So, that little update I promised.....
My mother got coronavirus after Christmas, was ill but survived. Her care home was closed to visitors in January bc they had a few cases. They announced they were reopening, I booked a time to see my mother....and then they had a bout of norovirus so had to close again. My mother was ill again, but survived although she is increasingly frail now so diahorrea/vomiting is not good. They are just about to reopen....and my car broke down but it will be fixed tomorrow. My friend’s mother, who also had dementia but was in her 90s as opposed to in her 70s like my mother, died so lots of long walks talking out a lot of grief.
I started Italian lessons....mi chiami Treasur, ciao
.....and I started moving forward in cleaning up some of my life admin with both anxiety and success....and I started making progress on my Plan A of ‘what the next chapter of my work/life looks like’.
I had actual real plans and timescales and s$it, go me. New work commitments, and more of them. There was a lot of good fettling going on. (Those of you who know my prior posts will know that for the longest time I could not even imagine a plan let alone put one into action so this was a big deal to me)
And then, my lovely landlord had a serious crisis in his own family a couple of weeks ago and got in touch to tell me that reluctantly his only way forward is to sell this house so he can do what he needs to do for his own family......so Gracie and me are having to look for a new home, and it is very hard/unlikely that I will be able to stay here in my little town by the sea bc it is a very expensive holiday spot for Londoners....ergo not many places to rent bc most are let as holiday homes. And it will take me another couple of years at least to get my finances back to a place where I might buy somewhere and I would never be able to afford here even so. Think over 500k for a 2 bed flat....
Well, the PTSD wolves returned in force. And brought puppies! Those of you who have got through PTSD will know what I mean.....the sad truth seems to be that I am much much better but my amygdala baseline seems to be set higher now. Grrr. I heard a woman on a podcast say that she has learned that her anxiety comes in two forms....an overwhelming pack of wolves and something that is a bit more like a relentless scratching noise at a window. This was definitely wolves
, but the scratching takes effort and energy to manage too and I seem to be stuck with patches of that. I think that when you lose a lot, or after a lot of WTF, a bit of your brain knows these things are all too possible bc it happened before, so it’s a kind of tightrope act between Fear and Realism, good and bad.
So the wolves jumped around snarling about how I was going to lose everything that mattered to me once again and how afraid I should be and how powerless I am - my new friends, my allotment, my sense of safety, my little cat bc a lot o rental homes say no pets, my walks by the sea - while the puppies yipped about shame and how much less I was than I used to be and what an irretrievable mess my life was and what a big fat failure I am and how i’m all alone and how many years I have wasted. Gah. It was horrific tbh. I think the sense of shame about my own vulnerability, about how far I had fallen financially post BD and post PTSD was the worst of it.....horrid. It was a very noisy place in my head.
But
And it’s a big But
It lasted for about three days instead of the weeks/months it would have done before. It paused me but it didn’t freeze me. It did frighten me to feel like I felt and it has woken up some grief bits bc tbh I am tired of loss so having to accept more perhaps is not easy.
I knew that some of my brain was lying. Or that it was pretending it knew what actually it couldn’t know yet. Ah, that awful catastrophising and noisy self-doubt that trauma packs, eh?
I used the old Rule of 3 to decide not to rush around finding somewhere/anywhere bc I was afraid. And decided to catch my breath and THEN start thinking about what I wanted to do. Bc after a few days I could remind myself that I had a couple of months at least, that I do have choices, that I have cash in the bank that I didn’t have a year ago. And that maybe a new chapter will unfold differently, maybe better even, in a new place. That maybe here had given me a safe place but that maybe a new place will give me a different platform to build on.
And I was impressed by my ability to be honest with my friends (bc I did need to hide in my cave for a few days which they understood) and touched by how my new chums immediately wanted to fix my problem so they could keep me around lol. It’s a funny nice feeling to realise that you matter to people again when you had to train yourself to live so solo as I did. And so many offers of help and support and fixing (even if sometimes that’s a bit exhausting bc I hadn’t got to that bit of the page yet lol)....everything from options to help packing to storage to saying me and Gracie could move in with them if needed. Gosh.
And I started to think about what I might WANT, and the pros and cons of different possibilities, as opposed to what I thought I could GET....such a big difference, the difference between surviving and living imho. We can get stuck in survival I think....I susoect I was for a long time, years. And more and more I am musing on whether what I needed 3 years ago when I moved here might now have changed.....and maybe I needed a God post it note to see that how and where you build might be different from how and where you recover....
All work in progress, so i’ll let you all know how/when the new home hunting goes. It is possible, but probably unlikely, that I will find somewhere here as all my new chums want (and are harrying friends, neighbours and town bigwigs to find lol) so I am conscious of a slow goodbye process now every time I walk in my favourite spots. But maybe the Hello will be worth it, idk. It’s interesting to see how different it is thinking about where/how to live when you really only have yourself to think about. A bit of me likes the idea of a little house in the woods where I barely see anyone lol. Another bit of me thinks it would be better to live in a place where I have old friends or can meet new humans and where I can walk out to get a pint of milk rather than drive for 20 mins
funnily enough three options have appeared - a cottage in the middle of nowhere lol, a small townhouse in a little town near where I used to live some years ago and a small cottage In a little village that my xh and me once visited and loved. Funny old universe....
I have held back from making appointments for a week or so until I felt a bit more settled in my own pros/cons and judgment....didn’t want to poke the universe until I felt able to say yes or no
....so that work starts this week. Tbh I am also thinking about just going to visit a few towns/places to see how they feel to me before even making appointments to look at specific houses, if only to test my own gut feel on what’s next. So, we will see....right now I have no idea where I will be living in 3 months time but I feel more confident that I will find a good spot than I did at first
Just seems like God has some different kinds of fettling challenges in mind than I thought......
And surrounding all that, a sense that a lot of things in my country are a bit broken or stuck right now. Quite a lot going on here or coming to light that is just a different kind of WTF. Don’t know if it’s my age, or a post-Covid malaise bc a lot of folks I know are a bit
about quite a few things. And I have no words for the staggering insanity of what Mr Putin might be planning for Ukraine or how it might feel to live in Kiev right now.