New Territory

I haven't been writing this past week or so, not even much in my journal.  I've been trying to figure out how to be of best help to Sam.  The brakes on her truck are almost out and she's overdue for an inspection; she also got a ticket for that and she just doesn't have the money.  Main thing, she needs to get to work and back three nights a week.  I realized pretty quickly that I don't use my car a whole lot and so I offered to lend my car to Sam on her work nights.  At first she refused, but then she got the ticket and accepted the use of my car at least for a couple of nights.  I want to help her out for the next three weeks because that's when she has the work, but when the schools here take a break for a month, she'll be out of work till they get back.  So basically, I get the car for half the week and she gets it for the other half.

Yesterday I brought my car in to have its pre-winter check-up and to be winterized.  The mechanic found  damage to my brakes.  It's going to cost a lot of money to repair them, but it has to be done.  I'm not ready to get a new car, though it looks as if that time will come within the next year or two.  I've had my car for ten years now, so I can't complain.  The car is in the shop right now and they'll keep it overnight and finish the work by tomorrow evening.  Thanks to my father I can still fix the car, but Sam doesn't have that safety net.  So she relies on her friends.  I don't know what she's going to do if her truck is not fixable.  She'll have to get another vehicle, but how?  And we're on the brink of going into the winter season.  Sam takes it day by day.  She has to.

I think part of why I'm not writing is because I'm still processing being around Sam more.  I need time to reorient myself, time to readjust.  I'm used to my connection with my brother, but it's going to take me more time with Sam because I don't know her well yet.  I will get there little by little.  So far, it is looking good.  My heart is not so numb anymore.  What a relief!  But I do have to pace myself and slow it down, not jump into the future.  Yes, I can be of some help to Sam and maybe others, but only after I take care of myself.  That's something that gets stressed in Al-Anon support groups.  It can be too easy to fall into a co-dependent pattern.  I've done that already and I don't want to ever go back to supporting an  unhealthy relationship.

Health in relationships is about setting good boundaries which may come to having to say no to someone else sometimes.  Respect, courtesy, being open minded, having a sense of humor all factor into making a relationship balanced.  Or so I think, for I only have partial experience with relationships and not a lot with having a female friend.  I have to watch out for any subtle imbalance.  With Sam, I could feel the pull of wanting to manage and control her life, which I absolutely do not want to do.  I can make a suggestion or an offer, but I cannot direct another human life.  Big lesson.  Be generous, be supportive, but keep hands off.  Give others the dignity to decide for themselves.  And if they fall, be there and welcome them.  I'm learning, but I don't fully trust myself to steer clear of subtle delusional inclinations.  The inclination to see myself as more important than I really am.

I'm in new territory, the territory of extending myself out from home base.  I will make mistakes, but I will catch them and correct them and not let them color my thoughts and actions.  Vigilance.  That's the name of the game for an individual who has survived acute mental illness.  I've said this before, but my trusty tape recorder helps a great deal with vigilance.  So does writing in a journal and in this blog.  There's something about witnessing myself and having others witness me that is extremely beneficial.  Sickness comes from holding all that confusion and negativity inside of you.  It's better to get it out in the open, share it, get feedback.  It's better to see that you are not a freak, to see that mistakes are all about being human and being human is quite okay.  When you name your particular variety of negativity and say it aloud, it loses some of its power to disturb.  And then solutions are given the opportunity to come forward into the space that you've created.

When I offer to be generous to Sam, I am releasing all of my internal stinginess.  I relax.  I tell you, it feels good.  I love the idea of people coming together and helping each other out in a small community. I love trying to set a good example.  My voices have not  been calling me evil for many months now and when I do something  helpful for anyone I can understand why.  I'm not evil.  Just human and so a mixture of strengths and weaknesses, just like everyone else.  This is another great relief to me because for a time I was battered by the voices telling me over and over that I was evil.  I came close to believing them, but ultimately rejected their assertion.  I set a boundary with them and mostly didn't allow them to cross it, and yet, at the same time, I prayed for them.  If they could heal, then I knew that I could, too.

Lending my car to Sam is such a small thing compared to all the forms of generosity out there, but that small step is helping me to connect more directly to her and her circle of friends.  I feel able to commit now, whereas before I couldn't handle it.  I don't have a life filled to the brim with responsibilities, no husband, children, work and so I  can afford to step up to the plate.

Home Alone Again

This is the first day in about three weeks that I've had free to slow the pace down.  For the most part, I have not kept up with my online friends.  I apologize for that, but I can only seem to focus on one thing at a time.  Also, before I have to do something with my family I need half a week to a week to prepare and then afterwards I need a half a week to a week to recover.  That's the nature of mental illness for many people I'm afraid.  I can appear relatively normal with my family for a week or two, but then I need to withdraw back into my solitary space.

This was probably the last trip my parents will make to visit Rob and me in New York.  From now on we will visit them only.  My father turned 85 this trip and my mother is 83 and they are visibly slowing down.  The day before I picked them up at the airport my brother had a small fire in his house; he fell trying to put it out and hurt himself and so he didn't come with me to pick up our parents.  It was very good to see them and a day and a half later to see my uncle.  My uncle recently turned 80 and yet he drove from Chicago to Western New York in a couple of days.  I thought he looked great, more energetic than my parents.  He is my mother's younger brother and she hadn't seen him in six years or so.  Despite living a long distance away from each other, they love each other and keep in touch by phone, but, as my mother has often said to me, it's not the same as seeing a loved one in person.

I arranged for my parents and uncle to stay in a B&B nearby.  It was only after a day or two of them staying there that I heard from my family that the owners were conservative Christian Republicans.  My parents and uncle are staunch liberal Democrats and confirmed atheists to boot and so it was a bit awkward for them living in such close proximity to their hosts.  Each side was certainly polite, even friendly, but my family had to restrain themselves and this made them uncomfortable.  Nonetheless, the house they stayed in was nice and safe and they didn't complain too much to me.

I discovered quickly that I had over planned the trip.  I was anxious and eager to please my mother in particular.  Both she and my father are great planners, but this time they realized that they didn't have the energy to do as much as I had anticipated.  And my uncle had the awkward responsibility of following my car with his while transporting my parents while I drove my brother because we couldn't all fit in the same small car.  And then on the birthday day (my brother was born on my father's birthday) as we were beginning the 45 minutes drive to a state park to have a nice lunch at a restaurant in an inn there, my "service engine soon" light came on.  Because we were an hour early, my uncle and I drove to the nearest service station.  It was lunch time, but the owner said that as long as the light wasn't flashing I could still drive the car to the restaurant and back.  And so I did.  The next morning I drove my car with my uncle following to my usual repair shop and dropped off my car.  It only needed a new sensor, but the part was expensive.  So I thought the car was good to go, but several days later, when we had driven to Ithaca, New York, an hour and forty minutes away to have lunch at a Thai restaurant and go to the theater there I encountered another car problem.

It was after we had eaten and after we had finished watching the play that when I tried to pull out in the parking lot, I found I could only move a couple of inches and when I did it made a terrible sound.  I immediately got out of the car and saw that the front driver's side tire was totally flat, but it didn't feel like a normal flat because normally you can still move the car a bit and I couldn't.  I sent my uncle and parents home and stayed with my brother after calling triple A to get a tow nearly 100 miles back to home territory.  Luckily I had gotten triple A plus which covers the cost of a tow up to 100 miles.  The tow truck came in an hour.  The man diagnosed the problem right away, said part of a coil in the front of the car had cracked, broken and sprung into the tire.  My brother and I quickly realized that we had averted serious injury, even death: if we had been driving at 65 miles an hour on the highway hours earlier with my uncle following close behind me who knows what might have happened to all of us?  And so, despite the inconvenience we were very grateful.

My uncle stayed an extra day and drove my parents to the airport and then headed back to Chicago while I had the work done on my car.  I prayed that they all get home safely and as it turns out, they did.  So the visit was a mixed bag, some good days and times and some not so good.  Last year, when my parents stayed at my house, we had a better time, were somewhat closer to each other than this visit.  Still generally speaking it went okay and I was very happy to see them all and spend a little over a week with them.

So here I am back to being home alone and I'm relieved, but it will still take me a couple more days to get adjusted.  A great thing that happened while my family visited was that I got a long letter from a woman I've been wanting to be friends with for several years.  She was responding to a three page type written letter that I sent to her.  She said she really enjoyed my letter and went on to write candidly to me about a few things in her life.  What's particularly cool about this woman is that she is not only a very interesting, individualistic person, but she lives close by.  In her letter she offered to do some work for me fixing my cat pen fencing so that my cats can finally go outside.  My friend Richard created a wonderful cat pen, but cut through the fence months ago to do some work on the back of the house and never got around to fixing it.  Right now he is very busy.  So I'm gearing up to ask this woman to come and visit me.  And I hesitate, not because I have any reservations about this interesting person, but because I have reservations about myself.  I'm so self protective that I don't often take chances.  Still, now is a good time to invite her over because my house is in moderately good order due to my family's visit.  Normally, I used my messy house as an excuse not to have anyone over, but right now I don't want to do that.  This woman is a private person with only a few close friends and I'm finding that I would like to become one of those friends.  So my next order of business is to write a good, long letter back to her.  I'm looking forward to doing that.