Yesterday’s post was all about doubts and worries. It also contained a solution to my problem: do it once a month.
Well it turns out that this was the solution, and looks like the organisation agrees.
Yaay me!

When is an opportunity good enough to push everything aside?
Here’s my problem: I have an opportunity to take up a radio show for the organisation I am doing work for. Trouble is, irony know how I’m going to fit it in around study and work.
Full time study at school l is 2 days a week, with studu at home to take the same amount of time. That’s 4 days. Add one day working and I’ve only got the weekend left. I guard my weekends passionately; they’re my time and I don’t like things taking away from them. Once a month, fine.
So, today I have to work out if an opportunity really isn’t and I’ll end up resenting it. Perhaps the trick is to know my limitations, and to stand by what I’m physically and mentally capable of doing rather than just throwing everything in and hoping for the.best.
Well, today’s the day I find out…

After a nasty hot night I find myself on the tram to work. I’m slightly tired, and have left the house without my morning cuppa, but have eaten and will be, at most, 10 minutes late.

Tossing and turning last night I tried the fan but found it too loud, more a reflection on my state than its – the over-tired mind wanting, demanding sleep yet not finding it and most likely sabotaging itself with its demands. Foolishly I kept checking email in my half-conscious state, the trap of having a smartphone next to your bed.

But today, instead of cranky, I’ve decided to be at peace with the day and to have a nice one. The wirkplace is pleasant and easy, I’ve got specific things to do and am, if truth be told, dazzling them with my geek credentials; in short, I know how to make their lives easier on a computer.

I also have a lovely partner and things are going rather well. We get along, we communicate well and we support one-another. This is a really good place to be.

So what’s to complain about?

There’s always something, but it’s a first-world complaint. My partner and I won a very schmick smartphone each in the weekend and they’re sitting in a box untouched. We’ve researched and researched, made enquiries of friends and there’s a split down the middle: some are saying “bird in the hand, free, nice phone, well done!’ while others are saying the opposite: ‘it’s android, hard to get used to after an iPhone, why not sell it and get a phone you really like?’

Thing is, it’s like a Christmas present in full view, and I’m getting more and more frustrated about it. I’ve played with the phone and it’s a nice bit of kit. There are some things to get used to, but that’s par for the course. For my partner, the improvements will be manifest: they’ve got an old nokia, a crackberry lookalike, purchased before smartphones really were smart.

The only drawbacks I can see are that the new phone has no front facing camera, it runs android and It’ll be slightly less elegant to sync with the Mac. But is that really worth $300 extra money? I would have to buy a new wallet because the one I’ve got takes my phone; a $16 investment before Christmas 2011. If I spend $300 on an iPhone I get to keep the wallet.

It’s not an apple, which seems the over-arching argument, and therefore less good. But it was free, and worth $500.

Like I said, first world complaints. Maybe I’ll chat with my partner about it tonight.

I’m sitting in a cafe called “gypsy” today on high street in westgarth after a day of calm after the storm of Christmas. That’s not to say it wasn’t a fun couple of days though.
My partner unfortunately caught a cold yesterday morning which probably says more about the stress if the time of year than anything else. Not only is Christmas in oz busy in all the usual ways that the time of year is, but it’s impossibly hard to sleep what with the overnight temperatures, exhaustingly hot days and humidity. This time of year is regularly monotonous in this way.

So, my partner went home this morning to rest, to sleep and really to stop. I got to do the same so perhaps the wisdom of the common cold, which forces us to slow down and look after ourselves so our immunity is built up again; to de-stress – affected us both.

Doesn’t mean I’d have preferred to spend the day with them though. But there will be other days, many more to come.

This soy chai rates a “passable but I wouldn’t kill zombies for it” and I expect it was made with powder.

Perhaps that’s what I can do when I get home: two projects I’ve had on the backburner for a while…

But for now there is chai, then a quest for envelopes and bluetack. I tried Northside plaza and k-mart earlier but found myself with the unnerving need to escape the depressive atmosphere. I dumped my coat hangers and bluetack after a fruitless search for the other items on my list and felt better for it. I’m not sure why but department stores create a feeling of claustrophobia in me, a need to get out, escape, as fast as my legs can carry me. They’re just so drab and soulless, and the kmart in question has a relentless feeling of ennui, a horror in the faces of staff and customers alike. I have never liked that store; like a dying man you never liked in the first place, the instinct is to be somewhere else even though you you’re expected do something to help, if not to just be there to comfort the soon to be dead.

The sun is out again and the chai is nearly gone. I will sign off now and hope you will return…

Seems it’s the day for profound revelations.

For most of my life I just haven’t had much time for money. I didn’t see the point of stockpiling it, I didn’t see the need for anything other than paying the rent, eating and odd bits of entertainment. I saw how it could corrupt and the effects it had on relationships so I’ve studiously avoided it in large quantities for a while now. Perverse, perhaps, but true.

The reason: It had no use to me.

I’m fairly ruthless in my life these days. Everything in my life needs to have a use – having lived in enough small homes, you get that way. If you stockpile stuff it means you can’t get into the kitchen for breakfast. You can’t get out of your house or even into it for that matter. I don’t like the idea of the McMansion, the huge sprawling house in darkest suburbia, I prefer compact, simple and neat.

Perhaps this has been my problem all along with money?

Anyway, so here’s the revelation that’s come from last night’s thinking.

The reason it had no use is because I had no reason for having it. If I’m not prepared to stockpile then there’s no point having it, is there?

Well there is if I have a goal in mind for it.

And now I have some goals. Neat!

So this week, as mentioned in the last post for those who still visit and are keeping up, has been a bit crap.

I’ve veered from very sad, to anxious, to pissy, to feeling all sorts of other things. And it all makes perfect sense once I got to the bottom of it all last night at 3am.

I think I should point out at this point that I, like many people, suffer from Zombies.

You think I’m joking?

Zombie memories that is.

They act like zombies: brainless, unstoppable, marauding, hungry and ugly.

They drag me down and I end up fighting with them.

And most of all, when you think you’ve buried them once and for all, they rise from the fucking dead to maraud and cause chaos all over again.

Now they’re not vampires, which was another idea I had. No, Vampires are intelligent and clever and you can talk to them. You might not be able to reason of course as they drain you of blood, but you get that this comparison doesn’t really work (though I might use them in a future post I’m sure!).

Zombie memories have got emotional material attached, but it’s damaged and oozing nastiness, dragging behind without being of any use whatsoever, the frayed clothing and flesh around the real issues.

This week, the Zombie had me, dragging me down into the pit of despair it lived in, filled with old memories of being abandoned, left, losing people I cared about; the loneliness was unbelievable and for a while I became it. I was picking at things my partner said and spinning them into things they weren’t.

And all the while I hated what I was feeling. I couldn’t work out why I had suddenly become this “Thing”. It came at night (of course it came at night, it’s a Zombie!) and I woke up with all these negative thoughts. Why didn’t this happen? Why didn’t that happen? Why was this done?

I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understandIdon’tunderstandIdon’tunderstand…

That’s where a mind like a steel trap comes in handy. I’m fairly logical in a lot of ways and I had to reason the damn thing out.

So what I started with was a page with the word “Feelings” at the top. On this I wrote everything I was feeling at the time in black and where it was in my body in red. This gave me all the specifics of what the zombie was about.

the emotions were (among other related ones):

abandonment

loneliness

a feeling of being left-out

isolation

sadness

Next page had the chain of events:

Reaction (is) Knee-Jerk (based on) Assumption (translates to) attack (to force) breakdown

These events were basically passive-aggressive in nature. And I don’t like passive-aggressive. It makes me angry.

Basically at this point, I lost it with the Zombie, writing:

I was fine

I was okay

This is bugging the shit out of me

What the hell has changed in the last 2 weeks?

I’d found Patient Zero: the one that caused the outbreak. I was at the bottom of the pit – like the “Hero’s Journey” – there was crisis, a slow downward decline into the pit, and here was the realisation, the change that I need to find my way out; the only way was up, where the light was, and the light was where I wanted to be.

Two weeks ago I wasn’t so bad; I had some odd issues (money’s tight at the moment for example), but I was coping, surviving, and chirpy with it.

What happened during that time matched the kind of zombie I was battling.

• My school came to an end
• I have worries around work
• I am aimless
• I had an awful cold that just wouldn’t go away

Here were the core issues.

Nothing mattered. I was cast adrift, without anything to grasp, without anything to feel connected to. I was lonely – the people I’d gotten to know over a year were now gone, the structure was gone; my work had dried up mid-year and so there was no structure there either. The aimlessness came out of these: what was I going to do for the rest of the year and next?

The cold was physical symptoms based on these. And it wasn’t going away – I still had a throaty cough a week and a half after the damn thing had gone.

Abandonment and lonliness: a loss of people

A feeling of being left-out: people are gone, school is gone, therefore I’m not a part of anything anymore

Isolation: As with being left out – there’s no-one I can rely on, I’m alone.

Sadness: the result of all these.

The steel trap had worked. I’d caught the Zombie and chopped enough off of it to work out what it was really about.

I needed something to anchor against. I needed a goal. I needed to find something else, and what I wrote was:

Where is my integrity?

What do I want?

Pursue

Now wallowing in self-pity isn’t like me: I usually work hard (one friend said I was the hardest worker they’d ever seen), I am intuitive and I work out ways to do things. I persist. I pursue. I can be like a Jack Russell Terrier the way I go after things.

I wasn’t persisting here. I was falling to bits.

The saying about 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration applied here. I wasn’t putting the effort in. Why? Because I had no clear goals.

What do I want?

• Career in counselling – need batchelors; 4 years part-time

What do I do in the meantime?

• Idea: 3-6 month contract in IT then study. – Lots of $ (but hard on me mentally) – would create a buffer

OR

• part time study and part-time job

And there it was: a solution, something to do, something to anchor myself on and a decision made.

I felt good again. I feel good again this morning. The zombie is dead.

Again…

I’ve been finding myself severely agitated over the last few days and not sure why. It started a couple of days ago and at the time I thought it was triggered by a soy chai latte from Starbucks (which will be my last for a while anyway – sugar is no longer on the menu).

Last week after the skating accident I had the same thing, but worked through it and identified the problems.

This week though, it’s back. Last night I was unbelievably sad and unhappy, mainly due to a phone conversation and the aftermath of that. I wrote, and wrote and wrote and wrote… it was almost non-stop until 2am. Then this morning I wrote a letter which I will never post, and the resolution arrived.

And now I’m back in it again. I woke angry, speculated a bit (which is what I do when I’m agitated), checked something, got really upset and angry, threw the laptop across the bed, then wrote some stuff out in a document.

Writing helps me.

Only about 20 one sentence statements got me to a place where I could work out something; they veered  from the anger, hurt and child-like reactions:

• “I am” (“I am feeling left out”; “I am feeling nasty”);
• “I have” (“I have unpleasant, nasty thoughts”);
• “I feel” (“I feel like I’m the one making all the compromises”);

…to ones more self-aware and of ownership:

“My moods” (“My moods are all over the place”, “my moods are controlling me”, “my moods are creating the situation”);

then finally I was led into queries and problem-solving:

“Could it be” (“could it be the hormones?”, “Could it be old patterns?”, “Could it be I haven’t had time for me?”)

I realised something: this is what my father did. The pattern was so close as to be uncanny: a slow arcing up, slow burn, some resentment, building, building, building, then a dark feeling of being alone and excluded (which is my stuff); all irrational, nasty, spiteful and out of character but uncontrollable like a tide hammering over me, lifting me up and carrying me along.

I researched mood-swing, which is the first thing that came to mind based on the statements.

That led me, thanks to google to wikipedia. There I found that ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) people suffer mood swings. I was diagnosed with Adult ADD a few years ago. Mood Swings ADD led me to a couple of sites with home remedies but suddenly the tension and anger was gone.

Whether the damn thing is still there is another thing altogether. Maybe I cut the blue wire and the bomb is now disarmed? Maybe there’s another one lurking just around the corner?

All I do know is that I’m getting better at noticing the signs, finding ways to fix my own reactions and minimising harm to those I care about.

And for that I have to be thankful.

It’s funny, but I’m wondering if this would be of use once I’m out in the world doing counselling?

I’m on the 112 tram on my way to meet mum at southern cross station. It’s a cold spring day in Melbourne (is there any other kind?!) and I have a bit of a sore throat, which time and care will determine whether it becomes better or worse.

I find myself at a loose end mentally now school has concluded. Or rather, I now have 3 extra days per week to organize the things I need to graduate.

Also, I have many plans for my organization which have a real chance of coming to fruition.

I’m designing the way it works with a focus on the “end user” (to use the information technology terms I’m used to).

The core issue I have seen in many organizations is either too little or too much engagement with the people they ultimately serve. There is value in community involvement but there has to be a limit, because you can’t please all of the people all of the time. Further, I feel that ideas need to develop in the wider world, with small ones expanding and developing into bigger ones.

Of course, in this way it is possible that mistakes will be made. But as Steve Jobs once commented “at least that means decisions are being made.”.

It is with this philosophy that I’m building the organization; an ideal that with every faltering step forward, with every fall, we still have the courage to pick ourselves up again, learn from the experience and try, try again.

That, as the poet Tennyson says is the goal:

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield