Japan

It's.........I mean.................

 

There just aren't words.  It's awful.  Tragic.  Incredibly sad.

 

And I can't watch any of it.  I've tried to watch the videos on the news; I've tried to read the newspaper.  I just can't do it.  Every time I see those images, I think about all the children who were swept away.  How scared they are, if they can even be scared anymore.  How terrified their parents are.  How it would feel to not know where your husband or parents were, and, with no technology to make contact accessible, there's really no good way for them to find each other.  I cry every time I watch it.  It's certainly not about me, and I should suck it up and watch, but I can't.  I don't have any idea how they'll rebuild, how they'll find their families once things are rebuilt, how they'll escape the cancer that the nuclear power plants are almost assuredly causing.  How they'll ever recover emotionally and physically from such a tragedy.

 

See, now I'm crying.  Awesome.

 

A few weeks back I went to see my family doctor.  He asked a few questions and I told him I've been sleeping better and explained why.  He asked me what the root cause of all the anxiety was, and I told him I had to play referee between family members for the last two years or so.  He said, "Why did YOU have to do that?"

 

"Because, that's what I do."

 

There's a counselor at my pain management doctor's office who sees patients, especially those with fibromyalgia, to make sure they're dealing with things effectively.  She let me talk for a while, and then said, "You're taking on every emotion that every person around you has.  You need to learn how to control that."

 

It is what I do, though.  And the people don't have to be my family, or even my friends.  When I see someone on the local news who has survived a house fire or something, I automatically go into a tailspin, imagining over and over how horrible it must have been.  Same goes for 9/11.  Did the same thing with the earthquake in Hati and Hurricane Katrina.

 

This may make me an empathetic person, but it's also disrupting my life in major ways.  The smallest things can depress me, and that's not good.  I owe it to my family to try harder to filter out all the negativity. 

 

It would be kind of nice if a lot of that negativity weren't coming from my extended family, though. 

 

I don't have time to go to therapy once a week to try to figure this stuff out, either.  I barely have time for 30 minutes of yoga per day.  Hopefully, I'll be going part-time relatively soon, and that will change, but for now, I'm stuck dealing with it on my own.  Which I'm awesome at, by the way *sarcasm*