Yoga with Debi, Poké with Jodi and Papa, Creative Process with Sheila

October 11, 2023:

Alright, today was a pretty good day, full of several different things. Ok, let’s go through the day. This morning, I had banana and strawberry & cream yogurts with my meds at 8:10am. Also took a Zofran at 7:43am, because I felt a touch nauseous. Took a short walk with Papa too. Then, I decided I might as well go to my yoga class. When I walked in to the JCC, I talked with Hannah the receptionist a bit, and when she asked about my day, I told her about my creative process class at night.

In yoga, my #1 realization was that I had been thinking that every single person without a TBI or cancer was a TON happier than me, and that the things that made it so out of reach for me, were things I just don't have, like having a serious relationship and kids. In the yoga class, the girl Anat, who had told me about the dance place for people with disabilities two weeks ago, mentioned a show they had on Saturday. After class, I had another talk with Debi. She told me that she and her husband like to do this thing where every day they’ll ask each other for their “trophies, turkeys and genies.” You list something you’re proud of, something you’re thankful for, and something you wish or hope for. I told Debi that I try to write something I’m grateful for in my photo story every day.

After yoga, I went to the hot tub for a few minutes, and then showered. I’m not sure when I had this thought, but I know this was when I wrote it down. It’s that: “No one will ever find friends like the ones they made in high school.” I kind of realized that I will NEVER meet high school friends again, and no one will. Those are relationships created in the past for everyone. Defining “good friends” as only my high school friends is very limiting to me. I just cannot call those the “only friendships worth having.” No one will ever meet their high school friends again, and that’s something I just have to accept.

Then, I went home to Papa’s house, and we decided to try to meet up with Jodi for a poké bowl. I was feeling a bit nauseous, so I didn’t want to eat in the store this time. So what we did is we just went there and picked them up and took them to Jodi’s house. I got the Tuna Lover bowl, but I added eel sauce to it, which I realized even a few minutes later wasn’t a very good choice.

When I was at Jodi’s, I also took some notes on my thoughts. “A big realization is that I’ve been equating being normal to being happy, and assuming that therefore, everyone else is a lot happier than me, because they haven’t got my abnormal medical issues.” And also, that happiness isn’t an on/off switch, the way I’ve literally thought it was for years. Even saying “I’ll never be happy again,” was literally just me assuming that happiness was an on/off switch, and I was thinking that “my switch will never be flipped to ‘on.’” Off topic, but we played like three rounds of Yahtzee together too. After that, we drove home and it was pretty soon time for me to go to my Creative Process class.

For the class, I left 15 minutes early. That was good, because I accidentally drove to the address for my Spanish class, not the right location. So I was able to get there like two minutes late. Today in the class, I sat next to Alisa, the girl I had the nice talks with last week. We didn’t talk much more today, but I did manage to talk a lot to this one lady named Sheila. We were talking about something called “synchronicity,” or things that happen that aren’t literally caused by each other, but seem to perfectly fit the situation. I said one example for me was the existence of this class, which kind of answered my desire to want to talk about feelings and cover topics you’d normally talk about in therapy or something.

My partner, Sheila, also very interestingly told me that she had a brain injury too, and had also been treated at HCMC. Her therapist was Courtney, not Elise like me. Sheila also told me that hers was a “mild TBI,” and not very severe. Oh well, mine was. She told me that when I introduced myself last week, she’d been thinking about me and what I’ve been able to accomplish. I forget what else we talked about, but oh well.

Grateful: Grateful for Debi, and also Jodi, and also Sheila, who I just met.