Loveburn

Collectors Quest

Love is transformative. It's beautiful and perfect. Like sunlight. It powers life. It brightens everything. It warms everything. It makes everything sparkle.

Just like sunlight, too much love can burn you.

When do you love someone too much? When you love them more than your needs, your need for friends and connections other than them, your need for emotional or financial stability, your need for safety and freedom from fear, your need for physical health. You love your kids too much when your life feels not worth living when they leave you. You love your spouse too much when you can't bear that they think anything bad about you, and you have to make them stop. You love your parents too much when you put their needs before your own or your kids'.

You love someone too much when you can't let them hurt, when you need to save them from everything, even if that means hurting and losing yourself.

You love someone too much when you can't think of anything but them. Birthdays remind you. Sundays reminds you. Grocery store aisles remind you. Movies, songs, books, pictures, colors, food, cups, necklaces, pants, carpet, sunlight, rain, snow, your calendar, what your boss said this morning, your neighbor's dog, your best friend's mom, the facebook newsfeed, the flower in the corner of the ad for return address mailing labels, everything, everywhere, always reminds you. Even when you close your eyes and all you hear is the sound of your own breath in the dark, even that reminds you.

You love someone too much when you can't forgive them for anything, because they hurt you that deeply, because you wanted that much for them to fill you up with themselves and their irreplaceable love, and they didn't. You love someone too much when you constantly expect them to change and refuse to except them and their behavior, for the same reason.

When you love someone too much, you use them, you depend on them, you need them. You can't and won't live without them, even if you wish you could and would.

That's loving someone too much.

And when you've loved someone too much so much that now your life is shriveled or even the briefest exposure burns and yet you'll stand there and soak them in, thinking, this is love, that's when you cannot love them. That's when you have to live without your light, your love, until the burn fades.

The grief of letting go

Image courtesy of Anna Destephano, annawrites.com.

Sometimes it doesn't work out. Sometimes people don't fit. Like mismatched puzzle pieces too bent and chewed by the family dog. Our edges are soggy, tattered, jagged.

We try "making it work," refusing to give up. We mash ourselves together into an ungainly unhinged scramble of a Thomas Kinkaid Disney castle and Guernica. We pull hard into each other's incompatibilities while they jab helplessly at our faces like Pickup Sticks in the eyes, splayed points gouging everywhere the harder we hold on. We break off each other's teeth, punch new holes in each other, and break ourselves in two, trying to make it work.

And we try to ignore this, sometimes. Even after all the damage, the self-mutilation, the shaming, the self-hatred and scourging blame of everyone including God, still we try to make this dysfunctional clash cling into a consoling whole. We see others hang together in pictures of fulfillment. They have familial love and warmth. Everything we want. And we ache.

Something like a yawning emptiness, a vacuum sucking sinkhole drops out in our heart. We hunger. It burns. It flickers with despair. And we panic. We claw and scramble away. We can't accept it. We refuse to even consider it. Surrender, "giving up," that would be a failure, loss. That would mean we're damaged, that we can't make everything right. It would be falling over the edge of that pit. If we do, we'll never get out. Nothing will ever be right again. We'll never be able to put the pieces back together.

And we'll be alone. Starving. In the dark. Forever.

Maybe it'll be our fault.

So we hate ourselves. And them, the ones we can't make fit. We try blaming ourselves. And them. We try running at them, and running away. We bargain. We do inventories. We do therapy. We plead. We pray. We do anything and everything as we scratch up and chew over and kick around every stage between ourselves and acceptance, between us and grief, that black shadow into which we cannot slip.

This does nobody any good, this aggressive denial, this refusal to accept what we cannot change. This obstinate denial that we, and they, fall into that category too. All it does is create misery. Scar us. Keep us tortured and trapped. Hating ourselves. Hating them. Blaming ourselves and bending ourselves until we break or feel half-labotomized with the pretend. We wear our spirits down, erode our souls, denying them, crushing them, until maybe they'll never fit anything ever again.

Sometimes, when you get here, to this desperate edge, all you can do -- the best you can do -- for everyone, is let go. Give in. Surrender. Fall. Sink into the black. Let grief swallow you, and trust that someday, somehow you will come up for air. After you cry and cry and cry and cry, you will land on a sunny seashore at the other side of the tunnel. You'll breathe. You'll feel warmth again. You will find love, real love. The love of acceptance, where finally, finally, you fit.

You'll fit with yourself. You'll just be you, complete.

But sometimes, you can't do this, you can't get to that free shore of self-love and self-fulfillment and health and peace, until you say goodbye.

Being Used is the Kiss of Death

Histrionic Vampires. Albernstein.com

Imagine someone jumps you. Their jaws tighten around your coronary artery. You feel blood reroute from your brain to their maw. At first, you struggle and try to scream, but you can't shake them. So eventually you go limp and stop fighting. The light gets fuzzy and pink-tinged. A strange, tingly warmth creeps over you as you start to think that spilling your life down your attacker's gullet isn't so bad after all. Maybe it's your great calling. You feel altruistic, selfless and loving, as your world goes black. Enabling an emotional vampire goes just like this.

The term "emotional vampire" is trendy, a little cruel, and overly simplistic. Unfortunately, it's also accurate. Let's demonstrate.

Back up and imagine your saber-toothed jumper is your partner, parent, sibling or friend. Let's call him or her "Vamp." Now Vamp is (probably) someone you love, or at least can't get away from. Vamp is an important part of your life and has lots of wonderful qualities you value highly. However, Vamp also has some not so good behaviors....

For starters, usually, to Vamp everything is always about Vamp. It's your birthday? Vamp wants to celebrate with five hours of stories about Vamp's latest triumphs. You're getting married? Vamp is so happy because Vamp is in a relationship too.

It's also likely Vamp can't let you have anything Vamp doesn't. You get a new car? Vamp buys a new house. You get a new watch? Vamp thinks you're so vain. You're off to Europe? How could you travel while millions starve? At least Vamp puts Feed The Children first.

More importantly, Vamp typically breathes drama. Vamp knows their boss enacts a megalomaniacal plot. Vamp is sure their cramps are septic appendicitis. Vamp's abusive checker "forced" them to hysterics at customer service and "made" them drunk-type rant Target corporate.

Therefore Vamp's life is chaos. Vamp "has to" buy all new furniture because plaid suddenly gives Vamp nightmares. Jerks should stop being judgy about how Vamp's last three cat adoptions just didn't work out. Vamp couldn't not borrow $200 grand to launch Vamp's dream ceramics shop. It wasn't Vamp's fault it closed after a month. Customers were stalking Vamp.

Mired in constant chaos (and this is the key thing) Vamp needs you. Vamp relies on you to take Vamp to the ER at 3 a.m. for that crampy (non)appendicitis. Vamp depends on you to be there for Vamp's three-hour scream-cry about that megalomaniacal boss. Vamp will feel so abandoned if you don't help Vamp haul all Vamp's old, plaid stuff out.

Should you resist Vamp, set boundaries, or do anything possibly loosening Vamp's death-chomp on you, Vamp probably won't react well. You admit your girlfriend hints at marriage. Vamp melts down and harasses the girl for being a skanky slut. You say you can't rush over to check Vamp's "probably-fractured" spine because it's 2 a.m. and you have an 8 a.m. presentation. Vamp maligns you as a selfish non-friend. You get promoted to Manhattan. Vamp accidentally cancels your flight. Then Vamp "repays" you by driving you out, where Vamp wants to live together.

Vamp can't ever -- ever -- let you go. Because to Vamp, you are a human life preserver. You keep Vamp afloat in a constant emotional storm. Unfortunately this blood-sucking smooch drowns you both.

The injuries to you are obvious. Your birthday becomes a Vampalooza. Your trip to Europe is soured by Vamp's ire. You snap at your kids after Vamp's cry-a-thon leaves you weary. You're late to your presentation after assuring that, indeed, Vamp's back is fine. You have to pay double for a new flight to New York.

Vamp's injuries are subtler. Because Vamp is an addict, and Vamp's drug is you.

"Emotional vampires" are not evil people. They're hurt ones. They're often gravely-injured, one-step-from-The-Walking-Dead ones. And they may not know it. But you probably do. That's probably why you keep giving Vamp "one more chance."

You're not healing Vamp when you let Vamp use you. When you conceal your bite-marks with fake smiles and faker forgiveness. You're killing Vamp, with kindness.

When Vamp uses you to boost Vamp's mood, reassure Vamp's insecurities, reassemble Vamp's life or fend off Vamp's fall-out, Vamps stays sick. When you "make everything okay," as Vamp spins in Vamp's whirlpool world, the hole sucking Vamp's universe down gets bigger. Your relationship becomes like the jack in a crack-addict's arm. Every hit widens the wound. And no hit ever satiates the hunger.

No matter how much love, empathy, forgiveness or energy you pour into the heart of whomever drinks your psychic life dry, it will never be enough. You will never be enough. You will never fix them. They will never feel fixed. Suck and suck and suck and they will still thirst.

Only they can fix them. Only they can fill them. And they can only find, fix and fill themselves when you're out of the way, and they face the light.

Being Present: Someday The Screaming Will End

Generally, I find there are two main modes of being present.

"Being Present In The Moment". The Pain.

Mode one: You wake up. You feel like crap-taffy. Your neck and lower back are all kinked up from stress that tormented half your brain with sleeplessness all night. Trying to recover, you give "noticing" the tension a whirl, and you burst into uncontrollable sobbing or a ten-minute pillow-scream before you can safely manage making coffee without scalding the cat. This is the more preferable mode.

Mode two: You try desperately to stay anchored to your sense of self and the now, feeling your breath, and focusing hard on your totem. But try as you might, you're blown out of your skin with your totem shattered to smithereens by a nuclear mushroom cloud of grief or rage that balloons inside you with infinite, unceasing energy. The memories and thoughts won't stop. After a max of ten minutes, you numb out and find yourself six hours later on your fourth pint of ice cream, your fifth bottle of Sky, your third bag of weed, your last working credit card, or fifth consecutive hour of Bioshock. You've missed a whole day of life. Because being absent felt better than being present. This is the more common option.

It sucks. When it's like this, you feel trapped. All you want is escape. You pray for freedom with desperation and shimmery puppy-dog eyes like that little girl at Christmas who just reeeaaallly wants that horse. You can feel hopeless, like your only choices are conscious torment, unconscious torture, or death. Many of us like choice three. If we ever chose it, we are grateful to have survived.

When being present is hard (splintery, shard-in-the-eye misery) like this, it's helpful (sometimes) to remember why being present matters. It's not just about noticing butterflies and bumblebees, and prancing like some blissed-out Snow White so la-dee-frickin-da happy to be alive. That's stupid. It's about finding your way out. Ending the torment.

Think of being present like holding the Maurader's Map. (Harry Potter fans, explain this.) When you pause and notice what's happening, all the paths appear. You can trace your own mental windings and dead-ends, you can follow your mental traffic. You learn your way around. You find the doors leading out.

But if you force it, crumple your map, pour Vodka or chocolate all over the paper or feed the sheet into your PS3 or bong, you ain't gonna find nothing. It stays blank (and probably silently laughs at you in some magical map kind of way, like a snarky Sorting Hat).

"Escape" through addiction or dissociation is a lie. All those blurry hours may feel like bliss, like freedom from life boiled in your own skin, but they actually trap you, simmering forever. Those silky voices luring you seductively back to your purple haze are really the voice of that skanky dealer offering you that "one last hit" from his track-marked hand. "It's just to get you over the edge so you can come down and get clean," the voice may say. And "Yeah, you can trust him," you may think. Then three weeks later you're back in the alley selling your flesh for one more hit.

Addiction, dissociation and avoidance keep you lost. They steal your map. They leave you no way out. So you're stuck there, forever. (Like Argus Filch. And who wants to be that guy?)

The only real way out is through the fire. Even when it's cat-scalding, coffee-spill-blister painful. Even when for yet another morning you have to sob-scream your way out of bed just to be able to tie your tie without strangling yourself to death.

You can get through. You can feel the feelings, think the thoughts, and get to the end of them. Every tunnel has its exit. If you just keep your eyes open and aimed at the light.

Mental Obsessions with Mortal Enemies

And we're back from a long hiatus. Sorry about that folks. I'll try not to let it happen again.

Anyhoo, you ever find yourself obsessing endlessly about someone you dread? For example, you spend hours a day anticipating how so-and-so will soon cut you open with words, trample your boundaries, rip apart your dreams, and generally leave you a crumpled, tear-soggy, helpless mass on the floor. And you ceaselessly imagine yourself confronting whoever-they-are with irrefutable proof of their many crimes and truly decrepit moral state. And in this fantasy you always picture that your just conviction crumples their soul (just a little) and (even better) changes them so that they will never try to hurt you again.

But then you never actually do say anything -- or if you do it's a self-recriminating pre-apology for your inappropriately hurt feelings or a spasmodic scream-cry of hyperbolic rage that leaves you in the wrong. You never get your point across. You never feel better. Your relationship with dreaded so-and-so never changes. And so you obsess on and on.

This behavior is a like a twisted inverse of that phrase, "hope for the best, prepare for the worst." Instead, you're obsessing about the worst and preparing for nothing.

So what's the solution? Well, the fist step is realizing that the obsession is probably causing you much more misery than whoever-they-are probably ever could. Just think about it. How many hours a day or week or month do actually spend in so-and-so's company? And of that time, how much is actually spent receiving hurts from so-and-so, or having your boundaries crossed by them, or being subject to whatever they do that drives you up the wall? Then compare that time to how many hours a day or week a month you spend obsessing about whoever-they-are and what they've done or could do next. Think how you feel in midst of the obsession, how twisted up you are with your hurt, resentment, shame, and fear. Odds are, reality is far less painful than your preoccupation with it.

And if it hits you that your obsession, not whomever you're obsessing about, is the primary source of your pain, you will be motivated and empowered to end both.

And that's the trick: realizing what you do have power over. Because the sad truth is, even if you did muster up the courage to confront so-and-so in a reasonable and matter-of-fact way, and did say everything you wanted to say in exactly the way you wanted to say it, you're not going to change them. You have no power over them.

People have to want to change themselves. And not everyone has 12 Step Programs. Not everyone has therapy. Not all have the willingness or capacity to change.

So if our fantasies of freedom from pain hinge entirely on someone else changing their behaviors, we will likely be left miserably dependent on something that will probably never be, and forever suffering.

We have to realize that only we have power over us. Only we can change. The so-and-sos ain't gonna. So if we're afraid that the so-and-sos will rip our souls apart with vitriol or violation the next time they come around, we can consider our real options: 1) we don't have to let them around, or 2) if they do come around and start attacking or imposing, we can say, "Stop. I don't let anyone speak to/treat me that way," or something of the like. If, after that, they keep attacking or imposing, we can leave or escort them to the door.

"And how on God's green earth and we supposed to do that?!?" you may ask. To some such direct self-care sounds like super-feats the likes of which will only be seen in the next Superman-Batman team-up. There might as well be a "kapoww!!" caption over our heads when we do it, it's that likely to happen.

Yes, self-care is hard. Terrifying. But it's better than helplessness. Or endless miserable desperation. Plus, you can practice!

You can visualize what you'd say and what you'd do the next time self-care is called for. You can practice, mentally, saying the right words, responding to so-and-so in a way that makes you feel healthy and safe. And the more you mentally practice, the easier actually practicing self-care will be. No kidding. They say athletes who can't train due to injury maintain and even improve their performance by visualizing their moves over and over again. Their minds actually train for action through visualization of action. You can do the same.

Try releasing obsessive fear and anger and embracing self-responsibility and care. The worst that could happen is you'd have something else to do besides angst powerlessly about doom.

When you don't heal. Trauma Tiger 3.

"Putting yourself back together again." KanrieAnn

"What the crap?" we may ask ourselves when our emotional struggles persist. We go to meetings and therapy, we mediate and practice yoga, we eat only raw, vegan muesli, and consume libraries of self-help texts. But still, we're edgy and anxious, we snap at our mates and friends, we weep loudly over small hurts, and our addictions itch. Despite trying every wise and even sketchy recovery technique, we still don't feel better.

We may even be told we can't expect to feel better. All we can have is management of constant pain. In despair, we think, "Is recovery worth this? My drug really was my only comfort." Then we cruise up to our favorite bar, drive-through or pharmacy, and just look. Yearning.

But healing and freedom, they exist. The trick is knowing where to find them. (They're not in those bags, bottles and cans.) Often, they lurk behind our unresolved trauma.

I know some of you may think, with your eyes all asquint, "Trauma? I've never been traumatized. Other people are beaten, raped, have survived war or car accidents. I'm just a normal addict," or, "I've just got your run-of-the-mill dysfunction." Well, maybe.

But traumatic events are not merely happenings like, for instance, an asteroid crashing into your back patio as Bruce Willis shoots off your pinky toes while fighting radioactive snake monsters from space. Trauma really isn't an "event" at all. It's a condition. A state of being, potentially caused by any deep hurt.

In Waking the Tiger (see this and this for background), trauma psychologist Peter Levine explains it:

"The official definition [of ] trauma is that it is caused by a stressful occurrence 'that is outside the range of usual human experience, and that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone.' . . . This description is somewhat useful as a starting point, but it is also vague and misleading. Who can say what is 'outside the range of usual human experience', or 'markedly distressing to almost anyone'?" 

Some of us have been raped, shot, overdosed. We can look back to an event and say, "This is what happened. This is why I hurt." But others of us just don't know what's with us. We've never seen ourselves as "traumatized," but for a while we've felt off. Some mysterious cloud of hurt chases us. And we have tried hard to get over it. We worked our Steps, shared it in therapy, wrote letters we then burned or sent flying skyward on balloons. But still, the hurt stays. We still feel scared, angry, sad. Stuck.

These are signs of trauma. According to Levine, traumatized people can have widely various experiences that cause their injury. Surgeries, falls, the sudden loss of a parent, child or spouse, the disastrous injury of a dear friend. Anything that triggers your primal trauma response will do. The unifying thing is the symptoms:

"traumatized people. . .  are unable to overcome the anxiety of their experience. They remain overwhelmed by the event, defeated and terrified. . . . Unresolved trauma can keep us excessively cautious and inhibited, or lead us around in ever-tightening circles of dangerous reenactment, victimization, and unwise exposure to danger. We become the perpetual victims or therapy clients. Trauma can destroy the quality of our relationships and distort sexual experiences. . . . The effects of trauma can be pervasive and global or they can be subtle and elusive." 

And that's the big giveaway. Subtly or globally, we feel overwhelmed, unable to overcome. Traumatized.

Healing starts when you can accept that, if you are traumatized, your feelings are "physiological as well as psychological." Your pain, fear, sadness and anger, they aren't shortcomings. They're wounds, even if you don't know what caused them, like the inexplicable bruises and scrapes that appear on your shins somehow. And you heal them, partly, in the same way. Hear Levine:

"we all have the innate capacity to heal our traumas. . . . trauma represents animal instincts gone awry. When harnessed, these instincts can be used by the conscious mind to transform traumatic symptoms into a state of well-being."

You wouldn't pick at those seemingly spontaneous bruises and cuts, slapping them around as signs of your malignant self-pity. You'd bandage them, allowing your body to heal. Similarly the best way not to heal trauma is to try to disgorge it, blaming yourself for a "pity party" and refusing to "wallow." (If this old timer's experience is worth one nugget of truth, it's that that ain't going to work.)

What works is admitting your trauma, aiding it with as much TLC as you can muster, and helping your mind relearn health. You may need some new forms of professional assistance. But you wouldn't decline the ER in favor of an everyday band-aid if you sawed off a finger, so it's probably unwise to deprive a metaphorically bleeding brain, right?

And then, one day, if you feel better, and along the way you recalled something like, "Oh yeah, I guess that one time my grandfather did punch me in the face," or, "I guess Mom did drive away and never come back," you'll know you were never a weepy masochistic. Your hurt was never your fault. And instead of punishing it with more pain, you helped.

Mental illness: Laughter in Crazytown.

Mental illness can feel like being trapped in the movie "Labyrinth." You swear you're walking straight ahead on an undeviating path. You look at the walls around you and they seem flat, sturdy and sound. Every once and a while you stop and talk to some sentient rodent who seems, while unusual, reasonable enough. Sometimes you take their queues on the way you should go. But then if you could see yourself from above, you'd know you were swirling around in an endless corkscrew of constantly shuffling walls and talking to mischievous sock-puppets operated by your own imagination.

The worst is the confusion. In your paranoia you absolutely believe, without any shadow of doubt, that klutzy barista Sharon throws scalding lobs of mocha at you in an attempt to make you feel shame. In spasms of post traumatic stress, you are entirely convinced with histrionic certainty that your assigned work shadow Brian is really orchestrating a plot to get you alone and assault you. Your disassociation invisibly splits your mind into raucous versions of "Crossfire" in which you and another you both attest with equal sincerity that you really are a Republican traditionalist who just wants to go to work, and you are also an anarchist hippie twitching to chuck all your things in a van and move to Venice Beach tonight. Then you wake up the next morning sleeping in the van in the kmart parking lot curled up on a pile of fifty cent stuffed animals and you have no idea why. (It's not as fun as it sounds.)

And don't even get me started on the medication. There are pills that give you a "safety net" but replace the whispering voices of sinister evil with a constant ringing in your ears that makes you want to bust your ear drums with booming Rastafari just to get some peace. Then there are the pills that temper your highs but make you feel like some rubberized prisoner in that moment when Ben Stein drones "Beuler. . .  Beuler. . .  Beuler. . . " and you can barely move your legs to escape because every part of you feels like it's swimming in lukewarm pudding. And then there are the pills that make you slightly less convinced that everyone you know wants to kill you, but simultaneously make you gain forty-two pounds and have untoward "leakage" that none of those previously murderous friends can ever discover.

Sometimes you feel your only choices are a disease that is a whirligig of interminably conflicting inputs and swings through bliss, terror and despair, and a recovery that is a parched desert of grey-tone faces,  muffled voices, dulled sensations and drowsily stumbling thoughts.

Plus, without your disease, in recovery, you can feel completely un-anchored. You may have been convinced that the voice in your head, who told you your place in the mystical architecture was eternal, penitent punishment, was God's. If that voice disappears, does God vanish too? Maybe you never lived one day not impelled through frenetic busywork by mania. How do you fill your hours once you're calm?

And who do you connect with? It's not like you can just go up to the guy in the lunch room and say, "Gosh you know, sometimes it is just so hard to stop crying in the morning in time to get ready for work, right?" 'Cause it's not like he'll, perchance, just back away slowly and maybe pull the fire alarm or anything.

You feel isolated. Like it's just you, and your disease, alone on a wide grassy plain with nothing else but crickets. It's scary.

But you're not alone. A recent article showcasing three people who got better from severe schizophrenia and depression highlights that, to stay well, they:

Have fun. And connect with others.

Often, we who bear mild to extreme crazies feel as though anyone who might discover our inner Wonderland would go running screaming into the night. We can also feel excessive shame. Sometimes the only people who feel safe are those suffering like us. And there are few more healing remedies than laughing with someone about that time you taped the windows shut against night daemons, and how it's not as funny as when they nailed the door closed to keep the giants out.

Just listen to these guys:

"It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Through humor, you can soften some of the worst blows that life delivers. And once you find laughter, no matter how painful your situation might be, you can survive it." ~ Bill Cosby

"No mind is thoroughly well organized that is deficient in a sense of humor." ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Some of the most ill of us are wiser, stronger and braver than the sanest of the curmudgeoney sane. Despite our struggles and brain-kinks, we can sometimes offer more to each other and the world than could someone who's survived less. And we gain huge relief from our illness when we can treat it like some cross-breed of David Bowie and a Boggart. (Just picture that for a second. Dita Von Teese? Anyone?) Our disease may never leave us. But its weight upon us and power over us will decrease significantly if we can laugh it out with friends. 

When life throws you landfills.

You ever look around your shambly room and all it's piles of garbage and laundry and spiderweb condominiums and feel burdened? Why can't things be cleaner? Why haven't we gotten a Roomba for Christmas yet? How can we be expected to fit in chores when we can barely handle stumbling out of bed at 8:45 a.m. to grope-crawl for our Abilify without having a panic attack?

Moments like this, when you're lying on the floor sobbing because you just didn't know it was garbage day until it was much too late, these moments call for gratitude.

I know I know. Shut up with the gratitude. But just give me a second.

Yes, recovery is very hard. You do sometimes cry in your car before meeting your boss, and silently strangle pillows in your closet before tucking in your kids, and miss bowling and dancing and fishing to spend hours resolving in front of strangers how your dad caught you stabbing a Ken doll when you were nine.

And yes, you probably did have had a very crappy life from which you now must recover. Aunt Betsy sat you on the stoop saying she'd return in an hour and didn't come back for fourteen years. Mom couldn't afford more than Icebreakers and cracker sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And Grandpa celebrated your birthday by dispatching three jugs of stout and tearing down your dead grandmother's rose-print wallpaper.

This is all real and painful. No one should ever diminish what you're going through. But, sometimes, finding the joy buried under your legitimate pileup of pain can transform everything.

Take this everything-that-is-adorable-in-the-universe girl:

Landfill Harmonic

Now watch this video (seriously, watch it):



If these kids who live literally in piles of garbage can make Yo-Yo Ma's muse out of said crap, so can you.

Maybe you can't get up and mow your lawn or burn the dishes. And that's okay. But while you lie there on the floor, patiently waiting for your soul to heal, maybe notice that you too are kinda like these cuteness wunderkinds. Beneath all the junk life's thrown on you, there is your courage, resiliency and beauty, the stuff of which Mozart dreamed.

Sanity through infographic: Wolf wisdom.

An old truth is a good truth. Howl on ~ The Curator

I believe I'm a bird.

Mistake: A) Slamming cheekwise into a freshly Windexed sliding door; B) Crashing your pimpmobile through the back wall of your sister's house (Note: Both A and B can be done sober, or otherwise); C) Failing to learn from A or B.

You ever watch Bob Ross? He may predate some of you youngins but for some of us Ents of the Eld he made our Saturday mornings. Rather than watching Power Rangers as they strobed their way with karate chops into our hypothalami, we sat with coco learning to paint endless permutations of the Grand Yukon and discovering there within the great meaning of life:

Everything is possible with practice. And there are no mistakes, only happy accidents. (Dear galloping-moose-in-the-trees, we love you bearded Bobby, almost as much as our bespectacled angel of heaven.)

According to Ross, every painter's mistake is a unique piece of something unfinished and beautiful -- if used well. Word, hairy whitefro man. Word. For Ross, this was a meta-narrative about finding joy and peace in life. Painting was living. Living was like painting. Nothing is irredemable. It just has to be blended in towards the goal.

And we all sat drooly awed in our footy pjs, wondering just why his hair was quite so very round, yet getting the message deep in our hearts. So let's again let bearded Bobby instruct the rest of our morning, via this video.

Paint well, dear readers, live well.

Comic Prozac: Because Mother's Day is heck.

And sometimes you just need to look forward.

From the wonderful, inspiring Incidental Comics:

Variations on Mother's Day

Lay on the floor like a pile of laundry and weep deeply. Run through the park like a Borg squadron chases you. Rip through speed bag drills like you're in a Hanes commercial. Let your therapist guide you through a coffee table timeline of your anguish. Sit sukhasana in the sand and watch the sun rise. Or drink tea over scones with your mother. Today can be Hallmark or Jackson Pollock. Whatever gets you through.

Some of us have mothers. For some of us, this is grand. We love them. They nurtured us. Or at least they did their best. We can look back over years of "mommy" with adoration and peace.

Others of us, not so much. Mom is something more akin to a hagmonster from the tidepools of Sheol reaching out from the black ravines of our memory to pull us forehead-first into the abyss, where we'd cry forever over why we've never been loved. Or she's a voluminous blob like an uncanny Miyazaki thing that absorbs all our air and space, eating every part of our life until we're left with only one little corner like Daffy being erased by sociopathic Bugs. We shriek and wail. We wave our helpless little cartoon arms. But mom's hag claws or unseeing, googly eyes just stump closer, absorbing all our mental autonomy until we black out in terror.

Still for others of us, mom is a bittersweet memory. Something unresolved. A piece from our past we've not found safe room for in the future. We don't look back in hate (anymore), but we don't look forward in hope (not yet). We're ambivalent. We're unsure. We feel love. But more than that we feel the need to stay safe from loved people who don't always act healthily. Mother's Day feels sort of like waiting in the airport. You don't know when your next flight leaves, nor from which gate. You just sort of hang out and wait for some sonorous, squawky voice from above to instruct your next move. And you're okay if the day passes without direction, because you snagged the leather chair in the Starbucks lounge anyway and have an iPad full of Iron Chef. Mother's Day passes like a leaf on the wind. You notice it. You find it lovely. But you're okay with it landing and fading into the earth out of sight.

And still others of us have lost our mothers forever. Mother's Day is a reminder of unresolved loss and grief. We weep like baritones in the privacy of our lungs, but we hold the buffets in gaspingly because we don't want to tarnish her day. Or we caress creased photos and spend time crying softly in her chair. Or we lay on the bed cuddling the quilt she made us when we were nine, hoping what we smell on it is her. We feel alone, and sorrowful. And yet when we reach out to heaven we know she is there, and so feel not alone anymore.

And some of us feel an odd, achy mix of all of this. One moment we lean into the hagmonster's pit, next we cry for mommy under the sheets, and then we run on the beach at peace because we're free.

And at the end of the day we're stronger, because of her, or in spite of her. Or both. Because we've grown to a place where we are our own mothers, and fathers. We're learning to care for ourselves in the best ways our mothers did, or never could. And we're grateful.

"Mother and Child," Jeff Fessenden

A diamond is a cracked stone.

IBC

Some days you feel broken. Your grey matter is hole-punched by hundreds of hits, your liver corroded by pools of booze, your ovaries incapacitated by too many years too thin. You feel wasted. Your present and future feel murdered by your past.

Are you over? Ruined? Not necessarily. Not with some minor readjustment.

"Minor" you say? Yeah, fine. My brain can't compute, so instead of going back to engineering I'll just sweep garbage shoots. My liver will burst, so rather than learning to run I'll lie floorwise waiting to die and studying the ceiling popcorn's Rorschach mystery. I'll never have kids, so I'll turn my apartment into a rescue farm and make all my dresses out of Purina sacks.

No, readjustment is not easy. But it is possible. And it leads to a more fulfilling life than despair.

Some things we can't change. Some wounds we can't heal. Some people we can't get back. No matter how sincerely you limber it up in yoga, nurture your organic turnips, cry it out in therapy, or make amends, sometimes Humpty Dumpty cannot be taped up. And refusing to accept it only creates new cracks.

Example: Your daughter won't see you. You could chase her down, visit her place of work, show up at her house unannounced. You could plead with her to see how sick you were, how you didn't mean anything you did. You could even fight, saying she's cruel. She rejects your amends, doesn't see her part. This probably won't go well.

Rather than snuggling your daughter into your warm embrace, you may just chase her deeper into shadow. What might be only a short time apart could become, because you fought it, one that may last years. Or forever. Your refusal to accept the loss magnified it. You created the pain you feared.

And this is basically how it goes.

You may have injured your brain. And you could fight it. You could go on interview after interview trying to prove it isn't so. And this may work out. If it does, wonderful. But it may not, and in the attempt you may erode your self-worth. Meanwhile you could have accepted your injury. Instead of fighting, you could have found new value. You might have helped somebody, coached kids after school, cared for an elderly friend. Your unexpected, unwanted life could have been more powerful than decades at a desk.

And so your liver's wounded. Again you could fight, keep on as if everything's unchanged. And this may prove a miracle. But it could also be your death. Alternatively, you might reap more years in admitting the disease, treatment and care, and meanwhile fill every hour of every day with joy as if each were a bubble about to burst so should be savored while it lingers. You could condense more life into a month than some might fit in decades.

And no, maybe, you can't have kids. And yes you can keep fighting, suffering through every test, believing it can be changed. And if this works, what a joy. But if you could accept your loss, you might find new purpose, and someone new, who needs you, to love and serve.

Your brokenness may be an opportunity for extraordinary meaning. Your dream of an unbroken life may awaken to a deeper life with infinitely more impact.

Ohio rape case special: Zombie warfare.

The news attacks with another story of kidnapping, imprisonment and rape, and our buried nightmares reanimate like zombies that will chase us bloodthirstily for a week.

First we're numb. We try to not click the news links and we palm back the zombies' lowering faces without looking. We mute the news-flashes that cut through our pretense that nothing exists in the universe besides Bruno Tonioli's hyperbolic frenzy for foxtrot, and we look straight ahead as the zombies murmur, "braains," in our ears. We dodge whispered conversations, hearing only snatches of, "It's so awful, so unbelievable. Wouldn't someone know?" and we duck into bathrooms feeling queasy, with the zombies behind us pointing back to the fading words.

By the end of the day we're twitchy. The night seems darker. The zombies trail us as we walk, seeming to move closer. Then closer.

By the end of the night we're shrieking in the tub like Janet Leigh clutching her shower curtain while dozens of zombies of all shapes and sizes pile on us to infect our brains with panoramic terror.

The world is a trigger bomb. Is there any escape?

Yes, there is.

Escape route, step one: You want to scream at those whispering people by the water cooler, "Yes these things happen! No, for the love of Albert freaking Einstein, it is not 'unbelievable'!" (strangles imaginary air-neck) "And yes, yes!, dear merciful death from above!, someone probably did know!" And then you'd kick over the whole 1982-ish Crystal Springs mechanism with a big sploosh!

This is okay. This is not wrong. Your residual trauma-related anger may be triggered and trying to work it's way out. Feel free to fantasize about various splooshings for at least a good half an hour. Maybe buy one of these. Or be like this brilliant child:



This may help you avoid actually kicking anyone in the head. That's really the main point of step one.

Escape route, step two: Your trauma memories spring from your pores like you're a Wes Craven Chia Pet and you're sort of choke-drowning in grief for those three Ohio women like one of those CGI extras in Titanic.

This is also okay. Remember, you were a victim too. Deep trauma leaves scars. And empathy is a virtue (even if it makes you like Leonardo DiCaprio who can't get on the door sometimes). You wouldn't ask those poor women in Ohio not to cry. Don't ask it of you. You can create a safe space to vent your feelings without doing harm to you or others (see brilliant child again).

Also know that (brace yourself) most enabling bystanders are scared too. Feel free to air-punch me from wherever you are for saying this. "Enablers are vampire-daemons from the Place Beyond Doom. They allow our hurt." Yes. True. But sometimes it's helpful to notice motives. Inside anyone who may have seen any strange perversity in that Ohio house, and overlooked it, is probably just another broken person who fears the truth. This could also be true for those who overlooked you. Accepting big hard truth is a feat of strength. If you can accept truth, and those around you can't, know this means you're stronger than them, and try to have mercy.

Somewhere around this daunting feeling is the general aim of step two.

Escape route, step three: Do good with your pain. Don't let the perpetrators win by turning you into them. Don't hurt others because it will make you feel better. And maybe, if you feel strong enough, use your experience to help others. Walk back up to that water cooler (after a hearty wail-out on your car's back seat) and engage them. Tell them that one out of every four women, and four out of every one hundred men, is molested or raped at least once in their lifetime. Maybe hand them this terrifying RAINN stat sheet (perhaps emphasize the last two sections):

If the water-hoarders walk away even slightly more informed, congratulations. You've completed step three. 

Then after all of that, if you've processed the kindling-bundles of rage, fear and shame, passed through uninformed, water-starved masses everywhere, and come out the next morning okay with yourself, knowing you survived, you know truth and you do good with it, then be proud. Rick Grimes has nothing on you.

Comic Prozac: Be a green goat.

Because we're all really just two steps from writing everything in crayon, here's an instructive infographic via Virus Comix. Stay green people. ~ The Curator

B-movie villains can't bite.

by Belathee Photography

So there is this monster that keeps attacking you. It's this four-armed, four-legged, two-headed blob of a sorta-human with two voices and four eyes each looking crazily at you from different directions. It wobbles toward you and reels back, screeching like Skylla, waving all it's arms, scaring the bumblebees out of your craptrap.

This is the person who triggers you.

He or she is this freakish conglomeration of their generally humdrum self and your worst nightmare. Flouncy Nancy in the print dress has your demeaning step-mom's face growing out of her neck. Jittery Frank in the hipster bolo has your child-molesting uncle's hirsuted arms flapping out of his coat sleeves. Nancy says, "Hi Bob," and you hear a caterwauling mixture of that and, "You ugly bastard! Nobody wants you!" Frank calls, "S'up Diana," and you get a squealing, reverbed, "You little slut."  

And usually you can't escape them. Nancy's your cube mate. Frank's your best friend's boyfriend. You're trapped. Your first impulse is to run, quit your job and dump your friend. But then your new boss is billowy Barbara with your step-mom's eyes staring out her forehead, and your sister gets engaged to chubby Charles with your uncle's drawl coming out a hole in his throat. 

The monsters keep attacking. Because they live in our heads.

Hear me out. Admitting our "trigger-monsters" aren't real is one of the scariest, hardest, most humbling recovery tasks. And one of the most healing.

It's hard because trigger-monsters feel real. We feel really attacked, just like we did back then when we were traumatized, abused, neglected, overdosed, raped. We feel cornered, demeaned and alone. Admitting the monsters' unreality feels like admitting the trauma was myth too. We feel blamed for our hurt by any implication that the triggers spring from the still-wounded crevaces of our minds. The suggestion makes us want to Bruce Lee somebody's skull.  

But the admission is also healing because it de-merges the past and present, at least a little. It's like moving a projector beam off the person blocking the screen. If you can accept that Nancy's over here, in the present, and your step-mom's face is over there, in your memory, the movie of your step-mom's screams may stop playing at you from Nancy's talking face. If you can allow that Frank just sits over there in that goofy hammock chair, and your uncle's gross arms died twelve years ago, the action sequence of your uncle's attacks could stop running in 3D surround sound. The traumatic memories may cease grabbing at you from an undulating phantasmagoria. They'll still exist. But at least Nancy will be just Nancy. Step-mom recedes back to 2D. Frank's just frank. Uncle fades to black and white. 

If the new perspective reveals Nancy as, truly, a triggeringly terrible nag, and Frank as a flirty sleaze, at least you can now deal with them as just them, and no longer space-monsters from planet Hades. And while step-mom and uncle will never be your favorite memories, their mind-daemon claws cut far less deeply from across the reach of the past. 

Our beautiful neighbors.

When you were scared and alone that time, I bet no one saved you. Maybe someone came later, someone kind who told you they would save you, build you a rocket ship and fly you to the moon. But then they left. And you were alone and scared again.

This lingers. These childhood feelings of isolation, abandonment and threat, they stick. They sink in, pool and stain. We stay scared. We keep feeling alone and helpless. Especially when we confront scary people today.

We're at the mall with a frenemy who bosses us around, feeling our dead abuser's hands tighten around our neck, and we snap at the slow cashier. We present before our grouchy boss while our mental loudspeaker crackles out the daily rollback on our worth, and our addiction itches. 

We're trying to grow up into big, strong people who can push back and detach from scary others without hurting us or them. But we aren't there yet. Today, our "voices of truth" are stuttered grunts or scream-cries blurted out in half-fragments followed by inarticulate heaves. We lash out in preemptive emotional nuke strikes or we run away, curl into hidden balls behind chairs, hoping some big white knight will save us. But no white knight trots in.

Except for Mr. Rogers.

What? Well, he is white after all. And he does have a castle. Just watch this video....



If only he were our parents. Sigh.

Mr Rogers made this video when America recovered from 9/11. This bespectacled angel of heaven wanted to soothe our nerves and help us believe we could still look forward with hope, rather than just look back in fear, after the worst national tragedy. His message matters. Still. Today, for everyone.

Especially for we've who've suffered the worst personal tragedies.

This message matters because, first, it reminds us there are Mr. Rogers in the world. Not everyone is that grandmother who locked us in the back room for crying after being hit, nor that guy who punched us in the gut, or did worse, in the shadows of the high school bleachers.

There are plaid-tie-wearing, fake-piano-playing, walking founts of adorably safe-huggable love everywhere. Sometimes even in the people we fear.

Second, it reminds us that all these beatific Fred McFeelys (I heart you Mr. Rogers, I heart you so hard), they believe in us. They think we're good. They're proud of us, even when it seems to us that all our attempted bravery, maturity and grace end up as pretty much awkward failblog trampoline jumps into the shrubbery. They support us when we can't.

And last it matters because he's talking right to you, the little kid shrouded in a fumbly, shrieking adult body,  petrified beyond-all-get-out of the harm-sharks about to bite. And scared even more of your own helpless capacity to fail. He's speaking truth.

The past's tragedies don't define you. You have grown up (at least partly). You will "do all you can" to protect your kids (especially, ahemhem, you). You'll learn to voice truth with graceful health. And you are no longer alone.

The banshees can't steal your floor.

Drawing by Kim Schrag, from Unbound Art, Embracing Life

What about those mornings when you want to shave your head and strip naked because your hairs and sweater collude in a malicious itch attack on your face? And then the cushion beneath you condenses into a rigid plank in some kind of proletariat protest against your bourgeois glutes. And then your legs decide to secede from this unhappy union with two petulant swoons into perversely numb uselessness. These are the mornings when life is a yarn-ball of discomfort.

Your mental banshees decide today's no ceasefire day, so instead of greeting you with their usual DMZ kabuki of non-hostile animosity, they fly around your skull rafters, toppling your cognitive filing cabinets and triggering your parasympathetic fire alarms. You can't get comfortable. You feel angsty for no reason. Your muscles tense. You want to scratch your skin off, and dear-pistachio-and-peanut-farmers-everywhere your spouse better not give you any dubious looks for a good hour and a half.

These mornings are hard. They can set everything askew, making any attempts at peace and serenity turbulent.

One good trick for diffusing these crackling lightning storms of "I hate you wool fibers, get the Frederic Fekkai off me" irritation is grounding to your felt sense of self.

"Grounding" is standard practice in somatic therapy. The goal of grounding is to find inner sensory resources and distance from overwhelming stimulus. The "felt sense of self" is a "pre-verbal sense of 'something'" (thank you Wikipedia) comprising you, an "inner knowledge or awareness" of your whole being. It is "experienced in the body" and is "not the same as an emotion." The quick and dirty is, grounding in your felt sense of self can improve your feeling of calm, stability, boundary and strength.

So let's give it a whirl. (Curse you mind-banshees, curse you to Customer Service at T.J.Maxx.)

Grounding to the Felt Sense of Self  

(Note: If you suffer from severe PTSD or similarly overwhelming disorders, it may be best to attempt this only in the company of a trusted professional.) 

1) Sit in a comfortable chair in a safe place with your feet flat on the ground.

2) Notice the floor beneath your feet. Notice it supporting you. Scrub your feet around if you need. Notice any comfortable, supportive feeling associated with your awareness of the floor.

3) Notice the sensation of the chair supporting you. Feel the fabric or material. Find any comfortable, supporting feeling associated with your awareness of the chair.

4) Notice any other comfortable sensations in your body. Focus on them. Are your knee muscles relaxed? Notice that. Does your chest feel open? Focus on that.

5) Try to expand these feelings of awareness all over your body. If you feel any physical or emotional discomfort, return your focus to the comfortable parts of your body (the supportive floor, those loose knees, that open chest) and keep your focus there. Try to expand the feeling again until you can do so without predominant discomfort. (It's okay if you can't do this comfortably. If you can't, allow yourself just to notice where you are comfortable.)

6) Try to expand this feeling all over you, including your parts beyond your body, like your mind and your soul, etc.

7) Rest in this awareness until an all-encompassing feeling of your "sense of self" forms in your mind and body. Rest in that as long as you want.

And you're done.

Hopefully, at this point, the banshees will be Ritalined back to bed, the hairs and sweater will have relaxed into more Gandhian compassion, and the cushion, glutes and legs will have reformed a more peaceful union. If so, wonderful. Go have a blessed day.

If not, then God help us all.

Playing with inspiration.

Monday again right? Crap.

I'm declaring Monday "Brain Candy Monday," or Bracamoday (brah-cah-MOW-day) for short. Welcome to Bracamoday ya'll! Come on in. Curl up into the fetal position on the floor below your desk, or lean your head right on up against your warm, soft monitor, close an eye and sorta-dream of when you can drool-sleep through Duck Dynasty tonight, and cock one ear towards these soft, soothing words of the sleepy-wise.

There's a lot of bad karma and "what in the what?" going on in the word right now, like more school shootings, the antediluvian terribleness of people's inane comments on rape (Trigger warning on that. It will be addressed by CuriCura later.) and whatever the Dionne Warwik this guys is talking about. And there's probably a lot of God-end-the-insanity-or-at-least-help-me-shred-my-pillow-into-a-pile-of-fluff misery going on inside you too. These struggles all must be discussed. They have to be massaged back into joint by loving words and hands, or at least have the sterilizing UV light of Truth shone on them.

But not on Bracamoday. Not when we're all too tired to hit the keys appropitately and are thus one twitchy, over-caffeinated second from that accidental reply-all of morbid workplace doom.

Mondays are for serotonin booster shots and lots of rubber padding. (Because who hasn't texting-walked into a lamppost on their morning commute?) And we have to keep it healthy. No Tijuana Sunrises or binge foods here. We want real joy. The kind that lasts beyond The Tired into motivation.

And this, apparently, is why some brilliant genius poofed up Recitethis. Recitethis is a nifty site allowing you to instantly transmogrify your favorite inspirational quotes into pretty nice looking photocards. (It's like the adorable lovechild of a fortune cookie and Instagram: it has neither its mother's styrofoamy mystery, nor its father's A-lister pride.) I just used it to make this:

What's great about this is that it's an easy but creative way to utilize the chasse-enchufla-free spin step stuffed under the risers of all 12 Step support groups called "the slogans." And you don't have to be a 12 Step program member to appreciate the handiness of ever-present, self-selected reminders of who you want to be, all abridged down to convenient commercial-break size. (They're like your soul's ToDo list.)

And though these can be scrawled on bits of scrap paper and lint-covered Post-its, and scattered across used car front seats and bathroom mirrors, it is kinda important to make these tidy. Here's why:

Our recent post on sacred places elaborates. Basically, beauty is square. It is mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually effecting. This doesn't mean everything needs to look like a Strawberry Shortcake T-shirt. We should just all be getting our daily dose of verbal and visual inspiration.

So what healthier way to tap out the rest of your Bracamoday's wee brain-cell power than with a couple of hours dreaming up endless permutations of this classic:

I'm sure your boss won't mind.

On how to be a giant.

You know how, in Gulliver's Travels, the Lilliputians greet Gulliver by tying him down to the sandy beach with dozens of threads that crisscross his body and twine off little tufts of his hair? And then they crawl all over him, raid his pockets and jab tiny spears into his nose? Small people are always like that.

Yes we're all small. We all have weaknesses. We're all broken. But some of us can't admit it. Instead we get hard, like little rocks, trying to prove how big, strong, and unbreakable we are. And then weirdly our puffy, overblown bigness warps into a quashing gravity field that actually contracts us down into a more compact smallness.

Our need to be more makes us seem less. 

And this is the sad little truth about pushy, controlling, self-centered, abusive people. 

Just think of the people who've hurt you. And not exclusively those who beat you with a chair leg, used you for sex or told you what a worthless little (expletive-of-the-day) you were (everyday for seventeen years). What about those who smile when your heart breaks, sideline you so they can star and boast they're the "best" and "most" yet say not a word when you succeed. 

They're small. And you can see it. 

Despite that they seem enormous, panoramic in full, HD sinkhole-of-a-nose-pore obscenity, that's only because they're pushing themselves right up into your face. If you can get distance, the mental distance that Windexes your mind's eye, you can see them for what they really are.

They're little people who never grew up, never got big, and can't. So they try to make you feel small. 

And the trick to getting them out of your face? Be like Gulliver. Stand up.