So I have this questionnaire type thing. It’s a 13 question “self check-in” that I look at on the hour and make sure I’m doing okay. Its purpose is to help me recognize my own needs and actually address them as I go through the day. Stuff like “am I hydrated? Am I feeling okay? Where are my thoughts? Do I need to stretch? What’s something that happened in the past hour that I’m grateful for? Is there something I’m doing to/for myself that I don’t want to do?” Things like that. My morning questions differ greatly from my evening questions, and the ones at work differ from the ones at home. But it’s the same essential list.
I am finding some success with it. I noticed on the first day, I wanted to ignore my phone’s alert notification for it. It doesn’t take but maybe five minutes, but I already had a list of excuses why other things were more important. I did the list anyway, and by the end of the day, I was much less anxious, even with the defeatist thoughts after what happened at Thanksgiving.
Nothing bad happened at Thanksgiving. I was just reminded that, due to the circumstances, I wasn’t around most of the time. I wasn’t in any of the pictures they shared around the table. My uncle (step dad’s bro) said that he’d rather have me sitting at the table than a memory on a piece of photo paper.
But the landslide hit as usual. During the questions after work today, I asked myself “where are your thoughts?” And I said to myself, “I just feel alone. No time for friends, no time games, no time for family, really.” And I think for the first time, I actually wondered how people like athletes and actors do it (I’m sure it’s easy to figure out specifically who I wondered this about). We normies have 9-5s (you know what I mean). We have a window of opportunity, even if the scheduling sucks. But I’m not alone. I’m just sans “active physical human element.” I have a few closer friends, and a town’s worth of acquaintances all over the world.
I went to bed at my normal time, tonight, and woke up at 1am, like I’m supposed to, without the alarm. Yes, please cheer that, thank you. And it hit me that maybe the problem isn’t that I’m alone, but I’m still going through grief in several places, and I feel lonely. I’ve not given myself the time to actually do that, because I’m busy wallowing in the pity of it all. I’m quite adept at beating myself up, neglecting my needs, and making everything my fault instead of letting myself feel things out and accepting conditions as they are. You can have all the friends in the world, and everything exactly where it needs to be, and if you have unresolved grief, then nothing matters. I made another list, and here’s what I need to sort out:
- I miss my mom. I accept that she is gone, but even still, her absence has been so loud lately, especially since I moved into the new apartment. I find myself wishing she were here, because she was the person who had all the answers. She was my anchor, and that’s a role I’ve yet to fill since she passed. I don’t know if I ever will, to be honest. I have a fix for this until I can truly let her go. I like to imagine that she is still very present with me in spirit (sometimes I feel like this isn’t inaccurate). So I may try to bring her places with me in that context.
- I’m still confused about why the two relatives did what they did. Part of me still tries to make it my fault. I still hear myself declaring how filthy I am over a sink full of unwashed dishes. Ignore the fact that I do have AuDHD and what I now understand is chronic pain (endo, not always actually painful but it makes me so tired). But again, I’m not recognizing myself before what others considered defects.
- There is still a part of me that feels like I don’t deserve the new life I have created for myself. I feel unworthy and not good enough. This is 100% lingering from what I dealt with as a child. The abuse is over, I’ve resolved that part. But I am an adult and I still have very strong emotional connections to the emotions from that era of my life. That needs to be resolved, because I built it, and it is mine.
- I am still preoccupied, and it shows. I’m mindful of it, but being mindful of a thing and still worrying about the what ifs…it’s kind of contradicting. Actually, this needs to be a post, but not in this context.
- I need to keep learning my boundaries — not just with others, but within myself. I wonder if “I also need to learn to focus” goes here, as well. The reason I wonder this is because if I had really good boundaries in place with myself, I would be able to turn off what is bothering or distracting me, and I’d be at work, doing work, and thinking about work instead of being sad and teary-eyed because of my thoughts while trying to sort through crates of potatoes. My focus would be vastly different, if I had the ability to turn the outside world off and just work.
So it’s not a lot. But all of it at the same time is almost too much. I’m starting to understand why it’s so important to feel safe in my body. The underlying sentiment in all of those listed items is that I feel insecure at the end of it. #3 is a major highlight of that. I also feel like, if I was safe in my own body, I wouldn’t feel so alone all the time.