Just for today

I really struggled this morning.  My PTSD symptoms were intense and I could not get my energy moving forward.  I got collapsed in foetal position on the bed with thoughts of all the things I did wrong or could have done better.  I spoke to a friend who really struggled in a similar way yesterday and today I had to call my therapist as I had had a very intense dream about my dead father and my sister.   I had watched a documentary on Australia singer songwriter, Paul Kelly last night and his father died when he was 10.  Earlier in the programme they spoke of how he used heroin for 20 years but managed to get off it.  It was not until later they mentioned the death of his father.  When I looked at his birthchart, like me he has Sun square to Neptune (though in different signs as he was born in 1955), when his Sun progressed (the Sun moves a degree ahead for any year we live) to exactly square Neptune he was 8 or 9, his father died and then he became very interested in writing poetry, but it seems in a very large Catholic family he was conditioned to ‘get on with it’ and swallow his grief.  Many years later one of his wives came in to find him collapsed over the desk crying. When she tried to comfort Paul and ask him what was wrong he said that he just had a memory of his father and that he felt he was beginning to open his heart to his loss.  I wondered this morning if watching this triggered my own loss.  My sister who doesn’t show emotion and was born a year before Paul Kelly also has Saturn in Scorpio.  In this placement people’s deep feelings around mortality, powerlessness, deep feeling and death can be blocked off or buried.  In the dream I was angry with my sister for not showing much emotion and in the dream both she and Dad were getting fat and bloated.

Anyway as I started out this blog, I said that today I am struggling and just for today came to mind, when I was a bit beaten down and crying in my room and only saw mess and failure.  I picked up my little Rumi quotes cards and read this :

The moment you accept what troubles you have been given, the door will OPEN.

Accepting that into my heart kept my heart open and I did an exercise that the body therapist gave to me a while back.  I looked for an object of beauty in my room, a patterned cushion of pink and turquoise and I put my focus on it, as a reminder of the beauty around me.  I know it is only an inanimate object but looking at it gave me peace and the desire to write this blog now as an affirmation of looking for what there may be to celebrate or build upon in the life that remains, flawed and imperfect as it may seem to be at times.

I thought sadly today of how I was so angry with my mother and my sister after my older sister died that on the day they came around to see me after visiting the cemetery to organise a few things, I was in a full blown panic attack and screamed at them to go away.  I see now, sadly how much grief there was in that anger and non acceptance too, of them in all their flawed humanity.  My Mum and sister are not hard people they are very soft inside, but they both have lot of defences, insecurities and fears which manifest in a rigid way at times.  And both struggle to open up to reveal any emotion around others.  My sister often looks severe and can be very judgemental sometimes but I have seen her softer side at times too.  My anger in the dream at not being able to be supported and embraced to grieve after my father died is real, but it comes out of hurt and pain.  Anger tells me only part of the story, there are deeper layers to it.

I count my blessings that due to chosing sobriety and recovery just under 24 years ago I have in later years been able to grieve.  I have not been able to build much yet, but have been treading water for the past 14 years, really.  But I am alive today, I am relatively sane and I have moderately good health.  Just for today I am going to focus on those while remembering too the pain I have lived through as so many, many others do.  I am not alone and neither are you, we are all in this together.