Living on shifting ground

I originally mis-typed that as shitting ground, and while that’s accurate too, that’s a different post altogther.

But I digress.

I had a counselling assessment yesterday, and something the assessor said has been rattling about in my head all night.

I’m not completely broken.

Which sounds like a fairly low bar for a birthday counselling assessment, admittedly.

But I knew what they meant.

Because I’m not.

I can still laugh. Properly laugh, sometimes, much to the dismay of my pelvic floor. I get incredibly excited about ridiculous bits of fabric and new ideas. I make things. I plan things. I can spend an afternoon with my children and feel completely, fiercely happy. I can stand in my cabin surrounded by half-finished projects and paint samples and think, God, I love this.

There is still joy here.

And I think, somewhere along the way, I’d started believing that meant I couldn’t really be struggling.

That if I was still capable of laughing at something stupid, doing my hair to make me fell pretty, making a dress, planning a party, writing something I was proud of — then surely I must be fine.

But that isn’t really how it works.

The thing that has been wearing me down isn’t an absence of joy.

It’s the absence of solid ground.

For months now, so very much of my life has existed in limbo.

Waiting for answers. Waiting for decisions. Waiting for somebody else to send an email, make a call, finish a process, decide what happens next. I’ve been stuck in a cycle where I cannot move forward myself, I’m reliant on waiting for others to make a move.

There is no point at which you can properly plant both feet and say, Right. This is where we are now.

Instead, the ground keeps shifting underneath you, generally just at the moment you think you might have found a foothold.

Maybe today everything will finally move forward.

Maybe today another problem will appear.

Maybe the phone will ring.

Maybe it won’t.

Maybe the email in your inbox will change everything.

Maybe there’ll be nothing at all, and you’ll spend another day carrying the knowledge that at any moment there could be.

And that, it turns out, is absolutely bloody exhausting.

Not dramatic, throw yourself on a couch with your hand over your forehead, movie-scene exhausting.

Just a constant, quiet tension in your body that nothing can fix.

Like trying to live normally on a floor that might tilt without warning.

You still cook dinner.

You still do the school run.

You still laugh at your children being feral. Or scream like a banshee when they spill an entire glass of fizzy juice all over the floor.

You still get excited when you find nine metres of beautiful fabric you’d forgotten you owned. (I’ve got plans for that puppy)

You still make plans.

But part of you is always braced for impact.

And perhaps that’s the bit I hadn’t properly understood until yesterday.

You don’t have to be completely broken to need help.

You don’t have to have stopped laughing altogether.

You don’t need to be utterly bloody miserable every minute of every day for something to be hurting you.

Joy and struggle are not mutually exclusive.

There have been a few genuinely lovely moments in these past few months. There have also been days when I’ve felt completely flattened by circumstances I have very little control over.

Both things are true.

Maybe healing, for me, isn’t about somehow becoming the person I was before all of this.

Maybe it’s about finding solid ground again.

A life where every step doesn’t feel provisional.

Where plans can stretch further than the next unanswered email.

Where I’m not forever waiting for someone else to decide what happens to me.

I don’t think I need rescuing from some enormous dark hole.

I think I’m just really bloody tired of living on shifting ground.

And now I would quite like somewhere solid to put my feet.