It has been a year

It has been a year.

It wasn’t my day. My week. My month. My year.

Yikes.

Not that dramatic.

But, it has been a year of years. One for the record book of not so awesome years.

It happens.

I just think I want to acknowledge that sometimes we have a really rough year.

Or two. Or three. Sometimes we have a rough go of it. And just left standing at the end of it is a damn good thing. Worthy of its own celebration. If we are a little tired and worse for wear, well, we have reasons, and we are still standing, or sitting. We still made it through. Maybe with some really rough lessons learned, that we didn’t want to learn. Maybe with some realizations about people we didn’t want to know. But we made it through intact.

Chronic illnesses and chronic pain ebb and flow and sometimes we get knocked down for a bit. Sometimes things are mentally, emotionally or physically just in a slump. Sometimes all of them are in a slump. Sometimes we are coping exceptionally well and we are resilient as all hell but things are still just, well, one blow after another and thank goodness we have all that resiliency. Sometimes it would be nice not to need all of it. But you can cope well even when things are going quite poorly. And we can also cope poorly when things are going relatively well just from the chronic weariness of being ill all the time.

I know with the way things have been economically that it has been a rough year for a lot of us. And for some of us that has led to a lot of changes. I know for me it has, some of that alone led to a lot of changes. Not that I see all of that as negative. It just was. But I acknowledge that those of us on fixed incomes are strained lately. A lot. And it isn’t easy in the least. That sort of stress on top of everything else. That alone, makes things hard.

For me it has been a year.

I won’t go into details. It’s exhausting to even contemplate. Because it has been more than a year honestly. And will be more to come, I am sure because I still have to recover from what has past. I will say it has been rough in many ways but I got through it. And man, these last few have left their mark for sure. And I suppose I don’t believe in people the same way I used to believe in people now. Not in a cynical way. In a sad sort of way. After all the things I have learned over the decades with chronic pain, it took just just these last two years to realize people just believe what they want to believe. Believe from their perspective. And nothing I say or do will ever change that. So, there is no point in saying or doing anything in regards to them. And I am fine with that. It just sort of hurt for some time. And this led to some hermitting. But I hermit sometimes.

There is something to be said for the skills we gain from being chronically ill that help us endure difficult times. The persistence. The endurance. The resiliency. All of it benefits us when we are in a burning house and saying, ‘I’m fine’. ‘It’s all good’. Because, it is almost like a part of us gets used to it. Expects it. Just handles every single thing with some sort of stoic calmness and moves on. At least, sometimes. I feel like I am burning on resiliency alone right now. Maybe burning out on it.

While another part of me, is not cool with it at all. And wants to scream into the void. But knows people do not want that, do they? So we have to funnel all that scream into something else. For me, that is writing, creative writing or blogging. It was also art but that has been blocked lately due to hand issues- I will find a way to get around that. Either way, expressing myself creatively is my way of screaming into the void. Because some things cannot be changed. And some things are just the way they are. And we all have emotions about the way things are. Tangled up emotions that have to go somewhere.

But if you’re not feeling particularly festive.

Or not feeling like making a New Year’s Resolution. Or celebrating the new year in particular. I get it. Sometimes we can have a bit of fatigue from the year as a whole, and that is fine. Maybe the best we can do is do just as little as we can. And have as much self-care as we can. Maybe that is the way to go. Or do the things we know will give us a mood boost in the midst of the things we also want to do during the celebratory season, however you celebrate the season.

Even a bad year or two doesn’t mean a bad life.

It doesn’t mean every moment was bad. Or that most of it wasn’t filled with the minutia of life. It was filled with the mundane for the most part. And I am not one to ponder too long on the negative. Not in this stage of my life. I am more one to take that and use it as fuel for that creativity. Because life does have ups and downs. All of us have that. And every one of us can have times where there are more downs than ups for a bit. But that doesn’t mean that is a permanent state of affairs. So I have no desire to have a pity party. Maybe a pity day or two stuffed in there to binge read. I just have a desire to move forward and grow from the scrapes and edges and see what comes of it all. Because something always does.

But it has been a YEAR, hasn’t it?

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. -Robert Frost