Grief.
It's a strange journey. When someone you love battles a terminal illness, a lot of people grieve before they're gone. We know what's coming. We're angry, we're sad, we're scared. Occasionally we reach a point of acceptance. The road isn't linear of course and a lot of these emotions repeat or run in tandem with each other. And then it happens, and the process starts all over again. The wounds are fresh.
Over time, the healing process begins. We cycle through those stages of grief. We start to live again. We start to find joy in our days instead of just surviving them. Some of us even love again. Life doesn't move on, exactly. We will never be normal again. But we find our new normal and we learn to live it.
For those of us unlucky enough to be predisposed to mental health problems, the journey doesn't stop here.
The journey never ends of course, because you always miss what you had. But for some... the journey gets increasingly complicated.
I've been seeing a psychologist for quite some time now. We talk about my grief, we talk about my issues with my self-image, we talk about my journey as a mother and step-mother. We've established a long train leading back to my childhood, having been bullied. It holds no power over me now, but it has shaped who I have become. Increasingly common, for the last year, we've talked about a crippling fear. We've called it anxiety, we've called it PTSD, I've mentioned that sometimes I'm starting to feel like a hypochondriac. But none of these seemed to perfectly fit. Then yesterday, in looking for resources, I searched for and found the answer.
Welcome to my battle with carcinophobia.
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