The Eagle has landed ....

Good grief! I can hardly stand it. Today, I was so low on energy that I stressed all day because I knew I needed to go to the bank that is located twenty-five minute walk from where I live. In the end, I had to borrow some change for the parking meter in town because I had to drive myself.

As if that wasn't enough, I feel so washed out this evening after my gargantuan five minute driving effort that my hubby has offered to walk home from the station (another twenty-five minute walk) after his twelve hour day!

It is on days such as this one that words like pathetic, useless, disabled, crippled, come rushing into my mind. In some ways I prefer it when I am so ill that I can barely get out of bed because I am left with no options to stress over. This in-between sort of day when I manage to do some work in the house but cannot walk across the road to enjoy my beautiful local park really pisses me off! (Please pardon the inelegant language). I feel like a shadow of my former self. I feel like the proverbial eagle who wakes up one morning in a chicken coop wondering how the hell it got there....

I also know that this kind of thinking does NOT help - in fact, it makes me feel worse.

So the question is: what would I need to think to feel a little better? The problem with jumping to my thinking straight away is that I risk plastering some positive thinking on very deep negative feelings. After all, I have a right to feel what I feel, without my jumping on my own case armed with condemning self-judgememt.

OK - so what are those deep feelings? I feel like I have a hidden disability. There, I said it. On the outside, I look like I should be living and working normally. My goodness: what is that 'should' and what is 'normally' anyway? At this point, I realise that I may not be the free independent thinker I like to pretend I am. What I feel is in fact 'self-inflicted societal pressure'. Nobody else is telling me I should do this or I should do that, I do. A friend of mine, whom I met at a local mental health support group, says he can't wait for his sixtieth birthday so that he can say he is retired rather than 'not doing anything' because he is unwell. I know how he feels. Perhaps it would help me to think of myself as retired (after all, I am not far off). I have always rejected the idea of retirement because I intend to keep on making a nuisance of myself for as long as I possibly can! Having said that, the word 'retired' does take a lot of pressure off. As a 'retired' person, I can do what I b****y well like, all day, any day. I think I will start using it to see how it works out.

You see, I would never have thought of 'retired' if I hadn't allowed myself to feel what I felt first. Only then did the thought of my friend come to me and lead me to a new way of thinking of myself and my situation. 'Retired' sounds a lot better to me than 'disabled' because I have never worried about getting older. In fact, I love being older.

 The time may have come for me to think of myself as a different 'bird' altogether (pun intended) - forget the chicken, or the eagle: how about a wise old owl :D