I am having a rough day today. And the last little while, I've been feeling rather resilient, so I'm hoping this does not last.
Last weekend was crazy busy for a healthy person, never mind me, and yet, I managed to get enough rest periods in there, and had a really good week, too. It was pretty productive, and restful and peaceful, and I felt really good, about what I did and didn't do. I made huge strides in terms of my sensitivity towards other people's feelings, and was able to tune into my own when I needed to. Very cool stuff. I spent the week in a very balanced way, and it was gooood.
It's even cooler, because there were emotionally critical situations both at school, in my online community, and in my support group this week. I managed to not take ownership of them, though, and keep focused on how to help others while still helping myself and not overextending. All the energy I previously would have directed to trying to fix it all and to keep anybody from feeling any pain was instead able to go into healing, which is exactly where I need it.
But yesterday, the weather in Toronto went crazy. It's as if it saved up all the rain that we did not get all through spring so far, and threw it all at us in one big huge stormy go. Traffic lights were out, there was quite a bit of flooding, and the roads were slippery and the wind was really strong.
So of course, I went for a nice loooong drive!
It just so happened that I had to pick my son up from his trampoline club and then take him all the way through the city, past my house again, and out the other side to his Dad's house. The way I've been feeling lately, this would not have been a big deal. But thanks to the weather, it turned out to be an extremely difficult and rather long ride.
Visibility was ridiculously low, the trucks were all in the middle lane, and imagine, if you will, what happens to my head when all I have around me is constant motion, and then add what low air pressure does for me. Yes. It turns into a physiologically stressful situation. The wind gusting against the car, the rain splattering on the windshield, the spray from the trucks, the clouds moving rapidly, the road flowing, the noise, the noise, the noise, the noise - talk about sensory overload, which only adds to that stressful reaction.
I am very glad I had my son with me for that, because he kept me distracted - we played what we decided to call the thought expansion game, which is really just word association - because he had just noted (how incredibly reflective is this child) how a train of thought or a conversation can end somewhere very different from where it started. So that kept me laughing and distracted without requiring me to really shift my concentration.
Well over an hour later, we sat for 10 minutes on the off ramp, guessing as to whether it was just really bad traffic, or the lights were blown out by the storm. Turns out it was both.
At the beginning of the crazy drive, my body went into sympathetic response, and has been there ever since. Since last night, every little annoyance, every thing that catches my attention (even seeing the ferns in my yard blowing in the wind in my peripheral vision) has my body reacting as if a dinosaur were walking up my driveway drooling and roaring and ready to eat me. Not a very fun way to live, let me tell you. And yet quite common in a variety of chronic illnesses. This lack of balance in one's neurological responses is one of the very real physiological aspects of ME and other illnesses and syndromes that hinders healing. It is a truly vicious cycle.
So I ranted and raved at some friends on facebook (thank-you my dears for giving the kind of support that helps wind down, and for not feeding into my mania), killed off some monsters in a dungeon trawling game, and watched Holy Grail. And then when I sat down to work on my jigsaw puzzle (it's a really pretty one - optical illusion with calla lilies), something outside started clicking and set me off again. And now I am so distracted, that it is too great an effort to continue with my puzzle. I am seriously wired. I can feel the energy buzzing away through my limbs, but it's not usable energy, it's a draining energy, which I can't work off because I do not have the strength or the stamina to even go for a walk right now.
I think today is a good day to keep watching movies and TV shows, keeping the left side of my brain nice and busy, so my body can get a little bit of rest from this hypervigilant and overly sensitized state in which I find myself. I'm so tired. Just so so tired. Now to see if I can get some rest....
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