More Important To Be Right Or Be Loved?

I am always amused and awed when I get an email from one of asking if I am okay. It makes me realize that I haven't blogged in a week or so and you are wondering if I have kicked the bucket. Blogging friends truly are wonderful. My regular friends can go months and not think anything of it. Kind of a sad commentary, no?

I think I mentioned that my mom has been watching the Oprah Network. Well, she has sucked me in, too. I like "the story behind the story" and I like shows that are digging for personal truth. Sort of like what I try to do here. If you are having difficulty in your life or your relationships, work it out. A show that is now ending on OWN is The Judds. Apparently Naomi and Wynona have had a volatile relationship forever. There are so many reasons for it and they get into all of them. I try to imagine being a teenager and having my mother for a mom and a boss. So not cool. That made the transition from mother-daughter to mother-friend an unnatural one. They love each other like crazy BUT...

I think about how hard it would be to work that out on television. On the other hand, if no one worked out their issues publicly, other people wouldn't have the opportunity to learn. If Chris didn't write her weight loss/life blog, no one else would have all that great information. If Phoenix didn't write her love each better blog, I wouldn't stop and think I could be doing that better. If Shoes didn't write his crazy ass blog, I wouldn't laugh every day. If JJ didn't write his philosophical stuff, what would I think about? If Lira didn't post her struggling actress tips for others, they wouldn't have that foundation. [I could go on and on about all of your great blogs but my hands would lock into position over this keyboard. ALL of you are amazing.] This is what we do for one another. We live our lives out loud for ourselves and other people. Some do it in writing and others on TV.

I have learned so many things watching Naomi and Wynona interact. First of all, people often are the most cruel to the people that they love most. Second, if there were a device to take words back, everyone would buy one. Third, revelation is a slow process. I think it is because you have to understand yourself before you can understand another. Think on that for a while. Yikes. Fourth, it is essential to speak your truth. Until you do that, you do not feel free. You are shackled by silence that eats your soul. It is only in speaking your truth at all times that you can remain free. That doesn't mean shouting it with the most pain and bitterness you can throw, but speaking it gently with the solidness of its truth. That is all.

Last night, Wynona said how important it was to her to be right. All of these years it has been so important to be right. She never saw before that if there were a choice between being right and being loved, being loved was so much better.

The answer here is not to cave in to everyone else on everything just so that you are loved and they feel good about themselves. That just makes you a doormat and you lose your truth (#4). However, everyone deserves to be heard and both can be right from their viewpoint. Acknowledging another person's rightness is okay, too. It is saying I hear and love you. And that is where Naomi and Wynona arrived. Some people never get there. One person is right and another is wrong. There cannot be two right viewpoints on the same situation that are different!

Look at what that little bit of learning did for their relationship. Now they can apply that to all of their relationships. Everyone who watched that show can start processing that in their relationships. Powerful stuff.

I called the kids on Saturday just to talk to them. I had been trying to get hold of H-Girl all week. I had talked to C-Man last weekend. My ex called me yesterday to wish me Happy Mother's Day. He told me that the kids said we'd talked the day before AND that they'd said they'd wished me HMDay then. I corrected him by telling him that I had called them, but nothing had been said about Mother's Day. After we hung up, H-Girl's cell rang. It was C-Man calling to wish me HMDay. He was rushed b.c. it was close to their bedtime. I thanked him and told him to go on and get ready for bed. I asked about his sister. She came to the phone, but she was clearly ticked off by her tone of voice. I asked her how she was, etc. I could tell that she was not going to say HMDay, so I just told her good night and she said good-bye. And that was that.

I sent my ex an email asking him not to do that in the future. The kids are old enough to know the holidays. If they want to call, they will. If they don't, they won't. But forced expressions of love are not love. And I am hoping that H-Girl unwittingly employed tactic number one on me. People are often the most cruel to the people they love the most.

I'LL HAVE A MOCHA VODKA VALIUM LATTE TO GO PLEASE

This post I think will actually be short (by my standards). It is shocking, I know. I spent some time last night thinking about my last two posts, and some comments I left on some of your blogs. I also contemplated Lucy March some more and how she is working her blog. Then I stirred all of that up a little bit.


Lucy March doesn't talk very much about her former husband (who she refers to as Fish, in order to keep him anonymous) because her journey is about her. That gave me something to think about. No matter what happens to us, isn't the journey of reclamation about us? Granted, other people or circumstance played their part, but ultimately didn't we (and by we, I mean I) make the choices that landed us where we are?

Well... for Lucy, that has meant examining all of her close relationships and taking a good, long, hard look at them. How did they work? Did they work? You know, that sort of thing. When you do that, sometimes you get some surprises. Not necessarily about the other person in the equation, but about you (and by you, I mean me). What that hands a person is revelation. Things begin to make sense. Patterns emerge. For the good and the bad.


I am amazed, frankly, that she is able to do this every day. Just thinking about it is exhausting. Especially when I feel like I have done so much internal work already. However, I read her blog, I am writing things down like a maniac, and I know that means something. Yeah, it means I am scratching the surface of something. Like I am tapping on a memory. Or an experience. Or a pattern. Or something similar. Not sure yet. It means I need to get in there and break it down.


I guess what I am getting at is this: once I figure out what happened to me before I met The Operator, then I will understand how I ever let myself get dragged into that relationship. What I am saying is that I will be eyeball to eyeball with the demon inside that knew on some level that this was bad and jumped anyway. Maybe I didn't know how bad, but I knew it was bad. Now, how did I get there? Figuring that out has absolutely nothing to do with The Operator and everything to do with me.

I think I know why I called this blog Blog Therapy now. I get it.

COULD YOU BE THAT HONEST?

I had a plan for the next few days. I was going to do my one word and fifteen minutes writing exercise so that I could really put the hammer down on my book. I have been reading instead of writing and it actually worked. On my way to the library yesterday, the light bulb came on. I love those moments. REVELATION. Of course, that also meant I figured out how/where I screwed up again and I am going to have to go back and fix that shit. But, it makes it possible for me to motor through it. Sometimes it truly does work to let something sit on the backburner and let your subconscious work on it. It isn't being lazy. It is working by not working. Or working on something else. I don't know, but it worked. That doesn't mean I haven't worked on the novel at all. I have, but it has been frustrating going because I knew something was off. Now, it will be easier.


Several things have jettisoned my plan. One was Misery's comment on my blog from yesterday. She, too, wrote about Eminem's new video. I suppose that is great minds thinking alike. Except that we didn't actually share the same opinion about it...exactly. I am a very new Eminem convert and am not at all familiar with the old stuff. She said I needed to have a listen to his song KIM and that might make me feel differently about him. I went to my music player. I decided video would be too distracting and had a listen. It was a horrible song. Abuse at its worst. Kim was his wife, the baby was crying, and, in the end, there was the distinct implication that he killed her. She was crying and pleading (or some woman was, probably not the actual Kim), and he was vicious. So, then I went to Wikipedia and read all I could. His whole bio. It broke down each of his albums, what songs were on them, and what the general concept was for the album. Amazingly enough, each album did have a concept. Eminem writes his own music and the album reflects his life... whatever it is at that moment in time. It also broke down his personal life so you could compare and contrast the two.

Well, that is something to think about right there. I am not sure that I could be that honest if I was as popular an artist as he was, and my life was what his life was. In other words, if I was abusing the shit out of my spouse, I don't think I could write about it, then put it on my CD. I am pretty sure this song was written in between their marriages. Stop and think about that one. They married two times. He wrote this horrible song about her and then she married him again.


Back to the writing what he's living.... every single important thing that he is living is flowing from his brain onto the paper. Then it goes onto a CD for the whole world to know. Abuse. Drugs. Missing his kids. Fighting with the record label. Political opinions. Opinions about other celebrities. Pretty much everything he thinks, it gets put on the paper and then on the CD. And it isn't just the stuff that makes him look good. In fact, a lot of it makes him look like shit. I think that you really start to see the turning point in his later music, but he still falls down. WHEN I'M GONE is an excellent example of him indicating that he doesn't have a handle on anything. His priorities are all messed up and he knows it. I listened to several. I think that LOSE YOURSELF has a great message, but I think that he was still in "the hole" at that time. I am not sure how AIRPLANES 2 fits in. It doesn't feel like the old Eminem. It feels a lot more like the stuff on this new album. I think maybe he recorded it during his hiatus? I don't know on that one. Maybe someone who knows more about rap can answer that one. Anyway, he released a Greatest Hits album and then took some time off. He needed that time away from that mad business of making album after album. He'd either gone through rehab or knew he needed it... not sure which. All of those were the milestones that led him to where he is now: RECOVERY.


The big question always is can you maintain it? Show business, the music industry, and all of the people that make money off of you want to suck you dry. Can you keep your priorities straight when you're in the middle of the hailstorm? It's easy when you're not in the middle of a tour, making videos, and having your songs topping the charts. It's easy when you're not being nominated for awards. Now is when it gets hard. Everyone is juggling all the time. The reality is that everyone's load is always too heavy to carry all at once, so we juggle. When we are moving at a comfortable pace, we can juggle slow. That way the balls are easy to catch and we don't have to put too many in the air. His pace just picked up and the musical powers that be just threw about ten more balls for him to keep in the air (on top of the ones he already was juggling). No one can do that forever. You have to know your limits. Marshall Mathers is about to find out if he really knows who he is. I hope that he really is Not Afraid To Take A Stand because he might have to (figuratively) kick some ass. That means saying "No," when you're being pressured by, what feels like, the whole world to say "Yes."

I just read that the definition of adulthood is no longer caring what other people think. I plan on writing an entire blog on that at a later date. But it seems a fitting way to end this one today.

A TIME FOR EVERYTHING

Do you ever have those days when you really don't want to get out of bed? Well, I spent my first thirty minutes desperately having to pee but not wanting to move. It was a quandary. On my list of Things I Needed To Do was call my doctor's office and try to explain how I missed my appointment without sounding like a crazy person, which I think I am, but I am not sure I really want them to know. It made me cranky. And then I had a revelation about why old people are probably angry and bitter. People assume it's because they're old. Not so. Maybe it's because they forget stuff and then find appointment cards and realize they've forgotten stuff. I know it made me mad... at me. And that is lousy. It's always much better to blame someone else. Self-directed anger makes a person really pissy. Throw in a nursing home stay and I can see lots of anger issues. I started thinking about that instead of what I was going to say to my doctor's receptionist because I was still trying to divert my attention from my bladder. Finally the bladder won out and I got up.

Turns out the doctor's receptionist was totally cool about rescheduling my appointment for next week and that turned out A-okay. The other biggie on my plate for today was trying to get a copy of my vehicle title from Florida. This is a critical document that I should have. The crazy thing is that I lost it in storage when I moved from Georgia to Florida and had to go to the Georgia DMV and pay to get a copy sent to Florida. A person with their head screwed on straight would have filed it and not be going through this nightmare again. So, I am trying to order a copy online and have this resolved before my birthday at the end of this month. I have been fighting with the Florida website for a while now and getting nowhere. I tried using my stepdad's desktop today, instead of my laptop, and it did seem to go better, but it didn't recognize my VIN number. I am not sure how a mentally healthy person would have coped. I am fairly certain it wouldn't have been a crying jag followed by lying down on the floor with the dog. That was what I did. That doesn't sound so bad, except I was having a lot of negative thoughts during the crying jag. Bad bad bad.

People keep telling me that if you think you're crazy or you can identify the crazy, then you're really not crazy. It's when that line completely blurs for you that you actually are crazy. So, the truth is I know that I'm in trouble. Actually, I knew that when I woke up. I was dreaming about glazed donuts and rice krispy treats. Whenever I crave sweets that means I am STRESSED OUT and I am not a sweets eater. It's also a symptom of the chronic fatigue. So, I knew I had to do something healthy because my train was going nowhere good. I decided I could take one of the dogs for a walk. It was good for the dog. It was good for me. Sunshine is good. I could see no downside.


What caught my attention today were the trees. They aren't very pretty right now. They are all naked and exposed and barren looking. Winter strips of them their leaves, their adornment, their garnish, and they have to stand there and take it until spring. If a tree had feelings, I would imagine it would dislike winter the most, not for being cold, but for being so callous in denuding the tree of its glory. Of course, the tree has the advantage of understanding cycles and what some would call "the balance". Insomuch as it might loathe winter, its enormous love for spring wouldn't be as appreciated, if not for winter. That's what winter does for spring.; it creates a vacuum for spring to fill. Therefore, the tree doesn't resist winter. It accepts the seasons as they come and go.

I am like the tree in winter. I am naked and exposed and totally off my game. The difference is I am not accepting it. I am banging against it. A friend sent me this in an email and I couldn't wrap my brain around it in a productive way. I understood the theory, but it only WORKS when you USE it. She said this, "Here's the thing about the law of attraction that many people don't get: WE GET WHAT WE GIVE IN LIFE. When we want more of something, we have to give it to create a vacuum for more of it to flow toward us. Your reality seems to be a pretty closed system; send some energy OUT - give other people what you hope to receive physically, mentally, emotionally - and blessings will flow back to you." Let me put this another way, I knew that what she was saying was that I was going to have to leave my house and spend time with my friends. That sounds easy enough in theory.

The reality is that I am living on a schedule of popping pain pills every six hours, keeping up with it on my little calendar, feel like crap, and am really close to unhinged all of the time. I don't want my friends to SEE THAT. That is not sending good energy out, that is releasing a scary person that they haven't ever met into their universe. I don't ever want them to meet Scary Me. Scary Me is that denuded tree and it is ugly. Scary Me hasn't found "the balance" and doesn't know when spring is coming. Scary Me gets reprieves sometimes during the day and is able to make insightful comments on other people's blogs. Basically, I think that I have just said that the only people I can send good energy to are people I am not talking to face to face. Egads. In other words, I know what my friend is telling me. I get it. I understand it. I can see that for my life to be better I need to start doing those things. I have to be like the tree and create a vacuum if I ever want to see spring. Okay. Since I want to be lovely again, I will try.


A Time for Everything
Ecclesiastes 3
3:1 For everything there is a season,
and a time for every matter under heaven:
2 a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
3 a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

GYM CLASS CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE

I am 99.9% certain that I can credit Mary Hull with the assessment that a person can learn something from just about anything. For instance, she said that if she were reading a book that was terrible, she would just put it down. Not finish it. Stop. Her time was more valuable than that. When she said that my mind short circuited for at least fifteen seconds. I was suddenly thinking about books that I had struggled through, not for school, but on my own personal time because I had this need to get to the end just because. The end turned out to be just as disappointing as the beginning and the middle, so why did I do it? Because I am ever the optimist and couldn't help but hope that the author would have some sort of revelation. The publisher did spend money to publish it, after all.


This revolutionary statement was made after gym class and I dream walked to my next class with my brain now somersaulting from books to other "leisure" activities that I have endured from beginning to end all in the name of fun when I could have just said "No," and walked away. For years we had one TV in our house. Did I always get to watch I wanted? No. Did I watch it anyway? Yes. I felt another short circuit coming on. Ouch. Suddenly the image of all those horrible junior high school dances in the gym floated into my brain. Horrible, terrible times. Did anyone make me go? No. Did I go? Yes. In fact, I believe I paid good money for that torture. Another blast of electricity. Oh, the pain.

And then came the joy. Never again will I read a poorly written book unless I have to for class, or sit through miserable television programming, or watch a movie that is complete crap. Later in life, I would include on that list, listen to telemarketers on the phone or listen to beligerent husbands and/or ex-husbands on the phone. Did you know it is actually okay to hang up on people who are rude?

So, thank you Mary Hull. You are the only person who ever taught me anything worth learning in gym class.