The past several years have felt like life coming at me as I stood, like Amy Lee in the video for Bring Me To Life, on one circumstantial ledge after another, trying to climb up from an effort to solve one problem to a solution for the next. And every time I get to that next ledge, something shoves me off before I can get a solid emotional footing, and emotionally I am falling, falling, falling as part of me pleads, “wake me up inside!”
In hitting one emotional rock bottom after another, I found myself grappling up time and time again. Eventually, I started to visualize myself as needing to be tethered to an emotional bungee chord. I know that given the totality of our circumstances, I’m going to continue getting pushed off of the edge of difficult situations. And I know I’m going to have to try and bounce back through everything as one part of my emotions sings to another, “bring me [back] to life!”- and I try and remind everyone around me, to borrow from another of that band’s songs, “don’t try and fix me I’m not broken.” To walk through the entirety of these circumstances- not just what I have written about but what I have also dampered and kept off-line- is the price for admission one must pay before I am likely to entertain the validity of a critique of how I’m handling all of this.
January’s ledges gave me some harder things, things that created new physical challenges for what I need to do to care for my family and maintain Tony’s therapy programs. My allergies are going through a more dramatic period of changes than I have seen from them in a couple of decades, and the new food sensitivities are trickier for me because they involve more foods that I love, and have put me in a position of having to return to eating meat.
In trying to climb up to a happier ground for my health and my emotions, I hit a point where even I stopped trying to hoist myself back up onto the bean ledge. Each attempt with a different type was producing larger hives, the black eyed pea hives were double the size of the kidney bean hives, the mayocoba beans were easily quadruple the size of the black eyed pea hives. I felt the wisest course of action was to defer to the recommendation of my allergist, and stop trying with any of the beans for now. And, given the more rapid escalation in hive size, when he decides to try and reintroduce them a year from now, I am going to feel safer doing that in office. I may often seem to be in an emotional free fall, but I’m not actually legitimately crazy when it comes to how I do things.
POTS is putting me through a slower upwards climb. When I first started trying to exercise in the days after the cardiologist telling me I met criteria for POTS, I was only able to do 20 strokes on my rower before I had to wait one to two minutes. After a few sets of 20, I would have to decrease to 15 strokes and a wait, then to 10, then to five, because my heart rate would start to spike up higher faster the more sets I tried to do. Now I can do 8 minutes straight. Going for walks in progressively warmer temps up to 106 degree temps trying to get my autonomic nervous system to try and tolerate heat better. Cooler temps still have lower heart rates for me, but the difference isn’t as dramatic as it was in early May. I try not to focus on where I was with my fitness before January, because it makes me unhappier to compare that way. Instead, I try to focus on being thankful that I can jog for short distances again, that I can do everything I need to to care for my family, that I was able to finally do a full circuit training workout with my free weights a couple of weeks ago without resting as my emotions soared to Savatage’s Hall of the Mountain King, as I can feel my autonomic nervous system’s ability to tolerate exercise oh so slowly coming back to life.
Some of those dampered things are harder to climb back from, the knock down flinging me past seemingly dozens of emotional stories. For many, many months now I have being pulling myself up from some of those things by the gilded chords of my makeup routine. I have been wearing make up off and on since I was in the fourth grade. Yes, that’s young by our country’s standards, and it may not have been your choice as a parent to allow that (and truth be told my mom thought that I was incredibly frivolous for wanting to at any age, though she clearly didn’t stop me), but that is exactly how long I have been enthralled with the ability to transform things that way on my face. I have taken breaks from time to time as circumstances required, but it’s something I long have loved.
Going to church in this… 
Ice, given life by fire on the edges, the orange shimmer in the corners and duochrome on the lid didn’t photograph true to color 
Similar, but different to the church look. This is copper and plum, that had peach and burgundy
As some of my emotions have slowly scabbed over and fused together through the healing power of color and self-care, I have found it easier to read plot lines with tension without it ratcheting up my own…I finally reached a point where I felt able to finish Deadly Sanctuary, and then took to binge reading Mercedes Lackey. Some of those books weren’t as easy. Because a few of them I read (and loved) decades ago, I knew there were some darker plot points, but the knowing helped me be prepared and prevented me from being knocked off a ledge by the emotions of what I was reading.
Sometimes it’s still harder for me to go out and meet new people -both emotionally and schedule wise- though I am trying. The past few years have made me wary and weary of how easy it is to get pushed from the ledges of people who find our circumstances for one reason or another don’t work well for their lives. They have that right. But when the pushing is done by people you knew for a while and had an emotional investment in, it’s harder to emotionally come back to life from that. Some things are just hard and take more time to wake up from.
So I enjoy the time I do have with friends who have clutched my hands to try and keep me from falling off some of those ledges, like Gena and Emily. And T, you know who you are, and since I’ve not asked if you are ok with your name being on these pages that’ll have to do for now, but I’m looking forward to us getting together more often now that you’ve moved local. And of course, there are moments of joy with my family. Walking in the rain with Hannah. Walks with Tony and Andy. Tony finding joy in some sprinklers at the park. There is so much life to love in those moments.
I had a dream a few days ago, and in it our country had been invaded and our family was one of many taken prisoner to be used for manual labor. I woke from this dream feeling how much I have in my life to be profoundly grateful for no matter how hard it might seem to people outside of it, how much of a life I really have even when I feel like I’ve been emotionally kicked off of the side of a building. We love, we loose, but we still live, and we are still there for each other, to be the hand at the ledge, to be the heart that reaches out when another is crying out, “bring me [back] to life!’
Just one more side note for my fantastic sisters-in-law during this Halloween season: I am putting a link below for a Cruella Halloween look in case any of you are interested in going that route (the title of the video and link will be after my pictures). But, I am going to take aim and issue with a couple of things Spencer is saying. You know, I think he’s fabulous of course, and when it comes to the beauty industry, obviously I am absolutely a nobody in comparison and certainly I don’t work in that industry. That being said, I respectfully disagree with his comments on powdering as you age. I am putting up a picture from a year ago with a high end powder and an under eye area that was moderately powdered, not even baked. Yeah, that’s me- from a YEAR AGO- and I look a good decade older. I was trying to get the powdering mix right to survive masking on that particular day.
I am playing show and tell with some other shots that were taken this week to make my point. I reiterate from last week, as you age, unless you want to visually age yourself even more, powder products are not your friends and need to be handled with care! Each is cranked to the same degree of smiling as the original picture from a year ago, but to save space I am only showing the eye area and one picture giving you the level of smile. Yes, my one side crinkles more…a life with a bit too much sardonic and half-cranked sarcastic smiling will get you there. And, the concealer alone on the eyelid thing that he did…unless you are just doing your makeup for pictures, it will do you dirty in my opinion and you definitely need an eye primer, in my opinion. Just saying. Here are the pictures, and again the link will be after that.
The top picture in this series is with a thin layer of concealer applied with a sponge, not patted in, and a minimal fairy dusting of powder. The next picture is with a thin layer of foundation over (pay attention to how that moisture decreases the appearance of lines), the next is with light powdering but more than the minimal set I did in the first shot, and the second to last is after setting spray. The very last picture is after a walk where my skin moistened up a bit and soaked in much of the powder under my eyes. As you can see, same day, and the lines are way less exaggerated than when first powdered. Click on the gallery for bigger pictures if you are viewing this post from my website directly using your phone, that will make it easier to see the differences.
