Tales from the directionally-challenged: How I got lost in my neighborhood. Again.

I do a lot of fairly stupid things. Generally, I’m well-intentioned, so it’s not like I’m trying to be stupid…but intention isn’t worth shit when the outcome of what I’ve done is completely ridiculous. I swear, if ever I write a memoir, all it’s going to be is a compilation of all of the weird-ass situations that I’ve gotten myself into. Like the time I walked into my friend's house-- a house I'd been to many times--without knocking, set my purse down by the door, and then slowly realized I'd walked into the wrong house. (There were strangers sitting in the front room, staring at me…so I said “just kidding,” grabbed my purse and just walked back out the door without further ado. That’s how I handle shit.) Or the time I sucked laundry detergent out of my washing machine with a straw (read about that here). Or the (two) times that I got lost walking around my neighborhood.

Yeah, that’s right.  I got lost in my neighborhood. Twice.

To be fair, we live in a strange little place. It’s a tiny housing development that currently has one large block with a circumference of .5 miles. This neighborhood has been carved out of the middle of the Nebraska countryside, bounded on three sides by farmland and pastures. 

So we live in this weird (yet awesome. Don’t underestimate the awesome factor; I really love it out here) little enclave, and I like to go on walks. Especially in the Fall, when the combination of crisp air and golden sun is so incredibly alluring—so much so that I’d go as far as calling it delicious. If Fall could be bottled, I would drink it every day. I imagine it’d be tasty.  (And no, Fall DOES NOT taste like a Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte. You are unoriginal.)

Anyway, where I was going with this was: walking the same half-mile block over and over can get boring, and also, people get tired of looking at you. So every now and again I get a little wanderlust and strive off of the pavement and into new territory.

There are paths where new houses are going up, and some of these paths connect us to another nearby housing development—so we often use this method to get from our development to the other. It involves walking through some brush and over some pounded dirt paths, and in some places, hopping a short barbed-wire fence. It’s really not bad. (Yeah, if you’re reading this and thinking that I’m trespassing at some point on these journeys, you’re probably right. Shame on me for trying to be fit and adventurous.) Those who are less directionally-challenged than me have no problems on these off-the-beat walks. I’ve been on walks with my neighbors, so I know it is possible to stray off of our block, see some things, and get back to our block, no problemo. One of my neighbor’s dogs is even able to accomplish this.

The problem (for me, anyway) is that one of the roads back from the nearby development ends abruptly, cut off by barricades and, if that wasn't enough of a deterrent, a soybean field. Yup, the road literally ends in a beanfield. Welcome to Nebraska, y’all.

Small roadblock between me and home. 

The first time I encountered this field, I was pretty sure that the route home was through it. So I navigated through the beanfield, and when I came out the other side of it, there were two roads—one going left, and one going right. I chose to go right. Long story short, by the time I consulted my phone to figure out where the hell I was, I was several miles away from home. I had to call my (non-impressed, directional superstar, born with an effing compass in his brain) husband to come pick me up. “Why didn’t you look at the sun?” he said. As if that works.

The road I ended up on. It's pretty, right? I mean, at least there was good scenery. And mile markers.

My neighbors really do pity me, and so after I told them about how I got lost, they took me out to try to help me find the error of my ways. Under their tutelage I realized that my beanfield jaunt had been the CORRECT directional choice, but I should have turned left after I got through the field.

So you can imagine my excitement yesterday when I encountered the same beanfield.

This one! I know this place!

(For the remainder of those post, I’m going to give you the insides of my head in boldface blue italics, like this, because it is through seeing what happens up in there that you can start to appreciate how truly frightening my decision-making can be. [Side note: Is anyone else stoked that I have a super-serious big girl job in which other people PAY ME to help them figure things out, including decision-making? If you’re not jazzed about this, you should be.])

Oh yes, this field! I know what to do here. Walk through the field, turn LEFT, and I’m home free.

But then I noticed that the field, while dry, was still unharvested. This means that there were grasshoppers everywhere, and I hate grasshoppers. I wasn’t in the mood for dealing with their crunchy, sassy little asses. As I surveyed the field, I noticed that there was a large swath around its perimeter that had been cut down.

Oh, someone has cleared a path for the construction guys, so they can drive their equipment through this field. If I walk on it in this direction, I will hit a road that I know, and I know this because I see a big cement silo that I’ve walked by before. Yup, that’s the ticket!

So I started down the cut-down path. I had some indie station playing in my earbuds and was walking in time to a song. I turned a bend and this allowed me to see further up the path—and what I saw was movement. One…no, two…figures.  

Must be someone from the neighborhood walking their dog. Which means I’m on the right track.

More walking. More fiddling with my phone, in an attempt to find a non-sucky song. I was getting closer to the person and his/her dog on the trail.

Wait, that dog is really huge. Like, really, really huge. Is that a mastiff? No one in the neighborhood has a mastiff. Or a great dane.  Hmm, this doesn’t make sense, this is weird, maybe if I just squint hard enough I’ll be able to see…Oh Good Lord, that’s a DEER. And that person walking the dog is ANOTHER DEER.

You don't realize how big deer are until you're really close to them. 

Do male deer ever charge at people? Who’s more scared, me or them? Do they feel safety in numbers?

I’ve had staredowns with animals before, but none who were bigger than a breadbasket (if you really insist on knowing, previous staredowns have mostly with cats and dogs and once with a mouse while I was pregnant, and coincidentally, naked. Which is another GREAT story).  Thus, I found this intense eye contact to be mildly unsettling. The deer stopped moving and went still, probably having a similarly shocking experience to what I was having (“Oh, there’s something big coming, probably another deer like us, maybe we can hang out, eat some soybeans and stuff…oh wait, no, it’s making way too much noise and the hair is all wrong, that’s an EFFING HUMAN and THEY KILLED BAMBI’S MOM so RUN.”) 

They ran. I didn’t get my camera out in time to document this, but man do I wish I would have. They were probably 100 meters away from me when they bolted. And the reason I know this distance is because I remember running 100 meter dashes in junior high track. Which when I ran it looked less like a dash and more like a medium-paced trudge, because I’m slow and because starting blocks confuse the shit out of me. But, it was the shortest distance race that we ran so it was my favorite. Because less is better when it comes to running.

Which is, weirdly, a great segue into what happened next.

The deer-staredown incident behind me, I continued down the path. The indie song playing involved a woman singing a plea for someone not to leave her, and I was thinking about how this is yet another pathetic cog in the anti-feminist wheel of destruction that is our modern music industry. If I hadn’t been listening to music and thinking so hard, I might have seen (or heard) the next thing coming.

Which was a combine.

For you city folk reading this, a combine is a very large piece of farm machinery, used to harvest both corn, and in this case, soybeans. It’s like a ginormous tractor with a rotating head (when it’s cutting beans at least. The corn head is spiky and doesn’t rotate at all. But I digress). Here’s what they look like:

With a beanhead, doin' work. 

Would you want to see this coming at you? I don't think so.

I’m a pseudo-farm kid. Meaning that my dad was a farmer but we lived “In town,” and by “in town” I mean in a village of 700 people and in a house that was two blocks away from a cornfield on three sides. In any case, I’m farm kid enough to be appropriately scared of being on foot in the same field as a combine. I’ve seen what a bean head can do to a deer, and it ain’t pretty. (Note: The staredown deer from this story did not, to my knowledge, die by beanhead. The poor mangled deer I’m referencing was something I saw another time, because remember, my dad is a farmer and encounters all kinds of gruesome shit. Which you might not expect, depending on how much you know about farming, but which is absolutely true.)

Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh shit. Is this seriously the last song I’m going to hear before I die? THIS?

And at this point I was running. I mean, as soon as I saw the combine, it was off to the races. (Which you know from above treatises could not possibly have been THAT fast, but rather, as fast as a slow girl can go.) Now, granted, the above set of thoughts about my impending death was admittedly a bit histrionic, as the combine was pretty far in the distance and I wasn’t even sure it was coming towards me at that moment. Didn’t matter, though—I’m pretty sure that a moving combine moves faster than me, and so if there was ANY chance it was headed my way, I wanted out.

Ooohh…so that “path that was cleared for construction” was a swath of harvested field IN A FIELD BEING CURRENTLY HARVESTED, you dumbass.

My feet found pavement relatively quickly. I was safe. The only thing left at stake was my pride, which I could have totally preserved if I wouldn’t have decided to go ahead and post this whole debacle on the interwebs. Who needs dignity when you can completely (and intentionally) embarrass yourself in front of all of your friends, and probably even some people you don’t know? Pride is totally overrated.

You might be pleased to know that once I doubled back the way that I came, I easily found my way home—which is a step up from the first time I got lost. Also, I wasn't even gone that long:  the whole 3.75 mile round-trip ordeal only took about an hour. SO THERE.

And that, my friends, is the story of the second time I got lost in my neighborhood. Look for it in my upcoming debut memoir, Good at school, bad at life: How having a PhD did not save me from myself.

The era of secret poop

Flushing the toilet is easy, right? I mean, I’ve never, ever heard anyone say that it’s hard. Can you imagine?  “Jeez, dude, that toilet flushing I had to do today was just brutal.”  “Ugh, pushing that little lever down was tiring. I’m gonna need a rest and a beer after that fiasco.” Um, no.  

And then I had kids, and all bets were off. According to Evie (7) and Jonah (5), toilet flushing is an exceptionally difficult life task.

Our family attended an out-of-town wedding this weekend. It was fun, but even the best of events is kind of exhausting with kids in tow. After the hours-long "let's pack up our stuff and go" process, followed by the hour-long ride in the minivan, the sight of home was more than welcome. Home! My safe place, my refuge. I couldn't get in the door fast enough. Usually I’m greeted by the still-new-house scents of cut wood, paint, and something vague gluey…but not this time. This time, I was hit with a wave of stank that I’d consider to be a Nostril Assault. My haven smelled like a damn outhouse.

And I knew it wasn’t our kitty's fault. Willy ain't got time for that. He's all about that litter box.

No, I knew right away what the problemo was. And the problemo, as it so often is when something unexpectedly stinks, was the kids' doing. A poop was left in the kids’ bathroom toilet all weekend. So I got to return from a long weekend to a festering, stinking pile of poop.

This happens at our house sort of a lot. In fact, often enough that my husband and I have coined our own expression for it-- “secret poop”—because some kid poops and runs, we don’t know who did it, and we find it way later than we’d like.

Evie claims that she is scared of the sound of toilet flushing, yet she admits that she flushes at school. Jonah's excuse is that he is scared he will clog the toilet. He just started wiping his own ass, and so he goes through a lot of toilet paper in trying to get his rear clean. Understandable. It really is gratifying that he’s finally wiping on his own— it’s a victory, in and of itself. When it started happening, I thought it meant that I was going to get to have less contact with human excrement—always a bonus. Turns out that now I still get the esteemed privilege of being responsible for the care and keeping of everyone's poop, it's just that now I get to look at it, smell it, and maneuver it when it's not fresh.

 Sometimes (many times) the toilet is clogged, proving Jonah's point, but still, does he have to let it linger? (Yes, if you’re from my generation, you now have the Cranberries song in your head. I did that on purpose). Could he tell us about the problem right away so we don't have festering poop? Festering poop and TP leads to plunging, basically a poop post-mortem, and that's no fun on so many levels. Tonight my husband tried to teach Jonah about courtesy flushing, in an attempt to both salvage Jonah’s clean butt/pride yet prevent flush avoidance/poop festering/smell lingering/poop post-mortem. We'll see how that goes.

We've just been bribing Evie. Ten cents for every unprompted flush. Seems to take the edge off that whole “fear” thing.

After my third poop post-mortem this week, and hence my third time this week scrubbing out the bowl, I started making (possibly empty) threats. You know, like, you can't see your friends tomorrow if this happens again, I will take away your Beanie Boos, the legos are temporarily going to a secret place where only Mommy gets to play with them. I told them I’d punish both of them if I found any secret poop, since there’s no way to tell who did it. The kids were unfazed. I think they've got my number, and knew that this was just tired Mommy blowing smoke up their asses. I mean, am I really going to actually periodically check the toilet for flush adherence? Obviously not, or the whole evening poop post-mortem and threatening ritual would probably not occur.

But seriously, I swear to Pete if I have to clean the toilet one ore time this week, I'm gonna blow a gasket. 

Breaking the rules

I broke one of my own rules for being a therapist today.

I cried.

You wouldn’t know it from watching how “therapy” is done on TV, but therapists have a lot of rules to follow. Some of them are set for us by ethical codes of our profession—things like “keep client information private and protected” (duh) and “don’t have sex with clients” (double duh).

And then, most therapists have these other rules that we place upon ourselves, things that have less to do with the general ethical codes and more to do with our own personalities, preferences, and theories of how we help people.

“No crying” isn’t a hard and fast rule for therapists. In fact, it’s subject to some debate within our field. I poignantly remember getting close to tears once with one of my very first clients. Because I was still in training at the time, I brought it up with my peers and supervisors. Through discussion, I came to more fully appreciate a powerful truth: that therapy is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. I learned that probably each of us would handle this in our own way, and that this was okay, because we each have our own unique personalities and ways of helping people. And that day I set my own personal standard on crying in session.

But today, I deviated from my personal standard and cried. I will usually let myself get to “misty eyes,” and that’s my cutoff. That’s where I internally say to myself “Alright, this isn’t about you” and tuck in the tears. Today I couldn’t. My eyes filled up and a couple of tears spilled over. I wasn’t sobbing or totally losing my shit in any way. Yet it was definitely crying, and I know my client saw.

I like to think that I chose that no-crying standard for benevolent reasons—to benefit and protect the client. I want to prevent therapeutic interactions from becoming “the Allison show”—that is, the heart of therapy should be the client’s experiences, not mine. In order to really be effective, I need for clients to know and believe that I’m hanging in there with them, no matter what they’re talking about and what pain they are expressing. I fear that if they see me cry, they might start to think they are hurting me and start holding back on me. This is the last thing that I want, as people are often already holding back a lot in their lives outside of therapy, in order to protect themselves and others.

Yet, as with so many things in life, there is another way to look at this. And this other perspective could make me out to be a hypocrite (again, damnit!).  In my point of view, crying is simply an expression of sadness. I also believe that letting others see our emotions is a genuine and hence courageous thing to do -- showing others who we are and what moves us is one thing that helps us others feel connected to us. (I say these things to people all the time! All. The. Time.) So, in showing clients that I’m moved by what they have said, am I possibly modeling an appropriate expression of emotion and maybe even aiding our connection?

*big gulp, tiny voice* And, is it also possible that the real reason that I don't let myself cry in front of clients is because I dislike others, client or not, seeing my vulnerability? (Damnit.)

IDK, being a therapist and making therapisty decisions is hard.

What I do know is that my emotional control in therapy has been tested lately. I've heard some of the saddest stories that I've ever heard; often situations that are very personally relatable. And while I do work hard to keep my own personal baggage out of the therapeutic interaction, at the end of the day I'm still human. The things that people say, that I witness through listening to client's stories with my heart and playing those stories through in my mind-- they affect me. Some stories are told with such immediacy and detail that the hardest thing in the world would be to not see it through my client's eyes. Sometimes the pain in the room is so palpable that it steals my breath, like I’ve been socked in the gut.

To be both naturally imaginative and empathic is a blessing-- these attributes make me who I am, and they are the backbone of my work as a therapist. Yet these very same attributes are the ones that keep me up at night and that allow me to imagine terrible things happening to me and those that I love-- and they're the personal characteristics that are making me cry in session! Stupid paradoxes everywhere!

Anyway, yes, the tears have been happening and I think they’re likely to keep on happening. Sometimes they will behave themselves and stay in my eyes, and other times they may go rogue on me and escape. As you can probably tell from the rest of this post, I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about this level of personal sadness being out in the open for clients to see. I'm well aware that there is processing that I can and will do with clients if I cry, and that this can give me a sense of where to go from there. I'm just still not sure I should be letting it happen in the first place.

Instead of the nice tidy resolution that I seem to go for in these posts, today I’m going to have to leave stuff hanging. I’m still working on figuring this whole thing out. Maybe I’ll stick with my old no-crying rule. Maybe I’ll come up with a new rule. I'm just going to roll with the ambiguity of it all today, and find solace in knowing that I’m working on understanding.  Life’s messy, folks.

And in the spirit of dialogue and progress, I’d like to end this post with a question: If you were (or are) a client in therapy, what would it be like for you if your therapist was so moved by something you said that s/he cried?

On body image...and donut sex

Note: Originally published in 2011 on my old blog,  ideclarelifecrisis.blogspot.com, revised and re-published 2015.

9/21/2011

I ate a donut last night. My taste buds nearly imploded from all of the deliciousness. It was one of my favorites, a cream-filled longjohn (the fluffy white cream! None of that nasty Bavarian cream business). Granted, it didn't have nuts and its frosting was white rather than chocolate-- but these were forgivable shortcomings. Besides, it was a gift, and I don't look donut gift-horses in the mouth. I just shove the donuts in my mouth. Much easier.

So I’m sitting there, caressing my donut, devouring it with ardor. I rather paradoxically demolished that donut in the most gentle, most caring way you can imagine --think “food sex," that's how it is with me and donuts. Yet in the midst of my pastry lovemaking, this soft but audible thought pops into my mind, “I wonder how thin I could be if I didn’t eat this donut. Or if I never ate donuts.”

This thought came unbidden, just about as welcome as when "Oh damn, I forgot to put on deodorant today" or "Gotta add peanut butter to the shopping list" pops up during actual sex. (C'mon ladies. You know this is a thing.)

Those darned thoughts, they do what they want sometimes. The particularly villainous anti-donut notion of being thinner— and numerous variations of it—tend to come spilling out of the recesses of my psyche, often midway through eating something mouthwatering and not particularly healthful. In the past it was pretty easy to give in to the thought—to accept that yes, I’m supposed to be perfect, and yes, thinner is better, and Yes, I should feel guilty and shameful about eating donuts and YES, I'm a food/body failure, I suck at life, etc. Then I'd wallow for awhile.

I am pretty stoked to report that last night, something different happened. I'm eating my donut, and the thought about never eating donuts and being thinner occurs to me. But then my resilient mind bounced back with, “Heyyy....maybe thinner isn't better. Maybe I'm a worthwhile person, no matter what's going on with my body." Whoa.

This has not been an easy place to get to. For one thing, I'm curvy. Not like "curvy in all the right places" but like "curvy in a bunch of haphazard places where my body has decided to curve"). When I acknowledged that the wayward bumps and lumps weren't going away, I had no choice but to make friends with them.  I mean, we're not friendly every single day or anything, but I try to be kind to them even when I'm annoyed. Also, I've got stretch marks and sort of weird boobs and a big long scarred up place at the bottom of my abdomen (because BABIES) -- yet when in a good mood I'm able to see those as badges of honor. I healed from two major surgeries and got two kids out of the deal. My body has not failed me in doing its essential functions, so I'm striving for détente with it, rather than being a hater.

Furthermore, I love donuts. I really do. I’m not going to give them up to chase some illusion of perfectionism. Granted, I’m not going to eat one every single day. But I’m probably not going to pass one up if the opportunity presents itself-- I mean, that's insane. I don't recommend it.

So, if there's any point to all of this, it is this couple of things: 1) Work towards making peace with your imperfect body. It's totally worth it in the long run, and 2) Buy me donuts. I also like donut holes. And apple fritters.

Following My Own Damn Advice

So there’s this thing that happens sometimes when you’re a therapist. I call it, “When you don’t follow your own damn advice.” Let me paint the picture:

A client is having a difficult time relaxing because they have “too much to do.” And let me be clear, in this scenario I’m not talking about the single mom so strapped for cash that she is working three jobs while also childrearing—that’s a bit different.  The clients I’m talking about are the college students who are double-majoring and working in a lab and participating in a bajillion clubs, and the parents who have their kids signed up for every possible out-of-school activity while also working, maintaining a home, and participating in community organizations, etc. When I ask these sorts of clients why they’re doing the things that they’re doing, the most common response is that scrunchy, lip-curly facial expression that implies that they think I might be dim, and the old standard: “Because I have to.”

The thing is, though, that that they don’t have to. There are really only a few things that we absolutely have to do—you know, the things that we do to avoid foreclosure on our homes, or failing or course, or certain death. And truly, even those things are choices. Think about it. I could blow off my clients and not show up at work, any given day. Instead, I could laze about on the couch in my PJs while watching Parks & Rec on Netflix and eating entire cheesecakes while intermittently, peacefully dozing (which may or may not be a recurring fantasy of mine). But I choose not to do those things— to avoid negative consequences, not because I have to.

Which leads me to my next client intervention, which is when I say something like, “How congruent are your life choices with your values?” This can lead into a really cool phase of therapy, when people are actively thinking about their values (sometimes for the first time), and then, when the therapy stars align with Jupiter or Mars or some shit, making changes so that their lives are made of things that they choose, rather than lives built around guilt, avoidance of pain/hurt, or martyrdom. Eureka! It’s amazing stuff, when it works.

On the heels of intervening in this way with a client, I self-reflect. And ooooh boy, does that self-reflection get me every time.   Not only do I have a mini-crisis of conscience (i.e., “What the hell are you doing with your life, Allison?”), but I get the added bonus of getting to feel like a huge hypocrite—that is, the whole “you can’t follow your own damn advice” phenomenon. I can’t even do the thing that I’m asking clients to do. In sum, this is a sucky experience. And it happens to me all the time.

Now, doubtless some of you readers are getting all high and mighty right about now. You’re looking at your screen dubiously, disdainfully. Your chests are all puffed out, your chins are held high.  You might be flexing your biceps in the mirror a little bit, just to remind yourself of your physical prowess. (I have no idea where I’m getting this stuff. Just go with it.)  Your thoughts are along the lines of:  “Well, I’VE got it all together. I know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.” And you know what, some of you probably really do have things pretty in line, and I honestly think that’s terrific. Keep doing what you’re doing and you’ll have less of a chance of ever needing to come work with a hypocrite therapist like me.

But as for the rest of you righteous chin thrusting bicep-flexors, the ones of you that sort of know you don't have it all together but have a hard time admitting it: you’re scared of vulnerability, and that’s understandable—but the life that you’re living is driven by fear. Like literally, fear is sitting in the driver’s seat of your metaphorical life car.  Do you want that?

I’m also intuiting that there will be a segment of you out there who are thinking, “Well, crap. I know I value X but I spend a lot of time doing Y,” or possibly “I don’t even know what my values are.” What I want to say to you is: it’s okay. You’re human. And because you’re human, you’re not perfect and you’re never going to be. But you can learn more about your values and find ways to life your life in step with them.

Do you hear that compassion? I can readily dish it out to others, but have a hard time spooning even tiny bites of it to myself. (Another hypocrite therapist moment! Yay!)  I’m working on it, though. Moving towards showing myself empathy and accepting myself as (very) imperfect will be a lifelong process. 

Fortunately, even in accepting the inherent messiness of me and my life, there are some things I can do to get my shit a little bit more together. I can make a concerted effort to spend more time doing the things that I really care about, and that really bring joy to my life. That’s what this blog is all about, actually. Some things that I value are: creativity and new ideas, connection, authenticity, humor, compassion, self-care, and psychology/mental health/wellbeing (duh). This blog will be a venue for all of these pieces of me, a place where they can party and dance on the tables for awhile. They desperately want to, and I’m going to let them.

And that’s it. That’s the most cohesive thing I can say about this, my latest venture in cyberspace creativity.  I’m going to write about stuff that I care about. My only agenda is to keep writing—because that will be one sign that I kept trying.