Archives for category: Brain Injury

Today might be too much, I feel it already. Rare these days, so the feelings really stand out –  helpful, more than aggravating, and I could use more of it. I can’t put my finger on something specific right now, or be certain things will go sideways at some point, but the potential for it exists as a distinct recognizable set of physical sensations that add up to an experience I recognize. It’s been a difficult day or two, and although I’ve adulted through it with considerable skill, generally, I’m quite human and there’s simply the possibility – leaning toward likelihood – that today it may all catch up with me. Can I make use of this awareness to treat myself well and gently, still get the day done, and perhaps dodge a meltdown, too? I guess I’ll find out as the day unfolds.

Well, sure. This.

Well, sure. This.

“Too much” is sometimes a thing to deal with. It’s not any more real than a lot of what I find myself mired in. “Too much” often reflects an unhealthy attachment to an outcome, or expectations that are unreasonable, or assumptions that are incorrect, piling up with circumstances that don’t bear that sort of emotional weight well. It’s that way today. A date with an acquaintance became a disappointment. The new job felt like a certainty, but fell through. A routine visit to a doctor becomes a referral to a specialist to rule out cancer – first. Disappointment adds to insecurity, which adds to worry, which adds to fear, which slowly becomes a soup of darker emotions, and a high risk of an emotional moment…or two…or some sort of meltdown. All very real. All very human. I could cash in my ticket for “a good cry” – haven’t done that, yet. As is so often said, it would probably do me good to just let go…once I can. Making a clear distinction between ‘balance’ (and treating myself well) and ‘repression’ (just sort of squashing everything down into a manageable presentation that seems appropriate to others) has huge value; hiding from my hurts doesn’t really work for me. “The way out is through” is real and meaningful today.

I have my ‘to do list’ for the day. I have events on my calendar. Purpose. A plan. I’ve also got this fragile vessel of flesh and bone to tend, and that’s rather non-negotiable for general wellness. I reconsider my list, move some things around, ensure that I keep a compassionate eye on myself today. I decide to trust my judgement – who knows me better than I do? – a meltdown today, you say? I think I have an opening on my calendar for that… if I must. lol Maybe later? Sometime after lunch? (Maybe not – that would be quite nice.) Either way, it won’t be necessary or useful to take it personally; I’m here for me.

Storms pass.

Storms pass.

Looking my concerns in the face eases them somewhat, at least for now. I sip my coffee, and start going down the list of things to do today. Today is a good day to be, and to do. 🙂

It’s morning. A Tuesday. The day is planned, and I’ll shower, dress, and head out shortly. The dawn was slow and gray, the sky heavy with fat rolling clouds, streaked with light as the sun attempts to break through here and there. My traveling partner sleeps in the other room. I am content and filled with joy, a pleasant start to the day.

A neighbor’s cat patrols the edge of the tall meadow grass just beyond the lawn. There’s generally one cat or another doing so at this time of morning. Red-wing blackbirds and jays mock them from the nearby trees, and as stealthy as the cats seem to be, I’ve never seen one of them catch anything. I’m okay with that – they’re clearly well-fed. 🙂

I sip my coffee, and think about the day to come. There’s paperwork to gather, and I check my list to ensure I don’t miss a detail. Today is a good one for rolling with changes, taking things as they come, and living the moment I am in – it doesn’t hurt to prepare for it. 🙂

This morning I woke with a Barry White song in my head, and thoughts full of love. 🙂 It’s a nice way to begin the day. I slept in, too, hours later than I typically do. I woke slowly. Yoga…meditation…walk…coffee… it’s a beautiful morning. I smile at myself cruising along powered by love, a seemingly limitless fuel from the perspective of this moment, right here. 🙂

Love matters most.

Love matters most.

I put on my favorite ‘sexy romantic’ playlist of love songs. It feels like that sort of day. I’ll see my traveling partner again tonight – I never tire of his warmth, his touch, his smile, his words. On my worst days, he can be such a calming presence. On my best days, he is pure joy. Sure, still human – aren’t we all? Our relationship is emotionally reciprocal on a level I find hard to describe. Is it enough to say that I return the favor – the love, the appreciation, the calming support – at every opportunity? (Depending on specifics, with greater or less skill – my results vary. Don’t yours?)

Love is reciprocal.

Love is reciprocal.

I sing love songs while I get laundry started. I realize with surprise that I’d wandered away from my writing without any particular awareness of being distracted by something else. I’m still smiling. Love tends to be somewhat distracting. lol

Love doesn't watch the clock.

Love doesn’t watch the clock.

I write today with new awareness of a pleasant bit of change; I feel love and I feel loved, and these feelings are not specifically dependent on today’s circumstances. They’re feelings. I have them. Some days I have them with similar intensity and a comfortably warm, merry glow, in spite of the circumstances of the day itself being fairly stressful or crappy in some way. Some days I feel love and I feel loved, even though I haven’t seen my partner, haven’t felt human touch, or interacted intimately with another human being, in days; today this seems very significant, if not understanding the experience then at least being aware of it, and valuing it. Today another puzzle piece drops into place, and I feel freed from some other bit of baggage – that bit that suggests love and being loved are dependent on circumstance, or the whims and moods of another. This morning it doesn’t feel that way at all; I am love, and my love is right here – to be accepted, to be returned or returned to, to be enjoyed, to be shared, to be savored, but it can’t be taken from me, or regulated, managed, parceled out, bought or sold, limited, or even destroyed. It’s mine.

Getting here was a journey - it is a journey to sustain love, too; there are verbs involved.

Getting here was a journey – it is a journey to sustain love, too; there are verbs involved.

The love songs have got me, this morning. I celebrate love. I want to shout “I get it now!” in some dramatic moment of hollywood-styled scripted enlightenment. I laugh tenderly and with genuine amusement at the woman in the mirror, recognizing that one element of my experience with my TBI is how completely unreliable my recognition of novelty is – maybe I’ve had this moment of recognition before? I’m okay even with that – how wonderful to recognize the mechanics of love, even for a moment?

Love is in the small things - strange for such a big deal.

Love is in the small things – strange for such a big deal.

I chuckle when I look back on what I’ve written so far this morning, and wonder if I am able to make any real sense on such an emotional topic when I’m immersed in it? I sip my coffee contentedly and note that the laundry will be finished soon…my ‘to do list’ this morning is a short one, and most of the day will be spent on study and meditation, until my partner returns to my doorstep, later. 🙂 Today is a good day to be love.

Love.

Love.

Today is singular. I woke early, from a less-than-ideally-sound sleep. I went back to sleep. I repeated this a couple times. My traveling partner was also not sleeping deeply. I sometimes snore, and I know I woke myself a couple times with it in the wee hours. This morning I am conscious of his need for sleep, and I quietly go about my gentle morning: yoga, meditation, study, a few minutes to pause and reflect on things I am grateful for and to appreciate my circumstances, a cup of coffee. I feel tender and sweet toward that human being in the other room, and enjoy treating him very well. I continue to treat myself well, too.

It is an unexpected (and unplanned) delight to have my traveling partner staying over, possibly for a couple days. I smile when I think about the delights of his day-to-day companionship, which I cherish. I frown briefly as I remind myself to continue to ‘handle business’, maintain my quality of life, and take care of myself well; it’s easy to lose track of everything but the warmth of his smile when he is staying with me. I’m very human. 🙂

Love matters most.

Love matters most.

Today is simple, my calendar is empty – that’s harder for me some days, rather than easier; there is still much to do with this precious finite lifetime and, since it isn’t on the calendar already, I’ll have to make it up as I go along. 😀  I’m okay with living life unscripted, actually. It’s taken some time to get here, but the conversations are profoundly more interesting when I don’t practice them in my head beforehand…and I hear more of what is being said. 🙂

Today I will do some things. Basic self-care will be among the things I do. I’ll prepare and consume calories. I will no doubt read something. Perhaps I’ll paint. The housekeeping is handled. The garden needs care. I find it rare to run out of things to do, and generally make a point of adding ‘sit still’ to my ‘to do list’ – not because I wouldn’t sit down for a moment, ever, if I didn’t – more because it reminds me that when I do, it matters to be in the moment, actually sitting, actually still, actually at rest, awake, aware, and committed to stillness. That moment of stillness is a big deal for me – and it can’t typically be had with the television on, sometimes even music in the background interferes with that needed moment of stillness, sitting, content, aware, not bored, not restless – calm and content.

A good day

What will I do with the day?

It’s a good day to chill. A good day for bird watching. A good day to walk in the sunshine, and to breathe fresh air.

Where does the path I choose lead?

Where does the path I choose lead?

Today I am in more pain than I’ve been in for a while. The cooler weather? It doesn’t matter too much why, the pain simply is, today. It’s just my arthritis, and it eases some with walking, and with yoga. The sense of being nauseous with pain is hard to shake, and unpleasant. It will pass. The pain isn’t terribly severe, just present, and I’ve been enjoying being in less pain with the hotter summer weather, recently (the contrast probably makes the pain seem worse than it is). This cooler more-like-spring weather returns and brings the pain with it. Today is a good one for seeking distractions. I’m okay with that. I find myself appreciating the luxury of not having to be at a desk for 8-10 hours while I am in pain; more freedom of movement results in less (and more manageable) pain.

Isn't this enough?

Isn’t this enough?

Today isn’t fancy, or busy, or well-planned, or filled with events or workload. It’s a day. It could be any day. This is the beginning and there’s so much more to come. If today were a shit day full of challenges and emotion, it would still be only a day, different from yesterday, different from tomorrow. Each one a new opportunity to do, or be, or go, or discover – or not – all at the ready to convert what I anticipated, expected or yearned for into what I recall. The stopover in this moment now, living, breathing, and being is all too brief. Today is a very good day to live now. I think I’ll go do that. 🙂

I woke at 3:00 am this morning. No reason for it as far as I could tell. Lately I’ve been feeling very fatigued, and my sleep was definitely disturbed by the recent hot weather. It’s cooler again, now, for the time being. Yesterday I powered through the fatigue of recent days and the headache that I woke with, mostly fueled by the emotional energy of excitement, having accepted a suitable job offer. I crashed hard, pretty early, after enjoying the evening with my partner. This morning, I woke at 3:00 am, after only 6 hours of sleep. I wanted to go back to sleep, but sleep was having nothing to more to do with me, this morning. It was sufficiently clear that sleeping was concluded I simply got up, and made my coffee.

Before dawn the only glow is in the art on the walls, not the sky beyond the window.

Before dawn the only glow is in the art on the walls, not the sky beyond the window.  “Without Substance” 11″x 14″ acrylic on canvas w/glow 2016

So, it’s back to the day-to-day grind of ‘gainful employment’… if I sound less than enthusiastic, it’s only because I don’t define the quality of my life by whether or not I am doing work for someone else in exchange for money. I enjoy my leisure time, and certainly there is enough I’d like to do with my time to fill all of it quite nicely without giving any of it away.  On the other hand, the offer I accepted is a very good move in a new direction, and I am genuinely stoked about that. Balance. I am also not being rushed back into the workforce; I’ll have a couple more weeks off before I get back to commuting.

My thoughts are interrupted by a cat complaining outside my window. I don’t have a cat, myself, so I know it isn’t mine. The plaintive wails are not those of pain or suffering as much as a call for companionship. I am on the edge of the park, and there is a lot of wildlife. It isn’t unusual to see a neighbor’s cat patrolling along the edge of the tall grass that separates the residential community from the park itself, but less interesting than the other visitors. Occasionally, raccoons wander up to the patio at dawn, or at dusk. Possums, too. Squirrels are plentiful, as are rabbits (though I don’t see them as often).  There are nutria, and beavers. The beavers are reclaiming trails and swaths of park, marsh, and meadow, by damming the creek here and there, causing flooding in areas that were once planned around human traffic. I’ve heard coyotes, but haven’t seen any. I spotted a young bob cat a bit less than a year ago, but haven’t seen it since construction began and ended in that area. There are herons, cranes, eagles, and hawks, and all manner of small woodland, marshland, and meadow birds. There are crows by the dozens, and woodpeckers are common. I smile, recalling happy hours sitting on my meditation cushion at the patio door, watching a sunrise, or the birds at the feeder. I yield to the bliss of this moment of contentment and contemplation. Right now, in this one singular moment, I don’t need more. This is enough.

The sky is beginning to lighten. The clock counts off the minutes, and the day advances. No headache this morning. No back pain for the time being. A rare pain-free morning? An unexpected bonus. It’s even a Friday without plans, aside from one new-job-related errand I will run later today. I feel myself relax, really relax. Was it stress that woke me, finding me wide awake and alert, so early? I yawn. 4:30 am? Why am I even awake? As I relax, sleepiness creeps over me. Seriously? I just finished my coffee…! I turn the idea of going back to bed over in my head… no reason not to…although I am already awake, already caffeinated, and already alert and active…Am I really sleepy, or tired enough to sleep more? Puzzled over the wave of sleepiness that hit me as I finished my coffee, and unsure what to do about it, I decide on meditation, next. Regardless, it’s a day with a pleasant start. That’s enough. The rest of it I’ll fill out with verbs, and see where it goes. 🙂