Happy Halloween!

We had our halloween potluck today for work. I didn't bring ANYTHING...and I have to say, I enjoyed this potluck more than probably any of the others I have ever been a part of. I feel slightly selfish partaking of something I didn't participate in, but it's also a great relief to just enjoy this great food my coworkers prepared without worrying if my contribution is good enough, if anyone is eating it, and if everyone likes it. Anyway, I probably won't make a habit of not bringing food for potlucks (I mean, let's not get too crazy here!), but it's a nice break to just enjoy and not stress for a change.

Had a meeting with my boss's boss yesterday. It was one we had scheduled several months ago when I was making the decision about whether to take the job with my old employer or not, and at that time I had been under the impression that this meeting would be my opening to ask for a raise and a title change. So I did, and my boss said no. Of course he cited the economy as a factor which is something I technically can't argue with, but it bugs me that the hard work I did during the beginning of the school year isn't being recognized in some way. I got really mad about it for a little while and fussed to a work friend about how I was going to leave the company, but for whatever reason (maybe it's being all old now, maybe it's all this Buddhism stuff) my mini-tantrum was over just minutes after it began. I occurred to me that I could freak out about it or I could just chill and deal and it would have the same effect on my current situation. I was talking to Tim about it later and I realized that in past years I've really felt like my job defined me and that getting a raise or promotion would somehow mean that I was a better person. It's only been recently, when I've been trying to figure out who I really am, that I've been able to let go of that external definition of my worth and not worry so much about work stuff. Kind of awesome, if you think about it.

On an unrelated note, I've been thinking about makeup a little lately. One of my favorite fat acceptance bloggers started this side blog called Don't Be a Makeup Chicken and it is making me want to experiment more with that kind of thing. I don't really wear makeup much except for some neutral lipstick from time to time, and this blog has really made me think about why that is. Part of it is that I don't really spend much time fussing over myself anyway. I usually roll out of bed, throw some clothes on, put my hair in a ponytail or something, and go to work. Another part is that I am afraid to call too much attention to myself. But that's BS, right? I don't want to do or not do something just because I'm afraid to be noticed. And it might be good for me to take a little more time for myself in the morning instead of rushing about and always being late. I'm going to have to think about these things more, I think, but it's entirely possible that there might be purple eyeshadow in my future. Stay tuned.

Love,
Carrie

Woo!

Check it out! This is me, shortly after I won the first annual Carrie's Fun Run! Okay, I was the only entrant, but still.

Last week when we were walking the 5k I commented on the lack of 5ks during the months of November and December. Mom came up with the great idea of creating our own events and, as a result of that discussion, we are going to have a Padian family 5k shortly before Thanksgiving...yay! I thought about that and realized I didn't have to wait for the whole family to have an event of my own, so I went to mapmyrun.com and mapped out a 1.4 mile course in my neighborhood. Sunday morning I got up bright and early, got myself outside, and did my fun run! I walked most of it, but there were moments where I felt like running, so I did. One of the coolest things about doing it was that 1.4 miles felt like such an easy distance to do. That wouldn't have been the case a few months ago, before I started training. So, progress!

I'm also slowly but surely making progress with the craft show stuff. I got my business cards in the mail yesterday. They turned out pretty well, though the perfectionist in me is a little annoyed that the logo is fuzzy around the edges. Must learn to let the little things go...

Hope you are all well!

xo,

C

I'm crafty...ha!

I have my very first craft show coming up in December and I am o-ver-whelmed! There are about a thousand little details that I need to get straight before the show, like a finalized logo, business cards, gift boxes, earring cards, getting a table, designing a display for that table, AND making some more jewelry so I have enough variety for the show.

I sat down yesterday and organized my bead stash and supplies, which turned out to be an incredibly emotional undertaking. A lot of that stuff I haven't really looked at or worked with since things started to get tense between T and me, and going through it all brought back some nice but bittersweet memories, like us watching a movie together while I worked on a piece or her pretending to care about jewelry when I showed her something new I made. It is incredibly hard right now to not talk to her about this show when I'm feeling swamped by it. She knew me inside and out...she would know that it was making me crazy without me even having to say anything.

I know all of that comes with time and that there will eventually be someone else who knows me inside and out and who notices and cares when I am quietly going crazy, but man, do I miss her.

An upside of this craft show craziness is that it is forcing me to take jewelry design seriously again. I went to that jewelry class I signed up for on Monday and was pleasantly surprised that, aside from a few tips and tricks I picked up from the teacher, I was pretty much already doing everything right. I had worn a wire-wrapped pendant I made last year and there was a cool moment where one of the other ladies asked about it and the whole class was like "ooooh..did you make that?" :D So I guess I'm a little further along, experience-wise than I thought I was.

Still a little scared shitless of sitting at a table full of my stuff and expecting people to buy it though...

Must develop patience...

So yeah, I had a rough couple of days there, bodywise. I think what happened is that my inner little fat girl got all excited about the idea of weight loss and was screaming "WANT THIN NOW!!!" and it was making me a little crazy. I think I'm on a more even keel now, though.

Sunday was the Run Like Hell 5k, which is the race I'm planning to run all the way through next year. Brian and Mom walked it with me (and ran the teeniest tiniest of bits as well). We were in the middle of the pack for the first quarter mile or so, then everyone else passed us and we became the very slowest walkers in the entire city of Portland. God, that was tough. That's where the struggle becomes almost entirely mental because my brain was ready to give up on my goal right there. Mom and Brian stayed positive and were excellently supportive throughout the rest of the race and then Brian ran through the finish line with me (awesomely, our names were announced as we crossed the finish line because of timing chips we had tied to our shoes...so exciting!). So I've been trying to stay positive.

Hey, I just looked up the results of the race and it looks like I beat my Mt. Tabor 5k time by twelve whole minutes! Also it looks like we maybe weren't the last ones after all, but I don't quite believe that. Okay, so that's good to remember...even if it looks like I'm being all slow and I'm last, I could still be making progress toward my goal. I've scheduled a bunch more 5ks this year. If I can improve a little more each time, maybe I really can run one in a year. Maybe.

On feeling conflicted

Imagine you grew up with an interest in art. It has always come naturally to you and you're good at it. But your whole life, your family and friends have said you need to get a degree and a steady job or else you can't possibly have a happy life. You feel deep down like art is the thing for you, that it's all you will ever be good at, so you set about the hard work of becoming an artist, including the starving and the rejections and the living in crappy tiny apartments. It's not exactly fun all the time, but it's who you are so you go with it. Your family and friends say you're crazy, that you will never be successful, and that you really should get a 9-5 job with a steady paycheck and stop with this nonsense about the art.

One day you decide to take a class in money management for artists and it turns out you aren't too bad at it. You're tempted by the idea of a more lucrative career, so you go back to school and do a lot of really hard work and get your business degree. You get the 9-5 job with the steady paycheck and you are so busy you can't do your art anymore.

When you get your first paycheck, your family and friends congratulate you but it just makes you think of all the times they didn't support your art and scorned you for sticking to it. Even internally, deep down you're conflicted. You like having more money and a steady job, but you worked really hard to believe that you could have made it as an artist...it was part of who you were and, until recently, the only way you knew how to live. But all of a sudden you're this other thing, and it brings with it a lot of questions, like "was I full of crap before, when I was sticking to my guns?", "am I now just selling out to go along and fit in with the crowd?", and "who am I really if I'm not a starving artist?"

This is me, only fat is my art.

So who's in charge here, exactly?

Talking with my trainer went well, I think. It was hard to gauge her reaction...plus then I asked her about food and we kind of started talking about weight loss as a goal which is not exactly what I want to do. She showed me this calorie and activity counting website which totally raised my anxiety level and pushed my buttons, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I am in complete charge of what I do regarding food and exercise. It's hard because my brain just jumps right back to when I was 13 and those topics were so loaded and I felt like I had to eat a certain way or exercise a certain amount to appease my parents. I really had to sit down and deal with those feelings and realize that they are no longer relevant to my situation.

So right now I'm kind of joyfully obsessed with the little calorie counting website, but I'm not changing any of my food choices in particular, just observing what I'm doing right now.

Another interesting thing was when you sign up for the website it asks you to rate your activity level and I immediately clicked 'sedentary', but after I thought about it a bit I realized I'm not really sedentary anymore...that's kind of cool :)

Oh also, according to my trainer's scale I've lost approximately 36 pounds since I've been working out. It's only an estimate since the last time I was weighed was in May in the doctor's office. I hate the fact that I feel a little gleeful about losing weight since I've been fighting so hard to live my life regardless of that number, but the glee is there. If nothing else, I guess it's a tangible representation of the hard work I've been doing, even if weight loss wasn't the goal.

I continue to be a little conflicted about what I'm doing here.

Fear and control

I am worried. The 2008 Portland Marathon happened a couple of weeks ago which means that I have less than a year to the next one. Right now, I'm not even at the point where I can run one whole mile, much less 26.2 of them. I am afraid this goal may be bigger than I can handle...I don't want to give up, but I also don't want to set myself up for failure.

This marathon goal keeps bumping up against the fear. There is still so much of me that believes I will fail, that I can never be a runner, that I will always be exactly the same way I have always been. Argh! I don't want that...I want to run...I want to be awesome...I want to succeed.

I have been thinking about food more lately, which actually worries me because it's a very slippery slope between trying to eat healthier and all-out restriction dieting. Such a tempting idea, dieting. It seems like the perfectest, simplest way to just take control over your life. It's a false sense of control though...and at least for me, dieting would really throw my tenuous connection with my body's hunger and fullness signals (not to mention what it would like to eat vs. what I am willing to feed it on a diet) out of whack. Also my trainer said not to be restrictive right now and she actually said I should be eating more calories than I actually am, so I know dieting is not the right way to go. It's so, so tempting though. So tempting.

I think in this case I'm going to have to deal directly with the fear. It comes up when I think about going out for a run. It comes up every time I go to my trainer's for a session. It comes up hardcore when I think about mile eleven or mile twenty or mile twenty-six. Man, I don't know if I can do this...

Update: Okay, I just talked to Brian a little bit about changing my goal. I think I'm going to. I have a lot of little goals that would be glossed over or missed entirely if I just pushed myself to do the marathon this year, like running a whole 5k, running a whole 10k, finishing the marathon with a respectable time, actually becoming a runner and enjoying running instead of just gutting it out to fulfill this one marathon goal. The tough part is the feeling that I'm somehow giving up or letting myself down by changing my goal. But I guess Brian is right...I'm not exactly changing my goal, just changing my approach. I wonder what my trainer is going to say...

Super

My friendship landscape has changed dramatically over the past few weeks. First, W has somehow disappeared off the face of the planet or is perhaps an undercover spy on assignment or maybe trapped under something heavy and can't reach his phone. Either way, dude is incommunicado. As if that weren't distressing enough, T decided on Wednesday that being friends with me is too painful right now so she and I aren't speaking. At first my reaction to this news was serious upset, but the more I think about it, the more I can see it as an opportunity to let go more fully of the person I was when we were together and become something else.

So yeah, my two closest friends in the world are no longer...present. I'm a little worried that I'm not more upset by this situation...right now I feel pretty okay about the whole thing. Okay, that's not entirely true. I feel their absence pretty thoroughly and I'm definitely hurt by it, but something in my head is working overtime to keep me from thinking about it. It helps that I'm seeing someone new, so I'm distracted lately by thoughts of him, but if I take any time to sit and think about what's going on with T and W, I get sad pretty quickly.

I know, I know...everything will eventually be fine. blah.

Breathing room

I have been feeling kind of low and crappy for the past two weeks or so, but this afternoon my mood seems to have taken a turn for the better. Part of it, I think, is that now I can look at my week without being overwhelmed with how busy I'm going to be. The awesome thing about having dropped my classes is now I have the opportunity to explore other interests. I mentioned the jewelry classes (and I did sign up for one starting in a few weeks) but also I feel freed up to go running again and maybe try a yoga class or two.

The other big factor in my mood changing has got to be something universal or environmental or something, because almost everyone I have talked to over the past couple of weeks has confessed that they have been feeling down too. Maybe it's a phase of the moon thing, maybe it's astrology, or maybe it's just the weather changing. I certainly don't know for sure, but I find it fascinating that whatever it was seemed to affect everyone in a similar way at the same time.

Along those same lines, I have been reading in my latest Pema book about the practice of Tonglen and how it can affirm our interconnectedness with the rest of the world, which I find incredibly comforting. Here's a passage:

In it's essence, this practice is: when anything is painful or undesirable, breathe it in. In other words, you don't resist it. You surrender to yourself, you acknowledge who you are, you honor yourself. As unwanted feelings and emotions arise, you actually breathe them in and connect with what all humans feel. We all know what it is to feel pain in its many guises.

You breathe in for yourself, in the sense that pain is a personal and real experience, but simultaneously there's no doubt that you're developing your kinship with all beings. If you can know it in yourself you can know it in everyone. If you're in a jealous rage and you have the courage to breathe it in rather than blame it on someone else, the arrow you feel in your heart will tell you that there are people all over the world who are feeling exactly what you're feeling. This practice cuts through culture, economic status, intelligence, race, religion. People everywhere feel pain -- jealousy, anger, being left out, feeling lonely. Everybody feels it in the painful way you feel it. The story lines vary, but the underlying feeling is the same for us all.

So lately, when I've been feeling sad or overwhelmed or crappy, it helps to think about how it's not just me feeling this way. When I'm upset I have a kind of tunnel vision sometimes where I can only see a short distance in front of me and I feel like I'm always going to feel this terrible for the rest of my life. This idea of interconnectedness helps to remind me that other people have felt this way and their lives have gone on and they survived. Anyway, I'm not trying to push Buddhism on anybody, I just thought it was a cool idea.

Hope you're all well :)

xo,
C