Scrolling through Facebook and there was a meme asking “What’s your super power?”  Hummm……what is my super power?  I can’t leap anything.  I can’t scale tall buildings.  I can’t blink and vaporize into a bottle (although I always wanted to).  I can’t stop an oncoming train.  Oh I know!! I can create scenarios in my head that reality can’t even imagine or touch!!  I can have full conversations in my head thinking I know how things are going down and I can do it all without anyone even guessing I am doing it!!   I don’t even need a cape, boots or cool belt!! I can do it anywhere, anytime, 24 hours a day, non stop!!

UGH!!  This is a very real and used to be private problem that I have had as long as I can remember.  Anxiety and useless worry consume most of my time except for the brief moments when I am counting my blessings and thinking about good things.  I am pretty good at the worrying part and have it down pat.  I keep thinking about my Gram and what a character she was!   My Dad used to tease her about being the “town worrier”!  He would say, “Call Pearl with your worries 24/7 and she will take the worry for you! No worry too big or too small!  All worries welcome!”  My Gram would laugh and stop for a few minutes then go right back to the grind.  I am my gram.  While she had many characteristics that I adored and would love to have, it appears that I have chosen the one habit that I didn’t like!!

A Type Personality is defined as   ” temperament characterized by excessive ambition, aggression, competitiveness, drive, impatience, need for control, focus on quantity over quality and unrealistic sense of urgency. It is commonly associated with risk of coronary disease and other stress-related ailments.”  While I don’t fit every example of the definition I do have roughly 6 of the characteristics, which I guess makes me a Type A!  The truth is that I have always wanted a certain amount of control in my life.  My rational mind knows that it is a false sense of order and control, but I make it mine and I own it!  I don’t like surprises.  I don’t like surprises that are good.  I don’t like surprises that are bad.  I don’t like not knowing the outcome or more specifically, that things are going to be OK.  My dad had a way of talking me off the ledge and reassure me that I was completely ok no matter how wild my thoughts might have become.  That reassurance has been gone for some time now.  Mike is pretty good about walking the ledge with me, but I think that most days he wishes I would fall off and reprogram my overactive mind!

Not complaining here, but the last two years have literally been one surprise after another and not in a good way!  I have had to learn that I am not in control of my body or this stupid disease.  I have had to learn that all of the worry and planning will not change the course of this crap.  I have had to learn to wait in doctor’s offices, waiting on test results, bloodwork, diagnosis, prognosis, more surprises, more anxiety, less and less control, and ultimately feeling like the earth has spun off her axis!! God help me, really!  I am better than I was, I think.  I think…  I worry.  Not about me.  About how “me” will affect “them” as they have to adjust to the new and under-improved version of me!  What a lucky bunch of folks they are!!

I worry about work, business, my mother, my kids, my grandkid, friends, loved ones, the weather, whether I will wake up and feel good enough to go somewhere, germs, flu, my artery repair (what if it leaks?), medicine, running out of medicine, doctors, my doctor moving, what to wear, life.  The irony is that I worry about life and as I am worrying  I am stifled from living!!  Round and round it goes–day in day out–night after night!! Want some?? Doesn’t it sound glorious!!!  Proof that you never know what burdens another is carrying, which brings me full circle to the crux of most of my blogs!  BE NICE.  BE KIND.  Everyone is fighting a battle of some sort!!  It is difficult navigating the waters of life and most days we are in the deep end trying to get back to the shallows.  Sometimes I picture myself sailing again (like I used to a lot) and the wind dies and I am caught in the irons and I can’t move, so I crack a beer and light a smoke and sit and wait for the breeze to come and move me again.

Today, I am stuck in the irons and find that puking it on this screen is helpful and I can see how ridiculous it is that I allow thoughts to wreck me and most of them are in the deep recesses of my imagination and they aren’t even real. Frustrating and sad.  I am working on it.  HARD!!

Waiting for the breeze.

until then…hey, be kind

e