Getting off the drugs...

I take two tranquilizers along with a sleeping pill before I go to sleep at night. I'm very determined to get off them as well as the sleeping pill because I think they influence my behavior during the night when I'm up and having my little blogging sessions. To say I'm under the influence is putting it mildly. 

Last night, I only took one tranquilizer with the sleeping pill and it doesn't seem to have hurt me any. I slept my regular few hours and was woken up by the dog. That was as normal as it gets. I do now feel less drugged and a little more clearheaded, but that could be in my imagination. Although, no doubt, less barbiturates means more alertness.

I'll try one week on one tranquilizer and then stop that one also. I usually manage to get off them easily as they seem to act as downers very often. After that I can start taking a lower dose sleeping pill. It's really a falling asleep pill, but I have the idea that the effects of it stay in my system for a while. I'll have to see first how I do without the tranquilizers. 

I don't want to feel high in the middle of the night when I read other blogs and comment on them and when I write my own blog posts. It's really not such a wonderful thing to be under the influence of drugs. It's much better to be sober and to be under the influence of your own unmanipulated thoughts.

Today is my birthday but I'm not making a big deal out of it. I've been telling people that I'm the age I'm turning today all year, so it feels very normal. I'm not struck down because I'm this age now. I'm still relatively young and not a pensioner yet and I've got a few good years left in me. I'll still wear my skinny jeans and my leggings and mini skirt. You can't keep a good woman down. 

I think the weather is such that I can start wearing my cowboy boots again. It definitely feels like fall outside. There is wind and rain and a general dreariness. The gales here aren't as bad as they are in the rest of the country because we are more protected here by the hills.

So, I will celebrate my birthday by putting on my tough broad boots and put my Keds away for the season. They have been very comfortable to wear this summer and suited me well. It never did get nice enough for sandals, I thought, unless you wore socks with them the way the Exfactor did like a real Northern European.

I will have to start thinking about getting a new winter coat because the one I have is too big on me. I hope I manage to find a sale on them. Now is a good time to start looking, I think. 

Lord only knows what sort of winter we'll have. I dread even thinking about it. Time is moving so quickly, though. The summer certainly went by fast when you consider that we didn't have much of one. I don't know what sort of harbinger that is for winter. I'll have to make sure that I enjoy autumn extra much.

It's time to go back to bed to get the rest of my sleep. 

I hope you'll all have a good day.

Ciao,

Nora

Skipping on the path to enlightenment...

It's in the middle of the night again and I'm up to my usual business with my cups of coffee and my cigarettes, albeit that I'm good mooded and in possession of all my faculties. Meaning that I'm not downcast and I'm not suffering from a dip in my self esteem and I'm generally feeling in charge of things. 

My adult self is sitting here being very reasonable and I'm not expecting anything out of the ordinary to take place while I sit here and have this one sided monologue.

I don't expect out of the ordinary highs and journeys to the top of the mountain of my psyche for incredible views. I'll leave that sort of chasing for the rainbow to other people more inclined to reaching their individual places of Nirvana. I want to keep both feet firmly planted on the ground underneath my desk chair and very much stay in the moment. 

The title is of this post is misleading because I'm not at all skipping on the path to enlightenment. There's no skipping to be done. There's only a slow walk during which you have a long sit down every once in a while to observe yourself and your surroundings and to absorb the material you've been handed. 

Skipping would be too much like fluttering along like a butterfly from flower to flower, easily moving from one to the other and picking up bits of knowledge as if they were nectar that you quickly absorbed. 

Real life is not like that. It is much more like drudgery in which you have to do a lot of hard work very often repeatedly and you know that this is something you're going to have to do for the rest of your life. It's a job of dedication. 

There are rewards, of course, and those are that you get to be in touch with your sanity and lead a more normal and healthy life. At least, after this brief time of practicing my own brand of mindful living, that has been my experience. 

As I gain more knowledge, I assume I will become more proficient at managing it, though I will never live under the mistaken assumption that I'll ever be done with it. It will be an ongoing project. A way of life. 

I shared my newly won insights with my psychiatrist yesterday and he was much pleased and thought I made complete sense. He closely wants to observe me during the start of this process, so I will see him again next week.

He recommended the writings of a Belgian Buddhist monk to me who is a bit of an expert on Mindfulness and I ordered a book by him yesterday that will get here tomorrow. I have to keep the momentum going. 

I want to read another book on healing the inner child as I have not read anything on the subject in a long while, although I remember much about it. I think it will be good to reacquaint myself with the subject matter. I do not want to miss any of the details as I'm combining the two disciplines into one therapeutic method for myself. 

Yesterday was a busy day, today is going to be an easy day with only the Exfactor coming to do the groceries. I will do my chores and practice living in the moment and having my sensible adult be in charge of my day. I'm looking forward to it.

I hope you'll all have a great day. Autumn is in the air. 

Ciao,

Nora

Having no Monday blues...

I've spent the weekend trying to live in the moment and it was at times a great success, but mostly very difficult. I had to constantly pull myself back to the moment I found myself in and remind myself not to get lost in all sorts of reveries about things to come and things that were of the past. 

It amazed me what my mind kept itself so fanatically busy with. It was as if it never took a break. It was always going over what had already passed the revue a hundred times or it was busy planning what had to be done and could absolutely not be forgot. Very seldom, unless I very consciously directed it, was my mind attentive to the moment I was in and the very thing that was taking place then. 

But sometimes I did manage it and a great feeling of peacefulness and happiness would settle over me. So I did have those moments and I know that it can be achieved with enough practice if you keep redirecting yourself to the task. I think you have to be very vigilant and not give up on yourself, but keep jerking yourself back to the moment whenever you start to get lost in a useless 'let's ponder that over' session. 

Another thing I've been doing is asking myself the question very frequently of who's in charge here and who's motivating my actions. I try to get that to be my sensible adult and if it's not, I question who the hell it is instead. I find that very often I'm being boycotted in my daily life if my sensible adult is not in charge. Things just don't run very smoothly and in that case I'm my own worst enemy. 

So, I've attempted to let my sensible adult do a lot of the living and taking care of things. She does a very competent job. She's definitely someone I can trust. I know she won't let me down. 

All this talk of different entities makes me sound like I have multiple personalities, while I'm really just describing different aspects of my whole personality or even different kinds of behavior. I'm not split up into separate persons with separate identities. They are all me at different stages of my development. The sensible adult is the most healthy part of all of them and the one I most like to be in. It's the part of me that I can count on the most. 

So, this weekend was mental health weekend and for the near future my mental health will be the main feature in my life. And it won't be because I will be talking about it, but because I will be actively doing something about it. I won't just be passively complaining, which I think was a habit I had gotten into. 

I did do other things this weekend. The World Championships Athletics were on TV and I watched a lot of that. I'm very fond of athletics and like to watch all the different events, but especially the running and jumping because that's what I used to do and what my daughter did. Watching those events brings back many memories and makes me want have have a young, strong body and do it all over again.

Because my sensible adult was present so often, I got a lot of my chores done. I did reward myself with a lot of times out, but whenever I had the courage again I got something else done. The jobs I most hated and always used to put off, I now did with much more ease. Even those dreaded dishes. What helped was to stay in the moment and to pay attention to the specific job I was doing and nothing else.

Today's a busy day with my personal helper coming and the domestic help and an appointment with my psychiatrist. I suppose you'll all know who's going to be in charge here. 

Have a good day. 

Ciao,

Nora

Conclusions...

Okay, so I saw my psychiatrist on Friday and he didn't tell me to quit whining and get on with my life, but he may just as well have because that's how I interpreted what he did say to me. That's the message I came away with. He also said that the tranquilizers didn't discriminate between emotions and didn't just eliminate the unpleasant ones, but also the pleasant ones.

I left the office with a lot on my mind and the first thing I did was stop taking the tranquilizers during the day because I did want to feel whatever pleasant feelings I had. I don't miss them one bit and am not going through any kind of withdrawal. I still take them at night with my sleeping pill to help me sleep, though I'd like to quit them altogether. 

I spent the rest of my free time thinking about things a lot and I realized that I don't spend enough time living in the moment. I'm constantly anxiously thinking ahead of time and worrying about all the things I'm supposed to take care of and dreading them. I don't live in the 'here and now.'

I'm now making an effort to do that and to constantly call myself back to the present moment and to not worry about the things that are supposed to happen. I could keel over from a heart attack and all I will have done is worry about  what I was supposed to have done and not enjoyed the moment I was living in.

I also realized that the person who had been in charge of my life lately was my 'frightened child' and that all my actions and reactions and emotions were coming from this entity. You can't let a frightened child be in charge of your life. All will come to naught and the whole thing will turn into a disaster. 

What I had to do was let my 'sensible adult' be in charge of my life and let that person make the decisions and react to the different circumstances. I do have a very well developed sensible adult in me, but I had acted like I didn't and had regressed to the frightened child and let her run the show in the hope that someone would come along and rescue it.

I realize now that I don't need to get rescued and that my sensible adult is quite capable of taking care of things so now, all day long, I'm posing this question to myself: who's in charge here? Once I find out who is, I make sure that the sensible adult takes the lead. 

Sometimes I have a happy child who's more in the foreground. I do give that person some space and let her enjoy herself while at the same time satisfying my adult curiosity. There's room for both, but there's no room for a frightened child, although it does need to be soothed every once in a while. It does get scared, but is not allowed to be in charge. 

So Friday and Saturday were big learning moments and I made huge steps in the right direction. Once you understand the mechanism, you can make the changes necessary. It's also important to know what triggered the frightened child to come to the surface. I'm starting to learn to lay the link now, but let's just say that she came to the surface an awful lot. I was almost constantly frightened. 

Learning to live in the 'now' is a real challenge and one that I constantly have to remind myself to do, although at times I'm so relaxed and caught up in something enjoyable that it happens automatically. But it's something I'm going to need to work at. It won't happen overnight. I have to learn to mindfully hang up the laundry, for example. And to mindfully sit in my armchair. 

When I do this, I realize how many aches and pains I have in my body that I'm not normally aware of. I also get a headache that's like a migraine and one sided like the ones I used to get when I was a kid.

I'm seeing my psychiatrist again on Monday, but I will be seeing him with a whole different attitude. He will not see a tearful victim of circumstances who is wishing for a 'happy pill.' He will see someone who's taken charge of her life. Timing is everything in life and he said the right thing at the right time and I don't even remember exactly what it was. It's what I came away with that counts.

That's enough of a long ramble and explanation. I will stop now and save the rest for another time. I'm sure I will do more philosophizing. 

I hope you're all having a great night and a good weekend. 

Ciao,

Nora

Oh, booger snot...

I shouldn't say that I'm in an excellent mood when all I mean is just the temporary absence of pain and stress. That does not make an excellent mood. In my naivety I call it so. An excellent mood is something completely different. It does not mean a woman who quietly sits behind her computer and feels a sense of relief for however long it lasts. People in excellent moods, seize the world. I certainly don't do that. I have yet to seize the world. 

When I woke up for the second time yesterday morning, I was depressed and whatever cheerful mood I claimed to have had earlier was gone. I now put great question marks by these so called cheerful moods I have. They are all of short duration and are apparently very shallow. I think that all they are are temporary absences of stress and pain. It's all momentary forgetfulness. 

For a while, when I just started taking the tranquilizers, they helped me forget too, but now they don't seem to work anymore. I don't really notice any effect from them. I'm starting to feel the same amount of stress and depression I felt before. I'm becoming immobilized again.

I'm seeing my psychiatrist first thing in the morning. I'm not very optimistic because I don't know what can be done, but maybe he has an idea. I am, however, very discouraged. 

Ciao,

Nora

Bullocks?

For some reason, I find myself up very early in the morning and, although I'm putting it off, I'm going to have to make myself a pot of coffee. I've already had to take my medicines because I felt that I was not functioning well without them, so I'm waiting for them to start working now. Soon I will be all sorted out and I will be like a newly reborn person. 

If you get all the ingredients right in the morning, nothing will stand in the way of a good day, right? That's my brand of magical thinking. If I follow all the rituals, it's bound to turn out alright. So you see, I'm actually a very animistic person and should have been born in a more primitive society. I could have been the shaman. 

I don't know why I'm up so early in the morning and if I'm going back to bed in a while. There's no reason for me to be up already. It's not like there is a mess of chores waiting for me to do. It's not even dawn yet. I do have to say that I'm in an excellent mood, but that may be a temporary condition. I'll take advantage of it while it lasts. I never know if these things are going to stay with me all day. I'm as changeable as the Dutch weather.

Well, lets just assume for one day that I'm not and throw the whole myth overboard. Let's assume that my mood can be steady just like anybody else's. It's not necessary to move from one extreme to the other. I can just resolve to stay in this mood. And why not, why should it suddenly be any different? Is it because a butterfly flapped its wings somewhere in China?Is it as mysterious as that? 

I'm overly sensitive to the slightest nuances in my environment. I'm too much aware of them. I have to develop a little bit of a thicker skin and not get off kilter so easily. Hopefully that's not too late at my age. I can't live in a sterile bubble. 

I've decided that I'm going back to bed for a while. There's nothing to keep me up yet. It's too early to start the day and there's no need to rush anything. The chores can all wait until later and it will be too noisy to turn the washing machine on now.

I'll take my cheerfulness to bed with me and hope I wake up with it too. Let's just assume that I will. Always assume the best scenario, right?

Have a great day!

Ciao,

Nora