State of me
Hi all *waves*
Welcome to 2016. I'm not sure how many of you have stuck around/who's new but the last three years have been kinda awful and stressful.
- I'm not inclined to document any further the circumstances pre-2012 that got me where I am; it's pretty well covered in my RL tag. Suffice it to say that I had a strained relationship with my family of birth/origin.
- December 2012 my father had a stroke and almost died. They wanted to turn off life support; my mother said no. Since then he's made an amazing recovery physically, and has very little in the way of cognitive damage for somebody who had to re-learn how to walk. It's also been three years since my father had a drink, which is amazing because he's an alcoholic who drank solidly for forty years - more than my entire life.
- Late 2013 my mother was diagnosed with bowel cancer and began a two-year bout with surgery and chemotherapy. I have four siblings, but the older three weren't in a position to help. It fell to my younger sister to move back to our home town so there was someone to a) make sure my mother got to her hospital appointments and b) stay with my father if anything went wrong - because he was (and still is) recovering from his stroke. I live in another country, but someone had to help my sister care for my parents even if just to be there for a couple of weeks at a time so she could go out and recharge her batteries. So I flew back and forth between my country and my parents' country something like 3-4 times a year for two years. Mother got the all-clear in November 2015 - no more cancer, just a benign cyst.
- In 2014, with everything that happened to my parents it was brought home to me that they won't be around forever so my husband and I started trying for a baby. We found out in August that we were having twins (they would turn out to be girls) but on Christmas Eve I suffered a miscarriage. It was something I'd been dreading, afraid of since I found out I was pregnant, because in 2010 I had a miscarriage and it resulted in a mental breakdown. But there was something freeing about my worst fear coming true: I had spent the intervening four years in intense therapy, I've become a lot stronger and healthier, and I made it through. The worst thing I could imagine came true, but I made it anyway. I'm still here. And even when some people turned their back on me, trying to get my husband to leave me and cut his losses, my family... came to my defense en masse, for the first time I can remember in thirty years.
- 2015 was a year of healing, and trying to let go of unhealthy influences in my life. Most of the year is a blur, to be honest; my husband and I worked through intense grief together and had to learn to live in the moment because our future is more uncertain than ever.
- October 2015 brought a third miscarriage. We're still here, still together and working hard on loving each other after almost eleven years.
I'm grateful for the people who have been there for me in the rough times - my parents, my sisters, my brother, my husband. Those of you online who stayed up with me and cried with me when I needed something to hang onto in the dark, someone to talk to who wasn't drowning in grief just as deeply as I was (like my wonderful husband).
somehowunbroken I was lucky to have you share my joy and my sadness; your gift for our girls will be something we always treasure.
lunabee34 words can't even express how grateful I was to have you there for me, in the middle of your day/the middle of my night, helping me keep myself together when the silence engulfed & overwhelmed me and I needed to be outside my head - your presence and your care kept me alive, literally.
I'm grateful for the friends I've made RL in the past four years, who were all wonderful and supportive - they allowed me to speak and be heard, they made themselves part of my healing journey, and they never minimised my pain or tried to push me to recover fast(er). I'm especially grateful for a special friend I made three years ago, just before things started piling up. When things were at the worst and my husband and I were lost, sad and broken, she dropped everything. She traveled 12 hours just to spend a week caring for us, and to give us a buffer so that my husband and I weren't alone in our shared pain.
And for now, the bad times are over. I'm hoping for a clean slate this year. I got the ball rolling with volunteer charity work over Christmas 2015, so that I could get out there and meet people, do things I enjoy, and freshen up my CV. Because after almost three years of unemployment I'm ready to do what it takes - try anything to make my life change for the better. It's not always cheery around here (I lean towards raw honesty) BUT this year I want to put more emphasis on the peaks of the rollercoaster, not just the valleys. Because I have so much fucking good in my life, y'all.
2016 will bring more volunteer charity work, more therapy & progress towards healing, more time in the moment since the future is up in the air, hopefully more writing, and best of all: MORE HOCKEY.
If you're new(ish) here, welcome aboard. I'm sorry if I haven't gotten to know you as well as I'd liked or as much as you hoped. The tl;dr above is part of the reason why.
The main fandoms I anticipate squeeing over in 2016: Check Please; Hockey in its many North American forms - CWHL, NWHL, NHL, OHL/QMJHL, SPHL (also RPF for my fav sports people) and Worlds/IIHF competitions for European hockey; The Force Awakens; DC comics (yes, still; mostly classic but some DCnu) and most of DC's productions on TV (Gotham and The Flash, to name a couple); and last but not least THE RIO OLYMPICS YAAASSS.
Check out my tumblr - I'm ariadne83 over there too. You may notice that it's mostly Hamiltion: The Musical. This is because despite the fact that I don't actually like most musicals THAT SHIT IS AMAZING.
/new year, shiny and chrome
Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/111295.html, where it has
comments
Welcome to 2016. I'm not sure how many of you have stuck around/who's new but the last three years have been kinda awful and stressful.
- I'm not inclined to document any further the circumstances pre-2012 that got me where I am; it's pretty well covered in my RL tag. Suffice it to say that I had a strained relationship with my family of birth/origin.
- December 2012 my father had a stroke and almost died. They wanted to turn off life support; my mother said no. Since then he's made an amazing recovery physically, and has very little in the way of cognitive damage for somebody who had to re-learn how to walk. It's also been three years since my father had a drink, which is amazing because he's an alcoholic who drank solidly for forty years - more than my entire life.
- Late 2013 my mother was diagnosed with bowel cancer and began a two-year bout with surgery and chemotherapy. I have four siblings, but the older three weren't in a position to help. It fell to my younger sister to move back to our home town so there was someone to a) make sure my mother got to her hospital appointments and b) stay with my father if anything went wrong - because he was (and still is) recovering from his stroke. I live in another country, but someone had to help my sister care for my parents even if just to be there for a couple of weeks at a time so she could go out and recharge her batteries. So I flew back and forth between my country and my parents' country something like 3-4 times a year for two years. Mother got the all-clear in November 2015 - no more cancer, just a benign cyst.
- In 2014, with everything that happened to my parents it was brought home to me that they won't be around forever so my husband and I started trying for a baby. We found out in August that we were having twins (they would turn out to be girls) but on Christmas Eve I suffered a miscarriage. It was something I'd been dreading, afraid of since I found out I was pregnant, because in 2010 I had a miscarriage and it resulted in a mental breakdown. But there was something freeing about my worst fear coming true: I had spent the intervening four years in intense therapy, I've become a lot stronger and healthier, and I made it through. The worst thing I could imagine came true, but I made it anyway. I'm still here. And even when some people turned their back on me, trying to get my husband to leave me and cut his losses, my family... came to my defense en masse, for the first time I can remember in thirty years.
- 2015 was a year of healing, and trying to let go of unhealthy influences in my life. Most of the year is a blur, to be honest; my husband and I worked through intense grief together and had to learn to live in the moment because our future is more uncertain than ever.
- October 2015 brought a third miscarriage. We're still here, still together and working hard on loving each other after almost eleven years.
I'm grateful for the people who have been there for me in the rough times - my parents, my sisters, my brother, my husband. Those of you online who stayed up with me and cried with me when I needed something to hang onto in the dark, someone to talk to who wasn't drowning in grief just as deeply as I was (like my wonderful husband).
somehowunbroken I was lucky to have you share my joy and my sadness; your gift for our girls will be something we always treasure.
lunabee34 words can't even express how grateful I was to have you there for me, in the middle of your day/the middle of my night, helping me keep myself together when the silence engulfed & overwhelmed me and I needed to be outside my head - your presence and your care kept me alive, literally.
I'm grateful for the friends I've made RL in the past four years, who were all wonderful and supportive - they allowed me to speak and be heard, they made themselves part of my healing journey, and they never minimised my pain or tried to push me to recover fast(er). I'm especially grateful for a special friend I made three years ago, just before things started piling up. When things were at the worst and my husband and I were lost, sad and broken, she dropped everything. She traveled 12 hours just to spend a week caring for us, and to give us a buffer so that my husband and I weren't alone in our shared pain.
And for now, the bad times are over. I'm hoping for a clean slate this year. I got the ball rolling with volunteer charity work over Christmas 2015, so that I could get out there and meet people, do things I enjoy, and freshen up my CV. Because after almost three years of unemployment I'm ready to do what it takes - try anything to make my life change for the better. It's not always cheery around here (I lean towards raw honesty) BUT this year I want to put more emphasis on the peaks of the rollercoaster, not just the valleys. Because I have so much fucking good in my life, y'all.
2016 will bring more volunteer charity work, more therapy & progress towards healing, more time in the moment since the future is up in the air, hopefully more writing, and best of all: MORE HOCKEY.
If you're new(ish) here, welcome aboard. I'm sorry if I haven't gotten to know you as well as I'd liked or as much as you hoped. The tl;dr above is part of the reason why.
The main fandoms I anticipate squeeing over in 2016: Check Please; Hockey in its many North American forms - CWHL, NWHL, NHL, OHL/QMJHL, SPHL (also RPF for my fav sports people) and Worlds/IIHF competitions for European hockey; The Force Awakens; DC comics (yes, still; mostly classic but some DCnu) and most of DC's productions on TV (Gotham and The Flash, to name a couple); and last but not least THE RIO OLYMPICS YAAASSS.
Check out my tumblr - I'm ariadne83 over there too. You may notice that it's mostly Hamiltion: The Musical. This is because despite the fact that I don't actually like most musicals THAT SHIT IS AMAZING.
/new year, shiny and chrome
Crossposted from http://ariadne83.dreamwidth.org/111295.html, where it has
comments