Heavy

I'm a bit stuck in another period of being "in the muck".  Everything feels hard and heavy and tiring.  Part of that is not feeling 100% for a month and a half now, but I also think this is just part of my brain's cycling that I've become more and more aware of.  I go through a period where everything is cool and exciting and I'm immensely grateful for every little thing, and then I seem to fall off the cliff a bit and go to the other end of the spectrum.  Add in normal ups and downs in life and I think you sort of just have to hope that the normal downs don't coincide with a brain cycle down, but I think that's sort of where I am.  For the record, my problems are not big, but I guess they just feel that way anyway.  I just saw a social media person I follow say much the same--that she's in a funk and it's all small stuff, so God forbid it was actually big stuff.  Most of the time I know I just need to wait it out, but here's some of what keeps nagging at me currently:

• Israel - The Palestinians (specifically their Hamas government) attacked Israel last weekend.  The human toll is terrible and I feel so awful for the normal people caught in the middle of this--on both sides.  Everyone is talking about Israel but I'm sure there are a number of Palestinians who have no personal need to exterminate the Israelis (assuming Israel's government would treat the Palestinian territory respectfully, which I don't think has always happened) and they are being affected by this as well.  It's horrifying to think that one day you have a normal life and the next it's in shambles.  I've had an underlying sadness for the last year-plus for the Ukrainians for that same reason because I can't even fathom how you function when your normal life is literally bombed out and suddenly you're a refugee, especially with kids.  It's also made a couple things at my work more complicated and it's just so depressing to realize that this could go on for a while.
  
• My Health - Ever since we got back from Florida, I feel like I've been fighting something off.  I eventually decided that maybe I'm just extra allergic to this time of year, so I started my nose spray again which seemed to work a little.  But I still felt like a couple times a day I was having a mild allergy attack, starting with a couple sneezes and then being congested for hours.  Once in a while it got to the point where I started feeling like I was coming down with something, either because it didn't go away or I felt headachy or tired, so then I took zinc and it would fade again for a couple days.  But it still seemed to be there lurking under the surface because I just wasn't ever 100%.  This weekend the cold finally seemed to break through a little.  I used my steroid rinse because I wondered if I was just stuck like I was last year, and today a little more congestion showed up.  It's still mostly on one side of my nose and only feels one step up from where I've been, so it's still a little weird.  I've also been extraordinarily tired lately.  Like, if I have something to keep me occupied, I'm fine, but the second I don't, I'm literally falling asleep in my chair.  Adrenaline or simply any activity is enough to keep me moving, but when that stops, I'm struggling.  For example, I could make it through Meliora Weekend where I had to stand for hours on end without being short on energy, but any old evening is a struggle to stay awake past 9pm.  I don't know if I'm still not adjusted to the earlier mornings or if it's a long COVID thing, or what.  I'm also just vaguely achy sometimes, like I'm sleeping awkwardly or like I worked out the day before but didn't.  It's mostly in my shoulders and my still-cranky elbows.  All of it is making it hard to work out in the evenings or motivate myself to go out into the world when I'd rather be relaxing (which is almost always).  I took off last Monday since the kids were off and ended up doing pretty much nothing all day--epically lazy, even by my standards.  The weather wasn't cooperative, I was tired, and all I could really muster was looking at my phone.  Any tentative plans wouldn't work because of the weather, which derailed the day, and any other replacement task felt overwhelming.  It was depressing and just made me feel worse.  I can't say today was much better.  I'm just in a physical funk with a mental one on top of it.  It's just been a long time to feel subpar without any real direction.  I'm hoping when this cold passes, maybe it'll take the funk with it.
• Others' Health - My cousin just had his second chemo infusion for colon cancer.  An old friend's daughter is approaching her one-year cancer-versary at the end of this month but isn't even halfway through treatment, which is still horrible on a daily basis.  My heart hurts so bad for both of them because I know I'd be a disaster going through something like that.  I know how my brain and anxiety operate, and I know that when I'm feeling even a bit off (or even worry about my loved ones feeling a bit off) everything just seems harder, so I can't even imagine something more serious--in fact, I have to stop myself from imagining because I will get completely overwhelmed.  
• Death - I lost an old friend to cancer this week.  I worked with him during my time in sports and his voice was one of my favorite PA voices ever.  He'd been battling cancer for years.  He was actually inducted into the Red Wings' Walk of Fame a month ago with another announcer friend of ours, and we had to miss it because we were coming back from Florida.  He went downhill fast and my heart breaks for his family, including four kids, a couple of whom are still pretty young.  I'm glad he's no longer in pain, but it's so sad. We went to the funeral home on Wednesday and waited in line an hour to talk to the family.  It's clear a lot of people will miss him.  It felt good to share my connection and a couple stories with the family, like how he swiftly avoided announcing an inappropriate fake name during our intermission frisbee toss!  He was such a steadying force out there on the ice despite the weird things that could happen during games, and I really enjoyed working with him.  Later that night I started searching YouTube to find video clips with his voice, and I'll admit I choked up a bit hearing it.  His voice was so distinctive and while I'll miss him as a person, my game production self is extra sad that his fantastic voice has been silenced.  I still loved hearing it at Red Wings games before the pandemic and his health took him away, and it hurt to know I won't hear him up there anymore.  It sounds silly, I know, but he was a master and I think seeing someone in their element like that is amazing.  It's also so much of how I knew him, so it's inherently tied into the loss of him as a person.  I also hadn't seen him in person in eons, so his voice was really most of what I had for the past 10+ years that kept those memories with him fresh.  He was also still relatively young and it's sobering to think of all the lost years and what his family might be facing now that he's gone.  It's definitely a lot to process, even from my spot on the very outside edge of his circle.
• The Weather - We went from 80s last week to cold, rainy, and windy over last weekend, and we seem solidly stuck in the 50s for the foreseeable future.  Sometimes it's nice fall weather...at least it would be for November.  Not so much in early October.  This weekend isn't doing us any favors either--Carter's last soccer game was a total frigid wet-fest--and next weekend currently looks just as bad.  It's just not looking promising to snag a day or two for fun fall activities while the leaves are still out.  And speaking of leaves, they're currently unimpressive.  I'm not seeing any of the bold reds, yellows, and oranges that we usually get.  Everything just looks sort of muted and brown.  I'm sure there are areas with nice color, but most of the roadside stuff I normally see is blah.  I know there are probably areas that do have better color, but with the weather being terrible, it's not like we can make a day of going to find them.  It's a little depressing since that's one of the things that usually gets me through fall.  I just want to get some pumpkins, see some leaves, and do a couple short road trips that involve some outdoor time, and the weather is just leaving me at a loss.

I'm doing my best to find the bright sides, and I will say that the funeral home experience Wednesday probably pulled me out of the worst of my funk because that was a clear example of big problems vs. small problems.  How bad can I feel for myself when I have my husband, kids, family, and (most of) our health, among other things?  I think even the process of remembering those memories with him and having that reminder of how everyone you meet can touch your life in some way is one of those things that makes me so grateful for the process of life.  Obviously the down times make it harder to focus on those little things, but I could probably take 90% of people who I've had genuine, significant interactions with and pinpoint something they brought to my life, something I learned, or some random memory I look back on fondly.  I often think that about random high school friends or my past co-workers.  Those relationships may just be via social media now, but most of them probably don't realize how much I value whatever they contributed to my life.  As Craig and I were in the midst of the funeral home outing, he suggested that we should try to get a suite for a game and bring out some of our old sports co-workers.  We rarely see so many of them (aside from the ones I now work with again, although one just left), and it would be fun to just hang out as a group and reminisce.  We have so many stories that we could go for hours!  Sports was a very up-and-down time--exhausting, fun, challenging, small pay checks, but completely unique.  I can't imagine my life without that experience--even if you ignore the fact it directly led to my entire present family and working life.

I think I'm finally having a bit of a travel hangover, too.  I just said a week or so ago here that I was feeling a sense of relief that I'm not traveling right now, and while that's still true, that one part of my brain that likes to ignore reality is feeling a bit bored right now.  I look and think back on my travels and all that I saw, and sort of wish I had that kind of excitement currently.  Part of it is probably that I'm just not in the mood to work right now, so any escape sounds enticing.  I was complaining about the cold Friday morning (I think we had a frost that I wasn't expecting) and Jacob's like, "Let's go to Disney!"  Geez.  I know I can't travel every time I'm feeling bored, but there is a part of me that's missing it, or maybe even the anticipation of it.  The other day I caught myself thinking about how webcams served as such an escape for me back when I first discovered them.  The idea that life was happening in another part of the world--whether it was another time of day there or somewhere that looked pretty similar to where I was--was somehow both comforting and fascinating.  I remember many a Saturday night alone in my dorm room engrossed in whatever cameras I could find--fascinated by seeing Asia in daylight, or sunrise in Sweden, or Montreal looking sparkly on a cold night, being entertained by cameras that were interactive, or just amazed by the sight of a live view of some landmark I'd only dreamed of seeing.  It gave me a lot of travel goals and oddly made me feel less isolated despite being very alone in that moment.  I can't say they give me quite that same feeling now, since I'm 25 years later in life and still haven't made it to most of those places, but I still appreciate the opportunity to look when I'm stuck in one spot for a bit.  

Tonight I sat transfixed watching my photo screensaver for probably 20 minutes.  It brings up random photos from the tens of thousands on my computer, and it was just one cool memory after another.  Little versions of my kids, places we've gone, sporting events, flowers and fun photos, pictures from my parents' photos or my younger years.  It's incredible all of the memories contained in those photos, and pre-digital (and especially pre-phones) there were so many more undocumented ones.  I'm grateful for all of them--the places I have been, the things I have done, the people I've known, and the life I've lived.  There may be a lot more out there that I'm itching to do, but man, that's so much already.  How sad can I be?