@Jes Robins I am obsessed with those big cypress trees. I am not artistic at all but I have painted those trees before. Just, obsessed! <3

@Jes Robins Okay, I'll rephase -- paint is not my normal medium. <3 I'm a writer.

This *just* showed up on my Pinterest right after I saw your post and I feel like you might need to see it.

Go to my favorite trail and wander the woods and the swamp. I haven't been down there since my fibro diagnosis and I stopped running...I am feeling the craving to get down there by Samhain this year though. Maybe on Samhain.

@Jes Robins Okay, I know I'm almost a week late but -- I've actually set plans in motion to head to my swamp for a few hours on Samhain, because it'll be during my weekend with my husband (we live in separate houses due to an eviction earlier this year so we spend the weekends together) and I've already told him we're going.

Honestly? That good hard cry is the best medicine I've found. I spent decades repressing my emotions and running from hard stuff and its only in the last couple of years that I've started really feeling them instead. One thing I've found that helps me when I'm really dysregulated is butterfly taps. Basicly, cross your arms over your chest like you're giving yourself a hug, and softly tap your collarbones, alternating sides as you do. I can't explain why it works - maybe @Jes Robins will have more insight, but it helps to bring me back into my body.

Gods, I felt the "Too much and not enough" part of your story in my bones. Mine is something that's really come up recently, but it's something that I've also been working on for a while. Without going into too many details, my 16 year old son recently had a mental health crisis that required a trip to urgent care, me fending off cops that wanted to take him for an involuntary commitment, and all the fallout that comes with something like that. It brought up an old wound. When I was his age, I self-harmed and when my mom found out, she blew up on me. Her anger didn't help me heal -- it just made me better at hiding. After I had my kids, even before I started my healing journey, there were always things that I knew that I absolutely refused to do with my kids. Invalidating their mental health struggles for example. She should have been there for me, should have supported me. Instead, she slammed the door in my face (sometimes literally) and proved that she wasn't someone I could rely on when things got really bad. Every time I choose to react with compassion instead of anger, understanding instead of making it all about myself (she was also a narcissist but that's a story for another ramble), I'm undoing everything that she did. The moment I had my kids, I knew I was going to do things differently then she did. The "ah-hah!" moment for me was when I started healing -- which wasn't until the last couple of years -- and really started uncovering all the layers of trauma that I needed to heal to *actually* do things differently.