Valentine’s Day – the post mortem. Okay I was going to join in with Hilly’s Self Love Valentine Day Extravaganza yesterday and I sat down and uploaded my little banner yesterday and was all ready to write down something that I loved or at least really liked about myself as per the instuctions. (Post the banner, write about something you love about yourself and see if anyone else has things they love about you too).
But when I started to try and think of something that I really loved about myself… absolutely nothing of any consequence came to mind. Sure I can rattle of a list as long as my arm of things I don’t like about me… my fucked back and chronic pain and my infertility and the insulin resistance and the shitty metabolism and the drug fucked stupor and the cranky, bitchy and generally irritable demeanour that I seem to have (inadvertently) permanently adopted.
But coming up with one thing I really LOVE about myself? I just feel like I had nothing. All I could think of was stupid little things… stupid little unimportant things. After thinking about it for a few minutes I started to feel like the little things are all I’ve got to hang on to at the moment.
Because I really don’t like where my life has been for the last 15 months. All I think about from morning until night is pain. I feel like I am losing myself in here somewhere. I don’t laugh as readily as I used to (which isn’t good as I wasn’t known for being easily amused in the first place). I am pessimistic and cynical and try hard but can’t seem to stop it from affecting the people around me. I feel so fucking depressed all the time and there’s always tears just below the surface… when what I REALLY REALLY want is to be the exact opposite.
Wishing for things to be different doesn’t make it so and thus far the unrelenting nature of this intense chronic back pain is slowly killing everything about me that I ever thought of as worthwhile. If you feel like a burden on the people around you, and you feel like you’re not a useful contributing member of your family… or your community… or society in general – well then before you know it you start to feel like you’d be better off not here at all.
Given that this is where my head at 99.9% of my waking hours I guess it is not surprising that I found it difficult to find something that I love about myself. Because quite frankly I hate my fucked up body and I hate what being in pain all the time has done to my emotional outlook and mental stability and I hate what I’ve become. I hate what it is doing to my relatonships and the wonderful people around me who deserve so much better than this shit.
If our realities are shaped by our perceptions… then my reality is that I’m pained, miserable and depressed and useless as tits on a bull to boot. So no. I don’t have anything I love about being me at the moment.
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