I’ve been absent for a while. Not a lot of craft progress. Not a lot of anything progress. Been busy just trying to adjust to life.
The crazy work project is over, and my upset with how it went has mostly passed. I see my failings, my assumptions, my misunderstandings. I’ve found areas where I really need to grow some new skills if I want to grow my career. And that’s a good thing. And even though I didn’t like the process of this project, and am not happy with the way I worked on it, the end result is something that everyone else around the office is very happy with.
My heath problems are slowly getting resolved. I was diagnosed years ago with fibromyalgia. I’ve been having chronic sinus problems, something is up with my thyroid, my sleep is out of whack big time, and I’m sort of depressed. But way less depressed now than I was a couple of months ago. It’s just that I actually realize I’m depressed now, when I ignored it before.
So I’m going to the pain management clinic, and the endocronologist, and the ENT, and the allergist, and the sleep clinic. I’m cutting out the diet coke, and cutting back on the obscene amounts of pills I take. I’m going to try and find non-pharmaceutical ways to deal with my health issues, because the drugs, frankly, were making things worse, not better.
And so now, coming out of the other side of this crisis of the last few months, I am able to actually see how worn down and tired and unhappy it made me. And while many of the root causes of all the pain are now gone, I haven’t recovered from their effects. I’m still really tired. And sort of angry. And really bored. I’m not sure what makes me happy these days.
I sat at lunch, reading, and thinking. Trying to figure out what my new “fix” was going to be. A diet? Meditation? The *right*self-help book? A new craft I haven’t discovered, a new way of talking to TheMister that will make us perfectly happy all the time.
And I came to a realization. That there isn’t a fix. That shit will always happen. That I’ve come to this exact same realization a million times before and I always forget it. I even tattooed a damn reminder on my arm, and I still forget.
There is no fix. There’s no point when you’ve won life. There is no job, no partner, no hobby, nothing that will suddenly make your life “right”. The job will always have sucky days and sucky projects. The partner will sometimes be an idiotic asshole who can’t do anything right. The dog is gonna wake you up at 3 am.
And life goes on. You get through the anger and the sadness and the whatever-ness and you try again. You can get better at things. You can find ways to do your job better next time around. Ways to not get annoyed by that personality “quirk” of your other half. And then something else will go wrong. You just can’t escape life.
I have these conversations with myself every time I go through ‘something’ in my life. And I vow that next time, I won’t get pissed about it. Next time I’ll remind myself that, “this too shall pass”, and that will be like a magic charm that allows me to tolerate anything with a big dopey grin on my face.
That next time I’ll remember to breathe, or to journal, or “connect with nature”. Next time I’ll eat nothing but fruits and vegetables, and 8 glasses of water and then stress won’t get to me.
But I don’t do those things. And if I did, they wouldn’t really change anything. Stress is stressful. Life is hard. People are dumb.
What I DO need to do is figure out how to notice the things that ARE good. That’s what’s been missing from my life. I obsess over the ‘bad’, finding a ‘solution’, making things right again. And I forget to notice all the parts of my life that do work pretty well.
The only problem is, this sounds suspiciously like all that “gratitude” crap that people like Oprah go on about all the time. Like I need a special journal to note all the things I’m thankful for each day. A new regimen. A “lifestyle change”. Another “fix” that doesn’t really fix anything.
Maybe the drugs are a better idea after all. 
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