hey – to anyone who may still be out there.
It has been a very very long time. Sorry about that.
And given the nature of this blog, I realize that for some people my extended silence may be viewed in fairly tragic terms.
Sorry if I caused anyone to wander down that dark road unnecessarily.
I guess I needed to go off the grid for 4 or 5 years.
I can hammer out another post at another time to try to explain why.
But tonight, for whatever reason, I was thinking about this blog and decided to do a bit of CPR on it.
So here’s the thing.
A TON of things have changed since I last posted here. One of which is I now have a dog. It has been so long since I last posted that my dog is now 3 and a half years old. And I adore him. He is my a) money pit and b) mental health saviour.
Every day when I wake up, I bend down and pet my dog and he is happy, happy, happy. He wags his tail and he is excited about what adventures we may have today.
In contrast to me.
So tonight, just a few minutes ago, we were walking through the November deluge of rain, and he was happy as a clam, and oddly, I was happy as a clam to be walking him through the deluge.
But I realized that perhaps one of the reasons I have been blog-phobic over the last few years is I thought as soon as I finished chemo my life would be all sunshine and rainbows and smooth sailing.
And it turns out, I have the same migraine inducing challenges post chemo as anyone else in the western world – except probably the 1%.
I guess I have been struggling with how to process that in my own head and how to communicate that to the larger world without sounding like a complete jerk.
As the hound and I were walking through the rain tonight, I was thinking about a scene in the Sopranos, where Tony is having an affair with a woman from Eastern Europe. She is fairly working class and has had a leg amputated and walks with a prosthetic and is completely unlike any of the other women he has dalliances with.
At some point he is talking about his life and she says something like “you (north) americans… you always expect to be happy. Why would you expect that?”
And while I may have just butchered a very interesting moment in American television, I think the sentiment comes through.
And I wonder why I can’t just get up every day and be grateful I am not dead – in spite of the odds.
I’m not sure having angst about not being grateful enough helps me feel, well, grateful.
But this is part of what I am struggling with.
But I have a fabulous dog who is happy all the time and he is a great role model for me and he makes me smile in spite of myself, so maybe I am on the right track and it’s all about the baby steps.
Good wishes to anyone still paying attention.