Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Assumptions

Last Thursday night, when I was in bed and ready to fall asleep, I had a thought that had me sitting bolt upright. I knew that I needed to write it down, because that helps me remember things, and this was a thing I did not want to lose to falling asleep. My actions disturbed my husband, and he asked me what was going on. Since I didn't want to stay up late talking about it, I just told him that I needed to write something down.

Over the years, I've tried to live by the four agreements, because when I do that I find myself being happier. I've eliminated many of my anxiety monsters with the four agreements. But my monsters are clever; they know that if I fully live the four agreements, then I will have no room for them and they will die. And that's why they try to create limitations and exceptions in how I view the agreements.

Don't Make Assumptions. That's an easy one, right? I took it as an admonition not to judge a book by its cover, so to speak. Not to assume things about other people based on appearance. That's definitely a part of it - but not the whole of it. There's more to it, and one part of that more is what jolted me out of my drift into sleep.

I have a habit of constantly thinking about how other people will react to things that I say or do. I restrict myself or, rarely, put myself out there, based on my **assumptions** about what other people might think about me, or what they might do in reaction to me. But my monsters kept me from thinking about that as being covered under Don't Make Assumptions.

I felt as if a great burden had been lifted when I had this revelation. I felt happier. Because I was giving myself permission to let that go. Not to try to conform myself to the expectations that I think others have of me, not to try and make those guesses about what other people think... That doesn't mean not thinking about whether what I say or do could be hurtful - I still need to Be Impeccable with my Word, after all. It just means cutting out the anxiety producing activity of assuming what other people will do and basing my actions on how they will judge me.

I told Ambrose about it later the next day. I didn't want to wake myself and him up right then, but it felt important to share, even though I immediately started post-judging my revelation as something that's surely obvious to everyone else. But that doesn't matter - I'm not going to assume anything about other people; I'm just going to write.

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Headache Resurge

I'd managed to go quite a while without getting a bad headache. That streak ended over the weekend.

I've come up with a new theory on them. I know that my jaw has been ground down a bit from tooth grinding - enough that even I could see it on the x-ray. And I've heard that some people get weather aches in bones that were previously broken. Therefore, if I get a headache when the rains come, and that headache radiates out from that very jawbone...

Unfortunately, that hypothesis would mean there's not a whole lot that I can do to alleviate things, at least not that I have found. Maybe if I could flee to a hyperbaric chamber? I feel like I've tried so many things to treat the headaches, with mixed success at best.

When I have the headache, there's not much room for anything else. Just the throbbing, aching pain, radiating out from the jaw or the neck, sometimes the sinus, but almost always the left side. I keep trying things to get rid of the pain, but the best I can usually get is some level of ability to ignore it. Just enough distraction to keep me from screaming into a pillow.

On the other hand, I did manage to go quite a while without a headache. AND there were other rainstorms in that time period, so maybe the whole weather ache theory is bunk after all. So I should look at what I was doing in that time period, what I might have done that kept the headaches away for months at a time, and maybe what I did to bring them back.

It could have been stress, but I should have been getting more headaches during the whole pandemic crisis, right? The only other factor that might be at play is my menstrual cycle. I wonder if I could find a correlation between headaches and a coincidence of being on my period and having a storm front pass through?

I guess I'll have to start tracking the weather...

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Weekend Unplugged and Lightly Scheduled

Over the Memorial Day weekend, my husband and I usually do a car camping trip, but this year we did a backpacking trip. Since we knew we wouldn't be able to get far into the Wilderness at this time of the season, the idea was to hike a short distance out and, essentially, do a car camping like trip except that we're backpacking in.

I've been keeping up with 4 runs a week for several weeks now, and I didn't want to lose that streak for a backpacking trip. So I organized myself around that goal. I did my fourth run of the week on Friday instead of waiting for Saturday, since we were travelling on Saturday. And I decided to do trail runs while backpacking, which meant packing extra clothing and shoes and preparing, mentally, for a tough and limited run.

To get a good start on the week's runs, I planned to run Sunday and Monday. Those were the only things that I really had scheduled for that weekend. I've been recording all my runs on the Map My Run app through my phone, but I did not want to bother with my phone out in the wilderness. I don't have a very protective case, and if I break it I will need to buy a new one. So I left the phone in the car and made some guesses after the fact on my run distance (I did time both runs with my watch).

I know I could have brought my phone and recorded my runs that way if I really wanted to. I could probably have managed not to break it. But it was good for me to be unplugged. No games, no apps, no phone to pull my attention away from the awesome natural surroundings. I did bring my kindle this time. Even though it is electronic equipment, on a trip like this when I'd have a lot of time to read, it was much more efficient to bring the many books in my kindle than one or two paper books that I would have ripped through in a day or two.

Since the stay at home orders, I've been seeking refuge in structure. I needed to hold onto a schedule of my own in order to keep going. But it's hard to keep that up. As the end of May approached, I needed a change. Backpacking has its own structures (for me anyway), but they're different than the ones at home. Being outside and unplugged for a weekend was an important refresher for my brain. I'm looking forward to more backpacking this summer, even as the trips get more structured. But I'm rather dreading the fall, when we may be facing more waves of virus, more stay at home orders and I won't be able to get outside - but I can still unplug and look for other ways to destress.

Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Writing Refocus

I have not been writing fiction during this pandemic. I've been thinking about writing fiction. And thinking up stories. But I haven't been writing. I can't seem to get my mind into fiction writing mode. Or I'm not trying hard enough to do that.

I am writing, after all, I'm keeping up with my blogs, but I want to refocus on writing fiction, and I've found a really good way to do that. I took advantage of WMG Publishing's pandemic discount and signed up for a writing workshop that starts next week. I've done one of them before, and I believe it really helped me improve my writing. Regular price is $300, so I had to figure out how to budget for that before I could do it. But half off? Done.

The first workshop I took was called Depth, and it helped me see a dimension of writing that I had not been consistent in, not having full awareness of it. The one I'm taking next is called Endings, because if there's one thing I struggle with most in writing short stories, it's ending them. I often feel like I don't know if I've reached the end or not.

Doing the workshop will help me get excited about writing and force me to actually do some with the assignments. I'll have some real deadlines to get my butt in the chair, so to speak, and I'm looking forward to that.

Writing might turn out to be an important income stream some time in the future; if I can build on what I already have published, then I have more work out there that has the potential to bring in my money. What I should be doing in this time that I'm not writing is getting organized. A proper inventory would be a good start...