Thursday 16 April 2020

Gratitude VS Panic

Gratitude.

I'm trying so hard to focus on gratitude. (A personal thing, and NOT something I would ever lecture somebody else about doing.)

When I sigh about needing to pee because it means having to wash my hands for the 4th time in the past half-hour, I remember this time last year having to drag a very heavy IV machine along with me in order to do the same thing. No thanks.
I'm grateful to be free of that, to just be me, no cords, no machines, no poles, no IV.

When I feel bored going back & forth between 2 single rooms from morning to night, I remember this time last year spending this time in a rock-hard hospital bed with stiff sheets, in a room that smelled of hospital. I had to put my slippers on every time I left the bed, too.
I'm grateful to be in my own cozy home where I can sit on my cozy sofa or in my cozy bed and feel the cool floor under bare feet & be alone with my husband, and not surrounded by strangers.
As I type this I can hear the train go by. it's cozy.
I'm grateful I can hear the train and the rain from my apartment.
I'm grateful I can open a window (even if I can't really see out of it).

When I feel the suffocating, heart-pounding, obsessive, intrusive, twisted thoughts of OCD burst their way into my head and settle into my stomach like a giant, icy, hard rock, and pinch and bend the tips of my fingers and ankles, and weigh down on my back and shoulders ominously, I don't feel gratitude at all. I feel panic. The type of panic where I plead with my own brain to just stop and let me have some kind of peace so I can go back to appreciating what I have instead of feeling like I'm being attacked and suffocated by my own mind.

I feel like I could just be fine if I could quiet down my mind for even a few days. It's so loud in here, and all of it has been distorted into nonsense.
Nonsense that seems so real.
(What if this time it's real?)

So much gratitude...but too much panic.

No comments:

Post a Comment

ICYMI: mask bullies = human garbage :)

Masks & distancing are INCREDIBLY helpful--life-saving, even. That's not opinion--that's just fact. I don't understand how t...