FEAR CAN HOLD YOU BACK ...

I've been sitting in the garden a lot because we have a heatwave at the moment - an uncommon event in northern England, so I feel bound to make the most of it!  However, I have done a little bit of journal work and this is the result.

Determined to address my tendency to work in shades of a single colour, I ruthlessly painted my background in not one, but three different colours!  I know.  Had to have a sit down after that.

Now I LOVE red and black so I grabbed black and white collage elements from my neutrals drawer and just pasted away, as you can see below.  You can also see the difference between the collaged page on the right, and the one on the left with black lines and grey shadows added.  It really makes a difference when you do this.

The reference to "brave girls" is because I've been a long-time member of the Brave Girls Club - google it if that sounds like something you should be part of!  For me, it is often about challenging myself to do things which make me nervous, or will hurt ... so its been difficult when in recent weeks two different friends who don't know each other have told me off (nicely) for not getting out of the house enough.  I've had to admit to myself that part of it is a fear of going out alone - as a wheelchair user I often feel very vulnerable, and anyway why wouldn't I prefer to go out with my Beloved instead?  A corner of my brain is also asking if they might have a point ...

I'm still working on that thought and whether its something I should take action on... do I have to?  Do I need to?  Is it worth the energy?

While engaged in this ongoing process I finished the page off with my usual doodles and drawings.  I still don't know the answers to the question, but a large part of me is going "so what"?  Is it actually compulsory to leave my lovely home and studio by myself?  Now is that fear talking, or me being pragmatic and sensible ... not sure yet.

WASTING TIME ON FEAR ...

 

This page marks a substantial shift in my thinking, and one that I hope I can hold onto in the coming hours and days.  The nearer we got to the major surgery, the more time I spent praying desperately and frankly allowing my fear to completely overwhelm me.

A day came when I realised that I was assuming the worst rather than hoping for the best, and that this approach didn't make any sense!  Its one thing to be realistic and acknowledge the risks of the operation, or the reality of the survival statistics, but its as if I was so determined to be sensible and pragmatic that I was failing to allow for hope, not to mention grace.

I knew when I set down the paint below that I wanted to describe and record this change in thinking, but not exactly how to do it.  I've learned that all you can do is BEGIN, so that's what I did using ordinary craft paint in three different shades.

Then I added some collage and it shouldn't be any surprise that it turned into a sort of sunrise image ... it really had been about the light dawning!  I've set these pictures side by side so that once again you can see the difference that a black outline and a grey shadow makes.

And then I started writing down everything I'd come to understand, and my decision to choose hope rather than assume the worst.  I do know that bad things might still happen, but overall the statistics for this type of cancer are good, with a high survival rate.  Removal of the bladder sounds really scary, but the more I learn about it the more I realise that its actually quite straightforward to manage and no big deal.  So, as I wrote at the head of the page, I'm not wasting any more energy on fear, I'm hoping and believing that this operation can be a total cure - words used by the surgeon. Maybe I got a bit knocked off course by the sudden death of my friend's husband on the operating table ... and feared a similar outcome.  I'm (trying) not to do that any more.

And then as per usual I got busy writing and drawing etc etc adding squiggly bits and generally filling up the page until it looked finished.  I do feel that a page should always have some human element - a face or an eye - just something to represent myself or humans generally.

The surgery is Monday, and it will be a long day (about 6-8 hours) before we know he's come through it OK, but I and many others will be holding him in prayer the whole time.  I've got my lovely daughters here at home with me, they've rallied to our side magnificently, so if I do have a few wobbles they'll be at my back.

I thank God that this is the kind of cancer on which its possible to operate - many aren't - and that we have a good chance of coming out on the other side of his recovery with a chance to start the retirement fun that's been put on hold.  Bring it on!

AND SUDDENLY ....SHE KNEW

 

Regular readers will know that I've been worrying myself to death over my Beloved's cancer diagnosis - like you do really, normal behaviour I guess.  A day came when I wanted to take back control, to say I'm tired of bursting into tears or waking up in the night to fret.  I found a tiny piece of collage with the words "and suddenly she knew" and it set off a train of thought in what seemed like the right direction.

Part of what I wanted and needed to get down on paper was the idea of toughening up and fighting BACK, instead of being such a wimp.  So, having painted a simple background and border, I found this face among my collage stuff and fancied her up a little bit, adding the words to her head.  She began to look more like a woman who could and would stand up for herself.

This woman is definitely no wimp, she wouldn't waste time creeping off to have a good sniff and worry about the future, she'd put her shoulder to the wheel and get this done!  I wrote the words out in big lettering and gave her some hair - or maybe its a hat?  She doesn't care.  The "caution" tape seemed to belong with this girl who doesn't take any nonsense, so you'd better approach with caution! Then of course I had to answer the question - what is it she knows?

And the answer was - why fret over something you can't change?  Just get on with it.  I began to add bands of bright colour at least in part as a statement of strength and resilience - you start with wobbly lines and just sort of doodle inside them.  That sounds like a metaphor for transforming from wobbly to strong doesn't it?

At which point the doodling took over, as it so often does.  I love that part because is meditative and reflective, and its easy to get carried away and over-decorate.  Hope I didn't this time ...

So there she is, representing my brave inner self, who has dug her heels in and said "get over it and lets just DO this".  Crying won't make anything better but being strong and determined just might. This girl gets things done, doesn't put up with any crap, and manages change - all of which I can and will do, because now I'm not going to be pushed around by fear any more, I'm going to stand up to it.

Himself has finished chemo and now has a month in which to recuperate before the surgery.  He's so much better already, its lovely seeing him get his energy back.  Sorry I didn't post over Christmas, I kept meaning to, but I was having such a nice time with my family around me that I just never got around to it.

PS Thank you SO much for all the responses to my last post - it did me no end of good to realise how many of you are out there and enjoying my work.  

SCARED

This began as one of my inky pages with water dropped onto it.  I drew the "tear" or crack across it, with me peeping out at the world, and wrote in big letters "I'm scared".  As you know, a lot of my pages begin with a single word or phrase like this ...

To appreciate where I'm coming from with this, the thing you need to know about me is that I tend to do this "good old Rosie" act, pin a big smile on my face, get everyone organised and be the one who cheers everyone else up.  My sister once told me (ages ago before I got ill) that I could be very scary in my extreme competence, and I gaped at her in amazement and said "but its all an act, I'm always frightened inside".  That's still true, although I'd rather hoped that when I got to be a grown-up (when does that start exactly?) I'd grow more confident with maturity.  Well I have in a way ... but my inner child is still in there and she's frightened of all sorts of things!  I suppose what I have learned is that most of our worst fears aren't realised anyway, and yet we waste so much precious time and energy worrying ourselves sick with our imaginings.  It seems to me that I'm more able to say "well I'll deal with that when, and if, it happens".

As you can see, most of my fears are just the normal stuff that haunts all of us - loneliness, bad things happening to people we love, and so on, but all of us have our really SECRET fears that we can't (or daren't) tell anyone about.  I'm certainly not writing mine down here!  These are the ones that come out in anxiety dreams, and tend to be at heart about being exposed for the fraud you really are .... yeah you know the ones.

I was trying to record these feelings in the hope that, by naming them, they'd lose some of their power?  It does work like that at one level.  So I also wrote about being brave, and what that means to me - I'm a member of the brave girls club, and I work very hard at being courageous.  Its that "feel the fear and do it anyway" thing I suppose.  I am a bit of a fighter for a cause too, but perhaps less so in my own defence, although I'll bravely stand up for other people, particularly against injustice.

I guess what I'm really trying to ask is ... how come a 58 year old grandmother like me can still feel such a lost child sometimes?  Still trying to conquer my fears, putting a "brave" face on, still doing my well-known impersonation of a confident woman who knows what she is doing.  Will I ever really become the Brave Girl I long to be, or is bravery really and finally about still being scared but not letting it hold you back? 

SCARY DEMONS

We all have scary demons that keep us awake nights - right? Well lucky you if you don't, but I do! But I have found that from childhood monsters upwards, things are more frightening when you allow them to grow and become huge in the dark. So my policy has been to bring fears into the light and take a long hard look at them. Somehow they are almost always less scary when you do this, and just occasionally they disappear. That's what I was trying to write about here.

I was also trying to be more adventurous with colour sprays, but ended up with a background that was truly vivid but a bit dark for writing on!
This page makes me smile whenever I look at it. I don't think of myself as brave - I'm prey to all kinds of fears and worries, as we all are. But I do try to overcome these things. It even works sometimes ....

OMIGOODNESS ITS ... WELL, SCARY REALLY!

I can now reveal the secret I've had to keep since before Christmas ... which is that we are moving north, back home in fact in March. Any of you in the Preston area please make yourself known because that's where I'll be and will be needing all the new (and old) friends I can get! Which is where the scary part comes in. When we moved here I was at a crossroads in my life and worked hard to make friends and get involved in activities which would fill the void my job used to occupy ... and I've come to have a host of crafty friends, run a scrapbook crop and card classes etc etc, but now have to leave them all.

So, while I'm excited about the future, a large part of me is very scared ... and that's what this journal page is all about. What did I do for therapy before this - just worked things out round and round in my head I suppose.
So as you can see, on a background of scrapbook paper (I love this texture from Basic Gray) I added a border at the bottom and the word "different", before getting down on paper the basic statement uppermost in my mind ... which is that change is scaring me!
Then I added a scary person (probably me, my friends tell me I do scare people) but the main thing is that I tried to counter my fear with my usual method ... which is look at it square on and face up to it. Nearly every time you find that what you're scared of is not so big or bad as you've been imagining, and sometimes we are just resisting change because we're comfortable! That little arch picture is supposed to be a house, and represent my feelings about home, and as you can see below I added a few more housey images (stamps from Invoke) because I was thinking about old home/new home.
And to finish the job off I added some more journalling in the spaces left over and admitted to the questions which keep me awake at night, and it does work! Once you are able to look at your fears square on it does become easier to deal with them, it really does! Not for nothing am I a member of the Brave Girls Club - courage to me means not so much as absence of fear as a willingness to embrace my fear and do it anyway!!