Freeing myself from my past by making peace with it.

Posted on September 5, 2016 by luckyotter

makepeacewithpast
Credit: Me

I woke up earlier from a very odd dream. Unfortunately, I didn’t post about it right away, so the details are a little fuzzy, but I do remember the gist of it. At first it made no sense to me (most dreams don’t right away), but when I realized it wasn’t to be taken literally, it began to make perfect sense.

I dreamt I was on vacation with my MN ex. I don’t know where we were, but it was on a beach somewhere. We were renting a beach house. We were getting along very well (!), and at some point I felt this outpouring of love for him. In real life, I feel nothing but a strong dislike and disgust.

Inspired by my loving feelings toward him, I told him I’d like to make things work with him again. I apologized for my part in the destruction of our marriage and the ways I’d hurt him. I prompted him to do the same. He was hesitant, but he agreed, and made amends for all the terrible things he did to me and to our family.

“Let’s just let the past stay in the past now and start over, as if we just met,” I said, and he agreed to let bygones be bygones.

When I woke up, I actually laughed, because I have no loving feelings toward my ex whatsoever. I have no desire to resume any kind of contact with him, ever. He’s still as evil and hateful as he ever was and has grown worse over time (I know not all narcissists are evil, but THIS one definitely is!) and has zero conscience or empathy. I also know that in real life, there’s no way he would ever be so agreeable and cooperative, even if I were to suggest such a crazy thing.

I scratched my head trying to decipher what this meant. Obviously it wasn’t really about him. Slowly it dawned on me that in the dream, my ex represented either my inner child (who I’ve spent years rejecting and denying) or my past. Either way, it doesn’t matter, because both bleed into each other. My inner child is my past, and my past is my inner child.

Slowly I’ve been learning to develop empathy for my inner child and stop pretending she isn’t there. I’m actually learning to love her and appreciate her because her heart is so huge and she is so genuine and has so much love to give. I’m learning to incorporate her gifts into my everyday life. It’s not easy and sometimes I still pretend I can’t hear her because I’m still programmed to feel ashamed of her. But I’m hearing her more, and realizing she’s not some pathetic, weak, immature little brat, but she is the real me–the one who never got to grow up because her spirit was squashed when she was so young. I’m mature enough now–and also armed with the truth about what really happened to me–to know how to use her gifts, or at least start trying. When I was a child, her gifts only brought me shame and I had no idea how to use them (and wasn’t allowed to use them anyway), so I rejected them.

In the process of learning to love the real me, I’m also learning to accept my past, and finally move on from it.

For as long as we can’t make peace with our past, we remain trapped in it.

The Apple Festival, Hendersonville, NC

Posted on September 5, 2016 by luckyotter

My daughter and her new beau Zach (a really sweet 22 year old guy who is showing NO red flags so far) told me they were going to the annual Apple Festival in downtown Hendersonville, North Carolina, which is only a few exits south of me on I-26. They asked me if I wanted to come. I had some chores to do, but I said I’d join them later on.

Henderson County is one of the biggest apple producers in the country, and the Apple Festival is basically a big street fair where the apple growers come to sell their harvests of apples. Just about every variety of apple is available, sold out of makeshift stands. There are also food stands, arts and crafts, a few rides, and a concert in which local musicians perform that’s held at night (I didn’t stay for that). It’s pure Americana.

Downtown Hendersonville has a lot of cute mom and pop stores and small art galleries, and on every corner are bears — not real bears, but full size bear sculptures painted in creative ways, most with landscapes or other decorations painted on them.

The last time I’ve been to the Apple Festival was in 1995, when my kids were just toddlers. For many years, it was eclipsed by Bele Chere, a huge street fair which was held every summer in downtown Asheville from 1979 to 2014. Now the Apple Festival is THE street fair in this region.

We had a lot of fun. I didn’t have a lot of money to spend (most of it being spent in Florida last week), but we walked around and looked at the local arts and crafts, and I stopped for an apple slushie and all three of us shared a funnel cake (which was so filling it turned out to be my dinner). You can’t go to a fair and not have funnel cake! And of course, I bought a bag of apples to take home.

“How to Be a Gentleman” and “How to Be a Young Lady” — mandatory reading for Millennials?

I don’t like to drive after dark because I have such terrible night vision, so I left just before sunset, while the kids decided to stay longer and then go out to a movie. On the way home, I saw the most incredible sunset (which rivaled any I saw over the Gulf of Mexico last week), unobscured by trees or mountains. I grabbed my camera and took a picture of it while driving back home on I-26 (I DO NOT recommend doing this!)

Outside my bedroom window.

Image

Lucky Otters Haven has a new look.

Posted on September 3, 2016 by luckyotter

Boredom isn’t always the devil’s playground. Sometimes boredom is so intolerable it can lead you to desperate actions to rid yourself of its special kind of pain–actions like, hmm…getting falling down drunk, hitting the mall and buying a bunch of stuff you don’t even want, sleeping the day away, eating an entire roll of chocolate chunk cookie dough, watching Internet porn, having sex with strangers, building a giraffe made out of toothpicks, crafting a voodoo doll of your narcissist ex (hey, if anyone has ever done this, can you post a picture of it, pretty please?), or…remodeling your blog.

So that’s what I did. I’m too scared to change my whole theme yet (I’m still on Twenty Ten) because of my (probably irrational) phobia about losing everything or the slightly more likely nightmare of my blog becoming FUBAR, or at the very least, all my Shares and Likes disappearing. But t I did make some pretty drastic changes within the same theme: the title font, the background, the header graphic, the sub-header, and the color scheme.

I think this look is more eye catching and the fonts and font background colors easier to read. I also think the new sub-head (up in the header graphic) fits my new focus–while I still will cover personality disorders (especially Cluster B disorders), narcissistic abuse, and healing, I realize that only about 60-70% of my posts have much or anything to do with those topics. I cover a lot of other topics that interest, inspire, or entertain me too, and have been doing so for awhile. So I wanted a sub-header that might attract followers and readers who just like general purpose blogs that have a lot of different kinds of content.

I also took the apostrophe out of Otters, so now the title is Lucky Otters Haven instead of Lucky Otter’s Haven. I think the look is cleaner, and it isn’t ungrammatical either, because I know I’m not the only otter here swimming up from the dark and murky waters of a traumatic past. I kept the word “borderline” in there because it’s an important part of this blog’s focus and my recovery, but it’s far from being my only focus. I wanted to draw less attention to BPD being an affliction, even though it is (BPD is to Marburg Virus what NPD is to Ebola) and more to the unusual and sometimes surreal vantage point it gives me when looking at myself and this crazy, horrible, and wonderful world I find myself a part of.

I hope everyone likes the facelift and new attitude. Please feel free to let me know if you think it could be even better or even if you hate it. I do listen to suggestions and unlike real otters, I don’t bite (well not usually, anyway).

On September 10th, this blog will be entering its Terrible Twos!

I can hardly believe it’s been that long and at the same time, it seems like I’ve been doing this forever. That’s next weekend. I’ll be doing a big post about all the changes Lucky Otter’s Haven has gone through since its inception, including screenshots (thanks to The Wayback Machine) of what this blog has looked like over time since September 2014.

Meet and Greet: 9/3/16

Posted on September 3, 2016 by luckyotter

An AutoZone commercial actually told me what was wrong with my car.

Posted on September 3, 2016 by luckyotter

I know the watermarks on the black background kind of ruin the effect here, but it still made me scream with laughter when I saw it.

It’s hard to wrap my head around this, but a commercial actually solved a problem I was having.

Or might have.

About two weeks ago, I stupidly left the gas cap on the back of my car while I was filling up my tank and then forgot to screw it back on. I decided, since there’s a little door over it and some kind of metal flap over the hole, that I didn’t need to go buy a new one.

Everything seemed fine until about 3 days ago, when that blasted “check engine” light came on. I had flashbacks to when my dying Ford Taurus’s “check engine” light wouldn’t go off for over two years so every year at inspection time I had to go through the unbelievably complicated process of obtaining a waiver from the DMV and spend about $200 or more to get that waiver.

I fretted and fumed and gnawed at the hard keratinized skin on the sides of my fingernails over the sudden appearance of the “check engine” light. I prayed it wasn’t something like the cylinders misfiring, as was the case with the old Taurus I finally sold (that car had 6 cylinders and “ran” on about three of them). But other than that unnerving engine light, everything seemed fine. The engine wasn’t bucking or stalling or having trouble getting started in the morning and besides, a full tune up was done just before I bought this car last March (it’s a ’99 Toyota Corolla).

Yesterday on my way home, I heard an AutoZone commercial. It empathized with me about how traumatizing the “check engine” light can be, and then it told me it could be caused by a missing gas cap.

Hearing that was like finding out that a swollen mole you thought might be cancer is just a garden variety mole with a pimple hiding under it. Dare I hope? I rushed over to the nearest AutoZone (there’s one on my corner) and approached a friendly looking staff member behind the counter.

“Is it really true a missing gas cap can cause my check engine light to go on?” I asked the man at the counter. “Your commercial told me that’s what it could be. Is it really true?” I continued, excitedly. He must have thought I was a complete idiot but I didn’t care. I just wanted my problem resolved and thought he might be my man.

“Yes, it’s true, because without it, oxygen can get into the fuel line and interfere with the engine’s running, ” the smiling (or was it smirking?) clerk informed me. Then he presented me with a new gas cap for my car’s model. It came in a tiny little cardboard box and everything. I was told I’d have to run the car for about 50-75 miles before I could expect to see the engine light go off. In a day or so, I’ll let you know if it worked.

8 good things about fall.

Posted on September 3, 2016 by luckyotter

Alright, fine. I hate fall (see my last post), but it does have a few redeeming traits. I can name them on one hand plus three fingers. See? I can be fair.

The end of flea season. If you’re a pet owner, you know exactly why this is important. Especially if you’re sensitive to their bites, the way I am.
No more blisteringly hot, humid, days that make you feel like you’re covered in glue and cause your hair to frizz up and your clothes to stick to you like ColorForms™, and cause tempers to flare.
No more bugs.
You don’t have to mow the grass anymore. Or at least you can mow it a lot less.
Halloween is kind of fun, and Christmas always turns out to be nice, in spite of the dreaded, over-commercialized “holiday season” that precedes it starting around Labor Day.
You don’t feel guilty about sleeping in on weekends, or get that awful feeling that you might be missing something because you wasted your day lying in bed.
Pumpkins are overrated and taste like garbage, but they do look sort of bright and happy sitting out there on a patch of grass covered with leaves. Gourds are nice too.
The smell of wet fallen leaves, fattening baked goods (except pumpkin pies, ew), and fires.

12 reasons why I don’t like autumn.

Posted on September 3, 2016 by luckyotter

ugly_autumn
In my neck of the woods, this is what Autumn looks like.

Yesterday was the first cool-ish day we’ve had since May. While the lower temperature felt nice, I also noticed for the first time that some of the trees are beginning to change colors. It was also overcast and gloomy, and I realized that my SAD symptoms have kicked in full bore. I just felt like crawling into bed to escape from the sadness I felt. After winter, fall is my least favorite season. Here are 12 reasons why I hate it.

1. Around here, the “changing colors” just means the trees change from green to brown to bare. A few turn this unattractive shade of deep maroon or this dirty looking yellow, but unless you go up to the Parkway, we really don’t get the brilliant fall colors you see in places further north, like Vermont. To me, fall is not only not pretty, it’s actually sort of ugly. The traditional “fall colors”–gold, brown, red and orange–look like ’70s colors to me–I much prefer the ’80s colors of spring.

2. Everyone crowing about how great fall is. Shut up. Please. Just shut up.

3. I have to deal with the school traffic again every morning on my way to work.

4. “Pumpkin spice” everything. Makes me want to puke in my mouth. Take your damn pumpkin scents and flavors (newsflash–pumpkin tastes like nothing) and GTFO.

5. It gets dark early and it’s dark when you get up for work, and every day is darker and shorter than the last.

6. The gloom. November and December are the worst, but October is guilty too. Gray, overcast, dark, rainy, and depressing doesn’t bode well for my SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder). And in late fall, around here it rains. And rains. And rains. And it’s not the life-giving, energizing sudden showers of spring, it’s all-day-and-all-night-long, cold, dismal, continuous drizzle that sometimes turns icy and makes you want to go hibernate until spring.

7. All the “fall-foliage” seeking idiots who clog the roads on their way to the Parkway. Go to Vermont instead. The colors there are much nicer.

8. Fake, over-commercialized holidays — in particular the extended Christmas season which seems to start earlier every year–which seem intended to bring some “cheer” to the gloomy last half of fall, but really just makes everyone a nervous wreck instead because of its unrealistic expectations of “family togetherness,” over the top commercialization, and extravagant gift-giving that no one can really afford. Oh, and let’s not forget Thanksgiving, with its heavy, fatty, depressing food and its gross PUMPKIN pie. And these days, Thanksgiving is eclipsed by Black Friday anyway, which now starts on Thanksgiving, so all the turkey stuffed lemmings go rushing out to stand on line all night in the rainy cold for a new flat screen TV. Halloween is okay, but is overrated as f.

9. I could give a rat’s arse about football, and that’s all anyone talks about besides their holiday plans.

10. Fall means winter is coming and winter is torture to me on every level.

11. Let’s stop denying it. In the fall, everything’s dying. Those “brilliant colors” you see for about two weeks? It’s just the leaves attempting to get your attention one last time before they drop dead and turn into worm-food, that’s all.

12. Once you get into the months ending in -ber, you know one more year is in its death throes and for some reason that’s really depressing.

Fall2008
A sad little twig with its wilting, dying leaves just makes me want to cry.