I see I have not managed to make time for writing in over three weeks, and as each day passes I am less inclined to do so because it seems such an overwhelmingly large task as more things occur (in the world of self-development especially) and I fall farther behind. So I will just begin free associating and see what I manage to get down, and whatever it is that comes out before I get fed up and want to go do something else, is what you’ll get….
DH found the camera/computer cable so I can post pic of new haircut. Whether I actually do, remains to be seen.
Stood up for myself last night when irritating ‘bully’ friend tried to badger me (yet again) into attending the local hotel for New Year’s eve. …”Go on, it’ll be fun” Me:”yes, fun for you, I understand that. Not fun for me, I don’t enjoy that kind of thing” …”You don’t have to come for long” Me with bright smile and fake cheerful voice: “Actually, I don’t even have to go AT ALL!!! How great is that?”… “I’m going anyway, and am just trying to get everyone to come too because that way it will be MORE FUN” Still in jokey matey voice with smile on my face:”Yes, if you get the people who WANT to go to come along, it will. If you drag along the people who don’t want to be there, they will be miserable and sulk in a corner, and that will be dull.” At this point she gave up. I WIN!! I win because I didn’t allow myself to feel bullied, or like I was having to really defend myself, justify my position or even try to get her to see things from someone else’s point of view (impossible). I just took my therapist’s advice about practising making these kinds of interactions into a bit of entertainment for myself (shifting perspective from feeling trapped and defensive, to focusing on the other person and turning it more into a game that doesn’t really matter. Taking it less seriously and not as a personal attack on me). It worked!! Whoo Hoo!
Have done lots of fabulous gardening in the last few weeks: re-applied garden clippings, sheep manure and straw (lasagne method of composting) to the two ‘new’ beds (in cut-up old water tanks), so the worms can make them into functioning beds for next autumn; cropped my (disappointingly very undersized and slightly mangy looking) garlic, cleaned it and sold 3.5kgs to the local health food shop for 70 bucks. Today I’d like to pull the remaining heads from the orchard area, and hope to get maybe an extra couple of kilos there. The rest (42 good looking bulbs, plus the sadly small exotic varieties I experimented with this year) I have hung in the potting shed. Perhaps a pic. Maybe. I have also transplanted out the final summer plants (tomato/cucumber/zucchini) and made a big wooden box full of lettuce seedlings/mizuna mustard/rocket and coriander for the shade house, in the hope that the environment in there will prolong the ‘bolting’. We shall see. With any luck I will have a crop of salad greens waiting on my return from South Africa.
Off to South Africa on Fri 11th of December for a friend’s wedding on the 17th. Return home on the 23rd. FIL house sitting for us, fabulous chap. DH on call for Xmas and boxing day, so I will head over to the family home and celebrate with nuclear posse in the new house. Hoping for lots of chilling out and no explosions. DH and FIL may mosey over later in the week.
Going deeper with the therapy, realising it is time to examine the core of the operating system I’ve chosen to run on. Even acknowledging it is a choice was kind of illuminating. To see where that choice originated from (emotional manipulation, neglect, abuse, abduction, bullying) is interesting and useful, but only the first step. The work, if I want to change my operating system (and I do, because it is not serving my happiness nor supporting my self-care) is to, wait for it……. sit and listen to my feelings. Ha ha ha. There it is again, the old meditation and awareness factor. The reason this is useful, is because I have suppressed difficult-to-admit-to feelings (maybe such as terror, fear, utter despair etc) and sense them instead as easier-to-cope-with feelings such as frustration, anger, resentment. So I feel a LOT of those latter feelings, when in fact they are but a funnel for other, deeper feelings I am keeping hidden from myself. My much younger self, who began the program, was unable to deal with these deeper issues, so she developed the current, now outmoded, operating system as a coping mechanism in order to protect herself and survive with her sanity fairly intact. Now I have to find a way of re developing a new system that serves the adult me without letting the junior me feel like she is being attacked or left unsupported. [And giving it this overhaul without throwing the baby out with bath water. As it were.]
So, being aware of feelings of frustration, letting them be, and inquiring as to whether they are frustration or if something deeper is being masked. Trusting that going into the previously unmanageble feelings won’t kill me, and sitting with those uncomfortable feelings until they pass. The most difficult part of the process for me is, knowing now that this is what I have to do to get where I want to be, that I have to refrain from turning the process into making a plan of attack, drawing up ways to do this, monitoring my progress, making milestones, achieving a goal in a set time frame. Because that’s the paradox of the whole situation. My plan-making success-monitoring self must, in order to achieve this ‘success’ let go, take a back seat, and just be. This will take as long as it takes, indeed, probably the rest of my life. The other thing I discovered (through counselling) is that in creating a new self, I cannot merely abandon my old self, or my new self will be brittle and crumble easily under duress. (This is why I am feeling SO frustrated and powerless in the current, impossible planning process for next year’s donor egg cycle). I must incorporate my new self into my old self, build upon it, and this will create more grounded-ness and stability. All the while doing this for my present self (and past self) rather than my future self, who will never really exist. I have to admit that all this existentialism is making my head hurt.
The counselling session with donor egg friend went well. We all ‘passed’, and now have a mandatory wait period of three months, then a final counselling session (booked for 4th March 2010) before we can proceed with a cycle. For those of you not in Australia, egg donation is entirely altruistic here, and our state, for some reason, has passed this extra ‘cooling off’ legislation, ostensibly to protect the egg donor from coercion. Not all states have it, in fact I think most don’t. But ours does, and I didn’t know about it earlier and there is no way around it, so there we are. In some ways, it is totally fine with me that I wait. I can use that time to decide A) if I cycle as well, and retrieve own eggs B) put own embryo back in me C) freeze own embryo and find a surrogate D) put DE embryo back in me or E) freeze DE embryo and wait for surrogate. Helping me make those decisions will be blood test results for thyroid issue, and the longer I am on the T3 treatment, the more reliable those result will be. Also, the longer time I have in which to find a surrogate and start the hoop jumping for that process. Plus the longer we have to save up for all this stuff. So that’s the positive side.
The negative side is that I really wanted to go to the UK and Europe and spend my 40th birthday with my dearest friends. I have also been planning a trip to visit them for about three years now, and every year, this baby making process gets in the way, in some form or other. This time it is the fact that we can’t know exactly when I’m going to get the DE cycle underway, or whether I will even need to be there for it (using my eggs? my womb?) So I have to wait and see, and plan to make no plans. This is frustrating and tedious, but also, these may well just be the surface feelings. The deeper feelings reveal themselves in imagery from the descriptive words that fall from my mouth as I describe feeling “trapped; like a hostage; hog tied; caged; pinned down;” I feel powerless to make decisions about things I really want to do, held back by a person who doesn’t even exist. And I feel resentful towards that person (people) who has held back my life for the past 6 years. Through him/her/them ‘refusing’ to come into existence, I have been hobbled, some important plans for my life have been scuppered. Left hanging around on the off-chance that the ‘what if’ may occur. However.
Recently, I have attempted to clear a few extra hours of ‘doing’ out of my week, and I have been successful. The quiet time with nothing planned has left me feeling relaxed and free, but also somewhat uneasy. Like I can see something out of the corner of my eye, catch a glimpse of a feeling, but not quite put my finger on it. I know it has something to do with the absence of deeper meaning, that sense of life-purpose that I am missing, that feels like a big, scary black hole. That all I currently ‘do’ amounts to nothing more than tinkering around the edges of life, entertaining myself and trying to have as nice a time as possible. That stopping and listening would mean I have to pay attention to the void, to hear what it has to say about its existence, my existence. And I resist.
And so, if I am honest with myself (which I generally am, to a fault) I then have to admit that it is not the ‘non-child’ that is holding me back from realising my dreams (what ARE my dreams???). [Although, it is holding me back from realising my dreams of motherhood. And if I am honest with myself again, making the dream of motherhood front and centre of my life is just a ruse part of me employs to distract the other part from examining anything deeper.] I do need to see, and not just out of the corner of my eye, but facing directly head on, that void. Because either in that void, or through facing that void, is where I will find that connection to myself that will allow me to feel ok about being in the world unconditionally. It will allow me to find the purpose within myself that is not reliant on having a child, a job, a label, whatever.
And especially because the very last thing I want to do is tie the responsibility for my emotional well-being on to my child (born or unborn).
And that, my friends, is where it’s at.
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