Hess, I see how the plans all link together. But on a day to day basis, if you focus firmly on what you can actually do that day, and on all the good things surrounding you, the rest of the pieces will come together. For example, if the day comes that what you can do that day is move to the shelter, then you will also find a way to keep using a computer to do everything else that you can do.

It is very hard, I know, to keep making long range plans and working toward them, AND live one day at a time. My experience has been that when the long range plan and the one-day-at-a-time don't mesh, and result in more stress instead of more solutions, then the person may not yet be on the right mission they are called to be on. Sometimes that mission changes when we are not looking. Needing to be needed, and being called to be needed, may not be the same thing. So if pursuit of the longer plan makes the daily function go down and down, something is wrong with that picture somewhere.

If on the other hand you find (logically and dispassionately) that the daily function IS going in an upward direction, but just FEELS like death, then what is needed is probably more silent laptime. The tears may not be the problem-- the lack of a safe lap to shed them, and a hand drawing your attention back into the good things in present time afterwards, may be what's actually missing here.

When I have counseled on (as counselor and as client) chronic deep physical distress, the most important resource has been the frequent opportunity just to be held gently in a collapsed postion, belly to belly like a newborn should be draped over the curve of the mother's belly, and allowed to let go for a break from the need to keep thinking, solving, surviving. A place to say, "OK, I am not going to fight to be alive, for the next ten minutes, and YOU are in chage of the whole UNIVERSE for that long. Stand guard for me!" Tears, laughter, and a healing sort of yawning follow in short order. That's been more useful to me, because that lap has been there, than anything else. More valuable than my amazing persistence, more valuable than my incredible intelligence and limitless creativity in the face of despair, more valuable than all the help I got-- because what it gave me was more mental slack to live in the world each day.

Do you have a lap like that at your disposal, or can you put anyone in touch with me who I can teach how to give that kind of lap?

~Susan