Nancy Napier

Sadie (my shrink) told me about this woman named Nancy Napier. Sadie also gave me one of Nancy's tapes and I really liked it. It was positive but also gentle, about looking at your future self. At the moment I'm really living one day at a time. I have trouble seeing a future self. I'm having bad joint pains and am fatigued from Lyme Disease and babesiosis. I'm also happy that I'm finally arriving at a place of awareness that my past wasn't as benign as I used to think. It's not an excuse for becoming a drug addict but at least it helps me understand it on some level and try to learn different coping mechanisms. I just ordered this book by Nancy which I got for $1.18 on Amazon.

The other night S (my husband) woke me up by putting ice in my hand - except I remember none of this. I was shocked and upset when he told me about it. I felt embarrassed. I'm learning that this sort of thing should make me feel compassion for myself but I'm not there yet. Instead my brain goes to "You are suck a FUCK UP!" Anyway, after a night of intense bad dreams, I woke myself up after yelling HELP several times - that deep slumber yell that generates almost no sound - but I finally was able to yell it out loud and wake up. I don't know if this not remembering is just normal sleep or a dissociative episode. It's so stressful and confusing but I'm trying to look at it as part of the process. A process which completely sucks, let it be said, but I'm part of it and radical acceptance of that is the best way forward, in my opinion. So, for today, I'm going to do an art piece on being compassionate about bad dreams. Sadie is overseas for a few weeks, and I'm so glad to get a break from therapy and try to just rely on myself. It feels so much more natural and comfortable to do this, but at least I realize that I can work on this other crap as well. So often this "reaching out for help" is just going through the motions of "What a less fucked up person might do" so right now I don't have to reach out for help at all. S took the kids to the mall and I can drink coffee, do some art and try to just be.