I Lost Everything & Found What Matters
In the past year and a bit, I lost everything but I found what matters. For all the bad, there’s been a lot of good too.
Emotionally and mentally, I feel better than I have in a really long time. The upside of getting sick and then the arrival of Covid? I finally felt like it was okay to focus on myself to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. As many are aware, I didn’t just get a little sick, I experienced a catastrophic medical event.
Between that, assorted other BS, and the Covid Quarantine, I found peace and learned how my life needs to be so that I can enjoy it.
“Enjoying life…who does she think she is?”
With my husband’s support, I spent the majority of my time over the last year doing physiotherapy, neuro rehab, and trauma-informed therapy for cPTSD. He’s a very brave man.
After a lot of hard and painful work, I started to feel really good mentally. It helped that for the first time in my life, there was no one making demands of me or on my time. There were no distractions from what I needed. I retrained my brain to become less reactive to triggers. I learned how to put the brakes on the trigger trains so it was harder to get sucked into rabbit holes of stress and anxiety. To encourage my broken brain to rewire around the damaged areas, I did physio every day. Through it all, I was pretty isolated except for my husband but it was great. There was no one sucking my energy from me, and there was no one bringing any drama to my life.
I’m more aware of the people around me, the situations I choose to be involved in, what I care about, what I think about, what I devote energy to, and what energy I allow in my presence. I realized I’m actually in control of all of it.
I’m now a careful curator of my peace and wellbeing.
I was always really good at giving of myself and my energy until I ran out in October last year when my brain finally broke.
For forty years, I felt my value was only in what I could give to others. I was a bottomless pit of codependence and I attracted folks who were bottomless pits of need and drama. It was a perfect pairing! They never ran out of crises, and I never ran out of problems to listen to, get involved with, advise on, and try to fix.
Until I said ‘enough’ last year and started ruthlessly and decisively culling the people and activities out my life that were causing me stress and sucking the life out of me. (Right out the hole in my brain stem, I’m pretty sure.)
It’s not because I think I’m too good to associate with flawed people. I’m deeply flawed myself, as you’ve probably clued into if you’ve read a post or two on this blog.
They had to go because I couldn’t stop myself from hemorrhaging energy for them.
It’s an act of self-protection, and self-protection isn’t selfish, it’s a human right.
Life is so much better without anyone or anything in it draining my energy. If I’m being honest, I have zero interest in taking on any personal pet projects or getting involved with issues that belong to other people. I’m done letting things that don’t actually affect my life, affect my life.
Don’t get me wrong. I have a couple of very good friends who’ve always been there for me, and I for them, but it’s a healthy, equal give and take. Their lives aren’t in constant turmoil, they’re normal folks who have good days and occasionally bad things happen in their lives just like everyone else, but it’s never a non-stop catastrophe.
I find that I don’t emotionally connect with people’s hard luck stories anymore. Empathizing I can do, but I don’t feel their stress like it’s my stress anymore. I used to feel their feelings like I was also going through their situation. And sometimes, I’d been through their situation which made it really easy to identify with them. I was sad with them, angry with them, depressed with them, stressed with them.
Like I needed to take on anymore emotional garbage, especially when it wasn’t even mine!
Did I subconsciously seek out people going through drama and emotional turmoil as a way to distract myself from my own? I had issues I’d never dealt with properly. (I’m no psychologist but I’m going to confidently assert that avoidance isn’t the healthiest way to cope with trauma.)
It seems likely that it wasn’t an accident that I often ended up associating with people experiencing (or who claimed to be experiencing) things that I’d gone through. I think subconsciously I hoped solving someone else’s situation would heal me. I think I was playing out the same situation over and over again but with different people, hoping to change the ending like that would somehow end the anxiety and the PTSD.
When ‘choose your own adventure’ goes horribly awry…
Doing that my whole life didn’t work, and we know what the definition of insanity is. And I’m a lot of things, but I’m not insane. I’m just slow to catch on about some things because I’ve always thought that I can do anything if I just try hard enough. And I often can, but I realize now that doesn’t extend to changing other people.
I feel great now that I jealously guard my energy. I made a list of people and things that matter in my life. They are both very short lists. If it’s not on either list, it’s not getting my energy. I can still empathize with other people’s problems, but I’m pretty good now at realizing what’s not my problem. It’s harder for me these days to get emotionally sucked in to other people’s situations. I think there are a couple reasons for that.
First, my life is now so peaceful I refuse to let anyone screw with it.
I refuse to give other people power over my emotional reactions anymore and suck me in to their drama. I’m delightfully detached and uninterested in anything that doesn’t directly affect me or my few loved ones.
Secondly, I no longer feel any compulsion to try and play out traumatic situations like I’m going to achieve a different ending.
It was what it was. I can’t rewrite endings to situations that are over.
The past is locked and editing is restricted.
Because I refused to spend the rest of my life listening to stories about how abusive her husband was to her, how afraid she was of him, how dangerous he was, how abused she was…I finally cut off a friendship of nearly twenty years.
I spent many years triggered by the stories (which I ultimately quit believing for various reasons) but even if the tales of awful abuse were true, I couldn’t make her leave. It wasn’t like I could make her stop tolerating it. I couldn’t force her to see she deserved better.
Then I realized I didn’t have to constantly relive and replay that story to try and get a different ending for myself.
I already had a good ending because I left. I got out. There came a day I decided to stop tolerating abuse and disrespect in all its forms, from any and all sources and I started the long journey of sorting myself out. I didn’t need her to save herself in order for me to be saved.
I already saved me.
The journey to heal my issues started years ago but it didn’t really start taking off until my brain broke. I started to identify my self-destructive patterns and worked on eliminating them. I had to make changes, and that included ending friendships that required me to put myself and my needs last in order to maintain them. It included not associating with people who lie, manipulate, make stuff up, misrepresent themselves, or refuse to take responsibility for their own actions. People who were bottomless pits of broken neediness and learned helplessness had to go, and so did people who brought out my worst traits because I need no encouragement to be negative, cynical, and morose.
I had a few gaslighters in my life, and they had to go because I made a hard and fast rule that gaslighters aren’t allowed in my life anymore. Period. If I call you out on something shitty you did and your response is that you never did the thing so I must have imagined it, but if you did the thing you didn’t do it exactly like I remember it and it wasn’t that bad anyway, and since it wasn’t that bad I don’t need to make such a big deal about it, and you really only did the shitty thing because of a thing that I did but you’re totally willing to let it go and move on because that’s what good friends do…
Best of luck to you, but I’m out.
I have no energy anymore to try and convince anyone that their behaviour is mean or unacceptable. I’m over reassuring them that they don’t need to lie to me because I love them unconditionally. No more will I stress out about their crappy life choices while trying to convince them they deserve better.
I deserve better.
I’ve spent so much time wanting everyone else in my life to be happy, it took me a long time to realize two things:
One: Some people just don’t want to be happy, and that’s their business.
Two: I deserve to be happy, and that’s my business.
Suddenly (haha 40 years, a broken brain stem and a gazillion hours of therapy but all of a sudden…) life is very simple. I want to be happy and being happy is my mission. I can’t make other people happy, especially if they’re determined to stay miserable, and I no longer care to try. Their happiness (or lack thereof) is their business.
I’m getting really good at minding my own business.
My own business is making sure I’m happy and healthy. That’s it. I don’t particularly care anymore about anyone else’s bad decisions or psychological issues, that’s their business to sort out.
Odd that even though I’ve kept my focus on my own health and happiness, my loved ones are happy too. My husband loves when I’m happy. He’s thrilled that my good MS days are starting to outnumber the bad. My true friends (the ones that survived the cull haha) are happy for me being happy and needing my cane less. Everyone who matters in my life has been cheering me on for the past year while I worked through anxiety and PTSD, neurological deficits, physiotherapy, and trying to regain the ability to walk unassisted.
My circle got smaller but so much better.
I have a lot less going on right now, but I’m happier.
I don’t have two pennies to rub together but everything I value now doesn’t cost much anyway.
A couple of days ago, I did a 1.6 mile hike with 300 feet of elevation gain at the end, no cane. How do you put a price on that? My husband and I plan days of adventure just to hit the road and explore, and all it costs us is a tank of gas, and they’re the greatest days for us.
For years, stress was fuel. I’d intertwined excitement with drama and thought they were the same.
My life isn’t in the least bit ‘exciting’ anymore but it’s so, so good. 🙂
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We’re still raising money for intense neuro rehab in Calgary this winter. If you enjoy the blog and want to buy me a cup of coffee, click here. Many thanks!
