Ikigai

     "If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." Bruce Lee


   Things have been going really well here! School has been a challenge but once I got a rhythm down everything started falling into place. At one point around week 7 I started to feel as if I was drowning. I started going under and the self doubt started to fester.  I had a mini breakdown. Then my bestie send me a bouquet of flowers, wrote me a motivational note and said to get on with it. That was the point I started to swim harder. Eventually, about two weeks later I started actually doing laps and was no longer treading water. At that point I noticed a drop off of fellow classmates. I then realized that everyone else felt like I did at that point, yet I didn't give up. I imbued myself with more determination than ever.

     I am handing in assignments at a fast pace now. I am usually the first one to do so and days earlier then they are required to be turned in. I was assigned a four page paper on Friday that I knocked out while lifting the following morning. Granted it was a topic I am passionate about (current agricultural practices, food, and biotech) and I enjoy writing. Just this factor alone helps with school. I have come to realize I do my best writing in the morning because I am zippy and thinking fast. As for the evening I do best with my reading because I'm moving slower and my brain can focus more. In the morning I am just too all over the place to try and focus on reading. So in learning these things about myself and applying them in the best manner has been extremely beneficial.

    Also being this age and in school I have a better concept of time than I did in my twenties. Time is much more valuable to me currently then ever before in my life. I get straight up grouchy when I feel like my time was wasted. So managing time is a huge proponent to being successful with online classes. Next semester though I will be traveling to class two times a week for chemistry. Chemistry is one I'm super excited for. I also get to take a nutrition class this semester so that'll help keep me engaged. It's hard if you have classes that you need but are just doing the busywork and motions to get through it. I had a hard time at first with having Environmental Ethics and Philosophy together but once Enviro Ethics started really getting past the terminology and into the nitty gritty of our current depressing state of things I've been really able to delve into the material.

    I'm actually reading ahead of the schedule because I enjoy the subject matter so much. I think I'll end up with three A's and one B which will come from Philosophy which I'm fine with. Seriously, this class is a hard one for an online format. Philosophy needs to be discussed, over and over, to help grasp the theories. My end of semester paper for Philosophy is ten pages long and the question is " Is democratic government necessary to achieve an ideal society?"  I'll need at least a page of definitions for each of the following: democracy, government, and an ideal society. I'll then have to put forth my argument, an objection and a conclusion, all done within the philosophical method. I started working on it a few weeks ago but really need to start gaining some headway or I'll have another mini breakdown come the first of December.

    I am proud that I am taking on this sort of challenge. Life is harder when you have other people that depend and count on you. As for when you are in your twenties and going to school one is usually a selfish, self centered, little shit that has all the time in the world. I love learning and always have, I just never had people rooting for me my whole life. I never had anyone pushing me to succeed. I've always had to find the gumption to take matters into my own hands. I suppose this is why I had so many years of turbulence but now that the course has righted itself I feel even more confident and hungry for my next chapter.

    I also have made it a point to put aside fifteen minutes a day for self reflection, essentially, putting myself into a meditative state. This has proved to be a very crucial component with me not being a huge stress ball. I have stopped listening to music while lifting and have feathered in more studying and schoolwork while lifting. So in a sense that was kind of my previous release time and I let school infiltrate that time in which I needed to find another decompression outlet. These 15 minutes of breathing and centering have succeeded at filling this niche.

    There are definitely more things on my plate, more extracurricular activities where I'm shuttling the kids, to and fro, yet there isn't the stress of caring for Nana anymore. After she passed there was this moment when I was actually able to step back and take a breath and say that shit was intense. That is the best way to describe it, intense. I didn't realize that I had put my head down and was just going though the motions to make it through a day. Here I found myself popping up to the surface and starting to swim again.

It's never too late. It's never too late to continue to better yourself. Why stop?

  "I thought, how many new lives can we have? Then I thought, as many as we like." Judi Dench

sometimes you win and sometimes you...win.

       

    I recently found myself thinking if only I would have started this sooner but immediately stopped myself. Sometimes starting something too soon will surely set you up for failure and possibly quitting all together. I had this thought start to fester that I should have started the school process a few years ago but honestly I was in no position to pursue that road.  I was in the midst of caring for Nana, M was a toddler,  L had a hard second grade year and with the normal occurrences of running a house, I was beyond maxed.

     I also had just started working through the layers and layers of trauma I had endured as a young child and that process was mentally exhausting.

     Age is just that, a number. Yes, it would be awesome if I had my bachelor of science all wrapped up and I was starting that next step but the reality is I'm just starting this long arduous road and that is okay. My spirit is the strongest its been in my life and quite frankly that's saying something! My intense spirit is the one thing that has been my steadfast throughout my life, whispering and pulling me along. I can do it, I can do it, has always been softly emitting from inside, even when I was purposely deaf and had become my worst critic and my worst fan. There has always been that something that I assumed everyone had and than I started to realize that feeling, the one manifesting in me and in a few certain adults that I had met along the way, was an obvious sign of children forced to become adults too soon.

    It was indeed a survival scar most noticeable to those that wore theirs as well. I guess it's always been easy for me to fall into those "bad" groups throughout my life, on the outside I surely don't look like I fit into a lot of those groups but on the inside, we were all just as fucked up. We all had our fucked up stories that we could roll up and snort into oblivion, losing that feeling of worthlessness, even if it was just for a split second. Thankfully, my inner voice was as loud and obnoxious as I currently was, so tuning it out proved wonderfully difficult.

  I have spent the past decade, stripping and peeling, layer after layer, of the physical abuses that were bestowed onto me. I find the hardest part of the whole process has been accepting and contorting those images into words.  I was 32 years old when I started my healing process when I was able to say this indeed happened and it's not my fault. That last sentence seems so cut and dry but is so much more involved than that.

  I was able to present my rawest form to my mother as she lay dying in the hospital; I didn't know it was going to be the last time I saw her. I stood next to her a shell of myself as I opened up, all of me baring my soul and waiting to be judged, waiting to be exposed, waiting for all those awful words I spoke of myself to instantly become validated, yet there we stood both in tears.  Tears that ran together yet for wildly different reasons.  I don't regret baring it all or bestowing my pain onto my mother before she passed. It was one of the hardest things I've done in my life, yet a necessary one. It was just another piece to aid in my healing.

Someday, I hope to wear and acknowledge my pain as freely with all, to be a voice, to not let it define me, but definitely acknowledge that it has shaped me into whom I am today, but I'm not quite there yet. Or maybe judging by others reactions that they aren't quite ready yet.

Honey, even chicken poop has potential....

                                                                             

 
    New chapters, new blog. These past few years I've gone through many changes in my life that has brought monumental change. The catalyst for this change and growth started with caring for Nana. One can learn a lot helping someone transition through and beyond the last chapter of their life. Shortly after her passing, my mother became ill. I spent her last few months shedding the trauma of my childhood.  I climbed through many mental hurdles and snapped quite a bit along the way allowing the stress to consume me. Every snapping point was replaced with a new seed. A new seed full of promise and with the potential for new growth. All the tangled roots were pulled like spring weeds and the damaged soil reworked with motivation and purpose. The rows look neater and less cluttered, all the new growth is in a larger, freer space, clear of debris and that pesky thorny underbrush.  I see a vast landscape with promising potential and much more room for growth.

This new growth rotation includes: determination, confidence, clear vision, set goals and a mantra.

A mantra that I am capable, driven and fiercely determined, and that I will and I can.