Hello everyone
It's saturday, it's freezing cold and i've just returned from my first proper go at the christmas shops. everyone, of course, had the same idea as me. i've managed to get quite a long way down the list now. i took dad with me, mainly because he can't 'do' shopping alone, and he proceeded to cough all his way around the shopping centre. cough, cough, cough. 'oh, how about this shirt?' cough, cough, cough. we've concluded he has a 'stress-cough', it's psychological. it's not accompanied by any pain, or a cold or anything like that. it comes from his mind, like a nervous tick.
thinking of psychological pains, i've had a bit of an eventful week which resulted in me being curled up in bed on wednesday night with stomach ache purely caused by another person's pain. which is odd, especially because the other person's pain wasn't a stomach ache. i tend to get so caught up in wanting to help people that i sometimes physically feel the impact. the phrase 'my heart goes out to them' is over-used, but its meaning has never been more clear to me. at the moment my heart is pretty much 'out there'.
making positive choices or taking positive action out of incredibly tough and negative situations is never easy. quite often the hardest thing to do is to roll up your trousers and march into the freezing cold sea, mainly because you can't be certain when you'll next find land. i told someone this week that happiness is a fight. you have to fight on your own side to make yourself happy. i can find this pretty difficult a lot of the time. the worse the situation becomes, the harder it is to get 'out there' and fight hard in your own corner.
having encountered a friend in quite a lot of pain this week, i then went back to the office with a different perspective on the smaller issues i fight day after day. i'm beginning to get entirely sick of 'bullet points' or being told 'well, shouldn't this be a priority?' when to be honest, i think i know what the priorities are by now. yesterday i was even heard to mutter 'oh, grow some balls, for godsake' under my breath at a work colleague. it's unlike me to lose my patience with other people completely, because i try to crawl into someone's skin and have a look out of their eyes in order to rationalise the way they think of behave. this tends to help me think 'ok... that's not how i would handle it, but ok...' but after seeing a slice of reality this week i'm afraid i lost my patience quite a few times. life issues got put into perspective. 'grow some balls' is possibly an under-used phrase, anyway.
it will be a bizarre weekend on all fronts, i think. it will be a weekend of reconsidering exactly where the land lies, what my priorities should be, and what exactly the priorities of others in my life really are. whether i'm on the list where i think i should be. wandering around town with my christmas list today i did start to wonder 'how many lists am i on?'
