Kinda blue and some thoughts on attitude

I felt a sadness again today, I started to long for family and feel sad not to be able to go to the coast house where my sister and her son are. I realised that its best not to dwell on it, all kinds of thoughts go through my mind about how I detached and kept to myself a lot after getting sober. I didn’t . go this nephew’s wedding when he married in 2006. I was deep in solitude, breakdown and depression after my marriage ended the two years before and then suffered the head injury. Maybe my nephew just doesn’t think I care. I just don’t know.. he has never made one attempt to reach out to me since moving back to my home town 15 months ago. But when I read my Al Anon literature I realise I am making assumptions and worrying about things I may not have caused at all. I just don’t seem to fit in to family and I get the feeling from my other sister’s sons I am wanted and loved but not from this other side of the family. I am sure they are just getting on with their life and its self punishing to carry on being self obsessed with feeling excluded, its showing perhaps a bit of self centred fear.

On a happy note I caught up with one of my good friends from childhood yesterday for lunch. We were close growing up, but when the trauma hit me between the ages of 17 and 23 it took me away from this friend and obliterated a lot of the memories. She posted a few photos on Facebook of her and her daughters attending the Elton John concert in Sydney last week with note of how it took her right back to listening to the album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in my living room in the early 70s. Funny thing is I don’t remember listening to it with her, only alone and I usually came home to an empty house so I listened to it most afternoons in my early teens before Dad arrived home at 5 pm.

In fact the other night listening to some other favourite 70s songs I was so immediately back there in that house No 88 that we lived in around the period leading up to my father’s illness and death in 1985 and I had fond memories of my Dad, I surprised myself by crying as I realised how separate I feel at times from the love of others. I read a heartfelt blog which took the form of a letter a son in recovery wrote to his father who had died and remained silent a lot of the time yesterday. It really resonated. There are often only memories of great emotional distance and fear when I think of my Dad and I guess you could say he wasn’t available emotionally but then, come to think of it, just how many fathers were back in the 1970s and 80s?

People tell you all the time to get over past deaths or that it happened years ago but the truth is losing a parent in early years or even up to your 20s has a powerful impact on your life. And being sent away after such a death and then having a major relationship end in which you had two terminations of pregnancy was also an enormous amount to go through and deeply marked me. If I feel disconnected from family now, maybe those feelings become stronger because I don’t have my own kids, not that I necessarily regret that decision but I do love children and my Mum was an only child too, while Dad left all his siblings behind in Holland and ended up not having much to do with them at all, even though his younger brother also ended up immigrating to Australia, as Dad got more upwardly mobile we began to see less and less of my Uncle too.

I wonder if I should just find my peace in solitude. Maybe continuing to nurture feelings of sadness over what is not available or given is not healthy. In Al Anon we are told to look to the attitudes we form and try not to get stuck in self pity. I can lift my mood on any day by noticing what I DO have or can do to make myself feel engaged and uplifted, or peaceful and happy. Today it has been resting. I actually took to bed for a rest for a while and to slow down consciously on the last day of 2019. I went out for a short while to have a cup of coffee and get my groceries and made a nice lunch, however on the way home I managed to give myself an anxiety attack by judging and worrying. I get triggered at the supermarket when I see the amount of merchandise including items that will just end up becoming even more ‘junk’, but I noticed after stopping how much my own anxious thoughts can then drive me into a beat up. I ended up having a bad panic attack after getting home and unpacking all my groceries.

I bought Matt Haig’s book Notes on a Nervous Planet the other day. He writes on worry and the speeding up of modern life siting this as a cause or trigger for much modern anxiety. The rise of technology has been exponential in a very small amount of time, for myself I find I operate better keeping my time on technology to a minimum, however I do enjoy just browsing through certain parts of it. Lately, I make sure I engage in the present non technological moment as much as I can first up after rising. That said WordPress is my refuge and the minute I log on here I do feel refreshed, however this afternoon it was just so comforting to rest in the silence in my room and get in touch with my body and my breath, to consciously feel the weight of gravity in body connecting with the softness and support of the doona and mattress while allowing my mind to drift in reverie. At times my mind just gets to busy and I get too busy doing doing doing. Its moments of stopping that I notice refresh me and its moments of turning my thoughts off from a negative or sad focus that brings me down that helps me feel more peaceful. I am all for letting the genuine sad feeling rises up and flows, that is a kind of release really when it just happens naturally as opposed to being generated by thinking over and over and over of the sad situation and yet I can also look for the peace and comfort and happiness in this day, and practice one of my favourite AA sayings “Easy Does It!”