Song: N/A
Mood: 5.5
Nightmares: 2?
I only remember waking up to nightmares twice last night. An improvement over the last couple of nights, but for one of them I had to get out of bed and go sit in the light and do grounding and mindfulness for a while to derail what felt like an oncoming panic attack. God, I hate those things. Other than the nightmares, I woke up worrying another three or four times but it didn’t take too long to get back to sleep from those.
I got up, had breakfast, did part of my morning routine, and then went back to bed for a couple of hours. I put in my earphones and turned on some very quiet music. I don’t know if I actually fell back asleep but just laying there, forcing my arms and legs to relax, felt good too.
J and I mostly did our own things today. We’re perfectly comfortable hanging out together but not necessarily talking or doing the same thing. She was reading a new book and I was doing a lot of thinking while playing around with my computer. I’m still working on the stuff from my last two sessions, and I think it’s good that I have an appointment with Dr P on Wednesday – the sooner I can talk to him about this stuff, the better. I’m trying to go on the assumption that I misinterpreted something or worded a question wrong, but it’s tough not to feel bad about all of this. I wish someone could tell me why I was able to live with this stuff for 35 years or so and then be utterly unable to cope. There HAS to be a reason.
After supper, J and I went through the two boxes of records from her uncle. My first impression was that both the covers and the vinyl is in really good shape; he obviously took care of them. I didn’t look at every piece of vinyl but the ones I did see were pretty free from scratches and warping. All good signs. As for content, the collection is a little eclectic. Everything from The Monks (awesome), to The Knack (fantastic), to B.B. King (great), to ZZ Top (pretty good), to Monteverdi (decent), to Nana Mouskouri (err…), to Colin James (listenable), to Zamfir (sweet Jeebus), and a whole lot of other stuff in between. I figure that more than 3/4 of them are keepers. The other 1/4 are stuff for kids (like Raffi and a lullaby album), really awful stuff, and there are a few duplicates of what I have now; I’ll figure out which one is the better pressing or in better shape and then drop WG an email and see if he wants them. It was very nice of J’s uncle for letting me have the records, and also very nice of J’s mom for hauling them over. Thanks everyone!
This evening I was texting with DA and he’s already thinking further about cabin security. He’s concerned that he’ll be sleeping there one night and people will break in looking for stuff, leading to what could get very ugly. I don’t think that’ll happen – anyone who goes there and sees his car parked outside and stuff moved around probably won’t bother him, my guess is that they’re looking for easy things to steal. The interesting thing is that he asked me if I wouldn’t mind coming up with ideas to help make things more secure. I asked J if she thought that was a good idea and she thought it was fine as long as I’m not taking DA’s worries on as my own (which is a very good point). So I told him I’d give it some thought.
There are already a couple of ideas percolating around in my head but I’m not going to start until tomorrow. I think I’m going to think about it a bit and once I’ve got it figured out a bit I will see if I can point my OCD and tendency to catastrophise at it. I’ve been trying to suppress those urges for more than three years, and it might feel good to let things go wild on a small problem that I’m dealing with at home. The question is whether I’ll be able to turn it off when I’m done working on it, and not lay in bed obsessing over it, and not going back over it repeatedly to tweak one tiny thing here or there.
Tomorrow I have my followup appointment with the surgeon who did my surgery a month ago. I do not want to go but I need to know if things are healing up correctly and if there’s anything else I need to do. The appointment is early in the morning; I hope that means that his schedule will still be running on time.
Wednesday is a Dr P appointment. I’m both dreading and looking forward to it. I really want to get clarification on all of this “living with it for the rest of my life” stuff.
Stay safe.