Nothing Personal, Just Enough

So I think I've got a handful of them down now, therapy tricks to feeling better.

What on earth did they do back in the day when life went seriously sideways?

I know, I know, rope, chair, barn. Rocks, pockets, sea. Shotgun, walk, woods.

This was never that. Just random attacks of nausea. Emotional dysregulation.

Anyway, recently, way back behind all the frantically firing synapses of my brain, Mother Mary came to me, whispered words of wisdom, "let it be".

Let it be.

One of the most helpful free therapy videos I watched was an unlikely woman who managed to hammer it home to me, finally, that almost all of life is out of my control - but I can still love.

Let it be. Love.

Then there was "give up your personal history" from Dr. Wayne Dyer. Also "there are no justified resentments". And "change how you look at life and life changes".

Let it be. Love. Let it go.

Still, my favourite, the man in a purple suit imploring me to take radical responsibility. It's all your fault. You made each and every choice along the way. Stop blaming others. Own your choices, your life.

Own it. Let it be. Love. Let it go.

I thought I wasn't ready to be older, and I wonder now if that's why the panic attacks, but it's not true. I am ready, just as I was ready to be a mother, ready to leave a marriage, ready to stop working - ready for it, now, to NOT be about me.

Because there's the rub. Growing up, hearing middle-aged people talk non-stop of living like irresponsible children with money to burn when they're old, we earned it, we'll burn it, and on and on and on it went and still so often goes.

Me, me, me.

And that's okay, to each their own. Those middle-aged adults then and many now didn't grow older with the privileges I did, but their older age is not for me. It was never going to be or I wouldn't have stayed home with children, left a marriage, stopped working for money when I did - two years ago now.

Imagine. And I think of myself as a money first person. Thought, I should say. I thought of myself as a money first person. Another story I told myself that turned out to be not true.

Own it. Let it be. Love. Let it go.

But live my life, not somebody else's, and certainly not the one and only advertised on television. We laugh at the Globe and Mail's advice to wealthy young couples on how to save for older age but we still fall for it. How can we have enough in a culture based on more?

Counter-culture, I guess. Find where all the old hippies are hanging out. Join the gang giving back to get what we need.

Own it. Let it be. Love. Let it go. Enough.

Thanks for reading.

Safe and Secure

Yesterday, out walking Bernie (resident hound/lab/beagle/?) I ran into a woman I know from our wait for the bus to work.

Just another person in the 'hood I can count on to be a fellow traveller.

That's mostly the case, of course, but we do have Freedom Convoyers in our midst, including an unvaccinated neighbour and former nurse I talk to on the regular, avoiding the obvious for the sake of neighbourliness, but keeping my physical distance just the same.

Anyway, my bus stop acquaintance was out for a walk during her public service work day, her lunch hour, and we got to talking about how it is in government these days.

Crazy. Way too much work. Complaints from the public over the top. Everybody at their rope's end. Not enough staff. People off on stress leave, sick, retiring.

So, same old, same old, just that much worse. And, speaking of, I know pretty much for a fact, from the horse's mouth, if the Liberals put hate speech back in Canadian human rights legislation, there's no way staff will be able to keep up with complaints.

They can't keep up now, not by a long shot, it's already an impossible workload.

Canadians complain about everything. The Commission deals with an assembly line of whinging. And if that's not bad enough, Conservatives regularly spam the complaints system with claims their human rights are being abused by Justin Trudeau. Gun regulations, trans rights, abortion decriminalization, and on and on and on it goes, white Christian Conservative males are being pummelled, they tells us - pummelled.

It's criminal, really, because their brattishness delays the processing of legitimate human rights claims, which certainly do exist, but that's how Conservatives behave nowadays.

For a long time, actually. Decades. Since the Reform Party gave an official voice to the fascist assholes. Alberta Conservatives, for instance, are why the original gun registry costs were so high, the gun registry later destroyed by Stephen Harper after his party cheated its way to a majority, which it did thanks to its current leader, Pierre Poilievre.

Before that sad day in our electoral history, Alberta Conservatives used tactics provided to them by the American NRA to sabotage development of the gun registry and run up its costs to a couple of billion buckaroos.

Fascist brats, as I keep pointing out on this blog, but enough of them.

My bus waiting friend didn't mention being upset by the return to work three days a week come September, by the way. I know it's easy for me to not care, currently not working, although who knows what the future will bring, but I do want to note here for the record that I ultimately preferred doing my job at the office. I didn't have a choice at the time, because I was at the level of mailroom clerk, and inmates can only make human rights complaints by mail, but once I was back I realized I hadn't liked having the government in my home.

Yuck.

(I also don't think the government should be run out of private residences, but that's a whole 'nother thing.)

What she did mention was the fact she'd really rather not be working anymore but she's nervous about being renovicted from the home she and her son have lived in for 20 years now, so she's still at it, as are a few of her co-workers who had thought they'd retire post-pandemic only to find themselves too insecure financially to do it.

We should all be thankful, really. We need all the burnt out public servants currently still at it. The hiring process - when there isn't a freeze - is so byzantine it can take forever to bring on board fresh recruits. And it's not like the work load is decreasing.

Cue temp agencies charging the government more while their temps make less than the going rate and go to work sick because otherwise they don't get paid at all.

Also, I know I complain about Conservative governments, a lot, but I have good reason. They're saboteurs, their goal once in government to further disable public services such that Canadians who can afford to pay out-of-pocket welcome their privatization.

But really, none of us can afford for this to happen, no matter how rich we think we are, and it will be a disaster when Pierre Poilievre is PM. He'll raid our CPP, which is all many of us have by way of a pension, but such is the way of Canada that we're none of us allowed to feel secure unless we were born into the lap of luxury like that bloviating old fascist, Conrad Black.

It's natural Canadians want to own a home, preferably single, detached, but would we feel the need to put all our money into bricks and mortar if renting was affordable, renovictions not a thing, 2 and 3-bdrms widely available, if we could feel as secure renting an apartment as owning a house?

If we ALL, every Canadian, had a guaranteed liveable annual income at least by age 65?

It's a crazy way to run a country, leaving so many of us on edge, not knowing how long we'll be able to live in the apartment we finally manage to secure for our family. Intolerable, really. But the only world Doug Ford knows is the one of single detached houses in the suburbs. He thinks it's what everybody who's anybody wants, too. And to be fair to Mr. Mobbed Up to the Gills, it IS what a lot of people think they want - indeed, need - because Canadians are still conditioned from birth to believe home ownership is the only real financial security there is.

It's 2024, ffs, our world is burning where it isn't flooding, and for Conservative politicians it's STILL all about cars and 2 car garage piles in the suburbs.

Well they're out of date and we're out of time.

Please, stop voting for them.

Thanks for reading.

Competing With Ourselves

Back when I was a kid I can remember my mother being on the phone with my aunt, long distance, for hours, drinking and arguing about politics.

A month later she'd complain about the bill.

Well, I may not get a bill, but for sure there's a toll, arguing about politics online. And I'm not making the world any better, wasting time and energy arguing politics either with people who want a very different world from the one I do, or fellow travellers who just support a different way of getting there.

Paying closer attention to my own behaviour, as opposed to that of others, is not only helping me get a grip, it's helping me gain perspective.

I posted something on Facebook yesterday morning which I shortly thereafter deleted. It was a partisan post with regard to foreign interference in our elections. But better people than me are trying to keep partisanship out of this problem, so I decided not to add to their load.

What do I know of foreign interference anyway?

Well, more than Michael Chong, I guess, who apparently had to be told post election that China had been trying to intimidate him.😀

I also put a "like" to a post by a friend with whom I'm not in agreement on a current topic, which I did instead of making a comment. I did that after noticing another friend, not in agreement with her either, give her a "like".

So instructive, his "like". Kindness in action. She needed it, he gave it to her, and so did I.

Back when I was on the parent council of my kids' elementary school I remember a certain parent being very agitated about what he perceived as a failure to make our kids compete with each other. He was worried they'd get run over in the workplace because they hadn't learned to compete with coworkers in our little JK-5 elementary school.

Later I was telling my brother about him and he said he'd finally asked one such parent, "Where do work that you have to compete with your coworkers?"

Unfortunately, we were raised in a competitive education system, not a cooperative one, so in spite of earnest professionals trying to teach our children a more evolved way of being in the world (although Gabor Mate would argue we were more evolved when we were living in cooperative, not competitive, hunter/gatherer tribes) we still imprinted a competitive streak onto our kids.

That's the real problem some Millennials are having. They aren't stuck because they got a ribbon in elementary school just for trying, they're stuck because they absorbed the wrong message, the one they got at home where influence is stronger. Instead of behaving cooperatively, so every body wins, they behave competitively, so winners and losers.

And everybody can't be a Bitcoin billionaire.

It's aggravating to me, particularly as a mother, that Pierre Poilievre, a rank and callow huckster, can get away with pretending to be the solution when he's in fact the problem. We need cooperation, not competition, more spreading of the wealth and more government investment in public services.

We need to help each other, particularly our lost young men, find meaningful ways to participate in and contribute to society.

Fun Times

The other night I watched a TED Talk on the importance of having fun. Well, tried to watch it.

I gave up.

To be fair, a TED Talk seems a tough fun sell.

But increasingly I've noticed I'm not the right audience for anything fun. Am I aging out of life? Already? I'm only in my 60s. What's it going to be like when I'm in my 70s? 80s? 90s?

100s?

Thank heavens for the smorgasbord of free therapy via YouTube. Oh and crosswords. Not only are crosswords fun, they've taught me to watch out for confirmation and/or cognitive bias and/or whatever that bias is when we believe to the very core of our being an answer is correct, the only possibility, until <voila> the actual answer emerges and we're able to solve a whole section of the grid.

Just writing that gave me a little frisson, as the French say, although they probably don't say it of solving a crossword clue.

But I'm the age now my mother was five years into retirement when, like a lot of men, but also women, because women are men, too, gender being nothing more than a patriarchal construct, she was kind of at sea. I don't have anywhere near her level of income security but I doubt I'll seek gainful employment anymore anyway.

I love not working.

Trading time for money was never my thing, but I undersold myself, too, and that's my own damned fault.

I'm also the age Gram was when she came to live with us, a divorced woman who owned nothing, collecting just a small old age pension she used to pay for bus and plane trips to stay with other relatives every now and then.

If I'd been paying more attention I'd have realized sooner Gram was pretty zen, and a fine example of keeping it simple, stupid.

Anyway, as I said, for fun I've been watching a lot of YouTubes on such topics as Radical Acceptance and I came across this man, and really, the look of him was what drew me in, he was just, so... unlikely a purveyor of wisdom.

Think a silver haired Will Arnott, except a silver haired Will Arnott in real estate, not acting, and wearing a purple suit.

I'm long story shorting here, maybe even completely misinterpreting what he said, anguished, rending of garments, but he seemed to take Radical Acceptance, mesh it with "it's not your fault but it IS your responsibility" to arrive at "Radical Responsibility because it IS your fault".

Oh. My. Gord. So freeing. Suddenly, everybody else was off the hook, it was all on me, and a wave of calm descended on my world. All this time, like Dorothy in Oz looking to everybody else for help, my good witch showed up, a silver haired fox in a purple suit, to implore me to see the truth staring me in the face: It has always been up to me. I am the problem. Not everybody else. Me.

You've probably long been in on it so indulge me here while I celebrate freeing myself from trying to change others, magical thinking, bitter recriminations, and so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc, and take responsibility for every big and little choice I made along the way that has brought me here to this truly, madly, and deeply rarefied existence I enjoy in our nation's capital.

And that's not all, because no sooner had I accepted responsibility for myself, than I decided to rewatch an old favourite, and maybe you know this guy who's been around for decades, Dr. Wayne Dyer, who told me - one more time - to let go of my personal history.

Now, for quite a while, I've known myself, as you reading this likely have known of me, too, to be hauling around an anchor to the past, my life story as I've made it up to be in a thousand and one retellings, pretending it was a necessary burden in order to be a writer, that giving it up would leave me at sea, and I wouldn't know who I was anymore.

Well, it turns out I was just using that narrative to avoid taking responsibility for the choices I've been making since I was a kid, and knew right from wrong.

I've got a very good memory, too. That's a good six decades of avoidance, I'm embarrassed to admit.

Anyway, it's all of a piece, isn't it, because in not taking responsibility for my own choices, including the choice to not set boundaries for myself, I was taking responsibility for the choices of others, blaming myself, blaming them, feeling guilty, used, abused, and suffering health consequences as a result.

Well, as much wiser people than me would say, today is the first day of the rest of my life.

Thanks for reading.