Adventures, Misadventures , Reflections and Profanity

I have been attending a support group for grieving people (which I discussed in an earlier blog post) following the loss of my mother, grandmother, uncle and grandfather all in the last 18 months. This support group meets at a Baptist church and the content of the support offered is Christian-based. I am not personally a Christian but I have no biases against Christians as individuals and trying to just muscle through my sadness, anger and grief on my own was bringing me no progress, only pain, so I elected to try something new. My second meeting was yesterday. These meetings all go the same way. We get together, eat mediocre snacks, and briefly discuss our week before opening the provided guided "Workbook" and watching a short video on this week's theme. The videos are produced by a Christian married couple and much of the content is related to "surrendering your grief and sadness to God so that he may lift this burden from your heart" and various re-phrasin...

Yesterday I tried something that I have never done before: I attended a support group for grieving people. Having lost 4 very important people in less than two years, the most recent of which was my mother in January, I have been struggling with grief and anger and exhaustion from it all. the anger and grief has started to make me a bitter person and I have caught myself being cold or short with people that I love, and that just isn't acceptable to me. I started researching online for some resources for free grief counseling. Being a teacher, there just isn't a lot of extra money to go around, so it was imperative to find something for free. My first choice was to find a grief counselor of some kind, but unfortunately one on one counseling just isn't ever free, or even affordable from what I could find, which I guess makes sense. That left support groups, which honestly scared the crap out of me. the thought of sitting and crying in a room full of strangers sounded like a t...

Several years ago I was in a pretty serious motor sports accident which left me with a dislocated and de-arranged knee, multiple contusions, a concussion, extreme whiplash and general badness all up and down my back. Things have never really been the same ever since and I live with some amount of leg and back pain pretty much all of the time no matter what, but there are times when all these old injuries get aggravated and the muscles in my neck and back twist and bind up for days at a time. The pain is immense and there is pretty much nothing anyone can do but give me some anti-inflammatory meds and tell me to just wait it out. The last two days have been bad for the pain. My right shoulder is always the worst because I am right handed. I have been bound up from the tips of my fingers all the way up my arm, and all the way up into my neck where the pain spills downward into my upper back and it finally all feels like it sort of pools under my right shoulder blade. I used to be in trea...