Tell me if this scenario sounds familiar.  

You’re an introvert, a person with ADD/ADHD, or in some other way someone who is put out of kilter by too much social stimulation.  

You get an invitation to a social activity after work on Monday, let’s say, a party for a coworker who is leaving the company (TRAITOR!).  You accept, because you like this person.  

Your loving, extraverted, gregarious spouse says “Hey, honey.  I invited the Hootersmiths over for dinner Friday.  That’s okay, right?”

You say yes, because you really do like the Hootersmiths, and your spouse is wearing you out with all the gregariousness, and it would be nice, after all, to let him vent all that talking onto some other folks.  Plus you have a new recipe you want to try out for Swedish meatball soup or somesuch.  

Then you realize that on Wednesday you also have to go to your book club, or Bible study, or whatever regularly-scheduled group thing that you joined for a variety of reasons, probably including “I need to not hole myself up in my bedroom eating Doritos five nights a week.”  

Shockingly, by Saturday, you are a wreck, and your right eyelid won’t stop twitching.  

One of the more difficult aspects of Self Care for Sensitive People is the fine art of knowing how much is too much stimulation for a given period of time.  Part of the difficulty is that most sensitive folks walk around with a chip on our shoulders, thinking we need to “toughen up.”   We think (usually in error) that if we just keep pushing ourselves past our limits, we’ll expand them.  

Another difficulty is that we often tend to be empathetic, and have a hard time telling people “No.”  Which actually IS an area where we probably would benefit from pushing ourselves outside our comfort zones.  

I’ve learned that for me, three “high stimulation events” a week is my limit.  Ideally, if I had a three or four event week, the next week I would do no more than one.  

Sometimes, I have to go beyond that–but when I do, I try to find ways to get “concentrated calm down” time worked in the mix.  

What about you?  What’s your limit for stimulation?  Do you respect that limit?  What happens when you push yourself too hard to be “normal”?

Well, it feels like it’s time for an update to my “Domestic Disruptions” post.  

First, an apparently-necessary public service announcement:

Husbands:  Just in case you were wondering, in the event that your parents decide to drop in for a three month visit, no, your wife will NOT be okay with the both of you sleeping on a cheap air mattress in your open, not-even-slightly-private living room for the duration.  And shockingly, being on an air mattress in an open room in a house where your inlaws are sleeping is also NOT a turn-on.  (A) Borrow someone’s RV. (B) Insulate the garage and buy a bed.  (C) Put the kids in a room together-better they be at each other’s throats than you and your wife.  

Okay, back to our previously scheduled programming.  (And to answer your not-yet-commented question, we have gone with C.)  

In other news, this just in: a preschooler who has been successfully potty trained for over a year can, when her routine is disrupted, revert rather shockingly on the whole “potty accidents” front.  Even if the disruption is a largely positive one.  

My next Bard’s Tale will not, thankfully, be about me.  It will not be about my past, my relationships, or my current domestic or professional dramas.  I am keeping the drama on the page.  

The next Bard’s Tale post will be a chapter from someone else’s life.  Names will be changed to protect the innocent (but mostly, to protect me from getting sued).  It’s a true story.  It’s an inspiring story, about someone who has inspired me.  I hope you enjoy it.  

img courtesy ddrccl on sxc

I am still in Daytona Beach for work, and this particular morning I have had a little rare “down time” to do some of that “Self Care for Sensitive People” I’ve been talking about lately.  I got to watch the sun rise over the ocean, did a little yoga, and had the pool and whirlpool all to myself for a half hour.  I’m currently sharing my room with a huge dragonfly who flew in when I had my balcony door open during yoga.  We have acheived a shaky detente.  He’s now staying in one spot on the ceiling, rather than buzzing my head, and I’m no longer trying to kill him.  

Having all this nice time to reflect, I have been thinking about where I’m going next in life, but moreso I’m thinking about where I came from.  This life I’m living now seems so strange and unlikely at times, I find that I have to retrace my steps a little to accept that it really does make sense that I am where I am.

As I mentioned before, I am not by nature a low maintenance person, but I’ve spent most of my life trying to pretend I am.  What happens when you fail to do proper maintenance on a high-maintenance vehicle is what happened to me: I spent a lot of time in my twenties broke down on the side of the road.  (And just for clarity’s sake, I’m talking about a metaphorical road here, people.  I don’t want any literal-minded folks thinking that I was actually sitting on the shoulder of the highway throughout most of the 90s.) 

In my early twenties, my tendency to pretend I was low maintenance and laid back when I was in reality really high strung and emotional, landed me in the hospital. For a smarter (or possibly just less stubborn) person, that probably would have been the wake up call that made them realize that they needed to change.  Not me.  Shocking, I know.

I did adjust my behavior after that incident, for a while, because it was the point at which I first realized that I needed to stop letting my shame about being sensitive keep me from taking decent care of myself.  For a while, I did much better. I ate properly, got a healthy amount of physical exercise, and returned to journaling and some spiritual practices that generally helped provide me with a more realistic, less self-centered perspective.   

Slowly but surely, though, I drifted back into my old bad habits.  

What I didn’t get from that particular reality check was the concept of being centered.   

People talk a lot about “getting centered” and they tend to make it sound vaguely mystical and mysterious.   Nothing against mystery, but centering is really not some transcendental, new-agey concept–at least it isn’t for me.   

I used to take ballet, long ago.  If you’ve ever taken dance, or possibly martial arts, you’re familiar with the concept of your center of gravity.  

It’s the pivot point, or point of origin, around which you can move and stay in balance.  

When you’re aware of your center of gravity, you can move freely, and quickly, even spin in circles, and not crash onto the floor.  

For me, “getting centered” means orienting my attitude so that my actions and behavior radiate out from a point of origin that both frees me to move, and keeps me from faceplanting like a bad vaudeville performer.  

What I didn’t figure out in that first reality check was where my center is.  My tendency, like most people’s, is to assume my “center” is outside myself.  For me, my husband was where I assumed my center was.  I oriented my behavior around him.  When we got along great, I could maintain a tenuous balance, but when things went south in our relationship, I crashed.  Similarly, his tendency is to put his center in EVERYONE around him.   When everybody liked him (which is actually much of the time–he’s a really likable guy) all those “centers” surrounded him and held him up like a net.  But when even one dropped off–his behavior would get as erratic as a spinning top.

Those patterns are consistent with our personality types (I’m an enneagram 4, he’s a 9, and we’re both Feeling types in Myers-Briggs).

When I finally had my big reality check, I realized that I couldn’t make him my center.  I’d love to say I stay perfectly centered now, but we all know it’s not a perfect world.  I can say that I know where my real center is now, and when I get out of balance, it usually doesn’t take me long to find it again.

If you’re a sensitive person, and you feel like you’re constantly on an emotional roller coaster of drama, you’re not alone.  Lots of people feel that way.  Remember that feelings don’t always accurately reflect reality.  

If you journal, you might want to spend some time thinking and writing about where you think your center is.  

• Where do you think it ought to be? 
• If you look at your behavior, what person, thing or idea seems central?  
• What do you orient around?  
• What person, thing or idea do you feel you MUST consider before acting?  
• What are the usual consequences of that?    

If you have any bolts of insight, feel free to drop them in the comments.  :)  I’d love to hear from you.  

Talk to you later!

I’m writing this on a flight to Orlando for work, after re-reading a couple of chapters of Julia Cameron’s excellent The Right to Write.  I’m also feeling a bit of creative conviction.  I’ve let my mood, and personal drama, come between me and the page–something Cameron insists is the equivalent of “active creative sabotage.”  

She’s absolutely right.  

A few years ago, my husband and I were the drama ministry team leaders at our church.  Because it was a relatively small church, we found ourselves both acting and sharing the responsibility for directing a dinner theatre production.  

What I learned from that experience is that you can play a part, or you can observe the scene.  You can’t do both at the same time–at least, not well.  

I can either put my energy and attention on playing a part in some sort of personal drama, or I can detach, observe–and possibly get some very good writing out of it.  

Playing the part in the drama can be tempting.  For a short time anyway, playing damsel in distress or scheming vixen is a lot more fun than remaining offstage, scribbling away at whatever writing work is at hand.  

But at the end of it all, once the drama has passed (and it always passes, eventually) all you have to show for playing your part is whatever leftover adrenaline remains to feed your addiction.  

Writing offers a return that is much more tangible, not to mention healthier.

So since it’s still National Novel Prep Month, I can still step gingerly away from the ledge of my personal drama for the next week or two, and continue to get geared up for NaNoWriMo.  

In my last Writing post, I suggested that you find an inspiration piece for your National Novel Writing Month novel.  This week, prompted by my latest adventure, I’m going to suggest that you start a daily writing practice.  

It doesn’t have to be lengthy, or fiction, or related to your NaNo novel.  The idea is just to get in the habit of daily “whether I feel like it or not” writing.  It can be a paragraph, or a certain word count, or a page, or whatever feels do-able at this point.  

At the end of this week, if you’re feeling frisky, double the goal for the last week of National Novel Prep Month.  

See you next week!

img courtesy kimberlee kessler design

This month, there will be plenty of bloggers writing about breast cancer.  With Halloween coming on, many will probably write about fear.  I doubt many will be writing about the fact that it is also Domestic Violence Awareness Month.  

The thing I love about Kirtsy.com (formerly Sk*rt) is also, unfortunately, the thing I hate about it–it produces a torrential stream of wonderful stories every day.  Too many good stories for me to keep up with, although I do subscribe to their “Popular” posts feed.  But anyway, somehow yesterday I clicked through a headline and discovered Maggie’s awesome blog, OkayFineDammit.  Just in time to read “The hidden quiet post about nothing and everything”.  

One in four women will be abused in the U.S. sometime in their lifetime.  

I knew this already.  

I knew this because my first web copywriting assignment at my last job was developing the content for the Bluegrass Domestic Violence Program website.  It was an eye-opening assignment.  In case you’re wondering, the bright blue ESCAPE button is in the header because, for a woman in an abusive relationship, getting caught looking at a website for a domestic violence program can be dangerous. My contact at the BDVP explained that we needed to provide an obvious way to get off the site instantly.  

I still remember the look of shock on the designer’s face when I explained it to him.  I don’t think he’d ever designed a website with an “escape hatch” before.  

Think about four women or girls you know.  Let the idea that one of them has been or will be abused sink in for a moment.  It’s like an obscene perversion of a children’s game.  Duck, duck, duck, goose.  

We tend to think, in our arrogance, that if we don’t see it or hear about it, it doesn’t exist.  We pretend that nothing happens in shadow and secret.  We pretend that evil is always visible, or at least eventually exposed and dealt with.  We think that if it were happening to a woman we know, a woman we care about, we would know.

We deceive ourselves.  

Being reminded of all this (which is what “Awareness” is all about, really–having things brought up into our conscious, daily awareness) has also made me think about my relationships with other women around me.  

I have two younger sisters, so one might think I’d be predisposed to close relationships with other women.  For the majority of my life, I wasn’t.  Instead, for most of my life, I fell headlong into the same trap that I think most women find themselves in.  I held an impoverished worldview that saw fewer blessings than people, and mostly saw other women as competitors for those blessings.  

My experiences with other women consisted largely of, at best, superficial friendships characterized more by cattiness and competition than genuine concern, and at worst, blatant attempts to invade and destroy my marriage.  

I kept waiting for a champion to come and rescue me from these wicked witches.  

It didn’t really work out that way, in the end.  

In the end, it was a small group of steadfast, loyal and brave women who ended up saving me from a destructive cycle of looking to men to determine my worth.  

It is a minor miracle, the beautiful, authentic, honest friendships with women that have bloomed from those particular ashes.  

It’s a great tragedy that in learning to trust other women, the statistics of abuse bear out with painful accuracy.  I don’t have to guess which of the women I hold dear have been victims of physical, verbal and emotional abuse.  I’ve heard their stories–and these women are the fortunate ones.  The survivors for whom the abuse is genuinely in the past.  

Domestic violence programs are valuable and necessary, as are awareness campaigns.  I just can’t help but think that it’s our willingness, as individuals, to be aware of the suffering around us that is where the real change starts.