Frustration – Frantic Shanti

“Dropping a Plumb Line”: Dealing with Disappointment

This is a follow up of my last post, where I described the unending saga of unfinished repairs following a leak in our apartment, something that left me feeling helpless.

Before I posted last week, I removed a section that I’d written about fears of kitchen cabinets not arriving on schedule, and that they’d be hung after our upcoming houseguest had arrived and the place would still be torn apart. I cut it out because I thought, “Come on you’re catastrophizing, no one needs to read about that.”

Except that that’s exactly what happened. I got a call that there was another delay. All the expectations I’d had came crashing down in one big pile of disappointment. That is, disappointment mixed with shame, self-judgment, embarrassment, depression, etc. because I’d mixed so many feelings of self-worth into having our apartment be fixed up prior to our guest’s arrival.

This was something so biting for me as a middle-aged women who, despite being an employed “professional”, was still locked into the idea that whatever else I accomplished didn’t matter if my home wasn’t in guest-ready condition.

I tried to do a meditation on imagining what it would feel like if everything that had happened was the way it was meant to be, but I couldn’t even muster that feeling of acceptance.

Again it was the expectation, the need that I had to have things be different. I tried sitting with my disappointment but the feelings were sticky and pulled me down even more.

So then I thought, if it’s the unrealized expectation that I had, the one that had built up over the last two-plus months of restoration agony in which I had no control and was at the mercy of the HOA, our landlord and anyone else…how do I soften that expectation to make this better?

Oh, how differently things look when you drop down into a situation without prior expectations.

I regrouped and tried meditating again, but this time I was dropping straight into the situation, vertically, without those weeks of built up frustration and need. As if I were sitting on the tip of a plumb line, called into action and ready to problem-solve.

What would it feel like to come into this situation right now? If I were to start out by knowing that I’d have to deal with the kitchen being in boxes in the living room area where our guest is supposed to sleep and then move forward from there.

I imagined myself arriving without baggage and it felt so much better. Suddenly, my focus was on dealing with the situation instead of lamenting about how things could have been. This was more productive and less agonizing. Yes, potentially still frustrating, but it took me out of the magnified disappointment that didn’t even make sense from this perspective.

It was such a small shift but it made a significant and immediate difference. That emotional wall that I’d been hitting fell away and I could see solutions. And now things didn’t look that bad. Yes, things looked different but given that I felt so much better and more in-control, this was the best outcome that I could have expected, given the situation.

Again, perspective came to the rescue and I was reminded that there is always a path out of every situation if we give ourselves space to consider it.

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And now, off to clean the bathroom.

2023: Thriving at Last?

Some of our greatest strengths are born in our lowest moments.
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While I try not to keep returning to stories about “how far I’ve come” since my breast cancer diagnosis almost six years ago, for the start of 2023, I wanted to do a teensy bit of navel-gazing and take stock of how different everything looks compared to how it did after my 2017 diagnosis…and even from just a year ago.

My breast cancer story started the same way as it does for most of those diagnosed with cancer, with a lot of shock and disbelief. There’s nothing new or special about that.

However, for me cancer had been my ultimate health fear, the worst thing that I could image happening, particularly because I grew up during a time that cancer patients had poor prognoses and I had lost dear family to the disease. My exercise, dietary and lifestyle habits were in part driven by health concerns and that’s why my eventual diagnosis felt all the more “unfair”.

I have survived almost six years! But I had been so angry about my diagnosis that it took several years to appreciate how much of a victory that was.

The absolute worst health catastrophe that I feared could happen to me actually did happen…and I was too bitter to appreciate that I survived it.

Not only did I survive the treatment, I have slogged through lasting side effects. Trapped by fear and anger, I lost the initial positivity that I’d experienced right after completing chemo and radiation — I mean, after all that almost anything is going to feel better — and became mired in frustration.

When I finally managed to get through my head that there are many bad things that happen to people who do not deserve them, and many far worse than my own, I was able to move past my preoccupation with myself. That took longer than I’d like to admit.

But allowing that time to work through anger and fear until I got to the point of acceptance was so important for me. And the magical part of this is that acceptance was followed by an unfettering of my thoughts. Holding that bitterness had taken so much energy that little remained for other, more important things.

At the time of my diagnosis, I was fearful and bitter. A mere year ago, I was still angry. But in 2023, I have given myself the gift of freedom from that negativity and that allows so much space to breathe deeply and turn my attention towards better things. It was that release that took with it a nice chunk of anxiety that had likewise held me captive.

And now, instead of being just a survivor, I am finally feeling like I’m thriving.

Invisible Effects: Chemo Brain

Ah, chemo brain: the eater of thoughts. I should note that what I’m experiencing might not just be the effects of chemotherapy messing with my brain cells. This could also be influenced by the estradiol-blocking drug Tamoxifen that is forcing me into menopause before my natural time, or it could simply be the menopause “fog” that women complain about. So I don’t know exactly what it is, besides being infuriating.

I lose thoughts in an instant. Sometimes I actually “see” them disappear in the distance. It’s such a weirdly tangible sensation. I can try to grasp at their coattails and occasionally I’m successful in latching onto the thoughts and pulling them back. Other times I need to stop and walk back through my thought processes to retrieve them. And then sometimes they’re just gone. My desk at work is covered with post-it notes as a testament to what’s going on in my noggin. If there’s something I need to do I need to write it down NOW, and it’s not unusual for me to lose the thought as I’m in the process of getting something to write it down on!

This is what a walk down my memory lane looks like.

I can juggle up to three things in my mind at a time if I keep repeating them over and over again and work to maintain focus. Any more than that and it quickly crosses into the realm of hopelessness — it’s like knowing how to juggle three balls but if someone tosses a fourth at you, they all crash to the ground.

Then there are those chunks of awareness that disappear. It may simply be distraction and losing focus, but it feels like a hiccup in time that I don’t notice until it’s happened. It’s that “huh?” feeling as I return to present time when I realize that I’ve been gone for a second or two.

More disconcerting is a strange myopia that prevents me from reacting normally in a familiar situation. For instance, several months ago I treated a red light like a stop sign, and this was a familiar traffic light in my neighborhood that I’d been through many times. I briefly stopped at it, then drove through it. It was a “T” intersection that’s not terribly busy, but I did get shocked back to reality by the angry honk of a car that had the green and was probably wondering WTF I was doing.

The bottom line is that I’m distractable beyond belief. My train of thought gets derailed before it even leaves the station. The first time I noticed this, my oncologist ordered a brain MRI, way back in February. Nope, couldn’t blame it on a brain tumor — it’s just chemo brain.

This feels demoralizing, especially since my memory used to be so good. I lament losing all those awesome thoughts and ideas. And I know they were awesome because I remember having them — I just can’t recall exactly what they were. Yeah, there will be more, but I better have a notepad nearby to write them down. I even had a better ending for this post, but, you know…