Strega

Published on April 17, 2023April 23, 2023 by Mary GelpiLeave a comment

I’ve just finished reading the most beautiful novel, Strega, by Johanne Lykke Holm. I am stuck in it. And on it.

I finished it days ago but my mind still feels trapped in the delicately told domain—A fantastical, once celebrated Hotel secluded in the mountains above the mysterious town of Strega. It’s called The Olympic, where nine 19-year-olds will supposedly be taught how to be turned into proper maids, women, eventual wives and mothers. Three older women mentor the nine, but the story is told through the perspective of Raphaela, a girls whose voice is haunting and lonesome but immediate, succinct, and deeply resonant. I read it in two and a half days, and I’m not exactly a fast reader.

Of course, the ostensible “plot” of the novel is not exactly what pulls you in, although even on its own, with only average prose it would have this capability. Truthfully it’s the one-of-a-kind style in which it’s written, translated from Swedish in fact, that makes it compulsively readable.

The story is told with incredibly ornate, impossible detail. It’s as if muted dead flowers mixed with a tray of metals and crystal diminutives and fragrant oils, inside a strange, old and deviant hotel came alive to hint at its past and warn of the future. Nearly every sentence feels like it took everything from the writers fastidious mind to form itself, and then it took more. And that’s how it reads too—as though the words via some supernatural force possessed someone into airing them out, refusing to be ignored before materializing through bleeding ink on a fresh white page.

The fragility and uniformity and meticulous measure with which each sentence offers itself becomes a quieted mediation, edging toward prayer and mercy, on lonliness, on the unbound love of female relationship. On autonomy and community. But the text isn’t lonely itself, it’s merely strange and dark and unflinching. It reaches out and resonates with the readers own memory, reminders of ones own loves and losses, and maybe most of all, on that undefinable nature of meeting someone and knowing them before they even open their mouths to speak.

Like most books I finish, I felt a total void afterward, because the author pulls you in deep, with mysterious descriptions that somehow poke at something in the depths of you. Places in the body you hardly knew were there. And the dream-like writing, which sometimes snakes into the “everyday descriptive” sort, is done so seamlessly—It’s as if a Murikami novel and a Wes Anderson film had a baby. Of course I had to restrain myself from underlining every other passage of words because they’re so immediate, I swear I smelled rose water the whole time. You’ll get what I mean when you read it. And you WILL read it! You simply must.

Even the cover, smooth matte black with beautiful gothic flowers…it makes you want to go back. The book itself feels like some secret treasure. I keep it in my bag, and I don’t really know why.

Here were a few of my favorite passages…don’t worry, no spoilers.

“I longed for my own room, the locked door, my little cell. I was a lonely person, I had been alone all my life. One is alone even in the company of ones mother. One speaks, and it echoes inside her.”

“The sky laid itself over me like a horse blanket.”

“We came from various places, but were of the same age and mind. None of us wanted to become a housekeeper, and none of us wanted to become a wife. We had been sent here to earn our keep, to become people of society. We were daughters of hardworking mothers and invisible fathers who slunk along the walls.”

“But I did as they had asked of me. I liked being an obedient daughter. It felt like being held by a beautiful patent leather collar.”

“Across the street from my sisters apartment is some student housing. I used to hang out there, by the main entrance, staring at anyone who walked by. They were all carrying bundles of books and wearing those sand-colored wool sweaters, you know, the ones one imagines smell like horsehair or a run ruined by damp. When I saw them, I wanted to spit, but I didn’t, out of self respect. …From my seat on the living room floor, I could see my mother walk u. She had cut out an ad from the newspaper. She called to me, as if I were on the other side of a frozen lake.”

“The tar burned into my lungs and into my fingertips. If you can’t give your body the good stuff, give it the bad stuff.”

“I called them the ghost rooms, not because they were haunted, but because rooms unvisited by humans simply begin to attract evil.”

My favorite one…

“Our parents were all deluded about the fact that the the world had changed and would not go back to being what it once was. They did not believe in a future without the good woman and her duties. They wanted to prepare us for a life where we would care for child and home, where we would stay with one man, no matter who he was, where our hands would repeat the same movements. At the hotel, our hands always repeated the same movements, but this was no place for a good woman.”

“There was something serious and industrious about her forehead.”

“Did you see him, she said during intermission, the murderers face?” I shrugged and bowed my head to hide my blush. I had an urge to put a curse on him or stab him with my knife.”

“I sat up with a jerk, suddenly wide awake. It was as if my body knew something that the brain hadn’t registered. I took out my lighter and quickly crossed the room. Held up the little flame above the beds and counted.. [all eight girls] Cassie was gone. I rushed over to her bed and tore the covers off, my hands searching the sheets, as if she might appear there, doll-size, hidden under the pillow.

…The bed was otherwise untouched, as it had stood since early morning, when the sun billowed in through the window like flames. I crawled across the bed and pressed my my hands to the wallpaper above the headboard, convinced for a moment she had been swallowed by the wall. I walked over and shook Alba. I whispered I can’t find Cassie.

…Her bed stood in the middle of the room, perfectly arranged, like a crime scene.”

Flipping through the book now I simply want to write out chapters so you can swallow them whole. In actuality, the chapters swallowed me whole. But I was ripe for it. I love when books take you that far away from a weekday afternoon.

In other news, this is the third day in a row where I have felt crashed, weak and heavy, and I have to consciously work hard not to fall victim to the fear that my entire health is going down. Crashes happen. I probably pushed it too hard last week. I have to believe that one more day of rest will be enough to pull my out of it. I also have to believe if I still feel this way tomorrow, that’s OK too. I just have to take it easy. So why not wax poetic about a book I love so much it feels like I’m holding a secret treasure, just flipping through the pages.

All will be well, and worrying, as they say, is like a rocking chair: It gives you something to do but get’s you nowhere. I guess that’s the things about to-do lists, they always wait for you until tomorrow. But it’s my sisters birthday, and birthdays don’t wait! I’ll plan for the best. Until then.

Health, Happiness, Stregaaaaa

Thank You Merric, My Eternal, Reliable, Recommender of Incredible Books ;)

A Little Older Now

Published on April 6, 2023April 13, 2023 by Mary Gelpi13 Comments

A little while ago I was haphazardly complaining that I couldn’t believe how old, number-wise, I was. I didn’t really feel older. I still feel like an idiot kid figuring it out litrally (said with accent) every day. My cousin Brenda piped in with something that should have been obvious. “We’re all getting older Mary. You’re not suddenly older than us!”

What a self-evident, seemingly obvious take on things. I had it somehow in my mind that only I was getting older, while everyone else stayed the same age. She was right, we were all looking the same, while somehow kids were growing and seasons continued to change and evidence of time past surrounded us wherever we looked. I guess that’s all to say, It’s been a while. I’ve missed you. How’s things?

I had no idea how to re-enter this little world I created so long ago and then took a sudden hiatus from for what, two years? Was I doing other important things? You could say that. (I wasn’t.) I was just living, plain and simple. The way people in picture frames and advertisements live. In some sacred moment— without a history of the last 10 years. No memory of being consumed by illness. Nothing lost. All I could ever need, I have. I’m just a smiling girl in a picture, no past—inhabiting ‘the eternal present’ as Tolle calls it. I erase it all.

The taking. Of friendships, relationships, autonomy and money and time. The leaking. Into every corner of my foolish little life. The waiting. In line at the pharmacy. In the first room at the doctor. The exam room at the doctor. On hold with the pharmacy. On hold with the insurance. On hold with the doctors office. And the loss, naturally. The loss of self to something I thought stronger than me. Of livelihood. Of growing into something impressive. Of opportunity. Of ways to make a mother proud.

There had to be a reconciliation with all of all that. And in truth, I might say that every day is exactly that. An eternal letting go, surrendering to what was and is real, all the while continuing to move forward. Embracing what is real and true by the ever changing second. Not to grieve the same things twice. In order for Life to overcome loss. To give what used to be taken. To have gratitude while I wait, because hey, at least I’m able to be here in the supermarket and wait on two feet. Not for long before it hurts, but I am somewhere. I am not a living couch.

This all points to my life now and how things have changed. When I look back at the move to Colorado, I see just how much of an insane shit show it was. We left with high hopes that Rocky Mountain air and crisp clear Colorado water could do nothing but help me. I’d have to feel better here, right? Wrong. It’s all too hilarious that I moved back into my childhood home, but moved into the basement. (It’s a finished walk-out OK!?) Every 36-year-olds dream. I did my best.

Looking back now from a stage of much higher functionality and a new, certain “availability” of health, I see how bad it was. My memory fills with images of me crawling up the stairs to the kitchen, on four legs like a monkey, because I was too weak to walk on two feet. Dizzily stumbling to the bathroom every morning, squinting in pain. Clothes all over the floor and Monty’s chew toys, because there was no energy in me available to do unnecessary things. Multiple Zooms with multiple doctors—zero real answers or treatments. A constant shortness of breath. A darkness under the eyes.

I rarely, ever left the house. People thought it was because of Covid. For me it was just life. For so many with chronic illness, quarantine was simply life as they already knew it. Covid was nothing but an interesting reminder that other people were also at home on a Tuesday afternoon. (Plus a whole lot more. We’ll get there.)

The truth is, I am very, very lucky. I write that with a strong knowing that it’s not even fair, what I’ve been given, because it’s what everyone should be given: a knowing, caring doctor. An MECFS specialist who treats exactly and only that. Proper healthcare. I can hardly convey how stark the contrast—visiting 6 different doctors in New Orleans to address eight different issues and dispense twenty medications, compared to one, bright, excessively knowledgable doctor, in charge of all my medicine, who knows so much more than me about this disease—which, it should be said, is how it should be. The patient shouldn’t have to wonder if the doctor has ever heard of her disease, let alone whether she says its name out loud. That is, if she even mentions it out loud at all. It’s always a gamble. Tell them or don’t tell them? Don’t. Unless they say it first.

Imagine. This will be a time in history, one day, when we look back and say “It was a gamble to even say out loud the name of your disease in the presence of a doctor. It meant they likely wouldn’t believe you. Which meant they couldn’t or wouldn’t help you. Which meant, well, here’s the number to a therapist, in the end. One day in the future, we will look back at this reality in awe. Shock. Shame.

With a lot of luck, but mostly hard work and some gambling on the part of my sister, she was able to arrange an appointment with Dr. Yellman, of the Bateman Horne Center in Salt Lake City. It’s only four hours from here, so even when I have to go, it’s a beautiful drive. I think most ME patients would be eager, health-willing, to drive for days to see this kind of doctor. Like I said, I’m lucky as hell that I got in, and I am far from the most deserving. I’m constantly grateful to have him on board and also a bit woefully heartbroken that so many sick people don’t have this access. To those I say, please hang in there. We will get there. There’s work to do. There’s so much work to do. But we can do it.

I should perhaps clarify that no, I am nowhere near perfect health. What changed is that my specialist is treating all kinds of things that a regular PC doc wouldn’t. Medicine like Cromolyn for Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, Pyrodistigmine for POTS, electrolytes and compression leggings for all parts dysautonomia. (That last bit is the easiest change you can make right now. I’ll post the leggings I use. That and at least one liquid IV a day.)

I still crash. Push and crash as though I haven’t learned this lesson a thousand times. But my crashes are less extreme, and a lot less long. This last month reminded me I am very very far from invincible, and it still doesn’t take so much for me to overdo it. I still need to be cautious with myself, but it’s difficult when I feel energy not to want to run outside and jump on the roof of my Toyota Camry and, I don’t know, sing Taylor Swift at the top of my lungs. Why? Because I can is all. That’s it really.

There is plenty more to say, about everything. We’ve got two years to account for! But mostly, I’m still me.

I hate to say it, don’t know how to say it, except to say it. I finally lost Monty, which I came close to thinking would never really happen. It was exactly a year ago next weekend. I’ve so much still to write about it, and him, and the whole thing. But the most I can say for now is that yes, it was very hard. But I realized that my fear of losing him was actually worse than the loss itself. When the time comes, you know. When you’re close with another soul like that, you know. Monty chose when and where, and I was simply there to pet his velvet ears and take in his smell one last time. OK, so I’m crying now. That happens sometimes and it’s OK. I think how wasteful all that fear of losing him was, when he was panting directly in my face!

Dogs are incredible teachers. Monty was next-level, and what he gave to me, in nearly every category of life, was precious. I really cannot believe how lucky I was to have such a dog as my own. It was a gift and a privilege to have him. I will never forget it.

It’s been a crazy two years. But I’m still here. Still Surviving. And Monty? Well, he’ll live forever ;)

Health, Happiness, Hellos & Goodbyes

Why Is It So Hard to Pee Into Those Urine Sample Cups?

Published on February 20, 2019 by Mary Gelpi8 Comments

Is it just me?

If it is, then I should feel pretty vulnerable and embarrassed after this. I’m sorry mom. I really do try and make you proud.

Is it just women?

It’s hard to say but I don’t think so. I do think requires more skill on behalf of the woman, I would think. Then again I wouldn’t know, I’ve never peed into one of those “specimen catchers” standing up. It seems like all you have to do is aim and shoot. Though I imagine splash-back could be a problem. Also I’ve heard dudes talking about the “split stream”, which would make producing a clean catch pretty tricky. But that happens to the lady folk too. So I’m a making a leap of faith in assuming I’m not the only one who has issues here. Right? Guys? Right guys?

I’ve had to give so many urine samples via those small plastic lidded cups over the last ten years, you’d think I’d at least have a technique mastered by now. But there’s just so little prediction in the direction that things will go once the golden exit begins.

You know the order of operations. First you go a little to see what direction your body has decided for the sample to go that day. Cool, you have a good idea. Place the cup in position. Aaaand begin. Aaaaand what is happening.

It starts to go awry when a renegade stream breaks off from the group for no reason at
all. Whyyyy. I can’t yell at my pee mid stream and direct it on where to go! It doesn’t respond to verbal orders or worried yelling. Why would half of this small waterfall decide to break apart from the its fluid crew and travel backwards? Return to the team you idiot!

Obviously, things don’t get better from there. The cup can’t catch the rebellious run off and the original stream simultaneously because they’re too far apart, so now I have to guess which one has a higher volume and catch that one. And because I’m indecisive, I start to get a little panicky, I can’t tell which is better. Now I’m going back and forth with the cup between streams because I’m worried the collection isn’t enough, and I’m right. I often miss more than I catch in the chaos. Great. Now there’s pee in places I’d rather there not be pee. It’s just my hand don’t freak out. (I’m talking to myself now) I mean urine is sterile, so I hear. That was the whole point of those deep breaths I took before beginning the process. You can do this Mary, just pretend it’s a game at the carnival, you’re a competitive gal.

I liken the stress to that of being on a motor bike and panicking that you’re going too fast but in the frenzy you keep hitting the gas, gunning it, instead of the break. You increase in speed until you crash and your shoe flies off. That actually happened to my friend Cody and I once. My shoe really flew off!

Anyway I guess it’s just the stress of getting it right and knowing there’s a limited amount

of material to work with that I end up internally yelling with my head down “WHAT. IS GOING ON DOWN THERE?! GET. IT. TOGETHER!” It’s like yelling at some kids I’m babysitting who I can hear are misbehaving in the basement. I hope I’m not accidentally
yelling that out loud in the stress of those 30 seconds. I can just see the nurses faces upon hearing the racket inside the bathroom, shaking their heads in resignation, Where did we go wrong with our children?

Now I have to place the cup on the counter, but why is the counter always wet? Is that someone else’s renegade pee? Impossible to know. Also, eeeew. So I awkwardly wipe down the counter, (still squatting on the toilet by the way), place the cup down, screw on the lid, make sure that’s wiped down and examine my sample. It’s like I want the nurses to be impressed with it. “Wow, did you check out Gelpi’s specimen cup? Not even a droplet on the outside!” I realize they’re wearing gloves and couldn’t care less about any of this.

Then you open that little stainless steel door to drop off your cup, and you see all the other specimens. Woah! I’m always surprised by the array of yellow colors that make up peoples urine. It’s like 50 shades of pee in there! I can only hope mine is the right shade of neon.

This is clearly Ms Gelpi’s perfect clean catch. How DOES she do it!?

It feels like an unnecessarily stressful event that I’ve had to do so many times, I just can’t figure out why I’m not better at it. Is there some method I’m unaware of? I had to give a sample yesterday just like I did last week and the week before that and a month before that, for all kinds of fun reasons. And still, I entered that bathroom, wrote my name on the cup, took a few deep breaths, and once again the urinary chaos began.

At least this time I didn’t fall. Yes, that is a true and exceptionally unfortunate story. It happened in the E.R. and I’m pretty sure they gave me a horse tranquilizer or something close to it prior to calm down the excessive adrenaline. I was in SVT (Supra Ventricular Tacchacardia) and flopping around like a fish out of water. Then I was tranked and expected to give a sample without help! So yeah, I fell. Let that image settle in and make the rest of your day happy.

Anyway, maybe I’ll develop a better method over the next few months. Or maybe giving urine samples will always just be one of those things we all have to do that are oddly more difficult than they should be, like hanging curtains. Don’t worry, because I know you might, I’ll let you know if there’s improvement. Stay golden yall! (I had to)

Health, Happiness, A Clean Catch

Day 7: The Final Day

Published on February 4, 2019 by Mary GelpiLeave a comment

Day 6

Published on February 3, 2019 by Mary Gelpi2 Comments

*As a follow up, my mom convinced me to go to dinner that night even though I felt really rough most the day. I stood weak and wobbly at the sink brushing my teeth and was seconds away from calling her and saying I just couldn’t make it. But something told me to go, given that my mom is typically right, and we could always leave with the second car if I didn’t feel well enough to stay. Also, these people are basically family, and they’d be completely comfortable letting me lay on the couch while my parents and my brother Nick enjoyed dinner. (Nick was in town and it was his second to last night. Another incentive to go)

To my surprise, their energetic spirits, both of them, (my God-parents–Varney and Sweet Pea) seemed to rub off on me-on all of us. I did need to leave this house, even if it meant just being sick somewhere else. To hear other people’s voices and stories and hear my parents laugh and engage with the world outside the ol’ farm…to remove ourselves from the everyday, which is hard to do in our state. But it was clear we all really needed it. The energy seemed to flow through each of us and build as we interacted and laughed and remembered how much love existed between us that we just don’t get a chance to see very often.

I felt lucky remembering such amazing people exist and who we consider part of our family. It was a gift to be able to get together that night and be reminders to one another of what real friendship and love can do, even if you see each 3 times a year. Love and friendship don’t keep score of anything. Anyway, I’m grateful. You get it.

OK, Super Bowl today…

GOOOOOO SAINTS!

Day 5

Published on February 2, 2019 by Mary GelpiLeave a comment

*my general editors note here would be that maybe writing through one of my more serious crashes in the last few years wasn’t the best idea because I imagine it can become a little daunting on the reader to read over and over again. Of course, that is the reality of living chronically ill, and it’s surviving the resilient day after day after month after month that is the most difficult part. But also this wan’t exactly intended for people to read and enjoy, although that would be a SUPERB secondary outcome. It was to clean house.

BUT, if I’m going to document such tough times, I have to be very cognizant about not letting the work feel tortured, even if I do. Torture in general is not the most entertaining subject matter, I think we can all agree. The point is not to let the sickness win and be the teller of the story. It should be the lens but not the primary subject matter. The challenge is to express and respect the experience authentically, be honest when it feels like torture, but allow enough distance and space from the part of me that wants to try to make this personal (the ego) so that humor and optimism and hope can carry at least half the narrative, the ‘happenings’–or ‘non-happenings’ as it were.

I thought I remembered by day 5 things were beginning to improve, and I read here that my weakness had finally started to just barely let up, and yet it was still an incredibly difficult day, mentally. I was still in really rough physical shape and I remember well just staring out of those windows and feeling an absolute absence of willpower–to do anything. I felt an emptiness inside and a certainty that anything I chose to do made no difference whatsoever. Talk about fun times! But I do remember seeing the bright red of that type-writer, this project I told myself I’d start and finish, and in my 1% battery charge of life force, I made my way and just started to type. It felt like a long exhale.

I actually remember the moment I began to feel better, in the midst of writing this piece. When I wrote “It seemed like a better idea to write at the type writer than to continue staring out the window, wishing things were different,” I realized how huge my role was in keeping my brain and mind active in positive ways when my body wasn’t strong enough. It makes a difference where you look, what you’re looking at, and how long you let your thoughts take the wheel away from you. In that paragraph I knew writing was a big way of living through something unpleasant and of changing how I felt about it, just by making a lot of small decisions that were opposite of what I felt like doing.

That role is so crucial, and like baby-sitting a two-year-old, you have to sometimes run around after your meandering mind, make it sit in time out, and remind it of true and happy and important things. Facts, not stories. That’s where you find gratitude and humility and grace and remember love and kindness and hopefulness. (All below the surface) You have to reach down far, and the willfulness to reach is for some reason so incredibly difficult it feels next to impossible. And yet when you do reach and feel something reach back, your entire outlook, even for an hour, can change massively. I think done enough times, we can remove a lot of the unnecessary pain we feel no matter what we’re going through..

For me, it’s sitting in time out and not letting toxic thoughts convince me of anything that isn’t true. Its not that I can’t acknowledge how extremely hard this situation is or allow the deep emotional parts of it to rise and let them out. In fact I have to do that. All parts of the spectrum need an outlet. It’s not about making those thoughts forbidden. It’s about acknowledging them but also then to keep going. Not to stay glued to some idea about fairness or unfairness that eventually keeps you from trying, keeps you from remembering who you are–buried underneath all the hardship that can feel piled on top of you. Writing is magic for me in the miraculous way it reminds me of the truth when I can’t think of or remember it on my own. It will literally turn bitterness into gratitude in just a few sentences, and that’s why it’s important.

Well, I’ve veered off track again. I just felt like taking some notes that maybe I’ll refer back to in the future.

Dammit, I just remembered the Super Bowl is tomorrow and how as a Saints fan I’m boycotting it, but as a curious person I’d like to watch some of it and also observe what 15 million dollar commercials the ad people came up with. I imagine my mom will be dressed all in black and if we had an American flag on our porch, you can bet it would be hanging at half mast. Hah. Football.

Ok Mary well it’s been real. Yeah Mary I agree. Have a happy Saturday. Yeah cool you too. See you tomorrow. Same bat time, same blog place.

Day 4

Published on February 1, 2019 by Mary GelpiLeave a comment

Day 3

Published on January 31, 2019January 31, 2019 by Mary Gelpi3 Comments

OK, there’s a lot of crap in this piece that needs to be re-written or scrapped. Taking on a writing project in the midst of a heavy crash may have been a bad idea in terms of writings to share because than crap like this emerges and I told myself I’d stick to the rules. Even reading it now I can see how convoluted my mind way, how easy it was to stray off topic. I’ve begun to improve since Sunday, particularly cognitively, and the writing really does emulate what’s going on during fog. I had to cross some out because it just meandered and was so clunky and unclean, it was very far from conveying my ideas properly at all. Anyway, as uncomfortable as I feel posting writing I don’t like and probably 2/3 of which I would change, or burn, this was partially the point of the project. So just trust and let go. Besides, there’s like 11 people reading this. I think we’ll all be OK.

Anyway, hopefully I’ve written a little better for day 4, or perhaps I’ll have more crap to share! Either way, it might be enjoyable. Just let go Mary. OK, I’m going. So go then. I’m gone. So go! I’m going! Just. Press. Publish. You Nitwit. Alright, see you tomorrow.

Day 2

Published on January 30, 2019January 30, 2019 by Mary Gelpi1 Comment

Day One

Published on January 29, 2019 by Mary GelpiLeave a comment

Seven Days at a Type Writer

Published on January 28, 2019 by Mary Gelpi1 Comment

You Can’t Unring the Bell

Published on May 20, 2018 by Mary Gelpi2 Comments

Short Story:
Fiction/Non-Fiction/Alternative Rock

I can tell you that indoors the weather is just fine. Perfect even. Outside though, it’s a soppy, dingy dish rag that sporadically drips into a mop bucket full of beetle-colored water. The yard a soupy mess. Rain becomes so droopy without wind to accompany it, so forgetful without the boom of thunder to remind the constant tick tock of water to slow or quicken or mix things up. No punctuation. No gusts or light shows. Despite the vertical, straight march of precipitation, a stillness encapsulates my little world into one whole thimble, and I find it hard to believe it’s not raining in China. Or somewhere across the world that apparently exists.

The flat, cheerless sky has hardly faded from two or three shades of a trendy-kitchen grey since morning to now, night. Almost night. The humanity! Do you know what unchanging, murky tones can do to a life like mine! But the sky isn’t listening. It doesn’t want to fight. Or talk right now. It’s too busy emptying a stream of many forms of consciousness, of prayer and disruption and quiet and mirrors, most of all, so we can see. So we can see each other, the sky finally relents. I wore her down. So we can see what we’re doing to one another, and this aquatic ritual to restore balance, maybe it might help us look. No dummy, not at yourself. (I had tried to find my reflection in a dim puddle, a reflective twin of its sky) At the others. At what your lack of looking has cost these “others.” I forget a mirror is a plane, a device, where I can see other things besides myself. Other, dare I say, dimensions?! I dare not say. Not because I don’t love a good dare, but because I didn’t look. I don’t look yet. I know that once I look, I won’t be able to un-see. Once I know, the bell will be rung. You can’t squeeze the toothpaste back in the tube. So I continue not to look and my ego agrees with this decision, but my innards do not.

Monty, the dog, he never even hesitated whether to look. He’s the reason I’m outside at all. He’d seen all along and it wouldn’t take a smoky sky and day of dirty dishwater drizzling filled with absolutely stupid feelings of nostalgia about an ex-boyfriend who no longer exists on this plane, for Monty to even consider the choice to see. He would never even have dithered or delayed. Think of people who are kind but who don’t have to try hard. They simply breathe and even their breath is kind. As opposed to those who put forth a lot of effort, noticeable effort, who are being good because they know it’s right to be good, but it doesn’t come easy to them. And they enjoy (prefer) a lot of accolade for it. I fear I can have this tendency too often. How else would I know this person exists, if he weren’t inside me somehow? Too different from Monty, from my dad, who never seemed to try so hard but had to saddle with the same choices we all do. They just didn’t grapple with what to do and they were happy when given the chance to do something kind and valuable. Me, I have to get all existential about doing the damn dishes. Eye roll. A person made of genuine good converses on the street, smiles when they see trash in the gutter, pick it up, and dispose of it while continuing their joke about where cows go on dates. To the moooooooovies.

A person made of too much ego would first, never tell this joke. Secondly, they’re absolutely disgusted at the sight of this same trash. They pick it up with a crab face and a secret pride that they’ve braved touching and holding le garbage, even if they are carrying it eight inches away with an angry stiff arm like a strangers dirty underwear. Then they angrily stuff it in a can while interrupting their own story, but of course their own story is about why the youth are a disaster as well as weather, frogs and politics, don’t get him started, and throwing away this trash is just proof that a disaster is just what the world is. Unlike an earlier time when there was simple decency that just doesn’t exist anymore. I fear a lot about living like this latter person. I guess the most I can say is I’m trying, and my insides tell me Hey, that’s something. The result is the same, right? The trash finds its way to the proper receptacle, but one of those people is clearly sad about getting old. I want to get happier that older I become and the more I know, which is very little now.

Watching Monty in those puddles makes me want to be good but keep quiet about it. Never have I seen even a moment of blurred consciousness in him. Or questionable kindness. Where is his ego? I wonder this as he splashes into a huge puddle and flecks of overjoyed water bullets burst out from under him and rise and fall, absorb into the earth. He saw every color reflected in that puddle, in every tiny droplet that exploded out from under the soft but protected pads of his feet, and still nothing but glee emits from his every move. How could he exist in such an effortless joy of Being? Did he forget to remember that we used to do this with someone else? Someone no longer around? How could he behold both truths and still be at such ease with the knowledge? That dog is roaring to go, bursting at the seams, to go anywhere—the mailbox—do anything, awake at all times, and yet he can count. He can remember. Still, every day is the best day of his life.

He knew about the way things once were. Who used to be here. How many days he has left, if you were to demand those kinds of numbers and answers from him. But once you knew, once you’d looked, as I was still certainly not doing, it would be absolutely silly, and stupid, not unlike the nostalgia over an ex-boyfriend, to calculate days left. To play the mental movie over and over of people gone and being wronged and things lost all along the way. The questions would hardly even compute, actually. Those kinds of calculations lose meaning in the way we interpret them—they lose their heaviness, their value, as does “losing” the people and things we love. Once you’ve looked, you would never use the word lost or lose. The whole metric changes. It would be like asking, “How much purple is in the sunset?”

I close my eyes a moment and listen to the sky busied at her nearly impossible task, pouring love that has to consist of a main ingredient truth, and thus pain, because this is how we’ve decided to handle truth: insulting instead of informational. It pelts the glass at my window and the lights on inside seem to inhabit the living room as though someone were in there. But we’re outside, not looking, and the dog seeing it all.

A sadness comes over me, knowing what the sky has to do. Wake all of us up, in a defiantly chosen, solid sleep with our fingers in our ears and our devices producing nature sounds. The pettiest of things distracting us even from idle, filler dinner conversation. If only zombies weren’t so trendy! Not looking. Not listening. Crossing the street anyway. And yet we curse her when we do harm to one another. Manipulate, kill, lie, take advantage. Deny a person their humanity. What do we do? Where do we look? Up. We look to the sky, angry, demanding answers to our violent curiosity: Why?How could you? This is why she offers the rain. And the rain offers a reflection. A way in. To see. Will any of us feel the fear stirring and jump anyway? Never go back to sleep again? Most of us only glimpse this possibility, and most of us won’t take the leap. It would mean never able to tell a lie again, not without knowing the untruth within us, and relying on ignorance is often very helpful.

She has many tasks, and waking the unconscious from their dream, their million year-maze of thoughts, is no cakewalk, I can assume. She can only try to show us what’s already there, but ultimately the dreamer has to want to aim his sight higher, at least want to wade through the stickiness of his psyche and open even one eye and see, if not awaken altogether. So many are too afraid of what they’ll lose, and in this instant of stillness, space—the gap— I see that I am one of them. I harm myself, and others sometimes, then I ask the sky how it could be so cruel.

Some part of me that I don’t very much like, doesn’t want to know, no matter how much in a conscious manner I can claim to want all the answers with a ferocity I don’t come across much in myself. That part of me that’s always there, the gatekeeper that doesn’t know the difference between stories and reality, no doubt finds the option to see as an ultimately punitive experience. Think what is means, it whispers in my forehead, where a mental playground of emotions, mundane observations, good and bad assumptions, real and false interpretations of reality all flow in and out like a river, all water of the same source, indiscernible when it comes to water that matters and water that’s muddied and wrong. We can agree this makes him a pretty bad gatekeeper. It means that our choices may be all our own, and not the intricate plans of an angry sky. That there may mean no answer for pain and struggle, even if we might actually be able to harness value from it. A good reality wouldn’t require us suffering to see or act. The voice becomes entangled in a web of sounds and rushing water and it’s hard to make it out anymore. It’s just so easy to hear the rain as a lullaby instead of some alarm.

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I open my eyes and temporarily, the heaviness lifts. The tasks disappear. My to-do list seems strangely laughable. It melts as if held over a flame, the edges darkening and curling. Monty is still jumping in puddles of rain and mud. In the puddles, the flecks of flying water in various shapes, I see myself from the outside. I see just how many choices were mine that I’d somehow attributed to unfairness or plain chance. In my night terrors I know when I am dreaming but I can’t wake up, and I wonder if ever I’ll be able to use the power that’s been given to get myself out. But I only get glimpses. Things around me dissolve like they’ve spontaneously turned to fine sand and dropped as a choreographed fall to a bottomless ground. Then they return in nearly the same moment. Reality becomes a solid. Things are regaining their importance. My to-do list resumes it’s urgency, reassembles in perfect form. The phone beeps at me, prying, crying for attention to matters of total inconsequence. What will you do, Mary? Pretend you never signed up for this stumbling of life? Ignore that moment you knew and signed the contract anyway? I chose to come here, some time ago. What am I doing crying about the end, an end I seemed to comprehend with that flick of my pen, but now feels like a puzzle that can easily turn pain worthless, and that’s the problem with forgetting. So the sky, she tried.

Sleep. Wake up. Jump. See. The space, the still, calm waters in the back of my head, the reflection to the foreground of my consciousness, whispers that the leaves of the tallest tree rustling at me every night are in fact my dad saying hello, and it’s OK to sound crazy when you write that out loud. And the crumbled dead leaves shaped like hearts on the dirty ground, that when I came across as a kid made me smile and cry because I knew they were him reaching back at me. Little tiny reminders, all of them. They go far far back to a dream I cannot remember, nor do I have the words to get right. The conscious waters splash and say it’s OK to take my time. “But we could really use you. No pressure.” That place is the gap—the space between thoughts—just like Tolle taught. But the gap is low in numbers. Too many sleepers.

The sky grumbles with thunder, like a disgruntled old man picking up a mess that isn’t his. The wind picks up. The drizzle elevates into a downpour and I sense the greatness of the sky, separate from my body and yet capable of removing its weight, able to reckon the things we always thought of as separate. Monty jumps in another puddle but I call him in, weary and limp-limbed, head pounding, words swirling in my forehead I still can’t make out. He trots, tail wagging, nearly a prance. He is so happy to be here; alive and at peace. The fact that he has never caused harm, that he wouldn’t know how to makes me feel like crying, which I feel pretty stupid about and so I cry some more. These thoughts do no good and worst of all lack total creativity. The gatekeeper fails. When will I believe the obvious whispers? The glimpses I catch. Something illuminates then leaves with barely any time to remember, and my memory of it is so far from the form it took while it was here. Like a dream there is no language for. But the clarity while you had it, stiff as the second you drive under a bridge in the rain and the quiet gets in. Then I lose the grip.

I have not been there but peeked in on that place of truth just on the other side of this one. Wakefulness animates everything residing there. People tell jokes and look each other in the eye. All their brothers keeper. No devices in the way of our eyes. Egos can try, but when they get even close to too large they pop like a balloon. At the bottom level it sounds like popcorn at one minute 20 seconds. I cannot wait for the grand relief of being there again. Of having the courage to see and stay there. Falling asleep here and choosing the illuminated reality there, where nothing hides, nothing lies. The folly of all our burdens gone. The great weight lifted.

*This “short story” or whatever it is probably belongs in the poetry section of this blog even though it’s far from poetry either, but I couldn’t figure out how to post there, so here it is. It’d been blinking at me on my screen for too long, so it was time to set it free like a dead persons ashes in the ocean. Sorry, morbid. Health and happiness :)

2017 and Falling Off the Edge of the Earth

Published on March 5, 2018July 11, 2018 by Mary Gelpi8 Comments

*I’m making a concerted effort to keep these blogs shorter and “more digestible.” This is not that blog. Last year was a book all on its own and I feel the need to fill some gaps where I was unable to write during certain parts, so I’ll do it now so I can move on to the present. Apologies it’s not shorter and sweeter. Next time.

*
The beginning of 2017 had begun so auspiciously. My health was in the “good enough” category. Not great, but not terrible. I don’t even know if the word ‘good’ fits with any precision here, but looking back at the beginning of the year, it was so much better than how the year was to end.

The hopefulness, the call to act, the feeling that I could help change things related to a health crisis all felt visceral and achievable. Whenever I felt down about something, disappointed, or discouraged, I constantly asked the same question: Why not me? I’d waited on others for so long, expecting there to be a happy ending soon enough. But you grow older and you see that things don’t happen unless people believe in the possibility of things changing, and if those same people don’t believe they can contribute to this change, in whatever way small or large, things remain the same. When we stop waiting on others, and decide no matter where we are in life, there is always something we can do, we will add light to a place of darkness. We can try. And I can tell you from personal experience, many failures, some successes, that trying, regardless of outcome, feels a whole hell of a lot better than waiting.

I think it’s why we may sometimes take the longer route home, even though we know there’s an objectively quicker way to get there—but that shorter way involves stop and go traffic the whole time. Most of us would prefer to just drive, on a road that feels open, than sit in a tense car and yell OH COME ON and beep our horns (as if this does anything in congested traffic).

I hadn’t expected the outcome that came out of writing the petition. Yes once again, I”m talking about the petition. But this stuff matters— to me, and to millions, and I need to quit pretending this is a blog that will always (or ever) be extremely exciting or cover my super fun travels to Brazil! I am after-all, documenting life and a chronic disease and a hopefully changing political landscape that I am attempting to contribute to. I try to keep things light-hearted and fun when I can, and highlight the sometimes tragic hilarity that comes from this weird, unconventional life I live. That’s the creative challenge. But the aim of truth telling is tied for 1st in what’s primary, because there has been so much, well, non-truth telling. (I’m looking at you, psychiatric club of England!) I also try not to make it so much about me, but that’s a joke, because this is me, writing about me, and also M.E. (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis— you get it.)

In early January I met with the LA State Director who works directly under Senator Bill Cassidy. I sat with him for two and a half hours, giving him the whole spiel. At the end, I showed him the petition, which had amassed roughly 35,000 signatures at the time, and it seemed to surprise him. That led to him arranging an extremely brief “meeting” with Bill Cassidy, (literally a 3 minute talk in the parking lot between meetings, where I said as much as I could, and handed him a printout of twenty pages of comments where sick people had told their stories in condensed bursts trying out for help. Some of them were heartbreakingly short and to the point. “I have lost everything. I am bed bound. I’m not living anymore.’ As he was being ushered into his car to his next meeting and his team shouting that he was late and to please hurry, he shook my hand and looked me in the eye saying “I really would like to know more about this.” But politically things were a mess at that time. Is that a redundant thing to say? No longer even necessary? I was told he would be in our state (Louisiana) for roughly 30% of the year or less because his help with the Healthcare Bill in DC was very much needed. So I met with the State Director, but it just inherently felt like such a good thing. Any politician empathizing with you, listening to you and looking you in in eye feels successful all on its own. I realized we were all looking for that. We just want to be seen and heard, and I want to continue that mission.

Attending the “Storm on DC” in May where a large group of us-advocates, advocacy group leaders, those sick with MECFS and those who loved them— met with representatives of more that 150 congressional offices, which felt like movement in the right direction. Besides that, the catharsis I found in meeting other people who were living my kind of life was invaluable. It was the human reminder that I’m always trying to tell myself, that I’m always replying to others when they reach out. We really aren’t alone, even if we’re by ourselves. There are many of us, and yet isolation dominates. This sentiment is perhaps the hardest to remember, the most difficult to convince your heart is true.

A good family friend arranged for me to meet the Majority Leader, Steve Scalise, where we all sat down, and I attempted a summarized spiel of MECFS and the train wreck it is. More importantly I introduced this disease to a man who’d never heard of it, which is typically how these things go. Then I told my story in fast forward, as something he could connect to. Maybe something he might remember. The three of us did a little trouble shooting of ideas. We didn’t have two and a half hours, bur he too wanted more time to learn about and think on this. I left him with short and digestible literature. When we left he shook my hand and I looked him in the eye, hoping he would remember me. That somehow in the future, he’d have some faint memory of a girl he talked to—explaining a crisis underneath everyones nose that needed immediate addressing. A continuation of being seen, being heard, asking people pointedly,”Can’t we do better?”

We tried. I tried. And regardless of what obvious or immediate changes were made (not many, but a few important ones), this all felt very good. To try. You know when you’re doing your best and when you’re slacking. Nobody really has to tell you.

***

Unfortunately after my bump of health in the spring, I seemed to start on a downward spiral to crap town. I fell in love, which was energizing, but the burst of it didn’t last very long. In late summer we tried ketamine infusions to try and get a hold on my chronic pain—in my legs and my head/face. It was basically insane. And sort of a Catch 22, because I think if I didn’t have ME, I would’ve been able to handle the 3 infusions per week for two weeks. But the physical demand of doing anything 3 times a week at that point was extremely difficult. Strangely, it improved the pain in my legs, but made my head worse. I’d get a horrible migraine after each treatment and woke up the next day like it was back for vengeance. I’d have a day to recover before we’d go in for another treatment and do it all again. For someone with this illness, this kind of protocol just isn’t all that possible or as it easy it might be for others. At any rate, we went through with it, because if I was going to endure the physical hardship and psychological insanity, I wanted to really go for it. I wanted to know explicitly if this would work or not, and not do some half-ass attempt. Apparently the first 6 treatments and the time in which they’re given is crucial to their effectiveness. I would try anything that might help the pain, get me off meds.

It was an intense two weeks, and I’ll go into much further detail on another post because there is a LOT about that course of treatment, physically and spiritually, and not a lot of personal experiences written about it out there. I believe it could have worked for the nerve pain in my legs if my mysterious stupid head didn’t explode at anything new we tried. I crashed from the exertion, the migraines became a given, and it just became clear it wasn’t working. Wasn’t going to be possible or given a real chance to work. So we paid a hefty financial and physical price, but at least we tried, and we always will attempt things that promise at least a good possibility of lessening my pain and eliminate the need for prescription drugs that are harder to fill than buying a machine gun.

This was toward the beginning of August, where afterward my functionality was already in decline but it continued and seemed to increase its rate of downward spin. Particularly in October, where I seemed to fall off the earth.

The pain doctor changed one of my long acting pain meds to see if we might get a better hold on the leg and face pain. I had an extreme reaction to it. On day 3 the “skin crawling” I had felt at first turned up to a 10. I’d wake up at 3 am to my legs and arms squirming, kicking, flexing— feeling like a kinked hose with full blast water trying to flow through it, impossible to keep still. My muscles would be flexed without my telling them to. My fists would be clenched and my toes curled under my feet, then pointed, back and forth on repeat. Moving felt “good” in a weird way, only because remaining still felt impossible. But I was so exhausted anyway, all this muscular strain helped nothing and only worsened.

On day 4 came an episode that we can’t really explain. I was at the vet with Monty when I was already feeling rough but pretty suddenly felt I like would faint and as though my insides were melting. Luckily it’s across the street from our house, so I cut appointment short, trying in spurts and sputters to explain what dysautonomia was to the vet techs as I sat on a bench before the 60 second ride home. Have you ever heard of POTS? “Like frying pans?” I came straight home, laid down on the couch, drank peppermint water for the intense nausea and iced my aching head. Suddenly I needed to vomit. I wrapped myself around my moms toilet where the bathroom spun but I could only spit. I prayed to puke because the nausea was so immediate, making my face hot and the saliva in my mouth swirl, collect at my lips and pour out like a faucet, but nothing.

I laid on the floor of her bathroom, stuttering and having major issues speaking. My muscles kept clenching, all of them, would become rigid, and my teeth chattered. If I diverted my attention away from breathing it became hard to breath normally. It felt similar to the symptoms of SVT but I was not in active SVT, or I’d taken an atenolol just in case I was, and it would’ve worked by the time I lying on the tile. Something else was happening. I had to focus on just taking normal, deep breaths, trying to stay calm. I was twitching and my muscles were doing whatever they wanted. When I finally stood, unstable on my feet, my parents each held an arm and tried to guide me to the bed—but every time I moved I felt insane vertigo and urgent nausea. Even looking too quickly with my eyes to the left or right caused a flash of the same symptoms unless I lay still on the cold tile floor. I laid around the toilet again and tried to be as still as possible, ignoring whatever my body was doing on its own. My parents brought in a pillow and blanket and Monty laid next to the bathtub.

My body took turns twitching and shaking and going rigid, and I stuttered horribly when my mom asked me questions. The lights were too bright, so I laid there just as the last of the sun was setting. I knew she was conflicted—do we take her to the ER? But we’ve both had enough experience there—no one has heard of my disease. They would look at my prescription list and long, convoluted history and none of it would add up to anything, understandably. (We hardly mention ME/CFS in med school text books, and the printed “treatments” are so outdated, some still state “hysteria” as a cause. If anything, going to a bright, loud, crowded ER would make it worse. She used to be a nurse and was monitoring my vitals the whole time anyway. I told her “Please, no hospital.” But I think she knew I was in better hands at home anyway. I felt awful. Not just physically, but that it had come to this. That my mom had to see me like that. That the place you’re supposed to go for medical help is not a place we can go. All of it felt so backwards, so wrong. And it was just beginning,

It took four hours for the episode to finally dissipate and for me to turn back into normal Mary. Clearly I couldn’t stay on that med, which was incredibly disheartening, because it was the first one that provided relief for both the nerve pain in my legs that I’ve had for eight years, and the mysterious head/face pain that we’ve been trying to figure out for the last 5. No luck. But that med, that pile of gold in a bottle that finally eased the pain for both, was also a med violently rejected by my body, so I was forced to quit it. I cried and cried. I felt angry at my own body. Why wouldn’t it accept something that was finally helping it? It’s hard to hold out hope during times like that.

I was horribly crashed the day after the episode, but we had to go back to the doctor the next day and get my medicine sorted out. Another hour car ride, (thank you Mom and Marc) and we weren’t really told why I would have that kind of reaction—which seemed to fit the bill for serotonin syndrome, something I have had at least one episode of before. But they shrugged it off and agreed it was best to just return to my old regimen. The “good enough” regimen. There was only one huge problem that remained:

The side effects of that new drug I tried didn’t go away when we stopped it. It was as thought a switch was flipped. It began in October. I am still dealing with extreme restless legs and arms and toes and hands (which for eight years prior were 90% under control with lyrica), and my skin crawls as if I’m being tickled from the inside if I don’t take a different med to calm my whole nervous system down. The symptoms are insane without this new med.. SO, just to fill yall in, that was the last quarter of 2017, and I can say objectively, IT ROCKED.

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I am telling this story because it’s just one example of how messed up this situation is, in so many capacities. I have had to see four doctors in order to get the medicine needed to calm down the symptoms caused by a medicine I tried for a short while in October. The DEA is coming down explicitly hard not just on patients but on doctors too and if they’re prescribing any kind of controlled substance. Their licenses are threatened, and they aren’t allowed to treat their patient the way they might normally choose— because an entity that knows nothing about medicine is interfering with their medicinal plan. But more importantly, I’ll never forget what my primary care physician said to me in a recent visit while we continued to try and sort all of this out, as I squirmed like a a worm on the examination table, about to run out of the medicine that was helping keep things ‘calm’ but I was forced at the time to try and ween off of. He’s a very good doctor and extremely educated in Dysautonomia, which is a huge part of MECFS. He said “It’s better for one or two doctors to be prescribing all your meds, not six or seven.” I agree with him. And how nice that would be, if only it were possible.

This is what MECFS patients mean when they say there’s no place to turn, no safety net. A person with cancer goes to the oncologist. A person with diabetes goes to the endocrinologist. Someone with heart disease, the cardiologist. Where does the person with MECFS go? The literal handful of specialists, if they can afford it? And where it’s difficult to fill any prescriptions because the specialist is out of state? Local doctors have often heard of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which they often conflate with Fibromylagia—an illness one of my male doctors actually used AIR QUOTES when he said it aloud, as well as “Intersticial Cysitus”. I wanted to laugh high pitched and say with my own air quotes “Yeah, you’re a “really good doctor.” It’s such a joke. We are so misinformed. So uneducated when it comes to such a debilitating disease that is not new and is not rare. I’ll leave the numbers out of it, I’ve said them so many times before I believe they’ve begun to lose any real meaning at all.

By Christmas, as you may guess, I was not doing well at all. It was my favorite time of year and it all felt so tainted— the normal seasonal colors were drab and as I looked out the window of my moms car as she drove me home from yet another doctor appointment, I couldn’t help but cry. It was drizzling and ugly out, and nothing felt balanced or fixable. Just let it out Mary, it’s OK to be upset, my mom comforted me. But I was upset at even being upset. I wanted to be cheerful and play Christmas songs, but everything felt covered in the haze of this disease, the amount of time it took not just from me but from my parents who have lives of their own, and my lack of ability to advocate or do anything I wanted—it was all waring on me. On us. Everything felt like it was falling away.

I was extremely depressed and hadn’t seen friends or felt like I’d done something truly social or fun or meaningful for too long. Everything revolved around finding waking up to and finding physical relief, and then being fought back on every effort we made. I can’t count the hours we’ve spent at Walgreens, arguing that insurance should cover a medicine, or being told that they didn’t have this or that medicine in stock, so we could wait three days or drive an hour to another Walgreens that does. Once we were told they had 19 pills, of my prescribed 120. “I can give you the 19 now, but you’ll have to go back your doctor (an hour away) and get a new prescription written in order for me to fill the rest when we have it back in stock.” Someone. Please. Explain. Everything was a battle. I grew so tired of fighting, for everything. The disease is hard enough, but the logistics of the disease is often just as hard or harder. It is truly, I say this with total conviction, a full-time job. That phrase It shouldn’t be like this would play itself in my head a lot and it was hard to disagree. But what can you do? Keep going. Always keep going.

We had a good Christmas, and thus far I’ve been able to get the treatments I need in order to remain mostly comfortable. Thank you, Dr. Patel, and thank you Dr. Klimas. You truly are heroes to someone like me. I wish the government would leave you alone—-unless it meant funding for research, then come on in yall!

It’s a new year, and for now, I have what I need. (Thank you MOM, and Marc.) How I wouldv’t survived the last part of 2017 without you, I honestly don’t know. I feel decently functional right now and for that I am incredibly grateful. I just felt I needed to write out a bit of what happened last year, because behind it all, I hated that I wasn’t able to devote more of my time to advocating. I was in bed or my house somewhere, thinking of grand ideas that I was too weak to carry out. But enough of that, it’s in the past. I believe this year will be different as I’ve said before and we’ve already hit some major goals, which I will spill soon. So be on the lookout yall and hang on. I know how discouraging it gets, how isolating. I know how hard it is to hear “You’re not alone” when you’re by yourself. But it is the truth. We are getting there, we’re not alone, and we still need outsiders help.

Mom, Marc, Monty, Family: thank you.

Health, Happiness, & Good Things To Come

Miami, Migraines, Diners, Doctors

Published on March 1, 2018March 1, 2018 by Mary Gelpi5 Comments

I am sitting at a booth in one of those themed diners in a shopping center, adjacent to the clinic where I saw the specialist on Monday and had what looked like hundreds of vials of blood taken today for more testing. I figure I should eat even though I’ve no appetite. I never trust a menu this long, so I play it safe and order the soup and salad, which is neither good or bad. I guess that’s what you’re really asking for, a meal to quickly forget.

mp,550x550,gloss,ffffff,t-3.3u2.jpg The music is too loud in here and I find myself strangely annoyed with the gimmicky decor. License plate style plaques fill every inch of wall space boasting phrases like “Stressed is Dessert spelled backwards!” and “Soup of the Day: Whiskey.” I stop. I just close my eyes a minute. Adjust. The problem is not the restaurant. It’s me and this body I have to animate—it doesn’t fit in the world in comfortable or easy ways. It’s like dropping a wild tiger in suburbia, except maybe the opposite. It’s like trying to build suburbia in the middle of a jungle, then complaining the tigers are noisy and sometimes scare the kids. No one else seems bothered by the music.

mp,550x550,gloss,ffffff,t-2.3u2.jpg — “Hey, you don’t belong here.”
“I might say the same thing about you.”

I don’t want to be this young and think like a curmudgeon. Better to let go. It’s because it’s 11:30 and I’m on day 9 of a migraine cycle and I’m wearing real pants. I had to get blood drawn and I don’t normally exist before noon. Mornings are just constantly, reliably painful and tough.

Everyone has days where life feels so tired, so repetitive, that you want to hit snooze and wake up under some alternate sky where there is no weight to carry. No gravity, no effort required to move. Where everyone looks each other in the eyes. We listen. We don’t say the words “Sorry” followed by the word “but…” or “if”. Our hearts resonate with each other, and our heavy bodies have shed like snake skin, like the useless, heavy weight they’d become. There is a lightness in every capacity.

Tolle says this alternate side of the sky I am referring to is possible here on this side. And I believe he is right. But it takes so much practice and learning and presence. Presence. How easy it is to walk into a cheap diner and complain about decor. ap,550x550,12x16,1,transparent,t.u2.png That kind of observation lacks creativity. Not to mention, it’s very counterproductive to complain about these things when you’re already feeling down. So I’ll tell you what I like about this costumed diner. All four booths in my vicinity are filled with at least parties of two people eating, and all of them are talking to one another. None of them have their phones out. A phenomenon! Particularly this couple across from me.

They are in their 60’s, and somehow it seems obvious they’ve known each other a long time. I could be wrong of course. They could be divorcees who met on ourtime.com and newly in love. But it’s not the sense I get. In my mind they’re in their Act III of their marriage with grandchildren they have pictures of on their phones to their friends at Bridge. I like that they haven’t run out of things to say or lost some kind of delight in the simple pleasure of each others laugh. They seem to laugh a lot, casually, throughout their light hearted conversation and this feels so good to watch. I always used to fear I’d marry a man and eventually he’d lose interest in me and I’d find his stories boring and then we’d be at a restaurant eating one day with nothing to say to one another. As though there was nothing new to discover about the other, or that we’d lose curiosity in the way each of us experienced the world.

But I know that only happens when we’ve decided we know a person completely and with total certainty. And if we’ve decided that, the issue is not the other person.”The human mind mistakes its opinions and viewpoints for truth…but it is no more than a viewpoint, one of many possible perspectives. Reality is a unified whole. Thinking fragments it into pieces.” Tolle says a lot about the “thinking” mind, and that it’s very useful in our world. But it’s also “very limiting when it takes over your life completely. It’s only a small aspect of the consciousness you are.”

Sometimes I seek the daily, thoughtless things about a person with such aggressive interest I think I might be dumb. Their calendars, notebooks, what they keep in their cars. One of my favorite hobbies is to take apart a guys wallet, piece by piece. All the useless receipts he saves. The frequent customer cards. An old crumbly picture, maybe. Movie stubs. Concert stubs. Their license—are they smiling in the picture or does it look like a mug shot? What made the cut for making it into the billfold and what didn’t. All tiny stamps of a person and his non-sequitor, paper trail of places he’s been. You can have the same fun or more going through a woman’s’ purse. Many clues in there. But these are little traces so few people see. Instead we go to dinner and say “Uh huh and what do you do? Oh interesting, tell me more about your boss. What a jerk!” I think first dates should be silent a exchange of wallet for wallet, or purse for purse, or wallet for purse, whatever. You get the picture.

My last boyfriends wallet, unless I’m remembering incorrectly, was a basic brown leather wallet that seemed to old for him and contained some concert stubs, because he was a music guy and not a whole lot else because he had a straightforward way of being in the world. A wallet was a thing to hold money and his license. But maybe more memorable was the night we went to dinner and left Monty and his dog Gracie home. When we returned, his wallet that he’d left on the coffee table had been chewed. His license, a credit card, social security card, and a one dollar bill perfectly torn in half littered the living room floor. We both loyally defended our own, claiming that “100%, my dog would never do that.” I thought it was kind of funny—a mystery we’d never know the answer to. Maybe it was Monty (it wasn’t), telling me Run! This thing isn’t gonna work! Mayday! Owell. Fun while it lasted. I still have the half chewed dollar.

I could say that the two buzzing gnats flying around my side salad are concerning, but you can basically always reduce these impulses to complain or feel disturbed by something or “talk to the manager” to nothing, because when you start to break them down, they just don’t mean all that much. We forget that so much of our devoted focus, particularly when it’s negative, is essentially meaningless. I am one person, and I chose to eat at a diner where children under the age of 12 eat for free between noon and 3. There may as well be a sign that says FREE BUGS. This isn’t the RITZ. The meal costs $10 and the waitress is nice. If you’re always making noise about your tiny discontent, you just become a human gnat. We should ask ourselves what our questions or actions or statements are intended to do for five minutes before we go running to every manager. It’s so often just a thoughtless impulse. Gnats! We could just as easily forget about it and move on with the day.

I take an Uber home, and I find myself alone in the back of Ubers quite often. ‘Often’ is a relative term. I’m appreciating that the driver isn’t trying to engage in conversation. “It’s hot out!” “Yes, it is hot out! Also, I have a doggy!” I’ll tip him more for that.

Miami is a picturesque place, and I like the sidewalk traffic. Watching the world through the window feels so much better than TV–and no commercials. Bonus! I see a couple kiss while they wait at the crosswalk. Then they smile and she says something that makes them laugh. I love seeing people kiss. Creepy? Maybe. I just like that kissing exists in general. There’s traffic, which is another easy thing to complain about. Tolle says complaining is one of the ego’s favorite hobbies. (Also being right.) But I’m in a quiet car. All I have to do is sit here, one of a few things where I’m actually quite skilled. Many beautiful things pass us by at a stop and go pace. I try to imprint the sights on my brain to take home with me.

I try presence. Just being aware of all my senses. I am grateful to be out in the world at all, when so often I am indoors. I try to remember how lucky I am that I was able to come here. What a gift it is to see a doctor who understands, who listens and looks you in the eye, who can help me find answers. (Thank you Dr. Klimas!) That I have my brother and his beautiful family to stay with and help care for me. That it’s time together we wouldn’t have had were I well. Yes, I have a body that feels like a decomposing pumpkin at times. And I actually feel I may look like a decomposing pumpkin at times. (See video below) But so many moments to be grateful for. So many gifts. Count them. Keep counting. They add up faster the more awake you are.

Keep fighting. Last year was hard. I believe somewhere in my depths, this one will be better, no matter the directional trend my health takes. I know we’re getting close. I tip the Uber driver and leave feedback. “Thank you for the quiet.”

Health, Happiness, Counting

All awesome artwork by Eugenia Loli

*Bonus*: I’m on Day 9 of my migraine cycle! Here is a clip of yesterday morning. It was kind funny in that tragically comical way.

Tension of the Opposites

Published on December 2, 2016December 14, 2016 by Mary Gelpi13 Comments

I often forget that my life is somewhat unconventional– That it requires further explanation to obvious meet-and-greet questions. I forget that answering the typical questions that arise with meeting someone new or catching up with someone old will often start a domino conversation effect that can go any number of ways. Sometimes it’s unintentionally critical questions, sometimes it’s the strangest of medical advice, and other times it’s this awful but easy-to-spot look that no matter what words they’re saying, it’s only the word doubt that’s written all over their face. Of course they’re not all this way, and sometimes when I let down my guard and am honest about my circumstances, it opens the door to friendships and closeness I would never have expected. There’s something about sharing a hardship (without being overly needy) and being heard openly, that evokes a certain trust between two people. It says I have seen the darkness too, and the space between them lessens.

There’s a whole spectrum of reactions, and even though I forget temporarily, for the most part I’ve grown used to and so prepare myself for the array of conversational tones and and twists and turns our exchange may take. It took a while but by now I can usually see where things are going fairly quickly and attempt to steer a conversation going nowhere either back to the other persons life or to an entirely new subject altogether. It’s for the best. Outside of the new and complicated, sometimes awkward anecdotes that come with simply talking to a person, my life feels very normal. On a personal, day-to-day level, I’ve grown used to the terms by which I live, and it’s usually when I share these terms with someone else, my large set of footnotes, that I remember how not normal my situation is. I long for the day when I can complain about my jerk boss, commiserate about the insane landlord of my apartment, (which in my fantasy always has big windows) and when my roommates are no longer my parents. No offense to them–they no doubt long for that day, too.

Living life with a chronic illness means a few things for me: It means being 32 and not working a real job. It means taking 25ish pills a day and still living under my parents wing. It means a lot of solitude and a lot of talking to the dog–probably more than to humans. It means I typically smell like BenGay or peppermint oil, and wear an ice pack on my head almost always. These things have aligned themselves under my own heading of conventional. They are my normal. But I forget that they’re not and require an often long, boring story that explains “my normal” that I’ve grown to cringe whenever I have to tell it. Reciting how and why you arrived at here and now, over and over and over out loud, you almost start to feel like a phony. I don’t know what it is, except that maybe after so long of recounting a story, one that could easily be labeled as unfortunate, in such a casual tone of voice that’s inarguably bored with itself, you begin to question how it is that you’re happy. How it is that you consider such ridiculous conditions as if they were commonplace and acceptable. You start to wonder why you aren’t more up in arms about the whole thing.

I don’t know when it became such a frequent place to end up, but lately I always find myself hanging in the tension between two opposites, struggling to find the fragile balance in the middle. Feeling bide between two of anything is usually unsettling at best, but can often (for me) be exhaustive torture. The two forces aren’t necessarily always polar opposites. Sometimes they’re merely dissimilar, but operate on the same plane. Think surrender and giving up. Gone unchecked, one can quietly ooze into the other, and suddenly you’re nowhere you ever meant to be. Sometimes they’re contradictory forces: maybe your heart wants something that the head doesn’t like. Other times it’s reconciling two truths at odds, choosing between two options and stuck in the messy mud of the middle. Since I consider myself pathologically plagued by indecisiveness, I seem to find myself living in this “tension between two” all the time. It’s trickled its way down from me flailing between two important choices, to agonizing over things as inconsequential as toothpaste. I’ve spent way too many hours of my life struggling in that aisle.

Currently, I find myself in the center of multiple conundrums, questions, opportunities, examinations.. Not all of them are quantifiable, and many of them seem to be ongoing or recurring. I lay in bed at night and the questions fly around the room like some kind of adult mobile made of cosmic curiosities and pitiful choices. Here’s an example of the things my brain has been tangled up with lately:

*How do I surrender to my circumstances and accept my reality without giving up on trying to make things better?

*How do I talk about being sick without getting caught up in my story?

*How do I write bearing the reader in mind without compromising authenticity?

*How do I maintain a sense of autonomy and identity knowing full well I am reliant on the help of others.

*How do I engage in advocacy that is proactive and realistic without losing myself and my worth in every day outcomes?

How do I satisfy this sweet craving without overdosing on gummy vitamins?

Welcome to what Carl Jung called “The Tension Between the Opposites.”

Jung taught that if you can withstand the tension between two opposites, if you can sustain the angst of being suspended in the middle for longer than what is typically comfortable, often possibilities and solutions will arise you wouldn’t have considered before. It can be an enlightening experience, but not easy, and often painful while in the thick of it. The waiting is tough. But if you can hold that tension, you’ll usually encounter what he referred to as ‘The Transcendent Third’. This new ‘third’ solution can involve both or neither of the two pieces you’re between, but in the wait, you can reach deeper into consciousness, and often that’s where the wisest answers can be found. “There will be two opposite approaches for solving it. Neither solution will be correct, but must undergo the tension that will result in a third approach.”

nataljung01 — “There will be two opposite approaches to solving a problem. Neither will be correct, but must undergo the tension that will result in a third approach.”

The world is so fast now. We rarely take the time to be still, to even allow a silence, mistaking it for boredom, or a space that must be filled. If you’d like to experience the discovery of the Transcendent Third, you have to answer the question that Lao Tzu posed on the matter: Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles? I’d say most of us don’t. Or we do but fail to realize it, living among a pace that’s fast and noisy and nearly impossible to keep up with.

Lately I’ve given a lot of thought to the concept of surrender; something I continue to learn and accept almost every day it seems. Among everything that being sick has taught me, surrender seems to stand out the most. Difficult beyond words, but once allowed in, it can feel like you’ve been given a glimpse of the divine. It can be a beautiful thing, but for me, learning it didn’t come easily. Or all at once.

For years before 2011, my body spoke to me in a language called pain. Fatigue. It said slow down, stop, you’re not getting any better. And for years I downplayed, dismissed, and sometimes outright denied to myself that there was a real problem. As things were falling apart inside, I strived to hang on to all the attachments that the illness slowly started to take. I thought as long as I could keep my job, it lessened somehow the reality of having a disease. It diminished it to an anecdote. I had it, but it didn’t have me. As such, surrender came in pieces. Determined as I was, I couldn’t bare the tension of working, being sick and trying to get better. Convincing myself I could multi-task, I was actually just failing at three at once. Hah. Something had to give. I

will never forget that conversation in Andrews office, me holding back the tears as best as I could, saying I didn’t want to go. I had done my best, but my body just couldn’t take it anymore. Neither of us wanted me to worsen. We hugged and said that thing people say even when they know it’s not true. “I’ll see you again soon!” Don’t worry, I told him. But he did look worried, something in his eyes. I punched my time card for the last time–yes the 100-year-old gallery still used time cards. On that drive home across the bridge to my parents house, I cried the whole way. I felt more lost and afraid than I ever had.

That was the end and the beginning. The next two years would be the hardest–the most brutal on every level. I resisted. Lied to myself. Conceived of ways I could return to the path I was on before getting sick. It felt like someone had sat on the remote control of my life and accidentally pressed the pause button. There was an incessant feeling that wherever I was, there was somewhere else I should be. Not this. Not here. I was sick when I should be well. In California when I should be home. At home on a weekday when I should be at work. I never had an inkling that Yep, this is right where I’m supposed to be. I thought if only I could survive this “wrinkle in time” I could resume the life I’d had before. Just like that. As if time moved in any direction but forward.

I’ve had six years to adapt to the life I would feel proud to call my own again, but it certainly wasn’t the one designed by my hand. I think the final straw that led to surrender was simply a matter of being too tired to fight. Somewhere after year 2, I let go of the last of my life plans–fed them into a shredder and watched as little paper ribbons emerged. Surrender. One part complete fear, one part total release. In hindsight it’s clear that the fear was mostly ego-driven. If I wasn’t designing my own outcomes, who or what was? And by the way, who could know the path I should take better than me? (Laughable now) But the release had one up on the fear. It meant making room for the life that was waiting for me to finally begin. In fact I was the hindrance. I was the one sitting on the remote.

blue-jeans-hi — My Life: Mid Rise Skinnies

After six years in the game, my life doesn’t feel foreign or as though it should be another way. It feels more like a perfectly worn-in pair of jeans. The ones where the denim is at that awesome level of soft and is tight and skinny in all the right places. I think jeans are one of the most personable clothing items. Have you ever tried someone else’s jeans on before? It feels like trying on clown pants. In the beginning, that’s what being home on a Tuesday at 2 pm felt like. Now that’s just business as usual.

I now struggle with the idea that if I surrender too much, if the circumstances of my life simply feel normal, I’ll become complacent. I’ll forget that it shouldn’t be this way. I’m not supposed to be sick all the time and spend vacations half conscious on the couch. But it’s become the norm. I don’t want to become so desensitized that a bookshelf filled entirely of my prescription bottles doesn’t shock me at all. And I don’t want to lose the fire in me to change the things we need to change, as a community that fought long and hard before I ever came around. I want to embrace and be happy where I am, but I want to be proactive. And so I’m trying to find the balance between enjoying the present while also remembering that there’s an injustice at play here, something that needs fixing. And I know that I have to try and help fix it.

I could easily be the one too sick to fight, just like millions of others with MECFS are, but I’d have no doubt that the warriors in the community would continue to work until it’s done. The baton might change hands but the balance remains. And just because I’ve tapped into joy and surrender and gratitude where I am, doesn’t change the fact that I am part of a community, one that has fought for this cause for decades. I owe it to them to do what I can. I am constantly seeking a way to advocate for what I know is right, but remain distant enough that my ego doesn’t get drawn in to the wrong efforts. It happens all too easily.

A very strange thing that might be hard to believe– I don’t actually love talking about being sick. Gasp. And I feel that I’m kind of terrible at the whole advocacy thing. Luckily online my awkwardness doesn’t shine through as much, but it’s still a struggle for me to solicit people to help, even though I believe 101% in the cause and am certain I’ll continue petitioning and fighting for it until the deed is done. But how can that be?How can it be true that I don’t like talking about being sick and yet I have an entire blog devoted to very subject: “Life through the sick lens”?

I’ve toyed a lot with these opposing truths and tried to understand how I could want both. And I think the answer is somewhere near this: By speaking honestly about the experience, particularly the chronic illness experience, which I found to be largely misunderstood, and by foregoing the typical polite response or social etiquette and supplementing it instead with what is true, I open up a space for us to move closer together instead of further apart. By writing about a topic that can be very isolating, I’m attempting to give people a chance to understand, instead of blindsiding them with “Well I live in mismatched pjs and I haven’t showered for a week because I’m too weak to shampoo my own hair and oh, you’ll never understand!” (Runs out of coffee shop. Trips. Continues running.)

Contrary to what I hear people say all the time, the world is actually full of good people, and most of them aren’t trying to hurt you. 99% of the ones I know are exceptional, and they are sympathetic and helpful about my situation when given the chance to be. But you have to be willing to reach out, which means you have to expose a need, and sometimes that’s the hardest part of all. I only know if I keep too tight a lid on my own unusual experience, hellbent that the world will just never get it, I will most likely be right, but it won’t be the worlds fault.

So, life continues, seeking out the peace in the middle. Waiting patiently for the right answer to arise in so many scenarios. And holding the tension between opposites long enough to tap into something deeper and wiser than I ever could be. It’s not the easiest thing, but it sure beats pulling my hair out between Crest Multi Care and Colgate Total at midnight in Walgreens. The point is to be still and patient, wait for the mud to settle, and allow enough time for my own transcendent third to arise.

Health, Happiness, Settling Mud

What Makes An Illness Invisible? I do I do!

Published on June 8, 2016June 27, 2020 by Mary Gelpi5 Comments

There is a certain hesitation that comes with being sick with a disease they refer to as “invisible.” Who are they? And why do they call it invisible? The they is simple; it’s not so much a reference as it is a perspective. People and doctors don’t tell us our ailment is invisible. They simply don’t see it. And when you’re sick, especially for a long period of time, you become keenly intuitive about who sees it and who doesn’t. With someone who does, a certain ease settles in, as though you could wink at one another and understand it completely, even if you’d met minutes ago. Your guard goes down. Shoulders relax. That apologetic tone leaves from your voice.

Those who don’t see it, or don’t fully “accept” it, and it makes sense that some wouldn’t, can be sensed just as quickly. There’s an immediate undertone of tension, it makes my cheeks hurt while talking, the way eating a lemon does. I can feel my defenses go up. No matter how strong I’ve become at sloughing it off, doubt or judgment, it still stings. ‘Rubs salt on the wound’ as they say. It makes me want to explain everything, from the start, “No wait, if you just listen to how it all went down, if you knew how I was before this, what it’s like most days…” but it’s useless. For them but more importantly for me. For us. I have to cease needing the validation from others and just trust my inner self. ‘Choose your battles wisely’ they say. Turns out they say a lot, don’t they.

I think about The Truth, the eternal one that we’ve gotten wrong so many times, absolutely certain with documentation and everything that we were right and that was that. And yet the world remained round and the sun chilled with black sunnies on in the middle of the earth revolving like dude, yall are way off. The truth has never required us to images believe in it in order for it to remain, and that often brings me comfort. It’s my ego that seeks the validation. Still, I’d call it’s pretty reasonable that you’d rather not be seen as crazy or a malingering pansy particularly in a vulnerable time of your life when you’re sick and need support. But this is another “invisibility factor” of the illness. And it matters because not being believed is a psychological kick in the brain. Or face. And that’s just it. We don’t look the part on the outside. People can’t see pain. Or a headache. Full body weakness. Mental spaghetti. Vertigo. The hit-by-the-truck feeling. Yada yada yada. Almost all we have for “outsiders” is our word, and some take us up on it, others don’t. I’ve been surprised observing the fluctuation of strength in my own word, depending on who it’s being exchanged with. I’ve been struck that a doubter could make me doubt myself.

Besides not seeing it “on” us, most doctors aren’t going to see it “in” us either. Invisibility factor number 2. We’ll give gallons of blood and urine samples and get x-rays and MRI’s and whatever other procedures they can think of that insurance doesn’t really wanna pay for. They may find little things, but for the most part it will all come back normal. Yaaay! Normal. But let me intervene quickly that the American medical term for “normal” is a bit flawed if you read how the numbers are configured, but that’s another issue. But the point is: invisible. Again. Nothing to see here. Even in our blood and our brains and our tickers!

So there you are either in an ER bed or sitting on the crinkly white paper of a doctors’ office being told you’re in fine health and that this is good news. But it’s also important to point out here, often these tests are ‘normal’ because most doctors aren’t trained on what to look for in regards to this illness. This isn’t taught in most med schools. There’s no standard diagnostic test yet, which makes things harder. Invisibility Factor Number 3: no research. The things a specialist test for are far more in-depth than a regular doctors work up: like NK cells, cytokines, CMV, HHV6 and many more. Right now, due to the lack of these specialists, it’s basically like having cancer and visiting the foot doctor. Welp, everything looks great to me!

Still, a large man in a white coat, his degrees framed behind him, scanning through your labs and telling you you’re fine, to get outside, drink more water and eat more protein, (my advice given to me) all encourage doubt. Even though I knew otherwise. I know what I feel inside, and it does not align with what I’m being told. And yet, when someone challenges your thinking, someone bigger and smarter and who you’re supposed to trust, you can’t help but consider that they might be right–thus, you might be crazy. Just great.

But it’s important to recognize the reality of the situation right now, and also that this it’s changing. More doctors are being educated about the illness and presumably in the next ten years, you won’t have to travel to other states in order to find one who knows more than you about it. Not to mention, doctors make mistakes. They are humans after all, and they are limited in their knowledge because they can only know what they’ve been taught. So often after a bad experience with a doctor, or anyone for that matter, I have to remember, (or my mom has to remind me) that this is vastly misunderstood right now, and people aren’t acting out of malice but from misunderstanding. That lack of understanding is just beginning to change. Slowly. And you know what? I think the petition may end up helping with that. That’s my hope, anyway.

A friend of my mine asked a while back “Have you ever considered that they might be right, that this might be more of a psychological thing, and you could actually be cured by pacing your exercise and receiving cognitive behavioral therapy? Or do you feel totally positive that it’s a physical disease?” This is all under the umbrella that I fully accept, and believe that mind and body are connected and the health of the mind is intrinsically tied to the health of the body and vice versa. Still, this topic is not being brought up so much in the same way with other diseases. The intention is different.

I admit I didn’t know exactly how to answer. I felt like “techinically” the right answer was, yes, they might be right and this might have a major psychological component that could be an intrinsic part of it and a part of curing it. I should have to consider that these psychiatrists might be right. But I couldn’t do it. Even though I have looked at myself in the mirror and asked that question, considered many times Could I be crazy? “Could this all be a front, could I be a mildly insane hypochondriac? Or could this all be ignited by something psychological from my childhood that I never worked out?” These doubts have run through my mind more than a few times. But in that moment, despite by own past consideration of other possibilities, I truly felt like a monkey being asked, Are you open to the idea that the others might be right, and you might be a giraffe? I answered in solid faith even though I felt myself nervous to do it. “No, I’m sure that’s not the answer to this.” I was in that moment, a total monkey.

I am an indecisive, uncertain person by nature. It takes me twenty minutes to pick out what to wear, including pajamas. (Ahem, that’s what I wear) I doubt and question myself a lot. I feel like I’m still learning how to be who I am. But, I’ve had twenty years of this invisible illness and gone through the ringer of its effects, felt deeply the losses it has caused. I’ve watched what it does to my mom, who I trust. I’ve read the stories and comments of thousands of others with experiences uncannily similar to mine. High functioning, happy people, (SANE PEOPLE) who had a rug swiped out from under them and were never the same. I think of the extremely current research and that of the last five years. I think of Lauren Hillenbrand. Of Whitney Dafoe. Of my doctor, Nancy Klimas. And I just can’t imagine at this point, that all of this comes back to some psychological trauma that just needs to be worked out with behavioral therapy and physical conditioning.

This is what is being touted as a legit cure in many countries, including ours, but particularly England, Australia and a lot of Europe. This illness can be triggered by a psychologically traumatic event, but this only points to another pathway in which, whatever this disease is categorically, (presumably a virus that takes advantage of a vulnerable immune system) has varying opportunities in which to intervene. This doesn’t make it a mental illness. And even if it were, it still doesn’t justify the way it’s been treated up to now.

I wish I could say that I’ve never doubted myself or the disease again. But I have moments where I do question myself. But I think that’s normal. Enough people question your your point of view, inevitably you’ll question it yourself. I know that there are many more invisible diseases besides M.E., and that a lot of people have felt isolated by the facade it produces. I hope if they’re reading they know they’re not alone, and they’re not crazy. They’re just sick, with whatever: ME/CFS, Depression, Fibromyalgia, Arthritis, Lupus. I have moments where I forget what it’s capable of and crash myself for days. My mom always tells me, don’t play ball with this disease, it will always win. That’s typically how I’m reminded of reality when I doubt it– the state of my own body. It’s hard to doubt your own illness when you’re struggling to walk. And if that somehow isn’t enough, I close my eyes and go back to my inner, inner self, where the truth lives in stillness, without interruption. Where the world is flat. Where the earth orbits the sun. Where an invisible disease simply hasn’t found the cause or cure, but one day soon will be seen, will be believed, but most importantly, will be cured.

Health, Happiness, (In)Visible

P.S. The petition is still live and running! The new goal is to get to 50,000 signatures before I formally present it to Collins and Burwell which should be in July. I promise this is the last high goal. We stop at 50. And if we get there, I will sing a song on camera that I wrote called “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Other Associated Conditions” and post it to the blog. It’s two chords, and worth seeing. Mostly to watch me make a completely humiliating knucklehead out of myself. So sign! Good night.

Hangers On a Ledge

Published on March 23, 2016March 25, 2016 by Mary Gelpi3 Comments

I run these ideas through my head, trying to piece it together. I try to make sense of a history that began before me and most likely, I’ll never really be able to figure out. Whenever you’re trying to find where things went wrong and how you can make them right again, it can all feel too big, too long ago to find solutions that make sense now. But still, the red part inside of me that stirs as though it has a body that can do anything, tells me this is something we can fix. We can do better–those words, they play over and over.

I travel back in time, the early 80‘s I guess. That’s when it started showing up in different places and on unexpected people, and the powers at large weren’t able to connect the dots. It’s understandable of course–the thing is literally invisible. Maybe the lack of pressure, lack of genuine concern about the disease began there–at a moment in time where it couldn’t be ‘seen’ under microscopes and wasn’t ‘believed’ often by the people who were suddenly sick and then never better. Maybe it was that the thing wasn’t killing anybody. Nothing fatal. Just a flu. “A yuppie flu” they called it. Not only are the sufferers alive, but they don’t even look the part! They aren’t sick on the outside. And rearranging my position in all this, putting myself on the outside looking in at this “movement” of unexplained sick people, I understand how this notion worked against us–how it continues to today. I think of the old adage “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” That may be true in many cases, but I can’t say it applies aptly here. Not in regards to our bodies anyway, which upon the slightest push can fall and not again get up.

What isn’t killing me is not making my body stronger. I am the least strong I’ve ever been. The medicine has caused weight gain that at times has me and my face looking like a bloated pumpkin. It’s hard not to feel at battle with the thing that is intrinsically connected to me, and between us exists a fine line of fighting it and not fighting it at the same time. The whole thing is an honors class in balance. Some days are better than others, and I wonder, am I stronger, or am I just less sick today? There remains a difference. But I’m probably focusing on the wrong area here. No doubt that in our minds, the adage applies. When every day is a battle, beginning with waking up, with sitting up in bed and planting your feet on the ground and taking those first few painful steps to the bathroom, and doing this day after day after day, for some of us years and decades, well then no doubt your mind will grow stronger. It can also grow cynical, it can become bitter–but many times you’ll surprise yourself with the strength you find and the moments you find it in. If you can keep trying, if you can manage a smile and a laugh, to be happy for other people, to still believe in something good, then certainly you haven’t been killed, and the battle has made you stronger. But that is our mind. Or the soul maybe– An almost contradiction that is both a connected but separate faculty from the body. Refer to the ancient philosphers and you’ll find some disagreement on the subject. I think in either case, for the mind the body is only temporary. And this brings a relief to me. Whatever happens to me physically, I won’t be carrying it forever.

I think of all the others, sick like me, dreaming and hoping and feeling desires like the rest. It’s strange how our indignant heads are alive and full, swirling with ideas and goals just as though we had a body that could serve them all–make them all come to light. But at present time we don’t. So call us “alive” and say we “look well,” but know there is only a very small surface of which most the world sees. And the majority of life with this illness falls far below it, in a darkness underneath that very few see. Some can’t see it. Some don’t want to. Others just haven’t had the access.

It’s funny thinking about that word “alive.” Sure, we’re alive. But there’s an important difference between living and surviving. “Just getting by” physically, is hard to equate with living. And worlds away from thriving, which might be called a pretty commonly desired endgame. We, however, are hanging on by a thread, and it’s hard to call an existence like that “life” with any real conviction. It’s similar to hanging at the edge of a cliff and grasping it by one hand– would we really call that hiking?

That is the point where many ME/CFS patients are: hanging on with a half-steady grip, still breathing, still a beating heart inside, but stuck; Left with few options but, you know, to go on hanging there. It’s hard to have a social life or work a job or vacuum your living room when all of your mighty, tiny strength is being poured into hanging on to this cliff. It’s no wonder why so many people have it let go. There is just not enough hands at the top, not enough people offering help to pull you up, and no safety net at the bottom. And similarly, just as pulling a dangling body up off the edge of a cliff is a difficult but achievable task, a “problem” with more than one possible solution, curing the disease that has millions of people hanging by their own one or two threads is equally obtainable. It’s just to a larger degree. But it’s far from Impossible. And it would involve a few similar tactics: some people at the top, those say, for whom walking and standing is not a great feat, and who themselves are not also hanging off the edge of a cliff, combining their efforts and resources and intelligence and getting to work; finding a solution, in this case a cure.

Never having the experience of rescuing a person dangling off the side of a high-up something or other, I imagine that a rescue is within the realm of human capability. There are many ways to go about it, and maybe I’m being sort of dense here, but I’d venture it basically comes down to people lowering themselves to the ground, extending their arms to the dangling human, and with a great amount of strength pulling the person up until he’s back on his feet. And while maybe the tactic is basic, the act itself requires a solid effort. Lifting a person from this particular state is like trying to maneuver deadweight– Much easier to carry a body which is alive even if incapacitated, than one that’s dead and stiff. I’d like to emphasize that I’ve never hauled a dead body around but I’ve tended to my share of drunk friends who had 6 too many, and it would take 3 of us just to get the person, alive with a LOT to say about the world and true friendship, into a car. The very obvious point is, saving the person who’s still hanging there off the edge while I write this, is a very doable thing. And I know I’m comparing apples to oranges, or apples to bowling balls, but I believe with every part of me that this issue of solving or at least better managing this disease has never been on account of inability. This is something we can do, we’ve simply chosen not to based on some very obtuse, very lacking scattered pieces of information that cannot be labeled as facts.

Me, I can’t rescue the hangers on the ledge. Of course I can’t, I am one. But therein lies the kind of rescue I can provide. I can hang off the ledge next to you. Because there is something undeniably comforting in knowing that whatever struggle you find yourself facing, that you’re not in it alone, and that others are in the same boat. Or off the same ledge as it were. Like I mentioned, you can’t do a lot while devoting all your energy into grasping your spot on the mountain and not letting go. I can’t march in front of congress demanding to be seen, nor can I carry out the hundreds of other ideas I have that I think could make a difference, could help change the state of things in a positive and progressive way. But I can do a little. And thanks to modern times, maybe my little could turn into a lot. As I write this, I am laying down in a dim room in my moms bed. I have a frozen ice pack on my forehead and around my neck, with a hot pack at my feet under the covers to help draw away the blood from my head, which is throbbing like always. And yet I am still able to write, thank you very much Steve Jobs, on this rectangular dense brick otherwise known as my phone. It’s often hard to sit up comfortably with the computer in my lap and so being able to jot everything down from just a small device is kind of a miracle. Very often, while either FaceTiming with my niece or buying dog food from my phone that will be at my door tomorrow, I this is it-we’ve arrived at the future. And yet, I don’t even know how a calculator works.

The point is, healthy or functioning or bedridden or whatever, there are little things we can all do, in our own way, that can help change things. And yes I hear how corny that phrase played out. Recently I watched an interview with an author and Benedictine Nun named Sister Joan D. Chittister. She was really inspiring to watch. An author of over fifty books, she writes about about many topics including spirituality, women in the church, and social justice. She is clearly leaving an amazing footprint on the world through her written and continued community work and is firing up others to do the same. She said she is often asked by people “What can I do to help change things.. To fulfill humanity or to better the world?” Her answer is very stripped down. “Something.” And her brilliance was immediately illuminated in her acknowledgment that speaking up for a friend is as big as a March on Washington. “Just do something. Wherever you are with whatever you’ve got. When you see an injustice or see something that needs changing, do something. It doesn’t matter how small, just do something.” Of course this answer resonated with me. I often get discouraged about the state of things concerning the disease and the state of my life and all the change I wish I could make happen but physically I am unable to. But I forget that small changes, small acts can have huge impacts when carried out diligently. I have so many big ideas, big dreams that I hope to achieve one day. But I also have to remember that one day is now, and it’s probably better to focus on what I can do today, as I am and with the resources I have now. And I think putting in the work that might feel small, that isn’t NY Times worthy, doesn’t mean it lacks the chance to make a difference. There’s a feeling you get when you pour yourself into something you care about, that seems to carry out a mission from deep inside you, even if you don’t know what that is exactly. I get that feeling every time I sit (or lay) down to write. I may not know for a long time what the role of all this is or how it will play out in the larger context of things later on down the line. I just know it’s what I can do now. It’s my something, so I’ve got to keep at it.

It’s been a pretty sick and trying few weeks for me, and I feel often that accessible moment of how easy it would be to just throw in the towel, or to become hardened by the relentlessness of the experience, but I want to remind the other hangers on the edge out there to hold tight, because not only are there rare gifts to find within all this, things will change. They have already begun to. Today will become tomorrow. And one day soon enough, this will all be a memory of something that yes, didn’t kill us and made us stronger. Hang in there. Hang on. It is going to get better.

Health, Happiness, Cliffhangers

Love Letter To My Valentine

Published on March 3, 2016March 23, 2016 by Mary Gelpi4 Comments

My love,

I’m well aware of your rare but genuine lack of sentimentality, and me addressing you on Valentines Day, one of those Holidays that makes all the whites of your eyes show when you roll them, is at least a little funny to me. I didn’t buy you one of those trinkets we often laugh at together. A “Blessed” keychain or one of those wooden picture frames with the non sequitur adjectives sketched in, meant to communicate love I guess. Love. Family. Hope. Frying Pan. Coffee Beans! Maybe we’re too young to be such skeptics. Maybe it’s our hiding ego, projecting superiority that we don’t need kitschy picture frames to allude to what’s real and shared inside of us. I’m in the card aisle at the pharmacy looking at a criminally large sized teddy bear holding a heart. It says I wuv you on it. It’s similarly tacky, but I consider purchasing it just for the laughs I know we’d have due to the scale alone; I actually don’t think I could carry it on my own. Then we’d feed it to Monty and watch him go straight for the eyes, as always, and fill the room with the cotton candy innards of a fifty dollar bear. But I hear your words play out in my mind “Don’t ever waste a dime on crap like that for me.”

I could lament about the commercialization of Valentines Day, but I think it’s all been said before, and I already know you’d agree. In fact I’d bet the farm you wouldn’t even bat an eye were the whole thing eradicated. You might not even notice! You’re funny. It’s not that you’re distracted, unaware. I’d suggest it’s the near extreme dedication to living a life of unwavering, powerful love, that is a fireworks display of a spectacle to watch. But for a lucky few, myself included, it’s a humbling miracle to be the recipient of. It sounds so dramatic to say, but I stand by that belief. It’s not hard to do. There have been plenty of reasons for your heart to have closed shop by now. To crack and break and crumble; call the whole thing off. And yet I’ve witnessed it come to the edge and never truly break. Instead I watch it explode like our day lilies in the spring, I watch it grow, astonished, in times that might normally make a person very small. And still yours expands, stretches, finds strength somewhere far in the depths and suits up for another day, knowing well the many things at stake when we agree to live a life. When we agree to love deeply. I don’t know exactly how one attains the capacity to love like this. I can only speak to the immense gifts of wisdom and friendship and compassion it has provided so many lucky ones, and me, knowing too well that ‘thank you’ isn’t large enough a phrase. I think how redeeming and salvational some of its outcomes have been. We’ve all experienced the pang of loneliness, and these last few years have shown me with unbridled truth just how far off and away we can feel, whether in a crowded room or a self-made island. Illness lends itself to its own kind of solitude, that can swallow you up whole if you aren’t prudent. Never have you let me drift too far down the rabbit hole. Sometimes sitting in a room with you, watching The Voice or Scandal or something I have no particular interest in, I feel wrapped in a sanctuary at the center of cupped hands, protected by the thick walls of a steadfast love that I know can never die. For two stoics like us, I can’t help but think ours is a Fairy Tale love, without an ending. We both know there won’t be one. Maybe I’ll submit it to Disney.

I keep thinking of this moment. A grey morning in December not long ago, I was more sick than usual. My central nervous system inflamed to a point that I could hardly tolerate sound or speak. My skin was buzzing, my hearing hurt, my thoughts and words felt and emerged mangled, and I couldn’t exactly articulate what was wrong. I felt like a shaken up liter of coke, hardened and about to fizz out everywhere, but there was no outlet. No where for the ‘fizz’ to go. My nerves felt inside out. When you came in the room, I tried to express what was happening but had trouble; honestly I hardly understood it myself. You didn’t look away, or demand answers or try to immediately “fix” the enigmatic pain I was in. You only said a couple words to me as you sat down on the couch and cupped your hand on the back of my head. “It’s going to be OK Mary,” and your voice cracked when you said it. My body felt as if it collapsed inside, calmed with this soundbite of peace, and the pressure slowly eased from that liter coke bottle. Tears came streaming down my face. I wasn’t that sad, truthfully. Certainly, all of this has been a trying time, for all of us, but there was a lot happening at once, my mind and body both being pulled and torn in different directions, and your very simple words allowed me the outlet. Permission. It’s pretty common for the tears to come when I feel so overwhelmed, overtaken physically. But it wasn’t your words exactly that moved me and conveyed your love with such depth. It was that your voice trembled when you said them. Just barely, and you’re not a crier, I know. I believed you, too, that it would be OK, but in that moment, you saw me. Accepting there was no quick answer here, no advice or platitude that could lift my heavy burden, you did the bravest and most beautiful thing a love can do: You sat down next to me, you put my hand in yours, and you shared what would normally just be my burden, my pain. You didn’t take the pain on, but you faced it with me. If only the world knew they didn’t need perfect words or answers to comfort and relieve us when we’re in the thick of pain. If only they knew that Love listens far more than it talks. A shoulder can mean more than a mouth. Love shares, it communes and confides. In joy and in pain. This is love. Our love. You helped carry the parts that I could not, and turned on its head what felt like momentary hell into saving grace. Just the memory of it strengthens me now.

This made me think of Nepo’s definition of Love. One I come to again and again, the most eloquent I’ve ever heard, and I often find myself reciting the words in my head: talking with friends, watching birds, kissing Monty. Somehow through your small action made with great braveness, your love materialized in a way I could not only feel inside with warm intensity, but could touch and see it, feel it in your hands. His definition for love is only this: Sudden Oneness. How perfect these two words capture what We shared that mangey morning. I warred with my same broken body, but I was also slipping into the outskirts of doubt and hopelessness; a place you know but helped lead me out of. His words so perfectly explain why when you love someone deeply and true, that when they cry you cry. When they’re happy you’re happy. Their joy is yours and vice versa. This is the beauty and brilliance of the oneness from love: lightening burdens and multiplying grateness. My tears continued but something about your unconditional nature made them begin to carry new truth in their waters. Hope, I think. Surrender. Reassurance. But it was this small gesture that mattered most; allowing me as the mess I was, seeing and hearing me and not turning away or trying to quell it with empty phrases. I know how hard it must have been for you– the only other soul in that dark room, while mine laid strewn on the floor like a discarded garment. It’s not that you saved me, necessarily, but you saw me through the darkness. You stayed. So many fear that stillness of pain, enduring the murkiness of life when there aren’t easy answers to offer someone. You helped see me through it, bring my tired heart back into the light, ready to try once again. But first you let me die a little. Shed a skin I didn’t need anymore. Another testament to what brave love can do. Little deaths prevent big deaths. That was Nepo too.

It’s interesting, but when I recall this whole ‘event’ now, we seem to be alive inside a pocket of timelessness. There we are, the two of us, enduring what we did, frozen in an exchange that felt unearthly, and I can’t for the life of me feel or remember the passing of time. The moment is still alive. The lessons are wide awake, and they pour through so much of me: My fingers when I write. My soul when I’m discouraged. My intellect when my respect for the novelty of life drifts– I think of you and our moment and I know that there is meaning behind the pain, but it requires seeking. And luckily we don’t always have to do this alone. The Oneness that enveloped me, I think in fact may have been my first real glimpse of Forever. Or Eternity. Whatever the word for that otherwise incomprehensible concept is, for a fleeting moment I caught it, like a fast grab of a buzzing fly, followed by thick silence. In this excessively brief lapse in spacetime, I glimpsed the two of us–we were not just not apart, we were the same. We were one another. And the comfort was greater than a reunion you’d imagine would bring great joy. It comforted me. Humbled me. A powerful experience no doubt, but mostly mom I’m just plain grateful to know and learn from you this way. You’ve mastered a difficult and necessary art, and expressed and given it the way that you do, it’s something that will last far after you. And me. And my children too. Perhaps like Einsteins theory come to life one hundred years after the fact, that little ‘blip’ on a device recording an explosion a million years old, your love ripples will be felt long after you’ve gone. This is the miracle of true love. It’s so huge and yet it can be easy to miss. Like looking for mustard in the fridge tirelessly and finally coming upon it on the middle shelf in plain view, right in front of your eyes.

For me, this is incredible news! I half-knew already this was true. Losing and still knowing dad, our love somehow still growing, I knew it had to be real and not just the stuff of voodoo or fairytales. So I rest more assured now. One day you’ll die, and if life is good to us, it will be before me. But I don’t fear this occasion the way I once did. I know it will hard. The pain will be deep, as loss is not a one-way street. You lose more than a person, you miss a piece of who you were with that person. But like my clearly favorite Nepo says, Grief is a sign we loved them well. It’s in living this life, that when we give and receive love in its pure form like this, unconditionally, that it sustains and lives on. It works miracles! And it removes the sting and surprise of death, a thing we treat with pretty odd behavior in my opinion. But anyway, I can’t lie. I’ll be a mess. A sobbing heap on the floor. A shaken up bottle of coke. And where will I go? How will I recover? As I was taught of course–I’ll remember that moment of your bravery, to see your kid in pain once again and have to surrender; to be at peace with the mystery of these things. Just as you saw me through that, I learned that these moments actually do pass. That life does go on, the pain isn’t forever, and we wipe up our mess and keep going. I learned that because you lived through it with me, not because you sent a card with a bow that said “This too shall pass! Call if you need anything!” You are living love, in a beautiful form, and you are doing incredible work in the world because of it.

Perhaps by now it’s become apparent that I’m single. (Haha) But I can’t think of a more deserving Valentine, a bigger barer of gifts who never seeks out recognition or accolade for loving this well. You seem to perform the duties of love effortlessly, and I’m not only grateful to have you around and receive them, but I’m happy and feel lucky to learn what love is through you, how to give it and accept it from such a master as yourself. You’ve been through enough pain for 10 lifetimes, but I’ve never see you throw in the towel or give way to bitterness. Sure, you’re still a human being and a mother and you’ve made your mistakes. We all have. But you’ve never faltered on love and it seems to grow larger and more powerful in happy and hard times. Perhaps this is what the pain of experience does for us. I don’t know. I’m still learning. But watching your resilience and continued faith in life, in things bigger than you and me, in good things, in eternity, I know I’ll never stop seeking the answers. I’ll never stop trying to find the good, the value, the meaning in every kind of experience. Including the dark ones. Perhaps especially those. Thank you. For all you’ve done and continue to do. I don’t know how you’ve not collapsed yet of exhaustion, but maybe all that loving you do is an energizing force. It certainly is for me. Thank you. Keep going.

Oh yeah, Be Mine?

I love you.

Health, Happiness, Modern Romance

P.S. I extend this letter to Marc, Doug, Nick, Amelie and their significant others for pitching in in all kinds of ways, helping carry me through the crap times, and loving me so well. You are all my angels. Thank you.

Adjusting the Perspective on Pain

Published on February 7, 2016March 20, 2016 by Mary Gelpi10 Comments

What is it about Winter?

Post-Holiday Winter, I should specify. It’s wearing on me. Draining and uneventful, this window of time moves so slowly it all starts to feel static. The date keeps changing but there’s nothing I can point to as proof of time passing. When I think back on it, this “leftover winter” has gotten me down in the past, too. It reminds me of the day after a night of drinking in college–hungover days where things on the outside are idle but there’s some invisible pressure that I ought to be doing something, anything, other than what I’m doing right now. But what that thing is I can never name. It may not even exist. I hold the colorless weather outside at least partially accountable. Winter is haphazard in New Orleans. Nothing sticks long enough to adapt a routine or wardrobe to. It goes from freezing and wet one day to weirdly humid and warm the next, but something about the sky, the whole atmosphere out there–it’s this oatmeal-hued environment that either mimics my insides or my insides start to mimic, and for whatever reason the affect is restless and un-motivating. It feels like weather that’s waiting on something and the ansi-ness rubs off on me. Then I find myself in this counterintuitive disposition of mostly-optimistic anticipation that something of note is going to happen in my life, mixed with that physically paralyzing effect that comes with a heart-ache depression. It’s like I’m sitting in a car all packed and ready to embark on some adventure with road-trip snacks (Gardettos) and a map, but there isn’t any gas in the car. So I just sit in the driveway, snacking on Gardettos.

One of the more confusing results of all this is that I can’t tell what direction I’m moving in. I realize that life and time pass in one way only, but somehow I don’t feel like I’m moving forward. Things are feeling stagnant mostly. And on really tough days they feel backward, a distorted Ground Hogs Day reality where I’m living one day over and over but I’m doing it worse than the day before. I notice during times like these, Oatmeal Winter and Illness at the Helm, one day can easily feel exactly like the one before it, and when I think too long on it, I can’t totally distinguish between the two. Or three or four. Of course it’s pretty easy for me to point my finger at the weather while this other important truth remains that I’m really sick right now–that I’ve been really sick since that crash the day after Thanksgiving and I haven’t really been able to recover. I guess sunny or not, this will get anyone down, even the most seasoned of sick people.

Being sick for months at a time poses an interesting creative challenge. Since you can’t often achieve a change in scenery, which is a widely agreed-upon method to upping ones mood, you have to find ways to see yourself and the world around you in different ways and with new eyes. This is really hard to do. Especially since there’s been such a distinct and relentless sameness to everything given the weather and my health and yada yada. It probably explains why I chopped eight inches off my hair, which helped, actually. But consciously I realize that becoming bored by your surroundings and state of being stems from a lack of proper perspective, and not a failure on the part of the universe to remain exciting. Everything around us is constantly changing, if even at a rate that is undetectable by our human eyes, and every day we wake up and live through is completely unique, never once experienced until now and impossible to ever be duplicated again. When I think about the fact that you never get to live the same day twice, it’s actually a comforting thought. Usually when I feel that I’m in some time warp with my struggles or misery or boredom on repeat, it’s because my vision has narrowed far too much and I’ve lost the horizon from my line of sight. Marc Nepo says “It’s the giving over to smallness that opens us to misery,” and I think that applies here. He says later “Misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything.” What a truth bomb. I think I read that line five more times after I underlined it twice. I know that when my focus zooms in purely on what is hard, the scope of my experience is cut in half, at least. This is why gratitude as I’ve come to understand and cultivate it is so immensely powerful. It wisely keeps and protects the good things in your life within your consciousness, within your line of sight. And it’s so incredibly true that the times when I am most unhappy, I’ve become lazy about remembering what I have, which is a lot. It’s not to say you can’t be conscious about the hard things or honest that they’re challenging or depressing. If you don’t express acknowledge these truths, the gratitude doesn’t have a chance to be authentic either. You have to be honest about both. But that’s the key, acknowledging one without forgetting the other. Grasping them both helps keep a broader and more accurate picture of your life within view.

Maybe this is a bit of what Nepo means when he talks about being a Spiritual Warrior–which sounds fancy but is definitively humble.

“All Spiritual Warriors have a broken heart–alas must have a broken heart–because it is only through the break that the wonder and mysteries of life can enter us. What does it mean to be a spiritual warrior? It is far from being a soldier, but more the sincerity with which a soul faces itself in a daily way. It is this courage to be authentic that keeps us strong enough to withstand the heartbreak through which enlightenment can occur.”

This was both comforting and angering to me. Angering because I think, why can’t the enlightenment come through cracks that aren’t caused by heartbreak and struggle? But this is a larger philosophical point. I think a more evolved species will be capable of this in the future–achieving higher consciousness and peace and gratitude without having to endure loss or pain or heartache to see it. But at this point within human evolution, our condition is still adapting. We haven’t caught on to the larger things yet as a whole. Think how bad we’re still blowing it. As removed as I feel from some of the real evils of the world and humanity, I don’t have to look very hard or long to see humankind missing the mark, in big and small ways, all around me, and that includes me and the seemingly petty ways I do this in my own life. Just because I can point my finger at ISIS and project all the evil onto them doesn’t make me superiorly more virtuous. What we see around the world are manifestations of evil that exist, if even dormant, within all of us. But I’ve wandered off-road again.

What’s comforting in Nepo’s words is knowing that our work ultimately is to become who we are at our center. And it’s funny how simple this task appears but how insanely hard and rare real authenticity is–being honest about our weaknesses, our beliefs, our limits, our expectations…It’s not as easy as I’d hope. And yet any time I face a truth about myself that for a long time I either hid or denied, I always feel stronger after having confronted it or shared it with someone I love. Even admitting the extent to which I was/am sick and the limits it places on my life is a challenge, even though totally obvious to an outsider. And I think this is why authenticity is such an important ingredient he includes in being a warrior–I don’t think it means knowing exactly who you are at all times, if anything this search feels like long–maybe it’s more the reverse: slowing peeling away who we aren’t until we become condensed, perfect little vessels of our true self. I think he’s also alluding to the idea that you can’t be conscious and inauthentic at the same time, and since ultimately we’re seeking whole consciousness, it requires in small ways along the path to acknowledge and cultivate the true self, while diminishing the layers that are not real.

The reason it angers me is because this formula is what I confront when reading all the spiritual masters and mystics and artists for thousands of years, and so it’s a clear truth that has persisted through the centuries–that it’s through hardship and pain that human beings seem to achieve deeper consciousness. Or at least, it is through this pain or suffering that we have the opportunity to grow and evolve consciously. It’s very easy to use pain as a reason to stop trying, and I’ve certainly done that a good number of times. But the most amazing people, those who seem to get it, those who appear to be made of peace on the inside and who exude joy outwardly and live their lives with creativity and virtue and light-heartedness, are not people who were given easy lives and thus are happy. They have all endured exceptional pain in their own ways, and have all found a way to use their most challenging of experiences to propel them forward, up, larger than their circumstances. The pain is still real inside of them, accessible and observable even to those on the outside–its not that they eradicated it, but somehow turned it into the material that would make their life good, whole. (See an amazing example of that here) They didn’t eliminate it, but they also didn’t use so much of it that their life was made up purely of struggle. This is another exploitation that’s easy to pursue with ones pain– using it as a platform for identity. The point, obviously, is not to become the pain, if we’re trying to transcend it. Wallowing in our own web of misery is an easy way to garner an audience but also to never evolve. To avoid consciousness. What I was trying to say when I began this thought of why this truth angered me, is that I wish human consciousness could evolve in easier ways than through pain. Of course, there are many other teachers that develop our soul and psyche, love namely, that aren’t as challenging as say something like, an invisible disease that pulls the rug out from under you. Everyday. :) But the truth is, the things which have taught me the most, shown me the gamut of human emotion and contributed to further compassion, kindness, capacity to love and ultimately consciousness on my end, have been these very deeply painful and trying experiences. And so I know that it’s true. And I know it’s vitally important what you choose to do with your pain or heartache, because not working to put it toward growth, gives it the power to swallow you up whole. It takes away from you, gives you a reason to be bad, to stop trying, to give up on the world. And that’s the truth– I say it because I’ve felt these things in the past in reaction to the tough experiences in my life, not always directly after they happened either. I still struggle with it. And it haunts me how easy it is to let those experiences take the wheel and drive me to unhappy places. Luckily we’re not powerless to pain. We have choices to make.

In a different way, using the pain to define your self, or wallowing around in it but never moving on from it is another struggle that I have to stay keenly aware of. I have a whole blog that is named after a damn disease that I am also trying hard to not let define me. It’s a huge part of my life and my story, but I have to keep it from growing so large that it takes up my whole view. I don’t want illness to be my only avenue for expression or creativity, and I definitely don’t want the art and work that I do pursue in the name of it to be all sad or negative or heartbreaking. Of course this isn’t always easy to do either, because writing about your health good, bad, or ugly, is naturally going to include parts that are bad and/or ugly. There is a lot of that in a life with illness. And my point when I began this project so long ago was to accurately portray what life with chronic illness actually looked like, since I’d confronted so many misunderstandings and false beliefs about it from people in my own life. Obviously some writing stems from hard days and dark feelings, and if you’re going to tell the truth, tell the truth. The point was to have a space where I could be honest and not polite for the sake of peoples small-talk comfort. BUT, the point I have to keep in mind is that illness is just one part of my life, and while it can feel like it defines so much of what I do, it is still just a part, but requires me to keep it right-sized. It’s only when my perspective zeros in on it do I lose the whole horizon, which are the amazing people in my life that I love so much and who love me back, the incredible house I live in, how happy my dog makes me every time I look at him, how lucky I am that I was given the gift of writing and this is one thing the illness hasn’t taken from at all. In fact, it’s what gave me a voice on this very medium. Hey look at that, the clouds are parting.

Winters are tough. They seem to be that way for a lot of people, North or South, sick or well. It’s easy to look around and see the same thing everywhere you look, because details are small and we’re usually too busy or too certain to stop and look twice or three times at things before we see the wonder in them. I know that during times like these, my life becomes very small because when you’re sick and weak like this, you’re constantly breaking everything down into smaller pieces so you can digest and complete them. You know how during hard times people will say “Just one day at a time”? Well during days like this, it’s really more down to a moment by moment basis. Mostly because each tiny little movement requires so much more from you than normal. It astonishes me how hard the simplest of tasks become when your body feels like it’s made of lead glued together with honey. It’s not just Wake up and make the coffee! It’s OK, sit up in bed. Ready? 1, 2, 3, sit up. Why didn’t you sit up? Try again 1, 2, 3. Come on, you can do it, just a little more, OK! You did it! We’re sitting up. Now, turn to the side to put your feet on the floor and stand up slowly. Feet on the floor, ready? Here we go. OK, feet are on the floor. Time to stand up. Heeeeere we go, and we’re dizzy we’re sitting back down again. OK, catch your breath. Breathe slowly. Calm down heart, all we’re doing is standing here. OK, try again on 3, rise slowly this time. Ready? 1, 2, 3 and we’re going to stand up. 1, 2, 3, we’re standing! Now, 12 steps to the kitchen, you got this, 1…2…3…

The kitchen is super close to the living room and my couch, and so sometimes I have to make a stop-off there first, which is perfectly portrayed in this cartoon by another blogger with CFS.

Anyway, notice the minuteness of each of those moves? I’m not exaggerating. This is simply what Bone Crushing Weakness does. Tasks this small shouldn’t require being talked through like you’re in a danged boxing match. But what can I say, it must be evolving some part of me so I can be the best of the best Spiritual Warriors ! Or just a normal 31 year old who gets out of bed. Either way. I think it’s this breaking down of things so they are doable is also what makes life feel so un-doable sometimes, because it all feels too big, too much, too long. Like I’ll never be able to get on top of things. But I know it’s because my vision is off and I have to be proactive about seeing my life and even these sometimes painstakingly long days against the larger backdrop of the world, of eternity, of the whole web of human existence. I find relief in seeing my life as a small spec within the largeness of our universe. I didn’t always feel that way, but now I know it means that enduring challenges come to an end. It means I am just one of many kajillion working parts and lives. It means that while not everything is up to me, the essential parts are, and I’m here because I’m capable of achieving them. I have to remember that as much as I can convince myself and be successful about it, I am not alone. That thought isn’t real. And my life is not impossible. And all of this, including colorless winter skies and lacking motivation and bone crushing weakness, will end. And I’ll look back on it one day, as the pain that moved me forward and opened the door for great things to happen, not as a shit show that ruined what could have been a good life.

Health, Happiness, Perspective

P.S. If you want to see one incredible example of taking tragedy and hardship and turning it into Greatness, watch Mayou Angelou share her life story on Master Class. It’s one of the most inspiring things I’ve seen, ever. http://cms.springboardplatform.com/previews/3405/video/937187/sfta001/

A Baby Was Born

Published on July 24, 2015 by Mary Gelpi4 Comments

I really didn’t think we were going to make it. Amelie’s due date was June 18, and my mom and I were scheduled to arrive on the 16th which, in hindsight, was cutting it rather close. She started having contractions on the 14th and by the next day I was convinced we’d never get in there in time. I prayed that he’d wait for us but it was pretty clear by then that the baby would arrive before we would.

Somehow, despite multiple airplane delays and three days of threatening labor, my mom and I arrive to California, pea still in the pod. He waited for us after all. We arrived late, and everyone was tired, mostly Amelie. As we all turn in for bed, I tell Amelie and Keegan to wake me up if anything happens during the night. I don’t want to miss a thing. I am weirdly excited getting into bed, the way you are on Christmas Eve as kid. I finally get to witness the miracle of life. Score.

Roughly 5 hours later, still very dark outside, I wake to Keegan whispering in a firm voice at my door. Mary. Mary! I am still half asleep, Wha? I mumble. Her water broke. We’re going to the hospital. Yes!! This is what I had waited for. I knew something would happen tonight! I dressed quickly but hesitate a moment about what to wear. Are jeans appropriate labor attire? In my peripheral I spot Amelie, walking ever so cautiously down the hallway toward the stairs. She’s in a bathrobe, moving like a ghost, groaning in pain. Are you OK? I ask, dumb question probably. Hurry, she says. We need to go. I quickly put her arm over my shoulder and we walk gently in unison, a conjoined ball of sisterhood floating down the stairs. Where’s Keegan? She asks. I assure her he’s coming. I lie, I have no idea where Keegan is, but I assume he didn’t run out on us.

We walk out onto the driveway, the tiniest bit of dawn peaking at the horizon. Amelie is barefoot. I help her into the front seat of Keegan’s man van. I climb in the back but notice there are car seats on both chairs. Obstacle! I wedge my large butt into the bigger one, which doesn’t really work, so I sit perched up on top of it with half of me hanging off the side. Just as she’s about to ask where Keegan is again, we both see him, a spectacle headed our way; Keegan, running out of the garage as the door descends on him, holding a giant blue rubber ball in the air with both hands, as though it’s a trophy. What is THAT? I ask. Amelie tells me it’s some kind of birthing bouncy ball thingy that helped progress her first labor. But I don’t need it this time! she says, but Keegan is already stuffing the large balloon ball in the backseat, trying to wedge it between me and the two carseats. It’s making the rubbery noise that balloon animals make when being configured. I am laughing but only to myself. I don’t know if laughing is appropriate yet. You never know! he says, and gets into the driver seat. As he starts to shift the car into drive, Amelie stops him with a request: OK, I need you to go slow over the bumps and turns and stuff. But seriously go fast because I don’t think we have a lot of time. I hear Keegans signature cackle. OK, he says, hitting the gas, but easing down the curb of the driveway like a champ.

Now we’re driving fast on the California highway and the roads are all ours. Amelie tells Keegan to call the doctor on the way. I am rubbing her back like a boxing coach, but she says it feels good so I stick with it. Keegan talks to a woman on the phone, which then Amelie takes from him. She tells the woman she’s “In full blown labor”– A phrase both her and Keegan will use numerously in the next hour. This also makes me laugh. Please make sure he knows I’m in full blown labor this time. Keegan has been running the red lights, but now we approach one and there’s a state trooper in the lane next to us. Planning to run the light and then continue speeding, Amelie tells Keegan to let the guy know so he doesn’t pursue us. Keegan rolls down his window and the trooper does the same. Keegan: My wife is full blown labor. Cop: OK. Keegan: I’m going to run this light and then speed. Cop: OK. The light turns green and we speed off in the van. Dude couldn’t have cared less.

I notice Amelie is taking really short breaths from the pain. I remind her to slow them down and try to exhale through her nose. It actually works, she begins taking good breaths. I don’t totally know what I’m doing, but I know deep breaths are better than shallow ones. And they say it in all the Hollywood labor flicks. I rub her shoulders and the big blue ball drifts over to my side again, crowding me back there. I laugh to myself again. I know I will remember this car ride forever.

At the hospital we get Amelie into a wheelchair outside and Keegan throws me the keys to go park the van. In the wheelchair Amelie informs the nurse that she’s in full blown labor and instructs the nurse to run. The nurse reminds Amelie that she is going to be OK but that they aren’t going to run. By the time I get the car parked and up to the room, she is being hooked up to IV lines and monitors with all kinds of wires emerging in every direction. There is a surprisingly large number of staff hurrying in and out of the room, performing respective tasks. Amelie has one concern; the epidural. I’m ready for the epidural as soon as possible. Can you make sure they know that? That I’m ready as soon as they are? They are asking her a ton of questions and typing in answers or writing them on a chart. I imagine that she wishes the questions would stop. I’m familiar with this position; being in pain, needing help that only someone else can provide, but first having to answer question after question–none of them seeming more important than the pain. The nurse tells her as soon as she’s checked into the system, she can have the epidural. The Holiest of Holy’s.

I am standing to the right of the bed, watching a machine hooked up to her which monitors the contractions. It looks like a seismograph. It strikes me what an interesting device this is. A qualitative way to witness someone else’s pain, to measure it even. This part sticks with me. I try to talk her through the bad ones. Since I can see them peak and descend on the monitor, I’m able to tell her when the worst part is over. I remind her to breathe deep. There’s not much else to do now besides refill cups of ice, which Keegan and I take turns with. It’s just like the movies. Amelie informs another nurse that she IS ready for that epidural, just so she knows.

Finally, the last of the questions are answered, and the man with the miracle appears in the doorway. He is glowing yellow and angels sing in harmony as he makes his entrance. Amelie perks up. Absurdly afraid of needles normally, she couldn’t wait for this one. It only takes a few minutes, and then the magic starts to work. You can tell because Amelie has color back in her face and relief in her eyes, as though she can suddenly breathe again. Not to mention she’s smiling, and much more chatty.

Now everything slows down. Keegan and I take a nap. I guess numbed up Amelie continued to labor. When I wake up a bit later, my mom has arrived with coffee and food. We eat and re-energize and prepare for the big show. Just a couple hours later, to the nurses surprise, Amelie is eight centimeters and the time has come. This is it! Yeah! The only problem is that the doctor is not here yet. He’s on his way from another hospital, but he is in traffic. Note: California traffic is different than Louisiana traffic. My mom and I sit at the bay window, on the lookout for Doctor James as the nurses quickly turn the room into a saran wrapped tent. There’s another doctor there in case hers doesn’t make it, but Amelie likes sticking to plans. It’s kind of her thing.

The nurse tells us he drives a gun-metal grey sports car. Of course. No sign of him yet, so my mom and I start singing Amazing Grace aloud in a two part harmony. She taught us this years ago– something about the vibrational energy of that song. We have sung it ever since when we’re in a bind, and somehow it always comes through. There we are, Amelie trying to hold off pushing, the nurses preparing the room like busy birds, and two women at the window singing in decent enough harmony, (I may have been a bit flat). By the third verse, a small silver sports car pulls up and a tall doctor rushes out. He’s here!! We all cheer. Amelie looks like she’s about to have a baby.

The doctor can barely get his blazer off and the scrubs on before she’s on her second push. I stand to the side between the doctor and Keegan. I even hold a leg! It all happens really fast. On the third push we can see his head. It is crazy. Amazing. Five pushes later, he is out. He doesn’t cry right away and the silence is paralyzing. I am worried but don’t say a word because neither the doctor or nurses seem concerned. It feels like forever but was probably four seconds. As Amelie gets both hands around him and brings him to her chest, he finally cries out. That weak, pathetic, entry level cry. The cry of alive. As soon as I hear it, I start to cry too. I never used to be emotional like this. But it feels good. Happy tears. He doesn’t even cry long. He gets swaddled and passed around to everyone like a perfect soft package. I watch his parents hold and love him, both grandparents, and then it is my turn. I can almost feel the love he’s been given already radiating from him. I think about his entrance to the world–how every baby should be this lucky. He’s alert, blinking slowly as he takes it all in. How he can already smell so good, I have no idea. I hold him and cannot fathom that any of us were ever this small, this helpless. Why do we ever convince ourselves we are meant to do this alone? Holding him I feel solid relief. Not just that he’s OK, but that the world is OK. In this moment, he embodies the world. Everything will be fine. He’s here. It’s perfect.

Health, Happiness, Happy Birthday James.

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GOOOOOO SAINTS!

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Short Story: Fiction/Non-Fiction/Alternative Rock

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Short Story:
Fiction/Non-Fiction/Alternative Rock