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I made it!

I made it through my birthday! Maybe I was just so prepared to cry that I held out through it, kind of like when you see a wave coming and take the time to plant your feet, but if you get blindsided, you're more likely to find yourself pushed under, slammed around, and having to spend a week getting the sand out of your nose.

I was extra-specially glad to see the work-week end this week... for a few reasons. First, I am vacating myself from LA and road-tripping up to Berkeley with Natalie this weekend, so the promise of vacation and old friends sort of heightens the drag factor of the working world. Second, it's just been an emotionally draining week on multiple, unrelated personal fronts, and was topped off by emotionally draining clients today, who cried and yelled and argued and made excuses and had to lay on the floor because they were so anxious and generally required me to do my job, of being a therapist who helps people sort through, contain, and express unpleasant emotions, when really I had just finally settled into my summer routine of staring at a computer doing paperwork and reserving all my emotional energy for myself.

So, needless to say, a little road trip up the 5 sounds delightful!

It's my party, I can cry if I want to

*** warning: another post that seems to have degenerated into musing about adulthood and other non-perky subjects and may only be relevant to women in their 30s ***

Every year I cry on my birthday, and this year probably won't be an exception.

I've been feeling a little wallow-ey, so I just came home from work and devoured another chunk of Alli's "better than sex" cake (which is a very ambitious name for a cake that won't even hold me afterwards while I fall asleep). And I decided at the last minute to take tomorrow off of work, so I'm dreaming of the possibilities. I had a little bbq on Sunday and as the evening ended, I felt astoundingly... grateful for so much about my LA life. I wish I could hold onto that feeling all of the time, but hey, I'm human.

I had coffee last night with an old friend from Berkeley, and we were musing on the general joys and tribulations of growing up, and he reminded me of a quote from his sponsor: "it's all about learning to wear the big boy pants." They don't always fit and they feel more formal than I'd like to be and sometimes they chafe... but I guess you just keep walking. You learn the world is rarely fair, and that it's definitely not going to take a smoke break for your emotions. You learn that maybe, just maybe, feeling happy all the time is not a constitutional right. You realize that sometimes (though not all the time) the best thing you can do is just let yourself be lonely and not try so hard to fight it when you don't have the energy to spare. You start to suspect that your magic wand may be permanently on backorder. But there's room in the pants to grow into, and you also learn what's worth spending your energy on, or as a friend recently put it, that you're "too old for insecurities, flightiness, and uninteresting things." You start to believe that life's really too short to worry about your upper-arm fat. And you get better, a bit, at knowing what you want and saying no to the stuff (or people) that you don't.

Lately I am learning that I am capable of being very, very pissed off (yes, I wasn't really sure about that one... I'm usually very easygoing). I am also realizing, and it is not very fun, that I may have Issues with expressing anger, or at least expressing it towards the thing that's actually making me angry, and then I get angry with myself for acting like I'm not angry, and then before I know it I find myself getting off the phone with the thing that's making me angry and then, oh, say, calling up someone 1000 miles away to scream about how angry I am. Yes, I know this helps no one. And I'm confirming that because I don't really "do" anger well, it comes out as "sad," because that's really the only emotion I'm good at expressing, well, pretty much anywhere. So tomorrow could just be the day where everything going on in there, all the gratitude and anger and getting to talk to so many people I love all over the country, and everything else, just winds up coming out through my eyeballs.

I'll keep you posted.

...be vewwy qwiet, the wabbit is sweeeeping...

I'm keeping quiet for a reason these days... though I can't exactly describe it. I think I'm imploding maybe, just a bit. Or, as my lucky LA friends can attest, it's a bit more explosive, as they watch me light off like a rocket, blow off steam, then glide gently back to earth to wait another hour or so for the return trip. The word "irritable" would sum it up nicely. I'm exhausted this week (I put in 20 hours over my usual schedule, at some other jobs) and feeling like I've hit the "angry" stage and have definitely not been getting enough sleep (partially work-related, partially because I stayed up one night watching an entire disc of Six Feet Under and working on a kick-ass sewing project until 3am), and I have just generally been on overload. I have a few chances to help it work its way out a bit this upcoming week though, so for now I feel like I've taken one step back again (into all the icky feelings) but I sense the promise, if I stay here for a little while and do something productive with them, of getting to go Mother-May-I-Take two big steps forward as fall rolls in. Keeping my fingers crossed, at least.

Mental Status Report

When we do intakes at my agency, we have to do a full-page "mental status" report for our clients (including taking a guess at their vocabulary and intelligence, often based on the 8 words they've spoken in the past two hours). But oh, how I wish we had a category for parental mental status.

At an intake last week, the parent reported that she used to let her daughter do gymnastics, but then she pulled her out and made her stop because gymnasts are really short, and she didn't want her daughter to be short when she grew up. So, no more gymnastics.

"Ct's Mo exhibits marked cognitive difficulty re: logic and reality testing..."

It's my party...

Yeah, there's nothing really going badly this week... pretty much cruising along, mostly just bored and tired. But methinks it's time for a good cry, and I'm just curious now what will actually bring it on.

If it doesn't happen soon, I may need to induce. Taking recommendations for a good tearjerker (bear in mind that I have been known to cry during commercials when the time is right).

Relationship People

It's funny how you can forget about things you once said.

I was having coffee with a friend the other day, and she reminded me that waaaaay back when Goat and I were starting to date, I was freaking out and kept worrying that maybe I just wasn't a "relationship person." I'd had nearly 30 years of being mostly single, moving around, starting over, traveling the world, doing whatever I felt like whenever I felt like it, and I was really worried that being in a relationship would feel boring, tied down, stuck... although at the same time, on some level I may have been just a teensy bit worried that maybe I was actually incapable of being content. I suppose I could say that about a lot of my 20s, and for 90% of my friends. We were having adventures, exploring, making great friends, but always looking for what was coming next. I had a string of jobs I didn't enjoy, never felt like I had roots, I was always either moving or people were moving away from me. And even though it was exhausting, we weren't ready to stop, because we weren't really happy, or settled, where we were at.

What a difference a few years makes. Somewhere along the way last year, I woke up and realized I was really... content. It was a surprisingly delicious feeling. Not that I never wanted anything to change ever again, but I felt like I was finally on some paths, in work and in life, where I wanted to just keep going in those directions, and for once I wasn't thinking about jumping ship and overhauling life and wiping the slate clean and starting over somewhere else again. Meh, maybe it's a normal part of getting a little older. Or maybe everything kind of fed off each other, and I wouldn't have even thought about settling into a relationship if I hated my job and was still feeling the need to make drastic changes that could send me fleeing. Maybe I never really let myself fall for people I dated in other places because I had one foot out the door before I even started.

Anyhow, somewhere along the way I seem to have become one of those "relationship people." Go figure. Clearly, I miss Goat for a million reasons about who he is, but I also just miss the boring little life we had going. So it's very interesting to realize that about yourself, and then find that you're single again and not sure what to do next. I could revert to "old single mode," filling my time but avoiding roots... but I think it would be at the expense of my shiny new ability to be content. I think, somehow, it will all answer itself without too much angst on my part. Or at least I hope. Or at least, with less angst than I had five years ago about all these things.

random

One of the fun and interesting things about this year is that I went from calling my bosses "Dr. So-and-So" to -- at their insistence -- calling them by their first names. Including the guy who the place is named after. Well, that was hard enough to do... but you really know that you've arrived as a "colleague" when you head out on a lunchtime trip to Jamba Juice and they insist that you take the front seat while they crawl into the back.