Thursday, March 24, 2022

 Thursday, March 24, 2022

 

      I was up and wide awake at about 1:30, dealing with uncomfortable feelings, not thoughts, just feelings. That weird feeling that all the cells in my chest were shaking. Ah! That’s anxiety. I wasn’t familiar with it because I used to launch myself into motion to drown it out. When I was younger, I would describe myself as working to catch Niagara Falls in a saucepan. Life felt overwhelming. I got up and continued reading Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation. He wrote about what faith is and how one achieves it.   He notes that the foundation of the Catholic Church’s ideology is submission to Christ. Submission to Christ’s will is the only way to peace. Only one problem. He doesn’t say how you know you’re submitting to Christ versus something else. We have a different concept of just about everything, no less Christ. Asking ourselves to be servants not just of Christ but of each other should be everyone’s goal. Now I see why Isaac thought giving his girlfriend everything was the way to form a good relationship. If he gave her everything, she would give him what he wanted. Problem: what if she doesn’t? What if her concept of being Christ’s servant is different than his? She thinks she is to serve the poor, the outcast, not her perfectly functional husband. In Christ’s day, it was probably simpler. A woman served her husband—period end of sentence.

       Adolescent D still hadn’t listened to audio file on his own, and he will not apply the steps I taught him when he encounters a word he doesn’t recognize immediately. I asked him if he still hated himself because of his disability. Yes. That hatred could interfere with him doing what he needs to do to read a word and follow the decoding steps I laid out. 

   When I asked him how he could overcome this negative feeling, he said by reminding himself that he’s amazing. That strategy may drown out the hate for a few minutes. What would he do when confronted with what he didn’t like about himself? We have to find a way to cope with our imperfections.

    I think the “I am amazing” approach is counterproductive. What happens when you have to deal with the moments of you that are not amazing or when you encounter someone who’s not impressed by ‘your amazing’ characteristics. I, for one, have met people who see what I consider to be my best traits as some of my worst. The ‘amazing gambit’ isn’t a good one.  

   I don’t believe it is ever good to consider ourselves amazing. Our life goal should only be to be good enough. Let others judge us as amazing. Only specific characteristics should be classified as such, not the whole person.

    Because of this encounter with D, I’ve given thought to the issue of being good enough. There is an accounting process. No one is perfect in all regards for all people at all times. Our various traits get scored differently by different people. We all have fatal faults in certain relationships. There are very few universally fatal flaws, but there are some.  

   Ted Bundy comes to mind. He was intelligent, charming, and a good life partner and older brother. He just had one minor fault- he was addicted to murder, a serial killer. It was a fatal flaw for the women he killed and for him. He was literally put to death for his crimes. That sounds fatal to me.  

   I ask the students I work with if they think they will be killed if they never learn to read. They all understand that’s a crazy question. (I warn them I’m going to ask a silly question.)  If I were going to ask them if they think someone would kill them if they went around killing people, I think most would understand the answer to be yes. There are fatal flaws, even in this day and age.      

   It was a busy day. I had driveway yoga in the morning, 7-8. Then PT from 9-10. Katie had my new arch supports. These were spongier. She watched me walk. She agreed I was more symmetrical, but my left ankle was weak. I told her about my possible UTI. It was scary to think that I could have a symptom-free case. She told me that in nursing homes, this is a problem. Since women over sixty have symptom-free cases, they must be alert for unusual behavior. Apparently, the infection can cause hallucinations. That’s pretty scary, given sepsis is always hanging in the wings, ready to strike.