Some days I can feel my brain thinking, but all I can hear is blah blah blah…

This could be the worst or best blog I have ever written, or somewhere in between! Blah blah blah is where my little grey cells are at, and if I had a real human visitor, I suspect the conversation would not be intellectual at all, just a blah blah blah type of chat! It’s a NaNoWriMo kind of day! Each and every day I post a blog, I wonder if it is good enough, honest enough, edited well enough. I wonder if it is too harsh, or if I am being stupid writing my inner most thoughts for the world to see. I wonder does it really matter if or what I write, ot whether anyone reads it. I wonder why I have dementia, why I bother to work so hard to accommodate and then try to outwit the symptoms of dementia. I’m desperately trying to finish my BA Honours theses, and am really struggling with the exegesis. I have found a mentor, a PhD student who is gently encouraging me and applying the horse whip when she thinks I need it! And yet, when I sit here and can’t work out how to start the online referencing program, let alone use it, I wonder why I am bothering at all.

‘Bothering to bother’ has been something I’ve been good at all my life. Living on a farm as a kid, where the weather was very hot and our annual rain fall was around 8 inches on a good year. We did not have mains water or electricity for the best part of my first 10 years, and life was pretty tough. Before catching the school bus somewhere between 7.10 and 7.30 each morning, we had animals to feed and other jobs to do. We had to ‘bother to bother’ because if we didn’t, the animals could die. We had years where the rainfall was so minimal our crops were poor, and therefore the feed for the animals was limited. We had to hand feed stock, We had to hand water stock near the house by carting water for many years too, by carrying large buckets of water into their troughs. This life was normal to me, not too tough. As a little kid, I thought everyone lived like this. It built in me a resilience that has stayed with me, a toughness to cope with almost anything.

Caring for animals cemented my ability to put others first, to look beyond myself and love more than myself at an early age. There was a time when this worked against me, as I took the ‘putting others first’ to the extreme and didn’t care for myself properly. I also allowed others to abuse me, to take advantage of me. This has changed, and now I usually apply the WIIFM principle to relationships. Living with the diagnosis of, and worsening symptoms of dementia, has given me the last big lesson in caring for myself; it has helped me live a more fulfilling life, a life with more meaning and more caring and giving not only to others, but to myself and those closet to me. It has helped me filter out and heal the personal baggage, as well as the people in my life who make me feel worse after seeing them. Old habits of putting up with cr*p have been placed fairly and squarely in the bin! Blah blah blah…