cats.

They hissed, growled and made other sounds I had never heard. Wa was normally very calm. She hissed more in those first few months in our new home than she had in the years we had lived together.

We did everything the experts say to do when introducing cats: allow them to see each other, but not get to each other. Give them treats when they are together without arguing, thereby rewarding calm behavior. Spray pheromones around the room.

What really worked was time. They had to learn to live with each other, and they had to do it on their timetable.

During the hard times, I put one of Wa’s beds underneath one of the windows in the master bedroom. That way we could keep a protective eye on her.

Eventually, I added a covered bed for her. She loved that space and spent a lot of time there even when peace finally settled on the household. She moved around the house, playing and lounging around. But her place in the bedroom seemed to be her home base.

TC and Sam never bothered Wa when she was there, and they never tried to take it over. It was Wa’s safe space.

Now the space is empty. After Wa died, we took up the beds. We picked up her special blanket and her favorite toys, which still sit on the dresser where we can see them.

When I decided that I wanted to commit to meditating on a regular basis, I wondered where I would do it. I wanted a space in the house where it would be quiet and where I knew I could always go to be still.

I decided to use Wa’s space. I sit on the floor looking out over the bedroom like Wa did. I stare at my candle (battery-powered, of course). Then I close my eyes and listen.

It’s difficult for me to use breathing as a way to center myself. I don’t know if it’s because I have asthma or if OCD makes me think too much about breathing. But I feel out of breath when I try.

Chanting or saying words out loud is also a problem. I feel out of breath or I get into a mindless mode instead of a mindful mode.

So I listen. I listen to the sounds around me: the tick of the clocks, the creaks of the house, the soft puff of the ceiling fan, a train passing through town a mile away. I imagine that my ears are stretching out and turning, like a cat’s.

I practice letting my thoughts go, and I picture them swirling into a globe and spinning around there. I try to watch myself. I try to be here right now.

And I share a safe space with my Wa in spirit.

I have written before about mandalas, and how coloring them, and then creating my own, comforted me during a hard time and continue to comfort me.

The mandala pictured with this post is one that I created to illustrate my meditation, my safe space.

Do you have a safe space? Is it an actual place, or is it a place you go to in your mind? What makes a space safe for you?

Learning: Nature does comfort

We had a hailstorm today. On the first day of spring, a battering of ice balls fell from the clouds, rain poured and thunder rumbled.

Afterwards, when I left work this evening, the air felt so comfortably cool. And it felt clean.

When I got home, before I went inside, movement high in one of our oak trees caught my attention. It was a squirrel.

A lot of squirrels hang out in our yard. I see a fluff of gray just about every day.



See the squirrel?



But this evening, this squirrel, high up in the tree, kept my attention. I don’t know how the small limb, a mere twig from my viewpoint, held the squirrel’s weight. But it did as he or she walked back and forth.

I still had my head back enjoying the play when my husband opened the door to greet me.

Periwinkle around rocks

After going inside and saying hello to my husband and cats, I grabbed my camera back up and went outside. I had to capture some of the beauty of this spring evening, our first spring evening this year.

Being among animals, trees, flowers—nature—calms me. I love the beauty I see. I love knowing that all this life goes on, even while I’m gritting my way through a long day at work.

Today was layout day. We went to press tonight, so all day I sat at the computer and created pages. I drew text boxes, formatted copy, input photos, wrote cutlines, made the stories fit.

My shoulders are telling me that I used poor posture most of the day. My jaw is tight, my stomach a bit unruly.

But I feel good, too, because of my little walk in nature, my little adventure.

That nature can calm and comfort is not my discovery, not a new idea. But I need to be reminded sometimes that there’s more to life than the four walls around me, my thoughts, my worries, my concerns, much more to life than I can even imagine.

It’s not that I had such a terrible day. Life is very good in many ways right now. But the darkness of depression and the anxiety of obsessive-compulsive disorder are there, in different degrees on different days. And I’m old enough to know that sorrows happen to everyone.

We all need comfort sometimes, different kinds and for different reasons. And nature is a form of comfort.

I have so much to learn about what is in nature. I grew up on a farm. I’m a country girl by birth. But I don’t know the names of all the trees around me, the birds, the flowers. I can enjoy nature without knowing such things, but I want to learn.

I love to read about nature. One of my favorite collection of essays is called “Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature,” by Kathleen Dean Moore.

I turned to her writings last fall, when I was mourning losing my Waddles, when I couldn’t sleep because of the pain.

Moore, too, finds comfort in nature, as her title states. I highlighted the following passage from the introduction to her essays:

“I don’t know what despair is, if it’s something or nothing, a kind of filling up or an emptying out. I don’t know what sorrow does to the world, what it adds or takes away. What I think I do know now is that sorrow is part of Earth’s great cycles, flowing into the night like cool air sinking down a river course. To feel sorrow is to float on the pulse of the Earth, the surge from living to dying, from coming into being to ceasing to exist. Maybe this is why the Earth has the power over time to wash sorrow into a deeper pool, cold and shadowed. And maybe this is why, even though sorrow never disappears, it can make a deeper connection to the currents of life and so connect, somehow, to sources of wonder and solace. I don’t know.” (“Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature.” By Kathleen Dean Moore. Page 10-11, e-edition.)

I am not a hot weather person. Spring in Virginia seems to so quickly lead into the hot, humid days of summer.

But I welcome the blooms, the green, the robins. I welcome this part of nature.

Do you find comfort in nature? What part of nature? How does it comfort you?

Mandalas

I have been coloring and creating mandalas for several months, and I’d like to share what I’m doing with you.

A mandala is at its very basic a circle. According to the book “Mandalas in Nature,” by Sonia Waleyla, and other sources, the word mandala is Sanskrit for “circle.”

The circle is used by many religions and traditions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity.

According to Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandala, spiritual traditions may use the circles for such practices as focusing attention, teaching spiritual lessons and meditation.

May stained glass windows in churches can be considered to be mandalas.

The many pictures of mandalas that I’ve seen use different shapes, figures and other drawings, some of them symbolic.

I started coloring mandalas when my cat Waddles became very ill last fall. I had trouble sleeping, reading or focusing on much of anything. Full of anxiety, I sat beside her.

I can’t remember why I turned to mandalas, but I found some free ones on the Internet and printed them out, got out my colored pencils and started coloring.

It gave me something constructive to do when I faced the loss of my Wa but couldn’t yet face the emotions it brought up.

I continue to color mandalas. It is relaxing to me. When I am focused on coloring, especially small areas of the mandala where I have to concentrate, I don’t dwell so much on what I’m worried about. If symbols are involved in the drawing, then I think about those. And looking at the finished product soothes me.

I am making a collection of my mandalas to use in my meditation practice.

As I learned more, I started making my own mandalas with symbols that mean something to me.

I have expanded my collection of pre-drawn mandalas. Those and the mandalas that I downloaded and printed from the Internet are much better drawn than the ones I create, but because of copyright concerns, I didn’t want to post those on my blog.

So here are some that I have drawn.

The first is a mandala that includes symbols of the most important things in my life. God and my spiritual life, my husband, my cats and my writing are the most important. Other important aspects of my life are music, animal welfare and animal rights, nature and the spreading of peace.

The second is an illustration of mindfulness. I got the idea for this one from Jon Kabat-Zinn's book "Wherever You Go, There You Are," where he writes, "In every moment, we find ourselves at the crossroad of here and now." (p. 7 in e-edition).

The third is just a collection of pretty things.

If you’d like to learn more about mandalas, one resource is The Mandala Project at http://www.mandalaproject.org/.

Where does the lonely hide?

Sometimes I think that because I have OCD, anxiety and depression, I’m extra sensitive and hyper-alert to how I feel. I monitor how stressed I feel, how down I get, how tense.

I try to be aware of any changes because if I need to make an adjustment in medications, I want to jump on it quickly. And lately, I’m analyzing myself more closely to try to decide if I want to take cognitive behavioral therapy.

But sometimes the feelings sneak up on me.

I had a semi-pleasant day today. I conducted an interview and wrote four stories for the paper tomorrow. It was hard for me to concentrate and settle down to write the stories, but I managed to get them done and get home at 7:15.

Once I got home, I thought things were OK. I told my husband about my day, watched part of “Jeopardy” and snuggled with my cat Sam.

But I started thinking about Waddles and, as soon as my husband left to go get some takeout for dinner, I had a deep crying spell over her.

Waddles was my beautiful baby cat who died in October. I wrote about her and the incredibly positive impact she had on my life in a past post.

I just fell down into the grief of losing her. I wanted to have her with me so badly. I didn’t want to go on without her.

When my husband got home, I told him how lonely I felt without Wa. He said he understood because she and I had spent so much time together.

I am still grieving. I understand that. And I understand that I’ll never “get over” her. I don’t want to.

But I have become more able to get things done, to focus on what’s in front of me, of making over the other cats. There are things that I still can’t think about, but the tears haven’t been so close to the surface lately.

I guess what surprised me about the episode this evening was that it seemed to come out of nowhere.

But then I remembered that I got out the Christmas stockings last night, including Waddles’ stocking. Maybe that stocking, which now represents a lost loved one, burrowed down into me and pushed the grief to the surface.

Maybe I’m not as self-aware as I think I am.