Rabbit in the Headlights

Later this morning, I’ll be going to the hospital for my annual mammogram, postponed from last month because of the lockdown. I don’t want to go – not that it’s that painful (though it’s never comfortable), but I don’t want to go to the hospital, or anywhere really – just as I didn’t particularly want to take the van out last week, but this time I really have no choice.

The card-making didn’t go so well yesterday, partly because I was, like Friday afternoon, trying something different (for the inside of the cards), and I only completed one. So I’m still not ready to send off my letters, which feels a bit as though time’s running out.

Thinking about all this yesterday after I’d posted – and when I was getting frustrated with how I was going to do it, and panicking a little in case I did anything that would ruin anything I’d done so far – it struck me that there is a distinct ‘first world problem’ side to all this. It’s all so trivial, isn’t it, on the global scale? Yet it feels so important to me. It feels – at risk of sounding melodramatic – like an act of courage, something I’ve had to psych myself up for, and have to keep motivating myself to continue. Now, not that long ago I would have been berating myself for that, feeling stupid, frustrated and angry with myself for making such a big deal over it. I’m trying not to do that, though several times over the last few days I’ve been struck by panic about it all. I honestly know how ridiculous and irrational all this sounds. This is a side of me that nobody knows about (unless they read this blog, and even then they probably won’t take it seriously). These are the sort of battles that I have with myself all the time, to ‘get over myself’, in that weird phrase that just popped into my head.

This is the rabbit-in-the-headlights me that somehow – not sure how – I manage to hide from other people a lot of the time. Life is easier if I don’t set her challenges, and there are enough challenges in everyday life to try to protect her from (though fewer during lockdown). I can never get rid of her – I’ll never ‘grow out’ of her if it hasn’t happened by now. She is the essence of me, and I’m not sure whether referring to ‘her’ in the third person is such a good idea, but there again, it does convey the point that ‘I’ don’t have a lot of control over her – I can threaten her and bully her but doing that always has consequences for me, because I’m the one who feels the pain (even more so when I get angry with her). But there are things which she/I now can deal with and enjoy only because I/she have persisted in making her/myself do them.

Little battles can be as difficult as big ones. I have to keep trying.