Life After the Pause

So here is the icky part about living in the "after" - you get lulled into thinking it is actually over. That you can pursue normal; that you can get back to doing things you love.  That you are now being rewarded for putting one foot in front of the other for so long, and you can shout "let's go!!"  Then you have a day, or a couple of days, that remind you that it isn't like before. This week has been one of those weeks.  Nothing major happened, no drama, no more stress than normal.  I just overdid everything in an attempt to push my way out of the funk I've been feeling. As you can probably tell from the title of the post, it didn't work. I feel literally non functional today. Every joint in my body hurts, I feel puffy, I have a headache and my brain literally feels 10 steps behind everything.  I talk or think, and have a hard time finding words (so apologies in advance if this post isn't as witty or as clearly written as other ones).  I litera...

 So I am one of those people who love inspirational quotes.  I seek them out, I find ones that resonate and, if you follow me on social media, you will often find these words of wisdom in my stories.  They're about believing in yourself, pushing through the rough times, or go be weird and live your life.  And I love them... I get a rush of positivity when I read them.  Not gonna lie - sometimes I feel like a fraud because there are days when I don't believe any of it.  But other days, they touch me and I love those days. Here is the one that I hate: Just choose to be happy everyday. First of all, I truly don't believe that people are happy everyday. Grateful, yes - but always happy? Just don't think that is reasonable. So lets strike everyday from that quote. Just choose to be happy. So, that one strikes a nerve in me that makes me want pre-populate my swear jar (just kidding - don't have one of those) - but it does make my eye twitch.  Not that I don'...

Ya so this has been a fun one. Here is how my psychologist explained it to me. You have so much capacity in your brain.  You use that capacity for everything from remembering to breathe and eat to dealing with stresses that come your way. As you go through traumatic events, the space available to "cope" with things gets smaller.  It takes more of your energy to remember to put one foot in front of the other, so you have less ability to deal with any added stress. So when you hear people say they get overwhelmed easily, one of the reasons is this capacity is on the full side. For me, I feel like my capacity has been sitting in full for years. I always say I have too many tabs open in  my brain when I'm getting overwhelmed and I usually have to walk away from whatever the tipping point was. Its either too much, or too many things at once. Like being in the kitchen with the TV on, trying to follow a recipe, having someone asking me a question and the phone rings. For me, imm...

So not gonna lie - I've been stressing a little about what to write about next.  Should I go back and tell you all about the difficulties I've had? Should I just focus on the now and what I'm going through? It gave me more anxiety than I would like to admit. Then I had an epiphany - who the fuck cares? I'm writing this for me, and maybe to let people who have been there know, what the reality for me was.  So why am I stressing about what order to write it in? Can it be a bit scatterbrained? Why not...I am! Can it jump all over the place? Why not...I'm not writing a novel you have to follow from beginning to end. Pick a point, start reading and if it doesn't resonate move on. The anxiety is more about me trying to put it all together so it is coherent - but for the love of God the pause was an incoherent mess so why should life after the pause move right into making sense? So here is what I decided.  I'm going to write whatever I want, in whatever order it co...

 So this will (I think) be the last post that looks backwards - this is about life after the pause!  But I could not let this date go by without some acknowledgment. I have lots of great events happen that changed the course of my life - meeting my husband, having children, meeting my circle.  But for me, life is succinctly divided into two parts:  before November 8th, 2017 and after November 8, 2017.  And that divide has me loathing November 8th. This was the day I got the phone call that changed everything - it was the day I was told I had cancer.  That one phone call ended up as years of dealing with shit no-one should have to.  So I tend to get grumpy, melancholy, pissed off as that date gets closer. It is subconscious, but it happens.  And I hate that it has that kind of affect on me. So a few years ago I decided not to fight the date, but to change my memories associated with it.  I vowed every November 8th to do something that was fun....

 OK so now you know all the sordid details that led me up to this point.  What you should also know about me is I am really good at compartmentalizing - I think it has always been a coping mechanism, and it truly saved me while I was in the thick of it.  I can box things up and not think about them - they stay nicely sealed and I can just move on. So at the end of all this, I figured I would just leave all those boxes nicely stacked in the far corners of my brain and I would move onward and upward with life. Um...no. What I discovered quite quickly is those boxes are fine as long as they are not piled too high.  Once there is a stack of them, they tend to fall over and out spills all the stuff you never dealt with when you were in the thick of it. Bring on all the emotions! I actually thought I was going crazy.  I would be sitting and all of a sudden start crying.  I would be watching a show and if a character was going through breast cancer I actually felt...