saving energy

I visited my therapist this week and came away from the session with a little bit more self awareness relating to personal energy.  I have always viewed the whole issue of personal energy as bullshit, but he has enlightened me to what it could mean to me.  I have been feeling oppressed lately by certain people because to a certain extent I have let them oppress me.  This oppression as I describe it is vague and up until the therapy session, I really didn’t understand how it was possible, but rather just that it happens.  My therapist explained to me that I give too much of my personal energy to the oppressors and therefore they succeed in their oppression.  This concept makes sense to me when I consider it in physical terms.  For instance, when my ex feels it her duty to say whatever it is she says to me, and I react by getting angry and writing a bunch of words in my defense, by doing this I am giving her my energy.  He instructed me to try not to give up my energy to such people, but rather focus it on things I consider worthwhile.  I understand this better now because I can rationalize and see explicit examples of how personal energy applies to the physical as well as the spiritual.  The spiritual aspect I consider to mean my psychological state.

I assume that considering personal energy in such terms has possibilities to help me navigate this ever increasingly tricky world.  I am not yet sure how to harness the wild beast that is my personal energy, but it is blatantly obvious that I can only benefit from controlling it better.  I have been wondering why I am constantly unhappy about certain circumstances and feel helpless to change how things play out.  The old cliché about choosing one’s battles lies at the heart of controlling personal energy outlay.  When I contemplate my behavior in the recent past I realize that I have given too much of my energy to futile pursuits, even when I was able to see beforehand that they were futile pursuits.  It now makes total sense to me why I was physically and mentally tired all the time.  I was blind to the fact that it all has to do with energy and the focus of it.  I’m not totally sure of how this plays out in practice, but I am going to attempt to consciously control it better.  Only I have the power to control how things affect me, although I am somewhat powerless to control what will happen around and to me.  Positive and negative things will happen, but how I let those things affect me is the key.  I feel this is a power of sorts that I never consciously realized I had, but now I do and it makes me feel hopeful that my life can only get better.  Keep your hands off of my energy!

I rearranged my living room yesterday finally.  I have been contemplating it for a long time now.  I am glad I did, because now it makes the space seem a lot larger and homey.  This past week was very tiring with very little me time.  Monday and Tuesday were very difficult days at work as described in my post from last Sunday.  I decided Monday night that I would take control of my destiny at work on Tuesday morning.  I felt it was time to draw the line to signal that the circumstances could not continue as before.  It worked out well, although the situation was difficult to confront.  As previously mentioned, therapy proved to be very beneficial.  Afterwards that evening the cost analyst invited me to dinner to try to reconcile our differences, or at least that is what I suspected his motive was.  Most of the conflict at work has to do with him, and Tuesday I called a spade a spade and had written evidence to back it up.  He didn’t try to reconcile our differences, in fact we discussed completely work unrelated topics.  That tells me that to a certain extent the confrontation at work was in the end a justified confrontation.  For me it is not about winning or losing, but rather accepting the reality of the situation.

After dinner I came home to organize my paperwork in preparation for the meeting with the tax man on Wednesday night.  I hadn’t organized my personal paperwork for about nine months.  It was a lot to catch up on, but I managed to get it done.  My work permit expired on Thursday, and I received a letter at work on Wednesday from the employment administration explaining that they needed more paperwork from me to renew it.  I called and spoke with the responsible contact and she explained what the problem was.  Everything she needed I had at hand and told her I would hand deliver on Thursday morning.  It seems everywhere that I have attempted to change my name has got it wrong.  I have received letters addressed with every possible combination of my new and old name.  It’s kind of funny, except for the fact that I have to try to straighten it all out.  I visited the tax man that evening which went fairly smooth because I brought as much personal paperwork as possible with me.  He gave me his respect for pursuing my gender change and I thanked him for his kindness.  I was introduced to the concept of “world taxation” and what it means to me, interesting.

I was able to drop off the paperwork at the employment administration office on thursday without delay, which I found very refreshing.  I went to my electrolysis appointment that evening to have her work on clearing my cheeks.  I’m not quite sure why, but I squirmed the entire 132 minutes she worked on me.  Sometimes the electrolysis is not so painful, and others totally unbearable.  I don’t understand it.  As a consolation, it will be completely finished sometime in the future. Friday morning I had to go to visit the immigration office to get a temporary work permit to keep me legal until I receive the official permit.  That didn’t take much time, again refreshing.  I went to my bank afterwards to have them order me again a new bank card, because the first new one still had my old name on it, although the letter was addressed to my new name.  Friday evening I went to La Bodega with Mari, Christi, and Helmi to have dinner and a couple glasses of rijoha.  We talked very little about work.  We mostly discussed irrational fears, such as my fear of being deep underground in a place like a mine or something.  It was a fun evening and the conversation was light.

Yesterday was an unusually stormy day with high winds and thunderstorms.  I took the opportunity to rearrange the living room since braving the elements seemed like a bad idea.  There was a break in the storms which I used to go do some food shopping and buy a new tube of lipstick.  I have never in the past completely used a tube of lipstick before it went bad and had to throw it out.  I ran into a problem trying to buy a new tube, they don’t stock the particular color from Clinique in Germany.  I bought the tube at Marshall Fields in Detroit a few months ago.  I had no other choice but to try to find a similar color and try it out.  A good thing about the store I bought it at is that I can bring it back if it doesn’t work for me.  I’ll give it a couple of days and see how it works out.  I am a blogging maniac today.  I will break this off now so I can get showered and shaved and hopefully start working on a pair of jeans.