Suddenly

Suddenly everything changes.  Just like that your world and everything you know is different.  You wonder how on earth life will ever be normal again.  When events occur suddenly there is no time to process what is happening, why and how.  Sometimes these sudden events can be happy, life changing events do not always mean bad but in my experience typically these events happen and rarely are the happy.  

Some years before I married hubby, I had a few (well more than a few but no-one has time for all that) sudden life changing events.  These events have shaped who I am today.  That phone call in the middle of the night, that piercing scream and knowing that my world had changed forever will live with me forever.  Putting my parents in the car, waving them away for Dad to take Mum to be with her siblings and knowing that they were counting on my brother and I to get through the next day or so for them and the business, I grew up so much in that instant. 

A few years later and many other sudden events later (non of them good), suddenly my life changed in a way I could never have imagined.  My partner, my love was gone.  It was as if it all happened in slow motion that afternoon.  Somehow I had a sense, an urgency, more than a need to speak to him, we had spoken a few times that day but there was this nagging sense that wouldn't go away.  I called no answer, I called again this time someone answered but told me he was not available which was odd it was his mobile.  I tried again this time it went to message bank.  I still had this incredibly sense of dread that something was not right.  I called the hospitals in the area but he either hadn't arrived there yet or they just weren't saying.  I called his dad but he wasn't answering, I called his sister and left a message declaring that I was sure that something had happened could she please call me as soon as she heard from him or had any news.  

What I know now is that the person who answered the phone was one of the police in attendance.  His dad wasn't answering his phone on purpose and his sister never got the message her partner erased it when he heard my voice because he knew.  I was filled with a complete sense of dread (I was well passed the worry, anxiety and even panic) as I drove home in Sydney traffic constantly re-dialing, even calling my parents in case they had heard from him.  I had not long gotten in the door and the phone rang and suddenly my world collapsed around me, this time it was my body screaming, my body collapsing, my brain not taking in the words that were being said to me.  He was dead, a workplace accident.  Suddenly, everything changed in that moment.  I was different, my life was different, my future would be different.  

The happy ending to that story is that my husband is a wonderful man, who was a good mate of mine in the wings, who stood by me and supported me and slowly helped me to know love again.  Gently he walked with me until I was ready.  One day I was and suddenly much to my surprise he wanted to spend the rest of his life with me!  Perhaps if he'd known what was ahead of us he may have run while he still had a chance but I suspect he would have stayed he's pretty great like that!  

It could be argued that my world changed suddenly again this year.  I suspect that when everything fell apart it felt sudden to everyone including me.  Though in reality my breakdown was not really sudden but a very long, slow buildup with an extremely sudden event that made all of us sit up and take notice.  

Yesterday, it was my oldest's birthday,  funnily enough even this event in my life was sudden, unexpected and completely unplanned.  The quick back story is that I had been told many years earlier that babies would not be in my future.  So, finding out I was pregnant just after my 30th birthday party was very sudden and unexpected.  This was one of the very rare sudden events that was a happy one for me.  I would love to say the pregnancy was long, uneventful with no sudden changes but this was not to be.  Even though it was a complicated and difficult in the end his birth was still sudden and in an instant I knew my life would never be the same.  Years later my life would change suddenly again when we thought we were having baby number two but the ultrasound showed baby two AND three, again life was going to be different and it all happened suddenly.  (Anyone who has been told they are expecting multiples will understand this feeling - and in case you are wondering NO you cannot do anything to try to have or to avoid having multiples!) 

Yesterday, we travelled to a funeral.  We said goodbye to a friend.  Someone that my hubby had known for over 20 years and me just a bit less.  For his wife and son though a week earlier their lives had changed suddenly with no warning, no build up and no time to take in what was to come.  My heart aches for them I understand how profoundly that sudden change can impact your life, your being, and everything you think you know.  They are strong, they have each other and will draw comfort and strength from each other and their wider families and communities.  None of that will dent the impact of how a moment in time can change everything so suddenly, so profoundly that their lives will never be the same.  

Sometimes events that happen suddenly can be great, they give those of us prone to anxiety no time to think we simply have to react.  Sometimes the thinking is what holds us back from something that could be great.  Sadly though, in my experience most events that happen suddenly are not good and will not have happy endings.  My theory on why things that happen suddenly are much harder is time.  There is no time to think, no time to process, no time to come to terms with things before life takes over and we have to go through the motions.  When things happen suddenly we have to process and live at the same time. 

Whether it be good or bad something that happens suddenly will change you profoundly and forever.  

hugs
Cathy xoxo

Maybe yes, Maybe No ...

It's been a while since I have had anything to say.  In a way that is not exactly true, my head is so completely full with so many thoughts but at the same time feels like it is full of cotton wool.  It is actually really hard to find one thought and turn that into something that makes sense.

Life is still a challenge, I actually think this is really the new normal for now at least.  Physically I am doing much better.  In fact my physio thinks I am nice and strong now.  I am still quite dizzy most days and my balance is still not quite there but overall from where I was to where I am physically she is really happy.  I need to keep doing what I am doing and keep using the stick so that I don't fall over  if I have a dizzy spell.  I also read that I have had a huge blow to my independence and that is for now my Dr does not believe that I have the cognitive function to hold a Drivers Licence.  While at the moment this doesn't feel so bad, I know that the reality of that will set in one day when I am feeling a bit better and more aware and want to just drive.

The big uphill climb is my mental health.  Apparently I had my 29th session with my psychologist this week, I say apparently because I am still very much living by my journal writings.  If it is not written down or recorded in someway then for now it pretty much hasn't happened.

Life can be pretty difficult when you live through other people filling in your gaps and reading over journals.  It can be really hard to piece together what is happening and why.  What I do understand is that this form of amnesia is called dissociative amnesia and is predominantly related to anything that relates to me and my place in the world.  The amnesia, balance, dizziness and the headaches that I seem to have written about a few times are forms of protection.  My brain is still very much operating in safe mode and does all of these things to in a sense force me to stop and sit and feel.

Functional Neurological Symptom Disorder is the formal diagnosis (with a pretty decent side dish of depression, anxiety and PTSD.)  FNSD can be a really confusing term but essentially if we think of the brain as a computer this is a software issue not hardware.  Continuing with that analogy for me the amnesia is a lot like that all of my memories for a very, very long time have been sitting in my working RAM and nothing has been adequately processed and filed away.  This is the process that I need to do now and I am in the fortunate situation of having a lot of love and support around me to be able to do this while my brain is in safe mode.  Unfortunately, the process is going to be long and quite possibly emotionally painful for me.

I am not 100% sure why this has happened or why I didn't ever process events in my life properly.  What I can say is that perhaps there will be no reason for this, perhaps there will, perhaps I will never know.  For now though I need to try to learn to sit with fear, the fear and uncertainty of the future, the fear of processing the past, the fear of letting go and not controlling everything, you name it I most likely have some fear surrounding it.  This goes for the good things too.  I still get incredibly anxious about life, seeing people, going out and about, I suspect a lot of this is attached to the amnesia issues but for now we don't know.  What I know is that I am climbing out slowly of the hole I have found myself in but first I need to dig through all the dirt that has fallen in and cover over the hole and be open to what will come.  This for me is probably the hardest part of all the unknown and that the end of my story is not written.

I will leave you with this Chinese Proverb:



hugs 
Cathy xoxo

For more information about Functional Neurological Symptom Disorder

Change ...

Change is an inevitable part of life.  Change will happen regardless of how hard we try to hold on and stop it.  Change is not something that I leap at enthusiastically, in fact it would be better to describe my feelings on change as something I am dragged to kicking and screaming all while digging my heels in trying to hold onto what is or has been.

I am not sure what about change it is that I don't like.  According to the Harvard Business Review the top ten reasons that people resist change are:

*  loss of control
*  uncertainty
*  when it takes you by surprise
*  everything is different
*  loss of face
*  fear of appearing incompetent
*  can involve extra work
*  the ripple effect of the change
*  historical reasons
*  very occasionally the threat change poses is real.

Looking at this list alone starts to raise my anxiety levels.  My mind is racing off to faraway places, times, events that haven't even had time to happen yet.  I have catastrophised every single possibility even the good ones.

I wonder if my fear of change came before my anxiety or if my anxiety was as a result of lots of change that has occurred that was a) out of my control and b) in many cases resulted in difficult or traumatic outcomes of varying degrees.

I have always been the type of person that likes to know how things turn out before they happen.  I will read the first and last chapters of the book to determine whether I read the middle based on how it ends.  I get frustrated with TV shows that have series long story arcs and there is no resolution in the one hour time slot and have been known to stop watching a series for this very reason until the entire series is available on DVD so I can binge from start to finish.  I am fairly sure I wasn't always like this (my parents might argue differently.)  I am almost 100% positive that my need to control every situation has gotten worse as I have gotten older (or quite possibly more anxious without realising that was a result.)

I would say that I have always been headstrong others would perhaps say bossy and I like things to go my own way.  I truly believe that the reason for this is because I was/am so scared of the uncertainty of the change, I was/am scared of how different things would be.  I cannot control how others will cope with the change and I project my feelings about it onto them (ripple effect.)  Many, many times in my life the change whatever it may have been moving house, moving schools, having no friends, being bullied, death, cancer, and so much more where things that simply happened to me, around me or to my loved ones.  That is so very scary so for me the perceived threat (or my catastrophised thoughts of the future from the change) has in many cases been very real.

I also have this ridiculous fear of letting people down so I can think of a time when I was editing a publication for an organisation, it had a very small circulation varying of between 3-5000 copies.  I had been editing for a number of years and had taken on more responsibility and the magazine was in reality one thing I didn't need on my plate but I struggled with letting it go.  I knew that once I did that things would change with it.  I can look back now with a little bit of self-reflection and hindsight and see that it wasn't the change of the magazine that I didn't want I was scared that if things changed this meant that all the blood, sweat and tears I had put in and the countless hours I spent away from my family was for nothing, because by changing the magazine in my irrational, crazy little head that meant that people weren't happy with my work and I had been doing it wrong the whole time and I had let people down that I loved and respected.  I truly believed this (and I think still a part of me still does) but I also understand that change is inevitable and that change can be necessary to stay relevant and current, which in itself is absolutely no reflection on my efforts.

I really want to be a 'go with the flow' type of gal but I just can't do it.  It goes against everything in me and I really struggle to enjoy things if I don't know what is going to happen.  If someone was to suggest going for a drive that would fill me with dread.  Where are we going, why, how long will we be gone, what is the purpose and on.  I find it really hard to just sit back and take in the scenery of the drive or that sometimes in life there is no other purpose than just to get out of the house and do something different.  I have certainly never been a jump in the car with a few clothes go travelling kind of gal.  I am much better if I know where, when, why and how (and to be the driver!) there is a bigger chance I will enjoy things and not ruin it for everyone else if I know all of this in advance.

Lots of change in life can bring beautiful outcomes like the biggest change when I discovered I was pregnant after being told I would never have children that is a huge thing to get your head around.  I have amazing children as a result of this change in my life they are the light of my life but boy that has been a huge learning curve in letting go, this is such a hard thing to do when every fibre of your being fights against it.

You would think I would have learnt through having children is that you cannot control everything, change will happen whether you like it or not but no I didn't learn that lesson.  So perhaps that is what this season in my life is all about it is about learning to accept that which I cannot change and the strength to cope with the change that does happen.  I don't think it is as much about changing who I am but more learning to love who I am and get it to work for me instead of against me.  Let's face it we can never go back to what has been because we are different people, we are older, in some cases wiser and very possibly we in our heads have romanticised the past it can never be that way again.  We need to live in the moment and enjoy things for what they are.

Change is not always bad contrary to what I tell myself.  Change can be amazing so I am told.  I doubt I will ever be someone who leaps feet first into change but maybe one day I can at least go along more willingingly and far less fearful than I am.  Let's face it without change a caterpillar would always just be a big fat grub instead of the beautiful butterfly it becomes through change.  Robin Sharma says "Change is hard at first, messy in the middle and gorgeous at the end."  Just like the butterfly!

image source:  butterflysite.com

How are you with change?  Do you like it?  Love & thrive on it?  Or hate it just like me?  Tell me your stories.

Big Love 

Cathy xoxo