From Lantzilla via Flickr.

One hopes to never get disappointing or shocking news, but life is difficult. We’re often dealt more than we think we can handle and are seldom equipped with the right tools to do so. At least, that’s been my experience. We can spend a lot of time spinning our wheels and engaging in unhelpful activities. All we really want after a while is to move on. Here’s how I deal with the first stages of a crisis and get to a place where I can begin actually dealing with the problem.

Note: For those who read my blog, you know that I underwent a surgery I thought would put an end to this year’s health problems. Last week I got word that it didn’t and that I could be in for a longer process than I thought. While it’s not serious, it’s emotionally stressful. I went through all kinds of emotions and wrote all kinds of blog posts. Finally, I realized the only advice I could rightfully give is how to survive the first days of shock and how to move out of it, because that’s what I wanted to read.

Let it out.
It’s natural to be upset, disappointed, angry, frustrated and/or shocked. I was all of these things. I spent pretty much the first four hours oscillating between anger and tears. I always know I’m going to go through this, so I just let it come. This isn’t a stage to short-cut. It will come out sooner or later, and it’s been my experience that later is worse.

Make the space to regroup.
You can’t just jump back into life and work like nothing’s going on, as tempting as it is. In my case, I got my bad news at the end of the day so I took the following day off. I needed the opportunity to get enough sleep, move at a natural pace through my morning and deal with any leftover emotions from the previous day.

Fill up your cup.
While I’m not religious, I believe that we all have a spiritual aspect to ourselves. I tend to think that we have spiritual reservoirs in which we make deposits and withdrawals. After a big withdrawal, it’s necessary to make some deposits. I call this “filling up my cup.” I spend time with family, watch a funny movie (laughter is a high-dollar deposit in my book), read meditation books, and hang around people who I think really have the life thing figured out. I always walk away from them feeling like they’ve rubbed off a little bit.

Process. Process. And process some more.
Emotions are flying, stress hormones abound. I’ve never been able to get a hold on a single sensible idea for more than 10 minutes when something like this happens. After every emotion possible has run out, then start processing them. Examine each emotion individually. There’s usually more than one factor playing into your emotional state. For me, anxiety over my job and leftover emotions from my past were showing up around the real problem. Separate your emotions out, deal with the ones you need to. I can toss out the job anxiety and regrets from my past. They don’t need to be here right now. It’s much easier to deal with one thing at a time.

Research. Ask questions.
Research does not equal Googling your condition. Good lord, no. If you want to send yourself to the padded cell, go for it. Find a legitimate source and start researching your options. Talk to a professional in the field and ask questions. It took me 5 days to ask my doctor what the heck all this meant. From there, I could start researching.

There’s a comfort in knowing. Fear of getting an answer we don’t want to hear can keep us from asking. It doesn’t make the answer any less true, unfortunately. Knowing exactly where I’m at allows me to figure out where I’m going. Think about it: if you asked me for directions to my house, my first question would be “where are you coming from?”

Make a battle plan.
I like the phrase “battle plan” because it suggests you are planning for a fight. And that connotes that you aren’t about to give up and let life steamroll you. This makes me feel empowered, as opposed to overpowered.

Start with the things that you can control. For me, it’s exercise, diet, and stress levels. So my battle plan pertains to those things. If you set yourself up to battle something you can’t control, you will lose in so many ways.

Detail your battle plan on paper. In what ways are you going to attack your situation? What are the things that can take a back seat in your life for a while? Who can you trust for good support? In my case, I write down my diet, my exercise schedule, and how I’m going to reduce stress. It’s important to write it down because at some point you’ll say either “I’ve got this down, I don’t need help” or “screw it, it’s not working anyway.” Been there, done that. It doesn’t work. If you’ve got it, you’ll forget it, and if you think it’s not working, then you should reevaluate, not throw it away.

Make a plan for when you lose your head again. You will probably become an emotional mess again at some point, so write down the process by which you got out of it this time (like this post!) so you can refer to it later. Write down the things that made you feel better (family, funny movies, coffee with friends) and the things that didn’t (isolating, eating comfort food, imagining the worst). When you are emotionally stressed, it’s easier to follow some self-tested steps than trying to figure it out all over again.

A friend of mine says that if you aren’t moving forward, you’re moving backward. At the very least, remember to keep moving forward.

It seems to be the nature of life that every now and then we are handed more than we think we can handle. Whether it’s one big thing or several small ones stacking up, everybody reaches their breaking point at some time or another. In those moments, we often just don’t know what to do with ourselves. We’re overwhelmed with emotion, with the weight of so much to deal with at once.

We know that eventually this will all pass, that the emotions will subside given time, but what is to be done right now? Isn’t there anything that can be done immediately?

The past few weeks have been difficult for me. I’m going through a break-up, my company laid off 10 percent of our workforce, and I’m oh-so impatiently awaiting medical test results. It seems like when it rains, it pours.

I’m doing everything there is to do – I keep myself busy, surround myself with friends and loved ones, try to extract what I’ve learned about myself, journal, pour myself into work and imagine a bright future. But I have too many moments when I just can’t do anything but burst into tears. The heartbreak is too great; the weight of everything is too much.

I went through very similar emotions when I first got sober. It was all so overwhelming, and when the loneliness became too much to bear I turned to a story a mentor told me. (Everything good I know I learned from someone much wiser than me!)

When she was having a particularly difficult time, she called her mentor and asked her what she ought to do. She was hysterical and went on and on about what she ought to do.

The woman on the other end of the line asked her calmly, “Are your dishes done?”

“What?” the distraught woman asked.

“Are your dishes clean?” the other woman repeated.

“No.”

“Go do your dishes and call me when you’ve finished.” She hung up the phone.

The woman did her dishes and called her mentor back.

“Do you feel better?” the woman asked.

“No,” the distraught woman replied.

“Is your laundry done?” the woman asked.

“No.”

“Go do your laundry and call me when you’ve finished.” She hung up the phone.

This went on for half the day. She did her dishes and laundry, swept and mopped, and dusted. At the end of it, the distraught woman looked around her clean house, finally calm.

The point? Sometimes there’s nothing that can be, or even should be done about the pain in our lives. Someone recently told me, “Holly, the only way is through.” Another wise person once told me that sometimes you just have to stand. There’s nothing to be done about the pain in our lives but to endure it until it passes.

None of us want to experience pain; it’s part of our biological make-up. We avoid pain because it is unpleasant. It is sometimes necessary, however, in order to grow. It’s been my experience that periods of pain directly precede periods of growth. There’s a correlation there. When we avoid it, when we try to cover it up, we often go too far. We’ll develop hardened hearts, character disorders, neuroses, or addictions.

When we can’t do anything to make the pain in our lives dissipate or even pass more quickly, the best thing we can do is to focus on what we can control – our physical environment. I sat in my ridiculously messy car yesterday and decided it was time to clean it. You see, I can’t do anything to fix my emotional messes right now. I have to go through them. But I need to do something, and what I can do is make my environment clean, calm and put-together, even if the rest of me isn’t.

“Doing the spiritual dishes,” as my friend calls it, is a way to distract us temporarily from discomfort and pain, as well as to improve our physical environment. A clean home or apartment will lend some much needed calm to a disquieted mind, whereas a disheveled physical environment will feed negatively into an already chaotic mental environment.

How do you get through the tough periods in life? What are your “spiritual dishes?”

Photo by quinn.anya via Flickr.

Eating crow: humiliation by admitting wrongness or having been proven wrong after taking a strong position

Eat humble pie: to apologize and face humiliation for a serious error

I’m not sure either of these describes exactly how I feel, but they come close. I had a particularly, and unexpectedly, emotional day. Around noon, I learned that a friend’s sister overdosed last night. I didn’t know the sister, but this recovering alcoholic can tell you that there is something about hearing that this disease has claimed another person that shakes you at your core. I believe it was that shaken state that allowed everything to bubble up to the surface.

I can’t write list posts or tell you how to get through your first day of work or even how to make more room in your life for love. The only real thing I have to offer is a candid view of the way I live my life, and to be as achingly honest about it as possible. And I’ve been wrong. About several things.

It started innocently enough. I stopped by Old Navy on my way home from work to pick up a pair of pajama shorts since it’s become clear to me that Date #4 will not take the hint and leave behind the necessary boyfriend boxers I would prefer to sleep in. While there, I decided to be a good auntie to my cousin’s 1-year-old daughter and pick up a few cute little things. I dumped it all on the bed when I got home, changed into my new shorts (ah…) and stared at the clothes. They were so cute, so little, and I couldn’t wait to see her in them. A feeling started to come up… and I shoved it back down.

All day, I’d been shoving it back down.

The loss of my friend’s sister stirred up my still-raw emotions over the loss of my friend Maureen back in March. I shoved it back down. Date #4 not being able to spend his birthday weekend with me stirred up feelings of jealousy, resentment and fear. I shoved it back down. As I stared down at the little girl’s clothes, it stirred up emotions of something I’d lost years ago, and I shoved that down too.

But it wouldn’t stay down.

As I tried to finish going about my night (I needed to blog, get my work and running clothes ready, make some concrete business decisions…), it just wouldn’t stay down. Something wasn’t right. It’s been this way for a few months but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I thought it was maybe my sinuses, maybe not exercising, not having my work and life balanced just the right way or not doing the right kind of work. I searched, all the while shooing away this nagging feeling that I wasn’t working something important out. Shoved it down.

It came up. All at once.

I miss Maureen and her death has affected me. I can’t ignore that. I don’t want to feel that pain because it is so very strong. I am missing a friend, a person who totally got me, who gave to me and took from me, to whom I told “I love you” every time we said goodbye. I wasn’t dealing with those feelings, that grief. I ignored it.

What I really want when I imagine a good, fine life for myself is to own my own café, just as I envisioned it in December, an airy cozy shop full of funky vintage furniture, good coffee and an owner (me!) who knows everybody. I would be in a cool town, maybe not too big but too small. Somehow I got the notion into my head that it just wasn’t grand enough a business for a smarty-pants like me. So I shelved it, said it was best left for retirement.

The most startling realization to you, my readers, might be what else I see in this picture. As I run my own successful café, I very clearly see children running around my shop. I want children. Three years ago, I was an alcohol who could not bring myself to bring a child into my world. That experience has been far more impacting than I ever thought, and fear has driven me in that regard.

I realize now that when it comes to the emotional things in my life, it’s going to take much longer to heal than I thought. It wouldn’t say much about my friendship with Maureen if I weren’t still moved to tears a mere five months later. I am. It wouldn’t be treating my disease with enough respect to think that the choices I made years ago because of my drinking would just go away on their own. They haven’t.

As to my business choices, I think I simply veered off course looking for something perhaps a little more glamorous, a little more grand than my simple dream of owning my own coffee shop. But now that I’m back there, it’s like a warm blanket, familiar and just right.

In some respects, I’m back where I was in December, which isn’t necessarily bad. I feel a little sheepish, a little humbled admitting that my ego inflated as I attempted to fluff myself up to meet these grand ideas. I don’t always know what I’m doing. I thought I was just putting on a brave face. When I put a brave face on, I only fool myself. And fool myself, I did.

Life is a tricky thing. I’m skeptical of anyone who says they’ve got it all figured out. Especially in these early years, as we try to form ideas of who we want to be and how we can become those people, certainly we’ll look a little foolish along the way. I guess I’m just happy to be trying.

Like Linus, the Peanuts character whose blue blankie is ever-present, so I am with my tan-and-black workbag. It contains whatever two or three books I’m reading (currently Eat Pray Love, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and E-Myth), my planner, two journals (one personal and one career-related), pens, pencils, highlighters, and all the lovely little things that go in a normal purse.

I lug it around with me everywhere. I get razzed endlessly by my friends, family, or whoever else is around to be embarrassed by what is clearly too large and inappropriate for the movies, a restaurant, or shopping. “What do you need all that for?” is a frequently-asked question.

What do I need it all for? Well, just in case. In case of what? In case I have a free moment. In case I end up somewhere alone. Just in case.

So, here I am in my hometown of Pensacola for my grandfather’s funeral, lugging around my bag of work gear endlessly, not getting anything done. I have nothing to do. My work stuff is all at the office. Staying with relatives means no Internet (slinking away from relations for a daily dose of coffee and Internet seems addict-like), so I can’t work on the blog. Endless chaos and noise and relatives you’ve not seen for years do not make for an environment conducive to reading or journaling. So, my bag is useless.

Which means I CAN’T WORK. For some reason, this has me geeking out more than anything. I have no routine. All of my pet projects, all of my entrepreneurial endeavors, everything that has defined my waking (and sometimes sleeping) life is unavailable to me. A big gaping hole of non-productivity – that’s what I feel like. It’s like an itch that can’t be scratched. I guess the real problem is that I want to be back in my life.

In reality, I simply don’t want to be here – not here in Pensacola or at my grandfather’s funeral. I don’t want to be going through this.

I don’t think that it’s uncommon to use work as a security blanket. Often times, we simply don’t want to deal with the big emotional things looming larger than life – surely updating the margin widths of my website is of the utmost importance. Hmm…

I won’t go on a lengthy diatribe about how detrimental a workaholic attitude (the use of work as a way to not deal with emotional pain) can be. We know that it ruins marriages, families, relationships, and friendships, and can lead to even bigger isms (alcoholism, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression). It also doesn’t get you anywhere.

Someone once told me that painful things will happen in life and you’ll have an overwhelming urge to do something, anything about it. You will be frantic trying to find a way to fix it, to plug the hole through which emotion is flowing, like the Dutch boy with his finger in a dam. Unfortunately, we come across situations that we can’t do anything about. There is simply nothing to be done about losing two people you care very much about in less than two weeks. There is nothing to be done about 12-hour drives, crazy families and heartache. The only thing you can do is feel the pain. All you can do is simply stand.

I don’t really know how I made it through actually. I can tell you that I feel somehow stronger knowing that I came through all of it without any crutches. I know I can survive almost anything. Asking for a raise no longer seems like the earth-shattering event it was three weeks ago. The thought of not seeing that guy anymore is no longer life-altering. Everything seems somehow smaller, paltry. I know I weather any unexpected storm. I know I can stand.

Stand undeterred.

Well, dear readers, if I am out-of-pocket the next few days I hope my excuse is valid. I lost a very dear friend this weekend. I am still sorting through the emotions, and the shock has only just worn off in the past few hours. Every hour brings a new emotion, a renewed sense of sadness and loss, and a glimpse of the profundity of this event. I know that something is happening in my soul right now that will impact me forever. I don’t know what it is yet, but that’s part of the ante when you agree to let life guide you.