February 22, 2004

• Extra Challenges Need Not Apply

  
  

  I decided long ago that I would welcome challenge.  This, I emphasize, was not my natural inclination, not an instinctive or intuitive choice.  I reasoned it out, logically.  I was born into a life of challenge.  That fact is clear in my medical history, and in my astrological chart.  Even the part of my life that I have always considered my “saving grace” or greatest gift, my intellect (on IQ tests, I’ve scored consistently in the high 99th percentile; Four Sigma Society rates me at 99.94%, too low to join them) has turned out to present me with many challenges.  So with the trained logic of an extraordinary mind, I decided that it would be to my advantage to welcome challenges, since I was going to have to deal with them whether I liked them or not.

  
  

  This does not mean that I go out of my way looking for ways to challenge myself.  In practice, it simply means that when I see something that needs to be done and I think I can do it, I don’t excuse myself.  One of my favorite coffee mugs has, on one side, an ostrich with its head buried and the words, “Somebody has to do the dirty work.”  On the other side is an upright, alert bird with the words, “I’m somebody.”  Since I  was already an adult when I came to that decision to welcome challenge and it is an intellectual choice, not my natural inclination, I sometimes bitch and moan when new challenges come along.   But increasingly as time passes I go ahead and accept the new challenge and do my best to meet it rather than run from it.

  
  

  I remember when I made that decision.  It was during my first winter in Alaska, the year of my first Saturn return, a time when according to astrology we really “grow up.”  Until then I had run from many challenges.  I ran from man to man, from pain and trouble and depression to drugs, or just away….  I used to ascribe it to “wanderlust, itchy feet,” but my travels were almost always away from something.  That first winter in Anchorage I lucked into a therapy group run by some abstinent junkies from the Family House residential rehab program.  They taught me that I would have nothing worth having until I got some self-esteem, and that the way to self-esteem could only be found through honesty.  That was a big challenge, getting honest with myself.  I had always been very adept at denial.  There was nothing I could not rationalize and explain away.  The negative side of Virgoan perfectionsim manifests itself in an inability to accept one’s own fallibility, one’s faults.

  
  

  Now, thirty years later in the middle of my second Saturn return, I acknowledge my fallibility and when I recognize that I am wrong I promptly admit it.  The best thing for me about these thirty years of practice at being honest, real, and ready to accept challenge, is that I now have relatively few faults to admit to.  Most of the biggest mistakes I ever made resulted from lies I told, pretenses I perpetrated, or challenges I tried to shirk.  I’ve learned over the course of three decades not to make such mistakes.  Yeah, yeah, I’m not perfect but I can live with that.  I find it easier to live with being imperfect than it ever was to keep up the pretense that I was infallible.

  
  

  My first Saturn return was prolonged and emphasized by a retrograde period:  Saturn crossed the position it had been in at the time of my birth and then retrograded back across it and then turned around and crossed it again before moving on.  Likewise, this time.  Last August was the return.  When Saturn turned retrograde around the end of October, about the time I was celebrating a year of abstinence from my lifelong drug of choice (sugar), it was still within orb of conjunction with its position in my natal chart.  Last month, on January1, it made the second exact conjunction, the retrograde one.  Next month, without ever having moved out of orb of conjunction with its natal position, it makes another direct station and moves toward the third conjunction, on May 10, less than two weeks from Greyfox’s and my “clean date”, the first anniversary of the end of his last big binge and the day I decided to stop smoking weed.

  
  

  I don’t count that as much of a victory.  Quitting wasn’t the challenge.  Staying off sugar while continually smoking weed and giving myself the munchies was the challenge.  Life is easier now, in that way and a number of other ways all of which involve having a decent short-term memory for the first time in about forty years.  The challenges associated with my new lifestyle involve many extra trips up and down this valley in all kinds of weather and road conditions.  I have accepted some responsibility for helping to keep my 12-step group running, and have taken on some twelfth step challenges, “carrying the message.”  I also willingly stepped up as co-therapist for Greyfox in his efforts to transcend his NPD, and that task carries a number of challenging features.

  
  

  But those are just the challenges I “welcomed”, things I saw needing to be done and volunteered to do.  They are relatively easy.  The challenges that are giving me fits, making me nuts, are ones I did not volunteer for.  They are handed to me by my own body in this winter’s worst-ever ME/CFIDS flareup or relapse.  They are a whole new set of “sensations” that at a less-evolved stage in my life I would have called “pain” or even “agony.”  Now I choose not to suffer, and I have opted not to run for mind-numbing medication.  Keeping my mind on top of these sensations is a continual challenge.

  
  

  And then there is the “vertigo”.  Actually, I’ve been reading medical texts on vertigo and have found that what I’ve been experiencing does not really fit that definition.  Vertigo is supposed to involve dizziness, head-spinning sensations, ringing in the ears, etc.  Those texts say nothing about sudden lurching sensations that feel exactly like an earthquake or the heaving of a deck in heavy seas, that throw me off my feet and leave me looking around in confusion, trying to assess the quake damage while my family, who felt nothing, look on in consternation.  This is a new challenge.  Challenging, indeed, even to the extent of finding a name for it.

  
  

  For a week or two, I’ve been dealing with a challenge that isn’t qualitatively different from some older ones.  It is the same old sensorimotor deficits and pain, but intensified in my left arm/shoulder/neck area.  I found a trigger point in my left sternocleidomastoid muscle that seems to be involved.  Working that trigger point with deep massage has caused alterations in my sensations that seemed at first to be improvements.  After a few days of it, all I can really say is that it’s a change, an alteration.  I gave up on attempts to judge better from worse.  Until this shit goes away and I am ALL better, I feel I’m just shifting around from one uncomfortable sensation or inconvenient sensorimotor deficit to another.  While I’m dealing with these challenges, I think I’ll bring in the welcome mat.  No new ones, please, for a while. 

  • 7:29 pm
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