the list of now

Recently I saw a tweet by Ez of Creature Comforts, mentioning a blogging challenge with this topic and asking other bloggers to participate. Without knowing much about it, I replied that I wanted to do it.

As I approach it, it doesn’t feel as simple as it was to sign on to in a moment. The challenge was inspired by Jess of Makeunder My Life who wrote this post. This got me thinking about bravery and sharing and that question… what is this thing I’m doing on the internet, blogging? Why? For Who?

You see I’ve been doing the online journal thing for almost 16 years now. I had a Tripod site. Then Geocities. Then OpenDiary. LiveJournal. Blogger. WordPress. Finally, my own site. But something happened to me along that way. I swung from incredibly open, personal and letting it all hang out to locking up it tight and trying to have a respectable website, about stuff. That became the thing right? No one wanted to read a blog that was a diary anymore, people who did that were attention-grabbing, needy whatevers. Suddenly it became harder and harder for me to navigate how much of myself to give online. Wanting to maintain a blog, wanting to always be writing about things that weren’t about me. And that isn’t a bad thing. I kept writing.

I started publishing my lists, things I liked, things I care about deeply. Art, politics, food, books, movies, geeky things. But I’ve left a lot out. I’ve started (even before this challenge) to think about how to re-integrate some of the parts of me back into this blog.

So since we are telling secrets today, here is a list of most of the things I’ve been leaving out. I may or may not tell you more about them later:

- I have PCOS and a great deal of my adult life has revolved around healing and symptom management. A great deal of the most difficult and painful parts of my life have to do with this disease and hormonal imbalance and most people have never even heard of it.

- I want to talk more about style, clothing, but it’s complicated being a fat woman and having a lot of mixed feelings, difficult times and frustration with my style, my body and the way that intersects with pretty much the entire world.

- I am angry often. I am full of rage often and also heartbroken when I think too much about specific cases of injustice, cruelty, torture and pain due to oppression, waste or apathy and neglect – things mostly I can do nothing about. I know everyone does this sometimes, but I easily get … obsessive and irrational. I have to disconnect from reading news too often or it jeopardizes me being able to function in the “normal” faculties of my life and schedule. Sometimes I don’t feel that it’s irrational and wonder if the disconnect is actually making me crazy.

- I have a love/hate relationship with my cats. (Not the dog. I just love the dog. I feel terribly guilty about this).

- I used to write and perform poetry. I got good. I started competing in poetry slams. I got selected to be on a team. I did ok for a while, but I started to freak out about being on stage in front of people. I started to freak out because of the amount of loathing of my own body I carry around with me and have for most of my life. I didn’t even really admit to myself that this is what it was about, but irrational fear just consumed me. It was crippling. Not my actual body (which is strong, somewhat active and capable of many good things), my hatred of it’s appearance, stopped me from doing this particular thing because I was afraid people were not hearing my words. I was afraid they were just seeing and not listening. I was afraid of being a joke.

- I don’t talk about my immediate family. I’m still not going to. *

Happy last day of January. It’s around now when people are making their jokes about how only a few short weeks ago, they made resolutions that are now getting abandoned, forgotten or given up.

This year, just for fun on New Year’s Day, I tweeted random resolutions off the top of my head. My goals and somewhat silly vows ended up being more of a mini-bucket list than anything having to do with commitment, resolve or discipline.

This is my 2012 bucket list:

- Drink more whiskey in 2012. Since discovering hendrick’s gin, I’ve been neglecting all the whiskey that needs drinking.
- Spend a night on a boat
- Write (draw) a short webcomic.
- Read a novel in Italian
- Learn how to knit socks.
- Talk to my cats more.
- Learn to play top five Springsteen songs on the ukulele.
- Go on a rollercoaster.

So these are all good, and I fully plan on achieving them. I’m excited about achieving them. There is a bit of quality of life improvement, a bit of “I’d be proud to be able to do that” and a bit of “stuff I want to get around to doing”.

However…

If I’m being super honest with myself, there isn’t a hell of a lot of deep reflective challenge going on here.

So here it the part about resolve. It’s taken me all of January to figure out what I really want from my year. What I really want to push myself to change.

I’m terrible about starting things, too many projects, well-intentioned ideas and sometimes even great things that I care about a lot  — and then for whatever reason, not finishing.

If I’m being honest with myself, that is my one real resolution for 2012:  To stop being the person who begins and doesn’t follow-through. My simple steps to change this are:

- To finish the projects that I have started (the ones that really matter).
- Let go of, abandon or table the things that are not priority.
- Don’t start anything new that I can’t, or realistically won’t finish.

and perhaps most importantly, telling myself:

- Shut up and just get to work now.

Max at the end of my yoga mat.

A while ago, inspired by reading blogs by people training to be yoga instructors and a good friend who started training to run a marathon, I decided I was going to commit to practicing yoga every day.

The health effects and brain effects of this decision were immediate and compounding, and yet, I didn’t stick to my goal. What happened in my life was indeed a lot more yoga, but not daily. I did some form of light stretching or meditation daily, but ended up doing yoga only about 3 or 4 days out of the week. Not bad, but not my goal. Not what I had said I wanted to commit myself to.

So I kind of felt shitty about this, but kept going, kept trying and still enjoyed what I was doing. The point of this is not to beat up on myself for not doing it right the first time, but it does bother me that I set a goal for purposes of measurement and end up with nothing to measure. That’s the point of making a structured decision right?

Long story short: a month ago I hurt my back. I bent or twisted or something and reactivated an injury in the discs of my lower back from a decade ago. It is something that had haunted me from time to time, but nothing serious until now. Now, I’ve been in pain for much of the last month. Sitting is irritating and my job entails hours of sitting. It’s been a struggle. I’ve been going to a chiropractor and the other thing that really helps the healing process is … yoga every day. Multiple times a day in fact.

I’m not going to go out on the limb that says this was more than a coincidence in terms of any kind of cosmic kick-in-the ass. (Although I don’t believe that’s totally impossible). What I think is far more likely is that just I knew I needed this. I knew my body was needing to be retrained and reconditioned and so I set a goal. A goal I was unable to keep in practice until something forced me to.

So this back pain. It feels like a reminder of something I forgot how to do in my life. And I feel really lucky for that. I feel grateful for this pain.

And in terms of measurable goals, now I have a little over a month under my belt and it’s easier for this to be something I just do every day. As I get my core strength back and more flexibility in my back, I do more yoga. More postures. Longer sessions. More variation. My practice is progressing naturally, without me having to plan that or commit to it.

I think I make the mistake of trying to overplan “better”. Trying to map out how to get to “better”. When this kind of thing – for me that works well in action only – is maybe what “better” looks like for me.

My back isn’t all “better”. It’s healing slowly. I complain about it daily. I get frustrated often. I was also doing more “impressive” structured yoga a few times a week – doing whole videos, not limited poses – before this happened. So that annoys me too!

But I think I’m realizing that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t making me happy. It wasn’t my goal. I can’t complete an hour class or video again yet, but the poses I’m doing are improving a little at a time. Measurable goals.

And now I have a visual reminder/reward that I’ve been doing the thing I wanted to be doing, every day, a few times a day – I inadvertantly trained my dog to do it with me.

Max started coming over to me when I got my yoga mat out. I said to him (because I talk to him like a human, shut up, you do it too!) “It’s time to stretch now!”

Now when I say the word “stretch”, he does a little stretch before laying down next to the mat. When I roll onto my back, he rolls onto his back next to me. That’s what he’s doing in the picture above.

I’m not making this up. He’s starting doing this every time. Other people have seen him do it!

So this is my little lesson this Fall I think. I’m not into big motivation, big changes, big enlightenment!!!! I’m not trying to be “better” here.

I just doing my thing. My back is healing. My brain is less muddled when I do yoga. My dog has a new hobby that might just change his life.

(or at least he looks really cute doing it and makes me smile when it hurts)

This is all good.

• My brother Dan was in town. I haven’t seen him in a long time since he lives on the other side of the country. It was great.
• For this occasion, a bunch of people came over my house to hang out.
• I made my popular spinach artichoke dip (came out well) and tried to make cheesy stuffed mushrooms (not so much).
• we made and drank Dark and Stormies
• we played Apples to Apples, which I have never done and greatly enjoy.
• I watched Flight 666 a concert tour documentary about Iron Maiden. It was excellent.
• We rented Kevin Smith’s “Red State” (available as a pre-theatrical release Video on Demand). It was also excellent. I hope to write and post a review later.
• We made the mistake of watching the end of the GOP debate this week and my heart basically broke into a million pieces when the crowd cheered the question that stated the absurdly large number of people that have been executed under Rick Perry’s time as Governor. Flashbacks to Bush’s execution stats and then the 8 long years of his presidency. The approaching election scares me. A lot.
• And also… last weekend I threw my back out. It was a flare-up of a lower back injury from a decade ago that still bothers me from time to time. It’s not a crisis, but it’s been hurting and ruining my life for 4 consecutive days now, which royally sucks
• Because of this, I haven’t worked on any of the things I’m wanting to be working on.  It hurts to sit and to bend. So that pretty much knocks out any writing projects and art projects that I would like to be doing.
• Therefore, I’ve gotten incredibly whiny and emo and frustrated with my body and it’s limitations.
• Hoping to be in a better place soon. And renewing my commitment to doing yoga everyday again, in hopes of preventing this sort of thing from happening often.

OK, so I’m exaggerating a bit.  It didn’t save my life. However, I was in a serious rut.  I finally moved to a new house with plenty of room for my projects and I was doing nothing.  I think it’s like when you keep a small animal in a cage for a long time and they have ideas and instincts for getting out, but then you open the door and they sit in the cage and stare at you – yeah… my creativity apparently is like a hamster.  This is what I’m saying.

So I have felt stuck.  I poured all my creativity into renovating and decorating the house.  (And that was fun!) And then I kept thinking “Now What?” and nothing was happening.  I missed the days when I would get entranced in painting for days, using ALL my free time to complete a project and then have to stop and write down all my ideas for new projects that would just come to me.

Thing is, any creative process is a practice.  It’s something you commit to opening yourself up for by doing.  It’s like meditation, you can only “get it” by doing it and the more you do it, the more it makes sense.  So I started drawing again, hoping something would happen and I felt a little better.   Finally, I did what I should have done a long time ago – I stopped thinking about the “hows” of it all and started thinking of some “whys”.  I realized I needed a project with a purpose other than for me to get back to where I once was.  So I went on the internet and went to the website of some of the people who inspire me and are doing great work.  And I played the blog-follow game – where you keep bouncing from blog to blog from links of people/references you may not know – until I got to something that sparked.

It didn’t take long.  I had found another artist that was participating in a project with the Art House Co-op in Atlanta Georgia.  The Art House does these massive projects involving artists from all over the country – and you can just sign up!  I looked at their upcoming projects and saw The Great Arthouse Print Exchange.  Remembering how much I used to love printing (and I’m talking about 8 years ago, so “rusty” is too kind a word), I signed up right away.  I ordered the supplies I would need (lino block printing is very affordable, thankfully) and got to work about a week later.  And Darcy was super-supportive (and always is).  She started printing with me.  (She’s crazy good at it, too!)  Darcy wants me to be spending my time working on my goals and I finally feel like I’m able to be really pursuing those goals, so her sacrifices in our life together are getting paid back in a way.  She doesn’t ask me to work more hours at a higher-paying day job, because she knows I want to be doing this and that’s awesome.

Now of course, it didn’t magically get all better.  My first prints were not exactly what I wanted, but I was pleased overall.  And it’s not like I went from no creative activity to a gallery show in a few weeks.  That was never the point.

The point was awakening something and I did, I got it back.   This project led to more projects – so many that I don’t actually have time to work on them all – and that is a very good thing. I wake up in the morning and can’t wait to work on one of my projects.  Sitting at the beach or at the coffeehouse, I have my journal, my notebook, my sketchbook, the laptop and I am working on one of my projects.  At dayjob, I daydream about one of my projects.  This is my life in its best possible day-to-day pattern.  This is the life I want to be living.

These are the prints that got me here:

I took these pictures during the printing process – in my kitchen.  I can’t wait to have a studio set-up.  I love printing in my kitchen, but I’m still finding little inky pawprints on our butcher block table (and chairs, and the floor… and in other rooms).   Because cats are always most interested in whatever you are doing that you don’t wish to involve them in.  (And you can’t even get mad, because cats with little inky paws are so damn cute!)