Since being ill, I have not felt comfortable about writing, my thoughts seem irredeemably black and without hope. Not that I feel hopeless generally - I don't. Just my thoughts, when I engage them - at night before sleep - which mercifully comes fast - or in the interstices of activity, are just dark.
Having survived menopause I know, these are just dark thoughts, they have no import or connection to reality, so I give them as little attention as I can. Sometimes the dark matter flares up engulfing everything. Two or three days go by of intense introspection that feels rough and harrowing like a washing machine. Then subsides.
Dominica, story no 3: my last washing machine experience:
My friend Y paid for my trip and the whole endeavor, which was somehow miraculous and disempowering all at once.
After 25 years, it was painful to me to notice how complete his life was, though I was also able to genuinely appreciate all the great parts of it. The way his life, well lived and nurtured has flowered into something wondrous and whole. And he seemed to have great connections with everyone - lovely smart wife, great family, kids, connections to community etc. But painful to me because it was so complete. There was no space or place in it for a me, except as occasional guest. This hurt, left a great big sore spot on my heart.
Perhaps it is dying, in that process you have to let go of everything, and often all I am aware of is the loss, a kind of resentment that I have lost love and it is gone forever. It seems I am surrounded by this. Loss of Love, loss of opportunity, the loss of childlessness, loss of youth (imminent). All of this preceding the final loss of life, when you let go and all is gone. Right now it's like I'm not accepting that, resenting it. So it is painful, like tearing.
Or it may be the opposite: Now - post this illness, approaching fifty - I am trying to reconnect with friends that I had, connections past that I let fall away. And it is painful how time has moved on. Where there was love is now overgrown with a different life, experiences have changed my friends, I no longer recognize the past. I search for my connections and they are not there. The person I loved no longer exists, or has no space for me. Nor I for him, if it comes to that - my life when I notice is full and defined.
And so there is this big hole, an emptiness, that moreover I have known all my life. But by this stage you would have thought I would have filled it up, found ways to be more complete, more whole.
It occurs to me that this old pain defines me, is me, has made me what I am. In that flame my decisions were forged. So like the dark thoughts, like menopause and loss of love, I should try to own it.
There endeth the lesson.
Photo: Y's wife Nancy, in Portsmouth Dominica.
I was explaining to my friend Jean why technology has never scared me. I have been willing to go through days/weeks/months of frustration and hoplessness just to achieve that moment when you wake the next day and its use has become second nature. That has always been my relationship with technology, ever since computers appeared to challenge us in the early 90's.
