The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It's a subdued, cloudy morning here in my little corner of the world. The Kenyan coffee that I'm sipping, a roast that I've been highly pleased with, tastes just a touch odd compared to the bright, sour cherry note that has been characteristic of this particular batch, and I can't help but wonder if perhaps I didn't rinse my coffee mug well enough, as the odd flavor is close to the scent in my dish soap. Then again, perhaps the issue is an issue with the brewing--when I poured the initial 50 ml of hot water on the grounds for the bloom, it funneled straight through them and down into the cup, and I had to compensate by pouring water around the edges to bring all of the grounds into play before they behaved themselves. First time that's ever happened to me, and I know I gave them their proper shake to let them settle before pouring, but perhaps I didn't do it well enough. Regardless, it's still really good coffee.
Above me, a mourning dove coos, and one across the street gives its own answering call. I am sitting on the generously sized deck of my new apartment, a third floor walk-up, and directly in front of me is a mature maple tree that makes me feel like I'm in a tree house, my very own Raven's Nest. The dove's call tugs at my heart strings a little, and I pay attention to them, finding the familiar feelings of obligation and guilt at the other end of the strings. I like my new apartment, I'm having fun outfitting it and fitting my essential things into it, a new puzzle for me to complete with many possible correct solutions. Deeper still, I've found that my intensely painful feelings of failure, grief, sorrow, and identity loss were all acknowledged and dealt with the last time my wife precipitously separated from me, and the work I did then, when I didn't even have an answer for who I would be if I wasn't trying to be a good, supportive husband, is still here with me. Moreover, I've actually found a fair bit of excitement in the prospect of building a new life for myself and discovering who I want to be now that I've finally let go of my rigid adherence to the vows I took almost two decades ago.
Grey divorce is a Hell of a drug.
In sharp contrast to my own attitude, my wife regularly texts me with her own emotional struggles, crying herself to sleep, feeling like life isn't worth living, etc. etc., and I feel badly for her, even as I recognize that she has consistently chosen for herself the prison in which she currently abides. Still, here is the source of guilt and obligation, my old role as emotional caretaker that still wants to help and be supportive, even as the wiser parts of my brain intercede with the knowledge that the best thing I can do is maintain enough distance to let her work her feelings out for herself. I know these things to be true, and yet I can't help but feel guilty for growing enough to have accepted that my marriage was dead, to have grown enough to learn to be comfortable in my own skin.
I'm not the one that said I wanted a divorce in the first place. I'm not the one that said of my vows, "I meant them when I said them." I'm too damned
stubbornautistic for that.The particulars of our divorce have been finalized and notarized, we've agreed to the division of assets, and we are both reasonably content with our choices. All that's left for us to do is wait for our court date, when a judge will make everything official. Then, we'll be legally free to go our separate ways and live our own lives. What once seemed like an insurmountable obstacle now just seems like a good, challenging hike, even though I have not one, but several different elephants to eat one bite at a time, the largest current one the almost two decades worth of cruft that I've accumulated in our home and need to clear out. My most prized possessions that won't fit into my new lifestyle, like my home theater system, will probably go into storage, but I'm going to try my best to practice Swedish Death Cleaning and let go of anything and everything that isn't essential to me or prized enough that my younger siblings would like them, and I know that's going to be a slog.
At this stage of the game, it seems my life is being most enriched not by what it contains, but by what I can remove from it.
Despite my age, this is the first time in my adult life that I've lived on my own and truly enjoyed it for its own sake. The other two times I was following the motto of, "fake it until you make it," and while I did my best, my emotional make-up was still far too close to the dynamics I learned in childhood, namely that I needed to be a part-time caretaker for my mother's sometimes-volatile emotions. That dynamic was so ingrained in my own emotional make-up that I didn't feel complete without having a partner in my life to nurture and care for, and the lesson life has consistently been teaching me as a result is that there is a boundary at which nurturing becomes caretaking, and another boundary that separates caretaking from enabling another's bad behavior, and that my idea of nurturing is far into the enabling spectrum by default.
The question that I try to stop and ask myself when it comes to helping others now is, "am I setting myself on fire to keep this person warm?"
And the beauty of that powerful question is that it helps me to stay the worst of my behaviors, the ones that are popularly called codependent. It helps me find better choices, and as a result I'm better positioned than ever before to take care of myself first, to meet my own needs, and to live a life I want to live for myself without feeling a deep, aching need for another to live that life by my side. I still love and cherish my romantic streak, but freed from the bonds of the expectations of a relationship, I can and do find romance in many of life's small, simple pleasures, like the food I eat, the apartment that I'm renting, this beautiful treetop deck that I like to enjoy, and the unique flavor of my current batch of coffee. My next batch is an Ethiopian bean, and one that looks promising, though an oversight in my roasting process meant that the roaster glitched out several times due to overheating, leading to a significantly longer than usual roast time as the temperature dipped with each glitch. I'm interested to see how it turns out, wondering if it won't be up to par, as my general rule of thumb with my roaster is that it does best with hot, speedy roasts, or if perhaps those glitches will lead to a happy little accident of flavor that I might not otherwise have had from my coffee. Time will tell, and I expect to be tasting my first cup this Sunday.
As strange as an earlier version of me would have found this, despite the challenges and the inevitable problems and complications, for the first time since childhood, I find that all is well in my life and that I am generally pleased and often happy.
Good post. I'm pleased that you are pleased. :)
Thank you kindly, I appreciate it!
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