Dawn of a New Day

Gabrielle sent me a stack of writing prompts, and I’m going to try to work through them.

When I wake up in the morning, how do I most want to feel?

I want to wake up feeling rested, at peace, and with hope for the day ahead.

I sleep a lot now compared to most of my adult life, but that probably just brings me closer to a normal or healthy amount of sleep. However, since the RA/fibro diagnoses, occasionally I’ll wake up feeling like my body forgot to make energy. I suspect it’s stress-related, but don’t have enough anecdata to prove it.

Peace is something I learned I took for granted until last spring. It was rare to wake up to some sort of chaos in the house. I didn’t appreciate it until I lost it. All last spring and summer, I woke up to what felt like endless inner turmoil. I’ve mentioned this before: processing the betrayal of trust and all the lies, whether I could live with that, whether I should live with that, and where exactly the breaking point lay. If my mind wasn’t externally occupied, I was thinking through these torturous questions and all that spiraled down from them.

Then, after my birthday, the mood swings began – his, not mine. I felt a weight lifted by speaking my truth, but despite multiple warnings, he didn’t believe the outcome would be anything but forgiveness and life as usual. I dread the first contact of the day, because I don’t always know what I am going to get: normalcy, awkward lack of communication, or an argument based solely on his own narrative of what happened.

We’ve had four (I think) major arguments about how he’s treating me badly and why, and between them, things go back to almost-normal. Currently, we’re here in almost-normal, but I don’t trust that to stay.

And finally, I want to have a sense of hope for the day ahead. Sometimes I’ll get something to look forward to, like a trip to Garden City, or the contractors pouring my basement floor (that was a good day!), or even just knowing I’ll have time with my partner that evening. Those days have hope, despite the mild dread. But I used to have hope for days when I didn’t have any plans outside of work.

Between the pandemic, the state of the country, the state of my marriage, and all the other stresses of everyday life, I’m too stressed and tired to have a general sense of hope. But, the vaccine (currently waiting for the second dose) gives me hope, as do Biden/Harris. My partner’s amazing amount of work on my farmhouse gives me a lot of hope for my almost-immediate future. And yes, I’ve done a lot on the farmhouse too, just on the less-skilled side of things.

These are the most trying times I’ve ever experienced, and somehow, I’ve survived this far. That gives me hope that I’ll make it through after all.