Wedding-Registry Brainlock

*thump. thump. thump.*

That'd be the sound of my head.

Neal and I both have long shifts today, so I'm tooling about a bit with online shopping. Hit the point on our registry where I can't remember what else we need, except, "Bookcase! And a hammock!"

...I probably can't explain that one. And neither of the two hammocks in the style we like at the one place at which we're registered has a rating whose look I like.

...explaining why a hammock is a higher priority than, say, a bath mat...actually has a lot more to do with my sense of obligations that need to be fulfilled. The hammock doesn't need to match anything. We are both very fond of hammocks (though, it occurs to me, we will have several months of being married before anything like hammock-weather decides to poke its nose out the clouds) and relaxing out-of-doors rather than inside-on-couch. Fresh air, grass, contact with ground releasing built-up frequencies from all the radars we work with...very nice.

I'm in a weird place with this registry business. In general, it's a lot of, "Meh, I'm not picky. I'll start getting choosy about details when we actually have a place where I need to work with colors and styles," meeting, "No! You're getting married! We want to give you something! Pick something now! START CARING!!"

To which I respond, "Oh! Okay! I hadn't thought of that!" And happily do my best to Start Caring. The problem is, I get a little fuzzy on WHY to care, beyond, "Aunt Carla* wants to give us something, so let's figure out something she can give us!!"

*I do not have an Aunt Carla.

So I start picking things based on...what I think Aunt Carla would LIKE to give us. Really, coming off a good chunk of time where both of our living situations were so much the property of where we worked, neither of us are especially skilled at personal choices and style - just recognizing functionality. There's a fair amount of, what do we think would be useful? I think I chose a bedspread based on what I thought would be relaxing for color scheme. And aside from that, the rest of it has been the idea that people sort of EXPECT to find THIS sort of thing on here, and would be baffled and perhaps judging if we had an item on our registry that they considered to be less of a priority than these other six things.

Okay, forget that "we" business on that one - Neal handles criticism with a fair amount of Biblical practicality. I have the tendency to be, "AGH! DON'T HURT ME!" when it comes to what people think of me.

Better yet, what I think people think of me. I kind of assume that the majority pay no attention, a smaller minority are continually exasperated or disappointed, and the 5-12 people I spend the most time with over here actually like me. I'm generally startled anytime one of the first two are proven wrong.

I suspect all of this is exactly what every other woman in her twenties is going through approaching her marriage. (I'm told that as you get into your thirties, you care a lot less what people think of you. Right now, I'm just able to identify sometimes when something more important than condemnation is going on.)

And somewhere, quietly, I hear one of the mom-voices soothing, "Relax. It's okay. Somehow, it will all work out."

"Safe."

It's the same things your whole life. "Clean up your room!", "Stand up straight!", "Pick up your feet!", "Take it like a man!", "Be nice to your sister!", "Don't mix beer and wine, ever!". Oh yeah - "Don't drive on the railroad tracks!"
-Groundhog Day

While Strawberry is in San Diego, I have charge of her cat.

The Gentleman (who I'm going to start calling Neal, because it has the same meaning and doesn't fit his personality at all) is not a cat-person. This has been shown rather clearly this week. We have different backgrounds concerning cats - he had some over-exposure to one of the households where there are many cats that are not well-cared-for, and thus has seen a lot of the worst of them. I've grown up with the idea that one cat is nice, two cats really show each other some contrast, and unless one is keeping them as rodent-control on a large property, or carefully and sensibly fostering, more than two is probably not necessary.

It has been some time since I've HAD a pet. And I'd forgotten a crucial detail about a young cat - in Todd's case, a cat can be about the size he'll reach at maturity, and still have the brains of a kitten. Which are, regrettably, not much. If you have an animal that has large litters, that's usually an indicator that not all of said litter are expected to make it to adulthood. A keen prey instinct paired with little sense of self-preservation and matched with a lack of discretion about which things in the world are, indeed, prey...tends to result in some undesirable experiences.

Todd also needs his claws trimmed. I tend to play with him using an oven mitt - he likes to wrestle. But it's happened a time or two that I was holding something that required proper investigation, and evidence would suggest he doesn't see any point to sheathing his claws when he's reaching for something.

I see scratches as just one of the hazards of dealing with a young cat - I said I'd take the cat for the week, knowing that his beauty is a compensation for his lack of experience. Neal holds better to an idea that we're taught at work, and I'd largely forgotten.

Part of this morning's training was on safety - basically the concept that when we assess the risk of something, we don't just accept certain injuries or hazards as "part of the job." This was news to me. Last two trips, I thought we always accepted certain hazards as "part of the job." Until it's so bad that it impairs work, an injury is just something that happens along the way of getting work done. So we practice evaluating something not in terms of whether we'll get HURT, but whether that hurt will impair what we're trying to accomplish. That's why we have the benefits package we do.

Personally, I think this is because we're undermanned. If we had more people to get the work done, we wouldn't be so focused on whether we'd be able to get it done in time to keep higher-ranking people happy - we'd be focused on getting it done RIGHT. We're actually pretty good at this - we get injuries all the time, but very rarely is it anything so bad that it would keep someone from getting more work done.

So, the idea in our textbook that says this shouldn't happen - well, this is the first I've heard of it, but hey, I'm willing to give it a go. Don't know if I can pull that off solo, but I'll sure try.

This got me thinking, though, about another aspect of safety. See, there are a LOT of us that corporate has to train. And so, a lot of the time, rather than teach us how to do something safely, they'll just teach us that that particular action is dangerous, and not to do it at all. And that idea actually propagates (go figure) - not the one saying, "It takes time to learn how to do this safely," but the idea that, "This is dangerous - only an irresponsible person would do this."

I don't know how much stuff this extends to. I DO know about taking falls, though - that's the one that gets me about wondering where else they're applying this. I know how to drop from 12' or less onto a relatively yielding surface. I know how to roll if the fall catches me by surprise. Every fall where I've gotten injured was because it surprised me AND there was something in the way. I know there are greater heights that a person can safely drop from if they know what they're doing - I have two friends from college who base jump competitively, and one from climbing who knows how to drop from a line 40' up and roll for the ground to absorb the impact (not something he does regularly, just that in a pinch, he can manage it). And I know I haven't learned these yet, and that the older I get without using those skills, the harder they'd be to learn without injury. I'm not reckless about it.

But if you have the idea that people can't go just jumping off things taller than themselves, it looks like I'm showing off or being foolish. One of my good friends was actually really scared on a hike, because I dropped ten feet onto sand - he's never done it, and like most of the others we work with, he's been told that people can't do this, that it's dangerous.

(Yes, I agree that if you do it WRONG, there's a greater potential for injury. The same applies to rollerblading, skiing, running, etc.)

I'm kind of playing with both these ideas, and the concept of fear. It's not out of any fearlessness that I accept small injuries - trust me, I don't LIKE them, and prefer being able to avoid them; I just accept them. If we're trained not to accept injury as "just part of the job," though, maybe it's time for an attitude shift.

Now, if I could just convince corporate to change THEIR attitude about training people properly...

Free to Run

Okay. *cracks neck* Taking a day off from the deep historical introspection stuff today, because a) good news from today I want to talk about, and b) frankly, hauling all that junk out of the closet with me is exhausting. Break time.

My job requires employees to maintain a certain level of fitness. Nothing extreme, just making sure that we're still in good enough shape to get the basics done and not be as prone to injuries and the kinds of medical conditions that accompany being overweight. They're pretty reasonable about it, just check weight and basic physical performance every six months.

Er, yes. About that. I am somewhat LESS reasonable. As in, I know what a reasonable level of activity and eating and stress-management (okay, it was only recently that I learned how much that last one had to do with it) would be. But, rather than do anything reasonable like adjust my lifestyle, I have a pattern of mostly eating what I want, going to extremes on exercise, doing my best to ignore stress (not always - most of the time, I deal with it fine, but when you consider that prolonged loud noises and short sleep are forms of stress...), the result is rather predictable.

And the result of THAT is that about two months before my next weigh-in, I start savagely checking my weight every day. And going a little nutsy with the extremes. Quit eating carbs by THIS date. Quit eating meat by THIS date. Work out like mad, start fasting at THIS point, dehydrating at THIS point, do everything I can (within what's legal) to get everything out of my system, get full night's sleep and go get weighed first thing in the morning after I hit the bathroom so my spine is longer (compresses over the day - if I'm an inch taller, I'm allotted three more pounds)... it's insane.

And oh by the way, I start measuring my value by the numbers on that scale. Every pound down is a triumph. Every pound up is a failure. I berate myself, hit the bike, and work feverishly - or I hit a point where I consider it hopeless, give up entirely, come out of that funk in a few days and berate myself for it, then hit the bike and work feverishly.

As my Dad says, "Dis is nutsy."

So, somehow, all of this came out in one of our semi-counseling* chats with Corpsmentor and Kidcrazy**. And once I'd finished snuffling my way through half a box of Kleenex, KC and I had a chat about my concept of personal value. CM had a point - an idea, really.

*Naming it "counseling" sounds so formal - these are friends, who consider the Gentleman to be family, and thus me by association. They just happen to be a more experienced married couple, and sometimes when a big issue comes up (like, say, Firefly doing some pretty unhealthy stuff to make herself LOOK healthy)
**That's her name for herself. The rest of us think of things like light and pure-heartedness and how she gets up at 5 to work out before the kids are up because she won't get a chance otherwise.

See, the Gentleman never steps on a scale. He's fit. He enjoys working out, hiking, and lifting. (He does NOT enjoy running, but he enjoys being with me, and I enjoy running.) He has a rough idea of his weight because he works for the same employer, and so gets the same six-month test. And I'm fully aware of all this, in an, "Oh, wow, but I could never do that." Nope. Because I am soooo close, that constant monitoring is the only route I can see - anything else is to risk failure.

CM didn't suggest that I do the same as the Gentleman - I'm not sure he knows of the Gentleman's practice. He simply suggested that I not get on a scale at all between that night and my next weigh-in. If those little numbers were affecting how I saw myself, what would happen if I couldn't see those little numbers anymore?

This was scary. BIG scary. I didn't agree to do it because it made sense. I'm not sure I even agreed with it that night. (I'm not sure I ever told the Gentleman I'd agreed to do it, but that's more because there isn't time to tell everything in a day.) But to myself, I did agree - just on the grounds that I really trusted CM. Scary-trust, like when I'm going down a rock wall and can't see how the next part goes, but knowing the person belaying me.

I made a deal, privately. And it actually came about one morning when I knew I was running late - I realized that looking at the clock wouldn't get me there any faster. My job was to do the best I knew with what I had to work with, and leave the results up to God. Looking for the clock, the finish line, the scale numbers - all of those, I realized, were actually me doing LESS than my best, wanting to know how much slacking I could get away with, or at what point I could quit trying because I'd already made it.

I had an alternate practice in mind, which was also a healthy one, but would require regularly checking the scale. I was willing to try what CM said, and even willing to take the penalty if I failed, just so that I'd KNOW. I was tired of cheating, of all the extra maneuvers I do to try to push the numbers down so they won't know that I'm not living healthfully. The Gentleman is happiest when I'm at my most healthy - emotionally, physically, socially, spiritually - all across the board. When I'm not, he notices, and I notice that HE'S...off, somehow, I don't know how to explain it.

It's kind of comparable to when I really want to give someone something for Christmas. I know I don't have to. It's not about what I have to do - it's that I honestly really truly want to do this. Usually because the person makes me happy, or because I really just enjoy seeing them happy. I'm that way with the Butterfly, too, which can be frustrating when I have no idea what will make her happy.

So, I stopped doing the extremes. I was tired of cheating. I wanted to live my lifestyle, and if my lifestyle wasn't enough to pass, I wanted to know about it, and change my lifestyle, rather than adding some magic food or extreme workout.

I started walking to lunch every day, and getting a sandwich from the shop about twenty minutes away from my work, rather than the cafeteria junk next door. I started taking just a little less at mealtime, but if I was hungry, I still ate. I started eating more of the plants, less of the packaged. But there weren't any absolutes, as in, I will absolutely not eat thus-and-so. I ran about as often as I normally would to maintain my emotional balance. I tried my pushups a few times, and blatantly ignored my situps (situps are dumb. Flutter kicks I understand. Planks I understand. Sit-ups are dumb.).

I didn't even dehydrate the morning of. I drank the normal water and coffee. I did go to the bathroom right before getting weighed, but that wasn't really a deviation from normal lifestyle for me.

And I came in at the lowest that I'd been in years.

And I ran - well, it wasn't stellar, but it was perfectly acceptable.

And I did my other exercises to the point that would be accepted. Nothing remarkable.

CM got me on a concept. I'd been thinking of health and fitness as ideals that one always pursues but never attains. CM had a thought for me - fitness, being "fit" for something. What do I have to do in my daily life? Well, take sixteen flights of stairs six times a day, run enough to keep my brain balanced, play with the kids, and I'm pleased when I can share experiences with the Gentleman, so at least being cardio-fit enough to keep hiking with him. Carry some stuff for work. I know what my life entails.

And there are other people whose lives have much greater physical demands. I am not them, and they are not me. And there are other people whose lives have different requirements than mine. I can't be forty people, I don't need to be forty people, so why am I trying to do what forty other people do?

Why don't I just do what I need to do?

And while I wasn't completely fearless going in for the test this time around, I at least didn't spend the whole month stressing, and I wasn't hitting that fear-response on it.

(This is a mixed blessing - that fear-response once jacked my heart rate to a breathtaking 208 bpm, and I flew around the track on that. Mind, I also had to be put under medical observation for the rest of the day. Not cool.)

And since I made that deal - well, it looks like I'm done with the scale, and a lot of the other numbers I measure myself by. Now it's just me, doing the best I can with what I've got, and leaving the results up to God.

Which feels like shackles falling off. And now I'm free to run.

Validating Kids, Dogs, and People

To revisit a theme we might be getting tired of - explaining what's going on, or went on, behind my eyes for years when I didn't tell anyone what was going on. Not stating that anyone else needs to have this going on or believe what I have concluded. I'm in a unique situation, you're in a unique situation - you have tools that work for yours, I have amassed a collection in my toolbox that get me into, working, and through mine.

There's a concept we talk about sometimes, and the best label I've heard yet is "validating emotion." We don't have a handle like that for it at Camp - that's courtesy of one of my nursing friends who works as a counselor for the teen suicide unit. But it's part of what we do as counselors - listening to someone talk about how they feel, and letting them know that it's okay to feel that way.
Never, NEVER invalidate emotion. Invalidating is telling someone they shouldn't feel that way. You can lose a kid when you do. Not necessarily that they're going to kill themselves after that, though I've known some who tried just because they couldn't get the words out. But if they believe you when you say it's not okay to feel a certain way, they'll try to stop feeling that way, or more likely, they'll stop TELLING anyone they feel that way. Doesn't stop the emotion, just stops the outflow. And I have no way of knowing if I am the only person this kid trusts enough to share what's going on with him.

Emotion is not the same as action, at all. If I believe everyone should follow my moral code, I can tell someone that something is right or wrong. Example, one group I was friends with in college believed that rape under any circumstances was absolutely unforgivable, and therefore, murder was an acceptable response to rape. If I believe that everyone has their own moral code, then I can't actually tell someone that they're right or wrong, I can only observe, "Hey, you said you're going vegan, and you're eating a ham sandwich. What's up there?"
Short version, emotion does not translate to action. Never invalidate what a person is feeling. A kid's feelings aren't wrong - he can feel whatever he likes. But he can't DO whatever he likes. I may have a very frustrating child, and entertain fond fantasies of putting him in a box and taping the lid shut for the rest of the day, but what I'm more likely to do is go next door and say, "Hey, Sheila, I need a ten-minute break from Little Tarzan. Can you watch my kids for a minute?"

Thing is, I GET kids, or I did, a few years ago. My friend Shay realized we had something in common - she's basically that grumpy cat you see on the internet, who doesn't like anybody. I like people, but I usually didn't understand them. I understood animals. I understood anybody under fifth grade. I wasn't awful with teenagers. I had no idea how to relate to adults.

We were very blessed as kids, because our parents permitted quite the menagerie in our home. There were very short times when we didn't have a dog, and there was one point when I think we were up to ten pets, between the hamsters, rabbits, and more free-roaming companions. My dad once explained to me that while pets didn't bring in any additional income, they did enrich our lives. They taught us to care about something outside ourselves, because they depended on us.

Dog was also a companion I could hang out with who didn't have much in the way of expectations. When I came home feeling like I had underperformed (which was almost every day), and let everyone down (which I hated, and some people knew I hated it and would use it to dig deeper into me), the dog wasn't concerned about me letting HIM down. Walkies? Oh boy! Pet my ears? Oh boy! Dog was happy to see me as soon as I came in the door - eager to see me, really. That does a lot for helping one's self-esteem.

Animals I understand. The ones we keep as pets are usually smaller than we are, so they will sometimes feel threatened just by our size - getting down to their level, and being still so it's THEIR decision on whether to approach, makes a big difference. Cats and dogs are usually good about letting a person know whether they want pettings and closeness, or to be left alone. And if they're saying very clearly that they want to be left alone, a person does well to respect their space. A person who doesn't respect boundaries is a threat to anyone or anything that HAS boundaries.

Kids, same deal. The kids I have known were my campers at Camp, my Awana kids, my nursery babies, my Sunday School class, the morning preschoolers I hung out with for the MOPS moms, and my daycare preschoolers. They've got boundaries of their own, they're just not like adult boundaries. They usually just want another friend to play with who's tall enough to reach the scissors, and sees them as people, sees that they matter, is interested in what they think and have to say.

On that note, Preschool Gems is a riot. I love preschoolers.

There's also the fact that, with some teenagers, if he's got more emotion and energy than he knows what to do with, we can usually work together to find a couple things he can do with all that. And if he really trusts me, and those things don't work, he'll come TELL me they didn't work, and we can figure out why they didn't. If I have good ideas but he doesn't trust me, he might use them, but I'll never see him again.

I didn't really feel like an adult until I was 25. I felt like I couldn't connect to adults, didn't understand what was expected of me. You ever see an eager-to-please dog that's frustrated because she wants to make people happy but, since she doesn't speak English, she doesn't know what's expected or what she did wrong? I don't know WHY, but I didn't understand what was expected of me, just that I wasn't meeting the expectations, so I was wrong as soon as I walked in.

Which goes back to that spending-a-lot-of-time-alone-in-the-woods thing. Also, spending a lot of time with kids and dogs. I made THEM happy. I made adult-people unhappy.

The bridge on that happened with my friend Lance, and Sara. Sara's work is all about working with dogs, training, their psyches, etc. She has a really excellent blog over at Paws 4 U. At some point, I noticed that a lot of the things she said about watching a dog's body language and responding to what they were communicating matched up with what I knew about interacting with the kids who are too young or too scared or just not interested in saying what's going on with them.

A thought on that - if a kid or an animal wants to be picked up, I have found that they're pretty good about communicating it. Being picked up means surrendering control - they have to trust a person to be that close to them, and they also have to trust that something they're going to want to run away from isn't going to happen. I have kids that I pick up and wrestle. I have kids who will gladly high-five me, and run off to play. I have cats that enjoy the closeness, and ones who will do their best to avoid it, and ones that will panic over being held and claw up my shoulder in their efforts to climb away and escape. If I want more closeness than the other individual wants, that's a boundary I have to respect.

And I think adults get that about each other, and don't extend it to animals. It was reversed for me - I understood a lot of interacting with them, and didn't understand how to connect it with my peers.

My friend Lance was the bridge there. Lance is my age, but a few years ago, was one of those delightful teenage boys whose mom recognized that he had more going on internally than was healthy, he wouldn't share with her and his dad was out of the picture, she sent him to a counselor and he just set about breaking the counselor. Or feeding her false information that would fit a stereotype so she would think her job was done and he could go home and get back to his video games. Of the ten guys I had as good friends, at least three of them did this.

Lance knew he was a mess. But he didn't want someone to come in and try to fix him. He would fix himself, or he wouldn't be fixed, plain and simple. I can't say he wanted a friend who would just let him be himself, because really, he didn't believe such a thing existed. The week we became friends, he kept coming back just to make sure he hadn't just imagined me into his world. I wasn't trying to fix Lance - I don't know that I was trying for anything. I was just happy to have another friend who liked stories, and who thought I was pretty cool. But there came a day when I realized that the way I listened to Lance talk about his stuff was identical to the way I'd listen to a frustrated sixteen-year-old boy.

And it clicked that everything I'd learned about interacting with kids and cats and dogs actually worked for adults, too. I was so used to the idea that adults had expectations of me and I wasn't meeting them, that that was all I saw, all I heard, and I was so focused on either trying to meet expectations I didn't understand, or trying to prove that I was fine without meeting them, that I missed it.

Long-distance relationships are still a mystery to me, though. Everything I do with the dog, the toddler, the rabbit, the ten-year-old, that's in the moment. Most of it is just about reading each other. When I can't read the other person, I'm at a loss.

Recap:
Validating emotions, good.
Invalidating emotions, very bad.
Validating emotions is not validating actions that would be the first response to said emotions.
Dogs are good. I know how to interact with dogs.
Kids are good. I knew how to interact with kids.
Felt expectations from adults, felt that I wasn't meeting them. Panic.
Go hang out with dogs, kids, and self. Not disappointing anyone there (unless it's naptime or they can't watch the movie they want.)
Realized about a year ago that everything I know about these interactions can translate to adult interactions. I did, in fact, know how to do this, I just didn't KNOW that I knew.
Still don't know how to handle long-distance.

EBAs and Love Languages

The Emotional Bank Account is a concept in one of Sean Covey's books that I read as a teenager. Say you have 5 good friends. When you do positive things with your friend Stacy, that she registers as positive, your emotional balance with her increases - she feels happier about you. When you borrow Troy's bike and do a number on it before getting it back to him, he'll probably forgive you because your balance was good beforehand, but it's now less than it was before.

My good friend Wings has a practice of making regular small deposits in the EBAs closest to him. There were 8 of us who became very good friends, basically family, over the last long trip. But a lot of that was due to Wings. He would write a note to someone who was feeling low. He would fetch coffee for three or four people so that the conversation at the table could continue. He would take us on fantastic adventures in his breakfast cereal, or plan exciting adventures for our next weekend off (usually a month away), that included everyone and everyone's schedules. He had the discernment to recognize when someone was emotionally thrashed from some news back home, or frustrated with work, or just flat-out exhausted from going nine days on three hours of sleep a night, and he could tell when a joke would be good, or when kind words would be better. He once shared a magazine with me that had as its main article an event I was interested in trying next year, and he thought the Gentleman would enjoy it, too, as I was putting together a care package for him. And, all added up, yes it was probably a lot of work keeping track of everybody like that. But he felt that we were worth it, and we started to believe him.
And, interesting thing, Wings was the only friend from that circle of 8 that I was not once mad at or hurt by for the whole 8 months we were gone. His EBA was never low enough. And he almost never did anything that would register as "really big." Just small, quiet, and regular deposits.

This is a concept I need to learn. I say this very seriously. There was a time when my world was relationships and emotions, and I was governed by both as my key motivations. I didn’t care about accomplishments, really, unless I could see a direct correlation to how they would benefit a particular relationship I cared about.

Now, it’s the opposite. I’m sometimes spooked when I realize how much I’ve emotionally shut down, and how functional I tend to be about relationships. They still work, they “function,” after all, but the vivid emotions I used to exude everywhere rarely show. Some of that might be growing up. A good part of it, I know, is coping with the long trips away.

But it’s difficult to explain that these relationships matter to me. I know how to explain that they’re important for what needs to get done, but since I don’t often know how to articulate without sounding fake, and I CAN reasonably explain the logic from relationship to goal, well, it’s reasonable to assume that the part that I can explain is the main part that exists. So, I try to put it into action, since I can't get the words right. When I do something that's sort of like a caveman's approach to Valentine's Day - that's what just happened there. The thought was good, the wish to express it was good, the means of expressing it could probably use a bit of social tailoring.

 It’s not a lost art, being human. I just have to relearn it. I did "human" for a long time, I am told, and haven’t been other-than for that long.

So, those means of expression are known rather widely as Love Languages. Very basic concept – some relationships, both people have a great amount of love for each other, but they feel like they’re sending out a lot and not receiving much, or any, back. Where I work, we would say that we’re transmitting on different frequencies – my primary piece of gear is one where the people receiving information HAVE to know in advance what channel will carry our information. They might be able to pick up someone else’s on another channel, or nothing at all, but sure as shooting they won’t get the info WE’RE putting out.

And this made brilliant sense to me, and explained a phenomenon. One of my closest friends and I have had a terrific misunderstanding about this one since we were small. I value touch, and one-on-one time. She feels trapped by touch, claustrophobic, and she likes to be efficient with her time and will communicate with the person in the room and another half-dozen people on her phone at the same time. So, the first one means that what I crave is actually threatening to her, and the second means that her style communicates to me that I don’t matter. It was a long time before we understood the amount of love that was coming in, and how frustrated the other person was over the messages not being received.

My friend Scooter is the only person I’ve seen nail my list on the first try.
Scooter’s a hoot, by the way – a clash in stereotypes. Actually, I find that most people are, once known beyond the surface level. But, in Scooter's case, she usually comes across as loud and crazy and kind of a ditz. This is because she is. She’s also incredibly perceptive and makes an excellent math-tutor, better than I do. (And I actually like math. I just, like, many people, don’t like feeling stupid, weak, or incompetent, and when I’m really struggling with a concept, that’s what I hear.)

Scooter is of an age with my sister, and I believe they went to school together, but she and I actually met working at Camp. Normally, one junior and one senior counselor will spend maybe two weeks of the summer living together, working with the same kids – we just rotate each week, and the result is that rarely are two people repeatedly paired together. But thanks to another assignment we both landed, we ended up spending 40% of that summer living together. There came a day when several of the women were sitting in the sun on the deck, our kids were all off playing a big soccer game, and we were talking about love languages.

The 5 basic love languages that author Gary Chapman describes are Gifts, Words of Affirmation, Touch, Acts of Kindness, and Quality Time. There’s variation – dialects, if you will – within each one. Dawn, for example, very much enjoys hugs, but isn’t much for snuggling. The idea is that, if you want to learn a person’s language, you observe them to see what seems to be dominant, and then focus from there, “Okay, she likes presents, but not expensive ones,” that sort of thing.

Scooter looked at me a moment, and then rattled off. “Time, Touch, Words*, Acts, Gifts.”
And I was dumbfounded. Even I buy into the idea that Scooter is a loud and zany ditz. But a ridiculously perceptive one. No one of my other friends had figured out more than two of those.
(*Words became less significant to me over the next few years - I started to express less, internalize more, and since I didn't use words as much, I didn't look for them as much.)

That gifts thing has been a real sore point. My friend Wolfe, that’s probably his primary, and his time is always so packed with assignments and meetings and projects that, as far as I can tell, he doesn’t see sharing it as an emotional thing. But that’s the one thing I always wanted from him – my Christmas present every year was a day where we just hung out and I didn’t have to share him with his phone or his half-a-dozen professional contacts. And I’m serious – it’s only one day a year that we did that. But, he would always be eager to show his affection by getting me very thoughtful presents – my favorite cd, from a band that not a lot of people knew I liked, was from him, and I played it for years. But gifts without time always made it feel like he was trying to buy me off.

There’s a point, though, when I WAS happy about gifts. When I realized that, it dawned on me that the languages spill in a kind of hierarchy – fill up the first pool, and then it spills over to the second.

I mean, by spending quality time with someone – not just being in the same room, although if we’re both quietly working on something, the mutual atmosphere is nice – it builds our relationship in my eyes. We might be sharing a project, or playing a game, or watching a movie and talking about it. Hiking’s good, canoeing and camping are GREAT, anything that involves challenging ourselves, working as a team, AND playing are great for this. Laughing together is great for building a sense of emotional closeness.
(Time where I have to be criticized is necessary for operations and goals. It is not quality time. I do not feel emotionally closer to my superiors after an hour of dressing-down, even though we did just spend an hour together.)

From spending time with a person, I can build a sense of trust, and figure out if I even WANT contact. Physical touch is actually really big for me, but I don’t want it from everybody. It used to be this constant flow-language when I was a teenager, just affirming, “Yes, I want you here. I’m glad you’re here.” Not necessarily, “I love you.” Just to be wanted, that the other person was happy. Not touching when the opportunity was there sometimes felt like a rejection. This was Camp, this was my home life, this was all of us band geeks. Camp we hug a LOT, or the girls will sit close enough to be in contact, or braid hair. Home is gentle and warm, and even when I knew I was in trouble for something I’d messed up, I knew home was a safe place to come back to. Band, sheesh, we had almost no boundaries. (I don’t recommend this today.) Used to be, someone would come into the music lounge, and find a pile of exhausted students sleeping on a sort of fort we’d make out of two couches. There'd be 9-12 people taking up two couches. No regard for gender, relationships, just the other students who were all on exhausting schedules and we had some downtime between classes. Also, it was always cold down there, shared body heat.

I moved to another state for a year when I was 20, and for the first time in my life, had no physical contact. It was really messing me up. It was just that I’d moved to a town where, really, I knew no one – the housing coordinator had my name with my face, and that was it. And our culture, strangers do not touch each other. Fortunately, I also had a Psych class my first semester, and among other things, we were required to keep a journal – my instructor noticed my response after we did an exercise involving training synapses, you had to squeeze the shoulder of the student next to you and see how long it took to make it around the group. Once I realized the problem there, I got involved with volunteering for the local animal shelter (when someone says, “Socializing cats,” this really just means that you sit in an accessible place in the room, and the cats that wish to be social may come to you, and the ones that don’t recognize that you are staying put and are no threat to them. I was once sitting in a pile of eleven black cats.), and started working for an area daycare. 4-year-olds don’t care who you are, haven’t learned that we don’t touch strangers – if you’re generally nice, always want to play with them, and have no problem with being used as a climbing tree, you’re going to get a lot of little people hugging and clambering over you.

Then I REALLY left home, to a place where personal boundaries are INTENSE. But this is getting long-winded, so I’ll move on.

The thing with acts of kindness is that, if a person hasn’t already shared time with me, I don’t recognize it as kindness – I feel like they want something from me. I’m one of a few women in a mostly-male work environment, which is where I spend most of my time, so when someone does something nice for me, that clearly cost them something, I’m usually suspicious of what they really want. When it’s one of my friends who spends time with me and I already KNOW their motives, then it makes me happy and I exclaim over them and praise them.

Same thing with words. Words are there to clarify WHY the acts or the touch happens. I don’t need clarification on a person spending time with me, unless they seem to not enjoy it. If I hear a lot of nice words, but they come before the other languages, it always sounds like they’re trying to make me like them without liking me enough to want to put some effort into it. Words are easy to make. But, they are very useful – for example, my love got me an absolutely beautiful Buck knife as my birthday present this year, but I wouldn’t have understood why he got it until he explained its significance, the time it took him to pick it out and get it customized, and took the time to teach me how to use it more safely and care for the blade.

So, on that note, I do accept and appreciate gifts…as the last language. When we’ve shared time, laughs, and stories, when I’m comfortable enough with you to enjoy physical contact*, and I know through your words what’s going on in your head when we share these things…well, actually, I’ll still mostly prefer gifts that are either acts (I really go crazy when people do nice things for me, and I’ll see that as a gift) or some form of time spent together.

*Thanks to other factors, the only males I’m really comfortable hugging are either my Dad, my love, or under the age of ten.

For example, my high school best friend is a very gentle-natured minimalist, who doesn’t like to accumulate possessions. When she makes something, she gives it away if she likes it, throws it away if she doesn’t. To give her something for her birthday, she will smile kindly and prattle over how pretty it is – less than six months will go by before she’s found some way to get it out of her house again. But, a good gift for her is something like a season pass to our local ice rink – something that enables us to spend time together on something she very much enjoys. I like gifts like that.

But, yes, it’s true, if I’m filled to the brim on every other area of love, then when a person gets me a well-thought-out gift, it completes the picture.

This is not to say that everyone must capitulate to my love languages. That would not be a loving statement. Rather the opposite – it’s on me to learn those of the people I wish to show love to. But some people have been trying to figure out what I'm understanding, so maybe explaining it out like this would help a bit.

Fear, Security, and Safety

I’m kind of starting off with the big chunks, because without these being understood, a lot of other things I try to explain will probably make even less sense.

This one could actually have been three separate ones - I had to spend a lot of time over the last 2-3 years figuring out how I thought and felt about the concepts, so there's a lot there - but since they all kind of fold into each other, it made sense to post them all together.

And fear is going to be a two-fer, because I kind of have to explain the wackiness that was going on before, before I get into what’s going on now.

Plain and simple, I don’t like fear. I don’t like being controlled by it, I don’t like it when fear shows up the door and announces that it’s in charge, it’ll be riding my back all day, and there’s nothing I can do about it. So, I saw two options – master fear, or be mastered by fear. And my means of mastering fear was to identify, “Ah. I am afraid of something. I will get in that something’s face and get on top of my fear of it.”

This is not the same thing as disrespect. I grasp the respect one has for the ocean, or for bears, or other things. There is a difference in changing my actions out of respect for what can happen, and pulling back inside myself because I’m scared.

The Bible tells us, over 300 times, some variation of, “Do not be afraid,” or, “Do not worry.” Yeah, some of it as addressed to specific people, specific situations (like every single time an angel shows up, which makes me think we have been SERIOUSLY underestimating angels in our artwork), but some of it isn’t. And that got me thinking, in some of those fall afternoons kicking around the woods talking things out with God*, WHY He might not want me to be afraid.

*Note on that – I started talking with God, looking for God, when I was seventeen. Reconciling the God I knew with the God in the Bible, and agreeing that I needed to live life His way (not that I always do, but I need to) didn’t happen until I was a few months shy of 20. That’s a story for another day. Point is, a lot of these conversations happened when I wasn’t yet a Christian.

But, I worked out that if I chose to be afraid, or to worry, knowing that God had told me not to, then I was choosing to be disobedient. Also, that if He told me not to do this, then it must be something I DID have choice in, it wasn't something that just happened to me. This was kind of a breakthrough when I was in college - learning that I could decide whether or not to be afraid, or to worry. Very cool when I learned how. I loved not being "under" fear any more.

I don’t know why other people do fear. I know what the Jedi teach, interestingly enough – the reason the Jedi are forbidden to love is because loving anything outside yourself, they believed, was to base your happiness on something outside yourself. Shucks, I knew when I was eight that if you based your happiness on something outside yourself you risked losing it – once I learned about Alzheimer’s, and how scary it can be to lose part of yourself, I realized that if I didn’t want to be afraid, I REALLY had to be careful with what I chose to base my happiness on. Anyway, if your base was something outside yourself, and you lost that something, you would lose your happiness. If you were constantly thinking that, you’d have fear. If you had fear, you would be tempted to do things that you knew weren’t good, because you wanted to be free of fear.

Note on THAT – I see fear as being twinned with hope. When I feel fear, it’s because I think something undesirable might happen. When I KNOW something undesirable is going to happen, I don’t spend a lot of time on fear – I start packing up and preparing for whatever it is. When I don’t know what to prepare for, and I know I don’t have the time or other resources to prepare for all the possibilities I can think of, then I feel fear.

There was also the point - I don't know if other people do this, but once I looked at the times when I felt fear or worry, really looked at them and turned them over, they were all things where I wasn't trusting God. Either I didn't believe that God was big enough to handle this, or it was somehow outside His control, or that He wasn't the kind of person who would take care of this sort of thing. And it wasn't that I had decided this on a conscious level - just that you can usually get an idea of what a person believes by the way they act.

(For example: If I believe my parents are coming over this weekend, I will take a few evenings in and clean up the apartment so they don't believe I live like a slob. If I think my parents MIGHT come over, it'll depend on what's going on that week, weighing the risk. If I'm pretty sure they won't be, I will go out Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, giving no time whatsoever to my house-maintenance, and crash all Saturday morning until I drag myself out to do laundry. Similar argument came up for whether or not I believed there was a God.)

I'm gradually learning that I can spend 10-15 minutes before something freaking out and hoping it goes well, or I can say, "God, I know You've got this, my role is not to freak, it's to do the best with what You've given me and trust You for the results." That's a combination of taking what I've learned from the Bible and friends, and seeing if it does apply to my life. You'd probably find your own combination.

My views on fear mean that when I get the impression someone is talking to me and trying to get me on board with THEIR fear, I usually dig my heels in. “I don’t submit to my own fear, why would I submit to yours?” It’s not that I don’t listen to it at all, now – nor do I get up in the face of whatever scares me. The Gentleman had a lot to do with that – more on that later. Fear, now, is one advisor on a board of about 12. Useful in its place, lets me know other information I need to factor in when making a decision, but it’s not an authority in any way. And I like it that way.

Security, I am convinced after watching a lot of the forms of “security,” break, security is an illusion. Possibly a necessary one. We don’t really have “security,” we have the feeling of security, which allows us to say, “Very good, this piece is taken care of, I can now focus on other things.” But it’s like a kid’s “security blanket.” Any true guarantee has to be a lie, because there’s too much about life that people can’t guarantee.

Since I don’t really believe any form of security is infallible, I would say I don’t believe in security. This is not to say that I do not trust.

Example – there is a particular job I do on a regular basis that requires me to wear a certain amount of safety gear. There was a time when I was depending on said safety gear to hold me, as it is supposed to, and it didn’t – I dropped. Now, I didn’t drop FAR before I caught myself, and then clung to the ladder in question until I’d calmed my nerves (usually I do this by singing little songs to myself while I’m working, or postulating on penguins – something fairly innocent and unimportant that is GREATLY important because I’m using it to take care of something that matters), and then got back to work. It didn’t cause me to stop climbing, to stop trusting my safety gear, or to stop wearing my safety gear. Just reminded me that it CAN fail, and I’d best be prepared in case it does.

I approach a lot of life that way. I still trust. I just look at things, consider what could happen if what I’m trusting fails, and am I prepared to deal with that if it does? And until someone stared at me incredulously, I hadn’t realized that this wasn’t what everyone did to cope with life in this world.

Safety is different. Safety, I am convinced, is just relative, like light and dark. I can be more safe if I do these things, or am in this place rather than that one. I don’t see it in terms of, “Ah, now I am safe, nothing can get to me.” Locking the door behind me means it is HARDER for something to get to me.

I had a car accident when I was 20. The nice deputy who pulled me out of the passenger-side window said that there was no way I should have walked away from that. Praise the Lord. But, one effect of it was that I made peace with my death during that roll. Really, I thought I was going to die then – and once I realized that I hadn’t, I saw no reason to UNmake that peace.
I’m not afraid of death, but I can be very motivated by pain, and I know it. (By contrast, a longtime friend of mine will bravely take on terrific amounts of pain, but still fears death. We fit well with each other.)

Given that I see a fair amount of life as an adventure, I’m not usually all that keen on locking things out. The Gentleman and I have had a few talks about this, and after some time I was able to understand that I matter to him, and he would see it as an expression of how I care about him if I would take care of myself. This makes sense to me.

These aren’t so much ideas that I came up with out of the blue. A lot of philosophizing happened over the last few years when the world I had to live in didn’t match the one I had prepared myself for. These are mostly the tools I’ve found to get what done what I need to in the current environment. Later, in other places, I will likely find other tools. I’m not much concerned about that – for now, I have something that works. I only really change it when it stops working.

Basics Begunt.

I would not post something like this to something as public as my facebook.

But there's actually a very short list of people who read this. I have a buddy who handles information for the green branch of the military, and he reports that, "Almost all classified material is REALLY BORING." Seriously. You just don't hear that in the news or movies, because hey, it costs money to make news and movies, and nobody's going to buy something because it's boring.

Point is,

...second point is that a fifteen-year-old that I care about ended up in the hospital last weekend, because she felt like no one heard her. She's moving, her family's relocating, there's a mess with a guy...somewhere in the middle of all that she felt lost and that no one would listen.

And I'm not in any danger of similar circumstances, but I know what she's talking about. At some point, I kind of stopped telling anyone what was going on with me, what I was thinking, because it seemed like a lot of the time, I just earned being told that I was wrong. No one knew me any better, no positive difference was made, and it got me yelled at. So, I started journaling and writing to get a lot of my thoughts out, which is probably a healthier outlet for a teenager than a lot of others. And then years later, I moved out-of-state, and had a solid circle of friends that I DID share my thoughts with, and they're wonderful and encouraging and love me to let me know when I'm about to ride my life in a dangerous direction, and because they're wonderful and encouraging, I listen.

But I'm looking at a couple of the relationships that I shut down on years ago, and thinking, they still care about me. And I get mad sometimes because they try to help and they don't know me or know what I'm thinking. Maybe it'd help everything if they did.

So, I figured, I should bring up a couple more pieces of what isn't immediately obvious by looking at me, just maybe take awhile to go through here.

Three for today, just because I feel like I'm "catching up," and

"There are all kinds of flowers, and they are all beautiful."
This is a quote from a story we heard a lot as kids - it's a granddad talking to his granddaughter, because she's heartbroken over her appearance and wanting to look like her cousin, one of his other granddaughters. I took it rather to heart, because it took a long time before I could accept that my form wasn't a failed version of beauty, it was its own kind. I've expressed to a friend, "A tiger lily that tried to look like an iris wouldn't ever look like an iris - it would just look like a really sick tiger lily."
I'm also convinced, more and more by the places I work and the people I work with, that cactus flowers and sunflowers and all the others are NEEDED to complete the picture. That a lot of "deficiencies" aren't at all - they're just a different take on the world, and somehow the team needs that person. The guy with ADD, or the kid who's always writing, or even a tech who likes people more than she likes gear.

Or, maybe someone who can't remember things. That's the second point that isn't immediately apparent when someone meets me, though Viking's known me long enough to figure it out.
I didn't actually realize there was anything odd here until I was about 10 or 12, and talking with another girl who remembers EVERYTHING. I...don't. I don't know how to describe what I remember. I remember images, and emotions - how a person makes or made me FEEL. I'll forget what they said and did. There's a guy I dated for three years - I don't remember a single conversation we had, but I remember sharing time with his family and being happy, and being lonely when he decided that one of his projects (which were good projects) was more important than spending time with me. I don't remember how often that happened - if it was just once a year that I wouldn't see him for a month, or if that came up more frequently. I remember visuals better if they were attached to a strong emotion - I can still see the images from when I rolled my car, or if they're repeated, like the emotional highs from waterskiing on the lake. I don't often remember WHEN things happened - my sense of time is very fluid. I usually put it together by, "Okay, this was related to a concert performance, and I wore THAT, which meant it had to be Fall, not winter, so that concert was at the end of THIS month..." and from there I can usually form an idea of about when things happen.
I don't consider this a deficiency at all - just a different way of seeing the world. I'm not sad about it - actually, most of the time I'm pretty happy. But it took awhile before I learned that not everyone's memories work that way, so they'd get very frustrated that I could remember how they made me feel, but not what they said.

I don't know whether it was truly that I annoyed people, or I felt like people were annoyed by me, but a third point - for a long time, probably starting shortly after high school, I held three ideas that meshed together.
1. "Most people are annoyed by me/don't want me around."
2. "God thinks I'm awesome."
3. "I think I'm pretty nifty."
Conclusion, "I'm-a go hang out with God."
So, I spent a lot of time "by myself" in the woods, talking things out with God. I don't know what you think of when you say, "Christian." I know I didn't have all the right ideas, but y'know, from hanging out with God, I learned that He cared a lot more that I was talking my stuff out with Him and we were hanging out. It would have been less valuable to Him if my theology was sound and we had a negligible relationship.
But, yeah, that was so solid that it still shows up now and again. I'm always prepared for the idea that people aren't going to like me, or want me around, and I'm usually very comfortable being alone. And I don't think of this as a sad thing - just part of the way the world IS.

Note on that - it is far more lonely to feel unwanted with people than to be happy by oneself. At least, in my experience.

More tomorrow.