and i am hurting, aching, tired bone-deep, weary, overwhelmed, and i am sick. but i am so lucky, lucky, lucky compared to everyone. compared to! those are the red-alarm words, right there, but what do i do with that? the fact of the matter is, everyone is really objectively worse off than me. my throat is barely sore, i’ve coughed like four times, my stomach can stand food, my nose is clear (thank you flonase!) all that’s wrong is headaches, aches, fatigue. so i owe. i owe and owe, i should be there for people. i should be other-focused. should is another word that raises red flags.
lucky girl, lucky girl… you know what’s kinda cool? i can usually tell when something is an old tape, because it doesn’t use the language of my true gender. lucky lucky lucky lucky.
we have talked in therapy about how we feel like others’ hard times mean we should be flawless, other-focused, strong. and sharon always says that isn’t true. that really, two people can be hurting and be supporting each other. like support can be a two-way street simultaneously. it is a very hard idea. but maybe it is the only way out of quicksand like this.
i feel badly, because shoulds and comparisons cluster thickly around my head. aeron asks me to make him jello and i suppress, suppress, suppress. i owe him. he is worse off than me. plus sickness gets to him way worse than it does to me. i think it has to do with his asperger’s, he is just so sensitive to everything in his environment, so particular. sickness is a change in the routine, and it’s sensory stimuli you can’t get away from. whereas i either just dissociate, or become a whiny kid, or both. but really i am pretty good at ignoring what is going on with my body. i try not to. but i can, still, sometimes, much of the time.
that’s why the migraines were so damn scary and why i whined and whined about them – i couldn’t get away!
beth is close tonight, and as is often the case, annoying most of the rest of us. she uses words like holding, like wellness, like breath, beside, nourish, like with. actually we do kind of like the language of “holding ideas” – even if it’s embarrassingly cheesy. it just means there is something between believing and not believing. because we can’t believe. but increasingly, the new ideas come alongside the old ones. i hate myself for being self-centered, while remembering the idea of love for self. and holding is a little less intellectual of a term, for something that is already too intellectual a process. we can only ever logically grasp what we are supposed to believe, and say we believe. we can’t believe it, except maybe sometimes someone like beth will bring us a sudden draught of cold clear drinking water. and in those moments we hurt so very badly for ourselves. (and it’s a good thing.)
we lost our copy of ursula’s translation of the tao te ching, dammit. it’s lost because it was out, because we wanted it handy… sigh. i could really use a drink at that spring.
