I've Been Bitch Slapped. And It Ain't Pretty.

I just finished reading Redhead Writing's new Bitch Slap Post: What's Your Excuse? If you haven't been reading Erika, shame on you, and you'd best hurry your little ass on over. She's got amazingly insightful, witty, and brilliant things to say and I aspire to be more like her in my wildest secret dreams.

So here we are. What is my excuse?

Since my boobie scare, I feel like someone kicked me in the gut. If you need to catch up on that tidbit, please go here and here. But if you're like me, you're tired of hearing and thinking about it. Yet I can't seem to stop the obsessive thoughts, the what ifs, the mind wanderings, the dreams.

I feel wrung out like a washcloth that someone's left in a moldy ball in the corner of the shower.

I feel tired, like I haven't slept in a bazillion years. Even though I am sleeping some. Fitfully.

I feel overwhelmed, impatient, gritty like sand. Shallow and cloudy like a wading pool. Hazy and opaque, like looking through a fog, smog, cloud, or into a dirty mirror. Angry smears of thick oil paint slashed across a naked canvas. Their dried, hard, raised ridges. Colors bleeding into one another.

While I was waiting for the MRI and then for its results, I went to the JCC to work out. I swam laps until I couldn't swim anymore. Then I got dressed and wrapped my wet hair in a bun and ran laps around the track until I couldn't run anymore. I was running from myself, from the fear. But I can't run. I can't hide (physically yes, metaphorically, no).

I have to face it. The raw reality of what I've just been through. So why can't I peel myself off the floor now that I'm safe? What is my excuse now? I am getting through my to-do list that Erika talks about, but I'm back to this auto-pilot mode. Half-assed. The reality is I don't deserve any trophy. There are no miracles here. Just plain old me.

And meanwhile I'm pissed that there's this gaping hole in my gut--a hernia--that I am having repaired two weeks from tomorrow. I'm bitch slapping the dick of a doctor who "fixed" it in August of '09 because he was apparently on auto-pilot and doing it half assed. No mesh. So now I have to go back under the knife, inconvenience everyone, and miss exercising for six weeks. I'm pissed. And I feel sapped. How can I go into this surgery feeling beaten down and trodden on, weak, angry?

I'm trying, I really am.
Slowly peeling myself back, piece by piece. After I worked so hard at #CIP to build myself up. And only to trip and fall. Only to get stuck, again.

Help me get unstuck, please.