It occurred to me recently that the scary decisions I have to make would be much easier if I had a goal. So I’m sort of working on one.

Right now, the goal itself is really small and vulnerable so I don’t really want to talk about it in public. But I’m making tiny, tiny steps towards it and trying to convince my monsters that it’s doable. Just having it there is making it easier to think about the decisions I need to make.

This is definite forward motion.

And I’m giving myself permission to make this a short entry – and to respond to the fabulous people who left comments on my last post.

I’m also giving myself permission to post something that is not Great Writing.

Dear world-at-large,

I kind of hate the fog.

I especially hate being in the fog when I have to deal with benefits, insurance people, and the HR department at work.

Of course, if I wasn’t in the fog, I wouldn’t need to deal with any of that stuff.

(Note: I really don’t need to be told that I should just go back to work and everything will be fine.)

The world is slightly falling down around my ears. I seem to be unable to write (even to blog, or post threads asking for help on my favourite message board, never mind the fiction I actually WANT to be writing) or knit (I keep casting on, then pulling the yarn off the needles) and even gaming isn’t really entertaining me.

I’ve been doing some tidying in my room at my parents’. It helps a bit to have a space that’s semi-organized. Then I go back to the place where, theoretically, I actually live, and it’s horrible, and I get mired in the fog again. Like, even worse than before.

I am jealous of the people who get depressed and then bounce back and feel their old selves again. Right now, I feel like I don’t have an old self that isn’t depressed. I can’t imagine a not-depressed me right now, which is super-frustrating. And yet I know that there have been times when I have found it at least bearable to get out of bed and when things are less of an epic daily struggle.

And it’s super-annoying, because a week ago I felt on top of the world, almost, and I have no idea what’s changed.

I want to say fuck everything, but I have so many big scary things and decisions and questions hanging over my head that there’s not much chance of taking a vacation from it.

I’m trying to figure out what the next step is – and because I want the next step to come from me and not to be too influenced by what other people think I should do, I’m not asking for advice. In fact, I’m asking you not to give me advice right now. However, tea and sympathy, hugs, love, and support would be much welcomed.

Like, a lot.

*mwah* to you all.

So I’m home again, and settling back into my usual patterns – all the comfortable bits and difficult bits that I’m used to. But with a twist, because I just came back from retreat and everything’s a bit different. Whether this will last or not, I don’t really know, but I feel a bit more distanced from all the patterns. In a good way.

It’s weird. One thing I’m noticing is my pattern of putting things off.

Ha ha, you might say. It’s not like this is the first time I’ve ever noticed this pattern. It’s pervasive, in that effects a huge number of different things in my life.

Things I want to get done.

Things I need to get done.

Getting out of bed in the morning.

Writing to-do lists.

Dealing with emails.

Writing blog posts.

It seems like all of these things get put off until the absolute last minute. Or in some cases, unti people are hounding me to get back to them. It’s kind of a distressing pattern because it often leaves me in a panic about stuff I need or want to get done and it ends up with certain things falling off my plate – not in a measured, “I don’t want to do this thing so I shan’t do it” way, but because I simply run out of time or forget.

I don’t like this thing the way it is. It’s definitely a pattern I want to shift.

So I’m thinking about doing an experiment. (I’m feeling more optimistic about doing experiments, since retreat.) The experiment is really simple: I’m going to pick a couple of things I’d like to do tomorrow, and I’m going to work on them.

Thing One: I’d like to get started on my homework for Cairene McDonald’s Time Disciples course. Cairene is truly awesome, and I’m really wanting to get going on this, but the first homework has been freaking me out

Thing Two: I’d like to do a little bit of Shiva Nata in the morning. Just one run through level 1 horizontal arms, I think. Then I’ll sit on my bed for five minutes and journal.

Here’s what I need for that to happen:

• I need to post the Shiva Nata numbers on my bedroom wall where I can see them.

• I need to read through Cairene’s exercise and make sure I have what I need handy.
• I need to make sure there’s a notebook by my bed for easy journalling after Shiva Nata.
• I need to set my alarm so there’s actually a morning for me to do these things in.

I think I can do those four things before I go to bed.

(Five things, because “do the washing up” is on that list, too. Yay, getting back home? *grumble*)

I notice, though, that I’m worrying about stuff not getting done. Like, if I give myself leeway to do all of this at my pace, everything will fall apart because I won’t get enough done. (Note: I’m getting very little done at the moment, due to depression and poor time management and stuff, and the world has not yet fallen apart. Not too much, anyway.)

So: an experiment. I’m experimenting. And totally experimenting with creating safety and support for myself in the hopes that I’ll feel more energized once I’m grounded. Which is interesting: we’re talking chakra stuff again, and how I’m scared of being energetic without having somewhere for all that energy to go.

I’m wondering if I can build a tiny morning practice that contains Shiva Nata and one or two gentle, gentle grounding exercises. Just breathing or lying on the ground or something.

I’m wondering a lot of things. I guess that’s what retreat does to a person.

Comments.

Ah yes, back to asking for what I want in comments.

The short answer is this: I don’t know. As usual, I don’t want advice, and at some point I really will write the post about why I don’t like to be told what to do (or, honestly, told what you think is going on right now – I like to think I can figure that out). But what I do want? I don’t know.

Maybe you could tell me what you’re experimenting with right now. Or how you feel about the whole “experiment with your patterns” thing.

Just a quick note to say that I am back from retreat with Havi and assorted wonderful people.

Seriously, the people. Every single one of them is so cool and I feel so lucky to have met them.

It was a crazy-intense, powerful, awesome week. I loved it. There was quite a lot of hard mixed in there. And an amazing amount of joy and laughter. The chance to interact with some messy, scary, twisty patterns and some obnoxious monsters and come out the other side, alive.

I’m going to try to get back into the pattern of blogging every day. Because that seemed to be good for me. (Hi.) But at the very least, I’m going to try to blog occasionally and not disappear for months on end.

It was a really great week and I’m sure stories about it will be popping up over the next… who even knows how long?

In the meantime, I’ve got lots to process. Also, it’s almost half past one in the morning and I’m exhausted, so I should maybe sleep.

Good night!

So over the last few days, I’ve discovered a TV show called The Big Bang Theory which you probably all had discovered long ago.

It’s interesting.

It’s kind of painful at times in terms of sheer recognition. There’s a moment in the first episode, for example when one of the central characters is knocked out of his (familiar and a little neurotic) routine by the new neighbour. Both his discomfort and the exasperation with which his discomfort is treated are familiar enough to me that it’s… well, kind of ouchy.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t be writing reviews of TV shows on this blog. So I’m going to reassure myself, and you, that this is not going to be me rambling on about The Big Bang Theory. Instead, I want to talk about a thing it got me thinking about.

One of the interesting things about the show is how it positions characters with regard to “normality”, and that’s got me thinking about normality and my own relationship to it. Where I am in relation to it. I have one of those love-hate relationships with the word “normal”.

On the one hand, I’m a freak and a geek and proud of it. Queer. Maybe autistic (that one’s still more on the side of hypothesis rather than proven fact). Too many masculine traits to be totally comfortable with the whole being a woman thing and too many feminine traits to want to be a guy. Fascinated by all kinds of bizarre things. Thoroughly bizarre (sometimes incomprehensible) sense of humour. Weird in all kinds of little ways.

So there’s a freak side of me, alive and well.

On the other hand, there is another part that desperately wants to be normal.

To have a normal body (ie, one that’s not fat or riddled with illness).

To have a normal job (even though I really don’t thrive in normal 9-to-5s).

To have a normal attitude to sex and a normal, loving relationship (not this absolute hard-line inability to fall in love things that makes me really sad).

To have a normal life. Whatever the hell that means.

So there’s a tension here, and it’s really hard to reconcile the two parts. Like: I honestly don’t see how to do it. I can’t be a freak and be normal at the same time. And I can’t just ditch one side or the other, and suddenly be totally comfortable with either being a total freak or being totally normal. Cannot. Do it. Not gonna happen.

So what are the needs behind these two strong desires?

The whole “I wanna be a freak” seem like the desire to be really me. To express all the bits of me, no matter how weird they are or how little they fit into normality’s stereotypes.

But I want to fit in, too, and that’s probably part of why I also feel this intense desire to be normal. I want to have a place where I fit, and people who really get me. Right now, it seems very hard to reach out to other people because there is an awful lot of explaining to do, and that’s hard work. I’m kind of bored of explaining myself to people.

(She says, on the blog that is all about the inner workings of her brain. But this is different somehow.)

I don’t really have a conclusion.

I’m interested in figuring out the next step.

I’m interested in working out if there is a place where I can fit in as me instead of having to tweak various bits of myself in order to be liked or accepted.

I’m interested in finding support and comfort, even if it does mean establishing routines that might look neurotic from the outside.

I’m interested in being more me. And listening more to what’s going on inside.

That comment thing that still doesn’t have a snazzy name.

This thing that is becoming the “usual thing” still applies: I really don’t want advice. Also, please don’t try to analyze what’s going on here.

I’d love to hear, though, your own experiences with being normal or otherwise. And with your wants and don’t-wants about normality and freakitude.

Also: I’m wondering if you guys who comment ever check back to see if I responded. (Even though you probably know by now that I’m not a comment-responding person.) If I were to respond to your comment, would you a) notice and b) care?

PS I was totally going to talk about Pace and Kyeli and The Freak Revolution but it didn’t go that way in the end. So I guess I’ll just link to them and talk about them some other time.

Today: a totally random collection of things I have been noticing. I’m not even going to try to give this a plan or a structure. I’m just going to write it!

• Yesterday, I gave an astrology session. Afterwards I was able to make a list of “things to work on for next time” without beating myself up that the session didn’t go 100% perfectly. This is definitely progress.

• I am always beating myself up for not having enough ideas. In fact, I even bought this to help me have more ideas (I haven’t really looked at it yet, but it seems awesome.) The other night, I noticed that part of my issues with sleeping is that as soon as I snuggle up in bed and close my eyes, my brain is filled with ideas for stuff.
• Of course, this is a totally useless time for my brain to turn on. But it gives me hope that maybe I can access the idea-generating bit of my brain when I’m, like, fully awake.
• I’m noticing a lot more when I am feeling angry and irritated. On the one hand, that’s probably a good thing if I want to start hanging out with my fire more. On the other hand, it’s really uncomfortable, and I’m finding that I don’t know what to do with it.
• Maybe there’s something in just being with the discomfort. Or possibly getting to know the angry bit of me a bit. I’ve been toying with keeping an “anger diary”, but then I could keep five million types of diary, and do nothing but write diaries all day.
• Maybe “write diaries all day” would be an improvement on “play WoW all day”, though?
• NB: I’m actually not playing WoW all day. I’m doing other stuff, too! I’m looking for things that cheer me up. I’m writing blog posts – definitely an improvement! I’m taking naps (good for me right now when I’m so tired all the time). I’m helping my parents with shopping. There is other stuff. So writing diaries all the time would actually not be all that helpful.
• I’ve recently discovered The Big Bang Theory – two years later than the rest of the world, of course! I just bought the first season from iTunes, and I’ve watched all of two episodes. It’s pretty awesome, though.
• I’m still not done deciding whether I should work on my first chakra or my third. Part of me is wondering if I can do a bit of both. Or alternate days, or something. In any case, “stuff about chakra 1″ is definitely on my reading list.

And I’m done!

Asking for stuff in the comments.

So I haven’t come up with a snazzy not-stolen-from-Havi name for that yet.

I also totally feel bad for asking for specific things in the comments.

And completely ambivalent about responding to comments. I find responses really hard, and I’m experimenting with giving myself permission not to respond. However, I really want there to be friendly discussions in the comments, and it’s kind of impossible to foster that if I don’t take part in them. Plus, I totally don’t want my readers to think that I don’t read and appreciate every comment.

I totally do. (Even the spam!)

So I’m going to go ahead and ask for stuff even though it doesn’t feel that comfortable.

Again, I’m not looking for advice. (You may be sensing a theme here. I really don’t get along with advice.)

But it’d be great to hear what came up for you reading this, or what you’ve noticed about yourself this week.

Yay, comments!

Hey, I gave an astrology session today – and I’m pretty sure it didn’t suck! (My client was lovely, smart, engaged, and insightful. Also I’m pretty sure I gave her some useful information and did the listening thing and maybe we uncovered, or at least talked about, some patterns.)

I was going to use today’s blog post as a post-mortem – and kind of a way to remind my lovely readers that the astrology thing is not dead in the water.

But I’m finding that I don’t want to do that. I want to talk about the other thing that’s been preoccupying me over the past 24 hours. And that’s the chakra thing that I’ve been rambling about all week.

(“Astrology thing”, “chakra thing”, okay. I’m good at things This is totally Buffy-ized language, isn’t it? I so sound like my whole generation.)

Anyway. Chakras.

That book I talked about before – which by the way is Wheels of Life by Anodea Judith, for those who don’t want to click the link – has a little chakra quiz in it. I love those little multiple choice quizzes, which I suppose is part of being brought up on girl’s magazines. So I filled the thing in and totted up my results and I was interested in what it said.

Now, it should be said that all of my chakras are pretty much far from great, according to this quiz. My best chakra was the 5th (which is the throat chakra). But while I’ve been obsessing about this wound over my 3rd chakra, that wasn’t the worst one. My worst one was the 1st chakra. Root chakra. Earth. Grounding.

Not really a surprise, for two reasons.

First: I’m not, not, not a physical person, or a body person. I’m not in touch with my body. I find it really hard to get into my body (this might sound weird to everyone but me). I have never really liked or accepted my body. I’m lazy. I don’t like physical exercise. (People keep telling me that physical exercise will make me feel better. This is not my experience. Maybe that means I’m doing it wrong or something, but you know what? It’s just not my experience. Physical exercise generally makes me feel like shit.)

Second: it kind of makes sense that accessing the fire in my 3rd chakra would be kind of hard, and terrifying, without the earth provided by my 1st chakra. It seems kind of logical that all that potentially-explosive power and energy would seem majorly dangerous without having some way to stabilize it. And that’s what the 1st chakra is for.

Wow. That’s a lot more woo than I ever expected to publish on my blog.

But woo or not, I’m now faced with a decision, I guess. I’ve been thinking that what I would really like to do is to get exploring my 3rd chakra, and try to access some of the fire that right now seems enormously missing in my life. But maybe the thing I really need to do is work on the grounding, on the 1st chakra stuff, so that I’ve got a more solid base to work with when I do get to activating that fire.

There’s a part of me that thinks I’m being lax and lazy and not following through if I don’t go ahead with my original plan.

There’s also a part of me that thinks I shouldn’t rely on any outside information – I should be making decisions all by myself, and therefore the information from that quiz should be disregarded because it came from outside me.

On the other hand, there’s a part of me that thinks that information (that my 1st chakra needs some work) might be useful.

And the part of me that doesn’t want to draw in any more fire without making things safe for it to exist, first.

The point is this: I have stuff to work through on this.

But also: I have options.

The main thing I’m noticing is that I want to learn more about this before making a decision. I want more information, internal and external. I want to play with this chakra concept that seems to have so much to say to me. And I want to help myself be more me.

What I want out of the comments.

Still no advice, please!

But I’d love to hear what this post brought up for you. Anything that went through your mind as you read it. Or anything completely unrelated that occurs to you.

I still seem to be in a third-chakra kind of place. Today: anger. And irritation. Coming up all over the place.

Wanting things to be mine. My stuff. My space. My time. My energy, and my expression.

Not wanting to be edited or altered.

Wanting to be given space to work on the things I need to work on. (And for some reason, finding that almost impossible today.)

Wanting to be able to take breaks on my own terms.

All of these wants seem to be getting frustrated – sometimes externally, sometimes internally – and that’s making me angry and I don’t know how to deal with it.

I’m doing my usual thing of quashing the angry responses. Because I don’t want to fight. And because things are already pretty tense today and I don’t want to make things even worse. I remember the quality of fights that used to happen, and they were horrible, and I absolutely don’t want to repeat that pattern.

(Yes, I’m being non-specific today.)

Anyway, that’s what I’m noticing today. Anger. Irritation. A desire for space and time and a lot more me-ness than seems to be currently available.

Even acknowledging that? Is helpful.

That thing I’m not calling “comment zen” any more.

Yup – short post, I guess.

I still don’t want advice. I’m not good at anger. And I’m not good at identifying my own feelings and needs. I’m still learning, and I know that. Please don’t try to interpret what’s going on for me here (I’m working on that myself).

But I’d love to hear how you deal with anger – or how you feel about it. Does it empower you? Scare you? Something else?

Also: what’s going on in your world today?

All right. I’m giving myself permission to write a quick-and-dirty blog post, because I really wanted to post something today, and if I don’t allow it to be not-perfect, I will not post at all.

I desperately want to have a blog with some actual content in it.

So: here’s what I want to write about.

For years now, I’ve had a giant book on chakras* sitting on my bookshelf. It was a gift, from a friend with whom I did some exploration of fairly woo-woo stuff a few years ago. (She then got even more woo than I was, and I ran away. Ashamed of that, but the things she was exploring kind of scared me.) It’s huge, and I don’t think I’d ever looked at it, because I expected it to be full of tiny print and scary. Why the idea of tiny print scared me, when I’m usually pretty damn good with academic-style books, I have no idea.

After yesterday’s flirt with chakras, I opened that book today for the first time.

It’s not as dense and scary as I thought. It’s full of all the kinds of stuff that I used to be crazy about as a teenager – lists of symbols, associated colours, herbs, flowers, gemstones, gods… I used to buy great books on symbology and be fascinated by how all these things were connected. I’d stare at my chart for hours and wonder how to get more of the energy in that chart into my life. And now, it seems, I’m doing the same thing.

The third chakra, the solar plexus chakra, is associated with the element of fire. It’s an element that’s pretty strong in my chart, or at least it would be if it wasn’t being eaten by all that air and earth. Fire is passion, willpower, and… well, power, in general. That’s something I have big issues with.

It’s not that I don’t have the strength, willpower, and passion. It’s there. I can feel it there some of the time. There’s a badass Lucy in there somewhere, trying to get out. But I let so much else get on top of her: mostly overthinking stuff, and worrying, and depression.

I want to connect with Badass Lucy.

I want to connect with the fiery bit of me, the bit that’s been super-neglected for most of my life.

I want to spend more time with the part of me that says, “yes, I could go back to work, but not without risking my health – and my health comes first, dammit”.

I want to be able to feel angry without repressing it or imploding.

Fire: I want it. But I need safety, too. I need to protect myself from explosions and implosions and burning up. I want to meet it, gently and for short periods of time, on neutral ground – not go bounding into its lair without an exit strategy.

It’s all about being kind to myself, I think, and being able to acknowledge all my needs at once, not trample on one part of me to satisfy another. I want to be able to negotiate. With myself.

Which means there’s lots of stuff to process.

Comment zen.

I’m going to come up with my own name for “comment zen” at some point. I don’t want to be borrowing Havi’s voice for everything (much as I love Havi).

Anyway – comment zen for today. I still don’t want advice or tips on where to go next! This is too new, too unsteady ground for me, and I need to walk it by myself for now.

But I would totally love to hear what bits of yourself you’d like to meet. Or what skills you’d like to learn as you’re interacting with yourself.

And of course, you don’t have to comment. Even if I do sometimes bitch on Twitter about having no readers.

See you tomorrow!

*That’s the link to the Amazon page for this book. I don’t approve of Amazon particularly, and I’ll maybe get into why in another post. But I’m lazy, and that was the first link that came up on Google when I searched the title.

So: I did in fact promise actual content the other day, and here’s what I came up with.

A while back I wrote about a mental image I had, about the sticky, spiky stuff in my head. And now I want to write about another one.

I always imagine myself as broken. (I don’t, in fact, know whether this is true or not. But it’s my image of myself.) Specifically, I think of myself as wounded. And when I think of this wound, I come up with a very specific image: the wound is in my lower chest and upper belly, large and diamond-shaped, cutting across my solar plexus.

Yeah, fucking right it’s bleeding.

It’s one of those wounds that is so raw that I can’t bear to touch it. Or even have anything near it. Even though I know bandaging it would probably be good for it and prevent it from getting worse – and that walking around with it exposed for the world to see is unattractive, and probably scares or disgusts a lot of people who might want to be near me.

Funnily enough, that sentence makes me think of all the people who want to be near me anyway, who don’t seem to be pushed away by my obvious, bleeding wound. And it makes me wonder if I would want to be near those people who can’t manage cope with my pain.

Then I get reminded that I don’t do so well dealing with anyone else’s pain, and consider whether wanting people to sit with my pain when I can’t sit with theirs makes me a hypocrite.

There’s another thing that struck me about that mental image – which may be a sign that I’m spending too much time with the wacky woo-woo folks, or may be a sign that I’m getting a little more comfortable with my own wacky, woo-woo side.

Solar plexus: isn’t there a chakra around there?

So now I’m looking up the solar plexus chakra on Wikipedia, because that’s always the first place I go for my information.

Interesting stuff that comes up here.

Dynamism, energy, and willpower: all things that I find problematic and scary. Fire (passion?) – problematic and scary. Digestion, which I definitely have some trouble with, and also the feet, which also have their issues.

I don’t know much about chakras, and I don’t really know what it means when it says a chakra has ten petals – but the list of petals certainly speaks to me. Thirst, jealousy, treachery, shame, fear, disgust, delusion, foolishness and sadness. Funny, that list kind of sums me up.

So I’m wondering now if I could play with that.

Comment zen.

I’m totally borrowing this concept from Havi Brooks – but try as I might, I can’t find the blog post where she talks about it! Suffice to say, I don’t really have a comments policy, but I want to go ahead and ask for what I would like. And what I wouldn’t!

I really don’t want advice, or to be told what I should be exploring next on the basis of this information.

But I would love any resources or information that you have on chakras in general, or on the solar plexus chakra in particular.

Plus: stuff you’re thinking about. Or little revelations you’ve had about yourself recently.

I might even post again tomorrow!