The 8th Nerve

The other day I caught a segment on NPR where someone shared his experiences with severe stuttering.  We didn’t turn on the radio until partway through however and I didn’t catch his name or the name of the segment.  He shared about his childhood experiences in school, where he went through several painful years of  being unable to connect with others or express himself to others.  Even though his handicap was different, I completely identified with his experience in so many ways.

I think he was in his late teens or early 20s (I’m not sure) when he tried a new intensive treatment approach that worked.  His stuttering went away, even though he has to always focus especially hard while speaking.  He believed everything would change after this.  He could be who he wanted to be, be the way he had always wanted to be with others.

I wish I could quote directly what he said at this point but I don’t remember it verbatim.  He said that it was not what he expected.  Essentially he had been so shaped by his early experiences that he still felt like the outsider, the boy with the stutter, regardless of his new ability to speak.   This hit me as a fundamentally true insight and suddenly I was made conscious of an underlying belief I’ve always had.  If there was a miracle operation or new technology that could actually restore hearing (or if I became fluent in ASL and joined others who use ASL),  I believed I would automatically have the ability and comfort level to freely join in conversations and express myself, not to mention feel an overall new level of confidence and contentment.

I had never considered that, even if I could easily hear and overhear others or communicate in general without extra effort,   something would still get in the way.  For better or worse, I am profoundly shaped by growing up with hearing loss that resulted in experiences where I frequently felt left out and inadequate as a person.

This makes me think of how powerful those childhood and adolescent experiences really are.  In fact, so many of us spend our adulthood trying to recover or compensate.  We create the appearances we want, we strive for the degrees and career successes that we want to define us. We do this to the point where how we appear to others is very different from how we still feel on the inside.  A great example is the woman with a perfect body who still feels like the overweight girl she was in junior high and so she obsessively diets, exercises,  etc and no one can understand why she’s so preoccupied with it.

Inside, many of us still feel like the lost child, the outsider, the child made deeply insecure by critical parents or traumatized by a dysfunctional family or a host of other potential factors that defined our experience when we were growing up.     Even if there is no one experience we could identify as the culprit, many of us have an internal critic that undermines us.

Essentially what this man on NPR proved is that at a certain point even fixing the original problem or source isn’t going to change one’s internal experience.  Instead we have to change those ingrained beliefs and thought processes that developed during the most formative years of our lives.  No matter how much we focus on outside appearances and props, we may fool others or be temporarily gratified but we would continue to go through life feeling all too easily threatened by certain triggers, overly focused on appearance and/or awfully anxious in general. Internal work must be done for us to truly feel at peace.

I suppose it is important to not only change our thoughts and beliefs but also recognize that WE are not our thoughts.  Or our job or our hairdo or our kids.  Our thoughts and beliefs are ingrained internal chatter that we can step back from and observe and transcend.  The more we practice, the better we will get.  Each moment- right now this very second!- is an opportunity to do it.

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Oct 15th 2009Hearing loss & Introspection

Ha.  Well, some days it might seem easy to put the baby in a sling and get stuff done or go places.  Other days, like today, I consider it a victory that I got dressed!

I’m in bed with the baby, it is after 2 am. (Although I think this entry will indicate a different time and date because I initially started this entry hours ago.)   I only got as far as washing my face and flossing my teeth.  At some point I hope to grab the opportunity to run back to the bathroom and brush my teeth.  I think this is the biggest surprise to me, how continuously I am tied to Emmy.  I can’t even hand her off to Steve for very long.  I realize that I had imagined us sharing very similar roles and taking turns with her throughout the day and night.  However, it just does not work that way at this point.

In the scheme of things, this time is fleeting.  I imagine every age has its pros and cons.   Everyone who has been through it tells you childbirth is painful and life with a newborn takes adjustment and enjoy sleep while you can and that kind of thing.  Even when I heard all that, a part of me thought I could outthink and outgut my way through.   Sometimes though, it IS painful or stressful or overwhelming just like they say it will be.   I’m not complaining though, I’m acknowledging this part of the experience.

In a way, just being with Emmy is similar to meditating.  You are sitting and just being.  A part of you starts thinking “I should be doing something.”   What I am doing is incredibly important-  taking care of my baby- even if I haven’t showered yet and I don’t know what day it is and I must have been sitting in this one place for hours and hours.  Regardless, the mind starts thinking that I should be more “productive” somehow, which can lead to a somewhat stir crazy, glued down feeling.

This is a time to just be present and not wander away with my thoughts, especially the ones that start with “you should”.  The more present I am, the less anxious I will be.  The less anxiety or self-induced distraction I have, the more connected I will be to Emmy and the moment.  The less anxiety I have, the happier Emmy will be.  Just be!

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Sep 2nd 2009Emeline & Everyday life & Introspection

I’ve been writing in this blog since March 2003 and just got my first fairly negative comment the other day! “Bo-ring” tells me that “finding out the sex is so unoriginal.” The other option, waiting until birth, isn’t particularly original either as people have been doing that for thousands and thousands of years. I’m forced to conclude that there must be some other original means of finding out. Waving a silver spoon over my belly perhaps. Consulting with the gods and visiting a medicine man. Better yet! have Steve look up there with a flashlight.

We have three strollers now, thanks to Craigslist. (All three in great condition for less than the price of one stroller brand new! Have I told you how much I love Craigslist?) How did that ever even happen? I knew I needed a regular umbrella stroller and a jogging stroller because I want to get back into running after the baby is born (I miss it, especially this time of year! I know, I know you saw Charlotte running while she was pregnant on Sex and the City: The movie so it must be ok.  I’m telling you, I feel weird and physically uncomfortable when I try to run while pregnant though.)

But wait, two strollers is not enough. Apparently there is this other contraption known as the car seat stroller which is especially handy during the first year. And if I get the JJ Cole Bundle Me for the winter months, which friends of ours told us is an absolute necessity, I’m not going to want to take the baby out of that to transfer to a regular stroller during the winter months… So it begins. We already need a bigger car, for both baby and dog, and it won’t be long before we need a bigger HOUSE. For all our strollers.

By the way, pink frilly stuff for girl babies is out of control. I. hate. it.

Spring break is this week. I have been getting caught up on paperwork at work and organizing closets at home. Not exactly girls gone wild but…

Will try to get a 23 week pic of me up soon.

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Apr 20th 2009Everyday life & Introspection & pregnancy

What? I didn’t do an entry about week 21? I’m coining the term right now. Preggers fog brain. It is real.

Last week was the week that people all the sudden noticed. I literally went from no one noticing at all whatsover to coworkers hugging me in the hallways and cashiers ringing up my produce and asking me when I’m due. All the sudden the belly is there. The baby is kicking and moving at regular intervals throughout the day; an internal, sacred rhythm of her existence. I will miss that when she’s born.

On Anger

I had two quotes but thanks to preggers fog brain I can only paraphrase them inadequately, nor can I recall book titles and authors. One is this premise: if you wish to go on thinking that you are a nice person, don’t have children. The other is this: by the time we are adults, most of us have accumulated a fair amount of anger.

We all know people who are so angry that their behaviors, words, body language and facial expression mostly consists of anger. But I’m really referring to all the nice people out there who bring a pleasant face and sense of humor to work and social gatherings and avoid confrontation whenever possible but then in the privacy of their home get into a funk and vent at their significant other. Or drink a lot or eat a lot of chocolate or whatever.

We have stores of anger. Where does it come from? From daily suppressive accommodation to today’s world? From deeper disconnection from others and our selves? Unmet needs, unresolved issues, past hurts, unfulfilled wishes, the frustrations of everyday life. The pile of junk mail that never goes away. From wherever it comes, anger or negativity periodically surfaces in the privacy of our homes. We can still keep it fairly civil most of the time, even when we pout and bicker and ruminate. We can still believe we are generally nice people.

Having a child in the picture is another story. He or she has an innate talent for pushing buttons, especially the forgotten ones from your own childhood, and releasing that anger. Not just a regular release either. It will build up, build up and then explode in fury like you had never thought yourself capable of experiencing. I’m nervous about that part of motherhood.

I don’t want screaming in my face or being helplessly manipulated by a 3 year old that won’t listen and gleefully exerts her will. I’ll catch that smirk on her face and the top of my head will blow off like Mt St Helens. The 3 year old in me will rise up and say I WILL GET MY WAY NO MATTER WHAT. I thought I was sane. I thought I was a gentle human being. Wrong!

How does one work through anger so that when a child pushes those buttons, there is no pent up fury? For me personally anger is the most difficult emotion to comfortably work through. It stays in its stores and cycles from time to time, in moods and peeving thoughts that cause me to ruminate about various things that really have nothing to do with why the anger is there.

The purpose of the thoughts is just to keep anger fueled, without addressing the source. Since anger is a secondary emotion, other emotions lie at the source. All the lovely hormonal changes of late seem to bring about a rhythm of occasional internal seething. All the emotions are being cycled out of their stores and intensified.

Unlike most other emotions, I really don’t know what is the most therapeutic way for me to address and release anger. Go in the woods and scream? Meditate, sit with it and release it? Learn “techniques” like counting to 10 and breathing? A lot of it I think is rooted in my perspective. Consistent cognitive restructuring and thought stopping is needed to reroute my perspective. Heightened awareness of the direction and content of thoughts and replacement with compassion and counting of blessings. Taking action to work through things or to achieve what I want in life. Anger that is properly channeled brings energy and purpose, rather than going back into stores only to come out some other time.

When you’re about to have a child, this inner work is even more important. Maybe these are the lessons inherent in the emotional havoc of pregnancy, as opposed to just chalking it up as a byproduct of hormones gone awry.

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Apr 14th 2009Introspection & pregnancy

We had the ultrasound yesterday and it was an amazing, amazing experience. It was just incredible to see her head, hands, feet, arms, legs, belly and face! We saw her kicking, squirming, opening and closing her mouth, and having hiccups. Everything looks healthy and on track. She had her legs crossed and even when the tech poked her with the wand she wouldn’t uncross them. We thought we might have to go home without knowing, which would have driven me nuts! Then I got up and moved around and jumped up and down. When we tried the ultrasound again, her legs were uncrossed. A girl!

We were amazed. We were both leaning toward thinking it was a boy, maybe because we both only have brothers and are more familiar with boys. After the ultrasound I saw myself in the mirror and I was already seeing myself differently, as the mother of a daughter. Somehow, I feel like having a son would have confirmed my expectations about myself but having a daughter means I will transform them. I’m going to be different than I thought I was.

Already I feel new responsibility. If we had a boy, all he would probably need to do in order to become a decent man is to spend time with Steve, building tree houses and pinewood derby cars. Of course, our girl will do the same, and she will have wonderful sense of self and relationships with others because she has a father like Steve. But she may have challenges that even unconditional parental support and role modeling can’t overcome.

I want to spare her the color pink, queen bees, and society’s scrutiny. I want to spare her the years where most whole girls disappear into the partial twilight of uncertainty and doubt. Fixated and insecure about appearance and self-worth, they spend long years finding it infinitely more challenging to become a whole person. I want her to know in her heart that she is good enough to do and be anything she wants with self-assurance and acceptance. It will be time for me to overcome anxiety in more permanent ways so that I can be the role model of confidence and positive self-esteem that she will sorely need in order to be herself.

After the ultrasound, I was in a daze. What an earth shattering, life changing experience. The last time I felt this way was when Steve proposed. We went downtown, had lunch and called the grandparents-to-be and sent out texts to everyone we knew. We went to Kids Town and bought a crib mattress. This is for real. I can’t wait to hold her.

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Mar 26th 2009Introspection & pregnancy

The weather this March has been amazing!  Usually March tends to be blustery and slushy and gross, but this time there are sunny, warm days.  I’m still a bit skeptical, Vermont spring likes to fake you out a few times before it is really here.

So I have been trying to think of what to write about other than the five inch human in my abdomen.  I’ll go with what has been bugging me lately.  I was really bothered the other day by the fact that a friend lied to us.  Not even about anything significant, just stupid, avoidance-type lies.  I recognize that I shouldn’t take it personally because he lies about stupid little stuff all the time. The thing that irks me the most is the fact that I KNEW he was lying but I just kept nodding and smiling and keeping up the social niceties. Really, the question that bothers me is WHY?

I feel like lies (all those silly white ones and big ones too) and pretense make up way too much of the fabric of social interaction.  People pretend, they wear masks, they cover up, they say things they don’t mean, they act all chummy with people they don’t even like.  People misunderstand things and make assumptions and misinterpret things others say and do, but no one directly confronts it.  No one dares to be honest and real.  They avoid confrontation and spare feelings.

People worry about sparing the feelings of others, but what drives them even more is sparing feelings altogether.  Anything other than social chatter and joking around is too threatening.  Not to say that anything is wrong with social chatter and joking around, I absolutely love it.  But then there’s the hypocrisy and the avoidance and the lies that seem to be required to maintain it.

This baffles and wounds me in ways that are hard to explain.  Maybe the exclusion that comes with hearing loss gives me a different angle on all of this, due to watching from sidelines. I spent too many years watching and wanting more than anything to be a part of it.  When I began to become part of it more (once no longer confined by the roar of hallways and cafeterias), I discovered the difference was very baffling and painful.  When it comes to socializing, appearance and reality are not the same.

I love to get down to the roots of perceptions and assumptions and reactions, making sense of where they came from and why.  Comparing and realizing the origins of misunderstandings and hurt feelings.  Insight, healing and reconciliation.  Not this pretense and distance “everything is great!” b.s.  Yet, more often than not, I go along with the surface stuff.  I play along and keep the confusion and intuitions to myself.  If I want things to be more real, I should initiate it more.

Steve and I have a couple friends that we’ve actually started doing this with, it has been really cool and a fascinating process.  Even though we have all expressed our intention to do this, almost as an experiment of sorts, it is amazing what a hard habit it is to break.  The social niceties and the pretense.  Keeping internal reactions, confusion and surges of annoyance to one’s self.  Rationalizing and explaining away thoughts and feelings in one’s head without even checking with the other person.

With these friends we tend to go back and analyze what happened and share our reactions and compare perspectives (and it is incredible how often it leads to dramatic realizations about one’s blind spots, past trauma, negative or outdated beliefs, among other things).  We’re still trying to get to a point where we can do it right in the moment.  Where we can experience our feeling in the moment (sometimes that’s a tough one right there), then say directly  “Wait, what did you mean when you said that?”  and explain how we experienced it.  In this process, no one tries to cover up feelings, ignore them, state platitudes or make jokes so that it goes away.  In those moments, everyone can truly express and truly hear each other.

When this happen,  angry outbursts and emergence of hurt or negative feelings that are so feared and avoided in the regular social get togethers do not occur.  Instead there are revelations and genuine closeness, safety and trust.  There is deeper understanding and my perpetual state of turmoil in regular social situations goes away.  This is the way friendships should be.

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Mar 17th 2009Everyday life & Friends & Hearing loss & Introspection

Last night was the best thing that has happened in America in a long, long time. I am SO relieved and also surprisingly angry. I’m angry that I had to put up with a president that I did not like or respect for 8 years. I’m angry that Bush did not respect us either. I’m angry to what has happened to the country. I’m angry that we are in a stupid, useless, costly war. I’m angry that saving the environment and decreasing dependence on oil isn’t the number one priority.

No more cowboys or mavericks. It may have worked once upon a time for America, but not any more. Their approach will destroy the earth. We need enlightenment.

What an amazing feeling to see Obama walk on the stage with his family. What an amazing vibe he has, the vibe of a true president. He spoke with such respect, poise and maturity. He’s intelligent! He’s articulate! He’s thoughtful! He was humble, completely lacking the unconscious, taken-for-granted laurels of white male privilege. “I will listen to you,” he said “especially if we disagree.”

He is a man who is WITH us. He is not someone who has power over you or me. He is not an institution. I liked what Obama said about responsibility and sacrifice. We need to support each other. We need to give up unnecessary consumption of energy and material goods. We need to do what it takes. We need to work WITH him. And it is a great feeling to have a president you want to work with.

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Nov 5th 2008Introspection

We found four ticks on the dog already and it’s barely May!

I meditated the other day. It’s not a habit although I wish it was. I was at the upstairs window overlooking the backyard. I could see the woods and the river, and to the right, a stream. At that moment I looked at it and thought “stream” and that was all it was. Suddenly I wondered how a small child who didn’t have words yet would see the stream.

I tried looking at the stream again with this perspective. The stream caught the rays of the setting sun and sparkled and meandered in between the trees. It became a magical glittering shining thread in the landscape. I watched it without naming it and it became something fascinating and joyful. A child who does not think “Oh, the sun is just reflecting on the water” would believe in magic.

The act of naming separates us and makes the thing or person we’re naming an ordinary object. If we consciously give up automatically attaching a name or a ready explanation, the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

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May 4th 2008Everyday life & Introspection

I’ve started reading When the Heart Waits by Sue Monk Kidd. I loved her other book, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, because of how she pursued her ideas. She would be overcome by an experience, paint it or write it or meditate it, then research the symbol, have a profound dream, experience an extraordinary coincidence, then the symbol starts showing up everywhere, followed by another profound experience that moves her deeper into the issue. What a way to live. Traveling, pursuing symbols, experiencing remarkable responses in nature and other people, researching passionate interests, having mind blowing insights, then writing about it.

She uses the word “Christ” and “Christian” a lot which kind of makes me cringe because I think those words have way too much fundamentalist baggage and association to closed-minded ideas and stereotypes. She had a lot of revelations in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter that seems to have had a surprisingly little impact on her state of mind and her writing, at least where she is picking up at the start of this book.

So far it is about the search for the true self, the removal of the series of masks we wear and present everywhere we go. She emphasizes the importance of stillness and waiting, and how unbelievably difficult it is for most of us in modern society.

My thesis in part was on the true self and how to move beyond the ego. I think this is why I like her books so much, because they show a way to make this happen. But I find myself beginning to be skeptical of this “true self” talk. As if a static self cowers under all the masks and layers, clutching the vulnerable shadow that was put away as too shameful to be seen. And if you dig deep enough and process enough, it emerges like “Hey, here I am! You’re real now!”

In Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from the Buddhist Perspective, Mark Epstein proposes that the true self, and finding the true self, is a myth within therapy.

In the Buddhist view, a realized being has realized her own lack of true self. She is present by virtue of her absence and can function effectively and spontaneously in the world precisely because of her ability to see the self as already broken. It is not necessary to impute a true self to imagine qualities that we associate with emotional maturity. Indeed, it may be the absence of grasping for that essential core that unleashes the flood of affect that makes us feel most real. This is the kind of paradox that both Winnicott and traditional Zen masters thrive on: the true self experience that has come to preoccupy Western analysts is achievable most directly through the appreciation of what the Buddhists would call emptiness of self. [72]

Epstein adds: “The crumbling of the false self occurs through awareness of its manifestations, not through the substitution of some underlying “truer” personality.” [73]

Perhaps it is re-training the mind, practicing attention and awareness, becoming an observer instead of a reactor to the critical, negative voice of the ego. Once re-trained, the experience of the self becomes the brilliant white light of the movie projector instead of the jumbled, endless drama and content of the movie screen. The self is nothing, it just is. It experiences, it observes, it radiates without changing shape. It moves from moment to moment without becoming stuck in repetitive, painful patterns. The qualities of spontaneity emerge as well as the ability to experience the full spectrum of feelings without repression and superimposed masks.

Maybe Kidd will come to these realizations or maybe something different. I’ll keep reading.

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Jan 30th 2008Books & Introspection

There’s not many things I like better than a book that changes the way I think. I just finished why beautiful people have more daughters: From Dating, Shopping, and Praying to Going to War and Becoming a Billionaire- Two Evolutionary Psychologists Explain Why We Do What We Do by Alan S Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa. Before I read this book, I was very much of the persuasion that culture and media shapes us and those influences are the root a lot of issues, such as the emphasis on appearance, money and material possession. I’m not completely detached from that idea, but I feel I have a much more balanced perspective.

The premise of the book is essentially this: we have the brains and bodies of animals that evolved on the savannah 10,000 years ago. We live in the 21st century with brains and bodies that adapted to life as it was 10,000 years ago. The environment must be stable and constant long enough for evolution to occur. This has not been the case in the last 10,000 years. The agricultural revolution, then the industrial revolution, and now the computer revolution means that things have changed so fast and there has been no opportunity for new adaptations that would favor farmers or factory workers or the guy in the office cubby.

The authors explain that the “Savannah Principle” means that we retain much, if not all, of what was useful and necessary to survive, find mates, and reproduce ten thousand years ago. This is so intriguing to me. If I looked into the eyes of a man or woman from that long ago, would I really see a human being of comparable intelligence and curiosity and desire? The authors go on to give very logical (though sometimes simplistic) theories for many things in everyday life, from the sweet tooth to marriage to gender differences. I once considered gender differences to be a socialized thing, now I do not think so. Culture does not wholly create us.

I like the reasoning and complete lack of “political correctness” of evolutionary psychology, but it is also cold. Religion and spirituality, for example, is reduced to logic of “better to believe than not to believe” merely in terms of risk. Are we really just animals who invent many convoluted theories to explain our existence and our behavior?

I buy their explanations for a lot of things but I draw the line at meaning. I imagine our ancestors thousands of years ago had a rich inner life of storytelling and spirituality and attunement with nature. They must have had profound experiences and magical coincidences and considered something greater than themselves. There is more to life.

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Jan 15th 2008Books & Introspection