On Living In Fear

When someone who is supposed to be trusted freaks out at you because they didn’t take the medication that makes them not become so crazy – not just once but two days in a row – what can you do but hide and pray and cry?

Some things I wish I could tell someone, but who to tell that can be trusted, and who to tell that can help?

All I can do is pray to God for peace, but does peace stand any chance in this ruined world?

PTSD locks me in fearful immobility.

If anyone reads this, please pray for me. I am not safe. I don’t know if I will survive the night.

Sharp pain in right temple

All day, off and on, a sharp pain has stabbed my right temple. It lasts only a second at a time and happens sporadically, several times an hour.

I am so stressed and grieved, the instigating last straw being the loss of my writing in a WordPress draft last night, that I do not feel like myself. It is not like my usual state of depression when things overwhelm me. It is deeply physical this time, very much like grief over loss of a loved one.

I wanted to say this in case I die tonight and the reason is otherwise unknown. A friend or family member might see this and know I had a strange pain in my head, not like the usual pain attacks I get every few weeks.

I took an Aspirin pill within the past hour. I haven’t tried Aspirin in years.

If I die and am therefore unable to say further words directly, I leave this here: please, my family and friends, please, I beg you, read the Bible and seek to know the truth. Please accept Jesus and thereby embark on the same eternal destiny as me. I want to see you there. I love you and do not want you to perish.

Just a flower I saw yesterday

No, I Don’t “Got This”

No amount of motivational posters are going to convince me that “I’ve got this”, “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”, “nobody can take away my power unless I let them”, or any other platitude can remove reality from staring me in the face.

“If you need to talk, just reach out. I’m here for ya.”

Actually, no. You’re not. Nobody is. It is all nice in theory, but when it comes down to it, the only one here for me is me.

And that is depressing, because I am too broken to help myself.

There’s always that one thing that does kill ya. So far, none of the other attempts have strengthened me. Here I am still crying out to no person.

I do know God hears me, and my only hope is in joining Him in that better place. Meanwhile, I push on and wait, hiding within my tent of flesh and bone, choking on tears for breakfast.

I do not have strength. God is my strength. I cling to Him.

I feel no motivation. I can only eke out: “Thank you, God, for sending Jesus to unite me to You. Without You, I am only dust. I await seeing Your face.”

Psalm 42, Amplified Version:

As the deer pants [longingly] for the water brooks,
So my ^[a]soul pants [longingly] for You, O God.
² 
My soul (my life, my inner self) thirsts for God, for the living God.
When will I come and see the face of God?
³ 
My tears have been my food day and night,
While they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?”
⁴ 
These things I [vividly] remember as I pour out my soul;
How I used to go along before the great crowd of people and lead them in procession to the house of God [like a choirmaster before his singers, timing the steps to the music and the chant of the song],
With the voice of joy and thanksgiving, a great crowd keeping a festival.

⁵ 
Why are you in despair, O my soul?
And why have you become restlessand disturbed within me?
Hope in God and wait expectantly for Him, for I shall again praise Him
For the help of His presence.
⁶ 
O my God, my soul is in despair within me [the burden more than I can bear];
Therefore I will [fervently] remember You from the land of the Jordan
And the peaks of [Mount] Hermon, from Mount Mizar.
⁷ 
Deep calls to deep at the [thundering] sound of Your waterfalls;
All Your breakers and Your waves have rolled over me.
⁸ 
Yet the Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime,
And in the night His song will be with me,
A prayer to the God of my life.

⁹ 
I will say to God my rock, “Why have You forgotten me?
Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?”
¹⁰ 
As a crushing of my bones [with a sword], my adversaries taunt me,
While they say continually to me, “Where is your God?”
¹¹ 
Why are you in despair, O my soul?
Why have you become restless anddisquieted within me?
Hope in God and wait expectantly for Him, for I shall yet praise Him,
The ^[b]help of my countenance and my God.

Footnotes:

1. Psalm 42:1 The Hebrew word translated “soul” in this psalm and elsewhere in the book of Psalms is nephesh. This word usually refers to a person’s “life” or “self,” but can also mean “throat,” as perhaps in vv 1, 2.

2. Psalm 42:11 Or saving acts of.

WordPress “Stats”?

On my WordPress.com blog Dashboard, I click on Stats, then Top Posts & Pages. It shows me a list of the posts on my site that got the most traffic. Strangely, there are items that it lists as having only one view, yet there are several “likes” and comments for that post.

This makes no sense to me. I don’t even know what to ask, let alone who to ask. I have other problems with WordPress, and I’ve posted them in a WordPress support forum, but so far I’ve not gotten any solutions.

Are there any actual WordPress gurus out there who know how to use this site and how to fix problems, or is it all run by users who are in the process of figuring it out themselves?

Problem Of Pain

Migraine, or whatever it is, hurts so bad that nausea sweeps in.

Five days of it, every three to five weeks, for, what, twenty years now?

Family physicians, a neurologist, naturopaths, a homeopath, chiropractors, massage therapists, and a physiotherapist all failed to fix.

CBD oil prescription is expensive and doesn’t fix. It helps minimally. THCa oil in acute attacks does the same.

Hospital emergency rooms in desperate moments is a gamble. Triage. Wait a long time. Downtime from duties. Need someone to do the drive home. Get shot with something that sometimes works. Demerol worked once, but when requested the next time, it was refused. Morphine took the edge off and allowed sleep, but the pain returned by morning. Ketorolac 60 mg injected with Gravol to combat the nausea it can cause works 80% of the time.

Face-first into a wall in 1988. Unknown whiplash unhealed. Spine grown twisted. Escaped from perpetrator.

Now add in the pain from being knocked over by a dog. Twice. Back of skull first day. Then knee next day.

Monday: Liquid nitrogen to plantar surface of left foot for wart. Burns.

Tuesday: Cleaning the kitchen because foot too sore Monday to clean before bed. Stuffing and baking a turkey. Many hours. Remove stuffing and refrigerate. When turkey cools, remove meat from bones and refrigerate. Put drippings in container to use for gravy. Too late at night to make gravy. Make it tomorrow.

Wednesday: Many processes to prepare for making turkey pies. Grind wheat outside in grain grinder because it leaks flour. Thank God for grinder given by friend. Good grinder is mailed to Vancouver Island shop under warranty.

Make turkey bone broth. All day.

Clean, clean, clean. Laundry. Floor. Cat litter boxes. Delegate but only so much kids can do. Listen to kids. Answer kids. Interact with kids. Pray for kids. Dishes in dishwasher, plus ongoing big pots and bowls washed in sink. Fold and put away laundry. Declutter stuff in ongoing decluttering after new bedroom carpet installed.

Thursday: Whole wheat olive oil pie crusts x6.

Soup.

Chopped carrots, celery, onions. Sauteed.

Other things unremembered. Many. Too many. Tears in there a time or two. Mine.

Thursday night, now: Suddenly realize forgot to let dog back in house. Oldest daughter to the rescue, brings her in. Long past bedtime.

Brain is gone. Somehow over three days of cooking, this is result:

Turkey

Stuffing from homemade bread

Gravy for turkey pies

Three turkey pies

Vietnamese spring rolls

Turkey soup

So much rice.

Onions were absent so they had to be bought this morning.

Family ate filling for turkey pies when it wasn’t yet done so had to stretch it by thawing Italian sausage from freezer and browning it… then driving to store to buy potatoes to cook and add.

Big pots to wash in sink. Sore hands from so much washing.

Phone calls I cannot return, added to list.

Deadlines for forms that needed to be filled.

People to contact via text and email. None for pleasure. Business and stress.

Dear friend in distress. Suicidal. Fear. Prayer.

Dear friend’s father had a seizure and in hospital. Prayer.

Noises in house.

Kids doing what told not to.

Me yelling.

Silence.

Ringing sound. High pitch ringing that permeates the room. Source unknown.

. . . . . .

See also: Giving Up

Giving Up

Tripped By My Dog

I tripped over my dog again. This time it was in the house as I tried to walk past her in the kitchen. She’s big and strong and exuberant and doesn’t move out of the way easily.

I landed on ceramic tile. Had to throw out the black leggings I was wearing because I fell so hard it made a hole in the knee.

I still can’t fully piece together the details on what led to me falling outside yesterday, it happened so fast. All I know is it involved my dog and I remember the back of my head hitting hard ground by the bottom of the stairs.

I still found pieces of dead grass in my hair a few hours later.

And my head still hurts.

Plus I also have a migraine type headache, one of the things that never responded to various prescriptions for migraine on which I’ve been tried. These happen every few weeks and last for 5 days. Even morphine at the hospital has failed to stop the pain.

The dog is a ten month old Aussie/Blue Heeler/Kelpie I’ve had since she was two months old. I figured she’d be a good companion for walks, runs, and hikes in the surrounding bear country during non-snow months.

I went to a trainer with her, to refresh my memory on things I learned 15 years earlier. I also bought a good book on dog training, recommended by a trusted friend whose dogs are incredibly well behaved. I am working on my dog, but she’s still got a ways to go.

I regret bringing this dog into my family. She’s killing me.

Nothing Good To Write

I have nothing good to write today.

I’m in a storm.

My head and my hand hurt from me being accidentally knocked to the ground by my dog as she ran past and tangled herself and me in a cable.

My foot hurts from liquid nitrogen my doctor applied yesterday to kill a wart.

I’ve been paying bills and watching the money drain from my account.

The messes keep happening.

The meals keep needing to be cooked.

People keep disappointing.

The weather is dark to match my mood.

Supposedly storms don’t last forever. I look forward only to the end of it.

“Oh, for wings like a dove, to fly away and rest! I would fly to the far-off deserts and stay there. I would flee to some refuge from all this storm.” (Psalm 55:6-8, TLB)

That lonely, needy feeling

It doesn’t seem to be socially acceptable to shout out, “Hey, I’m feeling lonely and needy. Can someone please talk to me?”

But sometimes talking to someone is all it takes to not feel that way anymore. It doesn’t have to be a conversation about feeling lonely or needy. The connection itself, the interchange of words and thoughts, even listening to someone else talk about things that have nothing to do with your own problems, can be healing.

The opposite effect can result from reaching out and not connecting, though.

So, more often than not, I don’t even try. The risk isn’t worth it to me.

 

 

 

People in dire situations

While I walked to the post office yesterday, a friend called me and we talked for the entire half hour and then some as I stood waiting to go get my mail. She sounded fully stressed out by her living situation. She’s been out of a bad relationship for the past few years, living with family, friends, and strangers, all in different locations and arrangements of rental costs. She’s finally got a good job, but it’s so hard to get herself on her feet in the city where life costs at least double what it does to live out here in the semi-wilderness.

Then there’s another friend who messages me frequently from across the globe. He is living in a land he hates. His beloved wife is living in a whole other country for work. He got hired at a job that he tolerated but it was not his ideal. The company went out of business after less than a month, and they aren’t going to pay him for the weeks of work he put in. He has no way to pay the rent on his place, and his wife doesn’t make enough money in the other country to cover both of their living expenses in separate households.

I don’t have the money to help them out of their messes or I would do so in a beat of my breaking heart. I have no way to help them but to pray for them and be a listening ear.

If anyone reads this, can you please pray for these people you may not know? God knows. I feel my hands are tied and I so want things to get better for everyone. I know I myself have been through stuff and wonder if anyone had been holding me up in prayer to get me through it and on to a safer place in this world.

Are there no good writers anymore?

It saddens me to have to circle writing errors in books.

I’ve been a bookworm all my life. Well, since I could read when I was four years old, thanks to my mom and Sesame Street.

My dad, whose first and main language was Serbian, was so proud of me being able to read his sixth or seventh language – and my ONLY language. I remember him grabbing the Vancouver Sun newspaper one day when a friend of his was visiting. I must have been four years old.

“C’desten!” my dad would say, which is how “Christine” sounded in his accent.

“C’mere. Read this.”

I shyly read out loud the headline at which he was pointing, followed by the first paragraph, and then I went to hide under the kitchen table, where my sister and I usually hung out when our parents had friends over, still hearing my dad bragging in the living room. The two men laughed and continued on in their regular communication.

My dad’s English writing was bad. He had little reason to write words when he came to Canada, diving straight into carpentry, which kept his hands busy with tools and numbers. When he had to spell something in English, he wrote it the way it would be spelled in anglicized Serbian, and by that I mean English letters with Serbian sounds and accent marks, not full-on Cyrillic characters.

By the way, I usually hear people pronounce “Cyrillic” as “ser-RILL-ik”. My parents and their Serbian friends always pronounced it “CHEER-litz”.

A favorite example is how my dad wrote the word “church” in his address book. I can still see his right-slanting all-caps that said “črč”.

Maybe I have, perhaps at least in part, become such a stickler for good English writing because of the struggles my dad had with it. He used to say he had stories from the old country that would make a bestseller, if only he could write it all out. I wish he would have.

Here I sit today in my favorite little cafe, waiting for the air conditioning to get fixed on my truck at the shop up the road. I was reading a book and after three circles of my red pen I decided to put the book down and write this here in my WordPress blog.

It is a book written by a former school teacher in my area, no less. But, teacher or not, we all make mistakes in our writing. I know I do, even in these little blog entries. I correct them when I find them, usually after I publish them.

If ever you find an error in my writing, would you please be so kind as to let me know so I can fix it?

(Funny… at the table across from me, I spy one of my neighbours, another former teacher. I bet she knows the author. I will ask her later and edit this to update.

UPDATE: I greeted her and asked if she knew the author. Indeed she did. That made me smile. I love my little town.)

I won’t say who the author is, out of respect and to protect her reputation. My point, though, is: don’t people care anymore about good writing? Rare is the book I read that allows my poor red pen to have a complete rest.