On Waking Up at 4 in the Morning

Every morning I wake up at 4 a.m., which is terrible and has to stop.

Because I’m me, I googled what Chinese medicine had to say about waking up at such an aggravating hour.

Chinese medicine says that waking up at 4 a.m. is terrible and has to stop.

But it also says that waking up between 3 and 5 in the morning is often due to an imbalance in the lungs, which is related to feelings of grief and sadness that haven’t been dealt with.

Grief was my number one feeling state in my thirties and I was hoping my forties would bring the prevalence of a different emotion, preferably joy or satisfaction, but I would honestly take any other emotion. Anger. Annoyance. Ennui.

Suggestions include breathing exercises, meditation or yoga to improve lung capacity, counseling to deal with your grief, and journaling about your emotions before bed each night.

None of those things sound appealing, probably because I’m suppressing a lot of grief. But I also want to get enough sleep to be able to function like a normal human.

I didn’t know organs could get exhausted, but it seems they do. My poor lungs are so tired. I just want to feed my lungs chicken soup and put them down for a nap.

Moral of the story: Our bodies have a deep wisdom and will give us guidance, if we're willing to listen.

So I either need to deal with my grief or resign myself to being exhausted and cranky for all time.

Work To Do

Nothing like a global pandemic, human hooliganism, and rampant uncertainty to make you feel powerless. While also reminding us that all we can ever do is pay attention to this moment, and do our best to positively effect moments to come.

Questions I keep asking myself:

1. How can I take care of myself in this moment?

2. How can I help today?

This is what we can do now: Take some small action to either help ourselves or help others, while remembering that helping yourself helps others and helping others helps you. (Well-played, universe!)

Big change wants to happen. Big change in the world and big change for each of us individually.

I’ve been feeling the big change breathing down my neck for years - especially around the summer solstice. For some reason late June is always when I take a good hard look at my life - and occasionally blow something sky high.

Right now, it feels like everything in my life is up for grabs. Where I live, who I spend my time with, what my life will look like from here. It’s unsettling, but it also forces me to do my work. Spend time really checking in to see where my soul wants me to go from here, heal anything left unresolved so the same patterns don’t keep repeating, take care of my health - mental, physical, emotional, and energetic - so I have the ability and strength to do whatever needs to be done.

I have a lot of work to do. The world has a lot of work to do.

It can be hard to do that kind of work when we’re all so tired. So self-care has become more important than ever, just when it feels the least possible or the most selfish. But that is when devoted self-care becomes imperative. Resting, taking time for yourself, time to do whatever nurtures you and makes you happy. This is on longer optional. Because 2020 is not letting up and we need to meet it as best we can from a space of being filled to the brim, not depleted AF.

We need to trust ourselves and trust the course of our lives. Which, again, feels like one of the hardest things to do, especially now.

So this is my new mantra, one that I may need to tattoo on my forearm so I don’t keep forgetting:

Things To Remember:

Breakdowns are not to be feared. Today’s breakdown leads to tomorrow’s epic productivity and general satisfaction.

(Here’s looking at you, Wednesday morning.)

I’m allowed to do things that feel good and stop doing things that don’t.

(Like Facebook. Why am I still doing something that? My god, why?)

Read books on paper.

(It feels so much better. Like an actual, physical sensation of betterness. Kindle is great for $3 romance novels but the experience of reading on my phone is like the difference between reading Facebook and talking to a good friend in person.)

Eat some goddamn vegetables, Amber.

(You have energy when you do that, and energy is something you greatly enjoy.)

Don’t be lazy about exercise.

(I know it’s tempting but don’t.)

Water helps everything.

(When in doubt, drink some, shower in some, sit in some, go to the beach and listen to some.)

Pause and appreciate what you have as often as you can.

(Petting the cats, drinking the coffee, listening to the fountain, basking in the sun, staring at the oak trees, reading next to the man. Notice it, appreciate it, be in it.)

Joy Is Knocking On the Door

Yesterday afternoon, I wrote up a business plan.

Yesterday evening, I wrote “FUCK THIS” across the whole thing in blue felt tip marker.

One of my themes lately is doing things because I think I should, not because they bring me any particular joy. 

Reframing the oatmeal to bring you joy is always a possibility - even if that doesn’t make it taste like a fresh chocolate croissant - but it takes some effort. If you’ve let the joy drain out of you for so long that you don’t really remember what joy feels like or why you should make that effort, you’re screwed. (Meaning, I've screwed myself over a bit.)

So I’ve been thinking about joy and how to have some.

One of the things I've noticed about joy is that it’s like working out. You can’t just target your arms and do a bunch of weight lifting and expect your arms to look amazing. You still have to eat nutritious things and do cardio and work on your whole physical self before you get to have amazing arms. Unless you’re 23 and can thrive on pizza and tequila shots and still look amazing, in which case don’t talk to me.

You can’t just say “Hey, I want joy.” You have to target your whole emotional body. You have to feel all the things. Now, this is for those of us who habitually repress. Joy can be one of the easiest things in the world - just look at a happy baby. But if joy is hard to find, you’re probably a feelings represser like me.

After my dad's death, I went through a few years of enforced feelings because none of my well-honed repression techniques were working any more. Anger and frustration joined the grief standby of crying on the floor. The up side of my dad’s death was that joy came more easily, because all feelings came more easily.

But I don’t think that means that having joy requires a whole lot of grief. Joy just asks you to feel all your feelings, not just the fun ones.

Babies can be little joy machines - and they haven’t had to plow through deaths and breakups and getting fired and whatever else life likes throwing you as an adult. Babies find joy in flinging oatmeal onto the walls. Babies find joy in yanking the dog’s fur.

Sure, babies can be jerks and some of that joy comes at the expense of the caretaker who has to scrub the oatmeal off the wall and the dog who has to hide under furniture until the yank stops smarting, but joy is joy.

Babies get that kind of joy because 1) someone else will clean up for them and 2) they’re taking care of their whole emotional selves. If a baby is unhappy, you will know. Everyone in earshot will know. They aren’t repressing anything, they don’t know how. So as often as they shriek with utter abandon in the grocery store, they’re just as often beaming out instantaneous and effervescent joy.

It's time for joy again. Because joy is necessary for humans - and it can fuel all the other things that need to happen too, the ones like job-hunting and weed-pulling and tough-conversation-having that don't necessarily scream "Hey, this will bring you deep and abiding joy!" but will ultimately make your life better. 

We don't even need to make it that complicated. Because, hey, meeting a new tree brings me great joy:

Joy is Holding a Baby Goat

Someone once told me, “You really understand pain.” 

What a terrible tag line.

While I would argue that every human on this earth has a more thorough understanding of pain than they’d like, this is still true. Pain and I have been bunkmates on a fairly regular basis.

We could say that those who understand pain understand joy on a deeper level, but do we really want that to be true? Can’t joy just show up without needing a PhD in Ouch first?

Here’s a new world belief I would like to instill:

JOY HAS NO PREREQUISITES.

Doesn’t that sound nice? Can I call myself god and make it so? [Poof! It is done. You’re welcome, world.]

My real problem with pain is that sometimes I take a nice snack of pain and turn it into a multi-course meal of suffering. I need to stop doing that. Pain, fine. No one gets through life without some pain. But suffering is a more self-inflicted syndrome and I for one call bullshit on suffering.

I stopped writing for awhile, because I worried that I was getting whiny, what with all this pain and suffering and who wants to read that? But then my soul started shriveling up from lack of verbal expression and that’s not a good look on anyone.

Apparently, I would rather whine than let my soul shrivel. Or declare myself god and prescribe joy that doesn’t require an equal balance of suffering.

Or maybe I’m just thinking about this too hard, because clearly the only thing joy requires is a baby goat.

Here’s me and a baby goat in Half Moon Bay awhile back. It fell asleep in my arms. Best thing ever.