banging my head against the same wall #1999 (at least)

star light bluecinderella via Compfight

I think it’s Maya Angelou who said, “The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

Well, there’s this guy who has shown who he really is to me hundreds of times, and yet I have always chosen to believe something better or different about him. When does that kind of behavior on my part go from being blindness to abject stupidity? When is knowing enough to keep some psychic distance not good enough?

Today.

When I experienced from him perhaps the most self-centered and hurtful behavior ever. (And that’s saying a lot.)

I wrote to a friend who was out of the country and told her what happened. I said, if I am speaking to him again when you return, please have me killed. Really. Please do. Because this is a lesson he has given me in many forms, over and over again. Learn it already, Mary Ann. People don’t really change who they are unless they see the need for change and take action. There are, indeed toxic people in the world who are blind to the damage they do to others. He is one. Toxic. Yes, suffering from childhood wounds like the rest of us, and yes, deserving of compassion, but toxic all the same, and besides deserving of compassion, deserving of great distance.

oops, i did it again

Fractured right-hand wrist. Sprained left hand. One hard cast and one brace. Much awkwardness and difficulty with everyday tasks. Pain. Another exercise in patience and acceptance.

What do you do for a dying person?

same battle every day
Photo Credit: Stefano via Compfight

This morning I had a dream that I was dying.

I sleep deeply and awake ready to go, so I’m hardly ever aware that I’ve had a dream, let alone remember it in any detail. But every once in awhile  I have an incredibly vivid dream—a technicolor dream that is so full of life that when I wake from it, I feel like I’ve been pulled out of reality into a place that is not quite as interesting as where I have been—the dream.

The dream that I was dying was one of those vivid dreams. So real. Super-real. A feeling I don’t have the words right now to explain. But I felt no sadness in the dream. No sadness about dying. Rather, I felt excitement about a new project I had started. Get this: I was starting a new blog post to be called, “What do you do for a dying person?”

I stayed in bed and pondered this dream. I focused on this: I am a dying person. We’re all on the journey towards death as soon we’re born. At age 61, the inevitability of death is something I am more starkly aware of than when I was 16, or even 56. I remembered when my father died. I remember the moment he died, and I remember my own thought: 89 years and it’s not enough time. And this morning, lying in bed post-dream, I thought, however long I live, it is not enough time.

I pondered my ever more impending death, oh so seriously, and then I laughed out loud. I mean, I am hardly the first person to see my mortality staring me in the face, am I?  What a cliché! Suddenly, I found it absolutely hilarious that I would consider thoughts about my inevitable death special in any way, and for a long time there in bed this morning, I laughed about what a silly human I am.

The oh, woe is me, I am dying, was not the important message of the dream.

“What do you do for a dying person?”  That was the important question of the dream.

If the dream had continued, I wonder what I would have written. Now awake, I am confident in what my answer should have been. You’re already doing it, Mary Ann. You’re already doing it.