A new monster!

I am learning the differences between fear, pain and suffering and how to control them. Do you believe any of that BS?  I cannot control any of this right now…but maybe just recognizing the differences in the 3 and what if anything I can do about them might help.

Fear is the worst…it is unexpected, it sneaks up and bites me in the heart, soul, and ass at the same time, it knocks the breath out of me, it takes me down when least expected, and I am overwhelmed and incapacitated.  Negotiating the sale and purchase of vehicles, fixing small things around the house I am simply physically unable to do, or alone at night the target of bad people.  The list expands daily depending on the new situations that arrive.  The new talk in my head has to be “I need to figure out the difference between what is only new and different” and what is “real fear”.  New and different looks and feels like fear every time but it does not have to.  If I can just stop and think through it rather than panic, I think I can do it by myself maybe even learn to ask for help, as long as I do not let fear overwhelm me. I was never afraid of new and different before because he was always there to "catch" me if I screwed up really big...at the risk of sounding truly corny "he was the wind beneath my wings"

Pain is just pain.  There is no controlling it at all.  I love him, I miss him, the guilt of I should have been there for him, and why did I not see this coming and take care of it.  The cause of pain changes daily. But there are some things that are the same.  My pain is connected to grief…. and the grief is connected to love.  I would not take back or regret one minute of our imperfect love, it is the imperfections that made it ours, so the pain is just going to be here because I am unwilling to disavow one second of the love we had. I will cry at the most inopportune moments, need to be by myself, and in all likelihood will reach out to people or meds or whatever I have to ease the pain.  The pain is here, I cannot ignore it. I can only choose how to deal with it at the moment it arrives with the tools I have at the time, knowing that it will pass in a few minutes, several hours, in the morning or a couple of days, but it will pass.

Suffering is another beast, but I think I may have some control over this one!  I think suffering is the long agonizing quagmire of paralyzing pain and fear stirred together. Suffering is when I am overwhelmed and lost in a boiling untouchable stew of negative emotions and absolutely cannot do anything. And yes, there has been and I suspect there may be more suffering, but recognizing it and perhaps even figuring out, what part is pain and what part is fear is causing the immobility might help me survive it better next time suffering invades my life.

"Wind Beneath My Wings" Bette Midler