I have been entirely, unintentionally, absent from here for the last week. In my defense, the last week has been particularly stressful for a number of reasons, even bearing in mind just how stressful the previous two weeks had been.
It’s not as if it was stressful for any one particular reason; there was no singular thing that made everything just a little more tiring and impossible to deal with, compared with other days, as much as I almost wish that was the case. (At least then, I’d have a good idea of what to blame, for want of a better way to put it.) Instead, it was a conflation of a bunch of small things — or maybe not entirely small, but at least small enough that I feel as if I should’ve been able to handle it without too much stress — that piled up on top of each other, Jenga-style, daring me to pull out a brick and see how quickly and loudly everything could fall over.
There are weeks (months, if you’re unlucky) when everything feels as if you’re stuck in a cosmic game of “Let’s See What Else Can Happen Now”; times when it feels as if the only respite from one particular problem is when another comes along to divert attention. That’s what it had felt like on a low level for the last few weeks, but last week was very firmly in the region of, just when you think you’ve got this one licked, get ready for its replacement. One of the pets was sick, and less than 24 hours after we get the “it’s okay really” notice from the vet, another one went down with an entirely different problem; it was that kind of week, over and over again.
(Sick pets, as everyone who has a pet knows, is the very worst type of stress because you just want to fix it but are operating in the dark at the very best of times.)
My fingers are crossed that this week will be different, if only because, surely that has to happen eventually. In the meantime, I’m planning on doing posts here every day through Friday to catch up; we’ll see together if the week’s insanity lightens up to allow that to happen, won’t we?