I have lived life with such asperity,
I missed bliss, joy, and hilarity,
I live now in calm austerity,
Healing the mind with a quiet clarity.
me, just now, just because
In the executive center I know as “me”, this is the little placard that sits on the reception desk; all of which I fabricate because I want to express the essence of myself as something far tidier and well put together than I ever seem to myself.
Aspirational posting, me for myself. But you can use it, too, if it’s helpful.
I have a lot going on lately health wise and it seems almost none of it is good. Instead of spiraling into despair and hopelessness, I want to focus on what I can do, what is possible, and most of all, communicate my experience in the hope it might help someone else.
We all age and die. Some of us faster than others. It’s not a race anyone truly wants to win. I am angry with myself for not learning faster how to care for myself. Which is ridiculous. But there it is.
I’m finally getting focused medical attention. As you might expect when this has NOT been the case for most of my life, there’s a host of issues running rampant in my body; all my pieces and parts are mad at one another and they all gang up and remind me.
I talk about them as entities/concepts/perspectives because it allows me to both separate my emotional being from them, and it provides me with the ability to ‘roleplay in my own head’ any number of scenarios and outcomes; it lets me talk about how I relate to and with myself (which I was surprised to learn is not ‘normal’ and not ‘easy’ and not even ‘understandable’ to anyone I try to explain it to…. maybe here, that will be different. I guess we’ll see).
It also lets me communicate sometimes deeply personal concepts and thoughts related to developing communion with body, mind, and being (the last being a combination of the preceding two). And I genuinely believe, feel, and think that in large part, this communion practice, combined with meditation and breath work, has allowed me to begin establishing a foundation of trust my physiology sorely needs.
The issues I face are almost entirely caused by toxic stress, lack of support structure (i.e., family, friends, helpers, etc), poor nutrition and medical care, and of course, being an autistic human. That I am even here, typing this, is more a miracle than I care to more than mention.
As I write this, I am waiting for news about how we will be dealing with a staghorn calculus that has taken up residence in my left kidney. If you decide to google that, do it knowing that it’s freaking huge and scary in both presence and potential.
I’m also dealing with the knowledge that I’ve got vascular compilations of calcium riding the plaque in my arteries and veins. Heart disease runs in my family, as does the “Big C”, the “beetus”, and a ledger list of neurology issues that make my fibromyalgia/poly-arthritis/slipped disc trifecta look like a cakewalk.
Succinctly, I’m in the process of falling apart decades before design intended and it’s more a matter of what gets me first than anything. Even my lovely autistic brain is having a hard time with this thought and until very recently, was dealing with it all by simply pretending it didn’t exist.
That is not a tenable strategy. So… it’s going to be changing. Since no one wants to hire this mind anymore, I’m going to use it to help myself… finally… at last? Yeah. This lovely autistic brain, well conditioned to consider information calmly, is going to help me do what needs be done for myself.
It is good to feel clarity.