The Never Normal

Things are messy. There is a lot I can’t say until it’s all over. I know that might not even make sense, but it’s been so long since I’ve written that I feel the need to give an update, if only to say happy new year…and to tell you my last visit with Boo was a wonderful one. I made food this time – cooked taco meat and brought down all the fixings, and watched my son devour 3 tacos consisting mostly of sour cream. The 2 staff members who were with us ate too, and afterward we took a campus walk (gratefully it was the warmest night of that week, which was otherwise frigid).

As usual, the 2 staff members walked a bit behind Jonah and me. Jonah almost always wants my phone to play music, but this day we held hands and sang 3 Guster songs together instead. In the middle of the 3rd song, he suddenly shrieked with laughter and yanked his coat & shirt up to do his “happy belly slap.” I was thrilled, and comforted, and drove home smiling.

Still I wake every day scared, anxious, and unsettled, as though I’d done wrong or was facing something dark and foreboding. A good friend hurt me terribly and now I feel sick inside, afraid to make myself vulnerable again. I joined bumble and am dating a good guy who plays the guitar and loves music. I own a guitar I’ve never learned to play, so now I’m doing that too. We’ve been hanging out a lot, and we have fun, but I can’t shake feeling uncertain, so I just allow myself to feel that way until I don’t feel that way anymore. I meditate semi-regularly, I walk the treadmill, I do intermittent fasting, I practice the guitar, I try to stay forward-facing. I willfully compartmentalize & ignore the thing I can’t talk about yet.

My parents are getting weaker, older, and more vulnerable, each currently living on their own, and an uncertain future of caring for them as their only child stretches out before me like a looming threat. I don’t know if I have it in me but I’ve got to have it in me, like it or not, for as long as it takes, despite my own shaky mental and physical health.

My heart skips and jumps and races and stops, so I went to the cardiologist and wore a heart monitor for the week after Christmas. My resting heartbeat is more than 100 BPM – and the highest heartrate of that week was 155, just after midnight on January 1st, when I am pretty sure I was asleep, which makes no sense at all. At any rate, now I’m on heart meds too.

Add to all of this a frigid winter and 2 jobs full of work, and it’s enough to send me to bed most days by 8pm, escaping into blissful sleep until the early morning brings its anxiety to drown me anew.

I’m hoping springtime and sunshine will help. It sure can’t hurt.

I’m exhausted.