Living As All of Me

[HannahOne]

What I want to remember from today is that once I arrived, I had a wonderful time painting with my friend. It was stabilizing to have the routine. I felt teary a few times, but it was contained within something safe and secure, painting together. It helped me process, much more than staying home in bed and ruminating would have done. And my work is progressing. It feels good to paint because you can see progress, it's a product, you can mark time by the object, orient by it. Oh yes, that's the season when I painted that one, then this one.... they accumulate. Much of my former work left me with no product and all my child-rearing and housekeeping is a repetitive series of actions that.... repeat, without progress. Painting feels orienting that way. and I can now focus on it and be present to it in a way that just a few years ago was extremely difficult .I've trained my brain and hand to attend now, and they mostly do. I think this is a healing activity that I hope to continue even as I get discouraged and think I should stop.

I'm teary and slept only a few hours last night. I'm going to take a rare sleeping medication and try to sleep tonight. I have to get up at 8 30 am to order dance recital tickets of all things, they sell out fast. Fine. Then, I hope to work on my new mashup project. Right now it feels like a brontosaurus, a brontosaurus that I'm worried is going to come apart and leave limbs and scales scattered all over. I am hoping I can wrangle it and that it will ultimately hold together and become a container, a vehicle for what I need to contain.

Love to All of You survivors out there, struggling or surrendering, whatever your state, may you have what you need for today to get to tomorrow.

[TheBigBlue]

 

[sanmagic7]

so very glad for you, hanna1, that your painting session felt good for you.  i think letting out that creative side is important for us, even if only once in a while.  i do hope you can continue with it.  love and hugs

[NarcKiddo]

 

[HannahOne]

Getting through the week. Staying in the present moment. Doctor's appointments, PT and gym time, painting, finishing my "brontosaurus" of a project, dance recital rehearsals, hours of driving kids around. Structure helps me stay more in the present. Focusing on three meals a day and working out every day. The knee is messed up again but that's par for the course with a tendon injury. Still hoping it can recover without surgery, the surgery doesn't work well for tendons. They had given me a 9 month timeline so I have three or four months to go, can't remember.

Facing some of my past. My first two decades of life I was convinced it would all be worth it. The next two decades were full of fulfilling that promise to myself. The last decade has been full of self doubt. And coming to the realization that it could never be worth it.

From here, it can't be worth it. I'm worth more than what I had to go through, worth more than anything I got out of it, even the good life I have now. I have to think that way, because my past self has to be of infinite worth to me. But from there.... it had to be worth it. Or I wouldn't have kept going. I had to think it would be worth it, because my future self had to be of infinite value.

When I feel it wasn't worth it, when I get depressed and angry, I have to remember this. From here, of course it wasn't worth it. But from there, of course it was.

This question of worth it has dogged me my whole life. Made everything heavily weighted, made jobs seem pointless... when it comes up I just have to remind myself that it all depends on perspective, on where I'm standing. It's strange for past/present to flipflop like this in my mind, in my experience. I just have to be aware of which lens I"m looking through at any given time.