Maybes

My life isn't what I want it to be. I feel guilty even typing that. It's been a year since I was writing a handful of Christmas cards to send to my close friends, and I was writing the same thing....that my life wasn't what it needed to be, and I knew that what I was living was a prelapse existence and needed to be altered. It's 12 months later and although some things have changed, nothing has changed. I have no one to blame but myself. I'm stressed and anxious and triggered and panicked, almost all the time. I don't want my children to grow up with this version of me, but this is who shows up for them.

I feel overwhelmed, exhausted and on edge. But I KNOW the things I need to do to change this. That's the most fucked up part - I know how to make this better, but instead of doing it I'm drowning in slow motion. A lot of my day to day existence happens in my head. I don't have people to talk to; not in the way that you do when you work with a group of people every day and become friends. I don't have people to vent to. Even when things are bad between me and Christina, I don't want to tell anyone because I know how that goes, too. When you only talk to people about the bad parts of your relationship, they assume it's all bad. And most of the time, I expect it to get better.

Moving to a new state without my children and not working really isolated me. I had Charlie every week, but that was pretty much it. Christina and I had only known each other a year. We'd only been married 4 months when my sister died. We've been through an awful lot of major stressors in the short 3 years we've been together:

• her divorce 
• both moving to a new state 
• her cutting all her toxic (but previously closest) friends out of her life 
• Jenna moving to Germany (so zero shared custody) 
• Christy's mental instability and chaos 
• my constant travel to Ga and back to get my kids
• my sister dying
• buying a house and moving again
• my boys coming to live with us 
• legal battles with both Christy and Jenna at different times 
• a difficult blending of the kids 
• Ari's autism diagnosis
• her sister stealing their Grandmother's money 
• both of our exes moving within a 5 mile radius of us at different times 
• her herniated disc and back surgery 
• my broken wrist
• Avery's broken arm
• financial turmoil/debt related to issues with the "new" house, my boys moving in & spending $40k on a timeshare
• my frequent dissociation, flashbacks and withdrawal

It has been an awful lot, and that doesn't even begin to touch on the day to day, typical stressors. For a couple of years, I've been saying and thinking that I need to do something for myself that is separate and untouchable. I wish it could be AMAW. I've thought it should be a dance class, or an acting group, or some type of movement class...I haven't found any of those things here, and we are much too busy for me to drive an hour+ away for something like that. So I cycle: google, email/call places for a week or so, give up and keep doing the same old shit for months....until everything reaches a boiling point again. When I started driving Uber, I thought I could make enough money to pay for whatever class/group may be. It really hasn't turned out to be what I thought it would.

I'm back at the boiling point. The truth is that there are things I need to do for myself, every single day, whether or not I find an external soft place to land. Those things are meditation, gratitudes, stretching/yoga/walking, writing, reducing my sugar intake, drinking more water. But inertia is a bitch, and my Shit Handler is an expert at making me believe that everything else is more important.

Maybe I've been going at it the wrong way. Maybe I can't begin to dig my way out of the hole until I start by helping myself. I need to make a Rain or Shine, You Do this Shit routine. I have to make time and space for it. Protect it like I do the nurse group.

It's incredibly difficult to take on multiple new things when I already feel like I'm drowning. Maybe I'm not drowning, though. Maybe I've just been treading water for over a year and I'm fucking tired. I've got to start somewhere. Maybe writing is the first solid structure my feet have found in years. It doesn't matter how good or bad it is. It just matters that I do it.