Fear (and wanting to spend the next week under the bed)

Some days are stunners, sunshine and unicorns, hazelnut coffee and sweet potato pie.

Today was not one of those days.  Today was the opposite of sweet potato pie, perhaps like sucking on raw horseradish root.  Some days taste like scat, all day long.  Sorry to disappoint, I don't want to get into too much detail about the rottenness of the bad mood details.  Simply frustrated with the continued uncertainty and unfairness of this fragile life.

Got a scan coming up in T minus 4 days.  A CT this time, three cheers for no radioactive glucose!  Quite honestly, I haven't done much active worrying the past few weeks, a big deviation from my usual pre-scan behavior.  I'm sure there's a live anxiety current running just below the surface - I can tell because as happened 4 months ago, I've been having difficulty swallowing (instead of feeling itchy, my telltale anxiety symptom).

One of my wise therapists told me recently about how when we are feeling down in the dumps, our memories tend to pick out all of the other times we felt down in the dumps and push them towards the front of our brains.  All we can remember in this state are other times we were in this state.  Sad times mean we've always been sad (and let me add my own piece here:  that we will always be sad).  In times of grief, all we can see is grief.  You get the idea.  While this makes perfect sense to me, as our brains are always looking for links and logic, it's still nearly impossible to talk oneself out of a mud puddle.

Most of you have heard this Florence + The Machine song already, but I played it on repeat during this morning's commute to my final day of training for the new job.  There are so many lyrics that simultaneously stir and comfort, and of course, as any good lyrics are, they are open to multiple interpretations.  I'm mostly sure that this was written about some volatile relationship, but I prefer to think of it as our relationship to whatever dogs us from our past ("It's hard to dance with a devil on your back").  In my case, it's fear.

Fears of the future ebb and flow with the phases of the moon, and perhaps that's the most reassuring news:  once they flow, ebb comes next.

Ready for a new moon.




PS. My goodnight gift to you: click here (song starts 1:26ish).