Trudging

Tired and extremely anxious because my housemate had heart pain all night — she is off to the clinic for tests and may need to see a specialist.

Giving myself permission to take baby steps today, just getting  over one hurdle and experiencing one fear at a time. The concept of baby steps  feels manageable, just.

The sweet Great Dane is behaving like a large glossy thug and has chased the small dogs around the house, eaten a dish towel and chewed paint off  a table leg because he detects that my energy is too low to  quell his naughtiness. He growled at me while trying to hide under the chewed table with the chewed dish cloth in his mouth, wagging his tail to show he was not growling  in a hostile manner.

Various nursing colleagues, neighbours and friends have been around to sit in the kitchen and offer advice and drink coffee. I have found over many years that  there are people who want to help but balk at doing it, people who feel their boundaries are  threatened by the idea of helping because they have been used or taken advantage of  too often so that helping always feels like enabling, people for whom helping is synonymous with controlling,  people who are too inept to be of any practical help at all, people who only understand conditional notions of helping (what is in it for me?)  and those few who help unstintingly and know something about helping as empowerment. In the Third World, this last is what counts.

This is when I am grateful for routines, the same routines and  simple little structures I write about nearly every day. There is a garden to be watered, animals to be fed,  meals to be made, pages of writing that will not write themselves. I can’t indulge the luxury of procrastination or bills won’t get paid. Work, self-care and  household tasks keep anxiety at bay and give me a way to just carry on while waiting for news.

Trudging I suppose. Every road we take or choose involves a fair amount of trudging.

 

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