Proof

I am, evidently, curating my life. But the older I get, the less I imagine being able to revisit all the things I saved to look at when I am older. That is a paradox. Do I imagine I will forget my life? The momentous occasions? I was just cleaning house and found saved magazines and newspapers from George Harrison’s death.

I have two stored boxes of print mementos in a closet—Mt. St. Helens,
an earthquake in Hawaii the day after I arrived (having escaped the swarm of aftershocks here during the 94 quake), Hawaiian newspapers on 9/11 (we were in Oahu), and the last edition of the legendary Herald Express newspaper that my dad read every day. Am I afraid I won’t remember these events? Are they part of who I am? Why do we want to relive events anyway? Do they give us a chance to see who we are now? We calculate the distance between years and between us now and us then?

I wonder if my mom had lived if I would have let her remember things for me, at least until some typical midlife searching. Then I could have asked her about things, things that impacted my life. Maybe losing her so early made me both mother and daughter. Maybe losing her so early made me fear that anything can vanish suddenly—or explode. The world changes in a second. Maybe Mt. St. Helens and earthquakes and George Harrison’s death are just like mom’s death. Maybe they are mom’s death. Maybe I collect reminders of shock. Trauma. Disaster. Loss.

Maybe I was afraid I would forget her. I don’t remember the corporeal Helen. I remember Marleen as if she were in the room right now, but not mom. Mom is more of a cellular memory, part of me but not visible. She is a niggling physical sensation, a suggestion of someone. She is on the tip of my tongue.

I threw away some old notes from Marleen’s ill days just before I wrote this. Notes I wrote when helping her find a psychologist to get her through chemo. I thought maybe I should let go of them since they can no longer help her. But they were my scribbled handwriting, written then, so they kind of are then. They kind of are her. I must be afraid I will forget her too.

Proof. I am saving proof… of what was, and what was lost.

8 Reasons It’s Been 8 Months

Wow, eight months since my last post. It’s not like I have nothing to say, so I was wondering why I don’t say it. Off the top of my head…

1. My daughter came home with my granddaughter 7 months ago.

2. Lots of stuff has happened that isn’t for me to write about.

3. There is a 3 year old in my house.

4. Since my therapist died, I have avoided monitoring my thoughts.

5. I am stressed about the elections and fear I’ll jinx it if I talk about it.

6. I have no patience and lack focus.

7. I may be on hiatus.

8. I use Facebook as my soapbox.

I’ll let this sit for awhile. There is surely more I want to say.

Quite Clearly Ocean

Quite Clearly Ocean, 10" diameter, by Diana Maus

How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.
Arthur C. Clarke
____________

I feel like I have woken up from winter and, while I’m not over the loss of last year (there were many losses in fact), I am feeling encouraged. This year has started off well business-wise and a new client heaped this wonderful commission on me. I think it reset my brain. If only I could focus like that all the time. There are so many things I would like to do. I keep wondering if I have ADD but it’s more likely that this tech-filled life has addled my brain. My attention span is spastic. It’s not that I can’t concentrate, because I will stray into a subject on the computer and not come out for hours. It’s that I can’t prioritize, or I can’t (after making my to-do list) focus. I know what’s most important but am easily lured away. I am just like I was in grade school, easily distracted from the task at hand, and way more interested in other people than I am in doing any work. I crave people. Always have.

That’s why I love beading these mosaics. When I am working, I am in the moment and completely happy. That brings me to my latest work…

I just finished a commissioned mosaic for a wonderful client in the Pacific Northwest. This is an elaboration of an earlier 4″ piece, “I Dropped a Tear in the Ocean”. This one is 10″ in diameter and was such a complete joy to create that I could barely stand to send it away when it was finished.

For reference, I studied photos of Pacific Ocean waves breaking off the Oregon coast — such amazing colors and textures in the waves.

Some day I will live near this majestic mother, the Pacific Ocean. Until then, I will long for her.

Here are some more quotations about this dear expanse:

Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.
H. P. Lovecraft

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
H. P. Lovecraft

Can ye fathom the ocean, dark and deep, where the mighty waves and the grandeur sweep?
Fanny Crosby

Every drop in the ocean counts.
Yoko Ono

I don’t know if you can change things, but it’s a drop in the ocean.
Julie Walters

A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets.
Gloria Stuart

I dropped a tear in the ocean.  The day you find it is the day I will stop missing you.  ~Author Unknown

Whiteout

2011 fades into 2012. Things change.

I love change, couldn’t live without it,
have to have it. But I also have trouble with it. Why do I need to change things? I credit my mom, who moved the furniture around every season and often put us in the car, unexpectedly bound for grandma’s house or Dorothy’s apartment in San Diego.

I have changed my blog design.
No big deal, but I wasn’t posting.
I needed a change to invite me back after Marleen died. Is that what needing change is about for some of us? I couldn’t go back to those last two posts, couldn’t follow up or talk about 6 months of grief, 6 months of forced change.

In my profession, I liked to fix things, especially things that needed editing or polishing. Some things not only can’t be fixed, they shouldn’t be made to look any better than they are. So that’s where I leave 2011. I just leave it — alone. There is no epilogue, no proper end. Just a relief.

––––––––––––––––––––––––

I have a new art gallery! Please come take a look…

Social insecurity

My life has changed and so I am changing too. What is real in my life and what is imaginary? Death is real. It forces me to look at my illusions and defenses. I don’t want to delude myself. I have a tendency to do that. I can’t seem to decide (or remember?) what matters to me beyond family, house, and home. I’m sure it’s a protective stance against fear of my own death — a hunkering down. And it’s not the first time I’ve felt this way.

I am only slightly interested in working again at anything creative. It all seems so pointless. I suspect my enthusiasm is dampened by loss. I just want my therapist back. I want little else other than to retain what I have left.

So it was with this disspirit that I came to delete a couple hundred “friends” on Facebook the other day.

Well before my therapist died, I began to notice that Facebook was making me depressed, yet I couldn’t help viewing the news feed many times a day. My friend list had grown over the years to include mainly people I had never met, only encountered on the internet. More recently, I collected quite a few old classmates right before our 40th high school reunion. I guess because I am lonely, I made a habit of watching their lives go by, family events, personal successes and complaints, and I always felt a fondness, like to people I know but haven’t seen lately. But, largely, these are not people I know, and they do not know me. There wasn’t a lot of interaction between us either and I came to suspect that most of those people I was watching were not watching me back (few likes and comments).

Then I read this book:

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo, William Patrick

and… this great article from 1956 about the media and para-social interaction.

I found the book after an internet search for “para-social relationships”. What I found was a description of what I was experiencing on Facebook. A para-social relationship is one in which one person knows a lot about another person that doesn’t know you exist. Like fandom. Like TV characters. I personally like several TV characters enough that they seem like real people to me — people I like! That is a para-social relationship. It’s not hard to imagine that this kind of one-way street wouldn’t be as fulfilling as one with a real person that will reciprocate.

There is a difference between TV and Facebook. The difference is that TV characters allow you the vicarious thrill of wearing different personalities from the safety of your living room. The fact that these people don’t really exist is a good thing. That’s what makes it safe to envy, hate, or adore them. The only dark part of idolizing TV characters is that their counterparts — the actors themselves — could care less about you. But if you know that, there is little harm in having fun following a show. TV characters are a little like avatars or surrogates — they are inherently unreal and you would never expect them to respond to you.

On Facebook however, the people are very real, and seeing them daily with their family and friends became frustrating to me. I’m lonely, and they evidently are not. And they could interact with me but most don’t. That’s what was intolerable. The belongingness mechanism that Facebook activates can make you miserable when your friend got dozens of birthday wishes from people you know and you got very few. It feels very much like school days. And whatever happened to emailing? I haven’t had a non-business email from anyone in a long time, much less a phone call. I think Facebook has supplanted real life in many ways. How about letters? When was the last time you saw someone’s actual handwriting? Are we all avatars, all the time?

So I deleted everyone from Facebook that I have never met or had an actual conversation with unless they had been interacting with me on Facebook via Likes or Comments. Otherwise I am reducing myself to being an audience when what I really want is lunch with a friend.

My life is a bit lean right now. It won’t always be that way but won’t change drastically any time soon. I’d like to live my life with as few delusions as possible. I think this makes for less anxiety. If I am to deal with how large the loss of my therapist is, I need to let myself feel how truly small my world is without her.

___________________

p.s. I can’t believe I wrote a post about Facebook as if it really matters. How absurd. And yes, I realize there is some irony in maintaining a blog projected at strangers but it helps me to define what I am feeling, even if it is unread. My words here are not me, just my exhaling into the blogosphere. And lastly, I am going to experiment with not replying to comments here unless I am asked a specific question, even though I really like getting comments, because I think it may cause apprehension for the commentor about how I might respond, and it does cause me apprehension when I do respond. So write away, without restraint. I read everything you write

Here are some related Facebook articles:

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2010/02/23/dear-facebook-friends-im-de-friending-most-of-you-its-not-you-its-me/

http://www.cracked.com/article_19029_6-things-social-networking-sites-need-to-stop-doing.html

http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/articles/7-reasons-why-defriended-facebook

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/fashion/29facebook.html?pagewanted=all

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/10/08/surprise-less-than-1-percent-of-your-daily-active-users-on-facebook-are-engaging-your-content/

She

It’s the finality of it, all the questions I will never get to ask.

No, it’s the unfairness of it—waiting for the other shoe to drop, it started to rain shoes.

It was the coincidence, the irony, the reverb and sequence that was shocking.

Or it was the poignancy, the cruelty and obscenity, the horror.

Why her and why now? She remains a cloak wrapped around my brain. Every hour spent with her formed the basis of my ability to withstand the loss of her. How ironic that She is the reason I can live without her.

She was the leader, out in front, with no one to protect her, all of us behind, all of us injured, but She was confident that, injured or not, we could go on. She decided at the end that she may not want to—she hadn’t considered that, except theoretically.

Mental pain and suffering was her forte. She confessed to having no defense against physical pain and suffering.

She’s not suffering now, but I will miss her terribly. She was my second Mom and closest friend.

I dreamed I forgot to water my mums—both of them—both withered and about to die. I spill water all over the floor, a flood of tears I step in.

–––––––––

Dedicated to my therapist,
Marleen Josie Doctorow Ph.D.
February 15, 1947 – June 13, 2011

Land, ho! (via MosaicMoods)

It’s always interesting to look back. There’s such a sense of promise and change in this previous post — and some of that change has actually happened. What a relief! But I am waiting for the last piece of the puzzle to fall into place before I feel like I have taken a full step into my future. Just one more thing needs to happen. It will change everything for good, I hope. I want to be able to look back in two years time at this repost and say that the change actually happened and that the change brought me the spirit and the life-force I need to live with the partial disability and frustration of CFS/FM. In fact, I hope that this expected change will leave me so fully living that the downtime my illness causes will just be a rest from the blur of life. No more slo-mo for me. I want vibrance, chaos, and chatter.

Meet you here in 2 years and we’ll see what we will see…

Times are changing here at my house, in my life. Good change, hopeful change, meaningful change. The fact that this change will manifest itself towards my destiny very slowly, is something I can’t control. I mean, if a boat comes to rescue you at sea, you should not complain about the speed of the boat, right? This will not be a quick journey b … Read More

via MosaicMoods