I've been a bit quiet lately. Part of it is that I didn't know how to say anything I felt or how things were going. I am ok with that. I never wanted to be a obliged to feed an algorithm or to use this space to say nothing. It truly is a place for me to say what I feel when I need to or how I need to, and lately it's been harder to sit down and muster the energy to think clearly. You see, it's been a bit of a hectic few weeks in all parts of my life. I had to take my daughter to the neurologist out of town for a follow up and today will go again so she can have an EEG. It's been 2 years since she's had a seizure so they wanted to check and see how her brain activity is. I'm dreading it because it's a long trip (1.5 hours each way) and she does not like to have to sit still for it. It often takes a few people to get her calmed for the meticulous process that is adding and removing the wires. Keeping her still is hard too. But hopefully the results are good.
To be honest, these trips are hard. What makes it harder is that it's not a thing that occurs in a vacuum. I feel depleted at this point. The pending thing that happened this year is still open. I'm no longer terrified me, but it was a huge stress. I had the dizziness thing which never hapenned again to that extent, but my ankle is still healing. Before the long distance appointment two ago, I had a kidney stone and my work has been stressful. There were storms here a week ago and a tornado touched down not far from here. I spent a third of the holiday weekend without power and the day work started I lost Internet for half the day. It's funny because as I type this my old traumas bubble up. Not at any one of those things... I just feel scared when I complain because people tend to dismiss me because they care about me and want me to encourage via positivity.
Most of the time if I express how I feel, I am told the same things. Sometimes it's too much, and I say that I am tired, or that I get dizzy and it's hard to do an remember all the things in a fully ND household and that it's been hard. How much pressure I feel about having to show up no matter what. Work and do appointments with kidney stones. Remembering all the logistics of prescriptions, admin work, finances, timetables, what things needed and where they are. Strategic work in all parts of my life. Working in a toxic culture that doesn't even accept how I work or process or organize information.
I am always told that I need to be more clear with my husband as to what is needed, make lists for him. To stop doing the things. Or I get cheerleading. I don't want people to believe in me. I'm not strong. I'm just really tired. I don't feel it's fair that I work full time and need to remind my husband who works part-time to do whatever needs to be done. Those lists were made years ago, the recipes are in his documents, and he's been given notebooks, sent videos on how to do things with adhd even if he's not interested. The sad thing is that if I weren't here, everyone would adjust and pitch in and do the thing. Having me here means it's easier to perpetuate using me. But they cannot do the emotional labor because I have always done it, our culture assigns women these tasks, and it's easy to ignore the pleas for help than to fix something percieved as being as natural as breathing. Women get to cry, and men get to rage. But tears and rages are expensive in a patriarchal society, aren't they?
John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.
– Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper)