random navel gazing

I've spent the last few weeks (months) going around in some kind of three dimensional figure-8.  Not quite a spiral, more just up and down winding up in the same places but different. It started out with a low simmer of anxiety over trying to have kids and not being terribly successful with it. We've not quite given up, but have put a lid on things, if I don't manage to get pregnant we're going to pull the plug. It was a bit of a rough ride coming to that decision, and the aftermath has been interesting.

The biggest part about this that I'm having trouble with is figuring out what to do with the rest of my time. At first it was a crush of "this is what I've spent my whole life gearing up for, what do I do now?" But I'm starting to come around on that front. I'm not entirely sure that I'm  being honest about this. Yes, I've been generally heading in that direction but it's possible that this is yet another in a series of excuses about how I'm trying to get ready for some big thing, about to start down a path, but it's really an excuse to not actually *do* anything now.

I felt like I'd lost some central thread, some major project that was going to give meaning to my life and be the thing I did that would be remembered. What was the point of collecting all this information if I wasn't going to pass it on? And then I read Herman Hess's "Siddhartha" after it had been sitting on my Kindle for quite a while. Hess points out that no matter how much you know, even if you've achieved "enlightenment", that knowledge is yours, and it was found by your own experience and you can't really pass that along because the things that lead you to your own understanding are not the things that will lead others to theirs. Mulling this over on the bus yesterday, vacillating between tears because I have no dreams left and admonitions about how this crisis of self is narcissistic wanking, I've circled back around to a few ideas. Yes, it is possible that the never ending journey to find one's essential self is a project born of Berkley trust-fund hippies who have more time than useful work on their hands, that personal empowerment retreats and walking on coals are all one big distraction from the unseemly truth that most people in the world have to actually work for a living, and yes, it's not necessarily fun or fulfilling, but they do it because it needs to get done. there was never some idyllic time when living off the land and being connected to nature was a magical, peaceful time that we need to get back to so we can commune with the spirits. Life has always been hard, nature kills us all the time and there's a huge difference between choosing to grow a victory garden with some chickens and watching your family starve because something went wrong with the crops that year. One is a hobby, albeit a useful one with real economic and ecological impacts, and the other is just another kind of work, great some days, but just that thing you have to do to survive all the rest of the days. whether I'm behind a plough or a keyboard, the net effect of having to spend a portion of my life doing things i don't really want to, but need to anyway is the same.

I have a job, it's not a magical, wish granting job, but it's a good job that I enjoy for the most part, I can do it, I get decent perks and give or take a few dollars, it's as reasonable a position that I'd find anywhere else at this time. I've tried a lot of jobs for many reasons, and no matter how much I loved or hated it, there were days I had fun and days I'd really rather have stayed in bed. After the co-op closed down, I'd pretty much exhausted the list of things I wanted to do without additional schooling, and while I'm in a bit of a holding pattern, I'm not sure that's such a bad place to be. To start, I *have* a job, which is no mean trick these days. I also have no idea what else I'd rather be doing right now. I could come up with another long-term plan, but I'm not unconvinced that wouldn't just be another stalling tactic to avoid making the most of what I have right now in front of me.

The thing I'm afraid of is becoming what i see so much around me, people who go to work to get money to go to the same bars and clubs on the weekends to get drunk and have the same embarrassing adventures, making the same mistakes and lamenting them loudly and publicly year after year. I'm afraid that if I settle into the present, I'll get stuck in a rut and keep doing the same things over and over and years will pass without anything real happening.  I'm starting to realize that perhaps there's a middle ground between "Office Space - Goth Edition" and a grand, unifying life that changes the world. I'm thinking, a job that doesn't suck, and maybe some projects that give me goals and things to do and make me happy.

I can't help but notice that when people have come to me for advice, I give the best I've got and maybe some subtle shift happens but mostly they keep doing things the way they were anyway. We all have to make a living and eat and wash clothes and bathe and get places, the differences between your life and mine are primarily in the subtle shifts. You have a different car, eat different foods, but most of you still go to a store to get it. maybe I'm focusing too much on validating my existence with outside measures, and the point of it all is really to do the things that make me happy and interested, so that I am happy and interested, and whatever effect that does or doesn't have on the outside world is beside the point. I'm not talking about becoming a sociopath, pursuing my happiness at the expense of others', but of not worrying about whether i make an impact on the world, and instead turning to cultivate the things inside me that might be useful for that. And if they're not, at least I was doing something that was meaningful to me.

I'm almost out of polite: the state of my pregnancies or lack thereof.

When people ask  in conversation how things are going in the "baby making department", I try to say something polite like "oh, still practicing" that reflects the way I'm pretty sure you meant it. I'm pretty sure the reason you're asking is that it's been a while since I've seen you and you remember I'd mentioned something about it before and it's a small talk subject you can think of.

Stop it.

The reason it seems like everyone knows I'm trying is because I've been trying for *five years*. That's a lot of time for conversations. I've had *four miscarriages* in those five years. If I see you and I'm not giddy with excitement and don't mention within my first three sentences the exact state of my uterus, it's because either
1. Nothing is happening. Again.
2. I am pregnant, but it's still so early that I'm terrified I'm going to miscarry again and could we please talk about something else because the "oh, hey, nevermind about the baby" conversations are getting kind of awkward.

But it's probably the first one.

The honest answer is that I'm finally starting to realize that I may never have a child. The honest answer is that I spend a vast portion of my energy in a given day not crying, that if I stop for three whole minutes and think about how my life is falling apart, I will begin wet, snotty bawling. I am not exaggerating, any given minute of any day, I am literally less than five minutes away from total meltdown. I don't look like it because I'm really good at putting up a good front, and honestly if you don't know when not to talk to someone about the personal details of their reproductive lives, you're even less likely to know how to deal with me losing my shit.

I talk about other peoples' babies because I work with them all day. I'm happy to talk to you about your baby. I'm happy to talk to you about your future babies, but if I have to excuse myself for a few minutes, do me a favor and just pretend that my eyes aren't more red than when I left and carry on. If I want to talk about it, I'll start the conversation.

If I want to talk about how my entire life I've known that I would have kids, I will. I didn't just wake up one day and think it would be neat to get pregnant.  For the last 15 years, every decision I've made has revolved around making myself a better person so that when I have my passel of offspring, I'm up to the task of raising conscientious, compassionate, creative, rational, reasonable, joyful humans. It's why I was a massage therapist for a decade. It's why I studied what I did in college. The careers that I've started, or haven't, the places I've gone or not, all of the forks in the road I've chosen because they would make me the kind of person I wanted to be for my kids. It's why my entire life is the way it is now.

And that may all be for nothing. It may well be that I've spent the last 15 years training for a mission that will never happen. There are a few steps more I'm willing to take, but not many. Clomid is my endpoint. That's the last thing I will try, and if that doesn't work, I'm done.
No, we're not planning to adopt. I don't have tens of thousands of dollars lying about, I've studied too much of the brain and what happens when to know that I'm not the right fit for adopting a ward of the state and I'm  not going to put myself in a position where I finally get an adoption through, bond with the child and then have some junkie mom find Jesus and decide she wants her kids back. Mine or none, the end.
No, I don't know what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. I have no interest in going into public education or opening a preschool. I work where I do because these are the babies of my tribe and we have similar philosophies on how children should be reared and respected. I work where I do because I'm tired of being a generic button masher and I wanted to do something closer to what I really want.

 I'll figure something out, but I don't want to talk about it right now. I can barely say any of this out loud, with my mouth, when I'm alone. I certainly don't want to chit-chat about it with someone else. Please, for the love of fuck, stop asking.

Beat the Lizard

I find myself driving out of my way to go down familiar roads lately. Something in me needs to reconnect to my past, to feel myself in the world that was part of me outside my current work/home/VA circle. Lately I've been aware that while I've done a lot of head work over the last few years, it's only half of my experience getting attention. When I was constantly stressed from living in survival mode, I felt like i was living more in my body than I do now. Granted, most of that was in the form of discomfort or pain, but my inside and outside experiences at least matched.

Part of this disconnect was a deliberate choice, for a while at least. when i started school i knew that there were going to be classes and thought processes I'd need to engage that would be inconsistent with the experiences i had and things i knew in my bones to be true but couldn't scientifically prove. So, I made a choice to set aside the parts of me that weren't logical and rational and set to the books. Thing is, I've been kind of stuck trying to get back to it. I've always been a kinisthetic person, and my body was the one way I could relate to others in a non-rational fashion. Even in doing body work, I've been told facilitate energy work well, but I never really did it with intention. i would sort of just move my brain out of the way and do what seemed like it needed to be done and that worked. At the same time, I remember a time when I could direct energy with intention and be more deliberate in how I relate to the world and others.

As i try to get back to my roots, I'm finding that while a lot of the clearing has been done on an intellectual and emotional level with my past, and the effects thereof, it's not in my bones. It's exactly like any other emotional experience when you *know* better, but still feel your feelings. The Monkey brain doesn't care that you *know*. The Monkey must be felt, willingly or not. it works out well to have done it this way, I've managed to clear out a lot of deadwood, to see patterns and consequences that weren't obvious before, to make changes and form new patterns based on the way I want things to be.

Like the Monkey, the Lizard also has a place. While I have also done work and reclaimed much of the emotional experience I shut out either in defence or deliberately, the visceral, body state experiences I've largely ignored. I honestly didn't give them much thought, and as I wasn't ready to before now it's just as well. I can see where trying to do PTSD clearing all at once would get messy and overwhelming really quickly. These are big files, it's best to manage them in small bites. I'm working with someone these days who is helping me get in touch with the Lizard brain. By creating intense experiences that recreate some of the states of fear, panic and pain I've felt before, but in a controlled and consensual context, I'm slowly reclaiming my pieces. I'm realizing how much power I'd given up to fear and anxiety, how much potential had become tainted by misuse, how much of what's mine I've left in the hands of the one who was supposed to protect me and was instead the source of my terror.

One key difference this time, in addition to being able to stop, is that I can finally fight back. It's just now hitting me how much having to take abuse without complaint or trying to protect myself made me angry and broken. The few times I stood up to my mother when she was in a black-out rage were to step between her and my siblings, because I didn't trust her not to do more damage than even she meant to. I didn't fight to protect me. The battle over my will was already lost, the flesh was just collateral damage.

When you hear "I beat you because I love you" all through childhood, is it any surprise it makes things a little weird later on?