Back in 2016, my spouse and I revealed to our friends and family that I was a woman with a husband, not a man with a wife as previously assumed. Unsure of myself and afraid, it was difficult to gather the courage to reveal that part of myself…
Source: Own Voices Guest Author Mercy Zephyr: Fear Fed My Words | Limecello
I just recommended the Artist Way by Julia or Julie Cameron to a friend on Facebook. Now, most of the people on my personal FB page are friends from high school. I went to a weird, freak high school where people have stayed in touch with each other over the years. We still have a pretty good turnout for both kids and teachers at our reunions. Although, they’ve gotten grayer as the years have moved on.
I stumbled on the Artist Way due to a recommendation from my bff. It literally was a necessary thing at a period in my life when I needed it. I wrote stream of consciousness in the mornings for almost three years. Probably longer than I thought I needed, but looking back far shorter than I should have. My mother’s death, wherein I went into a deep, dark depression fora few years probably could’ve benefited from journaling every morning. I forgot during that period as I was in survival mode. I wish I had kept up the writing so it would’ve already been there. I have given a lot of thought to getting back to it.
I still take myself on dates and buy myself presents. I spend ALL of my $10. I leveled up from $5 because inflation, yo.
Weirdly, the one other thing which has helped my mind is an amalgamation of a short story I read in 9th grade and something I read many years later. When I was in 9th grade, Mrs. Sinclair, who was my 9th grade English teacher gave us tons of short stories throughout the year. The one I remember in relation to this thought was one that was a science fiction. It was about the invention of teleportation. Humans has invented a teleporter. But in order to have living things alive from one point to the other, anything alive had to be put to sleep. So, you are put to sleep, you are teleported, and then you wake up. Less than a minute or two. A smarty pants boys wanted to know how and why a person had to be asleep to teleport. So, he took drugs or somehow concocted to stay awake during the teleportation. He ended up completely insane when he arrived on the other side.
Although the teleportation took only a second or two, the human mind when it teleports and doesn’t have a frame of reference perceives it as infinity. His brain had live an infinite amount of time… alone and in a vacuum. He came out insane. In case you have figured it out by now, humans are community species. We are built to live together with others. otherwise, bad things happen.
The second thing which hammered this home was Stephen Covey’s first 7 Habits book. I don’t remember anything else about that book today. But I remember this: Infinity resides in the space between action and reaction. The old ways of doing something doesn’t need to be kept because you have all the time and choices in the world as you sit in that space between the initial action and the attendant reaction.
When you put that together with the short story, you get a complete thought, in my mind at least.
Now, when you put all this together, using stream of consciousness writing to help your brain gain more time between action and reaction. Making that period of time go in slo-mo.
Anyway, I woke up this morning thinking these things and thought I would share them with you.
Infinity resides in that space between breathes.
I am three years into my cancer journey. August of 2016 was the month I learned my life would change. It’s been a hell of a ride so far.
A lot of people have told me they notice I have such a good attitude about the cancer. I tell them having agency in my own medical journey AND stellar at-home support are the keys to recovery with a sound mind. It’s an article for another time, but seriously y’all, being able to have choices was fabulous. With an out of control disease… having some control is NECESSARY. But I digress.
One of the interesting things I’ve noticed over the last three years is that the chemo stripped my mind of my normal coping mechanisms. For what, you ask. Well, I am pretty sure I have ADD. I say pretty sure because back when I was growing up, ADD or ADHD weren’t diagnoses. Not being able to sit still or listen very well were. Boys who had the wiggles and girls who daydreamed. All of that. It’s even more complicated because ADD and ADHD looks different in girls than in boys. And boys were the ones most studies are about… then… and STILL.
I’ve known I’ve had ADD since my early 20s when I was able to study such things at university. I figured out large quantities of caffeine, enough to keep one up all night in the form of “No-Doze” pills made me calm and withdrawn. All the same symptoms people taking who had ADD or ADHD and Ritalin, Adderall, etc., reported. It was enough tomato me look into why this would be. Thus, my amateur diagnosis of ADD. Because I’m not hyperactive. Just distractible.
As a child without a diagnosis, no one taught me how to cope with my world with the way I encounter it and how that didn’t work for the community at-large. I figured out that I needed low noise in the background to study. That standing up and walking for a minute helped. I learned how to stick information int the right mental file cabinet and I learned how to access it with ease. And I figured out how to get my body and mind to cooperate.
Chemo strips all of your mental coping mechanisms. That is, until you can re-trace those pathways afterward. But the way my brain is and the things that chemo did to it are both fascinating and frustrating. I am relearning how to cope all over again. With new behaviors. Some are old ones my brain is learning to use again. Some, though, are new ones. I don’t think I understood just how much my brain had learned to work around my distractibility or my desire to DO ALL THE THINGS AT THE SAME TIME, which is almost the same thing as being distracted. Being TOO attracted, if you get what I mean.
At some point in the last 13 years, I learned mediation. Well, I learned a form of it as an older teenager to help my brain stop whirling and go to sleep, but I mean I learned mediation deliberately as a thing in and for itself. One of the ways yoga has you mediate is to step back and watch what your mind brings up as you try to sit in nothing. Your monkey mind will have thoughts. What they are and how often thoughts come are interesting things to observe. Observing the ego is a fascinating thing. I don’t know what happens in other people’s minds, but in mine when I first started mediating, I would have MANY thoughts all coming in and out of my brain at different speeds. Lots of them and often. As I sit longer and longer in stillness just watching, my thoughts would slowly slow down. At no time have I ever had a mediation experience with no thoughts floating through. Even if it is one or two thoughts coming through every once in a while, I always have a thought running it’s narrative inside my head.
I am pretty sure mediation has helped me recover from chemo and having an ADD mind. Being able to sit and watch as my brain tries different things to get information into the correct filing cabinet AND be able to retrieve it has been interesting, to say the least.
It’s been three years since a diagnosis changed my life.
Hopefully, it won’t take eighteen to relearn or lean anew techniques and tactics and strategies to cope with my learning disability. My parents had to “donate” playground equipment to keep me in kindergarten because of my bad behavior as a kid, I’m not sure I have the wherewithal to make a “donation” to stay in society as an adult. Costs have skyrocketed, after all.
Like many others, I labored through Shakespeare as a student, but found my love for the Bard many years later. I remember sneaking out of bed in my teens when the rest of the house was asleep to se…
Source: So Are You to My Thoughts
Hello Romance on the Rocks readers from Paris! I hope that you are having a wonderful spring day wherever you are reading this blog. The Shakespeare themed blogs from each of the Romanc…
Source: Shakespeare & Notre Dame
Alas, poor Yorick. And by Yorick, I mean me.
Source: Lamenting Shakespeare
When I was a teenager, I didn’t get Shakespeare. I groaned aloud in class when we had to read any of his plays—save for Romeo and Juliet. Maybe because the lovers were around my age. Or maybe…
One Including collaborations with others, William Shakespeare authored approximately 39 plays, 154 sonnets, and two long narrative poems. His works have been translated into every major living lang…
Shakespeare is known for asking, “To be or not to be…that is the question.” Well, answering that question would take an infinitely long time to answer. Time this blog post canR…
Source: To Read or Not to Read
It’s a ritual of mine to sneak away from my desk in the afternoons during the spring and summer. I take a walk around the Capitol, past the Supreme Court, and down to Union Station. Every summer, t…
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