...first off, it's not yet easy to post with a tiny keyboard! But the cost of technology is high.
Lately I've been having more and more thoughts about not mortality, so much, as aging and wondering what exactly happened between 2004 and now. While this year has been a pain in the ass, brain, and legs, it's also been one of those classically thought-inducing periods of life where you reevaluate. But I think what it's resulted in is a lot of confusion about not only what I'm doing, but also why I'm doing so much of it in the same way.
I had a chat with Bear last afternoon about how I feel sometimes like my life is still not quite age-appropriate, that there's a lot of growing up in practical ways that I feel I need to do. It's hard to look at 39 on its way without wondering how I got here in one piece, and also to look at why it's so hard to make some changes and stop bitching about life being annoying. The number of years these last months have put on me since Jan 13th or so is really only now becoming clear. I don't think I've had any globally Zen revelations, but I've realized some real limitations. So long as the MS wasn't really bothering me much, which it hasn't for a while, I think I could kind of consider it a lesser-relative of Victorian swooning-- a kind of romantically stoic thing which really didn't matter because my brain is functioning relatively well (more about that later).
However, especially recently, it's become clear that there is zilch romanticism in the on-off use of a cane, of a crip parking tag, or of MRIs of holes in my head put there by something no one can cure yet. I mean, I like being different, but recurring vertigo and accompanying unsteadiness which brought out my cane after 2.5 months thanks to MS isn't anything "different" that is good for me. I have a really hard time remembering that there's no cure, and each drug works differently, and damn it, I can't predict it. I also have an impossibly hard time not just shouldering through life and insisting at all turns that "I'm fine." I never realized until now that I do actually need someone to lean on, that well-- once again, health and life shows me I just can't do it all all of the time. As a few people recall, admitting that isn't just scary, it's psychologically a real problem for me. It's probably not the disaster it was at Iowa, but still-- once more, I should find a decent shrink and try to articulate being both hypercompetent and really uncertain and scared.
See, the issue might be that I know too much but just don't know enough, and I hate ignorance in myself. It makes me a good and voracious researcher, which won't make me any money but makes me happy. While I am not worried now about my brain abandoning me, I find myself forced to think about a future where not knowing isn't curable-- no matter how many king's men and horses work on the problem. I guess maybe I'm tired of terminal "I'm fine"-ness. Either it gets okay, or the uncertainty grows before I have time to figure out how to deal.
Either way-- there's not much likelihood now of me checking out early, and karma may doom me to a long life-- and one most interesting and hard indeed. Wouldn't be my life if it weren't, I guess. Must be a lot of fun and contentment in a dull, average, placid life. Who knew I might want that one day?
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