It’s been approximately a year and a half since I had EMDR treatment after a medical trauma that gave me a bad case of PTSD. It was a combination of perimenopause and flares of activity in my thyroid gland which caused my thyroid medication to affect me in some pretty scary ways and me to have panic attacks when I would feel the slightest bit off.

Although I came close a few times, I have not had any panic attacks since treatment. I have felt anxious at times due to the perimenopause but fortunately, I haven’t panicked. I think part of it is due to becoming as angry as I got after so much time of suffering. I simply got fed up. Once you go from scared to angry, you tend to make improvements that you weren’t brave enough or ready enough to make before, as more often than not, we can’t force these things to progress as fast as we’d like. So once I got pissed and adopted a, “Go on, let’s see anything fuck with me now” attitude and refused to let myself get all worked up over shit, in conjunction with therapy, this stopped the panic attacks.

As time went on I found that EMDR therapy did more than just stop me from panicking. It seems to have dulled my emotions overall but I don’t mind. I never cared for emotional people anyway, and I was once pretty emotional myself, as I said in a previous entry. I’ll still get pissed at anyone who may try to burn me or someone I care about, and I’ll still laugh at a joke I find funny, but I don’t think I’ve even cried since treatment. Things just don’t faze me or have the same kind of emotional impact they would have had in the past. I don’t get as angry. I don’t get as sad. This doesn’t mean that I’m lacking in empathy or anything like that; I just don’t feel the intensity of emotions I used to feel. Fortunately, the thing I feel most is humor. It’s a lot easier to get me to laugh while it’s become damn near impossible to get me to cry, not that crying is a bad thing. I’ve had many a day in the past when I needed a good cry to help get things out and make me feel better and that was ok.

Overall I definitely like the person I’ve become better than the person I was. Trauma really can change us for both the better and the worse. Not that I was a bad person before, but I’ve always preferred calmer people over-emotional people, and being more on the calm side helps. So does being happier and healthier overall, since as most of us know, that can affect our emotions.

But still… even if I were once again going through some of the rough times I’ve gone through in the past, I still wouldn’t be nearly as emotional about it as I would have been before. So yeah, I like the me of today. :-)

I may be less emotional these days but I still have the same worries and concerns many people have. I fear suffering. I fear death. I fear a possible afterlife being worse than this life because I cannot know for sure that there isn’t an afterlife or what it’s like if there is. I fear my husband becoming ill or injured and suffering in the future even though he’s been in remarkable health thus far. But sooner or later we both have to die and I do my best to just enjoy what time we have left.

We didn’t know it until Tom spotted it a little while ago, but the “Twenties” made Residents of the Month, according to our monthly newsletter. I can totally see them making it too because they’re very sociable compared to us. Not that we’d want to because we just don’t care either way, but we were laughing at how we’re too boring to make Residents of the Month. I mean he works outside of the house, I work inside of the house. He likes to code. I’d like to write. We both like rats and to shop. Wowee! Super exciting, eh? ;)

I was teasing his ass about being more successful in making money at my hobby so far than he has with his. Yeah, LOL, sometimes the woman really is more successful than the man even if she hasn’t made nearly as much as she’d like. He loves programming and I love writing and it’s something we’ve always done. Any money earned from it is just a bonus. We do it because it’s what we like and is basically in our blood.

I recently saw an interview Linda Ronstadt did a couple of years ago and she was saying that in order to get good you really have to do it for many hours a day. This is so true. The voice is a muscle and needs regular exercise to get it as good as it can possibly be. I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing the karaoke contests I once did. You can still tell I sing but for someone who has had training and knows a thing or two about it, my voice is a bit on the weak side right now. You never lose your pitch because that would be like forgetting how to ride a bike, and you never forget proper breathing techniques because that becomes second nature, but things do weaken without regular exercise.

It’s great to see Jon back in the Land of the Living and posting his funny stuff. I don’t care for the political or religious stuff but most of his posts are hilarious. So are his comments on my own posts.

Tom replaced the washers in the master shower and we did another Amazon order. He’s getting a cheap Windows computer for programming because he needs a more modern one for testing, and I’ve picked out a birch tree mural for the master bedroom. I can’t wait! I’m excited to get that up but we probably won’t do it until right around the new year. I’m going to transfer the flowers and butterfly stickers that are on that wall but not the petals blowing in the “wind” or the picture window sticker further down that wall. We can apply the mural right over it. The mural has six pieces and should be a lot easier than the one we installed in Arizona. Hopefully, it will come out well. With the two of us working it should take two hours or less.

Next week he has to get new tires for the car. We were going to pick up some bulk items like paper towels at Sam’s today but neither of us wanted to deal with the crowds, so we grabbed a few things from Raleys.

For the last couple of days, I’ve gone from spotting to a light flow. I’ve now been bleeding for 3 weeks and 2 days. Really REALLY hope this stops soon! I’ve had enough of this shit. I shouldn’t be going through this so fucking late in life! Why must things always be the hardest or take the longest or both for me? I never seem to really get any breaks in life.

What I really dread is to return of the anxiety. I know it’s going to come back sooner or later. I haven’t gone over 5-6 months without it since it began nearly 3.5 years ago. It’s been 5 months since the last time it was noticeably bad which was from early June to mid-July. I know I’ve had a few anxious days since then but they didn’t last as long because I immediately skipped doses. It’s great that now I know what to do and that’s to skip as soon as I get anxious but I would really rather not have to in the first place. If only I could make it to the spring without having any waves of anxiety stabbing up my chest. No way that’s going to happen, though. It’s been more than obvious for some time that I’m not getting off that easy. I still think I have a few more years of random periods and anxiety.