Saturday, December 17, 2011

I notice I've been away from this blog for almost six months, and I haven't been feeling obligated to write something new, which is great. Writing is essential to my process, the capstone of all other work, but at some point in the last six months, I must have surrendered to the realization that the way I was using this blog was mostly to get attention and feel accomplished for doing so. It feels natural to let go of the need to constantly put myself and my writing out there in this format, because I've been busy doing things in the world that reflect what I know is important to me rather than substituting that with a blog.

It also reduces the anxiety I feel when I put something of myself out there. The hardest lesson for a Capricorn to learn is that difficult and hard and tiring are not necessarily the markers of something of value. I have to teach myself that one again and again.

I don't apologize for seeking attention or think that it's wrong, because a person who doesn't feel anyone pays attention will need to keep seeking attention for whatever it is they are trying to deal with or understand until they reach a more peaceful state. But it IS a kind of double edged sword or tightrope that the person must walk. On the one hand, it really IS important to give voice to feelings and philosophies regardless of what others might think, and receive input on the ideas and values one is exploring. On the other hand, it's necessary to present those ideas in a respectful and interesting way to others if one hopes to experience their appreciation.

It's hard to even consider tailoring your delivery when your mind and soul are filled with repressed confusion and anguish, you're just beginning to learn something, or you are so used to having what you think or say being automatically discounted or dismissed that you do it to yourself as a matter of course. But barreling ahead WILL likely cause more rejection or disapproval, and neither will over-adapting to perceptions of what others want yield a more promising result. It simply leaches the authenticity from what you have to say.

It's a messy process, a combination of building up trust and developing structure, clarity, assertion, and focus; of finding ways to interact with communities that support your beliefs and perspectives rather than wear them down through criticism and complaint. All people, though perhaps some more than others, need to experience the appreciation of others if they are to cultivate it in themselves. You can't drive a car anywhere on an empty tank.

At some point, self-respect and comforts for the soul need to be accepted as necessary additions to life and actively incorporated as antidotes to an overworked and over-worried ego. Knowing that things will work out, because you've seen it happen, experienced it yourself, is another key ingredient. There is a need for the mind to find a toehold in the chaotic whirlwinds of anxiety and victimization that well up and render logic and rationality impotent once you accept someone else's crazy logic as your own or find yourself depending on their perspectives and beliefs about how things have to be. Analysis can help with this, because it doesn't seek to rescue the client or move them ahead of themselves in their process of working things through, but it does build up the trust needed to merely broach difficult topics of conversation, and it lets them practice talking about them while gently burning off their own ineffective ways of getting attention. At other times, a little bit of guidance and a nudge in some direction is necessary in my opinion.

Craziness takes hold when you despair of getting another to listen to your reason and consider your values. Conversely, when you do feel like you've gotten through or been heard, you will suddenly feel empowered and all kinds of energy to do things is freed up.

Recognizing that someone else isn't doing dealing with you fairly is not the same as delicately teasing out these intrusive elements from one's psyche. Rebelling with attitude is not the same as understanding and moving on, though it's certainly fun at times.

These are things I've seen myself experiencing and been applying to my life in the last six months. Sorry for being a bit vague and a little grandiose sounding. Personal stories are more interesting than universal statements, but the latter seems to be an ingrained part of my writer's voice. I guess it comes from reading Thoreau instead of having sex and going to parties when I was a teenager. Perhaps, on the negative side, they were developed as an attempt to feel like my words were powerful or meaningful at times when it wasn't safe or effective to express myself more directly and personally, due to others' issues, my own wiring, karma, or some combination of the above.

I've played out my drama and my process of dawning understanding most directly in the relationship with my father. Contrary to many, I not only have a perception of a father I grew up with, but also a real time, real life person I try to relate to on an employer/employee basis when it is necessary to bring up the subject of my living situation. I, like some others in my middle class suburban neighborhood, live in the house I grew up in, and unlike others, perhaps, am being financially supported in part by him, who still owns the house and makes his own plans for it.

This situation and the reasons for it tend to invoke all kinds of ideas and emotional reactions in people and has led to some very weird rationalizations in our own minds, too, which I'm only now beginning to unravel and see clearly for what they are in the light of day. This is not a secure or healthy dynamic, but in the process of starting to work my way free of it, I have hashed out the criticisms I have of his way of doing things and learned to bite my tongue and listen to a little of what he has to say and actually consider it as if it weren't just my father being his same old self. A Gemini North Node must, according to Jan Spiller, consider all points of views and learn to listen rather to assume and dismiss. For those with the node in the fourth house, this would include listening to family members, regardless of their attitudes or yours.

My father is still planning to put the house on the market early next year. We have a contract between us for me to take care of the place - doing the usual maintenance, and also cleaning out and organizing the old things and touching up the place so it looks good on the market, in exchange for a monthly stipend equivalent to the rent. He still doesn't really know if this is something he wants to allow me to do, even though we've been doing this for four and a half years now.

When I arrived here in 2007, I had been living for a year in a state where I knew no one personally for most of my time there, and my self-appointed job, after the position I had at the university had been cut, was doing computer surveys and driving around taking pictures for photo essays I thought I would post on the internet about the place I lived. I was after all, supposed to be a geographer, having earned a PhD two years previous. I've been working here since, paying taxes on the stipend and documenting the process in journals, this blog, and with photographs, while conceiving of courses to teach and other ways to make money while finding an occasional part-time job, never an easy process for someone with emotional Cancer on the cusp of the sixth house and the bitchy, rebellious, insistently independent Lilith asteroid therein, opposite the Sun. I feel a lot differently about my background and the "side" interests than I did when I started, and that was one of my reasons for doing this whole thing, though I didn't know it as consciously as I do now. This set-up was, incidentally, something suggested to my father by his financial adviser, and I for some reason, contrary to the other 99 times out of a hundred, considered it patiently for several weeks rather than rejected out of hand. The so-called side interests are earning me as much money regularly now as the stipend for working around the house, and I've got a part-time job I usually like.

I've used the situation to pick up some handy skills, gain self-confidence, and learn about balancing goals with process. It has to be process if you are to successfully transform the place you grew up in, with all of its attendant incidents and memories, into something that reflects the values you are currently exploring, and I have done that. It took about four years before the changes took hold in me, and it happened after I had gone through every single scrap of receipt, Halloween costume, photograph, workbench drawer, closet shelf, and attic trunk. The sources of the uncountable, unchangeable memories that still confused the present were now grounded in a finite number of individual items, and those had been examined, organized, reflected upon, disposed of, incorporated into craft or photography projects, or otherwise completed. There have been some much improved aesthetic considerations, too, in my opinion, so that my space feels nothing like the self-abnegating plainness that reigned over everything for decades. The mediocre self-denial of one's own desires that seemed immune to change, indeed, forbade it. That fear of disrupting the safe, established way of decorating still occasionally comes up to bite me in the ass when I escape too deeply into unpleasant nostalgia and get stuck looking at old things for hours on end.

Most recently, the lessons I've been facing most directly have been about the necessary value of having something of your own, no matter how good of a deal someone else's stuff seems or how rational an argument you might have for substituting it for something of your own. It pisses me off when I think someone is making the situation harder than it has to be for no good reason, but maybe for some deeper reason, it is supposed to work out that way. I complain and rant while accepting the uncertainty because I want to invest in a deeper, spiritual process that I can have faith in because I choose to. In any case, its a pain in the ass if you're stuck working for someone with whom you are always butting heads or who can't let go of enough control to accommodate your way of doing things in your own house. Except of course, it isn't your own house if your father owns it. And living there isn't the same as having a place of your own, no matter how generous and well-meaning he makes himself sound (when he isn't being critical and passive aggressively resentful - not that I'm ever that way).

For the longest time, I felt like my father didn't value the work I did here, and that I couldn't express my perspective to him. That changed a bit because I kept working at it and was open to some suggestions and perspectives of a psychologist my father kind of suggested/made me get in touch with. We've met together, all three of us, several times, like a married couple in counseling. We've been just about as grumpy and obstinate as that, but somehow, as both of us were experiencing Saturn squares in our transits, there was a bit of a break through in that wall of hard-headed opinions we keep between us, and that's a lot more satisfying than just thinking you're at peace with a relationship in your own mind, while still having to deal with a different reality on the ground. Now I know that I can put in the work when I feel the pressure building and change the most important yet intractable things in my life, and that's something new for me, to know that I can just do hard, unpleasant work for a little while and not only will I survive the effort, but that it will have an impact, it will make a difference. It will lead to a peace of mind in my psyche and free energy in the body.

I was surprised, though I shouldn't have been, given how much I talked about it, by how much I have despaired of ever getting through these walls, how they depressed me, kept me depressed, and how important it was for me to give it a chance rather than write off the possibility of communicating with him. Of course, I had to let go of a lot of illusions and expectations before that could happen, and I've put in some new walls, no, boundaries, since then.

I haven't made as much headway with the idea about giving things the time they require to work themselves through instead of doing a half-ass job just to get things done and find something else to do a half-ass job on, etc. Maybe that's also part of a slick rationalization on my part, or brain washing after several years of analysis (a good brain washing, I'd say, though), but I finally am getting something after four and a half years of consciously focusing on trying to do what is important to me and learn what keeps me from doing that: If you give things the time they want to complete themselves and learn how to wait rather than force, you will enjoy the process and carry the experience of a properly done job on with you in life when the job is done, and you'll be that much better at what you had been learning to do, whether that is designing and building a garden, rehanging a door, or writing a book.

That was what I thought I would write about in here, along with how it is really devastating when you relentlessly criticize another person's beliefs or perspectives and don't give them any room to be different or respect for finding their own way in life or their own way to paint a room or fix a faucet. But it's easy to apply your ideals to relationships with people you've been too close to for too long to have any kind of objective perspective about. Double that if you give them power over your life by depending on them financially or for housing. If they are that close, though, my experience has taught me that you can't turn your back on communicating your point of view to them or trying to understand theirs. At the least, it will make you hash out your own values in great detail and figure out what about them makes you feel bat shit crazy. And you'll know inside that you have what it takes to do that work of getting through, regardless of what the other person does with the results. If the other person still doesn't get it, then you can focus on moving on at peace with the decision and interact with them on a less stressful, less dramatic level. Maybe they'll get on with their own process when you're out of their hair and not stepping on their toes, too.

No comments:

Post a Comment