With Samhain just passed, we begin a new year and another turn of the wheel. I have been thinking about what I want for this year.
This year, I want to be the River. I want to flow over and under and around the obstacles that crop up in my path, moving ever onward toward my goals. I want to rush wildly with excitement, burble over with laughter often, move steadily forward on the day to day, and rest still and calm when I need to. I will be the River.
I want to pause to take better care of myself. I have never been great at self care. I have a tendency to take care of everything else before turning my focus on me. It's been especially bad since my parents passed away. Everything got shoved to the back for a year to deal with the legal, financial, and logistical details surrounding their deaths and managing the estate. That took all of my focus. I didn't even feel like I could let myself grieve until it was all taken care of because I was afraid I would fall apart. The next year was full of a mix of delayed grief and guilt over questions of if I had done everything right the prior year. Did I honor them and respect their memory enough? Was I respectful of what was left behind? I still don't know. The grief and sense of being adrift overwhelm me sometimes. No living parents, no living siblings, disconnected physically and emotionally from the extended family I do have left. They never call or write. I never hear from them without being the one to reach out. Without my parents as the binding fiber, I have lost the sense of connection I have always had with my family. Intellectually, I realize there is nothing I can do about any of that. Emotionally, it feels like the universe telling me that the feelings of isolation and not "fiting in" that I experienced growing up have all been proven correct. Regardless of why or why not, maybe it is just time to move on and find a new definition of myself without them or at least separate from them. I can't continue to define my worth by home much they outwardly show they care.
Over the past few years, my physical health has started to take hits too. I know part of it is from the stress of everything above.
- My anxiety has been extremely high. My blood pressure has been higher than it should be, and I know the two are related to a certain extent. I've recently sought evaluation and medication for that.
- Sleep has always been a struggle for me, but my quality and quantity of sleep has deteriorated even more in the past few years. I am exhausted but not sleepy. When my brain should be winding down for the day in prep for sleep, it's just getting a second wind to go, go, go throughout the night. It's getting harder to pull myself out of bed in the morning because I haven't been able to get to sleep the prior night. I am Vitamin D deficient, and I am taking meds for that. I am anemic, and I am taking meds for that. My thyroid glands are underactive, and I am taking meds for that. Every medical condition I have causes fatigue, and yet, I can't fall asleep at a decent hour. It's kind of ridiculous. I have had two at-home sleep studies so far because my insurance will not cover an in-lab one to try and figure out any underlying medical causes. I should have results for the last test later this week. Hopefully it will show something conclusive or at least help cross some potential causes off the list.
- I need to take better care of my teeth. I have been avoiding the dentist like the plague for the last few years. Part of it was the Covid pandemic. Part of it was the fact that my father died because of anesthetic toxicity due to a miscalculation at the dentist office. I realize that I do not see the same dentist and that I have never heard of anything similar happening to anyone else. My anxiety doesn't care about that though. All my anxiety knows is that my dad was completely fine, he he sat down in the dentist chair to have some work done, and he was brain dead less than an hour later. It's not rational. I get that. But it's what I think of every time I go to schedule a cleaning. I have scheduled one for next month though. Hopefully I won't freak out.
- I want to do a better job of being more physically active after the holidays. I would love to lose some excess weight. I want to improve my mobility, decrease stress on my body, and hopefully just generally feel better and feel better about myself overall.
Financially, I want to really focus on lowering and eliminating debt this year. We had to use a chunk of savings this year to do house and car repairs and replace a piece of furniture that we hadn't anticipated replacing for a while into the future. It makes me nervous to have so little in savings. And of course with student loans reactivating, unlike all of the promises claimed, my monthly payments went up instead of down. It sucks, but nothing I can do about that. One loan will pay off in about three months, which will free up a bit of money that I can add onto the monthly payment for a credit card. I want to focus on paying extra toward those with the highest interest to lower my overall debt to income ratio.
What will I find this time next year? Hopefully a happier, healthier, more financially secure me. That's what I am hoping for anyway. It won't be easy, but then nothing worth it ever seems to be.
