overwhelmed...but determined

I haven't been sleeping well this week.

I've reverted to sleeping with a stuffed animal ever since Mom was hospitalized, but even he hasn't been able to keep me calm the whole night through, not this week. Sometimes it helps if I turn on the blue LED lights strung over my headboard.

I feel like a child again, afraid of the dark.

Afraid of my dark.

But I've done some thinking; what else is there to do at 3 a.m. when you can't sleep but are too tired to do anything else?

And I've realized that none of this is new.


Nothing in that pit I've opened up is new. Nothing in it is foreign to me - it's all happened to me, in the past, which means I faced it once and survived. I may not have dealt with it entirely at the time, but I survived, and this time I won't be facing those things alone. I'll have a lot of good, experienced people helping me sort through and empty out that pit. And teaching me how to keep it from filling up again.

It's still a scary thought.

But running away from it won't make it go away. I know that pit is there now. I know it's not healthy to leave it there.

Mom started seeing a psychiatrist recently too. Mom has never had a peaceful life, and she deals with it all the same way I deal with it - burying it, going on, always the strong one. She asked her psychiatrist if that stress, over all those years, never vented, could have contributed to her streak of cancer and autoimmune diseases. The answer: "More and more doctors are looking at it that way. We can't say that stress 'causes' cancer, but it certainly seems to aggravate it, maybe make people more susceptible to it. It seems to play a role but we haven't figured it all out yet."

It breaks my heart to see Mom so ill.

I want to have a family one day. I want to have a daughter. I don't want to break her heart.

I will be strong. I will face the things I'm afraid of. I will let people help me. And I will emerge, whole and stronger, in the end.