2:28 p.m. - 2024-02-23
The contributing factor

There won't be any Jam Social tonight. Strangely enough I had a feeling there wouldn't be. Uncle Ross' wife is in hospital with a long running and re-occurring condition. John's cousin is in the middle of an abusive and controlling relationship with a new man she met last year. It's causing lots of concern and even though he has tried to help her, she keeps refusing outside help.
Jamie's son has special needs and he decided to stop taking medication he can't really do without. He said he'd been feeling fine and didn't think it was needed anymore. His condition worsened dramatically mid week and he's now hospitalised. Jamie's latest work project is now massively over budget so he's hit rock bottom this week with family and work.

Once again my troubles seem nothing more than a little sorrow compared to the life situations my good friends at the Jam Social are going through. A little girlfriend trouble ain't such a serious thing but it's been enough to get my anxiety levels up to a place they haven't been for a long time. I'm not sleeping well, I have a flare-up of atopic eczema, probably due to stress and it may also be due to more than usual over thinking everything.

I've also been mulling over something Judith mentioned to me at my final counselling session last week. She said i'm doing well enough to not need further sessions although she did give me her card and said she would be happy to do private therapy if i needed it at short notice. I won't now be eligible for the free service until next year. That's apparently all due to funding by local authorities or more accurately lack of it. Anyhoo, she said I should try summing up an entire relationship in only one or two short sentences while focussing on the good points and possibly why it succeeded or failed. Her thinking was that any relationship can be summed up this way because all relationships mostly come down to just a few key reasons for their success or failure. The short sentences are to limit waffle and gushing about said relationship. That's also a homework request for you D-Landers out there. Give it a try, you may just be surprised what a couple of short sentences say about you and your beloved's relationship and why you are together, or not as the case may be.

I've tried to do this and haven't really been successful. Most of my sum up's have waffled on too long because of my natural propensity to dwell on the wonders of being loved up more than anyone else ever has in the history of the world. The thing is people do experience love in degrees. It's a fact. There's nothing wrong with being loved up more than your partner or them being besotted with you when you just love them enough. Sometimes that is how relationships work out well particularly at the start. Most longer term relationships will then naturally settle into an equilibrium of sorts. So, i'll keep trying to do some sum-up's for the coming entries but here is one past relationship I sort of got down to around two sentences:

We both loved each other from the start and although I did care a lot for her, I never sensed the same from her. I had immense respect and admiration for her as a highly creative, talented, artistic woman, a fine mother to her children, an intense lover, and someone who wanted the same things I did from life but in the end the timing wasn't right and we parted company but remained friends.

I've known this woman for nearly nineteen years now and she was one of the few relationships I'd had where we salvaged a friendship from those smouldering romantic ashes. We still keep in touch to this day. In other news, Big Tam came over yesterday and we did a deal on the "Gear". Both of us were happy bunnies with the transaction. I'm also going to see Marion on Saturday this weekend. Her dad Malcolm has apparently a business proposition for me.

We've also had a few long phone conversations this week and she says she is going through a little crisis of the self at the moment. Otherwise she is ok and she says her doctor thinks its too early to say whether she is in the early stages of perimenopause. How the next few months go will be a better indicator of what is happening. It may just be stress related.

When her doctor asked her if there had been any extra stress in her life in recent months, she answered yes. There's a new man in my life. Her lady GP said yes, that might be a contributing factor.