Counseling an Extrovert

Disclaimer regarding introversion and extroversion--I'm not a psychologist.  I've done some reading in the field, but not enough to qualify as an expert.

What I do know is that few people are rarely a total extrovert or total introvert.  It's more of a sliding scale thing.  "Pure" examples are rare, and, since extroverts are more common than introverts, pure introverts are very rare.

But we exist.  I'm almost completely introverted which A) does NOT mean shy and B) doesn't mean I don't like people.  I'm not shy and I like people just fine, so let's clear that up.  I'm just more comfortable dealing with people singly rather than in groups, I don't get close to people very easily, I'm very comfortable with alone time, and dealing with people takes energy.  I know lots of people that I get along with, but I only have three people in my life right now who I would consider close friends, and I'm absolutely okay with this.

I had lunch with a pure extrovert the other day.  He's a great guy and I like him, but he is Mr. People Person.  He's fantastic at group interaction and makes friends very easily, but he NEEDS people to function properly.  He gets bored and lonely very easily if he's not in the middle of the action.  It's not a good thing or a bad thing; we're just wired differently.

And he's married to a sweet lady who's almost as introverted as I am, and it troubles him that she's not more outgoing and doesn't have many friends.  He feels bad for her.  She, of course, is fine.

So he and I talked about the differences and I tried to promote a little understanding.  And he IS a good guy, and I think he may get an inkling.

It's hard for us to understand each other, but we need to make the effort.

You strange extroverted types, you.

God bless, friends.

A Bonus Day With My Dad

My father's not well.

It's not betraying any confidences to tell you that.  He's eighty-nine and in poor health.  He'd be the first to tell you he's seen better days.

But he's in a lot better shape than he was a month ago.  I'll be honest, I'd thought we were going to be planning a funeral soon.  He thought so, too--he had a BAD couple of weeks.  I'm still not betraying any confidences.  He'll tell you he thought he was dying.  And it was looking a little iffy for a while there.

He's not out of the woods yet.  He's very weak, and his stamina is shot, and he can't walk by himself.  He's still in a rehab facility and we're not sure at this point when he's getting out.  But he's clear-headed and not in any pain and his vital signs are in decent shape and he's getting stronger every day.

I went to see him the other day and asked him what he wanted to do.  And he asked if we could get out and ride around.  (Okay, what he actually said was "If I don't get out of here a little I'm going to lose my mind.")

So we checked him out, and got out, wheelchair and all.  There were some logistical issues, but we rode around, and we saw some people, and we ate sausage biscuits from Bojangles that weren't on his diet plan, and we talked a lot.

And it just struck me while I was riding around with him swapping stories that I was profoundly grateful for that day.  It was a bonus day, because a few weeks ago I really wasn't expecting my dad to rally from this one.  And I don't know how much more time I have with him, and we both know that.  And he's going to Heaven, and he knows that, and so we'll have eternity together.

But, even so, it was really, really.....GOOD....to get another day with my father.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Sports Impairment

There's an issue that I've yet to talk about on this blog, but it's actually given me personally a great deal of trouble fitting in to normal society over the years.

I'm sports impaired.

Physically I'm actually quite strong and before I blew my knee out I was a distance runner.  But I've never been agile or quick on my feet and never had any kind of decent hand-eye coordination.  I can't throw a baseball, basketball, or football with any degree of accuracy.  I was a decent endurance runner once, but never had either the takeoff speed or the top speed that any kind of athletic endeavor requires.  I can't play sports.

Psychologically I'm not particularly competitive and don't "get" what being a sports fan is like.  I've never had any interest in playing sports, and I don't follow them.  I can watch a basketball game and appreciate the grace, skill and power of a well-trained athlete, but I don't care who's playing or who wins.  I rarely watch or attend sporting events, other than my son's games, because I don't see the point.

Which brings me to my son's games.  Graphics Magician is adopted, which leads me to think there really is such a thing as a "sports gene."  He has it; I don't.  He loves sports, both following them and playing them, and he's pretty good, not a prodigy or anything but he can hold his own and then some.  He's fast, agile, and wiry and has the makings of a fine soccer or basketball player or a track & field athlete.  He'd play football if I'd let him.  He knows (and cares) way more about current popular athletics than I do, and I sometimes wonder how he picks all this stuff up.

But I'm glad, in a way, that my son is into sports.  He'll have his issues but he won't have to suffer the secondhand citizen status of the man who has to be reminded that the Super Bowl is coming up.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Panic vs. Anxiety

Adored Wife had a panic attack the other day.

"Quick," I asked her.  "Tell me what it was like!  I need blogging material!"

She just glared at me.

So, okay, no help there from AW.  But she has distinguished anxiety attacks from panic attacks for me before; she deals with both.  The main difference appears to be severity.  In her own words, in an anxiety attack, you think someone with a knife may be somewhere around and you're unable to focus on anything else.  In a panic attack you think someone with a knife is right behind you and you're absolutely shut down.

Medical science doesn't really differentiate the two.  Well, not as far as I know--I'm a layman and have to be careful claiming expertise that I don't have.  But I'm prepared to credit AW's personal experience that they're a little different.  The knife was just for illustrative purposes--anxiety is a feeling of general worry and fretting, panic is a sense of immediate, focused, impending doom.

There's more to it than just a difference in degree, but Adored Wife finds it hard to put into words.  The two have a difference in feel or flavor, or texture, or something.  It brings up one of the great difficulties in understanding any kind of neurological or psychological or emotional maladjustment--language is limited.  For instance, I can try to tell you that when I'm "depressed," it's not like ordinary sadness or grouchiness or pessimism but is more like a gray filter that seems to cloud all my experience, but that doesn't really convey the sensation.

This is why poetry is useful--properly used words can evoke the mood and feel of anxiety or depression or panic or hysteria without getting bogged down in limited and misleading attempts at description.  Unfortunately, AW also deals with anomic aphasia, the inability to come up with the right words, so telling me what panic attacks are actually LIKE for her is probably doomed to failure.

But we keep trying.  I have blog space to fill.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

A Day In The Life

Snapshot of the family.

The freezer died.  Lost some meat and cheese and the basement was FUNKY for a while there.  Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things and I got a funny Facebook post out of it.

Basement Artist is in a pretty good routine.  Works in a restaurant, socializes with friends, active in church, helps out around the house, learning French and piano, working on writing and drawing, planning a I-AM-SO-NOT-READY-FOR-THIS-wedding.

Social Hurricane has started a new job, working third shift at a local assisted living community's medical center as a CNA.  Some big adjustments working at night and sleeping during the day, but she thinks she's going to like it.  Active with friends and tends to be the one who livens up the household.

Graphics Magician is settling into eighth grade, excellent grades so far, planning to triumph over this year.  (Seventh grade was a little rough.)  Plays video games, hangs with neighborhood friends, active in church (and spends a lot of time playing basketball there), does chores around the house, getting back into the school year sports activities.

Adored Wife is still dealing with chronic pain, active in church, VERY active in community theater (where, among other things, she serves as volunteer facilities manager), investigating taking some classes at the local community college.  She's successfully losing weight and is very happy about that.

Oscar the cat pesters us when he wants attention or food and otherwise mostly sleeps.  Cardboard boxes are a favorite.

Yours truly is weaning off of caffeine and trying to shed a few pounds (less successfully than AW) and looking forward to auditioning for a play coming up.  It won't be until February but they're holding tryouts early and they need a lot of guys; I've got a pretty good shot at getting in.  Otherwise, also working on writing projects, spending a lot of time in prayer seeking wisdom and guidance, and trying to behave myself.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Defying The Urgent

Adored Wife and I are both engaged in creative pursuits.  I'm trying to further several personal writing projects and she's brainstorming and pulling elements together for a production venture.  So far we haven't made any money or enjoyed any recognition for these efforts, but we're hopeful.

These amateur endeavors would go so much faster if responsibilities and adulting and challenges and other activities didn't get in the way.  And don't get me wrong--I'm not advocating shirking duties, and other areas of our lives ARE important.

But sometimes things come up that are urgent but not important.  "Tyranny of the urgent"--you've heard that expression before.  We have a lot going on in our household, and the urgent could very easily define and control our lives.  There have been days (and sometimes weeks on end) when we've been so busy just surviving that it's seemed as though there was no margin for anything else.

So AW and I are defying the urgent.

It's a rule, and we check with each other at the end of the day.  No matter what else happens, you have to have done SOMETHING creative that day.  Even if it was five minutes of writing for me or five minutes of targeted research for her, it has to be something tangible you can point to.

Amazingly enough, five minutes here and there does add up.  And I've had a few days that I've been able to get to fifteen and even twenty minutes of writing.  The urgent's not quite as pervasive or powerful as it wants you to think it us.

Take THAT, urgent.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

The Artist Is Leaving the Basement

Basement Artist will be leaving the basement.

Not immediately--not for several months, in fact.  But early next summer if all goes according to plan she'll be marrying her young man and moving from North Carolina to Montreal.  She just got back from a two-week trip to see him in which, among other things, they finalized a date.

I missed her when she was gone for two weeks.  I expect to cry like a baby when she gets married and moves out.

But it's okay.  We don't own our children; we only keep them in stewardship for a little while.  I'll have had her at home for twenty-four years.  I'm very blessed.  If God's calling her to Canada (and it certainly looks like He is), then may she go with our blessing.

Of course, now I'm going to have to come up with a blog nickname for my future son-in-law as well.  He's a nice guy and I like him.  He was initially a little intimidated by me (which is only appropriate as I was his girlfriend's father) but I think he's started to relax.  He's a few years older than BA, has a good job with a career path, and spoils my daughter.  No worries there.

But, yeah, the next nine months are going to go by in a hurry.  Big changes for our family and for the Artist.  Lots and lots of other people have dealt with this, of course, but it's always different when it's your own.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Hallucinations In The House

I suppose one of the stranger things Social Hurricane deals with are the occasional hallucinations.  Monsters, usually, and voices.  She's always told us she'd rather NOT try to describe what they look like, and we respect her privacy to that point--it's probably not good to focus on them too much.

She's on a fair amount of medication already for one thing and another, and the psychiatrist would cheerfully prescribe her some stronger antipsychotic drugs to help control the hallucinations.  It's a trade-off, though, because generally the stronger the meds the worse the side effects, and she REALLY doesn't like the side effects.

So by choice, she puts up with the visions and voices rather than suffer the side effects, and we respect that, too.  She puts down lines of salt at her closet door, under her bed, and at her bedroom door, because the monsters "can't cross the salt."  It's a psychosomatic thing (and she knows this) but it works for her, which means it works for us as well.  It's a way of keeping her errant brain somewhat under her control, and more power to her.

But one time I twisted a hallucination's nose.  And I'm aware that most dads don't do this.

SH and I were having a conversation in the kitchen and she kept glancing over my shoulder.  I asked her if there was a monster and she told me yes, and she was trying to ignore him.  So I grabbed the thing by the nose, told it I was having a private conversation with my daughter in my kitchen and it wasn't welcome, and told it to get out.

And the Hurricane laughed and the hallucination, apparently much offended, retreated to her bedroom.

Now, we KNOW this is all in her head; the monsters aren't real, they're misfiring neurons or something like that.  But we face them, like we face most things, with humor and perspective.  Sometimes you just have to laugh.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.

Social Hurricane Deals With It

Social Hurricane is twenty-one years old, and a newly-registered CNA who's recently been hired to work in an assisted living medical center (she wanted this job and is happy to get it.)  Previously she worked at Goodwill and as dining room staff in a different assisted living facility.  She graduated high school, a little later than some but with good reports from her teachers, has a very active social life, enjoys helping her mother on various household and local community theater projects, likes to work with her hands, and has helped backstage and performed onstage at the same theater.

She ALSO suffers from rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, anxiety, and hallucinations, in addition to dyslexia.  She's a little under-medicated because she doesn't like the side effects that come with the major antipsychotic drugs, and I can't say that I blame her.  She does take a fair amount of pills, nevertheless.

She deals with it.  She has various coping mechanisms, and for the most part does pretty well.  Every now and then she has a "meltdown," when she gets overwhelmed and just can't handle things right then.  Those are much fewer and farther in between than they used to be.

She had a meltdown the other night, when we were off on a mini-vacation in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.  Adored Wife, Graphics Magician, and I were pretty tired and were chilling out at the hotel, and she took a fifteen minute walk into town just to see the sights and stretch her legs.

There were lots of people, and too many choices, and an unfamiliar environment, and she had an anxiety attack.  I've never had one of those, but I've seen them from the outside, and they're not pretty.  You go into sensory overload and can't decide between the various courses of action open to you, and you literally have no idea what to do, and your environment is getting scarier and scarier.

Now, she could have headed it off at the pass, called me, and I would have driven down to get her.  But she didn't want to bother me, so what she did instead was to find a little ice-cream place that wasn't busy, bought a soda, and told the nice man working the counter that she was having an anxiety attack and asked him if she could just stay there until she felt better.  He apparently handled it beautifully and just let her tuck into a quiet corner until she felt better, and then she walked back to the hotel and told us of her adventures.

I was actually very proud of her--she had a problem, didn't let it get the better of her, and dealt with it.  Way to go, Hurricane.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.