Having a disease like Fibromyalgia is not easy. I would say it is one of the hardest experiences I have ever had to endure. It is frightening, painful, isolating, demeaning - in every way a nightmare. It's made even harder when the ones you love don't understand it.
I want everyone to know that, before I got sick, I was an extremely active person. I used to hike, camp, ride bicycle, walk, do crafts, quilt, sew, scrapbook, cook. As a teenager, I play softball, tried basketball, enjoyed volleyball, mowed the lawn, was in the marching band, and participated in all number of other school activities. I even lifted weights and ran. I would have been on the track team if we'd had one at my school. I was literally hyperactive (although I didn't know I had ADD at the time). As I got sicker and sicker, I sought a cure that would return me to my active self. After awhile, I figured I was just getting old or lazy. Many years and multiple diagnoses later, I finally found out what was going on.
But in the meantime, I isolated myself from friends because I felt bad every time I had to cancel at the last minute. I despised them thinking of me as rude and uninterested in our friendships. I felt like I was the worst best friend in the world. I loved these people, but couldn't seem to make time for them. And I didn't know why.
More than once I thought I was losing my mind and falling apart. Even now that I know what is going on, I feel that way.
My husband was able to stick through me when I was sick with something that could be fixed - a gall bladder removal left me out of it for a few weeks. I was vulnerable and obviously too sick to do much besides sleep and stare at a TV screen.
And then I got my diagnosis. I started medication and it seemed to finally be helpng. And then a few weeks later, I lost my job. And relief became nightmare again.
No insurance means no medication for the woman with the chronic, debilitating disorder. No medicine, no treatment, no doctor's visits, no medical support, no solutions. A sick economy means no jobs for the woman with a chronic illness but a dual college degree and work experience.
And then my husband decided to leave me. And, because I know the set of problems he faces in life, I convinced him to physically stay because I knew he needed to know he had a place whee he was still loved. And I hoped to work things out.
Have I mentioned that high levels of stress negatively effect Fibromyalgia?
And that we had to accept help from a relative to survive?
And, in the middle of that, I decided to do something I'd wanted to do for years. I went back to school.
I accept some work. And then my husband got sick and had to be hospitalized for a week. My hell week. I started a new temp job, my husband was admitted to the hospital, I'd just adopted 2 kittens, and my first week of classes started. To this day, I am not sure how I managed to survive that week.
Somehow, several years later, I am surviving. Someday I hope to be thriving again. If I can.
In the meantime, I endure...
day by day.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Standing still in the center of the storm...
"Imagine your life going by and not having the energy to keep up."
Oh, wow, does this say it wonderfully. And this is totally
what I am immersed in today. Fibromyalgia has stolen my life and some days it
is obvious to me. Other days, I survive on the hope that it will be better,
that I will be stronger, that the pain will be less and my energy level will be
more. And it's a very lonely place to be, because I think most people don't
understand this. I feel left behind. I feel time passing and I am standing still. for the first 25 years of my life, roughly, I epitomized the John Mayer lyric "She's always moving, just like neon." Now I only move because I'm trying to minimize the pain.
If I had the energy to do what I want in my heart to do, I
would be scary to behold. I am not lazy and fat with some made up disease. I
want to move mountains and I'm willing to do the work to do that. But there are
days it takes all my energy to move myself up and down stairs and to the
kitchen to cook anything. This says it beautifully. I can't keep up. And
suddenly it's 10 years later and the person who used to camp and hike and canoe
and sing and quilt and write and run and work is gone. And I don't even
recognize the person in the mirror.
I can't help but think of all the things that I
probably will never do now. All the things that maybe I'll never do again. Standing on top of mountain I have hiked up. Waking up to the smell of a wood smoke fire and the sound of birds chirping above me in the trees. I always slept better camping than any other way. Now it feels like torture to wake up on the ground, assuming I could sleep that way at all. To sit calmly, quietly and still, listening to the natural world around me. Now I have to move every few minutes as the muscle pain catches up to me again. Feeling the strength in your limbs as you walk - the exhilarating feeling of your body move as designed. I can't clearly remember what it feels like to be comfortable anymore.
How does a person not get depressed? How does
anyone find a way back to thriving? All I know is to take it day by day and try
to hold on to hope and to concentrate on the blessings I have and what I can
do. I try to stay positive and find things to laugh at and smile at and take my
mind off the multiple layers of pain that inhabit my life. My passion, my love,
my hopes - they still reside somewhere inside me. I try to hold on to those.
And if somehow, in all of that, I can make someone else smile or lighten
someone else's load - well, then, that gives me a reason to still be here.
Monday, May 27, 2013
The Times They Are a Changin'
I have been finding myself having a lot of conversations lately where I'm uttering the phrase "The rules have all changed in the last few years." These conversations range from socializing and shopping to job hunting and world politics. I am certain I am not that old. Yet from the time of my "youth" until today, the world is a completely different place.
When I was a kid, we didn't have cell phones. Think of it - not being available 24-7! What an amazing idea! What did we do in an emergency? Answer - we fended for ourselves and we did things like walk to the nearest gas station. We walked to someone's house and asked to use the land line. We didn't worry as much about not being able to handle a situation when it came up. We relied on each other more than we do now.
I know every generation says this, but I think it's true. People were friendlier and less rude than they are now. Not everyone, mind you. But if someone wasn't a nice person, they were considered to be "that cranky old hermit-guy" or "that crotchety old lady." More and more these days I see people doing crap like strolling out in front of traffic expecting everyone to stop for them. There is less consideration these days for other people. We seem to have this new awareness of the length and breadth of the world and less and less awareness that this world does not revolve around us. Maybe it's because so much as been "personalized" that so much is less personal in terms of relationships. There is so much pop psychology out there that everyone is psychoanalyzing everyone else and no one is actually building relationships and getting to know people.
We have a new world of people who are at once savvy and entirely naive about the way the world really works. They believe that you should judge someone by what's inside, but at the same time think it's okay to call someone "fat" or "whore" as an insult. They call their best friends "bitches" and use the "f-word" as emphasis in every other sentence. They think seeing a "current" picture on a social media site protects them from old people "masquerading" as young people and that means they are safe. They think texting while driving is safe and see nothing wrong with posting "fml (f my life)" when the tiniest thing goes wrong. They believe in disposable relationships.
Notice, I am not labeling any particular generation in this? That's because I have seen this behavior across generations now. Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials. It's all of us. We have created a world that is freer, more open-minded, more aware that we live on the same planet with millions of others, more aware that people do things differently. And that's great. But we are also less connected, more blind, less self-aware, less communal, less accepting and less willing to work together to accomplish big goals. We are less aware of history and less willing to learn the truth about things. And that is a very, very scary combination. When we are too tired or too stressed or too lazy to learn, we are susceptible to forces that aren't.
I'm not saying that politeness is any better. In the United States, the 1950s saw some of the greatest social repression and that was because everything was lacquered with a thin veneer of politeness and propriety. The 1960s and 1970s saw so much upheaval because people were tired of being repressed. But I sometimes think we went too far in the name of freedom. We pushed so hard for personal freedom that I think we forgot about responsibility.
It is said that history is cyclical. If that is so, we will probably see a push back and lines drawn all over again. I'd like to think that someday we're going to see the balance that is needed, but that probably will not happen in my lifetime. The scary thing to me is that I am not sure just where we are heading - somewhere new or back into what we've already been through because there is no one looking backward or paying any attention to the "elders" because no one thinks they have anything valuable to say any more. In a time of rapid change (what Toeffler calls "The Third Wave"), everyone wants to judge progress on the next new invention. We are not valuing our historians and our elders. After all, in a youth culture, who wants to see anything of value in the old?
This is not to say that age alone brings wisdom. The truth is that neither being old or young makes you more qualified to judge anything. It is simply that knowledge is important, and ignoring knowledge of the past is a dumb thing to do. The arrogance of youth is to believe that "everything is different today than it used to be" and the truth is that this isn't so. People are people, no matter what age you are in. We look back at history, after all, and think that we can judge people from that time. Very often, we can, in basics, but we do have to take into consideration the time period. Motivations often remain the same- all people have passions, dreams, desires, fears, things they are proud of, things they despise. Human relationships have not changed over time.
When I was a kid, we didn't have cell phones. Think of it - not being available 24-7! What an amazing idea! What did we do in an emergency? Answer - we fended for ourselves and we did things like walk to the nearest gas station. We walked to someone's house and asked to use the land line. We didn't worry as much about not being able to handle a situation when it came up. We relied on each other more than we do now.
I know every generation says this, but I think it's true. People were friendlier and less rude than they are now. Not everyone, mind you. But if someone wasn't a nice person, they were considered to be "that cranky old hermit-guy" or "that crotchety old lady." More and more these days I see people doing crap like strolling out in front of traffic expecting everyone to stop for them. There is less consideration these days for other people. We seem to have this new awareness of the length and breadth of the world and less and less awareness that this world does not revolve around us. Maybe it's because so much as been "personalized" that so much is less personal in terms of relationships. There is so much pop psychology out there that everyone is psychoanalyzing everyone else and no one is actually building relationships and getting to know people.
We have a new world of people who are at once savvy and entirely naive about the way the world really works. They believe that you should judge someone by what's inside, but at the same time think it's okay to call someone "fat" or "whore" as an insult. They call their best friends "bitches" and use the "f-word" as emphasis in every other sentence. They think seeing a "current" picture on a social media site protects them from old people "masquerading" as young people and that means they are safe. They think texting while driving is safe and see nothing wrong with posting "fml (f my life)" when the tiniest thing goes wrong. They believe in disposable relationships.
Notice, I am not labeling any particular generation in this? That's because I have seen this behavior across generations now. Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials. It's all of us. We have created a world that is freer, more open-minded, more aware that we live on the same planet with millions of others, more aware that people do things differently. And that's great. But we are also less connected, more blind, less self-aware, less communal, less accepting and less willing to work together to accomplish big goals. We are less aware of history and less willing to learn the truth about things. And that is a very, very scary combination. When we are too tired or too stressed or too lazy to learn, we are susceptible to forces that aren't.
"All it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to stand by and do nothing." paraphrase of Edmund Burke by way of John F. Kennedy.
"Those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." paraphrase of George SantayanaThis is the kind of culture that spawned the rise of the greatest dictators in the world. The greatest deceitful and charismatic propaganda. It leads to people being herded, sheep-like into pens they didn't even know where there until suddenly the gate is shut. And even then, some people don't see it.
I'm not saying that politeness is any better. In the United States, the 1950s saw some of the greatest social repression and that was because everything was lacquered with a thin veneer of politeness and propriety. The 1960s and 1970s saw so much upheaval because people were tired of being repressed. But I sometimes think we went too far in the name of freedom. We pushed so hard for personal freedom that I think we forgot about responsibility.
It is said that history is cyclical. If that is so, we will probably see a push back and lines drawn all over again. I'd like to think that someday we're going to see the balance that is needed, but that probably will not happen in my lifetime. The scary thing to me is that I am not sure just where we are heading - somewhere new or back into what we've already been through because there is no one looking backward or paying any attention to the "elders" because no one thinks they have anything valuable to say any more. In a time of rapid change (what Toeffler calls "The Third Wave"), everyone wants to judge progress on the next new invention. We are not valuing our historians and our elders. After all, in a youth culture, who wants to see anything of value in the old?
This is not to say that age alone brings wisdom. The truth is that neither being old or young makes you more qualified to judge anything. It is simply that knowledge is important, and ignoring knowledge of the past is a dumb thing to do. The arrogance of youth is to believe that "everything is different today than it used to be" and the truth is that this isn't so. People are people, no matter what age you are in. We look back at history, after all, and think that we can judge people from that time. Very often, we can, in basics, but we do have to take into consideration the time period. Motivations often remain the same- all people have passions, dreams, desires, fears, things they are proud of, things they despise. Human relationships have not changed over time.
"The greatest thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been." - Madeleine L'EngleI find myself wondering what people will think of this time period if we survive to look back at it. I don't think it will be looked upon favorably, despite the rapid technological advancements. I keep thinking that this must have been what people felt like in the 1890s and 1910s, during that explosion of technological advancement. But I think this is different. Like many things, however, I believe only time will tell. History is going to have to be the judge of whether or not these changes are for the better or for the worse. God help us all.
Friday, November 30, 2012
THESE are the bad old days...
A wise person recently reminded me that "Permanence is not permanent." Change is what life is about. I need to hear it at that time, too. I've been having a rough time lately.
Since 2010, I've been struggling with one change after another in my life. To be honest, it's been going on since I was 17 years old. I've been struggling ever since my mother was taken out of my life.
When I'm hard on myself, I tell myself that it is ridiculous and unhealthy to be consistently drawn back to a date now 20 years in the past. When I'm strong, I tell myself it was the catalyst for a whole long list of lessons learned. I learned young and well that life is short. And I knew early what it means to sum up a life. What matters is not how much money you earned, what clothes you wore, what address you had. At funerals, no one mentions what kind of car you drove, how many bedrooms your house has, or how much you weighed (in most cases). What people remember was how you LIVED, how you treated others, if you "always had a smile for everyone" or volunteered in your community, and if you helped other people out. My own grandmother's epitaph included a young cousin who stood up at her funeral and talked about how she always had time for a cup of coffee and a chat. My other grandmother raised 9 children, who talked fondly of how many yard sticks she broke disciplining the 5 boys, all of whom towered over her. My mother was remembered to me, more than a year later, as the inspiration that caused her nurse in those last days to set aside time to become a camp nurse (which is where I encountered her). My father, whose obituary read like a laundry list of community accomplishments, left us a poem that summed up his life as something of a religious mystic in accountant's clothing. I have been reared by people who spent their lives focused on other people.
So, now I ask, "Where does that leave me?" I was groomed at an early age to go out and be a productive, active member of a community. At age 37, I find myself without any community. Really.
I am underemployed enough to be counted as unemployed by anyone except a census-taker - which makes me an out-of-work writer/secretary/customer service representative with excess education, in the process of getting more over-educated, who is struggling in a troubled marriage, has no home church, an almost totally unformed direction in life, with several chronic illnesses and the serious possibility of fertility issues. So those glorious poems I wrote in college about being "the mother of mothers and mother of fathers" are now pretty much reduced to b***s**t. I am not only struggling to make ends meet - the ends aren't even within sight of each other anymore.
I feel like Jaye from Wonderfalls. If you haven't seen the show from 2004, you should see it. It never found it's place (I don't think it was ever given a real chance), but it's pretty hilarious and includes Lee Pace, which is always a plus. I'll warn you, though, it's quirky.
Ahem...so, pity party over. This is what I see when I look with dark, dingy, A Scanner Darkly kind of way. But being me, I prefer happy endings.
I imagine that these are my "bad old days" days. That in 20 more years, I will be looking back and remembering what it was like to come through this to where I will be then. Maybe I am feeling like I am running out of time because my parents had short lives (46 and 58). If this is only midway for me, I have almost 40 more years to go!
Right now I have the time I wanted for so long to have to go back to school (which I am doing!) and learn some valuable, practical knowledge (which I'm doing - I am getting a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration to balance out my dual English/Journalism degree). Once I finish the degree, I am free to move anywhere I can find a job with my newly minted Bachelor's Degree! And I have a great deal of experience in many areas, which makes me a more versatile employee. I am free to go where God wants me to go! No home church means, again, I can pick up and go wherever. And my husband and I are working things out in our marriage, so it could end up being stronger than ever. None of my chronic illnesses are life-threatening in and of themselves. They are all manageable with diet and exercise and some medications.
These struggles I've been going through are teaching me compassion and understanding that I don't think I would have had otherwise. Until you go through unemployment, underemployment, struggling with illnesses and childlessness and being dependent upon the State or your relatives, it's hard to imagine just how hard that is on you psychologically. We like to consider welfare recipients as free-loaders in the United States, but it's like adding insult to injury. You already have to ask for help. Then you get insulted for it and told by politicians that you just didn't try hard enough. I feel like I have been given a unique opportunity to understand both the haves and the have-nots. I was a world-traveler by age 16 and had a taste of what upper-middle class was all about. I was given Upper Middle Class sensibilities. However, I was also taught to never turn my nose up at honest, hard work, and I married a man who is a proud self-defined redneck who grew up on farms and in trailers. I grew up somewhere in between. I'm proud to say one grandfather was a Master Carpenter and the other was a machinist. My grandmothers were a nurse and a teacher-turned-stay-at-home-mother. My parents were a teacher and a teacher-turned-librarian. I get to be a State Clerk-turned-something else. I just haven't decided what I'm turning just yet.
I knew a really interesting 80-year-old woman. She's the kind of woman I want to be in 40 years. She traveled to the Middle East to see the Holy Land (at 80 years old) and rode a camel. Now, that's an image I want to shoot for. I want to be 80 and ride a camel in Egypt. And as an homage to my mother, I'd like to play a game of Chess with a Turkish man while I'm there (when she was in England in the 1960s, she surprised a Turkish man because she could play).
When I was graduating college for the first time in the late 1990s, there was a great spoken word song out on the radio called "Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen" by Baz Luhrmann. It's almost 14 years ago now. Being 40 years old seemed so far in the future. I imagined I would find my path in life by then and it wouldn't apply to me. (At that time, 40 seemed soooooooo far in the future.)
The YouTube Video says the lyrics are from a famous essay written in 1997 by Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune. That whole column can be found, here on the Chicago Tribune's Website: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-sunscreen-column,0,4054576.column. It's worth a read.
Like I said, I like happy endings, so I'm going to close this entry with my favorite line from it.
Since 2010, I've been struggling with one change after another in my life. To be honest, it's been going on since I was 17 years old. I've been struggling ever since my mother was taken out of my life.
When I'm hard on myself, I tell myself that it is ridiculous and unhealthy to be consistently drawn back to a date now 20 years in the past. When I'm strong, I tell myself it was the catalyst for a whole long list of lessons learned. I learned young and well that life is short. And I knew early what it means to sum up a life. What matters is not how much money you earned, what clothes you wore, what address you had. At funerals, no one mentions what kind of car you drove, how many bedrooms your house has, or how much you weighed (in most cases). What people remember was how you LIVED, how you treated others, if you "always had a smile for everyone" or volunteered in your community, and if you helped other people out. My own grandmother's epitaph included a young cousin who stood up at her funeral and talked about how she always had time for a cup of coffee and a chat. My other grandmother raised 9 children, who talked fondly of how many yard sticks she broke disciplining the 5 boys, all of whom towered over her. My mother was remembered to me, more than a year later, as the inspiration that caused her nurse in those last days to set aside time to become a camp nurse (which is where I encountered her). My father, whose obituary read like a laundry list of community accomplishments, left us a poem that summed up his life as something of a religious mystic in accountant's clothing. I have been reared by people who spent their lives focused on other people.
So, now I ask, "Where does that leave me?" I was groomed at an early age to go out and be a productive, active member of a community. At age 37, I find myself without any community. Really.
I am underemployed enough to be counted as unemployed by anyone except a census-taker - which makes me an out-of-work writer/secretary/customer service representative with excess education, in the process of getting more over-educated, who is struggling in a troubled marriage, has no home church, an almost totally unformed direction in life, with several chronic illnesses and the serious possibility of fertility issues. So those glorious poems I wrote in college about being "the mother of mothers and mother of fathers" are now pretty much reduced to b***s**t. I am not only struggling to make ends meet - the ends aren't even within sight of each other anymore.
I feel like Jaye from Wonderfalls. If you haven't seen the show from 2004, you should see it. It never found it's place (I don't think it was ever given a real chance), but it's pretty hilarious and includes Lee Pace, which is always a plus. I'll warn you, though, it's quirky.
Ahem...so, pity party over. This is what I see when I look with dark, dingy, A Scanner Darkly kind of way. But being me, I prefer happy endings.
I imagine that these are my "bad old days" days. That in 20 more years, I will be looking back and remembering what it was like to come through this to where I will be then. Maybe I am feeling like I am running out of time because my parents had short lives (46 and 58). If this is only midway for me, I have almost 40 more years to go!
Right now I have the time I wanted for so long to have to go back to school (which I am doing!) and learn some valuable, practical knowledge (which I'm doing - I am getting a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration to balance out my dual English/Journalism degree). Once I finish the degree, I am free to move anywhere I can find a job with my newly minted Bachelor's Degree! And I have a great deal of experience in many areas, which makes me a more versatile employee. I am free to go where God wants me to go! No home church means, again, I can pick up and go wherever. And my husband and I are working things out in our marriage, so it could end up being stronger than ever. None of my chronic illnesses are life-threatening in and of themselves. They are all manageable with diet and exercise and some medications.
These struggles I've been going through are teaching me compassion and understanding that I don't think I would have had otherwise. Until you go through unemployment, underemployment, struggling with illnesses and childlessness and being dependent upon the State or your relatives, it's hard to imagine just how hard that is on you psychologically. We like to consider welfare recipients as free-loaders in the United States, but it's like adding insult to injury. You already have to ask for help. Then you get insulted for it and told by politicians that you just didn't try hard enough. I feel like I have been given a unique opportunity to understand both the haves and the have-nots. I was a world-traveler by age 16 and had a taste of what upper-middle class was all about. I was given Upper Middle Class sensibilities. However, I was also taught to never turn my nose up at honest, hard work, and I married a man who is a proud self-defined redneck who grew up on farms and in trailers. I grew up somewhere in between. I'm proud to say one grandfather was a Master Carpenter and the other was a machinist. My grandmothers were a nurse and a teacher-turned-stay-at-home-mother. My parents were a teacher and a teacher-turned-librarian. I get to be a State Clerk-turned-something else. I just haven't decided what I'm turning just yet.
I knew a really interesting 80-year-old woman. She's the kind of woman I want to be in 40 years. She traveled to the Middle East to see the Holy Land (at 80 years old) and rode a camel. Now, that's an image I want to shoot for. I want to be 80 and ride a camel in Egypt. And as an homage to my mother, I'd like to play a game of Chess with a Turkish man while I'm there (when she was in England in the 1960s, she surprised a Turkish man because she could play).
When I was graduating college for the first time in the late 1990s, there was a great spoken word song out on the radio called "Everybody's Free To Wear Sunscreen" by Baz Luhrmann. It's almost 14 years ago now. Being 40 years old seemed so far in the future. I imagined I would find my path in life by then and it wouldn't apply to me. (At that time, 40 seemed soooooooo far in the future.)
The YouTube Video says the lyrics are from a famous essay written in 1997 by Mary Schmich of the Chicago Tribune. That whole column can be found, here on the Chicago Tribune's Website: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-schmich-sunscreen-column,0,4054576.column. It's worth a read.
Like I said, I like happy endings, so I'm going to close this entry with my favorite line from it.
"Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't."
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Planned Planning
Planning.
Apparently, it's a problem.
For those of us with ADD/ADHD, it can be our nemesis. We have problems getting started planning, completing planning, following through on a plan. In the worst cases, all of these are true. We can feel it is a trap - something that will squash our creative energies (probably due to memories of years of teachers and authority figures telling us to pay attention and just do THIS). The problem is that it can also be incredibly freeing once we've done the planning. It means we don't have to spend any more time than necessary on structuring things we don't want to be doing in the first place. Personally, I like having the boundaries. Otherwise, I get overwhelmed and can't start things or I get incredibly distracted by all the shiny POSSIBILITIES.
I have the almost unique opportunity to learn what it's like on both sides of the ADD aisle, so to speak. I am an ADDer and I am MARRIED to an ADDer. While that may sound wonderful to those of you with ADD who feel no one understands what it's like to have ADD, let me assure you it is most often NOT. Because that forces me to alternately act the role of the NON-ADDer or the ADDer being misunderstood.
Our house is in chaos most of the time - and I am not just talking chores. Our finances. Our social life. Our TV schedules. Our work. Our meals. Even our love life. There is no anchor in the storm. Sure, we can have a lot of fun. But without someone to be the calm influence, we're frequently sniping at each other and wondering whether or not the electric company is going to show up at our door to turn off our service for a bill that got "missed."
I'm constantly struggling to "grow up" and waiting for adulthood to begin. It would be really easy to blame all these things on my husband. Really, really easy. But I'm not going to do that because I know that I am just as much to blame. Neither of us can get a handle on things. And the truth is there is really no one to blame for it. This is how we are both hard-wired. It requires us both to constantly be trying to figure out how to navigate a world not designed for our kind of wiring. I try to keep this in mind when we are arguing because I know that these problems are frustrating and people say things they don't mean when they are frustrated and angry that they are always fighting against the world to live. Still, you can only take personal insults so often and be called controlling so many times (and this goes both ways).
I think I've been blessed to have been exposed to so much since I first got my diagnosis of ADD in college in terms of ways to manage time and impulses. I have learned to make lists and made schedules my friends. Most importantly, I have learned to pick myself up and keep trying when one system or another fell apart (although I am pretty sure I learned that growing up with ADD and not knowing it). Unfortunately, I don't know how to teach this to anyone else, especially my ADD husband. How do you convince someone to sit for 5 minutes and discuss how you plan to move couches up and down stairs? My husband's mentality is: we just move it. Any suggestion about planning moving the items which they will have to be moved around (such as bookshelves) makes him decide I've worked in state government for too long. I guess those management classes are a waste of money, too. Why talk about it beforehand, after all? And then there is the insult that women want to talk everything to death. I'm pretty sure he forgets sometimes that I also have ADD. I just wanted to get the darn things moved without breaking anything, living or nonliving.
So, I guess we'll continue to live in chaos for awhile longer. And my husband has the satisfaction of moving the couches without me. Because I really don't want to break anything living...so I'm going to the library.
Apparently, it's a problem.
For those of us with ADD/ADHD, it can be our nemesis. We have problems getting started planning, completing planning, following through on a plan. In the worst cases, all of these are true. We can feel it is a trap - something that will squash our creative energies (probably due to memories of years of teachers and authority figures telling us to pay attention and just do THIS). The problem is that it can also be incredibly freeing once we've done the planning. It means we don't have to spend any more time than necessary on structuring things we don't want to be doing in the first place. Personally, I like having the boundaries. Otherwise, I get overwhelmed and can't start things or I get incredibly distracted by all the shiny POSSIBILITIES.
I have the almost unique opportunity to learn what it's like on both sides of the ADD aisle, so to speak. I am an ADDer and I am MARRIED to an ADDer. While that may sound wonderful to those of you with ADD who feel no one understands what it's like to have ADD, let me assure you it is most often NOT. Because that forces me to alternately act the role of the NON-ADDer or the ADDer being misunderstood.
Our house is in chaos most of the time - and I am not just talking chores. Our finances. Our social life. Our TV schedules. Our work. Our meals. Even our love life. There is no anchor in the storm. Sure, we can have a lot of fun. But without someone to be the calm influence, we're frequently sniping at each other and wondering whether or not the electric company is going to show up at our door to turn off our service for a bill that got "missed."
I'm constantly struggling to "grow up" and waiting for adulthood to begin. It would be really easy to blame all these things on my husband. Really, really easy. But I'm not going to do that because I know that I am just as much to blame. Neither of us can get a handle on things. And the truth is there is really no one to blame for it. This is how we are both hard-wired. It requires us both to constantly be trying to figure out how to navigate a world not designed for our kind of wiring. I try to keep this in mind when we are arguing because I know that these problems are frustrating and people say things they don't mean when they are frustrated and angry that they are always fighting against the world to live. Still, you can only take personal insults so often and be called controlling so many times (and this goes both ways).
I think I've been blessed to have been exposed to so much since I first got my diagnosis of ADD in college in terms of ways to manage time and impulses. I have learned to make lists and made schedules my friends. Most importantly, I have learned to pick myself up and keep trying when one system or another fell apart (although I am pretty sure I learned that growing up with ADD and not knowing it). Unfortunately, I don't know how to teach this to anyone else, especially my ADD husband. How do you convince someone to sit for 5 minutes and discuss how you plan to move couches up and down stairs? My husband's mentality is: we just move it. Any suggestion about planning moving the items which they will have to be moved around (such as bookshelves) makes him decide I've worked in state government for too long. I guess those management classes are a waste of money, too. Why talk about it beforehand, after all? And then there is the insult that women want to talk everything to death. I'm pretty sure he forgets sometimes that I also have ADD. I just wanted to get the darn things moved without breaking anything, living or nonliving.
So, I guess we'll continue to live in chaos for awhile longer. And my husband has the satisfaction of moving the couches without me. Because I really don't want to break anything living...so I'm going to the library.
Friday, September 14, 2012
Am I really a writer?
In high school, my English teacher had a several quotes upon the walls of his classroom. One of them was a quote by Carl Sandburg that said "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than other people."
On the face of it, that seems to fly in the face of logical observation. After all, writers seek out a career doing this very thing, don't they? And when you talk to non-writers, they say they don't like writing or that they can't write. I have been thinking about this quote since that first 9th grade English class. I wrote it down. I pondered it. One might even say I meditated on it. Then I went on and studied to be a writer. And I still wasn't sure I knew what the quote meant.
Something like 20 years later, I am still pondering it, but I do think I agree with it now. To be a writer means so much more than just writing things down. It means creating. It means birthing new ideas. It means struggling to make the philosophies of your mind make sense to someone who has not spent time considering them.
As I studied Journalism,I remember hearing about two men who just had books published. One was a career writer - a "real" writer, if you will. Someone who did it for a living. The other was a novice who was an expert in some field or another and had just written his first book. They sat down for an interview (for some reason at the same time), and the interviewer asked them about their "process" for writing. The novice smiled and nodded and enthusiastically told the interviewer that he would just feel like writing, sit down at his typewriter and pound out a few pages until he felt like stopping. The career writer shook his head and explained that he wished he could do it that way, but because this was a job for him it went more like this: Every day, no matter what he felt, he would sit down at his word processor and write 1000 words. He did this everyday. And some days the words would come. And some days they wouldn't. But he did it everyday nonetheless. And some days he would feel he almost hated writing. And some days he would love what he was doing. Either way, he would write.
And when I heard that story, I realized that the reason Sandburg was right was because this job takes discipline. It isn't as romantic as it seems. Sometimes it is so hard to be a writer, too, because you have an idea that just won't come out. And when it does, you will always face censure and ridicule from someone - you will never be able to please everyone.
Most writers do not strike it rich with their writing. They are not millionaires. Most writers are lucky to make a decent wage and are not famous.
But we don't do it for the money. Admittedly, there may be a small desire for fame. After all, if you write a book, that is something that can stick around a long time. Look at the author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo books. They weren't even published in English until after his death. There is a certain immortality to being a writer. The prospect that your work (and life) might be studied long after you are gone can be appealing. But it's like being a painter whose work is worth more after your death. Your life isn't what is important to the world.
We get scared to death about whether or not we are "real" writers because this work is not something we've slapped together easily. It takes blood, sweat, and, often, literal tears to get this work out there. And when it's good, they want more IMMEDIATELY (ask any bibliophile to confirm that this is true). The truth is...to be a real writer, you have to feel it. It's hard to explain to the uniniated because it isn't something tangible or easily identifiable. It's like being in love. If you are, you know it. But you aren't sure enough of yourself to immediately admit it. It's like twitchy fingers over a keyboard - knowing you want to write, but not knowing WHAT to write. And then wondering if your choice was correct once you do write something.
So..."if you've asked yourself, am I really a writer?" Then, YES...you are. And YES, I am!
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Talking to Fish
Ready for a rant today...here ya go, then?
In the recent season premiere of the show "Necessary Roughness," therapist Dr. Dani is in her kitchen at 2 in the morning talking to the fish in a blender that her daughter brought home from a visit to her father's house. Dani is baking biscotti and talking to herself, essentially, but it helps her to direct her thoughts to an outside entity. When caught by her daughter and son, she asks,"Which sounds worse, that I was talking myself or to the fish?"
I'm going to confess. I talk to myself. Sometimes it just helps to get the words out there. Sometimes I do it in the car while I'm driving. Sometimes I do it as a prayer to God. Sometimes I have "conversations" with my cats. In the case of my cats, they tend to talk back to me.
Wait! Wait! I am not the crazy cat lady, I swear! I don't mean they SPEAK ENGLISH to me or anything. Actually, they speak Spanish. No...No! I am joking, of course. I just mean they respond. We've taken great care to talk to our cats to encourage them to vocalize back to us when they want something...or when they are caught behind the hamper in the closet and can't get out. Believe me, it comes in handy then.
The point is...language is important. Sometimes, it just helps to hear the words out there. Like trying to remember how to pronounce a word. You say it out loud and go "does that sound RIGHT?" Sometimes words that need to be said need to be practiced before you say them to someone's face...or through the phone. I have no proof of this myself, but I believe that language is an essential human instinct. We desperately need to communicate. Verbal language developed as a means to do that. I imagine the "cave men" making singing noises in praise of their deity at this point in the discussion, because it feels really good to make noise sometimes. Look at Tom Hanks in "Castaway", for instance. Desperate for companionship and communication, he develops "Wilson" out of a volleyball so he has someone to talk to!
I wonder what the internet is going to do to language, actually. I've SEEN what it's done to written language. "LOL OMG wut's u up 2? " *shudders * To be fair, I don't know what people's language skills were like before this, so that may be an improvement. I heard there is talk of discontinuing cursive writing lessons in schools now. I go on record as believing that to be a bad move. I remember being a young child and I couldn't WAIT to learn this secret language of CURSIVE WRITING. (insert Dum Dum Da music here). I scribbled everywhere pretending to write it. I can't imagine taking cursive writing out of the world. They'll have to give special medical school classes to doctors so they can learn to use it to write prescriptions, I guess. How can we ever sign our ineligible signatures without it!?
Hm...I know I started with a point. What was it again?
Oh, yeah, I remember. Talking to Fish...and cats...and inanimate objects...
Just remember, if you don't learn to be comfortable with it now...you'll never be able to be okay talking to apparently thin air when you go travelling back in time and Al comes to you as a hologram... Or when you move into a house and find you're rooming with a ghost that only you can see because you've been turned into a werewolf....
Just sayin'...
In the recent season premiere of the show "Necessary Roughness," therapist Dr. Dani is in her kitchen at 2 in the morning talking to the fish in a blender that her daughter brought home from a visit to her father's house. Dani is baking biscotti and talking to herself, essentially, but it helps her to direct her thoughts to an outside entity. When caught by her daughter and son, she asks,"Which sounds worse, that I was talking myself or to the fish?"
I'm going to confess. I talk to myself. Sometimes it just helps to get the words out there. Sometimes I do it in the car while I'm driving. Sometimes I do it as a prayer to God. Sometimes I have "conversations" with my cats. In the case of my cats, they tend to talk back to me.
Wait! Wait! I am not the crazy cat lady, I swear! I don't mean they SPEAK ENGLISH to me or anything. Actually, they speak Spanish. No...No! I am joking, of course. I just mean they respond. We've taken great care to talk to our cats to encourage them to vocalize back to us when they want something...or when they are caught behind the hamper in the closet and can't get out. Believe me, it comes in handy then.
The point is...language is important. Sometimes, it just helps to hear the words out there. Like trying to remember how to pronounce a word. You say it out loud and go "does that sound RIGHT?" Sometimes words that need to be said need to be practiced before you say them to someone's face...or through the phone. I have no proof of this myself, but I believe that language is an essential human instinct. We desperately need to communicate. Verbal language developed as a means to do that. I imagine the "cave men" making singing noises in praise of their deity at this point in the discussion, because it feels really good to make noise sometimes. Look at Tom Hanks in "Castaway", for instance. Desperate for companionship and communication, he develops "Wilson" out of a volleyball so he has someone to talk to!
I wonder what the internet is going to do to language, actually. I've SEEN what it's done to written language. "LOL OMG wut's u up 2? " *shudders * To be fair, I don't know what people's language skills were like before this, so that may be an improvement. I heard there is talk of discontinuing cursive writing lessons in schools now. I go on record as believing that to be a bad move. I remember being a young child and I couldn't WAIT to learn this secret language of CURSIVE WRITING. (insert Dum Dum Da music here). I scribbled everywhere pretending to write it. I can't imagine taking cursive writing out of the world. They'll have to give special medical school classes to doctors so they can learn to use it to write prescriptions, I guess. How can we ever sign our ineligible signatures without it!?
Hm...I know I started with a point. What was it again?
Oh, yeah, I remember. Talking to Fish...and cats...and inanimate objects...
Just remember, if you don't learn to be comfortable with it now...you'll never be able to be okay talking to apparently thin air when you go travelling back in time and Al comes to you as a hologram... Or when you move into a house and find you're rooming with a ghost that only you can see because you've been turned into a werewolf....
Just sayin'...
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