I'm tired, I'm so tired of all of the management that daily life requires. I try not to let it wear me down, but it does and it is. I'm like that proverbial piece of "antique" furniture in your garage that needs to be refinished, but months go by and then years and pretty soon the elements, the insects and just the general effects of time begin to wash out the color, the smooth wood, the appearance that once gave it a lustrous feel... and now has left it just plain old. Some things do not get better with time; some things just fall apart.
I try to remind myself that everybody has a bad day now and then and ironically, I had a pretty good day today. But sometimes, even when I'm thinking that it's a good day, I can feel that sense of despair and, although, I despise using the word depression here, if only because I do not want to lessen the diagnosis of those who truly do suffer from this debilitating problem, I feel at a loss. I feel like I've put my shoes on the wrong feet. I can still walk, can still move forward, but much more slowly and with some sense that things are amiss...
I used to get mirgraine headaches and for many years, I didn't know that's what they were. When I was a teenager, I just labeled them "really bad" headaches; I didn't know that there were actual symptoms, medicine to combat those symptoms and even, therapies that might help alleviate the pain. When I was 26, I had an MRI done of my brain and, let me just say for a moment, if you are ever able to have this procedure done, whether you need to or not and you can pay for it, it just might be worth every single damn penny that you can scrounge from the couch cushions... but I digress, I know that MRI's border on ridiculously expensive, but the images that this proecdure produced and of my HEAD... let my pause for a second and say, I now understand why I was not capable of going to medical school. Because basically, I would have been standing over the patient with a gaping knife wound or a piece of glass stuck in their head and my mouth would have formed a nice doughnut while my eyes got wider and the sound, "Whoa" emitted from my throat. I am seriously in awe of modern day medicine and the technology that has enabled the peons of the world, myself included of course, to view images of their brains. For crying out loud, my BRAIN...
So, the doctor told me to wait until I had a migraine and then call, come in and they would do the MRI, while I was experiencing the excruciating and nauseating pain. They had already completed the images of my brain without the migraine so this was just the other half of the equation. I lay very still, or at least I tried to as the pain jackhammered itself into the right side of my brain and my stomach churned endlessly. The procedure takes about 30 minutes, but it feels like 30 hours when you are in pain and not able to move. I lay there, focusing on the noise, closing my eyes, wishing for certain death... no, not really, but wishing that the whole thing would hurry the hell along. Anyway, the procedure is finished and the radiologist asks me if I'd like to take a look at the images. I'm about ready to tell him off when I see him pull up side by side images on the computer and I feel myself moving automatically toward them. On the left are spliced images of my skull and my brain and on the right, you guessed it, my brain on drugs. Red synapses blossomed all along the right temple of my head and seemed to explode outward, but only in that one place. I felt compelled to put my fingertips against the pain, as if I could feel those red lines emanating throughout my body. I stared in amazement as the doctor pointed out different areas and identified what each was responsible for and how the patterns did this and that, but I was lost in the idea that he had actually captured my physical pain on camera, physiologically. From that point on, I knew that how I looked at things would literally be different...
I take medication now for the migraines, but, knock on wood, what a stupid expression, I don't get them as often anymore. I now know some of the things that trigger them and so I try not to smoke crack quite as often... insert smiley face here. I try to avoid too much caffeine, chocolate or wine. I try to get enough sleep every night and I try to stay hydrated. That is the worst one by the way, dehydration. When those don't work, I take Imitrex and that does work. So, on the days when things go awry, when my head is pounding and I cannot, for the life of me, seem to get a grip, I remember, I remind myself, I think back to laying in that machine and I know that things could be a whole hell of a lot worse.
I mean, that's no way to live your life, with the mantra, "Things could be worse, so I should be happy with what I have..." and that's what I was really thinking about. Happiness is like lowfat potato chips or fat free cookies: a mere illusion. Happiness is not the goal for me anymore, maybe it never was. Peace is the goal, inner peace and yes, I'm channeling my own personal half Yoda/half Buddha. But I'm talking about the kind of peace that slows your heartrate and allows you to sleep soundly at night, deeply... the kind of contentment that forces you to breathe deeply and smile as you exhale. I yearn for the kind of peace that makes me accept the fact that I will die and I do not know when or how, but that when I do, I will be ready because my life will have been everything that I wanted it to be. I think that happiness is temporary, but peace with yourself is eternal; a semblance of immortality if you will. It is the transference of a level of consciousness that transcends material goods and status. While I'd be lying if I didn't admit that my job and my ability to make money do help to define me, they are not me; they are what I allow them to be, what portion of "Yvette" I allow them to claim. Maybe not the best argument philosophically, but if I were to draw it on a piece of paper, it would be a few simple circles instead of a whole flow chart entitled what makes me happy, but I digress...
I just would like to get to a point where I wake up in the morning and stop telling myself that today has to be a "productive" day in order for it to be a "good" one. I mean, why can't I have days where I just lay around and do nothing, absolutely nothing, but read my book for 6 hours straight and then take a bath at 1:00 in the afternoon and, eat ice cream before dinner, well, let's face it, I do that anyway and often I eat it as dinner. But most importantly, when am I doing to stop judging my days by how much I got "accomplished?" It's not a checklist and I am not answering to anyone, not even to my family here. I'm simply saying that, for me, getting to that place of peace means accepting that boredom and sometimes just plain laziness are perfectly acceptable means and a part of my life and if I am trying to stave off the inevitable that I'd better start looking elsewhere because eventually, I am not going to be able to physically keep up the pace that I'm moving at right now and the sooner I accept that, the better shot I have of living a calmer and hopefully, more peaceful life. But for now, I'll just work on having a day or two where I do very little and try not to feel guilty or bad about it...
I saw a man sitting outside on his front porch this morning when I walked down to get a cup of coffee and that was about 7am ish... when I walked down around 10 to drop some mail off at the corner mailbox, he was still out there and I found myself throughout the day, just peeking at him to see what he was "doing." 3:00, he was just looking out at the street, shifting in his chair, kind of rocking back and forth. 4:30 or so, he had his hands behind his head, fingers interlocked and he was checking something out in the sky. The last perusing was around 6:30 and he had his arms folded across his chest. He might have been asleep, but I couldn't really tell from where I stood. I thought that he probably had gotten up a few times during the day, to fill his various personal needs, but, there he was, for a good 12 hours, just, well, just sitting. Imagine, just sitting, enjoying the world go by. I like to think that, as I write this, that he had no guilt about "wasting" the day because if I thought for a second that he did, the whole exercise would have been one of futility. So I just imagine that he was "happy" and at peace on his porch and that simple fact, or thought, gives me hope that someday I might be able to do that, or, at the very least, something similar. Maybe at least an hour. Here's hoping...
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