What is your rock bottom?

Life is full of ups and downs and ebb and flow… Nothing ever lasts forever so if you are riding on the crest of a wave, enjoy the ride… and if you are scraping the bottom of the barrel, time will pass and you can pick yourself back up.  The longer I live the more I realize that none of us are getting out unscathed… we have our trials and tribulations and we just need to learn to navigate our way through so when we get stuck at the bottom, we don’t stay there.

The last few years for me have been a lot of ups and downs, more downs than I care to admit.  I have lost 4 people that I loved very much including my mother and mother in law… and I damn near lost my marriage.  Smiling to the outside world while your life is crumbling is one of the hardest things to do, And I don’t know if it’s a GenX thing or what, but being able to shoot a session on the same day your mom passed without letting your client know is next level shit.  What kind of person literally shuts down all their emotions and puts them in a box to go to work?   Maybe this is part of my problem.  Being able to completely deny myself pain, shutting it down as if it doesn’t exist?  There has to be a psychological term for it.  But is it normal?  Two hours after I put my 17 yr old dog down, I was shooting a senior session – my client none the wiser that my heart was left in a vets office as I just watched my beloved pet walk it’s last steps.  And yet I did it without a second thought.

There are different highs and lows in our lives… they all rank different of course.  Some hurts are harder to swallow than others.  Some are instant and intense, while others are a slow burn that continue to chip away at the fabric of your soul until you can’t take it anymore.

I am not sure I hit rock bottom, but I’m at a pretty low point right now…this is one of those slow  burn moments that I think finally came to bite me in the ass.  As I have been trying to process the losses in my life, I think my ability to put it in a box at will is the slow burn that I have denied or not taken care of properly and now it’s staring me in the face at a dead end in an alley and I have nowhere to go until I address it.

I don’t want to live in this sadness anymore.  And only I have the ability to turn it around.  Knowing this however doesn’t mean I actually know how to fix it.  So for now I have just decided to take steps to pull me in a positive direction.  One is to start moving my body.  This is a hard one given the fact that my back has been an issue and I’m afraid to re-injure it.  So I have given myself permission to take it slowly.

In years past, I was able to run 5 miles maintaining a 13 minute mile (which for me was amazing).  Now I have to be okay with a 21 minute walking mile and only go 2 miles a day to start.  I need to start where I am at and build from there.  Let me tell you…it’s like pushing a truck uphill I am so out of shape.

But now that I have taken a look at where I am at (my personal rock bottom), I can only turn it around from here.  Little baby steps and document every victory along the way no matter how small.  I don’t want to live in my misery anymore, so I will be writing down my progress and my victories every day.  Shovel by shovel I will unbury myself and claw my way back up.

I know I am not alone in this journey and have amazing friends to check in on me and keep me accountable.  I will be leaning on them along the way.  No one should do this alone.

That’s all I got for now… the other task I made for myself is to start writing again and share my journey … I can now check that off my list for the day….

As Wynnona says in her song Things are tough all over, but I got good news,  when you get down to nuthin, you’ve got nuthin to lose, Rock bottom is good solid ground and a dead end street is just a place to turn around…

One day at a time baby… let’s do this….