Yesterday is Where I Left it.

 

Yesterday I saw a soldier demon try and claw its way out of a little girl. Constantine

Yesterday, all my trouble seemed so far away. The Beatles

Wait, no yesterday was the trouble and I was the little girl with the demon in her, wanting out.

I live with chronic pain. I just do. I don’t talk about it often. I haven’t had more than a week below a 3/10 since Arizona, and that was 7 days out of 7 years. I miss that chiropractor like oxygen. I swear she had angel wings and a halo. Her hands were made of magic and she rearranged my bones into a less painful configuration for a time.

I don’t talk about it often because to speak of pain aloud gives it acknowledgment and thereby power over me.

I hurt, and that’s okay. I am used to it and most days it doesn’t bother me. And on the days it does, I either let it or I don’t. Some days I have no choice and it huffs and it puffs and it blows my house down. So I nap and cry and put ice packs in interesting places and wait it out. All storms pass.

I am in control over my own damned self.
I manufacture my own happiness and other emotions in my own mind.

Giant said something the other day and I was quick to correct him.
He said “I can’t come running over and make you a happy Sarah.”
No you can’t, you can add to it, but you can’t create it with your presence or take it away with your absence.
My sadness also belongs to me and me alone.
I cried rivers over him, which flowed into oceans, but they were my own.
I could have stopped at any time, but I chose to go with the flow and see where it took me. Which is here, and here is good. I float.

4-6 days a year I hit an 8.
10/10 being active labor or the first while after the car crash that started all of this.

Yesterday was an 8.5

When I say I live with chronic pain I mean she sleeps with me every night, I try to roll over and ignore her, but she wakes me up sometimes. She sits with me in the car and I avoid acknowledgement until about hour four then she sits in my lap and weighs heavy on my legs and lower back.

I made a decision upon a farm couch 7 years ago.

There is no parallel universe with any version of me who would not have stubborned herself up off that couch. There is no doppelganger of mine that convalesced and died there. Sisterwife lays there dying now, her choice, not mine.

There are days where I hurt so bad that I cry hysterically and this opens me up to emotional outbursts that I cannot control. But there are days when I don’t. I live for those. I love being in the water because I float myself down to a 2.5. The stretching and cardio I get on the pole and the endorphins released during sex lessens the pain as well, or distracts me the same way opioids do. The pain is there and I simply don’t care.

Apparently poles of all kinds are good things for me.

I take the same attitude with my PTSD. I don’t have it. It has a key to my house and pops by now and again to remind me something bad happened years ago. But I have mentally put so much space between me and then, it’s like watching an old movie clip. If I put effort in I can remember the whole film, but why would I? I didn’t do that to me, someone else did and they are long gone and far, far away. I’m in no clear or present danger. Those little flashes are just warning lights when I veer down a familiar path. So I leave.

I do not understand why we would prolong our suffering. Wasn’t it bad enough the first time?

I didn’t do those thing to me, someone else did. Not my problem. I practice kindness not cruelty because I can. The only person I can control is myself, and these are my choices.

Let go and let god.

Everything is as it should be.

This too shall pass.

Laugh and smile as often as possible and pass it on to others.

I live for belly laughs, good food, better sex, writing, loving and learning.

Yesterday all of those things seemed really far away.

Yesterday don’t matter ‘cos it’s gone. Rolling Stones

Today is a whole new glorious day.