Describe your ideal week.
My ideal week is certainly not the one I’m having so far. To begin with, I had to go to work today. Actually, I didn’t have to. I have sick days and vacation time that I can use. And I can always just quit. Which I so badly want to do. Not because I don’t like my job. It’s a perfectly fine job. I just don’t want to have this kind of job. I’d like to spend my week at my home office…i.e. the back bedroom of our house that has most of our bookshelves filled with all of my books and the little trinkets and tchotchkes that I have displayed amongst the books. I want to sit at my desk with the light up keyboard that clicks loudly when you type on it. Seriously, look how cool this thing is! (You have to watch with the sound on, just sayin’).
I would spend my day in that space working on my book, or working on a new essay that I’d submit somewhere and hope it’s published. I might have the tv on in the background, because there is one in there. Or, I’d have my air pods in listening to my “high school nostalgia” playlist that I’ve been cultivating. The part of my book that I’m working on now is focused on that era of my life. Listening to songs from that time inspire me to keep writing.
But I’m not doing that this week. I was thinking maybe I should take advantage of some vacation days and sprinkle a day or two here and there to do that. In the meantime, I am at work today. On my lunch break now actually. And while my day hasn’t been bad, I faced a trigger that I am not equipped to handle.
My therapist has been great at helping me learn how to deal with things that trigger my past memories. How to move past the instant, stomach sickening anxiety that pops up. So far, I’ve gotten really good at dealing with the things that trigger memories of my childhood and memories from the job I left. But what I haven’t encountered yet. What I haven’t faced down, is a trigger from my miscarriage. It’s been 3 years and what I’ve been good at doing is suppressing the grief from that event. The pain and heartbreak from it is so great that when I do feel the tears coming on from thinking about it, I stop myself. The crying would be very intense I suspect. I don’t know why I won’t allow myself to experience the gut-wrenching, soul cleansing cry that I know I need. I just don’t.
Today though, I came directly face to face with a very different trigger connected to that experience. It wasn’t what someone said or something I saw on tv like it usually is. This time, I was literally at the same place. I was delivering flyers to a dentist’s office as part of my job. The dentist’s office was on the second floor of a medical building. The obgyn office that I used to go to was on the first floor. I didn’t realize they were in the same building. To get to the second floor, I had to walk past the entrance to the obgyn office. I glanced in before continuing up the stairs. It was difficult. Because the last time I walked into that building and into that 1st floor office, I had my husband with me. We were expecting to hear our baby’s heartbeat. Me, for the second time, he, for the first time. It was to be the last appointment before I could stop coming in every week. Everything had been fine up to that point. When we walked back out of the building, it wasn’t our baby’s heartbeat that we had heard. It was the words of my doctor saying “it’s a miscarriage”. Words that have haunted me ever since.
Miscarriages are tough in itself to deal with. Back then, I took exactly one day off of work to recover physically from it. I went back after that one day off because there were a lot of things happening at school that week for which I had been the coordinator. How could I possibly miss any of it? In another post, I’ll share what my “mentor” said to me about my miscarriage after I went back that really should have been the deal breaker, instead of waiting another two years for her to say even more viciously hurtful things.
Faced with that trigger today, I did the same thing I did 3 years ago. I quickly dried my tears and drove to the other places I had to go to deliver flyers. Essentially, I went back to work. What else could I do? And honestly, I don’t know what else I could have done. Feels foolish to take the rest of the day off. Why? So I can sit at home and cry about it? In reality, that’s probably what I need to do. But I have things scheduled for this afternoon that are important. Certainly not more important than my mental health, but, it’s what I have to do for now.
I have a regularly scheduled therapy appointment tomorrow afternoon. I think it’s time that my therapist and I start unpacking this trauma. This may be one of the hardest ones yet to deal with. But after three years, it’s past time.
So, not an ideal week by any means. It may be some time before I truly get one. But that’s o.k. I’m getting there. Both with my journey to being a full-time writer who gets paid, and also my journey to completely healing from my past traumas. It can be done.
Leave a Reply