It’s been a while…again…since I have been here. I didn’t include a picture this time because it just a pain in the you know what to add one. The software has been updated multiple times and allegedly “improved”. Maybe. But for those of us who just want to come by for a ramble, it takes too long to figure things out. But I digress.

I’ve been struggling a bit lately, well for a few months if I am honest. I’m not sure I go for more than a few days or weeks without struggling about something. Went on vacation and had two weeks of bliss without a single anxiety attack. It seems weird to think that getting onto multiple airplanes to travel to eastern Europe to go on a trip with strangers does not bother me at all but going to work on a Monday morning is enough to ruin my sleep on a Sunday night. I’m sure there is some sort of logical explanation for that.

But the struggle is more than work stress, this is a feeling of MEH. Total lack of motivation, sort of like when I am depressed. So maybe mild depression? Hard to put a label on it but I definitely feel like I need to snap out of something.

Today was better, even though it rained almost all day. It was almost like the rain gave me an excuse to stay in the house all day except this time I was motived to go through my closet and clothes to add to the donation stack. And then I actually did some cleaning. It made me feel better, as I knew it would.

Then I went through some old papers to looks for some motivational quotes to read. The stack included some old blog posts from late 2015 and 2016 which I now refer to as “The Year of Cancer”. That’s right folks – 7 years in remission as of now. A VERY GOOD THING!

As much as everyone else has more or less forgotten about The Year of Cancer, I have not. I still think about that terrible time every day, in one way or another. Sometimes I remind myself that I can do hard things – I went through multiple surgeries, chemo, and radiation so surely I can call the landscaper to come out and put down some mulch. Or sometimes I remind myself to take things one day at a time – just like I did that year. One of the things cancer taught me was to just think about that day and not the next. It was an important and powerful lesson. Or sometimes I remind myself to do things just because I can. Just because I want to.

On vacation, I befriended an elderly couple from Canada. They were nice lunch and dinner companions. One evening we were talking about hobbies and I mentioned that I have been crocheting a lot lately, something I picked up again during The Year of Cancer. I said that crocheting was a metaphor for life that I thought about a lot during cancer treatment. When you look at the patter or finished project, it can be overwhelming – it looks hard or maybe just really complicated. It’s easy to think you’ll never figure it out.

But then you realize that working on the project just one row at a time makes it much easier. So one row is like one day. Try not to think ahead 5 rows because it won’t make sense. “Ellen” loved that metaphor and said she was going to ask her daughter if she felt the same way about the knitting she does. Her daughter suffers from depression. Happy to pass it along.

Anyway, back to the reading of the old posts. It always makes me cry when I read the words. I can feel the pain and how terrified I was. It was also some of my best writing, when I just had to get the words out somewhere or else my head would explode.

What struck me today (and it has before, but more so today) was how weirdly upbeat I sounded in some of those ramblings and how much reading made a world of difference. Books have always been important but they probably saved my mental health that year. Not that I was happy for most of that year, not at all, just that it was not all bad. And the other thing I realized today, the thing that seemed weird for me to actually have to think about – I LIKED the person who was doing the writing.

When is the last time you said to yourself something like “I like you”. Like, as in, “I could really be friends with this broken person”. Not sure I have ever really thought that before. I mean, I try to tell myself that I am a good person with many faults but a genuinely good person. But like? Not that often. And we should do that more often.

So maybe I should spend less time beating myself up and more time just being a good friend. No, not in a multiple personality way, just kinder and gentler with myself. Or something like that.

We are all struggling with demons, different ones, but we all have them. Be kind to yourself.