Making Do

I've been watching videos on trauma, trying to piece together why I started having panic attacks last spring, and my takeaway so far is to pay more attention to what I'm doing, and thinking, because thinking leads to reacting, and what I think and how I react is within my control to change.💁

I can think myself into quite a state, I've noticed, now I've started paying attention to this hamster wheel brain of mine. Allowing myself to try out prescription medication to address baseline anxiety was a significant step for me, having always been suspicious of pharmaceuticals, instead aggravating my condition with beer and pot.😜

I was and am as guilty as an anti-vaxxer of believing against all medical evidence to the contrary the health measure to mitigate the effects of the illness is the danger and not the illness.😷

Of course, the first behaviour I changed when I started taking the medication (fluoxetine, as in, Prozac) was to cut out beer and pot, and it's quite possible it's all I needed to do. Self-medicating may work for some, but not me. Your just enough is my too much, which I should know by now, but addiction's a helluva drug.😀

My preferred state isn't even mildly tipsy as it turns out (and this is what every addict wants, none of us want to overdose in an alley) but rather to be engaged in sober reflection while working on a crossword puzzle to take the edge off.💤

Contentment with how it is right now is the state of grace I didn't know I was looking for but here it is.🙇

Also, leaving Twitter, which is a big deal, to read novels has been helpful in "thinking it through", "it" being the stuff of life. Reading makes me think of writing and writing helps me reframe the stories of blame and guilt I tell myself into stories of resilience, thanks to being armed with a sense of humour.💃

Also my mind isn't darting around anymore and I'm better able to think the present through to everything not being my problem alone to solve RIGHT NOW!!👮

In fact, nothing has required my flight, fight or freeze response. Nothing. Not a single goddamned thing has happened since I started thinking it through to require my flight, fight or freeze response. Also, I'm having the most illuminating dreams, which I occasionally post on Facebook where it turns out I'm friends with an illuminating dream analyst.😎

Hell is other people, sure, but also comfort, joy and insight.💕

The other evening I was watching CBC Ottawa news and at the end of his weather report Vikta Paolo smiled, and maybe because I was alone at the time and so more engaged with his animated delivery than I would have been had My Blond Companion been watching with me, I smiled back.😊

I felt an immediate release of tension and a radiating warmth around my heart. It was instant, the fluctuation from one state of being to another, just by smiling in response to another person's smile.💥

(Dear men who tell women to smile: You smile. And stay away from women. Children, too. You know what I'm taking about.😠)

Then, still smiling, I hauled myself out of the chair and made a "Fridge Wars" dinner of this and that, praised by My Blond Companion later for its delicious ingenuity.👍

Somewhere back there I skipped my mother to turn into Gram, who claimed her greatest reward in life was making a good meal out of what she had on hand, especially when we ate it all, no leftovers.👵

(Don't worry. I don't need the affirmation to appreciate my creating the sublime out of making do. I've long been my biggest fan. In fact, I'm so good at it, I decided to make it my retirement plan.👵)

Gram was the source of much fascination in my youth. Her needs so basic, her wants in line with her needs. For years I only ever saw her in one dress, although she had two, and I saw her every day because she lived with us. But like a housekeeper, not a grandmother. It was hard to believe she was my mother's mother. Of course it was hard to believe my mother had a mother at all and wasn't just born being ours, coming home from work to check the mail Gram had put on the mantle before changing from her high school librarian clothes into her casual clothes to have a martini and watch Mike Douglas.💤

It wasn't until I was alone in her seniors residence apartment, during her stint in hospital before the nursing home, going through photo albums of her travels, rescued from the laundry garbage by another resident after she dumped them all there, I realized I didn't know my mother at all. You don't know yours, either, but like another person terminating an unwanted pregnancy or transitioning gender (especially if that person is an adolescent or child) that's none of my business.👤

(One more time: Patriarchs want fascism, not freedom.👺)

Even at the time I heard about the album dump I knew it was likely a reaction to not being able to see the photos anymore, her vision too deteriorated. But the lady across the hall rescued them because, well, I suppose she thought my mother would regret it later. I'm glad they were rescued, though, because when I saw the photo of the stranger who was also my mother, I understood both of us better. I don't know where they are now and I don't care. They really only meant something to her, and it makes perfect sense to me now that she would throw them out once she could no longer make out the images.💔

Anyway, it's with Gram in mind I'm determined to continue reframing the stories I've long, too long, been telling myself, banishing blame and guilt from the narrative, keeping it simple, putting a hilarious slant on all those old stories and sending them out into the world in another book. Later. Because thanks to Barbara Gowdy's "The Romantic" (2003), which I recently read, I've been inspired to write another book about my many office temp jobs. I want to do my part for the historical record, lest future generations think the 80s were all about snorting cocaine through $100 bills in the washroom at Bemelmens (Toronto, where I did not snort cocaine through a $100 bill in the washroom).💪

By the way, if anybody knows how to get in touch with Meredith MacNeill to read my previous and only other book so far "That Looks Good on You - You Should Buy It!" please let me know. She'd be perfect as me in the CBC television series adaptation, which would really help with my Making Do retirement plan.💃