Today is the one year anniversary of when I walked off the cliff of safely employed status into the abyss.
One year ago, yesterday, I officially finished training. I was poised and ready to leave formal education and apprenticeship behind. I was done. I was given the pass. Proverbial lifelong learner aside, I was finally no longer a student. It isn’t the first remarkable anniversary this year but today is the day I wrote this. So that’s it.
Woo. An anniversary. Unfortunately, though, not the good kind. Perhaps the bad kind. Or at least, the ambiguous kind.
I hadn’t intended to write what I wrote above when I sat down. I had so many things to talk about. In fact, so many things have happened. Since forever. Since eighteen months ago. Since one year ago. Since the beginning of 2018. Since the summer. Since my last post. My mind is literally overflowing – brimming with thoughts, ideas, feelings, memories. Everything mixed together, swirling around, cooking a bit, losing a bit of form, transforming ever so subtly, and being incorporated into the mess that is in my head.
I had intended to talk about my mom and how she is coping with being newly retired and her adult daughter having stage IV cancer – she has thrown herself into information gathering of alternative therapies, calls often to “advise me, and often ends calls with “you better do this if you want to live” while talking to me if I were a child. That led me to think about how my fiance was angry with me for forgetting my medication – forgetfulness, sedation and cognitive dysfunction being known side effects of said medication – with escalation to giving me advice about what I needed to do although he isn’t living with all of this – and with him ending with “I don’t know if I can handle this.”
This quickly swirled in my mind to the thought of, I don’t feel great about sharing the details of the above topics. I am afraid of what they would think if they read my words. How they might feel. This mixed with all the rest that swirled.
Everyone is having a hard time. We are human and this is nothing any of us could be prepared for.
The thing is, cancer makes some nasty mind soup. Ugh.
What ingredients are in your soup? Let’s discuss in the comments below!
Let’s PRANCE!!!