The last few weeks has been a lot, and this time not all of it is in my head. I mean a bit of it is, obviously because I am what I am, but external logs have been tossed on the fire.

When my stepmother was dying I was living in a different state and I wasn’t around to help. Shortly after she died at the age of 49 I moved back hoping to help my father, a job I struggled with as he was an independent man and I was emotionally challenged man child. We muddled through with coffee visits and occasional visits from his grandchildren, both of us painfully aware that my stepmother would have been an amazing grandparent that would have created a very different environment for us all.

Now a person I care for deeply for is nursing her mother through the final stages of dementia, and once again I can feel myself failing at being there for them. I know I am still struggling with some emotional trauma that makes it difficult for me to express feelings like a regular person. The dark humour coping mechanism runs very deep in my family, and that is totally not what is required at the moment.

The psychologist I am trying to get into at the moment hasn’t gotten back to me yet, which isn’t helping with my feelings of rejection. I suspect my referral was a tad confusing as there was a bit of initially he needs the possibility ADHD looked into, but there are some PTSD issues that could use some attention. I of course am incapable of asking what is happening so I will just check my email obsessively and telling myself I filled out something incorrectly.

In addition to that I am also at the end of the farm renovation budget, but not at the end of the renovation, and I have a bit of surgery that will happen at some point in the next few months depending on how cooked the hospital waiting list is at the moment. It really is a perfect storm of stress that is totally wreaking havoc on my health and immune system. I have another appointment soon so my specialist can tell me that my Crohn’s is still not getting any better and that the new medication is not working as well as expected, while I try to explain that until the stress is under control there will be no improvement. Which he will dismiss and try to put me back on steroids again, which in my current mental state would probably be a very bad idea.

With all that going on my anxiety has been through the roof, the stabbing pain in my side is making sleeping a nightmare, and it genuinely feels like someone has been standing on my sternum in a stiletto. Last night even a valium wouldn’t take the edge off, and I woke up feeling like I had just given up smoking cold turkey. It took 4 hours at the farm before I even started to feel better. A bunch of little dopamine hits from waving an angle grinder around and doing some yard work had me feeling almost human again by late afternoon. It’s ironic that the farm that was causing me flashbacks and panic attacks for the first two years has become the place that calms me. Even with so much to do at the farm it still feels better than being in town where the bills and endless household tasks grind me down.

It was nice to have that boot off my chest for a few hours…