How to Deal With the Stuff

Thinking about hypervigilance, the defensive stance, and how easy it is to push people into traumatized reactions to what, to others, seem like ordinary statements or actions. Thinking about Facebook, how it keeps pitching me old posts from this blog, which sometimes I read out of curiosity, but rarely share. It seems lazy to share an old one. I suppose this will be the way I track my cognitive decline, when it comes...old posts will seem so good, and new thoughts mundane and hardly worth expressing. Or maybe it will be the opposite: maybe my old posts will be naive and trivial and my new ones compelling and passionately irrational. Sorry for you that have to watch...or maybe that is why you read these.

I wish I wouldn't think so much about aging and debilitating futures just because someone points out that I am not young now. Of course I blame the culture but really, it is individuals thinking these things that keeps it current. Yes, I don't want to move as fast as I once did, and I'm not motivated by the same things. Today I had thought I would get productive and go out in the shop, and the sun is out, so I could finish the pruning, but here I sit, wanting to write instead. So? Life passages are great. You be young, with all of the quickly made mistakes that set the course of your life before you know it. I actually like this slower pace here in the eddies at the edges of the mainstream. Do whatever you want on my former lawn, now tangle of blackcap raspberries.

I already did quite a few pages in my journal last night and this morning, working things over. I was spurred to put it down in words after reading a beautiful essay about author Patricia Hampl. It was some excellent writing, and reminded me that is why I practice writing...I want to create beauty like that. I feel lucky to have started this blog, because I put it here, people can read it if they want, but it doesn't create an object that will have to be dealt with. My living room (okay, house) (and shop)  is filled with objects. Even though I have started the process of getting rid of things, it's going to be a process for the rest of my time, and I don't expect it to get easier. No one is going to want most of what I have. Thank goodness for the free tree.

Lotte's family gave me more of her archives. This latest batch is much more poignant than the last, and I'm having a hard time delving in. One item is her copy of her book, (The Potter and the Muse) which upon re-reading provides wonderful insights into her work and through that, her life. Her extraordinary and ordinary life is part of my own musing now. I'm having an intimate relationship with her through her writing, one that is closed at the end but open for as long as I am the keeper of her things. The "and then what" part is what I'm chewing on.

I have lots of journals of my own, dozens. I put everything in there, all my misgivings and truth and probably quite a few lies that I believe are true. One reason I journal and one rule about it for me is that you never lie to your journal. This has saved my life a few times when I forced myself to check back and see what I said before, and the damning truth sits there, unalterable. Honesty has levels, and it isn't perfect. Perhaps it's more of an exploration of the veils of self-delusion, drawing them back.

Questions surface. Why do I think that, why do I feel that, why did I do that? Observations of what I have written about what I have done, causes patterns to emerge which can be identified. That's how I know about my hypervigilance and the many cognitive errors that I make under certain circumstances. I know if I'm writing at night, or putting aside other plans to write something scary, or writing long careful emails, or (horrors) the long ten-page letters to family members or lost lovers, I know that that pattern has meaning for me. Those are the signals that my trauma patterns are operating, and that something has set them off. While the material is essential to explore, sharing it is problematic. Mostly I don't send the letters. I save them though. I try not to read them.

Generally I can identify the causes now, of the patterned behaviors, which are usually multiple, subtle, and things that would seem ordinary to the observer. I can even have a rational track operating at the same time. If I'm defensive, the best thing seems to be to let it run its course, crafting the towers of self-righteousness and conviction, but then letting them collect dust. If I have to mount a defense, I have probably already lost whatever it is I want to hold onto. Somebody's wrong impression about me, my motives, or my actions, is probably not going to change through my defense. It has the best chance of healing itself through my actions leading forward, so if I can right my own ship so to speak, the sailing will get smoother. Back into the journal to discuss next moves.

Trying to fix everything, and thinking I can, is another aspect of the cognitive errors. (Google 12 or 15 or 20 cognitive errors if you don't know what I mean by that.) Feeling the over-responsibility syndrome, as I call it, means if the phone rings in a room, my hypervigilant self thinks I have to answer it. Even if it is not my phone. If I'm at a meeting or in a group, pretty soon I have just volunteered for everything, not to control it, but to set a good example of pitching in. Irrationality hates a vacuum. It's a heavy burden to set a good example. It's like trying to be a saint, very catholic. Have I mentioned it's Lent? Ash Wednesday still carries a shame charge for me, reminding me of how it felt to wear that smudge of certain sin to public school, and enter into that deprivation period when we gave up something we loved, like candy. That one was especially loaded as when Easter came, we got piles of it. Starvation and then gorging, so helpful for a life pattern.

I get that hoarding is about control, but I am not a hoarder, just someone with attachments to useful stuff and things that aren't finished with their useful lives. Like Lotte's journals. I could tell her family wanted to keep them, but they were all inundated with things that had to be saved. Anyone who lives 90 years and doesn't have to move into a place, has their history around them. It's essential history in some ways, and her Saturday Market history is really precious. I loved putting that together and look forward to working on it some more. They were very grateful to me for helping them sort things out.

From what I can tell with my little pokes into it, most of what I have now is Lotte's writing, and her writing about her artistic process and her pieces. My understanding of her work is increasing by leaps and bounds, and it's very profound. The materials would make a fantastic research project for a young artist wanting direction, or for some kind of retrospective about an ordinary potter and printmaker as an insight into how craftspeople live. Maybe it's museum quality...it is to me, but then I am the proprietor of the Jell-O Art Museum, so maybe I lack perspective on what the Smithsonian wants...or even the Lane County Historical Museum. Plus, they are full up  at LCHM until they get a new building, and UO probably is as well. Famous in Eugene is maybe not all that famous. Plus, potters are naturally humble, to my experience. Working with earth and fire keeps them very grounded and secure in the knowledge that back to ashes we will go. (Those damn Catholics again.) So Lotte probably expected it to be tossed into the bonfire at some point. It was important to do the work, and the product was less important. She wanted to give things away.

But when I add it to my own archives for the short term, (and I also offered to compile my Mom's writing for our family,) I get overwhelmed. I'm attached in a deeply emotional way to these materials, but I doubt that my attachment will survive me. I also have Mike's Mom's fabrics, and things all the way back to the sign-painting brushes and books and kits from a dying man, Charlie Toback, who lived over the fence from a place on Almaden Street where I lived in the 70's. I opened myself to what these people really cared about, and assured them I would make use of it. And I have! And I've loved them. I still want all of it. They might appreciate that their lives were extended in these ways.

Obviously the world is changing in a way that eventually makes these things useless and in the way, like me. I can fight it for awhile. I'll have to come to terms with it. Probably that will happen little by little, writing about it all the way, since some patterns are functional and do help my life. I could write a few books about it, if then they wouldn't become objects that had to be dealt with.

Probably should get tough with myself. Trick myself with routines like throwing away one thing a day or finishing books and then taking them to the Little Free Libraries. That's how I came across the Patricia Hampl thing. Now I don't want to get rid of it though. Maybe next week.