Don't Change, Just Grow

"In chaos, there is fertility"

Anais Nin

I used to think I needed to change myself to become a better person. This idea that the only way I would ever be happy was to transform in some way haunted me. Trying to change who I am led to a state of alienation from myself. Who was I and why didn't I like that girl? Would I like her better if she had blonde hair? Tried that, nope. Maybe if she listened to different music and read better books? Fun for a while, but still no luck. When external changes didn't work, I started to think of ways to really change who I was from the inside, but that led to more unhappiness. After a few false starts and stops, I've decided not to change. Instead I want to learn to love myself as I am every day. Was I grouchy today? Ok, that's fine I can have compassion for that grouch and love her anyway. Did I let someone I love down? I can forgive myself and move on. Did life throw me a major curveball that I not only failed to catch but that hit me in the head? I've learned that I'm not an athlete but I make a darn good cheerleader. I think I'm learning each day how to take what I'm given and use it as fertilizer for growth, not change. I think I'll stay the same Rachael i've always been. She can learn to relax into just being herself and growing into her life as it comes. 

What about you? Do you think you need to change? Do those thoughts help or harm? Is there a way you could stay who you are and grow in ways that make for a happier you? I'd love to know what you think. I'm just now getting a handle on this new way of thinking and would love some feedback. Let's support each other in growing our inner gardens not ripping them out! 

Have Your Own Back

My Back

I've gotten to the point in my life where I realize nobody is going to save me. It does no good to be a victim and expect to be bailed out by a friend, family member, therapist or spouse. Even if your spouse is a therapist or your family member is a friend, they aren't in this world to save you from yourself. I'm not saying it's not great and wonderful to have a helpful circle of people you can rely on for encouragement and support, what I believe is that you must take care of yourself first. I would guess that we all have our pity party moments of hoping someone will notice our problem and offer to make it all better. It's okay to feel that way sometimes, but it's even better to just get up and help yourself. If you do need extra help from a person you trust, go ahead and ask for help without expecting them to fix you. The amazing thing is that you have the innate ability to take care of yourself. Nobody else knows you like you do. We can be our own best friends and allies in times of trouble. Once in a while we have to look at our own faces in the mirror and say "Hey, don't worry I've got your back".  

Pod Club: Hearing Voices

Hearing Voices : Homeless

Pod Club this week is an episode about homelessness from the podcast "Hearing Voices". Take an hour this week for yourself. Put on those earbuds, go for a walk or get cozy in a big chair for an hour of listening pleasure. On Friday I'll post my thoughts as will Just Jill and Soft Spiral. We'd love to have more ears and voices in this weekly adventure. Maybe this is the week you feel like joining in? 

Pod Club : I'm Insane and so are You

Picture a windowless room. Open the single door and take a look inside.  Inside this room are things you wouldn't show anyone else, your secrets. A bottle full of habits sits in the corner. Nearby you'll find a small closed box with a rusty hinged top. Open it and you'll find bits and pieces of thoughts, the kind you never whisper to a soul. This room is one you only enter alone. You go there not because you want to, you need to. A hard day finds you sitting with the bottle or sifting through your box of thoughts. Oh, I forgot to mention the shelf. One single shelf, maybe two feet long and not very wide holds a book and a knife. The book is blank. There is no pen, but the knife works nicely. Once in a while you go into the room just to check that all these things are still there. Nobody knows about the room so it's unlikely anything would be missing, but you still wake at four a.m. and have to check again to be certain. You'll slowly unlock the door and turn on the small lamp, finger the knife and the flip through your book. Peek under the lid of your box and maybe take just a small sip from your bottle. Turning to leave you have a brief moment of terror...where is the key? Sigh as you find it deep in your pocket. Turn the light off, shut the door silently aside from the click of the lock. You'll never tell a soul. Surely they would think you were insane.

This week's Pod Club was an episode of Love + Radio called "Insane vs. Unsane".  What a fine piece of work it was! The stories perfectly intertwined. I was transported to the living room of a man in his mid 40's as I listened to him recount his current life situation and acknowledge flat out that he is insane, but "so are you". I walked the echoing halls of an empty insane asylum with a man who'd witnessed demon possession and cutting. Fascinated as I learned of a college boy stalked by a girl clearly in a world of her own creation. All of this led me to the same conclusion as our first narrator..I'm insane and so are you. All of us somewhere on the crazy scale. Maybe a ten, blatantly walking the street carrying on a three way conversation with yourself and yourself. Or you could be lower, a less obvious seven sitting in the waiting room tapping your toe exactly ten times before you turn the page of your magazine. Some folks aren't even aware of their insanity, twos or threes interacting with the world smoothly and "normally" only to go home at night to drink until they aren't scared anymore or distract themselves obsessively surfing the internet.  Once in a while you're a one. Then you get bored and start climbing the scale again...

Next week we'll choose another podcast for Pod Club and would love anyone with ears to join us! We post on Monday and report on Friday. Please comment on our blogs or post on your own. If you don't have a blog yet (ahem Stephanie) maybe this will give you a good reason to start. We'd love to have you join in the fun. 

My co-host of the Pod Club : Just Jill  (recently started xmas early)

Pod-Club member: Soft Spiral (recently had her blog taken over by a cat)

Growing Pains

It aches. This changing of seasons pushes my eyelids, lowering the horizon. My bones are too tired to cry out, choosing to whimper and moan like lost puppies. The stuff that breaks your heart. Winter has come before to this home. It's shaken white flags of pretense and flashed cold promises of peace, but always Spring comes. And so I will comfort my weary thoughts with stories of storms weathered.

Dear Diary 3/3/1991

More from my ten year old self...

"I'me sick so I stayed home today. Mrs. Evoniuk gave me a entry form for a poetry contest. The poem she wants me to send in is The Lighthouse. It goes like this.

There it

Upon a hill

A lighthouse stands with pride

Makes me feel safe here on the sea
Guider

It's called Cinquain poetry. Bunny's going to have kittens soon. Michael really likes Angel. I don't have any best friends anymore because Angels Mike's best friend now. Last night we went to a play called J.B. it was hard to follow but it had good acting. I was sitting by Mike & Angel & Michael had his arm around her and she had her head on his shoulder. Leah is a very bad brat. I hate her and that's not a lie. bye."

Once again I must stress that I have no idea what my precious sister Leah was doing to annoy me and I have a feeling I was the very bad brat. Also, I was playing around with calling my brother 'Mike' like all his friends were but it didn't stick then and still doesn't. He'll always be Michael and I have forgiven him for stealing my best friend away since I ended up marrying one of his! 

Pod Club : Love + Radio

This week our Pod Club pick comes from a podcast called Love + Radio. 

Insane vs. Unsane

"Meditations on insanity and unsanity. Aliens, the criminally insane and break-ups."

As always, this podcast is available for free on itunes as well as via the link above. Have fun and report back here or here or here at the end of the week to read our thoughts and share yours! 

Houston, We Have Liftoff or Furlough Schmirlo

Spaceship Endeavor Griffith Observatory Flyover

The last week has been a roller coaster of ups and downs with some ins and outs thrown in just in case we got too comfortable. Almost exactly a year to the day that we moved to Los Angeles for Rob's new job, he was placed on furlough. We weren't entirely taken by surprise as some problems had arisen with his employer in the last few months, but that didn't make it easy. What kind of word is "Furlough" anyway? You're not fired but we aren't paying you either. It's the purgatory of employment. My husband is never one to sit around and complain, he's a man of action. The first thing he did was put feelers for job openings. We spent a lot of time discussing different possibilities and nearly drove each other crazy dissecting the pros and cons of each. It's exhausting to do this over and over when the job in question isn't even officially offered yet. How many hours can you spend debating something that might not even be an option? The answer is every waking hour and some of the sleeping ones too. 

As of today, we can stop the frantic pace we've been keeping and prepare for a new job. It's scary to accept something not knowing if it's the right thing for us or for the future but in the end we are thankful for income and have to trust that we can make the best of anything. I used to agonize about every simple decision (I'm such a Libra) but with more life experience comes a sense of calm. Now I've learned that nothing is forever if you don't want it to be. We are the authors of our own stories. I have a tattoo on my left wrist of an old bookplate.  Ex Libris means "from the library of" and it's a reminder to me daily that my life story is my own. This last week has only deepened that knowledge for me. 

I hope you all are having a good day and a wonderful weekend. Don't forget to set your clocks back tonight. Savor that extra hour of sleep. 

Pod Club : Ghost Stories

This week's Pod Club pick was The Anything Ghost Show...

I'll admit it up front that I only listened to the first half of this podcast. It was fun but only up to a certain point. I was thinking the whole time that it would be more interesting if the actual people were telling their stories instead of the host reading them all in the same tone. It made them almost sound silly instead of scary. I don't know if I believe in ghosts but I have heard way more convincing stories than these. Usually when I hear stories like these I can think up a scientific explanation or can see how people drew conclusions based on the fact that they went hunting for ghosts in the first place. 

I don't go hunting for ghosts. If they exist (and I'm not ruling it out) I would rather not interact with them at all. So last year when I was working at a winery in small town Walla Walla, Washington I certainly wasn't hoping for a spooky story but I experienced one anyway. L'Ecole is one of the oldest wineries in Washington and is housed in an extremely old schoolhouse. Creepy right? I still wasn't worried even when I spent large amounts of time down in the cold, dark basement.  

Working behind any bar tends to be a whirlwind of activity. L'Ecole on a busy afternoon was no exception. Two of us would be doing the pouring dance back and forth answering questions and making witty jokes as we slid the bottles and glasses around. Two racks of glasses were stacked in their own shelving system. The top one was clean, the bottom dirty. These racks were at least three feet square. It was a chore to pull them out to take to the kitchen for sterilizing (I should know since I did it repeatedly all day long). One particular afternoon I had just poured a taste at the end of the bar when I heard a crash. I whipped around to find the top rack of glasses had shot out and flipped over onto the floor. My coworker was at the other end of the bar. We started to clean up as quickly as possible all while maintaining the tasting experience of our customers but all I could think was that the impossible had just happened. I played around with that rack over and over after that trying to see if there was any good explanation or possible way it could slip or fall out of that slot on it's own and I maintain that it couldn't have. That's all I know. I'll leave it to you to decide if my experience was shaded by something I was looking for or if I'm the type to exaggerate for effect or if I'm just making this all up to entertain. I could swear on a stack of Bibles, but as an atheist I'm not so sure you'd believe even that. 

Halloween was almost a non holiday for me this year and I usually have a little fun with it dressing up or carving pumpkins. This podcast was the only Halloweeny thing about that day since I spent most of it in the car. Thanks for suggesting it Jill! 

Pod Club is our weekly adventure into podcast world. Jill and Leah and I pick a podcast every week on Monday and try to have something to say about it by Friday. Join in if you'd like! Comment or post on your own blog and don't forget to read what Just Jill and Leah, Soft Spiral, have to say.

(I have just added this to say that after a visit to Jill and Leah's blogs, I'm officially freaked out right now. These girls have some serious true stories for you so if you enjoy having your arm hairs all stand up and you want to be too scared to sleep with the light off tonight I highly recommend reading them! If, like me, you do NOT like being scared of the supernatural and you don't want those pictures in your sensitive head maybe it would be best to read the beginning of their posts but do not scroll down. You've been warned oh sensitive ones.)

Dear Diary 1/3/1991

New Diary

Old Handwriting

January 3, 1991

"I've been sick since yesterday. Leah's been a real brat ever since I taught her "I ame rubber you are glue bounces off me and sticks to you". I started to feel better this morning but then I got sick again. I can't wait for school to start. I hope I don't look like a football player in my new outfit. bye"

My new diary was a gift for xmas 1990. It took the place of the little spiral notebook I'd been using and it had a lock! In this entry I begin a spelling error that I continue for an embarrassing length of time. I still look at that "ame" in my diaries and wonder how it happened over and over again. The "football player" comment is referring to my new blazer that had huge shoulder pads. As I recall, it was heavily circled in a J.C. Penny catalogue by my own hand and so was my gift from my grandparents. Hot pink and black...oh my.