Sunday, December 31, 2023

And Another Year Has Come to Pass…

On New Year’s Eve 2022 I randomly chose three statements from my day-by-day calendar that I had saved because they meant something to me on the original dates when I read them.

I’m doing the same this New Year’s Eve. I’ve randomly chosen three dates from my “You are a Badass” daily calendar that I had put aside on the date I originally read them. I am also posting 2 other quotes that really hit me in the feels this year. It has been a pretty rough year. In September I started by journey to ketamine therapy for treatment resistant depression. I finally had my first treatment session with the ketamine on 12/02/23 and it didn’t go well. I was much more depressed and had strong passive SI (suicidal ideation for those of you not in the mental health biz) after that session, but my care team helped normalize that for me and my second session was truly a breakthrough for me. I met with my personal individual therapist, my ketamine clinician, and my ketamine therapy Guide during the week after my second session and felt 75% less depressed and anxious. I checked in with myself and with all of those listed above to assure myself that I wasn’t experiencing hypomania or mania, which I wasn’t. I was probably feeling what those with a healthy, balanced emotional life and home/work life feel. Regardless, it was the first relief I’ve had from crushing depression and electrically charged anxiety in well over a year.

Today, 12/31/23 I completed my 5th of an initial schedule of 6 sessions. “Session” being defined as taking the medication and the preparation and integration that happens on session days.

So, back to the task at hand: here are the dates and messages from 3 randomly selected desk calendar pages from 2023!

Saturday/Sunday January 14/15: Your brain is your bitch.

My shrink, who I’ve been seeing since 2004 and with whom I regularly talk about how “the mind” is not necessarily in my corner (or anyone else’s for that matter), when it comes to processing experiences and the accompanying emotions post-experience. The longer we live, the more inaccurate and irrational thoughts and emotional responses we gain/develop over time. It’s classic CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). It takes a lot of work and repetitive practice of learning how to “respond versus react” to whatever experience we encounter during any regular, ho-hum day, much less the “biggies” which is a definition we create for ourselves. A “biggie” for me may be a phone call from my mother when she’s sobbing and whatever she’s saying is something I can’t translate so I let her ramble on for a few minutes before I tell her I can’t understand what she’s saying and end up hanging up the phone.

Thursday June 22: The thrills from the little wins will keep you rolling toward victory.

Despite how much I “know” that big changes result from small, day-to-day changes in habits, the way I think, and how I manage my expectations, it still fucking sucks that the changes I want to see in my life don’t happen when I want them to. I’m a classic addict: I want what I want when I want it. I don’t want to do the day-to-day shit, I want the miracle of change to happen simply because I say so and because I want it. This was a good reminder for me to get back to my “recovery roots”: one day at a time (sometimes it’s 5 minutes or 1 minute at a time). Nevertheless, it’s a good reminder for me to slow down, accept it is what it is, and keep taking those small, regular steps that eventually will be life changing.

Tuesday July 25: You are responsible for what you say and do. You are not responsible for whether or not people freak out about it.

Oh, dear Lord if I could truly embrace this concept life would be so much less work! There are versions of this I’ve heard in my life such as “It’s none of my business what other people think of me” which in my rational mind I know is true but fuck this is really hard for me to embrace. Until I found “my people” in junior high which happened well into 8th grade, I was shoved into my locker once, had the books I was carrying slammed out of my hands by a girl who would eventually become a nurse who took care of my dad when he had his prostate surgery. I had my rebellious periods during junior high and high school, which included dying a part of my hair orange and then blonde, then dying the whole thing platinum blonde the night before high school graduation. Seriously this is how I “fought the establishment” in the upper-middle class that was Appleton, WI in 1989. As I accumulated more life experiences throughout college and into early adulthood, even I giggle that this was my big stand against “the man” and the personal oppression I felt when I was 17 years old.

The other two quotes I’m just going to post, and you can interpret them as you like. As always, I will close with a quote from the New Year’s Even anthem, Old Lang Syne.




                                          

We two have paddled in the stream
from morning sun till dine
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                         

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                         

 


Saturday, December 30, 2023

Finding Mini Surprises Part 2

As the end of another trip around the sun nears, I’ve been looking through some mish-moshed paperwork, receipts, and all sorts of crap that has been accumulating on miscellaneous bookshelves, on top of temporarily empty boxes labeled “XMAS DECORATIONS”, and basically any flat surface in “the Patio Room” which is where I work from home.

The space is likely intended to be a third bedroom, but because we already have a twin bed in the “guest bedroom”, and there’s a full-size patio door in the room, this Patio Room has become my default office-I hate calling it that because I want to use the space for more than just where I work from, forty hours a week. I plan on setting up my piano keyboard in that room, once I have sorted through and organized the mish-mosh that takes up 90 percent of its space.

So, before I get into the visceral guts of what I want this post to be about, I will share another mini surprise I found when opening a 4” x 6” 60 sheet journal that was buried under unopened 401{k} quarterly statements and invoices from Apollo’s new vet.

There is no title, just the date of 02/23/23. 

There you were,
looking at the skyline on a
humid August evening,
methodically swirling the Pinot Grigio
in your wine glass.
Not knowing better,
one would assume you were
mesmerized by the passing skyscrapers along the Milwaukee shoreline.
But I knew you were looking through the passing urban landscape.
Your mind turning about,
you and her
me and him
you and me.


 

 

Sunday, October 29, 2023

Finding Mini-Surprises

Scrolling through my laptop's Documents looking for the Storycatcher's folder to post the "sage advice" Word document I read from last night I happened upon a folder titled "Poetry".  Prior to opening it, I thought I knew what was stored inside. I have some standards that I re-worked for so long, I can practically recite them from memory.

I was surprised to find pieces that, after reading them, I'm surprised by. I haven't posted them here before. I scrolled through all of my posts to make sure. So, I'm going to post a few of them now. Each of them bring me back to the environment, event, or experience that prompted me to write in the first place.

Where Hope Fears to Tread (02-11-17)
For twenty-four weeks I did your time too.
My cell: a desk, a chair,
a steel door, window banks of bullet-proof glass.

You retreat
behind your steel door, cover your window
with toilet paper, feces, blood.
I was constantly displayed for you,
to shout to,
to shout at;
demanding I fix your crisis or
be the target of your disgust for the system, “the man”, your lawyer, your victim.
Demanding my self, my values, my soul.

“Fucking bitch!”
“Kristine, why don’t you come talk to me?! Why the fuck you ignoring me?!”
“Come suck my dick!”

Ten hours later, I leave my cell, exhausted and empty.
Despite time and distance,
we both know tomorrow; these roles begin anew.



County Drive (12-10-14)
A heavy hawk lazily
circles, riding currents of a swift autumn breeze.
What were once proud and regal sunflowers
bow their weary heads;
time in the late summer spotlight expired.

Low laying fog, the smoke of smoldering brush
settled over farmers’ fields,
some already turned for the coming snow.
Harvest complete, their usefulness fulfilled
for another season.

Maybe You're Not As Good As You Think You Are

 

In a world that often encourages us to be our own biggest cheerleaders, with meditation, positive self-talk, and an entire field called “positive psychology”, it was a sobering thought for me to consider that I might not be as exceptional as I believed. I learned this lesson from my revered high school orchestra conductor in my senior year of high school, aged a tender18.

When Mr. Wolfman retired after 36 or 38 years with the Appleton Area School District, I wrote a letter to the editor of The Post Crescent to somehow commemorate what was a long, steady career of inspiring students, challenging students, having high expectations of students, and demanding it from us. All the while playing some of the most difficult, well-known, and eclectic classical music.

Every spring the orchestra played a Commencement Concert at the Lawrence University Chapel. This was an opportunity for seniors to audition to solo backed-up by the entire West/East High Schools’ symphony. As a senior cellist, I yearned to solo. And I didn’t want to play any cello concerto, I wanted to master the Dvorak cello concerto; a big, intense concerto that puts all others to shame.

I was confident that my passion for great music, especially the Dvorak, and the surprising progress I had made as a cellist since my first year in the high school orchestra, were going to be enough for me to claim that coveted solo.

My audition was appalling. I had started butchering the concerto in January. The concert was in mid-May. I took weekly private lessons with a music ed. major at Lawrence and after our first month in, I could barely play the first three bars. He asked, “Are you sure this is what you want to play?” I was adamant. In my mind, I had mastered everything I tried and if I recognized that a skill, a project, or anything else in life was something I couldn’t master, I threw it in the “Disinterested” bucket. That maladaptive thinking is what kept me trudging on, week after week, Dvorak, I imagine now, screaming from his grave, “STOP HER!” to the universe.

When the list of soloist’s names was taped to the inside of the orchestra room door my name wasn’t there. I felt an aching hurt in my soul. I cried in front of the entire symphony then ran from the room, not returning for rehearsal that day. I didn’t know I was on the cusp of learning a great life lesson.

Later, my conductor said to me, “I think you got so emotional because you’re not as good of a cellist as you think you are, and that's ok.” Well, that’s a hard smack of reality right to the forehead. It stung like hell…but it was true.

The lesson I learned that day is that life is not fair, and sometimes we’re all not as good as we think we are…and that’s ok. No matter how much of the spirit of the music I felt, how much I believed in myself, how much passion I exuded, I had to reconcile with my “Disinterested” bucket. I had to take every piece of failure out of that sloppy, long-ignored pail and own it…and it’s ok. I needed to learn from those failures instead of burying them. I needed to learn that true success can only come from attempting, failing, reshaping my efforts, and attempting again.



Saturday, October 21, 2023

Life in Chaos

 

In relentless chaos

I perform a turbulent dance.

Each day a storm, a wild tempest

this is my chaotic world and I am imprisoned.

 

Pieces of my fractured soul

strung back together at sunrise;

in the midst of turmoil

I must co-exist.

In the pandemonium, in a life of chaos

I am bound.

 

Through the labyrinth of disorder, I roam blindly,

embracing the tumult, my life lived in chaos

yet uniquely my own.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Auld Lange Syne 2022

In a matter of hours another year will come to a close. Technically, every minute of every day can mark the end of one year and the start of the next, but a good chunk of the world celebrates the end of the Gregorian calendar year on December 31 and the start of a new one on January 1.

Last year for Christmas Mark gave me a daily calendar titled "Change Your Fortune" and through the 365 days of 2022, I tore off and saved the daily messages that meant something to me. I saved a total of 97 pages. Roughly, that is one saved message for every 3-ish messages. Tonight I gathered all 97 and randomly chose 4. I chose them from the back blank side, so as I type this I have no idea what I chose. So, I'll turn them over, one by one, and document why I saved this message.

1. Monday, December 12, 2022: Stop viewing yourself in terms of others.                                              Ouch. Well, no point in dipping my toe in the emotional, self-disclosure pool. I'm jumping right in! I am a Taurus and carry the trait of generosity which that sign affords. I am also a desperate people-pleaser. If you're not happy/pleased/satisfied, there has to be something I can do to fix it and make sure you're happy/pleased/satisfied. If I can't, then I have failed. This is my constant inner-dialogue. How you feel about me is how I feel about myself. If you're disappointed, I'm disappointed. If the gift I give isn't wrapped to perfection, not only have I failed, but I am a failure. I make progress on overcoming this mindset, take a few steps back, then move forward again.

2. Tuesday, July 26, 2022: When you find yourself with 5 spare minutes, don't reach for your phone.                                                                                                                                                      HA HA! I refused to have a cell phone for many years until I required one for work sometime around mid-2017. My reasons for not having a cell phone revolved around my need for personal, unreachable time. I called cell phones "leashes" that I didn't need to be connected to, 24/7. I never had kids who needed to reach me for an emergency. I reasoned that I had an answering machine at home and voicemail at work, a home and a work email address, so if someone needed to reach me for an emergency, I would have access to one of these ways to contact me within a reasonable amount of time after said emergency. What I didn't realize is all of the other cool stuff cell phones can do. I've had a personal cell phone since early June 2019 because when I left my job that required and provided a cell phone, I missed it. I missed checking Facebook while in the drive-thru line at McDonalds. I missed checking my emails in between clients when I started working for Veterans Assistance Foundation. So I bought my own iPhone because that's what I was used to using and now check my text messages, emails, local news app, Messenger, and voicemails throughout the course of any day. Now, I'm hooked. And I freely admit it.

3. Thursday, December 1, 2022: Don't edit or judge while you are creating. Just create. The time for evaluation will come.                                                                                                                           I saved this one as part of my developing writing regimen. I'm trying to become more disciplined in my writing habits and this includes turning off my internal editor and just letting whatever needs to come out, come out. There will be time later for my internal editor to critique it, but that time isn't while I'm trying to create. 

4. Wednesday, March 2, 2022: Don't allow yourself to exist strictly on paper.                                        I struggle with this because part of me is desperate to exist on paper, as long as that paper is published, preferably with a photograph. However, I know I am so much more dimensional than existing on a one-dimensional sheet of paper. I am loud, opinionated, thoughtful, accessible, peaceful, willing, expansive, open, and determined. That creates a multi-dimensional being. If you think you know me, but don't know that about me, then you don't know me. I will be the first to acknowledge that I'm an enormous contradiction, but that makes me particular and not unquestionable. I am not a predictable assumption. If you think you know me, and know that about me, then you know me.

I will close with some versus not as popular as the first verse of Auld Lange Syne, because, my old friends, these verses have reflected the last year and likely years to come, but we will always take a cup of kindness and raise a drink to reminiscing as only old friends can do.

We two have paddled in the stream,
from morning sun till dine;
But seas between us broad have roared
since auld lang syne.

And there's a hand my trusty friend!
And give me a hand o' thine!
And we'll take a right good-will draught,
for auld lang syne.







Sunday, June 26, 2022

My Life with Roe

Last Friday evening, after I finished working, I checked the news on my cell phone and learned that SCOTUS had overturned Roe v Wade. I clicked on a story that showed a map of the United States of America, individual states in various colors representing what the new abortion laws were there. I clicked on Wisconsin and read that abortion was now illegal in my home state.

I have been agonizing on how to process and address this personal impact since. I’ve never had an abortion, but from February 1994 to the end of September 1996, I assisted in them. Likely hundreds of them. From week 8 to the end of week 21. I’ve attempted to write about it in meaningful and thought-provoking ways. This morning, I finally said to myself, “Fuck it, Kristine. You’re a storyteller. Just tell your story.”

In early February 1994 I interviewed for a position at an OBGYN’s office in Milwaukee that offered elective abortions as part of his solo practice. The position was to provide the mandated information to women seeking an abortion, complete simple lab tests typing the pregnant women’s blood type, start IV lines for those patients who chose to be consciously sedated during the medical procedure, assist the doc during the procedure, care for women in the recovery room post-op, and provide aftercare information before they were discharged.

The only thing that qualified me for this position is that I had graduated in May 1993 with a BA in Women’s Studies. When I moved home from Boston, I applied at every abortion provider I could find in the Appleton Yellow-Pages. Mostly they were clinics that provided abortions on certain days of the week with a rotation of doctors performing the abortions. About a week after interviewing, I was offered a job at the Wisconsin Women’s Health Care Center, the solo practice of an MD whose name I won’t print for fear of not remembering everything that happened during my tenure there and being accused of liable. Another reason I won’t print his name is that after being hired in February 1994, by Labor Day Weekend of the same year, we started an affair. I was miserable in my first marriage as he was in his second. I remember that Saturday when he asked me to come into his office before the staff arrived for the day as if it was yesterday.

I sat across from him at his desk. He said another co-worker had told him the night before that I “had a crush on him.” I immediately started backtracking anything I had said while very drunk the night before with two co-workers. He interrupted me and said, “But I feel the same way about you.”

Our separate marriages began the separation and eventual divorce processes in early September. Mine was much simpler because we had only been married since December 4, 1993, and the divorce was finalized in the fall of 1995. His was a complicated nightmare that is his private business, but eventually he too was divorced.

I can’t remember the exact chronology of the following events, but I’m giving it my best shot here.

He had been estranged from his entire family because of his second wife’s demands. He had taken her last name when they married. By Christmas 1994 I had talked to him enough about how much his parents and his younger brother and his family would want to hear from him. It had been years since they last spoke. His family lived in Montana, although they were originally from Colorado. His father and brother ran a family-owned electrician company, and his mother and daughter-in-law ran their cherry orchard. During the next cherry season his mother FedEx’d fresh cherries to my parents and my Grandma Krause who made cherry pies, cherry tortes, and we all ate the cherries by the handful. My grandmother said she had never baked with such good quality cherries and my mother will rave about them if you ask her about them to this day.

He and his family decided he should fly to see them alone at their reconciliatory visit. I was in total agreement. It was bound to be awkward enough without some young woman, 13 years his junior there standing in the way. While he was gone, the very active and very vocal anti-choice movement in Milwaukee listed him in the top three of their “hit list” which encouraged any anti-choice advocate to “do whatever it took” to prevent him from killing one more unborn child. While he was in Montana the U.S. Department of Justice contacted him with instructions on how he was going to return to Milwaukee. There were going to be to two U.S. Marshals on his flights from Kalispell, MT to Milwaukee. They would not make their identity known to anyone. When he touched down in Milwaukee, he was the last to deplane and another two U.S Marshalls were going to meet him at the terminal, drive him to a special location to pick up his luggage which would be pulled from the general luggage that went down to the arrival’s carousel, and follow the two of us back to the house we shared on a private lake in Waukesha County. For at least the next two weeks we would have two heavily armed U.S Marshalls with us 24/7.

When he finally walked down the jetway into the airport terminal I ran to him and was immediately tackled by both Marshalls. They knew his girlfriend was waiting for him and providing transportation back to our house, but apparently, they didn’t have an exact description of me and as they were charged to protect him, they took me down like a helpless lamb in a field of wolves. Upon confirmation I was who he and I said I was, I rode with them in an enormous black SUV with windows so darkly tinted I couldn’t see anything. We picked up his luggage and he drove his black Jeep Cherokee back to the house in Waukesha County, closely followed by the Marshalls who were going to spend the night armed and awake in our living room. At roughly 2am I was thirsty and had to walk past them sitting in my living room, watching TV, while I walked to the kitchen, grabbed a soda, then walk past them as I re-entered our bedroom.

He had to explain their presence in the office to the rest of the staff the next morning. One of them sat in the waiting room from 6:30am until the last patient of the day left, usually around 4:30pm. The other sat in the “lab” which was where the staff hung out between patients, where instruments were washed and sterilized in the autoclave, where the list of patients and their status during the day was written on a white board, where the doc completed his charting, and where the doc checked for the completed removal of products of conception to ensure that there weren’t portions of the pregnancy left behind which could cause serious infection and other complications. Both Marshalls were always inconspicuously heavily armed. We couldn’t go out to dinner. We couldn’t go to the homes of his friends. We had sex with them listening on the other side of a closed bedroom door twenty feet away.

Christmas 1995 we put up a tree in one of two floor-to-ceiling windows on either side of the two-door entry of our house. Before we left to spend the holiday at my parents’ house, we opened presents under the tree. By 7am there was a group of protestors on the opposite side of the street across from our house, hoisting anti-choice signs and chanting distorted versions of tradition Christmas carols all the while.

They protested in front of other employees’ residences as well, but at Christmas and Easter they appeared to be focused on our house. One time while our groceries at the local grocery store were being bagged, someone from the anti-choice movement recognized us and began yelling at the young man bagging our groceries, spouting that he was going to hell for assisting “a baby killer” by putting eggs and frozen pizza in brown paper bags.

By far the scariest reminder of how at risk our lives were was his decision to wear a bullet proof vest to and from the office every day. Since I started working there, I knew that the doc wore one, but once we became involved, he really wanted me to wear one as well. I refused. In my idyllic 23–24-year-old mind, I didn’t think I was invincible, but it was more about my sheer stubbornness that fought against every instinct to wear one. Around the time when the U.S. Marshalls were protecting us, I answered the main office phone and a man on the other end of the line said, “You are baby killers who soon will be killed” or something along that theme. The FBI came to the office and I remember sitting down in a private office with the agent who, when he showed me his badge and photo ID that I barely scanned when he held it in front of me said, “Ma’am, I really need you to look at my ID and badge and understand that I’m an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation” it was yet another way Roe v Wade infiltrated my life.

When I started working for this MD, I would shout back at the protestors who were shouting at me, the rest of the staff, and at the patients from the sidewalk in front of the office parking lot. It became very personal and very scary once the doc and I became romantically involved. Armed U.S. Marshalls ordered to serve where I worked? Ordered to observe and protect me? Trying to drown out the Christmas Day protestors at my home by turning up the volume of Jazz to the World? Wearing a bullet proof vest to work?

Yeah, I have a part of my life that was impacted by Roe v Wade in ways most Americans, who support a woman’s right to choose, could never even imagine. Sometimes I wonder how I ended up in that situation. Then I remember I fell in love with a doctor who felt even stronger than I did that every woman has the right to a safe, legal abortion.