Waiting and anxiety

I haven’t been very active in the blogging world lately, and I apologize for that. I miss you!

I thought I was on the road to recovery, but the cough and other symptoms came back with a vengeance. I just haven’t felt very good.

But life goes on, doesn’t it?

I am waiting to hear some news that would create a change in my life.

I applied for a job that would actually be for less hours than I work now, and would still allow me time for my editing business. And the new job would pay significantly more.

I had my interview Wednesday (thank goodness I didn’t have a coughing fit at the same time). And now I’m waiting.

And I’m not good at waiting.

It’s all wrapped up with OCD and my craving for certainty. I want to know right now that everything is going to work out, that everyone is going to be OK, that the change I want to happen is going to happen.

But that’s not how life works, is it?

I’ve been trying some mindfulness techniques to help me deal with my anxiety. All I have is right now, I remind myself. I focus my senses on what’s around me right now, the sounds especially.

I also try to accept what is. I have done all I can in the matter. The rest is out of my control, and I have to accept what the outcome will be.

And I focus on what’s most important to me regardless of anything else that goes on in my life: Larry, Chase Bird, my spiritual life, writing, service to the world.

My techniques to help with the waiting and uncertainty aren’t perfect, but they are helping me to be able to deal with the anxiety so much better than I used to. I love that there are things I can do to help myself in that way.

Do you have a hard time waiting for news, good or bad?

Asking the question, Who am I?

"Hidden clover" 

Asking myself the question, who am I, is not new for me. I have often wondered who I am in relation to mental illness. Would I be the same person if I didn’t have OCD? How would I be different if I didn’t have depression? Am I who I am partly because of the mental illness?

I am asking myself the question with a new concern now.

Since my mother’s suicide attempt a month ago, I’ve been flooded with all kinds of memories from my childhood and young adulthood.

Therapy over the years made me aware of my unhealthy childhood. And I made great strides in moving away from negative beliefs about myself. In many ways, I thrived.

But I stayed in a toxic relationship with my mother because I believed I had to. And I never fully faced what my childhood had been like and how much the anger and resentment I had stemmed from that.

My mother’s actions and the aftereffects a month ago tipped me over.

I’ve had to face the fact that I had a lousy childhood. There’s no longer any way I can dress it up and make it look reasonably OK for the rest of the world. It’s time for me to be honest about it with myself and with others.

And I have to look at myself and figure out how much of this past junk I’m still carrying around with me.

With the help of my psychiatrist, I’ve realized that my way of being in the world and my way of handling relationships were heavily influenced and shaped by my mother.

I’ve worked on this before, but now I am especially mindful about the ways I may be carrying on the habits learned from an abusive past.

So now that I know without a doubt that my mother’s influence was and continues to be toxic to me, how do I answer that question—who am I?

As I am apt to do in any new situation, I’ve been reading a lot. One helpful work I came across in my search was an article called “You Carry theCure In Your Own Heart,” by AndrewVachss. The article was first published in 1994 in Parade Magazine.

Vachss is an author and an attorney who works with children and youth.

Here is a passage from that article:

“If you are a victim of emotional abuse, there can be no self-help until you learn to self-reference. That means developing your own standards, deciding for yourself what "goodness" really is. Adopting the abuser's calculated labels—"You're crazy. You're ungrateful. It didn't happen the way you say"—only continues the cycle.”

This new journey of re-understanding of who I am is a difficult process for me, harder than it ever was before.

Meditation, reading, and writing in my journal have become very important ways to become aware of who I am without my mother, without the belief system that she started me on as a child. I want to be aware of what my values are, what my core beliefs are.

I keep telling myself, “I can do this. I am not alone.”

And I’m not alone. I know there are others who have gone before me who have overcome similar obstacles. I know there are those struggling with the same sorts of issues. I know there are people cheering me on. I believe there is a presence of Spirit—God, Creator—that I don’t understand but am becoming more aware of.

I pray. I meditate. I read. I write. I knit. I laugh with my husband. I hold my cat. I follow my doctor’s instructions and take the medication that helps enable me to do what I need to do.

And I find out who I am.

Mr. Mayor

Some people live their lives in such a way as to make me want to live a better life.

Rudy Burgess was one of those people.

Rudy, who was 84, died on Monday. The Altavista community is less because of his death, but more because of the life he lived.

Rudy was a public servant. He started serving on the Altavista Town Council in 1972 and did so for 40 years. For 28 of those years, he was the town mayor. He didn't run for re-election in 2012.

Until his retirement in 1993, he also worked a full-time day job.

Rudy was not a politician. He loved Altavista, and he served the people of Altavista.

He was one of the first people I met when I moved to Altavista in 2003 after Larry and I got married. He and Larry knew each other—Rudy knew everyone—and I quickly learned that this was a man who always spoke when he saw you, always had something funny to say, and always wanted to hear your opinions about things.

After I started working for the Altavista Journal, I had more opportunities to see Rudy. Though I didn’t usually cover Altavista government, I’d see him at events and discovered more evidence of the love Rudy had for his community.

In 2010, I had the privilege of interviewing Rudy and his wife for an article about long-lasting marriages I did for a special bridal section. At that time, they had been married for 60 years. I loved hearing their stories about their married life and the ways they worked together as a team. They stayed busy with children, church, work and Town Council, but they never forgot each other.

I reread that story yesterday and looked through some photos the newspaper has collected of Rudy over the years. I remembered the joke he used to tell people, that every time his picture was used in the Journal, he was paid $500.

Service to others, dedication to one’s work, love for one’s family, faith—Rudy personified these values. And thinking about him and his life makes me want to do better.

God bless Rudy Burgess.

I don’t have any photos of Rudy that I can share on my blog, but here are some photos of the town he loved. They were taken mostly on a Sunday morning, so there’s not a lot of traffic.

Who makes you want to live a better life?

Making the most of my time

“Time is what we want most, but what we use worst.”

 –William Penn

I’ve been imagining what others would see if they had open access to view me and my actions, hour by hour, like a fly on the wall.

I’ve not been doing this because I think my life is so interesting. I’ve been doing it as an exercise.

I’ve been on a quest to use my time more wisely, to live according to my priorities and values. I’ve written about how difficult it is for me to make plans, to motivate myself to do what’s most important for me to do.

This quest has led me to a question: How do I want to spend my time?

Which leads directly to this question: How am I spending my time now?

It’s not a pretty sight.

If others had open access to view my life, they’d see a picture of a woman who sleeps too much, spends too much time in indecision, eats without thinking. It’s a picture of a woman who wanders through her day.

How do I get to a place where I’m using my time to do the things that matter the most to me? How do I reach the point where what I’m doing reflects my values and gives my life meaning?

I’m feeling rather desperate. I’ve read books about time management. I read a great book about how habits develop.

I know that habits that I developed from having OCD are ingrained and it’s going to take a lot of work to develop new ones. I know that chronic depression makes it harder sometimes to take action.

But Lord help me, I’ve got to do better than this.

Remember what my therapist told me about what happy people do?

What they do, he said, is choose to do things according to their values. They do things that are meaningful to them, that make their lives meaningful.

I have finally taken the time to sit down with paper and pen to write. I usually compose on the computer, but when I’m trying to figure something out, trying to make plans, set goals, I find that physically moving a pen or pencil along a page helps me.

I made a list of my priorities in life. That wasn’t hard. My priorities are my relationship with God, my husband, my cats and my writing.

Under each, I’ve begun listing ways that I can better spend my time to reflect the fact that they are my priorities.

For example, to build and experience my relationship with God, I can spend time meditating and reading scripture.

To build a stronger writing life, I can spend time on my memoir, journal and read.

My next step is to start building those things into my schedule.

And there are all the connecting parts of my life to consider, too, like making time for relaxation, exercise and fun.

Once I put pen to paper and started writing, I began to feel better about my prospects. I’m planning now, making small changes along the way.

I’m moving towards making the most of my time.

How do you decide how to spend your time?

More on values: Taking care of physical health

Do you ever feel like you’re falling apart? Not mentally, but physically? In small ways, but ways that affect how you feel each day?

I’m feeling like that. And I’m also thinking about values.

First, the falling apart part:

*My right foot is hurting. For weeks—actually, months—it’s been hurting on the side of the foot. I don’t remember injuring it. I just noticed it hurting when I was walking at the Y before Christmas.

I figured it would just get better. Then it got a little worse, and I thought I might have a stress fracture, which I’ve had before.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I twisted the foot sideways as I was trying to move fast while wearing clogs, and since then, I’ve been in a lot of pain.

*My allergies have been kicking up lately. My eyes itch, I alternate between being stopped up and having a runny nose. My sinuses get tight. The dry winter air doesn’t help.

*I’ve had some bouts of trouble with irritable bowel syndrome.

*I’ve started with a bad cough.

Nothing life threatening, nothing serious. But enough wrong that I feel run down.

I haven’t been able to walk for exercise because of my foot. I’ve been sleeping more (too much) and lying around too much. I’ve been accomplishing less.

But I have some confessions:

*I still haven’t gone to the doctor about my foot. I keep thinking it will feel better “soon.” But soon has come and gone. It probably needs a doctor’s exam.

*I haven’t been eating the best of diets. I eat foods that know will have a good chance of bothering my digestive system and my energy level.

*I haven’t been diligent about using my long-acting asthma inhaler.

I’ve made vows before to take better care of myself. I have set goals that I never accomplished. But I’m not trying to go on a guilt trip in public by telling you these things. I’m leading up to my point about values.

I’ve been thinking about my values and how I use my time. I even wrote a post about it called “What do happy people do?”

There’s a connection between my feeling of physically falling apart and my values.

When I don’t properly take care of my physical health, I don’t feel like doing the things and giving my full attention to the things that matter the most to me.

Feeling as good as possible physically will help me give myself more fully to that which is most important.

And these are the things that matter the most to me:

*My husband

*My cats

*Writing

*My relationship with God

I don’t need to have reasons to exercise like, “I want to lose weight” or “I want to be fit enough to run a 5K.” Those reasons are great, and it’s helpful to set goals.

But all the reason I really need to exercise is to know that it will help me feel physically (and mentally) better and I’ll be better able to pay attention to what matters the most.

Likewise, I don’t need to have a reason like, “I want to lose weight” to eat better. All the reason I need to eat better is to, again, know that it will help me feel more like paying attention to what matters the most.

And the same for tending to any injuries and illnesses.

I now have my reason—my value—for taking better care of myself physically. All I need to do is follow through.

What are your reasons for taking good care of yourself physically? What’s your method for following through?

What do happy people do?

Recently, my therapist and I talked about the difficulty I was having in doing some of the things that we knew would help my mood, such as exercising.

He has told me before that action comes before motivation.

During this conversation, he put it a little differently.

He said people who are happy don’t go around feeling happy all the time.

What they do, he said, is choose to do things according to their values. They do things that are meaningful to them, that make their lives meaningful.

Which, for me, begs the question, what are my values?

Of course, I can tell you my basic values. I believe in loving my neighbor, in treating others with goodness, in not doing things like stealing and lying.

But how am I allowing those values to filter down into my everyday life, my everyday choices?

If I choose to exercise, what is my value behind that? If I choose to have a positive attitude, what is my value behind that?

I’m especially focused on this right now because of my new work schedule and the new choices I’ll have about how to spend my time.

I think I can work on clarifying my values in two ways. Both include writing.

I can write down what I think my values are.

And I can write down how I spend my time and how I want to spend my time, and see how my values align with that.

I believe that by being able to name my values, I’ll be able to make better choices in the things I do.

I’ll let you know how it goes!

How aware are you of your values as you make your daily choices?