Category Archives: Thoughts

Cancer, Photography, PTSD, Thoughts

A New Lens on Life

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Sometimes the numb sneaks up on me and settles in under my awareness leaving disconnection, isolation, and feelinglessness in place of life. I trudge on through days or weeks (sometimes years) without knowing I’m disconnected from deep emotion. Then suddenly it passes and I am flooded with the disconnected emotion returning. Like a couple of days ago when I found myself wanting to cry when I should have been relieved.

Yesterday I took a new (to me) camera lens out for a test spin. As so often happens, focusing on something else which requires me to be completely present and in the world let my subconscious work. As I wandered about learning just how shallow of a depth of field an 85mm f/1.8 camera lens has, things started to shift into place.

Earlier this year, in the middle of realizing we were going to need to move across the country, I found out I likely have thyroid cancer. Apparently, there hasn’t been enough trauma in my life, so the universe added the big “C” to my story.

It started simply enough in January at my annual physical. My doctor felt something on one lobe of my thyroid, and so out of an abundance of caution she sent me to have an ultrasound. It came back suspicious. Which prompted an FNA (Fine Needle Aspiration) biopsy. Which came back as very suspicious. A sample was sent for further testing, which came back as likely cancer… but not completely positive. I was for a few moments, very appropiately freaked out, but soon slid into numbness as it became too much. Dysfunctional coping skills learned in childhood to live with repeated trauma resurfaced to help me avoid feeling this too.

The next step is a Surgical Biopsy, which is a misnomer since it means actually taking out that half of the thyroid. So while my life is turning over, I consult with a surgeon and set a date for surgery in Atlanta after we are set to move to Chicago. It’s the only real step I can take, so blind and numb, I accept it. Then a few weeks later after we switch our move destination to California. I manage to wrangle a consult with a surgeon in the Bay Area.

The day after our one-way trip to SFO, I meet my new surgeon. We set August 14th as my new surgery date. Already overloaded with the move, there is only a twinge of feeling. Then nothing.

The surgery came and went, along with my whole thyroid since a rapid pathology check during the surgery finally confirmed cancer. So my “surgical biopsy” became a Thyroidectomy. Post surgical pathology confirmed good margins all around the spots of cancer, but also that it has spread to an adjacent lymph node.

That bit in a lymph node raised my risk. So, I was sent for a RAI (RadioActive Iodine) scan to check for further spread and assess for the need of RAI therapy. The 90 minutes I spent having to lie perfectly still in that machine while sensors looked for gamma rays emitted by the I-123 absorbed by any thyroid remnants and possible spots of cancer gave me a chance to use another of my childhood survival skills – disconnecting from the current moment by dissociation. The followup consult with the nuclear medicine doctor brought good news. Besides the expected thyroid remnants, there was nothing. No further spread.

I should have been relieved, joyous, happy; a weight lifted off my shoulders. Instead for the last two days, all I’ve felt is scared. All I’ve wanted to do is cry. I can feel it just under the surface, ready to spill forth, but it hasn’t yet. I’m not quite unstuck from numb.

Walking around yesterday with my new camera lens, I was getting frustrated at taking so many out of focus shots. As I fiddled and adjusted, I found that a higher f-stop gave me clear subjects. Then I discovered things further away were in better focus even when the lens was wide open. By the end of my walk I was getting several keepers. I wasn’t creating art yet, but I was figuring out how with extra care and attention I could create beauty with this lens.

Later in the evening as I was sorting photos and discarding (so, so many) bad ones, I could more clearly see on the larger display of my computer what had been happening. Taking photos with the lens wide open at a distance of about 6 feet, the depth of field (the range of what is in focus) is only about 1.5 inches. Everything closer or further away than that thin slice of space 6 feet away is fuzzy –out of focus. A breeze moving a flower back and forth pushes the bloom out of the small range which is in focus. One petal might be sharp, but the rest of them would be blurry.

I nailed the focus in this shot… on the leaf just below the flower and the petal closest to it.

This lens, as glorious as it is, has a very narrow window of tolerance for focus. So it appears do I.

Faced with something overwhelming, such as cancer, and then topped with the possibility of metastasis, I flew out of my narrow window of tolerance for feeling emotion. I dropped right back to my long-practiced coping mechanism of numb. Getting diagnosed with cancer is a traumatic event. It leaves no control over what will happen. It leads to pain, to suffering, and possibly even to death. These experiences are literally the very things which cause PTSD. A traumatic childhood set me up to deal with future trauma reflexively in the way I always had.

So here I am with a new lens on my life. I have to handle things very carefully. I can still create art, make a life worth living, and feel my feelings, but it takes great attention and skill when even the slightest breeze can blow me out the window into numb.

PTSD, Thoughts

Golden Dream

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For over a year my life has been frozen. I’ve been wading through a world trying to not only erase who I am but drive me into the shadows. Every day seemed to bring a new effort to shrink my existence and take away my rights, Being a childhood trauma survivor, the effect is multiplied, pushing me back into anxiety, fear, and disconnection. I’ve been wandering through life mildly triggered and disconnected, once again questioning whether I can have a meaningful life in this world which feels so unsafe.

There are three typical reactions to a traumatic situation. The first two, fight or flight are colloquial knowledge. The third, the freeze , is less well known outside of the psychological and mental health professions. It can be a precursor to fight or flight as the body prepares to take one action or the other. It can also be a defense mechanism in and of itself, like the snow hare who freezes against the backdrop of the white, drift covered forest floor when the arctic fox trots by. As a trauma survivor, I often get caught in a freeze like that hare when there is no clear path to safety.

As a queer woman in The South married to another queer woman, we stood out. As a married girl couple holding hands or kissing or just being together we were intensely visible even in our small queer friendly town. At first it was validating to be seen, but as the culture war on queer folk turned to a legislative attacks being seen made us a visible target.

“Don’t Say Gay,” Drag Bans, Bathroom Bills, and other laws passed around us in Florida, Alabama, and Tennessee. I disconnected from knowing more.

I had grown up in hot, humid central Florida, where Disney World visits were just part of life. Every major holiday, visit by a family member, or significant life event seemed to call for a trip to Disney. The joyful escape into a world of fantasy had become woven into the fabric of my life. As an adult I continued to find joy in its embrace, first with my son, then later with my wife. But suddenly Florida was a culture-warrior on the front lines of battle. The state of my long adopted hometown was feeling less safe. My days got fuzzier. I vacillated between compulsively checking the news and actively avoiding it in competing efforts to be informed and to avoid obsessive immersion.

Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World just before Enchantment, my happy place.

Then on a trip to Disney World we stopped for gas in Gainesville, FL. As I stood pumping gas into the car, my wife opened the passenger door and held out a bag. “Hey, Babe – could you put this in the trash can for me?” with synchronized precision, three other customers around us all turned and stared at me, at us. It had suddenly become personal and intensely uncomfortable. We flew to Orlando on our next trip.

Just wishing things would get better, that the world would come to its senses, seemed hopeless. So, filled with helplessness and unsure of a path forward, I slipped into a traumatic freeze. Falling back into the coping skills I’d learned as a child, unable to protect myself or run away from what was happening, I became stuck – frozen. My home, my career, my life was in a place which was becoming increasingly unsafe and unwelcoming. Suddenly, intrusive memories from my past were coming up unbidden again. I was going backwards. I struggled to enjoy or even live my life because I felt unsafe most of the time. My little progressive book loving town no longer felt safe enough anymore.

Then early this year, my own state joined in legislative culture war with 14 anti-LGBT bills during the legislative session and a ban on DEI in higher education where my day job is. Sure the ban was disguised as protecting academic freedom, but shortly after it was enacted anything with diversity in the title was canceled or cut. Somehow the threat getting so close, right on my own doorstep, helped get me unstuck. I caught up to where my wife had been for a while. It was time to leave before things got worse, before something bad happened to us, before we got trapped and couldn’t go.

Even though I had been stuck over the preceding year, we’d managed to explore places we could move to. Travel helped keep my mind from falling into the darkest places, so we checked out Albuquerque, Denver, Albany NY, Southern California, and Chicago. They all had their charms and challenges, but Chicago seemed to fit us best. It was the city of my young childhood and my beloved Cubbies. I’d always loved it. The towering skyscrapers, the expansive lake, affordable homes, great restaurants, and lots of culture just felt right. So as the need for action unfroze me some, we started planning a move by looking at houses and jobs. It seemed destiny was showing us a path forward, and things were working out. We were going to the Windy City and the safety of its warm midwestern charm.

The Windy City is alive.

And yet, fate still wasn’t done with me, I just didn’t know it. We flew to Chicago for a long weekend and picked the suburb we were going to live in. We met the Realtor we were going to buy through. We explored and got comfortable. Out of the blue, I got a call for an interview in San Francisco…then a followup interview.

Months earlier on a lark, I’d submitted an application to a university in San Francisco — my favorite city on earth. It was someplace I’d always wanted to live, but believed to be forever out of reach. So I never expected my application would amount to anything or that we could actually make a move across the country to one of the highest cost of living regions in America. It was a pleasant fantasy, an effort to escape my fear and pain.

An offer arrived for that university job in San Francisco. After we’d decided to move to Chicago, after we had made plans, told people, gotten comfortable with the idea, and even bought new winter coats. Now the truly unexpected was in front of me.

This offer seemed good enough that we could make it work. My wife’s company even had an office nearby. There would be no frigid, snowy winters. I’d evolved from being stuck, to a hopeful path to Chicago, to having choices. These were not just the choices of desperation, but between things I truly wanted. We decided to follow our dream. After having only visited San Francisco twice in her life, for a total of 5 days, my wife took a leap and jumped aboard for the ride. We would move to the bay area and follow my golden dream.

Six weeks later with all of our belongings in six suitcases and a couple of moving containers plus our car on a transport truck, we left The South on a one-way flight to SFO. That was three months ago at the beginning of this endlessly sunny California summer. Those five-and-a-half hours in the air shifted my life completely from where I was. Here nobody notices the queer girl couple, we are simply part of the cultural tapestry. We see ourselves reflected in many others. The laws work to protect our rights instead of the opposite. As I find my place in our chosen home, it has started to sink in. I am safe here.

Today I sit in a coffee shop with my laptop able to write for the first time in almost a year. I am finally thawing enough in California’s golden sun to find my voice again, to be present in the world. I am alive again. I never want to lose the freedom I have found here.

Photography, PTSD, Thoughts

Focusing in with Macro

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I’ve been experimenting with macro photography lately as an offshoot of taking so many flowers pictures this spring. It reminds me of being fascinated with microscopes and the tiny world I discovered as a child.

Until just now I’d forgotten how one year for Christmas I got a pocket microscope in my stocking. Yes, if you’re wondering I was a bit of a science geek as a child. I carried that microscope around the yard, on walks to the park, and when my family would take day trips to the mountains. While I didn’t much care to look at bugs with it, there were plenty of wonders in the micro world to observe.

I loved Lego as a child, and was thrilled to pass that love on to my son. As I’ve been unpacking from a recent pair of moves – one to a new home, another from my office – I came across a few Lego mini figures my son gave me as gifts when he was younger. They had graced the office at work which I no longer occupy with a shift to permanent remote work. While I have so many more mini figures in bins of my childhood legos hidden in the attic, these were right in front of me begging to be photographed. Ideas bubbled up in my mind. I could spend the month of May making pictures of mini figures in various locales. It would be a wild & crazy adventure of #MacroMay.

Wild & crazy Lego backpacker guy.

I lined a few up on my desk and started snapping pictures, remembering to use small apertures to get some depth-of-field so the entire figure would be in focus. A few tries were meh, and then by adding a flash I got a reasonable image. Was this really worth my time? Or was this more of a flight of fancy? Still I kept at it.

A slightly delirious and maybe evil Peter Pan mini figure!?

Perhaps I should to be more serious. Become the cold and detached photographer documenting their observations. Well, perhaps not, but it’s a fun image.

Should a photographer be an ice queen line this mini figure complete with stylish camera bag?

Even after years of awareness and work, I’m still discovering things about myself and my childhood. These discoveries and connections still occur on a regular basis even after years of therapy and effort at healing. Time and reclaiming passions of childhood allow things to bubble to the surface of awareness where they can be processed. I know I still have a lot of work to do in my recovery, but fortunately I’m not alone. I have help along the way.

I’m finding out today that looking closely and focusing on the minute is another way to distract and avoid the world around me. In the present it’s mostly about observation and discovery, but as a child… It was that and more. It was a way to dim awareness of the unsafe world I lived in. If attention was focused on a blade of grass, the veins of quartz in granite, the grain of a stump, then I was able to not know about the terrible things I experienced. The micro world became yet another tool in my box to cope, to keep from knowing. I’m realizing I’ve spent a lot of my life not knowing things which were too much to process or cope with as a child.

Those same coping skills can bring joy now. Maybe not a fair trade, but I’ll make hay while the sun shines.

Photography, PTSD, Thoughts

Cameras to manage anxiety?

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I’ve been spending a lot of time lately reading about cameras. So much so, you might assume I’m planning to buy one in the immediate future, but actually no. I’m reading about cameras because, well, it’s calming. For some reason I can’t quite identify yet, reading about all sorts of different DSLRs (Digital Single Lens Reflex) and some of the newer mirrorless cameras helps me manage anxiety. I *am* interested in cameras, because well… photography is part of who I am. It’s a hobby I’ve claimed since I was a child. However I’m not pining after the latest and greatest camera right now. I just read about cameras when I get anxious. Why is that? All I know is that if I find myself browsing pages on Ken Rockwell’s excellent site, I know I’m likely unsettled.

I can trace some of this back to when I wanted to learn more about my current primary camera – a Nikon D90 – after years away from using an SLR regularly. After that I started reading about the newer models which replaced it over the following 12 years, then I read up on some of the film cameras of my youth, and then some of the ones that had been in my dad’s collection. Things got a little scary down that dark alley, so I shifted back to modern digital cameras. Now rarely a day goes by when I’m not reading about a lens or camera or some aspect of technique even when the pandemic keeps me inside, away from taking as many photos as I’d like.

This has me thinking about Central Coherence Theory, which basically says that humans organize and process information within a context that gives it meaning, looking for the big picture. We focus on information which fits with the big picture and set aside information which doesn’t fit with it. It’s a concept I learned about when researching Aspergers and Autism after my son was diagnosed at the age of four. At the time there was a theory postulating those on the autism spectrum have weak central coherence. It proposed they have a reduced ability to coalesce information around a central idea, and discard the rest. The results is a flood of extraneous information which overwhelms and leads to reduced executive function which is typically seen in those on the autism spectrum. I’m not sure if it was ever accepted, but on a practical level the concepts helped me understand some of my son’s challenges. How does it apply here though?

Well, like most things with me, it comes back to trauma. My brain spends an inordinate amount of time avoiding awareness of memories of traumatic things which happened to me. Holding all those awful things in mind would overwhelm me, make it impossible to function. So those memories are pushed down out of awareness. To keep memories at bay, to keep my mind from pulling information back together and putting disparate pieces together thus finding the core idea, my brain tries to protects, tries not to know. It’s just part of how PTSD works.

How better to keep these memories from floating to the surface and coalescing into awareness of the terrible truth of my childhood than finding something else to focus on. Enter cameras.

Fortunately photography is a deep and complex topic. I can ask myself countless interesting questions based on my interest. What would be the best travel camera for when COVID winds down and I can visit interesting places again? (A Canon EOS M5 or Nikon D3500 are small enough to fit in my purse) What lenses make sense to purchase next that work with my longer term camera upgrade plan? (a Nikon 10-24mm DX ultra wide) Which camera will fit my hand size best? (heh.. none, though small SLRs are okish) What’s the best way to get film developed and scanned these days? (Turns out there is a lab in town) What’s the next book I should read about photography? (The Photographer’s Eye) Where should I take my next photographic vacation to? (Yosemite – my wife has never been there) The list is almost endless, engaging for my mind, and most importantly, far from my trauma memories.

Well, mostly distant from those memories. Actually, there are some crossovers with the more adverse experiences of my childhood. Stumbling across those connections when I’m trying to avoid knowing can be far, far too much. It is more destabilizing than a vivid flashback since it connects to the topic here and now… and then I have to deal with my trigger reactions, anxiety, body memories, fuzziness. Yay.

What surprises me most about this is that things I know be triggering about cameras and photography are losing their ability to invoke strong reactions in me. As memories spilled forth early on, I never thought I would be able to handle a real SLR camera again, much less a film Nikon, the camera choice of my father. Yet now I not only own one Nikon SLR, but two. One digital and one film. The sound of the shutter no longer makes me jump. As long as the camera is in my hand, in my control, I am ok.

As I read, learn, and distract, control comes back to my hands. I choose what happens now. I chose to take photography back. I choose to read about cameras when I am anxious. I choose to write about these things because this is my life. I am no longer powerless. I no longer have to suffer through triggers and overwhelm blindly. I have coping skills, including camera distraction to manage the anxiety that comes with my memories. I no longer have to white-knuckle overwhelming times.

It is a slow path to make sense of my experiences, to take my life back, but I work at it one click, one article at a time.

Art, Thoughts

Stickers & Washi

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Of late I’ve found solace in Washi tape – that fun, reusable Japanese decorative adhesive. It’s found its way into my paper bullet journal and I expect soon into my sketchbook. I suppose this shouldn’t be much of a surprise as I’ve been expressing myself with stickers on my laptop for years now.

I’ve even bought a couple of big bundles of washi tape from Amazon. It’s not the highest quality, but it’s a whole lot of fun to open a package of 30 rolls of joy! I mean just look at this, how can I not smile at all of these fun patterns?

Since it makes me smile, I take advantage of that little bit of joy in my bullet journal to make my days a little more bearable. I’m stuck home most every day now because of the Pandemic, so I’ll take a slice of happiness any place I can find it.

I use my bullet journal to take notes manage my work tasks all day. This can make it a pretty dreary place. While I like my day job, the minutes can get pretty blah and frustrating. So in addition to using multiple colors of fountain pens and markers (that’s another blog post) I use Washi to liven things up. A shiny dividing line here, a fruity border there and suddenly I don’t feel quite so dreary.

It actually can be functional too. Section breaks are more obvious with a thin line of Washi. I can underline an important item with thin Washi or give super-important ones a whole border so they stand out. Delinating columns is easy with a strip of washi. My mistakes even look good now… because they are covered by a delightful strip of Washi.

My little pick-me-up has turned out to be rolls of washi. I wonder how I will look when I go back into the office someday carrying a couple of rings of washi with my notebook and pencil case from meeting to meeting? At least it will fit with my colorful sticker laden laptop!

Art, Thoughts

Bullet journal blues

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This last week or so I’ve spent a lot of my free time looking at journaling and planners and organizational systems again. I seem to go through this form of soul searching on a semi-regular basis as a result of some external factor that shakes up my existing system. This time it was discovering the Hobonichi Techo Planner when I was looking for pen refills for my wife’s favorite pen the Otho Horizon. These amazing planners with grid paper come with fun covers in a myriad of colors (even in Marshmallow – want, so badly.) The pull of actual paper and seeing a new option threw my brain into a tizzy, resulting in hours of digging, questioning, and soul-searching around whether I really needed to change my system again. I’d once again fallen into the Bullet journal blues.

How I got here

I never used to have this problem as for so much of my life I didn’t even imagine I needed a planner, organizer, journal, or any such thing. I’d tried a few things in college, and then again when I started to work professionally. I really didn’t have a need. I tried mostly because I saw other people using day planners, portfolios, pocket calendars, or notebooks on a regular basis. They looked so cool and put together pulling them out in class or in a meeting – taking notes, jotting down dates, referring back to things. I wanted to be like that too, so I tired to use the tools too.

Pretty quickly, I discovered I really didn’t need those things as I had a good memory. I would forget to use my planner, but still remembered to do stuff. So I never wrote anything down, and I just remembered it. Sure, I might take a few notes in a class and I had a wall calendar to put important dates on. I might jot down a grocery list or some important dates from a meeting on a scrap of paper. For the most part though, my memory was good enough. My life just wasn’t that complex. My fancy day planner went unused. My pocket calendar was ignored till long after it expired and my nicely bound journals kept a shelf from getting dusty. I was good.

Then several years ago my life outgrew the basic organizational system I’d fallen into for most of my early adult life. It started when I got some more responsibility at work and I had to track my calendar closely, so I started using Outlook for more than just email for the first time. Then I had a lot of information to take away from meetings, so I used letter sized note pads for notes despite my awful handwriting. I tried a Palm Pilot for a while, though it was actually a Sony Clie which I adored, but mostly used as a precursor to a Kindle. More important dates and plans went onto a whiteboard in my office. As I became responsible for even more things, those tools weren’t enough and so my search began in earnest.

My first stop was back to a page-a-day planner. I dug my old one out of a box of stuff in my basement. While it helped a bit, I found it too constraining and small. So I went back to pads of paper which now felt too unorganized. Then I tried using OneNote for a while, and I did have some reasonable success with it for a couple of years. Though in the end I found the interface got in the way of my capturing ideas. Anything besides text didn’t flow freely on a computer and I also missed the feel of pen on paper. With the idea of paper back in mind, I did some research and discovered bullet journaling. It seemed promising, offering some organization with space for free form content using a regular paper notebook! In my further research I stumbled across the compendium of Pinterest bullet journal pages which connected to a rekindling of my artistic impulses and I was hooked on the idea.

Quickly I pulled a freebie journal that was a give-away from a trade show off my shelf and decided to practice for a month to decide if this would really work. Despite my (still) awful handwriting, the format *did* seem to work for me. I bought a real notebook and never looked back. For the first time I had a system that actually worked for me instead of hindering me. I went through a series of bound notebooks over the years, some lost to the inevitable moves and purges of the previous 5 years. Somewhere along the way though, two important things happened.

Four Old Bullet Journals
A collection of the the old bullet journals I still have. Did you notice I like Teal?!

First, at the behest of my therapist, I started to keep a personal reflection journal. A place to spill out all of the things inside my head. It absolutely did not feel safe to put things that were in my head on paper where people could just read them. Some of them were too scary to share. I was totally sure something awful would happen if I did that. It wasn’t until later I came to realize that as a childhood trauma survivor a paper journal felt incredibly dangerous for a reason, but that’s another post… or perhaps several. In any case it seemed safer to keep an electronic journal I could protect with a password, and so I splurged for DayOne at a whole $4.99 (it’s since gotten more expensive!) It worked on my iPhone and iPad seamlessly, and I became a daily writer as a result.

Second, I kept wishing for an electronic version of my planner. I missed the ability to search which I’d had with OneNote. I found I could only fit a year at most into a bound notebook which I could reasonably carry in my purse or backpack. I used my iPad & phone for my journal, calendar, email and reminders. It just seemed like there must be a way to make the leap to using a tablet for my planner/bullet journal as well. Yet try as I might, there just didn’t seem to be a way that worked for me. UNTIL… Apple came out with the iPad Pro and compatible “pencil”. I saw the promise and finally made the leap to an iPad with a stylus and using GoodNotes for my Bullet Journal. I can import documents and photos, then mark them up or take notes on them right in the stream of my bullet journal.

Built my way out of the blues

This is the combination I’ve come to rely on – a sort of hybrid bullet journal system I’ve evolved to meet my needs. It’s written, and fills pages in a virtual notebook, but since it’s electronic there’s as many pages as I could ever need. It’s all backed up in the cloud so I never have to worry about losing all of my notes and ideas if a notebook (iPad) gets lost, stolen, or accidentally used as kindling to start a fire. Thanks to the OCR technology built into GoodNotes, my bullet journal is searchable. I have an infinite number of marker/pen colors available too. My reflection journal is on the same device, and so is my kindle. The list of pluses goes on and on. I can do pretty much everything I need to from a device that fits in my purse. It even has a wireless data plan so I can use it anywhere. It’s become my one thing to carry around, my one device to rule them all.

Yet there are a few major drawbacks. First, at least until very recently, GoodNotes was a battery hog and I had a difficult time making it through a day without boosting a charge. My purse and backpack now both contain a robust charger and cable for just that eventuality. Second, I’m now looking at screens all-the-live-long-day. My eyes and head often are unhappy with me after a long day. Third, and most annoyingly, I miss paper. The feel of my writing implement on paper – a pen or pencil scraping across the not-unnaturally-smooth surface. I can’t hold 3 different pages open. My brain can think about and body can interact with a notebook in three dimensional space, but not with an iPad. It’s only mimicking paper. I’m an analog object using a digital one to impersonate an analog experience.

That longing for the feel of paper fills me at times. I find myself yearning for the imperfections of a pencil’s uneven shading, or bits of carbon scraping off from the freshly sharpened end. The smell of that freshly sharpened pencil is comforting. There is joy in the bleed of marker ink into the fiber of a page, of the smoothness left behind from a crayon filling in the imperfections of the page underneath it and yet somehow raising them up to make imperfection something pleasing to the eye. Sometimes I miss these so much it makes my heart ache and want to ditch the tablet for paper again. I’ve been in that space for a while lately.

Back to the blues…

So I was already primed and ready to fall headlong into the ultimately unconsummated love affair I had with the Hobonichi Techno Cousin Planner this last week. There was a hole in my heart which cold, digital technology couldn’t fill. It was a whirlwind week of romance and research followed by final letdown as I realized the Hobonichi wouldn’t replace my iPad, but simply supplement it. I would have yet another thing to carry around, to try to fit on my desk as I worked, another constraining planner system I’d just get frustrated with. I’m glad I didn’t buy into the siren song of a new planner half way through the year. I’ve kept my sanity for now.

And yet.

I do miss paper and ink. The rasp of the pen, the scratchy flow of a felt marker, the smooth scrape of graphite on paper. So maybe there is room on my desk and in my bag for a small notepad or sketchbook. Just enough to meet my needs. Maybe even a small discbound notebook so I can mix and match pages, customize, make it my own. Hmmm… maybe I should research that…

Guess I’m back to the Bullet Journal Blues. See you in another week!

PTSD, Thoughts

Missing Coffee shops

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In the midst of this pandemic shutdown I find myself missing something many people don’t give a second thought. It’s not the kind of thing which those I interact with on a regular basis seem mention. It’s not social gatherings or sporting events. It’s not shopping, a girls-night-out, or eating out. It’s not even the carefree ease with which life was lived before social distancing in the age of the Coronavirus. It’s something far more pedestrian. I’m missing coffee shops as humble as they are.

It’s not the coffee (or tea!) I miss as much as the place itself. The deep leather chairs and hard wooden tables, the aroma borne of countless urns of brewed coffee and kilos of ground espresso beans which pass through each day leave a blank space. I miss the hustle and background hum, the clatter and snippets of conversation that blend into a pleasant white noise which soothes my mind.

I miss the feeling of being on my own in a sea of ebbing and flowing humanity. I miss the calm and comfort I feel of being alone in a crowd. That feeling of being surrounded by people, yet by my self is comforting and calming to some tattered, wounded part of me. In that liminal space between alone and not alone, I somehow feel safe in a way that often eludes me.

I’ve often wondered why I’m this way. Questioned what it is about who I am and the way I came to be in this world makes me so comfortable in such a space. For years I’ve known that I work best in a coffee shop or similar busy place where the world passes by. If I need to get something done, I don’t seek quiet, I go to the closest Starbucks. If I really want to read, the quiet of a library or my couch is not as helpful as a diner (with a hot cup of something and slice of pie) or a coffee shop.

I’ve long judged myself for not being able to focus in ways that others could. Only now and I starting to accept that I can focus, I just need the right environment. But why? that question burns at my mind. After some thought I have a couple of ideas.

To explore the first idea, I need to tell you another story. You should know my son got into racing as a young child. I blame the Pixar movie “Cars.” He loved that movie, but the real impetus for his interest was a Memorial day weekend NASCAR race that happened to be on TV while we were at a Mexican restaurant. The big screen display with the race was impossible to miss from his seat, and the screen drew him in as usual. He watched enraptured as the *red* car (his favorite color) led the race. Later that night he insisted we watch at home, and he was excited she he found unit the next morning that the *red* car (the #9 driven by Kasey Khane) had won the race. He was hooked. At the age of six, he had a favorite NASCAR driver and a race watching habit.

I assumed it would fade after a few months like most childhood infatuations, but not so. As the summer wore on and fall approached his interest didn’t wane. Living in the south, there just happened to be a track within an hour or so drive. It hosted a fall race. Against my instinct, I decided to take him to a race. Not the big “cup” race, as I was sure he would never make it through hours at the track. I picked a shorter (and cheaper)”truck” series race the same weekend and bought 2 tickets fully planning to leave after 5 minutes.

Full of trepidation, we arrived at the track and found a spot we liked -surprisingly there was no assigned seating. He seemed calm through the preliminaries and some practices. I was worried that as soon as the noise began in earnest, he would struggle mightily. My son has some sensory issues, and I was worried the extreme noise would set him off into a full meltdown. I had unnerving visions of having to carry him out to a quiet spot.

I sat practically jittering in my seat as the drivers lined up to start and the flag waved. I missed the start of the race, because I was watching my son, just waiting to bolt with him for the exit. His eyes shined with anticipation as the trucks took off. I looked for any sign of distress, but as the trucks made their first lap I saw something unexpected.

He relaxed. His shoulders slid down a bit, and the tension eased out of his body. He calmed. My normally high-strung, overly sensory sensitive child calmed into a relaxed state. I was stunned. After a while I asked as best I could over the noise how he was doing, and he said “fine.” He seemed as calm as when he sat with his stuffed bunny in my lap on the rocking chair each night reading books before bed. He stayed that way till we left about an hour later (after the first wreck.)

I struggled to understand how this child who was normally sensitive to some of the minutest sensory inputs could calm so dramatically in the face of that overwhelming wall of sound. I pondered for quite a while until later an Occupational Therapist (OT) explained to me that in some people with overly sensitive sensory systems a massive sensory input will actually overload the sensitive part of the nervous system and allow it to function normally. Kind of like how in high school chemistry an experiment showed me that a buffered solution barely changed PH even when sulfuric acid was added to it.

The overload of noise leveled out my son’s sensory response, just like those apocryphal tales parents sometimes tell of colicky children falling asleep moments after the vacuum cleaner is turned on. So… how does this connect to the coffee shop I ache for every day now you might ask?

Well, reflecting on my son’s experience makes me wonder if some part of my nervous system is in its own form of overdrive. I suppose it’s possible that I share some of his sensory issues as 50% of our DNA is in common, but I have an unfortunately more sinister suspicion. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a childhood trauma survivor. The world I lived in for so many years simply wasn’t safe. Danger and awful things could happen any time, with almost no warning. So, early on in my life at some level I became hyper-vigilant with some part of me always on the lookout for danger. In a quiet space, every noise, change in lighting, or even air movement triggered a response to check for danger thus pulling me away from what I was doing. This hyper-vigilance is actually a feature and diagnostic criteria of PTSD.

A coffee shop provides me with a level of input that masks those little noises and changes. It in effect lowers my threshold of awareness for things that would trigger my hyper-vigilance. So I feel calmer, and more able to focus. I think this is why I first started journaling about my childhood experiences in a coffee shop, and why I’m best able to process those experiences in that kind of space. I can often write volumes in my journal at a Starbucks with my headphones on and at home struggle to get down a paragraph. That alone makes sense of why I miss coffee shops.

Yet it leads into the other reason I think I find alone-in-public spaces so comforting – there is little danger for me in a busy public space. Almost all of my traumatic experiences happened in secret – behind closed doors, in the dark, beyond the reach of public view. A busy public space is the anthesis of that. Besides I usually don’t know anybody in these spaces beyond a casual acquaintance with the usual barista or perhaps crossing the path of repeat patrons on occasion. Not only were my worst childhood experiences hidden, but like so many others it was often at the hands of those I knew. It makes sense that a public place full of strangers feels safer to me.

So I spend my days missing coffee shops. I wait anxiously for it to be is time to go back into my safe space again. Until then I do my best to find snippets of safe enough time and space to write wherever I can.

Thoughts

Stuff

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This is a post I started quite a while ago, have just stumbled across again and so decided to finish.

My wife sent me an article – What It’s Like to Live in a Space the Size of a Closet – about a writer living in a sub 175 sqft apartment in Seattle. It got me thinking about possessions. Paulette talks about how she’s actually found happiness once she got used to the idea of living in such a small space. What really struck me was a comment about stuff. It moved me to read about how she stood in her dad’s house an hour after he died and realized all his prized possessions was stuff that had no meaning to her. I’ve had my own experience being overwhelmed by somebody else’s stuff.

How much stuff we accumulate! I’ve come to be very aware of this fact. A few years ago I moved out of a house I’d spent 13 years in. I had so loved the house when I moved in because it had a basement, a garage, big closets, and a huge forested yard. I loved it for the space and I loved it for the shaded seclusion of that yard. Over the years things accumulated in all that space bit by bit. The clothes my son outgrew, the toys he never played with anymore, tools for the yard and house, implements in the kitchen, boxes of photos and more.

My Ex’s parent passed away suddenly and all of the beloved items of a remembered childhood arrived in our home to sit beloved but in boxes lining the basement and closets. The stuff grew. It felt important, as though I was less without all that stuff.

It overflowed as my mother came to live with me after she left a bad relationship of her own. Her stuff came with her filling the remaining space in the basement. When she moved out much of her belongings stayed. My child grew and his old nursery became a place to store yet more things my Ex couldn’t bear to sort through or part with.

The growth of belongings and ferocity with which they were protected overwhelmed and frightened me. I didn’t see it at the time, but they were an attempt to exercise control over things that couldn’t be controlled. The loss of a parent that couldn’t be controlled or accepted. The unwillingness to accept the growing up and moving on of a child maturing into their own. Eventually I realized my Ex controlled me too. I wasn’t allowed to grow, change or be myself. I had to be who I had always been.

As the relationship finally reached then end of its decade long crumble, I decided I needed to love myself and live my own life on my terms. I moved out and left so much behind. I moved for safety, for my own space, to start to finally live my own life. There wasn’t much to take. Some clothes, some books, A few kitchen things. Stuff that was necessary or the felt vitally important to making it through the first few weeks. Besides my Ex didn’t want me to take much of anything. Still exerting control through stuff.

What little I left with didn’t feel like enough, and yet at the same time it did. Over a few weeks as I started to settle, it became apparent it was enough, plenty in fact. Suddenly that confusion started to make more sense. The overburden of stuff had been as restrictive and suffocating as much as the relationship had been. As my Ex cleared the house to sell it, I wanted none of it. I needed to be free.

It was a chore clearing the decade of detritus in that house. I seethed with resentment at having to deal with somebody else’s problem. Not only was it somebody else’s problem, it was one I had finally felt like I had escaped, yet I was sucked back in, controlled by that pile of stuff one last time. It was a mad, painful dash against time to clear the piles before it sold. I was there cleaning until minutes before the closing.

In the end, it all happened and all the things I didn’t want or need went to a garage sale or donation. I didn’t get a penny for any of its but in the end I got something worth so much more – I was no longer tied to that pile of stuff.  I felt unburdened, clean and free. I wasted so much of my life trapped by things I never needed, by other people’s stuff.

Art, PTSD, Thoughts

A New Blog

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After a fair amount of soul searching (and a communications class), I’ve decided to migrate my old blog from a freebie wordpress.com site to a real wordpress.org site I’ve built and setup myself in the cloud. It was a the first time in a while I’ve been able to use my technical skills at all, and the fact it was to do something for my writing gives me a warm-fuzzy feeling all over. My professional world and my writing world collided for a brief moment, with one making the other much better.

I’ve been bursting with ideas, but slow to get moving on them. My drafts folder is full of pieces I’ve started and not finished, each in a varied state of composition needing work. They run the gamut from a couple of sentences of an idea to an almost complete piece that sits on the balance between being self published here on my blog or getting submitted for more formal publication.

Before getting back to those pieces, and bringing them closer to fruition here or elsewhere, I’d like to share something fitting for a new start — a drawing. There is some back story to this. Several years ago when I started working in earnest with things from my traumatic childhood I started to draw. It began as a simple respite of tactile input, pencil scraping along paper. It quickly became more as images of the past full of joy and terror flowed forth. My subconscious taking form on the page. Memories moving into the world. I moved from pencil to crayon, to marker, to colored pencils, to pastels, then to gel pens experimenting and relishing the feel of implement meeting paper. For 3 years I drew, and colored, and sketched getting better with practice.

One image of a flower showed up over and over again. I came to see it was a form of comfort for some long suffering part of me that wanted our existence to be as happy and simple as the world we drew on sheets of paper in 2nd grade. There are dozens upon dozens of sketches and drawings of a similar flower. Then I mostly stopped my art for a while as my life turned up-side-down. Every now and then a flower sketch would show up in my bullet journal or I’d drag out a sketchpad and color a flower when I felt the need for comfort.

After a few years of keeping a bullet journal on paper, I bought an iPad and went digital using GoodNotes. It works well enough, and I can keep all of my notes with me all the time, not just what fits in the most recent book. Still, flower sketches showed up in my bullet journal in the margins of pages. After a couple of years of missing my coloring and drawing, I noticed a sketch & coloring app for the iPad. It’s given me the ability to creat art wherever I am, but I miss the tactile feel of implement on paper.

The first drawing I did on my iPad marked a new beginning, and it seems fitting to share it here for the new beginning of my blog.

Drawing of a flower in front of mountains