Darkness

Today has been a darkness of the soul kind of day.  As you can see from the previous post, it started with grieving for some of my past.  It went downhill from there, in many ways anyhow.  Today it feels like every time I start to feel better I find something else that is plagueing me.  For a bit I was discouraged by this, but on the flip side it mostly reminds me of how long I didn't take care of myself and my health, mental and physical.  I need to remember this.  I have many, many years to get to where I am and have only really had a few months of feeling well enough to find ways of healing.  It will take time.

It's funny that such a dark day is actually filled with victory, success for me.  I used to feel like this all the time and it didn't seem so bad when I did.  Today it seems particularly hard.  I have lost many of my coping mechanisms for a dark day which in itself is good.  So many of my old coping mechanisms are not healthy as they generally involve running away from my feelings, pretending that I am fine.  Today I am facing the fact that I feel sad and down and anxious.  I have found the cause of my anxiety today.  I can't do anything about it in the short-term, but just naming it seems to have at least stopped the full-on panic attack.  And it allows me to look at what is bothering me to see if I can find a new way of thinking about it.

I am learning new coping skills, incorporating new ways of being into my life.  This is hard and often overwhelming (like today).  I can see growth though, even in darkness, and this is the hope.  I feel like I have a long way to go to learn some of the new skills and see my world differently than I do now, but I sure see it differently than I did a few months ago.  Even writing this blog out has left me feeling more peaceful than I did when I started writing it.