Captains Log: Day Four Million and Six. Still crashed, I guess. At what point do you stop considering yourself crashed and just accept that this new garbage state is just.…your new normal? Everything is acting up, like normal. But it’s been the challenge with my heart, wanting something it cannot have, which I’ve struggled hardest with. I don’t typically spend too much time in the “greener grass over the fence” world, but something in me is willing hard for a life I don’t have. It’s also being imaginatively precise in the world it wants that cannot exist.
I’m in a rut, if that wasn’t clear.
I’m reflecting on how it all began. I can at least say what helped inspire it: Ignoring what I knew I needed to do, which is one of those human behaviors I will never understand. My morale was low, which was linked to my motivation. It was still there, but it dissipated a little every day I went on deflecting from the thing that would do me some good: writing. It was like a shooting star that burst in a short lived flash of light. But it would fade just as quickly if I didn’t act while it was illuminated. Then the sky would go back to black, and having failed to act, the brightness dwindled, as did the likelihood of me writing all the things pleading to be let out.
That’s why they say strike while the iron’s hot, I suppose. Again and again and again I’d have the spark and ignore it. Or put it off. Or write in my notebook, which is something better than nothing, but I knew it’d little good there. It didn’t risk anything or challenge me in a way that makes me try harder whether the quality is better or not. Saying “tomorrow is just as good as today” became a dangerous motto I obeyed and it’s not even true. I was kidding myself and knew it inside, but I still couldn’t pull it together.
Instead I worked on three sudoku puzzles from a Southwest magazine I snagged on my flight home from Miami. I made some dumb deal with myself if I could finish all three than I could trust my brain. I finished the Easy, then worked on the Medium for what probably took far too long, but finished, and then spent over a week on the Difficult until I messed up somewhere and it was impossible to fix. So I threw it out finally, assuming OK, now it’s time for writing. But then I studied Sudoku strategies online instead, which I’d never done before. Interesting stuff.
I went to Miami in the first place to see my real life hero, Dr. Nancy Klimas. I honestly feel little a star struck when I see her and I just want to run up and wrap my arms around her bear hug style and lift her off the ground. Do a twirl with her raised in the air! Hah, what a sight. She ordered a lot of blood work and neurotransmitter tests. One interesting thing she suggested was the use of a tens machine as means to stimulate the Vagus Nerve, which has gotten a lot of press in the MECFS world and has helped people with varying symptoms. One of those is headaches, and since I’ve had one of those for the last decade, I’m really hoping it will help provide some relief. 3 times a day for 15 minutes. I’ll report back.
It’s always hopeful to see a doctor who specializes in your disease, particularly when the other seven that you see have never heard of it. They’re doing your best, for obvious reasons, there limits to their help. Seeing Klimas was cathartic in that regard and other levels as I’m hopeful some of her ideas will help with multiple issues I’m having resolve, or at least improve. Particularly crashing almost every day about an hour after I awake. Also the cystitis and peeing every 10 minutes. And the daily migraines. And five months between periods. So, all of it, basically.
As for the rut, I think an envy began sprouting in me that at first I wasn’t so aware of. It started in a very dormant way, even though I was really enjoying my trip in Miami. I probably had more fun than I’d had in all of 2019 combined, which could fit in a thimble. It began with a very attentive observation of my surroundings, of simple things actually, and seeing up close how people who have their health are able to live and operate, day after day. I don’t know why this time I was so conscious of it and in such awe. On a general level at all times, I am amazed what man in a state of homeostasis can do. Maybe because 2019 had been such a burning trashcan of illness and life that I forgot what real health looked like. I was so amazed on one hand, and on the other, the envy for their ease of capability grew in me like a weed.
The logistics of family life, especially with four young children, is extremely difficult and doesn’t look easy. But it does look fun, too. I came from a family of six, so maybe some part of me naturally feels at home with that number. But to watch reliable bodies and all they could do became compelling and incredible. I’d listen to my brother and sister-in-law talk about plans, and I think I literally forgot about the concept of planning as a real thing. It’s not impossible and I still attempt it in my own life, but it is always tentative. Always. I am never, ever, a sure thing.
Not a second thought about showers, grocery shopping, cooking big meals every night, meeting friends for dinner. How involved their social life was! I mean, they had one. How at ease everyday chores and tasks and errands (Or even just delegating them) were— not that they didn’t require work, but that no one was forced by potential physical repercussions to choose whether they would shower or grocery shop. They were solid people. They accomplished so much each day and were dead tired by the end of it, just when I’d start to feel a little more awake, strangely. They went to sleep with warranted exhaustion, and the sleep actually recharged them.
My sister-in-law was so alive in the mornings, which is incomprehensible to me. Both feeling alive at all, and being functional before 2 pm. When she wore workout clothes, it’s because she actually worked out. Not because she was a poser like me who wore leggings because sometimes just the thought of denim against my skin makes me cringe.
I had truly forgotten what the privilege of health affords you across a day, a week, in all your many roles and expectations. I was amazed and then maybe progressively envious? Can’t say, but typically I’m overwhelmed watching the pace and the volume and the largeness of healthy peoples lives unfold. But for whatever reason, I finally felt it deeply in my bones, as though it’d been welling up there for years and I’d just never said it out loud despite it being glaringly obvious. To the point of it being useless to even repeat here. But it’s still flapping around in my brain, and I want to release it. I’m warning you, it’s stupidly obvious: I am so, fucking, tired, of living life with this illness.
How’s that for a Ted Talk?
It’s still there for some reason. It’s obvious, I get it, everyone in the world gets it– why it continues to circulate in my psyche like some grande revelation is beyond me. Maybe it just begged to be said plainly, without a “But” behind it or any justification for why having it has made me better in other regards! No, plain and simple. Just say it and leave out the decorum.
Pardon the F bomb, that’s just how the thought plays out. I write about hope and working with the hand you’re dealt and discerning ways to find meaning in the parts of life you don’t control. And suddenly it all faded quietly into the background. I felt like a hack. I looked around and could feel viscerally how much I wanted what I could not have. What was not mine to take.
I can’t stay in that space long, even though I’ve still felt way a while now, though maybe not with such fervor. Zukav says that “The splintered personality must always choose between opposing parts of itself. The backbone of evolution.” I doubt it grows me any to want for what isn’t real. To live in a dimension where bad things happen without timely ways to always understand them. I am constantly walking the line between hope and despair. It is far easier to despair, I admit easily. I have to choose hope, consciously, with the intention that even if I can’t see the meaning in all of this yet, it will be revealed. Or at least if I’ll find salvation and treasure in it, the way I would try to in a life with my health. I can’t accept it’s all for nothing. I won’t.
Still, some days, some periods of time: So. Fucking. Tired. OK, won’t say it anymore. My mom will wag her finger.
Interestingly, I still had a great time in Miami. It wasn’t that I felt better there–I was crashed most the time. It was more of a simple enlightenment that being sick around people you love and like is better than being sick on your own. Obvious, I know. I stayed in bed, sleeping on and off until around 3:30 pm. That’s when Olive and Miles (7 and 4) typically came home from school, and I’d reach down far for some strength and get up to greet them as they walked up the driveway smiling or skipping or holding art they made as though it were a proud flag.
It was nice being around them. I really do treasure my role as an aunt, even if I can’t do more and play longer without tiring out. I was able to see Olive’s first performance in a play: School Daze. It was about school, and how school is hard. Can’t disagree with that. It felt so fun to go and cheer her on.
I’d meet them at the beach, but it’d be four hours after they’d already been there. But that’s the great part about kids (and dogs.) No questions. No backstory required. They’re just glad you’re there.
A beautiful part of children is how adaptable they are. They don’t seem to mind that I’m supine 80% of the time we’re together. Kids can tire you out, but they can rejuvenate you too, much like the ocean. Luckily there, I had both. And those two made me feel more alive than I’d felt in a while.
I guess being around the whole family helped re-tether me to the world. Seemed I had floated away from it, or maybe it was the world that had floated on without me. Either way, once I was home, I didn’t bask in the solitude or the quiet, like usual. Reuniting with Monty always makes me happy, and is the symbol of “home” to me. Otherwise a harsh reality settled around me that suddenly I was sick with no one around during the day. But it didn’t feel like respite.
In Miami I would often just listen to Estee on the phone, or working on some project, prepping food for dinner that night, caring for the twins. As my grandma would say “She’s a busy body.” I got used to the background sounds of people living, and despite not participating in it, it was comfortable to me hearing it go on. Comforting. A reminder that life moves continues on, no matter what you’re wearing or what room you’re in. Of course that same fact when you’re in the same four walls for months can feel worse than unfair. It’s a pitiful thought, but it feels very real that the world doesn’t need you at all. (That is NOT true and I don’t believe that in any form at all. It’s your ego messing with you, and it’s dishonest. All of it)
I guess the drastic change, whether it was the lack of kids to make me laugh or of late-night life talks after the kids went to bed, they all made my life at home feel disconnected. My mom had left for a trip to Colorado the day after I returned and I suppose what I normally call solitude began to feel more like isolation. I had this feeling that I’d probably had enough solitude to last me thru another decade.
I surpassed my wordcount by about 5,000 words. I have too much to say because I put this off too long too long and that’s what happens. I’ll let this fly and hope things lighten up inside me, then I’ll do a little better by saying more with fewer words next time. That’s the ticket. Between now and then, Stella is working on getting her groove back. I’ll get there. I always do.
Health, Happiness, Grooves
FibroM.E.-Awesome 