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The Lives We Live


I feel like I’m leading three or four different lives right now. There’s the blogger life which I have to keep going at all times and process everything emotionally, and don’t get me wrong. It’s fun! It’s what I need! It’s just… like a lot of trauma processing… exhausting after a while! I love it, but everything I love turns to expectation, from myself mostly and then from “others”: outside voices that tell me that I need to do something or that whatever I’m doing is wrong or I need to do more of it or whatever the case may be. Don’t get me wrong. It’s gotten me through very rough times and keeps me motivated nearly every day. Most days, actually. But after Partial, I found a new spark of joy and motivation within myself. It was because I felt like I was helping myself and helping others help themselves. Encouraging other people to find the spark in themselves to empower themselves to break free of something holding them back…there’s nothing like it!

But after Partial, I feel like I’ve been living this weird other life; not good or bad life, just other. I’ve been spending my days making sure I get plenty finished when I don’t have pain, and decluttering the house section by section. It’s been a real joy making a list like I did of the plans I wanted to do this day and slowly checking them off. We didn’t do that in Partial since it took up most of the day and most of our energy, but now I get to start the day with a clean slate and hopefully enough spoons to do a lot! I was decluttering and getting ready for Christmas, both!

Then came the holidays, and the social time hit me like a ton of bricks. I went from no interaction until 4-7pm to constant interaction almost every waking moment for almost a week straight. At the end of the time, my body just shut down from about 5pm to 7am. It worried my husband, but I told him later that when I woke up after three hours, my dystonia pain went from barely nothing to not manageable, and I had to stay in bed and get some rest. My body demanded it. My pain went back to nothing, I stayed awake the whole trip back and for errands and unloading everything, then took a three-hour nap!

So I’m back to my “usual” decluttering, laundry, looking for a job, blogging, etc. It’s peaceful. I can’t say Christmas wasn’t a “nice” interruption, but I hope I didn’t cause too much damage to the family dynamic in simply trying to help. It seems like we have this tendency to make it our job to help people, when it’s not our job. That’s when we get into trouble. I’ve learned my lesson. The older generation doesn’t want to change, and that is fine. It is our job to change around them. Change is an ever-growing process.

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