Stupid o’clock … again!
It is stupid o’clock again and I am awake. The sweat has awakened me and now I am up. It comes upon me like a cold swampy feeling, under my boobs, my arms and legs. A great damp river of water and a feeling of immense chills which I cannot understand. And then I fall asleep again and the cycle begins over and over again, until I finally get up to attempt to break the cold sweaty cycles. I have endured this ‘menopause reboot’ symptom for two or three years now. It comes to steal my sleep and brings yet more distress to a body already reeling from the stomach stuff. They say its ‘night sweats’ and signfies the peri-menopause and yet for me its just another symptom of this body that doesn’t work very well. One night I had the sweats for seven straight hours, and in the morning I just cried and cried, feeling clammy, cold and again an alien in this body. There is such a feeling of helplessness when the body is doing things I cannot control. And peri-menopause is yet another chapter of me being left bewildered in the dark, with no compass to navigate by. And these situations are really testing me, and I feel again like the little boat bobbing up and down on the stormy waters of life.
This body is my home, and yet the home is not stable, and attempting to exist here is becoming more and more precarious. I feel like the repair people need to come in and begin the fixing process, and that feels good and also a bit scary. That feeling of having another person step across this threshold and going round the ‘house’ of this body with a torch and assessing what is damaged and needs fixing.
And so Mark’s plan is like the fixtures and fittings of what is needed to mend this broken house. And so it becomes a methodical one foot in front of the other to bring this ‘house’ up to scratch again. And I feel a sense of calmness is beginning to land here, and maybe a sense of hope is beginning to bud into life. Perhaps the foundations can be made more solid and the ‘mending’ be easier than I anticipate. And it is good to have Mark’s plan, as it gives me a road map to follow. And yes there may be pot holes to navigate, and yet in time the ‘house’, that is this body, will rejoice with a new coat of paint so to speak and will hopefully sit majestically on the horizon with a smile on her face again.