March was my favorite month this year. It contained several great things and hardly any painful things. Here’s an overview of it.
Three wonderful things happened in quick succession. The first one came on the tail end of a painful event. Before the first week of March ended, my dog Sawyer had a major health scare. He woke up feeling bad and later went to bed without any improvement. Since he had always previously felt better by bedtime, I feared that his time had come. I managed to get some sleep after crying my eyes out that night and felt immense relief the next morning when I saw that he was feeling much better. Realizing that we still had more time together, along with working through a lot of fear and sorrow around possibly losing him, set me up for feeling way better through the remainder of the month.
A few weeks later, I had a juggling gig in Jekyll Island, Georgia. I had never been there before and hadn’t had a gig since December of 2021. Since one of my goals for this year is to get more gigs and enjoy them more than I have the past few years, I was determined to make it happen. And I succeeded. The gig turned out to be both way easier and way more fun than I imagined. Plus it carried on my tradition of visiting at least one new place every year. I went home feeling satisfied that my first gig of 2022 went so well in addition to feeling encouraged for future gigs and my future in general.
The day after my gig, I went to a family get together. I felt nervous about this as I hadn’t spent much time the past few years around anyone who was in attendance and hadn’t seen a few of them at all for several years. Fortunately, I was welcomed with open arms by everybody. I soon relaxed and thoroughly enjoyed my time there. I even stayed much longer than I had planned. On my way to dance afterward, I sobbed uncontrollably, both from relief that it went well and out of regret for not doing more in previous years to keep in touch with everyone. Due to tiredness and a bit of a headache from all the crying, I only danced a few times. Mostly, I just sat there enjoying the music and the company of a few friendly people. I cried more on my way home and rested well that night.
March still stands out as my best month of 2022. It came after several months of fear, doubt, and depression over how differently things in my life had gone compared to how I’d hoped they’d go. It came before losing Sawyer and all that that most painful loss of my life has done to me, as well as before I started a deep dive into decades-old pain that I hadn’t yet properly addressed. Although March started rough with Sawyer’s health scare, it improved tremendously immediately thereafter and stayed amazing through to the end. It doesn’t even seem possible to me that March occurred this year; considering how well most of March went for me and how rough every month has been since, it seems like March occurred in a prior year or even outside of normal time entirely. The time from mid-March to mid-April 2022 was the closest I felt to the emotional invulnerability I experienced from late August to mid-October in 2021. Sometimes I get glimpses of that strength and peace but many of my days are still full of pain and struggle. I hope that I can soon get back to how I was feeling for most of March, if not even better than that.