2020-07-01 — Over the Edge

Every day is a good day: It’s just good in different ways.

Right? 😊

You know that juxtaposition of brighter and darker days I mentioned yesterday, and how it’s good to have the darker to appreciate the lighter? Well, today’s an opportunity for me to soak in the darker (harder) for a little bit, allow myself to feel and experience it, and to take note of what it feels like. That way, when the light comes, as it will, it will be that much more brilliant, and I’ll be that much more grateful for it.

To that end, at the very moment, I’m feeling thirsty even though I’ve had a whole lot to drink in the last 20 minutes since waking up from my nap. Being thirsty even when having had a good bit to drink is one of the symptoms of that medical issue I have that nobody can figure out that I reference regularly when I talk about being on the edge. I’ve just had probably 30 ounces of water, but it doesn’t matter. My body says it’s still thirsty. When I get this way, I have to be super careful not to overhydrate myself, or I can make things a lot worse. It’s hard, though, because my body gets all turned upside down and can’t accurately tell me what I need, and I basically just have to try and balance food and water, lots of both, until I get better, which can be really hard once I’m over the edge because the thought of eating is nauseating, and I have to force feed myself to get anything in me.

I’ve got a headache, pre-migraine stage right now, where the back of my neck hurts, just a little bit right of center at the base of my skull, the pain (not bad right now) stretches in a line from there, up over the top of my scalp, and down into my right eye.  Whatever nerve branch that is, I think it’s the one that’s always affected with this condition. It’s the one that turns into migraines. If I can’t get my body to do an about face quite soon, that pain will go from being present to being… ugh… It’ll feel like someone is taking a blunt rod, and pressing my eyeball into my skull from the outside. Once I get to that point, it could take hours to days to get back to being good, usually the latter these days.

So yeah, I’m hoping I can coax my body into an about face, but if can’t, I’ll soak in the next stage of higher pain, nausea, exhaustion, etc., and hopefully, that’ll help me be more appreciative of the brighter days, more compassionate to others, and more willing to work even harder to make sure I get proper hydration and nutrition during these very hot summer days.

So that’s what’s going on in the moment. I laid down for a late nap because the combination of me already being depleted nutritionally and having the exhaustion that comes with this unknown condition, alongside the days and days of not enough sleep, followed by getting even less sleep today than my normal lack of sleep left me just wiped out… lay-on-the-chair, unable-to-properly-think, work-a-little-harder-to-even-speak-so-I-don’t-slur-my-speech-because-my-body-is-shutting-down wiped out. 🥺

So… there’s that. Then add to that the fact that everything related to my posts the last couple days and letting go and moving on has hit me hard in multiple ways. There’s so much that could be said there, but that’s a book in and of itself, and I probably sounded a little “out there” yesterday, and I can’t do the topic justice tonight without putting myself into a deeper state of sleep deprivation and exhaustion. However, I am at least gonna overtly acknowledge, if I haven’t already, the fact that there’s a large part of me that still wants to hold on, a part that actually increased in size today when I went back and read some of my old journal entries about all this. I have a special journal for my most sacred experiences that I hadn’t even looked at for probably more than two years; and I went back and read a little from it today because of a memory that popped into my head about one of the last things I wrote before stopped trusting in god. That entry seemed to clearly speak to exactly what’s happening right now, which has me a little jumbled right now.

(sigh)

I’ll figure it out.

In one ear I’ve got the “hold on.” And then in the other ear, the voice of Kylo Ren in Star Wars… “Let the past die… Kill it if you have to… It’s the only way to become what you were meant to be.”

Gotta love Star Wars.

Well… no, you don’t. The last film was atrocious (and that critique coming from someone who’s super easily entertained. 🙃)

Anyway… so… thoughts. 😊

So, yeah… I spent most of the day as a glob of chemical processes running through their cycles on automatic pilot, since their pilot (me) wasn’t really very available. Of course, I couldn’t just call it a day. I have a contract worker depending on me and lots and lots of customers depending on me as well, so shutting down for a day out of the blue wasn’t much of an option. However, I did work to try to keep from going out and doing jobs myself, feeling as awful as I was.

I rescheduled as many jobs as I could. I referred some customers to other companies for jobs I probably shouldn’t have taken to begin with (and hopefully, those customers will be better off anyway).

I got my tech where he needed to go and told the new customers that called in that we wouldn’t have any availability until tomorrow. That worked, and I was able to clear my own schedule for the day and just stay home, dealing with everything from home and then finally lying down for a nap about 7 p.m.

It was funny, though, one guy from like an hour away called, wanting us to replace all four oxygen sensors in his car (which is a big red flag to me that he’s just throwing parts at a problem hoping it’s gonna fix the issue when it’s quite possibly something else. Four sensors just aren’t going to go out at once. That’s crazy.). I asked him about it and suggested that he could very well be wasting lots of money just throwing parts at the problem, and I suggested he get it diagnosed first, and I recommended he Google shops near him with good reviews, since he was far away, and since I was feeling nasty, and my tech was busy, etc.

I thought I was going to get out of the job, but I sort of painted myself into a corner, and ended up agreeing to help him because of it. I guess that fact that I was the only shop out of all the ones he’d called that didn’t just say, “sure we’ll slap those on for you,” but actually cared enough to let him know that he’d likely be wasting money was enough, not only to get him to wait to get his car fixed until Friday, but enough for him to make the drive from Siloam Springs all the way to Fayetteville, so that we could look at it and diagnose it. I still don’t really want that job, because it’s just an awkward situation, meeting someone to do that kind of a job which involves touching the hottest parts of the car right after a long drive, but I’d basically painted myself into a corner building a sense of trust so fast that he was no longer interested in trying to find anyone else and pretty much willing to do whatever it took to have us be the ones to look at it.

Good problem to have, but I do wish I’d found a way to have him get someone else. But how do you just let him go throw hundreds of dollars at something that is obviously going to be a waste of money?

So… I’ve got an awkward situation to try to schedule around, but we’ll figure it out, and hopefully, the customer will be happy.

Anyway, it’s getting late again. It’s almost midnight, and I really need to get 8 hours of sleep tonight. I want to, at least. I need to eat and drink more and then go to bed.

What a day.

#1. I’m grateful that I am feeling better than I was earlier today, both physically and emotionally. I was really struggling emotionally earlier today, my poor mother hanging on the phone with me for probably a couple of hours because I was too anxious to be “alone.”

#2. I’m grateful that my business is successful.

#3. I’m grateful to have the capacity to look at the harder days and see value and purpose in them instead of just things to get away from as fast as possible.

#4. I’m grateful for the thought that entered my brain today that it would probably be a good thing for me to sit down and list all the positive things that have come from this very challenging experience that I’m trying to figure out and move beyond. I think that could be a powerful exercise that has the potential to help carry me through all this.

#5. I’m grateful that I’m not migraining yet. Cross your fingers for me that I don’t at all, please.

Good night, my lovelies. 😊 May you have peace and joy this night.

Loves and hugs.

Lift the World.

~ stephen