This blog will be a journal to attempt to solve some big problems for myself. I reached a point where I just can’t – no, I don’t want to – go on like this anymore. I’ll start by tracing how I reached a turning point.
2019 was a difficult year. It started with an incredibly stressful situation at work that blew up on January 11th. In February, my Bonny, the beloved dog I had for 16 years, died. This utterly crushed me. We had a very tight bond, kind of ridiculous even by animal-lover standards. Losing her was a devastating heartbreak.
Two weeks later, in March, I woke up in the middle of the night with what I thought was a bad muscle ache in my back. This ache and then other, developing symptoms morphed and changed – numbness, tingling, an intense pain that felt like sunburn – and was eventually diagnosed as shingles. My doctor indicated that it had probably been brought on by stress. This shingles persisted for many weeks. I couldn’t comfortably lie down or sit, or wear clothes or anything else. I couldn’t sleep for more than about 40 minutes at a time. There was a very specific position that was tolerable while lying in bed. I’d doze off, and when the natural urge to move or shift hit, I’d wake up because the new position was too uncomfortable.
Throughout early spring, although I was still dealing with the situation at work which would drag on for months, I thought and hoped that things would get better. The job stress was relentless, and never ceased. But I tried to move on and have some fun.
In May, my boyfriend and I took off for a quick weekend getaway. It was his first long distance flight, as he was had just gotten his pilot’s license, and wanted to get in as many hours as possible. Winds blew up as we were on our way back. It forced an emergency landing, and we were stuck in Albuquerque for five days, waiting for the winds to calm enough to fly this tiny plane back to Denver. This wasn’t the worst thing that could happen, but I was missing work, and couldn’t do much because I hadn’t brought my laptop with me.
In early July, that boyfriend – the man who had been with for years – broke up with me. This meant not only the end of a years-long relationship, and the heartbreak that went along with it (although it occurred to me, even in the worst of it, that it wasn’t as bad as losing my dog – my Bonny Boo). It meant leaving the first place I’d lived in that I really loved. The wonderful house with the amazing view. With the garden that I loved, designed and created.
In August I moved out of that house that I loved and into a tiny apartment in the city to begin a new life. A life I hadn’t wanted. But I’d salvaged one thing. Instead of renting some crummy place, I’d conceived and executed a plan to buy a condo. No easy feat in a hot housing market, especially since I hadn’t been planning to buy, and therefore hadn’t been saving for a down payment.
In late October, I got word that my grandmother was Ill in the hospital. She hadn’t been doing well, and was in a lot of pain. They didn’t know what was wrong. She was brought home, and declined rapidly. Family and I gathered and got her immediately back to the emergency room. She had a compression fracture in her spine, and had developed pneumonia after aspirating vomited blood. She was in the hospital for 2 weeks, and decided to go home under hospice care. She was not expected to live long, but she kept ticking.
But it was now a situation where she required daily care, and so trying to balance caring for her and working, even though missing a lot of hours. Suddenly, the responsibility of caring for her fell on me. It was grueling, grinding, and impossible to balance. I did my best, but it took all my energy and then some. That was how I ended up 2019.
I started 2020 – literally, New Year’s Day, 2020 – slipping on some ice. I was rushing out to my car in the middle of the night after getting a call from my grandmother. If I believed in signs, that might have told me. Because what I had decided, was that I was ready for this fresh start. 2020 was going to be my year.
I guess I don’t have to explain to anyone how that turned out.
Covid hit, businesses were closed, and revenue dropped. At work, the decision was made to cut back to ¾ of the pay for us full-time employees. I started working from home. Although my pay had dropped, and the other workers cut their hours accordingly, my workload roughly tripled, because they were trying to sell more to keep the business moving. I was working long days, on my couch, hunched over my laptop. Figuring out finances, scheduling, administration, processing sales, only to find out – to confirm – that my boss really didn’t think I did much of anything. This job had been stressful since the day I started. Poorly defined tasks, too much to do, expectations to make it work on my own with no direction or leadership from the top. I thought working from home was going to be better. It wasn’t.
And, let’s face it, ultimately, it wasn’t all about external circumstances. 2020 capped off what has been the longest, most brutally difficult episode in a life spent fighting anxiety and depression.
Brene Brown describes midlife as a slow, brutal unraveling. That’s exactly how it’s been for me. I’d say that my experience of chronic intense anxiety, or what I started to conclude was burnout, and uncontrolled emotions lasted for several years at least. This wasn’t a crisis. It was the end of a long road, and I’d pushed myself past so many points where I thought I couldn’t take it any more. But I really felt done in.
So: 2020. It was going to be my year. I was going to inject a little fun into my life. Needless to say, didn’t exactly turn out to be a platform for having fun. Nevertheless, it did turn out to be a year that I determined to turn my life around.
In order to do so, I’ll need to solve problems that have haunted me for my whole life. Big, tough problems, and stubborn, long-held bad habits and ways of thinking. Tendencies that have been resistant to my best efforts to date to change them. But I have no choice. Because life is not worth living if I’m miserable.