My coping skills are not what they used to be.

It's the middle of the afternoon and I'm drinking coffee out of my cup that says "Dying is easy, Living is harder." It certainly feels like it today. Have I written about this mug before? I don't remember. Its a line from Hamilton, I liked it so much I made myself a mug. Pretty purple swirly flowers and fancy handwriting. So that you have to try hard to actually read it. So many times I feel like Dan got the easy way out. We were supposed to go out together, with a bang even. Always together, we would have never ever left each other.

So far the first two days of Christmas break have basically been really crappy. I went into the christmas season telling myself I was going to make myself happy this Christmas. This will be the third Christmas without him, it's time I guess. I can do it. I'm stubborn as hell I can make myself happy if I just try hard enough. That's what we are going to do, we are going to have a good christmas this year. It's more or less been working.

Until yesterday. Yesterday was the first official Day of Christmas break around here. Other then my kid being out of school I don't know why that makes a difference but it seemed to because nothing went right yesterday.  Nobody died so in the grand scheme of things that was good, but it was just one of those days. The cat knocked over a full length mirror and broke it. Baby Girl hurt her knee and was in a very grumpy mood. I went to the store just to buy her her current favorite breakfast meal, Blueberry oatmeal. Here is a public service announcement for you, just because the box is blue and it has blueberries in the picture does not mean it is blueberry flavored FYI. I worked and nothing went right at work. Just your basic crappy day.  Not even particularly grief related, except that everything is. I couldn't come home and tell my husband about my crappy day. I couldn't text him while he was at work telling him all the things that were going wrong. I couldn't see him, feel him, hear him and I neede

Then I did get a grief related incident. Yay me, cause the day was going so well. A phone call telling me that our form of state health insurance is closing down at the end of the year. You see because my husband died and we had health insurance through his job we have been on state health insurance. State health insurance is a love hate relationship. Getting on state health insurance is no joke, I consider myself a pretty smart person, I even have a college degree, I have never felt dumber then trying to figure out state health insurance. It took me months and months and months of me arguing to get it. To prove that I needed it because the simple answer of my husband died and we have a small child wasn't good enough.  That might have been a little ranty.  If you can get on it, it is fantastic, they pay for everything, they pay for all our mental health. Have I mentioned how much therapy we go to since my husband died, we would be lost without it. That is the crux of the problem, well technically we will still have insurance it will be a different form and I don't know if it will cover mental health at all or if my mental health providers will accept the new insurance.  Crap, crap, crap, crap. Yup.  There really should be a rule that gives widows and their children free insurance forever without having to deal with all the paper work.

I have an appointment for baby Girl to see a specialist for her allergies. I call them to see if we can get it moved up to sometime in the next week  because who knows if my insurance will cover them next year. They were very obliging and said 'of course we can'  I have an appointment for myself to see a dental specialist. I call them with the same problem, my insurance is ending and who knows if you will accept whatever new one I get handed, because I don't get a choice. They were not so helpful. In fact they said no and didn't really seem to care about that whole silly insurance thing.  O hears another rant, there is a stigma with people that have state health insurance, much like if you get food stamps, you are poor, you have no work ethic, if you would just stop being lazy you wouldn't need us, you are working the system so you don't have to contribute to society. Essentially you are a lower class and not taken seriously. Or you know your husband with the good career that allowed you to stay home and take care of your baby could have just randomly up and died one day giving you no choice but to get state health insurance so you could actually try to keep your broken family healthy.  Yup that was definitely ranty.

And now were back to grief. I don't want to deal with any of this. This is all because Dan died, so much of what I deal with in life now is just because Dan died, k pretty much everything. Furthermore when something even remotely stressful comes up, such as loosing your health insurance again it tries to throw you back into that dark pit. The one I was stuck in for years. The one I'm just starting to climb my way out of. Where the pain is so bad you can't focus on anything else. Where no matter how hard you work you don't move up in the pit.   where you can't get out of bed, and if you do you have no idea what your doing. to quote another line from Hamilton "when your is so deep it seems easier to just swim down". Now small stresses feel like big stressess. Now when something is challenging or hard I just want to run away and hide, I don't want to deal with it, it's too hard. I did the hardest thing imaginable, I stayed alive, when dying would have been easier. So I don't react to hard things the same way anymore. Grief has made my coping skills worse, not better.

P.S. I dyed my hair today to try and make myself feel better and I pretty much hate it, so that didn't work either.