Barb Caffrey's Blog

Writing the Elfyverse . . . and beyond

Posts Tagged ‘despair’

Looking for Optimism in 2024

with 7 comments

Folks, 2023 was a difficult, frustrating, and disempowering year for me. A whole lot I wanted to get done didn’t happen. A whole lot that I never wanted to occur did.

So, how can I look for optimism in 2024?

It seems like every time I turn on the news, something else awful has happened. There’s a tornado in Alabama. There’s a documentary about a young woman, Gypsy Rose Blanchard (now happily married, married name Anderson), who was mistreated horribly by her mother and who served several years in prison for conspiring to kill her mother. (If you saw what her mother did to Gypsy Rose Blanchard, you might be like me and say, “Small loss.” Especially after Ms. Blanchard tried hard to get away from her mother, and how no one understood the horrific stuff her mother had put her through.) Blanchard’s story sent ice straight down my spine, as her late and (to my mind) unlamented mother kept her looking ill and much frailer than she ever should’ve been due to Blanchard’s mother’s significant mental illness. (The diagnosis for Blanchard’s mother, who I’m not naming as I feel she was among the world’s worst villains of the last thirty years, was Munchausen’s Syndrome by proxy, meaning Blanchard’s mother put Gypsy Rose through all sorts of crap by making her appear sick — as a cancer patient, as needing various surgeries Gypsy Rose never required, etc.)

Then, of course, there are the usual problems. Snow. Ice. Wind. Man against nature.

So, it’s a dark and rather depressing opening to 2024 for me. It’s cold, there’s not a lot of light at the end of the tunnel, and I’m frustrated overall because I’ve tried very hard for the last nineteen years-plus since my late husband Michael died (yes, I know to the hour, but I won’t be that anal-retentive today) to live the best life I can. Maybe I’ve done that, but my creativity has not been where I wish it to be; I didn’t achieve my goals in 2023 of getting some new stories out under my own name due to my father’s passing in October (partly, anyway; I was already behind that expectation due to the earlier cellulitis of the face I suffered in February and March before he died); work lagged, and I was having to play catch-up even before I caught Covid-19 in early December.

When looked at all as a piece, it seems much worse than what it was when I lived through it. And it’s of course not a patch on what Gypsy Rose Blanchard lived through for years until her mother was killed by Gypsy Rose’s then-boyfriend. (Don’t judge that young woman until you’ve seen what her mother put her through.) But pain is pain, and Michael always told me that it’s invalidating to try to compare your pain to others’ pain.

I think that’s good advice.

In my case, stuff builds up inside. I have no way to express it safely, or at least it seems like there isn’t one. This feeds depression, this feeds illness, this feeds lack of creativity and this also feeds despair, hopelessness, and as my friend Karl Ernst put it in his book Rocking Change, stuckness.

That doesn’t mean I’d not have been ill with Covid-19 if my problems magically went away. (Plus, life seems to be all about how to navigate problems. We always have some, somewhere.) That doesn’t mean everything would be lightness, creativity, brightness, and happiness, either.

What it does mean is that the real issues I’ve got: grief, again, this time due to the loss of my father; iffy health (that I continue to work on to get at least slightly better); loneliness; frustration; anger; hopelessness; well, they all get stuffed together in a maelstrom of despair.

That said, I think there are some reasons for optimism here.

First, I am aware of these problems. They aren’t just sitting there, unremarked and misunderstood.

Second, I have managed to write over 36K words in the last year into a new story I can’t tell you much about yet (it’s in a friend of mine’s universe and will eventually go out co-branded with his name), which is the highest word count I’ve managed in the last three years. This means the prospective novel is about one-third completed. (Yay!)

Third, I have good friends I trust, along with family, that have known me for many years. That has to help.

Fourth, while 2024 is already shaping up to be a year of change for me in many senses, I believe there is room for me to take a new role upon the stage somehow. (As life is but a stage, and we are merely players according to both Shakespeare and the rock group Rush, this needed to be said.)

Or as my father used to put it, “There’s always another season.” He was talking about sports, but I think that’s applicable to life as well.

So, what I’m going to do is this. Write. Edit. Compose music. Talk to other people as best I can. Continue on my path, as I know exactly what it is, and do whatever I can and whatever it takes to make my life happier, more stable, and far more satisfying.

See, I can’t control the future. I can’t control what other people think about me. I can’t control all the vicissitudes of life.

But I can control how I react to it.

That’s my overarching reason for optimism in 2024. (What’s yours? Tell me in the comments!)

Written by Barb Caffrey

January 9, 2024 at 8:54 pm

Posted in Framing Narrative, heartbreaking stories, in general, Michael B. Caffrey, Persistence, Prescient observations, Writing

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Where Can We Be Safe? #Updated

with 57 comments

Update #1: There was a mass shooting this afternoon — no deaths yet reported — at Graceland Cemetery in Racine, WI (where I live). No reason given yet, though the man who was being buried (Da’Shontay “Day Day” King) had apparently fled the police and been shot due to the pursuit.

Why anyone would want to shoot these mourners is beyond me.

In addition, as the names of the victims of the Tulsa Shooting have been released, I wanted to give a link about that. Four people died, including a pioneering Black orthopedic surgeon, Preston J. Phillips; Amanda Glenn, a devoted mother, wife, and also a receptionist; Stephanie Husen, another doctor known in the community as kind and caring; and a retired Army First Sergeant, William Love.

I have to mention two things. Dr. Husen had a devoted canine companion that is not going to understand what’s happened to his loving owner. I hope the dog finds a new forever home in honor of his brave owner. The second is this: William Love was 73. He was with his wife of fifty-five years (they married in 1967) when the gunman rushed in. He first held the door closed so his wife could get out safely, then confronted the gunman.

This meant until the end of his life, he remembered what he’d been taught in the Army.

All honor to him. All blessings to his widow.

Now to the original post, already in progress:

#

Folks, once again in the United States, we’ve had another mass shooting. This time, it was in a medical clinic, because (apparently) the shooter was upset that he still had pain from a surgery in mid-May of this year. The doctor (again, apparently) hadn’t been responsive to the shooter’s pain issues, so the solution for the shooter was this: Shoot the doctor. Shoot another doctor. Shoot the receptionist. Wound a whole bunch of other people. And then shoot himself stone cold dead.

So, let me get this straight. We’ve had shootings in the following places in the last decade: Temples of worship, churches, mosques, supermarkets, concerts (the Las Vegas country music festival comes to mind), outside basketball games (the shooting of 21 people in Milwaukee a few weeks ago comes to mind), movie theatres. People have been shot in their cars and in their homes. People have been shot in assisted living situations and in senior housing, too. There have even been shootings on buses and a few on subway platforms in the past few years. And, of course, there have been the senseless deaths at colleges, universities, and other schools, including the recent shooting in Uvalde, Texas, at an elementary school.

With all of that, I ask this question: Where can we feel safe?

Recently, I played a concert with the Racine Concert Band in a church. (Beautiful church, too.) It’s our 100th anniversary, and we’ve played free concerts in the Racine Zoo or elsewhere during all of that time. It’s certainly a setting where you’d never expect a gunman with a pistol and some sort of rifle (as this shooter at the medical clinic had today).

But as much as I enjoyed playing my saxophone with the band, I still was wary as I got out of my car and went into the building. I kept scanning the audience to make sure there wasn’t anyone suspicious or out to make trouble. (I’ve never done this before while playing a concert. Occasionally, I’ve done it in other places.) And I was glad to get through the concert, not just because we as a group played well (and I didn’t muff an extended solo as I’d feared), but because we hadn’t had our activity marred by senseless violence.

Why must we feel this way in the United States of America? Why is it that I feel as if we got lucky because there wasn’t any senseless violence where we were?

Are we as a band supposed to have armed guards around us to protect us as we play?

(If so, we won’t be playing any free concerts again anytime soon. Armed guards are expensive.)

Before anyone says this, I will: I realize that all life is risk. Every time you step outside, you are risking something. (Brushing against poison ivy or poison oak, for example. Or getting stung by a bee, which would be very bad in my case as I am deathly allergic.) Every time you get into a vehicle, you are risking your life to a degree because you can’t fully predict what other drivers will do.

Those, however, are manageable risks. They are known risks. You can, to a large degree, compensate for them.

With all of these shootings in all of these various places, they were not manageable risks. The Las Vegas shooter used a sniper rifle to kill people from a hotel room high above the festival. The recent shooting at the Buffalo supermarket was made by someone who was a racist and who wanted to kill Black people, and had scoped the area out with pre-planning. (That guy may have been evil, but he was not stupid. He didn’t even live in Buffalo, so how could anyone have predicted he’d do this?) The shootings in El Paso, Texas, a few years back, were also done by a racist who wanted to kill Latinos, and he, too, like the Buffalo gunman, didn’t live in the area and had driven from hours away to murder people for no good reason.

These gunmen were not on anyone’s radar, either, even though coworkers had mentioned that the killer of children and teachers in Uvalde recently had the nickname of “serial killer” at work. He was said to be a scary person, someone you didn’t want to cross. He also had discussed his plans with several young women online, but they didn’t tell anyone because they thought “this is just how guys are, always bragging themselves up.” (That last is a paraphrase of several comments I’ve read, and is not an exact quote.)

There is an argument in all of these shootings that they come from a culture known as “toxic masculinity.” That is, these are men (or in some cases, teenage men) who firmly believe they are right, everyone else is wrong, and because they are the “man,” they get to make the rules even if they’re against society’s covenant.

(Yes, I know this isn’t the way “toxic masculinity” is usually described, but it’s the way I think of it. I defined it this way because most men do not think this way. Thank goodness. Moving on…)

Personally, I think this is happening for three reasons. The first is because so many other shooters have gotten away with their violence in the moment that it’s emboldened other domestic terrorists to do the same. (This is one reason why I refuse to name any gunman at my blog.) The second is because local, state, and federal governments have refused to do anything — or in some cases have been blocked from doing anything — to protect people from deranged shooters. This includes prevention and identifying suspects and realizing that at least half of the domestic terrorists in the above cases were men below the age of twenty-five. (Somehow, the local, state, and federal officials need to figure out who these bad apples are and stop them before they do anything remotely like the horrid acts I’ve listed above.) The third is because people are apathetic and believe nothing can or will be done, because our politicians have made it so.

As I said, I don’t have the answers. I just have the questions.

Now, folks, you have the floor: What do you think? What can be done other than perhaps beefing up budgets to deal with people who are obviously deranged and having some sort of awareness campaign so young people will understand that a guy with the nickname of “serial killer” is not normal?

P.S. Before I end this blog, I also want to point out that most police officers, sheriff’s deputies, federal and state law enforcement, and other personnel are good people. They do the best they can with the limited resources they have. Usually, these folks are maligned when something awful happens (sometimes rightfully — at least, so it seems — as in Uvalde), but they’re the first line of defense. They should be appreciated as much as possible rather than denigrated or besmirched. They stop many bad things from happening that most of us never hear about. Which means things might be even worse without their help…awful as that seems, considering how bad it is already.

Written by Barb Caffrey

June 2, 2022 at 5:08 pm

Posted in heartbreaking stories, Informational Stuff, Prescient observations, Truly horrible behavior, vicious things

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Sunday Thoughts: Reject Hate

with 5 comments

Lately, I’ve been very worried about how the United States — and the world around us — has given in to both tribalism and despair.

I understand despair better than I wish, but I don’t understand tribalism.

Why? Well, it seems to be a conduit for hatred. And we need to reject hate, in all its forms, as best we can.

We are all human. It can be hard to remember that, with some of the awful things that people do. But we are all human, and we are neither the least of our actions nor the best of our actions.

Instead, we are the sum total of our actions.

Where I live, we’ve seen an uptick in senseless violence in the past several years. Last week, some guy with a long gun ran out into the middle of a busy highway, and carjacked not one, but two people. He wrecked both cars, and was killed by the police before he could do any more harm.

I don’t know what caused this man to run out into the middle of the street with a long gun, much less carjack two different people. But I do know that he gave them nothing but pain. Their cars are wrecked. Their finances will take a hit in trying to get new ones (and in this area, the public transport is so spotty, you absolutely need to have a car), their mental health will take a hit in that they were hostages, and their emotional health will take a hit because they were helpless to affect their own lives in those moments.

I don’t know if this man hated everyone, or hated himself, or hated his situation. But he spread nothing but vitriol in the last hours of his life on this Earth.

I also don’t know what the answer is to people like this, except for trying to be a better person myself. As I said above, I know we’re not either our lowest moments (what my good friend calls our “blooper reel”), and we’re also not our highest moments (what she calls our “glamour shots”). But I can try, the best I can, to help others, to understand them, or at least make that effort in trying to understand.

That matters, even when I think it doesn’t. (Does this make sense? If it doesn’t, blame the lateness of the hour.)

I don’t know about you, but I often wonder if I am making a difference. After all, the Earth is huge. The amount of people living on Earth is staggering. And it’s only possible to get to know a few, select people most of the time. That means there are so many others we don’t know, that we can’t ever know, and yet we have to act as if we know them all.

Or at least as if we want to know them all.

Anyway, I know that any given human being (myself included) can only reach so many people, whether it’s emotionally, or mentally, or (even fewer people) physically. If we’re fortunate, it’s also possible affect them in a spiritual sense, too. (Hopefully for good, and not for ill. But I digress.)

And every little bit does help. Every time you can help someone, even if it’s just smiling at them and actually seeing them, or if you can listen for a while without judgment (very tough to do, if you do it right, but necessary), or if you can run an errand for someone who’s shut-in, or if you can be good to a stray animal and find that animal a home…every little bit helps.

When I’m depressed, or worse, despondent, I think that everything I’ve done has no meaning. I am honest about this, which I guess is unusual in and of itself.

I know it does have meaning, though. Even if I don’t exactly know what that meaning is, I know it does.

So, I will continue to do my best to reject hate in all its forms. I will continue to do my best to help others, as best I can. And I will continue to live my life on my own terms, and hope I can affect others’ lives for the better in the process.

May we all choose to reject hate. (Please?)

Written by Barb Caffrey

September 4, 2021 at 10:57 pm

Posted in Inspirational stuff, Prescient observations, Spirituality

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Compartmentalization Vs. Alienation

with 8 comments

I’m worried about the state of the world. I truly am.

As I write tonight, there are many cities in the United States that have protests — some peaceful, but most not — over the senseless killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. That now-former officer knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck for six minutes, and the other three police officers around him did nothing. Mr. Floyd was black; the now-ex officer was white. It was a non-violent crime that Mr. Floyd was alleged to have committed — he may have passed a counterfeit $20 bill — and he was not resisting arrest in any way.

We have every right to be angry over this. It was reprehensible behavior by the now-ex officer. (I will not name him, as per my long-held beliefs that bad actors should not be named.) Mr. Floyd should not be dead.

But watching the protests is deeply disconcerting. People are rioting, and often burning their own neighborhood businesses; that only hurts themselves down the line, along with the innocent business owners. People are letting their anger, their justifiable rage, spill over to the point it almost seems as if the world is on fire.

And that doesn’t even go into half of what’s going on in the world, as Covid-19 is still rampant. In the U.S., we have had over 100,000 deaths, as I’ve said before. In three months! And many people who’ve been changed for the worse for life, who will live with lifelong health ailments…the hospitals in this area continue to be overloaded, the medical professionals are stressed to the max, and everyone’s on edge.

I think these two things are part of why cities are burning tonight. People are alienated, and people are scared. They don’t know what to do. They don’t think anyone cares. They don’t think anyone is listening. And they wonder what in the Hell the point is.

I get it. And I am worried.

“But Barb,” you ask. “You said something about compartmentalization in your blog title. What the Hell is that about?”

Well, I don’t know about you, but I still have to get my day-to-day stuff done despite the background of chaos that seems to be everywhere. That I can’t shut out. That I wish I could help, but for the most part can’t do anything about other than be as upset as everyone else (but hopefully in a more constructive way than burning everything to the ground).

The only way I can get stuff done — whether it’s writing, editing, or anything else — is to compartmentalize my brain. To say, “OK, I’m going to do whatever I can do right now on this one, small thing. I am going to keep trying, and keep my head up, and do positive things, even if they don’t matter to anyone but me.”

I think this is all I, or anyone else, can do right now.

But yes. I remain deeply concerned. And I wish I knew what else to do, as the world — or at least the United States — continues to burn.

Written by Barb Caffrey

May 30, 2020 at 8:32 pm

Posted in heartbreaking stories, Persistence, Writing

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