Weekend Coffee Share, Clearing the Stage for the Next Act

Welcome to my Weekend Coffee Share and a little slice of my life and dreams, where I am the writer, the producer, the stage hand, and the main character.  It has been quite a week!  Pull up a chair and a brisk coffee or a relaxing tea, whichever works for you.  I am lingering over my V8 and coffee, having slept in and missed the pilates class I was considering taking.  I suppose I needed a relaxing day!

I think I have mentioned before that, after working on and completing physical therapy for my back and shoulder pain (which may or may not have been due to arthritis), I am now going to work on the mind.  Mind you, I’m still keeping up with the body work on my own; today is arm/shoulder day!  Along with my aches and pains,  I need to work on my anxiety and OCD or slight perfectionism, and I have been doing so.  One of the things I’m doing is using an app called Curable that has a lot of writing exercises, meditations, and factual information on the mind/body connection regarding chronic pain. I have particularly benefited from the visualization meditation, while the writing exercises have me digging into my past and things that sparked anxiety for me.  I believe the goal is to identify the stressers you have or had and deal with them, confront them.  So, this week I was talking with my practitioner about my ex-husband.  She asked what the last straw was that broke the proverbial camel’s back.  So, I told the story.  It made me feel so tired to conjure up the setting, the actors, the events, picturing myself back in the house I lived in with my then husband.  I felt sad, scared, and angry as well.  I hadn’t told the story in quite a while.  Still, having done so, I felt more better equipped to deal with my present and future.  I went home tired, though.

I lay down at some point in the evening to relax, and in my mind, I recalled events of the day and the story I had brought up again.  I pictured hands reaching in and moving/removing stage props, my old house, furniture, the garage, the backdrop of trees.  Maybe this was demonstrated on a movie or something, I don’t know, but it popped into my mind and I observed all these things being removed and leaving an empty stage.  It made me feel triumphant!  I had brought up the images, the story, and the actors and processed them, and now they could be put away.  I could move on and create the next act.  Of course, it is never good to dwell on the past, but if you must process it, and if doing so lets you move on, then, eureka!  Something works!  I think we are all different.  But the mind/body work through the app does emphasize acknowledging the stressers from your life/past and that your way of dealing with them may have hurt you, i.e. caused chronic pain, digestive issues, or migraines, etc.  I stuffed so many negative emotions down since childhood that they were bound to hurt me inside.

So, perhaps the stage is my mindset/focus.  I know one should not focus on the past, but it comes up whenever I see the doctor and we discuss what tests I should have done; for instance, I had been tested for rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, both negative, thank God!  I was plagued with pain for a while when I was so busy tending to my son in his rough patch of his youth, and now that he is moving along and doing fairly well, it is time to tend to me, to learn and unlearn my anxious reactions to his rough spells, to deal with the physical trauma of having been worried and trapped in hospitals or ERs several times.  Parenting a son on your own is nothing to shake a stick at.  Now, he is choosing a life, an honest, hard-working life and not that of a hitch-hiker (one of my past worries, silly me! :))

So, the stage is cleared and waiting.  What will the next set be?  Who will be the actors there with me? I have some great people and a support network as it is.  Will I explore a meditation group? A writer’s group?  Improv comedy? Will I continue my teaching career until retirement or find another way to approach my ‘golden’ years?  The stage is waiting for me.  The backdrop looks pretty magical, especially when fear and distrust have exited stage left!

*Am I truly done with fear, distrust, and anxiety?  They are getting better.  I can be brave for others and at times, for myself.  I’ve been working on this.  Being of a certain age, I can get hot flashes and brain fog as well as anxious moments, but they’ve improved with my recent mind/body work which I plan to continue.  We’ll see what comes, but I am much better equipped to deal with it now!

Have a great week, my friends! I have Spring break and no travel plans, so this little fellow will have some play time with me, I’ll be writing/editing, and I’ll be getting some mundane appointments taken care of as well as relaxing and sleeping in some more!

**The Weekend Coffee Share is currently hosted by Allison at Eclectic Alli. Give her site a visit and say hello!

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Goodbye! A meditation in verse

Sending it Away, by Pamela Schloesser Canepa (c) 2020.

 

Put your stuff on the boat,

and send it off gently,

the baggage that only

held you back.

 

See them go,

you don’t need them,

and they won’t counter-attack.

 

Pain, shame, anger, fear,

low self-regard, loathing, and resentment

can’t fit your search

for an enlightened life.

 

What you held onto

has distracted and limited you.

For, baggage does its duty.

Now just send it away,

with a genuine, Goodbye.

 

The monster you created

out of negativity

is no longer your friend.

Put it on the boat,

with a tear-free Goodbye.

 

Photo by Levent Simsek on Pexels.com

#weekendcoffeeshare A New Year’s rollercoaster

If we were having coffee today, I’d tell you how I don’t like rollercoasters anymore.  They make me feel whiplashed.  Well, whiplash (a metaphorical kind) is what my life gave me this last week.From watching a rented movie New Years Eve to time spent in an ER New Years Day, to spreading news of my first book now in paperback, I don’t think normal is meant for me.  Even keel?  I have to try hard to maintain it these days.

I am so grateful that through this last week that I’ve had the support of my mom, my significant other, and my church family.  Because New Year day was horrible, getting a call from Shands hospital that my son had been in a bad car accident.  They couldn’t tell me anything else, so I went down there.  And sat, and waited, for at least an hour before someone could tell me his status since nurses and doctors were really busy in the ER.  Let me tell you, that hour is the worst.  Shands is the leading trauma center in our city.  I knew that, and it made me even more worried, not knowing the extent of the accident.

Finally, I got details, and when I saw him they had him sedated and in a neck brace.  I worried about his state of mind.  The next day, when he was in a regular room, he was awake.  Thank God! A day later he was discharged, and he has a concussion.  Considering all of my worries, we are blessed that he got nothing worse.  My writing this week has been seriously affected by this event;  I didn’t work on any writing projects or add to any flash fiction challenges, but I did post a free verse poem that acknowledges the process and pain of a fellow traveler in the ER that day and my struggle of being between two places, grief and relief.  https://pamelascanepa.wordpress.com/2017/01/04/10117/

After resting at home a day,  he went back to work, and so did I.  That evening, I got an uplifting piece of news.  The work I did over Christmas break paid off!  I had gone into KDP at Amazon and converted my first ebook into a paperback.  I had to re-do it a few times, and then after hitting publish, it took a few days to go “live.”  My mother ordered one, and I wasn’t telling anyone until I saw that the finished product was presentable.  It was a lot of hard work to figure out the formatting and their requirements; formatting is not my forte.  But I persevered!  It looks good! I think I should have gone with a smaller trim size (or whatever it’s called).  My mom’s excited because many of her friends love reading but don’t have a Kindle.  Therefore, my writing is getting into the hands of more people, which excites me immensely!  You may view or purchase the paperback of my sci-fi romance, Made for Me, at  http://www.amazon.com/dp/1520250215, and here’s what it looks like:

I had kept getting error messages about the text possibly getting cut off at the edges.  Well, it’s all there!  It was nice to get some good news after all that went on this week.  While I was a little down about not being able to work on any current writing projects, this came up and reminded me:  “Pam, this is who you are and what you do.  Nothing can take that away.  Rest if you need to, and then come on back to it.  You’ve achieved many things so far, and when ready, you’ll continue.”   That’s my self-talk to get me through the rest of the year.  *sighs with relief.

  Weekend Coffee Share is hosted at parttimemonsterblog.com and is a community effort shared by bloggers worldwide, where we share our insights, our comings-and-goings of the week, latest projects, or anything else under the sun.  Join the chat and add your link at parttimemonsterblog.com, while visiting some of the other posts.  I have met all types of writers and creative types through this effort!