Wendryn Doubt

I decided to push myself and start something new, so I found a new sport to pursue for my cross training for running. I signed up to learn how to rock climb. At the moment, I completely suck at it. I do, however, enjoy it. There is something exciting and a little surreal about hanging off a wall by my fingers and toes.

I get very, very sore after climbing, which means I need to do it more often, right?

My upper body strength is not great, to say the least, so this leaves many muscles aching. I have to work through my fear of heights when I climb on belay, so mostly right now I’m bouldering, just climbing on low areas. Even that, however, pushes me past limits I didn’t know I had. I climb until I’m shaking and sweating. That is enough for now.

It’s interesting to start new things that I know I won’t be good at. Rather difficult for my ego, at times, but I’m working to be proud of the attempt so that I can eventually be proud of successes. It’s good for me to have something to work towards.

I went to the doctor today to deal with the cold that I’ve had for two and a half weeks now.

He did the usual asking about symptoms and looking in my mouth, nose, and ears. He asked if I grew up near the ocean and if I’d surfed a lot. I said I swam a lot; I forgot to mention that I spent a fair amount of time scuba diving in very cold water, too. He said that when I start losing my hearing, it will be because I have surfer’s ear, or exostosis, but the good part of that is that I can get my hearing back with surgery.

I was somewhat more focused on the possibility of pneumonia, the need for X-rays, and the doctor saying that if I do have pneumonia I won’t be able to run my half marathon in a few weeks. I did manage to ask a couple of questions about surfer’s ear, though.

Apparently exposure to cold water and wind causes the bones in the ear to grow. This, in turn, can cause increased ear infections and eventually close off the ear canal. It can be dealt with surgically, and I’m very glad of that. Apparently it isn’t too bad yet, not requiring surgery, and I still have my hearing, but it was a somewhat startling diagnosis, as I had never even heard of surfer’s ear before today.

I am amazed that water and air can cause bones to grow. I tend to think of bones, at this point in my life, as fairly static, not growing or shrinking.   All of a sudden there are little bones in my ear that are growing and changing and I knew nothing about it.

Life is very weird sometimes. I learned something new today, anyway, and now I am much less likely to be worried if my hearing starts to go.

I got to do something at work today that made me happy. It was not anything important in the greater scheme of things, but it will make life easier for a lot of people over time.

Word documents, when long, complicated, and handled by people who do not know how to use headings and an index, end up in an awful state. Renumbering can take a ridiculously long time and the index won’t automatically update. This document is over 140 pages long and has a lot of sections.

Whenever it gets updated, it gets handled by another two or three people, all of whom get very frustrated by having to deal with it. I’m kind of the resident Office expert and I had some time. Certain parts of the document are related to my current job, so I was asked to review it, and in reviewing it I started fixing it. Now it’s clean. The headings are all right, the index updates easily, and I’ll write directions tomorrow so it doesn’t get messed up again.

It’s a little piece of satisfaction. I made order out of chaos and I did something no one else in the office had the time to do. I think there are only a few people who even know how to set it up as well as I do; I used to teach the Office suite, so I’m very comfortable working in it.

I’m happy. I made a small difference. I cleaned up something, made it easier for people to handle, and set something right which has bothered me for years.

I’ll take my victories, however small, wherever I can get them.

The definition of success, for me, is very strongly rooted in not having to worry about certain things.

It includes being completely out of debt, being able to go buy something minor without having to save up for it, and being able to splurge and not worry.

We’re not there yet.

I realized recently that I’m having a hard time with my definition of success. The likelihood of being completely out of debt is not high; cars and houses get financed, and, while we are paying off the car quickly, if we ever want to buy a house again, we will be solidly in debt for years. At the moment, though, that’s not an issue. We’re renting and I’m happy with that. When we move, we will give notice and it won’t be a hassle. If we still owned the house, it would be much more complicated. I’m not sure when or if we will decide to buy another house, but it could be a long time. The next five or six years will be in one place and then we will probably be moving again. We won’t be settled for a while. I’m looking forward to the adventurous aspects of those years and I plan to take advantage of being somewhere new. We aren’t likely to buy a house in that time, though, because we don’t know how long we will be anywhere.

I’m trying to avoid being angry with myself for not being successful by my own definition at this point in my life.  I know that it isn’t a reasonable definition, but we have been scrimping and saving for years now. Every paycheck is budgeted down to the penny. It would be very nice to have money rattling around at the end of the month. Not that we’re desperate; far from it. We have enough to cover everything we need. I just sometimes want to be frivolous, and that doesn’t fit very well right now.

I think, while paying off all debts is important, I need to focus on other successes. We have enough, despite being somewhat limited financially. I keep everything organized. We are seldom rushed and we enjoy our time together. Katja is happy and healthy, funny, and developing well. She’s learning new words on a daily basis (note to self: limit the use of the word “dammit!” while playing video games!) and she is almost always a pleasure to be around. Xander has completed his Master’s degree and I completed mine a while ago, so we’re pretty well educated. We have a decently behaved dog and a very sweet cat. We have at least a year to get everything organized for wherever we’ll end up next.

We’re not financially on top of the world, but we aren’t badly off, either. Under other definitions, though, we are successful. We are happy. We are doing what we enjoy and we  are working towards our goals. Those are all important.

I have not yet figured out how to rewrite scripts in my head, but I think writing everything out helps to an extent. I need to shift my expectations to ideas which allow me to accept my/our successes now rather than being upset for goals we have not yet reached.

Several years ago, an acquaintance of mine asked if I’d bought my car used.

“No, I bought it new. Why?”

“Well, there’s a rainbow on the back and I wasn’t sure you knew what it meant.”

I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area; I’m not sure I could have ignored the meaning of the rainbow symbol if I tried. There was more that needed to be said, though, once I caught my breath.

“I’m not straight. The rainbow is on my car because I support people who are LGBT, but also because I’m bisexual.”

“You are? But…but…you’re just dating a guy!”

I managed to keep from laughing that time.

“Well, bisexual doesn’t mean that I’m always dating more than one person. It’s a common misconception and it is really irritating. I tend towards monogamy. It’s less complicated. If I’m single, though, it could go either way. I lean a little more towards men, but I had a serious relationship with a woman, too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re bisexual. You can’t do monogamy.”

For some reason, that acquaintance didn’t blossom into a friendship.

I have had various people tell me that I’m just confused, that I can’t be bisexual, that I must be interested in sleeping with anything that moves, and that at some point I’ll grow up and realize who I really am. The most provoking part of this is that I’ve gotten it from both the straight and queer communities. I don’t feel much like I fit in either place because both groups want me to just settle down and decide. I don’t fit into their boxes.

At this point in my life, I mostly don’t make a big deal out of it. I’m married to a man. I’m happy with him. I’ve never cheated on him and I won’t; I love what we have together and I wouldn’t jeopardize it for the world. When I’m in a relationship I don’t look outside it for completion. I work, as he does, to make our life together as good as it can be. From what most people can see, I’m a straight woman. They don’t look farther than that because, chances are, that’s all I am.

I’m not just straight, though. I loved a woman. It was a good relationship in many ways, too. It’s over now, but that doesn’t make it meaningless.

I haven’t had many relationships in my life. I am pretty comfortable with that. I do know, however, that if I were single again (which I don’t want to be – I love my life!) that it really could go either way. I guess that’s what makes people uncomfortable. I’m not as predictable as I seem to be. I’m a stable, reasonable person in general (well, I think I am, anyway) but if my life changed, they might not be happy with me if I showed up with a date for a dinner party. The other person might not be who they expect.

I don’t talk about this much. I’m not embarrassed by it, but it isn’t a huge part of my life right now. It is a part of my identity, just as being Daniel’s sister is, or being right handed. It’s part of me, but I don’t see it as a huge revelation. Once in a while I catch people off guard with an offhand comment that I’m not straight because it happens to come up in conversation. I’ve lost a few friends that way. That’s life.

I’m a married bisexual woman in a strong relationship. I exist. I’m not that weird.

I realized I hadn’t written about this before. I thought, somehow, it was about time. We’re working on raising Katja to know that families are made with love, not with rigid guidelines. She already knows people who are not in straight relationships and she will grow up being comfortable with that. It shouldn’t matter very much. In some areas it doesn’t. Just because I ended up with a man does not mean that the LGBT community is no longer important to me. I’m still part of it. I’m just not very visible at the moment.

So, yes, in case you didn’t know before, I’m bisexual. Doesn’t actually change anything, does it?

I’ve been doing some things differently recently. Running is one, and I love that I ran three miles on Sunday without stopping. I just kept going and it kept feeling good. My pace was reasonable and I was happy with my time, so it’s going well.

Another thing I’m working on is reframing how I think about things. On weekends I am often catching up on housework and spending time with Katja, and the overlap between those two things has caused me some problems. When I’m playing with her I feel like I ought to be doing other things and when I’m, for instance, doing laundry, I often feel like I should really be paying more attention to Katja. This constant pull on my attention is frustrating and I often end the weekend feeling tired and stressed out.

I thought a lot about how I want to be able to enjoy the time I have, whatever I’m doing. I don’t mind doing laundry, but I don’t like feeling as if I should be doing something else. All of last weekend when I caught myself feeling bad for not doing something else, I thought, “Is there anything else I should be doing that’s more important than what I’m doing right now?” The answer was always no, and I could let go of feeling like I ought to be doing something else. By the end of the weekend, almost all of the normal things had gotten done. All the necessary things were done, at least, though the sheets, while clean, were not folded and put away. I ended the weekend feeling happy and relaxed, and if unfolded sheets are the price, I can live with that. They’ll get folded at some point during the week and we don’t need them to be folded right now.

It’s hard for me to put things into perspective. Making sure everything runs smoothly in our busy household is sometimes challenging and I have been letting myself get caught up in the minutiae. I get stressed when things are left undone, but it doesn’t help anything. I have lists of what should be done, but the world won’t end if one doesn’t get done immediately. I need to enjoy what I am doing while I am doing it, and the only limitation to that enjoyment is what goes on in my head.

Reframing everything seems to be helping. I like spending time with Katja. She’s a neat little person and she’s learning and growing so much that it’s fascinating watching her develop personality and curiosity. I also enjoy running, and she loves spending time with Xander while I do. Running is good for me physically, mentally, and emotionally. It gives me a sense of accomplishment, clears my head, puts things in perspective, and is something that I’m doing just for myself, which feels very good on many levels. I like cleaning house, too, strange as that may seem. It’s nice seeing something go from chaos to order and I enjoy seeing the results of something I have done.

There are very few things in my life right now that I dislike. That’s important. I just have to keep holding that in mind and enjoying life as it comes. I cannot walk away from the work that needs to be done, but the work is not drudgery and there is joy to be found there.

Every time I feel impatient or irritated at where I am and what I’m doing, I think, again, ”Is there anything else I should be doing that’s more important than what I’m doing right now?” It’s quite impressive how often the answer is no. So far it hasn’t been yes, and life is much better since I started asking that question.

I started a training program a few months ago and I’m getting rather excited about it. I didn’t think I’d make it through when I started, but I have learned that I am enough of a cheapskate that if I put money into something, I will almost definitely use the service. I do not like to waste money. As a result, very soon after I joined Nicole’s 0 to 13.1 training program, I also signed up to run a half marathon in June.

This is not something I would have imagined myself doing a year or even six months ago, but Katja has changed my perspective on a few things. I’m 38 this year. I’m not a young mother, to say the least, and people have actually asked if I’m Katja’s grandmother a few times. This amuses rather than offends me, but it does bring the point home that I’m older than many women who have a very young child. I could also stand to lose some weight, which I’ve been rather successful at so far (twenty pounds in six months and working on the next twenty now). I want Katja to have a healthy, happy mother. I want to see her graduate from high school. I want to get to enjoy her company as an adult. That means I need to take care of myself now.

In addition to all of this, I’m a happier person when I’m exercising regularly. Some people in my family have issues with depression. I am lucky enough to be able to control it in two ways: exercise and get enough sleep. For a while right after Katja was born, I wasn’t getting either one of those things. I decided it was time to get back on track and do what I wanted with my life, and Nicole’s program showed up at exactly the right time.

The program is interesting in a few ways. Nicole built it thinking about people, like herself, who wanted to run despite not being currently active. She also included a trainer who helps answer questions as they come up, and both of them have been extremely responsive. There is a Facebook group where we can share the highs and lows, which is really nice. I have made a couple of friends there.

It is an online community, which works well for me since I usually run at times that normal people are tucked comfortably into nice, warm beds. Nyx and I have run in cold weather (my limit is ten degrees Fahrenheit, below which I will find a treadmill at a gym), snow, rain, fog, and once in a while really nice weather. Nyx has taken a while to settle into running, especially since my speed is a trot for her. She still sometimes gets distracted by a scent, but she’s getting better at not stopping, at least. She is also much better at not responding to other dogs than she used to be. I like having her as my running buddy, though I worry a little about how the longer distances will work for her.

I ran a 5k race a couple of Saturdays ago. To my surprise, I actually enjoyed it. I did walk some, but I’m comfortable with that. My speed was faster than I’d been running in prior weeks. That made me very happy. I didn’t come in last, though I did get lapped twice. Most of the people in the race were high school students. I wanted to know what a race would be like and now I know that I can hold my pace despite being passed. I learned a few things, too. I need to bring my own food for the end of the race. They had Quaker chewy granola bars which were much too sweet and made me a little sick to my stomach. They had bananas, too, but they were very green and difficult to peel. The orange slices were a good idea, though.

I think I might end up being somewhat picky.

I have been reading a lot about marathoners and ultra runners, and one of the comments that showed up in a few of them was that they eat real food while they run. I really like this idea. I have a hard time stomaching the gels. I’m sure I could learn how, but pita and hummus sounds like a much better way to go, especially since I know exactly what goes into that food. There’s a mountain biker, Gary Fisher, who eats things like burritos, nuts, and bananas. I will experiment as I run longer distances to see what my stomach can take and what works best for me, but I think that gels are not really my thing.

I have made one other decision since I started this program. I will run a marathon by the time I’m forty. It’s a somewhat scary declaration, especially in a public forum, but I’d like to do it and I think it’s a good goal.

Running does not come easily to me. I spent much of my life with patellar tendonitis. That has gone away because I’ve been running in Vibrams, referred to in our house as toesy shoes. I’m not fast, I am probably not graceful, and I sweat a lot. On the other hand, I keep going. I’m on week ten of the program now (I had to take a break and then go back a week due to the gallbladder surgery). I like running most of the time, even when it’s cold and nasty out. I come home feeling like I’ve accomplished something. I also come home in a much better frame of mind, more likely to be cheerful and helpful. Nyx is happier, too, because she gets regular exercise, even if she isn’t quite sure if there’s a point to running around in circles.

This is good for me. Strangely enough, it is even kind of fun. I ran 1.6 miles this morning, which isn’t far, but it’s 1.6 miles farther than I would have run had I stayed in bed, so that’s something. It was 22 degrees out, too, so I felt just a tiny bit smug about being tough enough to run when it was below freezing. Once I get over my latest cold I should be moving a little faster. Even if I don’t, though, even if I stay slow, I’m getting to the point that I can settle into a rhythm and just keep going. That’s something I have never been able to do on land before. I could do it while swimming, but this is a first for running. It is starting to feel natural, easy, and comfortable, even on days that aren’t good.

Running has never been my thing, but I think I am beginning to think of myself as a runner. That’s kind of cool.

We spent five days in the San Francisco Bay Area week before last. I grew up in Oakland, so coming back is almost always a good thing. The green of the hills, the sun bouncing off the bay, and the salt tang in the air all make me happy.

BART stations seem much quieter than when I lived there because everyone is listening to music, reading, or engrossed in something on a cell phone. I remember more noise and more discussions, so the silence was almost eerie. I may be misremembering, but I think people used to talk more. I’m not sure if it’s a positive or negative change. It’s nice to not have to listen to the drama of someone’s aunt’s sister-in-law’s two boyfriends, but at the same time I feel like some of what makes us human, our connections to each other, is getting lost.

I had forgotten how many people live and work here. There’s a constant hum once I step out onto the street. Traffic, footsteps, horns, construction, yelling, laughing, and the other noises made by thousands of people moving through the day are sometimes overwhelming. At home I go out running early in the morning and it’s quiet. There are few cars and fewer people. In big cities, there are always a lot of people moving and talking and out. I went walking at lunch, two or three miles, and my body started adjusting to the large numbers of people almost without having to think about it. Walk past someone, careful not to bump them, then slide abck into the flow. Head up, watching everything, though these days I’m watching out of curiosity rather than paranoia. The first day I felt off balance and out of step; by the second day I felt more like a fish in a school, not standing out as much. I still got funny looks, mostly for my shoes, but I didn’t feel out of place in this multicultural hodgepodge of people.

There are many reasons to live in a larger city again. I miss having a better art, music, and dance scene. I would love to have a wider variety of restaurants. I like the energy in big cities. At the same time, I like the relative quiet of where we live now. I’m not sure how we will balance that out in the future. I’d like Katja to grow up in a place where she doesn’t stand out a lot unless she chooses to, and the bigger cities can provide that. I’d also like to be able to expose her to a wide variety of experiences, which is easier in a city. I think an ideal situation would be to live within reasonable driving distance of a big city; we could go in to see performances and eat good food, but there would be a balance, too, of more space and fewer people. I would also really enjoy living in a high rise apartment in the middle of downtown, though, and visiting wide open spaces on weekends.

In other words, the future is wide open, but I think medium or small cities are not going to be places we will seek out in the future.

When we moved a few months ago, we got rid of a lot of stuff. We moved to a slightly smaller place, so it was necessary, but part of it was also that we’d been in one place for a long time. A lot accumulates when there’s space and time, especially when life is busy. When it’s time to move, though, the question of “Do you care about this?” often got the response “Not enough to move it!”

I don’t like clutter. It’s frustrating for me. I can’t find what I want when I need it. Unfortunately, I’m good at making things cluttered. Items come into our house and I don’t find a place for them. The flat surfaces eventually end up covered.

It’s time to change. Whenever we move again, I have determined that we will not move a lot of stuff we don’t want or need. I’m starting slowly, just working on a small area. I’ve set up a better filing system this year so that when I bring in paperwork I need it just goes directly into the folder. I’m starting to go through books, slowly, to see what we will keep and what we won’t. I have a bad habit (which I’ve gotten better about) of wandering into a used bookstore, staying for a few hours, and coming out with a large pile of books. I do read all of them, but I often don’t care enough about them to read them again or even to give them to someone I know. These should really be donated. I’m also going through the boxes we haven’t unpacked yet to figure out if what’s in them is anything we care about or if they haven’t been unpacked because we just won’t use any of it.

It’s not necessarily comfortable. I like my stuff. It’s kind of like a security blanket. I think about moving it again, though, and suddenly it isn’t as important anymore. I want the next move to be as easy as possible, and the best way to do that is to only move what we want and need.

I’ve only gotten through a little of what I need to sort, but it is already making a difference in how I look at much of life. Do I want to buy something? Will I really use it? Do I want to move it in a year or whenever? I am not acquiring anything as easily and when I bring something home, it finds a place. I think I’m slowly rewiring my brain to stop being comforted as much by things. I don’t need them and I certainly don’t want to move them. I want to be less tied down. I still like having books and those will always be the biggest thing that we need to move, but I can pare down some and have the books we actively want rather than just the books that end up in our house.

It’s a new way of thinking for me. It’s spurred by moving but also by my recent surgery. I was irritated by some things when I came home, like the stuff on the chess table that didn’t need to be there and the piles of paper that I need to sort through. It’s time to clean up a bit.

This isn’t a New Year’s resolution. I’m bad at making those and I end up not keeping them. This is a lifestyle change, and hopefully it will stick.

The house is starting to feel like we live here. Moving is hard, of course. I wasn’t expecting anything else. I had forgotten how much of a pain it is to figure out what goes where. Eight and a half years ago, I moved into the old house; six months or so later, Xander moved in. We’ve been settled in for a long time, and we were pretty entrenched. I’m going to spend a day and a half at the end of this week finishing up the old house, at least to the extent I can. I will then spend all weekend finding space for everything I moved from the old house. I will be very glad to just be in one house. Being halfway between one and the other has been frustrating, so it’s time to just be done, accept that we are moving into another stage of life, and let it go.

We had a good life there; we’ll have a good life here. We already do. We’re enjoying the neighborhood. We’re both much closer to work. Katja likes the playground and already has other little kids to try to follow around. Nyx seems to like the new yard, especially since she has more room to run. I’m building habits to keep the yards clean and weeded. I’m even enjoying not having a working dryer yet. It has been a while since I dried clothes on the line, and there are certain benefits, like less static and the fact that my skirt doesn’t curl up at the hem.

The only constant is change. I know that. I’ve seen that. Every time I get settled, something changes. I adapt, just as we all do, and it always ends up fine. I’m feeling a little better about this change. The past few changes have been extremely stressful for me, but this one has been a little easier mentally. Well, except for the sleep deprivation, but that’s to be expected, too. I know there will be more changes coming. Xander’s work requires him, at least, to move next year. I’m not exactly looking forward to that, but since we’ve just moved and sorted out what we need and what we don’t, the next move could be easier. I know now that we can do this even when we’re working and sick and stressed. We’ll be okay.

Other than the move, there isn’t much useful going on in my head. I have bits and pieces of stories that won’t go anywhere until the house is more settled and I have time in the mornings and evenings. Katja will be eleven months old in three days, so we should really start planning some kind of birthday party. We’re also going to work on her Halloween costume, which should be fun. It’s all little stuff right now. I won’t start working on anything big for a while, not until all of the boxes are either unpacked or stored. At that point I’ll be able to get more things done; right now I’m treading water. Luckily I’ve always rather enjoyed treading water. It’s comfortable for a while, and it lets me catch my breath.