Magic, Love and New Beginnings

So four days later I get to finish telling you about the important part of New Year's! I've mentioned before that my husband and I have a few things to overcome within ourselves individually. I deal with depression and a few anxiety type disorders and he also deals with depression and anxiety type disorders, mainly PTSD from his experiences in Desert Storm. It's normally very tough for him to feel like he's physically fit enough to do most things but he can't shake the intangible damage inside. In *some ways* mental damage can be harder to live with than physical damage. If he'd come home paralyzed no one would think twice about it but because he appears just fine physically people often assume that he's just an unemployed deadbeat. Even if they know about the PTSD many people that haven't had to deal with mental illness can't understand why you can't just get medical treatment to fix it and get back to life. It tears me apart inside but sadly these attitudes are so prevalent even today that he even buys into some of it himself which only makes things that much worse!! New Year's evening he was telling me that he felt bad. He says he feels useless, out of shape, terribly lonely, that he's falling behind on things we said we wanted, and so on.

Thankfully though I'm still getting over this awful cold or whatever it is that's been trying to kill me off I've been in a decent place within myself so that I could help him. It often works out that way between us which is a blessing in our lives, that we each have someone who truly understands what it's like and is usually in a strong place where we can help lift the other one up. First I dismissed his self denigrating remarks! Just late last April he was thrown from a bucking horse and broke almost all the ribs on his left side. He not only broke the ribs he broke them BAD! The doctors were amazed first that they used an ambulance instead of getting a copter for faster transport to the closest major trauma hospital and next that with all the jagged shards of rib flung all over inside of him he somehow miraculously didn't shred his lung! They warned us that it would probably be at least a year to heal and another year until he'd learned to live with the new aches, pains and twinges that he was going to have from it for the rest of his life. So everything he had to complain about is nothing more than the natural result of healing from such a bad injury!

The next step was to figure out together what WE are going to do about it. I've always believed that if anyone in my family has a problem our whole family has a problem! I normally don't do New Year's resolutions because too often the goals tend to sound great when they're made but in the long run turn out to be pretty unreasonable for one reason or another. Instead of becoming a tool for self improvement I end up feeling guilty and "not good enough" yet one more time in a lifetime full of those negative feelings! But I felt that my wonderful husband needed some kind of goal just then to shoot for so I broke my rule but tried to do it wisely. I simply vowed that in 2010 he and I both would try different things to improve upon these things that were bothering us. And that's the key, my friends! Set a goal that you know you can achieve to help build your confidence and give you some momentum with which to achieve more! You have to build some things up one step at a time starting with one humble step.

We haven't done TOO much, it's only been four days after all, but we've already taken some steps on our road of improvement that I feel pretty darn good about! For social opportunities we've decided to give the Unitarian Universalist churches in Austin a try and visited one of them Sunday. I've had nothing but wonderful experiences with UU really! The people that gather in UU churches tend to be, in my experience, some of the most open minded and accepting people anywhere who share several things in common with us. I've been conditioning our tack in preparation for some serious work on the horses with or without a round pen. My poor sweetie admitted to me that since his injury he's been a bit scared at the thought of getting on his horse. I decided right then that I was going to go out, work on the horses on a regular basis, get up riding, and simply show him by example that what happened to him was a chance accident that doesn't have to ruin his enjoyment of horseback riding. We both miss our scuba diving horribly! Our last dive was the 2008 annual Christmas Dive a local dive club does each year! It's far too cold to do any regular diving right now but we did check into a new dive shop in Austin and have plans that when the weather turns warm enough again we'll pack our gear, go to the UU service on Sundays then hop over to Lake Travis for a little diving (maybe even a little more socializing at the same time if we dive at Hippy Hollow!!).

We're talking about and planning lots of different things along the same lines but the important thing is we're exploring what will work for us, not making unreasonable promises to do everything we discuss and try on an ongoing, regular basis! So really if you look at it we've already fulfilled our New Year's resolution just with the very small things we've already done! We want to keep that momentum going, of course, but from here on out it's all gravy! lol There's my "love" and "new beginnings" I promised to tell you about from New Years. The "magic" part I'll just leave you to wonder ;)