Making Peace

It is a beautiful day today here in So. Cal, after 3 PM, and I haven't left the house, except for some time out on the patio to write and laze.  

I'm not sure if I'm trying as hard as I can to heal my body, even as I realize the fallacy of such an idea - I must surrender to the flaccidity of MS when I feel too wobbly to take a walk, and if I create stress and dissatisfaction because of that, then I get to be stressed and dissatisfied as well..

I walk with a cane, now, mostly, which gives me a sense of stability.  I am grateful to have surrendered to this need to support myself.  It reminds me to slow down and be mindful in every step (when I remember to use it).

All is not grim.  I've always felt myself to be better suited to a different century/culture/country, and, while I'm still here in Long Beach, 2013, things feel different to me now.  It's my third act, I am 60 years old, nearer to completion, a little more so each day,  (although I don't really feel that way except in my body).  The Buddhist concept of the dharma allows for this time of life for the elders to put aside their worldly concerns and focus on spirit. 

What would it be like if I did not feel any guilt or sorrow about any of this?  Partly, it could be the pleasure of sitting on my bed (made - this seems important) with the cats, and making an effort to fulfill a commitment I made to myself (writing).  Maybe I could be hearing, instead of that voice of shame and doom, an inner voice that encourages me, saying things that are loving and supportive, telling me that I do have something to say. 

It's interesting that the only times I feel absolutely free of guilt is when I think I might be dying.  Then, I can perforate time, I can believe that I am not what I do, that I am not my body, and that I am worthy of love.  But, without that monstrous foe to fight, I find myself back in the mundane world of the body, of scarcity and lack of power.  

Not coincidentally, I am reading Carolyn Myss "Why People Don't Heal and How They Can".  She talks about how much power there is in illness, how much extra credit you get, how often you are the center of attention. I had a reading when I was first diagnosed with my second episode of breast cancer, in which I was told "you don't have to get sick to give yourself what you need".   I am still learning this, in fact it may be the lesson I am here to learn/teach.

For a long while, I could not write, because all I wanted to say was how much I hated MS and cancer; how angry I was to have been chosen to deal with this, (as if we have control in these matters) and the unfairness of it all.  But, like the man said, "if you want fair, go to Pomona".  When I can write about my illnesses as gurus, as parameters I have to live by, they become  my fiercest teachers.

This isn't what I had in mind.  But here it is anyway.

Out Beyond Fear

Who am I, in this moment, today, now?

How about now, who am I now?  And now?  And now?   How is it that my thoughts can go dark and then clear again?  Which is the "real" me?

A lot of facts(?) surround me –  a lot of voices speak in my head.   Some of these were voices not previously known to me, because, in my zeal to appear normal and average, I worked at stifling the unusual thoughts that came into my head, thinking they were the mutterings of a not normal person - a mute with Tourette syndrome.

I was encouraged in this belief about myself in various ways, and one was that at the age of 15, I was hospitalized for something that I would now describe as an anxious, acute, major depression.  It turned me into a nervous, pacing, sleepless and unproductive person I could barely recognize.  My parents, who were having their own problems, put me into a psychiatric hospital, where I was given enough thorazine to to wipe me out and make me compliant.

There are a lot of details I won't go into here, but there was a lot of rebuilding to be done when I got out of the hospital and returned to my life.  I am proud of the 16 year old who saw she was about to get dumped in a "tutoring school", which was essentially where people with dysfunctional kids, and a certain income level put their crazy, uncontrollable t
eenagers.  Except I had decided to not be one of those, and enrolled in an accelerated,  HS diploma night school to make up some of the time lost in the hospital, which would eventually put me in a normal school, with normal dysfunctional kids.

But before that happened, I'd already had my introduction to psychotropic drugs, specifically antipsychotics, which we given at doses sufficient to keep us all dopey and vacant.
This may have been considered reasonable from a medical point of view, as zombies are easier to control, but I question it's value for me who, whatever else I might have had going on, was never psychotic.

I left this place, at the age of 16, after 9 months, not due to any claims of a cure, but because I had become an incorrigible patient.  I had been introduced to pot and amphetamines, as well as barbiturates, while in the hospital; it was, in fact, the raiding of the barbiturate closet was the action that got me, and a few others, kicked out, the charge being "abuse of the facility".

This is one of the earliest of the stories I have formed into a life.   Often I am able to casually just toss it off,  minus the remorse, the blame, the judgment, and whatever else came along when it was all going on.  When you've censored your life into the images you think are normal, (because you definitely are not), you  can forget who you are.

We all have our stories.