Circles, stones, rings, and things

Hi,

Hello blog, my old friend. I’ve come to waffle on again… and with apologies to Paul Simon. 🙂

I’ve been gifted with a Friday off and I think I needed it. Not for any great dramas, but the five day week seems too much at this point in life.

Introspective

Today I had my second appointment with the counsellor and it really helped. We spoke about anxiety, load metaphors (we’ll come back to that in a mo), briefly the past, and the hidden impact of being genderfluid.

So, load metaphors? Load as in emotional heavy lifting. Some folk might say they’ve got a full plate, they’re snowed under, etc. I’ve heard some use the spoons metaphor of certain activities costing them a spoon, and the impact to them when they run out.

For me, my goto has been ‘bags of sugar’. Some you can put down, some are added by others, some you always carry, and the amount you can hold varies. The latter impacted by stress, sleep, health, and necessity.

There was something P, the counsellor, said that made my brain pop a visual of the curling sport, were there’s a scoring ring with various heavy stones in the concentric circles.

The stones near the centre are your chief concerns. Not everything can be at the centre, so some things get pushed out.

Some stones come in at speed and knock others away. Some stones may drift back in if there’s space, and there’s some older rocks that never leave the wider circle.

Each band of the scoring represents the presence of the worry and ideally, you would be able to psychically push them away from the centre, so you’ve room to think, rather than react. But hey, not all emotional baggage is created equally 😉

For me, there’s few centre ring stones that need to be a little further out. Right now, there’s a little too much worrying going on, so pushing things I can’t influence would probably be healthier.

I can’t fix the Ever Lovely Mrs J’s health, but I can accept it and do what I can to look after her. I can’t stop the bigotry aimed at the Trans community, but maybe I can do something locally; just keep the group going and be there for others. I can’t stop Climate Change, but I can recycle as much as I can, try to eat more sustainably, and reduce our carbon footprint.

Old Rocks, triggers, and cracks

As conversation moved on, we spoke about how I seen driven by guilt: guilt that I’m not doing enough. Be that work, home, or trans stuff. We dug into that a little and it hit old memories I’d not looked at for many decades. P said that such feelings can come from a time where we tried to make ourselves small and invisible, in order to get by or to survive.

There was a loud spiritual crack as the words clacked off an old, half buried rock in the ice….

Ah, surviving school: burying my nature in order to not stand out and avoid ridicule or violence. To behave in a way that was unnatural and inauthentic to me. To be out of my depth as being mistaken for ‘one of the clever ones’ but really, I think my possible ADHD hyperfocus and firework thought patterns probably let me ‘improv’ my way into grammar school.

But, as I said in the session, it’s the past, I am safe here, I survived, and it can’t hurt me now.

Remembering my triggers when Things Are Not Good: the sound of heels when I’m in drab mode. Seeing a woman’s hair swish as they drive and I’m reminded of my balding masculinity as Potato Shrek 🥔

The impact of masking and not masking your language when talking with friends and colleagues. If I see someone has had their hair done, bought a new outfit, has fancy nails, etc; then I notice. I don’t want to be That Creepy Guy by bungling a kind nod of respect and I also don’t want to suggest female friends are just their appearance either. For me, the very worst thing would be for the recipient to feel like I’m trying to hit on them or any of that wrongness.

So, why not just keep your gob shut, Lynn? A good question and the answer is my nature is that I like to talk about style, clothes, and people. With that happens, I feel like I’m not hiding away and I can be all of me, if only for a time. Hello coming up for air.

Take away

So, what can I learn from the above? Maybe even what might you learn from the above? 🤔

It is a funny thing that I’ve a load of patience, techniques, and self kindness ideas that folk have shared with me, taught me, or I’ve bumped into over the years.

You can only do your best in the circumstances you find yourself.

Yet, my own self critic seems to switch those off. This month’s self imposed homework is when the self critic rolls out you’re slacking off, I’m going to try some laconic Jedi / Dudeism* and go “Am I slacking off?” and maybe that’ll knock the feelings back a bit.

I think the other thing is to see which stones can be shuffled to the outer rings. What good is having them lurking around doing for me? Maybe it’s time to let them slide.

As to the old rocks? I’ll be careful to avoid tripping over them or knocking other worries into them.

Well, it’s worth a shot, right? 🙂

L x