Tag: blog posts

Brinking

If I’m honest, coming up with a daily blog post has become a drag.

You will know if you read a recent post of mine that I am less than two months away from achieving my one year goal of publishing a blog post every day.

Looking back on my life, my ennui and that attitude is kind of predictable.

I tend to run out of gas and ambition on the final leg of any journey.

That was true in the case of coming up to completing my university degrees, pending motherhood (by month 9, I was ready to extract my baby with a vacuum cleaner (just kidding) – I think that “get it out of me” feeling is nature’s way to prepare you for giving birth), house buying (in one case, I actually bailed on the day the house deal was supposed to close – turns out that was very poor judgment), and many failed so-called intimate relationships.

Relationships broke down as I edged closer to true intimacy. I was a baby adult, you see. While I presented as a walking, talking, competent adult, I was – in reality – a mewling infant. If I started to get emotionally close to someone – that is, feeling vulnerable and safe – the infant side of me took over.

There is nothing particularly attractive or romantic about a twenty something year old carrying on like a five year old. Temper tantrums. Blind selfishness. Acting out by running away.

I was the living epitome of the hurt and angry child who packs up all her belongings in a handkerchief, sticks them on a pole, heads out the door (slamming it, of course), and down the road.

That works until close to nightfall when said child is faced with the looming cold and dark. It’s about that time of the day that your horrible parents don’t seem that horrible any more.

In truth, I wasn’t really much more developed than that. Arrested emotional development is real, my friends.

The value of a healthy family, I came to realize, was that it can (should) provide a safe container – a nest, if you will – where you can work out and work through childish emotions as they come up year after year. It’s called growing up. From about age 5, I grew mostly sideways.

This growing up business is, of course, far from a perfect science. Many people are simply shut down as children and forced to stew in their own emotional pain perpetually. They can grow up to be emotionally arrested, too.

The ideal of a safe family environment in which to take root and grow is just that for many – an ideal. None of us gets through childhood without scars.

So the urge to bolt at the gate just as things are starting to go right was habitual with me for a long time. Maybe I did that because otherwise I would be forced to acknowledge that I was a real grown-up adult. I wasn’t having it. I was still looking for a knight in shining armor.

The acknowledgement of total personal responsibility would have forced me to accept that I did have power over myself and my choices and my fate. Frankly, that seemed like way too much responsibility to take on.

And the other truth was, I feared failure and disappointment so creating those conditions myself gave me a lopsided sense of control. “See,” I could say to myself, “I knew this would never work out.” And son of a gun, I’d be right.

I call it brinking. Giving up just before you are going to succeed. Giving up just before an important goal is realized. Giving up shortly before I could catch the brass ring. (It wasn’t always that, in reality. I stuck with and accomplished a good number of goals. It’s just that the self-talk was discouraging and total joy killer.)

My self-talk in young adulthood was guided by self-loathing and a broad-based lack of self-confidence. Not exactly a loving and supportive voice. It has taken years to change it. To “grow out of it.” The first challenge was to see it, observe it as it was happening and call it what it was. Something like I am doing now.

The accomplishment of publishing a daily blog post every day for a year that I will celebrate won’t matter to another single living soul but me. But here’s the difference between little me and struggling adult me.

I now realize that the primary and only single living soul I have agency over and who matters to me is me. Not in a selfish sense but in a sense of total accountability for my own life. As poet William Ernest Henley famously phrased it in his poem Invictus:

“I am the master of my soul, I am the captain of my fate.”

I quite liked this summary of the poem’s meaning:

The last two lines of William Ernest Henley’s poem ‘Invictus‘ contain invaluable advice to those who blame God for their failures. It is not only about God, but the mindset that makes one surrender while faced with challenges. Challenges make one stronger but mentally submitting oneself to those impediments extinguishes the inner light that one carries inside the heart from infancy. Through these lines, Henley tried to say that it’s not about how difficult the path is, it’s about one’s attitude to keep moving forward without submitting oneself to fate’s recourse.

https://poemanalysis.com/william-ernest-henley/i-am-the-master-of-my-fate-i-am-the-captain-of-my-soul/

I finally get it, Mom and Dad.

You did what you knew and the best you could.

The rest of my story and how it unfolds is up to me.

Heigh-ho.

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So here we are. December 31, 2023. New Year’s Eve 2023. What a year it’s been.

The world in which I am growing older seems nothing like the world I grew up in. And yet in some respects, it is exactly the same.

I lived through Watergate and Nixon’s “resignation.” A wise and timely choice that he made to avoid the impeachment motion that would have ousted him from the Presidency anyway.

Today, we are dealing with the non-stop histrionics of another corrupt and ambitious soul who is determined to reclaim the Presidential office. Whatever else Richard Nixon was, he exhibited a modicum of decency in certain regards.

Respect for women for starters. His vile thoughts contained within his inner circle. No suggestion of insurrection.

War is raging in the Ukraine and the Gaza strip. Though less invested in these wars than Vietnam personnel wise, the US Congress still votes billions for support for its preferred victors in both conflicts. War is good business, after all.

The headlines of 2023 were full of doom and gloom. Unprecedented wildfires of such scope and intensity as have never been seen in the world before. Not in our time anyway. And so the alarm bells about the negative effects of climate change are rung harder and louder.

Billionaires traveling to the moon in their customized spaceships. Moon travel now a business model designed to rack up even more millions for their coffers. These shrewd businesspeople don’t have stars in their eyes or great dreams for the evolution and betterment of humanity. They have a keen eye on their bottom line.

All of this demonstrates a world badly out of balance with the fundamental laws of nature. I often read that billionaires wealth can be compared to the mental illness of hoarding. The disconnect between what they really need and what they want is incalculable.

And yet, we must adjust to the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. Our only personal defense to all of this external craziness in my opinion is rigorous environmental and personal mental hygiene.

I am no longer watching TV news, for example. It has drifted so far from the fundamental ethics of journalism that I once practiced as to be unrecognizable.

Female journalists who once consciously worked to present a professional and respectable image now focus on their sex appeal. Where has the thinking gone that women professionals needed to restrain exuding their inherent sexuality to be taken seriously? Another quaint and old-fashioned notion.

I am choosing to eat more consciously. Don’t get me wrong. I occasionally enjoy fast food as much as anyone. But beyond the dictates of a good dietary regime is the pleasure that comes from “home cooking.” I’m not a saint and drift away from healthy eating more often than I care to admit. But I am conscious of it and aware that healthy eating is my choice.

I’ve taken up yoga again. I had forgotten how important that discipline is. And demanding. I’ve always laughed at those who see yoga as a simple and not at all strenuous exercise. You try holding a spinal twist or tree pose for several minutes. You’ll soon discover how essential strength and balance are to the practice.

So better habits – mentally and physically are on my list of New Year’s resolutions. Wisely I started them a few weeks ago so as not to experience the tapering off on resolutions at the end of January that so many experience.

When I quit alcohol for good, I started in October 1999 on Thanksgiving Day. That way I had a few weeks of sobriety under my belt before the new year and new millennium in the year 2000. After 23 years of sobriety, that strategy and resolution seems to have worked out.

I am doing the usual stock taking today. Reflecting on the year that just passed and hopeful for positive change in the year ahead. It is ever thus.

I should mention this is my last post for 2023. My 293rd to be exact. I’ll remind you how it started. On March 14 during a writing retreat in New Smyrna Beach of this year just past, I set out to write a daily blog post for one full year. I am flabbergasted by how close that one year anniversary is now.

The logic when I started was to grease the wheels of my internal writing machine in aid of finally revving up the engine of creativity to write “that book” – a memoir still conceived to explore the consequences and my strategies for surviving a violence and addiction addled childhood in a small town Canadian provincial backwater.

So there’s one resolution I will need to make and resolve in the new year. After the one year anniversary for this blog, then what? I am still writing for me. I’ve connected with a few kindred spirits along the way in the form of regular readers. That’s encouraging.

Like most of 2024 or any future speculation, there will be countless unknowns. And like every new year and every day on the planet, I will live as I always do. Hoping for the best while being prepared for the worst.

Buckle up, folks. Whatever else comes in 2024, it will inevitably challenge and change us. For my part, I think I’ll head to the kitchen now and prepare a “colorful” and nutritious New Year’s Eve brunch.

That outcome I can say with some certainty, is something I can control and look forward to. We all do what we can when we can as we can. Happy New Year, folks! See you next year.