swirling

this week felt like a blur of furious activity and a jumble of varied emotions. my therapy session on thursday, in which i recounted the thoughts and feelings i'd been having over the previous two weeks was more challenging than i expected. i guess the challenge was that while dr. s and i may have been discussing perspectives from the last couple of weeks, the topics those thoughts were about stretched over the course of my lifetime -- my relationship with my mother, the lack of one with my father, my marriage to michael, my struggle to summon the courage to risk new relationships, my frustrations at work, the pain i experienced with spending much of the first 34 years of my life struggling with my sexual orientation. we covered quite a bit of territory in the course of that hour, and when i left i felt like my head was filled with a tornado of swirling images and reactions.

and today, well,  the swirling motion has subsided, but there is a feeling akin to that eerie silence that often follows a devastating display of nature's fury. part of me wonders if it's a sign of my medication working almost too well. i have this sense of calm even though i know that i've just been reminded of a lifetime of hurt.

it's funny. when you tell the stories of the challenges of your life to others and see their reactions, you become more acutely aware of how "not good" many of the things you've experienced truly are. while i'm aware that no one emerges from this life without experiencing some type of suffering, i do believe that the degree of it varies from person to person and that just because we all suffer doesn't make the severity of the conditions we go through any less real or the damage any less significant. and yet, somehow they all fall back into the context of "well, it's your life and you do your best to deal with it." i'm doing my best, but the wind keeps kicking up when i least expect it.

frenzy

i'm not exactly sure what's going on, but lately the pacing in my work life has seemed to go from really busy to insanely busy in pretty short order and the mood from everyone around me is that everything needs to be done not yesterday but the week before last. there is such a frenzied, almost chaotic energy in the air that at times can be overbearing but frankly right now i'm finding it mostly annoying.

i mean what is really going to be accomplished by rushing to implementation? and yet this seems to be the standard operating procedure that is being adopted by many of the departments around the company. we're doing our best to remain focused and disciplined in how we operate in my department, but when there's a three ring circus going on around you, it can be more than a little distracting. this fact is particularly true when you are asked to participate in poorly designed processes or meet ridiculous expectations from your organizational partners. the approaches may seem reasonable to others, but frankly i'm not really interested in climbing out of any clown cars or picking up a chair and a whip to tame some lions.

our work is complex and challenging enough. do we really need to add rushing to conclusions and being careless in our approaches to make it even harder?

another shift in mood

another monday ambles in, and i'm sorry to report i'm not in the best of spirits today. it's strange too as, for the first time in a long, long time, i had a pretty productive day yesterday. i actually did the laundry, went grocery shopping, filled up my car with gas and got it washed, paid some bills, and most significantly, unpacked several boxes. i did notice though as i headed to bed that i had a lingering sense of melancholy. i thought it would dissipate with a good night's sleep. it has not.

if anything, my mood is probably at a lower point after the sleep (which was good and solid) than it was when i laid my head on the pillow. maybe it's the weekend's reflections on my father. maybe it's the thought of coming back to a work culture with which i'm experiencing a certain degree of frustration. maybe it's the pressure of still having much to do to get prepared for a visit from my mother -- a visit that i have mixed thoughts about. maybe it's the continued feeling of desiring to be with someone. maybe it's not having the opportunity to purge some of my angst through therapy last week due to my psychologist being on vacation. maybe it's some hiccup with my medication.

i'm not sure of the exact cause for my current mood, but as i look back on the list of all the maybes in the previous paragraph, i have to admit, with all of that facing me, i probably should be grateful that my mood isn't worse than it is. well, at least not yet.

the love of a father

so another song from if/then. i have written a few times about the effect that not growing up with a father has had on my current life. yesterday, i was listening to the cast recording of this musical as i was driving around town and this particular song came on. i have to admit that each time i have heard this song, i've thought "how nice it would have been to have a father who loved me like that." and yesterday when i had this thought, this well of emotion burst open in my heart, and i was more that a bit weepy for some time after. i find it amazing that even as old as i am there is still that kind of pain in me about a matter that i thought i'd long since come to terms about.

something that i do find kind of funny about my picking out this song is that there is another song sung by the same character, which i  posted in this entry, to which i've had a similar response of longing, but in that case it was about how much i would like to have such a decent, caring, thoughtful man in my life (and attractive to boot -- i've provided a link below to this actor's imdb page so you can take a gander).

sadly, there's no way to change the past and my lack of relationship with my father but i'll try to be hopeful that maybe this type of companion will appear someday soon.

hey kid -- james snyder in if/then