The Teenage Poet

Several weeks ago I was talking with a friend and somehow I mentioned my poetry. "You write poetry? I didn't know that!" I explained that yes, I was a Teenage Poet, but I hadn't written poetry for many years. I told her I still have pages and pages tucked away. I told her that maybe I would bring my poetry to our next retreat, and use the time to get it organized. I was kind of surprised that she didn't know I was a Teenage Poet. I know her well and we have shared quite a few details of our lives. The Teenage Poet that I was is still here; she just doesn't come out as often or in the same way.

Three things about being a teenager:

- Most of us would not want to return to our teen years. Those years, for me, were full of pain. loneliness, confusion, and anger. Things were changing: with me, with my body, with my family. Friends seemed to become strangers. I wasn't one of the cool kids, but I sure tried to make myself stand out. Most often I stood out as weird. Like my friends, and like teenagers before me and now, I was sorting out who I was and how I fit into the world. Guess what? I still am sorting myself out and learning how I fit into the world. I believe most of us continue to re-evaluate our lives and our Selves always. We just fail to see the connection to our teen self because the struggles and battles and joys and life events are different now.

- I remember my Mom telling me "Here I am in this old and crippled up body, but my mind is still sixteen". She wasn't that old and although she had difficulties and extreme pain from advanced osteoporosis, she really wasn't all that crippled, either. The point is, her dreams and her thoughts and her desires and her needs and her joy and her anger and her longings were still there, still the same. Life had given her some tough blows and some extreme joys. Some things beat her down. Inside her sixteen year old was still there. So is mine. So is yours.

- I'm lucky to still have a couple friends who have been in my life since I was a teenager. My childhood friends are all gone, for a variety of reason, but these select few who battled through teenhood with me hold a dear and special place in my heart. They've seen me at my worst and they've seen me at my best. They "get" me like no one else does. Time passes and people move in an out of each other's lives. Those who have been with us the longest - your family, your childhood friends, your teen friends - are important to each of us for our own special reasons. Like a pair of jeans that are as comfortable as an old pair of pajamas, the teen friends hold us together even if there have been rips and frays in the fabric.

I look at my Teenage Poet and I know I would not want to live that time again. The parts of me that no longer serve me have been cut loose to waft away into the breeze. The core part of my Teenage Poet still lives on, sometimes as the fourteen year old rebel who is annoying as hell and sometimes  as the sixteen year old who only wants understanding and sometimes as the girl who lets the giggles overtake her. The loneliness may always be there.As time continues to fly out of the clock, I am learning my core being has always been and will always be. That brings relief from the loneliness, the pain, the wanting.

There's No Such Thing as Self-Help

I was the queen of self-help books. I read many and each had some nugget I could take away, that helped ease the pain, end the nagging inside me, fill the empty hole. My life didn't really change. Some things would get better for a while. For the longest time I couldn't understand why the books didn't really fix me. Melody Beattie. Wayne Dyer. Steven Covey. Harriet Lerner. So may more. And still the empty pit was there.

I took classes and workshops and joined groups. Same thing. Each would make me feel better for a little while, and then I'd return to that dark space within me. The space that was never filled up, never went away. I was so sure that there was something fundamentally and inherently wrong with me. I learned to put on the mask to plod through my days and kept some little clicker of hope alive within that maybe someday I would find that elusive answer. What was wrong with me? Why couldn't I just be happy?

All of this reading and all these workshops and all these group sessions taught me enough about my life and my background and my childhood and my marriage and my choices and my parents and my siblings and my bosses and my friends and my colleagues that I could intellectualize all my problems away. HA! I discovered why I thought I was the way I was, but never the "fix".

Three things about self-help:

- My meet and greet with cancer was a huge lesson. I can't even begin to list or describe the things I learned, truly learned, and took into my heart, mind, and soul. It was the push I needed to realize that there is no such thing as self-help. We each have to do our own "work" whatever that may be, but we can not do it alone. Each of us need support, in varying degrees and from different sources. Sometimes we can't find that support or reject that support. We don't live in this world alone. The empty pit of feeling alone seems so true, but we are not alone. You are not alone.

- All the gurus are saying the same thing. (This is a post in itself, for some other day). The same primary message is there no matter the source. AA, Steven Covey, Wayne Dyer, the Bible, Deepak Chopra, Buddha, to list only a few. Different words, different languages, different eras.

- True self-help comes when you learn to trust: yourself, others, your higher power/creator/God (insert your term here). Trusting means you get to the point that you realize you are not in this by yourself. Your life, your actions, your feelings are yours alone. To make a change or grow into yourself, you do the work. Trusting others makes it happen.

This past weekend, I went to a Hay House I Can Do It conference. I can not say that it was life-changing, but I can say it was affirming. I will continue to buy and read the books and attend workshops and go to classes. I know I will learn something new, feel something new or feel something old, but I now do this not to fix myself but to remind myself of what I know. I am not alone. Neither are you. Reach out to someone. Reach out for someone. Keep reaching. Don't let go. Reach some more.

Three Wishes

Some of my people are going through some tough stuff. Really tough stuff, life-altering stuff. My inadequacy at "fixing" it for them burns at me some days. I want to be able to give more than a few words, a hug, thoughts, prayers - I want a magic wand to wave to make it all easier for them. And for me. Often times in my life I've wondered if I feel too much, feel too deeply. I carry the pain of others too readily. I have learned I need to be very careful to not carry too much. When I take their pain, their challenges, their very well-being and make it my own, it is not healthy. Not for them. Not for me.

I've taken a number of personality tests over the course of my life. No matter which test - Myers-Briggs, Colours, Enneagrams, or the simple tests in magazines, the dominant and very clear trait is FEELING. This also showed up in the results of a Sacred Gifts workshop I took last year. It is so inherent,  this is how I've always, always lived my life. I embrace this and have some weird sense of pride that I own this so fully. The dark side of this is neglecting my own self care to the point where my ability to care for others can start to shut down. I am much more aware of this at this stage in my life than I used to be. Years of over-feeling, over-caring turned me into someone who felt so neglected myself that my natural love and care for others got hidden behind a wall. It took a lot of hard work for me to tear that wall down and to reclaim who I am. It's been worth the work.

Three things I wish for my people going through the tough stuff:

- I wish I could fix it for you. I know I can't. I know that some things can't be fixed. I know that some things have to be there creating pain and chaos. It is so hard to believe that things happen for a reason (Do they all truly and really happen for a reason?). I know you need to have your own stuff, feelings, reactions, journey, lives. I just hate to see you hurting.

- I wish peace for you; inner strength and peace to find a measure of joy in your most trying times. I hope your spiritual beliefs, whatever they are, are rays to tightly hold onto, so you have some moments of relief.

- I wish for laughter for you. As trite and cliche as it sounds, laughter really does help us get through anything. It brings perspective, it brings release from stress, it changes our focus, even momentarily. Even the toughest stuff seems do-able when laughter shows up.

That is what I wish for my people. I wish the same for me. I wish the same for you. I will go on feeling deeply, caring deeply and do my best to keep an eye on myself. Only when I take the best care of me, can I offer those words, hugs, thoughts, prayers that will help  "fix" it for you. Caring about myself and others, loving myself and others: that is the magic wand.

If You're Happy and You Know It...

I've been paying attention the past few weeks about how people refer to happiness. "I'm so happy". "I thought I'd be happy when..."  "I have everything I want, but I'm not happy". "She makes me happy". For me, happiness is a fleeting emotion, one that comes and goes. As are all emotions - feelings that happen and then move on, replaced by the next one and the next one and the next one. Happiness to me is not a state of being. Peace, on the other hand, is a state of being. I believe it is peace people truly desire and they (and I) confuse this with being happy.

Three things about being happy:

- I have spent years looking for happiness, wondering where it was, why it was so hard to find. When would I be happy? Why wasn't I just HAPPY? I was the queen of the self-help books. I had dozens on my shelf. I'd read them, agree or disagree with the principles therein. I may have done some of the exercises and a little bit of work. I still wasn't happy. What was wrong with me? I should be happy; the books said so. There was absolutely nothing wrong with me. I had just learned to believe that happiness was magical, that somehow the right person, place, thing would come into my life and with it would be...happiness. Once I decided that it wasn't happiness that was missing from my life but peace and soul-feeding, my life began to seem better, feel better. I need to remember to always go back to the place of peace, no matter what is going on in my life, in my brain, in my heart.

- Some people and things do make me happy. Externals that influence how I'm feeling can bring some moments of happiness. But I've learned, for me, that nothing and no one BRINGS happiness. When I choose to react to a person or situation or a physical object with acceptance and joy, I label that feeling as being happy. I have the choice. Often times it is hard to remember. Sometimes I want to choose unhappiness. I want to wallow. I just want to feel miserable. I need to have those times too. We all do. When I deny the happy, I also deny the sad, the mad, the love, the enjoyment. It is far too easy to turn emotions off. That is dangerous. I'm getting better at knowing this and better at catching it sooner.

- Replaying old life scenes in my head with a focus on "happy" brings a different perspective to the life I've lived. I don't pretend awful things didn't happen, I don't pretend it was all okay. I look back with curiosity and try to re-learn a lesson from a different viewpoint. It's a tough exercise and often I relive pain and anger. I can almost always find at least one nugget of good, of happy.

I want to always return to that place of peace within me. I want to bring others along. I want to tell those who are chasing happy to chase peace instead. It's not easy. It seems to leave and abandon, but it does come back. Nourish it. Enjoy it, Accept it. Find your peace and you'll find your happiness.

I want THAT!

I have been feeling somewhat unsettled and restless lately. Restless inside. Wanting...what? Needing...what? I don't even know for sure. Part of this has to do with loneliness and not seeing my people enough lately. Part of it has to do with my general dissatisfaction with having to spend time working. There's more under all this frustration and crankiness than that. I'm sure a good part of it has to do with a lapse, a slowdown, an almost neglect of my spirituality. I just know I want and need..something. This is a familiar feeling and theme in my life. I struggle with knowing the difference between want and need sometimes. I struggle with asking for help. I struggle with guilt when I do want something. I'm not sure how that came to be; I know it's been there for a long time.

Three things about WANT:

- I grew up as the youngest child of eight in a household and home where there certainly was never enough money. I was sometimes envious of the other kids homes, clothes, toys, and houses that had fathers. I learned somehow that it wasn't right to ask for too much, verbally or through thoughts or prayers. It too often didn't happen. I quickly learned it was too hard to see my Mom's face time after time when she had to say no. There was also unspoken messages about being grateful for what we did have. I don't think these messages came from her as much as from the church, the school, the other well-meaning adults around me. I was taught to be proud of my intelligence and my humour, to look around me and find others who weren't as lucky as I was. There was a resignation that this was just the way things were, that it could be worse, that I had what I needed. In many ways, this has served me well over the years.

- I spent many years thinking want and need were the same thing, and many years thinking the wanting of physical items like cars and houses and clothes would fill the empty hole inside me. Each time I got a bit "luckier" in my life and got the car or the house or the clothes, magic happiness did not rain down upon me. I spent many years thinking the right person, the unconditional love and acceptance, the adoring friends, the good job with an outstanding boss would fill the empty hole. Alas, magic happiness STILL didn't rain down upon me. The hole was still there. And it still wasn't okay within my brain to want something. The guilt at wanting and the non-filled hole with the getting were still there.

- As a single Mom myself with not enough money, I once found myself with an eviction notice. The rent money had gone to buy food and to pay overdue bills. I was scared. I told only a few people about my predicament, and one of them shared my situation with my brother. He called me and we skirted around the issue - he knew and I knew he knew. Finally he said "If you want help, you have to ask for it". That was a key for me and the first time it sunk in to my bull-headedness that it is okay to ask for what you need. Along comes cancer about twenty years later. Of the many things my cancer experience taught me and showed me, one of the most pivotal was it is okay to ask for what I needed and for what I wanted. As I got healthy again, I soon let the guilt about asking come back. Guilt was the great Ruler of want and need.

This week I have thought about this a lot.  I believe want and need can often be the same thing. This week realizations and memories about my own needing and my own wanting spilled from my core being into my brain, into my heart, into my soul.The magic does not reign down upon me, ever. The magic comes when I allow myself to need and to want. All I have to do is ask, and wait, and accept what is given.

Welcoming My Self Back

The break is over. I think. I hope. I decided to take a wee break from my writing. I wanted to sort out what I was doing with this blog, and why. I wanted to sort out what I was doing with my book, and why. I wanted to sort out what my plans were for my family history writing ( I know the why for that one). The wee break turned into weeks and now it's been months. I still don't know what I'm doing with all this, nor why. I've missed it, though.

Three things about me, today:

- The break from writing, which is one of my biggest soul-feeders, turned into a break from many other parts of my life. Soon I was back to the person I used to be: not moving enough (literally and figuratively), too much coffee, too many cigarettes, not enough sleep, general grumpiness and dissatisfaction. I wasn't feeding my soul often enough and it was a stretch to find the joy. I somehow chose this, without even realizing it. I don't like this. I can and will change it, fix it, get back to my best spiritual self. I know the things I need to do to make that happen.

- Today is the first day of a new year. I'm not big on resolutions - they are too easily broken. Resolutions for me are a way of living, with the quiet acceptance and gratitude that I will get to where I want to be, where I need to be, if I just keep moving and growing and being open. Today I wrote the dates from last year's calendar into this year's brand new one. As I flipped pages, I came across birthdays for three people in my life who died this year. I struggled with this a lot over the past couple hours. A dear friend, with whom I lost contact for many years, had reconnected with me a couple years ago. She was full of life and laughter and spirituality. She died after a second battle with cancer; one she lost. A colleague was killed in an accident in late June. I can't say we were friends, but there were connections between us - a few days apart in age, knowing people in common outside of work, living in the same small town for awhile (although not at the same time). He loved to laugh, he truly grabbed life by the horns and wrestled it down. My dear almost-life-long friend, who died this past fall after suffering with pain for much of her life. She, too, loved to laugh and could find the funny side to all situations and loved her people fiercely. I am still grieving for these three people, and realized this morning I am grieving silently and alone. I miss them and I can not cry. I want to cry, I need to cry.

- There is a connection between my break and to my unresolved grief, between my lack of self-care & soul-feeding and to my unresolved grief. There is a connection between these three people I've lost, a connection beyond that each knew me, but were unaware of the others. The love of laughter that was such a core part of each of them slaps me in the face as I face my grief and pain and loneliness.

The break is over. I think. I hope. I'm moving on and am now once again holding my people, both dead and alive, close to my heart. I am ready again to hold myself close to my heart. The steps to joy are right in front of me. One step at a time, keep moving, keep growing, keep loving, keep myself open to all the pain and all the joy. One step. This is the first one.

Time Flies Out of the Clock

I heard this morning that a small coffee shop in Calgary is closing its' doors next month. The news makes me sad and sent me on a flying trip down memory lane. You see, I spent time in this little restaurant when I was going through my chemo and radiation treatment. This tiny spot, with less than a dozen tables was a place of sanity for me, a place where I could pretend in my head that THE CANCER was not happening. The food was good, and simple. A bonus for my family: they would sometimes have porcupines on the menu. Porcupines so much like my Mom used to make - meatballs with rice and tomato sauce. And they called them porcupines, just like we do! A touch of home and a touch of sanity outside the daily routine of dragging myself from the hostel to the radiation centre, outside the rest-of-the-time reality of sitting for hours waiting for my chemo baby bottle to be changed, wondering if I would survive, feeling so very tired, fighting itchy, blistered hands and feet, swollen eyes and swollen face. Central Grounds is where I first met The Little One, my great-nephew, only a few weeks old, smiling up at our adult faces and giving me hope. My usual order was an egg scrambled with spinach served on a baking powder biscuit, and maybe a cup of decaf if my stomach was behaving that day. I couldn't face trying the porcupines, and that made me sad. Brief times spent here with various members of my family, laughing, talking, eating, with them making sure I was loved and supported.

Not so very long ago, someone made a comment to me about how often I spoke of my cancer. I don't remember the exact words, but it was a comment to challenge me about living in the past and not getting beyond my cancer. I was very hurt, but I knew this person did not understand. And she was right - - I do talk about it often and my life in my mind is firmly divided between by before-cancer-life and my after-cancer-life. I'm sure this lady had no intention for making me feel bad. It was honest feedback, and I did need to spend some time thinking about what she had said. Perceptions of others could easily be coloured by my speaking of my cancer. I came to realize that if others believe I am in living in the past or can't "get over" my cancer experience or think I'm looking for a break or favouritism or sympathy because I talk about it, then that is their road. I decided I would not filter my thoughts, emotions, beliefs about cancer, about life, about myself because someone else is uncomfortable. I truly do not want to bore people or have them roll their eyes with a "Here she goes again" shrug. My life lessons from this life changing year need to be shared. I'm sorry if that makes anyone uncomfortable, angry, frustrated. But I won't and can't quit exposing myself. I trust that some days what I am saying makes a positive impact on one person, if even for a brief glimmer of a second.

There are no "three things' today, listed here for you to mull over. Eight years ago I was just off work, waiting for treatment to start, scared, angry, surrounded by others but yet alone. I was waiting for a previously planned trip to Toronto; it would be my first trip there and most days I thought it would be my last. Seven years ago I was just back to work, struggling to have the energy to work four hours a day and excited about a "being alive" party that my family was planning for me. Last year I was fighting my own emotions through one of the hardest times I've ever had at my job, and waiting to go on my first ever trip to California, where I had a different type of life-changing experience at 'meditation boot camp' at the Chopra Center.

I need to remember. I need to make the connections of why I am still here and how each event in my life played into today. I, like you, am here for one very important reason - to serve others. The rest of it is gravy, a bonus. I walk my way towards each day, growing in spiritual, intellectual, emotional leaps and bounds or growing in minute baby steps as I sort out my life. The coffee shop is closing; I hope to get there one more time before the doors are shut. I may not. It will be there forever in my mind as a place of sanity and reality during the very real horrors of cancer treatment. It will be there forever in my mind as the place where I first laid eyes on The Little One, who is an old soul and wise beyond his years, where I first held The Little One who told his Mom recently "Time flies out of the clock". And it does. I live for each day with my opportunity to have this most important do-over, with the before-cancer and after-cancer years as different times in my very different life. Time flies out of the clock. Take advantage of the time you have. Be who you are. Reach out. Love, laugh, sing, cry, scream, but LIVE!! Time flies out of the clock. It does. It does. Thank you, Little One.