Serenity to Accept

It's humbling to admit that you've lived most of your life in a state of denial. That's where I have lived most of my life. 

Mostly I've denied my own powerlessness to change one or more things about people - either myself or the people I love. I liked to think that I could manipulate a situation ... or a person ... even resorting to intimidation at times, so they would be funneled into a course of action that would benefit me. 

I was wrong. Yet it took me nearly five decades to realize it. 

My manipulation took the form of emotional blackmail, usually. It is something that I still struggle with, on occasion. I'd treat the behavior of someone else as an attack on me personally so as to make that person feel guilty and therefore do what I wanted. They'd do what I wanted, all right, and resent me for it. Or, I'd overreact to a decision someone else had a right to make, and refuse to participate in it, ruining their enjoyment of it. 

Occasionally, I'd even lose my temper and make people afraid to cross me in certain areas - ruling and controlling by making them feel threatened, unsafe.

It's not something I'm proud of. But it happened. Frequently. 

About two months into a healing process that for me took a total of a year, I was introduced to the concept of acceptance - an acceptance that is based on my total inability to change any person, any outcome, any situation - acceptance of what is and that which cannot be changed. It involved learning to let go of my need to control something - ANYTHING - about someone or something. 

Within weeks of that mental attitude shift, my loved ones - those closest to me - noticed, in a way bordering on astonishment. "What's with Mom? why isn't she freaking out?" I heard whispered behind me. And I'd smile to myself. Of course it wasn't easy to let go, to NOT "freak out" - but the dividends paid off every time, and the positive response was incentive to keep at it. I got to like the way my relationships strengthened when I let people be who they were without fear of my disapproval or my other equally unpleasant responses to their beliefs, choices, and words. 

In fact, the more I practiced the skill of letting go, the more I realized how many things there were over which I had no control, much as I would have liked. Even things I had always thought I could influence - and sometimes I could - I discovered that I had no right to touch. 

Having grown up in a dysfunctional home, I never knew that anyone had a right to have boundaries. Nothing was ever private; nothing was beyond the scrutiny and judgment of others who wielded power (real or imagined) over me and my brothers. Everything was everybody else's business. The only boundary there was pertained to the shroud of secrecy that covered anything that happened inside the four walls of the homestead. Everything else, though, was fair game. Every word, action, thought was subject to being evaluated, praised or condemned after it passed through the parental filter.... and by parental I mean that every adult in the whole family (and extended family: aunts, uncles, grandparents) felt he or she had the right to pass judgment on the appearance, words, and beliefs of everyone else, especially every child.  The children, on the other hand, had no right to do the same to the parents. Infractions of this code were met with swift and severe punishment.

Nobody ever questioned this fact of life. The attitude was that as soon as we grew up and had families of our own, we would have the same right they exercised on a daily basis, with our own children. 

When I began to heal from that toxic atmosphere, which unfortunately carried into adulthood, I realized more and more that this assumption of the right to pass judgment on others was not just dysfunctional, it was downright sick and wrong. I familiarized myself intimately with the notion that everyone has boundaries, and that these boundaries need to be respected - including mine. That knowledge helped me figure out what, who and where I needed to let go, to accept not only who and what I couldn't change but who and what I had no right to change even if I could. 

And even then, I had (and have) no power in myself to accept those things and people that I need to accept. That power comes from above - from the peace of my continued relationship with God. Knowing and resting on the fact that God looks after me, that He is calmly and lovingly in control of all things - including me, including those I love, including every circumstance - gives me the strength and the serenity to accept what I cannot change.

This is not a fatalistic acceptance either. It is an active choice to allow people to be who they are, to let them make their own decisions and to let them live with the consequences of their own actions, no matter how much I am tempted to make it easier for them. It is a decision to not rail against circumstances, to not take them personally, to realize that everyone has "stuff" and that it's okay to feel what I feel about it, experience it and then let it go. 

The lifestyle I'm learning is like being handed a new key ring that unlock doors previously closed to me, opening pathways I never dreamed possible. Acceptance was the first key I learned how to use - and I have used it every day since. I have discovered, over time, that it is the first key to something that eluded me before, but which I have been able to experience more and more: happiness. 

Live. Today.

One day melds into the next, and each day glides past like precious beads slipping off a string into the abyss of yesterday, escaping from our grasp to be caught no more. 

We talk about living our lives. I talk about it, anyway. But do I really live? or am I just existing?

Existing versus Living

Mediocrity comes in many forms. Life can take on a sort of monotony especially if I spend it waiting for the next big thing to happen: the next paycheck, the next vacation, the next visit, the next long weekend, Christmas, Easter, summer. (Yawn). Routine is a great thing and can give structure to life, but too much routine can make my life blah and uninteresting. I go on auto-pilot, and I end up looking up at the calendar one day, and wondering where the month (or the season) went. Is it really less than six weeks to Christmas Day? Wow! The pressures of expectations for the future can weigh on me and cause me to slip into fretting, worrying about things that haven't happened and may not ever happen! 

I forget to look after myself, to make time for me-care. I look after the urgent things, the things that scream at me to be done while my own insecurities convince me that my needs aren't as important as those things, and they'll get done "eventually." However, "eventually" usually doesn't happen unless I make time for it to happen. By the time I get around to it, something else intrudes and takes precedence. So, I never get around to it! 

Dreams stay dreams. I find it hard to take time to even think about the small steps I want to take in order to put those dreams in motion, and even harder to take the time to actually take those steps.

Life just ... happens. And sometimes it happens without me being aware of it. I get into a rut, and keep doing what I always did, hoping to get a different result. Like that's going to work.

Making a start

Living on auto-pilot is easy; I need to face it. I also need to realize that easy isn't necessarily good. Living intentionally ... is hard. The trick about getting out of that rut is to make a start. It doesn't take a lot of brain power or even a lot of will power. It doesn't even take big changes. It takes a simple decision to put one foot in front of the other, to make tiny changes that are progressive. 

The operative word is Today. Start - today. Begin to live ... now. Not tomorrow. Today.
It's okay to ask for help; it's okay to make mistakes as I go. I can learn to let go of the errors and keep going, rather than give up in frustration. 

Change will happen. The scenery does change. I know it; I feel it. It might not change as fast as I would like, but if I keep making those miniscule choices, I'll look up one day and think to myself, "Hey. That was living!" 

And if that takes a while, perhaps I can just enjoy the journey instead of wishing myself at the finish line all the time. That will happen soon enough. That's the other thing about Today. It's Today; it's not next week, next year, ten years from now. It's today. That's where I can truly live.

First Things First: Are They?

Priorities: everyone has them.

Family. Work. Friends. Money. Leisure. And oh yes, God. And somewhere in there ... me?  It's one thing to have priorities, another thing to put them in the right order - and a whole different ball of wax to be true to them.

It's really worth the extra time it takes to list them out and put them in order - not necessarily on paper, although if that helps, why not? 

Priorities wheel found at
Women on the Fence

However, the exercise doesn't end there. It's not enough for me to say that this or that is most important (or SHOULD be - I hate the word "should" ... just saying), A followed by B, C, D and E. It's useful to examine, for starters, how much time I spend on the things I say are priorities, and find out whether some things need to be adjusted in my daily schedule. 

There are core priorities that I'd call "anchors" - these aren't just a matter of how much time I spend on them, in the sense of compartments in my life that don't touch each other, but rather, how they affect my decisions in every facet of life. They consist of core relationships: with God, with myself, and the outflow of those things: principles, beliefs, and character. 

If those things are in place, a lot of the guesswork involved in figuring out how to spend my time or what I should do next ... just fades away.  

It's not a perfect world

Nevertheless, it isn't a perfect world. Things change. Unexpected events happen: money troubles creep in, relationships begin ... or end, someone important to me moves away, another friend just moves onto a different path, someone else's social or political agenda affects mine, and my carefully-laid foundations can get shaken. I get hurt. I doubt myself. I doubt God. I question my ability to know what He wants; I question His love and care for me. I am unsure about my place in the world.  I become suspicious of others' motives.

Life has a way of throwing tantrums: circumstances scream at me in such a way that the peripheral things - the things that don't matter so much, the urgent things - tend to take center stage for a while. I lose touch with - or flat-out deny - what I'm feeling. Or why. (Big mistake!)  Before I know it, the priorities have started to shift, and I'm not exactly sure what's happened. All I know is that I feel uncomfortable, as if something is not quite right. Stress builds; unhappiness niggles at me, tugs at my sleeve. I get fatigued. If I ignore that, the discontent grows stronger, and I feel like I'm dragging myself around. Everything becomes an effort - even things I enjoy doing. Little things people say or do to me become huge - even things they don't say or do. I begin to perceive that I'm being attacked or persecuted ... when in fact, no such thing is happening. (A colleague told me once, "It's not like these people are laying awake at night trying to figure out ways to deliberately ruin your day." That helped me get some perspective.) 

When I step back and look at what I've allowed to take the spotlight, that's when it makes sense. That's why it's crucial for me to not just do the mental exercise of setting priorities once; I need to do it on a regular basis to make sure that the things that need to be at the center of my life are actually staying there, or if they've been upstaged by things that could have waited their turn ... instead of slowly (yet just as rudely as if it happened quickly) bumping to the front of the line.

If I allow that to happen, my spiritual and mental unrest will have physical consequences eventually. My body will become unwell - and it will force me to "lie down in green pastures." I will get sick, that is. The physical symptoms of stress will come to the fore: headaches, stomach troubles, joint aches, even a lowering of the immune system so that I succumb to some sort of virus. On the flat of my back, a lot of priorities become so clear - and I begin to get them straight and live in gratitude again. 

There was a time when I had to be laid flat out in bed every time, in order for me to pay attention to what really mattered. I can't say that never happens now - just that it's not as often. I guess life has beaten me down enough times for me to be able to catch the warning signs more quickly than before. Or maybe I'm growing spiritually ... stranger things have happened!   ;)

Who knew?

What I do know is that since I gave my will and my life over to Him all over again (approximately March/April 2009), I've noticed a difference - albeit slow, but a difference nonetheless. 

 Perhaps He took me at my word. 

Rigorous Honesty

Would it shock you to know that I, who have been a Christian since age 12 and a committed Christian since age 16, spent most of that time being dishonest?

Of course, it started long before age 12 ... but after I was converted, this was one area where I didn't see the need for change, because I didn't even know I was doing it. 

Don't call it lying

Secrets were a huge part of my upbringing. 

Two rules reigned supreme: 
(1) Don't make Mom angry, and 
(2) Don't ever talk about what happens inside this house. 

I remember a time when I was nine or ten, innocently asking my mother in a store if we could afford this item (I even forget what it was) only to be grabbed by the arm and taken out of earshot forcibly. She got her face twelve inches from mine and hissed, "I don't want these people to know we don't have enough money to buy things!! You be careful what you say in public!!"

Oh. So I'm supposed to not tell the truth. In other words, lying is okay if it protects the family image. But don't call it lying. Cover that part up: it's not lying - it's protecting the ones you love.

Image from
What Career Needs to be Studied to be a Social Worker?

This message was repeated over and over, combined with fear-mongering to keep me in line. When I let it slip to a teacher at age 15 that I'd been abused, he got a social worker involved. They sat in our kitchen and confronted my mother with me present about the situation. She asked for a moment alone with me and took me in the other room. "You know what's going to happen here don't you? They're going to come in and separate you and your brother from us and put you in foster care, somebody might even end up in jail, and none of us will ever be able to look anyone in this town in the eye again. Do you really want to be responsible for that?"  

My eyes grew wide. She continued, "I want you to go back out there and tell those people you made the whole thing up. It's the only way out of what you did." 

What I did? 

I reluctantly did as she told me, feeling betrayed and wounded to the core, and deep inside I learned once more that the truth would always need to be sacrificed to make loved ones look good. Even if it was wrong.

So, when as a young mother I figured out that my husband had been an alcoholic for several years, I was understandably upset, but soon naturally bought into the cycle of lies that repeated more and more often to get him out of tight spots, so he didn't look bad, and so his (and possibly my?) reputation didn't suffer. "He must have had something that disagreed with him." "He won't be in to work today, he's not feeling well, probably some 24-hour thing." "He's been feeling a little weepy lately. I'm sure it will pass."

Things started to unravel in February 2006, when he ended up fighting for his life after drinking windshield washer fluid. The doctors treated it like a suicide attempt and he let them (and me) think that rather than admit the depth of his addiction. (Not until much later did I learn that he just wanted another drink and couldn't afford to go to the liquor store.) Thanks to the love of friends, I managed to make it through that ordeal. In the process, though, I was forced to tell the children that their father was an alcoholic and that he'd been one for their entire lives. 

They didn't take it well. They blamed ME.

The beginning of rigorous honesty

When the house of cards fell apart in April 2007, and he ended up in Detox for a week, that's when he had to admit to himself that he was an alcoholic and that maybe he needed some help. We started attending a 12-step group in May 2007, where we learned about a whole new way of living which demands "rigorous honesty." In the practical sense, that meant that if members "fell off the wagon" they would be honest enough to admit it to the group, and start off all over again from square one. Instead of the condemnation they expected, they received nothing but acceptance and encouragement to keep on keeping on, to take one day at a time and move forward. 

It took nearly two years of attending meetings, relapsing and ending up in the hospital on occasion for him to get the full extent of the Program - and it took me nearly as long as it took him. All the while, I tried to protect him, afraid of the negative repercussions on our reputations, on our ministries, on our children. They were already feeling the effects of a father-absent home even with him here. And, I had sucked them into the same web of deceit I'd been weaving; this time though, it backfired and they kept his drinking from me so that I wouldn't "freak out." 

I was supremely unhappy by that point; I considered leaving him to save myself the anguish of seeing him in blackouts and drunken stupors. Secretly, I felt that it was my fault that he was drinking, that if I was only a better wife, a better housekeeper and a better mother, he'd not feel the need to drink. I didn't understand the true nature of addiction. And I truly believed that were I to admit all these feelings to people in the church, even to my friends, that nobody would understand and that I would be judged, criticized and condemned. 

When he lost his driver's license in December 2008, something snapped inside of me. I saw this long, six-month period ahead of me in the dead of winter, and me being the only driver in the house, as the straw that broke the camel's back. I was scared. I needed help. So, I called a family counselor who understood addictions, and I talked to him. We set up regular sessions, and he began to walk me through the Twelve Steps, a blueprint for relationship with God, with self, and eventually with others.

That's when Rigorous Honesty started to make more sense to me. It wasn't just about telling the anonymous people in a group about my failings, and compartmentalizing that portion of my life without it affecting anything else. It was about being honest with ME. It was about being honest with God. And THEN it was about being honest with other people. 

Over the course of the next year, my life did a complete one-eighty. The outside looked pretty much the same - but I was a different person as I reached my 1-year anniversary of "recovery" from the need to control, intimidate, and manipulate people and circumstances. I was also recovering from being a doormat - learning to set boundaries, to let people bear responsibility for their own actions instead of blaming myself for them. I was learning that it is perfectly okay - indeed, even preferable and very freeing - to live a lifestyle which demands rigorous honesty.

Best of all, when I was about 2 months into my own healing process, my husband began his own journey of freedom from alcohol, independent of me and without my help. His first Christmas sober (2009) was the capstone for him; he celebrated nine months sober that day, and realized that his hourly cravings to drink were a thing of the past, and that he was even beginning to feel content without booze. In April 2010, he and I agreed to do a ten-minute Youtube video for a production for our church: a video about the miracles we each had experienced in the area of our addictions: his to alcohol and mine to control-freaking and doormat-itis, and we found such freedom in that. We also discovered which people among our circle of friends hung around with us because of us, and which ones were only attracted to our reputations.

About six weeks ago, my husband celebrated three and a half years of sobriety. 

Reminders like this necklace, hand-made by a new friend of mine, make sense now. Looking back over the last four years, with all those dark days and tough slogging of those first few months followed by a gradual emergence into light and truth ... and yes, happiness, I marvel at the contrast. I can't get over how drastically our lives have changed in such a short amount of time. 

And I wouldn't trade that for anything.

Site Name Change - Words That Stay

Kira:  "What is writing?
Jen:  "Words that stay."

I've decided to go back to what I love best: writing. Not correcting other people's writing (even though I am capable of it) but just writing for the sheer joy of creating "words that stay."

Through the magic that is Google Blogger, I was able to come up with a new website address (sorry, "judyswriting.blogspot.com" was already taken). The new title is based on a scene taken from Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal -  and it is one of the most powerful descriptions of the written word I have ever heard. 

Words that stay. This is the allure of writing for me: that I can communicate my thoughts, my words, to someone across the room, or a world away from me. This is "the wow factor."

I don't know where this blog will take me. What I do know is that you can come along for the ride if you like. "Following" information is on the right panel of the page.  

I'll be back, as Arnie S. would say...

My apologies

Judy's Proofreading is officially out of business.

Nobody who hasn't already got a pile of money can compete with ad campaigns for software programs that offer the same services as I do without exposing my potential customers the embarrassment of someone else checking their work for them. It might have flown as an idea twenty years ago when computers were still a luxury, but now everyone seems to have at least one, and I guess this kind of service (in the format I offered it) is a dinosaur.

I've decided to close up shop. Now if I could only close down / delete this blog.

Hm. Perhaps that's a bit drastic. Perhaps it will morph into something else; one can never tell.