Life in the slow lane.

I do not regularly post about my everyday life... But this time I have to share. In the early morning of july 8th, we (as in my husband, our 2 children, our dog and I) were traveling to France. We left the night before, meaning to arrive at my In-Law's house around 7ish the next morning. All went well, and we did listen to all the good advice on traveling looooong distances. We had a good 900 km (560 miles) to go and did stop frequently. Because we both have a driverslicence, we alternated who would drive and avoid getting sleepy behind the wheel.

At about 60 km (38 miles) from our destination we were harshly woken up... al 4 of us! For just a second my husband must have dozed off and missed a curve in the road. Our sturdy VW came to a full stop with a loud, creaking sound... and then came silence. I remember just a moment of nothing before I started what I am good at: taking care of everything with no question as to how I was handling the whole ordeal. There were children to be comforted, phonecalls to be made, nurses from the ambulance and the policemen to speak to... all in my best French! And I can tell you that my French is fine, but not in a state of emergency. Luckily, everyone we met was helpfull and very kind.

My parents-in-law drove over to meet us. My husband had been taken to hospital by then and they helped me get our belongings into their car. Then they drove me to the hospital to find out how my husband was doing: he suffered a headwound, 2 wounds on his left arm, he broke the metacarpal bone of his left little finger and ulna of his left arm... Last winter he shatterd both bones in his right lower leg (shin-and calfbone) and he was just up an running again! He had to stay in hospital for 5 days and was fixed up nicely.

The children, dog nor I didn't suffer any harm!  I only had very sore muscles in my neck and right shoulder from the tug of the safetybelt and that was it. We are so very lucky to be able to tell this story! OK, our car is wrecked beyond repair... but other then that...

Now that the worst is over I can start re-orienting life. If anything, I have learned that I don't want to live in the fast lane anylonger. I want to be mindfull of what I do, asking myself what is needed Here&Now. Asking myself what is needed, what I need... It's not easy, because I am not used to an approach like this but it is good therapy. I hope to keep it up, it's easy to sit down and keep on asking myself: "Why does all this happen to us? Didn't we have enough misfortune?" I still want to believe this wake-up call will bring some good in the end.

Breakdowns can create breakthroughs. Things fall apart so things can fall together.

Unknown Source

Moving on

I haven't beaded for over a year now. But the good news is that I am starting to miss it! Somewhere, sometime there has been a shift over the last few weeks and I suddenly found myself wondering, what to do. What do you mean, what to do? How about beading? Not that I have already actually picked up a bead, oh no. I have rearanged my cupboard, so now I can easily acces my beads&needs. That's a start. More importantly, I have found a way to finish my BJP-maypiece of 2010.

How silly of me to think I could finish a piece that is about my therapeutic process. I wrote I would tell you about why it is all in black and white after it would be finished. Now I know it will never be finished.

I already wrote that I have been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder and severe depression. I feel ashamed of these things, mostly the former . I have always felt that a so called Borderliner would be a terrible person to be with: manipulative, controlling, destructive, only capable of black&white reasoning... Since I have learned that there is a huge grey area for me to discover. Firstly because not all people with my diagnosis are suffering from all the symptoms in the worst way possible, so I could view myself as a mild case. Second of all, I am capable of learning and girl! am I learning!

This piece was meant to and is depicting my search for those grey areas. The idea was to bead a black and a white section and then to see if I could bring the two together. I have succeeded partly but it was harder then I thought. Those of you who have gotten to know me a little, will also know I am quite stuck to rules I set myself. It is hard for me to let them go and be easy about things. Not finishing this piece meant not starting a new one, but now I have found my way around.

I will not finish this piece as I intended, but... I will bead a border, that I have already started partially. I will bead a lifeline, as I intended... and then put this piece aside. It will be as fninished as can be by then, and I will have my desired opening for progress, new beadings, new searches. There, I met myself in the middle. Now for one more step: really picking up my beads.

While writing I listened to this beautifull piece of music, and thought you might like to enjoy it too.

I did it!

Last saturday I did it. I ran 10 km's (= 6.21 miles), and my lucky number was: 1216.We ran through the beautifull countryside I live in, the sun was shining and there was a cool breeze. In short, it was perfect. For over 9 month I have been training for this event. And then to realize that about 2 years ago it seemed as if I would never run again. This is my little miracle story:

7 Years ago, when pregnant with our youngest, I was diagnosed with Pelvic Girdle Pain . After our son was born I got intensive physical therapy, lots of exercises to strengthen my pelvic muscles and all seemed to heal very nicely until one night I simply turned around in my bed and screamed with pain. No physical therapist, nor neurologist could find out what had gone wrong... but the fact was that from that day on my PGP didn't heal. One day my therapist told me: "If it's not over by the time your boy turns 6, you will suffer pain for the rest of your life." That's not what you want to hear when you have just turned 35!

Over time my stubborn me tried to run (for that is the only sport I really enjoy), but every time I tried for just a very short time I had to pay for my endeavor with pain during a sleepless night. I gave up the idea of ever being able to run again. Untill the summer of 2009. Having gained over 10 kg's (= 22 pounds) due to medication, I wanted to start sporting hoping that I would lose some weight. I didn't really lose the weight, but my muscles and overall wellbeing benefited hugely. Last summer I was on the treadmill running for about 2x 5 minutes... Wait a sec.. did I say running?

That was the summer our boy turned 6! In the nick of time I was able to run and not suffer pain, even though it was only for a very short time in a row. I talked to the trainer at the gym and together we decided it was worth the try to extend my running time very slowly and increase speed. Guess what? It worked! My leg does protest now and then, and 10 km. seems to be my limit for this moment but I am more then happy with those limitations, because I ran 10 km's and won 2 prizes. I was 3rd of all women running the 10, and the fastest woman of my village!

Me in the aqua-shirt after the first lap.

.... halfway through....

.. at the finish with on the far left my sweet husband (in the read shirt and black jacket) and our 6-year old son, cheering for me!

I was supposed to stand on the right side... but was just a little late...

But then again, I got my private minute of fame!



I am proud and happy... and next year? I will run again!!

I know this music was written to accompany a wedding... but it was the first music that came to my mind to illustrate how I felt at that moment: triumphant.

BJP for april 2010

It's been a long time since I've posted, a hazardous journey has begun but I am still here to tell about it.

OK, now is time for a confession: aside from being genetically endowed with genes that make depression run in our family, I also suffer from what is called a Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). It is hard for me to say this, as for a long time I felt that being diagnosed with BPD meant that one was the kind of person no one would want to be around. Deciding to accept my diagnosis and open myself up to deal with it and start healing was a giant leap. That's why I choose the rabbithole from Alice in Wonderland as my theme for april. Seeing Alice in 3D on the brink of my great adventure seemed like more than a coincidence.

As it is in myth and fairy-tales, the heroine often sets out on a bad start. And so did I on my april piece. I wrote all about that in my previous post. Work on this piece was quite labourious. I got stuck numerous times, started over, got set back, picked it up again... I surrounded the hole by fresh green grass, beaded some pahtways alongside of it, added a few of the beaded flowers that I had made in advance... and now I have something to show for all my effort.

For the first 3 months I divided my pieces in seperate sections and wrote about them, naming them. Not so this time. That's a first for me: I usually need to stick to something once I have started a routine. For me to break that rule feels quite scary. But this is an adventure that is (among others) about breaking the rules of my inner critic! What is most visible in this piece is that the surroundings of my rabbithole are you could say chaotic, but more lovingly I would say variegated. It is, what it is and it is one piece.

I love that the tiny green and red flowerbeads date back from my early teens, when I first picked up making jewelry. The medal dates back even further and is mine from an event called de avondvierdaagse. This is a very Dutch event, where schoolchildren walk a distance varying from 5 to 15 km on 4 consecutive nights. When you have finished your first time around you get a medal, and in later years a small pin to go on the ribbon. I have walked it a couple of times, but only have this medal and no pins. I used it for 2 reasons: I needed me to be in this piece and I deserved some encouragement for having the guts to start this endeavor.

I have chosen Chopin's Etude opus10 nr. 1 to go with my piece. It reflects the ultimate chaos I experienced just before I started my treatment, yet it is one of the most brilliant pieces of pianomusic I know. I hope that's how this all will work out in the end: that I have learned to hear and appreciate all the different tunes in me, that in the end make... ME. So you could say I have landed on the bottom of the hole, and now am out to find my jabberwocky. I have met the red queen, seen glimpses of the white queen... This tale is not over yet.

April-Fool in May

Got all of us (including myself) fooled last month in thinking I had my plan for my april BJP-piece all conjured up. I had cut up my pieces of white and blue felt, sorted out all my shades of white and blue beads.... and then suddenly realized I was not going to make a Delfts Blauw piece all together. I have made myself one promiss when starting out on this journey, and that was making each piece a journal of that particular month. The thoughts I had on the Delftware piece are still very nice, and I did celebrate Koninginnedag but still that doesn't resemble in any way what I have been through in april. So here I am again for something completely different.

As some of you may know, I started an intensive therapy programm april 19th in hope of finding a way to deal with my recurrent and very severe depression(s). A couple of days before I started, I saw the movie Alice with a dear friend, and realized that the beginning of the film - where Alice looks into the rabbithole before falling in - was exactly depicting how I felt. I was sitting an the rim of the hole and knew I had to jump in on monday. It was terrifying! Mostly because I had hardly any idea of what was going to happen after I had taken that giant leap into the unknown. Now I have shrunk and grown and shrunk again a couple of times, I ran through the forest of Underland and am still waiting for the day I will have to slay my own jabberwocky. That is when I decided to bead my own Rabbithole.

So I went to my attic and was very pleased to find some green felt and then it began: the making of the rabbithole was an adventure in itself. I first set out to make a sleeve of plain, black cotton cloth to fit the hole I had cut into the felt. It took a while untill I thought I had succeeded, but the sleeve was to long so I tore off  a just a small part. Ha! It didn't tear straight, because I had sewn the sleeve on leaving the direction of the weave in my cotton slightly slanting (if that is the correct phrase to use). Then I thought that if I would tear in the other direction I would make it straight again... All I did was shorten the sleeve on both occasions, leaving me with just a trim of black cloth around my rabbithole. Feeling very frustrated I took the whole thing off and decided to bead the thing!

You know what was so marvelous in what happenend next? As soon as I started beading around the hole, I knew I was on the right track just because I couldn't stop beading! It started to emerge under my hands as I was picking up the beads. After I had beaded a nice, wobbly edge to my rabbithole I realized I needed it filled up with "dirt". My attic was good to me in providing a good piece of brown felt and I soon was beading away again. Now the rabbitle is done for the time being at least. I had already beaded some flowers to fill up the green. Now on to the next stage... beading a lawn and finding a way to fit me in it.