Climbing Out of an Abyss

Obviously I've been absent from my blog, I feel like I've been absent from my life.  Truth is I feel my life has been on hold for seven years now, the life where I am a social, fun loving, get involved person. But the last five months have been absolutely horrendous.

Stress from family and the realization that I'm just a 'utility' to them, that I have no protection and have to be prepared for things that I know will happen to disrupt my life in the future and of which I have no control whatsoever has all made me a wreck.

The disbanding of the Bead Mavens in not a happy way seems to have been the final straw for me. I fell apart totally....and the thing I had been most afraid of happened.  I lost my ability to bead.

I'd been struggling for a couple of months with concentration and my level of production had dropped right down but all of a sudden I couldn't remember stitches or work out things that normally come easily. I know some of you will be worried about me...trust me I know exactly what you're thinking because I've experienced it before. That said I am doing everything I should be...so be assured of that.

After a solid week of not being able to bead a dang thing I decided I just needed to go back to the beginning, so I printed out one of my peyote flatwork patterns and followed the instructions :) I could still follow a pattern...YAY!

That's not saying I haven't unbeaded a hell of a lot more than usual....but for me it was progress. 

The thing with me is I am hopeless at dealing with stress when it gets built up past a certain level...and that level is pretty high, but once reached I simply stop being able to function.  It actually takes my body physically reacting to the stress to shake me out of it.  Then I go into crisis mode (I am the person you want around in a crisis) and my practicality takes over.  It cuts through all the crap, makes decisions and gets on with it. It kicks foot holes in the side of the abyss so I can climb out.

I've accepted that I need to have a bag packed for Thanksgiving and Christmas so if the thing we dread... happens, I can leave quickly and go to a hotel. It's the safe thing to do....sucks royally...but whatcha gonnna do? Safety first! Emotional and physical!  And so what if I'm alone in a hotel for the holidays...I'll make it fun.   And I refuse to think past there right now.

And I'm back to working up a new design. Something I've done before but tweaked and with a new element. It's going very slowly, lots of ripping out because my brain is still not behaving but I'm getting there.  My muse hasn't been fazed at all and has continued to throw more ideas at me which is on one hand annoying because I'm not capable of working them out, and on the other hand reassuring that the creative part of my brain is working fine.

I'm challenging myself to work out the new design that showed me my brain wasn't functioning correctly and when I've done that I will feel more like 'me'.

I'm thinking of my brain like a computer....it froze up, had to be rebooted and I still need to reload all the programs. We all know how irritating that can be :)

It took some finding but after turning everything upside down I did manage to find a tiny bit of hope and I'm nurturing it so it grows and takes over my life.