2019 fall reflections

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2019 Fall Reflections

This post is late. Usually I like to reflect on the last twelve months at the beginning of fall, but fall is about a month away from being over. Though I haven’t had a chance to keep up on major changes since July, here is what has changed over the last year.

1. I am not as good at things like I thought I was. I use to believe that I had very little room for improvement when it came to communicating with others, reading people, managing relationships (personal and work) etc. But it turns out that I suck at most things. I mostly do a mediocre job at the things that I do. What I am good at however, is making people think that I know what I am doing, but I don’t. If people only looked a little closer they would find that I am a fake. In my favor is the fact that I am also not so important that people would even want to take a closer look. I do however, want to be better at least at one thing. I want to be more than mediocre at loving my wife and mother. I suck at it any time that I feel stressed, or tired, or mad, or distracted, or busy, or mostly anything else. This is the one thing that I want to be good at.
2. Life is an urgent affair. I take almost everything about life for granted. Mostly because much of the time I feel like everything is so mundane. I wake up to the same routine day after day. I shower, I get ready for work, I come home, I spend a bit of time with mom, I do a bit of work, watch a lot of YouTube, I go to bed to toss and turn for four or five hours only to do it over again the next day. But without notice one of my cat dies, or I find myself talking to a doctor about mom’s end-of-life being just months away and suddenly the mundane things have become embued with so much meaning. Daily I think–or rather I ask–myself if this will be the last time that I will do what ever it is that I am doing. “Is this the last time that I make dinner for mom?”, “Is this the last time that I will see my wife?”, “Will this be the last time that I pet any one of my cats?” I am in constant fear of loosing the things that I love the most. This is a new fear for me and it paralyzes me and I go numb.
3. I miss music. When I first moved to Ellensburg I had a ritual that I whould have realized at the time that it could not be sustainable. It was my music. I found solace and comfort in it. It caused me to write more, to read and meditate more. I would like to recover some of that, but I feel numb a lot of the time and I mostly want to be asleep. This is another face of depression that I have been acquainted with, and the side that I hate most because it keeps me from feeling anything at all.
4. I had a fallout with my sister again. I feel abandoned by her. I am angry, sad and hurt, but she will just not get it. I don’t need her to understand. However, if I die without making peace with her (or if she), it will be the second thing that I will most regret in life.
5. I feel alone. I don’t feel lonely, but I do feel alone. My only guess is that this feeling comes from not feeling like my wife and I are partners. It’s a sad fact and mostly my fault. I wish that our relationship was stronger, but I don’t feel like I have any right to ask her for anything.
6. I don’t have friends. I like the people that I have met in Ellensburg. The majority have been through work. I like them so much that they have become some of my favorite people. But I refuse to befriend them. It’s become an art form for me to get out of social invites to get a drink, have dinner, etc. This is going to come back to me in a bad way when I am old and my wife is no longer around. For now, I am still not interested in making any friends regardless.
7. I miss my cat. I try to remember him every month, but mostly I forget when the day comes. On at least two occasions I have had to walk out of a meeting because without any warning I feel like I am choking with the same knot in my throat, and drown in the same tears that choked and drowned me when I held his little limb body last December. I don’t know if I will ever get over his passing, I am not sure that I want to. For now, I just have to find a way to deal with the sadness that I feel sometimes while I am driving, in my office, or when I am lying in bed tossing trying to sleep. I miss him.
8. I want feel sad for and because of mom. This year more than any other in the past I have felt the fragility of mom’s life. In June I had conversations with hospice doctors about mom’s last wishes. Does she want to die at home? “it is going to happen, and it only months away” is what Dr. Martin told me. Months! Well it has been months since that conversation. That conversation has caused me to need to check in on her every morning (sometimes multiple times) to make sure that she is breathing. The irony is that I often find myself wishing that she could go back to the days when her dementia was the only thing she was dealing with.
9. I am dying. I am not really, but my glucose is not yet under control and my eyes are finally showing signs of damage. I need to handle this.

In general, I don’t feel like I have grown much. I haven’t really learned anything new and when that happens I feel like I have been floating in the same place for a year. I really love my job and that provides enough challenges to keep me busy, but without any personal growth, reflection, introspection or whatever you want to call it, I feel like I haven’t moved.

When I wrote this, I was listening to this:

I can’t remember who shared this song with me, but I know that I wasn’t the one who found it. Soraya passed from breast cancer in 2006. She was only 37. I have outlived her.