Reflecting on being clear again

Each time I get a clear it means that I am:

• Less likely to get a recurrence
• More likely to continue to be clear
• Moving further away from the horrible stuff that happened to me
• Gradually getting my strength back and repairing my body
• Able to plan a bit further in to the future
• Less plagued by dark thoughts and self doubt
• Building some optimism for the future

I'm still getting to grips with:

• Being quite fragile when it comes to emotional stuff on films and TV
• Getting or feeling angry at people who are self centred and selfish
• What on earth I want to do with what bit of my life remains both professionally and personally
• How I feel about myself

It was interesting to see "how I feel about myself" being on the list because I recognise that I don't feel particularly good about myself at the moment - it is one of those things that you deal with a lot with staff and you need to be sure that they feel good about themselves but also that they feel good about their colleagues or you can get problems.

My low self esteem is really about not having worked in a "real" job for the past two and a half years. I've been 18 months in this job and was messing around for about a year with the lame brained one. It just doesn't feel that I have done much whilst I have been ill and not really been anything other than looking after my own sorry arse. The family are provided for which is a blessing, at least I got that right and had insurance in place for a living death.

I'm just not terribly satisfied with my current life, my current job and many other aspects of my life. I think that it is all part of a major reevaluation you go through when you have a chronic illness. Some probably come to terms with it really quickly or pragmatically argue that it is just something to deal with, get over it and move on. In my mind it is far from that. What sticks in my mind are the regrets and the decisions I took when I was younger that "may" have contributed to where I am now. Like working quite so hard, smoking all those years ago and that sort of stuff. I used to work really hard and drive myself to do a great job. Did it actually achieve anything? Am I reaping the excesses of my youth?

It is a strange dilemma. Someone hands your life back to you after you had been threatened with the alternatives. You get it back, not in quite the same shape your remember it and suddenly you have to decide whether to keep on with the same old same old which you were leading up until the time of diagnosis or go and do something different.

The older you get the more ties hold you in one place. Friends, clubs and organisations, work children, school, their friends and so on all tie you down. I'd be tempted to move further out into the country or to the coast or abroad but that probably isn't going to happen. There is an underlying need to make the most of this "opportunity" but as already discussed on this blog site, there is the fact that the only person likely to feel that way is me, no one else lived through this and what it did to me. Their experiences are likely to be very different and apart from some changes that they have noticed (I'm much more laid back than I used to be) they probably wont understand the desire to make some sort of change. I just wish I knew quite what that change actually was or is!