The Dragon Years

Last week I finished my last visit with the counselor for stress. I will have to say she was very good, well worth the time and money, and after six months of visits I am far better than I was before I began the process. As I've mentioned a time or two, I had been under a considerable amount of stress - some of which I wrote about here, some of which was private enough that I didn't write about it here. I believe in sharing, that is part of what writing a blog is about, but I can also be a very private person, a jealous gaurdian of my own privacy and the privacy of the people I love.

As part of that last counseling session we talked about the power of giving things names - one of the things I had given name to was "The Project That Nearly Broke Me". The high stress I found myself under had arisen from the rapid succession of that event, followed by the amputation of my toe. It was a wicked double wallop of life stress. The counselor suggested that I rename that time period when I refer to it and I've toyed around with a variety of names, but I have come to the conclusion (subject to change at any given moment) that the best way to refer to that time, for me - is to call it "The Dragon Years".

One of the things I relearned in stress counseling was how to wear my armor properly (to visualize it as armor to protect myself from stress causing events, to allow my resilience to rebuild). For me, it was a highly effective visualization. I would often pull my car into the parking lot at work and don my armor to start the day.

At the end of the whole process, at the end of the passage of time that marked "The Dragon Years", I have found myself - changed, different, but still alive, still thriving. Both I and my armor took quite a battering, that is for sure - but I, like my armor, can be repaired and returned to full service, and like armor, when repaired, I may be even stronger than I was before.

So, here I sit at the end of the Dragon Years, battered, knocked around, scarred, with a new limp and a few new sensibilities and sensitivities - but ready to enter the stream of life again, ready to cross through the stillness and the rapids and all the places that run in between.