It’s been a hard year…

I haven’t posted much lately.

I haven’t had the energy.

Some stuff happened, and by stuff, I mean an abusive work situation, a TBI flare-up that tanked my health, doctor-mandated medical leave, the bureaucratic hell-scape that is filing harassment complaints (ongoing, because OMG, there’s no end to the stupidity), finding and starting a new job, and finding out I now have PTSD (thank you, old job…I really need that).

You know, nothing out of the ordinary (insert sarcasm/dark humour here, obviously). Long story short, I had a lot going on. I had to retrench.

Retrench. It’s such a Jane Austen kind of word, but it works perfectly for what I’ve been doing. I’ve been reducing costs, diminishing expenditures, cutting back in extent and quantity. Minimizing, except that instead of finances, it’s social and emotional expenditure. Some people might call it withdrawing or cutting myself off from friends and family, and maybe there was a little bit of that too. There were moments when I was in the worst of things that I couldn’t be around people. I felt spiky inside and out, like my emotions were shards of glass that would cut anyone who got too close – but to me it feels a little more like being wrapped up in a cocoon. It wasn’t intentional – I didn’t make a conscious choice to become the worlds worst correspondent (and I’m very sorry to the friends I left hanging and the new connections I never built) – it was my body doing a quick tally of available resources and deciding to shore up the defences and prepare for a long, hard siege.

Emotions take energy. Strong emotions and traumatic experiences take a LOT of energy, and so does processing and recovering from them after the fact. I’ve spent the last year with almost nothing in the tank. I wanted to do things – visit friends, write emails, craft a blog post – but they were insurmountable tasks. My body was in protection mode, and it saved what little energy I had for the things that mattered most; family, getting my health back on track, and work.

OK, that last one is debatable, and I’m kind of overruling my body there. It’s giving very clear signals which I am ignoring at my own peril, because fuck capitalism. We have a mortgage, bills, and a kid about to go to university, but as Adam so clearly articulates in the post below, being too fatigued for life outside work means I’m too fatigued to work.

No easy solutions, there.

Anyway, I won’t say I’m out of the cocoon yet, but there are some rays of sun creeping in, and one of the things my therapist has been encouraging me to do is look for and savour moments of joy. Glimmers, she calls them. I like that. And because I finally have enough energy to post, I’d like to share some that joy with you.

Here are some of my glimmers.

Find the glimmers. They can be anything – a new book, a cookie, a walk by the river or a shared moment of laughter with your best friend…a fleeting second in which you forget about the hard stuff and feel okay. Find the glimmers and savour them.