Archive for the ‘The Serious’ Category

We all look at life from different perspectives. With different histories. With different destinations. My perspecitve isn’t special anymore than anyone else’s. It’s just mine.

I am a 27 year old wife, daughter, sister, aunt. I am a full-time student. I am an adult living with chronic pain. I am the survivor of an eating disorder. I’m a cat owner. I’m a brain surgery survivor. I’m a “retired” teacher.

I’m on a journey.

The destination remains to be seen.

The road is rough. It has been full of hurdles, it has been full of detours, pain, medications and tears.

But it is my journey, and this is my story. The story of a 27 year old chronic pain sufferer, brain surgery survivor, married to a doctor, fighting against the odds. Succeeding in the face of people who say that success is impossible. Continuing to fight when I’ve been told to give in.

My journey is one of pain and fear and complication. It is one that is lived out quietly by men and women who manage each day in the face of pain. It is one that so often doesn’t have a real voice, it is one that is overlooked because it isn’t always easy to watch or easy to listen to, it’s not always pretty. It is a journey that is even more difficult to live through, to survive.

It’s easy to overlook my journey because it doesn’t take place in the limelight. It takes place in the quiet struggles of making it through each day, overcoming each hurdle, managing each obstacle. It is in the small victories that go unnoticed, the big challenges that are conquered.

My story is one of perseverance. It is one of survival.

Mine is the journey of succeeding, against all odds, against all bets. It is the story of hope.

Tomorrow is Independence Day. It’s a time for us to celebrate our country’s freedom from all other countries, from all other nations that once held us captive.

Independence is something that we fight for throughout our lives. As children, we throw fits because we just want to learn to do things ourselves. As teenagers, we get angry because we want our parents to give us more room to try things, to grow, to change. As adults, we strike a delicate balance between being a part of a family and being ourselves. And as we age, we start to see our independence slip, and our lives return to a state of dependence we haven’t dealt with in decades.

The fight for independence, the fight against dependence, is one that comes full circle. No matter what we do or how hard we fight, at some point, like when we were children, we will need the help of others. We can’t always do it all ourselves.

In the last 11 months, independence is something I’ve fought for more than anything else. There were times in those months where I needed my husband, where I relied on my mom in a way that felt so much like my childhood. There were times when I absolutely required the assistance of friends, when I could not succeed without my classmates. There were times when I needed help, help that I didn’t want, help that directly challenged the independence I was fighting for.

I want to say that I’m going to stop fighting it, that I’m going to accept that I need help and suddenly not hate asking for it, but that’s not me. That’s not my style.

Getting help isn’t a bad thing. Knowing you need it is probably a sign that you’re a hell of a lot more self-aware than I am. But I think that when you give up on having independence, just like when you give up on anything you’ve passionately fought for, you lose more than just that thing. You lose hope, you lose your fight and your fervor, you lose your reason to push on, at least in some ways.

For me, that thing is independence, it always will be. I know I can’t fight pain, it’s completely outside my area of control. I know I can’t fight school, I can’t fight things that I’m not in charge of. But I’ll fight to my final breath to stay in charge of my body, of my decisions, of my life. I’ll fight as long as I can to do things on my own, to succeed of my own volition.

Tomorrow is Independence Day, but if we’re being honest, every day of my life right now is really an independence day. It’s a day where I can celebrate that I haven’t given up this fight, that I haven’t lost yet. Because other people have lost this fight, other people I know aren’t able to live a life I am blessed to have.

I know that there will come a time again, maybe just for a while, maybe forever, where I can’t do things my way. Where I can’t succeed without others. Where asking for help won’t be a rarity, but rather a routine.

But until then, I’ll fight. Because I have to.

These past few weeks have been a little different for me. I’ve been putting myself, intentionally but without great thought, in situations with people I don’t know well (or at all), or people I haven’t seen in a long time. I’ve put myself in places I’m unfamiliar with, doing things I’m not competent at.

For me this is usually a recipe for disaster. I don’t do strange situations and incompetence.

I went to Utah where I spent a lot of wonderful time with people I had met only once or twice before. With people I had never met. With people I secretly adored from afar. I spent a lot of time before I left Los Angeles worrying about what people would think about me. Would they hate my glasses? Would they think my haircut was all mom-ish (not that there’s anything wrong with that)? Would they notice that I’m not comfortable in my own skin?

I worried.

I had the same sensation with the clinical I started this week. I worried that my instructor would think I was an idiot (which, I still have plenty of time to prove). I worried that the patients would think that I was weird. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to do all the things I need to do, that my brain or my lousy hand would hold me back. I worried that I looked stupid or confused all the time.

Again, with the worry.

And both times something weird has happened. I just stopped. I stopped worrying.

In Utah, it just got so tiresome. I was exhausted from all the concern. I realized it was holding me back from fun. It was keeping me stuck in my own head instead of out enjoying the short time I had with those people, in that beautiful place. I didn’t want to waste that opportunity, I didn’t want to miss out on all that was available to me.

With this clinical, I realized and accepted, for perhaps the first time ever, that I am going to fail. I’m going to look like an idiot. I have to. The only way I’m going to learn is by making mistakes. It still pains me to do it, I still hate it with a deep burning passion. But I know that it’s necessary. If I spend the whole time worried that I’m going to do something wrong, I won’t ever try. I won’t figure out how to do it right, I’ll just make myself sick with worry.

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I feel comfortable with me, with who I am, with what people see and know about me.

I am imperfect, in fact, I’m a hell of a lot closer to a total mess than I am to perfect. And that’s okay. I know that I have no attention span, that my left hand sucks, that my voice shakes when I’m nervous, that I wear glasses, that I fall down a lot. And that’s what makes me, me. If I try to hide all of that, pretend like it’s not real, then I’m not being true to myself, to anyone else.

I think what I’ve finally realized is that I’d rather be me, than pretend to be someone I’m not. And I’d rather have people like or dislike me for what’s really here, than for the facade I put up for them. I’d rather just live than worry about how I’m going to do that.

Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say “I love you” right out loud,
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds,
I’ve looked at life that way.

But now old friends are acting strange,
They shake their heads, they say I’ve changed.
Something’s lost but something’s gained
In living every day.

I should be studying right now because I have an exam tomorrow, but I need to rant because I’m so angry and so sad that I hardly know what else to do.

Someone gave me a link today of pictures of some of the birds caught up in the oil in the gulf. Just beware before you look at these, because they are devastating, they are tragic. They are a perfect example of why we all should be angry right now.

Today, Sarah Palin blamed the oil spill on “extreme environmentalists” because they moved the drilling away from “safer” areas and into the gulf. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think that there’s such a thing as a safe place to drill oil anymore. I also struggle to watch the same woman who chanted “Drill Baby Drill” point the finger for the oil spill on the people who opposed it the most. But I know that my feelings are not universal.

People have turned the finger on Obama for reasons I don’t yet understand. I’m not sure what he can do seeing as how he is a lawyer, a politician but not a physicist or geologist or oceanographer. I’d like to think that if he had the answer, he would’ve given it already. I do hope that he makes BP pay for this, but none of us yet know how that will unfold, and until then, I choose to give him and his administration the benefit of the doubt. Again, I know that my feeling is anything but universal.

And then there’s BP. A company who cut corners, who cost the lives of several of their own workers and now animals, and the marshes in and around the gulf. A company who hired workers to pretend to clean up beaches for the President’s arrival. A company who hasn’t given masks to the workers who are there cleaning, for fear of damage to their image, meanwhile, the workers are getting sick. A company who I think a lot of us would like to see in a court with their pockets bleeding from all the money they have to pay for this.

There are a lot of players in this tragedy. And when you think about it, maybe that list of players includes us and our dependence on oil.

I don’t know who’s to blame for this (though, if I’m being honest, I’d really love to put it all on Palin), but the thing is, we can worry about blame later. We cannot worry about these animals later. We cannot worry about the livelihood of families that are multi-generation fishers later. We cannot worry about the wetlands, the fragile ecosystems, our ocean, our planet later.

We must worry about them now.

It would be so satisfying to get the head of BP to stand up and face us, to face all of us who are angry, who are heartbroken, and try to explain themselves, but what would it achieve? Where would that get us? It would get us no where. Oil would still be gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, oil would still be killing animals and wetlands and harming the lives of fishermen in the Gulf.

And so here comes the hard part. What can we do?

Maybe we’re so ready to blame others because there is no simple answer to that. Because we are all so entirely helpless to stop this leak, to stop this trainwreck that’s playing out on television and on the internet. We can’t plug that leak (though there’s a facebook group advocating shoving the higher ups in BP in there to seal it, again, satisfying, but probably not effective), we can’t all give up our lives to help clean those poor birds or create work for the fishermen.

But we can continue to put pressure on BP and the government to deal with this now. We can be more aware when politicians and companies talk about offshore or onshore drilling. We can consider our dependence on oil and encourage alternate source creations. We can pray for our friends, our families, for our Gulf, for our planet.

We can donate, we can write, we can speak out. We can make it so that no one ever forgets what happened. We can be the generation that prevents another disaster like this one. We can be the generation that sparks alternate fuel projects.

We must turn this outrage into something bigger, we need to turn this disaster around. And since we cannot plug that hole ourselves, since we can’t scream and yell at the head of BP or our politician of choice, we have to fix what we can.

And we can fix our future. We have to, because it cannot wait.

For a month, I have watched and read in horror. I have heard frightening statistics about the number of gallons that were spilled. I have seen pictures of the animals who have been hurt or killed. I have been rendered speechless time and time again.

I think I’m done being quiet now.

Four years ago this week, I was in the process of driving a moving van to New Orleans to start my life there. Just a few months prior, we had visited Galveston for the first time, and I set eyes on the Gulf for the first time. A few months later, my husband and I drove hundreds of miles next to the crystal blue water, next to the clean white sand on our first trip to Florida. The majesty of the Gulf of Mexico stretched on as far as the eye could see.

For 3 years I called the South my home, and the Gulf of Mexico was my sanctuary. It was one of the places I could go to feel at peace, to hear the sound of waves crashing, to smell the salt in the air. I’ve sat out on those beaches a few times now and no picture will ever do justice to the beauty that is held there.

It houses more than memories, it houses animals, it houses ecosystems, it houses financial lifelines for many who live in the South. It’s not just a body of water or just a pretty vacation spot. It’s more than that.

And it’s dying. It’s being demolished by oil, by a spill that shouldn’t have happened, a spill that continues to gush oil into that water at this very moment. This isn’t about politics, it isn’t about a company and what they should or could have done.

It’s about the Gulf of Mexico. It’s about the animals and the people that rely on it. It’s about the memories it holds. It’s more than water and sand. It’s the Gulf, and it’s dying.

What are you doing about it?

(More love the gulf posts can be found here or here or here.)

Donations can be made at a number of sites depending upon where you are interested in making a difference. The Audubon Institute of Louisiana, the American Bird Conservatory, The Greater New Orleans Foundation and Oceana. I’m sure there are many more, but you gotta start somewhere.

It’s been 3 days shy of a month since I sat at this computer and admitted that I have a problem. I don’t know what I expected to happen after that day. I had already told my husband I would see a therapist. I had already told him I was doing better.

Well, I didn’t. And better is a very relative term.

I’m eating enough calories now. I’m still losing a little weight, but not at an alarming or unhealthy rate. Just enough to keep giving me that little exhilaration of success, of control. Just enough to keep giving me that hit of my mental addiction that I need to make it through the day.

My eating may have improved, but the mental side of this remains unchanged. I can’t talk to anyone about it, or I guess, it’s not an inability, it’s just that I don’t want to. I feel alarmingly alone, even though I have people on all sides of me, offering me a rope to climb out of this hole. Even though I have people who are willing to build me a ladder to get out.

The truth is, I like this hole.

I like that I’m doing something successfully. And I like the way my body is starting to look. And I know how incredibly fucked up that sounds. I really do.

I make jokes about having an eating disorder with some people who know. I make jokes about being a control freak all the time. But it’s not really a joke. It’s serious, and I know that. But I’m still not able, not willing, to face it.

It’s easy for people who are outside of this to sit aside and say, hey, this girl needs therapy. This girl needs a trained professional to help her. She needs to realize that she’s hurting herself, even if not physically, then mentally and emotionally. This girl needs someone to help her find a healthier way to find control, or a strategy to give up control altogether.

It’s easy to be an observer on this life.

But it’s not easy to live it.

I don’t want to go to therapy. I don’t like to talk about this, at all. I don’t like to talk, aloud, about the things I’m doing wrong, about how I am not normal, not right. I don’t want to sit in a room and try to dissect why I am the way I am. I don’t want to tell another person that I need help, I don’t want to admit that I’m not okay, out loud, to someone who doesn’t know me. To be honest, I can’t even say it out loud to people who know me well.

I don’t want help.

But I need help.

I knew I needed help when I finished my birthday dinner and worried, unreasonably, about how much weight I had gained in one day. On my birthday. I knew I needed help when I was willing to skip out on eating a cupcake that my sister and I baked last weekend because I had already eaten more for lunch than I had planned in my head. I knew I needed help when I stepped on the scale and felt crushed because I had gained back .6 pounds.

.6 pounds should not ruin a day. Birthdays should not be a time for thinking about weight. A cupcake should not cause mental distress.

I know this. I know all of this. And if it was as easy as knowing, then I wouldn’t be typing this at all.

I know I need help, but more than that, I know I don’t want it. I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to sit for hours having another person dissect my life, my brain, my problems.

I don’t know where I’ll go from here. I don’t know the next chapter in this story. I just know that it’s only just begun. I know that the resolution won’t be quick, and it won’t be easy. I know it will involve tears and that it will involve time.

And I know at some point, it will involve help.

But not today. Not yet.

I got on twitter this morning while I was stuck in traffic. I sort of figured it can’t be illegal to look at twitter when your car is in park on the freeway. I certainly wasn’t going to hit anyone.

When twitter loaded I saw a tweet from a friend that was a link to a blog post, which in and of itself isn’t at all abnormal. The post was titled “The Worst Possible Thing Has Happened.”

At first, I thought it was going to be a joke. A story of hyperbole. I wondered if my friend was pregnant, thereby making her blog domain (notamomma) not work for her any longer. I wondered if it was something silly, or pretend drama.

And then I clicked on the link.

My friend Mary Jo died on Saturday. My friend Mary Jo, who was only 29 years old, died. I keep typing it because I’m wondering if that will make it stop being true. Or if it’ll make it sink in.

I am in disbelief.

I am heartbroken.

I know that it’s hard for a lot of people to understand friendships that are born on the internet and so I’ve kept this mostly to myself today. No, I never met Mary Jo. But we talked on twitter frequently, we were friends on Facebook. We played Words With Friends constantly. My husband always referred to her as Maryjors (the last part rhyming with doors) because that’s her name on twitter and words with friends. We would talk about whether he was beating her or not, since for whatever reason I could beat her, but my husband, the scrabble wiz, could not.

She was my friend.

She came to me a few weeks ago asking for help with her health. I knew she’d been sick and I offered her some advice. I told her to go back to her doctor because I didn’t think he was taking her seriously. She asked me another question a day later (mostly unrelated to what we’d talked about before) and I didn’t know the answer. But I didn’t push her to go back to see a doctor.

I know this isn’t about me, and I have no intention of making it that way. But I have spent hours today in my head wondering what I could’ve done to help my friend. How I could’ve forced her to go to the doctor. How I could’ve read her past blog post telling me about her history of heart problems instead of being so involved in my life that I couldn’t take a minute to read about my friend’s. Because if I’d known she’d had a heart attack a few years ago, I would’ve pushed her harder to go to a doctor.

I want to blame myself because then at least there’s a reason. Then at least there’s some cause and effect in this crazy cruel world where my friend is gone. I know it won’t change anything. I know that logically. But it’s just another part of my universe that is so profoundly out of control that I’m grasping for anything to hold it all together.

I’m sad. I’m heartbroken. I can’t imagine what Mary Jo’s husband is feeling tonight. I can’t imagine what her family, her “real life” friends are feeling.

All I know is that I’m sad.

That I miss my friend.

And I wish that there was something, anything that I could’ve done.

Rest in peace Maryjors. We miss you tremendously.

This morning my hair straightener broke. It wasn’t that big of a deal, but it meant I couldn’t wear my hair down today because it was tumbleweed sized and the curling iron couldn’t start to tame it. So I pulled it up into the worlds tiniest ponytail and turned around to see the back. To my surprise for the first time in a few years, the scar on the back of my head was plainly visible.

And more surprisingly, for the first time in a long time, I was self-conscious about it. I was genuinely worried that people might comment, or stare. That it would be noticeable again.

It’s no secret that I have some substantial scars. I have the one on my head, the one on my breast, a couple of good ones on my arms, a few on my legs. My skin is marked with experience in the very same way that my spirit is.

You can’t see all the scars on the inside, but on weeks like this one, they seem to show a little clearer.

I have a scar in my memory from the last time I went to a therapist for anorexia and she told me I wasn’t that thin.

I have scars in my memory from the last time I recovered from not eating by gaining all the weight, and then some, back.

I have scars in my memory from the pain of admitting my problems, time and time again.

I have scars in my memory from all sorts of things I wish had never happened. Many of which were my own doing.

My mind feels raw with its wounds right now, my spirit cracked in more places that it’s solidly together. I am trying to let them heal, to take care of myself and to find my way back to normal, but it’s a struggle. It seems like every time I start to heal in one place, something else breaks.

I feel exposed right now, like all my flaws are on show. It makes me feel even less in control of my life, which really makes everything worse.

It’s amazing how just this morning I found myself worried about what people would think of the scar on my neck, of how they would react if they saw it. And then I realized that it wasn’t really about that scar at all, it was about all my wounds and imperfections.

It was about how worried I am that people might see what’s really going on and how that might change everything.

It started innocently.

I woke up sick at a weekend retreat in San Diego last month. I didn’t really eat much because I felt like hurling pretty much all day. I tried to eat as much as my stomach would allow, but at the end of the day, it didn’t amount to much. When I got on the scale the next morning, I had lost two full pounds.

I haven’t mentioned it too much, but with starting school in August and with the restrictions on activity from the blood patches, I’ve put on some weight I never really wanted. Exercise hasn’t even been an option, particularly given how difficult a regular full school day is right now, and that hasn’t helped much.

Shortly after that weekend, my husband started working nights, meaning he was at work from 5pm to 6am, which was the polar opposite of my schedule. I leave for school between 6 and 7 in the morning and rarely get home before 5 in the evening. While he’s on nights I don’t seem him for 5 or more days at a time, which is tough for a number of reasons. During those weeks I’m responsible for myself only. And somehow I failed at that this time.

While my husband was working nights, I drifted into a familiar pattern. It wasn’t intentional or planned. It wasn’t even something I was fully aware at first.

I was starving myself.

I don’t need to rehash all the details, but I was pretty successful. In two weeks I lost the weight I gained in the past 8 months and then some. I became close friends with my scale, weighing myself multiple times a day, letting the numbers dictate what I ate. I became paranoid of eating foods that would bring the weight back on. I started letting food rule my life.

It took me a week or so before I realized what I was doing. And it took me about 10 seconds after that to realize why. It wasn’t about the weight. It wasn’t really about the weight last time either. It was about the fact that every other part of my life is going to hell in a handbasket. My grades are starting to sink, I’m not sleeping, I’m in so much pain on a day to day basis that I have thoughts that I can’t even admit to here. My husband, my family are all impacted by this.

And I can’t control any part of it.

But food I could control. Losing weight was something I could accomplish, something that I could be responsible for, something I wasn’t screwing up. Which, when you get right down to it, is pretty fucking ironic because screwing up was exactly what I was doing. And even when I realized what I was doing, I didn’t stop. Because in some totally distorted way, I was happy. If I’m being honest, I’m still struggling to stop.

It’s been almost a month and I haven’t told anyone. I only told my husband last night. Not because I didn’t trust him, but because I was, I am, embarrassed. Because there’s a small part of me that doesn’t want to stop, that doesn’t want to lose the control that I’ve finally rediscovered.

I want to say that really don’t know how this happened, how I ended up back in this place, but I do. I am just disappointed in myself, humiliated that this has happened again.

And now I have to own up. I have to admit that I have another problem, I have to seek help because clearly I can’t handle this, my life, on my own. And it’s so damned frustrating that I just want to scream. I don’t know how to live like this, where nothing is mine, where nothing is under my own power or choice. I don’t know how to be a passenger in the backseat of my life.

It’s interesting that people always say that the hardest part is admitting you have a problem. But I’m starting to feel like the hardest part is actually admitting that you are the problem. That the only thing that’s really wrong is you.

Some nights I sit down at the computer with a pretty good idea what I want to write about. And many of those nights, like tonight, I hesitate. I realize that after a while, this blog starts to read like a soap opera, or a big fat drama festival. I know that it is sometimes a chore to read.

This is sort of how I feel in life too. Like I’m crossing the threshold from being a daughter, wife, sister, friend, etc, to being a burden. Some days I wonder if I’m contributing much besides trouble and tragedy. And often I think the answer is no.

But even when I put on a happy face, or choose to write a light-hearted blog post instead of a harder one that’s rolling around in my mind, I don’t stop living this tragedy. This drama festival.

Tomorrow will mark 8 months since my head started hurting. Each month, each silly milestone, shocks me a little. I’ve lost two-thirds of this year to pain and unlike last month, there’s no end in sight. There’s no treatment shining ahead. There’s no hope this month, this milestone.

Instead, there’s a sense of seriousness. A sense of permanence.

This is my life.

I’ve found myself concerned lately with what this new reality means for my family, for my friends, for my relationships with those people. It’s one thing to have a friend who is temporarily ill or in pain. It’s not easier, that’s not what I’m saying at all, because I don’t think that’s how pain and sickness work, but there’s an end to most conditions. If you wait it out, things usually normalize. It seems like it’s becoming obvious that this isn’t normalizing. Or rather, it is, but this headache is now the norm.

I’ve always been one of those people who said that if people walk away from your life then they weren’t meant to be in it in the first place, but at no point had I wondered if maybe it’s the other way. Maybe if you can walk away from someone, they aren’t worth staying for. That maybe it’s not really them, maybe it’s me.

With all these new worries are the normal ones. The worries about school, about holding down a job in the future. It just seems like as much as I want things to get easier and want life to become less complicated, the less it actually works that way.

What I want more than anything is a break. I’m tired in every way. I’m not sleeping well again, which has made all the little things seem so much bigger. I’m tired of fighting all the time. I’m tired of feeling hopeless. I’m tired of pain. It’s not like I just need a nap in the afternoon and everything will be better, it’s like I need a nap from my life.

But that’s clearly not an option, so I continue to fight and move forward in spite of my fatigue.

I have managed for 8 months, and though it seems harder every day, I’ll continue to find a way. I am discouraged, sad, and tired. But I’m not defeated.

Not yet. Not this month.