Clumsy Moments

After a long hiatus I felt it only fair to pick back up on recounting my small adventures as it is summer and I am spending significantly more time alone.

It is a known fact that I suffer from a condition known as clumsiness. Although this may not seem as serious as many other conditions, I fear it may one day progress to a terminal state. My moments of clumsiness have actually been called works of art. Contortions of the body, falling from unheard of heights, demolition of various household items  occur with ne'er a bone broken.

It has recently come to my attention that I am in fact suffering from co-morbid conditions: clumsiness and awkwardness. Yes, in fact, these are co-occurring disorders. My official diagnosis is Clumsiness with Awkward features, recurring type. The essential features of this condition involve recurring acts of clumsiness that victimize others.

For example, last week at a baby shower I managed to knock over three glasses of punch while kicking a table and elbowing a small child in the head, simultaneously. In my attempt to exit the room lest any other human or inanimate object be victimized, I managed to walk directly in front of no less than three photos being taken. As I said, my clumsy-awkward condition tends to draw others in magnifying the awkward nature of the condition. This condition makes me leary of small rooms, heights, slippery surfaces, environments where the weather has the potential to be discussed at length, small spaces where children or small dogs are present, refrain from touching breakable objects in stores (a very recent lesson) and prevents me from ever running, ever.

I have found, for many people, their clumsy moments occur interpersonally. They try to walk into a perfectly normal relationship and the next thing they know they are spilling the punch (emotional baggage) and elbowing small children in the head (making a big thing out of nothing). The clumsy moments become awkward as others are drawn into their awkward attempts at navigating something as simple as friendship. As a therapist, it is no difficulty to advise them on the conditions to avoid and provide them with an emotional hand rail to guide their way however, I find myself experiencing my own clumsy moments.

Sadly, these clumsy moments have ended with broken bones (metaphorically speaking) and worse. The co-occurring problems of clumsily and awkwardly navigating interpersonal relationships are not easily corrected. Clumsy moments in the physical sense are easily recovered from, laughed and cried over and easily forgotten. Clumsy moments in the emotional sense can leave lasting scars and are not so easily discarded.

I pray I will continue to gain wisdom so that my clumsy moments become less clumsy and less frequent. It is a small journey, navigating your emotions and relationships. No one may navigate them for you and no one but you may clean up the aftermath when the awkward nature of your clumsiness has left a puddle of green punch behind.

A few weeks ago I came home in the dark and the vaccum was right next to the basement steps. I rushed forward to race up the stairs only to find myself entangled in full-on brawl with the vacuum which ended with me  laying on top of the vacuum on top of the stairs. I was left laughing and crying for no less than 20 minutes. At the end, I felt stupid and somewhat violated and was suffering from a stubbed toe.

God, please protect the people in my life from becoming that vacuum in the dark.

I am thankful that vacuum wasn't the lawn mower. THAT would have been a true adventure!

Saying "When"

My husband and I had just returned from a week long stay in a third world country. Some friends of ours picked us up from the airport and suggested we stop for dinner on the way home. We chose olive garden as our diet had been pasta and cheese free for the past week. I love cheese. At any given time you can find a minimum of 5 types of cheese in my refrigerator. My mouth watered at the prospect of re-acquainting myself with such a friend. As we sat down to dinner and enjoyed the never ending pasta bowl and the freshly grated Parmesan, something unheard of happened. We were cut off. The waiter literally refused to serve us any more cheese. Never in the history of Olive Garden has an individual been denied the table-side grating of a fresh Parmesan. We were told that we could have no more cheese during our visit. It seems we had failed one too many times to say "When." 

Aside from the obvious shame and ridicule this story provokes, it also reminds me of the challenge of saying "when." As an adult, no one can say it for me, just me. No one else can say when my salad has been adequately cheesed or my food has been nicely pepper-milled. No one can estimate the perfect cream to my hot tea or the depth of my thirst when pouring water. Saying "when" is the tiniest of pleasures because it means I control my culinary fate. 

Unfortunately, in life, saying "when" does not end in a  garnish of lovely cheese on your plate. Saying "when" equals parting or ending or change.  When we say "when" we say "enough." That day I went to olive garden I never wanted to say "when" because  cheese held endless pleasures that had been denied to me for seven long days. Today I say "when" because I don't want to have high cholesterol or to face the shame of being cut off from the privilege of cheese again.  When I say "when" in life I say it because I realize I am not prepared to accept the inevitable consequences of allowing  something to continue.

Because "when" equals "no" I find myself resisting it.  While boundaries with others are difficult, boundaries for ourselves are painful. I can't know what will happen when I say "when." When I decide that I've had my fill of people or things that seem good but, in the end, hurt more than heal, I imagine I will find myself to be a much healthier and happier individual. Just like when I "when'd" the cheese. 

But no one can do that for me. No one can say that this habit or this friendship is too much for me but me. I have the adventure of personal responsibility before me. This week I find that saying "when"  is a solitary sail. 

The adventure, today, lies in what life will be without whatever we have "when'd." 

Life without cheese  would hardly be a life worth living. I comfort myself in that fact that despite the things I must "when", I will always have cheese to depend upon. 

The Ego's Bane

While not entirely alone recently, an important event has occurred that begs me to  address it.

My birthday.

What's special about birthdays is that while they are celebrated with others, create a bond shared only with your mom and produce reflections on moments shared with others over the past year, they truly are moments alone.

Sure, I have great birthday parties where even the Peanuts Gang shows up to celebrate or I force a friend to wear a pink cowboy hat because he failed to provide his own (the invite specifically stated!) but my birthday is a day I experience as only I truly can.

Every birthday DAY and every year is unique to me. This year was my 26th birthday.  Only I know the thoughts I thought when I woke up that morning and the reflections I indulged in throughout the day. Sure, every day is like that for each one of us. Our birthday is unique in that it is the one day that the world surrounding us assents to our demand for narcissism and ego-centrism. On my birthday I get to be what I hope to avoid being every other day of the year.

I wake up with the resounding proclamation "World, Celebrate Me On This, The Day of My Birth!"

This year I decided that birthdays can be very lonely days. While everyone else is going about their day in the bliss of the ho-hum, I awake to the undeniable reality that I am getting older and that an end somewhere is surely immanent. What is only  the background noise of the second hand ticking throughout the year, becomes the gong of the changing hour on that day.

The failures, the wasted time (Gaa the wasted time!), the insecurities and the fear of the unknown in the coming year all break upon you at once. Where you were once able to keep them all at bay they have liscence to plague you without apology on your birthday.

And who but you will say, "This year I will do such and such better," or "This is the year I finally blah blah blah." Nobody makes your goals for  you. You are thrown into the reality that a new year of life has begun and you must make the most of it.

Add to that I have a December birthday and so my birthday is almost coupled with the actual change of the year. It's pressure.

How does one cope with it all?
My strategies:

-I never work on my birthday, this gives the sense that the world has stopped for the day to celebrate me. Now my husband has gotten into the habit of taking the day off too. This confirms the importance of the day.
-I always have people around me to celebrate with. This reminds me that the world does extend beyond my existence . In fact my existence is more about others than it really is myself.
-With naivety and relish I welcome the new year full of hopes and possibilities and know that yes "This will be the year!"
-For now, I remind myself I am still young. (note to self: explore new coping skills before finding 30).
-I keep myself on a cake high for the entire week following my birthday. I can then blame any unsuspecting feelings of depression on a sugar crash.

Birthdays are the ego's bane. The one day a year where the Id and Superego come out in full force to fight to the death.

So this year on my birthday the redeeming thought I had was, "I wonder what God thought on the day I was born? What plans did he make for me?" Redeemed from the path of self-indulgence or self-mortification I spent the day musing on which of those plans I may fulfill in the coming year.

I am most certain they will be filled with adventures big and small. I'll be sure to document the small.

Until the new year.... (barring any small adventures occur during Christmas. Highly doubtful, December is made for grand adventures)

I can only control myself'

So I've been on my own for more than a week. I couldn't find a spare moment to blog in all that time. More accurately, I couldn't muster the motivation. I've spent all my free time playing guitar and watching re-runs of "Are you being served?"

I find it odd that I am supposed to have much more free time then I did in grad school, and yet, in grad school it seemed as if I had endless opportunities to blog. I believe the reality of it lies in the fact that there were many more things I COULD avoid doing by blogging. In fact, the only reason I finally found time to blog was because I am avoiding my clinical notes RIGHT now!

The past week has been unusually stressful and the hopes that this week would be less so have already been shattered.  Added to that stress is my husband being in New York for ten days.  Without his comforting presence, I have taken to sleeping to cope with the stress. While that may seem like a one way ride to depression town, I have found that short naps are healthy coping mechanism. The alternatives being eating, drugs, alcohol or mental breakdowns, sleeping appears to the lesser of all evils. Granted, there is always exercise. There are certainly times when I go that route. But exercise in itself is stressful. There's the putting on of special clothing I would never wear at any other time. The actual GOING to the YMCA. If I decide to walk around my neighborhood there's the clothes changing and the showering when I return. Added to that is the guilt I always feel for not taking my dog with me. He's not good on long walks because he's so slow and has to pee on and smell everything. Then there is the inevitable verbal altercation with the other neighborhood dogs. That is not peaceful. So I leave him behind but experience significant guilt because we both know where I'm going and what I am doing. He never mentions it when I get back, but it's there. To appease my guilt I feed him treats. He already has a weight problem. So at that point treating my stress is leading my dog to senior obesity. So naps seem like the best alternatives. Short moments in bed, or on the couch, or on the porch swing that revive me and grant me a fresh perspective when I awake.

Of course prayer and reflection are also essential for resisting the swelling tide of life's circumstances. This past week there has been one thing that has brought me an overwhelming amount of peace. A friend and college suggested an activity for assisting children in identifying areas of their life they may feel are out of control. The activity involves requesting the child to draw a picture of the ocean and a picture of a boat in that ocean. The therapist then asks the child to write everything they have control of on the boat and everything they don't have control of in the ocean.

So this past week I asked one of my child clients to participate in this activity, She surprised me by drawing a picture of herself in the boat. On boat, she wrote, "I only have control of myself" and in the ocean she wrote   " I can not control other people." Pretty impressive! For some reason this stuck with me all week. Whatever happened, whatever went wrong or whatever seemed insurmountable, I thought about that picture. It was a great reminder that I have no control whatsoever of the circumstances surrounding me. If clients cancel appointments at the last minute, if life's circumstances seem to be getting out of control, I can only control my own attitude and behavior. I can only accomplish the tasks in front of me. Even if I'm great, if I'm 100%, the actions of others can steer my little boat the wrong way.  But at the end of the day, I am left with the peace that I have done all that is in my power to do, and not deceived myself into thinking I can do anymore.

And the greater peace of that is that whatever is mine to control I can turn over to God. In that is the greatest peace! I can only control myself (which trust me is A Lot to control!!!) but God can control me and everything else.

"I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning how to sail my ship."- Louisa May Alcott

New song! "I wear a coat"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNwKbsOTr_0

Writing my thesis- Effective Means of Reducing Prejudice

Of all the challenges I've faced in the past few years, writing my thesis was perhaps the most difficult. There was a time when it felt as if my life was literally defined by the status of my thesis, I was either working on it, avoiding it, waiting for it to be sent back to me, writing a song about procrastinating working on it (check out my FB for that video!), proposing it, researching it or defending it.  I can picture myself a few short months ago, working on my thesis at 3am, eating copious amounts of candy and watching reruns on TVLAND. I would procrastinate for weeks (months a couple of times) and then spend three crash-n-burn 12 hour days in a row researching, writing and editing. I amused my fellow cohort members with stories of how I was avoiding it, I suffered innumerable mental breakdowns because of it and came to see it as the very bane of my existence,

The Result? 93 scholarly pages addressing a very important problem in American society.
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"Contact Theory: A Multi-Model Comparison of Effectiveness in Reducing Prejudice Among White Professionals in a Single Interaction."

Scholars and researchers have expressed alarm over the under utilization of mental health services by Blacks. Scholars speculate that one reason for this under utilization may be the expectation of prejudice from White mental health workers. The most widely studied method for reducing prejudice is Contact Theory. This study compared models of Contact Theory to determine which model would be most effective at reducing prejudice using White professionals. Results of the study indicated that none of the models effectively reduced prejudice and none of the models was more effective than any other. That was the unfortunate outcome. The fortunate outcome of this study was a stellar historical account of Blacks in the field of psychology from 1700's to the present, a detailed look at the holes in the current literature regarding Black underutilization, a massive amount of suggestions for future research. Most importantly, the discussion portion of this study explored how society has changed since Contact Theory was first proposed and proposed methods for reducing prejudice by addressing the evolution of expressing prejudice in America.

The very last thing written in my thesis:

"Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away, and that in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty." (MLK jr., 1963)
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The bound copy of my thesis arrived this week. At first, it just sat there and I thought "All that time and money and that's it?" But today, I realized how proud I should be of the work I accomplished. I read 120 studies, I designed a true experiment, I ran stats and wrote 93 pages of intelligent words. I reflect on all of this to remind myself, as I always tell my clients, that we MUST take time to celebrate what we have done. Big or small. Whether we paid our bills this month, or finished the laundry or wrote a thesis, we should CELEBRATE  that accomplishment. There are plenty of people who chose not to fulfill their responsibilities, who chose not to love their kids or their spouse, who chose not to use the gifts that God has given them to their fullest extent. Let's not take being a responsible person for granted. Celebrate what you've done well and  celebrate the ONE who enables us to do it! Whatever we have done alone, he has done it with us.

Colossians 3v23 "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men"

I Feel Very..... Young

It pains me to admit my husband was out of town for a whole week and I failed to blog a single adventure.  Perhaps its for the best, after overcoming the shock of grad school I am enjoying the calm of "normal" life. I considered if infact any adventures have been had. Adventures while alone that is.

I am not sorry to say my most recent adventures have been full of the people I love. A pleasant thought.

However, I am finding that there are things you must do, as an adult, alone:

1. Interviews.

Can you say stressful? It's worse when you are a mental health professional, trained in the art of reading body language. You spend half the time wondering what the side glance 5 minutes in meant followed by the short response at 7 minutes and 20 seconds. At some point you realize you have no idea what they just said because you are trying to analyze why they placed their coffee cup on the left side of the table instead of the right.

Then, of course, you reach the inevitable "Do you have any questions for me?"

Questions? Uh, yes. "How many employees have been murdered on the job in the past year?" What can I say? He covered everything else.

There I was, FRESH out of grad school, trying to look and be professional and all I felt was very....young.

2. Working

This is probably unique to my profession. I am required to be alone in a room with anywhere from 1 to 25 clients at a time. It is my sole responsibility not to make the worse than they were when they came in and to conduct "therapy" skillfully and ethically. While it may not seem like it, that is a tremendous amount of pressure.  Nothing is worse than being in the middle of a session about fiscal responsibility and, out of no where, a client says "When I was 4 I witnessed Mr. Rogers murdering my dog with the family Bible." (*not an actual incident).

What do I do next? I follow the therapist's protocol.
-nod my head like I am really taking it in
- repeat it back, just to make sure I got it right in a less traumatic way "So you saw your dog being harmed by someone you cared about."
-State the obvious "That must have been very difficult for you"

Hopefully, by this time, you have stalled enough to consider where to go from here. There are many times my knee-jerk response is to want to say "I'm not qualified to do this." Then I would leave. (I'm not going to go into a long tirade about why I actually am qualified, the truth is I'm a brand-new therapist).  I don't leave, instead I allow the client time to work through their trauma and some how leave the session with the client thanking me for helping them through it. The role of the therapist is one that is solitary. You don't have responsibilities like that when you are younger. There's always a bigger person to lend a hand. At any rate, there is SOMEONE around to help.

3. Selling yourself.

It feels like there is no end to this representing yourself to the world stuff. Whether its a job,  a client, a PHD program, submitting writing or trying to propose at a conference. I have never cared to sell anything and I hope to never have a job where that's required of me. All I want to say is "Look, do you want this or not?" But no, it feels as if there is an endless stream of people and situations I'm required to convince that I have the skills, knowledge, training , talent, personality etc. they are looking for.  I must precariously balance the fine line between humility and narcissism. I feel I never find the balance. I'm either saying "I guess I'm ok but I'm sure you could do better (in my best Eeyore voice)." or "I'm so awesome you're a fool if you bother considering anyone else! Revere me!"

I long for the good old days when all chick-fila wanted to know is if I was 14 and knew how to mop floors.

It feels like I've been thrust into a world I'm not ready for. Although growing is something we do within the company  of others, it is also a very solitary journey. The challenge for me is to accept that perhaps it is not that I can't do these things, it's that I don't want to do them because the doing feels like a message to the world that I feel old enough to be all I'm needed to be. But I don't feel that way at all.

I feel very young.