I feel like I haven’t written anything in ages! Partly that’s true. I haven’t posted for over 2 months. But I have been writing a little.
There’s a host of reasons for why not. Some of them good, some of them…. not so much.
I’m battling yet another new health issue. It never seems to end. I’ve written a lot about gut health and dietary things, and until recently I had my IBS under control. At first I thought it was because of a little too much sugar and grains sneaking into my diet over Christmas, but getting strict again didn’t resolve it this time. So I think something else is going on, and it’s causing me a massive amount of gut pain and digestive issues.
Of course, all of my initial test results have come back normal, so now I’m booked in for a colonoscopy – fun times ahead – not! I guess you can all look forward to a blog about that!
I’ve also been battling the demons in my head again. It’s not unusual when a new health issue arises (or an old one just gets too much) for mental health to take a bit of a dive again.
I’m going to take a little detour around that and come back to it in a moment.
The ever tolerant Knight in Tarnished Armour and I have been renovating for what seems like forever. Some of the things we wanted to do got put on hold when I got sick. It simply didn’t make financial sense to borrow money for mostly aesthetics when we really didn’t know if I was ever going back to work.
We’ve diligently saved up and worked out cheaper ways to do things, and studiously ignored the unfinished and unpainted bits. But now we are getting some of the things done! Yay!
Part of the reason for this is that I got myself registered as a Marriage Celebrant and have been setting up my home office sorted and doing all the things associated with setting up a new small business. I’ve got a couple of weddings booked and I’m super excited about this new adventure.
Now I’m never going to make a massive amount of money doing this. But it’s a job I’m already loving – possibly as much as I loved being a vet! And it’s much more manageable energy wise.
But the renovations has included getting some painters in to finish painting the places that we started. Now I actually don’t mind painting. It’s a task I used to help with when I was a kid. My tiny kid hips would fit between the handles of a ladder so I could happily sit at the top, and monkey up and down painting the cornices of a room, while my vertigo affected mother tried not to watch!
As an adult, I can remember painting half a wall before work, heading off to do a full shift as a vet, then painting the other half when I got home. So getting people in to paint walls really triggered the FibroTroll to bring over all the mental health friends (co-morbid conditions) and along came all those feelings of guilt, inadequacy and depression. Combined with the new health issues. I’ve really been struggling.
So I’ve been back to my psychologist, who again has proved her worth. I’m in a much better frame of mind – and that’s probably the reason I’m back here.
We talked about a lot of things. I was reminded to get back into my meditation, yoga, writing – all the things that I know help, but then start to forget when things take a turn for the worse.
But the big thing we talked about was priorities. Everything we do in life requires an allocation of resources. It might be time, it might be energy (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual) and it might be money. And how we choose to prioritise those resources is up to us.
Back when I was well, the limited resource was usually time. As a university student, it was usually money. Now, it’s energy. I’ve got loads of time. I don’t have loads of money, but I’m super lucky that the Knight earns enough that we are comfortable. But energy – oh that precious, precious resource!
So now I’m sitting at my dining table with my laptop, while a very nice man is sanding and filling gaps and cleaning and prepping my front room. He’s going to paint it later today and tomorrow and then my new office will be freshly painted and looking lovely.
This is something that I can do. I have the knowledge and skills to perform this task. (Probably not as good as the painter’s skills.) But it would literally take me weeks or months. He’ll be finished tomorrow – and do a better job. And that energy that I would use on that task will simply not be there for anything else.
I won’t be able to cook, do the washing, write blogs, meet clients for weddings, do gardening or any of the other things that compete for my energy resources. My energy is already lower due to the new health issues and needs to be saved for looking after me and the Knight.
The Knight hates painting, so he doesn’t want to allocate his time and energy to that task. He also doesn’t much enjoy cooking and cleaning (although he does do those anyway) and very much does not like watching me in pain.
So instead of feeling guilty about this, I have re-framed it as a choice. Instead of allocating the resources of my time and energy into the painting task, I have chosen to allocate the resource of money – to pay someone else to do it. The priority for both the Knight and me is that I keep my energy for the other tasks, so that I don’t collapse in a heap and he has to take time off work to care for me. And the big break-through that I have had this week? – I’m ok with that choice.