Thursday: Today I’m grateful for feeling…

Surprised and delighted after hearing I made a great impression on a coworker’s husband yesterday. I wasn’t doing anything in particular at all, I didn’t even think I’d hear anything of it. But apparently he loved my curiosity and easy way of talking. It felt validating, like I’m moving in the right direction. I feel like I make good impressions like this frequently now, especially as I get more authentic. 

Obsessed and reinvigorated in my quest to learn Spanish. I haven’t been lagging any but booking the Costa Rica trip seems to have put my motivation into overdrive. Aside from increasing my time on the language learning app, I’ve decreased my audiobook time to make way for DuoLingo’s Spanish podcasts. I’m so thrilled to be semi-competent in another language. I’ve even begun thinking in it sometimes! I’m going to be bilingual!!!! This has been a life’s dream of mine and it’s finally paying off!!!!

Reserved, sad, and worried about my mom’s physical health. She’s had two hip replacements, a knee replacement, and pretty significant arthritis. She’s been struggling to walk a lot, to be pain free, and I’m scared that her days of mobility are ending sooner than we expected. She didn’t even want to make Christmas plans because she’s not sure how mobile she would be. I can see the fear in her and we just sit in it, our mutual fear. I even cried during the phone call listening to her update. I feel helpless and have no idea what to do. Should I be closer to her? Should she be closer to me? Neither of us want to move but the clock is ticking. What is the right thing to do? 

Confused, frustrated, scared, and sad after doing parts-work with my therapist. We’ve been really working on the part that had to go back, after a year of separation and virtually no contact, to 45 straight days of living with only him. I think it was more traumatizing than I’ve been willing to look at. In between moving and that summer, I experienced the first non-stressful, normalcy of my entire life. I think I had acclimated to his specific hell, to the fear and terror of being around him, to the injustice of it. Going back after knowing safety was crushing and completely overwhelming since my defenses were gone. I was supposed to be safe and suddenly I was just as unsafe, if not more, than before. I’m so sad for that younger self and feel at a loss as to how to help her get out of that place. 

Reluctance to resume doing the work. I guess this kind of inner work has its own momentum. Now that I’m reentering it after a week’s absence, I find that I really don’t fucking want to. I don’t want to go to meetings, I don’t want to journal, I don’t want to recover. I just want to live my life and not be in the pain of recovery every day. I go anyway, I do the things anyway, but I miss the lack of reluctance that I used to have. It will take a while to settle in.