#365Gratitude Day 236:Knife behavior

When I was in college, I was mugged at gunpoint. It was a horribly traumatic experience. I was pretty scarred by it after it happened. A few days later the cops found my wallet and ID in a garbage can downtown.

There's a funny story I tell about the really weird things I ​had to do to get it back.  Ask me about it, I'll tell you sometime. 

It's been 26 years since that happened to me, and the trauma has long since passed, leaving me with just a funny story and a better sense of how to move about a dangerous neighborhood at night.

​Until just now. 

I saw this video a friend of mine posted to Facebook.

It got me thinking about the man who attacked me.

How it went down for Julio Diaz isn't how it went with my guy. My guy put his hands in my pockets until he got my wallet, then told me to count out loud, loudly, to 100, and not move unless I wanted to die.  

Yeah, not great. I was too busy counting and crying to really get a good look at him.

I don't remember much about him. He was black and shorter than me. I remember at the time thinking the cold, hard end of his gun poking me in the side made our height difference utterly irrelevant. 

I can't tell you what he was wearing, or really even what he looked like beyond those scant details.  

I remember that night though. It was cold. My breath steamed in front of me as I walked down the street at 2 am. 

What was I doing walking down the street at 2 am?  It doesn't matter, it was a stupid bad choice.  

But I'm left wondering, what was he doing walking down the street at that time of night too?

Sure, you don't just walk around with a gun in your pocket on the off chance you might get to mug a dumb college kid.  

Sure, I was hunted . 

But what drives a person to hunt another person?  How desperate must you be? 

I feel kind of like those shark attack survivors who turned to advocate for sharks afterward.  Seriously, that's a real thing. 

I haven't thought about my mugger (what a weird thing to say) in years. And before today, I don't think I ever truly made the connection to see him as a person. 

I'm glad I did.  

It's got me wondering what I can do to help folks like him now.  

#365Gratitude Day 231:Oreos and Milkshakes

A close friend of mine got some awful news today.​  She texted me, asking if I wanted to have lunch, and shared said news.

I texted her back immediately​ and said I was going to get her a milkshake.​

When I first heard about it, my whole body thrummed like a high tension wire being hit with a baseball bat.  My stomach knotted.  My head pounded.  My empathy-flight-or-fight mechanism went off, hard.​

I'm a sensitive sort.​  At first I was going to say "sensitive snowflake", but then I corrected myself, because that's a value judgment, and a nasty one.

I've been listening to Brené Brown's The Power of Vulnerability lately, and learning a lot from it.​  One thing I've learned is that there's this social filter in place, especially in men, where we tend to see ourselves as either Viking or Victim.  

We're either winning or losing.  Champ or Chump.​

It's a toxic fucking lie, filled with shame and expectation.  

After a few minutes of calming my breathing, expressing my sorrow to loved ones about my friend's situation, I did some self-care of my own.  I went and got some Oreos from our company kitchen. 

Funny thing about that.  Another lesson I picked up from the book is often we are able to see and appreciate vulnerability and the need for self-care in others, but struggle to see it in ourselves. 

I'm super focused on this sort of stuff lately.  Part of leveraging my own vulnerability, part of living in a whole-hearted way is placing value on my own self-care.  Oreos might not be the most nutritionally healthy choice at the moment, but they were absolutely a good emotional choice. 

Now I feel armed to go help my friend.  I've got my empathy close at hand. 

It's going to go well with that milkshake. 

#365Gratitude Day 226:Pushing the envelope on gratitude

This has been quite the day for my practice of gratitude.  

So, first of all, there's this particular envelope I've been waiting for.  Moving is an expensive proposition, and in the course of my move, I bent, and then honestly broke my budget really hard.  It caught me off guard.  As I joked to some close friends, for the past two weeks or so I've been so broke I could barely pay attention.

That's a tough thing for me to admit, because I place a whole lot of self-worth in my ability to be self-sufficient.  I had this narrative playing in my head that went something like this: "I'm a 45 year old technical professional, who makes a very good salary.  This sort of financial hiccough is beneath me."

There's a word for what I was doing with that narrative.  I was shaming myself.  

So, cue today.  First, the envelope I was waiting for arrived.  It was the return of my security deposit from my old house.  Well, most of it, anyhow.  Just the budget broken bone band-aid bonanza I was waiting for!  Plus, payday is right around the corner, too.  Whew!

I actually called the tiny post-office in the rinky-dink town I now live in, to intercept the envelope in my meandering errand-doing today.  It was my Big Errand, really.  I showed up at the post office around the time they told me to, but they hadn't found the envelope yet.  So they had me leave my phone number, and gave me that lovely small-southern-town-service of calling me to come get it when it was ready.

About two hours later I got the call, just before they were closing.  I really needed to get it today. But the traffic was awful and I got there about 20 minutes after closing.  On a whim, I knocked and someone inside who had waited just for me, because she knew I was close by answered and said she'd be right there!  

Amazing.

Not five minutes later I was envelope-in-hand, heading to the bank.  

In all this hustle and bustle of running errands, I also was listening to an amazing audiobook, Brené Brown's The Power of Vulnerability, which my friend Andrea had given to me.

The book is powerful.  It's the sort of good, hard book that is as wonderful as it is unpleasant.  It's about the relationship between vulnerability and shame in your life.

It made me cry, I mean real, out loud sobbing, at least four times today.  I saw in it so many things about myself, my life, what motivates me, and my own demons.  I am incredibly hard on myself.  I can be a perfectionist, which has a very big relationship to shame.  There's this part of the book where Brené talks about how she was super sick, amazingly, extremely like death's door sick, during a pregnancy, but wanted to bring work with her to the hospital, because "she doesn't get sick."

That sounded SO DAMN MUCH like my inner narrative about not making financial mistakes.

Cue tears.

A bit later she was talking about how people experience a sort of foreboding joy.  You are always waiting for that other shoe to drop.  Sure, work is going well, but... you might get fired.  Sure, your partner is spanking and diapering you, and told you how much they want to tie you up and tickle you like you've always wanted... but something bad is going to happen to them, or you.  (By the way, I really don't like tickling, it's just an example.)

There is however, an antidote to this sort of automatic mode of waiting for that damn shoe.  It's the actual, conscious practice of gratitude.

Let me say that again.  

The way you lean into joy, the way you live without succumbing to shame and fear is to make a daily practice of gratitude.

The same practice I've been doing in my life for a long time.  Sometimes I've been spot on with it, totally rocking it each day.  Other times I've let it go, and even though I've observed my gratitude to myself, I haven't written it down.

I'm not going to ding myself for that.  That's not what this is.  (Besides, perfectionism is self-shaming, remember?)  I'm just SO GRATEFUL that I'm aware of how healthy, life-affirming and good my practice of gratitude is, and once more, I'm all in on it.

Oh, I'm also kind of wrong about ageplay and community - but I'll get into that in another post, soon.

#365Gratitude:Lubble, Frubble, Squee and no Trouble

So this past weekend was a really, really big deal for me, and for Missy, too.

My girlfriend Squee came to visit us.

 I took off time Friday and Monday for her visit.  Missy and I did a fair amount of prep work to be ready.  We bought a bed for the guest room, put it together, realized we had it wrong, fixed it, realized we bought the wrong bed frame, returned it, put it together, and then collapsed in a sweaty, satisfied heap.

Missy agonized for days over finding good nightstands to put in there, and ended up rigging up some ersatz ones with plastic drawers, and a sheet or two.  (This was a total thoughtful surprise for me by the way - I love her so much.)  We just moved, and all the furniture money we had available really went towards the bed, so that was a lovely solution.

Squee told me that it was all amazing, but we didn't need to trouble ourselves, because the most important things she was coming to see weren't things at all, they were people - me, Missy, and my sister-in-law.  

There's this funny word that gets thrown around in polyamorous circles, frubble.  Frubble is (to quote Urban Dictionary [I know, but don't judge me, in this case it's great]) "Total joy over someone else's happiness."  In the case of polyamory, it's when you're happy that your partner is happy.

See? Cuddling!

We were positively dipped in frubble the whole visit.  Missy was thrilled for me.  Then Squee gave Missy and MB these amazing duct-tape wallets her daughter had made for them, and I was happy for them.  And we all spent time, and everyone was happy for everyone else and for themselves too.  There was a whole lot of cuddling on couches.

That's my wife, and my girlfriend, and if you look really closely, me sitting behind them (See my arm?)

We were family-building, forging all our individual feelings for one another into something greater than the sum of its parts.  I commented to Missy that frubble wasn't quite what I was feeling, because this joy I was feeling wasn't just someone else's happiness, it affected me, too.

She suggested a new word "lubble."  Maybe that's "total joy over the happiness of people you love, that makes you all love one another more"?  I don't know, it's a work in progress.

MORE CUDDLING?  Yep.

We spent amazing quality time together.  We hunted for Pikachu near our house.  We wandered around small charming towns near our house.  We ate Waffle House hash browns.  We felt love, connection, and closeness.

I am so blessed.

#365Gratitude:Not Powerless

Gun violence.  Institutionalized racism.  Police brutality.

It's a pox on humanity, the whole damn thing.

You can wring your hands, cry, and moan all over social media how fucked up our country is.  Or you can do something.

I'm doing something.

What am I doing?

8 Specific somethings.  

That's a link to a page listing 8 things you can do, 8 actions you can take to stop gun violence.

I signed up for their email list this morning.  I'm going to find a local group to volunteer with too.  Enough talk.  Time for doing.