Healthy Resource Management.

Since my conversation with Renee last week about allowing myself to receive from others (and thereby interpret from a Higher Power) instead of exhausting myself from my own reserves, I’ve been considering how I manage resources.

For the most part, I live within very meager means; I always have. I don’t really live extravagantly, and would go on shopping binges to make up for the time I kept such a tight lid on everything. My apartment is perfect for what I need it to be, except for the lack of artist space in it. My computer is perfect, except that the operating system is so old, I can’t access the Kaiser email system without refreshing four times. My clothing is perfect, except that the majority of the clothing is several years and a style old. And my love life is perfect, except for the aching lack of intimacy and connection.

When I have resources coming toward me, I tend to either reject them or blow through them quickly, so I can be back at smallness again, where I’m familiar, if not comfortable. On my blog site, I can see what blogs have been read recently, and for some reason, someone accessed and read one from 2010 called “too much to ask,” so I went back to read it myself. It's all about how to allow myself to receive good things. Hmm. Sounds familiar. I know there’s another blog about a meditation in which I was supposed to be allowing myself to receive light from benevolent sources, but I refused to allow that light in and kept my guard up like Wonder Woman’s bracelets – you’re not getting in here! Pew! Pew! I have been working on how to manage resources for years, and have been rejecting them for years.

I have a free ticket to; If you want me to put you in touch with; Sure, you can show your art here …

And I let these connections languish. Those things are for people who can sustain momentum and movement. As evidenced to myself by myself, I’m a person who manages resources by rejecting or blowing through them – what kind of a manager is that – of course I can’t possibly contact your friend - "I don't have it in me."

I'm just becoming more aware right now of how habitual this process is for me, of keeping myself small and insulated and insular. And of how exhausting, and ineffectual it is.

The problem is that I don’t want to be small or ineffectual, and that’s where I run against myself. So, I’m back to the suggestion from Renee last week about allowing my former, or current, rather, way of doing things dissolve without attempting to figure out how to put them back together. I know this way isn’t working, but I don’t actually know a different or better way. So, I have to allow it to resolve itself – which, of course, is a frightening prospect, but not as frightening as continuing to live in a shoebox existence.

Things that come to mind like ordering a 'monologues for women' book, but I don’t actually look one up. The flight lesson thing that’s been on my list of things I want to do for years. The ice skating thing I was talking about yesterday – a free trip to the rink to do something fun for myself … well, I’m just so busy over here being UNfun.

No wonder I feel so tired; this lack of fun. This lack of flow. My therapist was very astute yesterday when she finally put it in no uncertain terms: I am ambivalent about intimacy. I both desperately desire it, and am terrified of it. It’s the same coin as “resources.” I want, but I’m scared. I want to move forward, or differently, but goddamned, I don’t know what that’ll look like. She and I have been working on this forever, but it was the first time I really got to see my hemming and hawing about connection and relationships, an energetic exchange in its own right.

In the relationships that I have had, they have been an unequal exchange, again, like with my “stuff,” allowing me to subsist with less than I actually want, and rejecting those options that look more healthy – like blowing through a chunk of cash, so I’m back at square one, I will take your genuine desire to know me better as a threat to my way of life.

My way of life isn’t working.

I want it to work better. I have to trust that if I let go of what I currently and already know that I will be taken care of.

I hate the maudlin nature of this quote, and I have my doubts, but it’s been coming to mind over the last few days nevertheless:

When you take a leap of faith, G-d will either catch you, or you will be given wings to fly.

I know the ultimate cheesiness of that sentiment, but if I’m at the end of what I know how to do, there really isn’t anything left except to leap, and trust that whatever comes, somehow and eventually, it will be better and healthier for me than what is.