2017: a year of pain

[seventhe]

I’m sure approximately zero (0) of you are aware of this, but every year since like 2012 or 2013 i come up with a tag at the beginning of the year that i hope fits the year’s theme. (It doesn’t always work, so occasionally i replace the tag, or come up with multiples.) for 2017 i have ended up with 2 tags that really capture most of the year: “fight me” and “no”.

Unfortunately in my heart 2017 has ended up being a year of pain. Physically; emotionally; spiritually; professionally; financially; nationally; politically; chronically. In every area of my life I’ve ended up hurting for most of this year. The one exception has been romantically, and I’ll start out what will end up being a depressing entry telling you all that Mike and I are engaged; we will be married on 14 April 2018, and then there will be a big reception party some time at the end of May (Memorial Day wknd plus or minus a week). Mike has been my bedrock for so much of this year, and I’m honestly not sure i would have come out of this year as intact as i have if I hadn’t had him. I call him my grounding rod, my ground wire; he keeps me balanced.

I will try to intersperse good and bad, but here’s a memorial to the year that has hurt me in more ways than I’ve ever known.

My family used to summarize the year in this fashion, and so, “2017 was the year when...”

• I lost Marzy. You all knew this would be the first one, and it is. Marzy was my stability, my ground; he was my emotional support animal, and losing him started a downward spiral for me that it took a while to equilibrate. I’m still not okay. I still cry about that little fucker; I still pick up the box of his ashes and hold it hard as if he can feel it. He was everything, so so much of my life; and while the beginning of the year hurt, this was the first physical stab through my heart, in March 2017.

• I fostered the Marmelade family from Columbus, and Rosa, Iggy, and Potato joined my life; while Noctis and Prompto joined the family down with drakonlily and crankyoldman. They have changed the dynamic of the household in many ways: not only are they an added light to life in the Feymarch, but they have been a driver to motivate me to start taking control of my surroundings and cleaning up my 4 years of Black Hole clutter. The transition was hard and, many times, painful - fostering 5 cats when you already have 2 is a lot of work! - but the joy that they’ve brought me, along with watching Porter and Rydia grow through all the changes, has in many ways literally saved parts of 2017 for me.

• I left my job as Plant Operations Manager. Y’all have seen and read the 4 years of the Black Hole that was that job, and many of you had suggested I look for other options; well, this was an option that had been discussed as a potential career move, but I didn’t get to pick the timing of it - in fact, it was a surprise to everyone except my boss, who just decided to do it for [insert reason]. This transition sucked. It severed what had been a mutually beneficial, developmental mentorship between my (previously awesome) boss and I; it gave me no control over leaving the job that was killing me; and i went into a spot that wasn’t ready for me and spent 6 months underworked and undervalued, which not only is incredibly painful to me as a person but is not a healthy way to transition out of a job in which you were overworked, highly valued, incredibly important. The professional hit has stung for the better part of 2017, and while the argument can be made that I’m “in a better job now” that doesn’t consume so much of myself, it also doesn’t give back as much of myself - that sense of accomplishment, of ownership, of self-confidence. The move has set me back in a lot of ways.

• My health hit an unsustainable rock-bottom. Not a surprise: stress triggers fibro, which triggers pain, which triggers missing work, which triggers more stress trying to catch up. Do that for 4 years straight with no breaks and a heavily increasing workload and... well. After I transitioned, i lost a lot of work time to FMLA as my body started slowly to recover from a 4-year Black Hole deficit. You know how you can hold off a crash when you absolutely have to, when you just have to grit your teeth and push through and save everything for later? Well... later came. It was awful.

• The fucking state of USA politics, our flaming trash bag asshole of a “president”, the state of our planet, the state of humanity. There’s no hope for this world, and there’s no refuge to be found there.

• my mental health has been an unstable spiral, somewhat-but-not-entirely correlated with my physical health. I’ve had to fight off depression (as much as you can “fight”, right) more times this year than ever.

• I’m sure tomorrow I’ll come back and add the million other things I have forgotten about this shithole year.

Honestly, i really lost myself and my place this year. There were huge gaps and chasms I spent a lot of time and energy trying to fill whatever way I could. I spent a lot of time being tired and overwhelmed, and feeling exhausted and hopeless. With everything on top of itself, it really took until about October before I started finding handholds and climbing out of this goddamn pit.

The thing I do need to say here is that my friends and family - and family friends; you know which ones you are - have also really stepped up to help me through the low times this year, and I can’t help but love you more for it and look forward to having continued fun positive memories in the years to come. <3

Part of moving forward is archiving these things here; i have to get this out and over until I can start to look at 2018 and what I want to do and change and how to go forward.