To Trust or Not to Trust: Sunday, January 10, 2010
Writing time for me, seems to come in the mornings or very late evenings. This is when the house is most quiet and calm, and my mind is most clear of all the daily things that block our creativeness. I shouldn’t really say “block” because it’s more like a clog then anything … creativeness runs slower during the day, like a half-clogged drain you might say.
Chronic pain seems to run the same way, when there are distractions the pain seems to be lesser then when it’s quiet at night and you’re laying there trying to fall asleep or something. It’s long been known that pain increases during the evening hours … not just with me, but with everyone.
In a post I’d made earlier in the week, I touched on the subject of how this cancer was effecting my day-to-day life, and the uncanny ability that it has to halt anything you might be doing at anytime of day or night.
My thought was that if I take something on, like a project for work or for Scifillian, will I be able to complete the work in a reasonable and timely fashion, that would satisfy the criteria of the expected job.
This what you’re basically up against when you’re dealing with this cancer. Untrusting abilities, is what you can expect out of yourself … and that’s not always an easy thing to swallow. In the past, I’ve always depended on myself and myself alone, to accomplish whatever task or tasks I took on. I could trust that if I said I could do it … that I could, and that no matter what went awry during the project, I’d have the time, energy and mental capacity to overcome the obstacles and win out.
But now-a-days, I’m never sure if I can trust myself and my skills, and that things will always turn out with the best of intentions. I’m learning to be careful about what I agree to do and the amount of time I alot myself to do it. This is true in both family life and work, and both have already been effected by it.
A simple example of how this effects family life:
The other afternoon, Sher asked if we could go down to the pool later in the afternoon and do some swimming. I said fine, give an hours notice before you want to leave and we’ll take a break and go have some fun. Simple right? The hour was so that I could finish up whatever I was doing and spend a few minutes getting ready to go.
Later in the day, when the time came to go, I was having one of what I’ll call a wave of cancer, and we ended up not going. By the time I was feeling good again, the pool was closed for the day and it was too late any how.
In reality, this was not a big thing, no one got angry or anything like that … but it was disappointing (at least for me), not to be able to complete a simple thing, and on top of that, a simple thing I wanted to do myself. We certainly had no argument about it and just brushed it off as “oh well, another time then” … but, it still had a disappointing effect on our lives together. Not just because of the swimming incident, but because that can happen several times a day and definitely several times a week.
Making any kind of promise of plan, becomes a very difficult and requires a very strategically thought-out course of action. We don’t want to constantly fail at completing things no matter how simple or complex they may be. A steady flow of disappointing actions is not a good thing in any relationship no matter what. How many times can you back out of something until it does begin to effect your life. Both for Sher and I.
I want her to enjoy the activity and feel awful about holding her back because I don’t feel well or whatever, and for myself I want to prove that I can overcome most of this cancer stuff without having to surrender the life I want and used to lead. In our case, we seem to be able to share the uncertainty of knowing our plans may change at the last minute … but that’s a lot harder to do, when you add children to the mix, or friends that may be meeting you, or just about anything else that requires others be involved.
So it digs in deep, and it digs into the social aspect of your life. This is not a time when I want myself or Sher, to begin losing touch with friends and becoming “hermits” or “loners”. If anything, it’s just the opposite I’m looking to accomplish, and especial for Sher and Alberic for that matter. I want them to have friends and a social life beyond whatever comes through our household through me.
