Did you know my therapist had the utter gall to tell me I’m human? LOL (sob) And that completely shutting down is a perfectly human and normal reaction to severe grief, emotional and physical stress, illness, and burnout? (/s)
How dare she!
Yeeeeah.
We lost our sweet Grimmy kitten on 2/7. I sat there holding him in my arms as he passed, telling him he was the world’s best kitten. He was almost 15 and I’d raised him since he was a tiny kitten. I considered him my familiar, and always joked he was a “cat-dog” because he thought he was a dog and actually knew a couple of trained behaviors because he was raised around dogs.
And in the past couple of weeks some other stuff has cropped up, family health issues along with my own ongoing health issues, so my plan to buckle down and just GET SHIT DONE(TM) fell by the wayside. It doesn’t help our weather’s been shite, and I spent a good chunk of January (and this month) dealing with migraines due to severe weather fluctuations.
As I was telling my therapist all this, lamenting what a failure I feel like for not being able to pull myself up by my bootstraps and throw myself back into work, she had the “nerve” to ask me what would happen if I pushed through and forced myself to work on this book feeling like I did. And I had to admit that it would likely suck balls and be something I wasn’t happy with if I did, and it would suck.
(All kidding aside I love her, she’s an amazing therapist, and I probably wouldn’t have survived the past several years if not for her.)
So she asked me if I could just “let go” for a while and focus on self care.
When I finished lauuuuuuggggghing…
She was like okay, what else can you do if you feel you “have” to be working, and I said well, I can crochet, and I could try to get one of the crochet patterns done that I’d set aside over a year ago.
Then she said well, how about working on that, would I feel like it was “worthy work” if I did that, and I was like okay, duh, point taken.
Which is why I have a crochet pattern finished. LOL I started working on it a couple of years ago and set it aside. So I finished it last week and it’s now for sale. (If you’re in one of my paid memberships, you’ll see it show up in your Payhip or Patreon user account.) [Buy direct from me | Buy on Etsy]
I made myself sit down at my desk this morning (Monday) and try to work. Obviously, I have to work, because duh, I need income. But at least now I do have a long-overdue WIP off my plate (well, crochet WIP) and it’s no longer nagging at my brain.
I decided that this week I will work at my desk every day, at least a few hours every morning, and try to get my body and brain back in the habit of buckling down to work so I can get this Bleacke Shifters book released. (Because I’m being stubborn and refuse to work on ANY writing project, no matter what my “muses” tell me, until this Bleacke book is released.)
I had hoped this year would be better than last year (and the Universe laughed at me). So far, not so much.
Sorry to sound so fucking whiny. I hate being whiny, too.
In the good news column, one of my cats, Trey, who despite never spending a second living outside since she was born in this house has always acted like a rabid, feral weasel on meth, has decided in the wake of Grimmy’s death she is now MY cat.
Ironic, because she never could stand Grimmy.
So the little dingy with only one brain cell to her name has started coming to me when I call for her (which literally has never happened in her nearly 14 years).
I know, life goes on, the wheel turns, yadda-yadda. But I turn 55 in May and even though I’ve learned a lot about myself over the past several years post-AuDHD diagnosis, it’s still hard to shed difficult and unhealthy thinking patterns in some ways. I’m a work in progress.
Why do I post about this stuff? Because I want others to know you’re not alone. It’s okay to feel less-than on occasion. We all feel that way. But it’s important not to wallow there, or to let your lying brain fool you into believing you deserve to remain there forever. That it’s okay to need some recovery time before dusting yourself off to try to get back in the saddle. (Or whatever metaphor you want to use.)
And it’s okay for you to take baby steps to get there.
((HUGS))