Progress

Small steps one foot in front of the other.  I needed to get on and sort some things out.  I managed to really get cracking and finished early this afternoon.  It's been a gas and finally, finally, I've sort of freed myself away from these invisible hands which were dragging back downwards.  Of course all isn't clear right now but I'm  I'm getting there and not having the black moments that have interspersed the last few weeks.

It is nice to be free of these periods of doubt and as I think it may be grieving or mourning.  I suggested that I never really did grieve or mourn for being ill or what it did for my life.  Looking back I've never really recovered from bladder cancer.  I'm not back to the place I was before I was ill.  Interestingly I don't think I want to be either now, in retrospect.  I now want something very different indeed.

I thought I wanted my old life back, it was pretty good, money was OK, life was OK, I had my work to keep me busy and out and about, I worked around Europe and the UK and we had a good enough life, I got my dream job and BAM Bladder Cancer exploded onto the scene and that was it, life got interesting.

I suggested that the only person who was truly affected and altered was me.  No one else was and I wouldn't ever want them to be but the outcome is of course that when you've all travelled through the trauma and the treatment and the recovery you all arrive at the same place at very very different times and unfortunately the person who started the journey isn't the person who finished it.  That person is me, I am nothing like that person.  I'm sure my friends recognise me still but there is a very different person there now. 

What it leaves is an awkward truth, physically I look the same (a bit thinner maybe), but mentally I'm scarred, damaged goods as I often tell people :-) I'm not the same as I was 7 years ago.  I'm very very different and even more so recently.  It's taken me a very long time to get out of where I was and to realise how I was trapped in my own mind and my own rhetoric.  All along I've really known the answer and was even making reference to collateral damage early on in the saga.   I have no idea how it will end but the thing is to let it happen now as it will and to stop suppressing my life in the meantime.  I made a rod for my own back in some ways - now I'm going to please myself and start to live my life.  After 6 or 7 years I've got some catching up to do no matter how frightening it is to me and no matter in some ways the damage that may happen as a consequence.