Never lose track of the essential

Lately – read the past eight months or so – I have been writing mostly about Poets of the Fall and it is as it should be since they do make me happy, and writing about their music is more therapeutic than talking about myself to a wall. Don’t worry, I am not experiencing such a dreadful thing – it is just an image, my therapist is amazing. Anyway, it has been two days that every time I drive home from work, my thoughts are in disarray and both times, I have had this ranting post writing itself in my head, but when I am finally home I have neither the energy or the memory to write it down. So, today as I am off, I will try and dig in this head of mine to see if I can find anything useful to share with you guys.

Back to work

I went straight to the wall a little over a year ago. The recovery is slow, but I am doing very good. I have really good people around me who are helping, even when they are not trying to. I am very lucky that way. Last week started probably the toughest step of my rehabilitation though. I started working 75% – thirty hours a week. I knew it would be trying, but it almost feels like I am going backwards. I sleep good on weekends, but I have started dreaming about work again during the week, so when I wake up in the morning most of the times my shoulders are tensed. Maybe, it has something to do with the intensity of that step so the dreams may actually fade in a few weeks… you see, I am not unhappy at work. Things are kind of better there for me, even if there is still a lot of room for improvement. However, I cannot say that I am happy either, but that is another discussion I believe, one that I will not take up here. The truth is that I am tired to say that I am tired but I cannot help, it is how I feel even if I have more energy than I used to have some months ago. But I also know that it is not only due to my diagnosis. We have now entered a very dark period called Winter and it has to have a negative impact as well. so I just have to hang on until the snow comes again so that it won’t be as dark outside, which might be helpful to make me feel a bit better, you never know.

Save Me

Yesterday, I created a Poets of the Fall playlist – yes, another one – which includes two complete albums (Carnival of Rust and Clearview) as well as many songs from the other albums. One of the songs is Save Me, from Revolution Roulette. I have been listening to that playlist the whole day while working and it helped me focus (concentrate) on the task at hand. When I listen to Poets of the Fall at work, my lips are moving but no sounds is coming out (I’d probably get in trouble if it did), however, as Save Me played in my earphones, I heard a whisper escaping my mouth, singing along “Save me, save me…” I guess it is how I felt, like a lion in a cage eager to escape. Was it the remains of how my body and mind use to feel? Old habits die hard… or was it really my state of mind at that time? It is hard to say. When I explained this to my husband, I guess he started worrying again (or more). I did not tell him about it to complain though. I recalled how I felt, and there was no discomfort, just the comical situation of a never ending task I had been working on for two days… and the knowledge that a similar task was waiting for me when this one was done.

In this song, at the end, there are these four phrases that always remind me that I am my own ally and that me, myself and I are in this together to see it through for the better.

No more skeletons for me, self-sabotage has gone out the window for a while now… but when my thoughts are in such disarray, it feels like they are trying to come back and haunt me. Fortunately, I am stronger than that.

Patience, care and love

I could go on and on about how Poets of the Fall‘s music made me feel and saw to it that I would go through the day with the energy required to finish my assignment, but I won’t. I will just say this, my husband said something so very true yesterday evening, I should not need the music in order to focus. But I do, and although it is great to have such a “tool” at my disposal – some in my situation cannot say that, the “normal” state of being I should experience would not need any tool to go through the day. This is another sign that shows I am not fully recovered and I have to make my peace with that. Most of the times, it feels like I have, but other times I could scream just for the sake of it… In such cases, there are these two songs, about which I talked in my previous post Poets of the Fall – Love never goes out of season, that manage quite neatly to put me back on track reminding me of the essential, therefore reinforcing the daily messages that my husband is sending me… which brought tears of happiness to my eyes yesterday… I am definitely Cradled in Love.