A lot has happened in the last 9 days since I last posted.
I sort of realized I wasn't so much depressed as just that life kind of sucks right now. Good to know.
I reached a level of stress that went beyond my reserves, beyond, those backup storage reserves, and entered damaging to my health territory. None of my usual techniques has fixed it.
I fell and cracked my head hard on the cement walk in front of my house. I could have died. Like my neighbor Ray did. Like other people do. Walking to the car. Dead. So that happened. So far? Still alive.
We sold our flip house, which until the burden leaves you, you don't realize how it has been there waiting, while you soldier on, refusing to give in to worry and stress. It is a huge relief, but now all the worry I had bottled up is released.
A low level anxiety exists for a writing day I'm going to in December, with my idol author, and it is just giving me mild yet continuous waves of insecurity and ever stronger feelings that my stupid idea of being a fiction writer is so so ridunkulous. Labeling what I'm not good at is so easy.
I don't want to waste time here on my work stress. Let's just sum it up this way: my team went from 14 to 8 in the last 2 months time. We are still attempting to carry on work as usual down 40% of our FTEs. One of those losses was to unexpected, young death. Two left for career reasons, and three were 'downsized' out of the blue.
It is surely more than the sum of these few items that has my typical solid and ready attitude to battle any crisis in the toilet. Instead I feel like I'm made of tissue paper.
But wait, there is good news.
So last night I curled up in bed with my ear buds and my super-sized box of Nutty bars and watched the most depressing movie, and it left me feeling so much better. It is 'Cake' and was (unlike its title) about a woman with chronic, severe pain. Twenty-four-seven. I don't know how I ended up with it, as I was looking for a 'feel good, stress-relieving' kind of movie. After this I watched a really bad tv Christmas romance.
But it made me realize for the 147th time that people have it worse than me. That most of those things I listed above are actually GOOD, like really good things, I'm just in a fragile state.
I also used technology to my advantage, found a cool meditation app (more another day), read my bible, called in to work today which in and of itself is a luxury that I'm sure 98% of the world's population can't afford to do. But while in the shower just now, a light shown from above and hit my palms. (I was trying to be in the moment) Through the soft-focus of the water hitting my palms I had a major realization: "The palms of my hands don't look any older than they did in high school."
Wow. Life-changing that? Yes. I don't even worry about aging much, wrinkles, spots, sags. But something in me said, 'There is a silver lining moment. You should share.' So I'm sharing. And I'm taking it a step further. I'm going to try to find as many silver-lining moments as I can every day between now and Thanksgiving which happens to be a month from today. I promise it won't be every day, I'm too ditzy to remember.
Learn by teaching? Feel better by making others feel better? Laugh at yourself? I'm sure those are all on posters somewhere.
p.s. friends who got this far, feel free to share one of your silver lining moments as all writing is basically
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