Making Sense (Or Not)

Tomorrow will be exactly one year since I was diagnosed with AML. Happy Anniversary to me. It has been a year of extremes. Extreme pain, extreme exhaustion, extreme perseverance, extreme relief. Moving forward, I hope, it shall be a year of extreme happiness.

So far my happiness project is not going exactly as I had planned. It turns out that chronic insomnia is a severe impediment to feeling happy. Let’s just say it’s difficult to be cheerful with your children at 6:30am when you’ve been up since 4:30am, especially when you can’t drink coffee.

So how do you choose to be happy anyway, when every fibre of your being is limp with exhaustion?

I'm trying to keep my eye on the prize. The first month of my happiness project went fairly well – I exercised more and drank green smoothies and tried to be tidier. February was also a qualified success. I had more dates with my husband, played laser tag with friends, did more yoga, and actually went on a child-free snowboarding weekend with the love of my life. We definitely had more fun. (Though, admittedly, having more fun than we did last year is not all that hard to do.) Throughout all of this, however, I was utterly exhausted.

And now it is March. My goal for this month was to focus on my career. I have some major decisions to make, decisions that are difficult to do with a muddled brain that hasn’t really slept since 2008. How smart could I be, I wonder, if I got the sleep that I really need?

But I can’t get that sleep and I can’t think rationally. After months of making myself crazy trying to make a logical decision, I gave up. I made a decision purely from the heart. I decided to enrol myself in yoga teacher training. I have no idea what I’ll do when I’m finished – my brain can’t think very far into the future right now. But it just felt like the right thing to do. It felt like something that could heal me. And for the last seven years I’ve been making decisions with my head while stifling what my heart wanted. I’ve been doing what “made sense” even if it didn’t make me happy.

I am acutely aware that I could land back in the hospital at any time. Any plans that I make, any decisions that I land on, could blow up right in my face. Why agonize over the planning? It’s all so tenuous anyway. So from now on, I’ve decided that I will no longer make sense. All decisions, all the time, from the heart.

Let the crazy begin.