There's a heaviness in my heart. I don't know how to carry on. How to do all the everyday things, pretend they matter, go about the motions of life, like they are leading somewhere, pretend some joy in them? I look around me at people and wonder how they do it. How they go about life so easily, so happily. Don't they feel this heaviness sometimes, this wanting to just pause, to lay down, to cry...

I find it very hard to connect to people in general. It is a very very rare thing for me to make a connection. I don't even expect it to happen because it would be a miracle and miracles don't just happen. And yet, I count it among the best blessings in my life to have made one that was beyond what I could have ever asked for or hoped for. When it is something so precious, you want to hold onto it forever. And so I did. Deep down though, even as I found it, I always had this sense of time ticking. The patterns in my life gave me an intuition that it was just a matter of time. God had sent me this blessing when I most wanted it... but He would take it away... as he has always done, someday not too far. A part of me held this painful knowledge never wanting to confront it. Because I knew I couldn't do anything about it. All I could do is to hold the precious gift as delicately and tightly as possible. I feel sad that I did not always do that. It is easy to forget when you have something, to take it for granted... and so I did. Though I want to tell myself that I appreciated and honoured it too. I never lost sight of what a gift it was to me... there is this saying that I love and hate at the same time... when the student is ready, the teacher appears... when the student is truly ready, the teacher disappears... I hated this quote because it expressed what I really feared... that my gift would be gone someday... And I fear it has... my heart feels tremendously heavy at the thought of it... because the truth is I will never be truly ready to lose something so very precious... something that comes so rarely to me...but it wouldn't know...

As I was trying to find bits of energy to carry on, just to keep going, even if without much will or hope, there was a severe blockage in my kitchen sink... anything else I could have ignored but there is just one workable kitchen sink that needs to work... with me living in my own house, the responsibility is greater...it felt like when I could just not bear to feel anything but the deep sadness gripping me, I had to force myself to deal with this practicality... it made me want to drop everything and run... but it also made me see that if an issue with the sink could force my attention so much, how must it be if there was an issue with health? How much more terrible it would be if I had to be forced to deal with a painful tooth or a blocked gut...? A dear friend said to me recently that it helps to reframe a situation when something seems very dire... my reframing it this way helped me see how difficult it must be for someone who must deal with both internal health constraints and external worries... it also made me think about my own privilege to be able to freely wallow in sorrow without having to force my attention on survival or bodily emergencies... maybe we never realise how lucky we are with what we have until we aren't...