Multiple Reflections

earlier today we discovered a tremor with our right thumb and possibly the beginnings of a tremor with a few of our right fingers if they are placed in a certain position.  the thumb though is pretty much a guarantee though in a certain position. we noticed while holding our mouse.  and of course now that we went to actually try and replicate it– we can’t do so.  so perhaps it is only with certain insiders.  i’m not sure.  it was stressing a number of us out because the mother has tremors of unknown origin and she’s had tons of tests done.  and she says her father had tremors as well.  so anyway, we did a little bit of research and came up with a few possibilities.  then we were so exhausted suddenly and had to go lay down and take a nap.  it was the kind of exhaustion that we know and experience a lot as we weren’t tired really just prior to noticing the tremor and then doing a few brief research things on it.  it seems like it doesn’t take much at all to push us past our stress limit and we have to ‘go lay down’ which ultimately usually ends up in a nap.

Mostly we just find it interesting and wanted to document how we’ve noticed how something benign and minor in a lot of ways can affect us so quickly and exhaust us to the point that we can’t seem to push past it without laying down in bed and taking a nap…with the hope it will have subsided by the time we wake up.

It’s not just this example… there are so many.  It’s like one thing can so easily throw us off course in the day or night and we’ve suddenly gone from managing, coping, or surviving, or perhaps even doing okay or well to this drastic non-functioning mode.  We’re still trying to pay more attention to it and document it because we’re really trying to understand this pattern and dynamic and how to get a handle on it instead of it handling us.

This also seems to be connected or tied in somehow to the whole ‘only able to really focus on one major thing at a time’ sort of thing.  And yet that sounds so crazy, being multiple and all.  It’s hard to explain and put into words because we’re trying to recognize it and understand this dynamic as well.  One example we can think of is how when we’re at Sean’s house, it’s like that’s ‘our world,’ and even though we know in the background there is this and that we need to do or take care of and is on our agenda, there’s still like a big concentration on being with him/them and living at his place and whatever is going on around us there. We also tend to ‘disappear’ from staying in contact with our other friends or journaling.  We’re working on changing that though.

This weekend our big focus has been our kitchen cabinets.  It’s taken us days and hours, but there have been tons and tons of breaks.  On one hand our only focus has been the cabinets… in that we can’t really cope with much of anything else and we are struggling to get it done and can’t cope with taking on anything else, even though there are tons of other things we need to be doing and there are friends locally we could be visiting or helping in some way. But we can only focus or handle the cabinets.  Yet that isn’t entirely true because we’ve had numerous breaks and often they are hours long breaks after a short bit of working on the cabinets.  The breaks have basically involved either the computer or napping or sleeping.  It seems the kids and some of us older ones as well have been taking breaks and visiting our neopet and playing lots of neopets word games and so forth.  Somehow playing word games justifies the time spent playing those games.  And of course we like word games anyway.  Plus just general web surfing or email a bit, but a lot of that has been reading.  It’s just that the whole idea of doing other necessary tasks that are critical and urgent things on our business to do list– we can’t cope with them because we’re dealing with the kitchen cabinets.  And if we did cope with them, the kitchen cabinets would have to go.  Rather than going back and forth between them.  And this whole weekend has really been about those stupid kitchen cabinets, which by the way, we’re nearly done with them.  Seriously.  A few more steps and that is it.  Then comes cleaning everything again before putting them away in the cabinets with organization and order.  Uggh.  The sad and shame thing is that we were feeling so much anxiety and being overwhelmed with it all that we couldn’t handle leaving the house to go visit our nephews or the mother to help her with something she needs help on.  Part of it is that we’re leaving out of town in a little over a week for a week with Sean and so that always stresses us out to go out of town, even if it is a good and pleasant trip kind of thing.  And I think when we have more “order and togetherness” in our life that leaving out of town won’t cause nearly as much anxiety as it does for us “to leave.”  But “to leave” is another huge thing for us too.  We have huge issues around ‘leaving’ anywhere that we are at.  Now I just thought while writing it that perhaps it has to do with the whole dissociation factor of ‘leaving,’ and perhaps that is why we always have anxiety and stress and stuff around it.  I don’t know.  I still haven’t figured out exactly what the deal is with ‘leaving’ people or places.

And really when we re-read all of that and think about it, we wouldn’t have been able to cope with going anywhere at all this weekend until we get these darn cabinets done.  We’re just sticking our feet in this and plowing away until they are done, even though it is taking us days and hours to get any of it done.  Had we just stayed with it from the beginning it would have only totaled out to be a few hours (perhaps longer than that), but really, they would have been done in a day for sure.

We’ve written a lot and need to get back to the cabinets before we lose our energy.  We actually were going to write about something else that is really hard to write about and so we ended up writing all of this… which is important too.

julie/s and Julie/s