Tag: clutter

Found Them

I am beyond relieved to have found the forty or so old journals that I feared were gone forever.

Decades worth of pages and pages worth of writing. Those journals were my ballast and my mast. I clung to them for the life-sustaining exercise they rendered. They have my deepest gratitude.

They weren’t stored in the “usual places.” Given their importance to me, I was pretty sure I’d tucked them comfortably away in a nice dry spot where I could put my finger on them any time I wanted. Wrong.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit I found them in the back of the shipping container I just recently offloaded. I have no idea how that happened. It was a very careless way to handle something so important. Sadly, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Trauma dulls discernment. I used to write about the aftereffects of trauma as having “broken antennae.” All of the natural instincts about sensing evil and avoiding danger get crushed and messed up in the aftermath of trauma.

I think that is some type of exaggerated survival instinct. Even when you are undergoing the worst trauma imaginable, there is a part of you – a very large part – that wants to survive. And is usually determined to survive. Sometimes that survival instinct is all that is left after serious insult or injury.

Trauma survivors become like something similar to a vase with a beautiful external presentation, but its’ insides are empty and hollow. I lived like that for most of my adult life.

Writing was my salvation. I felt almost nothing but fear for many years but I wrote up a storm. I was a casual and frequent observer of the turmoil I was going through externally and internally.

Writing was a lifeline. I couldn’t control anything or anyone around me but I could control my thoughts and put them down in nice, neat lines. I am grateful for that.

Now will I ever read said journals? Heaven only knows. I fear them a bit if I’m honest. There are bits of me and my fragmented life in there that I’m not crazy about revisiting. So I’ll pick my way through them and ingest them bit by bit. On an as-needed basis.

This house purge is the bigger healing focus in my life at the minute. I am beginning to feel what every single person who has ever gone through downsizing says: “I feel so much lighter.”

If, as some authors claim, I will let go of unwanted pounds along with letting go of unwanted clutter, I am going to be rail thin by them time this purging exercise is over.

That’s not a terrible prospect to look forward to.

Necessary Losses

Necessary Losses is the title of a 1986 book by Judith Viorst. The title intrigued me but the sub-title even more: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow. 

(Grown up children (like mine) will recognize Viorst’s most famous children’s book, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. We loved that book when they were little people.)

When I first encountered Necessary Losses, I was in a period of deep mourning for my life. I’d lost nearly everything. My family of origin. My marriage. My job. My self-confidence and my center. My “promise of youth.”

What Viorst’s book taught me was that we all go through inevitable losses in life. They are unavoidable. We will lose “our childhood.” We will lose our youth. We will lose our parents. And, eventually, extended family. Then friends.

It is how we grow and change through these losses that we are brought to a deeper perspective, true maturity and fuller wisdom about life.

Oddly, it was this book I was thinking about when I was clearing out a storage locker yesterday. The contents of many boxes reflected my life back to me. An agenda for a planning meeting. Articles I’d published. School reports for one or the other of my children. Random recipes and receipts from everywhere.

It was both freeing and unsettling. Clearly, I had hung on too long to too much stuff. As my energy level dropped in proportion to the amount of stuff I had to go through, I understood why. It is emotional and daunting to revisit the past. My past in any case. It is also exhausting.

I saw my survival through line in the detritus. The contracts I pursued to keep body and soul together. The self-help books that acted as guides and friends when I felt bereft of both. The children’s art that I kept to remind them one day of their younger selves. (I honestly don’t think they care all that much. A mother’s predilection, not a child’s.)

Growing older, I can feel myself bracing for the upcoming wave of losses over the next ten years.

When you are younger, the death of a friend or acquaintance is shocking and seemingly random. We celebrate together as a community and memorializing that death is a noteworthy event. We go to the funeral as a community. We share remembrances of the departed and swap jokes they used to laugh at. It is a bonding experience.

Then I remember my mother once went to the funeral of three friends in one day. We are still in the time of “one-offs” when among the condolences, we dutifully deploy “s/he died too young.”

We see ourselves in the remembrances in the obituary. We remember rocking out to Tom Petty in the basement together. Furtively getting high on illicit weed from questionable sources.

We meet their adult children and marvel at how much they look like the parent – our friend – that they just lost. The culling has begun.

It is for the best that the wisdom we gain about death as we get older does not preoccupy us when we are young. Persistent thoughts of death and dying are deemed pathological in our youth. In youth, those thoughts are often treated as symptoms of a mental condition, like depression or suicidal ideation.

In old age, those thoughts can become constant companions. After attending so many funerals and reading so many obituaries, we aren’t surprised by death anymore. If we are wise, we prepare for it every day we are living.

We all know there are “no guarantees” in life. An infant can expire as well as the octogenarian.

I decided some time ago to walk with death. Aware it is there and standing by. But not yet invited to the party. I have too much living and exploration still ahead of me. I think.

This attitude has been both life-affirming and life-changing. I am philosophical about death compared to what I was in my youth. Then the thought of death or a terminal illness could make me white with terror. Looking back, I think my greatest fear was dying before I had actually lived.

No one knows the internal crater of pain and emptiness as well as the recently bereft. It is not a universal reaction, of course. Some deaths bring more relief than sadness. That is a loss for all involved in that particular passing.

I accept death’s inevitability now. I know it will take precious loved ones from me. That constant, hovering possibility focusses me more on living life now. I make the apple galette when asked. I watch a movie I’m not crazy about because he enjoys it.

This is not about suppressing or ignoring my own needs or sense of self. Because what I need most now is for my dearest to live happy and healthy for as long as possible. As that is my ultimate goal, the details of how I get there aren’t as important.

On with the day and dealing with the next batch of boxes. Sifting through memories. Even expressing gratitude for the hideousness of the task.

At least, I am still here and able to go through them – a privilege denied to many.

Self-Care

This is my 81st post in a row. Nothing particularly special about that number, just noteworthy.

As a refresher for those who may have just recently joined me, I started this blog on March 14, 2023, with a view to documenting my book-writing journey. I planned and still plan to write a post every day for 365 days in total. Ostensibly until I have a manuscript in hand.

I guess I wondered what I would learn along the way. Well, here’s something I’ve picked up. Life intervenes. That was inevitable and I knew that starting out. I did wonder how I would handle life’s interventions when they did come up.

So far, I’ve managed to keep writing daily posts through my daughter’s visit with all of the delicious deviations and distractions, all the machinations and legal/financial back and forth and endless phone calls involved in buying a house, going through a stop-start immigration process, which is still stopping and starting. All that is on top of just daily living.

So today I felt myself vacillating. I was going to sign off on this post with two sentences and excuse myself. But then I realized that this stage is as much a learning stage as any other. I need to remind myself about self-care.

There have been minor but time-consuming medical procedures to contend with on top of all the aforementioned issues. I am exhausted. A temporary casualty of my “busy-ness” has been my faithfulness to my 3X weekly women’s writing group. I miss it and the consistency of carving out those two hours three days a week to get grounded and just write.

If a friend of mine was going through what I have been going through, what would I tell her? “Honey, it will be just fine.” “It is a marathon, not a sprint.” That is generally a good perspective to keep in mind whether chasing a degree, a house-building project, child-rearing, or writing a book.

The world will not fall apart if you don’t publish every single day for 365 days. No one will punish me. I am good enough at doing that myself.

I once did a 60-day yoga challenge. That meant showing up consistently for a one-hour yoga class every single day for two months. Boy, there were days I didn’t want to go. So I did workarounds. My favorite workaround was yoga nidra. I felt like. a naughty child because this yoga “practice” essentially means lying flat on your back and breathing deliberately and deeply for an hour. Heck, I could have done that in my sleep. In fact, a couple of times, I think I did.

The point is, I have created for myself something of a false idol with my goal of daily publishing something I’ve written. It is a worthy goal and I have no plan to shirk it. I just don’t feel the need to twist myself into knots whether or if I do or not. Heaven knows it might be a welcome relief for readers!

A technical glitch had me miss a day in my publishing continuity this week. I did not read about this grievous oversight on the front page of The New York Times. Oddly.

So I am off to bed. Clear conscience. Happy to have gathered this assembly of words together and to push them out into the world come what may. We, women, are notorious for putting all sorts of absurd and unrealistic expectations on ourselves.

More and more I prefer the route of self-care when life warrants as it often does. That goes for me and anyone else out there who occasionally struggles with the weight of life’s load.

Get yourself into a comfortable position. Put that extraneous clutter out of your head for a while. Breathe deeply. Relax. You can thank me later. You’re welcome.