Writing My Own Permission Slip
Mood:  energetic
Topic: Daily Eruptions
I had my second therapy session this morning, and it felt really good. The woman I'm seeing is very skilled at honing in on the important parts of my ramblings and mirroring back exactly what I need to hear. She told me just a tiny bit about some of her family and friends and it feels like she gets me and this weird, circuitous journey I've been on. She had read the lists I took her last week and came in with the exact right question today, "So how do we get you back?"

I'm not sure the real me ever really left the Big Ride although I have approximated the real me intermittently in the seven years since. I do think the real work I've been struggling with is, how do I bring her home? How do I give myself permission to be her all the time in my real life instead of just bringing her out when I'm on novel adventures where the every day world "rules" don't necessarily apply?

What I've been realizing lately is that it has been convenient for me to be in jobs where my boss didn't exactly see my potential, because I could always complain that I wasn't succeeding because my boss wouldn't give me the opportunity to grow and try new things. It has also been convenient that I helped to set Hans up in our relationship as the rule maker--then it could be Hans's fault that my life didn't look the way I wanted. But now I have a boss who does see me and who has given me all the freedom I could ever want to succeed and to try new things and learn anything and everything, and Hans and I are both sick of him holding the power position, so now it's up to me to go out and make my life what I want it to be. So why am I hesitating? This is what we've set up as our topic of therapy discussion for next week.

I left feeling relieved, energetic, and optimistic today. Basically, she warned me to be careful of the stories I tell myself--something she recommended from Joseph Campbell--because it is too easy to believe them and therefore get trapped by them. (There is what happened and the story we tell of what happened and they are not the same thing.) And we talked about energy dissipation. Essentially she gave me the reality check that Hans has been trying to give me that it may be important for me to engage in all the activities I choose to engage in, but it is not realistic for me to hope to engage in all of them and lead a highly productive life all at the same time. So, if I'm going to train for a marathon and hold a full-time job and work on myself and my marriage, maybe I should cut myself a little slack that the new house is a mess and I haven't been writing.

Through talking to her I realized also how much progress I have made and the small things that are happening every day. And, I need to do a better job of seeing the continuum of my life. I tend to view my life as a series of starts and stops and every time there's some major stop, I freak out and think I'll never start again. I think that's part of my whole perfectionist thing. I keep expecting that I will find some kind of smooth balance where all the things I want will be consistently present in my life and that I will be able to maintain this balance and the schedule needed to support it through all the unexpected things life throws at me. Somehow, I need to get over that and realize that the things that are important to me will stay with me and the stops are just pauses. The therapist told me a really great story about one of her writer friends who is also an experience junky who needs to do something cool and new and exciting every year or two. The writer always expects that she's going to write while she's off having her new experience, but doesn't. And when she comes home, my therapist says the way it appears to her is that it takes the writer 6 months to a year to gather all of her molecules again and put herself back together in her "real" life. I love that image of gathering molecules! You can't be expected to stick to schedules and be wonder woman when your self is scattered across the landscape and you aren't fully inhabiting any one place.

Tad has been warning me for years not to tie my self-esteem too tightly to my ability to follow schedules and meet deadlines and keep to my lists. I thought for a long time that he was criticizing the process of making schedules and lists, but I think he's just been saying that those things might be helpful tools sometimes but not always and that if I'm not careful I will set myself up with unrealistic expectations.

Which is exactly what I'm carrying around: an unrealistic set of expectations, but even knowing they're unrealistic, they're still hard to give up. So hopefully I'm going to get the reality check I've been needing for a very long time and learn to deal with the crazy rhythms of my life in a more healthy way.

5 x 1 mile
Mood:  happy
Topic: Marathon
I got up early this morning and managed to get my workout in before the sun was too high in the sky. Today was a simple 5 times 1 mile workout, and it was fun. I did the first mile following a 1 min. walk, 1 min. run sequence. Mile two was run two minutes, walk one; mile three was run three minutes, walk one; mile four was run four minutes, walk one; and I ran mile five without a walk break. With each minute of running that I added, I took between 30 and 45 seconds off my mile time, which doesn't seem like very much. Turns out I ran mile three at about the same pace I ran mile five, so it obviously pays to take walk breaks. Today's optimal ratio was running four minutes and walking one.

Unfortunately, my time for mile four was still well over 14 minutes per mile, so it looks like I have to get used to the idea that I may need to be bussed over the bridge at mile 20 in the marathon. There is still some time that I think I can shave over the next ten weeks, but it's going to take discipline. Next weekend I increase the mileage to 23. I'm hoping to do 23 in the time it took me to do 20 two weeks ago.

Despite the humidity that was already present at 6:00 a.m., I really enjoyed the workout. I think making a game of it with each mile being a different ratio made it more fun. Mentally, it was easier to run five miles that way than it would have been if I'd just set out to run five miles. And I had no asthma attack, so I'm considering using this same build-up strategy in the actual marathon, peaking at run 4, walk 1 and holding that pattern for as long as I can. (I'm going to experiment with run 5, walk 1 and run 6, walk 1 this week to see if they improve my time enough to warrant using either of those ratios.) I'll try that next weekend and see how well I hold up.

And in other news, I think I have to somehow find the reserves to hold myself to a better eating plan. After two weeks of feeling fairly strong, confident, and optimistic (what Hans has labeled a manic phase), I crashed on Friday night and the slump lasted through most of Saturday. It started with me feeling what I refer to as "free floating guilt" which is just a nagging feeling that I've done something wrong, but I'm not sure what it is. This usually happens if I've had too much caffeine to drink. I've given up drinking caffeine, with the occasional exception of a single 20 oz. bottle, because I've tested this theory enough that I've finally convinced myself of its truth. However, on Thursday and Friday I binged on chocolate covered donuts and then was surprised to find myself responding to the caffeine from the chocolate when I got home Friday night. I'm going to talk to my new therapist about hypnosis, and then either try to schedule a few sessions with her or with the therapist in Carrboro that I met at the Book Festival back in May. Either that or look into a Greensboro meeting of OA, but if I can avoid that, I want to.

Today has been better. I think the run was a great way to start off the day. Then Hans and I went to see The 40-Year-Old Virgin this afternoon, which was a lot of fun, and a good way to relax. I'm a little nervous about my therapy session tomorrow morning because I have less of an idea what to expect, but I'm looking forward to this week. Sudie and I have been getting a ton of work done, and I've got some good momentum with the marathon training, and I'm hoping that this week will just build on all of that.

I Take That Back
Now there's an ad for a "natural" lithium product posted, so I have to take back what I said about there being no drug offerings....

Targeted Ads on This Blog
Mood:  mischievious
There aren't enough emoticons available to me! Where's "amused" or "thoughtful" or "serene"?

When I checked the ads that run atop my blog the other day, there was a nice mix of heart rate monitors and virtual coaching and running sites listed. Today, however, I notice that there is a straight across the board listing of mental health support sites! Thankfully, no direct advertisements from drug companies, but the ads clearly let you know you've crossed into crazy person territory!

Yes, where is that "amused" emoticon?

Savannah Blue's Activity Book is here!
Mood:  celebratory
Topic: Books
We received 4,000 copies of Savannah Blue's Activity Book from the printer on Wednesday. They look fabulous! We sold our first copy, without trying, that very day!

This is the first book project Sudie and I have completed together, and it is very exciting. My first assignment when I started working for Sudie was to find a bilingual editor, and then a translator. That involved a very steep learning curve, since I don't read, write, or speak Spanish, as did trying to figure out how to communicate regularly and inexpensively with an editor who lives and works in the Southern Hemisphere! Oh, and, of course, we can't forget having to untangle all of the details of the ISBN number--apparently, the U.S. has decided to join the rest of the world in using a 13-digit ISBN by 2007, which is a change from the 10-digit we currently use. This sounds fairly straightforward, except that no one in the industry really knows the transition is happening or how to deal with it. (Except maybe Bowker and us, finally.)

I spent most of yesterday creating a map that covers Sudie's whole kitchen table outlining our domestic and international marketing plan, so she could see all the pieces. She asked me when it would all be accomplished! She should know as well as I do that, as long as you have product, marketing is never finished. This is especially true when she wakes up at 3:00 a.m. and starts scribbling notes about needing to break into foreign markets that I find on my desk when I get in in the morning. Right now I'm working with our graphic design geniuses on a new ad campaign, and with our web designer to get an announcement up on Sudie's website. I'll post a link to the new book as soon as it's in place!

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.