De-Pathologizing the Human Experience

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There’s been an article floating around Facebook lately, that I’ve found myself afraid to link to it, even though reading it was one of the most gratifying things I’ve done for myself lately. I’ve been gathering courage and other necessary emotions, so here it is:

What a Shaman Sees in a Mental Hospital

Although some of what is referred to in this article rests on a more serious side of the spectrum of mental illness, something clicked when I read this that I hadn’t really been able to articulate until now.

Yeah, I thought. What if there’s nothing wrong with me and there’s actually more RIGHT with me because of how I feel -- and how much I feel?

As far as “mental illness” goes, I’m not even on the radar. Yes, I’ve dabbled with depression. Yes, I know and have dealt with addiction and mental illness in others, and a lot of even deeper shit of my own that I’m not interested in getting into here. But to the average person looking at my life, I look pretty normal: I am a 32-year-old freelancing woman who is building a life that can be as nomadic or stationary as I wish, battling demons both quietly and out loud here on my blog, and dealing with—I have discovered – many things that many people feel. I know this because very often an invisible audience member will peek up briefly to tell me that what I write applies to them, and that they admire my ability to say it out loud.

Anyone who’s been reading my blog at all has probably noticed some themes. Please don’t hate me for being different; let me try to explain why I do this is one of them. The deeper root of this is an even simpler sentence: please tell me I’m not crazy for being this way.

There’s a lot in my head. But you know what? There’s a lot that’s NOT in my head, invisible audience, and that article pointed it out. I have thought I was crazy because I could not make myself happy with the things that we’re told we’re supposed to be happy with. In our society, there must be something wrong if you have everything anyone could ever want — shelter, food, family, relationships, vacations, even! — and yet you still find yourself restless, nomadic, deeply introspective and unable to rest within the role you’ve been given. But what if — WHAT IF — that lingering depression, the melancholy that comes after spending an evening with people discussing things you don’t care about is your entire being telling you not that you’re crazy, but that your real responsibility in this lifetime lay elsewhere? What if those niggling feelings of doubt and fear and restlessness were your psyche trying to tell you that there was something more for you out there, outside of the existence of “having it all,” when "all" is a predefined notion set by someone else, with no regard for the yearnings you have in the middle of the night, when everything is quiet and you're exhausted beyond all belief and surrounded by all you've created, but you can't help but dream of something different?

This is where I have arrived, invisible audience. I am done arguing. I am done explaining. And I am done trying to justify my actions in a way that makes them sound not crazy. Because there is no fighting the cloud that makes me feel crazy. It is a non-entity just as invisible and strong as gravity, and the trick is not to fight it, but go dive into the ocean, where the rules around gravity are different; where I have always known how to float when others sink.

I have been really angry lately. And that anger is a new feeling. It’s not polite, you see; it will not follow the social norms I have been taught about respecting my elders and not interrupting. It would make me look crazy if I let it erupt out of me, but you know what? As far as that spectrum goes, my craziness is already established. I burned some shit in a pile in my yard the other day just for the hell of it. I’ve been standing naked in the rain a lot. I have shut the door to my bedroom for more privacy in a house I live in alone. I’ve been singing loudly and badly on purpose on walks, and I have given up on trying to explain my reasons for anything. Because sometimes I don’t have reasons, invisible audience. Sometimes I am simply sad, followed by being simply angry, followed by being simply and profoundly grateful that underneath all this gunk, I have found that feeling ME is not as crazy as I was led to believe. 

So instead of scrambling around trying to rid myself of the half of the feelings on the spectrum that I learned were signs of a problem, I’ve decided to acknowledge that they are signs from myself that something needs to change: something is not working, and something else can take its place. When I’m tired, I take a nap. When I’m angry, I snap at people. When I’m happy, I whistle, sing and dance in my yard. And when it’s all over, I am me, all of me: all a human is supposed to be. 

Love and wholly human kisses

Morgan

Sandbagging: Planning for the Worst & Missing the Best

When I was working at a sales job in Bellevue, my manager asked me if I had any floss.

“Why did you ask me?”

“You seem like the kind of person who’s prepared for anything.”

I pulled a travel-sized floss out of my purse and handed it over.

In college, one of my friends gave me what she called a “shack it brush,” a toothbrush I could carry in my purse in case I ended up “shacking up” with someone. She didn’t need to, though: I already carried a travel toothbrush with me, not for shacking up, but simply in case I ate or drank something and felt a need to brush my teeth afterward.

Here in Boquete, where I am usually without a car and dependent on taxis, rides and buses to get me to and from home, I carry snacks with me to ensure that if I get hungry I have a choice of something healthy to eat.

Maybe floss, travel toothbrushes and a bag of almonds are all a good idea in the long run, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg as far as my preparation is concerned. I recently started to realize how often I do this with everything: how often I am anticipating the worst and spending all my mental energy trying to plan for that eventuality instead of letting myself live in the moment.

I call it sandbagging because sandbags are heavy. They take energy to move around and set up. They require thought and planning to put into place, and they are supposed to help keep out the floods, the natural disasters and inclement weather.

They also only work if they’re placed at the right place at the right time.

It’s definitely ok to have a contingency plan; an escape plan or an understanding that things may go wrong. However, I have found that I’ve been sandbagging so many parts of my life – planning for so many disasters – that I am so caught up in future could-possibly-kill-me-moments that I forget to look up and see that there’s no flood, actually, just sunshine and chirping birds. I call it sandbagging because of the energy it takes, and yet it’s ridiculous to spend all my precious energy planning for a future that may not come; to take all my valuable resources and put them toward protecting myself from an unlikely torrential downpour.

When I sandbag, I don’t just pick the most likely place where the water will come through. I sandbag the whole fucking house, because if I’m already expending the effort, I may as well work a little harder and make sure the whole structure is a fortress. Oops, I forgot to leave an entrance for supplies, and for me to get in and out. Oh well. For now it’s safe in here. I’ll just hunker down and wait for the flood that will never come.

I spend a lot of time and effort anticipating an attack of one kind or another, so I prepare myself for the worst. I expect people to want all my time and attention, so I automatically limit how much of myself I give to ensure they can’t take it all, regardless of who they are or whether they’ve shown themselves to be psychic vampires. I expect I will eventually run out of money instead of trusting in my own ability to make it (despite years of proof otherwise) so I hoard what I can while I can and beat myself up when I can’t. I expect one day the bottom will fall out of the work I have done, so I live in constant fear that it will be taken away. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, invisible audience, and it means that every good moment looks like it has a shadow.

There are going to be terrible moments. There are going to be unexpected tragedies; unexpected expenses; unexpected emotional turmoil. However, what if instead of sandbagging, I simply let myself remember that I have the resources and the capabilities to handle any problems that come my way, and instead of spending all my time building defenses, I simply let myself enjoy the good that came my way?

Well, my life would be much better, wouldn’t it? I’d be less stressed out. I’d have a lot more mental energy; I’d be a lot less wary. If, instead of hiding behind my sandbagged defenses, I stepped out into the world, what would I find? Probably a lot more wonder; a lot more love and a lot more space.

They talk about how worry doesn’t actually help anything. Anticipation of potential problems and outcomes is helpful in planning, but actually worrying about something makes not one damn bit of difference to its outcome. It’s easier said than done, but I want to let go of the worry: the parts that make me feel like there’s nothing I can do but spin the worst scenario out in my head over and over again; that imagining how it won’t work is somehow useful.

More than anything, I want to be able to put down the idea that I failed if I was unable to see the outcome of a situation before it happened. I want to be able to not just forgive myself for not seeing a potential failure, but dismissing the idea that that was ever my job. If I had known that ultimately I would end up with a bunch of cookbooks in a storage unit that hadn’t sold, would I have done anything differently? Damn straight I would have, but I had no way of knowing that the books that had been selling so well would stop selling. I had no way of knowing I would run out of steam; that other things would take precedence in my list of priorities; that one day I would realize that I had to choose between my own happiness and future and those damn books.

I couldn’t have known. I have no reason to keep beating myself up for not knowing that. I have no reason to beat myself up for not knowing relationships were going to end before they started; for not knowing that the longer I stayed away from the States the less I would want to go back; for not knowing a year ago that one year away would really only be enough to scratch the surface of the new path my life is taking.

The sandbagging hasn’t worked. Not only did I build dykes in the wrong places, I beat myself up for not realizing where the weaknesses were, without knowing what they would be. I have beat myself up for not knowing what I didn’t know, instead of having the experience, learning from it, accepting what I’d learned and moving forward with that new knowledge. I tend to beat myself up a lot, invisible audience, but now is the time to stop.

I can’t know what I don’t know, and spending my whole life trying to anticipate every last possible outcome not only takes the fun out of it, but it also negates all the lessons I need to learn along the way. Now that I know, I treat my business interactions a lot differently. I divide the money I make into different categories: living expenses, savings, paying off debts, and business expenses. I never would have learned to do that if I hadn’t done it differently when I was selling my cookbooks. I never would have learned what doing what I loved felt like if I’d never done what I hated for money instead. I never would have known what happiness was without experiencing real sadness.

When I sandbagged, I not only wasn’t letting in the flood, I was also holding back the sunshine. It's time to step out of the fortress and know that there's a lot more to anticipate than just a flood.

Love and sandbag free kisses

Morgan

Time: All We Have; All It Takes

 

Hello invisible audience,

I’ve been meaning to write, but the things I want to write about are all the same, and I don’t want to be accused (even by myself) of beating a dead horse. Nevertheless, you are invisible and I have been pondering quite a bit lately, and I find that there are a couple things that I need to get off my chest – again.

One: time. That precious little gem that is really all we have. The one thing that we bargain for, that we trade money for; that we use to buy possessions. How many hours of work is my car worth? How much of a day am I working to pay for my phone bill? How much of my precious commodity am I trading in now in the hopes that the money I make will support my leisure time in the future?

That leads me to pondering number two: why do I worry so much about what others think about how I spend my time, or where? Even more important, why do I think others are even interested in how I spend my time? Yesterday I told my mom that I felt pressure to conform: pressure to want the things so many people seem to want, or already have: stability, 9-5 jobs, company-paid health insurance, houses, kids. “But, you don’t want that,” she said, looking at me with a puzzled frown.

It’s true! I don’t! So why the heck am I constantly berating myself for not wanting these things? It is related to another one of Mom’s statements. “I hope someday you find somewhere that you really like and want to settle down and stay there.” I wanted to hang my head in shame, not because she said it, but because I constantly catch myself thinking the same thing. Yes, that would be great. It would be great if I wanted to stay in one place. It would be great if I wanted a life that was readily accessible to me without any sort of social clash. If I could convince myself despite what my soul is shouting at me, what I am yearning for, that my happiness is found in a house with a yard and a job with x amount of weeks of vacation a year and a benefits package, I WOULD HAVE IT ALREADY. I can’t. Each time I get settled into that groove, I feel more unstable than when I have no idea where I’m going next. I feel hemmed in, fenced in, terrified and depressed. I feel less alive.

I’ve been reading a book that makes me feel guilty about this. You can change, it tells me. Any time that you say you can’t do something, you’re subscribing to your own limited behavior. Except I’m not. I’m trying to buck a deep trend, and move on. I’m trying to let go of a lifetime’s worth of shoulds and have to’s and live authentically, just for me. And God damn it, it’s harder than it looks.

In the soul searching I did this summer, I realized first that I had been listening to a lot of what I thought other people wanted or expected of me. Not even what they said out loud, but what I thought they wanted me to be. This was a big step, but the bigger and scarier one was when I realized that I had been welcoming these impressions, because I could use them as excuses. I kept trying to fit myself in the box because it was easier to complain about how I felt different from inside of it. I have tried to live a life of responsibility and fun based on other peoples’ definitions because it was easier than having to admit that I found nothing they did fun or rewarding. And that leads me to horse-beaten point number three: I got myself here.

And just like I got myself here, I am the one that can get myself out. Over-stated point four: I have to choose to be authentically me, not just once, but over and over (and over and over) again. No one can do this for me. No one else is going to come to my rescue and tell others what I want and need. The only way to meet like-minded people is to continue living and know that my lifestyle will lead me to them. They’re not in the box, so why do I keep looking for them there?  Not only that, but why am I focusing on people in the box when I have so many more friends that are bucking the trend in their own way?

There’s really only one answer: time. I am going over the same things in my head and revisiting the same mental real estate because these realizations are still new and they haven’t quite sunk in yet. I am still in the phase where I am unsure about what I’m saying, no matter how good it feels. At one time I didn’t know anything about writing a recipe; now I could teach a class about it if I wanted to. In between then and now, however, time passed, I learned some things, and I gained the necessary experience to feel confident that I know what I’m talking about. I’ll get there with these poor dead-horse points, too, invisible audience. All it takes is time.

Love and time-filled kisses,

Morgan

P.S. No horses -- dead or alive -- were beaten in the writing of this post.

A Dangerous Four-Letter Word: Fear

Last week I did something I have been meaning to do for quite awhile. It’s nothing major, and probably not life-changing, but for some reason it was something I could never bring myself to get around to doing: I created a food blog. It’s called Savoring Life, and it’s related to my book Savoring Chelan and the book I’m currently compiling, Savoring Leavenworth (I’m savoring things, get it?)
For anyone who has never set up a blog, there really isn’t much to it: you find a blog host (Blogger, WordPress, etc.), fiddle around with the design until it looks how you want it to, and write something on it. Seems easy, right? For a writer like me, who writes a lot and already has a weekly blog, it really shouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but it was.
Part of the reason that I dragged my feet on this is because it’s a commitment. If you’re going to have a blog and get any sort of regular audience, you have to post on a regular basis. Not only that, but you have to be able to blog about interesting things to keep your audience. (This is where I would like to give a shout out to my friend Molly Steere, who just celebrated her blog’s first birthday and just passed 10,000 hits – way to go Molly!)
The truth is, there’s something about committing to do something regularly that has made me want to drag my feet. What is that something? It’s fear, plain and simple.
It’s such a small word, fear. It doesn’t leap off the page at most people, and it rarely incites the kind of response that other words do: massacre, genocide, food poisoning, Rapture. Fear isn’t even a normal four-letter word that you should teach your kids never to use. Some words, though, are sneaky like that. You think about the word fear and it doesn’t motivate or scare you the way “plague” or “empty cookie jar” might, but it is still an incredibly dangerous word.
How many things have I failed to do because of fear? Countless things. There’s no way to keep track of how many times I didn’t do something without even being able to admit that fear was the reason I didn’t do it. I like to think I’m not the only one that rationalizes my way out of facing my fears. Mountain biking? I could break a leg, or fly over my handlebars. Going to Mexico? There are drug cartels there. Talking to that cute guy at the bar? He probably has a girlfriend already. Asking for help? It’s easier just to do it myself than to be shut down.
The worst part about fear is not what you actually fear, however. It’s the totally unstudied and illogical idea you have of what will happen if your fears come true. What’s the worst possible thing that could happen to me regarding my food blog? That someone finds it highly offensive – “Fried plantains? You HARLOT!” – and tells everyone to shun me forever. See? When you admit your worst fears out in the open, they seem silly and illogical. The trick, then, is to admit what your worst fears are, maybe just to yourself to start with, then deciding that the realization of that fear is not worth hanging back for.
I was scared to start a food blog because of what it could mean: yet another thing I would be required to write on a regular basis. But wait a minute, I’m a writer…what I WANT in life is something more to write about, something I care a lot about and want to share with others. What do I care about, think about and do nearly every day? I care about, think about, and write about food. Why shouldn’t I share that with you, invisible audience? If I leave out the fear factor, there’s no good reason left.

Love and fearless kisses
Morgan