The Dream Posse Post #1

This is the first week of The Dream Posse and The Year of the Impossible Dreams. In order to be in fighting shape to sing with Run DMC and Aerosmith (after they say yes and after I learn to sing) I have to figure out how to 1. sleep soundly and 2. not poop my pants in public. Or anywhere.

I went to Dr. Mark Lucas, the chiropractor who has helped me over the years with a wide variety of issues from migraines to alignment problems and told him about my dream and my need to sleep and make it to the toilet. I told him I’d been off sugar for the past three months until I went to an adoption conference and helped myself deal with feelings by eating cookies with a shovel.

I told him about the migraines I had since then, about my mood swings, about the fact that I woke up at midnight thinking it was morning.

So you can guess the first thing I have to do.

Goodbye cookies. Goodbye muffins.

Shoot.

Oh well. You should see Dr. Mark. He’s my age, and he’s ripped. He bounces into work in the morning and bounces out at night and rides his bike all weekend. He sleeps like a baby. I want that. So if that means I can’t have sugar, well. Okay. I’m still not convinced. I LOVE a good dessert. I love the (okay, short-lived) high sugar gives me. I love feeling like I could bounce off the walls (even if this does make me a public nuisance). I love the confused, drunk feeling I can get from a morning glory muffin. It distracts me from clear thinking, from facing things that need to be faced, such as…calling the DMV with proof of insurance. You know, those small, annoying things that can slide between the cracks and then mess up everything.

Focus, Anne. I don’t care if you are adopted and your brain is always fighting for clear air. Focus.

I want to sing Dream On with Aerosmith and Run DMC in front of all those adopted kids and foster care kids in their superhero capes more than I want to scarf on morning glory muffins. I just have to continually remind myself of that because the truth is sometimes I think I really, really need some sugar.

And this is what I realized as Dr. Mark talked about eating low-glycemic food: I am lonely.

This was a shocker. I feel like I spend most of my life wishing for more alone time, but as Dr. Mark suggested I have fish with some veggies for dinner, I thought, and what about the food I can shove my face in to make everything bearable?

Hold on: bearable? Since when was my life unbearable? This was news to me, and as Dr. Mark talked about my adrenal system and how, as an adopted person, it’s already taxed and needs an evenly fluctuating blood sugar level, not a wild ride of pass the cupcakes, I thought about my phone.

No one is closer to me these days than my iPhone. It sleeps with me; it eats with me; ; it hikes with me; it watches movies with me. We don’t shower together. Yet.  I do more with that thing than I do with any living person. I think it means I’m not alone. I get to have people in my life and distance at the same time.

For someone who has abandonment issues, this isn’t the way to the fullest life possible. I’ve learned to create a world for myself that feels safe. No one can leave me if I don’t let them in.

And what scares me is that I don’t really want to let anyone in. I don’t want to hike with others. I don’t want to watch movies with others. I don’t want to sleep with others. I mean, hello? What is happening? I look like I have so many friends but the fact is that I think more about what I will have for dinner than what I will do with other people in real life. A lot more.

When I am on my death bed, I’m not going to remember what I ate but I am going to be looking for faces. How do I know? I think it’s a reasonable guess. When you are drowning in grief or gratitude you tend to look for a hand more than you do a donut.

I can’t tell you how much writing all of this scares me. I don’t want to admit how much I have isolated because then I will have to do something about it. I will have to realize that, yet again, it’s not about the food.

Increasingly I have the sense that life is short and that I’d rather live like Hunter Thompson than well, me. I see my friends, I see their talents, their beauties, their wildnesses and I push and push and push them to go for it, to just do it, whatever it is for them. I see life is better when you have dreams and the hubris to chase them. I see it is better not only for you but for everyone you come into contact with because you are light, and light makes things grow.

I also see that if growth were easy, when I was a teenager my legs wouldn’t have ached from the bones stretching. If growth were easy, we’d all have reached our full potential at age 12. Ulysses wouldn’t still be taught in schools.

The Dream Posse and The Year of Unreasonable Dreams is for all of us, particularly now when the world around us seems to be on fire in unimaginable ways. We can buy into the fear and the idea of not enough or we can set out own hair on fire and run down the streets just for the joy of it.

Come on, be with me. 

In my next post, I’ll write more about how Dr. Mark suggested I sleep and not poop my drawers.

Dr. Mark Lucas can be reached at Proactive Healthcare, San Jose, California, for private consultations.