progress

Who am I today?

I think it’s time for a report on my progress, but I’m not sure what to report. Everything in my life is shifting and offering me a direction I’m both delighted with and terrified by.

I still cry at the drop of a hat, sometimes its a pinprick of grief and sometimes it’s an icepick of grief, but the pain eventually fades and I’m back to moving forward again.

I’ve been baking cookies, that helps. It’s creative and encourages me to eat.

Yeah, my diet. Some of you have seen me, some of you haven’t. I’m shrinking and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. It’s kind of a forced death march diet that’s getting more demanding as time goes on. How do I explain?
I appear to be becoming slowly more and more protein averse. It has an odor and a taste that repels me. It started with meats, but it’s slowly gotten to the point where the sunflower seeds on my salad are triggering. There’s another odor associated with food spoilage that I’m very sensitive to now as well. So much so that a food that seems perfectly harmless to everyone around me smells like death to me. Not fun.

So yeah, My clothes are falling off and I eat like a bird but it’s not a conscious choice I’m making. I have to believe it’s all part of the process, whatever this process is.

I gave up deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, makeup (not that I had much) and I’m loving my Diva cup. Baking soda, vinegar, and coconut oil are my friends. I still use my own soap because… my own soap, duh.  And I’m working on a toothpaste that’s portable for work purposes, my current batch is good but needs tweaking.

I spend almost all of my time alone in healing, writing and trying to map out my goals. The current goal is to write the book, so I write the book, or it writes me… there’s some confusion sometimes.

I tend to be very stable and capable now, most of the time, then this past week John came in for a visit and my new found strength vanished as I went right back into the old patterns of serving him and ignoring my own needs. I bought things I didn’t need, ate food I couldn’t process and engaged in conversations I had no interest in. I later caught the word “authenticity” and realized that that was my lesson, staying authentic with John and we talked about it and I made some real progress over the week.

In the middle of the worst of my self-loathing over the John situation, I got a text out of the blue from Rowan. I continue striving to appreciate the timing of the trickster in my life. Already out of my typical orbit he brought me to additional insight into my current book chapter on addiction. I didn’t realize that I was holding on to so much anger there. I feel awful because I was harboring a mental terrorist in my brain who was hurting me and the people I care about, but I negotiated well and the situation is resolved now. I continue to work on my addictions and my book, now with renewed insight into the ways the pleasure centers of our brains work and don’t work for us.

The house will become the first temple. That’s a process, but we’ve got time. I’m thinking about temple meetings on Friday nights but I don’t know how they’ll go yet. That all depends on who shows up. I have a small but vocal group of idiots who long for a support group for their “Quit our jobs, buy more booze” campaign. Ben wants a church like DaveCon, where everyone brings their favorite board games and you play together every week. I like music and discussions in the round. Faerin’s memorial fund is buying the temple a nice karaoke machine for the new year. It’s to be used for team building and morale-boosting purposes, especially around seasonal holidays.

I may very well be crazy thinking that I can save the world all by myself and, of course, I can’t, I need hearts and minds to help me. I continue to search for the hearts and minds (and backs, in some cases, I suppose) that support me and want to lend me energy when I need it.

Right now, I write. I’m working through the process of creating a skeleton outline for the book with 2-3 pages per chapter. When that’s completed (no telling when if I need to endure training for each chapter), I will revise it into something resembling the book I want. Then it goes to Ben for fact-checking. He refuses to allow me to print a word that isn’t factual. When the Ben approved copy is complete I’ll need a handful of people who want to give me input on it before we publish. I’m just one person, my perspective isn’t always clear.

If you want to be a reader, let me know. I have no clue when I’ll have something for you but I am working steadily on getting it down and I hear the countdown clock in my head all the time, so 2016 is critical.

I chose this path. I have nothing left to lose and everything to gain. It’s a bitch, but I’m Ocean Song and I cannot be silenced any longer.