Today, when responding to the recent "flurry" of events associated with Toni Bernhard's publishing of my piece in her Psychology Today column, I used the terms "wild abandon" when describing how I felt when I originally wrote the article. Having just received notice (after months of being harassed) that my long term disability company had been taking video surveillance of me, I was frantically spinning in circles with energy. And it wasn't good energy. Feelings of anger, fear, violation, shame, panic, judgement, humiliation, mortification...were so intense I found it difficult to even breathe. It was the kind of news that if not for a nearby chair, would simply drop you to your knees. 

It's been almost a month now since that letter came in the mail; about twenty-five days and just as many emotions. In those first days, one minute I would think I have the whole equanimity thing figured out (if it turns out good, I'm okay and if it turns out bad, I'm okay...) and the next I would feel paralyzed by the stories spiraling in my head. Many nights completely unable to sleep. "How can they truly know how sick I am and how this disease affects me if they only video tape me outside?? I only go outside on good days! How do they know by looking at me how many times I have thrown up or if I have been unable to leave the bathroom due to unexpected diarrhea? How do you see cognitive disfunction or migraine on a video screen? Where are they every evening when I feel so ill that taking my medication and falling asleep is my only reprieve? Yes, I drove myself to that doctor appointment, but what about the thirty or more that I was unable to drive myself to this past winter? Maybe I shouldn't drive anymore. Maybe I shouldn't get the mail. Maybe I shouldn't water my flowers on a good day. Maybe I shouldn't go out to eat with my family..." It's been a crazy roller-coaster ride and it takes a tremendous amount of mental work to make it stop. 

But this is what I have figured out about myself throughout this whole ordeal thus far. And believe me, I'm still a work in progress. 

1. I don't believe I randomly picked the words "wild abandon" out of thin air (like I felt I did) this morning when describing my frantic writing episode after receiving that letter. It was wild abandon. There were no rules when I wrote. In fact, when I did it, I had actually planned on using it as a journaling exercise to try and rid myself of the physical side effects I was feeling from the panic I was experiencing. Definitely wild. No one's looking kind of wild. A complete lack of inhibition or restraint kind of wild. 

2. If you look in the dictionary under abandon, the first definition reads something like this, "to give up completely (a course of action, a practice, or a way of thinking), discontinue". That is exactly what I needed. It's what my body was begging for. For that horrible sensation to be gone. I didn't want it any more. And for some reason, I felt that if I just let my fingertips go on the keyboard I could somehow find a way to release things. To let it go. To give it up. I didn't care what I was typing or who was going to potentially read it or if I would somehow let my viewers down. I had simply had enough. 

3. The second definition, although similar to the first, says, "to cease to support, take interest in or look after; desert. Leave empty or uninhabited, without intending to return". To me, this means that not only am I giving up something, I'm not planning on taking it back. And by doing so, at least in my situation, I am leaving this "thing" empty and definitely uninhabited by me. I am putting my foot down and refusing to allow this situation to take up any more space within me - or I within it! 

4. The third definition is where I am at now. It's the very thing I talked to my health psychologist about during our time together today. For me, it's almost a byproduct of the first two; "to allow oneself to indulge in (a desire or impulse)". The minute I hit the "Post" button on my blog account there began an immediate change in my internal circumstances. At that very moment I was done being scared. (Not that fear hasn't returned at times, but with much, much less ferocity!) This was the first moment I truly felt the presence of equanimity. Once I let go, once I no longer let these "things"(fear, anger, my long term disability insurance, whatever is making me miserable) have power over me, or in me, or in my future plans... my world felt bigger. It wasn't really a change in my circumstances, but more a shift in how I was looking at them. I allowed myself to indulge in a desire or impulse. And my desire was to let this all go. Quite a task for a control junkie like me!

The picture at the top of this post is that of an abandon house in Kensett, Iowa. It stands (barely) just down the road from the Izaak Walton League where my grandfather was the president for many years. I was so fortunate to be there recently for an old-time family reunion, which is when this picture was taken by my husband. Years ago, when I was healthier, I walked down the railroad track about a mile or so and carefully made my way through the old front door, which now no longer resides on it's hinges. If you've ever done such a thing, there's a feeling that goes along with it. That feeling can range anywhere from a sort of "spookiness" to a grand sense of days gone by. It's fun to look at light switches and wallpaper and envision what it used to be like way back when. But for me, the minute I walk into an old abandoned house I have this intense feeling of Holiness. Like I'm stepping on sacred ground. Outside the door, old abandoned house. Inside the door...a home. Where the rooms and walls are filled with stories of life and death and everything in between. Just like those stories and the people that lived them turned this old abandoned house into a home, so, too, do our stories turn you and I from flesh and bone into compassionate, spirit-filled beings, beautiful and holy.

Peace,