It’s Flashback Friday, a weekly event where Tanja feels the past sneaking up on her. She said it’s as if the events of the evening of March 3 were somehow able to send out tendrils that grasp at her and threaten to pull her back.
“It’s like it wants to get me,” she explained.
“Hasn’t it already gotten you?”
“It wants to do it again and I can’t let it.”
I sometimes think of that night and how desperate it was, and it helps me get back the gratitude I started to feel when she opened her eyes and continue to feel as she gets better and better.
And that’s a reminder of the difference between being concerned with it and being right fully in the center of it. It comes back on her like a nightmare. There’s no logic to it.
This is all part of the work she knew she’d have to do. But today she described how in a TV show, when someone goes through rehab, there’s the scene where they try and fail. And the PT says something really challenging. But the patient can’t or won’t respond. Too weak. Then there follows the scene where the patient tries again. And they just barely do it. Then the next time you see them, it’s all good.
“But really, you’re just in it all the time. And you don’t doubt yourself once. You do it over and over. Or I do. And you tell yourself the pep talk over and over.”
She walked 2.5 miles this morning. She made more Lego flowers. She opened the mail.
“But it’s so hard. And so tiring. I don’t think Lego should be hard.”
Personally, I’ve always found Lego to be a challenge, but I take her point. I’ve got this new thing I picked up somewhere—from Carolyn Hax, I suspect. When somebody is presenting an issue, you say, right off the bat, or as soon as you can without being odd, “Do you want to be heard, helped or hugged?”
It keeps you from wading in with unwanted advice or short circuiting a much needed venting.
So far, in my short experience, people are not looking for one’s spur of the moment problem solving, no matter how wonderfully apt it may be.
Usually they want to be heard. And then hugged. And that helps.
But you never know, so you have to ask:)
Anyway, today was a hug day.
In the afternoon, the clouds melted away and Tanja went out on the porch and lay in a pool of sun where she dozed like a cat. It was lovely to see.
And tonight, as a counterweight to flashback Friday, she instituted the Collar Countdown. I think the magic number—the answer to the ultimate problem—is 41. Not a giant number at all.
Here’s a song I heard on the radio today. The DJ said it was an incantation meant to conjure more sun. It’s worth a try.
Tanja power 