Overachiever

There is a ball of hurt in my chest that is there despite having accomplished a lot of the big life goals I set out for myself, an education, a nice home, and a beautiful family. I still look out at the world as someone who needs to achieve something to be worthy of all the wonderful glittering experiences that I think I should be having. 

I feel a lack of, personality, worthiness, ability, and intelligence. I feel like these things are keeping me from having this idealized picture of friendship and competence. 

I want to retreat into a world of books and television and just be by myself because it's safe there. But my "by myself" time is actually quite full of remote work and adorable but needy dogs.

I feel like I need time to recharge my batteries by being left alone to think deeply and read but I so seldom get the chance to do that. Sometimes I think that a lot of these self-confidence issues and the stress in my life would dissolve if I could just spend time doing core activities like that.

For most of my life, I've felt like I needed to learn, I've had a great interest in many things, but in a way, I wasn't driven by what was most enjoyable to me but what I felt was a skill that I lacked.

I've spent a lot of time organizing my interests into a plan of action and trying to make progress on all of them at once. This doesn't work, I just get frustrated and give up. I need to focus on a single interest at a time and make progress toward it.

The task then becomes narrowing down what I want to work towards to that one thing.

I kind of like the idea of learning Python but also like the idea of learning a financial software called Anaplan. One would lead me down a path towards a coding career (possibly), the other further down the path of finance skills.

Then the trick is to do things I just naturally like; gardening, health, drawing, painting, and music putting time aside to do them without putting pressure on myself to do them.

At my company, they're all about automation and I have the skills to pull people together to work on things but I don't have the skills to do the automation. 

I'm a bit frustrated.

Some reflection

 I am almost 44 years old! Reflecting back I acknowledge the struggles that I've faced, how I've grown, what makes me the person that I am today. I'm perfectly imperfect. 

My biggest periods of growth have come from accepting uncertainty and letting go of beliefs that were given to me that no longer fit. I'm emotionally, physically and mentally healthier because of this. 

The night before last night I got stuck at the bottom of the canyon to Ophir. I had gone down the road to call Matt and had kept the headlights on so that cars zooming down the canyon would realize I was there. Now I knew the battery could die if I did that, so I turned it on every once in a while and ran it. But I didn't want to keep running it so eventually I stopped turning it on. Well the inevitable happened and the battery died. So lesson learned. 

Now I could have just stayed there waiting for someone to pass by, but I felt strong enough to at least make a start on walking. At least if no one came by then I would get back to camp. 

It's a pretty safe area, not much wildlife to worry about, so I wasn't particularly scared. But I was a little intimidated by the distance since I had driven that road earlier and it took a lot longer than I thought it would to get to camp. 

I tried to take in the beauty of the night sky, I could see thousands of stars. I tried to appreciate that I wasn't particularly cold, even though the wind was whipping around me. I had a moment of awe as I looked down at the ground and saw the wind dancing through the light on my phone. I also saw a deer on the other side of the road. 

I couldn't help but cry a bit, sob actually as I walked. I felt so alone, a feeling I know well. I think we all know this feeling well. 

I let the sobs subside into calm and just kept walking. Then when I was almost back my son passed me on the road and gave me a ride the last bit of the way. 

I was less tired than I thought that I would be. Probably because I had been exercising a lot the past week on the long trip I was on with my cousins. In fact I'm proud of how healthy I feel, I'm not as sore and worn out as I would have been in past years, though I am still sore and worn out. 

I'm not immune to bouts of melancholy but they're fewer and last for only a short amount of time. My life has been good and I still have a lot if it left to live! 

Grief

More constant than other companions, a probe of deep feelings, of sadness and loss. Sharper than love, easier to recognize, grief.

It is easy to want it to end. Harder to accept it, harder to sit with it. 

It sits so heavy on the heart. You would think it was a stone, but it's more like water. Water that seeps down into the ache and brings the tears up through your heart, through your throat and through your eyes.

It is a recognition of loss, an appreciation for what you had, a sorrow that isn't easily healed, grief.

For me it is most intense when I've lost someone I love. Especially if it seems so needless, so pointless, so empty. But some things aren't easily healed and so I sit with grief and try to feel it without it collapsing around me. 

There's Nothing

I seem to have the talent of getting myself into situations that I really don't want to be in.

It's usually the result of a curiosity for something different, a fascination perhaps of pushing past my own warning sensors. 

Here I am, midnight, searching for something. A distraction perhaps, a human connection, or just anything with any substance to it.

There's nothing

At this moment, at this point I can't find it. 

But I keep searching, hoping to find a salve for the empty feeling I currently have. 

I know that it's pointless, and perhaps I should turn my mind again to reading instead of this empty search. 

I'm reaching out to the void and grasping, trying to find myself there, but comming up short. 

SG

Recovering, Moving forward

Last Tuesday I woke up near 3 am with a terrible sore throat and just feeling like crap. I felt that way for a solid 6 days and today I woke up feeling like a burden had been lifted. 

I was useless for most of the past week, looking around at the clutter in the house with no will or energy to clear it up. Today I got up and cleaned the house, my lungs are still a bit heavy, I'm still a bit tired, but I think the worst is over.

Today is a holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. I don't feel qualified to say too much about him, to quote him, or act like I know what his fight was all about. I only know snippets, bits of info from movies and TV shows, a little bit from history class, quotes from people's Facebook posts. I don't feel qualified at all to talk about him, his life, his legacy.

All I know is that he was trying to fight injustice and that he was trying to make a better world for his children. 

I know that one group of people subjugated another group and justified that by making the other group into a subcategory. This happens all over the world, it still happens. 

People enslave others to benefit from their labor. They make others into this subcategory of "less than" to steal from them and subdue the guilt they might have felt for doing that to another human being. 

It is easy to want to just say, "that was so long ago." Or to say "I didn't do that to others, I am not my ancestors." Maybe I could feel like that if the people who had been subjugated had been summarily restored to a livelihood back then. If they would have been treated with respect and invited into society as equals, I would think "let's leave all that in the past." But I know as well as everyone else that didn't happen.

That the people who had been held as property had to fight for their standing in society. Not only that but they are blamed when things get violent because "we should be able to just work things out peacefully."

We know that nothing will change if no one puts up a fuss, that's the way of the world. There's a concept I've heard of recently, that of getting into "good trouble." Fighting against oppression, racism, bigotry, hatred, and fighting for our survival in this world are all things to fight for. 

For further reading and understanding, I'm going to read what he wrote.

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/publications/king-papers

https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/books-bibliography/

What is Happening?

For some reason, no matter how many times I try to explain what's going on with me, it doesn't help.

I'm going to describe what I go through. Most of the time my breasts hurt, from the sides radiating into my armpits they ache, the middle and upper areas are tight and hurt if pressed, my nipples get chaffed easily. So I try not to agitate any of this area. I don't want anyone touching or bumping them. I want to protect them. Trying to make me aroused by touching them makes me feel violated, hurt, upset, withdrawn and really sad. Because I know that they are the fantasy of men, the objects of desire and are intricately tied up in the desirability of a woman. I know that it seems like I'm withholding a part of myself from my partner and it seems like part of the problem that I have in my relationship.

The other things that I'm dealing with vary in severity from day to day and sometimes aren't a problem. Most of the month I have a degree of what is called brain fog it makes it hard to concentrate, it makes me feel confused and it's sometimes hard to make decisions because I can't think through them quickly. Day 1 of my period I know I'm going to start because the brain fog suddenly clears and it's like coming out into the sun after being in the fog all month. 

About a week before the start of my cycle (bleeding) I get progressively more achy, it's hard to move, I don't have energy, my joints hurt, my muscles hurt. It's harder to sleep because everything hurts (which makes everything worse, I need a lot of sleep to deal with my body). I get sensitive to lights and sounds, I'll have a light headache or occasionally sharp stabbing pains in different areas of my head or a migraine. I get more anxious, confused, clumsy (I tip things over and drop things), I forget things and it's hard to concentrate. My sense of smell tends to increase and some smells make me feel nauseated. All I want to do is sleep but ironically I also need to pee a lot as well so it's hard to settle in.

Then the more insidious side of this disorder start up, I don't like to look in the mirror because I don't like what I see, my body, my face, my hair, my clothes all make me feel a little sad. I push these thoughts away but then I have other thoughts. I feel like I'm not good at my job, the dirty house makes me feel like a failure, the projects that we're working on are overwhelming because I can't seem to get them under control (and I start feeling like my house is just crap anyway), my children's struggles make me anxious and sometimes I'll start ruminating about them all night. 

Meanwhile

I usually start off my week days by getting up to take the girls to school. I stumble out of bed and put on some warm sweatpants and my glasses (sometimes my contacts depending on how well I slept). Sometimes waking up interrupts the aching, fitful, non-rest that I was enduring and when I get back from dropping off the girls I can go back to sleep having moved around a bit and worked out the kinks. 

After sleeping a bit more I wake feeling a bit better and get to work (sometimes taking a bath right before starting but sometimes holding off because I need to get working).

I settle into work by following a familiar routine, tea and toast, pitcher of water and cup. I get through my day often not realizing until too late that I've got nothing planned for dinner and this creates anxiety in me. Usually by the time you get home I've finally gotten into the thick of things at work and I can't stop to fix you an after work snack otherwise I'm worried that I'm never going to catch up at work. 

Sometimes your mom lets us know that we're invited for dinner, sometimes we play the "what should we do for dinner game", sometimes I can make something simple. most of the time I'm overwhelmed and not ready or able to cook anything. 

For most of the day I'm battling these symptoms and trying to be a productive member of society. I do all I can to get through the day, until we lay down and relax, 

Changing Perceptions

 A hundred years seems like a long time. But then I'm almost to the halfway mark of a Century and I feel like that time passed so quickly that it's hard to dismiss how short a hundred years truly is. 

So then think of how short a time 244 years is, comparatively, that's how long it's been since the founding of the United States in 1776.  

The thing that seems to make a difference in peoples perception of time is that their time is different than their parents time, which was different from their parents time etc. and we overlook the ideas and beliefs that are being passed down from one generation to the next, some that are the same and some that are purposefully different from what we were taught. 

Sometimes we are trapped in a cycle that we are unaware of, like the cycle of prejudice. I had believed for instance that the problem of racial inequality had been solved for the most part. That people of color still faced prejudice from some racists and those racists were deplorable, but I couldn't understand them. I thought how could they still hold on to such archaic beliefs after all we've gone through? 

But then I couldn't understand the plight of whole generations of people who had gone past the civil rights movement to these modern times not being able to escape the cycle of poverty they were in. I was told that it was a failing of their moral character, or their innate laziness that kept them down. I couldn't see the truth, and that because in the first formative years of my life I had no understanding of how the world outside of my community worked. 

But then I wound up in a situation that made me face some hard realities. I was a young mother, I married a man who worked hard but was completely oblivious to how money truly worked and he didn't have a clue about how to deal with children or a wife. 

It was then that I found out how hard it was to get help in order to get out of the situation I was in. I went to school so that we could get Pell Grants to cover the rent and some of the bills. I was a frequent visitor to our local Workforce Service office, toting around my babies, one on the hip, one in a car seat. I would have to wait there for hours in order to talk to the agent to figure out what we needed to do to get rental assistance, food assistance, and work assistance. It wasn't easy! Just when I thought things were set they would send something else in the mail requiring some other proof of something or other that we had to get to them ASAP. I had to walk a lot, or drive in beater cars that smelled weird or belched black smoke. 

The irony wasn't lost on me, I had to deal with the very ingrained belief that people on government assistance were lazy and living it up on the system to the reality that it was really hard to get government assistance and it wasn't even enough to really help much. 

Another thing that I didn't think too much about before having mixed race children was being asked awkward questions. "Where did you adopt them from?" was a frequent question. "I love their hair" was something I would hear sometimes. My kids schoolmates were usually shocked when I came into their classes to pick them up. 

I never thought my kids would face discrimination, for the most part I haven't heard from them about being discriminated against but then they just might not be telling me about it. 

My perception of the US as a place that had gotten past the past as far as equality for POC drastically shifted when George Floyd was killed. Just looking at the faces of the police officers that were literally killing him in front of the world to see changed my perception forever of what racism truly is and what it does. How deep it runs. Adding POC to the cast of shows, making sure that there are different 'types' of people in commercials, and print Ads is disingenuous. It's fake. I was fooled by the window dressing and couldn't see behind it. 

I admit to feeling helpless when it comes to knowing what to do to help though. It's like many of the large issues we are facing today. Deforestation of the rainforest, people fleeing from oppressive regimes in their country and seeking asylum in the US, pollution, catastrophic storms, wild fires, poverty, hunger, the brainwashing of Fox News viewers (like my Dad). I don't know what to do. 

I've turned back to my blog to write out these thoughts because I can moderate comments and it's less likely that my Dad's going to show up here ranting about "Socialist, Communist, Marxist Democrats"

Write more later.

SG

Becoming an Accomplice

 How to start off writing. It's 2021, people stormed the Capitol. They're not being punished for it really, though the police are making a minimal show of doing so. 

So many thoughts. 

What is the overarching theme of the universe? Change.

We resist change because we are scared about what it will mean for us. We're not sure if we're going to be OK after the change has happened so we try to prevent it from happening, through spit and grit.

I've lived the reality of change at times being carried along with it and sometimes taking action. In 2020 I realized the reality that I had been living in was a lot different from the reality that people of color live in. That my local police seemed to be OK guys (although a lot of them seem a bit egotistical) but I didn't think for a minute that there was really a big issue with the police. I thought they were stopping bad guys from doing bad things. 

Sometimes they stop OK guys from doing stupid things, sometimes that turns into sending people to jail that shouldn't really be in jail.

I didn't know that there could be racism without overt racist comments and that we could be complicit in a racist state without understanding that is what was happening. 

So I'm going to educate myself, try to do better, help where I can. 

I just attended a meeting on how to be an "accomplice" vs. "ally" where the speaker, Marci Rizzi, was making a distinction between being supportive in the background and taking action.

Here's a list of things she mentioned (that I was able to write down).

1. Help create safe spaces - be like John Brown

Read John Brown - a Biography

2. Help reform the prison system - write your legislators

Be a pen-pal to prisoners

3. Harness the power and anger of Fred Hampton, Malcom X and the Black Panthers.

Watch every video you can of Fred Hampton speaking.

4. Be as stealthy and quick witted as Harriet Tubman

Support the work of black organizations. NAACP, The Innocence Project, ublac.org, The Conscious Kids.

5. Capitalism and Racism are conjoined twins

Buy from and support black owned businesses. www.officialblackwallstreet.com/directory/

bookshop.org

6. Be more like Dr. Martin Luther King

Be willing to put yourself in harms way to protect black bodies. Dr. King Center for training.

7. Be less like a "Karen." Stop being defensive.

You are a racist without your consent. By default. Everyone is.

Follow Stacey Patton and Son of Baldwin (James Baldwin)

8. Buy books and art

"Just Mercy" The Career of Bryan Stevenson

"Whoreson" by Donald Goines

"Bail-Bonds" White Man's Justice, Black Man's Grief

"The Blind Spot"

"The New Jim Crow" and then "How to be an Antiracist"

"The Bluest Eye" 

"Propaganda" by Jacques Ellul

Anything by Toni Morrison

"A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn

"Stamped from the Beginning" by Ibram X. Kendi

"Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Pablo Freire

9. Watch Black TV Shows and Media

"Good Hair" by Chris Rock

Seeing "White on Scene" on Radio Podcast

Resources:

www.officialblackwallstreet.com/directory/

bookshop.org

Betty Sauer - Diversity Committee

Lobbyist training through https://www.lobbyschool.com/online-training/ 

Equalityutah.org

2020 Thoughts

This year has been so much, all at once. It's been chaos and burning, fear, lots of fear. No one's had a clear idea of what's going on. So much anger and politicization. I've had so much rolling around in my head I keep wanting to write it all down but not taking the time.

It's kind of ironic really. Growing up I thought that as a nation we valued public sanitation and had the means and tools to counter infectious diseases. That surely a plague the likes that people used to see wouldn't happen in my lifetime, how foolish. Plus I thought that we as a nation had overcome racial inequality for the most part and that now we were just trying to overcome bias and prejudice that was residual from the past. How wrong I feel now!

I thought the "War on Drugs" was a good thing, that we were addressing a problem by putting "criminals" away. How little I knew about how the system worked, how unfair it is.

This year conspiracy theories galore have emerged and people have become so outspoken about their pet theories. Yet it's hard to know who to trust really.

It has become clear that our government is a shell, impotent and corrupt, and I have no idea what to do about it. Revolt? Join those out protesting? Vote in another parody of an election?

Also I feel so lost. I keep wishing that somebody older and wiser could step in and be there for me. Come over and help me set up a garden or something. Help me figure out how to use my resources better. I have 2 refrigerators and a chest freezer and cupboards of food and I still feel like I'm starving. I used to know how to manage it all but I work so much that I don't feel free to figure out what I'm doing. I'm hungry all the time!

I'm feeling so isolated. I'm an introvert so for the most part I'm OK with how things have panned out with me being able to work from home. But I feel like facing the world outside of home makes me stretch my comfort zone out and I think it's sometimes good for me.

I read that we are becoming a society like the one that Ray Bradbury was trying to warn us against in his book Fahrenheit 451. It's true. " No one wants to be made uncomfortable, no one wants their beliefs challenged. To be exposed to diverse opinions would demand considered thought and might upset a life of naïve pleasantness. Such a possibility provokes resentment from an immature mind, and resentment often leads to self-righteous destruction. Look at the first line of the novel: “It was a pleasure to burn.” Why a pleasure? Because maintaining a false sense of moral superiority by silencing people who disagree with you is one of the perversities of human nature, something that a liberal education is designed to remedy. Intellectual development is always a struggle, and the search for truth never ends; it requires continuous exchange and debate." (Taken from the site Intellectual Take Out).

I want to think more. It's my nature to sit and think but I feel like that's been limited lately because of certain demands on my time. I want to be knowledgeable, broadly educated. I wish I had the time to study Latin, Greek all the old texts.

But then there aren't many people that feel like this and it's hard to find those who do in order to have intelligent conversations. Every once in a while I'll find someone, then I lose them. That seems to be how it is for me.

Also I want to do something towards resolving the issues we face behind racial inequality and our history of slavery. I've always heard that I had ancestors who fought on both sides of the Civil War so I thought I would look them up. I found a resource, a book of our family history that some of my ancestors have put together. There are a couple of mentions of slaves and their names. I bought the book and I'm going to pour through it and find out the details as much as possible and work with a group called "Coming to the Table." Which is a way for Black and White people to reconcile what has happened. Black people have a hard time finding anything out about their ancestry so I will share what I find in hopes of helping someone find their ancestors.

I've also decided to make regular donations to the "Legal Defense Fund" to help those who are caught in the trap of the American Criminal system (not Criminal Justice, there's very little justice going on).

SG

Reflecting on the times

Looking at things happening in the world today makes my heart break. It breaks for those who are suffering due to other peoples prejudices and actions, and it breaks for those who blindly charge through life thinking they are right and don't take into consideration anything that others say.

If you listen to the TV pundits they sound so serious most of the time they seem right in their opinions because they are bringing in "experts" and discussing the topics with them. What their shows are really are echo boxes. Listening to them for a length of time makes their opinions seem legitimate, they get into your head and all the thinking you should do for yourself is conveniently done for you. Get away from it for a while and come back to it and you can hear the echo chamber (perhaps). But if you're immersed in it for too long than it just sounds legitimate and real.

The same thing happens in religions.

Anyway I will write more later. I'm just sad we're in this position as a country and as a world.

SG