I am so much braver and my world is so much bigger than last year. That's great. Yet in the last few days, I've realised just how much my world is still carefully controlled. That's disheartening.
It's such a slow process to rebuild your world when it comes crashing down around you. What it does is makes you very vulnerable and hyper-conscious to the fact that nothing is "safe" anymore.
I am constantly doing things that require huge emotional reserves to fight fear and regain ground but yet I still have so far to go. Probably on the outside, I look pretty normal to the majority of people and particularly in everyday life. But introduce something that I haven't done since Steve died or haven't done alone or requires me to put myself in an unfamiliar situation...
It's exhausting. I'm constantly second-guessing myself and/or trying to balance the need to continually keep moving forward with taking a break from the constant stretching. I don't like to have to explain why I can't or won't do something because it sounds so silly to people who haven't been there and/or haven't seen how far I've come.
After 18 months (almost), it's weird that things can still affect you so much. As far as physical energy, I'd say I'm back to normal (well, other than how constant lack of sleep affects you). Emotional energy is an entirely different subject. I would struggle to do much more than I'm currently doing. I'm sure I'll pretty much get there eventually--I'm wondering just how long it's going to take!
