each has their own pace

I have been struggling for about a year with a loss that I have only recently accepted. I thought acceptance would soften my grief. Acceptance has sharpened it. I hope this sharpening sadness is a kind of cleansing, readying my heart to expand anew.

I feel open, happy, hopeful and, well, new. I am so different than I was a year ago. How did such big change unfold when I thought nothing was happening?

I am sick, which is a drag. I have been sick for several weeks. I tend to frame all health related body experiences to my diabetes but other stuff goes on. I forget that I can feel very sick and it's not about diabetes.  I've been sick all year.

I imagine everyone who has been chronically ill for what stretches as if its forever is surprised that they go on feeling sick, and feeling sick on and on.

I work hard at my health. I exercise quite a lot. I kept on exercising when I got sick for a couple weeks. It's only in the last couple days I stopped willing myself to keep exercising and I gave in to being sick.

I sometimes have a lucid dream, a dream that flashes through my thoughts like a movie but which happens in only a few seconds. Inside the dream, the unfolding story can seem long and spacious but when it ends, only a few moments of 'physical plane' time has passed.  A recurring lucid dream is one in which I am paralyzed, my body like running sand. I try and try to hold myself together so I can take a step or move a hand but the sand slithers away. It is an awful feeling dream.  I feel helpless and often morph into hopeless feeling also.

This battle I am facing with being sick much of the time feels like that dream. No matter what I do, nothing helps.

I imagine anyone who has dealt with cancer, especially advanced ones or particularly lethal ones, feels this way. I tell myself I am not entitled to my thoughts

this is gobbledegook, isn't it? Codeine, morphine and, tomorrow, generic oxycontin.  Who'da thunk.