Rainbow and I had a great session with my OT today. Challenging in terms of concentration and maintaining my calm - but brilliant in that I did, to all intents and purposes, manage to acheive both. I felt tired when I returned home, but not exhausted, which is a huge bonus compared with many outings.
Now that I am feeling better for longer, my emotional effort is transferring from simply staying alive and facing another day, to actually keeping my hand on the handbrake and stopping myself from speeding up and expecting too much too quickly of myself. It is quite a discipline to choose to stop before I am forced to stop because of agitation or exhaustion. I am learning a new respect for my well-being. This is counter my earliest training which was to sublimate my own needs in order to be present and facilitate the needs of others. I am learning about personal respect for myself and feel I am very much taking baby steps with this at the moment.
Over-doing it could be construed as an act of self-sabotage in itself, couldn't it? So I have done my big thing for the day and am now moving back into my new routine activities like blogging.
Lots of thoughts are beginning to gain life once more and whizz around in my new thought-processing head. Although this feels a little overwhelming after such a long gap of emptiness and nothing - it is also reassuring. My partner teased me this morning - and former parishioners will recognise the joke - (EA especially - GW tell her about it!) - "Oh, no, this doesn't mean your going to start having ideas, does it?"
Yes, I'm afraid it does. I chose today's t-shirt to emphasize the point:
I think therefore I am dangerous.
One of my ideas is to try and get to the bottom of why I need to carry so much weight around with me. I have an inkling it has represented an emotional protective layer to me in the past and so now maybe the time to embrace the fact that this is not how I need to 'protect' myself so forcefully in the future. I was talking to my OT about this over our de-caf cappocinos without a pastry or cake! At some point I need to connect once again with a dietician and look not so much a losing weight but living in a healthy way with foods that will also help maintain and improve mental and emotional balance. If I can do this, I will, of course, coincidentally, take off a few pounds and keep them off.
I think it was the make-up idea which has started me thinking more about my physicality. I still don't think make up will do it for me one way or another - but I could see that I would enjoy embracing a picture of myself physically which is different from the one I have as my current reality. I need to let this swill around in the psyche for a bit. For now I am just surprised, and a little non-plussed to have thought it!
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