Category Archives: triggers

Being available

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This week I am on vacation at a writing workshop. I came to this workshop because I learned this particular writing technique in the past, and it served my writing well. I want to get back in the saddle of doing it regularly. Unfortunately, I think I discovered why this technique is such an issue for me.

The technique is relatively straight-forward, and I’m going to over simplify it here for the sake of explanation. Number your paper from 1-25 first. Then you meditate for at least two minutes. You take a topic, any topic really, but in my case it was churches, and you start listing images that come to you from age 6 to the present day, one image per line. You have 7 minutes to do your listing. My head immediately began to hurt as I started this exercise. I felt a flood of peeps and selves start to tweak out simultaneously. I fought it because I wanted to do the exercise, and the more I fought it the more tired and floaty I became. The room started to take on a haze for me.

“By meditating you are making yourself available to the images. The memories are there, and they will come if you make yourself available to them.” This was one of the takeaways from the exercise.

I’m struck by what she said because it was very similar to what Doc often tells me about being open to the extrinsic memories when odd things happen to me that make no immediate sense.

It looks like the universe is sending me a message, be available to the memories. I’m afraid to know what lies ahead.

Father’s Day, be gone

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Father's Day Cake 2009

I recently wrote about my father, and I find myself thinking of him again on this day. I remember Father’s Day 2008 when I reached out to him, and he was drunk. He had wanted me to reach out to him, but when I did he was unable to be present in the conversation because he was drunk. This experience sent me on a drinking and acting out binge of my own. A few months later, after I entered sobriety, he sent me a chapbook of poetry. I really did not look at that book until a few weeks ago.

His drinking is so painful to me that I can’t have a relationship with him. I wish there was some way to work around it, but there isn’t. I get too messed up in my brain when I can see and hear his sickness.

I want to write more, specifically I want to write about the few good memories that I have of him. Today I want to remember the good of him, the part of him that resonated with me.

But, alas, I cannot. It’s hard enough to write this small blog post, and it has taken me an inordinately long time to do so. I’m foggy, and in and out of being present. And so, Dad, I’m sorry that I cannot do better than this post in your honor today. I hope we cross paths again before one of us leaves this earth. I miss you, and I still love you, even though you have a hard time accepting my love. It is there.

(Photo credit: Jim, the Photographer)

Sometimes you have to break a commitment …

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I take commitments seriously, and do everything in my power not to break them. But, today I found myself breaking a commitment that I wanted to keep. I started running regularly again, and I was scheduled to volunteer at a 5k race today with post-race refreshments.

As I was driving to the race location I came upon a detour that bottle-necked traffic on the highway. I felt my body start to panic and tweak out. For the first time, I understood what was happening. It was Secret. The traffic was scaring her, and because she was scared other peeps were getting scared as well. There was a domino effect at work here that needed intervention.

So I made a quick and decisive move. I immediately got off the highway, and started driving towards a place we like for breakfast. In the past I likely would have just persevered on, and eventually I would have arrived at the race. But I decided that such a move would have exacerbated things, as it has in the past. This was not a situation where I needed to get to a work site, or something just as critical. At that moment in time I needed to get the peeps feeling safe again, and proceeding on to the race likely would have delayed getting everyone feeling safe, in particular, Secret.

Until I’m able to work further with Secret on the whole traffic issue, I need to understand where she is in the process. Right now, if it takes aborting a volunteer situation in order to help her feel safe I will do it. I don’t like to let people down, but I had to make a tough choice in that moment. For the time being, I won’t be volunteering at any race that requires us to travel on the highway in order to get there.

It was a good move. Secret was on the edge for a bit the rest of the morning, but, ironically, running helped her feel better. A lot of this work is just trying to figure out how to work with the peeps or selves. And with that, I am tired, and falling asleep as I write this. Here’s hoping for no more dissociative sleep.