This afternoon, an apostrophe made me cry.
OK, context.
My fibromyalgia is in full flare today. Extreme fatigue, brain fog, body aches, plus the mental health symptoms: anxiety and depression.
I have a ton of work to get done in the next few days, including a few freelance assignments and two custom speaking programs I’ve got to have ready this week. And I’ve got FOUR municipal government meetings this week. OK, one is a picnic, but it’s municipal government, and it’s taking up a chunk of my calendar, so it’s a meeting to me.
I need to rest. I can barely function. But not being productive right now turns the anxiety into full-on panic, so I’ve been trying. All day.
I managed 75 minutes of work on a digital advertisement for the life insurance industry. As I was researching their collateral, I found in one document two errors in using apostrophes (they’re not for plurals, people!!), and then a reference to people with *only* a million dollars as “lower net worth.” I decided the whole world was unfair because I know how to use punctuation but I don’t have a million dollars. So I cried.
But don’t worry. I looked around my bedroom, where I’m nesting with my laptop, at the photo collage from my 10-week, cross-country road trip with The Best Dog Ever, street art from Ouro Preto (Brazil), Prague, and Bruges, and all the adventure photos just in this one room, and I reminded myself how very rich I truly am. I stopped crying.
Minutes later, I read in my research a case study of a man who needs $200,000 a year after retirement in order to “comfortably live” and I thought HOW AWFUL. How awful to have put himself in the kind of situation where he needs so much money to feel “comfortable.” That’s when I looked at my bare plywood floor with its peeling paint and felt so very free … and, somehow, so very safe.
I know these things, but I forget, and it’s so easy to get caught up in doom when we don’t feel well. Today, I was able to leave my doom by asking myself that all-important question, yet again: What does “rich” mean to me?
