Things About Crying in the Sink

I used to joke that all of my exes*, rather than being from Texas, were from Wisconsin. Back then I took some pride in the fact that other than the mere fact that I had more than one "ex*" to claim, there wasn't much else about my life that resembled a country song. The fact that they were from (as I think it should be called) the Middle East of the U.S.A., just meant that there was less deep-south heartbreak to correlate with my breakups, plus, my dogs were still alive and my kids were all smart and attractive, and nobody in my family had been thrown in jail in a couple of generations.

Lately, my bragging rights to a relatively melodrama free life have been circling the drain. Both my big dogs died, leaving me bereft and without a hound dog to ride shotgun in my pickup. My employment situation wavers perilously on the brink of the down-and-out blues, and my love life went tits up, relegating me to a life that is the smack dab epitome of a cry-in-the-sink country song.

Most of these things, with the exception of two dead dogs, I can boil down to matters of choice. My career path has been, to say the least, a meandering one, for which I make no apologies and generally thrive in the flexibility and enjoyment that I usually get out of it, however much stability is lacking. That's a choice I've made and I own it.

 In love, I can only blame my choices for the broken hearts I have borne. Either I chose the wrong guy, or I chose the wrong behavior. And maybe sometimes, like my recent past, I chose both.

I'd like to say that my choosing has gotten better over the years. Albeit much too gradual for my impatient taste - but I know that I have been choosing better and better in the men department and I know that as far as behavior goes, well, I wouldn't hardly recognize the girl I was ten years ago if I bumped into her today. I am getting better, no matter what they say.

But still, no matter how real those increments of improvement might be, they haven't arrived me at blissful perfection yet, and while the number and geographic diversity of my "exes*" have grown a little, so has my ability to be the kind of person that someday, when I choose the perfect guy, will make me nigh unto perfect myself, and I'll be singing the B side of that heartbreak album about heaven and having everything I ever wanted. Someday.


*Authors note: I am strongly adverse to the terminology of "exes" - I tell my girls that once a relationship ends, you aren't their anything, and they aren't yours. I don't like the ownership idea that it conveys. I have former husbands and past boyfriends (don't really like that word either...)... but they aren't "MY exes."

Things About Thoughts

The thing about the human mind is it's a closed loop. I mean, things get in. Lots of things, all the time - we are introducing new information into the little speed track in our head. But once something is in there, it never leaves. Even when you think it does. Even when you can't remember and you want to... it's still in there. Even the things you want to get out of your brain, they circle around and around and around. Like that time you saw your great uncle in his maroon underwear. Or that Selena Gomez song. It's there for keeps. Sure, you can practice real hard at filing those undesirables away and make a habit of repressing them. You might even be successful at forgetting most of the lyrics, but it will ALWAYS be there, somewhere.

I am not a bible thumper, usually, but there are a couple verses that I memorized as a kid that still surface in my thoughts at semi-useful times. One of them is the verse from Second Corinthians (yes, that's a real book in the bible, you heathen) that talks about taking every thought captive. Sure, it goes on to talk about obedience, blah blah, and in context it's about vain thoughts that are irreverent, which might be the thing in the world that I am best at, but the practice it refers to is a useful one.

"...Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ..." 

2 Corinthians 10:5 (KJV - because I may be a rebel, but I am an orthodox rebel)

This is one of my antidotes to anxiety. To grab the thoughts swirling inside my head, sit them down and try to filter them through an objective lens. It doesn't always work, but sometimes just the exercise of it gets my mind into a different rut than the panicked frenzy that it was prior to the attempt. And when you think about it, it's pretty much a rephrasing of what the great stoic philosopher Seneca said, that we suffer more often in our imagination than in reality.

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality”

― Seneca

If I had a nickel for every time some random thought crept into my mind without any real basis and wrought havoc on my soul, I'd be a zillionaire. We all do it. At least I think we do. Or maybe I am just fucked up beyond all recognition. Thoughts like "nobody even likes me." Or "I'm such a dog," (welcome back, 1988). Or "the way he said goodbye - he was so happy to leave me..." or "my kids can't even stand me" - that's a good one. Where do these thoughts come from? If I knew, I would have the thought generator fired. But I can't, so there they are, forever in my mind. I can grab them one at a time and have a Reasonable Conversation with myself about the fact that they are erroneous. I might even be able to convince myself, but after awhile, a new wave of trauma, real or imagined, will wash them all out of the places where I have them neatly filed and they will slam into the walls of my mind with new ferocity.

And the waves never stop coming. Sometimes it's a tsunami after a break-up, or the death of a loved one, or when Hannah Montana quit being available on Netflix. Sometimes it's the gentle persistent lap of repeated hurts over time that erode the banks where we have stored those useless, baseless thoughts. Sometimes it's a hurricane of stress and life changes that leave everything in your mind topsy turvy and disheveled. Sometimes there are just SO MANY THINGS on your mind that it begins to pile up like an episode of hoarders and the bad thoughts are all mixed in with the good ones and the necessary ones and the memories and they begin to tarnish everything. 

How do we keep that shit cleaned up? I guess it's one thought at a time, just like a recovering hoarder, or after a hurricane. One by one, taking them captive, looking at them, putting them back where they belong. I guess trying to be prepared for the waves, trying to catch them when they're falling out of the vault, before they impact the serenity and stability of your day, of your imagination. Before they become worry and anxiety. Lock that shit up. It will never be completely gone, but you can see it for what it is and file it away and keep an eye on it so it will have a harder time escaping next time. 

There's no perfectly beautiful solution, because there is no perfectly beautiful mind - except Russel Crowe's, of course. But there are steps, there is a pathway to being less crazy. I've been walking it for awhile, in my own meandering and imperfect fashion. The bible talked about it to the Corinthians. Seneca said it before Jesus was an itch in the Holy Spirit's toga. It's a thing. 

Human minds have been inventing fear and trouble with their minds since they've began using them. Check out the wild imaginations of the earliest cave artists if you don't believe me. Our minds are the monsters that haunt us. Our mission is to conquer them.