Truth 34 November 8, 2014 Home Alone

As I sit here home alone I look around at all of the things I could get done and think back to when the kids were little and how I would have loved to have some time alone to get chores accomplished and yet I cannot move myself from the couch to accomplish anything.  So I wonder what happened to me and then I remember, oh yeah, it’s that invisible illness that I was gifted with over 10 years ago that has stolen my soul and taken over my life in more ways than I wish to admit out loud.  Slowly the tears roll down my cheek and the sadness washes over me, what the hell happened to me.  Gone my mind says, you are  gone.  I want to move, I want to get up and do all the things needed to be done around a home but I am just so tired.  You see, I didn’t sleep well last night or the night before or the night before that or that or that or you could keep going on and on.  My head pounds and my stomach churns and the tears just slowly flow and I hope as they do the sadness will leave my body but I know it won’t.  Yearning for the old me does me no good because all I do is become more frustrated.  Trying to find a new me has me at a loss for I have lost my self esteem along the way and I am so overwhelmed I don’t even know where to begin to look.  So I sit here and type words on a page, hoping something will come to me, pop into my brain and trigger my memory and help me along.  But the tiny voice that speaks out from the back of my brain only says – chin up buttercup, it will come, take baby steps, don’t push yourself.  So I think what should I do first, the wash is now done.  I will finish this and let me OCD kick in and pick things up that are out of place, then gather up the dust rag.  Such a beautiful day outside the window pane, sun shining, trees in beautiful fall colors but I’ll close the drapes to help filter out the bright light for my eyes and my head, I’ll take baby steps around the house for I have all day to myself to pick up.  Maybe along the way I’ll find me, one can only hope.

Truth 34 November 7, 2014 Cliche after Cliche

The cliches are just running through my head today.  I just can’t get it together  wanting to move forward.  My brain is all about shutting down and giving up.  This is so tough to fight these demons day after day.  Trying to convince yourself with a level 8 pain in your head that you need to go on and live this life.  Who the hell does that?  Who wants to do that?  Would you?  Pain in my head every day anywhere on a scale of 5 to 10 trying function and live a life. Thinking alone is just a chore when it cranks up.  Yet I take my medicine, I say chin up butter cup and I baby step it forward.  But there is this voice in my head that just wants to lay down go to sleep forever.  So as an invisible illness warrior, I not only fight the illness itself, I fight the secondary illnesses that comes along with it, the psychological battles of the brain and I wonder why, why, why do I have to.  What is it worth? What am I worth?  Does any of this make sense to anyone.  And yet, I trudge on because you know I have exciting things to do tonight – wash.  Wow brace yourself, don’t get too excited for me.

Truth 32 November 4, 2014 Change is difficult

So many things change on a daily basis.  At work things are constantly changing and we do our best to keep up with the never ending rules, regulations and protocols necessary to go with these changes.  The most difficult change to deal with though is when you change.  It’s okay if you desire the change and are trying to change yourself but when you are forced to change due to an accident or illness visible or invisible that takes over your life, the change is difficult.  You have not asked for this change and this change is usually not something that brings happiness into your life with new and exciting things to do.  It usually takes every day normal operations away from you and replaces it with something that is deficient and painful compared to your past.

So I have difficulty with change, not the work kind of change, but changing myself.  I wallow in myself and all that I am deficient in.  I grieve for the lost me and can’t get over the loss.  My mind though knows I need change.  It knows that in order to move forward in any sense of the word and to have any type of a life, I need to try to change and the biggest change is going to be my attitude/emotional balance.  It seems like such an overwhelming task that I just keep putting it off for another day and each day I do that, I know psychologically I am not helping myself at all.

Truth 26 October 29, 2014 Packing it In

Today was just one of those days I want to just pack it in.  With only three and a half hours sleep last night I started the day already tired. This exhaustion has been something I haven’t been able to shrug off since last week.  Work, of course, was long and difficult with no lunch break and now I’m just crashed on the couch wanting to just pack it all in, wondering why do I even push myself so hard.  Why do I bother? Is it even worth  it?  This life is just so exhausting and others just don’t even realize.  The look at you and wonder what you are even stressed or dealing with.  They can’t see any of your pain or worries.  There is no invisible sticker to wear on your head.  Maybe next week, I’ll just put myself out with the garbage……honest truth as to how I am feeling right at this moment.

Truth 25 October 26. 2014 There I said it

Did you ever just keep saying something over and over in your head but never really say it out loud?  My mind will say I just want to die over and over at times.  Death is nothing to taken lightly or to be joked about and my mind really isn’t joking when it states this.  It comes out in  times of frustration, severe pain, end of the rope feeling, when I feel like I just can’t take it anymore.  The last four days have been like this.  I have had severe exhaustion having issue with even just getting out of bed in the morning.  I never felt like this before.  I push myself daily to get up and get moving but not due to feeling exhausted, more due to feeling the pain that I am dealt.   I never used to even think about getting out of bed years ago.  I just rolled over, threw my feet on the floor and got out.  Now I take a “temperature” of my body – see how the pain scale is, see how the exhaustion rate is, then I slowly roll over, put my feet on the floor and struggle to pull myself up.  When you are  no longer yourself and that you are never going to get that person back it’s easy for your mind to tell you I just want to die.  But  yet there are still so many things to be thankful for and yes my life could be worse I am sure but losing yourself is terrible and until you experience it, you really won’t understand but be thankful, take it from me, it’s difficult to get up each morning wondering who you will be today and/or if you will want to die.

Truth 14 September 26, 2014 Thank Goodness Alcohol is not a Trigger

After a few days of rotten migraines from the rain that went through the valley, I am still having pain but it is finally starting to let up into a regular pain level that I am used to dealing with.  Just in time thankfully for the weekend and a getaway to our camper.  Thankfully for me alcohol is not a trigger and after the week I had, alcohol is going to be my friend this weekend and I’m going to take a liquid chill pill in the form of liquid refreshments and kick back and relax with a few cold ones.  It is supposed to be a nice warm weekend in the high 70’s, low 80’s and it will be just perfect weather for that.  I can physically hear my body saying right now I need this……..biggest truth ever……

Truth 12 September 23, 2014 Negativity really isn’t Motivational

When you hear over and over how you can’t accomplish anything or how things are constantly going wrong or how it is implied that you are incompetent at what you are doing, the negativity of it all does not motivate you in any way, shape or form.  In fact, after days, weeks and months of this type of continued behavior, your mind takes the opposite toll and questions itself as to whether it is worth moving forward or not.  Now some feel that being pushed to your limits and being told that you are not capable, motivates one to become better.  This might be true when it is first introduced as a form of motivation.  But when this type of motivation is used day in and day out, for me it didn’t work,  I lost my self esteem.  I no longer felt compelled to move forward but stood still and I  felt lost with nowhere to go and nothing to do.  The negativity that was given to me decreased my sense of worth and I lost my soul and became nothing.  It is in this nothingness I am stuck with my chronic invisible illness, feeling worthless and useless.   How do you respond to repeated negativity in your life?  Is your self esteem high?  How do you go about getting out of a rut that has been dug into you for over a year?

September 21, 2014 Does your Brain ever just not Shut UP?

Today is just an off day emotionally.  I just can’t seem to get my brain to shut up.  I really wasn’t ready to get up this morning but my brain was and all day it just has been off the charts of jumping from here to there with all kinds of thoughts and not even letting me finish them.  This is the kind of migraine day that I hate.  The migraine started last night and the brain started slowly but this morning was in full swing.  I tried to occupy it with going to the store and doing some baking but it didn’t seem to work.  By this afternoon my body was tired and as my husband was watching the football game I thought I would shut my eyes for a  short time and take a much needed nap.  But alas the brain would not take a break, therefore, not allowing me to settle down and sleep to help the pain go away.  So now here I sit, my toes and fingertips freezing from the migraine, my brain at full speed ahead at least three sentences ahead of my fingers, tired yet nowhere near a bed time and I already know when I do finally lay my head down, it will be a struggle to fall asleep.  It will be a fight to the finish between my brain and my body.  I guess I wouldn’t mind so much if my brain would actually have productive things going on inside but that is not the case and the emotions that are there should be washed away forever.  So I will try to watch the TV program that is on the background and block the emotions that do not serve me in anyway.  I hope for your sake, you don’t have to deal with a brain that won’t shut up with information that you do not need to hear.  Invisible Illnesses are not a piece of cake in any way, they deal with all parts of your body from top to bottom and haunt your mind at all levels.

Truth 10 Do you self motivate?

In my never ending attempt to self motivate I found an app for my phone called Grid Diary.  Every day at the end of the day I should open the app and answer the eight questions there, as well, as record the weather and my mood.  I have the option to change the questions which I do and there are many questions from which you can pick.   They are categorized by Health, Life, News, Information, Inspiration, Family, Emotion, Study, Work, Growth, Productivity, Fortune, Financing, Success, Failure, Reflection, Dream. Goal and Plan.  For me I find the questions thought provoking and I try to pick different questions each day to challenge myself to think about the day and what I am trying to get from life and where I am trying to go.  My invisible illness drags me down so much that I feel I no longer challenge myself and I am using this app to do so.  The trick will be to use the app daily and be consistent about it because I also started a migraine diary app which is, of course, depressing.  That is the reason I started both apps.  I have forced myself to record in the migraine app daily but haven’t done so with the grid app only recording a few times.  Again, as the weather changes I search for motivational, inspirational projects in which I can challenge myself to move forward and stay happy during the dreariness of the winter blues.  I guess I found out first hand the meaning of why they are called the winter blues.  Do you self motivate, challenge yourself to do something that is difficult for you?

September 18, 2014 Will your Obituary be worth reading?

I have grown up to talk about death and dying being a child that was born to parents who were 40 and 45 at the time.   My Father always felt he wouldn’t see much of my life.  He lived until I was 32 and got to see all my accomplishments except for the birth of my last daughter.  But as far back as I can remember he spoke to me about death and dying.  Always about the possibility of him not being able to be there for something that would be important for me.  The first major accomplishment I remember was my high school graduation.  He was going to be retired by that time and he was forever saying you know I might be dead by then.  With all of this talk starting at such a young age, I think I have never been afraid of death or about talking about it.  I have always felt as it was just the end of your journey of life and the beginning of a journey in a world of the unknown that we would have to look forward to.  It is something that is definitely going to happen, you can’t stop it, so you might as well go with it and witness the process, the journey, move on and hopefully upward to something more important for you.  As part of my job, I also look at the obituaries daily to see if any of our clients have passed so we can send condolences.  Sometimes I read the different obituaries and think about my own, who will write it and what will they have to say about me.  Even at my funeral, will anyone come and reflect on my life, have I done anything that inspired anyone else to go on and do something important in their life?   What do you think?  Life is all about putting yourself out there, enjoying the world, meeting people and making your mark.  Don’t you think the mark you make should be something that makes others inspired to go forward in their life?  Somehow I have to get my invisible illness out of my way so my mark isn’t marred and it can be remembered for me and not my handicap.  So take a moment to reflect on your life, your mark, your inspiration and what people will write in your obituary.  Will it be worth ready?