Back on the Couch
Mood:  lyrical
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I had my first session with my new therapist this afternoon. It was interesting. I didn't cry. I always cry. Whenever I'm in a safe space and doing real work, I cry. So maybe I wasn't doing real work yet, or maybe it wasn't safe space yet. Or, maybe, I'm really in a better place than I have been before and things aren't as desperate as they seemed eleven days ago.

She's not convinced I'm bipolar, which is good, because I'm not convinced either. The funny thing is she suggested that the things I do that look like manic episodes may be obsessive compulsive disorder instead! Hans hasn't heard that one yet, but he's going to die laughing. I am the farthest thing from OCD and he is the OCD King. His roommates in college used to move things around the room and have friends over to time how long it took him to put everything back the way it belonged, all while he was talking to them and completely unaware of what he was doing. The all-or-nothing part of OCD sort of makes sense to me, but there is not an environmental component for me at all. I think because I went in with lists of issues categorized by whether they were a long-term or critical concern, potential action steps, goals for the next 12 months, and questions I would like her to help me explore I looked more OCD than I really am. What she hasn't seen yet is that my brain and my environment are both slightly controlled chaos and if I don't write things down, nothing makes sense.

It was an interesting shift in perspective, however, and she said some things that made sense.

As I left I remembered why I can only take so much therapy before I have to leave. It tries to reduce so much to brain chemistry, and squeezes out personality and choice. My choice to ride a bike from Seattle to Washington D.C. could be seen as either a manic episode or a fit of OCD. How romantic!

Tactical Error
Mood:  happy
Topic: Marathon
I let myself sleep too late this morning before getting out to do my ten mile workout. I don't sleep well on the night before the long runs, probably worrying about not hearing the alarm or not getting up. And even though the alarm was set for, and went off at, 5:00 a.m., I didn't get up until 7:00. With dressing, pills, inhalers, breakfast, walking Kaija and feeding her, I wasn't out the door until 8:00 and by then it was humid, the sun was out full blast, and it was already too late. The heat index was 93 degrees.

I walked the first half mile to warm up, then started my watch. I managed the first mile in 13.5 minutes, which made me very happy because I was shooting for 14, by running four minutes and walking one. Unfortunately, I couldn't sustain this, or couldn't bring myself to work that hard. I eventually settled down into a run one minute, walk one minute rhythm which was manageable for the first two hours. After that, somewhere in mile 8, I decided it was too hot and I allowed myself to walk the last two miles completely. It's days like this when a coach would be good. A coach would have urged me to keep running and would also have been there if I got into trouble. I'm probably too easy on myself and would have achieved more mental benefit, and physical maybe too, if I'd forced myself to keep up the running.

By the time I'd finished 10.5 miles, though, I was every bit as wasted as I'd felt last week after twenty. I drank both water and Gatorade twice as fast this week as last, couldn't bring myself to actually eat anything once I'd started, and began getting chills after only three miles. I shivered throughout the workout, but I continued to sweat, so I decided that was probably okay.

I'm running out of time, and there is a real possibility that I will need to be bussed over the bridge for being slow and may be the last person to cross the finish line. These thoughts went through my head while I was out there today and they definitely weren't helpful. I tried to counter them each time they came up by reminding myself that I will finish--I always finish, workouts and races--and that as long as I'm still training and as long as I get to the starting line, I've already accomplished something. This for me is about the process and not the outcome, and I'm still in the process, so all's well. I even managed to smile a few times today and I am walking better after this week's workout than I did last week, so maybe I'll have the energy to get some work done around the house.

War of the Worlds--Warning: Sappy
Mood:  happy
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I've been having a really lovely extended conversation with Tad. We actually talked on Monday, and we've been emailing ever since. And Tad's emails are unlike anyone else's! Just like his conversation, they include references to Rilke and Jesus and Krishna and Buddha and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. In other words, they're intimidating! But they are also inspiring and reassuring and full of love. I never quite feel like I'm giving back to him the kind of wisdom he's sharing with me, so all I can assume is that he gets something out of knowing that I, too, am a seeker and that we're artists and on similar paths, even if his path includes more formal spiritual study and mine includes more psychotherapy.

The Class of 1985 had its twenty year reunion last weekend, and that's been freaking me out a little bit. My twenty year will be happening next summer and on the yardstick by which I judged success in high school, I'm not sure I even register! I've had a series of amazing adventures and learned a lot of things I wanted to learn and some things I didn't even know I needed to learn and I've always been able to surround myself with great people and I take risks regularly and I'm really pretty cool (in a quirky, weird, yeah, I'm-still-a-geek-but-not-making-any-money-off-of-it kind of way). But those are not the kinds of things you can easily put on a business card--although I did try when I was living in Seattle.... So there has been a renewed push by me to make my life look like I wanted it to look, or still want it to look, depending on where I am on any given day. The push to lose weight, figure out my marriage and either make it the partnership of my dreams or learn to be thirty-something and on my own again, to be a writer who writes and is published and paid, to start my own business, to find some way to make a recognizable, valuable, and substantial Contribution (yes, capital C, Contribution). And I know that much of this is ego driven and comes from a need to please my parents and other adults who encouraged me when I was growing up. And much of it comes from insecurity--I need to be able to hold these things out in front of me to justify my existence, to feel worthy, to feel "successful." And, because these things are worldly things, maybe they aren't as important as spiritual things.

Tad, I think, has been trying to help me realize--forever--that my spiritual growth is more important than my material worth. He wants me to find my true work and engage in it because it is what I love and what I'm here to do. I want this, too, of course, but a lot of times I feel paralyzed. I think I know what the true work is, but fear overpowers the love I feel for it. The material, ego driven comparisons I make between myself and others make me doubt my ability, the truth of my work, its value, my value. And so I do little and accomplish less and expend an enormous amount of energy denying who I really am, really trying to hide myself, trying to convince myself and everyone else that I'm unworthy.

But at the same time there is a part of me that's clinging to the truth and hoping desperately that someone will see me for who I am--luckily, there are a small group of people around me who do see me--and feeling hurt that I can't believe in myself and convince others to do the same.

So I have a foot in the material world and a foot in the spiritual world, and I can't quite make up my mind which it's going to be. (The really scary thing is that I may never make up my mind and never make any progress in either world!) What I'm really hoping to accomplish as a result of this current bout of depression and therapy is self-confidence. I know I'm capable of it. There have been times in my life when I oozed it. But then it's like I misplace it, like I do so many things, and I can't find it again. Or maybe I know where it is but I'm afraid to go claim it as mine. So I want to go claim myself again, get comfortable in my own skin again, stop making and believing in comparisons. I just want to go do the work because it's what I love and why I'm here. This is possible. I've lived there for brief periods in the past. I just have to learn to make living there a habit and let myself fall so in love with my life that I won't lose it again.

Revisions
Mood:  sad
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Okay, so I revised my statement about not cooking for Hans. If he will keep the necessary ingredients on hand, then I will continue to cook and bake for him. I don't think it's my job, though, to go to three stores--or more!--looking for the exact right ingredients, when he goes to those places throughout the month and can just be sure everything is stocked. I got online today and found the Spectrum Organic site and the shortening product is made from a single ingredient that Hans can eat, so we either need to order it online and have it Express Shipped (in the summer months, express shipping is required) or find a retailer who carries it. They have a second product, refined Coconut Oil that can also be used as a butter substitute. But after 11 years of being the one who has to find and adapt every recipe for every recognizable dish Hans eats, and when the list of things I have to avoid using grows every year, I'm really burned out. It would be different if Hans were a child with severe allergies and had to rely on me to do all of this for him. But Hans is old enough and capable of doing these things for himself--it's just such a gigantic hassle he has given up on baking and relies on me to do it for him. His idea of cooking is to open a can of tuna or sardines (with 3 ingredients or less and absolutely without broth), a can of black beans (again, 3 ingredients or less), and pour them over a bowl of crushed up tortilla chips (3 ingredients or less, no spices, no partially hydrogenated, etc.). So, Hans's end of the deal is that he no longer gets to walk into the kitchen, find me cooking or baking something for myself, and guilt me by saying, "I wish I had brownies/chili/fill in the blank," in his sad sack voice to make me feel bad for not taking three times longer to cook from scratch something that he could also eat.

Total Waste of Time
Mood:  don't ask
Topic: Daily Eruptions
Well, I spent an hour and a half driving out of my way and shopping for the ingredients for lemon squares, which, by the way, I made as recently as Hans's birthday without complaint. Kroger didn't carry guar gum, only xanthan gum which Hans is somehow allergic to, so I decided to skip that ingredient and see how the crust held. Then, they didn't carry the Spectrum margarine I've used for Hans for the last five years, but they did carry Willow Run Soybean Oil margarine. I have used this for Hans in the past, and it is made with partially hydrogenated oil--which I know Hans avoids but has nothing Hans is allergic to. The only other non-dairy margarine alternative was a completely hydrogenated product, which would have been great, except it has mono- and di-glycerides which Hans also has reason to believe he is allergic to. So I opted for the partially hydrogenated Willow Run and had made the crust when Hans walked in the door, opened the trash to see the soybean oil margarine wrapper, and refused to eat the lemon squares. He dragged out his list of forbidden ingredients, which at this point is three columns wide and three pages long, and showed me the word "hydrogenated." He insisted it had something to do with fermentation. A quick check of the dictionary and a call to Chad squashed that theory, and the best we can come up with now--aside from the heart disease issue which is not one of Hans's issues--is that it may cause inflammation and should be avoided by asthmatics--I am the asthmatic, not Hans. Still, Hans refused to eat it. So, a total wasted effort that caused an argument. I vowed, as I have before, that I will never cook for him again because if he doesn't refuse to eat it, then he comes back three days after he's eaten it interrogating me on what could have been in it that is making him sick. I hate saying I won't cook for him, because there have been times in the past--before the list exploded to include everything related to gluten when I went on a gluten-free diet in 2002--when I have spent hours laboring over something special, a birthday cake or peach pie, and it has meant a lot to him. Saying I won't cook for him feels like I'm denying him love, but I can't take the stress of it anymore. So maybe at least this means I won't be calling any of my friends at 10:00 at night complaining that Hans is insisting I stay up to make him a batch of chili (while he goes to bed) because he has nothing to eat for lunches for the week and he doesn't have time to cook for himself.

I really was trying to do a good, loving thing. Really.

Intimacy
Mood:  lucky
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I am so lucky that Tad is still my friend after all these years. We hadn't talked since my birthday in February, but after several months of phone tag, he called me Monday night. He said I hadn't sounded at all happy in my last several phone messages and he had to call to make sure his friend wasn't going crazy, and if I were, to make sure that it was at least just the usual flavor of crazy. We were able to talk for several hours. He told me about recent difficulties he had with one of his women friends that sounded an awful lot like other difficulties he's had with other young women. It seems Tad is capable of forming intensely intimate bonds with women, but unfortunately, it sounds as though the intensity eventually sucks all the air out of the relationship. I, on the other hand, am suffering from the exact opposite: intense neglect.

I asked Tad what reasons he had for telling me on my wedding day, "You chose well." He told me (all good reasons), and as he did, I remembered that he had told me before. He also listened, without laughing, to a dream I had had that morning about a former boyfriend. He was able to explain to me why that former relationship was the way it was, which helped me understand why I keep going back to it in my head, and why it's also not a useful model of a long-term relationship. There's a good chance he's explained this to me before, too, and I promise not to forget this time! I blame my memory problems on a highly developed corpus collosum--because I'm always zipping back and forth between the two hemispheres of my brain, I never know where I was when I learned something and so can never find the pathway back to it. You'd think, though, with major emotional insights like these that I'd be able to find a way to hold onto them. And just because Tad remembers EVERYTHING doesn't mean that I get to abuse him by making him repeatedly remind me of what has happened in my life and why this or that event is significant!

One of the reasons Tad thought Hans was a good match for me was because he wrote such amazing wedding vows (and cried while he read them), and, very obviously made me very happy in so doing. (I reminded Tad of the Billy Joel & Christy Brinkley situation: Christy acknowledged that Billy was a musical genius but said she needed more than one song a year to tell her how he felt about her.) So I went looking for the paper copies of the vows we each wrote and unfortunately they weren't where I thought in the Guest Book with all the wedding cards I saved. Which means they're with the wedding planning notebook I kept, and I don't know where exactly that is among all the moving boxes right now. (And I can't watch it on video because the VCR isn't hooked up to the t.v. yet.) I will keep trying to find them, though, because I'm considering asking Hans to write new vows with me now as part of our counseling work (provided we actually make it long enough to start counseling--last night he suggested that due to the crazy hours of his new job he may not be able to join me in sessions until December, and not October as we're currently planning). I read some articles online last night about the "maintenance" phase of marriage - the phase that follows wooing and the honeymoon, the phase you stay in until one of you dies or leaves. I have some strong objections to some of the articles' assumptions, and I'm at least glad that beginning next week I'll have someone to talk to about things like this.

In the meantime, I've decided that it might help me feel loving emotions if I engage in loving actions, so I'm driving to Kroger in Durham--the closest one to the new house--tonight after work to buy rice flour, tapioca flour, and guar gum to make Hans a double batch of gluten-free lemon squares. He really is having a tough time with the new call center, and it would make him very happy to come home to find his favorite dessert waiting. Wish me luck that Kroger has all the ingredients I need!

As If Your Hair Were On Fire
Mood:  on fire
Today's Daily OM message included the following Zen quote: Practice as if your hair were on fire.

Love that!

To read more, visit www.dailyom.com

Good Morning!
Mood:  on fire
Topic: Marathon
With the depression I have decided it's even more important that I get in my daily training sessions, plus I was still sore this morning from Sunday's long run, so I got up at 5:00 and went for my short run. When I headed out, it was beginning to rain, and I started out counting steps to get myself going. I know, it's weird, but it occupies my brain long enough that my body can get into a rhythm. I walked ten minutes at a good warm-up pace, and then ran three minutes out of every five for the remainder. The "runs" started off as shuffles each time until my thigh muscles warmed up and didn't feel jarring pain each time my foot hit the ground. By minute twenty, it was raining harder and I was grinning! By minute thirty, it was a downpour and I was running in asphalt riverbeds and having a blast!! The run portions were easy once I got going and I didn't overheat or want to stop early. The hardest parts were sticking to an even-odd breathing pattern (breathe in for count of 2, breathe out for count of 3--important because of my asthma)--the smiling made me just want to pant along--and keeping my hands cupped in a natural c shape--I kept wanting to flatten them out and catch the rain on my palms! I only passed one person out walking her dog and was passed by another woman jogger during my warm-up. Other than that, I was just passed by cars leaving the subdivision, and I just kept grinning along. It's fun to be the crazy woman running in the rain! I would have kept going except that I do have to get to work sometime today.

What a great start to my day! That was the most fun I've had in ages.

Chillin' for real?
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I have always disliked that Tripod's icon for "chillin'" was a pill. It looks, though, like I've come around to another place in my life where chillin' might really be the equivalent of taking a pill. I've been worried for a couple of weeks that I was hitting another depression as a result of the move and the pressure it's put on my relationship with Hans and my own personal issues. Last Friday I was pretty near hysterical when I called my mother-in-law to ask for her help in dealing with Hans, and it's pretty clear that this is not a sit-under-a-sunlamp or pop-a-St.-John's-Wort level depression. Hans thinks I've sunk pretty far in, but I know for a fact that I've been deeper in than this. The point is that I don't want to let it get any worse, so I called today and made an appointment to meet with a woman next week to get some help. She will have to refer me to someone else if she thinks I need a prescription, but I've never used medication for depression before and I'm hoping I don't have to start now. My first impulse last Friday had been to call my general practitioner for an antidepressant, but then I took a bipolar questionnaire on my health insurance website and that made me think twice. Anyway, research has shown that 30 minutes of exercise every day is as effective as any of the antidepressants on the market; the challenge is setting up a system that will get me to actually do the exercise.

I'm not looking forward to the therapy thing again. It is so hard and so painful, and the irony is that depression by itself makes it hard to get tasks accomplished and a therapy session can shut me down for a whole day. There were times in college when John would have to drive me home after a session because I couldn't drive myself, all I could do was cry until I finally fell asleep from exhaustion. And when I was in Seattle, Carron would always schedule me off on the day I was in therapy because it was like I was swimming in Jello and just couldn't keep up. So. Definitely not looking forward to any of that, and just a tiny bit resentful that I'm going through it alone for the first two months instead of starting couples counseling right away. I'm sure Hans thinks he has my best interests at heart when he says I need help, but I can't help it that hearing that from him makes me think Stepford....

As much as I'm dreading the experience, I also know it will help. It saved my life in college and it helped me transition back into "real" life after the Big Ride. I'm hoping it will help me move forward on some of my bigger goals, now that I have a better handle on what I want to do with my time on the planet this time around.

And I plan on being proactive. When I went into my first counseling session in Seattle, I surprised the counselor by taking in a four-page baseline self-evaluation that I wrote up to orient her to my situation and to help me determine exactly where I was in the depression (the bottom line: I was non-functional). Today I wrote up a list of questions that I would like to explore in the sessions, and made a chart of the issues that need long-term work and those that need immediate attention. I don't want this work to be as much about figuring out what happened in the past to get me here as it is about how do I propel myself forward in the right directions now. I may be in depression again, but that does not mean I'm in the same place I was when I was diagnosed in college. As in all aspects of life, you cycle through some phases over and over, but all the while you are moving in an upward spiral, so even though the phase has the same name, you are in a completely new space. I like this space. I am surrounded by good people and good circumstances, and I know more good is on the way.

Twenty Miles, Baby!
Mood:  chillin'
Topic: Marathon
Despite the month off from training, I finished twenty miles this morning! The last long run I did was only 13 miles, so I added seven today (a no-no), and I seem to be recovering well. No asthma attack and I felt really strong right up until about mile 18, then my thigh muscles started feeling it a little. I only ran 1 minute out of every 3, but I still finished the first thirteen miles 26 minutes faster than I did them in June. I got up at 4:00, ate breakfast and stretched, and then made sure to eat something every three miles, and alternated between water and Gatorade.

The most amazing thing was that I actually had fun! Aside from the 5K finish at the 2002 Danskin Triathlon, I don't remember ever enjoying running. All of my self-talk was positive and encouraging, until somewhere in mile 18 where I said, "This sucks," and "This is killing me." But even then, I turned it around and finished on a high note.

I knew this was a pivotal workout. If I couldn't finish it, there was going to be little chance of me being able to finish the race in October because I'm running out of chances to catch up when I miss training. Plus, the 20 mile mark signifies some kind of barrier in my mind. Once I've done 20, I don't see any reason why I won't finish 26. (I have heard, though, that the last six miles feel completely different than the first twenty.) I need to work on speed now. I need to be able to maintain a 14-minute per mile pace for the first 20 miles in order to avoid being bussed over a portion of the course once one of the bridges opens to traffic. That, more than finishing, is going to be the real challenge.

Overall, I would call today a really successful day!