Rebecca Michael's blog

Snow?

3.30.09

It snowed on Friday.  I watched last week as the clouds began to slowly swallow up the mountains.  First the tops disappeared and somehow as the foggy clouds enveloped the higher peaks, the outlines of the lower ones became more crisp and defined.  Then the clouds got thicker and lower until it looked like Santa Fe was nestled in the middle of flat, white sheets of paper rather than mountains.  Driving to work the normally expansive vista of desert and mountains was replaced by what looked like the background of a small child’s drawing - plain, empty, negative space, only white.  I had the impression that if I drove far enough, I would simply drive off of the earth or hit a paper wall.  I suppose that driving 65mph (yes, I do drive the speed limit, especially since my car is a little under the weather) I would rip right through a piece of paper.  I wonder what would be on the other side . . .

It was not until I arrived at work as on time as I could be seeing that it took me at least twice as long to drive through the unplowed, snow-filled roads that I even thought to think that perhaps I didn’t need to be there.  I had actually been woken up that morning by a text message from my sister saying that if I was not going to work, we should hang out.  At that point I had no clue about the snow and in my half-asleep confusion I thought, “well of COURSE I’m going to work!  That’s what I do!  I can’t just not go because I decide that I’m not going . . .”  Well, as it turns out, I didn’t need to go to work until 10AM because we had a two hour delay.  I discovered this by calling a coworker as I sat in my car, looking at the deserted Head Start building, unable to check my work phone because it was sitting at home in the pocket of a sweatshirt.  My coworker was able to confirm that I needn’t be there for another hour or so, but there was no point in trying to make it back to Santa Fe.

I was never given a key to the front gate, but as luck would have it I had someone else’s with me.  I felt triumphant at such good fortune until I discovered that the lock was frozen shut, which left me to plunge through shin-deep snow around the side through the gate that is never locked.  Snow filled my dansko clogs and soaked into the legs of my corduroy pants.  I got inside, kicked off my shoes, and made myself at home.  It was nice to be the only one in the building and the snow outside left me feeling warm, cozy and peaceful.  All in all, accidentally showing up on time worked to my advantage because I had a nice, relaxed but productive morning and got to leave early.

The weekend remained chilly and the snow stuck on the ground for a few days.  While it looked pretty that first morning, I am so over snow.  

Saturday night Adi and I developed a plan.  We have both put on a few winter pounds and gotten into some less-than-desirable habits over the past few months.  In an attempt to reverse all of that, we have decided to start joint grocery shopping on a fairly regular basis so that we will eat out less and eat healthier food.  Sunday we went to a produce market and for $29 purchased a very, very large amount of vegetables.  We also hit Trader Joe’s for protein and a few other things.  Arriving home we put the food away carefully - Adi helping me by dividing my dried mango into six containers so that I won’t accidentally eat it all in one sitting.  Then I baked banana bread and we played cards.

Since Sunday we (and really by “we,” I do mean Adi) have made two large, delicious salads that served as a few dinners and lunch.  Last night Adi made chicken soup from scratch for dinner that was even more delicious today for lunch.  I’ve been eating my mango as a snack at work and overall it’s going really well.  Adi loves to cook/prepare food and is having a good time making stuff for us to share.  It feels good to be eating things that are good for my body and to be sharing food and clean up.  

The other part of the new plan, which is really just my own new plan, is that I have re-introduced swimming to my daily routine because I’ve just been so inconsistent with exercise recently.  But get this, not only am I swimming daily . . . I’m waking up at 5:30AM so that I can get to the pool by 6AM so that I can swim for an hour BEFORE going to work!  I’ve been going to bed by 11PM every day this week and while I am tired and it is certainly a routine to which I will need to adjust, it feels good.  The hard parts are getting out of bed and then once I’m at the pool actually getting into the pool.  Once I’m in, it’s rather nice.  I’m usually not entirely awake, which helps and by the end I am rather energized.  I hop in and do one lap to warm up, one lap with the kick board, twenty laps, three laps kicking, five laps, two laps kicking, five laps, one kicking, one last victory lap and I’m done.  When the pool is set up for short course (swimming the width, which is 25m), it takes a little under an hour and I’ll do some pull-ups towards the end.

What I am starting to all in love with about this routine is getting home from work and not thinking “Ok, I need to make sure I get an hour in at the gym, so that means that right now I can do this, then I have to do that, but what if I want to do that, man oh man I’m tired . . .”  I also enjoy that I leave in the dark and when I get out of the pool the sun is just rising.  I like that by the time I get to work my body is awake.  I like watching the sky outside of Chavez, where I swim, in the early morning and feeling the texture of morning air.  

Tomorrow I have to go to Albuquerque for a training for work.  I am going to try to get to the pool to do at least half of my workout, but I have to have my car at the shop and be ready to leave from there at 8AM.  We’ll see.  Now I need to go because I am running late!

I’m Not Pregnant!

3.21.09

I am not pregnant!  Not that I thought that I was or anything.  Unless I had done something really bad, it would be rather miraculous for me to be pregnant seeing as I am currently dating someone who does not have boy parts.  And I didn’t do anything bad.  I’m just trying to keep things in perspective because I had another morning that felt like the universe shitting on me and since getting here it seems that I do is wipe off the universal shit that keeps falling from the sky.  As of late I’ve been wondering what role I play in what seems like an unending streak of bad luck.  I see myself over and over again acting as though I am the victim of cruel fate, causing me to first get angry and then to shut down.  I recognized that I have allowed the negative to take up so much space in my mind that I cannot appreciate the positive but for fleeting moments.  I came to that understanding and made a conscious choice to shift my focus and my perspective.  And today, keeping life in perspective means thinking about how much deeper trouble I’d be in if somehow I were pregnant.

After weeks of putting it off, I took my car to Alex Safety Lane today to find out what the clunking, rattling, shimmying and shaking going on in the front end of my car is all about.  Pep Boys said the sway bar is broken and then never called me back after they said they’d find the part.  It was suggested to me to go elsewhere.  So I dragged myself out of bed, took a shower, got all of my work stuff together, got directions and headed out.  The people at Alex Safety Lane were very friendly as I explained what was going on.  I gave them my keys and they offered me a ride if I needed one since it would be a few hours before I could get my car back.  It’s the first day of spring and Santa Fe is sunny and warm today, so I declined and headed out for a walk.

After about forty minutes of walking and exploring a different area of Santa Fe that I’d never really explore before, I headed to Whole Foods for some coffee.  I’ve been feeling under the weather this week - sore throat, head ache, tightness in my chest - and whether I’m sick or have some sort of allergies, I was totally out of it by the time I got to Whole Foods.  For at least ten or fifteen minutes I wandered around trying to decide what to get for breakfast.  I looked at one juice, compared it to another, wandered to a different section, went back to the first juice and wandered around some more.  I finally got a juice that supposedly has like five hundred million times the vitamin C of any other anything on the planet - I wanted something cold and it seemed that vitamin C might be helpful with whatever it is that is ailing me.  I bought it, sat down, finished it in less than a minute and decided to go look for some food either for breakfast or to buy for lunch later.  

Around and around I went again.  I settled on coffee to give me more time to decide what food I wanted.  I got my cup, grabbed a copy of the latest Santa Fe Reporter and tried to slowly sip my coffee while reading the paper cover to cover.  Still no word about my car, so I headed back to the isles and wandered some more.  I found a can of soup that looked good and cheap.  As I headed to the check out, I got distracted in the whole body section and ended up sitting on the floor next to the flower essences, reading a very large book that listed all sorts of ailments and what flower essences to take to relieve them.  Adi and I just had a discussion about flower essences recently, so it seemed quite pertinent and was actually quite interesting.  A woman working in the whole body section came over and offered me a little cushion thing to sit on.  Then my phone rang.

The estimate they gave me on the phone was about $600.  They say when it rains it pours.  I live in the desert.  It doesn’t matter.  All I could think as I walked from Whole Foods back to pick up my car was “I just spent basically an entire pay check on a new laptop because mine got stolen.  Today is pay day and there goes that pay check.  When does it end?  When can my pay check just pay for my living expenses and then go into my savings?  What else could possibly come my way?”  I wavered between angry, indignant, sad, resigned and eventually tried for some sense of calm, for some type of rationality.  At the garage they printed a cost summary sheet with a balance of $507, as I paid a $100 deposit on the spot.  When I sat down at my desk when I finally got to work, I realized that the parts were not listed on the sheet, so I called and discovered that in fact the total will be $715, so at this point I owe $615.  

So here I am.  I talked to my dad about it who said, “are you looking for help?”  I thought about it for a second and said no.  I don’t want help.  Well, actually I don’t need help.  I have a full time job and do have some money in the bank.  These repairs will not break me.  They are much less than it would cost to get a new car and in order for me to get to work and to live, as much as I absolutely hate it, I currently depend on my Daewoo.  I think I just needed to complain about how much it sucks to be an adult.  I just needed to be reminded that this is not the universe trying to make my life miserable, it’s just how things go.  And it’s ok for me to feel upset and angry and frustrated about it.  But it’s not just me.  A little later on I talked to my brother.  He talked a lot about the mechanics of it all.  He mentioned how much money he used to spend on repairs for his Land Rover.  A little later later on I talked to my sister-in-law.  She offered empathy in a way that was comforting and called me yet again back to the idea that this type of thing happens to everyone.  It just does.

And I am not pregnant.  I just have me to pay for.  I’d like to be able to be saving more money than I currently am, but I have a home, I have a job, I have food, and I have people who I care about and who care about me.  Once I get my car fixed, it’ll feel like a new car.  When I got in it at the garage to drive out to work, I took a deep breath, petted the steering wheel and told the Daewoo how I love her and understand that she’s getting old and has been good to me.  It’s important to take care of the people and also the things that we love, value, and need and sometimes taking care means spending money.  Et voila.  

It Doesn't Get To Be Easy All The Time, huh?

2.25.09

A Wet Desert

I moved to the desert six months ago.  The high desert with dirt, scruffy looking shrub-trees, thin air, and more shades of brown than I ever knew existed.  It’s not the picture of a desert that I first developed as a child.  The looming mountains that surround Santa Fe prevent an unending expanse of land and sky.  There is no need for mirages or oases.  Sand dunes do not belong to this landscape.  But it is dry.  In the summer it does get hot.  The sky seems endless, even with the neighboring mountains.  The altitude makes breathing difficult at first and I arrived with the need to adjust in many different ways.

I arrived during the rainy season.  One of the first things I came to appreciate about the area was my ability to watch storms in the distance from where I stood dry and warmed by the sun.  I loved to see the clouds that looked like they were mimicking the mountains in the way they stood tall, thick, proud with vertical streams of water connecting the sky to the earth.  When the storm got closer, I could feel the air thicken and the sky would darken.  Underneath the storm, I felt the intensity with which the clouds shed their excess moisture and allowed the dry desert earth to soak it up.  During one such storm, I learned first hand about the amount of water the sky could dump upon as I drove home through flooded streets, wondering if my car was going to float away and how so much rain had made such a sudden appearance.  At home we ran around closing windows to keep our insides dry and protected.  Depending on the wind and the severity of the storm, I would sit on the couch on our front porch.  It was more practical to watch storms in the distance from that vantage point, as there was no danger of getting sprayed with cold water.

My own first storm came with the same fury and intensity of a Santa Fe summer rain storm.  Not long after my arrival I returned home from the gym one afternoon.  I got home to see Bucket’s car.  Bucket was good friends with the Rosie, only housemate I did not know upon moving - I moved in with my sister, her then boyfriend and Rosie.  While I try with all my might to be open to meeting new people and making friends, with only two weeks between my life in Paris and the desert, my intentions seemed to matter not and I had no desire to be around any of the new people I met, particularly not Bucket.  I walked into the house and promptly realized that I needed to leave.  I took my iPod and my cell phone and went for a walk.

Unable to understand the emotions welling up inside of me and unsure of what to do with them, I called a dear old friend in hopes of connecting with someone who knew and understood me.  I, of course, chose to call the friend who, like me, is notorious for not answering.  As I listened to the outgoing message on her voice mail, I lost it.  Crying for the first time since leaving Paris, perhaps for the first time since the previous September, almost one entire year, I left a message in which all of the fears that I felt unjustified in feeling came pouring out - I had made a huge mistake in leaving Paris, I was trapped by my decision to live with my sister, I would never make friends and was bound to a circle of people who I found to be annoying and pretentious, I would never find a job and all of my savings would go to waste.  Tears streaming down my face and gasping for breath, I could not go back to the house that I had agreed to call home for the next year.  With nowhere really to go, I kept slowly walking through the neighborhood.

Much to my relief, barely a few minutes passed before my phone vibrated and I looked to see Tucker’s name pop up.  I answered and continued my outpouring of fears, anxiety and sadness.  When I reached the elementary school about three blocks from my house, I sat down by the parking lot to continue.  “BUCKET!” I exclaimed, “who the HELL is named Bucket!?  What a stupid fucking name!  Can you imagine, god, her stupid name says it all.  She is a bucket.  She barely even acknowledges my presence and is so whiney and self-involved.  She talks like she’s sooo deep.  Her name is BUCKET for fuck’s sake!”   Of course it wasn’t really about Bucket at all.  Whether or not Bucket had come into my life was really quite inconsequential, but it was easy to use her as a way to vent my frustration.

Knowing me well, Tucker laughed at my tirade and also took seriously the fact that I was in tears.  Since she first met me when we were both 17 years old, crying had been a once a year occasion and it took a lot for tears to come.  I often felt desert-like when it came to emotional expression.  I tend first towards anger and use that energy to plow through whatever might be upsetting to me.  Sadness and tears were generally a sign of a level of honesty that felt uncomfortable and abandonment to the idea that I just might not be able to change whatever had caused the tears.  And then there were those times when I wanted nothing more than to cry and no matter how hard I squinted, dry-sobbed and worked to produce that salty liquid, I could at best squeeze out one single tear that would dissipate before even reaching my chin.  It was as though I cried out all of the tears my body could produce after my boyfriend broke up with me a month into my first year at college.  

Tears were not the only piece of me that dried up during that time of my life.  My menstrual cycle, which had never been regular to begin with, all but disappeared.  Months would pass and there would be no period.  I knew I was not pregnant and at first I suspected the irregularity came from weight loss that had taken place over the two previous years plus the stress of transitioning to college.  My mom insisted I see a doctor, but there was never really anything conclusive that they could tell me.  I was prescribed hormones to take every time three months passed with no period, but the hormones made me feel like a crazy person and it was much more convenient to just not have a period, so more often than not I just let it go.  No period was particularly useful when I went abroad for my junior year of college and when I returned to Paris the year after I earned my Masters degree.

It seems curious then that moving to a desert would bring the liquids back to my life.  The reappearance of tears came first and matched the rainy season.  The rainy season passed and my tears remained.  I also finally got another prescription for hormones to bring my period back after a year of dryness.  The hormones exacerbated the crying and life became a series of storms with no end in sight.  While I had made a few friends, established a few routines, met and started a relationship with my girlfriend Adi and gotten a job, I remained dissatisfied and overwhelmed by the feeling that there was nothing to look forward to.  I fought endlessly with myself about looking back too much, about romanticizing about how things could, should, would be different if.  I fought with myself about feeling bad and got annoyed with my inability to see the good for what it was and my life for what it was - complicated.

The rehydration of my life is continuing to this day.  I cry at least once a week.  I cannot even count how many times in these past months I have sobbed with abandon, laid on my bed shaking, rocking myself, trying to catch my breath and more importantly trying to catch my life.  I got my period without the assistance of hormones once and my tender, swollen breasts tell me that I should soon be having another all on my own.  While I’ve tried to maintain a full time job and my daily trips to the gym, a combination of stress/hopeless/boredom eating and exhaustion have caused my body to fill out, softening what was once tight and hard, rounding out my stomach, hips, butt and bust.  While I miss the controlled version of my body, smaller chest and ass, tighter stomach, I feel womanly and fertile.  

There is a lot of growth in me these days.  It is the painful stage though, the stage that is watered by my tears and derived from my struggles.  I am learning to be more honest with myself about what is going on.  I am trying to be more patient with my emotions and to allow them to happen so that they can pass quickly and with more ease.  I am working on allowing myself to feel what I feel without turning myself into a victim.  I am not happy, but I am figuring out how I can become happy again, how I can become the version of me that I miss.  I am also figuring out how I can be happy and unhappy, how I can have tears and still smile, how I can be a softer, rounder me and still feel sexy, how I focus on what is worthwhile in the present without settling or giving up hope for the future.  I am trying to love today and not to worry about how much it might hurt tomorrow if I have to decide that I cannot stay here for the love of someone else.  I am aware that I need to make decisions based on my needs and my ability to be and to find happiness and I am learning that the road to that happiness, to fulfilling those needs might cause me more pain along the way.

I moved to the desert after a lush year of fun, adventure, excitement, financial stability and sheer joy in Paris.  Paris brought me luck and allowed me to push myself in new ways that magically felt easy and good.  I learned about my capacity to be social, to be independent, to be adventurous and to seize the day.  Valid lessons they were and the process of learning them brought me continual joy and a sense of true, solid contentment.  I left feeling confident that I could take all of that with me and that life would just continue to work out with the same luck, ease and magic that I had found in Paris.  I also suspect that my body left Paris but my heart and spirit were unwilling to keep up with my body and are still stuck across the Atlantic.  It has taken a lot of breaking down for me to even be able to recognize just how hard it has been to move to a place that seems so dry and desolate.  And as I begin to wade through the tears this year has brought so far, I am finally able to start to see that the experience here has as much to offer as my experiences last year in Paris; I am finally able to start to see that the struggle is as important a piece of my life as the ease of Paris was last year.  It is a different type of learning, a different type of experience.  It is a different piece of my life and it adds a new layer to my story, it brings a new level of depth to my emotions and gives me access to parts of me that have been consciously or unconsciously on lock-down for quite some time now.  Like the dry desert earth soaked up and was nourished by the water dropped by mountainous clouds when I first arrived, I is soaking up the tears and using what they reveal as they wash over me to nourish myself in a way that is unfamiliar and not always the most comfortable for me.

Fridays Suck

12.12.08

I hate Fridays.  Fridays are the day on which all of the tension and exhaustion and stress and lack of sleep and disappointment of the week comes crashing down on me and as I drive home from work I have to concentrate extra hard to make sure that I don’t veer off the road or something.  There is tension in the back of my head, the right side right where my neck meets me head and my jaw aches.  My back is all twisted and out of sorts from sitting sideways at my desk so that my computer monitor doesn’t face the entire office.  I get home and want nothing more than to sleep for a hundred years, but the gym closes at 7:45 on Friday nights and so what I try to do is to find a way to gather some scrap of energy to allow myself to change and get over to the gym because inevitably I’ve skipped more times that I find acceptable during the week either because I had a fever or my period or a family night or there was a birthday or whatever.  And if I can find that little bit of energy to get over there, I push push push through the workout, wanting nothing more than for it to be over and done with because it is no longer enjoyable but a chore to get done because the rest of my life feels riddled with requirements and should dos and so working out has become something I have to stretch to do.  

And so today I came home with a lot of pain in my right side.  I had polarity work done at work today, which is energy work.  I was upset because I had been expecting a massage and ended up getting polarity done and it wasn’t at all what I wanted.  There were other little things throughout the day that built up – crap with health insurance, feeling like I’m doing a job that I am not getting paid for, long boring meetings and the like.  By the afternoon I was dragging and in pain.  It was to the point where I took painkillers.  I probably could have survived without them, but I really really wanted to get to the gym and so I thought “may as well take them in hopes of it helping me later on today.”  Then I even left work a little early in hopes of being able to have an extra moment for myself before going to the gym.

It is now 6:06PM and while I know that if I were to jump up, change and rush over there right this minute, I could get in my workout.  But I’m tired and frustrated and so so so angry at feeling this rushed and unable to do what I want to do that I can’t even do it.  I started to write last night about how I miss France and as I lay here in bed hate hate hating that I can’t even find the energy to go to the gym and that I have no desire to go to the pot luck at Cinizia’s tonight, I thought about how different my life in France as and how I miss it.

I think what I miss most is that France was this space in my life in which it was totally OK and easy to make myself the number 1 priority the majority of the time.  It was such a luxury to be able to think of me, my wants, my needs, my emotions, my time, my goals, and my happiness first almost always.  I guess maybe it spoiled me.  But it seems so wrong to me that my life should consist of spending more time doing things that I would not actively chose to do if I really felt like I had the choice.  And it pisses me off to think that this is what it means to be an adult and to be grown up.  And I know know know that in some ways I am playing the victim and that I do make choices and decisions and that it is up to me to prioritize things, but when student loans and rent and bills have to be paid, when a lease has been signed, when there are people you love who want and need you in their lives, when there was only one job interview and lucky that job was offered to me, it doesn’t feel much like there’s a whole lot of room in there for constructing the life that I want.  And maybe I am just giving up too easily or being far too stubborn about the things that I want.  But even so, I could not help but start to cry as I lay here tonight thinking about how I couldn’t even just go for a walk, just a simple walk today.  All of the “exercise” I got in my life today consisted of me walking around the Head Start.  On an average day in Paris, even if I did not find the time to take a walk for the sake of taking a walk, I got in at least 45 minutes worth of walking through the city, up and down stairs in subways and at school.  

And now I’m at that place where I feel so much anger and frustration churning inside of me that I need to do SOMETHING to get rid of it.  But I am so tired and at a loss as to how to deal with it that I can’t figure out how to even get out of bed to deal with it.  And no, I am not on hormones and no, I am not pmsing and no, I am not sick.  I want to break something.

One of my gripes living here is that I feel like I have no friends of my own or life of my own.  Tonight I have been invited to Cinzia’s for a potluck.  Cinzia taught ESL with me and potentially could be my very own friend.  I have no desire to go.  In fact, I actively do not want to go.  So the one time something of my very own presents itself I can’t even figure out how to want to participate.

Living here makes me feel so crazy.  It wasn’t supposed to be this hard.  I know staying in France would have been hard in its own right.  I mean, I think about that every time I start to miss it.  I pull out my list of reasons why it’s really OK that I’m here not there - my list of why it would have been hard and not the same and not satisfying and not what it was had I stayed there – finding a job, finding a place to live, working out visas, not having the same social network, being far away from home, not having furniture, etc.  In the end it doesn’t help to think about those things.  In the end I still miss my life there.  I still miss the city and how it felt to spend hours upon hours wandering through the streets, usually the same route over and over and over again but sometimes a new path, a new back road, a different turn, or just noticing something that I’d passed a million times and never seen before.

Sometimes I think I am meant to live a really solitary life.  Human relations exhaust me and I feel like I’m not really equipped to maintain really close relationships with people, or at least not to do so for extended periods of time in one place.  Sure being far away and alone has its drawbacks, its moments that don’t feel so great and are hard.  But life is like that no matter what.  You can be in a room with the people who know you best and who love you more than anything and still feel like complete and utter shit.  You can be there with them and have them holding you and telling you it’ll be OK, listening to you, supporting you and doing everything in their power and more to make you feel OK or to let you feel what you’re feeling and STILL you can feel like shit.  It happens with our without witnesses, and sometimes I think that maybe for me what works best is being on my own and being OK with it for the majority of the time and then when I’m not so OK with it, just going through that and coming around to the other side of it.  

Of course I’m not actually going to act on this.  I’m not going to become a recluse or a hermit lost somewhere in the streets of Paris though that seems like exactly what I want the freedom to have right now.  I mean, I guess being on my own just feels like so much freedom and coming back into a situation where I am more actively involved with people I love feels like losing a lot of that freedom.  And it feels like such an awful awful thing to say – that being with those people who love me and who I love is stifling and holds me back so I don’t say it.  And I don’t mean it that way.  I just mean that it brings about a really unique set of challenges for me and it really overwhelms me and I feel ill equipped to deal with them.

Did I write about the family night on Monday night in which we talked about stress management?  Did I talk about how part of the info packet had a worksheet about transitions?  Did I mention that I realized that these past six months of my life have included at least four transitions that are a lot bigger and more major than I had ever really realized?  It’s hard for me to give myself the time and space to deal with them.  It’s strange because last year in France (and when I lived in Dijon as well), I learned to be super compassionate and kind towards myself.  I learned how to set outside of myself and take care of myself how I would take care of a friend.  I learned to let go and to lower the bar and that it’s fine to not live up to all of the expectations that I set for myself.  

Those were all strategies and ways in which I was able to cope with the challenges in my life – transitioning and acclimating to living in a different country, on my own, and such.  Now here I am hit with all of that (yes, even acclimating to living in a different country and going through culture shock counts) and I feel like my body is in constant rebellion and like I am never doing enough or doing it right or balancing or showing up for people or showing up for myself and I let it get so big and impossible that its crippling to the point where I get home from work on Friday evening with one single goal – to go to the gym- and I end up in bed feeling angry with myself and my life.  And it doesn’t seem to even matter anymore or to work anymore to tell myself that its really fine and that I need to be kind and compassionate to myself, that one night of being less active than usual won’t kill me and that I need to rest and relax.  Those thoughts that used to work seem to just make me remember all the other nights I’ve had like this here (and maybe in reality they are not as many as they seem in my worked up mind right now) and then I start thinking about how many more there are to come.  

One major strategy that I think has worked wonders since the end of high school has been writing and maybe I need to come back to that and be more intentional about that these days.  Walking and going to the gym, of course, were other huge de-stressing techniques.  Of course now they only seem to add to the sense that I am overextended, overwhelmed, overly obligated and incapable of figuring out how to balance my life.  But maybe if I take more time to sit and write I’ll be able to readjust my life in a way that makes sense and allows me to feel like I am living up to my own expectations, meeting my own needs and being the person that I want to be both for myself and for the people in my immediate day to day life (and really there are only a few of those people and even then it seems to be way more than I can handle – I really should become a recluse).

My Life as a Calendar

12.9.08

I have an appointment to see an obgyn tomorrow morning.  I am a little bit excited but also apprehensive.  The excitement lies in the possibility of a new doctor being able to tell me something new, something concrete, something informative, something helpful . . . I mean, something really.  Of course the apprehension is due to the fact that I am well aware that I might just hear the exact same thing that I have heard from other doctors – inconclusive sounding, tentative, unclear explanations and reasoning for why my periods are so irregular.  Of course that response will likely come with the recommendation to either take progesterone, a hormone, once every three to four months for ten days in order to induce a period that would otherwise refuse to happen, or to go on birth control.

Neither solution has had much appeal for me and I’ve spent the past few years not feeling very concerned about the problem.  I was reassured that my lab work was all normal and fine last time I went in to talk to someone and also about a month ago when I went in for an annual.  However, I am starting to realize that this really isn’t normal and probably isn’t so OK.  In preparation for my visit tomorrow I went through my calendar to make a list of when I have had my period and whether it was natural or induced hormonally.  At first I started in 2006 and then ended up going back as far as 2005.  I discovered that from January 2005 until right now (November 2008) I have had my period a grand total of seven times, four of which were hormonally induced.  Were I regular, or mostly regular, I would have had it about 46 times during that span of time.  

The point of this really wasn’t to get into my gynecological issues, but rather to allow myself a moment to think about what I really found tonight.  The process of figuring all of that out included me looking through my calendar, which I have done a decent job at keeping up to date with the goings ons of my life, over the past four years.  It took me from living in Dijon through my senior year of college and my Masters degree back to France and finally here to Santa Fe.  I had to try hard not to read too much of what was written in the years in Dijon and Paris because the second I started to allow myself to do so, I was hit with a feeling of longing and sadness.  

Even just letting my eyes scan over the days, weeks, months and years was neat though.  Just to think about how many places I’ve been and how many people I’ve met.  Today I got to thinking about skydiving and it took me a minute to register that I have actually jumped out of an airplane.  It almost doesn’t seem like me who did it and though it wasn’t even a year ago, it feels distant.  I don’t think I’ve ever missed a place the way I miss Paris.

Last night I stayed late at work to host a parent training on stress management.  The training itself was not the most inspiring, but at the end of the handouts was a section on transitions.  The very last page was a worksheet that simply asked that we think about transitions we have gone through, how we dealt with them and then transitions we are going through and how we can deal with them.  I quickly started to list transitions I’m currently or have recently undergone and was surprised to find that the four bullets were quickly filled and I felt as though it might not have even been enough space.  I chose to write down that I am living with my sister for the first time in seven years, I moved away from Paris, I’m in a relationship for the first time in a long time and I’m working a full time job.  Then I tried to think about how I’m giving myself space to deal with it and I came up with . . . nothing.  The key word on the worksheet I think was “space” and as I thought about it, I realized that I’ve been so busy that I don’t actually feel like I’ve had much space.  Sure, I could say that I go to the gym, but with my time crunch even that has become stressful.  I haven’t had time to write, and I seem to be so focused on getting through the things that I have to (or that I feel obligated) to do.  I do have moments of clarity in which I can step outside of the hecticness and try to prioritize a bit, but I have a hard time with it.  I also think I’ve been having a hard time allowing myself to feel and experience just how hard these transitions are.

Anyway, it was fun to look at a calendar overview of how I’ve spent the past four years of my life.  All in all I have to say I’m rather pleased with how it looks.  And after having thought a bit about transitions and some of the stress causers in my life right now, I’m feeling a bit of calm and peace, and optimism that I will be able to be more present, able to prioritize and happy in the moment when I get back from winter break.

Raise a Hand . . .

12.8.08

It’s early morning – or at least what counts as early to my groggy body.  I haven’t even had coffee yet, but I’m already driving down the highway, pulling into the exit lane as the mountains disappear beyond where the highway continues.  Pulling to a stop at the end of the exit, I think about the very first time I made this drive, not knowing if I’d ever make it again, not knowing exactly where the pueblo started, not having any clue what lay inside the pueblo.  I wonder how many times I have made it since.  I fiddle with the radio in hopes of finding a better song and turn left under the highway.  

As I turn onto the frontage road that parallels the highway, I remember the warning not to speed because there are days when the police like to set up camp at the very spot where my day begins.  Looking around to make sure today is not one of those days, I accelerate.  It’s hard to drive parallel to the highway at a slower speed than the cars next to me.  Plus, the road stretches out in front of me, slowly rising and falling, yet unable to hide the distance that remains to be driven to the stop sign by JR Clothing where I will turn left.

The pueblo lies at the end of the road where I turn left by JR, but by the time I have reached the frontage road I am already on reservation land.  I am on reservation land because someone or somebodies drew a line and created a boundary stating that the piece of land beyond this line belongs to these people.  There is a sign that alerts you to the crossing of the line, as does any “Welcome to Blahblah state, home of smiles and rainbows and sunshine!” sign.  The sign for the reservation is more straightforward, “Now entering Tesuque reservation,” or some such message.

There is no dramatic change in the already dramatic landscape – mountains growing up on either side of the desert, sky expanding beyond any expanse I can describe.  There are less visible signs of human inhabitance than there are in Santa Fe, but Santa Fe is a city.  The houses on the pueblo do not look significantly different from my neighbors’ homes, except perhaps for that some are a bit more rundown looking.  The dirt roads that wind their way through the pueblo seem rural or of another time, and everything feels dusty and is some version of the color brown.  There is a sign on one house indicating that one can buy pottery there, but no storefronts or gas stations or grocery stores exist.  There is a recently renovated church that stands over the plaza.  Groups of stray dogs, some recent mothers clearly still nursing their young, run around after cars, get into fights with one another or sit by the side of the road watching all who pass by.  Old bikes lay on their sides in front yards bounded by barbwire fences.  Piles of scrap wood, metal and other miscellaneous items decorate sides of houses and back yards.  Fancy cars looking slightly out of place are parked in front of some houses.  Shades are drawn; there is an eerie sense of emptiness.

From the moment I pass under the highway after the exit until I park my car, I raise my hand slightly off of the steering wheel in an automatic salute to every car that I pass.  Having worked on the pueblo for barely two months, I only know one or two of the people whom I salute, if even that many.  When I first witnessed my boss wave at every passing car on my first day of work, I assumed she must just know everyone.  I came to learn that it is not an interaction based on friendship or even actual acquaintance, but rather a custom, a tradition or perhaps simply a habit.  It’s an acknowledgement of having seen the other person and though I felt hesitant at first to initiate the ritual, I quickly discovered that people I did not know would raise their hand at me if I did not and if I did it first, I almost always would get a wave in return.

It seems like such a small gesture and not very significant.  My experience of real life interaction with people I met on the pueblo varied greatly, but my very first reaction was that they were not overly friendly.  This is not to say that I found them to be mean, unpleasant or unwelcoming, but simply not overly, outwardly, animatedly friendly.  I suppose that’s why the hand wave seemed a bit incongruous at first.  

One of my interview questions for this job was about how I would handle getting to know another culture.  Going into the interview I realized that working on the pueblo meant working with a culture different from my own, one about which I had no knowledge.  Having lived abroad twice, I felt confident in saying that I have lived through culture shock and really appreciate the process of getting to know another culture, despite the fact that at times it can be frustrating and confusing.

There is still much that I have yet to learn and much more that I likely will not learn at all.  I realized that today marks two months at my new job and I take comfort in raising my hand to salute passing cars.  I don’t really feel part of the community in any significant or important way, but I no longer feel completely outside of it.  I even catch my hand starting to loosen its grip on the steering wheel in an effort to wave at passing cars when I turn onto the less traffic-filled streets of my neighborhood.  So far I have been able to catch that hand and place it back down before waving at total strangers who would likely either wonder if they knew me or think I was crazy.

A Day For Giving Thanks . . .

11.27.08

On a day of giving thanks, today I found myself doing just about everything but.  To make what could be a long story that a public audience might not have much interest in hearing short, after about ten months of skipping my period, I got a prescription for hormones that would induce it and started taking them about eleven or twelve days ago.  The period-inducing process takes a lot out of me.  Well, it puts hormones into me that seem to cause a lot of intense and sometimes irrational emotions, exhaustion, physical changes in my body, and basically all of the other crap you go through during puberty.  The ten days of hormones is followed by a regular menstrual cycle and when you haven’t experienced this in almost eleven months, it is really intense.  At least it is for me.

So today I woke up particularly sensitive and irrational.  I had kind of been dreading Thanksgiving here.  My sister, Adi and I made plans but throughout the morning little things kept setting me off and I kept finding myself on the verge of tears.  I felt tired and not very good in my body.  I felt lonely and isolated, nostalgic for France and generally difficult, unresponsive, cranky, distant, disconnected and sad.  My Thanksgiving plans involved going to two separate Thanksgiving meals.  One was at a friend of Kt’s and the other was at a friend of Adi’s.  Neither of these households are places were I feel especially at home or like I belong.  I mean, I’ve never actually been to Kt’s friend’s house but in general both places just felt like places that I was tagging along to.  As a youngest child I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling like the tag-along who isn’t necessarily wanted or invited but who shows up anyway or who gets invited as an extension of another person.  

As an adult I still find it hard to relax and to be myself in certain social situations and as today progressed, I felt more and more anxious and full of dread about going to be social with people I don’t really know on what traditionally is my favorite holiday because I spend it with people who I love and who I know and can feel care about me.  I didn’t feel so much invited to these places and in some ways it felt like intruding on someone else’s holiday.  And the worse I felt throughout the day, the more I felt like whether or not the intrusive feeling was in my head and stupid, my mood was such that I would not be fun, happy, talkative, social or enjoyable as company.  The thought of showing up and having to make the excuse of not feeling well or having cramps was enough to make me periodically burst into tears.  It’s one thing to make that excuse to people who know you, who really know you well and around whom you feel comfortable just being yourself.  It’s another thing to make excuses and then sit in the corner quiet, feeling like a total alien, forcing a polite smile from time to time.

I cried harder this afternoon than I have in a while.  I think that I may have cried that hard within my first week of moving here.  Everything built up and suddenly I felt like I was ruining Thanksgiving, letting people down, hating myself for being upset, hating myself for not being able to have an easier time being social, and not living up to expectations.  The part of today’s plan that involved going Adi’s friend was harder for me than the part that meant going to Kt’s friend’s.  I have met Kt’s friend once or twice and had pleasant interactions with her.  It felt really low stress and low key.  It was with people I hadn’t met before and could easily never see again.  There was no pressure, no real importance to going there specifically other than it was where Kt was going and since she’s the only family I have here, it was important for me to be with her on Thanksgiving.

Going with Adi to her friend’s house, on the other hand, felt a lot harder and more emotional for me.  When she invited me, she made it clear that it was important to her that I go with her because it’s important for her to be able to share other parts of her life with me.  I’ve spent time around her and this friend before and have not really clicked with the friend.  Usually when we’re all together I feel left out or like it doesn’t matter if I am there or not at all.  It’s like watching TV in a way because they have their dynamic that has been established and rather than being a part of that dynamic or what is going on, I am observing it from the side.  They clearly get along well, share a certain sense of humor, care about each other and have fun.  I haven’t felt like I’m a part of that.  I take responsibility for the fact that I don’t always go out of my way to make a huge effort.  Unfortunately this has happened a few times when I just have been low energy or not in a great mood to begin with anyway.  I just can get really shy and quiet around new or different people and it’s not always easy for me to find a way in.  And if my experience has been that I don’t think I’d be friends with this person in other circumstances, it makes it even harder.  But at the same time I get that Adi wants to bring together two parts of her life that are important to her.  So it leaves me feeling guilty for not trying harder, torn about not necessarily feeling like I have the energy to do it and sad because she actually has community, friends and a life here in a way that I don’t feel like I have.  

That last bit is a challenge because that is totally up to me and I can’t get mad at her for that and I’m not mad at her for that, I just have a hard time when she tries to involve me in those things that I feel I am totally lacking here.  The few times I try to put aside feeling anxious about being around new people, feeling super conscious of it being important to Adi and making a good impression, well, I’ve not really been able to put it aside.  Today I kept thinking about how if I needed to spend the day in bed crying, she still had somewhere to go where there would be people who wanted her there, who invited her, who would welcome her and around whom she would feel comfortable and cared for.  I, on the other hand, felt like my options were to stay home, to tag along with Kt or to tag along with Adi.  And that’s not to say that I didn’t want to spend the holiday with them because I really did want to spend the holiday with both of them.  It’s just to say that I feel limited here in a way that I am not used to feeling.

Anyway, emotions, hormones, nostalgia and life collided today and made it really hard for me to feel much in the way of gratitude.  I did finally go to Kt’s friend’s house with Adi.  It was nice and low key.  There was lots of good food and we played cranium.  Then Adi and I stopped by the other party.  I spent the whole drive over telling myself that I would go in with a positive, open attitude because I strongly believe that you get what you give.  I thought really hard about going in with a smile on and trying to make it genuine.  I thought about trying to make conversation and to really get myself involved.  I thought about how despite my feeling less than enthusiastic about being there and interacting, it was really important to Adi and therefore needs to also be important or taken seriously by me.  Then we got there and I felt invisible.  I’m sure I contributed to it and at one point I had to duck into another room to make a phone call home.  I think what happened was that I tried to make conversation a little at first and it got interrupted or side-tracked or just died because I didn’t know what to say.  After that I felt like I wasn’t even there or didn’t need to be there.  Conversations picked up and I didn’t have anything to say, any way to relate or any way to get into what was happening.  When I was on the phone in the other room I could hear everyone laughing and chatting away and I thought about how it didn’t matter if I was in there with them or on my own on my cell phone.  

And as I write this it sounds really whiney, victimy and immature to me, but sometimes you just feel the way you feel.  That’s how I felt.  And in addition to feeling that way, I didn’t really realize how I was feeling or why I was feeling like that.  I didn’t realize until I started writing this really.  I just felt bad.  I guess I felt like I wasn’t make enough effort or doing enough but I also felt so invisible and little that making an effort felt impossible or just like something really unappealing at the time.

Anyway today was just rough.  One bright spot in an otherwise dark, rainy, snowy day was finding a missed call from Sue on my phone and having a message from her wishing me a Happy Thanksgiving.  I think she saw that I had written on my facebook that I was having a hard day because she said something about hoping that my day had gotten better.  It was a nice reminder that there are people in this world who do care about me and know me and around whom I can just be me.  There are people whom I might not see or talk to on a regular basis but who I could call if I needed to and who will reach out to me if they discover I’m in need of it.  I might not feel as though I have much in the way of community here in Santa Fe, but I have a network of people all over and for that I am beyond thankful.  Maybe tomorrow I will take some time alone and do some writing about what else I am actually thankful for as an exercise in gratitude and an attempt to reframe my attitude and to adjust my emotions.  

Oh What I Do

11.20.08

For some reason tonight I decided to browse through old entries in here.  I like to do it from time to time and generally I find it to be an interesting, gratifying exercise.  It made me feel sad tonight.  It also made me feel super grateful and almost surprised at who I was last year and the life I lived.  I got to the entry that contains pictures from Amsterdam and thought, "wow, I really lived that?  I got to experience that?  That was me?  I was there?  Wow." 

Wow.

Where Did I Go?

11.19.08

It’s been a while, huh?  It seems a bit daunting to try to catch up with myself, but tonight I got to thinking about this journal and how neglected it has been and decided that I should at least giving writing a shot.

So where have I been?  Well, it seems like a lot and nothing at all has happened in the past two or so months.  One of the biggest things that has happened is that I have started seeing someone.  It began as friendship and intensified until neither one of us could continue ignoring what neither one of us knew how to address.  And then one evening through a kiss on the cheek and a few simple words so much of what we had been holding back spilled into the open.  I feel like I’ve become that couple-y person who I never thought I would be and whom I scorned a bit throughout my years of singledom – that person so wrapped up in the excitement of a new romance that the rest of the world seems to recede.  But it’s also more than the newness, it’s the fact that I have found someone who I can trust, who I can be myself without reservation around, someone who I care about and who I know cares about me.  It’s feeling safe and feeling important, it’s feeling excited to make another person smile, it’s knowing there is someone who will listen when you need to talk, who will buy you soup when you are sick for the third time in two months, it’s the look you get when you’ve put on something nice and done your make up a bit.  It’s enjoying a night in watching a DVD and eating soycream as much as you enjoy going out for a nice dinner.  It’s all of those things that sound so flat when written out like a laundry list, the same old laundry list that makes up what we deem as loving relationships.  But while they may seem flat on paper and while I may not yet (or ever) have the right words to explain why this is anything but flat, I am feeling lucky to know that I am cared for and to know that I have found someone for whom I can care as well.

The other big change in my life these past months is that I have started a new job.  After what felt like an eternity of searching for a job, I got an interview and was hired.  On paper it seemed like a decent job for me – administrative assistant and family services coordinator for a Head Start pre-school.  Sure, it wasn’t teaching, but it meant working in a school.  Sure I’ve always said that pre-school is not the age group for me to work with en masse, but the job was not to be a teacher.  My first week was miserable.  I hated it and wanted nothing more than to quit.  However quitting was not an option because, well, I needed a job.  Since that first week it has gotten much better.  There are days when I like it and feel good about it and days when I feel bored.  There are days when I feel frustrated by basically everything, but at the end of the day I do realize that I am paid well, I work with good people and it is a fairly flexible, not too demanding job.

One of the interesting pieces of the job is that I am working on a Native American reservation.  About half of the kids in our program are from the tribe.  The other half of the student body is from Mexican families who live in a trailer park on the reservation.  When interviewing for the position, one of the questions that at the time struck me as odd was about culture shock and adjusting to new cultures.  I was told that working on the reservation means working with a distinctive culture and one of the goals of our program is to embrace, celebrate and teach the children about their culture.  At the same time I was also cautioned upon beginning work that I’m not really supposed to ask too many questions about it.  I was given the impression that the tribe is rather protective and perhaps even a bit closed about their tribe and cultural heritage.  The non-tribal students in our program are not allowed to participate in the language program provided by the tribe to teach the children the tribal language.  I use this as one example of why it seems that they are protective of what is theirs.

So far my experience has left me, well, a little confused.  I am trying really hard to bear in mind that there is a difference between the tribal culture and the tribal administration.  Perhaps what I mean is that there is the culture (language, music, ritual, ceremony, beliefs, story, etc.) that the tribe is working to preserve and pass on and then there is the current culture of the administration, the government and the day-to-day running of the pueblo itself.  They are two different cultures, in my opinion, which rest upon one another and at times are hard to see clearly or understand.  As an employee of the tribe, and especially one who works in the administration of their pre-school, my experience lies mostly with the tribes government and administration, which from where I sit at my desk at times feels unorganized, frustrating and slightly chaotic (and coming from France where needless bureaucracy, red tape and disgruntled government employees are part of the joy of day to day life, I am at least used to, if not at this point fairly immune, to dealing with this type of irritation).  

In terms of the cultural heritage, as I mentioned, it’s often hard to suss out what tribal culture actually means to the tribe.  For me as an individual, that lack of understanding comes from my hesitancy to ask questions.  I have tried unsuccessfully to research it a bit on my own, but there seems to be almost a complete lack of written records about the tribe. There are little hints here and there – the language classes, some instruments and music in the classrooms, costumes that we worked on making, etc., but I don’t quite have a grasp on what it means to be a member of this tribe to the members of the tribe.  Today I had the opportunity to hang out with the three-year-olds and two of the language teachers because the Head Start teachers were sick.  I was really impressed and enthralled listening to one of the teachers read the story “No, David!”  Her animation, improvisation and interaction with the students kept them all engaged and involved.  

It got me to wondering if she knew stories that had been passed down in the oral tradition from her ancestors.  It also got me to wondering what stories she herself had about her own life – did she grow up on the pueblo?  What was it like when she was young?  What traditions did her family have?  Were there tribal traditions, ceremonies, rituals that she participated in?  Are they the same today?  I wanted to ask her but found myself keeping quiet, I guess for fear of asking something that I wasn’t supposed to ask.  I doubt that it would have been offensive, but I didn’t want to risk it I guess.  It seems silly though because in my experience most people like to talk and to tell stories about themselves, and when given the time, the space and the attention I think that most of us can come up with a few anecdotes that we would be a little happy to share with someone else.

My grandmother is a good example.  Growing up she and my great aunt and grandfather were our babysitters.  My father is an only child and his parents and aunt lived in our town and we were lucky to have them around as we grew up to take care of us on the few occasions that my parents went out or had a meeting or whatever.  Going to their house meant running around outside on their big lawn, climbing trees, playing ping pong in the basement, baking cookies, playing hide and seek, playing dress up, drawing, drinking “tea” which was really just hot milk with a ton of sugar and a tea bag dropped in the cup for .2 seconds.  It also meant stories.  There were pictures to prompt stories but most often we would just say, “Grandma, tell us about when you were a little.”  I remember her chuckling a bit and telling us that we’d heard all of her stories.  We would insist that we didn’t mind and she’d say, “let’s see” and pull out one of her stories about growing up in rural England during WWII.  There were stories about her being forced to swim at school in cold weather, stories about the big tree on the main road, and watching boats pass by on the Thames.  There were also stories of food rations and black out curtains.  She carries with her still the fear and anxiety of living through a war, never knowing how close it would actually come to her country home and her family.  I can hear her voice now talking about how awful it was, “absolutely awful!”  Awful being the hardest, most bitter word she could summon to talk about the war.  I think about the arsenal of words that I have, much more caustic, shocking, violent and angry than her simple “awful” and as I hear her voice and her modifiers “absolutely” or maybe just repeating the word twice “awful, awful,” I wonder if those words spoken with that tone and that experience are more powerful that whatever with which artillery I could arm my speech.

These days the same old stories are not quite as exciting to me as they were when I was young.  In fact, there are times when it seems frustrating that she is so stuck in the past, so fixated on what is long gone, and I find it impossible to relate to someone who seems so out of touch with today.  Then there are times when it seems sad to me that she has not been able to let go of those stories and that she has not found new stories from the intervening years to replace, or at least to accompany, those same stories that I grew up hearing. As an adult, some of the details seem suspect – a little romanticized, a little exaggerated, not the same as they were when I was younger.  But part of story telling is knowing how to emphasize, de-emphasize, embellish, exaggerate and appeal to your audience.  Stories that rely upon memory will inevitable mix up some of the facts and details and be subject to the interpretation of the person who is putting the pieces back together and their intention in doing so.  

And so there is also a part of me that will always cherish those stories and hold them close.  They are a piece of my own personal history and my childhood.  However accurate or inaccurate the stories may be, they are the stories of my family and I will pass them along to my kids one day as well.  I had the opportunity to visit my grandmother’s home village in England last year.  I went with a dear friend of mine and as Sue and I walked up and down the main street, delighted in the quaint old houses, sat on the bench where the old giant tree used to grow, and scoured the cemetery for any name that might be a part of my family, my grandmother’s stories hummed gently in the background of my thoughts.  I have already passed some of those stories along to my host family in France and to friends who are patient enough to listen as I talk through the ancient history that has lead up to who I am today, laying here on my futon bed in Santa Fe, NM typing this and thinking about the power of story.

Maybe the elders of the tribe do tell their stories to their children and maybe those children will pass the stories to their children and grandchildren.  What we have to say is important.  What we remember has significance and sharing memories, experiences, emotions, interpretations, ideas and stories brings people together and is exciting.  Maybe I can work on trying to get some of the elders to come tell stories to the children as part of my job.

Losing Track . . . Losing Track . . .

9.24.08

I am usually very meticulous about time.  I keep track of it and guard it closely.  Dates generally stick in my mind easily, and in my mind where I am is directly related to where I have been, where I am going and how long to and from each of those.  I keep track of time in the large sense of months and years and I keep track of specific dates, hours, weeks and days.  Time is even and regular, yet at times it feels as though two identical units can have entirely different durations.  I guess I like having my life made up of units, despite how unequal they may be at times.  I like structure and being able to visualize.  

Santa Fe has done some strange things to me.  I have lost track of time and my life seems to be very fluid, morphing days into nights and weeks and months and I don’t even remember when I got here.  I honestly could not remember if I arrived in July or August.  Normally I would have not just the month, but the specific date fixed in my brain as an anchor for this new life I’ve begun.  My horoscope for the week from Free Will Astrology begins with: “Against all odds, you are finally finding a way to quit that nagging "addiction." You're shedding a dependency that isn't worthy of you.”  I have to wonder if the addiction was my fixation on time and mapping time.  I kind of hope not because despite the fact that my life has become so amorphous, I still like and find comfort in the idea of being able to break it down into what seems quantifiable.  But maybe it’s not specifically about how I visualize time.  Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that since arriving here I have just let go in general.  The situation in which I currently find myself (not fully employed, not in school, not scheduled, not structured, not stressed, not required, not restricted) is one that I would expect to find uncomfortable and hard to deal with.  However, for some reason I’ve just slipped right into it without anywhere near the discomfort that my logical mind tells me my emotional self should be feeling.  

I don’t entirely credit Santa Fe with this, however.  I think that Santa Fe is where I happened to have landed after years of slowly letting go of neurosis and the slightly uptight pieces of myself.  I feel at peace and at ease with myself.  I am happy with where I have been over the past several years and not even thinking about where I am headed.  I am just here and focusing on how I can enjoy that.  Yes, of course the lack of a job is a stress and I do hope/need to get that taken care of soon.  But I’m working on it and hopefully it’ll work out soon.  Speaking of working out, it’s time to go buy a new bathing suit since my old one has gotten so worn and tired that I am surprised that it has not yet disintegrated off of my body.  I have been wearing a bikini bottom under it for weeks in order to spare the pool crowd the sight of my bare butt.  I also had Adi tie knots in the straps because my chest kept falling out of it every time I pushed off the wall to start a lap.  Unfortunately, it’s gone far beyond what a bikini bottom and knots can save.