I’m pretty resilient, as a person. I tend towards being self-motivated, and have been described as having “the willpower and internal motivation of a war machine”. I’m not even making that up. That was a real quote from someone used to describe me.
As a result of falling heavily on the side of ‘action’ when the going gets tough, I tend to want to solve my way out of it. That works for me, it always has but it also has some pretty aggressive downsides.
I tend towards letting things completely consume me until they’re extinguished, or I am. I approach tasks with what can only be described as unrelenting obsession. If I’m in one of these states, I am generally only about 46% present in real life while the rest of my brain noodles on a problem.
Ideally, long before I’m extinguished I ask for help. I am getting good at verbalizing that I a) am overwhelmed; and b) need somebody’s help to help get me back to just regular whelmed. Not asking for help was a big problem for me as a kid and as an adult. Not asking questions to clarify or just to get more information has caused me no end of stress and over the last 6 or so years that I’ve been a professional, I’ve learned to make question-asking part of my stress-relief routine. A lot of stress can be avoided simply by asking questions. Frequently, a lot of stress can be communicated to the other party by asking questions. The other party frequently tends to recognize stress when their subordinate is firing questions at them 10,000 at a time. They can’t recognize stress when you go back to your office and say nothing and hope to work your way out of a hole.
This coping mechanism works for me because I am a verbal person. I’m not afraid to share how I’m feeling and what I think and given the fact that I’m pretty much constantly self-analyzing, I’m really good at recognizing and assigning words to what I’m feeling. It helps me understand my stress and it helps me cope with it. Sometimes, friends, husbands, families, coworkers, innocent by-standers, the air next to me while I am muttering under my breath, might get treated to a one sided lament while I describe in great detail not only my stressor but also all of my reactions to it and what they mean. Trust me when I tell you that this is more exhausting for me than it is for the listener. Because most of the time the thing has been eating at me for a week before it gets to be the subject of its own meandering tirade.
But what happens when you’re not good at understanding your feelings and really understanding what they mean in a context? What happens when you don’t discuss the stressors, or you try to work your way through them but the work is still piling? What happens when you don’t understand why you feel the way you do and your work-til-its-done method isn’t working anymore and you try to force it? You basically create a pressure cooker of emotions. And the problem with pressure cookers is when you leave them unattended for too long, and they get too hot, they have a tendency to explode. Which, of course, is problematic. Because then their insides are unexpectedly outside, and it’s very embarrassing for the pressure cooker, and the poor pressure cooker doesn’t know how they got to this place and doesn’t understand why their insides are on the outside and why they are so broken and how this even happened.
It gets to be a mess. But, to a certain extent, the mess was preventable.
Knowing yourself, knowing your own heart, doesn’t happen by accident. Self-reflection is important. Understanding your own behaviour and patterns is important and it isn’t inherent. It takes time, and it might take late nights spinning your wheels. It might take asking someone to lay some truth on you. But you should do it. It’s painful sometimes, realizing you were wrong, or that you might be an asshole. If you’re not comfortable talking about your feelings, write them down. If you think you’re a bad writer, who cares? Nobody is going to read it anyways. Maybe you’ll get better! Maybe you’ll have an epiphany! Maybe you’ll realize earlier that the heat is up too high and you have to turn it down.
I don’t know how to get someone who isn’t great at saying what they feel to say it out loud, I don’t know how to bridge the gap between understanding your feelings and asking for help, but I can tell you that it gets easier to ask for help once you’ve done it the first time. And maybe it’ll go awful. And if it does, ask for help from someone else. Your support system is there to catch you. Your support system is there to support you. So leverage them! Use them! You’d do it for your friends/family/coworkers, why shouldn’t they do it for you?
An Introduction, how I almost was a Satanist, and the Tarot
Firstly, the only reason we started this blog is so we could get famous and go on Ellen. I’m not even sure how to use tumblr. But I feel like a blog post is a text post, so that’s what I’m going to do here. Make a text post.
I think at some point we’ll have other kinds of posts, maybe posts of fun things that we do, maybe just like reblogs of things we like. Sometimes, if people ask us things, maybe we will answer. All three of us. Or two of us. Or maybe just one. I guess it’ll depend on the question.
I would like to note that I am virtually certain that we are in no way qualified to give advice anyone, so any advice given is taken at your own peril. Good luck, inquirers.
Recently, and to the great chagrin of the illustrious and very sensible BJackson, I’ve started trying to learn the art of tarot. This is a pretty significant departure from all of the other decisions I’ve made in my life. I’m not a religious or even a spiritual person, really. I was baptized and spent many years attending Catholic church before I came to the conclusion that it was doing nothing for me. I wanted answers that were not satisfied by god or church. I remember spending hours arguing with my dad (who never directed me onto one path or another) about religion and its purpose, and why on earth people believed what they did. I knew, as I suspect my dad did, very early on in my adolescence, that I wasn’t going to be a god-fearing woman.
Despite my firm break from the religious, I have always had an affection for the occult. “Anything with a skull on it” would accurately describe things I like in a store, things I want for my wall, things I’d like to put on the shelves next to my fireplace. Possibly as a hangover from my church-going days, I was fascinated with ritual, the stories of gods that were more human that deity, stories about vampires and ghosts, stories about the dead, stories about strange things moving in the house, myths and legends. There was a pretty brief period during junior high school where my mother was terrified I’d become a satanist. Like, not the kind of satanist that people think kids with leather jackets are, but an honest to goodness Satanic Bible follower. I brought a copy of it home from the public library (where I spent many a lunch-hour) and devoured it the same way I’d devoured every other book I read. Part of me took it out just to be a 14 year old shit-disturber, and I got a thrill that I, a baptized Catholic, had a copy of the Satanic bible IN MY BACKPACK, IN MY CATHOLIC SCHOOL. Rumours of my bad-assery are greatly exaggerated.
Anyways, I had this book, an actual copy of the Satanic Bible, and I remember cracking the cover and being dumbfounded. The equivalent of their “Ten Commandments” were these ideas that seemed so reasonable. They just seemed like general rules for being a decent person. I remember sitting on my bed and not even know who I could talk to about it. About the fact that Satanists! Satanists of all people! had these rules that I agreed with. And they made sense and they seemed so much more reasonable than everything I’d been taught for my whole childhood. So naturally, in a swell of confidence and bravery, I walked downstairs and told my mom that in fact, I was going to become a Satanist. She was not impressed, to say the least.
To sum a very long story that’s already become lengthier than I intended, I did not become a Satanist. Despite a fascination with rituals and a very steady thirst for knowledge and the overwhelming reasonableness of their version of the 10 Commandments, I don’t feel very comfortable being bound by a religion. I just like to do my thing, holding onto the firm belief that when I die that my husband will do what I ask and get me cremated and then shoot my ashes out of a cannon and then that will be all. Maybe there could be sandwiches, but if not, that’s also cool. On the off chance there’s an afterlife of some variety, and that the criteria for getting in don’t automatically rule me out for not being religious, I think I’ve objectively made a pretty good effort to live a virtuous life. I make a concerted effort to do the right thing all of the time (but nobody’s perfect, so I’m probably somewhere around an 85% - I’d say a solid pass by anyone’s definition).
ANYWAYS, the Tarot. At around the same time as my failed attempt at becoming a Satanist, my friend Carly acquired a tarot deck. Something that was decidedly off-limits due to the fact that my mother is already a superstitious person who “doesn’t like to mess around with things she doesn’t understand” and her fear that now that I was destined to become a worshiper of Satan that I’d probably open a portal to hell in our basement. Carly leant me her tarot deck anyways, because she was a good friend, and I didn’t tell her they were against the rules at my house. The deck was a pretty Rider-Waite deck, and it came with this tiny little book with the thinnest paper imaginable. It was hard to read if it wasn’t lying flat on a surface because the words on the other side bled through, obscuring the side you were trying to read. I remember lying the cards out on the bed and just looking at them. Trying to make sense of the images and suits, and the arcana. Trying to understand how the cards could tell the future, and not really believing that they could. I tried to do a Celtic cross reading, it “didn’t work” , and I returned the deck to Carly on the following Monday.
My experiences and affection with tarot and all other things unusual sort of dwindled until quite recently (except vampires, I firmly remain a sucker [hahaha] for a vampire romance). In the years between then and now I worked with a girl who was really fired up about her tarot cards. She wouldn’t let anybody touch them in case they knocked her energy off the deck. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not, in any case, she was very upset when she dropped a card and someone else went to retrieve it. She kept them in a gauzy bag, that she apparently just carried with her all the time, and would do readings for people when they asked but only FOR that person. Everyone else was sort of turned away from the conversation while she read the cards JUST for the person that asked. It felt very high-handed and exclusionary, and I didn’t like it.
The last leg of this saga (which holy hannah, has it ever become a saga) begins, as most of the sagas in my life do, with a book. More specifically, a book series. The Raven Cycle, by Maggie Steifvater, which I have recommended to literally everyone I know. I got really caught up in the story, and in a fit of impulsiveness I bought the tarot deck associated with the series. When I did it, if felt like exactly the right thing to do. You know the feeling, like something was out of place and you didn’t notice until it got put back. That’s what buying the tarot deck felt like.
While I was waiting for the deck to arrive, I started reading about how to do it right this time. I discovered a number of errors in my initial dabble, and realized that it’s not an occult-y practice, and it won’t predict the future, and it’s not really going to summon a portal to hell in my basement, but that it’s more of a meditation. It’s a process that can put feelings to words, and can anchor some of your thoughts and give some context to things you didn’t know you were feeling.
The first reading I did, I started following the instructions and said fuckit in the middle and just let what felt right happen. When I read the meaning of the three cards aloud, it made the hair on my arms stand up by how accurately the cards described the situation. So, naturally, I did a second reading. I followed the instructions in the book to the letter, thinking that might help and make the reading even better. But following that particular set of instructions felt wrong and awkward and the reading reflected that. So for the third reading, the one for myself, I did the same thing I did on the first one, and the reading revealed the card the Queen of Wands. I don’t remember any of the other cards because the Queen of Wands nailed who I fundamentally am as a person. Since then, the Queen of Wands has come up a lot. It sticks to my fingers in a reading, or when I cut the deck - there she is, breathing fire. So I’m trying to take her meaning clear, and trying to determine whether or not a situation needs my interference before I interfere.
This blog turned out to be a monster blog. I am surprised I have so much to say, and surprised that I’d very nearly forgotten about my near-conversion to Satanism until about halfway through. How do you forget you were almost a Satanist?
I’m going to try and get better at tarot, I still don’t really understand how to link the cards together (what does it mean when two suits show up together? What’s the relationship between them? What do the cards mean in series together?). So stay tuned!
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