Moving on - I thought

 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 nauseous. I couldn't listen to certain songs - particularly the ones about losing a loved one.  My brain felt like it was on overdrive, and my emotions kept skipping around. My anxiety went through the roof and the catastrophic thinking I worked so hard to keep at bay made an appearance at the most inopportune times.

It took every ounce of my energy to keep functioning so people thought "I was fine" - I didn't want anyone knowing how much I was drowning. The only one who had to deal with the crazy was hubby and he did it like a rockstar.  Oh - then pile on the guilt for putting him through all this while he was working and holding down the fort. It felt neverending and most days I would end up curled up in bed, or would down a bottle of wine just to not feel all the feels.  Not my finest moments.  But I still wasn't ready to deal with the bigness of it all.  It was too much; too overwhelming.  I genuinely thought that if I just kept moving eventually it would all settle into place and would go back to normal.  Um no...just no.

There was no big a-ha moment; no single thing that made me realize ignoring wasn't the best way to cope. I think as my brain started to recover and could handle a bit more, those boxes just started to flutter open.  Some weren't as scary as I thought...others I slammed shut without blinking an eye.  One thing I did learn - eventually they all need to be dealt with.

And so starts this blog.  There seems to be quite a bit on how to deal with things as you are going through them, but no-one really talks about the after.  They talk about "moving on" so I always felt like I wasn't moving on fast enough.  I would see all these people who had big health issues and they seemed to be able to just get passed it.  "I ran a marathon 3 months after finishing chemo" - I could barely walk around the block. "I'm back at work 2 months after brain surgery" - I couldn't be in a room with more than 2 people talking without feeling overwhelmed.  So what the actual f**k was wrong with me? Why was I failing at this getting better thing?  

This is my journey - my life after all this.  I'm hoping writing this all down helps me to continue working through all the "stuff".

J