Tag Archives: fear

Fabulous Friday, RA

Fabulous Friday: Moving through Fear

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I know that worrying is fruitless; it catastrophizes the future while stealing from us the present.

Logically, I know this.  I also know that, roughly 99% of the time, I am pretty much worry-free.

I am grateful beyond words for this.

But that 1% gets me.

As I had expected, I am responding extremely well to Enbrel, as demonstrated by the fact that I can do anything even while I’m tapering off the prednisone.

As of this coming Sunday , I’ll be steroid free.  And I fear it.

I know that the medicine is working. I know that I can’t be on steroids for the rest of my life.

I know, I know.

But I also know, or rather, remember, that the first time I tried to taper down, I was immobilized.

And of course this time is not that time; I have been tapering down for the past 6 weeks or so. 15 mg, then 10 mg, then 5.

And now I will be on 0 mg.

A friend of mine told me that she had an appointment to get a shot in her shoulder, and that she was scared of the pain.  She’s to the point where she can barely move it–lifting her arm above her head is damn near out of the question.

I have so, so, so been there.  “It will hurt,” I told her.  “But the difference it will make will be worth it.”  I remember getting that injection, how I was so scared of it, but afterward, I realized that the shot did not hurt anywhere near as much as the shoulder did.

And when the relief flooded over me, I would have easily done 10 of them to find that same relief.

My fear of the shot was far worse than the shot itself.

Perhaps it’s the same with the steroids. I’ve been on them since April. I know that they cause all sorts of bad stuff, but I’ve been with them for so long, I’m afraid of being without them.

I’m already seeing the side effects of weaning off them. I only thought I was exhausted before.  I had somehow lost track of how much the prednisone was “propping me up,” masking the depth of the exhaustion.

But I’m adapting. If I want to do anything like write, have clean clothes, clean house, it has to be before work. And it may only be 10 minutes or 20 minutes or a single paragraph written, but it’s something.

I’m making it through a 40 hour work week, give or take for doctor’s appointments and taking off an hour or so here and there toward the end of the week when I can’t hold my head up anymore.

And I won’t “win” NaNoWriMo this year.  But still, I’ve laid down about 6k words in 13 days, which is far more than I did the entire month of October. And, I’m managing to limit the self-editing, so that I’m just plowing through.

And that’s something fabulous. 

 

 

Art of Relationship, Fabulous Friday

Fabulous Friday: Courage and Grace

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We are not enemies, but friends. We must

There has been a lot of talk about courage since Caitlyn Jenner came out. What is “real” courage, what isn’t. Who gets to define it, who doesn’t. Who’s a good role model and who isn’t.

I like that. I like that there’s a lot of talk about it. Debate is good. What I don’t like is all of the personal insults being thrown around by both sides of the debate.

But debate is good.

I think, perhaps, that we confuse courage and grace. We often say that people who are fighting cancer have courage–which may or may not be true–when they are actually displaying grace.

One of the standard measures for courage includes brawn: a soldier, a firefighter. Not all courage, though, requires muscles, and to say that one thing is courageous does not set in stone  a single definition of courage.

Courage consists of going beyond fear. Not being unafraid, but looking it in the eye and plowing through it.  Fear is a line that divides us from where we are *here* to where we could be *there.*

It’s a big, fat, scary line, but it is just a line.  And courage merely a step that crosses over that line.

Just a step. One single step.

Very few things are black and white. In fact, even “black and white” isn’t black and white. Colors exist on a spectrum. Colors aren’t binary.  But somehow we’ve become convinced that things are absolute: either something is or it isn’t.

But because of this binary thinking, we often assume an unspoken part of a statement that may not have even been intended in the first place.

And we all know what ass-u-me does.

A perfect example is “Black lives matter.” By saying “black lives matter,” no one (to my knowledge) is implying “…and no other lives matter.” They’re saying that, despite current circumstances where black men and women are being killed at astronomically high rates, sometimes by persons of authority, black lives do, in fact, matter.

It is not diminishing “all other lives” by stating “black lives matter.” It is not saying “black lives are the only lives that matter.”

If there’s any binary there, if there’s any opposition there, it stands in opposition to the death rate, to the violence. NOT in opposition to other lives.

You may or may not think that what Jenner did was courageous, or that she deserves to be called a role model.  But in a society that has such a huge rate of bullying and suicide and violence targeted at ALL people who are different, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people in particular, publicly stepping up and identifying herself as someone who is part of that population, making herself known and possibly a target of potential violence and bullying, is, at the VERY least, just a little bit courageous.

Yes, courage is most certainly displayed when soldiers hold a front, when firefighters go into the blaze, when police officers save lives. But it’s also displayed in small, often unnoticed ways that rarely get mentioned and never, ever get fanfare.

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Eat Pray Exercise, Journey, Uncategorized

Cure Fear Now

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If ever there were a bumper sticker that should be made, this is it, I think.

I’ve long held the belief that fear is the antithesis of all that is good, and, as such, is the source of all that is evil. Greed, dishonesty, even violent crime and war, to me, can all be traced back to fear. Fear of not having enough, fear of not being thought of as good enough, fear of loss and lack of power.

Fear.

Yesterday was the 30th day of my 30 Day Challenge, and, wow, what a month. I lost sight of it at times, I plain didn’t want to do it at times (which was, perhaps, the most telling realization), and I succeeded far more than I wanted to at times.

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random

Black Friday

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I’m in a weird position, torn between wanting to see a friend, comfort her maybe, just be with her certainly, gauge how she’s doing, and being seriously afraid of her sister.

I’m talking restraining-order afraid.

“But it’s all good! She wants to apologize, that’s what sisters do. We’re all sisters. You should come to lunch with us.”

Now, I’d like to think I’m a forgiving kind of gal, but I’m still struggling with the notion of being able to accept a face-to-face apology from the woman who tried to break in a door to get to me.

Since recurring depression is something I myself struggle with, I try to be as understanding as I can of others. It’s a matter of wiring, it’s a matter of bits and pieces of brain matter being scrambled around, synaspes and neurons not firing, whatever.

But there is illness, and then there’s illness.

And then there is a paranoid schizophrenic who refuses to be medicated.

So I’m stuck. Haven’t seen my friend in weeks. Certainly haven’t seen her since her husband died.

They’re shopping, doing Black Friday as grief therapy. I can dig that.

But I can’t do lunch. So I’m blogging rather than sleeping, rather than writing a paper.

Rather than eating lunch.