Am I better yet?

Today is a weird day.

The snow is coming down like Mother Nature is trying to reach her year-end revenue mark and it's keeping me out of the malls and in my apartment. I have been thinking about all the things I should be doing and I am eating a little snack of an apple and some cheese instead. I can't get my mind to focus. I am used to being a whirling dervish of activity and productivity--busy from 6am to 10 pm with work, school, chores, exercise, etc. But now. Now I can't seem to get to the laundry or cleaning the floors. I can't write my Christmas thank yous or read my new book. I can't go get the gym membership I've been meaning to get and I can't contact a man I am supposed to meet for an interview in a week. Nothing is happening. I managed to put together a bookshelf and I managed to spend 30 minutes on the treadmill, but other than that--life is moving backwards through quicksand for me right now.

And this frustrates me. It scratches at my skin. I want to be doing things. I want to be productive.

Instead I am like a child in day seven of chicken pox recovery--I am starting to feel better, but am still contagious, so I am stuck inside the house when the sun is shining and all my friends are playing at the park. I am sick of my books, my movies, my video games. I want desperately to be done with this sickness.

I guess in this way grief is like the chicken pox. I am done with the writhing-in-pain stage, done with the quiet-coma-recovery stage, and I am entering into the too-sick-to-go-out-but-well-enough-to-want-to stage. It's making me want to stomp my feet on the ground, throw a toy across the room, and pick a fight with a sibling.

I probably should let go of the fact that laundry is not getting done and remember that I am being held in by a process. I am not myself just yet. I am still getting over my grief virus. I will be well and I will be healed and the laundry will eventually get done. I just need to be patient with myself and the process and absorb all that is in this moment. If I don't process it now I will always be dealing with it. 

So- I guess I will just keep eating my apple and cheese, play solitaire on my computer, go through old scrapbooks, old journals--the only things I have an attention span for right now.

Hmm... maybe that is God's way of pointing me in the right direction. Away from the Pulitzer prize winning book I have been meaning to read and towards my past, and my processing of it.