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Most Days

Today I feel normal. Or at least what I think is normal. I didn’t feel bad. Well, actually I started the day feeling quite anxious, but then I had a good conversation with an insurance agent (right?) and went on a long walk with my husband and then I just felt like, kinda good.

I feel like my executive function is better than most days, though still quite scattered, and I just feel happy. I enjoyed having friends over somewhat unexpectedly tonight. It was nice. I cleaned the living room and kitchen and didn’t resent it or have to use all my effort to force myself to do it. I just knew it needed to be done, so I just did it and it was even a bit enjoyable.

I feel like I have the space to breath and be introspective for the first time in….months. I’ve been going so hard and my mental health has not been good. I took some time off work for Christmas, 4 whole days in a row that I didn’t work. It was amazing. But it wasn’t until now, a week later, that I started to feel lighter, more whole, able to work on things other than survival.

Being working poor is fucking awful. It really is. It’s so hard to struggle every week to just barely get by, everything else falls away except work work work. You find meaningful moments here and there to connect with your spouse and your child, but there is no room for so much of what makes life worth living, because you can’t afford to not work on the weekends. 2018 was a fucking slog. It was really hard.

The skatepark was a roller coaster and still is. I wish I was certain about that spring opening date, but that easily could get pushed back again. There was a time I was certain we would be open in October, then it became December, then January, now I’m cautiously optimistic for April.

I’m constantly scared I’m doing too much, or too little regarding Stronger. But I’m constantly aiming at a moving target.

Delivery driving is now the longest single job I’ve ever held, well over 2 years now. It was never supposed to be this way. It’s not a terrible job, that’s why I keep doing it, but it’s not terribly rewarding either and some days can be quite stressful with traffic and parking and restaurants running behind.  

Again, I’m struck by how clear-headed I am today. It’s just so abnormal that it makes me grieve the 99% of days that I don’t feel like this. The last time I kind of felt like this was when I took that long hard walk in Ladd’s Addition, but it didn’t last, it was just during the walk and directly afterwards that I felt so clear.

For some reason I was feeling good tonight that I put on Carrie and Lowell. “The Only Thing” just started and it’s so much closer to how I usually feel. “The only thing that keeps me from cutting my arm….” is often much closer to how I feel. I’ve never been a cutter. I self harm in other ways. I’ve even felt like a failure at harming myself, because I don’t “do it right.” I smack myself in the head or the face, sometimes hard, sometimes over and over. I bite myself. I pinch myself. I bash my head on the wall. I don’t do these things often, but when things get too hard it’s all there is left. My brain shuts down, or gets caught on one negative word or statement, “BAD BAD BAD”, “HATE HATE HATE” and doesn’t go away until I go through the cycle of a full meltdown.

That didn’t happen today.

Today I got up, played an hour of “Pokemon: Let’s Go Eevee” while I waited till I could eat. Then I made tea and bacon, realized I needed some carbs with the bacon and had a piece of chocolate (made toast for my child, forgot I actually had some GF bread around, because I usually don’t). I was getting ready to do some yoga when I got a text from a friend saying her son wanted to play with my son. My son had asked just a few minutes earlier if he could play with said friend, so I changed my plans and took him over. When I got home I had the phone call that I had been anxiously awaiting, they have a quote for insurance for me! Excellent!

I asked Ace if he wanted to go on a walk and he said yes so we went on a long slow walk that eventually had us up on Woodstock where we made a few quick stops before walking home. We bought tamales from a man on the street and they were amazingly good. When I got home I quickly cleaned the living room, still covered in confetti from New Years Eve, wanting to get it done before the kids came to my house. I picked up my son and his friend and made plans to hang out with the friend’s mom later that night. We got back to the house and I cleaned the kitchen and got a text from another friend saying he was in the neighborhood with his girlfriend and I told them to come on by.

I was able to clean the kitchen, make myself dinner, make dinner for my family, and eat, all before anyone showed up. I hung out and socialized, mostly successfully, and just enjoyed being around other people. At one point I caught myself making the conversation about myself, after I had asked my friend to tell me her story, I stopped, and didn’t beat myself up too much about it. Friends left and I rushed to get Mark to bed. He freaked out because his bunny was missing, and I calmly helped him find it.

Then I did some laundry and turned on some music, got some wine, and sat down to write. Something I’ve barely done over the past two months.

Today was just so beautifully normal, and I felt so wonderfully sane and happy.

I need days like this, and I’m not entirely sure how to get them. They come at a financial cost, which can weigh heavily on my mental health at times.

I’m debating if this is worthy or ok to post on my blog. Is it too real? That’s the only way I know how to write. It’s the only way WORTH writing.

I haven’t blogged in a long time because someone was hurt by one of my posts. Hurt is too strong a word, they were made slightly uncomfortable, and they brought it to me.

It was hard because it was over a post I was extremely proud of. I took it down. I haven’t had the strength to go back and look at it. I don’t know how to make the changes I need to to make everyone comfortable. I don’t know how to change the way I experience things for writing. I write things as I experienced them and that didn’t work, I made someone uncomfortable.

So I stopped writing.

I even stopped journaling.
I told everyone I was fine, it was fine. But I wasn’t fine. But I should be fine. People should be able to tell me those things without me breaking. But I’m already broken it doesn’t take much for those broken parts to fall apart again. This conflict on top of the financial problems, on top of the continued delays for the skatepark just really stopped me dead in my tracks.

Like I said at the top it’s been months, months since I’ve felt normal, since I’ve felt happy for almost an entire day. It’s a foreign feeling. Today I feel safe, connected, peaceful, loved, I feel all these things that I should feel most of the time. I don’t know when I will feel them again. It could be tomorrow and I want so badly for it to be tomorrow. If I felt this way even half of my days I would be a different person. I would be a more whole person, I would be able to do so much more for those around me.

But I don’t. Most days I am anxious. Most days I am tired. Most days I’m lonely. Most days I’m working. Most days I am struggling to feel anything at all.

But today wasn’t most days.

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Mental Health Awareness Day

Today is Mental Health Awareness Day, barely, we still have a few minutes here on the west coast, so I’m technically correct.

I’ve struggled with mental health. I had a full on mental break down in August of 2015. I quit my job, and started seeing a therapist, who I still see, and who I will send this too. Shoutout to Melissa, she’s awesome.

In 2015 I was tender and scared. I was far too anxious to publicly blog about these struggles. I’ve come a long way.

This time was also when my public facebook page, at the time called The Unpreschooler, started being neglected. I was too anxious about comments to continue posting.

I wanted to post something for today because this is an issue so near to my heart. I’ve been anxious, I’ve been depressed, I’ve been suicidal.

In this blog are the things I wrote while I was in those states.

I don’t struggle the same ways I did in 2015-17. I’m much healthier now. There are things I wrote about then that I don’t believe anymore. Yet, these posts are still me and are still important and I finally feel safe enough and healthy enough to share them.

My secret blog is no longer secret. You can go read the entire thing at https://simplelifepdxblog.wordpress.com/

I suggest reading it in chronological order, you can jump through the months on the right hand menu.

Peace to you.

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“On Growing Up”

Recently I cleaned out my closet. In that process I found some old journals. Some I had remembered, but one I had forgotten about it. It was from 2006-2007 and didn’t have a ton of entries, but enough to give me a good look inside my nineteen and twenty year old head. A head I’ve apparently lost touch with.

I have mythologized that period in my life to one where I “had it all together.” I was living alone at the time as my roommate had gotten married and moved out and Ace was off at college (and we were in rough patch in early ’06). I was very proud of myself at the time to have two jobs, being going to school, and have my own place with my own pets. I really did take on a lot pretty quick. I often look back on that time and wonder why I don’t have it so together now. Early in my marriage I would get upset with Ace and blame any and all disfunction on him. That was obviously the thing that had changed in my life.

Now that I’m reading this old journal its become clear to me that I struggled a lot in ’06 and ’07 as well. Its unfortunate to see how unnecessary some of that struggle was. I write a lot about my guilt around not praying enough and my “sin” which means making out with or fooling around with Ace.

My anger at the fact that I was indoctrinated to feel so horrible around that extremely normal, appropriate, safe, and consensual sexual behavior could be its own post.

My anger that my pastor emailed me to let me know he had a dream about me sinning and that he didn’t want me to turn away from God could also be its own post.

Today I’m going in another direction.

My therapist asked me the other day “What would 19 year old Allison think of 32 year old Allison?”

“Well she would be upset at the idea that I was going to hell.”

I was full on “fundie” at that point. I was about the deepest in it in 2006, right before bible college started opening me up to new ideas and theologies about God the next year.

I had a life plan that was totally different. Nineteen year old me was going to become ordained in the Assemblies of God. I was sure of it. I was going to grow our church’s Children’s Ministry and then eventually start a new church plant focused on family ministry.

I was going to get a big house in the suburbs and fill it with adopted children and have happy vanilla monogamous sex for the next several decades.

The last page in this journal is the one that rings most true to this day.

Frankly nineteen year old me would be utterly shocked at how much I’ve changed. Almost everything about my beliefs surrounding religion, politics, parenting, and health have drastically changed. I owe a lot of that to becoming more educated. It was a combination of what I learned in bible college and what Ace learned in bible college that helped me to start very slowly peeling away the layers of fundamentalism just shortly after this journal ended in mid 2007.

On top of that I’ve always loved learning and have continued to educate myself about any topic that seizes my interest. That habit has contributed significantly to my growth as an educated individual.

There are a few interesting things that stood out to me as similarities to my current self; my struggle at staying on task and building habits, struggling to stay organized and keep up with household tasks, being deeply emotional for no discernible reason, being deeply in love with Ace, being extremely passionate about what I view as my life’s mission, being confused about my relationships with friends, loving my parents but being frustrated with my relationship with them, and of course my tendency to process things via writing, both publicly and privately.

Deep under all the guilt and obsession that came with being a pentecostal fundamentalist evangelical Christian there is still me in there. I somehow survived my deep dive into what I would now classify as a cult mostly in tact.

Nineteen year old me wouldn’t think that though. She would think that who I am now has lost track of everything that really matters, that I had abandoned my God-given mission to share the gospel with the children of Illinois. She would be praying really hard for me. Or feeling guilty about not praying enough.

Luckily she’s not here anymore. I’m thirty-two now and still growing up. I’ll never be “grown up” becuase I’m never a static being. Who I am will constantly evolve and change based on what I experience and the way I interpret it . Who I am will change based on my physical location in the world and the people closest to me (both physically and relationally). You might even say that I’ve died and been resurrected as a more authentic version of myself.

I will never be “finished.” I will always be changing and I think thirty-two year old me will be happy with future me as long as I never stop growing up.

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New Website!

If you are seeing this post you are looking at my new home for my writing on the internet! The site will be changing slowly over the coming weeks, so hang in there while I’m getting things ironed out.

I’ve imported all my blog posts from my free wordpress site, Living Small and Large and will be posting all my new blog content here. I will also be writing freelance pieces for other sites, and I’ll link those all here as well. If you have a blog or a website and are in need some content send me a message!

 

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“I’m Going to be a Writer!”

The past few months have been an exercise in patience as I wait for a potential space for Stronger Skatepark to be ready for occupancy. As of this writing there is no date in sight, as the owners of the space are slowly jumping though legal hoops before the city will grant them the permits to begin construction on the ADA bathrooms they need to be approved for occupancy. Long story short, this space will not be available for several months.

In the meantime I found another potential home for the park in Milwakie. It is much closer to my home and needs far less work before we can move in. This space has kept me up at night again, fully renewing my passion for this project. I can’t sleep becuase I’m designing ramps in my head, thinking of the best way to make a 7500 square foot space both friendly to beginners while being big enough and fast enough to keep veterans like myself entertained during the long winter months.

Its been a full two and half years since I started working on Stronger. Its been over a year since I started looking for buildings. I honestly thought that getting funding would be the hardest part, but it hasn’t been. Finding a building has been exponentially more difficult. Strict occupancy rules and high fees in Portland have pushed me to neighboring cities, where empty large spaces are in short supply.

I wax and wane in my involvement in my own social media for the project, feeling like a failure as I have nothing to post. I’m still here working away at this, but it just hasn’t materialized yet. Having the support of my ramp designer and builder has been absolutely key to my not giving up. As I apologize for dragging him to yet another space, and asking him so many of the same questions again, “Would this space work?”, “Can we fit a mini ramp in here?”, “Would we need to put in our own flooring?” he reassures me, “Its fine, I don’t mind at all!” and “I think you are doing this the right way, taking your time to find the right space.”

It doesn’t feel right to me, I want results, I want a tangible skatepark. The one that fills the gap Portland still has; something larger than commonwealth, friendly to beginners, clean, safe, and close to town, a place to hold contests and other community building events, a place where the skate community can gather under one roof, a place that can bring us together. “Together we are Stronger” thats the whole idea. This has been needed in Portland since before I lived here, since Department of Skateboarding closed its doors in 2010.

Along with the frustration of the slowness of my vision to materialize is my frustration that I don’t have a career to be working at while I’m waiting. In the past I’ve been a children’s pastor, a nanny, I’ve worked in my families restaurant, I worked in a skatepark as a teen, I’ve worked with animals in several capacities, and currently I’m hustling in that new gig economy, primarily delivering food with Caviar.

To be honest, I don’t hate it, I actually like it. I spend hours driving while listening to podcasts and music. I’m introverted and often feel refreshed after a shift, spending five or more hours almost totally alone, with only a few short words to restaurant employees and customers. I’ve learned that usually customers don’t want to talk to me, and that is just fine. But its not paying the bills, the hours are limited, and I’m working almost exclusively when my child is not in school, evenings and weekends.

While driving I often find my mind wandering away from whatever podcast is playing and I start thinking. I can spend a lot of time thinking, planning, finding problems with my plans and ideas and refining them and suddenly realize I need to start my podcast over completely. Gui Raz has been droning on in the background for thirty minutes about art art and I didn’t catch a damn thing, I’ve been exploring every career possibility in my head.

After a lot of thinking and probably not enough research I’ve decided to try and develop my writing skills and look for some freelance writing jobs. Its a skill I already have, and one I feel very comfortable in. One of my earliest jobs was writing for a website, with weekly live call-ins to an internet radio show. I was 13 and it was 1999. Each week I would write about something related to skateboarding, usually a review of a product sent to me, or an overview of an event happening at my local skatepark. I would report on demos coming to town, contest results, new skateparks opening, and I got paid in lots and lots of free stuff. I loved it.

In high school, I was consistently praised for “my natural wiring voice” and in college I continued to excel at writing, without trying all that hard. Honestly, I’m excited about taking some time to refine my writing skills further. I’m hoping that I can attempt to develop these skills and make some money along the way and maybe some day have a real career I can lean on when my crazy passions aren’t panning out as hoped.

Again, long story short, if anyone knows any writing gigs that would fit my interests and passions (skateboarding, alternative education, spirituality, personal growth, small business) please send them my way, or throw my name out there. I’d appreciate it. I’m officially throwing my name out there!

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I wear glasses now, so you know I fit that writer stereotype. 

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Writing Practice Works

I want to share with you a piece I just wrote in my journal as an example of how powerful writing practice can be. I sat down thinking “I have no clue what I’m going to write about, so I’ll start with that.” Somehow it took me deep down to the depths of my soul and back up. I’ll let you read it for yourself.

Disclaimer: Dear “friends” that may read this, this is not about you specifically, it is about no one specifically. It is an exploration of my raw exhausted self. Feel free to PM me if you want to talk. 

I am still struggling deeply with knowing what to write and feeling like a failure for writing so little yesterday after setting such a lofty goal. Yet, I am determined to stretch and flex and build this writing muscle. It is an important exercise that I value. I believe it will help me be better and I value myself. I want to be better. I always feel behind on everything and why would it be any different here? I look around my yard, my house, my life, my business, my finances, nothing is where I want it to be. Everything is behind.

The laundry and dishes are chronically behind. I rarely meet my self-imposed goals and lately that crushing feeling of knowing I will always be behind has gotten me down. I’m tired before I begin. I have no idea what to do about it. I am merely observing it. I do know the part I value most though, life. When the apple tree was on the brink of falling I was there to prop it up. When the sequoias were brown and nearly dead I got the hose to them. When the “elm”, which we now know is a mulberry, was about to loose a massive branch, I got it fixed. I do whats needed in a crisis. But I don’t prevent those crises with daily care. I’m too busy caring for Mark, Ace, the dogs, and myself. Its a fucking lot. Then I have friends that constantly want to be social and thats draining. I feel like I’m not a good friend. I can’t fucking keep up. I have too many of them and my friendships feel shallow.

I feel shallow.

What depth do I have that makes me me? Why should someone want to be with me as opposed to any other clump of conscious cells? My good looks? My deep philosophies? My attitude? I just don’t understand who I am. I guess this is a classic dilemma. It is the thing that makes science so interesting to me. Just as it made theology once so irresistible. Maybe it can give me some insight into who I am and how to be better at being me.

I want to love harder, “friend” better, be more productive. I want my house and my yard to serve my life instead me feeling like a slave to all the stuff and responsibility. I feel like there is no way I can maintain my house without becoming a slave to that and having no time left to enjoy said house and yard. I guess thats why I’m so apathetic to its forever half finished state. I know. I know I want to enjoy it. If I make it what some part of my mind thinks of as perfect I won’t be able to do that [enjoy it] anymore. So I must live in the tension of done and not yet done so I can have those moments of enjoyment with my friends.

I really do love this place even with its constant rough around the edges unfinished look. I fucking love my yard. It is the perfect place for my son to grow up. Its so perfect it gives me hope that God is real and he game me this one thing. I’ve lost so much else and the struggle to pay bills is so fucking real, like I’ve never known. But I have this. I have [****] Ogden St. And even though I could rent out the yard or the garage for a decent amount of money I hope it never comes to that. I want this little escape in the city be for me, and for Mark, and for Ace. Not for money. Its too wonderful to be turned into a thing designed to extract a profit. I’ve buried two dogs here. I saw a solar eclipse here. I had my vow renewal here. This property chose us as much as we chose it. And its a perfect fit. I would be happy to stay here forever.

Again, I’m not sharing this for the content in and of itself, but as a personal example of how valuable writing practice can be. These thoughts were all just passing thoughts. I love my friends DEEPLY and appreciate my time with them. The point of sharing this is to say, just sit down and write. Even if you feel like you have nothing left to give. Even if you are so tired you should be in bed. You just might start your session feeling like failure and walk away crying in happiness because you love your yard so much, with maybe a little bit of nihilism in between.  You don’t know where you will go until you sit down and go. Just move the pen across the page. 

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Writing Practice

I’ve been slacking off on writing the last few weeks, both here and in my various notebooks. In an effort to revive my writing practice I’ve committed to filling an entire notebook in one month. I found this challenge on reddit and it immediately resonated with me. It was presented as an alternative to NaNoRiMo (National Novel Writing Month) for those of us with no aspirations to write long form fiction.

I’m using my current journal as my notebook to fill, I’ve only been using it for a month and only have a handful of pages filled. I counted 133 remaining blank pages yesterday, which means if I shoot for 5 pages per day I will have a little wiggle room for the days I don’t quite meet this goal.

In order to meet the goal I’m starting up timed writings again. I set a timer for 10, 20, 30 minutes, and I go. No set idea about what I’m going to write about, I just move my pen and try my best to not stop moving until the time period is up. This has already generated some writing that is of a higher quality than I expected. A peice on some special times I shared with my Grandmother and a peice about the significance of my son turning seven.

I plan to take a few of my timed writings, type them up and edit them so I can share them here.

Writing really keeps me centered and sane like almost nothing else. Its the one habit I’ve returned to throughout my life in times of stress and times of happiness. So for the next month I’m really going to lean into it. I have until my my son’s birthday, September 18th, to fill a whole lot of pages!