Got stuck in full throttle ahead

[sea storm]

dear ones,

I had to sell my house on the river.  Pretty sad. Everyone says oh how awful to lose this wonderful place. I look down on th e river and just over the river is a little island. In the spring a bear lives there and  I can see him walk on the shore in the morning.  This year he isn't there.  The only way I know he is ther is I can hear loud cracks as he breaks branches.  It is sort of ominous by beautiful too. i can see him swim across the rive and that is also an amazing thing.  So powerful swimming against the tide of the river flowing fast.  He climbs right through the thick blackberries and I know its time to go inside. i know he walks through my yard every day. I am glad when winter comes and he hibernates. There is so much life on the river. Much better than a lake. Kingfishers, plenty of big eagles. So I went through  a big mourning period about leaving.  Then I started to hear things like
 Eagles dont carry luggage.   It is better to be free than have a mortgage that is driving me nuts and breaking my spirit. I came very attracted ot the buddhist nun way of doing things.
Moving is very stressful.  I found a smaller house and it has a pretty garden.Right in town. Walking distance to lots of things. 

[sea storm]

I am doing something wrong and my message disappears if I write very long. Anyway, I have cried a lot about moving and it has stirred up the old demons of loss and betrayal.  My ex took a lot of money and so I have to sell the house after trying to hold onto it. The very act of selling the house is liberating though. I had so much grass to mow and a big garden and the
Whole Catastrophe  as Zorba would say. I am very lucky house prices as pretty low here and I sold my house for enough for a downpayment on a little house.  I am sick of striving. It took a lot of work to get my house sold and two years.  It is a lot of work to get my paperwork together and take care of business. So i really was going full throttle for too long. There is a great picture of a big passenger ferry stuck in full speed ahead and it gets beached.
Now I am starting to have nightmares about my ex stealing the money my mom left me.  I guess I am lucky he didn't throw me off the boat to get the insurance. 
It has helped to write this down. I feel calmer. I am looking out the window and there is a big bunch of snowdrops bllooming in a basket on the deck. So much change this year and lots of hard work.  Thank goodness I can calm down and everything will be easier when i get in the new house ( built in 1948 with lots of nice old fashioned touches).  sea storm

[lighter]

Sea:

At least you're out of your marriage, and know what's yours, and what's not. 

At least you have your money from your mom.

It's a new beginning....

a new garden.....

a new little neighborhood to explore.

I love living in town, and walking to favorite little familiar spots. (Not the case for me now.)

Different, yes, but sometimes starting fresh doesn't have to be sad.

Sometimes it's the best thing that can happen to us, even if we don't know it at the time.

Lighter

Lighter

[Hopalong]

Sea,
I'm so excited about your new, little, in-town house (because that's nearly exactly what I've done).

Your descriptions make me yearn to visit you.

SO much beauty. Don't be afraid.

The old bad dreams are going to fade as you keep claiming one more square foot of YOUR place,
YOUR dream, YOUR present, YOUR life. He is nothing. And he is gone. He doesn't matter.

New space for you. And in you. It will open up as surely as the amazing natural world around you is.

love to you
Hops

[Meh]

The little house with a garden sounds really awesome to me. Moving is stressful!!

I would go for that in a heart beat if it was an option for me.


http://www.stress.org/holmes-rahe-stress-inventory/

[sea storm]

Thank you all for your kind words and encouragement.  Very helpful that's for sure. Really I am very lucky to live here. It is a small mill town that is starting to lose the mill. The main street has the nick name " Boulevard of Broken Dreams".  This makes real estate a lot less than other places.  My house cost 154.000.  That is a low price in Canada. Probably in the US it is a lot cheaper.

My partner took my mom's money just to get that straight. She worked so hard for it and it makes me ill to think about that. It is liberating to make a new beginning although it is scary too.

Yes, Hops, every bit of new ground is cause for celebration.I just got the loan approved and that was very intimidating to me. Thanks also for the stress scale. Hard to believe sexual difficulties are more stressful than getting a mortgage. Seems funny to me now but it was not funny to  live with a man who was impotent and blaming it on me. Now I think," Well, off you go then buckaroo and find someone who will change all that for you". Maybe he needed a prison felon who would beat him with whips and throw raspberry jello by the truckload on him.  I am actually able to laugh now.

I will no longer have a tenant and that is nice. I have had such a list of psycho tenants. One guy got of tomahawk haircut the day after he moved in and started dealing drugs so there were people coming and going all the time. Won't it be nice to have a place without a tenant. Also it will be nice to walk to local places.

You can visit me any time Hops. That would be lovely. In my little old house that is kind of art deco there are two bedrooms up two down. Lots of room. I will be retiring then too. I still have my Japanese antique business though.

It really helps to write this down and have someone care. Thank you.

Lots of love,
Sea storm

[sea storm]

I'm feeling a bit lost. Just want to stay in bed today and read all day. I am saying goodbye to this house and all that it meant. I think it is inevitable but kind of stupid as well. Its just a house and I shouldn't care about a house that much. I am probably tired as the selling of it entailed a lot of work. I even have backed off from my store for awhile.I got a bit workaholic there for a while and isolated myself. Now just isolating but went out for Chinese food and really laughed a lot with a friend. She tried to be an apartment manager for a month. She couldnt eat, sleep, poop, laugh or see friends for coffer ever.  She worked from the minute she got up at five am until about 8 pm but that was not enough. People put pizza boxes down the garbage shute to jam it up. They do this about twice a week and someone robbed the money out of the washing machine  and it was flooding. There were forty two suites. I admired her because she didn't give up. Then she started to take Senyquol (spelling?) during the day to keep calm. People knocked on her door very frequently. It was so hard for her to say she had enough and finally she did. We celebrated with Chinese food. We came at four pm and the lady took four dollars off each of our smorgasbord orders because it was toward the end.  That doesn't happen most places but in a small town it does.

The point I am making is that no one could have known what it was like being an apartment manager in a place that is funded by mental health with 42 suites. It was like that song Bob Dylan sings about everything being broken. Its just broken.  People cheered her on and said she could do it and it was such a good job and paid well. Her bosses were from a large conglomerate that owned dozens of buildings in lots of cities. No one could have guided her through the experience. It was really big. She moved out of her little house in the woods to do it. Took a big risk.  These big risks are wearing me out right now.

The good part is that I know where I am going and if I just go step by step I can get there to a manageable life. I don't feel strong enough though. Its like it going to fast for me to keep up.

Sea

[lighter]

SS:

Glad you got out and laughed.

It helps.

Please remember....

You have two huge pieces in place....

selling your house, and purchasing a new home.

Yes it will be hard work to make that transition, but at least you aren't worried about that too.

Chin up, SS.

This too shall pass.

lighter

[sea storm]

Thank you Lighter,

Your words of encouragement really help. Hard to know when one is in it up to the eyeballs.
Signed papers for the loan and took the subjects off the real estate deal. Wow. I wasn't sure I could get a loan so that is a relief. I really balk at paperwork. It is a part of my brain that does not work very well. Now I know there is not much point in everyone being the same so i am grateful for my gifts.

I also had a private showing of my Japanese antiques and brought out Antique kimonos, vase, plates and scrolls. A lot of work and first time I have done that. I got an accountant to do four years of taxes and she said that she looked at my site on the internet and liked some things and thought she might like to get something for her brothers wedding present. So I hired a housekeeper and put the stuff out. She came over and it was lovely and fun. If I was rich it would be nice to have a salon like this and spend time making the beautiful old things come to life with their stories. This was not the most practical thing in the world to do but I have decided that life is not about the money all the time. I was surprised that the lady picked out a very subtle, zen scroll by a painter who was a national treasure.  Don't know if she will buy it but the whole thing was very interested and she is my first live customer. Living people are better thank internet.

This is so rambling.  I need to bump up my business and sell stuff on a better site. My computer skills are holding me back and so is my confidence.  Selling fine art on this site is like trying to sell it at the mall.  Not the right group. 

This keeps me going and keeps me interested in getting out of bed.  So different from what I used to do.  I think art is like the spark of life. It amazes me that there are people who spend their time devoted to creating it.  Thank God everyone is not completely motivated by money.

Sea

[lighter]

SS:

Sounds like you had yourself quite a project there, and energy for taking your business to the next step is on the way.

Taxes behind you.  Loan papework behind you.  Sale behind you.  Organizing your fine art inventory....

check.

Now what?

It'll be interesting to see what you do next.

hhaw

[Hopalong]

Salons with Japanese art!
I love this.

Sea, you are right: art is life.

SO happy you let that part blossom.

xxoo
Hops

[sea storm]

Thank you guys.  I am doing this in a town of 15,000 on the west coast of Vancouver Island so I don't have a lot of interested supporters.  I appreciate your kind words. I gave this up thirty years ago because it seemed only rich women who volunteered got to be in this. Now I can do it too. Believing in myself is very hard. I feel stupid saying this. At least I am following my dream and not giving up. It is way more work than I thought it would be.
I just got to the point where I had to reinvent myself. It felt like there was nothing left.There are poignant surprises in this. There are so many times in history when the good guys did not win. So then what do they do. I mean the people who get snagged up in the experience of getting close to a narcisisst or two. Really seems irretrievable. I cashed in my rsps and went to work on Japanese antiques. Scrapped the therapist work.
Oh well

Sea

[sea storm]

I am having to be accountable these days. Financially, and that is why I had my taxes done. Out of the blue I got asked to appear on a IV show about antiques where they have someone bring  a piece and four antique dealers make offers. Someone on CBC  noticed my site and thought it was interesting. I couldn't go because I hadn't paid my taxes and was away from work sick. So now it is all legitimite.
They wanted a Japanese fighting fan.  So interesting.... When the Shogun banned samurai from carrying swords, they resorted to using other items as weapons. They made their fans with iron instead of bamboo.  There are vignettes of men showing how they used the fans for signalling and for fighting. It is dazzling.

I had two counselling clients  too. One was a murderer who wanted to keep his young wife from leaving. I actually wondered if she would live to the next appointment.  He was so charismatic.  Also a psychopath.  There were so many ethical problems.  Problematic.
The other client was a mother who was worried about her suicidal daughter. The mother wanted me to fix her daughter and did not or could not see the role of the family. The gift I gave her, which she did not want, was that the family was very much a part of this. I wondered how the daughter could survive in this family and marvelled at her strength. The gift I gave the daughter was to see some of the dynamics that were contributing to her distress and to affirm her view of things. She was so the truthteller in the family. I found the work amazingly profound but also not what I need to be doing.  All that is too much without support and debriefing.

So I went for Jin Shin Doh which is counselling and bodywork Powerful stuff. I am not stuck in full throttle but have been sleeping for days. Feels like the flu. OR.... like I have been at war and having to fight and be vigilant and now I have stopped.  I was trying to be somebody, to amount to something, to realize my potential. Selling the house is significant in some way that I can't understand. You would think I was married to it. Big deal. I have lived in a small trailor in the the woods with no electricity, in a boat in the middle of nowhere, in apartments, nice houses.  I just put stuff n boxes and moved. This time I am like a jellyfish with tentacles wrapped around the house.

I went to the new house and the owner was there. He was really nice and asked if I would like to see the yard as the ffowers and plants were coming alive. It is so much more than I thought it was. I am so lucky. But it has triggered my old post traumatic stress and I am feeling the old wild monkey at work. I have almost stopped my store but it goes on by itself almost because it is online. I need ot go to the next step with it. A better website, get things to auction houses for higher prices. But right now I am really tired out and there is no denying it. Of course I am catastraphizing this and thinking the worst.

Any thought or advice appreciated.

Love,
Sea storm