Becoming and Overcoming

Change is difficult and gradual.  Slowly I am becoming the person I think I would like to be.  My life is filled with good things, a comfortable place to live, good and sufficient food to eat, more clothes than I need, and adequate interesting activities to fill my days.  Still the underlying stress of uncertainty and impending change challenges me to overcome habits I have developed over the years in coping with stress.

For the most part, I have stopped using food to deal with feelings of stress and have been able to maintain a weight closer to what my ideal weight should be.  I still have a few pounds to go and should be doing more walking to take off those last pounds.  It's hard to get myself up and going; so often my get up and go just appears to have got up and gone.

My other coping strategy, a lifelong one, is more difficult to deal with.  As a child, I would scratch the bridge of my nose until it bled and when the wound healed and a scar formed, I would scratch off the scar and again scratch until I bled.  I don't know why I did this but it really annoyed my mother.  The scar on the bridge of my nose is still there but now, I pick at the hairs that grow on my upper lip and on my chin until they bleed and form scars and when they heal, I start all over again.  In 1982, at the suggestion of a friend, I began going to a salon at the old Eaton's store to have the hair on my upper lip electrically removed.  The operator was newly trained and in a burst of over enthusiasm one week, she removed too many hair in one session and I developed a long lasting infection on my upper lip on the left side.  Since that time, I have had recurring problems with ingrown and infected hairs on my lip and chin and in response, find myself daily picking at the hair on my face and the bumps of ingrown hair to try and remove them.  The result is often bleeding and scars and a face that is constantly in the process of breaking out or healing.  Somehow this reflects how I feel inside about myself. 

Sometimes I feel great and other times, I remember all the times in my past when people treated me badly and I end up bashing myself.  My husband, in the last years, as he was going through the stages of cognitive impairment and then dementia, was one of the offenders that affected me the most. His sisters didn't help.  Those days are gone but they still haunt me.  How I would like to be rid of the ghosts of the past.  I will probably never be totally rid of them but hopefully, the bad memories will fade and be replaced by good experiences. Old scars mainly hurt when they're disturbed and we all have scars.