The Perfect Storm of Insecurity

Posted on by stilllearning2b

Last night found me obsessively visiting online clothing retailers. I would set the appropriate filters, scan the merchandise and place several items in my virtual cart. Then, without making any moves to complete the purchase, I would do the same on another site.

By the end of the evening, I had bought nothing. Because I wasn’t really looking for clothes, I was looking for confidence.

I’m not surprised I’m feeling insecure right now. In fact, I’m pretty much sitting at the collision point that brews a perfect storm.

The new school year begins next week. Last year was an enormous undertaking as I built a new program for a new school. The work was hard, but because there were no expectations (from myself or my students/parents/administration), I had a “Well, let’s try this and see what happens” approach. And it was successful by all accounts.

So this year, I have expectations to meet (or exceed) both from within and from without. (Why oh why did I not set a low baseline last year???) And right now, after being disconnected from school for several weeks (which was the recharge I needed!), I’m feeling unsure about my ability to meet those demands.

From the other side, I have the recent release of my new book. Even though this book is like my second child in some ways, it is still scary releasing such a big part of yourself into the universe (and onto the internet). The book has been a singular focus for the past few months and now I have released control.

And that lack of jurisdiction has made me uncertain.

My body is reacting to both the letdown of finishing the book and the ramping up for school. Sleep has been elusive and an infection is trying to find refuge deep inside my sinuses. My body reflecting my mental space.

Ugh. I hate this feeling. I’m tempted to throw myself into preparing for the school year in order to distract my brain from the reception of the book and to release some of the anxiety about the new school year.

But hiding in busyness and work is my default setting. And I’m a pro at what I call precrastination – getting it all done under pressure, but at the beginning, not the end.

And I don’t want to go there on these last few days of summer.

I know this feeling of insecurity is both fleeting and cyclical. No different than the storm clouds that darken the skies before floating away.

Today, I am going to practice finding peace in the storm, resting and trusting that all will be okay.

 

Life At the Intersection of Yesterday and Tomorrow

Posted on by stilllearning2b

My new book is now available on Amazon!  

I’m really excited about this one! As my mom recently said, “I feel like all of the writing you’ve been doing the past several years was for this purpose.” And I have to agree.

 

Here is the introduction:

Life is meant to be lived in the present. But there are those times when it feels as though the present is a holding cell between the memories of yesterday and the dreams and fears of tomorrow. Those days or weeks or months when one wave hits after another and you feel as though you’re being beaten down by life itself. And you can’t imagine how you’re ever going to get back up again.

I occupied this state of limbo for several months after a tsunami divorce robbed me of life as I knew it in the summer of 2009. It began with a surprise text, from my partner of sixteen years, stating that he was leaving the marriage and leaving the state. That was followed by the discovery of fraud, marital embezzlement and bigamy.

That confusing and grueling period is one I hope to never repeat. Yet at the same time, I am now immensely grateful for its lessons. That experience has made me more compassionate towards myself and others and more understanding about why we respond to stress the way we do. It’s made me more grateful for what I have and less critical of what I don’t. And most importantly, it’s motivated me to help others move through their own challenges.

The difficult times in life both reveal who we are and shape us into what we can become. In the struggle, there is opportunity. In the challenge, there is growth.

Even though this book shares essays about my own personal experience, it isn’t about me. In fact, as I learned when facing my own trials, the details of our situations really don’t matter as much as we think and the broad strokes of our experiences all share certain common truths.

These selections address the challenges that we all, regardless of our circumstances, face throughout life – love, loss, fear, isolation, hope, and the challenge of getting back up when life has repeatedly kicked us down. You will laugh. You will cry. You will shake your head in recognition. And then you’ll be ready to get back up and begin living again.

 

Sometimes life sucks. But you don’t have to let it suck the life out of you.

 

intersection cover final

Learn More!

 

Disclosure: This book contains some of the essays that have been published on my blog throughout the last five and a half years. They have been edited and organized in order to provide a “how to” guide for moving through trauma of any kind.

15 Ways Fear Hides in Plain Sight

Posted on by stilllearning2b
fear

It’s one of the few times my mom ever screamed at me. Because of that, the memory is seared into my mind.

I was six years old and ecstatic to visit the “Happiest Place on Earth” for the first time. We were standing at one of the monorail stations, waiting to board the next high-speed train. Curious about the way the unique system functioned, I darted off through the crowd to peer down into the track.

My mom’s angry shriek brought me back from the edge.

But it wasn’t really anger she was expressing, was it?

It was fear.

Fear is a strange emotion. Sometimes it’s easily visible – the shaking hands, the trembling voice, the widened eyes. It can be expressed as worry or anxiety. Or marked with the words, “I’m scared” or “I’m nervous.”

But even more frequently, fear masquerades as something else, especially in people who have been taught that it’s “weak” to show fear or, like with watching your child about to be hit by a train, the fear completely overrides the system. Additionally, fear is not a pleasant emotion and we often allow it to morph into other forms in an attempt to distance ourselves from the discomfort.

So the fear manifests as anger or control or dependency. And if we can learn to recognize – and respond to – the fear behind the mask, we can improve the communication and the interaction.

The following are fifteen common ways that fear hides in plain sight:

1 – Anger

“You’re never going to see the sun again!” the mom angrily threatens when her teenager shows up three hours after curfew. “You’re grounded for the rest of your life!” The parent certainly comes across as furious, with their reddened face and raised voice. But their slight tremble reveals the true emotion – fear that their child wasn’t returning home at all.

2 – Rejection

“I’ve realized I always seem to break up with guys right when we’re getting close,” my friend revealed to me one day. To the men, this behavior read as surprise rejection. Upon further consideration, my friend determined that she ended things out of a fear of growing closer and getting hurt.

3 – Isolation

I am fascinated with the people on the show Life Below Zero, especially Sue, who lives in an extremely isolated camp near the arctic circle. She never reveals much of life story, but her drive to be alone speaks to a deep-seated fear of being close to people.

4 – Irritability

“Why isn’t he picking up his phone,” I grumbled to myself, feeling my annoyance build. On the surface, my irritation stemmed from not having an immediate answer to my benign question. But beneath that impatience was a burgeoning fear that the call went unanswered due to some tragic accident.

5 – Stubbornness

Teaching me to ride a bike was a true exercise in my patience for my parents. Even though I was physically capable of mastering the technique by the age of 7 or so, it took an additional 3 years (and plenty of banana split bribes) for me to lose the training wheels for good. On the outside, I exhibited stubbornness, a resistance to practicing or to removing the supports. On the inside, I was afraid of falling.

6 – Control

Upon hearing about her daughter’s plans to marry before obtaining a college degree, a mother begins to try to dissuade the daughter and the intended husband through manipulation. It comes across as controlling, yet it stems from the mother’s fear that her daughter will not be able to look after herself.

7 – Meanness

The new girl showed up at my school in the middle of eighth grade. She was tall, blond, beautiful and had the best style any of us had ever seen. As the boys tripped over themselves in an attempt to get to know her, the popular girls began immediately to slander her reputation and make her life miserable. This “mean girl” routine was performed out of fear, the popular girls afraid that this interloper would steal their top spot and move them down the (very important in middle school) social ladder.

8 – Delusion

“I won the computer in a raffle at that networking thing I went to today,” explained my then-husband as he placed the new MacBook Pro on the kitchen island. The claim didn’t resonate as true, yet I still accepted his alibi. Because seeing the truth – that my husband was capable of extreme deceit, was too scary to face.

9 – Clowning

I had one student that would become disruptive towards the end of every unit of study. He would interrupt, annoy other students and basically treat the classroom like his own personal stage. Once I became aware of the cyclical nature of the behavior, it became apparent that the clowning was an attempt for him to manage his anxiety about not being prepared for the upcoming assessment.

10 – Distraction

I stood in line for the extreme roller coaster that advertised the steepest drop in the country. As people approached the start of the line, where the view of the first plummet jutted out at a sickening angle, they began to pull their phones out of their pockets and turn their attentions to something less frightening.

11 – Overly Cautious

“I don’t want to get a driver’s license,” the seventeen-year-old revealed to me. I don’t want that responsibility. The former student was one of the more mature ones that I have taught and was more than capable of safely handling a motor vehicle. Although she never admitted that she was afraid of the liability that comes with a license, it was clear that she was holding back out of fear.

12 – Judgmental

“I would NEVER get divorced,” a person on Twitter announced to me. “I would stay and fight for my marriage.” At first, I grew defensive, reacting to the subtext that I too-easily quit on my marriage. Then, it registered that this person’s judgment was really just a veil over their fear of losing their own marriage.

13 – Barriers

“Hi, I’m Lisa. I’m moving out of state within the next few months.” This was basically how I started my first several dates after divorce. I was afraid of getting hurt again, so I basically refused to allow anyone entry.

14 – Dependency

The eighth grader felt more like a preschooler, with his lack of maturity and independence. Once I met his mom and heard her story of a string of miscarriages and years of infertility finally leading to one successful birth, I understood. She was so afraid of losing another child, that she was determined to keep her surviving one a child forever.

15 – Overcompensation

He was easily the largest man in the gym, his biceps roughly the size of my head. Yet although he looked the part of confident bodybuilder, his physique was born of insecurity, a fear that he wasn’t quite enough.

Gaslighting – The Flame That Refuses To Be Stamped Out

Posted on by stilllearning2b

Just when I think I’m healed…

I’m having a big old trigger attack today. My heart is racing. My gut, nauseous. My brain is split between two years – 2009 and today.

And all because I bought a computer.

This one’s going to require a little back story.

In the suicide note (He’s still alive, as far as I know. Go here to learn more) that my ex left to his other wife and my mother, he described how I always needed the latest and the greatest. He painted me as needy, whiney and horrible with money.

That statement was far from true. Not only was it gaslighting, it was projection. My ex bought an iPhone months after they were first released. Had a first generation Kindle. And always had multiple Apple computers, each one the top of the line at the time.

He always justified the computers by saying they were for work. In the final few years, he was supposedly using them for graphic design. Although since I learned that most of his “income” came from credit cards (including ones in my name), I now doubt that the machines did much more than run World of Warcraft.

When he left, I gathered up a few belongings and escaped to my friend’s house. One of my excerpts from my old life was a tired MacBook Pro that my ex had deemed too slow for his purposes. This machine held me until 2012 (even though I wanted to vomit every time I saw his name as the computer’s “owner”).

At that time, I was writing and needed a basic machine for that and for school purposes. I bought the cheapest Mac I could find – a two-year-old refurbished 11″ Air. And it felt good. I paid cash and I had a machine that was all mine. And it didn’t trigger me because the old one was really quite dead and the new one was bargain basement.

But now is different.

My little MacBook Air is still chugging along for writing. But as my eyes get worse and my writing and curriculum projects more numerous, the small screen has become a challenge. The memory struggles to manage working with images or even MathType (not good for a math teacher). And the clincher? iMovie won’t even pretend to function anymore.

I knew it was time for an upgrade. I looked at my budget and made a conservative plan to purchase a desktop this winter once I could save up enough to pay cash.

But then this morning, frustrated with a movie idea I couldn’t act upon and dreading the final edit of my book on a minuscule screen, I decided to see if I could act early.

I logged on to the Apple page, navigated to the educator section (woo hoo for teacher discounts!) and selected the machine I wanted for my purposes. I then clicked on “special financing” and noted that, if approved, I could get 18 months with no interest. And the monthly payment would be well within reach.

I called my husband to talk through the idea of buying now. He was wonderfully supportive, both emotionally and financially.

I decided to pull the trigger.

And now I feel sick.

In my head, I hear my ex’s voice whining about I always need the lastest and the greatest. And this time, I didn’t buy used or the cheapest model. Although it’s still FAR from the top of the line.

When my parents both noted that I am a writer and that a computer is a key tool of my trade, I hear my ex’s excuses that he “needed” his computers for work. And I think about how I could continue to scrape by with the old one.

With another credit card in my name (and ONLY my name), I’m reminded again of all the debt my ex racked up and left me with.

I know this is different than his spending. I CAN afford this. I’m NOT hiding the purchase. I WILL pay this off before the grace period ends. And I DO need this (and no, not for shooting warlocks).

Yet the damn gaslighting is still doing a number on me. Between trying to prove his stupid voice wrong and having to live so lean while I paid off his debt, I have a really hard time spending money. Especially on technology. And even more so on a Mac.

It just feels too close to what he claimed I was. And I feel like I have to climb my way out of his mind games yet again. And added to it now is the fact that I’m angry at myself for reacting this way. I should be happy I can do this. I should be excited for the new machine. I should be past this shit already.

For tonight, hot yoga. There will most likely be tears. Of anger. Of confusion. Of gratitude. Of relief.

And tomorrow, when that box shows up at my door, I hope that I can be excited for today and leave yesterday in the past.

 

You’re Not Ready to Date Until You Have These 7 Things In Place!

Posted on by stilllearning2b

I put the cart before the horse when it came to dating after divorce. I invited dates to take part in the drama that my ex-husband directed. I looked to my partner for the day for emotional support and validation that I was desirable even after being rejected. And I even allowed my date’s views of me to shape my own self-image.

Overall, I made the experience much harder than it needed to be because I didn’t have these seven things in place before I started dating. Click here to learn more about my mistakes!