Ahhhh, don't feed me any of that gratitude crap - what do you think this is: 12 Step recovery? Next you're going to tell me to write a gratitude list.
You are, of course, right to focus on the positive, not one of my strong suits.
I don't believe I mentioned that I started to see a therapist about a month ago. My tendency to low-level anxiety had morphed into something uncomfortably powerful - sucker really started to pick up speed. I think the accelerant was that fourteen month period where I lost my mother (suddenly), my father (in a slow-motion, alcoholic quasi-suicide), and my sponsor, a man that I was closer to than any other individual in the world. At the end I spoke to him every day and I really believe I was listening to a man who had begun to move into the next phase - he talked about god, heaven, spirituality, love in a manner more profound than I've experienced before or after. I really believe I was getting some kind of preview.
And turning 60, in the midst of all of that mortality, really threw me for a loop. I know it's just a number, no different than 59 or 61, but it is a classic marker of the passage from not-really-old to no-longer-young-by-any-metric. I'm grateful that I'm healthy and vibrant and mobile but those markers can still pack a psychological punch, especially given all of those in-your-face losses I had.
My mother - god love her - could find the pot of shit hiding the pot of gold under every rainbow. If I was going hiking in Oregon - she would bring up bears. If I drove to Utah to hike - no bears - she'd read me something she cut out about someone who died from a rattlesnake bite. The destination of any of my travels never threw her - she always knew someone who had a friend's brother-in-law's first cousin mugged in that location. And I was a mama's boy.
A fearful, overprotective mother and a distant, alcoholic father virtually guarantee a fretful child.
I recall a quote that I seem to attribute to Schopenhauer along the lines of "there is nothing so absurd that it can't be inculcated into a small child by solemnly repeating it over and over." I think he was talking about religion but I like the universality of the idea. I think often of the uproar that arose when it was suggested that our old coach be invited to our basketball reunion - the lesson was to be careful how you treat kids because they take it to heart. We remembered a lot of slights and insults that happened 40+ years ago.
The other accelerants in the last year have been a couple of extended bouts with the medical profession. I have a couple of genetic blood-clotting disorders that I addressed with a series of procedures that basically consisted of a doctor sticking a big needle into my legs, digging around until he found a damaged vein, and then killing it by injecting a cement into it. After this was done I addressed my neglected mouth - fixed a bunch of small cavities, had a couple of crowns, and a root canal that led to a tooth extraction that opened a small hole into one of my sinuses that had to be repaired surgically that then got infected.
So when I tweaked my back my ability to modulate my reaction was severely compromised. Kind of like how you handled the disappointment when the first stop on your home research walkabout fell through versus your reaction when the last one didn't pan out. I'm sure it was was easier to look on the sunny side of things at the start as compared to the end
And all of this loss has put some stress on my marriage. I've been busy and I've been grieving and I'm sure in some form I've pulled away from SuperK because I'm tensing against any more loss.
How's that for a morning screed?
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