This entry is less bubbly than usual. It’s vulnerable, emotional, and raw, but it’s far from sulking in depression. I will show you how in the past few weeks I have gone from anger to hope if you are patient enough to hang on for the ride…
These past two or three weeks have been hard on me. I knew moving back into this toxic, cursed, Love Canal house, would prove to be a really bad thing for my health and I knew this would be most evident during the colder months as winter sets in, but whew! I had forgotten how bad it really was, how far I came after moving out, and how out of it I can really become. After spending Spring, Summer, and part of Fall running around like I had a fire under my ass, I am now capable of almost nothing. I am plagued by relapses of the Epstein Barr Virus I caught as a teenager. I have been in and out of “sleep spells” as I like to call them, where I get up vibrant and alert, and am run down to the point of no longer making any sense in as little as two hours – back to bed I go again and again until I lose track of the days.
The hardest part of all this is the fact that my mind is still vibrant, vivid, and craving all the stimulation I gave it in previous months but with a body like this, wrecked and weary, I am unable to keep up with that. My mind reals and gives me a billion different things I need or want to do and damn do I try! But as of late this usually ends in failure and frustration. In previous years I would have beaten myself up about all this. I would have attributed it to depression, something all the doctors seemed to think I had, and I would have asked myself why I insisted on being sick all the time – effectively blaming myself, but over this past year I have come to realize this doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with depression. My body is killing me. My mind is still joyful and excited, planning for the future, pushing me ever farther into a better life. That is not the profile of depression! Nor is it the profile of a hypochondriac or neurotic. I grow angry now in my older age knowing I took this bullshit for so many years. Now instead of bowing my head and joining in the beating I look up, back straight, eyes blazing, and say, “FUCK YOU. Fuck all of you who think I’m crazy because you can’t find a fucking answer!” Anger is good. Anger is healthy. Anger is something it’s OK to feel in this situation because it’s justified and serves a purpose. Only you know what it’s like to be in your shoes – so never fucking doubt yourself because of what others say. They have no business trying to get inside your head.
Still there’s always room for improvement. These days I had been afflicted with great anxiety so I had to sit myself down and figure out why – the only way to conquer one’s fears are to face them down like the warrior you are. I had two things going on. First I was growing impatient. I wanted to keep doing things at the pace I was in the warmer months so I could keep dragging myself forward, so I could get out of here and onto my new life somewhere else. By my calculations it should take me approximately fifty years to save up for my shipping container home in the woods… that is supposing inflation is a myth created by bored economists. I needed to keep going, to find new avenues of income, to save faster, to become whatever it is I am to become, and to end up wherever it is I am to end up. But my body doesn’t agree. I was forced to sleep up to sixteen hours a day. I just wasn’t functioning otherwise. So I had to ask myself a really hard question: Why do I really need to be out of here so fast – other than the obvious that I do better elsewhere? What’s wrong with sticking around a few years?
The answer was painful. I wanted to be on my own so I could take charge of my own life again – so I could live somewhere where I wasn’t too embarrassed to invite anyone over, some place I could stand on my own two feet as an adult and maybe, just maybe, find someone to help me start a family. I’m thirty-two and not getting any younger. I’m also single, with health problems, and have no suitors in sight. It’s a bleak prospect. It’s funny, I only had been actively planning on children for two months of my life – and yet when the break up happened, and I was flung into uncertainty, I found this to be by far the hardest pill to swallow. I felt like I already had children and someone had killed them. They were already real to me with names just waiting to be used. Long after I got over losing the farm, stability, my normal life, my sane household, my boyfriend, I still ached and mourned for the children I never had. For my own mental health, for my sanity, I knew I had to let them go once and for all because it was my drive to have them that was making me try to push myself too far too fast, at dire consequences.
So I sat, in the quiet, looking at the reality around me. I had a short chat with my mother who finally started to prod. Had I really been planning on children? It seemed out of character for me. Yes, I was. She was really quiet. She has two children of her own and had been eagerly awaiting grand children which she gave up on about ten years back. It seems intensely unlikely she’ll ever have any. I mourned for her loss as well. I told her I had no need to have biological children, adoption has always been much preferred for me, so there was always still hope, and part of me still believed that. Another part of me told me not to give up, because this mindset opened me up to all sorts of options – I could adopt, I could have step kids, godchildren, or just be the adopted “aunt” to the children in a close friend’s life. I’d be happy with any of those! But with so much uncertainty I had to let it go – let it be part of the whispering winds. If I am meant to be a big part in a child’s life I will be, if I’m not then I have to accept that with grace and dignity and move on.
I wondered what had changed within me to make me go from never wanting kids to wanting nothing else more in the world (even over the prospect of having a mate! I could be very happy raising kids as a single mom in my little future home in the woods. I could be so content with that.) I realized I was asking the wrong question. The real question was why did I want children at all? It wasn’t something I could easily answer… I just saw children as the logical ends to achieve family, community, and ensure I wouldn’t die of boredom or loneliness in old age. But really when I cut it down to the gristle I realized I wanted children because I have an endless well of love to give and few people to give such a brilliant gift. I had given this once to my boyfriend, with the wholeness of my being – but when you believe yourself to be disposable (because of your illness and the limitations it puts on you) can you really blame anyone else for holding the same opinion? In the end I was. I had to learn that essential lesson – that I am worth far more than what I can give a fucking employer. Money means nothing, absolutely fucking nothing. Love is what matters, your actions are what matters, who you are as a living breathing soul is what matters. The rest is all bullshit. Knowing this now I am far from disposable, damn well know it, and will die screaming this sentiment into the void.
That’s when I realized I didn’t need children to express my love, to be involved in the community, or to be surrounded by people who profoundly care for me. That was just the easiest and most socially recognized way to go about these goals. I know now that the likelihood of me having my own children is slim to nil but I am suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of peace. It’s either I go that route or I continue on the path I am on – writing, making my art, making something of myself career-wise while involving myself in good community oriented projects that help other people as much as I can. With my health I don’t have the energy to have both a career and family and that’s OK. For the first time in my life I have finally realized I can offer a lot to the world even if I am disabled. In fact, dare I say it, I can offer so much more because of it! If I were healthy and working a normal nine to five job how exactly would that be satisfying to anyone? How is that fulfilling? How does that breed self worth, pride, and joy? How does that give you a sense of doing something worthy and important? It doesn’t. It’s all a lie. It’s a lie that is cancerous in it’s message and spreads so much misery – among the healthy and the disabled alike. Don’t buy into it. There’s only one you and you only have one life. Make it worth it. Follow your heart – do what is right for you.
And so that’s where I am now – at total acceptance of the two things that was keeping me within the clutches of anxiety – being unable to work faster, and being unable to have children. Now I am breathing once again, taking one day at a time. I still work towards all my goals, I still plan for the future, I still claw desperately to get out of here, and I still make it my personal mission to make every day as productive as possible, but if I can’t do anything I no longer beat myself up about it. When I am on my death bed I am not going to look back and say, “You know, I wish I pushed myself harder – to the point of absolute mental and emotional collapse, over and over again, to prove something to somebody.” And I have accepted I will most likely die without a family to carry on my name – because it’s not the name the counts, it’s the spirit, and I can pass that on to anyone.
Life is good again. I’m happy and if I continue to surround myself with love, laughter, and light, it will attract more to me. Someday I won’t be on a lonely quest anymore. Someday I will find someone just as full of piss and vinegar worth standing at my side. I know they’re out there and am more than content to wait for them and should they never come let me at least live in hope with a smile on my face and a fire in my belly.