Month: April 2022

Something. My body is tired and tight. My head aches, everything is out of alignment. My chiropractor couldn’t even crack me. Years of trying to hold it all together have finally caught up with me. I think that when your body is in fight or flight mode for so long, it’s really, really hard to decompress.

I look at the above graphic and literally have every single symptom from the shoulders up. My shoulders are tight, which leads to my neck and then my jaw and then my aching head. Apparently I’m clenching my jaw so tight that I fractured a tooth in my sleep (didn’t even know that you could do that). My damn body is tired. Because my mind is tired.

I think that I had a whole year off to grieve Benny. I had a year to sit in it and let it wash over me. Unlike after my Mom’s death I had some time to process things. And it was a truly healthy start to this whole process. For the first time I felt like I was actually dealing with my stuff instead of shoving it down deep.

But we all know that grief doesn’t have a timetable and I wasn’t magically healed after a year. But I was pregnant. And facing a whole new set of anxieties I couldn’t have imagined. And then sleepless nights and chaos. And then 2 years later in the thick of all of that again with the next baby whilst we moved 4 times until we were finally home. And I loved every moment of it (besides the whole moving part).

Things finally settled a little bit for us and I could catch my breath and then boom, Covid. The whole world is thrust into a grief unlike any other. And everything kept changing and we just kept having to adapt.

I feel like I have been in fight or flight mode since 2013. And I am truly, truly exhausted. With the chaos came very little time for me to continue processing the fact that my son died. Sometimes it’s much easier to lean into the crisis of the moment rather than to face your own reality. Because the reality is that my son died. And it’s fucking awful.

So here we are. I’m ready for a good crack from the chiro. I’m going for a massage to try to clear some of that tension. It’s time to start going through some of this stuff that I’ve been holding onto and to try to change how I’m living. Because I’ve been fighting this battle for so long and my soul is just exhausted.