How do I convey 6 months of epic challenge on many fronts, what has been going on?
Deep breaths, self-love and a lot of room for grieving.
Tense, gaining more awareness of the person I’m becoming.
Settled into the truth that my life belongs to me (as a former fundie, this is crucial).
But overall, I find myself defining this year as exactly that: definitive.
Someone absolutely, poignantly and beautifully precious to me and to my immediate family died suddenly.
She lived on borrowed time, but nothing prepares you. I’ve been unable to write any kind of memorial or much of anything at all. Instead I’ve either actively allowed the grief or ballistically refused any emotions associated with the grief. It turns out there’s only so much active and outward grieving a body can take within a certain timeframe.
So I’m finding the year punctuated by a few pauses. Particularly after the loss, pause/crash prevailed even if it looked like I was functioning. And when I’m not paused, I live in a way that feels like a tribute not only to the preciousness of my own life, but especially to all that Sarah couldn’t participate in for long, if at all. Just typing that little bit conjures tears. But I am seldom allowing much of their spill. It’s more about one step, then the next.
And along the way, the many newsworthy goings on hammer away at peace if you allow it. Need I state the obvious about our nation and the world? No. We all get it. But today, most of us awakened to the ongoing progress of holding the former president accountable. Fingers crossed for an actual measure of accountability and justice.
Besides all of that, I’m working even harder on what I think about and how I think while remaining aware of the energy I’m brewing. The aim is to cultivate everything that imparts creativity within myself and my world here. And I find the work of cultivation mostly to be about love and acceptance. Love informing the tasks at hand as I create and work to manifest a measure of financial abundance. “Manifest” is only used in that I acknowledge my attitudes and beliefs can either serve me or sabotage me. I acknowledge there have been times when it seemed like the universe brought me what I focused on receiving. There’s a bit of that sort of manifestation awareness at work, too. But the tricky, potentially upsetting bit rattles around reminding me that our main source of income is gone for now, daring me to indulge in fear, desperation.
Mostly the path has been massively stressful unless I insist my thoughts and actions along lines of resilience, faith and strength. And so, that is where I reside as much as possible. This insistence encompasses the ongoing work towards now keeping and improving my baseline of activity and rest. As a person with MECFS, the baseline can be lost and never retrieved depending on the circumstances. So far, retrieval has always eventually occurred for me. I’ve been very fortunate. Once a baseline is established, it’s wisest to maintain it for a period of 3 to 6 months (or longer should the MECFS experience be especially risk saturated). Beyond that, the path unfolds with gradually adding on new activities and then following those additions with maintenance months or years. It’s a tedious work wherein you seek to hold to a faith in your body’s ability to recover while recognizing MECFS can put you in the spin cycle out of nowhere. Maintaining a non-traumatized relationship to your health both challenges and galls simultaneously. So, insisting thoughts of resilience, faith and strength, saturating myself in love and patience bolsters and affirms as I work and play towards hopefully broader fields of living.
I would say that I can’t believe I’ve not posted since the holidays. But then I look at the trail behind me, and it makes plenty of sense. Throughout these challenges, the focus on Digital SoulSpeak continues, also experiencing pauses along the way. That I can even attempt an Etsy shop reveals how my world enables me, a person with MECFS, to focus on projects most folks with this illness can’t even remotely consider. I’m daily aware of the sheer luck and privilege at play in my life. My gratitude flourishes every time I recognize those bonuses as does a longing for everyone to experience the same. That’s not to say this has been easy. I’ve channeled the strength I’ve gained towards the shop and have had to rely on others for daily basics most take for granted. I would have visited my daughter when she noted how long it’s been since I’ve made the trip to see her, but now it’s just not possible. And though my visits have encompassed previously understood days of rest once I arrive at my destination, my energy needs to go towards creating and managing revenue streams. The risk is too high at this point.
So, it’s no surprise that the world of the ignored and underserved chronically ill remains uppermost in my thoughts. As I develop printables for Digital SoulSpeak, my aim is to shed light on that same world. In the meantime, my hope is to begin a website for the purposes of sharing and selling those products (and others) as I’m able. For now, my blog here should suffice as a platform for sharing the shop’s progress.
And that is it, in a rather large nutshell, the past 6 months.
Onward…
J. Ruth Kelly 