Hot Flashes and High Seas: Discovering Gratitude Amidst Chaos

Or...It's been one of those weeks.

It’s been a week, y’all!

(I have never said the word “y’all” out loud in my life, but that sentence is asking me for y’all, so y’all stays).

I’m having one of the worst psoriasis breakouts of my life. I am so freakin’ itchy and scaly and ugly. It’s gross. It's so gross that I want to wrap myself in bandages like a bleeding mummy- and I mean bleeding literally because I’m scratching my legs so hard that I have blood spots on my linen trousers (tips for getting blood spots out of linen trousers, anyone?)

Even though it’s been raining and cloudy here, I am still having two hot flashes an hour, and, if you know, you know, hot flashing in eighty-degree weather is like finding yourself stranded in the Sahara desert cowering under a giant magnifying glass. There is a lighthouse on our street. It’s inactive, but if it was running, you could turn it off and stick me out on our back patio at night, and I would glow for The Bahamas.

But I can’t stand out on the back patio because of the wind. Oh dear, the wind. The wind is north-easterly and 15 mph - the perfect (not) conditions to make the sea furious at our patio (see post photo). If I risk the patio, I risk a sudden, soul-shattering soaking of sticky seawater. The sea is still warm (thanks climate change!), but too warm to cool a hot flash and not warm enough to prevent a shriek and a shiver in non-hot-flash-moments, of which I believe I have already established there are few.

This morning I was standing in my shower, stewing over the ugly psoriasis, the weather, the hot flashes and the wind, when a gorgeous sailboat appeared on the horizon. It was bumping along happily, sails unfurled in full glory, speeding toward whatever adventure its owners or guests were headed toward that day. I stopped to watch and got coconut conditioner in my eye. It stung, but it smelled good.

Now, I realize how ridiculously privileged and “woe is me and my first-world problems” all this sounds. It makes me a bit sick to my stomach writing it, to be honest. But I have a reason for telling you.

When I froze in my shower to stare out the window at the frolicking sailboat, I thought, how great is the wind! Without the wind, this sailboat would be stuck in the doldrums, like I had been for the past week. I realized that for every ruined patio experience for me, there is a grand adventure for someone else. And that, my heroine, is something to be grateful for.

I am a firm believer in the practice of gratitude. It’s part of my morning journaling and has been for most of my life. I write at least three things I am grateful for and why. But during my miserable, first-world problems week, I forgot that I should be grateful for all things, and not just for good things. There is always value in challenges. You need challenges to get through the second act of your character arc!

I am so grateful that even though I have psoriatic arthritis, living in Scotland means I'm spoiled with top-notch treatment and free drugs I wouldn’t be able to afford in the United States. Each weekly jab of relief carries a price tag that could fund my daughter's monthly rent in Brooklyn. The list price for the drug is $1,905.98 per weekly 50 mg dose or $8,000 per month.

I am so grateful that we had bucket loads of rain during our time in The Bahamas because our front garden is looking fecund and picturesquely tropical.

I am so grateful that I am struggling through these unpleasant hot flashes because I’ve lived long enough to be menopausal. A century ago, making it to menopause was a fifty-fifty chance for American women.

I guess my ultimate point is... I’d be happy being the lighthouse if it meant fewer people would crash on the rocks.

JOURNAL PROMPT

Bust out your journal and think of everything you’ve been complaining about this week. Write these down as bullet points. Underneath each bullet point, look for the gratitude and document it. You may not feel it at the moment. Gratitude might be hard to find. But it’s there. If you can’t find it right now, come back later and keep digging.

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