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Mental Aftermath

Today seems to be the start of what I term "the rebound". It is the feeling of mental and physical malaise I seem to feel following a severe emotional and mental stress. As has been far too frequent for me during the last several years, I have these life altering events occur every month or two. The vast majority of these situations have been dealing with illnesses of elderly relatives (especially my mother), but there was the bout of pneumonia my wife had this past winter and other things as well.

"The rebound" is the emotional state of being where things seem to be returning to "normalcy" in terms of day-to-day routines, but are accompanied by an awareness of all things that have been allowed to "slide" during the past crisis.... cleaning, yard work, work at the University, research. While technically I have been "keeping up" with the immediately essential aspects of all of the above, I have once again lost all sense of continuity and growth and development. It is discouraging and depressing. I feel exceptionally blue and hopeless that I will ever be able to be able to have any sense of continuity or development in my work or day-to-day life.

Dealing with these crises again and again and again... the best I can equate it to is that it is akin to me being a running, functioning computer in which the reset button is pushed every so often. The work, the efforts, the time that had been devoted on the machine previously is lost by hitting the reset "on/off" button. Even if the programs you were using have a contingency for saving a "backup", the files are usually partial files at best when the computer is restarted.

I am tired and angry. I also feel guilty for feeling this way because my mother is improving... so the effort of the last two weeks ended up being successful. But I feel I have again lost a part of me, a part of my life, a part of my well-being and soul. Oh well, it is not the first time. I will simply again start over (for the hundreth time) and pretend to be happy as I start building and growing and developing again... and will probably eventually feel happy again... for a month or so until the next damn crisis and then my mind can be reset again and I can lose all the effort again.

PipeTobacco