Yesterday was the first day since I started my daily writing challenge at the beginning of December that I didn’t write. I made it almost two months without fucking up. I’m going to try and continue to make it the rest of the year. I won’t be perfect, I may fuck up. The point of this journey is growth and part of my growth is teaching myself that that is okay.
Yesterday started with taking one of my pups to the vet cause she had stopped eating. She was diagnosed with lymphoma last year and went through chemo, and is now one year in remission. Her battle with cancer has made me extra protective of her and extra nervous about losing her, so I suspected some GI problem, but my biggest fear was the cancer was back. My vet ran bloodwork and sent us to a specialty hospital/ER about two hours away. The cancer wasn’t back, or isn’t as far as we know right now, but instead she has IMHA. I won’t go in depth into that condition, but the short version is a fair to guarded prognosis with a estimated 65% chance of survival after days or a week of hospitalization with medication and blood transfusions. I was a mess, I still am. I thought about writing when I got home, it didn’t happen. I thought about doing homework too, it didn’t happen. Aside from a short trip out to bring my niece home from work because she was considering walking 3 miles in 1 degree weather which was not happening on my watch, and talking to the doctor again about Kiwi a bit after midnight, I really wasn’t in any shape to do anything. I’m still not, but homework has to happen, so I am going to at least try to do that now.
Anyway, I feel crappier because of not doing anything that I see as useful and productive, and because I failed to write yesterday or do homework. Which teaches me something very important. I may have a lot of self confidence, I don’t think I’m shitty in any way for not being functional right now, but I need to learn to forgive myself. I can fail to meet my standards for myself and still maintain my self esteem because I don’t connect individual actions with my overall self image, as long as I’m not violating my core morals. But that doesn’t mean I’m immune from feeling like a failure for a specific action or lack there of. It doesn’t mean I’m not hard on myself. And right now is not an appropriate time to be hard on myself. It isn’t helpful or reasonable, and I need to foster forgiveness and compassion for myself instead. So there is my lesson for the day, I have yet to figure out the exact hows of doing so. Normally I learn through my writing, this process teaches me a lot about myself. Today I learn from what happened when I failed to complete my writing, and I will use that learning to better myself even more.
An Explosion of Rainbows 