Enjoying the Quiet

I haven't had much to say over the last couple months. I feel like I'm plugged into a unit recharging myself. I've been mostly okay with it thinking, if you don't got it, you don't got it. I do have to keep reminding myself that it's part of the cycle of living. We go through quiet moments and it's okay to simply exist in the quiet.

Things have been great at my day job. Great in the way that staying and fighting the good fight and witnessing the changes in committing to stay rather than run away. All through my life I've been the person to move on. I think it's a symptom of having moved a lot as a kid. No problem was ever too big to walk away from. Or, if I had a problem it was no big deal because we'd probably be moving soon and I wouldn't have to face the problem anymore. It's not easy to speak your mind every single day at every opportunity when people misunderstand us. My worry was always that I would come across as the angry Black woman. I know if I'm just seen as the angry Black woman then no one will ever 'HEAR' what I'm saying.

I stayed even with the worry. I stayed and consistently spoke my mind. I stayed and things have become so good for me in my position, relationships have surpassed what I could ever believe they could have become. I stayed and this current state of contentment has made me quiet. Last week I was able to move into the realization that I don't have to fight anymore. People are listening to me. People are valuing the work that I do. So now that I don't have to be on hyper alert what shall I do?

I've been contemplating my personal 9 year and what past junk I can get rid of, heal myself from. Behaviours and mind sets that have served me well in the past but are no longer needed, like my nature to run away. I remember a friend Jordan saying to me years ago that we often carry survival techniques with us that served us well when we were in crisis but can sabotage our lives when we are no longer in crisis. Those words have always stayed with me in a profound way.

It is astounding to me to have witnessed someone who didn't believe a word I said to seeing that person value my opinion and ideas. That has been a truly powerful experience and lesson for me. And so I'm still in my quiet. I am deep breathing, meditative breathing, into my quiet. I am listening to what my silence has to say to me. What other powers might I have if I stick to one goal? What other survival techniques can I transform?

I've been quietly unearthing my buried treasure. I've been thinking about the light, my light, that I have to offer. It's a little flickering candle at the moment. I've been nurturing it and very mindful of those who would blow on it with insensitivity. I've been acknowledging my fragility, that's the part I never admit to. I like to scare people out of affecting my fragility. I scare people by being the elephant trampling everything in her path. I scare people by being the deadly Mother bear who runs at danger with hysterical fear protecting her baby cub.

Now that I know how to do that, use those survival techniques to protect my fragility, my little flickering candle, how do I learn how to share myself with openness? How do I bring the self protective side and the fragile side out together? That is my goal to work on in my Personal 1 year in 2013.

Silence

I’ve always wanted to do a silent retreat. From the first time I ever heard it existed, I’ve wanted to do one. I have a feeling I’ll probably become addicted to them.

I’m a person who thrives in silence. Especially because my work life is so filled with constant chatter. I work with all men by day and if you think women are chatty, we’ve been sold a bill of goods. Ha-ha! My part time job is also a chat-fest. No matter what job I am at, people always want to know what I am doing in that moment and if they don’t ask about that then they have to tell me something random. I’m not always interested.

I’m not an idle chit-chat kind of person. I have no use for it. I have no patience for it. I think it’s a time filler and I could be doing better things with my time. I also believe that if you have nothing worthwhile to say then don’t say anything. It may sound cranky but not everyone’s a chitchat person. A little bit of silence never hurt anyone.

There are so many reasons why people engage in idle chit-chat. It’s a way to avoid the silence. For many people it’s uncomfortable to be with someone and not talk. Some people feel that they’re being rude if they don’t talk. Some people don’t understand that you can be connected in silence with a simple smile. Some people just love the sound of their own voices. Some people are bored and want you to be their entertainment. Some people are trying to get you to like them …

For me, the constant chatter drains me. I’m a good listener, a great listener actually, and it’s exhausting being a great listener. I empathize with what I hear, I feel it emotionally and physically. I have anxiety and worry for the person I am listening to if it’s a troubled story. I feel heavy in my shoulders if the chatter is just foolishness. It’s all energy.

I was raised to be seen and not heard. I’m of that generation. Being seen and not heard, something I perfected, meant I did a lot of listening. I knew a lot about the adults, things that I shouldn’t have known at my age, but I was so good at being quiet, they’d forget that I was there. And if they’d look over at me to see if I was listening I’d busy myself in some way or not show any facial reaction, to make it seem like I didn’t understand what I was listening to. I literally was raised to be a good listener.

It’s hard now, though, as an adult, and I almost need to shake it off, shake that energy out. It’s hard to explain. Part of it is because I’ve actually never analyzed it, I just know that it drains me.

I found myself at one point in 2003, feeling down in the dumps for an extended period of time, subsequently being diagnosed with depression and refusing to go on the meds (for a year minimum). I always go through cycles/seasons where I need more time to myself and I need to cocoon and recharge to be healthy. In 2002/2003, that season turned into an entire year. It wasn’t healthy anymore. I made the decision that it was my thinking that got me into this trouble so I’d have to use my thinking to get me back out of it.

I took a hard look at the people in my life, what they gave me, what I felt they took away from me. We can really spend an entire lifetime doing what everybody else wants in the name of maintaining relationships. I looked at how much I loved the people in my life. Was the love strong enough for me to continue the way things were? Was the love strong enough to commit to discussing with them the changes I needed for us to remain in each others lives? I became more honest about how I felt. And most importantly, I became more precious about my time.

My time. I’m not going to leave my house to sit at your house to watch TV. I can stay home and watch the shows I actually want to see. I’m not going to suffer through another dinner with friends of yours who I’m not in love with (not even in like with)if that’s the only way I can spend time with you. I’m not going to come spend time with you on your work break to have to sit through a thousand and one people coming up to talk to you because they just have to tell you something that they could have told you all day long. And you don’t bother to say, “Listen, come see me later, I’m with my friend Shelley who I never get to see.”

My time. Hah, Depression made me learn to put myself first in My Life. I’m not going to do everything your way so you feel great and I feel like an exhausted piece of shit. My life.

I’m such a firm believer that illness is an indication that change needs to happen in our lives. The gift of illness is like a decluttering. With my stomach problems when I was a teenager, my doctor a stomach specialist, told me to speak up for myself otherwise I’d be sick for the rest of my short life. Because I wouldn’t live long with those stomach problems that I had.

In 1991, My Naturopath asked me after I’d been hospitalized for 2 weeks with 3 types of rashes all over my body, “What or who is getting under your skin? What’s making your blood boil that’s turning your skin into 3 rashes?”

And in 2000, after two years of getting colds where my ears would fill with liquid and I couldn’t hear, I finally started to ask myself, “What do I not want to hear?”

Today, Idle chit chat is one of the things I don't want to hear. lol

The thing about listening to others all the time is that, at some point, I can no longer hear that voice in my head. You know that voice? She’s so quiet. She whispers and she only whispers once and her whisper is connected to my gut. Somehow her whisper yanks me in my gut , untangles the knot, and creates a subtle energy within me that makes me nod my head once and I know what I need to do in a surefooted, tunnel vision, focused way. She brushes over my mounting fear when I’ve reached my limit in a situation and burn a bridge. Sometimes the only way you can leave or change is by burning that bridge, leaving yourself with no choice. She whispers “don’t worry I’ll lead you through this. Just listen.”

When I make the space to stop listening to every chatty Cathy, I create the room within me to hear myself.

EY

John Francis, a Pisces like me, made me think about listening and silence. 17 years of not talking?

Woman's Work

I recently got my own office at my day job. Well, I share it with my boss’ assistant but he has so many meetings that he’s hardly ever there. Being moved to my own office has really changed my attitude. I’m a whole lot less cranky. In fact, I’m downright happy!

When I was down in the main office, I was the go to person for everything. If a contractor, security, the mailman, housekeeping, Joe Blow came into the office, they came to me first. If the phone rang, the expectation was that I would answer it despite the fact that we have two other extensions.

As is the case in every workplace, we have more and more work to do and the same amount of hours to do the work in. When there are three other guys ( I work with all men) in the office you would think that one of them could take it upon themselves to answer the ringing phone especially when I look busy. What they do instead is they look over at me as if to say, “isn’t she going to answer that?”

That’s what started to make me cranky.

I’ve never worked with so many people who receive so many personal phone calls at work in my entire working career. I can honestly count on one hand the number of times I’ve received personal calls at work . Three of them, on Sept 11th, 2011 because I didn’t have internet access, didn’t have a radio and it was important to know if the world was ending. It really did feel that way. All my friends and family know not to call me at work, if they even have my work phone number, because they’ve been told, “Don’t call me at work.”

In this day and age, you can contact me on my land-line, my cell phone, by email (I have two personal accounts), on Facebook and you know, leave a message. But call me at work? No! I’m at work to, you know, to work.
A couple of years ago I broached the subject with my co-worker that I would appreciate it if he answered the phone half the time. “It would be different ,” I said, “if all the calls were work-related but half the calls are personal and a lot of them are yours. I don’t see any reason why I should have to stop what I am doing to answer all the calls to say, it’s for you.”

He told me that he looks at the call display to see if it’s for him and if it’s not he doesn’t answer.
“Well no, that’s not entirely true because I’ve sat here and watched you not look at the phone repeatedly.”
“Fine,” he said with THAT tone of voice, “I’ll tell my wife to stop calling.”

Um, in what part of this discussion did I say that your wife calls too much?

We had a silent moment and I backed off because I didn’t want to turn it into a war especially since we get along so well. And I tried a new tactic. If I saw that a call was for him, instead of answering, I’d say, “it’s for you.” Something about that change made him realize that yes, it was true, he wasn’t looking at the phone, ever. And he improved somewhat. He started looking at the phone sometimes. Especially on the second ring when he realized I might not be answering because it was for him. Of course there was still the case of everybody else’s personal calls.

With my move to my new office, I still have an extension to the main office but now I have my own direct number. If a call comes through on the main office number that looks like it might be for me, I answer it, but 90% of the calls I no longer answer. The guys now have the responsibility of answering the phone and there is some serious grumbling about it.

It’s become like an episode of ,”The week the women left,” a show where the women of a small community are transported to a week’s vacation sans children and their husbands are left to fend for themselves taking care of all they’ve taken for granted. It’s a lovely world when everything is automatically done for you. It’s a rude awakening when you find out, through experience, that it’s darn time consuming when you have to do it yourself.
A couple of my guys have asked me, ‘Don’t you answer the phone anymore?”

“I answer it if it’s for me but it doesn’t make sense for me to answer the phone to put it on hold and yell down the stairs to tell you that it’s for you, especially when it’s a personal phone call.”

“OH!”

Don’t even get me going on what we deem “women’s” work or a “secretary’s” job…

It’s one of the stories of my life actually, that expectation that I’ll take care of everything and know my place. I do for a time, until I get tired or I take a good hard look at the unfairness of a situation and I speak up. My assertiveness always pisses off the other person, the person called on their actions or lack of actions, as the case usually is. But I have to speak up.

It reminds me of the first time I finally spoke up within my family. When I was assigned all the housework at 13 years old. My step-dad would come home and survey the house to see what I ‘d done or more appropriately, what I hadn’t done yet. And he’d tell me, “you haven’t cleaned the bathroom yet, you haven’t cleaned the kitchen yet…” He was my first micro-manager. Lol No wonder I can’t tolerate being micromanaged, but I digress.

In my meekness I suffered in silence for months but then even I couldn’t take it anymore and I spoke up. I stood in the living room while he and my mother were watching television and I waited until they noticed me.
“What do you want?” he asked with that tone of voice.

I looked at the carpet and said softly, “If you don’t pay me to do the housework, I’m not going to do it anymore.”
The volume of the television was quickly turned down and the stepfather said, “What did you just say?”
“If you don’t pay me to do the housework, I’m not going to do it anymore. You come home and all you ever notice is what I haven’t done yet.”

Then came the yelling and swearing and the accusations of being an ingrate and troublemaker and how they could never simply have a nice quiet night at home because I ruined everything. Everything!

I was sent to my room with a, “get out of my face,” and had to sit in silence listening to all the qualities that proved there was something wrong with me. As I listened though, there was a little smile mixed in with my thundering heartbeat because I’d said what I wanted to say despite how completely terrifying it was. The yelling and complaining ended with something along the lines of, “I’ll show her if she thinks she’ll get away with this.”
The next step of course is that I knew I had to actually follow through on my word. And for a week I didn’t do the dishes, the dusting, didn’t clean the bathroom or any of the other chores I’d been assigned to do. With a few more days of bad moods and worse words, they caved and started to pay me.

Now, I have to say that I understood why they had assigned me the chores but the unfairness was that I’d inadvertently found out that Step dad’s daughters, who were both younger than me, received a larger allowance and received “extra” money from my mother. That I Could Not Tolerate! So yes they paid me to be their live in maid and complained to anyone who would listen that I MADE them pay me. But it taught me a fine lesson.

At work, for the first time ever, it has been someone else who saw the unfairness in my situation and fought my battle by moving me. It was my boss’s boss (the big guy) who’d come into the main office, watched what was going on and asked, “How the hell does she ever get any work done with all those interruptions?”

Right? I told the big guy recently that I am so thrilled that every time I see him I’ll give him four kisses, one for each cheek. Ha-ha! (I got that joke from Charlie Parker who kissed Richard Nixon’s cheeks four times.)
It’s still not resolved, I’m sure. There will probably be more complaining before the guys finally realize that maybe they should receive their personal phone calls at home or suck it up and answer the phone since I’m not going to. Time will tell, and I will continue to state the facts… I wasn’t hired to take messages from your creditors, your dentist & doctor, your wife, or your friend who wants to know if you’ve gone on break yet so he can meet you on it.

EY

26May12 - Watching Ken Burns Jazz and the quote is actually from Duke Ellington. He was honoured by the then President Nixon at the White House and in accepting the honour kissed Nixon 4 times. When Nixon asked him, "Why 4 times." Duke said, "once for each cheek." :)

Quiet Time

Wednesday 5:34am 30Apr08
It's hard to take quiet time for myself. I always think that there is something better that I should be doing, like writing or cleaning the apartment or having more of a social life or something, anything. But as I move into the second or third week of this I'm seeing the definite benefits.

I'm finding a peace within that I don't think I've ever had before. Heck, I know I never had it. The biggest change I notice is that when I get ticked off I don't seem to hold on to it for hours on end. I have my moment and then move on just as quickly. I've started this growl that makes my co worker laugh to no end. Whenever I get on a good rant and catch myself doing it, I stop the rant and growl like a dog. Ado and I have named it doing the growl since he too has started doing the same thing when he gets into a particularly strong rant. Apparently he's got his wife doing it too now. Too cute!

But back to the anger. I used to set myself up with getting pissed off about something and thinking or naming it as a bad day. "Oh this is going to be a GREAT day!" I'd say, with that attitude. Now I recognize that it isn't the day, it's just a moment and they all pass. Call it and move on. Talk show host, one of the guys I work with, likes to push people's buttons to the extent where they get so worked up they can't let go. He used to pull that shit on me and although I'm happy to say that it's been about a year since I cured that, I still get to watch him do that with the others. But my major amusement with him is when he tries to check and see if he can catch me with it and I show him once again that no, I'm cured!

With my biweekly Shiastsu treatments I keep listening to what my aching body is telling me. I can't keep going the way I was going without being in constant pain. My body keeps telling me that even though I feel young at heart my age is creeping up there and I just can't sit for 12 hours at a time without a break, working myself to the max. I've got to get wiser with how I focus my energies. If I hold my stubbornness in my neck then what the heck else do I hold in my body? Where do I hold my anger and frustrations? I read somewhere that arthritis is frustration. Don't know if it's true but it's definitely something to think about.

The last several years with the changes I've made about the type of people I allow into my life, I realize that I was teaching myself to say no. Ah the lovely word NO! So many women don't know how to say no. I've learned how to say no to those guilt trippy requests that people will put on you. I've learned how to say no to people who want to monopolize my attention but don't want to reciprocate with the listening part. I've learned how to say no to all sorts of stuff and yes to my sanity. It's amazing that there is still something else to work on. But with the creeping age, I'm getting more comfortable with that too. As long as we're alive, there's something to work on and it's good to be alive, right?

I've been listening to Cheryl Richardson's, "Create an Abundant Life" CD from my Simply Audio Book monthly rental. One of the things she says is, "A high quality life has a lot more to do with what you remove from your life than what you add to it."

Hmm, somehow it motivated me to go through my kitchen and purge the clutter. Why does one person need 50 coffee mugs? Yikes! It's not like I'll ever have 49 guests. If leaving the country is a possibility for me, I need to get rid of a lot of stuff. But in the meantime, if I want to make room for the good that life has to offer, it's time to get rid of all the stuff that I've been holding on to that I haven't touched in years and takes up a whole lot of space. Boy oh boy, those bags of garbage and recycling and stuff left for others to pick through added some serious breathing space in my kitchen. I've got more to do in the rest of the apartment and I'm actually looking forward to it. For the first time in at least a couple years, I can see the surface of my kitchen table. Not that I ever eat in the kitchen but I could now. What a concept.

It's funny how having a lot of stuff always seemed like such a great thing and now I'm getting how it's just bogging me down. Once I get through all the papers and things I figure I'll have the guts to go through my massive collection of books and let go of the ones I know I'll never read again. And at the very least, reorganize them. One step away from a life of pack rat insanity.

EY