Like a Robber

I got home and ate the duck soup that beau left on the counter, spaghetti all tangled up on one side, broth with floating parts of dislocated greasy duck in the other. Then I inhaled two pieces of baguette dug in, bite after bite, the hummus tub, until there was hummus no more. Then, I finished an auld piece of cheese (I write auld this way when it feels really old, it amuses me).

This looks like a relapse but this is the Monday evening after the Monday return to work after the vacation. It's fitting. I'm not pleased but forgiving. It was not so bad, the highlight of the day was the heat wave that makes you go all slow and melty. There was also a violent car crash involving an assisted living travelling bus and a car, both smashed pretty hard, in the heat wave.

I noticed how I fled during lunch and even at night. Like a robber. With blown up guilt and heart too big and a propensity to busy my mind with other things or eat. I slept during lunch listening to a podcast. I slept really deeply even though I woke up at every 2 minutes to check the time. I took a nearly 2 hour lunch.

There is no rational for this nervousness. I always feel outside myself at work, though today was not particularly bad. In fact it was very good, uneventful, friendly, and calm, come to think of it. Always better to get to it and at it. Tune your attitude in. That way I may fall back inline with myself and with everyone. That would be nice.

I see I have come some way since the panicky paralyzing attacks of a few weeks back. I am still edgy, but more remotely. I don't cry just by reading the stories in the papers. I'm not as seized as I was, though the anxiety is still there.

I did 45 min. body scan meditation this morning. It's the third time. It is powerful but the length and repeating makes me antsy. I may alternate it with the shorter 20 minutes unguided meditation, because that one tells me things too.

Balance is always what I need to return too, while the context is always shifting. Yesterday's leisurely and sometimes fearfully empty days are replaced with my gainful employment, and all the catastrophic employment scenarios I think of are not happening. Maybe life can just be a bit still and uneventful for me now.

While I'm waiting for my admission test results, to find out if I'm accepted for night school. I dawns on me that it will be hard to attend at night, but I'm doing things one step at a time. Baby steps.

Time passed, last week, with all its uneventfulness... reading, walking, laying. Being with beau, despite my malaise in front of the void, and my tensions that crept out in the daylight, that traveled to him and back, well that was all very nice. And I am so proud of all the little moments, the decisions, the enjoyment we had out of very simple, unglamorous, nothings (which hold everything).

Amourx.

Precious Things

Early morning and the plan is to pack and leave for a week-end getaway with my love. I'm so lucky. We could go North, South, East, or West... The weather is not on our side, but it's pointing West. Beau is still sleeping.

Where am I? The other day's meditation told me that it would be very, very long. That I have to enter another dimension of time, to tap into the things that are my questions. It also told me that my father truly loved me. I knew that, but I remembered how much. And also that he needed so much love that he didn't get. He needed soothing, affection, someone to hold him close and tell him that everything would be ok. He the child, me the kin. He was in perpetual distress and we left him there, me and my three sisters, to save ourselves.

The world is quite magical in that it brings to me stories related to my interior journey. An article about a woman who's mother was her abuser, how the adult daughter deals and loves her mother. A new novel I started in which the main protagonist is a translator. My boyfriend found on Facebook that a long lost acquaintance from University who now lives in France, an engineer at the time, became a successful translator from Polish to French. Prior to that news I had paid attention to his translated book, a biography, well displayed in the library. I wonder what it's like to be a translator.

The book that I am slowly reading about MBSR is not entertaining, but it is very enlightening. It says that healing is not the same as curing. Your ailments, your chronic stresses and pains, don't dissolve, don't go away when you are healing. You don't cure them,  but you gain a bigger, higher perspective on them. They become part of a bigger system, of life. They have some meaning. And with this perspective you have acceptance, grace. And possibly your ailments can become tolerable, smaller, easier or even just accepted. You have gained a higher vision with lots of other things in it, you are no longer your disease, you are much more then that, you are the whole world and the whole space and the whole time, encapsulated in you, interconnected in the fabric of the world.

I have been thirsty for good stories of quests and self realization. They teach me and support me and accompany me. I read Wild and Want Not, bot excellent and good for me. Want Not is a masterpiece to me. You don't always know with books. A lot of them are sad and depressive, I think the majority are, I wonder why. Maybe to help us relate or gain perspective that some have it much worst? I'm not immune to those those dark, troublesome, psychological stories of crime, of brutal violence. They can be attractive, and mostly they are just so prevalent, but I should consume them less than I do wine, and I'm pretty much done with wine.

Spent the day with sister yesterday, had a long and lovely walk, a bite, then came home and found some clothes that was bought for me, to try on. Beau and his mom do that for me. I know how much this is precious.

Amourx.

Everything Done in the Dark

We did it, for the second time, and it was beautiful. It looked like a galaxy inside of me, La Voie Lactée... I don't really have the words, but I'm reminded that in the outside world it's peak Perseides day tonight.

I am contented and calm, with many other layers interfering. That's normal. That's how everybody works. I'm no different. The calm part of me feels like a relaxed plane inside me, spacious, released, incline to make me smile. It's an inner smile I think. It's soft and subtle.

Yesterday I was quite nervous and aside from being with beau at the clinic, aside from going to see bikes for him and books for me (I bought three books from Quebec authors, and it happens to be "buy a Quebec book day" today. He wasn't please about that excess --I have a book buying habit), and having the walk, and eating good food with him, I read all day until late at night and finished the book I started the day before, the Girl on the Train.

Feelings where not great you know. This is a book with mentally ill people speaking in first person, journal style. It won't be described that way in general but that's how it inhabited me. I was eager to finish it as much to find out who did it as to get out of the depression and distress that the main characters live. It was well done, I could relate, and for some time I felt uneasy. Thinking back now, it's quite horrific. Plus, it had a lot of the worst baby related stories at the core. Probably not good prescriptive reading haha. But I've finished it now and it was a good read, even if a bit painful, it's over and I'm happy, if I refer to what I wrote upstairs.

So yeah I got depressive and fearful moments along the way too. Judgment. I caught that and named it, because this type of feeling where I sort of dread the next choices I have to make and the lack of time and the fear of going back to it, is laced with judgment. Maybe if I just pay attention to all the judgment, it would help me dislodge it.

The walk was an out of this world experience. There is a place in the heart of the city, with trees as big as in the deepest Canadian forest, surrounding houses with large yards by a wide park with trails leading around a clearing, with train tracks going through, taking us to rows of triplexes and backstreets, to derelict industrial buildings painted all over in graffiti, to inner city park where my mom and dad posed for the photo when they were together a long time before I came. Everything done in the dark holding his hand in wonder.

Amourx.

Nor my Stories, Nor my Plans

Every day is different. When I wrote yesterday I wasn't at my best, I was trying to do something, and writing often helps but in some cases it reaffirms the very condition I'm trying to get out of.

In Woody Allen's last movie Irrational Man, the anti-hero says that anxiety is the disease of freedom or something like that. In front of the emptiness of freedom, in the absence of a set course, we freak out. It's true.

But today it's not like that. It's early morning and I returned to my mudra for serenity and harmony, which also causes imaginary gardens to grow abundantly, and I became sort of clearer. Literally I "saw" the colour within turn brighter. Today I am having a baby.

Today I am again open and ready to see, to find, the beautiful simple things.

I am multi-layered though - I tap into that beautiful realm, but there are also all the other forms of stresses. One of them, oddly, is that I feel I should plan my mother's 70th birthday better than my sisters already have. Yet I resist it completely, like I don't feel ready.

One of them is when I accidentally checked my work email. I'm blocking that out quite willingly.

I monitor the pangs of anxiety, and I like to describe their multiple flavours, like yesterday in my French post, it was auld hollow tree like. I think in the course of the last 48 hours I have felt it within my breathing pipeline, kind of a warning warmth that I try to figure out. I've had pangs located near my heart, and I've had spikes when I raise into sudden alertness like something's gonna happen to me if I don't.  Feels like I've done something so wrong, and I've been so stupid, and I better  make it right, right away, or else I will lose everything. This is familiar, that feeling. Feels like the whole world is about the break down maybe because of me. Like I have the power to break everything that's good and make it miserable for eternity, hell. A terrible mistake.

I'm reading the Girl on the Train book and the girls portrayed here are lost like I have been in the past. I don't know if it's good for my spirit to be with them and revisit that, but I get them.  I paused from watching that gruesome series. But for these girls I see that I'm not alone, that it's probably common, I even read a story about a girl like that in the papers today, who bought a home on the internet to get away from her pain. Sometimes I imagine everyone's heart big like mine, too big, sensitive and vulnerable, and it appeases me. Maybe everyone's heart is like mine, and I don't need to keep mine a secret, nor my stories, nor my plans.

But friends, I didn't just casually drop that I was having a baby up there above this digression. I am! The embryologist just called me to say everything is well and ready, and to show up at 2 o'clock with a full bladder and my love.

Amourx.

French

Je suis dissipée. C'est ça le mot? Je ne l'utilise jamais, mais en ce moment le voici. Aujourd'hui l'anxiété a texture de veille arbre, vielle âme asséchée ou sorcier. Je regarde un série télé pas mal glauque, peut-être pour ça. C'est congé pour moi et je me repose, j'observe le terrible battement de tambour des guerriers intérieurs, culpabilisants et bloquants, qui me gardent au beau fixe justement, et si j'arrive à les faire fuir je serai tout en sérénité. Je souris, car un sourire fait beaucoup en ce sens.

Même si je crois avoir trouvé ma voie en l'espoir de retourner à fond, le plus vite possible dans les lettres et la traduction, l'anxiété demeure. C'est très stimulant et satisfaisant de croire qu'on a trouvé la réponse, la clé qui fera tout mieux aller, et mes journées sont très belles, et ma maison plutôt propre. Mais j'ai besoin de faire ou d'éviter de faire en même temps, je me pousse et me tire, et avec l'insomnie et les 5-6 médicaments que je m'injecte, avale ou colle sur ma peau, je peux pas trop m'en vouloir de retomber dans le doute anxieux, quand je suis devant le vide d'une journée libre ou pas, et d'apprécier le repos quand même.

C'est clair que j'ai besoin d'écrire. J'irai peut-être au massage, mais non tiens, le yoga serait mieux. Bref, vivement une idée, un projet, une tranquillité, une sieste, une occupation, un agrément, ou l'acceptation tout simplement.

Ok, j'accepte.

Amourx.

Go!

I'm writing quickly because I am not alone, we are on holiday me and my beau in my little apartment, on holiday. This morning I weighed myself and lo I am nine pounds lighter than about a month ago! What a nice feeling. This will fluctuate but it's a definite sign that my eating of small meals is paying off. I think this effect is linked to the meditation I do everyday. I am very happy!

Also happy because I completed the French and English admission exam yesterday. A full three hour affair in the auditorium of the Uni, the same one I went to some fifteen years ago for my first graduate degree. They have added plugs for laptops since. Internet was barely used at that time, and Google didn't exist. Every moment of this journey towards becoming a translator, that wasn't even an inkling of thought last month, feels like a clear and straight path that is self evident, self fulfilling, like I found the key about ten days ago.

Brings about a lot of joy and enthusiasm in me and beau is also thrilled. Now we have to find something for him --but meanwhile my path is not a short one, it's a second graduate degree on a part-time schedule.

And, FIV is in 2 days. Can you see me holding my baby with one hand and translating with the other? I certainly do.

Amourx.

In Letters

I changed my Mudra today to a centering and strenghtening one. Why? Because the one I was previously doing worked so well it's almost spooky, and also because I have anxiety resurfacing strongly this week. Here are the things that I learned.

I think I can start to describe different types, different layers of anxiety. Like the sediment crusts of archeology, some textures and flavours of anxiety may stem from this or that period in my development, who knows.

This week's flavour is high schoolish. Like i'm not at my place, not good or pretty enough, about to be shot down by the cool girls and expulsed. There are actually two beautiful young women in my team who just came back from break. They cause my anxiety, specially my new boss. She is almost an archetype in her perfection in brains, expression and looks. I don't envy her, but I feel small and disintegrated, in contrast. I think that likewise she feels awkward with me. Easier for me to leave than stay at it.

On Saturday at 5am I was up because I couldn't sleep, that's not so unusual. I went everywhere in my home searching from my school documents, because somewhere along the previous 48 hours I had decided to apply to university in translation!!

In my red file I found old tax reports and outdated stuff from when I had an apartment on the Plateau and a cat. In my filing cabinet I found stacks of bills from old credit cards and phone lines. Where could my school documents be...

In two storage chests I found old drapes, books, art supplies, a lot of photos and negatives from my college stunt in photograpy, and some paintings I made. Still no school report to be found.

In the fireproof storage box that I was given at 13, where many eras of journalling. I sat and read through the first pages of each book. I visited a time in my twenties when I escaped to Scotland to rekindle my previous experience there and found a lover. My teens where I talked about boys and sleeping with them like I knew what I was doing. Trying to impress someone (me?) and hide behind a camp maturity.

I read beautiful poems too, of my time in uni. I found letters from papy zen, a man in France met on the internet, who used to correspond in long letters with me and help me out of my distress. I found notes on a forgotten therapy I held with a social worker for a while.

I found notes during my period of struggle to find myself in my later twenties, when there seemed to be no one, no job, no money, no prospect, no friends, no lover. I still regard that period as an marathon of suffering in an apparent bottomless pit. But I know how I got out of that, and I am equally pleased by that fact.

And always, at every epoch, repetitive expression of distress and anxiety and trying to figure out what was happening, analyzing, discovering, encouraging, confiding. It could be disturbing to find so much text like this if I wasn't sane throughout. Today I am here again but it is better.

I found my school reports in my portfolio from my stint in photography college. I filled out the application for a certificate in Translation and by 10am, the course of my life that I had just revisited completely was officially starting to change again.

I can feel the streams of that future flowing, this idea of becoming the translator was the key and I just took it and jumped. This realization came so fast, that's why I say it's spooky, but it's not really.

I have always been in letters, I have always written, I am the facto a translator. I am soothed by the thought of returning to school. I am studying avidly for my admission test of french and english. I am unafraid of losing my current job, and raising children, while my work will be spent in letters.

This is a humble path. I'm glad.

And now I'm off to the doctor's, to find out when i get the IVF which should be in the next 10 days if the ultrasound agrees. Then I will be pregnant... hard to believe it!

Amourx.