swirling

this week felt like a blur of furious activity and a jumble of varied emotions. my therapy session on thursday, in which i recounted the thoughts and feelings i'd been having over the previous two weeks was more challenging than i expected. i guess the challenge was that while dr. s and i may have been discussing perspectives from the last couple of weeks, the topics those thoughts were about stretched over the course of my lifetime -- my relationship with my mother, the lack of one with my father, my marriage to michael, my struggle to summon the courage to risk new relationships, my frustrations at work, the pain i experienced with spending much of the first 34 years of my life struggling with my sexual orientation. we covered quite a bit of territory in the course of that hour, and when i left i felt like my head was filled with a tornado of swirling images and reactions.

and today, well,  the swirling motion has subsided, but there is a feeling akin to that eerie silence that often follows a devastating display of nature's fury. part of me wonders if it's a sign of my medication working almost too well. i have this sense of calm even though i know that i've just been reminded of a lifetime of hurt.

it's funny. when you tell the stories of the challenges of your life to others and see their reactions, you become more acutely aware of how "not good" many of the things you've experienced truly are. while i'm aware that no one emerges from this life without experiencing some type of suffering, i do believe that the degree of it varies from person to person and that just because we all suffer doesn't make the severity of the conditions we go through any less real or the damage any less significant. and yet, somehow they all fall back into the context of "well, it's your life and you do your best to deal with it." i'm doing my best, but the wind keeps kicking up when i least expect it.