Friday 5 August 2011

When will today be a better day?

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 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'm just hoping that one day soon I will be able to say 'today is a better day.'