Crazy Going Slowly Am I

To be honest, I've been having a bad several weeks. Things have been worse with my health since Christmas, and my doctor recently put me back on the medication that she thinks we stopped too soon. This has induced some extra side effects without any solid positive progress yet. (It's a month-by-month instead of a minute-by-minute game.) So I've been pretty down, struggling hard.

This week to boot, I've been steeping in a swirling sea of hormones (the medicine seems to be impacting all the levels of everything in my body) and it has amplified some feelings—mostly fun ones like disorientation, fear, and frustration—that were floating around before. Fortunately, my husband's patience level of late seems to rival that of Jesus himself because I'm definitely less amusing than a day at the park. Stranded in the rain. With wind. But he said something to me in a moment of upset (my husband, not Jesus himself—things aren't that bad yet) by way of commiseration: "I can see how you are feeling down; all the things that give you validation are gone."

So I thought about that a bit. (I have the time and occasionally the mental fortitude for thinking.) I realized he is dead on: my problem is I have no context.

What I mean is this, I think: when we socialize with friends, for example—or maybe even more so with strangers—those interactions are one of the primary ways of defining ourselves and our roles. When someone laughs at a joke or questions you further about something you have to say, when they are interested to hear what you think or feel about the topic at hand, these are naturally validating occurrences. What never occurred to me before is what a complete absence of these little social moments would feel like. (Spoiler alert: many surgical procedures are more pleasant.) I can count on my left hand the number of times I've had human contact to the level of an actual face-to-face conversation with someone other than my husband in the whole of 2017. (And some of that lack is due to an ongoing inability to even articulate my half of the conversation much of the time, thanks to the 'brain fog' that lingers on...)

I kept on thinking, when we engage with things we love to do, that's also inestimably self-affirming. Presumably you're good at at least a few of those things you enjoy—and/or you are on a trajectory of improvement. (Otherwise, you have some entirely different issues we call masochism, and you'll need a different blog for that.) I still dabble with some of the things I love—creating floor plans, furniture and lighting schedules, pretending I'm working out the architectural details of a new-build house, for instance—but it's all in my head. Most of my experience of life these days is all in my head. (Side note: I sure am glad my brother-in-law filmed my wedding since my husband and I basically eloped after dating abroad here in Europe. Seeing as very few of my friends and extended family have therefore even met the man I now call spouse, I could have been sitting here having serious additional concerns about his existence as well by this point. [Insert "phew" emoji.]) Anyway, things start losing their "real" quality when life is mostly lived solo in a holding pattern, and I am coming to believe that much of what we (I?) benchmark as "real" has a lot to do with it being a shared experience.

So my own narrative starts smacking dangerously of existentialism, but now I see how subjective crises like these crop up along the path of chronic illness due to the need for/lack of framework. And I've been trying to create just that by dressing up for Instagram and occasionally posting style content to this blog, and by sharing random thoughts and observations with the 6 friends, at a guess, who visit me here on this site, but that is just a flailing attempt to grab onto to my sense of creative self. Still, while blogging may be a synthetic validation, a poor replacement for actual friends, at least when you put something on the Interwebs, the possibility that someone could see what you've done is enough to make you feel like you have a voice, like you're connected, possibly even still relevant. (It occurs to me that I am getting a taste of the plight of geriatrics in America, a culture that ships off their aged and infirm to pasture disenfranchised in nursing homes, and I feel much more empathy for the issue...)

And so here I am in an escalated effort to keep the inside of my head tangle-free by writing a blog post about who knows what exactly, padding along behind notions Kierkegaard had a couple hundred years ago (hooray for originality) and wondering, What really still exists aside from me and my struggle for health? At that, how much of me actually still exists? What defines me? Who the hell am I? These are not questions I am unfamiliar with lately, but I thought they were in my rear view mirror, discarded sometime in 1999 alongside my teenage angst and those 3 cigarettes I smoked in high school thinking I was cool while trying not to vomit. No wonder they look like that on Orange is the New Black when they come back from the SHU; even here in my living room with windows, solitary confinement is way more punishing than you'd think.

Fortunately, Jesus will be home from work soon.