armful of papers
I went through a period a year ago where I meditated each day.
The difference, I told people, could be explained like this.
Normally, I felt like I was holding a stack of papers, and I had just dropped one. As I reached down to grab it, more fell from my arms. As I picked them up, more fell. I was in a constant cycle of trying to keep things together.
At this time in my life, I remember telling people, I did not feel like that.
I am not sure if this is true or because of meditation or achievable again, but I am tired of feeling like the papers are falling from my arms. I am scared of the long term consequences.
For example, I am short sighted with a stigmatism. It is a bit of a joke amongst friends and family that I never spend the money I need to to get my latest prescription, or if I lose my glasses I go long stretches without being able to see instead of getting new glasses. I've always been like this.
Recently I started worrying: I'm a young woman and my vision has worsened, so where will it be when I'm old? Will it be worse, irreparably, because I did not care for myself when I was young?
That feels like a metaphor for my whole life.
Don't get me wrong. I obviously work pretty hard to hold things together and always have.
But is there a way to feel more in control of it all?
The truth is, I feel tired all the time. If I sit down and relax and let myself feel it, I fear I may never get up again.
I am tapering off a pain killer, at the moment. One I have been on for six years. It is an anti-convulsant, actually, that the medical overlords realised they could treat pain with. Naturally, like the course of all opioid alternatives, it was initially embraced and hailed as the queen alternative, to be sidelined some years later as its problems revealed themselves. Addiction, overdoses, long term side effects, seizures upon withdrawal. Well, who knows if it gives me a single one or all of them - we cannot know until I am free of its daily ingestion, and the weeks of withdrawal afterward, and the months of chemical rebalancing of the brain.
Fatigue is, of course, a side effect. But I am not so naive as to hope in a large way that I will awaken healed afterward. However, on this journey toward mental and physical health, we must take one step at a time, and this is the step I am taking at the moment. The important first step, so that there can be no doubt as to what it is producing, when I take steps afterward.
The difference, I told people, could be explained like this.
Normally, I felt like I was holding a stack of papers, and I had just dropped one. As I reached down to grab it, more fell from my arms. As I picked them up, more fell. I was in a constant cycle of trying to keep things together.
At this time in my life, I remember telling people, I did not feel like that.
I am not sure if this is true or because of meditation or achievable again, but I am tired of feeling like the papers are falling from my arms. I am scared of the long term consequences.
For example, I am short sighted with a stigmatism. It is a bit of a joke amongst friends and family that I never spend the money I need to to get my latest prescription, or if I lose my glasses I go long stretches without being able to see instead of getting new glasses. I've always been like this.
Recently I started worrying: I'm a young woman and my vision has worsened, so where will it be when I'm old? Will it be worse, irreparably, because I did not care for myself when I was young?
That feels like a metaphor for my whole life.
Don't get me wrong. I obviously work pretty hard to hold things together and always have.
But is there a way to feel more in control of it all?
The truth is, I feel tired all the time. If I sit down and relax and let myself feel it, I fear I may never get up again.
I am tapering off a pain killer, at the moment. One I have been on for six years. It is an anti-convulsant, actually, that the medical overlords realised they could treat pain with. Naturally, like the course of all opioid alternatives, it was initially embraced and hailed as the queen alternative, to be sidelined some years later as its problems revealed themselves. Addiction, overdoses, long term side effects, seizures upon withdrawal. Well, who knows if it gives me a single one or all of them - we cannot know until I am free of its daily ingestion, and the weeks of withdrawal afterward, and the months of chemical rebalancing of the brain.
Fatigue is, of course, a side effect. But I am not so naive as to hope in a large way that I will awaken healed afterward. However, on this journey toward mental and physical health, we must take one step at a time, and this is the step I am taking at the moment. The important first step, so that there can be no doubt as to what it is producing, when I take steps afterward.
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