Happy Jonimas!

Happy Jonimas! My fellow Joni Mitchell devotee and friend SS reminded me that yesterday was her birthday, and we always like to celebrate one of our favorite artists. In honor of this special day I listened to two of her albums on my MP3 player-- For The Roses and her live album, Miles of Aisles -- while cross-stitching during Mabel's gymnastics class.

This was a good thing to do, because yesterday afternoon I got horribly irritable, and I could feel the urge to binge creeping in like cold air seeping into the cracks of a house. Music does have a calming affect on me, as well as doing needlework, and it helped me to avoid eating yet allow me to focus on what was bothering me.

I will say that one song in particular really hit home: Lessons in Survival. But that's a whole therapy session in itself there...

What I did manage to sort out were the feelings that were affecting me that evening. First of all, my back was hurting me off and on all day and was really starting to ache by late afternoon. That by itself is a logical cause of my irritability. But the real problem was feeling overwhelmed: I've dug in deeply to this Room of Doom project and making real progress. My book shelves are looking great and I managed to organize my large collection of greeting cards (I suppose that sounds odd, but my late grandmother was an avid card sender and always had a stockpile for every occasion. And guess who inherited it? Yeah, me.) But now I'm getting to the hard part; sorting through my husband's and my own miscellaneous papers and other office doodads and figuring out what to do with them all: file them, store them or throw them away. I feel a lot of uncertainty about Hubby's stuff (I have a difficult time getting him to file, organize or throw away anything, and if I go ahead and do it for him, I worry I'll do something wrong), and the piles are so big that I don't even know where to begin.

I found myself facing a similar situation last night with the counted cross stitch project I've been working on since August. I am finally getting close to completing this larger-sized, somewhat intricate picture, yet last night I had that same feeling of being overwhelmed and not knowing where to start. I finally made myself minimize my focus and just pick one color of thread and deal with that and not think about the rest. By changing my perspective, concentrating on a small amount of stitches instead of letting myself get overwhelmed by all the ones that need to be done, it was much easier to deal with and lessened my trepidations.

As I was getting into the groove and enjoying myself again, I realized I need to do the same thing with the Room of Doom, as well as the rest of my life. I see that this has to do with my perfectionism: I fret so much about doing something right that I either get irritable and fret about doing it wrong or wind up not doing it at all. I've seen this kind of procrastination a lot in my family and can recognize it in myself. Instead of getting overwhelmed, frustrated and apprehensive about the big things or what's going to happen in the future, I need to redirect myself and focus on the Now -- i.e., conscious living.

While I was still a little irritable when I got home last night, at least I knew why, and I didn't turn to food to make myself feel better. I used my shiatsu massager to loosen up my back, laid down on my heating pad and went to bed early. This morning my back is still a little tender, but better, and I'm prepared to tackle that stack of papers this afternoon a little bit at a time.

Woman of Heart and Mind

Over the past 24 hours I've been doing a lot of thinking.

The doctor's appointment went okay. We're cutting down my Lexapro from 20 to 10 mg a day for a week, then see how I feel, and maybe do the 10 mg every other day. In two weeks I'm to call the doctor and let her know how I'm feeling. We're both torn as to what to do next: go off entirely, or switch to something else, namely Wellbutrin. It has less occurrence of the side effects I'm currently experiencing, which sounds good. She needs to check on the Wellbutrin and the binge eating, however, because there is literature saying that people with eating disorders shouldn't take it. This literature is based on anorexia, though, so I don't know if that applies to me.



The other thing that's been hounding at me the last 24 hours has been an odd thing: I feel like I've somehow lost myself, and that this loss of identity is at the root cause of my depression/anxiety (or possibly bipolar II, as Frances pointed out to me in her comments yesterday).


I seemed to step outside of myself yesterday and see this pseudo-soccer mom, struggling June Cleaver wanna-be, and I didn't recognize or particularly like what I saw. There's nothing wrong with being the carpooling, domestic wonder woman who fusses over home made cupcakes for the kids at school or stands at the door with her husband's lunch and brief case in hand to send him off to work. It's just that I never envisioned myself filling this position.






Instead, I suppose I envisioned myself following in the footsteps of one of my idols, like Joni Mitchell. Independent, a free thinker, pushing the boundaries and definitions of being a woman and of creativity. A painter, a writer, a musician, following my muse and not adhering to the antiquated standards of my parents and grandparents. A Woman of Heart and Mind, if you will.

Yet here I am in my Podunk little town, in my little church job, planning my daughter's ninth birthday party and spending my days sweeping and dusting and folding laundry. Where are the paintings? Where are the novels? Where are the albums (okay, it is the 21st century, I should say CDs)? Where is my little cottage in Laurel Canyon with the colored glass bottles in the window? Where are my musician boyfriends who write beautiful songs about me, and my songs about them?

I can't blame anyone else but me for this strange place I've gotten to. Although I did have one big warning sign a year or so ago when my husband gave me a string of pearls as a gift. Those things really freaked me out. He thought they were beautiful, and they are, but all I could think of was June Cleaver and a life of servitude to my husband and my children while chained with those pearls to the house I must clean and present to the world as a representation of my self-worth.

I was watching "Crossing Jordon" on A&E this morning and the one character Lilly (played by Kathryn Hahn, who I just adore, and not only because her name is spelled the same way my middle name is) was having this existential moment about her life. She said something to the effect of "I just thought I was meant for so much more," and it hit me like a rock.

I don't need to be a nationally-known singer/songwriter, some critically acclaimed painter or novelist. But right now I just feel like I should be doing something else, something more. Or that I should be more Me instead of what I think people want or expect me to be.

The problem is, I'm not quite sure what that's supposed to be. Thus my dilemma.