Have you ever tried to change something you didn’t like about yourself but found that you couldn’t just change that one thing–you actually had to change your whole, entire self? I am finding that to be true as I’m about halfway through The Year of Being Positive. You see, I like to dedicate whole years to things. Last year was The Year of Standing Up for Myself. There is so much that goes into standing up for yourself or being positive, not about some things but about everything, that devoting a full year to it makes me think I might actually have a chance of making some progress. So it’s usually pretty clear to me what a year’s going to be about, and this past New Year’s, as everyone was getting their list of resolutions together, I knew that this one thing was going to be my fulltime job.
Anyway, being positive is something that has always been hard for me. I have a bent toward anxiety, worry, that I think I got from my parents who tried to protect me by always thinking of the worst possible scenario. Also, to protect myself from the pain of disappointment I started to tell myself that things weren’t going to turn out. Roll it all together and I find myself living in a way that’s contrary to what I want, that will never enable me to get what I want, and that will keep me in a perpetual state of doom and gloom for the rest of my life. So I decide to change my attitude about life, but too late, I find that my attitude about life is part of me. It’s as much a part of me as my left hand.
So I have started making some changes. And these are changes that will happen slowly but they will change the root of the problem, not just the symptoms. I have been looking for different ways of dealing with my anxiety about life and recently I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Traditional Chinese Medicine. I know not everybody is into that, but one of the things I really agree with is the idea of Qi, or life force, that flows through the body via particular channels, or meridians, corresponding to different areas of the body. You can activate these pressure points by touch, which is called acupressure, and you can also activate them with acupuncture, which is done with strategically placed needles. As I’ve been turning toward more a holistic viewpoint of health and away from Western medicine, I have become more open to homeopathic treatments. In the midst of my reading, I stumbled on a few articles about how acupuncture has been successfully used to treat depression and anxiety, to the same degree of effectiveness as anti-depressants.
Thanks to this series of events and my need to change certain things about me naturally, without medication or artificial stimulants, I ended up lying face down on a massage table last week, as a licensed acupuncturist who specializes in the treatment of depression and anxiety quickly and efficiently inserted hair-thin needles into my back, neck, ankles and wrists. The sensation was often very much like getting stuck with a needle, and other times it was a gentle pinch or just a feeling of pressure. Anyway, I was laying there looking probably much like a pin cushion, and I was doing this visualization thing and breathing into the center of my being, and I felt like all the tension was being compressed out of my body, as if someone was letting the air out. The places where she stuck the needles were strategic, of course, correlated to the different areas of energy in the body.
New Age-y and weird-sounding stuff. But you won’t know until you try it, and when you do try it, I am pretty sure that you will not want to stop. I didn’t just come in for the actual procedure–the lovely doctor subjected me to an hour-long psychiatric evaluation, except instead of prescribing me drugs, she prescribed me food and sleep and relaxation techniques. The whole time, there were four interns in the room who nodded sympathetically to my story and two people lying behind curtains on beds (I could see their feet with pins sticking out). But I wasn’t bothered by the lack of privacy. In fact, it was slightly comforting to be in community, to feel surrounded by people with ideas about how to make me better. And it was nice to have someone tell me that this was something I would have to do every week, and there were things I would have to do every day, to get better. It felt a lot more real and a lot more physically tangible than a pill. It made me feel like I could change, and that I would change, the way I respond to life and situations that daily tie me up in knots. I was really glad because becoming a positive person seemed to be part of the overall plan, broken down into a million little choices and a million little needles and a nice tatooed boy named Lesley giving me some kind of Chinese massage that felt like a windmill and flattened me on the table.
