It’s the giving up of things, the erosion of all those things gave you comfort, the inexorable diminishment of your life by slow degrees that is so hard to bear.
I have had a knack for forgetting all my life, for walking through disaster and not exactly recovering but somehow just forgetting to be scarred.
I have been thinking, thinking much too much perhaps, lately of how I have come to be here, how have the last few years, the last decade, treated me. When I put it together, I’m thinking I’ve got a right to be depressed, hell, even, well, nevermind, that’s a never go there, even for literary effect.
In the past ten years
- I have been alone with no hope of ever being with someone again.
- l lost everything I owned in hurricane Katrina
- — Which turned my hometown into a disaster zone for the short term
and a very different place from what it had been in the long term - — Causing me to have to live in my parents’ home for the
last three years of my mother’s life watching her
dwindle and collapse inward until there was more pain
in her than will to fight it and she chose her time to die. - And I sat alone with my mother as she breathed her last.
- I was diagnosed with a life-altering chronic nasty disease that stole all my comfort food from me and replaced it with an unshakable sense of personal physical doom.
- I suffered through years of a disgusting autoimmune disease which caused no end of pain, oozing, and terrible scarring, culminating in two radical pitt-ectomies and two failed skin grafts.
- I lost, permanently, half the volume of hair on my head (much of which does seem to have migrated to my chin, but that may be unrelated) - a massive blow to the self-esteem and confidence of an already quite ordinary looking woman. (I think of myself now, with my desperate updo and oversized hair bows as ridiculous looking and have often changed my behavior accordingly.)
- I finally divorced my husband/not husband of nineteen years.
- I am in more debt, more of the worst kinds of debt, than I have even been before. Every time I make progress and start to believe, yes, with time and vigilance and more frugality than I am really capable of, I can get through this and rise above the debt, every time I get myself all comfortable in that delusion, something else happens and I am further back than I even was. And that makes me feel just damned stupid.
- I suffered undiagnosed through more hideous, painful, and embarrassing symptoms for half a year before having all my female internals removed, plunging me into sudden impact raging menopause without so much as a pamphlet’s worth of “getting through the change” assistance from the last male gynecologist I’ll ever go to. I have not yet regained metabolic equilibrium in this area.
- I lost the ability to sleep without suffocating unless I wear a face-strangling bellows machine that makes breathing possible but sleeping unlikely. Consequently, I sleep most nights in a recliner in a slightly reclined position (think economy class but with more legroom). (I do, however, allow myself all the peanuts I care to eat and the tenant’s little girl hardly ever cries during my red-eye non-flights.)
- I broke my back and lost height of which I had little to spare while I was, of all things, gardening! I learned, for the first time, what chronic, probably never to dissipate discomfort is and developed a permanent relationship with chemical comfort.
- I bought a house with the help and advice of “friends” which has turned into an unmitigated money pit. Then, thinking to help out a friend who needed some extra money and happened to be a maintenance director, I used that friend to make many repairs on my house, many of the things that had been fixed by the group of friends who helped me buy the money pit. I trusted him to know what he was doing and to help me out and I didn’t feel bad at all giving him more money than I really had to give. Well, I didn’t feel bad until I realized that everything he “fixed” ended up needing to be fixed again. Either he really doesn’t know what he’s doing, which I can’t believe, or he was simply screwing me over for money. So now I’m hiring out jobs to strangers to fix these things, some, like my tenant’s leaking toilet, for the third time. I don’t know whether I can trust them or not, but at least I don’t have to feel guilty about firing them if they screw me over.
- I lost my journal site of fifteen years and many of my friends, a loss from which I, a socially awkward woman of few friends in the actual flesh, have not fully recovered. (This place is nice enough, but friends were lost, never to be heard from or of again.)
- Two months ago, which trying to stay physically active, I took a tumble off of a bicycle and now I am trying to rehabilitate from breaking all three main bones in my right arm. (Of course, it had to be my right arm.) I’ve lost range of motion and strength neither of which is guaranteed to return. I’ve gained near constant discomfort and a closer relationship with chemical comfort, neither of which is guaranteed to go away.
- Three weeks ago I signed balance transfer checks on three different credit cards in order to pay for fixing part of the foundation of my house. Even I could see the damage happening due to inadequate supports and rotted joists. I’d even pointed out the most visible sign to the kindly folks who helped me buy the house and been told not to worry, they’d fix it for me before they finished flipping it and sold it to me. Just a note to anyone thinking about buying their first house - The answer to the question, “Should I get a house inspector out before we start this deal?” - even if you’re dealing with friends, the answer is ALWAYS YES! If I hadn’t taken No for the answer on that one, I would have probably saved myself the $7000 I just borrowed on credit cards to keep the back end of my house from falling down.
- I am supposed to wear an extensor brace on my bad arm for eight hours every night, a device that applies constant pressure to coerce my elbow into opening up just a few more degrees. The idea is that, little by little, the pressure will eventually force my arm back into straight. Success in that is not guaranteed. Discomfort, fairly serious discomfort during and following for hours after each night’s treatment, is. Apnea, cpap machine, recliner, continuous arm torture device - I may never sleep comfortably again.
- And here is the kicker, a single fact that’s an ongoing horror-show for me right now. I have a very slow bleed internally that’s been going on for a few weeks. It isn’t much but it’s there. The blood that should not be leaking out of some spot inside is leaking anyway and making it’s way out through a natural orifice I don’t care to mention. It’s one of those really bad signs you ignore only if you’re really stupid. So I’m not ignoring it. As soon as I realized that it couldn’t be explained away as occurring due to one of several innocuous things, I got the first doctor appointment I could with my internist. She looked at the site where the dramatic and offensive liquid was escaping and, just as I had, crossed several innocuous explanations off the list. Then she referred me to a specialist whose title I really don’t want to reveal here, so we will simply call him Dr. MassivelyEmbarassingSpecialty from here on. I went directly to Internist Doc’s referral coordinator (who knew there was such a thing as a referral coordinator or even a need for one?) and she got me the very next available appointment with Dr. MassivelyEmbarassingSpecialty, - in two weeks. And that is just when the MassivelyEmbarassingSpecialty odyssey begins. Who knows where that could go?
(Stop.
Breathe.
Do Not Panic.
It is simply not allowed.
I will not allow myself to panic before examinations and tests are even begun.
I Will Not.)
And all of this writing, this compiling of this massive list of crap that’s befallen and keeps befalling me, is not to say to anyone who wishes to read it, oh poor me, look at how hard my stupid damn little life is. It really isn’t that.
It’s for me to work it out in my mind, to do the logical progression of things here, view all the facts, puzzle out the pieces to convince myself that, yes, it is true, I have had a huge load of awful dumped onto me in the last few years.
I have lost far more than I have gained.
I have been sick or broken or slowly recovering far more time than I have been well and painfree and I have been woefully mis-served by the medical establishment more times than I have written here and probably even more times than I know.
And I had dealt with it, with all of it, alone.
Even when I had help,
some of it well intentioned and caring, but terrible in its overbearing loving bullying kindness,
and other of this help suspect in its intent and effectiveness and in the end worse than no help at all,
even when I’ve had help I’ve been alone.
No, I don’t think it would be wrong to say that I have indeed gone through an incredible amount of misfortune and pain, more than many people could handle, I think, especially alone.
It is logical, natural, I work through the list to prove it to myself that it is understandable, even, oh please yes, even forgivable that I am depressed now, that I am weepy and down.
It is not just me being emotionally lazy or self-indulgent.
Given this list or even one considerably shorter, I think, it’s only natural, only normal, I think, to be unhappy. I can allow myself not to think myself the lesser for not being able to rise above.
Maybe.
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