Song Of Myself.

This has been a year filled with many challenges, difficult decisions, lots of different kinds of emotions, turmoil, and pain. Over the years, I have survived ten years in an abusive, alcoholic home environment, and nine years of living in four different children’s homes. I successfully graduated from college, taught school for almost five years and loved the children I taught. I married, had a child, and went back to school to work on a Master’s degree. I worked for thirty years in my profession helping others cope with living and other kinds of issues they felt motivated to work on. I loved my profession and was successful in the work I did. My son went to college, and  eight years later, I divorced. I lived through that and kept working. My life was good. I had purpose, money to take care of myself, a home I loved, dogs to take care of, friends to go out with, and a future to look forward to. My energy was great. I was strong, did many activities, and was close to retirement. My health started to go down hill after a few years of having pneumonia. I went to part-time work along with Social Security until I became physically ill and retired permanently.

In the last two years, I went through a major trauma that turned my whole world upside down. Trauma from childhood was reactivated. Everything I believed to be true in life was erased. I  came down with pneumonia again and was hospitalized. A month or two later I was told I had a serious illness, one that would need for me to get infusions. That also reactivated more childhood trauma. I was in counseling but it was not going well. The level of antibodies in my body was low. My energy level was low. I had unpleasant side effects, and my body was struggling to endure the infusions. I felt like I was fighting a battle I could not win. I did not accept having this illness or the other things that were happening. I was angry, bitter,  and developed the deepest depression I had ever experienced in my life and severe anxiety. I was not snapping out of this and things were progressively getting worse. I had lost hope, and I had lost faith in all things. I was not going to survive. I changed therapists. It was one more loss to contend with, to grieve. For the first time in my life, I wanted to give up. The following quote expresses a lot of what I was feeling at the time.                                                                                             

I felt God had abandoned me at a very vulnerable time in my life. I felt lost, alone, and without the help I needed to be able to survive. I felt I had lost everything that really mattered to me: my job, a routine to  bring order in to my life. I felt I had lost my identity and all I had once believed in. I lost my health, my strength, my energy, my purpose. I was turning in to someone I did not like. I started counseling again with someone I had interviewed and felt she would be able to help me get back on my feet again. (To be continued).

Yu/stan/kema