Loneliness and moving on (again)

Sun rising on a new day... Mission Beach, Australia. Copyright (c) 2008 Wendee Holtcamp

I don't want to dissect everything today
I don't mean to pick you apart you see
But I can't help it
There I go jumping before the gunshot has gone off
Slap me with a splintered ruler
And it would knock me to the floor if I wasn't there already
- Alanis Morissette, All I Really Want

I heard this Alanis song on my ipod shuffle the other day while running and it was like a scene out of my life! I won't get into details, and they're actually two unrelated situations but it was like whammo! Love Alanis - she is like my soul sister.

It has been a doozie of a week. After coming back from trip after trip (Costa Rica, Miami) I experienced some post-bohemian-travel-adventure blues that hit me like a sledge-hammer. Oh, it was a combination of factors, I'm sure, but probably mostly the loneliness from the lack of constant companionship and friendship from my on-off relationship of nearly three years and the realization that is truly is indeed, over. The loss of that companionship, combined with the death of the dream (and oh do I dream of love and closeness with someone... probably far too idealistically), and then throw in a little bit of parenting-a-teenager-stress plus a healthy dash of PMS and you have the makings of a week from hell. But hell is the broth from which progress is made.

I am taking part in a 9-month-long "step study" in Celebrate Recovery, a Christian 12-step program that is for people dealing with all sorts of issues and of course things come up during this process. You get stirred up emotionally and spiritually, and this isn't a bad thing. I know that things will happen and it's good because then you can deal with them and with people who are safe and won't judge (because we are all in there for our own "junk" and believe me, these people are real because you gotta be if you're going to do recovery right!)

So what else? I have a short Science Selection piece in Environmental Health Perspectives Nov 2011 issue, "Poultry Relief? Organic Farming May Reduce Drug Resistance" - this is just a basic summary of a peer-reviewed science article that is in the EHP issue that month. But it's quite an interesting study and a topic I'm increasingly intrigued by - that is, food and health issues. I don't have any travel coming up that I know of yet - trying to stay close to home for a bit. I will probably be pretty darn busy in the next several weeks with some articles I'm working on. Hopefully I will have some time to write up some great recipes I've made in the next few weeks!

Do I gossip?

Irises I bought my daughter Savannah this weekend
Copyright (c) 2010 Wendee Holtcamp

As I mentioned, I'm participating in the online 40-day Inner Mean Girl Cleanse, and what that means is that for 40 days there will be weekly hour-long talks by 6 different authors/speakers on 6 different focal areas - plus journaling and paying attention to that particular issue in our life (and as one of the 'Self-Love Ambassadors' I'll be blogging weekly about my experiences). The overall goal is to stop our inner critic and turn it into a voice that will help us. And to stop self-sabotaging behaviors. As I mentioned, the opening call was with SARK - the original Succulent Wild Woman, and someone who I've loved for a long time (her email newsletters are how I of the Inner Mean Girl Cleanse). But the first week's actual topic is gossip, and the guest speaker is Susan Shapiro Barash, author of Tripping the Prom Queen and Toxic Friendships.

I have never been one to gossip about people. It's just not what I do. I adore my friends, and generally most things roll right off me. I just don't have anything bad to say about any of them 99.9% of the time! However, after reading a blog post by Christine Arylo (one of the coaches behind the IMG Cleanse) called "You May be a Gossip And Not Even Know It!" it challenged me to think beyond the obvious type of gossip to other times we may talk about someone to another, holding the thought in mind: Would I feel bad saying this if they could hear me or if they were in the room?

And I realized that the person I would often talk to my girlfriends about was... the guy in my relationship (or sometimes my mom). I would call my girlfriends and vent over some frustration, and was this actually helpful? Could it be- gasp - gossip? So, even though that particular relationship is now over, I had an aha moment in this realization that I need to take forward in my life. Don't get me wrong, everyone needs a close confidante to share deep issues with but I have several close girlfriends, and I would vent or discuss the issues at hand with any number of them. So... I realize now that this is probably not so productive. In retrospect I also see that I should have been out of the relationship many months ago but I have a tendency to hope against hope, and believe in the things I want to see at the expense of the obvious.

About the whole concept of "Tripping the Prom Queen" - I haven't read the book but the call was quite interesting. As an adult I have many super close girlfriends and I love them to pieces. However, I recently had one of those experiences where some women (woman?) treated me in that manner, and I was sort of the victim of this "tripping." It was not pleasant to say the least. However there were some life lessons there, as always. Still processing it all, to be honest. Maybe I will blog about it sometime - in ten years? :)

I had a productive weekend! As I mentioned before, I'm trying to get my house in tip-top shape so I can sell immediately if the need should arise. So my kids and I worked on the yard - besides mowing and edging, we put out some new bark mulch around the trees in my front yard. Sam helped me put the towel rack back on the wall, as it had fallen off (involved drilling a new hole in the wall, putting in an anchor etc). We also painted two walls in the kitchen. One section we just did the same white as most of the walls, and another we created a mustard yellow accent wall only the color turned out to be a bit more greenish-yellow than I realized and I'm not sure I love it. Oh well, it is going to have to do! In my living room adjacent to the kitchen the walls are brick red, which I love, and I have mustard yellow drapes, so I was hoping the kitchen wall brought it all together. I think it all looks ok. But I feel good about what we accomplished. And I went for a run today! Below are a few photos. Ugh looking at them makes me want to repaint the wall. It really is too greenish for my taste. I may have to get some more paint and paint over it... Sigh.
Before painting - I had stripped the border off the top, so the wall had some staining where the border used to be. I actually started taking the border off in the kitchen about 4 years ago... and it was tougher than I realized so I left it sort of half-stripped off this one wall (you can see the border on the wall next to it - I left it around the rest of the kitchen). It's taken me this long to motivate myself to actually paint the one wall and fix the problem I created by attempting to take the border off. So I'm very happy to have accomplished this!
Here's the finished product. It looks better when you can see the wood floors (which I love!) which set it off and accent it better than it looks in this shot. It looks even greener in the photo to me than it does. So I'll give it a couple days and see if it grows on me.

life and love

A fur seal pup in the Galapagos Islands. The mom leaves the pup alone while she feeds at sea, and comes back to shore and must to find the pup by its cries and scent. Sometimes I feel like the helpless alone pup like this - am I the only one?!
Copyright (c) 2007 Wendee Holtcamp

I have to admit, as I mentioned in a recent blog post, that I had been feeling pretty down lately - really a lot worse last week. It has been a lot of up and down over the past few months. This really is not all that new. We all have ups and downs, right, at least that's pretty standard for me. But I started feeling a real sadness in my soul and I couldn't quite identify where it came from. I also realize it's been a while since I have been very raw and honest on this blog, which is sort of my trademark. I decided when I started it that I would be open and honest about my feelings and about life. As I like to say, I want a life of radical honesty and transparency.

It becomes challenging to do so, though, when other people are involved. I can't write about my present feelings and emotions without mentioning the people who are intertwined in my life and who affect my moods. I don't want to do that to people who may not want to be talked about. I try not to talk about my children too much, to protect their privacy, and the same goes for those closest to me. I may tell stories about things that happen to me, but it's not obvious in any way who that story happened with. I do that on purpose. But when you're dating someone, as I am, it's kind of obvious who you're talking about! Right? After my break-up with the man from Australia I dated, I decided that although I may put photos and the like up, I wouldn't really talk extensively the personal nature of my relationship.

However it feels like it's time to say a little something. I am realizing that my downs have mostly been related to confusion and communication issues in this relationship. There's no doubt that they can have a real toll on the heart and soul and mood. I am someone who didn't really date much before I met my ex-husband, who I met at age 20 (and oh don't we think we are so old and worldy wise at 20?). My ex and I had a whirlwind romance, and were engaged after 6 months. We got married two years later but we lived together for nearly all those two years. And we were married for 10 years. The intensity of that closeness happening all so quickly had long-lasting effects on our relationship - not good ones. We didn't have a chance to learn one another's idiosyncracies slowly. Today, we are great friends and I'm so grateful for that. But we also shared a lot of communication breakdowns from the start.

During the marriage, we went to counseling and read books and I learned so much about communicating tools and techniques, and about the differences between men and women, and about prayer and about growing in spiritual maturity and understanding of my faith. And I learned, post-divorce, that a lot of what I may have once "blamed" on him turns out to have been a lot me all along. True there are always two people involved in every relationship. But it's also a good and illuminating thing to truly shine the light on oneself. However, it can also be very painful. And it is a lot easier to understand with one's mind than to implement them when it counts - in the heat of the moment.

Since my divorce I've really only dated a couple of people. And the relationships didn't last long, and the two more 'serious' ones were both long distance. So here I am, 5 years after my divorce with someone who lives here near me, and feeling like a teenager who doesn't really know how to date. And similarly to my relationship with my ex, D & I have gotten very close very quickly. I love that man, he is such a good soul. He is warm and loving and kind and gentle and sexy and sweet. And we sometimes frustrate the hell out of one another. And when that happens, it makes me want to run for the hills. But I really don't want to. The more I know him, the more I love him. I see so much beauty in his character.

In the deepest part of me, I want to stay put, and learn to implement all the tools and techniques - including praying and seeking God's will - in real time. Oh God it can be challenging! I'm so blessed by his patience with me. Because I tell ya, sometimes I feel like a big huge loser with all of this. Shouldn't I be more mature by now? Shouldn't I be more secure? Shouldn't I be able to make myself happy and not allow someone else to affect the state of my emotions? Would that it were so simple. I can do that, I can make myself happy when I'm sad, but it feels like the only way involves moving on and clearing the plate of a relationship, and that isn't something I want to do. So my mind goes into self-torture mode... Sometimes I think I want that, but in the deepest part of me, I don't. I don't. I don't!!!

And day by day I'm learning that through his loyalty, and through my own. I'm learning about myself, and about what I believe true love to be - selfless giving to another person and seeking their own best, and loving them despite flaws, and forgiving. And through that, we bring joy and acceptance and peace into one another's lives and souls. D&I do that for each other, at least I can speak for myself anyway, and despite some turbulence at times, it truly is beautiful and lovely. I don't know the future. I don't even know tomorrow. I am only just learning to understand the geography of my own heart.

Here are a few photos from the past few weeks.

Hugs rule. Doesn't my face look kinda like the lost little seal pup? LOL.
Being dorks!
Grilling chicken at my house the other week. I call this is my "I don't need a man grill." :) I put it together from like a zillion pieces out of the box, with no help!

Doug made me dinner! It's usually me who makes him dinner so this was an awesome surprise - what a sweetheart. Then we watched HEROES Season 1 episodes.

Kisses rule too!

It was a beautiful day the other day and we went to his apartment's pool for the first time this year. This photo cracks me up! (And after the sun, came the rain... it totally flooded last night!)

I love this photo. A bit out of focus but cute.

back home

Sam and Savannah climbing a giant sand hill on Fraser Island, Australia.
Copyright (c) 2006 Wendee Holtcamp

I got home from the hospital last night. I came home to a very messy house, and I just started crying. It reminded me of how alone I was, and how lonely I feel sometimes. I honestly normally do not think of myself as lonely. I am pretty independent, and yet, when something like this hits, all those feelings come home to nest. I think they are especially heightened because I have become close to Doug, and now he's offshore for 3 months, and that is a darn long time. I got so much love and support from friends and family on my facebook page, in email and from phone calls, and a few visitors at the hospital but most of the time I sat in my hospital bed alone, with my laptop. Most patients had people there in their rooms 24/7. It was just a very lonely and scary time. Made worse by the fact that not one single doctor or nurse really seemed to care at all what was wrong with me, or in finding out!

I guess I'm feeling sorry for myself, but the truth is I have never been hospitalized in my life. I've never been sick. I'm really healthy and when something so weird like this happens, it is very scary and it would be nice to have someone in my life who could be there with me. Doug once described our relationship as a young sprout that needs to be nurtured, and I agree, but can a young sprout of a relationship survive this kind of distance for this long? I don't have the answers. I wish I knew, and all I can do is hope and pray because I believe it is worth it. There's nothing I would like more than to have someone godly to share life with again, long term. I have so many questions for God, and just wish answers were more easily found.

I am working on my positive attitude thing, I have to remind myself, and count my blessings. In fact I think I need to restart up my gratitude journal. I have let that go by the wayside. I think I'll also start morning pages again. I have recommitted to praying and reading the Bible every morning which I usually do, but sometimes things get in the way like hospital stays.... they did not have Bibles there. Can you believe that?

So despite no real diagnosis as to why the right side of my body went numb, and a huge bill looming, and missing the heck out of Doug and feeling lonely and a bit scared, I am going to focus on the positive - the many wonderful friends I have, the roof over my head, the safety of my community, the career I love and the book I'm writing that I very much believe in the importance of, and the new President who gives me hope for a better tomorrow, a wonderful man who loves and adores me, and last but not least the hope and faith in my God, Jesus, who is amazing and radical... I will put one foot in front of the other and trust that He has plans for me, plans to prosper me and give me hope and a future.

just the way it is

Passionflower in East Texas
Copyright (c) 2007 Wendee Holtcamp

I love the passionflower. It's so complex and beautiful. Passionfruit totally rocks too! I ate lots when I was in Peru... yummy.

Passion. Love. This is what I think. I think a person can love someone very much, and that does not mean that's the best relationship for them at the time. I think that it can be complicated and entangled and that there are sometimes spiritual battles being waged, and psychological and emotional issues needing unentangled within our own hearts. It can be so hard sometimes to determine God's will.

I have one of those Portals of Prayer things that I get at my church which has a little daily bible lesson, and today's passage was from the story of Gideon (Judges 6:1-8:-33) and how he asked God for a sign that he and his tiny army was to subdue the massive Midianite army which had been oppressing the Israelites. He laid down a piece of fleece on the ground and said God if this is your will, in the morning have dew on the ground but keep the fleece dry. And that is what happened. But that wasn't enough for him, he said, God if this is really right, please tomorrow morning have just the fleece covered in dew and the ground dry. And that is exactly what happened. A friend asked me why I asked for signs like I did or do. I don't often. This story is the basis for doing so for me.

This is the problem I'm having right now. I got all these answered prayer and things are not going the way I would have thought given the answered prayer. What my friends say is all over the map. Some say, maybe you were looking for what you wanted to see. Another said it worries me that you needed to ask for signs at all. I felt I had a lot at stake. So now, things are a bit going down a different path than I would have thought. I am ok with this. But it's confusing. It's confusing why God would answer multiple prayers and there would be so much synchronicity and, then, this?

The only thing I can think of is that there was a reason for these two souls to meet, that I know for sure anyway. It may mean that it's the right person and the wrong timing. It may just mean there were other purposes for the meeting and that the full reasons will be revealed in time. I'm trying to live in the Now, the present. As my friend Trish said last night in an update to the Edward Clark advice, "Imagine if for one day, everyone decided that nothing was 'wrong.' That everything was fine, just the way it was."

dissatisfaction

Copyright (c) 2007 Wendee Holtcamp
Dogg Lake, Yosemite National Park

I'm back from girls night out, which was fun as always. This is just a fly by the seat of my pants blog so bear with me. I just have been thinking about dissatisfaction. Dissatisfaction with certain aspects of life. It seem I've always been a certain level of dissatisfaction with something or another. I am always looking at the unraveling hem and trying to fix it - whether in my own life or what in my career or my kids or whatever. I see things as glass half full but at the same time am always working to fill up the empty half - or quarter or whatever. So I've been wondering whether in a certain situation I'm going to create a need I didn't feel before, and then have it taken away, and then I'll end up dissatisfied. Am I creating or putting myself in a situation where I'm doomed to become dissatisfied? Is that wise? Or am I not trusting enough in the providence of the universe, of God to provide love and fill a need that we all have, even when we (I) like to hide behind the mask of independence and "I am an island"?

I see so many women (or men for that matter) get in relationships quickly after a divorce or relationship breakup. I've been solo for over 5 years now. I had one relationship for about 4 months in there. I like my life this way for the most part. I like raising my kids and working on my career and spending time with my friends. It's been my philosophy that "It takes a damn good man to be better than no man at all" and so far I haven't met anyone that fits the bill (am I too demanding? ha! Have to be, I think - too many unhappy married couples and I ain't gonna be one of those - don't want to be!). There's something to be said for making your own money, not having anyone to negotiate or argue with about financial or other decisions, and all that jazz. (Luckily my ex and I have pretty much the same philosophy about our kids so there are not parenting disagreements). There are certainly some things I miss being solo, but, well I won't go into details.

So I wonder though whether getting into a new relationship is something I really want to do, especially when it's distance and could be destined for creating longing or more dissatisfaction in a part of my life where I'm generally pretty satisfied (or not worrying about a buried need, at least). Sometimes having something there for a while, and then having to go without, fills this space you didn't know was there and then if you take it back away and then all of a sudden you miss what you didn't realize you longed for in the deep recesses of your heart and soul. So is it better to go on as always, ignoring that part of oneself, or to become vulnerable and create this vacuum that will necessarily be empty in a long distance relationship? I have a lot to think about. Insight and comments are much appreciated, even if anonymous!!