coffeebarconfessions

It's amazing how such a redundant statement can be both so true, and so difficult to accept. What Is Is. However, it happens to be the only thing keeping me from spinning out of orbit like The Sun just released its gravitational pull on Earth. To live in a subjective state of reality is impossible for me. There is simply no way to reconcile the hurt, pain, unfairness, opportunity lost, destruction, devastation and misery the last eight years have caused me and those I love. Not unless I want to spend the rest of my life in the reconciliation phase. Which I don't, because it's a sucky place to be, stuck in the unrelenting and painful quagmires of my past.  I spent years building "freak out" neural pathways in my brain. For a long time after the strokes it felt like that's all there was. It's still my default, knee-jerk reaction to upset, stress or pain. Retraining those pathways to respond positively to challenging situations is hard work. I feel like I hav...

It's happening again. That feeling of victimized rage I spent the last few years stewing in. I feel it rising up inside me as I try and navigate my way through the outside world. Meet the minimum requirements of a successful existence. Manage my illness on top of it all. Me oh my, learning how to live life again is a much greater challenge than I anticipated. Despite my unrelenting insistence that today be a much better day than yesterday, it's not. I lost my cool on the way to another doctor appointment. This time it was at the mercy of my car's navigation system. It got me to the freeway exit okay, but failed to guide me to my destination. All I could see was one spot on one road, me, and everything else blanked out. No next turn...you went the wrong way...keep going this way. None. I cancelled and re-started it, whereupon it informed me I was too close to my destination to show it. Racing through mega-office complex after another did nothing. At this point I SATTOMLOL. S...

So there I am, driving on down the road on my way to a doctor appointment, late and flipping out. Getting stuck behind two cars driving right next to each other, both going exactly 40 mph in a 45 zone, pissed me off. Hitting fourteen consecutive red lights convinced me of a conspiracy theory between the Arizona Traffic Commission and the owners of all gas stations. By the time I was circling the parking lot of my doctors office like a vulture looking for a parking space, already 15 minutes late to my appointment, I was crying. Yes I got mad at slow drivers and full parking garages and the grinding frustration of a trail of red lights, but mostly I was mad at me.  That ugly thing called 'the truth' was inescapable. See I woke up with plenty of time but laid in bed playing solitaire and looking at the Groupon app for at hour. At least. After deciding both suck I was finally ready to face the day. I took my pups on a lovely walk, grateful for a beautiful day after the 24 hour trip...

This last weekend I did something I have not done in many years, attended my annual family reunion in Las Vegas. I really can't even remember the last one I went to. Perhaps over the past eight years of chronic illness I maybe mustered up enough strength once. Maybe. The only real memory of Vegas I have is the last trip I went on with my husband a good four or five years ago. It was so bright, loud and smokey I couldn't deal and vowed not to return until I wasn't so sick. To describe Las Vegas as a sensory, neurological experience from hell for a person with Fibromyalgia is a supreme understatement.  For some reason I felt up to going this year so I packed my bags, kissed hubby goodbye, and flew off to sin city for a little family togetherness. What met me there was so unbelievably surprising I still can't believe it happened. I felt great. Not okay, good or fine, but really great. Yes I was at the total mercy of everyone else's schedule and horribly short on sleep....

I'm on a constant mission to improve my life. With great joy I gleefully report that it's working. By focusing on three main principles as the guiding force of my behavior I have improved my health, attitude and productivity. Getting those three tenets to align at the same time is nothing short of a miracle. For so many years they seemed to exist like magnets, each repelling the others into a far off, unknown land. If I felt okay I was in a bad mood, or did too much and just gave my lilacs away to a flare from overexertion. Some days I was happy, but it was only a matter of time before some egregious event took place, like dropping a new quart of yogurt on the floor or pouring my coffee in the dog's food bowl. Then happy would vanish in a cloud of victimized anger, made all the worse because I knew what set me off was simply not that big of a deal. But for the most part I pretty much just felt like crap all the time, which made being productive and happy extremely hard to a...

For a long time I didn't believe I was entitled to happiness. Life was too hard, confusing, unfair, devastating and simply tragic. While I was too sick to work or care for myself at the fresh age of twenty-nine, life was going on all around me. I became estranged from my friends and family because their reality, normal life, was nowhere on my radar. The ambitions and dreams I was taught to aspire for, work toward and achieve became nothing more than a sick joke I was utterly incapable of accomplishing. There wasn't a place in the world I fit in as the components of my former existence hurled away from me like dark matter expanding the compactness of space.  So I changed EVERYTHING about my life, and here I sit feeling old and worn out from the endless toil at the weary age of thirty-seven. People remind me how young I am but I don't feel young. I feel wise, trampled, bitch-slapped and raw, but not young. The friends I grew up with all have kids and mortgages. I have canine ...