Uncertain : today’s update

Uncertain of what to write about today.. I like to do a morning journal WordPress entry most days just to touch base with myself and I share all my blogs in my twice weekly therapy sessions too. I am feeling pretty peaceful today I just had a bit of traumatic recall this morning though as my sister is going to go in for surgery later in the year and is off to see the surgeon in another city next week and that called to mind the time I drove Mum to Sydney to meet her knee surgeon for the operation that went horribly wrong. She ended up developing thrombosis that nearly killed her and I was the only one well enough to go down to support her one day out of having painful root canal therapy on my tooth.. I checked into a hotel for four nights and walked each day to the hospital to see her and she was in terrible pain a lot of the time and at that stage she was already nearly 90 years old. I remember standing outside her room crying at seeing her in pain from deep cuts that went from hip to knee and knee to ankle and her male nurse who was Cambodian and called ‘Bean’ said to Mum “Your daughter…NOT STRONG… she was crying like a baby’.

This is what empaths do, we feel others pain and it must have resonated too as it took me back to being in such agony in skeletal traction when the steel pin moved in the top of the lower leg bones and I developed an infection.. Today I thought of all of this in relation to my sister..she will have to travel there alone and at this stage I don’t know if I can give support again, I have had so many years of supporting family through illnesses and this is elective surgery to make her more comfortable after breast cancer in that it is cosmetic and not strictly necessary… I myself would rather just let my body rest after cancer not make changes to make it look more appealing, that said I respect my sister’s right to make that choice and she can support herself through it.

Apart from that I am feeling good today… I feel in a good place right now.. yes I still have a lot of fears over certain things but I am grateful for feeling a bit freer these days in my body and the sense of hope I have that I can make myself happy through my own actions and acceptance of life.. At times those painful traumatic memories come back to besiege me and I cry at what my Mum had to suffer through in those final years…. watching her daughter attempt suicide was hard but sadly there were times she cut her down energetically, my sister was only ever trying to come to life after her marriage but I think sadly our families ideals of overworking, emotional neglect and lack of empathy as well as an over concern with appearances and less concern with nurture made all of our lives far tougher than they needed to be and may have been a contributing factor in marital breakdown…

Getting clearer on my own values helps me to live a happier life, just because I was raised in a family with certain values it doesn’t mean I necessarily share them… and I can still offer love to a point though at times when I see the lack of empathy aspect it makes my blood run cold. I could never have been so distant and detached and I actually think its a sign of strength to be able to feel another person’s pain.. yes we do need to make a demarcation between what is and is not ours… and yet we are put on earth to share with, care for and about others…how can we truly feel for others if we narcissitically cut down life, deaden or numb our bodies and sacrifice our creaturely feelings, longings, dreams and hungers. Yet so many do this.. Narcissists become conditioned over time not to feel how it is for a child to long and depend and need and meet an unfeeling stone wall.. it truly is a horrific thing to happen to a heart that it gets so severely cut off from truly being alive in a suffering mortal body…