March 17 2023
I realized, as of yesterday, that I haven't really talked much about the fact that I do, in fact, complain.
On occasion.
Not as much as I could, given the circumstances, but I still do complain. Once again, the lucky person who has the most access to this part of my life is my husband. He's very understanding and very tolerant. I appreciate him so much, and love him to the ends of the Earth and back again. Nothing can change that. (Let's not get into "You can't know that! Anything could happen!" Because you, on the other hand, can't know that. I know people say it all the time, but there it is.)
I just wanted you all to know that I'm not angelic, or even perfect, or even the best. I'm not even practically perfect. I am a flawed individual, like every other individual I've ever met. None of us are perfect. If anyone says they are, they're probably acting at best, lying at worst.
We've all got flaws. Each one of us is decidedly not good at something in life, at least one thing, more likely several, most likely many. Here's the thing though: There's nothing wrong with that. Flaws make us human. Many of us have one being we qualify as perfect, and that's not someone we meet, for the most part, throughout our lives. And that's fine. We don't need to be perfect. It's not our job.
So, I complain. Not all the time, because what possible good could that do? But sometimes, it all gets to be too much, and I have to rail at the sky. Why do I rail at the sky? Well, really that's just a turn of phrase, it's not like I actually stand out on my lawn and scream at the clouds. I sometimes do, however, need to let loose.
Mostly, I talk about how I've made so many gains. But there are losses.
I can't drive. True, I'm working on this, but I likely won't drive by myself for quite some time, and possibly won't ever do that again. Bad memory makes for awkward road trips, you see.
I can't do my old job. That's a definite never again, and I did love my job. It was one of the things that drove me to work through the pain of the migraines I used to get.
I can't just go along blissfully living without glasses, anymore. Those are permanent. They help quite a bit, though, so it's not really a bad thing. Oh, and I also likely can't get contacts.
I can't get the last year of my eldest son's high school time back. Lost out on the last of that due to the stroke and early recovery. To be honest, so did he. He had to graduate a year later.
And really, don't get me started on what I missed of my youngest's life. It doesn't seem like much, but I can't remember a good deal of time from around the stroke, and I can't remember most of the time during both the stroke itself and the immediate recovery. He was 8 when I had the stroke. I vaguely remember his 9th birthday, I think. He wanted to go bowling. So we went bowling.
I'm not going to Pollyanna this today, either. There's nothing I can do to make it look better. Consistently, every time I look at these things, they all look just as bad. They never really improve. There's a book I read, once, called I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Never did see the movie. But, it's true. Nobody ever promised us perfect lives. Heck, no one ever even promised us good lives. And sometimes the fact that a good life is not guaranteed is painfully obvious.
We all have bad times, and most of us don't do much to chronicle those. You have pictures of the happy times; the birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, parties etc. Very rarely do we have pictures of the sad and difficult times. No one takes pictures of the funerals, or the break ups. No one takes pictures of divorces or when things just fall apart. We can see extremely bad times in the media, of course. There are always pictures of World War II. There's pictures of World War I. There are photographs, paintings, and etchings of wars previous to those, as well. But our own, personal, really bad times? Not usually. We don't want to remember those, for the most part. We want to move on.
I know a couple of people who take pictures of funerals, mostly to show family members who can't attend. But not everyone does that. There are some who use funerals as a way to get pictures of loved ones who they never see at other times. Somber occasions, yes. But, still beloved family members who they don't see often. The pictures usually capture a strange beauty, because weirdly, grief can make us beautiful. We're more exposed, more real when we're grieving than at most other times. We're stripped of our facades, and left at our most bare, our most real.
Heh. Maybe that's what I'm doing. Grieving what I've lost, but somehow keeping some beauty with what I have. That sounds like a nice thought.
Maybe I'll look at it this way, from here on out. Mostly, I've seen the sadness and depression I live with pretty much daily as a weakness. If you know me at all, you know I prefer not to show any weakness. If you don't know me, now you do. This weakness, though, the sadness, the depression, the sense of loss and feeling of yearning for what I once had, it feels different. Different enough that it doesn't seem like a weakness at all. More of a badge, if you know what I'm saying. Like the badges we used to earn in girl scouts or cub scouts, it shows what I've been doing, and what I've learned. These feelings I used to bury as far down as I could, now show my growth through all of this.
Not that I'm going to go out and boast about it. It's a more private showcase. More of a "Look what you can do" than a "look what I can do" type of situation.
I said I wasn't going to Pollyanna this, and I haven't. There was a dark part of Pollyanna too, after all. She did end up paralyzed in the story, and lost a lot of her hope and will to live. My feelings about my losses are the darker parts of my story, but still an integral part of my recovery. Maybe kind of a "you can't see the light if you've never seen the dark" kind of thing. Something for me to ponder, I'm sure.
