12.12.08
I hate Fridays. Fridays are the day on which all of the tension and exhaustion and stress and lack of sleep and disappointment of the week comes crashing down on me and as I drive home from work I have to concentrate extra hard to make sure that I don’t veer off the road or something. There is tension in the back of my head, the right side right where my neck meets me head and my jaw aches. My back is all twisted and out of sorts from sitting sideways at my desk so that my computer monitor doesn’t face the entire office. I get home and want nothing more than to sleep for a hundred years, but the gym closes at 7:45 on Friday nights and so what I try to do is to find a way to gather some scrap of energy to allow myself to change and get over to the gym because inevitably I’ve skipped more times that I find acceptable during the week either because I had a fever or my period or a family night or there was a birthday or whatever. And if I can find that little bit of energy to get over there, I push push push through the workout, wanting nothing more than for it to be over and done with because it is no longer enjoyable but a chore to get done because the rest of my life feels riddled with requirements and should dos and so working out has become something I have to stretch to do.
And so today I came home with a lot of pain in my right side. I had polarity work done at work today, which is energy work. I was upset because I had been expecting a massage and ended up getting polarity done and it wasn’t at all what I wanted. There were other little things throughout the day that built up – crap with health insurance, feeling like I’m doing a job that I am not getting paid for, long boring meetings and the like. By the afternoon I was dragging and in pain. It was to the point where I took painkillers. I probably could have survived without them, but I really really wanted to get to the gym and so I thought “may as well take them in hopes of it helping me later on today.” Then I even left work a little early in hopes of being able to have an extra moment for myself before going to the gym.
It is now 6:06PM and while I know that if I were to jump up, change and rush over there right this minute, I could get in my workout. But I’m tired and frustrated and so so so angry at feeling this rushed and unable to do what I want to do that I can’t even do it. I started to write last night about how I miss France and as I lay here in bed hate hate hating that I can’t even find the energy to go to the gym and that I have no desire to go to the pot luck at Cinizia’s tonight, I thought about how different my life in France as and how I miss it.
I think what I miss most is that France was this space in my life in which it was totally OK and easy to make myself the number 1 priority the majority of the time. It was such a luxury to be able to think of me, my wants, my needs, my emotions, my time, my goals, and my happiness first almost always. I guess maybe it spoiled me. But it seems so wrong to me that my life should consist of spending more time doing things that I would not actively chose to do if I really felt like I had the choice. And it pisses me off to think that this is what it means to be an adult and to be grown up. And I know know know that in some ways I am playing the victim and that I do make choices and decisions and that it is up to me to prioritize things, but when student loans and rent and bills have to be paid, when a lease has been signed, when there are people you love who want and need you in their lives, when there was only one job interview and lucky that job was offered to me, it doesn’t feel much like there’s a whole lot of room in there for constructing the life that I want. And maybe I am just giving up too easily or being far too stubborn about the things that I want. But even so, I could not help but start to cry as I lay here tonight thinking about how I couldn’t even just go for a walk, just a simple walk today. All of the “exercise” I got in my life today consisted of me walking around the Head Start. On an average day in Paris, even if I did not find the time to take a walk for the sake of taking a walk, I got in at least 45 minutes worth of walking through the city, up and down stairs in subways and at school.
And now I’m at that place where I feel so much anger and frustration churning inside of me that I need to do SOMETHING to get rid of it. But I am so tired and at a loss as to how to deal with it that I can’t figure out how to even get out of bed to deal with it. And no, I am not on hormones and no, I am not pmsing and no, I am not sick. I want to break something.
One of my gripes living here is that I feel like I have no friends of my own or life of my own. Tonight I have been invited to Cinzia’s for a potluck. Cinzia taught ESL with me and potentially could be my very own friend. I have no desire to go. In fact, I actively do not want to go. So the one time something of my very own presents itself I can’t even figure out how to want to participate.
Living here makes me feel so crazy. It wasn’t supposed to be this hard. I know staying in France would have been hard in its own right. I mean, I think about that every time I start to miss it. I pull out my list of reasons why it’s really OK that I’m here not there - my list of why it would have been hard and not the same and not satisfying and not what it was had I stayed there – finding a job, finding a place to live, working out visas, not having the same social network, being far away from home, not having furniture, etc. In the end it doesn’t help to think about those things. In the end I still miss my life there. I still miss the city and how it felt to spend hours upon hours wandering through the streets, usually the same route over and over and over again but sometimes a new path, a new back road, a different turn, or just noticing something that I’d passed a million times and never seen before.
Sometimes I think I am meant to live a really solitary life. Human relations exhaust me and I feel like I’m not really equipped to maintain really close relationships with people, or at least not to do so for extended periods of time in one place. Sure being far away and alone has its drawbacks, its moments that don’t feel so great and are hard. But life is like that no matter what. You can be in a room with the people who know you best and who love you more than anything and still feel like complete and utter shit. You can be there with them and have them holding you and telling you it’ll be OK, listening to you, supporting you and doing everything in their power and more to make you feel OK or to let you feel what you’re feeling and STILL you can feel like shit. It happens with our without witnesses, and sometimes I think that maybe for me what works best is being on my own and being OK with it for the majority of the time and then when I’m not so OK with it, just going through that and coming around to the other side of it.
Of course I’m not actually going to act on this. I’m not going to become a recluse or a hermit lost somewhere in the streets of Paris though that seems like exactly what I want the freedom to have right now. I mean, I guess being on my own just feels like so much freedom and coming back into a situation where I am more actively involved with people I love feels like losing a lot of that freedom. And it feels like such an awful awful thing to say – that being with those people who love me and who I love is stifling and holds me back so I don’t say it. And I don’t mean it that way. I just mean that it brings about a really unique set of challenges for me and it really overwhelms me and I feel ill equipped to deal with them.
Did I write about the family night on Monday night in which we talked about stress management? Did I talk about how part of the info packet had a worksheet about transitions? Did I mention that I realized that these past six months of my life have included at least four transitions that are a lot bigger and more major than I had ever really realized? It’s hard for me to give myself the time and space to deal with them. It’s strange because last year in France (and when I lived in Dijon as well), I learned to be super compassionate and kind towards myself. I learned how to set outside of myself and take care of myself how I would take care of a friend. I learned to let go and to lower the bar and that it’s fine to not live up to all of the expectations that I set for myself.
Those were all strategies and ways in which I was able to cope with the challenges in my life – transitioning and acclimating to living in a different country, on my own, and such. Now here I am hit with all of that (yes, even acclimating to living in a different country and going through culture shock counts) and I feel like my body is in constant rebellion and like I am never doing enough or doing it right or balancing or showing up for people or showing up for myself and I let it get so big and impossible that its crippling to the point where I get home from work on Friday evening with one single goal – to go to the gym- and I end up in bed feeling angry with myself and my life. And it doesn’t seem to even matter anymore or to work anymore to tell myself that its really fine and that I need to be kind and compassionate to myself, that one night of being less active than usual won’t kill me and that I need to rest and relax. Those thoughts that used to work seem to just make me remember all the other nights I’ve had like this here (and maybe in reality they are not as many as they seem in my worked up mind right now) and then I start thinking about how many more there are to come.
One major strategy that I think has worked wonders since the end of high school has been writing and maybe I need to come back to that and be more intentional about that these days. Walking and going to the gym, of course, were other huge de-stressing techniques. Of course now they only seem to add to the sense that I am overextended, overwhelmed, overly obligated and incapable of figuring out how to balance my life. But maybe if I take more time to sit and write I’ll be able to readjust my life in a way that makes sense and allows me to feel like I am living up to my own expectations, meeting my own needs and being the person that I want to be both for myself and for the people in my immediate day to day life (and really there are only a few of those people and even then it seems to be way more than I can handle – I really should become a recluse).
12.9.08
I have an appointment to see an obgyn tomorrow morning. I am a little bit excited but also apprehensive. The excitement lies in the possibility of a new doctor being able to tell me something new, something concrete, something informative, something helpful . . . I mean, something really. Of course the apprehension is due to the fact that I am well aware that I might just hear the exact same thing that I have heard from other doctors – inconclusive sounding, tentative, unclear explanations and reasoning for why my periods are so irregular. Of course that response will likely come with the recommendation to either take progesterone, a hormone, once every three to four months for ten days in order to induce a period that would otherwise refuse to happen, or to go on birth control.
Neither solution has had much appeal for me and I’ve spent the past few years not feeling very concerned about the problem. I was reassured that my lab work was all normal and fine last time I went in to talk to someone and also about a month ago when I went in for an annual. However, I am starting to realize that this really isn’t normal and probably isn’t so OK. In preparation for my visit tomorrow I went through my calendar to make a list of when I have had my period and whether it was natural or induced hormonally. At first I started in 2006 and then ended up going back as far as 2005. I discovered that from January 2005 until right now (November 2008) I have had my period a grand total of seven times, four of which were hormonally induced. Were I regular, or mostly regular, I would have had it about 46 times during that span of time.
The point of this really wasn’t to get into my gynecological issues, but rather to allow myself a moment to think about what I really found tonight. The process of figuring all of that out included me looking through my calendar, which I have done a decent job at keeping up to date with the goings ons of my life, over the past four years. It took me from living in Dijon through my senior year of college and my Masters degree back to France and finally here to Santa Fe. I had to try hard not to read too much of what was written in the years in Dijon and Paris because the second I started to allow myself to do so, I was hit with a feeling of longing and sadness.
Even just letting my eyes scan over the days, weeks, months and years was neat though. Just to think about how many places I’ve been and how many people I’ve met. Today I got to thinking about skydiving and it took me a minute to register that I have actually jumped out of an airplane. It almost doesn’t seem like me who did it and though it wasn’t even a year ago, it feels distant. I don’t think I’ve ever missed a place the way I miss Paris.
Last night I stayed late at work to host a parent training on stress management. The training itself was not the most inspiring, but at the end of the handouts was a section on transitions. The very last page was a worksheet that simply asked that we think about transitions we have gone through, how we dealt with them and then transitions we are going through and how we can deal with them. I quickly started to list transitions I’m currently or have recently undergone and was surprised to find that the four bullets were quickly filled and I felt as though it might not have even been enough space. I chose to write down that I am living with my sister for the first time in seven years, I moved away from Paris, I’m in a relationship for the first time in a long time and I’m working a full time job. Then I tried to think about how I’m giving myself space to deal with it and I came up with . . . nothing. The key word on the worksheet I think was “space” and as I thought about it, I realized that I’ve been so busy that I don’t actually feel like I’ve had much space. Sure, I could say that I go to the gym, but with my time crunch even that has become stressful. I haven’t had time to write, and I seem to be so focused on getting through the things that I have to (or that I feel obligated) to do. I do have moments of clarity in which I can step outside of the hecticness and try to prioritize a bit, but I have a hard time with it. I also think I’ve been having a hard time allowing myself to feel and experience just how hard these transitions are.
Anyway, it was fun to look at a calendar overview of how I’ve spent the past four years of my life. All in all I have to say I’m rather pleased with how it looks. And after having thought a bit about transitions and some of the stress causers in my life right now, I’m feeling a bit of calm and peace, and optimism that I will be able to be more present, able to prioritize and happy in the moment when I get back from winter break.
12.8.08
It’s early morning – or at least what counts as early to my groggy body. I haven’t even had coffee yet, but I’m already driving down the highway, pulling into the exit lane as the mountains disappear beyond where the highway continues. Pulling to a stop at the end of the exit, I think about the very first time I made this drive, not knowing if I’d ever make it again, not knowing exactly where the pueblo started, not having any clue what lay inside the pueblo. I wonder how many times I have made it since. I fiddle with the radio in hopes of finding a better song and turn left under the highway.
As I turn onto the frontage road that parallels the highway, I remember the warning not to speed because there are days when the police like to set up camp at the very spot where my day begins. Looking around to make sure today is not one of those days, I accelerate. It’s hard to drive parallel to the highway at a slower speed than the cars next to me. Plus, the road stretches out in front of me, slowly rising and falling, yet unable to hide the distance that remains to be driven to the stop sign by JR Clothing where I will turn left.
The pueblo lies at the end of the road where I turn left by JR, but by the time I have reached the frontage road I am already on reservation land. I am on reservation land because someone or somebodies drew a line and created a boundary stating that the piece of land beyond this line belongs to these people. There is a sign that alerts you to the crossing of the line, as does any “Welcome to Blahblah state, home of smiles and rainbows and sunshine!” sign. The sign for the reservation is more straightforward, “Now entering Tesuque reservation,” or some such message.
There is no dramatic change in the already dramatic landscape – mountains growing up on either side of the desert, sky expanding beyond any expanse I can describe. There are less visible signs of human inhabitance than there are in Santa Fe, but Santa Fe is a city. The houses on the pueblo do not look significantly different from my neighbors’ homes, except perhaps for that some are a bit more rundown looking. The dirt roads that wind their way through the pueblo seem rural or of another time, and everything feels dusty and is some version of the color brown. There is a sign on one house indicating that one can buy pottery there, but no storefronts or gas stations or grocery stores exist. There is a recently renovated church that stands over the plaza. Groups of stray dogs, some recent mothers clearly still nursing their young, run around after cars, get into fights with one another or sit by the side of the road watching all who pass by. Old bikes lay on their sides in front yards bounded by barbwire fences. Piles of scrap wood, metal and other miscellaneous items decorate sides of houses and back yards. Fancy cars looking slightly out of place are parked in front of some houses. Shades are drawn; there is an eerie sense of emptiness.
From the moment I pass under the highway after the exit until I park my car, I raise my hand slightly off of the steering wheel in an automatic salute to every car that I pass. Having worked on the pueblo for barely two months, I only know one or two of the people whom I salute, if even that many. When I first witnessed my boss wave at every passing car on my first day of work, I assumed she must just know everyone. I came to learn that it is not an interaction based on friendship or even actual acquaintance, but rather a custom, a tradition or perhaps simply a habit. It’s an acknowledgement of having seen the other person and though I felt hesitant at first to initiate the ritual, I quickly discovered that people I did not know would raise their hand at me if I did not and if I did it first, I almost always would get a wave in return.
It seems like such a small gesture and not very significant. My experience of real life interaction with people I met on the pueblo varied greatly, but my very first reaction was that they were not overly friendly. This is not to say that I found them to be mean, unpleasant or unwelcoming, but simply not overly, outwardly, animatedly friendly. I suppose that’s why the hand wave seemed a bit incongruous at first.
One of my interview questions for this job was about how I would handle getting to know another culture. Going into the interview I realized that working on the pueblo meant working with a culture different from my own, one about which I had no knowledge. Having lived abroad twice, I felt confident in saying that I have lived through culture shock and really appreciate the process of getting to know another culture, despite the fact that at times it can be frustrating and confusing.
There is still much that I have yet to learn and much more that I likely will not learn at all. I realized that today marks two months at my new job and I take comfort in raising my hand to salute passing cars. I don’t really feel part of the community in any significant or important way, but I no longer feel completely outside of it. I even catch my hand starting to loosen its grip on the steering wheel in an effort to wave at passing cars when I turn onto the less traffic-filled streets of my neighborhood. So far I have been able to catch that hand and place it back down before waving at total strangers who would likely either wonder if they knew me or think I was crazy.
