Where has the time gone

Where has the time gone?? I feel like I just published my piece on acceptance yet here I am staring at the published date of almost 10 months ago! OK, Samantha, what’s the deal?

Well, to be fair, a LOT has happened since my last published article, and the months leading up to it. Let’s review in a nutshell:

At the end of 2022 I finally received validation from long-term disability (LTD) that I am worthy of financial support (yay!).

With that enormous stress lifted off my shoulders and after a big long exhale my husband and I got pregnant two weeks later after having tried for almost three years. What do you know, the old adage of “just relax and it’ll happen” worked! Though I think it had more to do with stress than simply “relaxing”. It certainly confirmed for me how much stress was affecting me; another piece of validation to help improve my mental health.

Since discovering we were pregnant, we reviewed the date of our planned wedding and, wait a minute, count it out (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8-), yup, we’re going to be eight months pregnant at our wedding. Oh well, here we go! Maybe we’ll have a wedding and a birth!? (PS that didn’t happen). Realizing that we would have a baby as a honeymoon we made the decision to hop on a plane to have our first and last international travel together as a parentless couple. We spent a couple weeks in France to gorge on food (oh, the cheese and bread), soak up culture and sun, and allow me to unwind and sharpen up my French tongue (or more like the back of the throat).

The wedding planning took up much of my mental and physical capacity for most of the year. We hosted it on our property which allowed us much greater control over the details. The wedding itself was an incredibly joyous occasion that brought both of our families and friends together for the first time.

And of course, baby planning. Though this took a hiatus early in the year until the wedding was over. One thing at a time, seriously.

A proud moment for me earlier this year was that I became a volounteer Pain Coach with a wonderful non-profit here in British Columbia, Canada called PainBC for their Coaching for Health program. I am on a short hiatus since giving birth, but am excited to go back once I find some consistency with the baby (that’s coming right?). This has been an incredible step for me to give back all that I’ve learned from being in pain for over two decades and provide support to others in navigating their unique pain journeys.

I’ve also been reassessed by LTD twice. Always a stressful experience in itself. Currently I am waiting on the latest results.

Then, BAM,! a baby! An always and forever changing baby. She keeps us entertained like never before and is a most excellent companion on my long and lonely days home on disability.

With the help of a new doctor and a phenomenal counsellor I’ve gained so much more understanding about the state of my physical and mental health and am perhaps getting closer to unlocking some of the root causes of the pain, and more importantly, finding some relief.

And aside from all the events and milestones happening, what has probably most kept me from writing is crippling anxiety over the writing process itself. Not writing the “right” thing, or saying the “right” thing, or writing in the “right” way. This is really what’s kept me away if I’m being honest. I want everything to be perfect before I can allow myself to hit the Publish button. I have to read and re-read the content. Edit, review, edit, hum, haw. Are the titles right? The subtitles? Is my SEO good enough? What about an audio version?

It also takes me many times sitting at the computer to write an article in the first place because of current pain limitations. Sometimes I simply lose the motivation between starting an article and finishing it hours, days, or weeks later.

So to that end, I am making a commitment to myself to lower my standards. To write what I can write when the feeling strikes (and the baby allows), and hit the Publish button when my time is up. Mistakes, errors, typos, and all. I hope to expand on many of the things I mentioned in this article, including living with pain while raising an infant, discovering the source of the pain, and a more recent experience of submitting an art piece for a competition with the Pain Society of Canada. Stay tuned!!

And, without further ado…..(inhale)….here goes. [Publish]