I was looking for WordPress but typed in Blogger by mistake. I found some more of my old blogs (there’s 10-15, one day I should collate them) and found a post from where I was a medical receptionist sitting the GAMSAT, complaining about people complaining about the Medicare out of pocket. Which, in 2005, was $10.
What struck me was how cyclical everything is. Not just birth and death. Everything. Trying for something, failing or succeeding, starting over regardless of outcome. The dumpster fires of our lives, leaving trails of destruction. The clean up after the storm. The slow return to whatever normal was, but isn’t now. The merry-go-round you can’t opt out of. And if you’ve socially conditioned into being an emotionally reactive people pleaser like myself, you’ve added loads of things onto that merry-go-round until it doesn’t function properly, and the clean up after the storm is all about not taking on the seeming one-off opportunities that definitely don’t come up repeatedly in this field (except that they do).
The merry-go-round is you. And the intrinsic worth of that ride isn’t defined by the things you add to it. The intrinsic worth is all in how well you take care of it. It’s taken a cancer diagnosis to finally see that and it stings reader, it really really stings. When your worth stops being defined extrinsically, suddenly all the things you were doing lose their meaning. Sitting in clinic trying to focus on something you’ve ultimately chosen for reasons that don’t resonate anymore is hard. Watching your colleagues ascend and ascend and feeling one part jealous and one part lost because now there is two yous, the before you and the after you, is hard. If I’d had good instrinsic self worth from the start, how much of this life would I have chosen for myself? And now that I am here, how do I choose anything at all, for the future? And survivorship means its hard to plan for a future you now really know was never guaranteed. It’s easier to be blind to that.
Anyway it’s nice to finally feel like writing again. I’ve been slowly extracting myself from social media because the opinions of absolute strangers are meaningless to me now, and no foreign policy is going to be helped by faceless hordes. Journalling has become a bit of a buzz word, but in my darkest times it has helped. I have too many journals going on at once but they all serve a purpose. Like Taylor Swifts pens. I have my deepest darkest. The day to day record. And now, this one back. The longest thread of my life, the journal that helps me hold onto myself and who I am, what I care about.
I’ll be shocked if anyone is still reading but if you are, hello! And thank you!
Bake. Love. Run. 