Quick update before I get started: no update, pain has not settled and I’m still stuck in bed.
Today I was talking with my sister, a deep and vulnerable conversation. Since I started therapy around 3 years ago I have become a much more vulnerable and open person. A person who holds space for her emotions and truly shares all of that with those around me. Not in a heavy, dumping-on-others way, but in a heres-where-I’m-at-and-what-I’ve-learned-this-week kinda way. I cannot expect those around to understand what I’m going through, truly it’s impossible and I wouldn’t wish to burden anyone with understanding this, but I do feel lighter by helping them understand how I feel and where I am mentally. How I can hold space for what hurts, how I view the world, allowing them to see my vulnerability and trusting them to handle it all with love and care.
It wasn’t until I started therapy that I allowed myself space to feel anything or handle any emotions. As a young child I took on the role to look after others, but it means I lost a lot because I didn’t always look after myself. I didn’t grieve loses, I didn’t share my true joy, I didn’t set boundaries or even know that I could. All this leads you to never finding out who you are. I didn’t meet me until I was 28. But I’m also not that version of me anymore because I had to become a different version. A version that could survive this situation I find myself in. When I get to live again I’ll have to let go of this version of me and meet myself all over again because this version of me, the one in survival mode 24/7, cannot exist in the big wide world. This version cannot welcome the world and all its uncertainty and challenges with grace and acceptance.
But for now I am that version. It’s sad but necessary. It’s sad because I crave life and living. I long to live and be free, to maybe travel for a few months and to feel the sand and sea on my feet and feel the breeze through my hair. To see sunrise and sunsets and the way their beautiful colours glow and light up the world around me. To find myself and decide what I want to do with my new freedom, but ultimately to take the time to enjoy life for a time and fill myself with the little moments and little things that make it glorious.
I want to take ice skating lessons and singing lessons for no reason other than I enjoy them. I want to go caving with my sister and learn to surf or just enjoy falling off the board into the ocean that is so full of life itself. To sit quietly with a coffee in an outdoor cafe somewhere in the world on a beautifully warm morning.
These are the thoughts that fill my day. Sometimes they bring me hope and joy, other times they bring me such deep longing that I can feel nothing but sadness. When I feel like I do I truly can’t and shouldn’t do anything, because anything brings consequences. It means I’m just stuck tossing and turning in bed, trying to ease the pressure sores on my hips. I can’t do a puzzle, tv and my phone are exhausting and bring me pain. I can’t paint either due to no concentration, shaky hands or the pressure of leaning forward on my still healing neck. So I’m left with reading, and after 29 months I am fucking sick and tired of reading. I’m bored, and boredom leads to restlessness, which leads to a wandering mind, which compounds loneliness and sadness.
It’s a wicked cycle. But today, while talking with my sister and telling her all the things I feel and all the things I crave doing and seeing again, while I felt sadness, I felt a little less lonely because on the end of the line was someone who craves to do those things with me, and wants to see me truly live again. So this afternoon I felt a little bit of hope and a poem I read this morning said if I had hope then I had everything I’d ever need.