(Written in September 2010)
Woke scared & sad. It’s grey and it rained in the night so all the fall colors are glowing. Yesterday was tough. I cried so much with Karen that I got a headache. Caryn would have made me stop and work on it, but I felt too hopeless and tired. I just felt like a miserable blot on the earth’s surface and could see no reason for going on. Karen said it was old tapes and to throw them away. I couldn’t do it. It just seemed so obviously true. I was also terrified that I’d never come out of it. Karen said it was OK to not know what to do, it was OK to be upset. Finally I repeated the affirmations “It’s OK to not know” etc. Karen talked about how as a child I was expected to know a lot of things that no one had ever taught me. I struggled to feel some compassion for myself but couldn’t quite get there.
Drove home with the same sense of wrong and bad, seeing a landscape full of pain — full of evidence of a losing battle, until I got to the highway. Then there were just trees, and I was sometimes able to see the beauty.
Somewhere along the way I decided to just keep going. I have a little hope that Lydia Faesy (a naturopathic Doctor) may be able to help the thyroid/adrenal problem.
Karen said that the effort to act “normal” takes a lot of energy. That helped me understand why I was so tired after Wed evening board meeting.
About a week later, my friend Lynelle said that she had realized afterward that telling me about Diane being “grateful to be alive” might have been hard for me. I acknowledged that it was. She said she didn’t feel it either, that it was something Diane always had, and she, not really envied, but wondered at. That helped a lot.