Much better, thank you

Lest anyone worry overmuch, I feel a lot better today. Why? No idea – but I'll take it.

Maybe this IS hormonal. Am I having a hot flash? My gyno thinks I'm still a few years away from that, but how could anyone know for sure?

In any case, the Rx is the same as always: ixnay on the caffeine, increase exercise, simplify diet, drink tons of water, and stick to a regular sleep/wake schedule. And talk to people – do not under any conditions isolate myself! Tonight I've organized a little drinky snacky thing with some friends from work, including one whose father passed away last month.

I know I mentioned I was helping her a bit there toward the end ... Well, he did finally go. The flyer for his memorial had a collage of photos of him from throughout his life, and I spent a good long time looking at them. It was humbling to recognize the gleaming, muscular, shining-haired 26-year-old caught mid-swan dive, soaring in perfect form against a perfect sky ... in the fragile 89-year-old man he became.

Having turned 44 this summer I'm still considering myself in my prime of life. And am doing my best to enjoy it as long as it lasts, as well as attempting to arrange things so that I can continue to enjoy my life as long as IT lasts. Cancer probably isn't the worst way to go; at least you'd have some time to wrap things up, say good-bye, and get rid of anything embarrassing you wouldn't want your mother to find ..... A heart attack could also be good, as long as it was quick and final. Strokes, not so much. Although I watched that documentary about Ram Dass recently and realized even paralysis might be workable, as long as my mind still more or less works.

So yeah, cheerful thoughts! I guess for me, today, the thing I want to remember is that even though my "health issues" have not been a lot of fun, my experience has shown me that I'm capable of dealing with them. And even though technically I do have at least two chronic illnesses, I don't think of myself as "chronically ill" or even unhealthy – just someone who has a couple of extra angles to keep an eye on.

It does seem useful, though, sometimes, to apply the label "chronically ill" and see how it fits. I don't really identify with it, but I also don't want to dissociate myself from it. There may be strength in claiming it as part of my identity, if not now, then someday. People who need help should be able to ask for and receive it, and that doesn't happen if they can't acknowledge what is happening with them.

Anyway. For today I'm OK. And grateful to be.

This is what chronic illness looks like

[From last week] Just a brief note while I'm waiting for Obama to start his healthcare speech to Congress ....

I really want something good to come of this. My insurance doubled last year, and this year it's going up 41%. I damn near cut off my thumb last weekend and had a few scary moments contemplating whether I could actually afford to go to the emergency room .. though thankfully it turned out that wasn't really necessary.

Lately I'm having some trouble with a healthcare concern that seems kind of stupid: I'm just really, really exhausted all the time. I don't know why I should be. I eat well and carefully, I exercise at least an hour every day, I get plenty of sleep, I take my vitamins, I don't smoke and very rarely drink, no drugs, no dangerous or unwholesome habits or proclivities ... I'm not even eating sugar anymore.

And yet I feel like crap. Unless I'm actually on my bike or exercising in some other way, I can hardly keep my eyes open. I can't seem to focus on my work, either; in fact I recently had to give up a small freelance copyediting job because I just couldn't seem to get my head together enough to finish it. I couldn't concentrate, and I was too embarrassed to tell the client what the problem was ... there was no specific deadline so I just let it drift  ... and today I got an email asking how it was going and decided to tell her I just can't do it right now. [to be continued ....]

It's so easy for me to blame myself for being lazy or stupid or a worthless, terrible person. But thinking of it right now, even if those things were true – this little project was so small and so easy there isn't any reason for me to have dropped the ball this way if I were just being lazy. I should've been able to just jump in there and bang it out in a couple of hours. But every time I looked at the pages ... I just couldn't.

So what's going on? Is it hormonal? Seasonal? Environmental? Do I have some kind of allergy? Or is it something more nefarious than that? Cancer can make people feel tired ... and so can about a half million other life-threatening diseases.

Maybe I'm just anemic again. But I've been taking my iron supplement religiously for a couple of years now ....

The other possibility that comes to mind, the one I really don't want to think about at all, is that I may be heading into another depression. This desperate exhaustion and inability to concentrate are so familiar to me ... and this morning, for no apparent reason, I woke up all flooded with fear and adrenaline and spent 40 minutes sobbing my guts out before I finally remembered I still had a bottle of Xanax lying around somewhere, and nibbled a few crumbs off the end of one just to get myself together enough to go to work. Then spent the rest of the day trying to stay awake, since that drug does take the edge off the anxiety but makes me so sleepy I can hardly function.

So damn. Now that I actually describe what's been going on it does seem pretty clear. I must be getting sick again.

I've been through it before, and so far it hasn't killed me. I think the worst part of it is that I feel so guilty about not being as functional and energetic as I would like to be. It's funny to me that despite my own experience with this stupid condition over the last 16-17 years – which you'd think would be enough to convince me it's just as real as my boss's herniated disk or another friend's congestive heart failure, or my own diabetes, all of which can be seen and measured and proven to exist – I still very often find myself secretly agreeing with the masses and leagues of "healthy" people who don't quite believe depression is an actual illness, but think it's more just a failure of will or character in a person who really just doesn't care to work as hard at being happy as everyone else does. I know feelings of guilt and worthlessness are symptoms in their own right ...

Anyway. Blah blah blah. Just like the herniated disk or the damaged heart muscle, my mind's tendency to freeze up under stress is just part of how my body seems to be composed. Sometimes, it forces me to slow my life way, way down whether I want to or not.

I'm sick of thinking about it, and sick of feeling ashamed of it. It sucks, being shaky and exhausted all the time. And knowing that so many people probably see me as a lazy, boring loser and a disappointment, because despite my supposed talents and capabilities, I never seem to really accomplish much.

This is stupid. I know it's the depression talking. I might not be able to turn it off inside my own head but that doesn't mean I need to broadcast it all over the internet.

Mainly, I just wanted to write it down as a record of what's going on for me this fall. And as a reminder to be kind to other people, no matter what ... because you can never really know what someone else is going through, even if everything looks OK.

Back to healthcare reform, though ... I don't know how any kind of healthcare reform would really help me with my particular problem, because right now the most commonly prescribed treatment still seems to be antidepressant drugs, and those have caused almost as many problems for me as they've solved. It's been years since I've taken any, and I don't really want to start them again. Still, it would be nice to know that if I did start seriously losing it, I could just go see someone without having to worry about how I was going to pay for it.

Ugh. So boring. SO boring, it makes me want to shut down this blog. Still, at times in the past I've received email from people thanking me for writing, letting me know it's helped them to read about my experiences, that they feel better knowing there's someone else out there who's coming out the other side of the same thing they're still stuck in the middle of. And it's made me feel better, knowing there are sympathetic strangers sending me good wishes.

I've been writing this blog (under several different titles) for just a few months short of ten years now. Maybe it IS time to start thinking about shutting it down. Or at least making it private again.

Or not. Just rambling now.

I guess the other connection with healthcare is that I can really see, when things get like this for me – and thank god it usually doesn't last very long – that I'm just not contributing to the world, or even just to my own experience and enjoyment of it, nearly – not NEARLY – as much as I would like to. And it makes me wonder what we all lose by not supporting the highest level of health possible for everyone around us – what might be brought forth by some of the people who are suffering even more than I do, for long periods of time or even for all their lives. What would they do, who would they be, if they were feeling well enough to really thrive?

There's this romantic idea afloat that illness, especially certain kinds of mental illness, can bring out the best in people. Beethoven created his best work after he lost his hearing. How many other geniuses of art, literature, music, science – are bipolar, schizophrenic, depressed, Asperger's? I'm sure it's true that some people rise above their struggles to do great work. But if my own experience is anything to go by, there are also plenty of people who are held down and held back from their best work, because it's all they can do just to get through every day.

My opinion is that getting through every day is a beautiful and important thing to do with one's life. It's all there really is, for anyone. But still ... sometimes I feel myself really yearning for just a little bit more. And it hurts when I just ...  can't .... reach it.

So, what else is new

Just got back (yes, at the very early hour of 7:54 p.m.) from a birthday party for a neighbor – who, as it turns out, is turning 27 in just a couple of days – and who, although you will not have heard of the man himself, comes from a family you very well may have heard of, if you're any kind of a foodie type of person in the United States of America ... his semi-famous father did make an appearance, and I found myself drawn to him – not so much as a moth to a flame, but rather as a mature woman of certain years (44, to be precise) is drawn to another mature human being – any human being – displaying gray curls and age-worn hands, when every other person present is perfectly beautiful in the manner of folks in their early to mid-20's ....

I'm getting old, dammit, is what I'm saying.

It was a nice party, and will certainly continue to be so, on into the night. If I were younger, I probably would have stayed. Maybe the fact that I was invited at all (by his girlfriend, a very cool woman I know from work, who is young enough to be my daughter) should be more important to me than the fact that I'm almost twice as old as most of the other people there ..... Really, the main reason I didn't stick around wasn't so much because of my age, but more because they all know each other and I didn't know anyone but my hosts, and also – more importantly – because I have some freelance work I really have to get done.

I enjoyed remembering when I lived in the middle of a large circle of friends like that. I loved it. Does anyone really still have that kind of life though, by the time they reach their mid-40s? Hmm. Undoubtedly some people do. I'm just not one of them. Most of my friends are too busy to do much hanging out of that sort. And I rarely have the energy to stay up much past my usual bedtime of around 10 p.m. One of my most favorite indulgences these days, in fact, is going to bed early – as early as I can – 8:00 or even 7:30 is the ultimate in luxury, assuming it's winter and dark enough to sleep. Not that I actually do it very often.

Funny ... as sad as it seems, sort of, to see myself as no longer young ... I actually really felt good riding away from the party sounds into the twilight, knowing Mr. A would be here, and we would sit down and have dinner and watch a little tv and go to bed early enough to get up at a reasonable time tomorrow, and get some puttering done around the house .....

Anyway. Just meditating on mortality. Middle age. All that fun stuff.