How’d That Happen?

While struggling to fight my way out of whatever swamp I had become lost in, I realized two things:

1. Life was still going on around me; and

2. Love still reigned supreme.

It was not quite noon I believe, when I felt that I had stopped breathing. Only in my mind of course, but I still felt it all the way to my toes. I had started crying…and couldn’t stop. I got up from my desk and shut and locked both of my office doors. I got my doctor’s nurse on the phone, “Bare with me,” I cried. And spit out the words, “Please, I need some help – I can’t stop crying. I can’t breathe, I can’t think, I can’t talk.” We talked for what seemed like hours, well she listened more than talked, while I heaved words out as best I could. I was drowning in my own tears. Is this what a mental breakdown feels like?

After we hung up, after she promised she’d call me back after she talked to my doctor, I couldn’t get up to unlock my doors. People needed me but right at that moment I was the only one in the world. They waited.

She called back. It seemed a medication change was in order. Ya think????

I then thought maybe a call to my neurologist would help. He wasn’t in, but the nurse would have him call me the next day. Ok. Ok.

The next week he calls. His words: “I’m telling you what I told you the last time you were in my office. I want you to see the psychiatrist I have already referred you too.”

My reply: “And I’m telling you what I told you last time I was in your office. I can’t afford to pay the deductible. And besides, its not me that’s crazy, it’s all these other people around me that are causing me all this stress.”

His retort: “Oh my girl, you are in SUCH denial.”

I honestly couldn’t think of anything to say to him except, “ok, I’ll get back with you about that.”

I felt like such a wimp.

But after a change in medication and almost three weeks of mostly sleeping…I have stopped crying. I am feeling better and the fog has cleared a bit.

I don’t want to go through that again. And really don’t know why it happened then. Unless it really was the medication I was on and had been on about three years. Did my body chemistry suddenly change?

Who knows?

But I think I’m back.

Stealing Nickels and Smelling Palmolive Dish Detergent

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains; another, a moonlit beach; a third, a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years. Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.

~Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

Earlier today while sitting at the park with Little Miss ASIJ, before the wind and rain came, and while watching her swing so high I thought a couple of times she had touched the sky, I remembered when I used to come to this park as a teenager. On Sunday after church sometimes in the summer, me and a bunch of friends would come here and just walk around and sit and relax and enjoy the flowers and drink coke and eat potato chips. I wondered where all of them might have gotten off to in life and who might be dead and who might still be alive. And what would all of our lives be like if we had made different choices. Oh I got lost in that one and came to the same conclusion I always come to…if things had been different, if I had made different choices, I might not have Mr. ASIJ and Little Miss ASIJ in my life today. I can’t stand that thought so I always think of something else real fast. Then all of a sudden Little Miss ASIJ was beside me saying let’s go to the slides.

Walking over to the slides, I caught a scent in the air and instantly I felt Pensacola, Florida. Scents can do that to me ~ whisk me away to another place and time. I was about 8 yrs. old I think and was in the car with my Aunt E and Uncle J, Cousin R and Cousin J. I had swiped some of Cousin R’s nickels, then lied to my Aunt E about where I got them. I have never told anyone this and I don’t know why I remembered it today. There now…I said it…I stole some of my cousin’s nickels one time when I was a kid. Sure felt good to get it out. Good grief, I didn’t steal all of them – I left her some.

I try to always have a bottle of Palmolive Dish Detergent in my kitchen. If I’m missing my Mom really bad, I fill the sink full of hot sudsy Palmolive water. Just one whiff and I’m standing in my childhood home kitchen, washing dishes and laughing with Momma.

The way the air feels can do that too. Sometimes when I walk outside, the air will feel the way it did when I was in another city and I can close my eyes and just let myself go back. It’s hard to describe how air feels and sometimes its lighter than other times. Different cities have different feeling air. Even different areas of the same city might have different feeling air. It’s always very brief when this happens and I sometimes wonder how the air from one city can just happen to make an appearance in another city for only a minute or two. But always, the air goes back to feeling like its supposed to and the memories are gone.

I just read back over that last paragraph and I think I must be very weird.

But I enjoy being able to do that.

After Little Miss ASIJ got through at the slides, while walking back to our truck, I caught the scent of honeysuckles. For just a split second I was standing out behind the car in the parking lot of my Mom’s chiropractor, waiting for her appointment to be over. I was pulling the little stems out of the flowers and sucking the nectar off.

I sure do miss my Mom…and I miss being a kid.

Stop Whining ~ Stop Belly-achin’ ~ Slap a Smile on Your Face and BE HAPPY :)

Sister, there were people who went to sleep last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. And those dead folks would give anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of plowing. So you watch yourself about complaining. What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.

Maya Angelou, (Quoting Her Grandmother)

This morning I’ve been reading this blog about a group of bloggers who sponsor children through Compassion International that got together and took a trip to meet those they sponsor.

Amazing.

I am once again reminded I have NOTHING to complain about.

EVER.

I am so blessed.

If you are a follower of Abraham-Hicks or are hip to any of the Law of Attraction teachings, you will know what I’m talking about when I say that if you beat the drum of ‘what is’, you get more of ‘what is’. When I was married to Mr. Ex, he used to get so frustrated with me because he said I complained too much. I would reply to him that I was NOT complaining, I was merely stating facts. Ladies and gentlemen, hear me now…I was complaining and at the same time attracting more of what I was complaining about into my life. Some days I’m still reeling from the repercussions of all that I have created in my own life through the years by default. Of course, I didn’t know at the time I was doing it, but that doesn’t change this very important universal law:

What you focus on, you attract to you…into you life…into your reality.

So, how do I turn this around? Can what I’ve done be undone?

The answers to those questions is what I’m trying to find these days. And I’ve been quite successful in finding many of the answers I seek. Putting them into practice has been tough in some situations, and it seems on many days I have to start all over but I can truthfully say that I’m not the same person that I was even two years ago. I know my life CAN and IS BEING turned around because I see the changes every day.

I now can see the beauty in everything.

I now can love the unlovable – whoa Nellie…somedays THAT’S a tough one and yes, somedays I fail at this one – but the beauty of this life is I can stop in an instant and call a “do-over”. Starting over these days is what I do best 🙂 And that’s one reason I try to give lots of second chances in life, because I’ve needed so many.

I now can see that there are positive aspects in even a seemingly negative situation. Digging out those positive aspects may take a minute, but they’re there weary pilgrim…just keep diggin’.

Life is good folks…

I just read this on Twitter (submitted by @pixelsforpeace) “Life is good. Love it! Eat it up – devour it like a sweet peach and let the juice dribble down your chin.”

Yummy. Sounds good to me.