Some nice person over at Healthline.com keeps nominating me for “Health Blog of the Year” and “Menopause Blog of the Year.” Guilty
after not having posted anything since September of 2013, I shall try to revive
my blogging muse. Thank you, kind anonymous reader, for the prod.
My last post was gloomy, followed by months of gloom. While
I haven’t shied away from writing about some of the sadder parts of midlife,
the past months didn’t seem like anything I wanted to impose upon my readers. For
me, sometimes writing about depression doesn’t do anything but make the
depression more real and makes it harder for me to masquerade as a healthy,
happy person. Not that anyone seems particularly fooled into thinking I’m in
the best mood EVER.
There’s also that little voice that says, it could be worse,
you don’t have the right to be sad. Schmutzie does a good job of refuting this
notion here. If I’m sad, I’m sad, even if there is food in the pantry and the electric bill
has been paid and I have a job. I can still be sad, even if I have a good
credit score.
It’s not just me being moody for no reason.
People I care
about keep getting sick, people keep dying. Friends are being hurt and
abandoned by their partners. My husband and I are basically alone in caring for
both of our elderly mothers. Then the Menopause-from-hell, teaching for a
living, and tight finances don’t lower my stress level at all. Although I have
been known to have a gallow-ish sense of humor, humor can only take you so far
in the face of some of life’s tougher months and years.
The stress is really getting to me. It takes a lot to admit
this.
In a recent article about Anne Lamott, long one of my mentors,
she said she was going to practice “radical self-care.” Geeky me started
researching this term. Is this what I need? What exactly is it? Radical.
Self-care. Would I allow myself some radical self-care? This feels like a life
preserver thrown to me by Anne Lamott.
Meanwhile, a routine visit to the dentist revealed I’d been
walking around for at least a month with a wisdom tooth that was broken in
half. Could a stress injury be any more symbolic? A wisdom tooth, cracked from stress-clenching my jaw so tightly that
I broke one of my own body parts?
“Stress can kill” is such a cliché. No woman wants to think
that stress can kill her. That if she doesn’t, no really, if she DOESN'T take
care of herself in a BIG way, in a RADICAL way, she may die from stress. The
needs of my body and soul are calling, pleading, screaming, for change. I’m afraid. I’m afraid that I don’t know what self-care
is. I’m afraid I don’t know how to make radical self-care a priority.
I did manage a half hour walk tonight, I ate black-eyed peas
and collards for dinner, and here I am writing about self-care.
Maybe these are the first steps to making it happen.
