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an update with no snowflakes in it
There is family stuff that is ongoing and extremely difficult, and about which I have so far spoken with my mother, my brother, my sister-in-law, Gentleman Caller, and my EAP counselor. It is not like me to have kept it that tight, but it's been necessary. Back home for MLKmas this weekend, and maybe when I return from that I'll be ready to talk about it with a wider circle.
Carving my life up into small, manageable goals. Right now my keep-moving goal is to do the Royal Canadian Air Force XBX routine each morning (which takes about six minutes, so there's really no excuse not to), plus a certain minimum distance on the elliptical which can be postponed to evening and possibly skipped if the day has involved a lot more walking than a normal day sitting on my ass at my desk, and generally keep the nerve in my shoulder as unpinched as possible; my not-overfueling goal is to eat breakfast and then make sure I'm not distracted by hunger at lunchtime and then have some sort of non-ridiculous dinner, or in the alternative have whatever I want at lunch and then just make sure those aren't the last calories I have before bedtime; and my keeping-my-shit-together goal is to string together two days without crying. I'm doing okay on keeping moving and not overfueling; keeping my shit together is going less smoothly. I cry all the time, y'all. Usually not for very long, but seriously, every day something happens that makes me weep, or if nothing in particular happens my mind will wander somewhere that gets the job done without any external stimulus. I'm no longer so distracted that I need my colleagues to give me small discrete tasks at work and then follow up more or less daily to make sure I'm doing them - so there's that. But after years and years of being the sort of sentimental where I might feel my throat tighten or my eyes well up in response to $whatever, I am now in a place where at least once every day I've got tears running quite freely (even before I blink, they spill over) and I can't even be arsed to dash them away until I feel them drip off my jaw and land on my collarbone. I have to stop and consciously remind myself how much better I'm doing than two months ago, because without deliberate acknowledgement of this I feel like I've made no progress at all.
I went back to curling tonight and made some decent shots and decent calls. Everyone was very kind and professed gladness to see me back, whether they knew why I'd been away all this time or not. I could feel the tightness in my chest on the way there, and knew it meant on some level I was dreading going - though I was back at the club for the junior championships, which I ran, I was there sixteen hours a day for three and a half days - but once I was there I was glad to be there. It is ever thus.
That tightness in my chest is particularly confusing now since I had a flu thing last week with a cough in it; the slightly gummy feeling in my lungs that means ugh, cough feels an awful lot like the squeeze around my heart that means anxiety, so half the time I don't know whether I should take NyQuil or Ativan. I don't think I should probably take both.
I adore my Gentleman Caller more every day. I can't even tell you. I am long past the point of fretting, at such times as he's not as responsive as I would be if I were him, that he's fed up and going to leave me - by which I mean, especially in my more fragile moments I do have the occasional superego blip of going ohno something I have done has displeased him and that's going to be the end (because - and manymany months ago I made one too many offhand remarks about scaring him off or his running away screaming that he finally asked me to unpack that; because there's an insidious way we're taught, isn't there, 'we' being young women, a lesson that shapes up more or less as When he leaves - and he will - it will be because of something you did - I no longer know where I was going with the structure of this sentence, but the point is that he knows that's the baggage I'm carrying with me because he asked ♥♥♥), but then I am always, so far, able to reflect that such blips of worry have no basis in reality or any sort of precedent.
I'm off back to yoga tomorrow as well. The first class was last week, but I stayed away because flu. I'm sure this will be another thing I'll have to tell myself to do and then be glad I did. Sigh.
Oh. I've just had a Facebook message from a long-ago curling friend (whose life has been too full of work and other things to be a member of our club for many years) who told me that at a recent tournament, her first venture back into curling in ages, a couple of friends from the club told her that I had lost my dad. One of the friends she refers to, I didn't even know that news had reached him (not specifically; we're friendly, but he's also moved away in the past couple of years). What this means is that, at a minimum, people I haven't seen in ages are asking how I'm doing and other people I'm friendly with but not necessarily close to are reporting not just "yeah, she's still a member" but actually relating "she's having a rough time, poor kid, her dad recently died". More ♥.
I think I need a vacation. I don't mean some time away from work, because a) I've had that and b) I can carry on having it more or less whenever I want, because although I'm wildly underpaid it's nevertheless true that my team is awesome and made of rock stars. And I don't mean a trip somewhere full of diversions, although that would also be nice. I mean for the first time in a long while I think I need to go lie on a beach, or sit on the porch of a cabin in the mountains, or some other sort of mild sensory-deprivation non-activity, for a few days. I'm sure I'd be bored senseless, but that's the sort of purgatory between a busy life and some kind of meditation, isn't it? A hard reboot, anyway, is what I think I need. I won't get it, but I really feel like going away somewhere would be marvelous right now.
Carving my life up into small, manageable goals. Right now my keep-moving goal is to do the Royal Canadian Air Force XBX routine each morning (which takes about six minutes, so there's really no excuse not to), plus a certain minimum distance on the elliptical which can be postponed to evening and possibly skipped if the day has involved a lot more walking than a normal day sitting on my ass at my desk, and generally keep the nerve in my shoulder as unpinched as possible; my not-overfueling goal is to eat breakfast and then make sure I'm not distracted by hunger at lunchtime and then have some sort of non-ridiculous dinner, or in the alternative have whatever I want at lunch and then just make sure those aren't the last calories I have before bedtime; and my keeping-my-shit-together goal is to string together two days without crying. I'm doing okay on keeping moving and not overfueling; keeping my shit together is going less smoothly. I cry all the time, y'all. Usually not for very long, but seriously, every day something happens that makes me weep, or if nothing in particular happens my mind will wander somewhere that gets the job done without any external stimulus. I'm no longer so distracted that I need my colleagues to give me small discrete tasks at work and then follow up more or less daily to make sure I'm doing them - so there's that. But after years and years of being the sort of sentimental where I might feel my throat tighten or my eyes well up in response to $whatever, I am now in a place where at least once every day I've got tears running quite freely (even before I blink, they spill over) and I can't even be arsed to dash them away until I feel them drip off my jaw and land on my collarbone. I have to stop and consciously remind myself how much better I'm doing than two months ago, because without deliberate acknowledgement of this I feel like I've made no progress at all.
I went back to curling tonight and made some decent shots and decent calls. Everyone was very kind and professed gladness to see me back, whether they knew why I'd been away all this time or not. I could feel the tightness in my chest on the way there, and knew it meant on some level I was dreading going - though I was back at the club for the junior championships, which I ran, I was there sixteen hours a day for three and a half days - but once I was there I was glad to be there. It is ever thus.
That tightness in my chest is particularly confusing now since I had a flu thing last week with a cough in it; the slightly gummy feeling in my lungs that means ugh, cough feels an awful lot like the squeeze around my heart that means anxiety, so half the time I don't know whether I should take NyQuil or Ativan. I don't think I should probably take both.
I adore my Gentleman Caller more every day. I can't even tell you. I am long past the point of fretting, at such times as he's not as responsive as I would be if I were him, that he's fed up and going to leave me - by which I mean, especially in my more fragile moments I do have the occasional superego blip of going ohno something I have done has displeased him and that's going to be the end (because - and manymany months ago I made one too many offhand remarks about scaring him off or his running away screaming that he finally asked me to unpack that; because there's an insidious way we're taught, isn't there, 'we' being young women, a lesson that shapes up more or less as When he leaves - and he will - it will be because of something you did - I no longer know where I was going with the structure of this sentence, but the point is that he knows that's the baggage I'm carrying with me because he asked ♥♥♥), but then I am always, so far, able to reflect that such blips of worry have no basis in reality or any sort of precedent.
I'm off back to yoga tomorrow as well. The first class was last week, but I stayed away because flu. I'm sure this will be another thing I'll have to tell myself to do and then be glad I did. Sigh.
Oh. I've just had a Facebook message from a long-ago curling friend (whose life has been too full of work and other things to be a member of our club for many years) who told me that at a recent tournament, her first venture back into curling in ages, a couple of friends from the club told her that I had lost my dad. One of the friends she refers to, I didn't even know that news had reached him (not specifically; we're friendly, but he's also moved away in the past couple of years). What this means is that, at a minimum, people I haven't seen in ages are asking how I'm doing and other people I'm friendly with but not necessarily close to are reporting not just "yeah, she's still a member" but actually relating "she's having a rough time, poor kid, her dad recently died". More ♥.
I think I need a vacation. I don't mean some time away from work, because a) I've had that and b) I can carry on having it more or less whenever I want, because although I'm wildly underpaid it's nevertheless true that my team is awesome and made of rock stars. And I don't mean a trip somewhere full of diversions, although that would also be nice. I mean for the first time in a long while I think I need to go lie on a beach, or sit on the porch of a cabin in the mountains, or some other sort of mild sensory-deprivation non-activity, for a few days. I'm sure I'd be bored senseless, but that's the sort of purgatory between a busy life and some kind of meditation, isn't it? A hard reboot, anyway, is what I think I need. I won't get it, but I really feel like going away somewhere would be marvelous right now.
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The snowy Berkshires are sometimes good for sensory deprivation. :)
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Second, it might be worth your while to come to my Temple for a few Sundays, just to see if the peace I found there can sink into you. It might not, but it might.
Thirdly, and I think I know this isn't going to be received well, I think you need an anti-depressant. I'm not talking Ativan, and I'm not talking Prozac, I think you need to be evaluated for something medium-term (shut up, you know what I mean) to help you past this. Yes, I'm on drugs out the wazoo and may be speaking from a prejudiced point of view, but still. There are hoards of different types and I really think it would do you good to be evaluated, sweetheart. I hate seeing/hearing you in pain like this, and I want you to feel better.
And I really, really approve of your GC, esp now.
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