Relections...What We Tell Ourselves When No One’s Looking

If April felt suspiciously quiet from Jean’s corner of the continuum care campus, that’s because she spent the month living a double life. By day, she was the same woman who shows up for Wii bowling, Mahjong, and medical appointments that require more specialists than a NASCAR pit crew. But by night—and by “night” it means any hour she could barricade herself in her apartment—she was secretly hammering out posts for the A to Z April Bloggers Challenge like an undercover agent with a keyboard instead of a badge. And somewhere along the line she stumbled across a phrase that lodged itself in her brain and refused to leave through out the entire Bloggers Challenge.….AI

It seems like a month of Sundays since I’ve written a regular blog post. Oh wait—it has been that long since I’ve written the kind of essay that's about what’s going on in my life here in the continuum care community. The A to Z Bloggers Challenge was fun and energizing, but it devoured a month when my calendar was already full. And since none of my fellow residents know I keep a blog, I felt like an undercover agent who couldn’t reveal what was really taking up my time or why I was staying in my apartment more than usual. I was the Cheshire Cat of the CCC—smirking my way through April, wishing I could blurt out my secret but knowing I couldn’t. Shouldn’t.

Some of the other things I did during April:

• I got the results from my overnight-in-the-sleep-lab study, which confirmed that I have Central Sleep Apnea which means my brain is failing to signal the muscles that control breathing at night that is needs to do so. 

• I kept up with my weekly Wii bowling team and Mahjong group.

• I had an outpatient surgery to implant a Bravo device  which led to a diagnosis of Barrett’s Esophagus. Another puzzle piece on why I kept waking up. When I lay down, acid reflux crawls up my esophagus and wakes me up. Treatment is easy. Two pills. 

• I was in the audience—instead of the cast—for the first time at our annual mystery dinner theater. Boohoo.That was hard to explain since our Life Enrichment Director was begging for actors right up to the day before.

• I finally saw a urogynecologist after waiting five months, even though the original problem of getting up to pee seven to nine times a night has been cut down to three or four times thanks to my handsome, young sleep doctor and being put on estrogen cream. (I'll leave it to your imagination on how to get it where it needs to be.) The urogrynocologist and Dr, Google agrees, it helps with sleep issues. Strange, eh? 

• I got a BiPAP machine, which puts me to sleep like a baby and—gasp—might be turning me into a morning person but is making my face look like a relief map when I get up. In case you're wondering, a BiPAP differs from a CPAP because it puts air in and takes it back out where the CPAP only puts it in.

• And I went to book club unprepared because the assigned book couldn’t hold my interest. Watching ants march across my floor would have been more exciting than A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler.

But I believe in facing the music when I haven’t finished a book—unlike a few others who simply skip the discussion. And I’m glad I went, because the facilitator tossed me a comment that stayed with me all month as I wrote my A to Z posts. I don’t remember what excuse I gave for not finishing the book, but she replied:

“We all tell ourselves stories about the stories we tell.”

Her words smacked me right in the place where blog posts are born. I said, “I want to get that embroidered on a pillow,” and she shot back—tongue firmly in cheek—that I couldn’t because she had it copyrighted.

Naturally, I googled the phrase to see whether she made it up or borrowed it. The closest match was Joan Didion’s famous line, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” but that’s not quite the same thing. What I did find was an interesting idea about the four stories we tell ourselves: who we are, where we came from, where we’re going, and why things happen the way they do.

And Google completed the concept with:

“The stories we tell ourselves are internal narratives constructed to make sense of experiences, often acting as filters that dictate our reality, self-worth, and behavioral limits. These scripts, often formed by past traumas or habits, can either empower us or create self-limiting beliefs that hinder growth. Recognizing and rewriting these narratives is essential for personal agency and overcoming emotional traps.”

That explanation gets at exactly what the book club facilitator meant. And I used her phrase as a magnifying glass while writing my A to Z posts. With every post I'd ask myself: Was I being totally honest? Was I sugar coating parts to protect myself or someone else? Was I being unfair or too harsh in my assessments of events or people?

And now I’m asking you: Do we tell ourselves stories about our stories so often that we stop recognizing where fact ends and fiction begins?

Maybe it depends on how scarred some of our realities are—whether we invent stories to protect our inner child or to shield an abuser who’s still in our lives. The latter is, of course, one of those emotional traps Google warned about.

I don’t know the answer. But I do know it was pure serendipity that I heard that phrase at book club on the first day of April, and I thought about it with every post I wrote for the challenge.

So yes, we tell ourselves stories about our stories, and sometimes those stories are accurate, and sometimes they’re stitched together with wishful thinking, duct tape, and whatever scraps of memory haven’t wandered off. But if the A to Z Challenge taught me anything, it’s that the act of examining those stories — even briefly — is its own kind of honesty. And if I ever do get that phrase embroidered on a pillow, I’ll make sure it comes with a tag that reads: “Warning: Jean tries to tell the truest version of her stories — or at least the version that makes her look only moderately unhinged." ©

See you Next Wednesday. 

One Thousand Posts

Gosh, I would be remiss if I let the statistic of this being my 1,000^th post in this blog go by without a---mention? A celebration? Whatever I might call a thousand posts spread out over eight years. ‘Celebration’ doesn’t sound right because this blog was started because my husband died and I could no longer continue the caregiver blog I had going at the time. If I counted all the posts in all six blogs I’ve had over the past twenty years, my post count would probably we closer to 1,700. My first two blogs got purged from the platforms they were on so I don’t know how many posts they contained but with the four other blogs still in the ether of cyberspace there are 307 posts. One of those four blogs is about family genealogy, another blog---my personal favorite---was written in my dog’s voice. I have two others that were caregiver related---one a speech class diary that I kept while observing my husband work with student speech pathologists, and my Planet Aphasia blog that was the cross-eye child of Humor and Frustration, born from living with a guy who was right-side paralyzed and lost his ability to speak and write.

I’ve always tried to keep my blog posts between 900 to 1,000 words long. Doing the math on how many words I’ve written for public consumption boggles my mind. But would you believe it, there are still secrets and untold stories stuck in my head? Well, not so much ‘secrets’ but stuff too private to share---stuff I haven’t shared with a single soul except with my husband. We met when he was 28 and I was 27 so we came with histories that we didn’t keep from one another. He was storyteller and all his tales came with long-winded windups. Whereas when I had something inside bursting to get out I’d write him long, soul-bearing letters. When I was cleaning out his desk after his stroke I was shocked to find he’d kept those letters and I in turn kept them until after he died. I have a hard time parting with my own written words, but some things a couple shares really are too private for others to read. I love letters, though, and I was the person who spent years going to estate sales and buying letters written by people I never meant. Thankfully, I’m not the only one who likes old letters. I recently was able to sell my estate letter finds on e-Bay, and all my own letters written back and forth to Vietnam found a permanent home in the American War Letters Museum in California---if the building made it through one of the forest fires, last year, that threaten the college campus where they are housed. Not sure I want to know the answer on that question.

No, this is not a celebration post because when I look back on all the blogs I’ve written I mostly see them as life-lines I’ve thrown out trying to connect with others. But once in a while I feel like I've had diarrhea of the mouth, wasted like an old horse that’s been ridden hard and put away wet. Ohmygod, does anyone besides western ranchers and equestrians even understand that metaphor anymore? The only reason I understand it is because my husband’s family kept work horses when he was a kid and it was his job to make sure the horses were brushed dry and warmed up after working them so they didn't get chilled and sick. I’ve put a lot of myself out there in cyberspace, mostly anonymously from my off-line life, which means I blog a post then stand around wet and wondering if anyone will come by to help warm me up by sharing their reactions. In the spirit of Chandler from Friends, “Could I get any more pathetic?” Gosh, I miss that TV show. And I’ve got it into my head that after I move to the continuum care campus next year I’m going to find my own ‘friends’ tribe. A group of mismatched people who are all too old to hide our idiosyncrasies from the world and they'll make me giddy with new blog material to use.

Already I’m wondering if I should start a new blog with a new name or just continue with this one. It's so ME to be thinking far in the future instead of doing/living in the present. Once a dreamer always a dream my mom would say if she knew me now. If she knew me now she’d probably be surprised that I like to write at all, having watched me struggle well into adulthood. When I was a kid they had no idea what dyslexia was. I was the girl that exasperated her mother with my inability to learn to spell and sound out words. Is it any wonder that I consider Kindle's Alex to be my best friend? I love her because unlike my husband and my mom she never gets impatient, never makes me feel dumber than a box of rocks, never gives me irritated sighs and stupid suggestions to "just look it up!" Ya, that’s a feeling that has plagued me since grade-school and it still drives me to keep writing. Alex can, however, frustrate me when I’m trying to spell a word like ‘plagued’ and she comes up with pledged. (If a word doesn't look right, I'll have her define it after spelling it.) It took me three tries to get the right word out of Alex. Thankfully, I can enunciate most words to her satisfaction because when I can’t I’d like to bitch-slap her off my WiFi.   © 

Who Reads Blogs?

Are personal blogs just a written form of reality TV? That question crossed my mind when someone on The View said he never watches the genre because he is philosophically against it being passed off as entertainment. At first I totally agreed with him until I looked up a list of popular reality TV shows and much to my surprise I found out that on occasion I actually watch five shows that fall into that classification: American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, Hoarders, Antiques Roadshow, and Storage Wars. Who knew? When I thought about reality TV shows I was thinking of those programs that make me want to stick my fingers down my throat and vomit: Here Comes Honey BooBoo, The Kardashians, Real Housewives, Duck Dynasty, Jersey Shore, and The Apprentice. These shows are very popular which just goes to show that taste in entertainment is far from one-size-fits all. Why am I philosophically against make-me-vomit television?  I don’t think it’s good for society to lower the bar so much by depicting the daily drama that occurs in these so-called average or affluent families. I don’t want to go back to the days of Father Knows Best but if we’re going to elevate and encourage voyeurism then what we watch should have some redeeming or teachable factors to justify having cameras capture so much bad behavior. Garbage spoon-fed into society, garbage out.

Having said that, I also have to say that reading personal blogs is not much different than televised voyeurism. We not only get a window into the daily lives of the blog writers with all their flaws and foibles but we also get the main attraction; we get a window into the blog writer’s stream of consciousness. A stream of consciousness according to about.com is defined as: “A narrative technique that gives the impression of a mind at work, jumping from one observation, sensation, or reflection to the next….” And aren’t we all interested in knowing how our own stream of consciousness stacks up against the next guy’s? We want to know, for example, how often our neighbors think about their past and future, their families and society at large, even the lint in their belly buttons. We want to know if they worry about the same things we do. We want to know irrelevant stuff like how it feels when someone goes to the ‘days calculator’ online and finds out they are 26,227 days old. By the way, the answer to that last question is that being 26,227 days old makes me feel much older than the run-of-the-mill septuagenarian that I am---like I’ve crossed over into Buddha-land. Say something insightful and wise, old woman.

This long winter has been hard on us blog writers who live in the Snowbelt because many of us have to live inside our heads more than usual. To write, we need outside stimulation and we're not getting any. There are just so many ways I can describe the impassable roads, the birds at my feeders and the tin fold hat I’m thinking about making to keep the crazy, snowbound thoughts from coming in. There are just so many ways a widow can say how lonely she is or how much she misses being relevant in the world. Oh, here we go again! says the Mary Poppins-like voice in my head.  It really is time to say something insightful and wise, old woman.

Okay, I’ll give it a shot. “This, too, shall pass. Spring will come, I’ll get back out into the world and once again the box of Reynolds Wrap will be safe from the would-be hat couturier who lives on Widowhood Lane."

Who reads blogs? According to Social Media Today, blogs get 46 million unique page views per month and 71% of internet users read blogs. They also report that the majority of blog writers are women. There are 6.7 million bloggers on blog sites and another 12 million on social networks. Clearly, a lot of people are interested what others have to say about things that touch their lives in some way, be it a personal musings blog like this one or a blog written by a hobbyist beer maker or the highest earning blog of all, the Huffington Post.

The unique page views on this blog number over 64,000. Yet only 1,033 comments have been made. I’ve often wondered about my statistics. Who are these people who come and read my thoughts but never share their own? Who are you? Won't you give me a clue? Did you land here by mistake, a Google search screw-up? Are you a recovering widow like me? Are you a fellow blogger? And the most important question of all: Do you also have a roll of Reynolds Wrap that hides from you on long, snowy days? ©