more than healing
Carpe Bucko started as a blog project and has continued on sporadically. At this point, it’s meant to describe my mental health journey. (I need to update that logo; I’ve recently come to understand that anxiety and not depression has been my life-long challenge. Depression has just been a delightful side effect.)
scratching the itch
Mindfulness is about learning to focus attention purposefully, not like a dog dragged around by a leash. Learning to be with a small irritation like an itch is an unpleasant but useful way to learn how to also be with anxiety, fear, and such. The funny thing is: it works!
stop and see the change
Mental healthiness isn’t a quick project. It can happen so slowly, you don’t even know you’re doing it.
entropy can wait
Entropy: the law of the universe that says energy is constantly loss and everything falls apart. Pretty much summarizes depression, too – but it doesn’t have to be. We can put off entropy, not forever but long enough for a good life.
distraction
Mindfulness meditation involves a lot of being unmindfully distracted. It’s a normal thing. The key isn’t to stop being distracted but to acknowledge when it happens and return attention where you intend it to be. Gently, kindly.
despite that….
Life is hard, then you die. So what? Man up & deal with it.
If only it were that easy.
willingness and perseverance
Running away and hiding is, of course, the exact opposite of willingness and perseverance.
value adding
It’s not that I don’t have any values; I am simply unable to define them. Which means, for all practical purposes, I don’t have any functional values. This is a problem. Because I have been able to get consistent long-term mental health care through the VA, meeting
something more
As a former Christian turned atheist, I have a lot of stuff that continues to linger. Perhaps most useful, as compared to the crap dealing with being good, guilt, etc, is the question of spirituality. While I do believe that the universe is an entirely physical thing, not only are
nothing to apologize for
A friend messaged me the other day to chastise me for not turning to them for help when my ex-housemate robbed me of a bunch of stuff, including my entire month’s SNAP allocation. My immediate response was to send a return message apologizing and explaining … but then I stopped,
befriending
It began with this sentence from the book “The Nurturing Effect” by Anthony Biglan: In the first session, the parent consultant befriended the family and began to learn about how parents were …. And my immediate reaction was: Befriend? Seriously? You could almost see the sneer. But almost immediately, a different