I had an awful experience at the supermarket yesterday when a customer behaved horribly to me as she perceived I was in her way because I was walking with a stick. The staff in the store were magnificent but it reduced me to tears in private when I got home.
What this incident did was bring to the surface just how upset I am about my current situation. The fact that try as hard as I can, I am still reliant on a walking stick outside of home, that I am so, so tired and in pain all the time and that my body is currently a mess.
I go in cycles with this as there are days when I can tell myself that it's all about baby steps, but then there are the days when I think about how things were this time last year and I feel so despondent about how much breast cancer has changed my life. It is so hard to find a balance between the two! When I thought about it, I realised that a family wedding in August last year is the last time that I actually felt happy as just a couple of weeks later I found the lump. I have written before about my problem with 'happiness' and the fact that I feel I have forgotten what it means to experience it and I find myself wondering if I can ever manage to find my way back to that place. It's a tough thing to have to admit but things are never going to be the same again and I have to find some way of dealing with and indeed accepting what normal now means for me.
I go in cycles with this as there are days when I can tell myself that it's all about baby steps, but then there are the days when I think about how things were this time last year and I feel so despondent about how much breast cancer has changed my life. It is so hard to find a balance between the two! When I thought about it, I realised that a family wedding in August last year is the last time that I actually felt happy as just a couple of weeks later I found the lump. I have written before about my problem with 'happiness' and the fact that I feel I have forgotten what it means to experience it and I find myself wondering if I can ever manage to find my way back to that place. It's a tough thing to have to admit but things are never going to be the same again and I have to find some way of dealing with and indeed accepting what normal now means for me.
I can't change the fact that I have breast cancer or what it has done to me, but dealing with the reality of that is proving to be more difficult than I'd anticipated. Somehow it's worse when the sun is shining as I feel like I ought be happy or at least grateful that I am here to experience it, sadly it just isn't that easy.
At the moment I feel like all I do is exist and that I am caught in some kind of limbo land. Until I can find a way to move forwards I am stuck in this strange place yearning for how things used to be and unable to face what today's reality brings. I know that I need to find a way of dealing with it all but I've yet to manage to do this.
I have been catching up with your blog (still can't access it most of the time so take advantage when out of the country) and just wanted to send you a very warm hug.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me so much of how I felt last year - and it prompted me to look back on my blog from a year ago as we are almost exactly a year apart in our diagnoses. I have also been reflecting a great deal over the past few days - it was my birthday earlier this week and that is always a prompt too! I hope it is reassuring if I tell you that I cannot believe how much better I feel - in fact I am in Cambodia, on my own, having a wonderful break to follow on from my UK home leave.
Looking back, it was slow, but steady and I would notice that I was able to do slightly more and feeling slowly better as the weeks moved on. As you know, there is lots of gory detail on my blog! There is also a huge amount of discussion on what "normal" means to us after diagnosis and treatment.
I hope the days start to get noticeably easier, and in the meantime please know that you are not alone.
Thinking of you and wishing you well
P (aka Feisty Blue Gecko)