It has been a rather pleasant week, although I found the first part of Tuesday to be rather trying. It involved a lot of driving in surprisingly heavy traffic, first to get a minor repair on the Audi, and then to pick up a headboard for Grandma’s bed. She has now moved from her upstairs bedroom to a room downstairs which James and Ally have set up as a lovely new bedroom. Grandma has been in hospital for the last four days so we have been up and down to Hairmyres constantly, but she has responded very well to treatment and was discharged today. She is delighted to be home.
Anyway, when I was at the Audi garage I decided to go to the toilet and when I got inside, the handle broke, so I found myself locked in. I phoned the customer service desk on their external line from inside the toilet because I was too embarrassed to thump on the door. I was soon freed but I felt a bit flustered because all of the other customers were staring at me when I was rescued. By the time I got home with the headboard it was time to jump straight back into the car to meet Heather in town for a meal before our theatre outing. Of course the traffic was still dreadful and I became more and more stressed as I was held up at every single red light. In the end I was less than ten minutes late and I nabbed a semi-legal parking space straight away (semi-legal because my back tires were legal but my front tires were on a double yellow line) and from that point the day improved mightily. It was lovely to see Heather, and we had a good chat while enjoying a tasty dinner at Ardnamurchan, just across the road from the Theatre Royal. The play was excellent; it was a dramatisation of the novel “Still Alice”which tackles the difficult subject of dementia in a very sensitive way. And I didn’t get a parking ticket.
I was at the theatre again on Thursday evening, this time Eastwood Theatre to see an ex-colleague in the musical Footloose. I had dinner with Karen and Audrey first. Now, I have been feeling much less stressed recently, to the extent that I am not worrying about much at all. It’s great. But there is something holding me back; it’s like I don’t feel that I deserve to be happy. I have had some really sad and difficult times and it’s actually really difficult to let go of that. My goal for a long time was to make my Mum better but of course I ultimately failed at that! And then I have had a great deal of stress at work, although I did deal with it and overcame it. Over the past year I have been gradually feeling better though. And then as I sat watching the musical, which was great fun, I was very moved by something that the minister said towards the end of the play. It was like an epiphany for me.
I looked it up online today, and here it is in its entirety:
“Now, somehow I got into my head that my loss was the greatest. That my pain was the deepest. And then, last night, someone much younger than that made me realize how tightly I had been holding onto that memory. A memory that has weighed me down as surely as a great stone. And in that moment, I did something I haven’t done for a very long time: I laid down my burden. It was a terrifying moment. And it was exhilarating.”
Wow. Who would have thought that dialogue from Footloose would have made such a big impression on me. I’m not sure that I have managed to lay down my burden yet but it certainly feels a bit lighter these days.
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