Vignette

No one knows. The blood is still pumping through her hand, the index finger held the trigger. A body in the closet, gun under the bed. It is morning and the sun beams on her conscience like there is nowhere to hide! “Should I run to Tijuana and then report him dead?” she thinks to herself, “They won’t catch me there.” She is a mess of bones and bruises. He beat her, “It was self-defense!” she says aloud.

 

Suddenly, a hand grips her ankles from under the bed. She kicks her foot. Is she imagining things? She can’t sleep. He’s dead, but all she hears is his whispered, dying threat, “If you don’t kill me, I’ll kill you!”

 

The wonderful world of this!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,400 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 57 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

When you ask yourself, “Is he the right one?”

Every relationship comes to this point –the one where you look at your partner in bed, visibly flawed, and ask yourself, “Is this it? Is he the right one?” Whatever your answer to this question, the meer asking is the point. Turns out that asking whether or not our partner is the “right” one opens us up to the reality that there is NO RIGHT ONE and affirms that we alone are responsible for our own happiness. American society is riddled with a black-and-white, binary frame of mind that is quite unhealthy when it comes to thinking about relationships. The minute initial attractions sour in relationships, we panick. Yesterday, I read an article that has changed a lot of my thoughts on long-term partnerships (be they platonic or not).

 

Excerpts from Psychology Today (February 2012):

• “What to do when the initial attraction sours? [...] It’s not a sign you’ve chosen the wrong partner. It is the signal to grow as an individual –to take responsibility for your own frustrations. Invariably, we yearn for perfections but are stuck with an imperfect human being. We all fall in love with people we think will deliver us from life’s wounds but who wind up knowing how to rub against us.”

• “A new view of relationships and their discontents is emerging. We alone are responsible for the relationship we want. And to get it, we hae to dig deep into ourselves while maintaining our connections.”

• “Romance itself seeds the eventual belief that we have chosen the wrong partner. The early stage a relationship, most marked by intense attraction and infatuation, is in many ways akin to cocaine intoxication, observes Christine Mienecke, a clinical psychologist in Des Moines, Iowa. It’s orchestrated, in part, by the neurochemicals associated with intense pleasure. Like a cocaine high, it’s not sustainable.”

• “Eventually, reality rears its head. ‘Infatuation fades for everyone,’ says Meinecke, author of Everybody Marries the Wrong Person. [...] You conclude you’ve married the wrong person –but that’s because you’re accustomed to thinking, Cinderella-like, that there is only one right person. The consequences of such a pervasive belief are harsh. We engage in destructive behaviors, like blaming our partner for our unhappiness or searching for someone outside the relationship.”

• “Rather than look at the other person, you need to look at yourself and ask, ‘Why am I suddenly so unhappy and what do I need to do?’ It’s not likely a defect in your partner.”

• “In mature love,” says Meinecke, “we do no look to our partner to provide out happiness, and we don’t blame them for our unhappiness. We take responsibility for the expectations that we carry,  for our own negative emotional reactions, for our own insecurities, and for our own dark moods.” 

• “Say one partner likes to travel and other doesn’t. ‘If you view this with a feeling of resentment, that’s going to hurt, over and over again,’ says Doherty. If you can accept it, that’s fine –provided you don’t start living in two separate worlds. ‘What you don’t want to do,’ he says, ‘is develop a group of single travel friends who, when they are on the road, go out and flirt with others.’”

• “To enter a relationship with an idea of what it should look like or how it should evolve is too controlling. It takes two people to make a relationship. One person doesn’t get to decide what it should be. And to the extent that he or she does, the other partner is not going to be happy.”  

Tags: clinical psychologist, intense pleasure, psychology today

Cuba and Mark

My cat wants attention. He climbs up on my hallway console and knocks down my keys. The thud is entertaining –to him, at least.

Mark runs over to scare him off the ledge. He runs to the kitchen. Mark follows him. I sit on the couch, smiling. In one room of my apartment are two of the most important beings in my life.

I once read that there is no fear in love, and I cannot disagree more. The more I love, the more I fear. Who wants to lose these happy mornings, warm skin, welcome kisses, eyes as big as heaven, blue like the B in beautiful.

On teaching compassion …

AIM: Why do we think so much and feel so little?

DO NOW: How are you feeling now? Answer the question in 2-3 complete sentences. Start by rephrasing the question and remember to support your answer.

MINI-LESSON:
David* was a student of mine during my second year of teaching. He had a Disney cartoon voice –a muffled, low, shy voice coming from a short, stocky body. He didn’t want to be the most popular kid, and he wasn’t.

But David was bright and quietly held his own despite having a learning disability. He preferred to sit alone in the back center of class and once punched a much taller kid in the face for trying to steal his pencil case. He earned the “don’t-mess-with-me” rep after that.

I thought about David today.

The year I taught him he was pretty much unnoticeable (well, not for me … I’m a teacher; I notice E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G!). But it wasn’t until last year, when David showed up in front of my classroom door the last period of the day, that I saw him clearly for the first time.

David’s world had been turned upside down that Fall. His older sister had told a teacher about a sexual abuse incident at home. ACS became involved and placed David and his other siblings in foster home. His mother had tried to gather them and fly to her country of origin, but she was arrested at the airport.

What hurt the most about hearing David tell his story was that he told it with a smile. He cared more about my feelings than he did about his own. Or maybe he had cried too much already to start doing it all over now. Whatever the reason, I knew that smile costumed some pain.

I thought about David today. I don’t know where life will lead him, has led him. I wish I could say I wrote down his number and gave him mine. I wish I could say I corresponded with him via email. But I haven’t.

What I can say is that bad things happen to good people … like David … like some of the people we see in the train asking for change every day. We are so quick to place judgment as if someone ever wanted to be “homeless” or “drug addicted” or “a rape victim” when they grew up.

Bad things happen to good people. We can’t always control the outcomes in our lives no matter how well intentioned we are.

And if I had a lesson plan for teaching compassion, this would be it. When I see someone hurt, there’s a big part inside me that crumbles.

ASSESSMENT:
Do you ever feel another’s pain?

HOMEWORK:
Remember that silence is acceptance. The next time you see/hear an injustice, speak up or act on it.

But, my finger is not a wand …

Since I was in first grade my teachers praised my writing and made me feel so smart because of it. They would said, “Wow, you’re such a natural!” or “This is brilliant! You don’t even have to try!”

Sadly, I believed them. I was conditioned to think that good writing came easy, and that it was so organic I could just do it any time, any place, any way.

How pretentious of me? You may think. Actually, how debilitating.

Writing is my biggest insecurity. I am afraid of writing average, of these words being mediocre.

All the teachers, friends, and family that ever told me I was so naturally good at it ignored the torment I go through with words. They’ve dismissed all my beginnings tapped, tapped, tapped back into nothing, a blank page. They made it easy to believe that good writing was an act of magic. But my finger is not a wand.

Writer’s block has become my biggest fear. It took a friend recently writing, “Waiting to see new poetry…” on my Facebook wall, for me to ask myself what or why it was taking me so long?

So here you have it … some mediocre writing –not poetry, but close … A realization!
The reason why it’s taken me so long is fear –a conditioned fear of failure.

When we praise the results much more then the effort, we oversimplify accomplishments.

Writing is hard, and it takes a REALLY LONG time to do it right. And my fear of it has led me to write less … 

So here is a promise: I’m going to write more often and I won’t always be good. But I know that when I write, it comes from the most obsessive yearning to express, share, inform, work shit out, release, and connect.

… And the next time you want to commend or congratulate your little sister or niece on an accomplishment, focus on the hard work they put in!

And the worst is feeling alone in a room full of thoughts.

I remember being 13. When the world was my block, my school, my friends, my family. Most answers were a quick yes or no. There’s so much gray now and doubt in what I think I know. 

 

My thoughts are too many and too loud for me to feel alone, but that’s exactly what it feels like now. And the worst is feeling alone in a room full of thoughts.