Monday, February 25, 2008
OSCARS
Last night was the 2nd annual Academy Awards without a party at Rebekah's house. Last year I at least was up to date on what was nominated and watched and was excited; this year I hardly knew what was nominated and totally forgot they were on until I got home and turned the TV on to catch the 10 o'clock news and behold Best Actor award. I guess I saw the important stuff best actor, director, and picture huh? What is really ironic is that I have seen about five movies in the theatre this year and 3 of them were nominated (There Will Be Blood, Atonement, and Juno) and I recommend all 3 of those but you know I sometimes like wierd movies. If Knocked Up and 27 Dresses had been nominated then Wah Lah I would have seen all 5 and I would have to say they should hire me on the nominating committee!!! I guess I am going to have to go see No Country For Old Men now. Its not that I don't want to its that 1) I live in Abilene where I no longer have the artsy theatre right down the street from me like in Austin and 2) I live in the clinic so I guess I'll go add that to my Netflix wish list now and 3) I prefer to watch in the confines of my home or a friends where I can get up and move around. Has anybody seen it? If of all this movie talk you haven't seen Juno that is the one you should rush out and see very whitty, funny, and good; not to mention full of Arrested Development stars. So I guess my Oscar obsession may be dying with my old age but I will still continue to like good movies (especially if they are short!!!).
Friday, February 08, 2008
Masks
I have noticed without the benefits of social research class or further research (that I hate by the way) that there is a direct correlation between when I blog and when I can't sleep; maybe writing is how I make myself fall back to sleep and probably why half of this doesn't make any sense who knows....
Anyway, something I've been thinking about lately is how many masks we wear as we go through this adventure called life. My freshman year in highschool I opted for the creative english route where we read Of Mice and Men instead of Phantom of the Opera. The less creative class however, got to do something really cool with their reading of Phantom - they got to make a mask as it represented one of the masks they wear. Funny I was jealous of this project and they all hated it and would have preferred to have written the literary critique on Mice and Men I had to write and I was supposed to be in the creative class - I'm not bitter still at all!!!!!
Funny though I was at the YMCA where me and another girl do our externship with jr. high and high school teens (as society or the schools term "at risk" teens) anyway we had them asking each other those hard questions and one thing I realized is they know what the right things are but they put on these masks to be cool or popular or accepted or sometimes to survive because they don't have the encouragement and sometimes the opportunity to be real.
Realness is something that is so important to me in my friendships and probably one of the reasons I don't trust people because of all the masks we wear; yet I think about all the masks I wear. And I think about how EXHAUSTING!!! it is. Why do we do this to ourselves? Part of it I think is the societal expectations we, others, our family, our culture puts on us but part of it I think is us trying to cover up our own hurts and insecurities. We all want to be accepted and so as that means so many different things in so many crowds we have to switch masks as we think appropriate.
Now I'm not talking about switching behaviors or emotions like being funny or serious or loud or quiet at appropriate times; I'm talking about the things we do that aren't really who we are but we do to cover up who we really are. Those deep seated or sometimes shallow things we hide or try to become someone else by switching our masks. Some call it leading a double life. Its sad and I wander what the world would be like if we destroyed all of these masks and were just real with each other. I might not have a future job then though because ironically these masks we use to cover up our insecurities and hurts are the same masks we so long to expose and rid ourselves of in therapy and in our true friendships because of the hurt they cause.
So think about it - how exhausting does changing masks make you? Then why do we keep doing it?
Anyway, something I've been thinking about lately is how many masks we wear as we go through this adventure called life. My freshman year in highschool I opted for the creative english route where we read Of Mice and Men instead of Phantom of the Opera. The less creative class however, got to do something really cool with their reading of Phantom - they got to make a mask as it represented one of the masks they wear. Funny I was jealous of this project and they all hated it and would have preferred to have written the literary critique on Mice and Men I had to write and I was supposed to be in the creative class - I'm not bitter still at all!!!!!
Funny though I was at the YMCA where me and another girl do our externship with jr. high and high school teens (as society or the schools term "at risk" teens) anyway we had them asking each other those hard questions and one thing I realized is they know what the right things are but they put on these masks to be cool or popular or accepted or sometimes to survive because they don't have the encouragement and sometimes the opportunity to be real.
Realness is something that is so important to me in my friendships and probably one of the reasons I don't trust people because of all the masks we wear; yet I think about all the masks I wear. And I think about how EXHAUSTING!!! it is. Why do we do this to ourselves? Part of it I think is the societal expectations we, others, our family, our culture puts on us but part of it I think is us trying to cover up our own hurts and insecurities. We all want to be accepted and so as that means so many different things in so many crowds we have to switch masks as we think appropriate.
Now I'm not talking about switching behaviors or emotions like being funny or serious or loud or quiet at appropriate times; I'm talking about the things we do that aren't really who we are but we do to cover up who we really are. Those deep seated or sometimes shallow things we hide or try to become someone else by switching our masks. Some call it leading a double life. Its sad and I wander what the world would be like if we destroyed all of these masks and were just real with each other. I might not have a future job then though because ironically these masks we use to cover up our insecurities and hurts are the same masks we so long to expose and rid ourselves of in therapy and in our true friendships because of the hurt they cause.
So think about it - how exhausting does changing masks make you? Then why do we keep doing it?
Friday, January 25, 2008
Am I really staying another year here?
As some of you know I am thinking about/pretty sure I'm gonna stay here another year but after last night and this morning and a rememberance of West Texas culture maybe I need to get back to Austin as fast as possible without passing go....
So last night I come out of one of the wierdest sessions I've ever had to the announcement that I better call my clients mucho fasto because it is raining and we were going to close the clinic. What the hey? Oh wait it is Abilene - rain and near freezing temperatures of course is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Of course I was a little frustrated when I walked outside and it wasn't even raining yet; it just was SUPPOSED to. For the record I don't think it ever did ice over but anyway I'll respect safety first. And it was nice to go to Wal-Mart and NOBODY was there; although there were not many diet dr. peppers I guess people had been stocking up all day for the expected storm (that never materialized as usual but we have to keep the weathermen employed)
Well I haven't felt 100% the last couple of days- some asthma some sore throat some probably just exhaustion so I had this great idea to sleep in this morning. Granted sleeping in for my old self is like 8 or 8:30 at the latest. Well a couple of weekends ago the light in our bathroom had exploded and well guess what I guess since they weren't able to shut down because the storm didn't materialize the renter company and the electric company decided they didn't have anything to do today since they ended up having to work and gave us a call at 7:18 AM. RIDICULOUS - are you kidding me? Not only did the rental lady wake me up but she was calling to tell me that the door bell I just heard ringing while on the phone with her was indeed the electric man to look at the light. yes now it is 7:19 AM. So a sleepy eyed, disatrous haired, pj dressed, morning breath fumes flowing out opens the door and lets the electric man in who proceeds to tell me I am cute and asks me what I am doing this weekend. I must just believe that he was trying to make conversation with me because of how I looked but I must reconsider staying another year in West Texas!!!!!
So last night I come out of one of the wierdest sessions I've ever had to the announcement that I better call my clients mucho fasto because it is raining and we were going to close the clinic. What the hey? Oh wait it is Abilene - rain and near freezing temperatures of course is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Of course I was a little frustrated when I walked outside and it wasn't even raining yet; it just was SUPPOSED to. For the record I don't think it ever did ice over but anyway I'll respect safety first. And it was nice to go to Wal-Mart and NOBODY was there; although there were not many diet dr. peppers I guess people had been stocking up all day for the expected storm (that never materialized as usual but we have to keep the weathermen employed)
Well I haven't felt 100% the last couple of days- some asthma some sore throat some probably just exhaustion so I had this great idea to sleep in this morning. Granted sleeping in for my old self is like 8 or 8:30 at the latest. Well a couple of weekends ago the light in our bathroom had exploded and well guess what I guess since they weren't able to shut down because the storm didn't materialize the renter company and the electric company decided they didn't have anything to do today since they ended up having to work and gave us a call at 7:18 AM. RIDICULOUS - are you kidding me? Not only did the rental lady wake me up but she was calling to tell me that the door bell I just heard ringing while on the phone with her was indeed the electric man to look at the light. yes now it is 7:19 AM. So a sleepy eyed, disatrous haired, pj dressed, morning breath fumes flowing out opens the door and lets the electric man in who proceeds to tell me I am cute and asks me what I am doing this weekend. I must just believe that he was trying to make conversation with me because of how I looked but I must reconsider staying another year in West Texas!!!!!
Friday, January 18, 2008
HOPE
Step two of the 12 Steps Program overriding emphasis is to offer a message of HOPE. One of my frustrations lately has been that I guess over the past ten years too many of my brain cells have died because I can't remember things like I used to but for some reason tonight I am vividly recalling the acrostic for HOPE from Celebrate Recovery last Sunday night. (that is HOPE in itself five days and its still floating in the abyss of my brain!!!)
H- Higher Power
O- Openness to Change
P - Power to Change
E - Expect to Change
Change is so hard. Period. Oh maybe not the little things that don't matter much but to really scrub our lives clean of the mildew and soap scum that has built up over days, weeks, months, years of living one way and then being brought out of our denial that hmmmm maybe this isn't who I am or how I want to live is not easy. When I was at Harding we had this dorm mother (I wish I could say wonderful but...) Aunt B. Now Harding believed in keeping your rooms clean especially in the new dorms and Aunt B was the bathtub Nazi complete with the white glove. Some of you remember how could you forget? Every week we had a shining bathtub. Well I had enough of that so after about 4 years of NOT cleaning my bathtub in Memphis when I moved out of my apartment well you can only imagine the toil and chemicals (there was no Mr. Clean erase sponges back then) at trying to get all that crud off the bathtub. Now as grose as that may be (I clean my bathtub now) how often are our lives like that?
I often talk to my clients about this techy therapist talk of 1st order, 2nd order, prochaska change I think these 4 letters of HOPE are just as good and a little bathtub analogy. But its still hard. And sometimes that message of hope is hard.
Even when I become open to change knowing how to do it and feeling like I have the confidence and power in me to change especially after trying before and failing leads to no faith in the expectation of change. So in essence I guess the expectation in itself that change can occur must be a change. I asked my supervisor how to give a client hope when I wasn't sure there was any hope and he took the situation and reframed my whole thought process about it. Maybe this is the greatest strenght of therapy or friendship; a different view, a reframe, a different perspective, a calling out, all followed up by walking side by side encouraging and never giving up the Hope they have in the other.
H- Higher Power
O- Openness to Change
P - Power to Change
E - Expect to Change
Change is so hard. Period. Oh maybe not the little things that don't matter much but to really scrub our lives clean of the mildew and soap scum that has built up over days, weeks, months, years of living one way and then being brought out of our denial that hmmmm maybe this isn't who I am or how I want to live is not easy. When I was at Harding we had this dorm mother (I wish I could say wonderful but...) Aunt B. Now Harding believed in keeping your rooms clean especially in the new dorms and Aunt B was the bathtub Nazi complete with the white glove. Some of you remember how could you forget? Every week we had a shining bathtub. Well I had enough of that so after about 4 years of NOT cleaning my bathtub in Memphis when I moved out of my apartment well you can only imagine the toil and chemicals (there was no Mr. Clean erase sponges back then) at trying to get all that crud off the bathtub. Now as grose as that may be (I clean my bathtub now) how often are our lives like that?
I often talk to my clients about this techy therapist talk of 1st order, 2nd order, prochaska change I think these 4 letters of HOPE are just as good and a little bathtub analogy. But its still hard. And sometimes that message of hope is hard.
Even when I become open to change knowing how to do it and feeling like I have the confidence and power in me to change especially after trying before and failing leads to no faith in the expectation of change. So in essence I guess the expectation in itself that change can occur must be a change. I asked my supervisor how to give a client hope when I wasn't sure there was any hope and he took the situation and reframed my whole thought process about it. Maybe this is the greatest strenght of therapy or friendship; a different view, a reframe, a different perspective, a calling out, all followed up by walking side by side encouraging and never giving up the Hope they have in the other.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)